Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 19, No. 4, Winter 1980
Editorial
Serve as You Go Along The phrase intrigues us. We first ran across it some years ago in Witter Bynner's poetic translation of Laotse's Tao Teh Ching or Book of the Way of Life. "Man at his best, like water, serves as he goes along." In another translation the same sentence is rendered as "The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive." These comments are far from the muscular, upward striving, crusading, and reforming kind of life that most of us have been taught to respect and practice as much as we can. The whole of the Tao Teh Ching is a gentle but insistent rebuke to the dominant ideas and passions of our time. We suppose we have read the Tao Teh Ching {it is very short) thirty or forty times in the last few years. If we had read the New Testament as much, we might be a better Christian. B u t this was a book we were ripe for when we came upon it, although it had been in our library for many years as something we hoped to get around to sometime. It seems to speak to the multiple confusions, crises, and terrors of our time with the kind of sanity, humor, and humane wisdom we so desperately need, not only in healing the wounds of persons twisted and torn within b u t the wounds of nations caught in a deadly, outmoded game of competition and retaliation. The Tao Teh Ching begins with an assumption so simple and profound that we fail to realize it should be familiar to a n y b o d y who cares for democracy. People m u s t be respected and accepted as inherently sound and healthy. They do not need to be led or pushed around. It is better if their natural powers and inclinations are given an opportunity to express themselves. "Fail to honor people; they fail to honor you." " T h a t government is best that governs least," was a Taoist principle before it was a democratic maxim. "The less a leader does and says, the happier his people. The more a leader struts and brags, the sorrier his people." It is a warning that all of us who teach, preach, admonish, and persuade should take to heart. We cannot force others to do what we think they should do, even if we are sure that it is best for them. People will do what is best for them only when they have discovered that for themselves. The role of the teacher or healer is to aid in that discovery. Again, we can never teach people anything that they are not ready to learn. There is a tendency among most of us in the field of teaching and healing to think we possess a certain kind of truth which it is our d u t y to impart to 255
256
Journal of Religion and Health
others. We have a mission to spread that truth as far and wide as we possibly can. But in reality that truth, however beautiful and true it may seem to us, will not be seen as important and recognized as truth by those unready to consider it. Hence the foolishness of preaching. All we can hope to do is be available to others who have recognized that they have a need that we may be able to help them deal with. The popular religious position has been that churches, preachers, teachers, and missionaries must go out and arouse the sense of need, which they can then fill with the good news of their particular gospels. Our airwaves are cluttered with these hucksters now. They come in assorted sizes and shapes: TV evangelists, political candidates, advertisers whose task it is to create desires for the products they are trying to sell, and a wide assortment of varied prophets, saviors, and popular pundits competing for attention and support from the public. The public, according to Laotse, would be better off without this kind of persuasion and influence. People can follow the ways of nature without too much strain and find superior wisdom when they need it without having it thrust upon them. The same principle holds, we think with regard to the matter of protecting the weak and the sick. Hospitals and therapeutic institutions are only beginning to learn the importance of getting patients active and out of their doors as fast as possible. At the same time, large numbers of the sick, the infirm, and the old are living in overprotected environments mainly because we can no longer work out the optimal conditions that would provide them with as much help as they need and as much opportunity to live as they are capable of using. To find what an individual needs in the immediate situation and keep up with that person and those needs as they change is perhaps more than we can hope for from large and complicated institutions. But surely it is an area where the concerned individual can make a real difference and provide real help to a few people whose condition and needs he knows and understands. If our institutions of health care and therapy must be large, and perhaps they must since our population is large, then there is even greater demand for caring people who humanize the institution and its practices by understanding the personal needs of a few patients and helping them to grow toward greater strength and self-reliance. The kinds of protection that national and cultural groups practice for and upon one another are even more terrifying than the methods used by individuals. One can only feel sadness and pity for the people of small nations who are unfortunate enough to be protected by their larger neighbors or interested friends. The people of Afghanistan could do without the protection of the U.S.S.R. as well as the people of Vietnam could have done without U.S. protection a decade ago. The unconscious irony of a comment made by an American officer in Vietnam about the reason for destroying a whole village has become a part of the vernacular: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Gangsters sell their clients and puppets protection whether they want it or not. One of the worst fates that can befall the people of any small independent nation is that a large power may decide to give them protection. Laotse suggests the appropriate epitaph for all wars and warriors: "Conduct your triumph as a funeral."
