To Love Is To Serve.
{source}
Heresy, in Greek, means choice.
I’ve been ordained in a world cynical and irreverent about moral ascendancy; to stand for a people of my sexual orientation assailed by intolerance and met with violence in many parts of the world; to represent a liberal faith in a country so steeped in dogma that one can be jailed for offending religious feelings.
And my only question is, What brings me here?
Three years ago, my life spiraled downwards. Because of a wrong decision to study law, I found myself unable to hold a job. At the end of a year that led to bankruptcy, my 7-year relationship imploded. In a moment of utter desolation I cried, “Hineni!” — summed in Hebrew to mean, “Here I am! Send me!”
“Don’t waste a thing like me!”
In my nothingness, what I asked for was not to receive but for a chance to give. I was mourning not my lack of things but my lack of capacity to be useful. The message was clear: The joy of contribution is an elemental need in all of us. This is what leaders are called to serve: to make service and contribution a modality for all.
I have found two common messages in many faiths I’ve visited: To love and to serve.
And we can still sum it up: To love is to serve.
What I have discovered is that if we put ourselves out there for service, we are met with power, in more ways than one. We realize that we can do and give a lot when we have empathy and we can be vested with power when people begin to rely on us.
But the hard lesson that I learned during my moment of failure was that there is service in being on the receiving end, in accommodation of other people’s contributions, in listening, in giving way, in acceptance — not one that is done because there is no choice, but one that happens when you are trusting and loving the one who gives. As a minister, I feel called to create that space for others to give of themselves. Nothing is more devastating than to have no space for service. We are not meant to live like that.
We are manifestations of reality for one another. Let us lead one another to light and lightness.
Service without love is not voluntary, and makes a slave or a follower or an imitator.
Service for love, by love, with love makes a leader, a Gandhi, a Buddha, a Christ. Thus to serve with love we are all called to lead — to create options, to provide clarity, to correct error, to restore faith, to exemplify the life-giving rewards of virtue, and to nurture response-ability in others by sharing responsibilities, not hoarding power, but giving others a chance for dependability.
To lead is to make leaders of others, not to make of them consistent subservient receptacles of good faith only, to lead others is to let them say of their own volition, “Hineni! Send me!”
But what is my mission? Send me to do what? These questions bring me here. These questions brought me here. A life of inquiry is just as important as a life of purpose. I need to be led and to lead. Jesus said to his disciples before he left, “I have called you friends, for everything that I learned I have made known to you.”
Friends can question friends, or challenge them, not just follow or imitate or emulate.
So here I am, at your service, hoping to find the friend in you. Friends, let us lead one another, serving with love.
I have been ordained by a faith that offers a life of inquiry in a world that needs to be questioned and needs new questions; by tradition to be called The Reverend because we revere one another; as an embodiment of a people of my sexual orientation that is realizing the message of our existence; here in a country whose religious feelings may need to be offended as an act of service.
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Tet Gallardo
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