Helping Others

We have been talking in the last two meditations about the intention to help others. How do we understand this idea of helping others? And what does helping others do for us?

Helping others is the key to our own happiness. In the most familiar of images, there is the Madonna, the archetype of the mother, helping the human infant. To take care of the infant takes us beyond the ego, beyond our own needs. Beyond many of the boundaries we have set for ourselves. This is a kind of mammalian hard-wiring for a certain experience of awakening. An awakening to helping others even when our own convenience would dictate otherwise.

So our survival as individuals and as families and as species depends on selflessness. I have been watching a couple of bluebirds bring up their young in our high mountian meadow in Santa Fe. When the parents were on their own, they looked relaxed, svelte, insoucient. Then four sky blue eggs were laid. The parents' incoucience disappeared. They were hunting for insects all day long, enough to feed four ravenous bundles of luminous blue. They did it without stinting, without stopping.

Their genes helped. They were following a program laid down long ago that has allowed bluebirds to prosper and survive. But I still think of the parents working long hours, no longer a chic bachelor couple.

With humans it is the same, in a way. We are programmed to love those we are related to. Not that it is easy to do so. Most of Western literature, and half at least of American TV, is about how hard it is to love those we are related to. So to love our families is the triumph of intention over culture. But if it is difficult to love those whom our genes tell us to love, what about the rest? How can we possibly be dedicated to helping other people? To 'saving all sentient beings'?

We don't have to force ourselves to feel any particular emotions. Ever. We don't have to like everyone. We can't like everyone. My favorite line of Martin Luther King: "Jesus says we have to love everyone. And so I try to love everyone. But He didn't say we have to like everyone, and there are some people that I just can't like."

We need never take on an emotion because we think we are supposed to. We need instead to test what our emotional system is doing in any given situation. What are we registering, what are we picking up? How does this relate to my intention? If my intention is to help all who suffer, and I am trying to do so in a particular situation, and I am getting abused in return, what do I do? The best answer is often: retreat, to help someone else another day.

It is often not those who can most easily help, who have been most privileged, who do the helping, but those who have suffered most, and so know the need for help, who do the helping. I will never forget a poll that the pollster Louis Harris did in 1991. It was designed wit a clergyman, and the goal was to find out where the saints were in America. The word saint, of course, was never used. Instead, the poll, widely distributed, asked questions about how much of your time and money you would give to help others, even if you had nothing to spare.

It turns out that there were a lot of saints in America. Most of them were poor, overweight, middle aged, black women in the South. These were the people who were willing to give. Doubtless they had taken the lessons of need in their own lives to heart, and were willing to extend themselves to others.

How do we learn from them? If we haven't been broken by need, by discrimination, by any real objective suffering? If we are privileged, and our only difficulties lie within our own emotional confusion, how can we follow their example?

Do we feel sorry for ourselves, with all our privilege, and wallow in our own suffering? Is this how we spend our time? Do we think our suffering is special, our family history special, our grievances ones that we justify nurturing? If so we are fooling ourselves. While we are free to spend our lives doing this, it is a waste of lives, and the gifts we have been given, to do this.

Can we really help others, beyond our small circle? It is because this is difficult that the notion arose in spiritual practice of focusing on intention. Of taking a vow to help others. T