Service
The Chiapas Project : A Catholic Worker Community
“NON SERVIAM”, OR, QUESTIONS ON SERVICE. This dilemna of service! Oh, the concept of serving has plagued me for years. In reading, in discussion, in action the concept of service comes to my conscious life with regularity. The service of each day- The service that is in my head (perhaps some romantic concept tied to my layers of cultural experience)- The service that I have experienced in my brief history. Why, after all, do they call it a “church service”? My first conscious exegisis of service came in reading James Joyce. The Thomas Aquinas concept of “serviam” filtered through Stephen Daedulus in “Portrait of an Artist As A Young Man.” Aquinas elsewhere speaks of his concept of service- “…..a hard service. A service where we seek the divine.” Yet- Aquinas and Joyce are often confused with the distinction between service to the Church and service to some other vague distinction of “Religion”, “Christ”, etc. I think Joyce got it wrong. His service was tied into his concept of a Catholic Church that forgot the “love” in preserving the ritual; hence the coda of his protagonist “Non Serviam”. Nor do I think I can serve such a church… Machiavelli in the service of “The Prince” reminds us what price, the service. What are the ends? That is to say, if you serve a Prince in this world, everything or any means are legitimate if the Prince incorporates the values you find as an end… If, however, one serves the “Prince of Peace”, or an end not of this world one must consider the means along the way to those ends of another world.
Nationalism calls us to service for the state. My service in the Army? In
Vietnam? Yet, nationalism calls me to ask for what ends? What are the ends of the state- the nation where I was born? Is Nationalism any different that serving Machiavelli’s Prince? Does it make any difference if, for example, I vote to elect a President who will use any means to glorify his Nation at the expense of the poor? Serving without God is a kind of Epicureanism; serving Plato’s “The Good”- or greed- or ambition- or family- or happiness. To what end? Perhaps Stoicism? In Art, which I try to ply daily, that is, either in looking at what is around me or the more active taking photos, building in a wood shop, designing lamps, rugs, working with other artisans. What does it serve? If my ends are religious, does it serve for the greater glory of God? Does it, as Isaiah says, “Restore the breach….” In sum, “Ya got to serve somebody.” Serving Caesar or God or, better yet “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Perhaps I can only read and think and act each day in a conscious way trying to move away from theories to acts, towards that “preferential option for the poor.”
