The Common Place

Common Service of Public Good

This week we witnessed the fall of a champion of the common good. Eliot Spitzer, in his speech resigning as governor of New York, said, “I will try once again, outside of politics, to serve the common good.”

If serving the common good is truly Mr. Spitzer’s passion, it may well be a blessing that he will be serving it outside of politics instead of inside. As a private servant of the public good it will be easier to stay in touch with what we all have in common.

There exists this strange paradox that the higher a person reaches in public life, the further that person is removed from common life ($80,000 for prostitutes).

When we desire to serve the common good we are often lead or drawn or forced into public service. It seems like the best way, or sometimes even the only way, to get things done for our friends and neighbors, for people who are less fortunate or less able to fend for themselves. There is this consistent temptation to seek the power of public office in order to use it for the common good.

But it seems to me that the only way to sustain a public service of the common good is to combine it with a generous amount of common service of the public good. I think of Gandhi spinning thread for his clothes, or maybe Jimmy Carter teaching a Sunday school class. Even so, I have a very difficult time imagining a fruitful combination of common service and public office. Jimmy Carter has done a much better job of serving the common good since leaving the oval office.

Yes, Eliot Spitzer had a very successful career of taking down rich and powerful people, people who had been so successful at putting their own good above the good of those around them. And we may all be better off because of that work which he did. But now he has the opportunity to do non-political, non-public, common work for a larger good. And he will get some good experience doing this (in the trenches, you might say) as he tries to rebuild trust within his own family.

May he find peace and joy in a new life of common service.

March 15th, 2008 Posted by Pastor Mark | Uncategorized | no comments

Starting Over

Welcome to “The Common Place”

I’ve written that before … when I began this blog a few months ago. But now I’ve moved our website to a new server and I seem to have lost my previous posts. I could have copied them and moved them to this new blog but I didn’t think of that in time and now they are lost forever some where in cyberspace on a MySQL database that I can’t seem to access and probably couldn’t read if I did.

Sometimes we are forced to begin again. Generally it is frustrating. And I admit I’m a little frustrated … but I’m getting over it. Generally I like new beginnings, even if they are forced on me . So this is an opportunity to let go of what I had written, even the direction my blog was headed. I could consider those earlier posts as practice for the real thing. I can even let go of the rest of my frustration.

Something new is coming soon. First, though, I need to take care of some administrative tasks for this blog and for the church website.

February 19th, 2008 Posted by Pastor Mark | Uncategorized | no comments