Editorial
257
If we are to serve people well, it is essential to begin where they are and not where we think they ought to be. We have, perhaps without meaning to, cultivated the m y t h of the omnipotent, omniscient healer, the one who has passed beyond the ordinary human weaknesses, if he ever experienced them, and can therefore advise from the point of view of complete knowledge and perfection. The minister, the doctor, the teacher, the therapist must be beyond the ordinary weaknesses he is trying to treat. Or at least he must appear so. To help with this masquerade we have created all kinds of rituals of office: consulting room, operating table, the couch, the one-way window, even the vestments of priest and doctor. Most of us know that underneath and behind these protective walls and garments are some ordinary, confused, uncertain human beings. But in our roles as helpers and healers we dare not admit that. Why? The theory is that those we try to help would lose confidence in us if we admitted to doubts or personal weakness. But is that necessarily so? They might accept our aid and guidance better if they realized they were listening to a human being who knew what anxiety, fear, and confusion are really like. As Laotse remarks, "One who knows his lot to be the lot of all others is a safe one to guide them. One who recognizes all men as members of his own body is a sound one to guard them." It takes courage and honesty to come out from behind our professional defenses and props and be human beings, but it can be very rewarding for both the helpers and the helped. The Olympic speed skating champion Eric Heiden, who after winning five gold medals at Lake Placid was soundly beaten in the championship races in Holland the next week, remarked that it was a great relief. He felt a lot better being human instead of invincible. People liked him better, too. The myths of-any kind of group superiority and perfection--social, religious, national, or cultural--should all be relegated as quickly as possible to the dust heaps of history. They hurt not only the peoples and nations against whom they are directed but even more the peoples who are beguiled by them into believing that they really are superior and divinely ordained to fulfill some special function in history. When one considers the cost to the whole human race of the effort to perpetuate myths of omnipotence within various nations, one can only hope that sanity will come soon, before it is too late. The great powers destroy themselves by paying attention to armaments and military power while neglecting natural resources and the sources of natural power like the sun, which could help them solve their problems. The small, weak nations wait helplessly to see what the giants may do. They are the losers anyway, since in seeking to destroy each other the giants tend to destroy everything in their paths. Instead of absolutism in doctrine or power, Laotse's sane philosophy teaches a kind of relativism that is both humane and sensible. Einstein's theory of relativity is a concept we cannot understand in precise mathematical terms; but from reading about the man and his life, we think we have the general idea. It is thht everything in the universe is in motion. Nothing remains static and unchanged. Hence, our views of reality in nature and in other human beings are views seen, as it were, enpassant. They are moving. We are moving. People meet, see, and touch each other as they move along through the process
258
Journal of Religion and Health
of life and growth. Hence, if we convey meaning, truth, and support to other people, we do so as we go along. Our lives have many encounters that are brief b u t are significant. They have a few shared journeys, with traveling companions--some chosen and some provided by circumstances outside our control. If the concept of relativity applies in this field of human relationships, as we are sure it does, then it explains a lot of situations and difficulties that human beings find. For instance, it explains w h y the faith of our fathers, once so dear and so apparently immutable, can lose its power and its appeal. It explains w h y something that seems absolutely necessary to us can seem totally irrelevant to somebody else. Relativity means that, for a meeting and understanding of two persons or groups of persons to take place, there must be both readiness to give and readiness to receive. B u t it also explains why the healer, the teacher, the therapist, the one who is trying to help, must restrain his impulses to demand, insist, and b u r s t through the defenses of another. Yet he must also keep open every possible avenue of communication s o that no chance to reach the other, no door half open tentatively, escapes his notice. To serve as you go along means a readiness and openness to the needs for intelligent caring that are always coming along on the currents of life. "Respond to the life that addresses you," wrote Martin Buber. In short, be fully present wherever you are. Do not waste much time and energy loking franticaly for opportunities to serve, to reform, to be useful. But keep very much alive to the opportunities that come your way and so often are missed because your attention is elsewhere. The implications of this approach for social life are numerous. Laotse suggests one