Cheerful Channel of God's Provision

I recently took a course at church called "Finding Your Spiritual Gifts." It was too short, and too superficial, but I still found it to be thought-provoking, and also a bit scary on the cusp of my 40th birthday (1 week from today!). One tool we used was a pamphlet put out by the Catholic Church called the Spiritual Gifts Inventory. It's a questionnaire whose results are tabulated into one's top 5 or 6 'spiritual gifts,' which are basically capacities that God has given us to empower us to freely choose to do certain things in the world. My 5th top gift was "Giving." The short definition of this gift is this: "The charism of Giving empowers a Christian to be a cheerful channel of God's provision by giving with exceptional generosity to those in need."

I will admit that I have always been a generous giver. I've given to church, to dozens of causes large and small, to personal friends or colleagues who needed it, to homeless people at stoplights. Problem is, I have also always been a prodigious spender on myself. It doesn't do much good to anyone if I break myself to give to others, and yet I never quite got the idea that if I wanted to be generous (which I very much wanted to be), I needed also to deprive myself, at least of immediate gratification. Apparently, I liked the idea of an ever-expanding pie, and when I was single and living beyond my means, it was easy to pretend that the pie kept growing.

I think I learned all this from my dad. He also broke himself giving money away. Not to church, but to friends, colleagues, causes, waitresses at the diner, and, most broadly, to his ex-wife and kids (us). When I was about 15, Dad, who was a part-time, divorced dad, gave me my first credit card, allowing me to buy gas, snacks, movie tickets and also things for my friends at the mall. Granted, our living conditions with mom were incredibly poor (not to mention dangerous), but it was still excessive. When I went to college, Dad told me I could buy as many books as I wanted. So I racked up huge bills at the college bookstore --which also sold art supplies, music, clothes, and even makeup. Perhaps out of his frustration at being taken advantage of this way, my dad has come out irked and even bitter about his history of giving, feeling that he never 'got anything' for all his generosity.

I don't have that feeling of bitterness -- only a few people have ever taken advantage of my generosity -- but I do feel abashed at how childish I have been in the past. Sure, it's easy to throw money around when you make a lot and you borrow even more. One gets a lot out of it, too -- you get to feel proud of yourself (even when you make an anonymous gift), patting yourself on your back for your sense of mercy, kindness and compassion. You get to feel "rich." Less crassly, you get to feel like you're doing something, without actually getting off your behind, to fix the injustices you see in the world.

When I went into college, my father and I had big arguments about the direction my life should take. He thought I should aim for a high-paying career, and then use the money to help others, ideally by starting a foundation or something similar. I thought I should forswear riches of my own and work in the trenches of social justice directly. To his frustration, I majored in women's studies and spent my years in school on soap boxes, in the editorial pages, and debating publicly. To my frustration, I ended up in a high-paying career, and using what money I had to help others AND myself, without succeeding in either respect.

The federal budget is similar, I think. We in the United States are rich, compared to the vast numbers of humanity. As such, we love to throw money around, feeling good about ourselves, sometimes making a positive difference, sometimes being taken advantage of, sometimes feeling holier-than-thou and sometimes feeling bitter that we can't buy love. There are so many problems to solve, and yet there are also so many strictures on the amount we can actually spend. I am clearly unqualified to decide where the boundaries should be. But I can recognize the illness.