Let me begin by saying this is not the sermon I wrote coming home on the plane. That attempt remains un-transcribed from my chicken-scratch penned in a pocket-sized Moleskine notebook. All week I struggled with what to share and wondered why I felt no impulse to write. I went to Haiti expecting to be transformed. I went to wash feet, to be humbled by that moving ritual of intimacy, and in so doing, to serve. I went to bear witness to a ravaged nation, to a people who persist in the face of extreme deprivation. I went expecting to come back less at peace with my abundantly comfortable life. And though I rinsed many feet—- of women and men, children and babies, and bore witness to the ruins wrought by an earthquake and a far more complex set of problems, I return with the understanding that I may have helped but I did not serve.
In her book My Grandfather’s Blessing: Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging, doctor and teacher Rachel Naomi Remen writes:
Unlike helping and fixing and rescuing, service is mutual. . . True service is not a relationship between an expert and a problem; it is far more genuine than that. It is a relationship between people who bring the full resources of their combined humanity to the table and share them generously.…Service is a relationship between equals.…Over forty-seven years of illness I have been helped and fixed by a great number of people. I am grateful to them all. But all that helping and fixing left me wounded in some important and fundamental ways. Only service heals.
I wish in no way to diminish the value of help in the form of a pair of shoes that arrives unbidden. I agree with Remen’s assertion, “When we bless others we offer them refuge from an indifferent world,” and while mission trips intend to offer refuge from indifference, the catch is in the word “blessing” which Remen defines “not [as] something one person gives another [but] a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true worth.”
The truth is without humanitarian aid many people would starve, die even sooner, and suffer more. But the other concomitant truth is that relentless aid creates a relationship of dependence that keeps us from coming together in our shared humanity because after a while, the donor becomes a dollar sign and the recipient a manifestation of need. Then it is not one’s true nature and worth being recognized, but rather a pre-determined role. Whether we want it to or not, charity always maintains imbalance.
For the most part, the blessing I experienced in Haiti happened with my wonderful tripmates and our local liaison John, a soulful man who moved to Haiti twenty-two years ago. We spent all day and evening together sharing our stories, our experience, our faith, our questions. We played cards and laughed, ate meals together. John offered his vast knowledge of Haiti and our group leader Katie afforded us ease of travel. Both provided a rich opportunity to experience a glimmer of Haiti viewed from several facets. I found value in every moment of the trip and returned so grateful but in all honesty, my encounters with Haitians could not constitute blessing because the interactions lacked “that certain kind of relationship” Remen writes of where “both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth.”
The people who sat across from me with a basin of water between us understood they were there to receive shoes not share their gifts. The shoes no doubt will be helpful and as much as I want to believe those folks felt my presence and desire to rinse their feet as a gift, the fact that they had no opportunity to offer theirs, and had no role other than recipient kept the moment from blessing us. I suspect some, perhaps a few, would have preferred to rinse their feet unassisted. Having me pat their feet dry as a mother might do for her children may have been an indignity quietly endured instead the tenderness I meant to give. Because of the language barrier I could not ask their preference.
The year I volunteered as a jail chaplain during a time of tremendous upheaval in my life, I knew every time I got buzzed through the massive electronically controlled door, that I wasn’t there to help; I was there to serve. Every visit I brought with me my unspoken brokenness. I have told the story many times of a day I arrived feeling fragile, grateful for the distraction of another’s woe. I sat with a man I met with every week named Darrick who was a fervent Christian. As usual I asked if he wanted to pray. He caught me off guard by responding, “Yes, Leaf, I’d like to pray for you.” That he recognized my humanity—acknowledged my true nature and worth—was the prayer. The words he offered up to God were proverbial icing on the cake. What made that encounter a blessing is that Darrick saw me in my full humanity, as a pastor and person with sorrow of my own, and in return, I gave him the gift of pastoring to me.
Allowing someone to meet us in the valley of need is a gift when shared. The gracious patient Haitians who accepted free shoes allowed me with my good intentions and big heart to express my desire to “offer refuge from an indifferent world.” But in a world punctuated with charity the imbalance of every sentence suggests a grammar of indifference.
Remen writes, “Service is free of debt.” It is devoid of obligation or imbalance. In Haiti the children we visited at an orphanage, and the women with babies and the students and teachers at an elementary school who received shoes didn’t get to bring anything other than their need.
Our religious impulse, lo, our very humanity, calls us not just to do all the good we can, but to do better, and with the least harm. Fostering dependence causes harm. That’s why the Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo entitled her first book Dead Aid.
So as we give away shoes, how might we invite local folks who receive them to share their gifts with us? The resourcefulness, patience, persistence, and abiding faith evident in Haiti makes it clear the Haitian people have much to share: be it through singing together, or teaching well-meaning missionaries to cook, paint, sew, carve figurines, or make jewelry as they do.
At the orphanage we visited, a girl about seven named Vanessa asked not that I take her picture as so many of the children did; she asked that I let her take pictures herself. She made a series of self-portraits and happily went about photographing images arresting to her eye, to her sensibility not mine. That was a moment of blessing when she escaped the role of an orphaned, deprived child with legs so bowed she could barely walk and I escaped the role of benevolent white do-gooder with a pocket full of toys to bestow like Santa—and the two of us became photographers together.
