Service

The calendar page flips to September, the promise of a new month and for schoolteachers and children, a new year. Following yesterday’s theme, another excerpt from my hopefully forthcoming book. And R.I.P. to author Wendell Berry, passed over yesterday at 92 years young after a lifetime of writing essays, poetry, novels, plays in service of speaking for sustainability, simplicity, sincerity and the sacred land we are here to caretake. 

 

Service is a strange concept in our rugged-individualist-watch-out-for-number-one-grab the largest -piece-of-the-pie-before-it’s gone American culture. Yes, we have the Red Cross and volunteers at soup kitchens and food banks, but there is nothing in our upbringing that suggests that service is more worthy than fame and money. There is lip-service (and yes, also real service) to the Christian notion of charity and the Jewish practice of performing mitzvahs, the expectation of doing good deeds as part of one’s duty. There used to be philanthropic expectations that the excessively rich needed to pay back to the community, as evidenced by the Andrew Carnegie libraries, the Rockefeller agricultural schools, the Ford Foundation’s endowments to the arts. Some like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Dolly Parton still follow this model, but the new breed of tax-evading excessively rich (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) prefer to fly themselves into space and buy 500-million-dollar super- yachts. With so much energy in the culture flowing to the notion of grabbing a disproportionate amount of our collective resources for one’s own personal power and profit, children in school are not likely to admire those in the service industry or feel their obligation to be of use. The Wolf of Wall Street is valued far and above the service dog for the blind or needy. 

 

All of which makes the kinds of service both explicit and implicit in Zen practice, jazz performance and Orff teaching a needed healing antidote to our mainstream greed and selfishness. Here we look at the unique ways each of the above encourages us to be of use, to be helpful in the community and attentive to the needs of others. 

 

The Buddhist Notion of Service 

The seven-day Zen meditation retreat (sesshin) is one of the most physically rigorous, emotionally challenging and mentally arduous experiences a person can willingly choose to do, up there with running a marathon, hiking the Inca Trail or climbing Mt. Everest. Why would one ever sign up for something so demanding when they could be lounging on a beach or binge-watching an engaging TV series? 

 

Why indeed. The motivation for each person is undoubtedly unique, ranging from escaping the difficult demands of one’s daily life to facing one’s traumas to slaking some spiritual thirst. In my case, it began with a few drug-induced experiences of higher consciousness that confirmed my intuition that there is a spiritual world beyond a mindless faith and belief in a stern Judeo-Christian God. When I began sitting in meditation, I hoped to reclaim some of my childhood sense of wonder. I was curious about the stories I had read about enlightenment. In short, I hoped to personally benefit from a practice that had a few thousand years behind it of transformation. Truth be told, the notion of spiritual achievement as a means of being of service to others never entered my mind. 

 

Yet there was a time in many sesshins when I’d be circling the walking meditation path with some 30 black-robed beings at 4:00 in the morning, all of us tucked away on a mountain alongside granite, pines, morning birds, an occasional coyote and a sky full of stars. More than once, I was suddenly graced with the unshakeable sense that though the world didn’t know we were there, we were somehow helping to hold it all together. We were bringing some light into the darkness. I had read that there are re-incarnated Buddhas somewhere in the Himalayas that are fulfilling their Bodhisattva vows to heal a broken world. No one has seen them, but that’s what’s keeping us from spilling into utter chaos and destruction. Up in our mountain retreat, I imagine we were doing the same, choosing this difficult practice not just for our personal transformation, but on behalf of all sentient beings. We were there to serve. 

 

(The chapter goes on to explore the ideas of service in the jazz world and in Orff Schulwerk teaching. I’ll leave that for another time.)