of them in his comment on leadership: " B u t of a good leader, who talks little when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say 'We did this ourselves.' " Or in the context of personal conduct: " A sound m a n . . , by never being an end in h i m s e l f . . , endlessly becomes himself." It is a healthy and sobering thought for a political year. H o w many candidates have you met who have succumbed to the temptation of becoming ends in themselves, thus forgetting the ends that leadership in a free country is supposed to serve? Because the wisdom of Laotse is gentle, humane, and open only to those who will choose it freely, it seems to be weak and without any hope of prevailing in an angry, noisy, violent world. Yet it has already outlasted all the great kingdoms and empires up to the present. It is safe to say that this wisdom will be around so long as human beings are. The root of things, Tao, the way of life, is in the person. We can choose it if we will. From our choices come all the other fruits of the human enterprise. It is this crucial choice that the great religious figures like Jesus, the Buddha, Laotse, and so many others are trying to get us to make. It is not a choice of faith b u t a choice of being. From this personal choice flows the quality of life in homes, families, communities, nations, the world itself. There is nobody so old, weak, infirm, or lost that he cannot make this choice. There is nobody so young, strong, powerful, ambitious that he can make a better one. We win independence and gain usefulness when we decide to be what we are and serve as we go along. We do not have enough years to wait until the majority of the people in the world can catch up with this choice. If we are aware of it, we have to make it ourselves. And we may t r u s t that
Editorial
259
others will make it, too. Laotse asks: "How do I know this integrity? Because it could all begin in me." If you are seeking a guide to pastoral counseling, psychotherapy, or general practice, Laotse cannot help you with the jargon. But he can help you with yourself. And if you can help yourself to be more of a self, then you can help others also. But one word of caution: don't make a big thing of it. Don't proclaim a new gospel or school of thought. Be what you are and "serve as you go along."
Harry C Meserve
Editorial
Serve as You Go Along The phrase intrigues us. We first ran across it some years ago in Witter Bynner's poetic translation of Laotse's Tao Teh Ching or Book of the Way of Life. "Man at his best, like water, serves as he goes along." In another translation the same sentence is rendered as "The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive." These comments are far from the muscular, upward striving, crusading, and reforming kind of life that most of us have been taught to respect and practice as much as we can. The whole of the Tao Teh Ching is a gentle but insistent rebuke to the dominant ideas and passions of our time. We suppose we have read the Tao Teh Ching {it is very short) thirty or forty times in the last few years. If we had read the New Testament as much, we might be a better Christian. B u t this was a book we were ripe for when we came upon it, although it had been in our library for many years as something we hoped to get around to sometime. It seems to speak to the multiple confusions, crises, and terrors of our time with the kind of sanity, humor, and humane wisdom we so desperately need, not only in healing the wounds of persons twisted and torn within b u t the wounds of nations caught in a deadly, outmoded game of competition and retaliation. The Tao Teh Ching begins with an assumption so simple and profound that we fail to realize it should be familiar to a n y b o d y who cares for democracy. People m u s t be respected and accepted as inherently sound and healthy. They do not need to be led or pushed around. It is better if their natural powers and inclinations are given an opportunity to express themselves. "Fail to honor people; they fail to honor you." " T h a t government is best that governs least," was a Taoist principle before it was a democratic maxim. "The less a leader does and says, the happier his people. The more a leader struts and brags, the sorrier his people." It is a warning that all of us who teach, preach, admonish, and persuade should take to heart. We cannot force others to do what we think they should do, even if we are sure that it is best for them. People will do what is best for them only when they have discovered that for themselves. The role of the teacher or healer is to aid in that discovery. Again, we can never teach people anything that they are not ready to learn. There is a tendency among most of us in the field of teaching and healing to think we possess a certain kind of truth which it is our d u t y to impart to 255
256
Journal of Religion and Health