What I learned in four days is that Haitian people don’t want to beg or rely on endless aid. They hustle every day to just to exist; they sell used shoes or clothes or quart jars of gas, components harvested from used electronics, colorful pills in blister packs and a host of products that come from somewhere else. The once fertile fields lay fallow, woodlands have been cut, factories sit empty. Charity and missionaries pour in offering compassion and relief but Haitians like any people seek self-determination. As nice as it is that the shoe company Teva gives away shoes I paid over a hundred dollars for, wouldn’t it be even better for the folks receiving the give-away shoes to choose them?
I love the Teva’s I bought last summer but I chose them after looking in no less than a half dozen stores. I passed up several other models of sensible waterproof hiking shoes in search of the perfect pair for walking my dog in the woods. I couldn’t help but think as the women at our first distribution slipped off their simple black lightweight loafers or flip-flop style sandals, would sporting a pair of thick-soled leather lace-ups perfect for mountain trails suit their urban tropical life?
We’ve all heard the phrase “Beggars can’t be choosers” but these were not beggars; they were women who waited patiently for hours because they could use another pair of shoes. When we get shoes we select them. As adults we pay for them which affords us dignity because we get to exchange something we have for something we need.
What if we were to multiply the good we do donating dollars and gently worn shoes by participating in a longer range vision as well so that there can be an end to charity and a regeneration of Haitian agriculture and manufacturing? What if in addition to the microbusiness Soles4Souls promotes by helping folks in Haiti (and elsewhere) sell used shoes as street vendors or even shopkeepers, it partnered with investors to recapitalize local manufacturing? Why not work toward Haitians producing the shoes, new or used, others Haitians sell?
One of the women on the trip is a shoe designer who wants to go back to Haiti in April. She told our group leader she feels she has so much more to give. And as loving and light-filled as she was shaking hands with the women whose feet she washed, what if she were eventually able to teach a score of Haitian women how to design shoes? What if the CEO of Soles4Souls shared his vast entrepreneurial and management skills with future Haitian shoe company executives instead of just asking American ones to donate shoes?
What if the droves of good-hearted missionaries arriving daily in Port-au-Prince were to preach a gospel of agency and self-determination?
As Unitarian Universalists we respect the interdependent web of life and a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, which is to say we understand the limits of self-reliance and value the importance of participation and co-creation. We all rely on a host of beings and elements other than ourselves. In some ways the very notion of an individualized self is illusory. We share DNA not just with chimps but mice and breathe the same air. We survive not by dint of our own grit and innovation, but by the heat and light of a distant star and a watery mineral-rich earth we mine to keep the forges burning and cell phones ringing. We endure because our forebears resisted giving up, and because the bees continue to pollinate and the rivers still run. We overpopulate the planet not simply from our procreational zeal, but because we haven’t yet managed to deforest all the trees.
There is a vast difference between inter-reliance and dependence, hubris and humility, self-sufficiency and charity.
Each week in our worship we recite as part of our covenant “Love is the doctrine of this church, the search for truth its sacrament and service its prayer.”
Service, as Rachel Naomi Remen suggests, “is a relationship between people who bring the full resources of their combined humanity to the table and share them generously…a relationship between equals.” A relationship between a chaplain and inmate where both get to offer a prayer. A relationship between a young Haitian girl who longs to shine her light capturing it through a lens and a middle-aged privileged American who longs to be of use. A relationship between a graceful surgeon who came to Haiti as a young man to help build a church and school, still there two decades later, and the baby in the orphanage who naps peacefully on the man’s chest as he stretches out on the floor of the nursery also in need of a nap.
“Service,” Remen writes, “connects us to one another and to life itself. When we experience our connectedness, serving others becomes the natural and joyful thing to do.” As we know from compassion fatigue, “fixing and helping are draining”— not just to the helper, but the help-ee. Always being the recipient is tiring, while service—which is mutual—renews and sustains.
As soon as I registered to go on the shoe distribution trip, I expected the experience would be utterly transforming though I had I had no idea how. Each day in Haiti, be it sitting with a toddler in my lap or driving by shanties of deprivation I kept waiting for the transformation. As I conversed with the four generous, soulful women who traveled there with me, as I listened to John recount how he learned to perform surgery prior to medical school from an eminent surgeon who nurtured his skill because he saw a country in need, I felt blessed to be in such fine company. Each day, riding along cavernously rutted roads, whether visiting an orphanage, distributing shoes, or walking amid the rubble of a cathedral destroyed in a city of tents, I witnessed patience, persistence and faith as never before. The transformation I went in search of was not what I could have imagined: that truthfully, much as I wanted to serve, I had helped. There is value in helping, virtue in giving, but service is the prayer.
Amen.
Closing words: “Service is an attitude founded on the recognition that the World has supported you, fed you, taught you, tested you whether or not you earned it.”(Dan Millman).
“True service is an experience of wholeness, fulfillment, fullness, self-reliance, self-sufficiency for all parties.” (Lynne Twist and Dan Millman.) “The very purpose of life.” (Marion Wright Edelman)
