Pagan Service
Service, that fine Druid (and others) practice of turning up and giving your best because it’s needed. Service to Gods, land and tribe, not for any personal gain, but because it is the right thing to do. It has to be open hearted and unconditional, or it isn’t service. I’ve been lying awake this morning poking this as an issue, because it so often goes badly for me. I’ll willingly show up to whatever needs doing, pour heart and soul, everything I have into doing the best job I can, and at the end am left bruised, exhausted, and quite often feeling that it wasn’t enough, or that it was somehow an imposition. People who will ask for everything I’m capable of and more, and then belittle, shame and/or push me away for having given that. Doing it freely is one thing, doing it and then being wounded for doing it, is another.
Service needs a context to exist, and that context is all about honourable relationship. It’s all too easy, when someone gives freely, to take that for granted. Much of mainstream culture encourages aggressive, acquisitive, competitive thinking. When that is the norm, the person who gives freely is easily branded as weak, foolish, and fair game for exploitation. If you can get something for nothing out of a person, that makes you clever, by regular standards and it will make you more successful while the person who gives won’t get ahead.
Volunteers make the charitable sector viable. Schools depend on the time, efforts and extra cash parents give. Our national health service gets a lot of mileage out of people who care for sick family members, fundraisers and contributions to medical charities. Politics depends on grass roots folk turning up and giving freely, as do many things that cause communities to exist and be viable. Paganism would not have viable communities, magazines, teaching groups and rituals without volunteers. Everyone wants volunteers, service and generosity, but so often that’s treated with disrespect, and it’s a cultural thing.
It is possible to treat people as though they have a value without giving them money. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what really makes the difference here, and I think it’s about the place of the volunteer in the community. If you mistreat a volunteer, it is easy to make them feel there’s only a place for them if they turn up to give. If your unconditional service becomes the condition for being present, all kinds of things start to go wrong. The volunteer has less sense of innate worth and an increasing awareness of only having a place in so far as they provide service. What started as an unconditional gift becomes an exceedingly conditional arrangement, where all of the onus is on the person who gives. I have been in organisations that, for a time, pretty much did this deliberately. Eventually this breaks your volunteers.
If someone offers service you can afford to assume there is something important in this, for them. They show up only because they care. People who do not give a shit, do not serve. So they’re passionate about the cause, the space, the community, the person they’ve dedicated to… whatever it may be. It is this passion that makes unconditional service viable. The more serious the person is, the less they will ask for. But that doesn’t make it ok to give nothing in response to service.
We need to recognise that the people who serve love what they are doing. Scope to be in that space, part of that tribe, around the focus of devotion without having to be unconditionally giving stuff all the time makes things a lot more emotionally stable. If we honour those who give, we might try figuring out how to take better care of them.
