Service activity or spiritual discipline?

The year 2011 brought a wave of change in our thinking and approach to the Sathya Sai Medical Camps conducted annually by the three Sri Sathya Sai Baba Centers of the greater St. Louis area since 2004. All along, our mission has been to offer free health checks and health education to the underinsured or uninsured community, including populations who have a high incidence of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease but no or low access to health care. Besides comprehensive preventive health screening, we were educating our visitors on choices in their daily meals for staying healthy and giving them nutritional snacks in a goody bag.

Then it dawned on us that the preventive health goals of our medical camp would be incomplete if people were starving elsewhere in St. Louis, with no access even to a loaf of bread, or suffering from sickness or slow death. We realized that the time had come to serve our hungry homeless brethren as well, in conjunction with our annual Sathya Sai medical camp activities. As Sai devotees involved with the medical camp, we felt that we should provide more and more essential services to the poor and needy, not only in our community but elsewhere in the neighboring communities in the city.

So on 17 Sep 2011, the Mid-Central Region of the Sai Organization (the region includes Belleville, Illinois, and the states of Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee) conducted its eighth annual medical camp, with comprehensive health checks, blood testing, kids’ safety education, and a bone marrow donor registration drive at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in St. Louis County. A total of 202 people availed themselves of these services, with 21 attendees registering for the National Marrow Donor Registry.

Children were given “goody bags” containing books, pencils, crayons, and other items. Some children were fitted with bicycle helmets, and 22 defective infant car seats were replaced. A booth on health and human values included the screening of the video, “His Work,” about Sathya Sai Baba’s selfless service projects to humanity that provide free education, health care, and water supply on a large scale. Each participant received a brown bag containing nutritional food products.

All services at the medical camp were rendered with love, humility, and unity by over 150 volunteers from varying religious and ethnic backgrounds. Executives of the County of St. Louis and Health Department attended the medical camp.

Meanwhile, our joint soup kitchen activities had begun on the second Sunday of August, preceding the medical camp and continuing again on the second Sundays of September and October at the Centenary United Methodist Church in downtown St. Louis. The venues selected for these service activities were different, but the goal was “one” and also related to health: to prevent sickness, whether due to faulty nutrition or total lack of meals.

The population attending the soup distribution was different than that of the medical camp but with no less dire needs. Each month, about 14-18 volunteers prepared, with great enthusiasm at Centenary United Methodist Church, 88 quarts of nutritious vegetarian soup – “Sai vegetable chili-bean noodle combo soup” – to serve 200 homeless brethren who come to the church.

Our service activities for each of the projects began with a solemn prayer (see sidebar at right). The food service activity also includes a food prayer (also in sidebar).

Addressing our spiritual experiences

Our core team of volunteers also reflected upon our personal spiritual experience resulting from these activities. We pondered questions such as: What drives us to undertake these service activities? Is it merely a feeling that we should help the poor and the needy in the community, or are we utilizing these service activities for our spiritual progress? Are we reducing our ego by serving the people with selfless love and compassion and with a feeling of oneness with all? How are we doing according to Sri Sathya Sai Baba’s spoken yardsticks on what service should be: “Service is spiritual service and not merely a social service,” and “See God in all”?