Why I’m Alive: Learning to be of service

by Fiach O’Broin-Molloy

When Matthew first asked me, “Why are you alive?”, my answer came quickly: to be of service.

It was not a new answer. I had carried some version of it for much of my adult life. I was drawn towards work concerned with human rights, refugees and equity. Even the foreign service appealed to me because it seemed to place one’s abilities at the disposal of something larger than oneself.

Those causes mattered, and they still do. But there was also something reassuring about imagining service at that scale. It gave purpose a visible shape and allowed me to picture a meaningful life as a large life.

Perhaps it also allowed me to feel important within it.

Over time, service acquired a different meaning for me. It became smaller.

It became one person.

Caring for someone close to me through serious illness changed the scale on which I understood service. The details of that illness belong to another person, and I will not borrow them to make my own account more vivid. What belongs to me is the change that caring worked in my understanding.

There was no great cause to disappear into. There was simply another human life before me and the continuing question of what love required now.

Care at that scale is particular. It is not love for humanity but love for this human being. It asks us to notice rather than presume, to respond rather than perform, and sometimes to accept that we cannot repair what we desperately wish could be repaired.

I had previously associated service with action. A problem existed; a useful person did something about it. Caring taught me that action is only one of its forms. Service may mean helping, carrying or arranging. It may also mean listening, waiting, staying close or resisting the temptation to make another person’s difficulty into a test of our own usefulness.

Usefulness is reassuring because it can be measured. Something has been answered, organised or completed. Care often offers no such reassurance. The same need may return tomorrow. There may be no satisfying resolution and no audience to tell us that we handled it well.

We are asked simply to remain present without making ourselves the hero of somebody else’s life.

I began to understand that one person is not a small cause.

An entire life is present in each encounter: its history, dignity, fear, humour, hope and mystery. To attend faithfully to one person is not to withdraw from the great human questions. It is to meet them in their most concentrated form.

I have discovered something similar through people I accompany in their spiritual lives. Week after week, we make time to sit, listen and pray. Sometimes guidance is sought, but the most important thing I offer is seldom an impressive answer. It is the discipline of returning and the willingness to remain attentive long enough for another person to hear their own life more clearly.

This cannot be hurried or manufactured in bulk. Each person must be encountered as themselves. What helped one may be precisely wrong for another. I have to listen again.

The prayer associated with Saint Francis has become important to how I understand this. I return particularly to its movement away from seeking to be understood and towards seeking to understand.

To be understood is one of our deepest desires. I do not think the prayer asks us to deny it. But it does ask whether that desire must always come first. Can I become quiet enough to hear the person before me without preparing my defence or reply? Can I allow their reality to interrupt the version of events in which I am already reasonable and correct?

When I can inhabit that prayer, even briefly, I do not feel righteous. I feel right.

Righteousness places me above another person. This feeling places me correctly beside them. It is less like moral achievement and more like alignment: the sense that, for once, the different parts of me are facing in the proper direction.

I do not live this consistently. I become busy, annoyed and preoccupied. I can believe deeply in compassion while feeling irritated by the immediate demands through which compassion must become real. I can be generous towards humanity in principle and impatient with the human being directly in front of me.

Service is therefore not a virtue I possess. It is an orientation from which I repeatedly wander and towards which I repeatedly turn.

The turning is usually small: pausing before answering, listening beyond the moment when I think I have understood, keeping a promise, making time, praying with another person, or noticing that an interruption may not be preventing me from doing important work.

The interruption may be the important work.

This is what I have come to think of as a big little life.

Its radius may be small and its actions may pass almost entirely unnoticed. Yet a life can become very large through the depth with which it inhabits small acts.

This is not a rejection of large causes or public service. Justice requires structures as well as kindness. But systems exist for persons, not persons for systems. The large work loses its meaning when it can no longer recognise the single human life for whose dignity it claims to labour.

Perhaps my earlier understanding of service was not wrong. It was incomplete. I had looked towards the horizon and imagined purpose waiting there in some sufficiently consequential form. I had not understood that the great moral landscape might also be contained within the distance between one person and another.

Faith tells me that I do not serve to earn my place in the world. Service is not the rent I pay for being alive. If it were, every limitation would become a moral failure, rest would become suspect and receiving care from others would feel like indebtedness.

Christian faith begins elsewhere: with life received as gift. Love precedes usefulness. I do not serve to persuade God, the world or myself that my life should have been given. I serve because it has been given.

So why am I alive?

I still answer: to be of service. But I now hear less grandeur and more intimacy in those words. They do not offer a heroic explanation of my existence. They give me a direction in which to turn.

To be of service is to seek to understand. It is to meet the life before me without reducing it to a problem I can solve. It is to act when action is needed, remain when nothing can be repaired, and leave room for the freedom and mystery of another person.

That may look like a little life from a distance. Lived faithfully, it feels immeasurably large.

Author note

Fiach O’Broin-Molloy is an Irish maker and beekeeper living in Scotland. Through Paisley Honey, he makes rosaries, prayer beads and devotional objects by hand, exploring how faith, craft, heritage and the natural world meet in ordinary practice.

Learn more at https://www.paisleyhoney.com/