Strange Giving

“I came to the city to serve those in need. I have resources and abilities to clothe the ill-clad, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless. These are good works that our Lord requires of us. And there is blessedness in this kind of giving. But there is also power that allows me to retain control. My position as a helper protects me from the humiliation of appearing to need help. Even more sobering, I condemn those I help to the permanent role of recipient.”

Robert Lupton, “Theirs is the Kingdom: Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America”

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Dear Kate,

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre insisted that love is but a person's freedom eating up that of another person, and thus always and only a hazardous and painful struggle.  The implication is clear, that our every act of generosity is only a cover-up of our need to come up on top, in particular to declare and maintain superiority over the ones we appear to help.

Cynicism! we cry.  May it well be.  But is it true?

When we give we see ourselves standing on a higher plane of respectability and resourcefulness, no doubt, or else how does our giving flow downstream to bless the poor and needy?

Being poor and needy is hell of a place to be, a humiliation.  I don't want to feel weak waking up in the morning.  If I do I don't want to let on.  I spent most of my money, time, and energy on achieving exactly that.  I don't want to explain my shame, my story with more than fifty shades of grey.  I want to put on a three-piece suit and let it do all the explaining about me.  I drink power juice for breakfast.

As a giver, I can live with a one-off epiphany of my own weakness being somehow addressed by that of my beneficiary, my vulnerability as a proof of pure-heartedness, a joyful surprise.  But to walk through that gate of charity day after day as if I am actually the one equally, if not more, in need of love and care is not a very sustainable balance of power.  I can't let myself be in a habit of being weak without finally being dull and dumb.  I am here to take others' trouble away, to make the world a better place.  No one expects me to add to the burden of anyone.  I don't.  A true savior can't be a sinner.

Jean-Paul Sartre is right after all.

So what should we do?  Come clean and stop caring, giving, loving?  We might as well stop being human.

“Weakness, recognized, accepted, and offered, is at the heart of belonging, so it is at the heart of communion with another.”

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

The power to give and control lives in us. A mythological creature are you.

Myths are serpents of throat, the strangled beast with a skull tapering to an end without oxygen or outlet, the untangling of the first few lines in an unwritten novel. The plot roils in a piece of action I seem to want, a trauma unwinding to wind in saga, thoughts too taut to talk of on paper, a rape deeper than bones, joy wider than rainbow. I am not brave enough to tell myths of giving or keeping when I should be writing less and reading more to live out fully.

Perhaps the best myths are verses unscripted to be graced on eye and heart, empty of power, pregnant in pain, telling the worst of a start recoiling to the best of an end. There is power in retaining the control of a story to protect me from the humiliation of appearing to need help. But there is also blessedness in this kind of speaking in the city you have come to serve those in need.

I do not have a manuscript written about how I may clothe the ill-clad or shelter the homeless. The words of Lupton seem mythological to me because I have done obscenely more to benefit myself than others. So I shall not be writing for a while until the mythological creature, this quote, begins to breathe out of me.

The Spring showers have been relentless all day here. Then comes this photo of mythological beauty.

Your, Kate