How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

Caring for one another, we sometimes glimpse an essential quality of our being.

Nothing may be more important, in all this, than being gentle with ourselves.

The ability to avoid being entrapped by one another’s mind is one of the great gifts we can offer each other. With this compassionate and spacious awareness, and the listening it makes possible, we can offer those we are with a standing invitation to come out from wherever they are caught, if they are ready and wish to do so.

“The greatest sin of the age,” wrote the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, “is to make the concrete abstract.”

But affluence has bought us privacy, and the apparent power to guard it against the encroachments of other people’s adversity. As individuals and as a society, we set up lines of defense. We isolate poverty, old age, and death so that we need not confront them in our daily lives. The poor are off in ghettos, the elderly in retirement homes, the dyi

There’s one thing I’ve learned in twenty-five years or so of political organizing: People don’t like to be “should” upon. They’d rather discover than be told.

What kind of victory is it when someone is left defeated?

For one receiving help, it can be immensely useful to become more conscious of the habitual ways in which we react to our suffering and the help offered to alleviate it. Just seeing these patterns clearly may allow us to discard reactions that cut us off from others at a time when we need them the most.

But perhaps there will be nothing we can do. Then we can only be, and be with the person in his or her pain, attending to the quality of our own consciousness.