Pretty little pinata

The meeting for clearness regarding what to do with our kitchen (above) renovation money was held. I was surprised to find that my small group unanimously thought of giving some of our refinance money away to charity as "weird". Weird? Wow.

As I have mentioned before, Mark and I are contemplating a renovation of our house. But what began as a simple desire to open up our kitchen and dining space became increasingly elaborate. One night, I was looking at a stack of counter-top brochures I'd gathered from various kitchen-design stores and felt tortured by the choices. Silestone or granite? Corian or Cambria? Black or white? Veining or flat? Suddenly too much hinged on exactly what type of kitchen counter I chose. I worried about what my new counters would say about me; am I boring, gaudy, or some awful compromise like "interesting"? (Above is a picture of me with my brother Moges and friend Daire, leaning on the current countertop)

Since when does a kitchen counter define a person? Since never, dang it. I threw that stack of brochures away and considered things. It's not that these are pointless choices, I realize the value of choosing your kitchen surfaces with care. I do. It's just that it began to consume way to much of my time and energy. I started to think of the re-finance money as soul-killing. What else do you call what happens to a person who even knows what Cambria is? So that's really when this whole discussion of giving at least some of this money away began.

Enter my dear friend Alex. A few weeks ago she asked me why this issue troubled me so much. I gave her what I felt was a righteous but not sickening response about the responsibility of spending money on less fortunate people and so on. She listened and then laid it down for me. I would not be giving my money away. I would be giving the bank's money away. And even at a low interest rate of 4.25%, if I gave $5000 to charity, I would be giving way more than that away over the 30 year life of the loan - but to the bank, not charity. "Oh, yeah," I said. I guess I hadn't really thought about that. Her message; that money wasn't really mine to give away.

So my small group's response to the whole thing was striking because they essentially agreed with Alex. I expected them to tell me to go ahead and put my money where my mouth was, especially given what we've been talking about most recently (see pictures below of Richard Foster, and his book). But when John, an unusually diplomatic and sensitive speaker, called my plans "weird", it did turn the whole thing on its head a bit. There was my charitable notion, hanging like a pretty but empty pinata. I suppose more than anything, I felt I had been somewhat arrogant, and not a little silly. From my Christian point of view, my idea wasn't particularly generous spirited since the money is a loan, and from the point of view of someone like Alex, it isn't even an efficient expenditure, since for every $1000 I give away per year, I'm giving the bank $40.25.



In the end, after some discussion and silent contemplative prayer, the general consensus of my small group was that: a) this renovation wasn't some frivolous luxury that we could choose to do without for the sake of charity, and b) this renovation could be a small scale project, with a portion of the refinance money going right back to the bank as a pre-payment. Mark and I could then take money out of our own coffers, like sensible people, and give that to charity. One thousand dollars, if we like - or even better, one thousand and forty dollars and twenty-five cents.

I'm so glad my friends and spiritual mentors can be both honest and caring. Sometimes I wonder, as Alex does, why I even devote so much time to this question. I'm either over-simplifying the nature of giving or over-complicating it, not sure which (I honestly feel like an evangelical drama-queen sometimes). But I'm determined not to be ashamed. Because we all have to go down these spiritual paths every so often, if only to find that when we reach the point where we're losing more sleep over whether to install Cambria or Granite countertops than we are about how to most effectively give to those in need, it might be time to find another path.

Meeting For Clearness

We (small group) are nearly done with the book "Freedom of Simplicity" by Richard Foster. I confess never to have been a fan of Foster before this book. Maybe it's because I was never a disciplined reader and perhaps his best known book is called "Celebration of Discipline". In any case, this book has subverted a lot of my thinking on the subject of giving, as I hope previous posts have shown.

On the verge of finishing the book, I have requested that my small group consider praying with me and talking Mark and me through the thought process behind giving up at least some of this refinance money we now have sitting gathering dust (and not much interest) while we consider whether to renovate and if so, to what extent. This kind of prayer and talk is what Foster calls a "meeting for clearness." Now, that terminology may be old school Quaker, but it sure sounds new school freaky, especially given a recent article on Scientology I read in the New Yorker (dying to discuss that, but at another time). But to heck with terminology; the fact is I need to meet with some like-minded people and get some clearness. This is scheduled to happen some time next weekend.

I can't lie. Sometimes I sit in my kitchen and think about how great it would feel to sign a check for the entire amount of our renovation money and send it to an orphanage somewhere. And then I question my motives; am I really doing it because I feel honestly compelled to do it, of my own free will? Do I want to prove to my small group that I'm taking what we're reading seriously? Do I want to earn kudos from non-Christians who wish we'd all just walk the talk or shut up? What about kudos from Christians who will feel guilty/motivated? I don't know. All I know is that I haven't stopped to consider what God wants me to do for very long. I'm driven by something inside me that asks how I could have so much and others so little. And in spite of what we see all around us, that seems an empty question outside of what God has to say about it. Meeting of Clearness, roll on.

