Serving and offering

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

These past few days I have had some conversations with women about service. In most understandings of spirituality, both in western and eastern traditions, service has become a central approach to a spiritual life. In essence this is a noble principle, far better than to live without a sense of service.

Where I invite a more considered reflection is about how this plays out for women’s lives. For centuries women’s roles have manifested the service principle and asked a sacrifice of their passion, presence and unfolding, in service to this service principle. As mothers, wives and daughters, many of us as women have implicitly and explicitly been required to service the very foundations of the kind of societies we all live in today. These kind of service models are deified as Mother Goddesses who are infinitely giving and ask nothing but childlike affection in return. It is women’s unpaid (or underpaid) and unseen work in domestic and care giving roles that sustain the kind of lifestyles held as aspirational all over the world.

And so I am not enamoured of the service paradigm. I invite the question what are we serving and what are we not serving, in the service choices we make as women. Often the answer is that we deny serving our own presence, energy and passion in this world. And that is a difficult service because it is not held up as valuable or purposeful. In fact it is largely invisible. And somewhat dangerous because the unfolding of the fullness of womanhood can topple the bastions of how we service our lives in these times.

The Goddess tradition offers another model of being in the world, which is Yagna. Yagna is the manifestation of the fullness of our presence, with passion, energy and beauty. The Goddess invitation is that by simply being the fullness of who we are, we serve Nature. Nature is in Yagna, each plant, tree and animal is offering their simple presence each day. When we are in Yagna we at once sense how our presence answers the call of the birds, how we sense the gaze of a tree upon us and how clouds can gather intimately above us. These are not fantasies, but the connection that emerges in Yagna.

Yagna is an offering of our life, our beauty and our presence to all of the rest of life and Nature. It is our gift to them for their gifts of song, movement, scent and presence they pour out to us, each and every moment, every day of our lives.