The historian records two things about the Essenes that the fellowship holds together. First, that they were the most hospitable of people: a member traveling to another town took nothing with him, for in every town one of the community was appointed to supply strangers with clothing and provisions, and the Essenes of one place received those of another as old friends. Second, that they were careful to help the deserving and to give food to the needy, and that in these two things alone, mercy and help, the overseers did not need to be consulted; a member could act on his own.
A people so strict about every other act of life left two acts free: mercy and help. The fellowship takes the hint.
Why Service
The inward practices of the way, the watches, the Still Lamp, the communions, are the roots of the tree. Service is the fruit, and a tree that bears no fruit is, in the teacher's hard parable, cut down. The fellowship has watched students become expert in stillness and remain hard, expert in simplicity and remain selfish, expert in the texts and remain unkind. In every case the missing practice was this one. The inward practices curdle without the outward turn. The Essenes knew it; their Rule bound them not only to piety toward God but to justice toward humanity, and the two were one oath.
The Common Table
The first service is the table, opened. The Essenes ate together, in rank, in silence, and the common meal was the center of their life. The fellowship asks students to open their own tables: to eat with others regularly, to invite the one who eats alone, to make the meal a place where the greeting of peace is more than a word. This is the simplest service and the oldest. The first followers of the Way broke bread daily from house to house. So can we.
The Care of the Sick
The historian says the Essenes studied the properties of roots and stones for the healing of diseases, and one old derivation of their name is from a word for healers. The fellowship has no medicine to offer and does not pretend otherwise. But the care of the sick is more than medicine. It is presence: the visit, the meal brought, the night sat through, the hand held. Every student of the fellowship is asked to know who among their neighbors is sick, and to go.
The Right Weight
The Essenes, the philosopher says, had no trade in weapons or luxuries and engaged in no commerce that fed greed. Most of the fellowship's students work in commerce of one kind or another and cannot leave it. But all can give the right weight: honest work, honest words, honest dealing, the refusal to profit from another's need. The prophets had more to say about false weights than about almost any other sin. The fellowship holds that a student who keeps the Morning Watch and cheats a customer at noon has kept nothing.
Kindness to the Least
The tradition tells of holy ones who would not crush an insect or cut a green tree, and the fellowship holds the Sanctity of Life as a teaching. Its practice is daily kindness to the least creature: the worm moved from the path, the spider carried outside, the bird fed in winter, the tree planted that one will not live to sit under. These are small. They are also the training of the eye that sees the breath of God in all that breathes, and the hand trained on the small is spent on the great.
The Secret Service
The teacher of the Way said that the left hand should not know what the right hand gives, and the Essenes, who kept the names of the angels secret, understood secrecy as a form of reverence. The fellowship asks students to do one service a week that no one will ever know of. Not for the humility of it, though that comes, but for the freedom. A kindness that cannot be credited cannot be corrupted. It is the purest form of the practice, and the one the Essenes, who held all things in common so that no gift could be traced, came closest to.
A Practice for This Week
Choose one: open your table to someone who eats alone; visit someone who is sick; put right one dealing in which you have not given full weight; do one kindness to a creature; do one service no one will know of. Do it before the Sabbath. At the Evening Watch, do not record it. Let it go into the common store of the Unity, which has no ledger.