In related news, I read this fascinating article on this Hollywood Director, Tom Shadyac. He looks like a cross between Weird Al and Jesus. But also, he's famous for directing some monster-budget pictures quite successfully (The Nutty Professor, Ace Ventura). But he gave all his millions up for the sake of enlightenment. Of course I now can't find that original article, but here's an interview he gave to Esquire that will do the job:

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/qa/tom-shadyac-i-am-012811

Relationship to Money/Profit

Marta, to your question: “What does it say about you when you're not particularly willing to go beyond that?”, I'll respond: It says you don’t see the point presently. That’s all.

Reading Josh’s comments and talking to Marta about this “exercise” you all wanted to experience got me thinking. Like Josh, I don’t think that giving up stuff (like my beloved old out-of-order gold Omega watch) would be so mind-bending for me: out of sight, out of mind/heart. But, how about giving up experiences, moments… cherished ones…? My blood pressure started to rise at the thoughts…

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On a related topic, but a bit off as well: relationship to money/profit. I don’t experience it as enslaving. And I’d like to bring up this topic of the morality of money – an inquiry written by our friends’ son, Paul, a rancher in Arizona. http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/notes/paul-schwennesen/the-morality-of-profit-an-inquiry/393082701962

I wholeheartedly agree with him. What do you all think?

Giving Something Away

So my small group (Evangelical speak for "Bible Study Group") has been reading the book I mentioned before by Richard Foster; The Freedom of Simplicity. In it, Foster writes about John Wesley, the 18th century cleric and founder of the Methodist Movement, who as a young man calculated that he could live on 25 pounds, or $65 per year. Even when he earned 1400 pounds a year later in his career, he continued to subsist on that 25 pounds and gave the rest away. Foster, no slouch in the pragmatics department, recognizes that we obviously have to allow for growing families and expenses. But he says the principle should remain the same.


So what does this have to do with our small group? Well, we love a challenge, plain and simple. So we challenged each other to give something away; something that was meaningful but not essential. Then we met at our house last night to debrief. Here's what we came up with:

John and Suvia had one of their cars totaled in an accident days after we issued the challenge. They decided that rather than replace it, John would ride his bike to work and that the family would make do with one car. No big deal, some might say. Try cycling through a foot of snow in the Prince George's County back roads. Pretty impressive.


Jean, a confessed shopaholic, recruited a friend and together, they combed Jean's closets, getting rid of something like 75 items of clothing. She held up a particular favorite that she'd brought along to the meeting; a velvety black, tailored collarless jacket that would have slimmed the bulkiest of frames. It was an elegant number, subtly embroidered and ready for a night out. Goodbye jacket. Good for Jean.

Josh is Jean's husband and is nothing if not calm and methodological. He walked us through a list of things he might give up, a list which he maintained on his smart phone, a Droid he got for a newly acquired job. The first item on the list? The Droid. But his arguments for keeping the Droid were sound. So the Droid would stay (for where else would he keep his list of things to give up?). Also staying - his ipod, his five suits that he needed for work, and some other stuff. So his conclusion was that he had nothing that he could reasonably and meaningfully give up. ("But he hardly has anything to start with!" Jean reminded us as he put his Droid carefully back into his pocket.)



My husband, Mark, suggested that the tv in our bedroom be jettisoned for quiet evenings of reading in bed. Huh. Guess I'll just have to watch my "Office" re-runs downstairs as he reads quietly in bed.

And me? Well, earlier in the day, I'd met Alex for lunch, and I told her about this challenge of ours. To my surprise she didn't immediately mock it as a largely academic exercise designed to make ourselves feel better, but instead thought seriously about what she would give up. So then I started to feel like maybe I hadn't taken the challenge seriously enough. I half-heartedly mentioned my ipod. "You could give it to me," she kindly volunteered. "No." I gently responded.

As I left her, I still had no grand ideas about what to give away. I began to comfort myself by saying that maybe I took the challenge too seriously, and planned to report back to my small group with this sober announcement; "I don't think I'm ready for this." But I knew that wouldn't cut water with this crew. So I said I would give up the yearning I had for a very specific set of kitchen knives that I had my eye on. Easy enough since that wasn't giving anything away, really. As evidence, I presented the coupon for the knives that I'd cut from a catalog and symbolically threw it in the re-cycling bin. I admitted to my small group that this was a huge cop-out, and no one argued with me.

But it has made me think. I mean, going back to Foster and his recommendations, my contribution to the challenge was worse than a cop out. It was a downright refusal to participate. Here Wesley gave away all but 25 pounds of his salary, even when he was earning 56 times that. And I couldn't think of one thing I cared to part with. Don't get me wrong, I get rid of stuff all the time. Perhaps no one has helped Purple Heart out more than I have. But that's not the point of the challenge. Anyone would be happy to give away what they don't want. What does it say about you when you're not particularly willing to go beyond that?

