A Hidden Wholeness  Parker Palmer

Summary from Goodreads

In A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer reveals the same compassionate intelligence and informed heart that shaped his best-selling books Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach. Here he speaks to our yearning to live undivided lives--lives that are congruent with our inner truth--in a world filled with the forces of fragmentation. Mapping an inner journey that we take in solitude and in the company of others, Palmer describes a form of community that fits the limits of our active lives. Defining a "circle of trust" as "a space between us that honors the soul," he shows how people in settings ranging from friendship to organizational life can support each other on the journey toward living "divided no more."

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A Hidden Wholeness weaves together four themes that its author has pursued for forty years: the shape of an integral life, the meaning of community, teaching and learning for transformation, and nonviolent social change. 

My thoughts

For me this book was about trust. Trust as foundational to our humanity, trust as the virtue that potentiates all other virtues, trust as the sine qua non of human relatedness and cultural cohesion.  Trust in the same sense that Erik Erikson use the term: to describe the basis for our ontological sense of being in the world. Trusting others but above all trusting oneself. Healing our self by learning to listen to the inner voice, and trusting that the voice will reveal our truth to ourselves. 

And trusting the process, in this case The Circle of Trust which he developed and promoted over the course of his long career. I found myself wanting to join such a circle and then realizing that I already have relationships and communities that honor the principles of the Circles, even if we don’t acknowledge it explicitly. 

Our discussion

Our discussion called into question some of the terminology Palmer uses to explore and expound upon this issue of trust. What is he referring to when he says “soul”? What does it really mean to listen to the soul? How does God fit into this whole picture? 

There was the sense also, in our discussion, that Palmer’s gentle, affirmative, uncritical way off encountering life can’t withstand the “sturm und drang” of the world as it actually is, with all its conflicts, violence, and rapaciousness. Is it realistic or even possible to think about circles of trust being the basis for transformative change? Where do controversy, argument, and confrontation fit in?