Understanding Buber in the context of Service-Learning

Through my understanding of the text of I and Thou, written by Marin Buber, I interpret his understanding of Thou to mean God, and the combination of I-Thou to mean man’s relation with God. Buber writes, “The Thou meets me through grace—it is not found by seeking. But my speaking of the primary word to it is an act of my being, is indeed the act of my being. The Thou meets me. But I step into direct relation with it. Hence the relation means being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one…” (11). Later in his book, Buber writes that the Thou is in everything and is, in fact, everything. It is interesting that in each one of us is a desire to be found by the Thou, and that we should seek to find the Thou when it should be so apparent to us (being that it surrounds us and is the reason all things hold together). This further prompts me to question what it is that keeps us from seeing the Thou clearly. Buber seems to emphasize that if one is to find the Thou, it will not be in seeking to define it, but rather it will be met by us through grace. We do nothing to attain this knowledge of the Thou by our own willpower to find it, which is uniquely humbling.
In addition, this knowledge of the Thou serves to free us and give us a perspective on life that is reality. It is significant that the relation that is formed between I and Thou is one created by choice. We are met with the Thou at some point (“all men have somewhere been aware of the Thou; now the spirit gives them full assurance” Buber 53), but we must enable our will to choose to step into direct relationship with it, which includes becoming very vulnerable, and allowing oneself to be totally absorbed into the Thou. This action to choose becomes the basis for all consecutive decisions we must make in life—whether they become connected with the Thou, or whether the Thou remains distanced from us. The act of choosing is significant, because without this gift of being able to choose, we emulate robots carrying out a set course of instructions, and this format by no means can become relational.
It seems as though by being in communion with the Thou, one is given the freedom to think beyond oneself, and to therefore think in terms of one’s relation to the world as being a part of it, rather than distancing oneself from it and creating an individual identity. In this way, one is able to interact with others effectively…
Often the most effective and life-changing service learning is done by those who, apart from a sense of duty, find that they are called into relation with others because of their relation to the Thou. It is because of this relation, Buber suggests, that all other relations to the world are put in perspective. Buber muses, “Structures of man’s communal life draw their living quality from the riches of the power to enter into relation, which penetrates their various parts, and obtain their bodily form from the binding up of this power in the spirit” (49). By choosing to step into this relation, we gain the reality of life, the perspective we can base all other relations besides, and the motivation to continue in faith what we alone could never have started ourselves.