The Rev.
Several years ago, I had the
privilege of participating in a judging panel for the Spirit of the American
Woman Awards, given annually to honor women in the local community who had
overcome significant barriers in their lives to achieve excellence in their
chosen field, while living a life in the service of others. I sat with ten or so women on this judging
panel, most of them full-time career women with families and many volunteer
commitments themselves, and we laughed, and wept as we read the touching
stories of the nominees.
One that
still stands out in my mind even now was an elder woman – an accomplished
teacher and poet -- who had grown up in the depression era in rural Idaho, and
had literally run away from home with a dollar in her pocket and a suitcase
full of vegetables, so that she could attend college in Boise. She managed to pay for a bus ride, find a
woman willing to take her in for the promise of future rent, and spent her last
nickel to send a postcard home telling her parents where their wayward child
had gone and why. Remembering her own
struggle to gain and education, she had never stopped caring about young people
who want to learn, and had given her life in service to education and the arts.
As we
were struggling to decide who the final recipients of the awards should be,
someone made a comment about how tired she was, and suddenly all the women in
the room were laughing and talking about how busy they were, and how exhausted.
One woman got up and demonstrated a new
dance step she had learned that describes the lives of most working people: Get
up, go to work, get home, go to bed. You
dancers will note that this is the box step, and in this case it is aptly named,
since lives like these can easily become boxes which constrict one’s personal
creativity, and keep people separate, lonely, and somehow empty.
And yet
there we all were, taking an entire morning of our precious time to volunteer
for this awards panel.
Why? Not because
we were selfless; not even because we felt obligated. We were there because offering ourselves in
service to something beyond the box-step life created a sense of meaning for us
– allowing us to dance free of the constrictions of a “me and mine” centered
existence.
Some of
you may have read about or seen the movie version (starring Robin Williams) of
the life of Dr. Patch Adams, whose ambitious dream of transforming healthcare
through building a 40 bed hospital in West Virginia to provide free services to
those in need, while also allowing the needy to serve one another, is yet to be
fully realized. Patch Adams, who was
once hospitalized for depression and thoughts of suicide before embarking on a
medical career himself, believes passionately that service is a path to greater
wholeness:
I perceive service as one of the
great medicines of life. It is difficult
to have a general sense of fulfillment unless a person feels he or she has
served. This, I believe, is why many
women feel more fulfilled that many men: most women have given intensive
service through mothering and serving as a lover or friend. Society’s highest respect and admiration is
granted to those who give of themselves.
Mother Teresa, for instance, was universally loved. Most good people sustain themselves and their
spirits by their own giving and by following examples that inspire them. Few medications have more power to prevent or
dissipate mental illness than regularly giving of oneself. As scientists understand the biochemistry of
psychoneuroimmunology better, it will become clear why unabashed service to
others has such power to assuage pain and, if not cure illness, at least make
it tolerable.
Patch Adams is not a perfect man, and some have
questioned his vision. He readily admits
that he is saddened by the fact that he still hasn’t broken ground on his
hospital after 33 years of work towards his dream, but despite his failures
along the way, he still hasn’t given up.
As Rachel Naomi Remen pointed out in our reading today, it is better to
bless life badly than not to bless it at all.
No one else has succeeded in transforming healthcare – perhaps some day Patch
Adams’ slightly wacky approach -- involving clowns and alternate agriculture as
well as alternative medicine -- will prove to be viable. Who knows?
But as he himself says, “…the journey has been heavenly all along the
way. Simply being in an idealist quest
is its own reward.”
Those of us who work in the so-called “helping
professions” – social work, ministry, teaching, nursing, counseling, etc. –
know that it is difficult if not impossible to measure the impact of our work
much of the time.
We can’t always know
whether we have actually made a difference in someone’s life, strive as we
might to walk with people in their ups and downs, providing a bit of comfort
when we can. Sometimes, especially when
we forget to take care of ourselves in the process, we “bless life badly,”
giving only begrudgingly or seeking app
One thing I have found very helpful in this vein, is
understanding the distinction between “helping” and “serving.” “Helping” in the arena of social action, is
the idea that we have something to offer to the more unfortunate – that through
our action or example we can allow poor or oppressed people become more
advantaged.
When we “help” others we
see ourselves as righteous, good, giving people, and our intentions seem above
reproach.
Unfortunately, often
implied in our “helping” is the unspoken message that the recipient of our
benevolence is separated from us by a wide gulf, and that to cross over that
person (or persons) will have to accept our value system, and a debt of
gratitude for what we have done.
Ram Dass
and Paul Gorman, in their wonderful book entitled How Can I Help? note that “helping” can become a prison in
which one becomes trapped by strictly defined roles, leaving people feeling
alienated and distant from the very people whose lives they set out to touch:
“Helper” and
“helped” become states of mind and ways to behave that go way beyond function. Entrapment in these alienates us from one
another: a social worker and a juvenile offender just miss; a nurse and a
patient seem worlds apart; a priest and a parishioner, so distant, so formal. What otherwise could be a profound and intimate
relationship becomes ships passing in the night. In the effort to express compassion, we end
up feeling estranged. It’s distancing
and puzzling.
I was
raised in the wake of the Boomer Generation, which made a significant
contribution in terms of the reawakening of feminism, and the empowerment of
women to express their gifts in public fields – like ministry, medicine, and
many others – which had traditionally been all-male domains. While I’m grateful to feminism for allowing
me to have so many choices on my own path, I do question one piece of feminist
analysis: the idea that women have traditionally given too much of themselves
away – losing themselves by living for their children, husbands and
others. Feminism encourages women to
look out for themselves first, to be less selfless and more selfish, and to put
their own careers on a higher priority than family or voluntary efforts. By doing so, we were promised, women could
have it all.
