More on charity
From a friend who is "too tired / lazy to figure" out how to do so:
My thought about giving is that you initially give out of some feeling of moral obligation or duty (and maybe partly as a learned behavior -- my father has always been a big charitable giver and it is a value he passed on to me), but that you continue giving partly out of moral obligation and partly out of habit but partly also because giving makes you feel good. There are always exceptions, but as a general rule people who give seem to be happier than people who are selfish. Giving can make me happy in a simple and relatively direct way, but I think it also promotes some deeper sense of contentment and thereby has a positive impact on my outlook and worldview. It discourages the negative thinking of "how much do I have," "what's in it for me" and "who's ahead of me".
My thought about giving is that you initially give out of some feeling of moral obligation or duty (and maybe partly as a learned behavior -- my father has always been a big charitable giver and it is a value he passed on to me), but that you continue giving partly out of moral obligation and partly out of habit but partly also because giving makes you feel good. There are always exceptions, but as a general rule people who give seem to be happier than people who are selfish. Giving can make me happy in a simple and relatively direct way, but I think it also promotes some deeper sense of contentment and thereby has a positive impact on my outlook and worldview. It discourages the negative thinking of "how much do I have," "what's in it for me" and "who's ahead of me".
Posted by Andy Morriss on
Wednesday August 31, 2005 at 10:48pm
Also, at least in spiritual terms, if I perform some act of charity in order to get my "warm fuzzies," have I thereby polluted the well? In short, have I performed charity in order to serve myself first and foremost? And the object of my charity, the person I have helped, is he merely accidental, secondary to me giving myself an endorphin rush? In that case, I have, in fact, used him, not served him.
The result would be that people only serve others in order to serve themselves. I don't believe this to be the case. Surely we've all done things that brought us no happiness but were the right thing to do. Love, by one definition, is willing the other person's good. My feelings don't enter into the equation at all.
Allowing myself to ramble around with this thought, one of the desert Fathers described love as the willingness to exchange bodies with a leper.
Less extreme, but -- God forbid -- perhaps closer to home, is this poem by Robert Hayden called "Those Winter Sundays":
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fear the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?