Last Sunday a group of us carpooled into JP to hear Charles Eisenstein speak at the Jamaica Plain Forum. I spotted him standing to the side at the front of the church, waiting for everyone to settle down and the event to begin, and an uneasy feeling grew in me. He looked out of place in that big, cold, stone church. It was packed, but he looked alone, and bone-tired. When the talk began, he explained he had just recovered from the flu and that his voice was last to recover. It was painful listening to his voice.
Yet there he was, giving it his best.
I loved Charles’ talk, his words, his confidence, his humbleness, his answers to questions and criticism, and how he held everyone’s silence for over a minute all the way at the end. After the talk I took my copy of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible for him to sign and thanked him for saying that “sometimes we think we have forgotten how to be human, but we have brought reminders along.” I said he gives me hope that we can come fully alive when it is needed and we need to live up to that more beautiful world. All he did was nod “yes,” and that was enough.
After the talk I read his essay, “2013: A year that pierced me,” in which he writes that the did over a hundred and fifty speeches and longer events in 2013, despite  doubts that he was doing any good. He writes,
I cannot keep doing this work – the exhausting travel, the missing my family, the rejection by social institutions that confer money and status – unless I believe that it is worth it, that I am truly and effectively contributing to a more beautiful world, and that such a world is indeed possible… the case for despair is by far the stronger. No matter. It isn’t evidence or logic that sustains me, nor can it sustain anyone else in a life of service.
A life of service.
Later on I spoke with a friend who was also at the talk. She said she hated it. She hated being cold (it was freezing in the church), and the speaker wasn’t giving it his best, it was like he was just rehashing things from other talks, and she felt that being there was a waste of her time. I expressed surprise, said  I had loved it, then told her that there is this thing I do before walking into events like this, where speakers carry in messages near to my heart: I examine my expectations, then let them go (insofar as I am capable, but I think I’m pretty capable by now). Now this friend is an amazing person and she understood. She asked:
“What do you think I missed because I couldn’t let go of my expectations?”
What an amazing question! I answered all the above (paragraph 3). But this is what I should have said:
“You missed the meal.”
In hindsight, what I see is a man who was offering himself up and being eaten. He was already half-eaten, and yet he had come and was serving himself again, living his life of service. Tired and sick, he came anyway, because people asked him to come, because people needed to be fed.
While shoveling snow after hours of tedious and unappreciated activist work and before cooking dinner, the thought of Charles Eisenstein being eaten by those who love him and those who hate him alike made me angry, then guilty. I had eaten. What had I given him in return? Even when I gave him my thanks, was I taking yet another piece? Then I felt scared for him. There must be a way, I thought, for people of service not to be consumed. A balance of some sort? A protecting ceremony? A cadre of helpers? A way of giving thanks?
Of course that was about me – a little run-down, at that moment, a little resentful for not even being asked to do the work, and the work being anonymous, unnoticed, and the results nothing much to write home about. But after a while when I let go of that, I looked at Charles again. Though I still very much grieve that this is how it seems to have to be, and wish that he will not be fully consumed by our demands on him for a new story, for hope, I come to accept the meal he gave so readily.
As he writes in his essay,
Why am I still doing my work? Much as I would like to say otherwise, it is by no means because of any personal fortitude. It is because of the timely help I receive from people like Joshua, people close to me and strangers from around the world who reflect back at me what I know in my heart and cannot believe without help…Â Â This support answers those who say it is foolish to trust in the generosity of others. It is living proof that we yearn to contribute to something beyond ourselves that is beautiful to us.
It is but one piece of giving true thanks to the one who serves us: not to decline it, to accept and thus value it fully, and make the giving of it everything. There is another piece: to then pass it on.
I am enrolling  in Stephen Jenkinson’s Orphan Wisdom School, which begins in April.
The Orphan Wisdom School is crafted specifically for all those people who will fail to live forever, who have come to the idea – or been driven there – that their yearning for a deep life must be tethered to the plough of labour and learning to harrow the hardened field of sorrows and solitary, grey news that has become our corner of this beautiful world, so that children can one day soon be born into to a real, detailed, laboured over Better Day that we ourselves might not live to see.
There IÂ hope to learn how to serve the meal as well as eat it, all of it, with deep gratitude for the giving.
{UPdate} I just discovered this on Stephen’s blog. In this five-minute video he actually talks about eating:
OLD HANDS Stephen Jenkinson from Tim Wilson on Vimeo.