Generosity: Giving Good Light by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz

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Generosity: Giving Good Light

     When I was a Faithful Fool, spending hours and days and sometimes nights with the poorest of the poor, people who were living on the streets of San Francisco, we used to talk about “the generosity of the streets.” When life is stripped down to its barest essentials, you discover that you don’t need that much to get by – and that what you really do need, the streets will provide.

     If you’re hungry, someone on the street will reach into a bag, pull out a loaf of bread, and share it with you. If you need a piece of cardboard to put between yourself and the cold cold ground, some obliging soul will lead you to the store where they stash flattened cardboard boxes behind the dumpster. If you need a cup of coffee, you’ll find pennies on the street, and put them together with quarters that strangers will miraculously put into your cup.

     The generosity of the streets. How many of you have that faith? That you will have what you need before it is asked of you. That the roads and paths and the communities you encounter on your journey will be generous.

     Maybe you have good reason not to have faith. Maybe you’re newly in this country, and people have made you feel unwelcome. Maybe your journey has been marred by skin color prejudice, if you are not white, or by gender prejudice, if you don’t identify yourself the way people think you should, or if your ways of loving are not those of the majority. Or maybe you just think it’s a strange time to be asking such questions.

     You’ve lost your job, or you fear that your job is next. Or your kids can’t find their first one, or you don’t know how you’re going to pay for their college, or you’ve dared to open the envelope and actually looked at what’s left of your 401k. Who’s got faith at a time like this?

     In a recent column in the Post, Michael Gerson pointed out that historically, economic downturns have created a window of opportunity for people to reconsider the true values of their lives. It may be counterintuitive, but in the Great Depression of the 1930s, crime rates went down. So did divorce rates. You know what went up? Health. People become healthier, maybe because ice cream becomes a weekly special treat instead of a nightly indulgence in front of the Letterman show.

     “During tough economic times,” Gerson wrote, “people seem to increase exercise, take fewer car trips, reduce smoking and cook healthier foods at home -- choosing to control the remaining things in their lives that they are capable of controlling.”

     In other words, we look to ourselves, our families and our communities for meaning – and less to the next house, vacation or flat-screen TV we will buy, or the next rung on the particular ladder of success that seemed so all-consumingly important during what used to be known as “good” times. The faith we had misplaced in our economic structures or in our “way of life” turns to faith in one another, in community, in caring.

     The other day a friend sent me a link to a story about Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. The CEO of Beth Israel, Paul Levy, had called a huge meeting of all the staff. They were on the edge of their seats. Hospitals are not immune to the economic climate, and they were expecting pink slips. The only question was, how deep the layoffs would reach to the heart of the hospital.

     But Levy, according to the article, had spent the past few days walking around the medical center, and he had seen that the lowest-paid workers – the orderly pushing a wheelchair, the food service worker handing out trays, the custodian who empties the trash – all were taking the time to chat with patients, to put them at ease, to laugh with them and their families. A lot of them were immigrants. And all of them were, in a way, practicing medicine.

     I recently spent a bit of time in a hospital, and I could relate to this story. The doctors were good, the nurses were good, but the attendants were amazing -- people like Martha from Columbia, who coaxed me to walk the length of the endless hallway that first awful time post-surgery with a gentle laugh that said, I know you think you can’t do this, but I know you can.

     Anyway, in Boston, the CEO, Levy, did not announce pink slips. Instead, he put a question to his staff: in order to make sure nobody loses their jobs, would they be willing to accept pay cuts and lower benefits?

     The applause nearly knocked him off his feet. In the days that followed, he reported, he got a hundred messages an hour from staff members. Nurses on one floor voted themselves a 3 percent pay cut. A financial officer suggested that he and all his workers cut back to four days a week. The entire staff seemed aligned in protecting the jobs of all of them, especially the lowest paid.

     Is it possible that a new ethic is arising? -- an ethic of community and solidarity. An ethic of generosity.

     These past weeks of our church commitment campaign, we have looked together at the core values of our community – hospitality, justice, and today, generosity. Generosity, of course, is not just about money, but it is partly about money. We often talk about giving freely of our time, talent and treasure, a phrase that irks me because I want to be clear that part of what we are talking about is, indeed, money, and “treasure” to me does not have a lot to do with money. Time, talent and T-bills would be more like it.

     Generosity, though, is more than our free and direct gifts of our -- days, dexterity and dinero? Generosity is also a willingness to give good light – in Emerson’s words, to afford one another the same courtesy we would give a painting, by looking at one another in the best possible light. Generosity is approaching those we meet with a spaciousness of spirit that notices our own assumptions, suspends judgment, stops to listen, and works to figure out another way, whether it is a way that an entire staff can be retained through an economic downturn, or a way that all voices can be included in a community conversation. This is the generosity of appreciative inquiry – a way of working in community that asks, “what’s possible?” rather than, “what’s wrong?”

