To give or to want to give (continued, again)

Alex's post below has me reacting in various ways. As usual, she's spot on, as far as pragmatic thinking goes. Sure, it's obvious that there are benefits to keeping what you earn. And sure, those benefits extend beyond you. Using my refinance conundrum as an example, she mentions that my renovation will obviously benefit me, but will also provide employment to a number of people who almost certainly could use the work. In fact, she says, one should never engage in charity unless there's some anticipated benefit, to both the giver and the receiver. Again, this all makes very good sense from a pragmatic vantage. It's charity backed by sound economics. Seems like a great model for giving.

But you know, the thing that most frustrates me about my faith and yet most attracts me to it is how completely illogical it is. In my earlier post I mentioned the New Testament example of the woman who gave practically her last penny in the temple, and how much more meaningful this donation was than the more significant donations of the wealthier temple-goers. Alex's response to this story might be to point out how much more the temple would benefit from the larger donations than the pittance this poor woman was donating. Also, it probably wasn't the most prudent thing in the world for a broke woman to go throwing her last bit of money away like that. But the point Jesus was trying to make in praising her giving was that it came from the bottomless generosity of her heart. So what, Alex might reasonably ask. Who cares what's in your heart?

Ah. You see where I'm going with this, right? When you talk about charity from a Christian perspective, it's all about what's in your heart. No, it doesn't jive with wise economics. It doesn't even jive with common sense. It is all about what your convictions are based on. Are your convictions based on the bottom line? Or are they based on a generosity that expects absolutely no returns? Wouldn't it be crazy if our convictions about how we treated others were founded on the latter principle? Well, that's exactly what Jesus taught and it's one of the reasons he was a radical. Although Alex more than once has rejected this notion and recently described him as a depressed guy who couldn't hack it in the real world and felt everyone should be as broke and directionless as him. She said, "He was probably a bum. A nice bum, a kind bum, but a bum."

Ok, she cracks me up. I can't help but laugh when she strips away the "make nice" language around religion and says it how she feels it. Who else in my life would ever call the great Jesus a "nice bum"? But to get back to this notion of why we Christians feel this call to give without calculating what either we or the receiver get out of our giving, I want to recall another conversation I once had with Alex.

She and I were driving in my car, and I mentioned I had to make a quick detour. I had to deliver some food to my kid's pre-school where a Thanksgiving collection was being held so people could come in and take what they needed home to make a feast for the big day. She was silent for a while, and I asked if she minded the side-trip. She didn't mind that, but what she did object to was the use of the word "feast." She couldn't comprehend why poor people would need to have a feast, an actual blow-out, eat yourself silly feast for Thanksgiving. It would have been way better to provide them with staples that would last them for months at a time; sacks of rice, beans and lentils, etc.

I couldn't articulate then why I felt like everyone deserves to have a friggin' feast on occasion, because technically, practically speaking she's right! No question, it would have been way better for the church to collect long-lasting staples instead of these feast materials that would last less than a week. But spiritually, even from a non-Christian standpoint, come on. Everyone needs a feast. And from the Christian standpoint, the symbolism behind feasting is so powerful it's not even funny. I would never, in a million years, be a follower of a God who said, "Now Marta, given who you are and what you've done in your life, upon the termination of said life I reckon you should come over for dinner and I'll give you some lentil soup and some brown rice. That should do you nicely."

I don't know a lot of scripture by heart, but I can tell you, the word "feast" floats through the good book like a tantalizingly good smell. It wafts gently over all the other stuff about me that's not particularly deserving of a break and serves as a guarantee of a completely illogical and endless generosity that asks nothing from me in return. Now there's no question that what I just wrote there was a terrible, no-good, run-on sentence. Sorry. But hopefully it suggests something about an alternative, if uneconomical model for giving.