Many years ago, my husband had a conversation with a Benedictine monk whose selflessness haunts me.“It wasn’t that he was thinking too much of himself or too little of himself,” my husband says. “He just wasn’t thinking of himself.” “What does that mean?” I ask. “When we spoke, he got himself out of the way.”To get oneself out of the way – what would it be like to encounter others without an inventory of wishes, wants, expectations and demands. Who would be left without the odd, borrowed bits of selves that coalesce as faces to hide behind? I used to pray until I heard a still, small voice. “Serve others,” it said, and I stopped praying because I didn’t want to. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur I try to pray again, asking God for the grace-or maybe the strength–to get myself out of the way.
Diane Winston is Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.
