THE POWER OF SERVICE
James Ishmael Ford and Noreen Kimball
6 August 2006

James
When Noreen and I sat down together to discuss today’s sermon about the power of service, service as a spiritual practice, she suggested I do the “larger more philosophical” parts and that she would talk about the more “hand’s on” parts. Reminds me of when Forrest Church, our minister at All Soul’s in New York City told his wife he was going to write a book with John Buehrens, who would become our denomination’s president, Forrest’s wife replied, how wonderful! A perfect team! He reads and you write. So, as I’m good at talking about the great spiritual and Noreen’s so good at doing it, I agreed.

My early years as a Zen monastic with its emphasis almost in equal part on meditation and work, service to the community, provided my initial hints as to what this all might be about. My memories of long hours in the meditation hall crowd up with still vivid memories of other aspects of monastic life: attending to sweeping a stairwell, trying to mindfully wash dishes, to finding that last bit of dirt behind the toilet. These were all equally pointers on the path. Later as I began my UU years, with its vision of a life of service to one another, and particularly within my various forays into social engagement I found much the same experience, the same hints, pointers to something.

Lessons arising out of attending to the details of our lives pile upon each other, particularly when done for another. Within this attending to service, sweeping stairs, serving food to the homeless, engaging in social activism; I began to learn this is one of those places where the proof of the pudding is in the eating. No matter what our original motives, and they can be quite complicated, if we open ourselves within the act, we discover many things.

While I suspect most of us have an intuitive sense that service is somehow spiritual, we may not immediately have a sense of why. Today parsing out that “why” is my task. Turning to the dictionary and trying to find a root meaning for service is an exercise in tautology: service means to serve, serve means to be a servant or even slave. Both servant and slave are those who provide service or help, one with compensation, the other without. Obviously, ultimately, service has to do with doing.

Service as a spiritual practice is a curious thing. What we do certainly affects who we are and shifts who we become. Taking on service as a spiritual discipline moves us in certain directions. Most of our lives we feel some sense of isolation. Certainly we feel our separateness. I’m here, you’re there; there are poor and rich, hungry and fed. As we serve, as we open our hearts and reach out we begin to see connections. Please note this. This insight into connections is one of the fundamental realizations of an authentic spiritual path. But it’s even more complicated. Service is also the fruit of our insight into our connections. Service becomes what we want to do as we see how deeply related we are to each other and to the world.

This seems to be the strange reality of the spiritual life. As we begin to walk a spiritual path like this one of service, our conventional sense of causality, that A necessarily leads to B gets confused. We know we’re different. But we begin to suspect that person we’re serving is a relative. And then it can get even deeper. Perhaps we begin to realize those folk on whose behalf we’re advocating at the State House are our very selves. We engage fully, and it becomes confusing, and wonderful.

Discovering these deep connections, this since of identity within our separateness, opens many doors. For one, it allows us a vision of profound peace, knowing we are one and that one is perfect just as it is. This is something worth the price of admission. Its one of the great assertions of mystical reality found somewhere in just about all the world’s religions.

But, wait, there’s more. This reality isn’t stagnant; it’s dynamic, and organic. We quickly find this is also an assertion that the differences and divisions are real, not a dream or an illusion. I am me and you are you. This world of choice and hurt is real; at the very same time our sense of separation is not the final truth. What we discover is our sense of separation cannot exclude the simultaneous reality of our connection.

Something happens out of this insight of fundamental connection. It shows a way to change the hurt we encounter within our lives in organic and healthful ways. That’s the secret of today’s reading from the twentieth century spiritual giant Shunryu Suzuki: “Everything is perfect, with much room for improvement.” The wisdom that allows us to live wholesome lives is discovering a deeply felt understanding we are one and we are separate and distinct both at the same time. The one is perfect. The separate and distinct has much that needs improving.

What takes this from a philosophical contradiction to being a spiritual path happens in the magical moment we see what we do counts for everything because we are all connected. It is the joy of discovering we are not alone. And it opens the heavy responsibility that we all belong to each other.

Noreen
You know, when I discovered I’d be talking to you this morning about service, I felt a little like someone who discovers that Julia Child is coming to her house for dinner. Not really equal to the task of telling anyone in this group anything they didn’t already know about service. You have, all of you, been engaged in doing things for others most of your lives. And, this whole issue of service is so complicated. Why do we do service? I suspect the reasons are as varied as the number of personalities in the world. There are common reasons to be sure but you know, there’s Mother Teresa and there’s Bono and there’s Billy Graham and there’s Laurel Farnsworth…

We do service out of habit; many of us grew up doing volunteer work; it was part of who we were in our families or our churches. We do service because we genuinely want to help, to do some small thing to make the world better. We probably also do service because we want to feel good about ourselves. We’re lucky to live the way we live, to be who we are—we feel less guilty if we find a way to serve in the world. And then, of course, we want to look good and to have people think well of us. It’s pleasant to have people look up to you and judge you a good person. The price of giving service doesn’t have to be too high.

The thing is, that in these, my later years, I have come to feel, and I suspect Shunryu Suzuki would agree with me, that every one of these reasons for performing good services in the world is a worthy one—and more—that there probably isn’t any hierarchy of reasons for performing good work. The rewards, as James has outlined them, are many and they are as profound for ourselves as they are to the persons we serve.

Turns out that for me, the reason for performing service to others that I find most compelling is how much I learn. That took me years to realize.

The first thing I learned was how hard it was to enter the world of performing service for others while leaving your ego behind. I was so sure I knew what people needed. What was best for them. I did learn, of course, painfully, slowly, that if you aren’t completely committed to giving people what they think they need as opposed to what you think they need, you’re wasting everybody’s time.

And I learned that if you aren’t willing to be served yourself, you should probably get into another kind of activity. Because, if it isn’t all right for you to accept that others should offer you service when you need it, that means it isn’t really all right in your head to be the recipient of service. Somehow, that is going to communicate itself right out of you to the people you help. And that’s really too bad.

And, I learned that performing service to others involves all those basic things about being a good and responsible person that your parents and teachers tried to drill into you when you were growing up. We think, when we embark on the road of performing service to others that we will require new and exciting competencies. And, perhaps, we will. But in the main, we will need to rely on a quiver full of the old virtues. We will need to keep our word, for example. And that means that when we make promises to people, we have to write them down and then deliver. And we need to constantly be on the alert for displaying faultless manners. Returning telephone calls and emails. Acknowledging others, even people we don’t like, because it’s the right thing to do. Being always careful in our speaking—making sure that our requests are requests, not subtle demands, and that we find excuses to say thank you again and again. And that we never assume but always ask permission for any activity that affects another person whether its something as simple as taking photographs at an event to using the facilities in someone else’s house. No one is more in need of careful treatment than the powerless.

And finally, there are the tricks you learn when you decide to devote a part of your life to performing service to others. The little things that keep you from going crazy. The biggest one is DO IT NOW. Make a sign for over your desk and by your phone and next to your computer. When a thought comes into your head, do what you need to do so that you don’t have to think about it again or handle it again or worry about forgetting it. You know, all the basic time management stuff you learned when you got your first job. If you are entering the world of service to others, efficiency will help you do more and do it better.

Then, of course, there’s the part about joy. You should be laughing. If you are really committed to helping others and you haven’t found a way to be laughing quite a lot, find someone to help you get it right. That’s the very best part. Find a friend who laughs a lot to help you—and they will help. People who laugh a lot are natural givers.

You know, I wish I had had something profound to say to you this morning, because you have all been so important in my life. Being here, watching you and the difference you make in the world has been such a privilege for me. I’m so glad to be back here and to know that I will be back again and again. Amen.