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Path of Service and Mastery:
Spiritual Dominance and Submission
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In this day
and age, and especially in this country that I live in, there is a great deal
of ambivalent and conflicted feeling about one human being serving another in a
formal and negotiated submissive role. Most of us claim to hate the idea of
having our right to do whatever we want trampled upon. We may complain about or
even rebel against authority, perhaps even reflexively, simply because it's
there. Most service jobs, from housemaid to waiter to social worker, are
low-paid and socially devalued. Especially when it comes to personal service
jobs, such as the aforementioned waiter or housemaid, we tend to assume that no
one could actually enjoy such a job, and everyone in such jobs are merely
biding their time until they can get "better" jobs. Those would be
the ones where you are on the ordering side of the lunch counter, rather than
being on the side where they cook the fries. Actually doing the order-taking is
seen as degrading by definition. We encourage this attitude in every new
generation, and then we wonder why they are surly to us from behind the
counter, forget our ketchup, steal from our houses as they clean the floors,
laugh at the idea of community service, and eventually grow up to hire
desperate illegal immigrants to do the work that they found so belittling.
Attitudes
toward service weren't always this way, historically. While there was plenty
about medieval European society that was psychologically unhealthy, they did
have a healthier and more practical ideal of service than we do. Service was
not limited merely to a class of rich folk who never served others and a class
of poor folk who were never served themselves. Since everyone lived as part of
a hierarchy, everyone (except the very top and the very bottom) was expected to
experience both serving and being served. If the Duke came to visit the earl,
the earl or his son might serve the Duke supper with his own hands, to show him
honor. The Duke himself might have served the King a week ago, and so on up and
down the chain. Beyond this, there were clerics and monastics who -- ideally,
anyway -- served God, often by serving the people, for spiritual reasons.
While a
medieval hierarchy is impractical in today's modern and complicated social
world, we modern Americans could certainly use some reeducation in the value of
service, whether towards people who are paying you, people who have no money
and need aid, or one specific person. To put oneself -- even temporarily -- in
a selfless position for the sake of making others happier and more comfortable
has always been a worthy goal. For it to be a spiritual goal, however, the
rewards have to come not in the form of obligations and favors owed or returned
by those you sacrifice for, but in the form of intangibles -- pleasure at
making others happy, pride in doing a good job, and/or positive feelings from
being part of a larger goal of making even a small part of the world easier
rather than harder.
There are
many places in society, past and present, where people have willingly given up
certain of their rights in order to lead a simplified life of discipline and
focused purpose. One of these is the military; another is monastic orders of
all sorts, from abbeys to ashrams. In each of these cases, the entire lives of
the individuals involved are heavily controlled, up to and including their
sexuality, their clothing and hairstyles, the possessions that they are allowed
to own, and their daily work. If no one was ever drawn to a path of willingly
giving up certain freedoms in exchange for a greater reward in the end, no one
would ever join these organizations. (Read more >>)
by: Raven Kaldera
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