Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: Saving and Savoring

VJ Mohan
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

Beginning of last month, one evening I was crouched over my laptop in my apartment in a village in South India, bringing up the browser in the hope of reading emails from family and friends far away in another land. It was sweltering hot, with the temperature around 85 degrees and the humidity hovering around 90%. The only comfort was from a ceiling fan that was circulating air, cooling my body and keeping the mosquitoes at bay. Just then the power went out, as it often does throughout the day in those parts, and the fan came to a halt. The mosquitoes started attacking me with renewed vigor. And as usual I started cursing myself, “Why do I do this? Why do I come all the way to put myself through all this when I could be having fun in the bay area? I must be crazy.”

Luckily the laptop was still working, off the battery. And I opened an email from Amy, inviting me to assist her with the service today. She included the passage by Richard Gilbert that I just read to you. It moved me deeply. I thought to myself: How true! I had to choose to come here and do the work that I am doing. I had to work with those children in the rural schools and make their life a little lighter, a bit more promising. I had to try and get the college students to see that it was not enough to worry just about getting a job when they are done. I had to encourage them to pay attention to their neighbors and see if there is a way they can help those around them even as they help themselves. I had to try to work with the villagers to turn them back to traditional organic farming practices and to plant back more trees in their neighborhoods. I could not have chosen otherwise. For me to choose only my comfortable life in the bay area, excluding what I am doing in India, would be dishonoring all that I have come to believe. Reading that passage made me realize that mine is not a lone struggle, other souls have also felt the same tug to take the easy road.

If we truly believe in our seventh principle, the interdependent web of all existence, we have to choose to serve others. To serve others is to serve ourselves. We as a whole are only as well off as the least among us. How can I choose otherwise but to choose to work to raise the bottom up?

As some of you know, I am also a believer in Hindu non-dualistic metaphysics and the ethics that flows from it. I believe that the Supreme Reality underlying all of existence, call it God if you will, is one. It has manifested as this universe and as each one of us. I serve God by serving those around me. That is how I celebrate God and honor our common Oneness. With that belief, can I choose otherwise?

And then as I re-read the email, I was bothered by the title of the service “Saving and Savoring”. Am I saving anyone with my work? Is it not presumptuous of me to seek to save someone else? I realized that with my work I was not saving anyone else but myself. I would indeed be lost, if I chose otherwise. To serve others is to save myself. Serving others, especially those among whom I was born and those who helped me grow, was the only way I can redeem my life. We construct the meaning of our lives by the way we live, by the choices we make. Choosing to serve this way was the only way I can find any meaning for my life, at this juncture.

But then there is a cost to every choice we make. We can choose differently and pay differently, but pay we must. I am no warrior, missionary or martyr. My ability to handle pain and suffering, to even accept discomfort, is limited. I am just an ordinary bloke who loves his creature comforts, but somehow has got this urge to engage. What can I do? What I have chosen to do is to split my year between my two needs. Fortunately I am in a situation where I can afford to do this. So, for the last couple of years, I go to the parts where I come from in India twice a year, spend a couple of months engaging with life there bringing what good I can. The rest of the time I am here with my family and my friends, you, and savor my blessings. I go singing; I go dancing; I go walking on the beach and hiking on the hills; I sit to meditate with my dharma friends; I hang out. Life is good!

Now I am just using this choice as a glaring and obvious example of a clear choice and its cost. It is not as if it is all pain and suffering over there and sweetness and light over here. Every day in both places there is this choice of how much I work versus how much fun I will seek; how much time I will spend enjoying myself versus how much time I will devote to others to build the common good. The specific choices will be different for each of us and the point of balance will also be different. Even for the same person both the choices and the balancing point will change with time as well. I know it will change for me. I suspect that, as time passes, I will get more and more involved with my work in India and people there, but increasingly my body will put up with even less than now. And that will mean I will have to choose differently then.

May the spirit grant me the strength, may it grant each of us the strength to always choose to pay the price and do our bit to ease our neighbor’s burden; to always work to leave the world a little better than we found it.