The water is hot enough to sting a little. Plates come in faster than I can stack them, and behind me there’s the sound of a queue forming at the counter: chairs scraping, a tray set down, someone saying thank you. My hands know what to do before my head does. Rinse, scrub, rack. Rinse, scrub, rack.
A busy mind doesn’t work like that. It runs ahead, plans, argues with things that aren’t in the room. Ask it to sit still with a teaching and the noise usually gets louder, not quieter.
About six years ago I started volunteering at St Pio Friary in Bradford, with the Franciscan brothers. After that I volunteered at the Immanuel Project and at the Jubilee Centre, both in Bradford too. I still volunteer. Over the years that’s meant food banks and soup kitchens. The jobs change, but the shape of the work stays the same. Someone needs something, and for a while you get to be the person who hands it over.
Washing up is washing up
I don’t want to dress this up. Washing up is washing up. Serving is serving. Nobody at the counter needs me to be having a spiritual moment. They need a warm plate and to be treated with respect. That’s the job, and it’s enough. The queue is the reason the kitchen is there, and the kitchen is the reason I’m there. Keeping that order straight is part of the work.
But something happens in the doing of it. When I’m carrying a tray, I can’t also be rehearsing an argument. When I’m wiping a table, the table is all there is. The mind, which so often feels like a crowded bus station, empties out a little. Not because I’ve forced it to, but because for a moment there’s nowhere else for it to go.
Merit, and a mind that can slow down
In the Pali texts of the Theravāda tradition, generosity, dāna, comes first. It is listed first among the ways of making merit, puñña, and the teachings often begin with it, before anything about meditation or wisdom. “Merit” can sound like points on a scorecard. That isn’t how I understand it. Generosity here doesn’t have to mean money. It can be time, or food, or a pair of hands at the other end of a heavy box.
I once heard a monk explain that generosity helps the mind slow down and settle, so it can understand the teaching more clearly. In my own practice I’ve found that serving food and chanting feel like part of the same thing.
That’s all I mean by merit here. Not a reward, not a ticket to understanding, not something you earn by putting in hours. Just a mind softened a little by giving, so that when the teaching arrives there’s room for it to land.
It’s easy to assume understanding comes first: that once we’ve worked it all out, we’ll be ready to give. That line turns it round. The giving comes first, and the mind that gives is the one that can slow down enough to hear.
Everyone’s path is their own
The Franciscan brothers at St Pio Friary have their own reasons for serving, rooted in their own tradition, and those reasons are theirs to tell. What I can say is that they never once minded talking about Buddhism with me. Some of our best conversations happened over a stack of plates.
I don’t push Buddhism on anyone. People in the queue have come for a meal, not a sermon. But if someone asks me why I chant, or what keeps me coming back, I’m happy to talk. That kind of conversation between traditions isn’t new. Father Francis Tiso, a Catholic priest, has spent years encouraging Christians and Buddhists to sit down and talk (here he is in conversation with Dale Allison).
So I’ll leave you with a question rather than a lesson. The last time your hands were busy helping someone, what was your mind doing?
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— Rafik