To give or to want to give (more thoughts)

In an earlier post, I wrote: “I deeply feel giving has to fit in one’s circumstances just right. It has to flow effortlessly. It should not be agonizing, afflicting, harrowing, tormenting; if it is, then one becomes a liability to oneself and others. The whole thing becomes a hindrance, putting the individual at a disadvantage, or compromising what he/she is responsible for.” The way it works for me is that I have to feel (not “be” because it’s all subjective and relative) that my husband, children and I are secure – mainly financially, but maybe also emotionally? – to give with all my heart. This is the way it works for me at this point in my life.

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

If what matters is the act of giving it all and not its impact or lack thereof, then I need to find out how transformative and sustainable that can be. How can it be sufficient to say “it only needs to come from the heart” but the donor as a result then depends on someone else’s goodwill? And if the exercise here is to experience what it is like to let go and give away things we are attached to, then it should not be done at the expense of the needy, should it?

Yes, I can’t help but go back to pragmatism especially when it comes to the charity feast example. If giving is done strategically, then it will have longer lasting and further reaching impacts. It reinforces my feeling that people are often “poor” because of, in great part, their mindset [boy I know I am going to take some heat for saying this]. And the feast is a perfect example: if their goal is to get out of poverty and be self-sustaining and autonomous, then they should not even want this feast, and would want to direct the charity towards more impacting operations like gathering long term staples, and such. Which one (the feast or the long term planning) would feel better and more rewarding? Otherwise, it’s as if both the donor and recipient want the status quo.

If one gives from the heart, and the donation has no impact, or maybe even makes the situation worse (like rendering people dependent and assisted minded), then is it fair, is it good that the act of giving benefits only the donor? Then can it not be defined as self-indulgence? If not, then what is self-indulgence for Christians?

When the women gave her last coin to the temple, why does the story end here? What happens when she leaves the temple and goes back to her life? Does she then have the attitude “God will provide?” But I thought God only helps the ones who help themselves? Is that helping oneself to give it all out?

These are all new thoughts… I need to make sense of them; help welcome.

If there was an X-games of giving, this guy would win the main event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_3BEwpv0dM

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.

To Give or to Want to Give (cont'd)

Reading your post, Marta, many ideas are rushing through my head. Here they are – very raw and unorganized:

Your refinance money is going to go to various individuals who will have worked for it (manually and/or selling you good and services via their businesses). They will feed their families with it, which in turn will sustain farmers, ranchers, and other industries out there… The money does not vanish into thin air. It circulates. It’s an efficient dignified system. And there’s something to be said about sweating for one’s dollar earned. Aren’t those transactions noble and efficient – dare I say even “godly”?

Yes I understand that part of the argument is about those individuals that cannot be part of the economic system…

Well, if there is a God, surely he knows if one really wants to give to charity or if one just does it because: (i) it’s the right thing to do; and/or (ii) feels guilt. But what is the goal here? Helping the “poor” (the end justifying the means)? Or personal brownie points?

I find charity tricky in many ways… for the recipient and the donor.

Charity should not be carried out with the only goal being to let go of one’s possessions or wealth. Its intent has to be goal-oriented, and it has got to be fulfilled for it to be worthwhile. If all it does is handing out a fish without teaching how to fish, there is really no point. Going ahead with it could then be called self-indulgence.

The power of intention. If the genuine intention is behind the gesture of giving, the result will have more impact. Not having the desire is quite alright.

I deeply feel giving has to fit in one’s circumstances just right. It has to flow effortlessly. It should not be agonizing, afflicting, harrowing, tormenting; if it is, then one becomes a liability to oneself and others. The whole thing becomes a hindrance, putting the individual at a disadvantage, or compromising what he/she is responsible for. It defeats the purpose. But what is the purpose? I am wondering if that is where the real debate lies.

Also, if keeping one’s earnings to oneself somehow motivates the individual to be even a better human being. Surely giving is not the only criteria to assess one’s goodness. How about it makes the person even more focused, in touch, reaching for quality all around? How about he/she spends (not give) it thoughtfully? Quality is sometimes expensive: quality food, quality education, quality time with one’s children, family, friends... when one surrounds oneself with quality, I am sure that person radiates it… and many benefit. By “thoughtfully,” I mean purposefully. For instance, instead of going to my regular haircuttery 5 minutes away and pay $20 for a haircut, I now go to my friend’s husband’s hair salon (45 minutes away) since I heard that the 2008 economic downturn cut his wages by two third. I now pay 3 times the price for a haircut. I do get a better haircut in the bargain as he is a true professional hairstylist (ha!)… so that is not charity per se, but I feel really good about it because it helps the receiver.

Anyway, to go back to what you were pondering about: wishing one could… I obviously don’t feel like that. At least not yet. Not that simply.