Antoine de Saint Exupery, The Little Prince I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big successes, and I am for those tiny molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man s pride. William James Service has been essential for humankind since the beginning of time. More recently, it has been elevated, along with attendant virtues such as volunteerism, into the national consciousness by, for example, the Presidents Summit in Philadelphia in March 1997. The popularization and politicization of fundamental concepts seem to be a mixed blessing. Broader public awareness often brings shallow attentiveness.
Service is too important for that.
It is a welcome step that the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Fetzer Institute are attempting to examine facets of the spiritual heart of service. The main point of this presentation is to suggest that the very heart of service is itself spiritual. Obviously there are numerous aspects to service. Yet at the core of service there is not just an outer activity or gesture, but an accompanying inner, non-visible action. Often spiritual things, by their nature, are less dense, less palpable than material phenomena.