Gratitude and Giving

This is a response I posted on Jeanne's blog on giving, but since it fit with the theme of gratitude, I thought I would post it here.

Jeanne,

I appreciate your blog, and I hear what you are saying about elites supporting other elites ... Quakers supporting Quakers. I do get angry when I see the symphony hall built in my home town from a major donation and know the money came from the profits of racist fear-mongering in real estate years ago. They helped wreck the city and now they’re putting up a fancy venue? And in a city full of housing that you wouldn't let your pet live in ... a symphony hall? Then, like Chuck, I do remember I appreciate Mozart --but that too, I recognize this as a class-based taste ... and why should educated class tastes be supported ahead of others?

But as I mull this, I think of how healing it was for me for my Quaker meeting to support its own after coming from a church that always seemed to want to take my money. Take and take. It meant a great deal to me that the meeting would support my children going to Quaker camps ... and it meant a great deal to my children. When my meeting cares for me that models how to care for another ... but I agree, that care has to push out to the "least of these."

Also, my husband works for and two of my children attend Olney Friends School, hardly an elite boarding school. It's a school that provides a true Quaker education to kids who might not have any other opportunity to get one--because they would might be turned down for admission at the elite Quaker schools. Not because they couldn't do the work, but because they couldn't pass the test or look good enough on paper, which in itself might be a class issue. Or because they want an alternative to an elite school. I see hope for the world in schools like Olney. However, Olney does depend on support from other Quakers--it can't make it on tuition alone ... so I struggle with this. I hate to see needs compete and want to believe there's abundance for everything important, that we don't need to divert from one charity to the next but to divert funds from the latest consumer good so we can support more charities, especially these days.

As I write this, I realize how tight the budget is at Chez Reynolds, tighter than in decades. I think many people are feeling the pinch. All the same, I think we could look at our spending creatively and find ways to support more groups ...While I think it takes a leap of faith to believe the resources are here, I believe they are here. Do you believe they're here?

The library: Collective blessings and gratitude

One collective blessing I am grateful for is the Barnesville Hutton Memorial public library. It's in the center of town, housed in a lovely small new building with a bowed floor-to-ceiling window letting in natural light and comfortable armchairs tucked in the corners. It even has a Quaker genealogical research room.

As in most libraries, the librarians are friendly and helpful. The library is part of a system of county libraries that together comprise one big library. I can get almost any book I want through interlibrary loan. And so can anybody else in the community.

I am especially glad to have the library these days, while our family's disposable income is limited. In the old days, I would have gone the easier route of clicking the button at Amazon and having my books delivered, bought and paid for.

I am on queues for most of the books I want. For instance, I look forward to reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, but people are ahead of me in line for it. So the library is not the route to immediate gratification. But it does cultivate patience. And I will have to pick the book up, rather than having it deposited on my doorstep, but that's all right: I'll get to go the library!

Are we self-centered: Blessings and gratitude

Blessings and gratitude have been much on my mind this past year. Possibly as a result of the economic crisis, more people seem to be stating what they are grateful for and calling out their particular blessings.

Individual blessings are no doubt good and in times of economic distress, it can be useful to remind ourselves of how grateful we are to have houses, jobs, and health insurance while all around us people's lives fall into ruin and chaos.

At the same time, it can come across, even when sincerely and humbly meant, as a tad self-centered to celebrate one's own good fortune in the midst of the carnage. It is good to have a roof over one's head, a job and access to health care, and better yet to be grateful for them, but at the same time, it's a sign of the sickness in our society that not everybody has these things. What I often hear is a gratitude not centered in a context of abundance but in a context of scarcity. What I hear is not gratitude that we collectively are prospering but gratitude for my individual fortune. "I" am so grateful to have what others don't.

How would it sound if someone were to stand up in meeting and say: "I am so grateful to have air to breathe," if, just a few blocks a way, people were choking and gasping and possibly dying from lack of air?

What good is a blessing if others don't share in it?

I am convinced that God's true blessings are meant for everyone. When the Bible says the sun shines on the good and the evil alike, it points to the paradox of rewards but it also describes how God gives. God rains down blessings on us in great abundance. Indiscriminately. Not just on the "deserving," by whatever arbitrary measure we may devise to determine that, but on all people. Maybe all people are deserving in God's eyes?

