In service to others

As I've written before, I'm not a believer. I won't reiterate here my philosophical reasons for being so. However, that in no way means that I don't draw lessons from the world's various scriptures. While I don't believe in the God they describe, they are part of our human inheritance, and have wisdom in them.

For example, this:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.

Philippians 2:3-4

I derive pleasure and accomplishment from few things more than I do when someone says to me "Thank you for helping." The gratitude from someone whom you've helped, who may have been at their wits' end, who may have been facing a serious dilemma, is intoxicating. It is a positive reinforcement: you gave of yourself, and yet you received back tenfold.

And yet, so many people—including many who call themselves religious—never experience this. They never go out of their way to give to another human being with no thought of recompense. They are their own Alpha and Omega, the center of the universe, the pivot point around which all life circles. 

All the great faiths have selflessness and community at the heart of their traditions. Religions, really, are a way to figure out how to live a decent human life, one in which the law of all-against-all is repealed. Religions, at their best, have service to others as their clarion call. 

Where religions go off-piste is when they descend into determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Dogma replaces humanity. Religion becomes a blueprint to separate human beings into the damned and the saved, rather than all humans as children of the divine and deserving of respect and honor simply for that reason. When fetid dogmatism becomes the central feature of a faith, out goes what should be its true focus: service to others.

We see this so often in our modern religious life. Read these lines of scripture and you'll be saved. Send money to this church and God will repay you a hundredfold in Heaven. Follow the correct rituals and you will be among the blessed. But this, to quote Ecclesiastes, is all vanity. It doesn't matter. Faith without works is dead. Faith without attending to the great needs of teeming humanity is useless. Actually, it's less than useless. It's an active harming of the people you claim are made in the image of your God. A hungry woman doesn't need a disquisition on the three-personed God; she needs food, she needs a place to lay her head, she needs a way to reclaim her life from one of squalor.

For me, now in the middle of my life, I've discovered my life's calling. It's in serving others. It's why I'm a librarian. It's why, however hard it is, I dig into the work of helping to fight the pandemic, even though, as I often say, my student loans are not in epidemiology. It's what I've been called to do, and it's what I will do. For me, it's the only way to be fully human. I'm most human when I help others. I'm most human when I give comfort. And the rewards are boundless.

If we hairless apes are to survive our adolescence into adulthood, we need to heed the great sages who came before us. They knew that nothing matters unless we make this life easier for each other. Setting winners and losers makes losers of us all. We lose our humanity to mere bigotry. It's time to put aside self-centeredness. Doing so is literally a matter of life or death.