Copyright  Raven Kaldera

Original article – http://paganbdsm.org/articles/power-exchange/spiritualds.html

In this day and age, and especially in this country that I live in, there is a great deal of ambivalent and conflicted feeling about one human being serving another in a formal and negotiated submissive role. Most of us claim to hate the idea of having our right to do whatever we want trampled upon. We may complain about or even rebel against authority, perhaps even reflexively, simply because it’s there. Most service jobs, from housemaid to waiter to social worker, are low-paid and socially devalued. Especially when it comes to personal service jobs, such as the aforementioned waiter or housemaid, we tend to assume that no one could actually enjoy such a job, and everyone in such jobs are merely biding their time until they can get “better” jobs. Those would be the ones where you are on the ordering side of the lunch counter, rather than being on the side where they cook the fries. Actually doing the order-taking is seen as degrading by definition. We encourage this attitude in every new generation, and then we wonder why they are surly to us from behind the counter, forget our ketchup, steal from our houses as they clean the floors, laugh at the idea of community service, and eventually grow up to hire desperate illegal immigrants to do the work that they found so belittling.

Attitudes toward service weren’t always this way, historically. While there was plenty about medieval European society that was psychologically unhealthy, they did have a healthier and more practical ideal of service than we do. Service was not limited merely to a class of rich folk who never served others and a class of poor folk who were never served themselves. Since everyone lived as part of a hierarchy, everyone (except the very top and the very bottom) was expected to experience both serving and being served. If the Duke came to visit the earl, the earl or his son might serve the Duke supper with his own hands, to show him honor. The Duke himself might have served the King a week ago, and so on up and down the chain. Beyond this, there were clerics and monastics who — ideally, anyway — served God, often by serving the people, for spiritual reasons.

While a medieval hierarchy is impractical in today’s modern and complicated social world, we modern Americans could certainly use some reeducation in the value of service, whether towards people who are paying you, people who have no money and need aid, or one specific person. To put oneself — even temporarily — in a selfless position for the sake of making others happier and more comfortable has always been a worthy goal. For it to be a spiritual goal, however, the rewards have to come not in the form of obligations and favors owed or returned by those you sacrifice for, but in the form of intangibles — pleasure at making others happy, pride in doing a good job, and/or positive feelings from being part of a larger goal of making even a small part of the world easier rather than harder.

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