The forces of evil would try to hoard those blessings for the few. But at the point, they get turned into something spoiled, like the manna from heaven the wandering Israelites tried to hoard. I don't think, for example, it's a blessing, in and of itself, to live in a huge house when others are homeless.

Things that are blessings for the few can linger and rot. When we think of haunted houses in the popular imagination, for example. we think of large old Victorian dwelling, with flapping shutters askew and inside, cobwebs festooning the once-fancy woodwork. Or we think of ancient castles. We seldom think of haunted huts or cottages.

Yet we live in a world that routinely encourages us to hoard the blessings for ourselves and our group, be it our own children, our faith groups, our cities, towns, counties, states or countries.

When the English ruling class started to enclose what had traditionally been common grazing lands, lands available to promote the common good and common prosperity, trouble ensued. Today, some don't care that water and air, traditionally freely available, at least in this country, have become polluted. There's money to be made by selling the clean versions of these-now--commodities.

As we contemplate Christmas and the birth of Jesus, it's integral--not simply a pretty embellishment-- to the story that he was born to bring grace to all people. He is a universal blessing. He brings a hope for peace and goodwill to all.

The challenge I am taking up is to try to be thankful for and to ask for blessing for all people. If I am grateful for a job, a home or health insurance, then I want that for everyone. If I deserve it, so does everyone else. I ask why isn't that blessing raining on everyone? What more can I/we do to ensure it?

When I think of the blessings I would most like to spread, they tend to be more of a spiritual nature: I would love everyone to have loving relationships, goodwill, peace, joy, beautiful surroundings, health, etc. But I also recognize that we are incarnate, material beings and the above spiritual needs are nurtured by physical security. Of course, we can have all these things in terrible circumstances--and the saints among us carry love, peace, joy and all the rest into the darkest dungeons--but most of us are not saints.

This is a roughly written piece, as I try to process these thoughts. I recognize that a crude equalitarianism is not necessarily a blessing either, though I think it might come closer to God's vision than what we have around us. Certainly we don't want to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator but to bring everyone up to a comfortable place. I keep thinking of John Wesley's dictum: earn as much as you can, save as much as you can, give as much as you can. Do we agree with that? How can we take what we have--our blessings--and make them more of a blessing to everyone?

On Gratitude

A memory has been plaguing me for the last few months of a man standing up in Quaker meeting for worship to speak about his gratitude to God for all the good things in his life.

The man was humble and sincere. He was giving the glory to God.

And yet ...

I was troubled then and continue to be troubled by him, because this man's gratitude was individual and personal. While he was in no way trying to flaunt his good fortune, the whole focus of his gratitude was on himself. He was grateful for all the good things that God rained down on him in particular, all the good blessings that God had favored him with. Again, that's fine. But I couldn't help thinking that perhaps there were people listening who didn't feel quite so blessed. Maybe they were dealing with cancer or a loved one sick or dying or financial problems or divorce. How was this person's message, which, although he did not intend it to, boiled down to "look how lucky I am," help people who didn't feel so graced?

I thought too, of what I heard once--perhaps misheard?--that some Anglicans were upset with the revised 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which is the basis of their worship, because some collective responses were changed from "we" to "I," as in "I believe in..." rather than "We believe in." At the time, I couldn't understand how such a little change could cause such outrage, but now I think I do.

The outraged people, perhaps, recognized that we're not a collection of little "mes" worshipping side by side, but ideally aiming at becoming a "we," a body that transcends the individual self. We are part of something bigger that reaches back in time to tradition, forward in time to leave a better world to posterity and in the present all part of each other What good is my good fortune, if it's not shared with those around me? The world wants us to strive to be those special people who everyone else looks at with envy, to feel separate from and better than the mass of humanity. This can seep into our spiritual lives: We can long to be those people whom everyone looks at and says 'I want want he/she has' spiritually. God had, however, has something much different in mind, which is focus on others. How can I break my bread, so to speak, so that others can share what I have, so that eventually we can each feed 5,000? How can I expand my gratitude so that it encompasses my neighbor?