Group items tagged

Lately, I have spent much of my time studying places of service: schools, community organizations, advocacy groups, healthcare facilities. Those that are most alive and vibrant have in common a kind of blessed confusion about who is giving to whom. People, no matter their role, seem infused with a gentle and expectant gratitude as they interact with each other. A doctor enters an examining room, preparing to be cared for. A professor wonders how her students will teach her to understand the world in new ways. A soup kitchen volunteer is ready to find her spirit nourished by the person she is serving. In each encounter of service there comes a choice. We can continue to awkwardly push our skills and expertise at someone or we can remember to take a step back, breathe and say, "Here I am. Meet me, and we will both receive something we could never find on our own." This perspective is simple, but its implications for the various personal and institutional calls to service we participate in - healing, nurturing, instructing, speaking for - are drastic and disarmingly hopeful. In my own work as a teacher, writer, and community practitioner, I find that I am most helpful to others when I am most reverent toward what they are offering me. I think this is true because what we are called to give is also what we most fiercely need. A gift is a perfect conspiracy, meant to open us up to the possibility of becoming something new. What is asked of us, then, is simply that we pay attention.