A Meditation on Service
My need to serve transcends all.
It shows up in my work, in my relating, in my very essence, it seems.
Service.
This is key to the hidden wisdom of BDSM. I’ve written about it elsewhere, probably from the perspective of the submissive woman, probably needing to sort out my complicated feelings about being a radical feminist serving in stereotypically sexist forms.
Service has a complicated meaning in contemporary American society.
Sometimes it refers to a military veteran who has served the US in voluntary service in one of our branches of the armed forces.
Sometimes “service” refers to jobs that are not very highly respected but important none-the-less.
Sometimes this word refers to the relationship or treatment of patrons of establishments with these workers in place to serve them.
Sometimes the word has to do with voluntarism and community support: a trash clean up day, reading to children, or catching stray cats to be spayed.
Sometimes it even has to do with games, as a look at a dictionary reminds me, we serve in tennis and volleyball, sports with a net and a back and forth between two sides.
Sometimes it means a ritual process, an experience led by one for another, a way of marking time and fundamental realities of life.
Sometimes service is a gift, freely given.
Sometimes service comes with expectation and resentment.
Sometimes service is seen as lowly and unimportant.
Sometimes service is celebrated and honored.
The word conveys a meaning of dualism, of the transfer of labor from one to another. It is dyadic in its essence in more ways than one. It is multi-faceted and brave in its expansiveness. It means all these things and more.
And yet, we have many words branching off from this one word that reveal our discomfort with the concept: servile, servitude, servant. Here we see the assumption of the lowly, the designation of service as something to be avoided. And yet. How many of us secretly ache to be in service to something greater than ourselves.
To me, this feels like the righteous expression of the need to be kept safe in our community units. We are kept safe within by serving the needs of the collective. There is a connection here. Service can also be corrupted, can be in service to evil as much as to good. And good and evil can exist in the eyes of the beholders. Service here is neutral to that determination. Service is simply a program to follow, and method, a way of transferring energy.
A way. Not THE way. Service is not for everyone.
There is something here I am struggling to get to.
I ache to serve. I want for everything I do to be in service to something greater than myself. I want never to act purely from my own selfish desires. Except that I do--I do indeed always want to act from my own selfish desires. It’s just that definition of selfish. And the connection of the self to the whole, the assumption that these are opposites and not what they actually are, which is fractals of each other. There is no collective without me, without you, without the individual. And, there is no me without the collective either, for I cannot exist alone. It is simply impossible to be a single human without other humans to keep us alive. So, this selfish vs. collectivist dichotomy is false: it does not exist.
To be beneath me then is also false. It is impossible that we remain locked in a single dynamic for all time. The universe just does not work that way. The universe relies on motion for its continued existence. Physicists and physical therapists and Daoist philosophers agree: Stagnation kills.
Therefore, what goes up must come down. What goes down must come up.
This is a far cry from what I imagine my friend wanted to read when she asked me to write about service.
And really, I want to go back to her to ask what service means to her, because I have ideas, just based on knowing her and her place in life and the struggles she has faced. I am tired of writing and thinking about these big generational, demographic assumptions. I have them. My mind wants to type them now, things I think I know about my friend because of her age, her gender, her race, her religion, her life story, her medical history. I think I know and I probably do know a few things. It’s probably true. But it is boring to already know.
More interesting would be to ask her what service means to her. More interesting would be to find a way to help her expand her own definition of the word. If she wants to.
But can I help her? Does she need and want help? Why am I here, at this time, with this drive to serve if not to help? And turning that friendship into different sort of relationship, well, would that be a help? Would it be service? I know it would.
And here is where I come back to myself, my long history of service that was hinted at, at the end of yesterday’s writing session. Selling shoes. Editing papers for my friends. My entire career, in service to artists, the arts at large, and arts administrators. And my call to teach men about sexuality, this is a service. This is a calling.
This is the one form of service I have not mentioned yet: The call to serve the divine. As the Priestess prays, “Take me, take my life.” Implying the service of her life, her energy, her work, her being, exists as a tool of the Divine. And this is how I feel too. I am a tool of the divine. I am following my own path.
I guess, in answer to my friend’s question, I would say that service to that which is greater than I am drives me. I am committed to my role as a servant of the Divine.