others. We have a mission to spread that truth as far and wide as we possibly can. But in reality that truth, however beautiful and true it may seem to us, will not be seen as important and recognized as truth by those unready to consider it. Hence the foolishness of preaching. All we can hope to do is be available to others who have recognized that they have a need that we may be able to help them deal with. The popular religious position has been that churches, preachers, teachers, and missionaries must go out and arouse the sense of need, which they can then fill with the good news of their particular gospels. Our airwaves are cluttered with these hucksters now. They come in assorted sizes and shapes: TV evangelists, political candidates, advertisers whose task it is to create desires for the products they are trying to sell, and a wide assortment of varied prophets, saviors, and popular pundits competing for attention and support from the public. The public, according to Laotse, would be better off without this kind of persuasion and influence. People can follow the ways of nature without too much strain and find superior wisdom when they need it without having it thrust upon them. The same principle holds, we think with regard to the matter of protecting the weak and the sick. Hospitals and therapeutic institutions are only beginning to learn the importance of getting patients active and out of their doors as fast as possible. At the same time, large numbers of the sick, the infirm, and the old are living in overprotected environments mainly because we can no longer work out the optimal conditions that would provide them with as much help as they need and as much opportunity to live as they are capable of using. To find what an individual needs in the immediate situation and keep up with that person and those needs as they change is perhaps more than we can hope for from large and complicated institutions. But surely it is an area where the concerned individual can make a real difference and provide real help to a few people whose condition and needs he knows and understands. If our institutions of health care and therapy must be large, and perhaps they must since our population is large, then there is even greater demand for caring people who humanize the institution and its practices by understanding the personal needs of a few patients and helping them to grow toward greater strength and self-reliance. The kinds of protection that national and cultural groups practice for and upon one another are even more terrifying than the methods used by individuals. One can only feel sadness and pity for the people of small nations who are unfortunate enough to be protected by their larger neighbors or interested friends. The people of Afghanistan could do without the protection of the U.S.S.R. as well as the people of Vietnam could have done without U.S. protection a decade ago. The unconscious irony of a comment made by an American officer in Vietnam about the reason for destroying a whole village has become a part of the vernacular: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Gangsters sell their clients and puppets protection whether they want it or not. One of the worst fates that can befall the people of any small independent nation is that a large power may decide to give them protection. Laotse suggests the appropriate epitaph for all wars and warriors: "Conduct your triumph as a funeral."
Editorial
257
If we are to serve people well, it is essential to begin where they are and not where we think they ought to be. We have, perhaps without meaning to, cultivated the m y t h of the omnipotent, omniscient healer, the one who has passed beyond the ordinary human weaknesses, if he ever experienced them, and can therefore advise from the point of view of complete knowledge and perfection. The minister, the doctor, the teacher, the therapist must be beyond the ordinary weaknesses he is trying to treat. Or at least he must appear so. To help with this masquerade we have created all kinds of rituals of office: consulting room, operating table, the couch, the one-way window, even the vestments of priest and doctor. Most of us know that underneath and behind these protective walls and garments are some ordinary, confused, uncertain human beings. But in our roles as helpers and healers we dare not admit that. Why? The theory is that those we try to help would lose confidence in us if we admitted to doubts or personal weakness. But is that necessarily so? They might accept our aid and guidance better if they realized they were listening to a human being who knew what anxiety, fear, and confusion are really like. As Laotse remarks, "One who knows his lot to be the lot of all others is a safe one to guide them. One who recognizes all men as members of his own body is a sound one to guard them." It takes courage and honesty to come out from behind our professional defenses and props and be human beings, but it can be very rewarding for both the helpers and the helped. The Olympic speed skating champion Eric Heiden, who after winning five gold medals at Lake Placid was soundly beaten in the championship races in Holland the next week, remarked that it was a great relief. He felt a lot better being human instead of invincible. People liked him better, too. The myths of-any kind of group superiority and perfection--social, religious, national, or cultural--should all be relegated as quickly as possible to the dust heaps of history. They hurt not only the peoples and nations against whom they are directed but even more the peoples who are beguiled by them into believing that they really are superior and divinely ordained to fulfill some special function in history. When one considers the cost to the whole