     Many of us have received copies of a Vision Statement by the People of Color Caucus. This is a vision of what’s possible, of the kind of community our principles call us to live into. It is a statement of faith that we can, as Diane said in her “I Believe” statement, make Martin Luther King’s dream of Beloved Community real, right here in this church. (forum?)

     Even the commitment campaign -- of course, it’s about money, but it’s about more than that, too. It is about the meaning we make in community, in this community, and our investment in that work of meaning making. Are you willing to suspend judgment, to make room for new voices to be heard? How generous is your spirit? How willing are you to work for the possibilities that are present in this free religious movement in Arlington, Virginia – possibilities for children to be brought up in a spirit of loving inquiry; and for people to share together their deepening spirituality; possibilities that we can hold the power structure accountable to create more justice in our community, and that we can be a church that mirrors the human family, whole and reconciled, in all its glorious diversity.

     Martin Luther King said that true compassion is not flinging a coin to a beggar; instead it is “restructuring” the “edifice that produces beggars.” This is the work this congregation has begun together in VOICE, and also in our advocacy work for marriage equality, for the end to impunity inGuatemala, and more – the work to bend the arc of the universe toward justice, which no one of us can do alone. But as a congregation, and especially as a coalition of 40 Northern Virginiacongregations as we have in VOICE, we can put our shoulders to that arc, and move it.

     Of course, many of us are liberals, and we all know the word on liberals, right? Tightwads.dinero, their … T-bills … than liberals are. This is partly explained by the fact that more conservatives than liberals are members of churches, to which they direct the largest portion of their charitable giving. Conservatives are far more generous with their money.

     Let’s talk about those conservative churches a minute. Many of them are creedal religious movements that do not encourage the free and responsible search for truth and meaning that defines our faith. And part of the deal, in some of these churches, is tithing. They expect and sometimes require their members to give a full 10 percent of their income to the church. That’s a lot. There’s something valuable, though, about an expectation that this is what you do: you structure your spending, your saving, your life so that ten percent of what you earn goes right off the top to make the world a better place, in whatever way you define that. The 12th Century Jewish rabbi, Maimonides, proposed a ladder of giving, that we pay attention to how we are moving on the ladder. Maimonides’ ladder is not so much about the amount of your giving, but this: What does your giving mean for your own ethical development?

     When I first began to get involved in a Unitarian Universalist church, I spent a little time thinking about how much I ought to put in the plate each Sunday, and I settled on $35 a week. Here’s how I arrived at that amount: I figured I got about as much value from the Sunday service as I would get from a rock concert, and that was the price of a ticket around that time. Well, that shows you how long ago it was.

     This was an interesting and even possibly creative comparison, but it was, I now realize, spirituality light – and not just because it had me looking for rock-concert thrills every Sunday in worship. It was spiritually immature because I was approaching church as another consumer choice, and setting the amount of my investment accordingly.

     Now, JD and I are on Maimonides’ ladder, working toward a Unitarian Universalist tithe. We give about five percent of our after-tax income back to the church. And then we give another five percent, or close to that, to other organizations doing good work in the world. As a spiritual practice, we plan to increase this, not cut it back, in the face of the fear we feel when we dare to look at the balance of our retirement savings. What does my life mean? That’s the question I ask myself now when I make these decisions.

     Martha, the attendant in the hospital, was not obliged to spend all that time coaxing me down the hallway. She did not have to respond to my reluctance with a smile, and yet she did. In those unfamiliar and even frightening corridors, I found generosity of spirit. It was the same when I visited Nicaragua in January. I lived with people who had to struggle to get enough water to drink, let alone food on the table. Yet they shared everything they had with me – more than they had – joyfully.

     One day I happened to be walking alone down one of the streets of the barrio, and a mean little dog came out and bit me on the ankle. The street was dirty and it was hot and the bite was bleeding, and I didn’t know anyone on that block and I didn’t know the language. I stood there in the middle of the street and started to cry. And somebody came out of her house and led me inside and sat me down and washed my foot, lovingly, with soap and water, and then applied lemon juice, I kid you not, the folk remedy to prevent rabies. (It seems to have worked).

• Mark Lau Branson, Memories, Hopes and Conversations: Appreciative Inquiry and Congregational Change

• The Faithful Fools Street Ministry and the people of Barrio

• “Recession's Hidden Virtues,” The Washington Post, Feb. 20, 2009

• “A Head With a Heart,” The Boston Globe, March 12, 2009

• William J. Jackson, ed., The Wisdom of Generosity: A Reader in American Philanthropy

• Nicholas Kristof, “Bleeding Heart Tightwads,” in The New York Times, Dec. 21, 2008

• Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and Why It is Necessary to Give