Serving with Soul
Jim Burklo, Sausalito Presbyterian Church
May 6, 2007
Service is about feelings.
It’s not just about what we do for others. It’s also about how it feels for them, and for us, when we do acts of service.
It’s the “how” even more than the “what” that matters.
Our church’s Leon Mission project, which the marvelous Mexican Brunch after worship will support, does good things for the children and the Indian families at Casa Hogar and Casa Indigena. We work hard on building housing, fixing facilities, running a day camp for kids. We send down a lot of money that helps keep the program going. We do good things. But over and over and over, the folks in Mexico say that what matters most is the friendship and love we share with them, and that they share with us. What makes this project so wonderful is the relationship we have with each other. A relationship that feels really good.
Serving from the heart – serving with soul – so much of it is about taking feelings very, very seriously.
You know, we live in a society that doesn’t do so. We are so shallow with each other, so much of the time. So much of what passes for service is done at arms’ length – giving little access to each others’ souls. We ask people how they are, but do we really want to know how they are? When we ask “how are you”, are we ready to take the time to listen to how that person really is feeling? And yet one of the highest forms of service is just this: to check in with another person and ask them how they are doing, and really to be ready to hear about their true feelings. And to let the person know we are ready to hear what’s on their hearts.
That’s service with soul. That’s the service of the soul.
When I worked with homeless people, I got a lot of powerful lessons in how, and how not, to be of service. One thing that still haunts me is the enormous effect that seemingly subtle things can have on a relationship of service. I learned that the design of an environment for homeless services was absolutely critical. To serve mentally ill homeless people, to make them feel comfortable at our drop in center, required special attention. People suffering from psychosis needed space – they needed a way to have distance from the rest of the people if they wanted it. For years our drop in center was outdoors. It was right next to a very busy road, but there were trees and birds and dirt all around. Mentally ill folks could take a folding chair and a cup of coffee and sit under a tree, away from the center of the action, and feel comfortable – feel like they had access to conviviality without social pressure they couldn’t handle. The place felt good to them. The openness of the outdoor site was ideal for this population, and the Urban Ministry became very effective at serving homeless mentally ill people as a result. When we finally got an indoor space, we were very careful to design an outside courtyard that had dirt and trees, where the most disturbed people could go and feel comfortable. Last September I went down for the opening day of the Opportunity Center, a facility for which I and many others had dreamed and worked for 20 years – the beautiful new drop in center and housing complex for homeless and very low income folks in the Peninsula. I had the privilege of leading a ceremony to close the old center and then leading the homeless people from the old outdoor center to the gleaming new building a few blocks away. It was an incredibly moving experience for me, one of the most important days of my life. I was nervous, however, because I didn’t know how well the most troubled folks would take to the new facility. I still weep when I recall leading them into the courtyard and the building. The homeless folks gazed in wonderment at the pristine $24 million dollar building, uncertain, but amazed. After milling around and looking, a number of them drifted toward the dirt area, and found the walls on which they could sit or lean under the trees. Close to the center of the action, but far enough away from it to feel comfortable. I could feel their relief, their willingness to call this place their home away from home.
How does it feel to be served? A question I try to ask – but often forget to ask. How might my attempt to be helpful be received? Am I doing unto others as I would have them do to me, or am I doing unto others as others would have me do unto them?
These aren’t easy questions to answer, sometimes. Sometimes it’s very hard to tell what is service and what is not. Sometimes people need things that they don’t want. When is it, and when is it not our place to serve them in ways that they won’t like now, but may very well be grateful for later? How do we negotiate service to others when we may have power over them that makes both them and us uncomfortable? That’s hard to tell. But worth asking.
We often want to serve the people we love. But sometimes we lose sight of how our gifts and care to others might be received emotionally and spiritually.
A few years ago I heard a piece on NPR radio about a guy who was in business school and was researching customer service systems. He was learning techniques applied by retail and other service industries. Then he decided to apply the approaches he was learning on his wife. So she woke up one morning to him hovering next to her. He said, “Hi, I’m Sam. I’ll be your husband this morning. How can I provide you with excellent marital service today?” She was a bit taken aback by this approach at first, but quickly began to enjoy it. He would seek her input about the quality of his service, and adjust his performance accordingly. He’d give her customer satisfaction surveys to fill out. Yeah, it was a little weird – a bit of a farce at some level – but in fact she did get better service from her husband as a result of the exercise.
The question I’m trying to learn how to ask a lot more often, in all my relationships, is this: “How do you feel about what I am doing or saying? How would it feel if I did this versus that?” It’s a powerful question and the consequences of asking it a lot are really quite positive and profound. If I don’t ask it enough of you, please remind me to do so, would you?
Because feelings are beyond doubt. If you feel something, and say you feel it, there is nothing to argue about. We can argue about supposed facts and figures, times and dates, we can argue about opinions, we can argue about evaluations and descriptions. But when we share our feelings with each other, we’re as close to the truth as we can get – there’s no dispute about them. And really, there are only a few feelings. I’m learning, later than I wished I had learned, that I do well to talk a lot more about feelings in simple terms. That’s tough for me as a word-smith, a guy who talks and writes for a living. But it turns out that the simpler and more direct I can be about my feelings, the better. There are only a few of them: joy, love, fear, anger, sadness. Every other supposed feeling is just a fancy way of talking about one of these four feelings.
Same goes for theology. You can argue forever about religion. I’ve argued plenty, and it’s a spectacular waste of time. You can argue about whether or not God exists, whether Jesus really walked on water. You can argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. You can argue about which religion is better than others. But what’s to argue about when you talk about how it feels to pray? I was at the Marin Interfaith Council annual prayer breakfast this week. A Quaker, a Pentecostal Christian, and a Sunni Muslim spoke about their experiences of prayer. The Quaker talked about the profundity of sitting in Quaker meeting and feeling the power of the silence. The Pentecostal talked about a feeling of tingling from head to toe when he first experienced the Holy Spirit. The Muslim talked about what it feels like to be very present and close to Allah during the five daily prayers. The feelings seemed so similar, though the language and the forms of their religious traditions were so different. And in hearing these three speakers, I was so moved by their expressions of their feelings that everything else debatable about what they said seemed to melt away.
We sometimes call our worship a worship “service”, and I think there is something profound about that term. I think what makes worship a service is the level of feeling that it inspires us to experience and share. It is a time to share our true feelings with each other and with God. Worship is a service when we use it to express our joy, love, fear, anger, and sadness – sharing it all in a way that increases our love for each other and for the divine.
I’m Jim. I’ll be your minister today. How can I provide you with excellent pastoral care? How does my effort to care for you actually feel? Let me know – let each other know, please – so that all of us can serve with soul. Amen!