Thank you Brother Peter Mayson for sending me this text from the Noetic Sciences Review, Spring 1996.
In the Service of Life
In recent years the question how can I help? has become meaningful to many
people. But perhaps there is a deeper question we might consider. Perhaps
the real question is not how can I help? but how can I serve?
Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality; it is not
a relationship between equals. When you help you use your own strength to
help those of lesser strength. If I'm attentive to what's going on inside of
me when I'm helping, I find that I'm always helping someone who's not as
strong as I am, who is needier than I am. People feel this inequality. When
we help we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever
give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth,
integrity and wholeness. When I help I am very aware of my own strength. But
we don't serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves. We draw from all
of our experiences. Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even our
darkness can serve. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and
the wholeness in life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness in
me. Service is a relationship between equals.
Helping incurs debt. When you help someone they owe you one. But serving,
like healing, is mutual. There is no debt. I am as served as the person I am
serving. When I help I have a feeling of satisfaction. When I serve I have a
feeling of gratitude. These are very different things.
Serving is also different from fixing. When I fix a person I perceive them
as broken, and their brokenness requires me to act. When I fix I do not see
the wholeness in the other person or trust the integrity of the life in
them. When I serve I see and trust that wholeness. It is what I am
responding to and collaborating with.
There is distance between ourselves and whatever or whomever we are fixing.
Fixing is a form of judgment. All judgment creates distance, a
disconnection, an experience of difference. In fixing there is an inequality
of expertise that can easily become a moral distance. We cannot serve at a
distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected, that
which we are willing to touch. This is Mother Teresa's basic message. We
serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.
If helping is an experience of strength, fixing is an experience of mastery
and expertise. Service, on the other hand, is an experience of mystery,
surrender and awe. A fixer has the illusion of being causal. A server knows
that he or she is being used and has a willingness to be used in the service
of something greater, something essentially unknown. Fixing and helping are
very personal; they are very particular, concrete and specific. We fix and
help many different things in our lifetimes, but when we serve we are always
serving the same thing. Everyone who has ever served through the history of
time serves the same thing. We are servers of the wholeness and mystery in
life.
The bottom line, of course, is that we can fix without serving. And we can
help without serving. And we can serve without fixing or helping. I think I
would go so far as to say that fixing and helping may often be the work of
the ego, and service the work of the soul. They may look similar if you're
watching from the outside, but the inner experience is different. The
outcome is often different, too.
Our service serves us as well as others. That which uses us strengthens us.
Over time, fixing and helping are draining, depleting. Over time we burn
out. Service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will sustain us.
Service rests on the basic premise that the nature of life is sacred, that
life is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know
that we belong to life and to that purpose. Fundamentally, helping, fixing
and service are ways of seeing life. When you help you see life as weak,
when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole.
>From the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like
my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges
naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing.
Lastly, fixing and helping are the basis of curing, but not of healing. In
40 years of chronic illness I have been helped by many people and fixed by a
great many others who did not recognize my wholeness. All that fixing and
helping left me wounded in some important and fundamental ways. Only service
heals.
Reprinted from Noetic Sciences Review, Spring 1996
Peter Mayson
Analyst Programmer
GT - Retail Product Technology
Nedbank Wealth
You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd.
57 Heerengracht, Cape Town
Tel:+27 (0)21 412 3913
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