Re: Reflections on volunteering after 9-11

Hi all,

While I applaud the idea of engagement in the message Lisa forwarded, 
I want to push a little by challenging, as a rationale/foundation for 
action, the idea that: "There are so many people who need our help in 
many different ways."

One of the things I like about the service-learning field is its 
concern with reciprocity/mutuality. While service-learning or any 
type of "civic engagement" can indeed emerge from the idea that other 
people "need our help", I believe it is more powerful and positive to 
engage with others from the understanding that the connection is 
important and beneficial to both or all people involved in a way that 
goes much deeper than feeling a sense of reward for helping people we 
define as "in need." 

This is not a new idea/critique, and certainly not one that I came up 
with. But I feel that it is important to keep these issues in the 
spotlight in the service-learning field. There has been a great deal 
of harm done in the name of "helping" people. Sometimes the harm 
comes because "helping" merely serves as a mask for some form of 
colonialism or neo-colonialism, or other manifestations of 
domination. Sometimes the harm comes from sincere goodness of intent 
without critical self-reflection. And I am sure there are other 
configurations I am not thinking of right now.

I would like to share some comments on the subject of 
reciprocity/mutuality from an essay I have recently been reading. I 
find this very articulate and thought-provoking. These ideas are not 
new and these quotes are not the first or only articulation of them 
that I have seen. I just happen to be reading this particular essay 
right now :)

"To speak of the primacy of relationship...is above all to insist on 
the deep, total sociality of things. All things cohere in each other. 
Nothing living is self-contained; if there were such a thing as an 
unrelated individual, none of us would know it. The ecologists have 
recently reminded us of what nurturers always knew -- that we are 
part of a web of life so intricate as to be beyond our 
comprehension...

"[But] in our dominant ideologies and intellectual traditions, do we 
not think of ourselves as most effective, most powerful as moral 
agents when we are most autonomous and most self-reliant, when we 
least need anyone else's help or support? .... Notions of love [from 
this dominant framework] are images of heroic, grand gestures of self-
possessed people. It is an image of patronizing love, the love of the 
strong for the weak, or, conversely, the snivelling gratitude of the 
weak toward the stronger who grant 'favors.'

"Never mind that none of us wants, or has ever wanted or needed, 
transactions with that sort of love. Never mind that we all know -- 
unless our sense of self has already been twisted almost beyond human 
recognition by sadism and brutality -- that the love we need and want 
is deeply mutual love, love that has both the quality of a gift 
received and the quality of a gift given. The rhythm of a real, 
healing, and empowering love is take and give, give and take, free of 
the cloying inequality of one partner active and one partner 
passive."

--Beverly Wildung Harrison. 1989.  "The Power of Anger in the Work of 
Love," in _Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist 
Spirituality_ co-edited by Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ. 
(Harper Collins). Quotations from pgs 221-222.

Anyway. Just thought I'd share this.

Best,
Michelle