human race of the effort to perpetuate myths of omnipotence within various nations, one can only hope that sanity will come soon, before it is too late. The great powers destroy themselves by paying attention to armaments and military power while neglecting natural resources and the sources of natural power like the sun, which could help them solve their problems. The small, weak nations wait helplessly to see what the giants may do. They are the losers anyway, since in seeking to destroy each other the giants tend to destroy everything in their paths. Instead of absolutism in doctrine or power, Laotse's sane philosophy teaches a kind of relativism that is both humane and sensible. Einstein's theory of relativity is a concept we cannot understand in precise mathematical terms; but from reading about the man and his life, we think we have the general idea. It is thht everything in the universe is in motion. Nothing remains static and unchanged. Hence, our views of reality in nature and in other human beings are views seen, as it were, enpassant. They are moving. We are moving. People meet, see, and touch each other as they move along through the process
258
Journal of Religion and Health
of life and growth. Hence, if we convey meaning, truth, and support to other people, we do so as we go along. Our lives have many encounters that are brief b u t are significant. They have a few shared journeys, with traveling companions--some chosen and some provided by circumstances outside our control. If the concept of relativity applies in this field of human relationships, as we are sure it does, then it explains a lot of situations and difficulties that human beings find. For instance, it explains w h y the faith of our fathers, once so dear and so apparently immutable, can lose its power and its appeal. It explains w h y something that seems absolutely necessary to us can seem totally irrelevant to somebody else. Relativity means that, for a meeting and understanding of two persons or groups of persons to take place, there must be both readiness to give and readiness to receive. B u t it also explains why the healer, the teacher, the therapist, the one who is trying to help, must restrain his impulses to demand, insist, and b u r s t through the defenses of another. Yet he must also keep open every possible avenue of communication s o that no chance to reach the other, no door half open tentatively, escapes his notice. To serve as you go along means a readiness and openness to the needs for intelligent caring that are always coming along on the currents of life. "Respond to the life that addresses you," wrote Martin Buber. In short, be fully present wherever you are. Do not waste much time and energy loking franticaly for opportunities to serve, to reform, to be useful. But keep very much alive to the opportunities that come your way and so often are missed because your attention is elsewhere. The implications of this approach for social life are numerous. Laotse suggests one of them in his comment on leadership: " B u t of a good leader, who talks little when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say 'We did this ourselves.' " Or in the context of personal conduct: " A sound m a n . . , by never being an end in h i m s e l f . . , endlessly becomes himself." It is a healthy and sobering thought for a political year. H o w many candidates have you met who have succumbed to the temptation of becoming ends in themselves, thus forgetting the ends that leadership in a free country is supposed to serve? Because the wisdom of Laotse is gentle, humane, and open only to those who will choose it freely, it seems to be weak and without any hope of prevailing in an angry, noisy, violent world. Yet it has already outlasted all the great kingdoms and empires up to the present. It is safe to say that this wisdom will be around so long as human beings are. The root of things, Tao, the way of life, is in the person. We can choose it if we will. From our choices come all the other fruits of the human enterprise. It is this crucial choice that the great religious figures like Jesus, the Buddha, Laotse, and so many others are trying to get us to make. It is not a choice of faith b u t a choice of being. From this personal choice flows the quality of life in homes, families, communities, nations, the world itself. There is nobody so old, weak, infirm, or lost that he cannot make this choice. There is nobody so young, strong, powerful, ambitious that he can make a better one. We win independence and gain usefulness when we decide to be what we are and serve as we go along. We do not have enough years to wait until the majority of the people in the world can catch up with this choice. If we are aware of it, we have to make it ourselves. And we may t r u s t that
Editorial
259
others will make it, too. Laotse asks: "How do I know this integrity? Because it could all begin in me." If you are seeking a guide to pastoral counseling, psychotherapy, or general practice, Laotse cannot help you with the jargon. But he can help you with yourself. And if you can help yourself to be more of a self, then you can help others also. But one word of caution: don't make a big thing of it. Don't proclaim a new gospel or school of thought. Be what you are and "serve as you go along."
Harry C Meserve
