There are probably a hundred reasons why I related to this story and shared in the spectrum of emotional responses of individual players living the team story. And, carrying this story and its emotional resonance around with me like a small gift for days, it isn’t surprising that it got me thinking. What was it in the experience that was so moving for the players involved? And, though vicariously, how was I touched by the same experience.
The first time I watched this story, I felt a tear in the fabric of my heart, a small rending. This is what it feels like when my heart is touched and responds when witnessing or participating in something that is profoundly moving. Interestingly, it is a visceral response. We feel it in the body… when a lump grows in the throat, or we have a surge of feeling, or tears well up. And, perhaps we say, “oh, that was so touching.” There is a sense that we have been impacted deep in our core by an experience and we are moved…I have heard some describe variations of this as being “broken open;” others fluent in the neurosciences talk about the limbic system at work; still others may talk about compassionate service.
A small act of compassionate service on behalf of another can be profoundly transformative for those serving and those receiving the service. In the opening of her book My Grandfather’s Blessings Rachel Naomi Remen says this about service: “We do not serve the weak or the broken. What we serve is the wholeness in each other and the wholeness in life. The part in you that I serve is the same part that is strengthened in me when I serve. (p. 7)”
The goodness, simplicity, unity, courage, selflessness, and compassion demonstrated in the story on many levels were compelling and deserve fuller attention. For now, taken as a whole, the event had a luminous quality; it was bright and life-giving…light spilling from the heart. The kind of light that shapes how we see, transforms our awareness, and leaves us altered.
What is the attitude I must embody, from what place must service flow, for it to be luminous, revealing a deeper, greater reality? For the person served and me to be transformed? Is there a particular type of service that does this better than others? How do I “tap into” the heart light and let it shine, shine, shine?
In her poem The Pleasure of Serving by Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral remind us that it isn’t about grand gestures, “re-tweets,” or “likes.” Small acts of service make a difference.
“But don’t fall prey to the error that only great tasks done can be counted as accomplishments. There are small acts of service that are good ones: decoratively setting a table, putting some books in order, combing a little girl’s hair. The one over there is the one that criticizes. This other one is the one that destroys.
You be the one who serves.”
Service can take many forms. And, when service flows from a place of generosity, of giving-of-oneself without expecting anything in return, then it has the power to transform, to illuminate the sacred space between us, our mutuality and connectedness–revealing, but not compromising the unity and truth of our sameness and difference.
Undoubtedly said better elsewhere by others and likely painfully obvious, perhaps this is the insight: serving is a gift of oneself–a radical expenditure without return. It is when we give of ourselves, place ourselves in service to the other, that we open to transformation and the light of heart to shine through us in love.
“You be the one who serves.”