Part of
this I understand quite well – and that is the need for the men in our lives to
take a balanced responsibility for our children and charity efforts, and for
women to gain greater respect and equal pay for their efforts. But what is missing from this analysis is the
understanding that many women had a sense of losing themselves not simply
because they gave to others, but because they were trapped in the “helping” prison.
It seems
to me that issues of seeking justice and equality in Feminism became confused
with becoming more selfish as human beings, and that many women of my
generation who now supposedly have it all – home, family, and career – feel
just as empty doing that box step (get up, go to work, come home, go to bed) as
did their mothers, whose dance went more like “get up, clean the house, feed
the family, go to bed.” In fact, perhaps
we now understand the emptiness of our fathers as well.
What can turn all of this around
is grounding our lives in service with
others. In an age where people seem to
float around like lost souls, using consumerism and extreme recreation in an
attempt to assuage emptiness, there is a greater possibility waiting out there
in the life of service. Again from Ram
Dass and Paul Gorman:
The
philosopher Gurdjieff pointed out that if we wish to escape from prison, the
first thing we must acknowledge is that we are
in prison… With that alertness we are ready to seize opportunities. A doctor comes in to ask how you are feeling,
and you notice he’s looking you in the eye; he’s really asking. Now you can tell him how you are feeling…not just what your body is
up to. An uncle who’s been depressed
drops his guard and tells you just how much he misses his dead wife. The old family constraints fall away. He doesn’t have to be strong; you don’t have
to be deferential. You can meet as
friends, both of whom have known pain.
In the 1980’s, at the height of what was called the
“me-decade,” Robert Bellah wrote a significant breakthrough book entitled Habits
of the Heart in which he stated that the idea of individualism and autonomy
on which this nation was founded had gone too far. He posited that a part of our hearts were
crying out now for something greater than living for ourselves alone, and that
in community we might find our redemption as a nation.
I couldn’t agree more. His book might have just as well been called “Hunger
of the Heart” because when I look around our corner of New Jersey and beyond to
our society at large, I see people literally starving -- less from material
lack than a lack of intimacy, a lack of connection, a lack of being known and
valued by ones community, a lack of opportunity to give ourselves in service to
one another, “to give as simply as flowers breathe out their perfume.”
In 1998 Robert Bellah gave the Ware Lecture at the Unitarian
Universalist General Assembly. In his
talk, he spoke about his wish that UUs and other Americans had a more
fundamentally social understanding of human beings:
Here
let me assert that what religious liberalism and American culture generally
lack is a social understanding of human beings. We start from an ontological individualism,
the idea that individuals are real, society is secondary. This is clear in the
dissenting tradition…. In the dissenting
tradition the individual is primary and community, however valued, is
secondary. But this voluntaristic notion
of community, however treasured, is unable to bear the weight it is expected to
carry. This understanding of community
is perilous because individuals devote themselves to it only so long as it
"meets their needs," and when it doesn't, there is no claim of
perseverance or loyalty that community so understood, can exert. I am convinced that only a social
understanding of human nature is ontologically true and that only a social
ontology could divert American culture from the destructive course upon which
it seems to be set.
Bellah challenged Unitarian Universalists to reverse the
order of the seven principles as a corrective to our heavy emphasis on
individualism. For those of you who
haven’t yet memorized the seven principles (and there will be a pop quiz today
during coffee hour!), that would mean putting the interdependent web of all
life first, and the inherent worth and dignity of every person last.
Imagine what it would be like, if our congregation were
truly given by this shift in emphasis.
Jim Russell and Inge
Spungen wouldn’t struggle mightily to fill leadership roles and volunteer
positions that are open – instead, every person would step forward to offer
their gifts for the well being of the whole, because they would see the whole
as an extension of themselves. The
pledge drive, which is beginning this week, would be something we’d all look
forward to – our chance to finally commit some of our hard earned money to
something we really value. There would
be a synergy present, because in my experience the sum is always greater than
its parts. And experiencing this kind of
true belonging here, expressed through consistent acts of service and
generosity, would quickly spill beyond our four walls, as it already does to
some extent, in the form of outreach and social action.
There is a way and a form for each one of us to be of
service. Even when we are stressed, and
overly busy – when life seems like a box step determined by the demands of the
daily round, there is an opportunity to claim your freedom through service. It may not seem like the obvious solution –
but giving truly adds meaning to life.
I’ve had times in my own life when pressures to succeed
and fears about my own future have left me feeling lost and unsettled. I remember in particular a time during my
college years when I became quite overwhelmed with my heavy course load and
with the emotional demands of crossing over into adulthood.
What saved me then, and
continues to give meaning to my life now, was giving myself over in service. Not giving my self away – not becoming
selfless – but enlarging my sense of self through the joyful act of stepping
into the care and energy of the community, working together for transformation
both inner and in the world.
From Patch Adams:
Service is
an action word, a perfect antidote to boredom, loneliness, alienation, and
fear. Service can impart the gift of
inner peace. Service is the physical
expression of thanks to the world, and apt way to appreciate the miracle of
life. People who give service are free
to ask for what they want, knowing they are worth it. Service gives a feeling of genuinely
belonging to the human community. Service
is probably the greatest call to action by most religious faiths….
Living the life of service ultimately means living a life
in which we are able to love and be loved – not because we deserve it, not
because we are obligated, and not because we have earned it through our
achievements – but because we see that this is all that matters. We are, indeed, fundamentally social
creatures, inextricably connected to one another. This is what makes us human.
There are as many ways to express our giving as there are
potential acts of loving kindness in the world, and none of our efforts towards
generosity are to be belittled or dismissed.
It is better to bless the world badly, than not to bless it at all. But to truly reap the rewards of service, it
has to become a way of living. In giving
thanks through service for the gift of living, we find ourselves rich indeed.