Recently I was asked to write a letter about the work of Parker J. Palmer and I thought that work might be of interest to readers of Sharing Witness. I first met Parker in March 1990 at a week-long retreat he facilitated for a small group of Kellogg National Fellows in Taos, New Mexico. We connected deeply on that occasion, and we have remained close since.

He spoke at my inauguration in 1993. I wrote the preface and a chapter for the recent festschrift volume in his honor, Living the Questions. We've participated together at many retreats and meetings and have, on several occasions been keynote speakers, opening and closing national conferences.

I'll comment first on Parker's own work as a writer, teacher, and scholar, and then on the work of the Center for Courage and Renewal, which has, under his committed guidance, been elaborating and disseminating his ideas, with marked success. Parker's books have introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to his vision for a better world. They have brought him a wide and devoted following, as well as numerous awards and accolades; the range and impact of his words and work have been expanding steadily in recent decades.

In essence, the idea of vocation is the master theme of Parker's life's work - vocation as the unification of "who we are with what we do," and how we project that out into the world, or vocation as the integration of "soul and role," in the more specialized language Parker uses when appropriate. This focus on vocation and what he calls "the inner work of leadership," for example, has broad social implications in his view. As he wrote in a remarkable early essay entitled "Leading from Within," leaders, by virtue of their positions, have the opportunity to project darkness or light on the people around them. They, therefore, have a special obligation to stay in touch with the forces of darkness and light within themselves. Otherwise, they can do more harm than good. The salience of this message could not be more obvious than it is right now, at a time when exemplars of trustworthy leadership are few and far between.

Parker writes with a rare mix of analytic rigor and linguistic elegance, posing questions that are multilayered, complex, and yet deeply personal. He speaks with enormous moral authority, leavened with an infectious Midwestern sense of humor. He integrates the individual's ceaseless inner search for integrity and equanimity with the large-scale project of revitalization and reform of our educational and democratic systems, and indeed the larger society. As a graduate student, he was influenced by the sociologist Robert Bellah, whose imprint is visible in the emphasis Parker places on the interior work (the habits of the heart) that are necessary foundations for a good society. Parker's writing and public speaking are vehicles for advancing his thinking about teaching, vocation, leadership, dialogue, democracy, and the dynamics of social movements.

What sets Parker's work apart from other scholars, however, is the extent to which he personally has attended to its implementation and dissemination, initially in the education field and, more recently, in a number of other serving professions. Although he begins in the only place any of us has the power to begin (or end), with our own identity and integrity, our own evolving lives - and although he is adamantly opposed to making anyone a means to an end - his work is suffused with an unusually pragmatic bent. He is interested, ultimately, in helping individuals find the personal courage to bring themselves more fully into their own work, and, having made the decision to live "divided no more," to create or find the "communities of congruence" that he believes can spark the liberation movements through which people can stand up to structures and systems that have become "death-dealing" rather than life-enhancing.

Parker sees the world without illusion, appraises it analytically, penetrates its paradoxes, knows its dark underside, knows the shadows all too well. And yet, as a teacher at heart, he trusts that knowledge can set us free, but only a particular kind of knowledge, one that sustains connections and affirms life. "A knowledge that springs from love," Parker wrote in The Courage to Teach, "will implicate us in the web of life; it will wrap the knower and the known in compassion, in a bond of awesome responsibility as well as transforming joy; it will call us to involvement, mutuality, accountability."

I have on many occasions sat with Parker in a "circle of trust" he has created. These gatherings are organized around the ground rules he has shaped, defined, refined, tested, articulated and documented in his new book, A Hidden Wholeness. I have sat in these circles with many different groups: groups of various sizes, and comprising participants from a wide variety of personal backgrounds and professional settings. Without fail, and remarkably quickly, these people who begin as strangers develop a depth of mutual trust that enables them to speak to and hear each others' deepest yearnings and most heartfelt concerns and dreams.

Participants are encouraged to sit in stillness, welcome silence, discover wonder and mutual gratitude, bring their patience, learn together, and gradually build new confidence in their ability as fellow humans to create spaces in which to hear and speak their unique stories and find their common truths. They learn to listen with the non-invasive discipline Parker teaches, asking only sincere and respectful questions that might help the speaker hear more fully what s/he is saying, or trying to say.

As Parker explains in A Hidden Wholeness, a circle of trust can become a place "where differences are not ignored, but neither are they confronted in combat." They are "laid out clearly and respectfully alongside each other" so that individuals "can grow together toward a larger, emergent truth" that "reveals how much they hold in common. The voice of truth [a participant thinks s/he] is hearing from within can be checked and balanced by the voices of truth others think they are hearing. As participants hear themselves speak their own truth, they gradually become more receptive to its implications for [their] lives."

The questions to which Parker has applied these principles of honest dialogue and interpersonal encounter could not be more urgent or ubiquitous, especially now. This is where the Center for Courage and Renewal enters in. Among the wide range of kindred efforts to encourage mindfulness and contemplative practice, catalyze deep conversation, foster integrative knowing, enhance democratic discourse, support critical thinking, and bring spiritual awareness into teaching, and learning, and leading, none is more powerful, in my experience, than the set of principles and practices, and the animating social vision, that have emerged out of the creative body of work being developed through the efforts of the Center.

Parker and his colleagues have been especially self-conscious about sustaining the integrity of the Center's work even as they respond to the many pressures to extend its services and expand its scope. The Center is providing in-depth preparation for facilitators across the country and this is stimulating the thoughtful growth of a powerful national movement, with small centers growing up in a number of locations.

At a time when the need for it is ever more manifest in the mounting crisis in leadership and vision - local, national, and global - that is literally threatening life on the planet, this work has the potential, as Parker writes, to "take us beyond ourselves to become healers of a wounded world."