From “Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation” by Parker J. Palmer
Where do people find the courage to live divided no more when they know they will be punished for it? The answer I have seen in the lives of people like Rosa Parks is simple: these people have transformed the notion of punishment itself. They have come to understand that no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment.
In the Rosa Parks story, that insight emerges in a wonderful way. After she had sat at the front of the bus for a while, the police came aboard and said, “You know, if you continue to sit there, we’re going to have to throw you in jail.”
Rosa Parks replied, “You may do that…,” which is a very polite way of saying, “What could your jail of stone and steel possibly mean to me, compared to the self-imposed imprisonment I’ve suffered for forty years – the prison I’ve just walked out of by refusing to conspire any longer with this racist system?”
The punishment imposed on us for claiming true self can never be worse than the punishment we impose on ourselves by failing to make that claim. And the converse if true as well: no reward anyone might give us could possibly be greater than the reward that comes from living by our own best lights.