I went to bed last night with the urge to write. I woke up, and it is still here. I came to my local coffee shop just down the road, where I'm now sitting on the deck in the unexpectedly warm weather of November 1st. Low clouds are rolling over the Catskills, and I feel nested in the valley with the warm gray wind pushing everything through.
I didn't actually have a plan as to what to write. Sometimes I do - I get a bug up in me when I read something, or overhear a conversation that sparks a sentiment. This morning it's just the wind in the pines, the swaying red paper lanterns above me, the feeling of emptiness like there's nothing in me to get tangled or hooked on.
On my mind these days is the most recent turning of the old, familiar wheel of Wondering How Best to Contribute to the World, so perhaps I will begin here. Now that I think of it, that's where the spark came from last night as I spoke with a good friend about our respective journeys into work. I spoke of feeling a bit like the priest in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. He is a man wandering in Mexico in the 1930s, having lost his faith but looking to do good work and make sense of the unraveling of society around him. My feeling of affinity is less about being some noble person than it is about trying to do some good in a society that seems clearly dysfunctional but also does not present immediate solutions. How do I live an ethical life where I can both care for myself and also address pressing problems from a local to global scale?
In my reflections on work, the word "minister" has been on my mind these past few weeks. The Benedictine nun who supervises me in my hospital chaplaincy training asked me to try out using the word "ministry" rather than "work" to describe what we do. Interesting, I thought, with a little feeling of discomfort. My mind's first inclination is to go the noun "minister," and the image of a Protestant clergyman with the black shirt and white collar insert. Though I dress in dark shirts when at the hospital, and though patients do sometimes seem to think I am a pastor, that image feels a little strange and inaccessible to me.
The verb "to minister," however, has a little more grip for me. Wiktionary says that it means "To attend to (the needs of); to tend; to take care(of); to give aid; to give service." This moves me closer to the way I want to be in the world. I feel like the act of ministering transcends the idea of work as a 40-hour divided part of my life. I can minister by busing my own dishes at the coffeeshop, by picking up litter, by listening to the lonely person in a too-white hospital room, by volunteering to anchor some bookshelves at the local library (can you tell what I've been up to recently?). I can minister by really putting energy into the endless/impossible practice of the three pure precepts in Buddhism - abstaining from killing, practicing good, and actualizing good for others. In aiming to be an upright person (an insurmountable task, usually daunting to even try to comprehend), I can perhaps minister to the world.
The world certainly needs carpenters, plumbers, nurses, social workers, painters, baristas, clerks, doctors, librarians, drivers, and all the other jobs that make up society. But with what intention do we undertake our tasks? Do we keep working as a highway repair man and hope that someone else will address Stand Your Ground violence? Do we keep generating clever advertising campaigns and figure that someone's working to stop the accelerating extinction of thousands of animal species? How can we minister to the world?
If we don't take responsibility for the whole enchilada, then we have to decide whose responsibility it is. And that brings us to the mess of modernity. Someone's fracking for natural gas, and polluting the air and water in the process. So we have to hire/elect some people to decide how much the Gas Company should pay, and to whom, to meet someone else's standard of offsetting the "externalities" of drilling. The Gas Company can get lawyers whose responsibility it is to minimize the company's responsibility. We create organizations to keep tabs on both the government regulators and the Gas Company itself. We create oversight committees that bring the various groups together to talk, and then issue reports that go out about what seems to be the state of affairs. We bring in some more lawyers to decide how little or how much the Gas Company needs to disclose about its process, and who might be responsible if such-and-such a scenario might theoretically happen.
We use up so much energy, time, and money because we perpetuate a society of division and narrow self-interest and then apply layer after layer of argument to defend ourselves from liability. Guess what? We're all liable. Yes, there are Amazonian tribes deep in the jungle who have been minding their own business for perhaps millennia. There are Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama, Wendell Barry and Julia Butterfly Hill. Maybe we think of these folks as less culpable because they are prominent do-gooders. But I am fairly sure that they feel responsible for this whole mess too. It's not about perpetrators, victims, and heros, although we can certainly delineate a story along those lines. It's about encountering all aspects of ecological destruction fully, and having the courage to be responsible. To minister to the world.
We don't need to go out and find more problems so that we can flagellate ourselves with some story about how we're not doing enough. That's just another way of making life Me-centric. Oh, poor me, I'm so overwhelmed by the state of the world because I'm so sensitive and really aware of the problems out there. Notice that this implies that I am special and better than those folks who haplessly go around seeming not to know that the whole thing is burning. It is our job simply to wake up to what is, to cultivate an ability to face all situations with a sense of responsibility.
What happens when I do that, when I really look at the police's abuse of power and melting glaciers and broken healthcare? Won't I freak out and lose my mind? To be flippant, yes, we're lucky if we lose our minds, our habitual way of relating to the world. To be more practical, I do well when I don't worry ahead of time about how it's going to be. That's just a game run by my little egocentric hamster in the wheel, designed to perpetuate the hurry and chatter of holding myself separate from the rest of the world and avoiding responsibility. In fact, I can just look at these situations, and feel. I need to begin with just feeling. Just letting myself be sad, or angry, or whatever, without immediately jumping into fear - "I can't let myself be with this feeling because what will I do with all that feeling?" I run that racket a lot, but I know from occasional glimmers of experience that I don't need to. I can feel things fully, and I'll be okay.
Perhaps ministering to the world is just entering each moment by living the question "How can I help?" And then listening with the ear of the heart, as encouraged at the beginning of the Rule of St. Benedict. My Zen teacher told me that trying to be good or do the right thing (i.e. acting on my ideas rather than responding openly to the situation) will immediately stifle my ability to help. I can feel that, when my mind takes over and sells me a bill of goods made up of impatience, anxiety, desperation, and being separate from the world. So my practice these days is to slow down, keep slowing down, notice my breath, and let my waters get calm as best I can. How can I minister to the world in each moment? How can I help?
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