COPYRIGHT TOM PRESCOTT 2006

The Heart of Sacred Service

Cheryl Sanders-Sardello

When Sacred Service classes began at The School of Spiritual Psychology in 1999, there lived in our hearts an earnest desire to find the right relationship to helping others. What called was a sense that truly helping must first be awakened through meditation and prayer, and then the teaching must come from within a new model, toward imaginative thinking, away from abstracted theories.

What developed is the intention to enter the spiritual nature of being human by living faithfully and always out of the time stream from the future, throwing one always into the position of living in the complete unknown. Recognizing that to live in the unknown requires a diligent attention to everything that wants to hold onto the past, we discovered the demands of a spiritual work that revealed itself as the terrain of a new model for service.

Although we live in a “service-driven, industry/market” the social/spiritual reality is that no one seems to know or care about the true meaning of service. We are waited on, attended to, cared for, assisted, intervened, helped, and in innumerable ways “served”, but service itself is not forthcoming into the world as a Deed recognized by the spiritual worlds in any of these exchanges.

To truly serve offers the soul an experience that becomes emblematic, each “other” becoming someone who must be allowed to make an impression on the heart, like an intaglio, pressed into the surface of the physical heart itself, reforming it into a vessel for the sake of the other.

The heart becomes central, as service only happens in its chambers. One discovers in service the heart that one must attend to, not just where the heart is leading, but also the very heart’s nature itself, to meet the iron necessity that guides service as a spiritual activity.

Some of the “heart characteristics” that emerged in the course of the classes include; devotion, assent, discernment, emptiness, constancy, courage, enthusiasm, centrality, balance, discernment, forgiveness, and even, surprisingly, the “virtue of shame”. (A mysterious virtue, not at all like the experience of ‘being’ shamed) The heart taught us these aspects of its own nature and led us toward its own sense-ability, which is to become a conscious organ of perception.

In our traditional efforts to be of service, before the heart awakening as an organ of perception, we can be the one who offers assistance, or become the intruder and overpower others, but none of these are serving, as we are not served, and all exclude the sacred by taking on an egocentric power model that, when completely revealed, is completely self-serving. Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the things we do for others, or the things that are done for us, but the understanding of service is poorer when we name these kinds of exchanges ‘service’, and we are confused by that which occurs between people when it only means to us something equated with what ‘we get out of it’.

When the heart becomes the central model of the work, we can no longer employ the standard cause/effect thinking that formed our means of success in school. Of course, there are difficulties in working outside of an academic model. For example, many have discovered that if you think you’ve “got it” – you don’t. If you think you are “doing it” – you aren’t. We are easily tricked by the illusion of our own accomplishment, which overtakes us through the current models of self-esteem and success-oriented psuedo-sermonizing of education and business management pedagogies. Rarely, of course, there are precious moments of grace when service is asked of us, and we say yes with our whole heart, and enter into a field of spiritual activity, and let go of what has been sought as ‘the right thing to do’ and so, through forgetting, find the forgiving stream of grace that allows all we know to become the ‘right thing to do’, and we actually do only what is needed. It is so very difficult to ever only do what the other needs, not what we need for them to need so we feel needed.

Meticulous preparation is required. Then, everything that is learned, and everything that is known has to forgotten, for in the forgetting is found this miraculous field of forgiveness that makes possible truly serving the sacred.

It requires something more than our psychological explanations of whom we are and what we think anything means to enter into this realm. There is the possibility of becoming overwhelmed, mostly by fear of coming too close to the spiritual realm that we do not understand. There is much preparation and strengthening of soul capacities to be able to enter here. Through meditation exercises and working together to form the community of Sacred Service that each class represents, we all enter together into an unknown terrain, and are supported by each other. This supportive community becomes more connected over time, but is always aware that each group is part of a greater whole. To this end we try to bring all who have completed this work together for an annual class that continues and deepens the research. As the work is always for the sake of the world, the community of each class works most deeply when there is always in their consciousness the awareness of belonging to this greater whole. Of course, some achieve this to greater or lesser degrees, and some wish to remain a small isolated cozy little group. It is easy in our time of much need and weakened inner life to want to hold fast to small groups that look like community.

The School of Spiritual Psychology is committed to awakening within each person who comes here the living imagination of being a part of a larger community that extends all over the country and into many other countries as well. And yet, this too, is limiting the nature of community to the material realm that we can see and touch, and forgetting that the spiritual world is also the world that we inhabit and seek to serve. The first step in learning the true nature of service is to open the heart to the whole of the world that includes and is permeated by the spiritual realm. We must learn the laws of the invisible to truly serve, or be caught forever in the psychological past, never able to come near the wholeness that is before us in every moment. To be trapped in this place of constant explanation, judgment and analyses prohibits service entering the whole of the world in any way. We can learn to penetrate the depth of the whole of the world through interest in and love for the invisible realms that include the angelic beings, the saints and the ‘so-called’ dead.

In these five years of teaching sacred service to over 125 people from every background and profession imaginable each one has taught us that to serve means to allow that many are never awakened, but that most will be touched deeply, and a few will be inspired by the divine ‘other’ that accompanies each class, and so they set forth with renewed capacities to offer healing and peace to the world. When any one truly does this, we feel the work is working. Happily, there seems to be great enthusiasm among most to continue the work past the two years.

There is a sense of a deep yearning in the world for ‘service’ to be transformed from being a mere ‘industry’ to truly entering the world as a spark of the divine, creating a field, flowing through grace, fostering forgiveness and healing evil. This yearning is almost universally present in all who participate.

Those who come to a class in “Sacred Service” do so from a call deep in the heart to serve wholly from the soul. Yet, Sacred Service as a teaching presumes no special significance. We humbly attempt to aid in the development and strengthening of soul and spiritual capacities. We work from a stream/tradition that has been concerned with the community of spiritual seekers since very early times, but do not try to tie the work down with dogmatic theory or abstractions. It is open to almost anyone, and is accessible to almost everyone. The only requirement for admission is a willingness to learn how to live in and though the heart, not just when there is a crisis or wondrous event, but in every mundane moment, every predictable day, until not only each day, but every single second becomes unknown, an adventure, a discovery of the world and every thing and person in it anew in each moment, not sentimentally, but at the deepest spiritual level. Here we hope to learn to be servers, out of, and into the sacred realms. Here we are transformed from an accumulation of our past and what has been given to us, into the ability to resonate with the truer aspects of being and the wholeness of others. There are no theories about what this means. Working through exercises and meditations, eurhythmy and the labyrinth, the mysteries and miracles of food and silence, community within and the “so-called” dead, seeing the invisible, stepping out of time past into the time stream from the future, Sacred Service will transform your life and you will become a sacred servant in and for the whole of the world,

We invite you to join the next Sacred Service class, forming now for next fall’s opening session. We will meet on the following schedule:

September 28 – October 3, 2006

February 8 – 13, 2007

May 24 – 29, ‘07

Sept. 27 – Oct. 2, ‘07

Feb. 7 – 12, ‘08

May 23 – 28, ‘08