by Peter DeWit
No one is ‘just a volunteer.’ People who step up to volunteer are a gift to the world. We are a dedicated group of people committed to causes that speak to our hearts. We are eager to make a difference. It doesn’t take much to keep us going, but sincere recognition goes a long way. Just to be seen, or to be thanked, is enough reward to bring us back joyfully again and again. Yet there is something deeper that keeps us going, we ourselves are changed in the act of volunteering. We could call that personal growth. We are becoming better people.
Serve the City hopes that every volunteer would see or feel some of the benefits of their volunteering. We also make a big deal out of our six values, they aren’t just ‘poster values’ or nice words printed on a T-shirt. A lot of thought went into identifying what values should be core to our community, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, North America or elsewhere. We are proudly a values-driven organization. Many of our activities begin or end with a brief summary of one of our values. It’s included in our volunteer training. And though we don’t always live up perfectly to our values, we aspire to do so.
There is one value that, in my opinion, does not get talked about enough, but it could be called the greatest of all our values. It’s love. Love is such a rich and challenging word. It is transformative, potent with goodness both for the giver and receiver. It’s a heart word. Too often, though, love gets relegated to our private lives, it’s become a romantic word, kind of a feeling-oriented and sentimental word. But the place where love, do I dare say true love, needs to be seen, perhaps the most, is in the public spaces, in our societies, in our streets and in our daily activities.
How would you define love as a value? May I describe it here as the capacity to enter the world of others, even with those we have little in common with, and instead of looking down upon, we desire the lifting up of spirits, instead of rushing to negative conclusions, we offer positive solutions. It could be as little as taking time to listen with your eyes and ears to the stories of others. Love choses connection. Father Gregory Boyle, who founded the world’s largest gang intervention and rehabilitation program, describes love as the language of tenderness. He says, “It is not about arriving at ‘nice’. Tenderness is radicalized nice. It is the finishing touch in love.” If we could learn to speak that language of tenderness, we would see more hearts, even hard ones, softened. Father Boyle’s Homeboy Industries has seen so much transformation in the thousands of lives of its beneficiaries. Love, and its ‘supple mercy’, it turns out, is pretty life-altering.
Here in Paris, I have fond memories of serving on the streets. One man in particular, Ivan, from Bulgaria, was unforgettable. Each time we saw him, he was laying flat on the sidewalk surrounded with what looked like a mound of garbage. At the beginning when we came around he would act afraid, like someone wanted to harm him. With time and tenderness he warmed up to us, he would be sweet and usually up for a chat. He had an old guitar nearby, and I sometimes asked for a song. Surprisingly he’d rock out some old ballad. He must have been quite something in the day, but his voice was but a whisper now. One day Ivan told me someone stole his guitar, and could I buy him a new one? Before I could even say, “Sorry, we do coffee and sandwiches only”, he stuck out a bunch of bills, enough for me to get him a guitar. He trusted me. And I learned that love cares enough to become aware enough and to dare enough to do something. It enters the messiness of a situation, but instead of being repulsed, it tries to rise to the occasion.
So much of the work of Serve the City is with those just like Ivan, people on the margins. They are often complete strangers, or at least in the beginning they are. Our hope is they become friends. Nonjudgmental love serves without creating categories or labels of ‘Us and them.’. It creates room in our hearts for others. Valarie Kaur, an American activist and filmmaker, wrote in her book, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, that when we love the stranger, “We begin to sense that they are to themselves as vast and complex as we are to ourselves, their inner world as infinite as our own. In other words, we are seeing them as our equal. We are gaining information about how to love them.” Isn’t that good? I appreciate how Valarie reminds us of love’s curiosity, that if we remain compassionately curious, it inevitably leads to the breaking down of walls that separate us. We realize that we are in this together as fellow human beings. Love is solidarity.
There is so much more that we could say about this value of love, let me finish with a little nugget of truth from an interview with the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Marilynne Robinson. She was asked, “What single thing would make the world in general a better place?”
She replied, “Loving it more.”
There it is again. Her answer, though seemingly simplistic, is the right one, and it deserves our wrestling with what it means for us in our own Serve the City contexts wherever we are. My encouragement to each of our city leadership groups is to create an event, any kind, centered around a discussion on love and how it impacts our cities and lives. Yes, love in the verb form of it, remains potent, for you and for me. And yes, loving can seem like such an uphill battle especially in the light of so much present dysfunction in our world, but if we become indifferent (the opposite of love), we all lose. That’s why we at Serve the City are not shy to remind us of the value of love, because we still believe that our communities and cities, and our own lives, become more happy, kind and beautiful when we serve with love. And that value of love becomes the inspiration that keeps us coming back again and again to be more than ‘just a volunteer’.
