Love has been praised as the thing that makes the world go round and the keynote of Christian teaching. But love today is a word so overused as to have a debased meaning. Giving is suggested as an alternative.
This essay argues for giving as the essence of the religious, spiritual and ethical life.
Giving as foundational
Whether we’re religious or non-religious, we can probably agree that giving is part of the foundation of all existence.
If we’re religious we acknowledge the Divine in one of its forms – Christian, Buddhist or whatever - as our foundation. The dynamics of the Divine are many and varied, for the Divine is all-encompassing, but when we look at relationships, we can say there is both giving and taking, or giving and receiving. Inevitably we ourselves, as reflections of the Divine, partake in this dynamic: we too give and take and receive. We don’t do these things in equal proportion, but we give our lives an overall colour by the proportion we choose. We can be givers, for example, who are open and friendly people, or takers who are closed and hostile. Religious ideals generally favour giving (though it has to be admitted that there many adherents to religion who behave otherwise).
If we are non-religious, most likely our primary reference point will be something to do with the physical universe and its creation, including our ongoing everyday evolution. Science tells us that we come from an energy which was released through the Big Bang. The creation process which followed was one of boundless giving out, with one energy flowing into others. Initially this was just physical, but now we can say there are all sorts of other giving as well: giving of attention, of regard, of credit, of effort, of courage, and so on. The list of different kinds of giving is more or less endless. It entails different qualities like openness, outreach and generosity, which are necessary parts of being human. By and large, these things are fundamental to ethics.
The imperative of giving
We are free to choose how we live, but I believe our predominant attitude should be giving. This is not to exclude ourselves from enjoyment of life – far from it – but simply to recognize that we are a world of many, not just one, and we are therefore inescapably interdependent. This is a truth often ignored. For all sorts of bad reasons we routinely exclude others from “the good life”, but this is wrong. We have no sound basis for excluding, for we are all equal. Not even the self has any greater entitlement. Liberty, equality, fraternity was the catch-cry of French revolutionaries – fraternity being the key word here – and for very good reason this ideal has been adopted by many other countries since.
The temptation not to give
But what about self-interest, you might say, and what about happiness through pandering to or preferring the self? Was Jesus on the Cross happier through denying himself? These are legitimate and very human questions. Part of the answer is that virtue is a discipline, and in a plural world we cannot live without that discipline. Indeed we might even claim the practice of virtue to be the ultimate discipline, the ultimate life skill.
People who are religious, spiritual and/or ethical set for themselves a high standard, being prepared to suffer at times in pursuit of the good. Some might see a reward at the end of the road, maybe a heavenly reward; others just follow the good for its own sake. Whatever the case, we have to be aware that giving is often hard. We have to know what we’re about when, like the young Queen Victoria, we say “I will be good.”
Giving is whole-of-life
Giving can take all sorts of forms, encompassing all aspects of our life. It starts with openness to other people and other things, or new ideas and new experiences. Anything other than our self is potentially a challenge. In order to give we have to shut off our defences, even prejudices we barely realise we have, and reorient our minds to see the new as it really is.
This does not mean that we should say yes to everything. There will still be things that are bad for us which we should shut off, like road rage and hackers, there will also be things not to our taste, such as (in my case) pears and barking dogs, but these can and should be managed. Pear as a fruit is anathema to me but I acknowledge that pear cider is very pleasant, and barking dogs can assist in security. In the case of violence I support counter-measures which may achieve more than just curbing the violence. Consider for example all the secondary benefits of the UN – the development work, the public health work and so on.
How to become more giving
If giving is to be supreme amongst the virtues, we might test it in ourselves through a thought experiment. Pick anything where we can each day be a little more giving. I, for example, would choose my attitude, mostly harshly punitive, towards certain world leaders who are widely regarded as authoritarian and murderous in intent towards those who they see as their enemies. In my darker moments, which are frequent, I have them lined up in my mind, sentenced to receive mediaeval punishments. To get myself out of this mindset requires a huge and repeated exercise of giving, but it is possible. For as long as we continue to hate, our lives are infected with our own darkness.
Where might all this giving lead?
We cannot know the future; nor indeed is there any obvious logic in creation. The best we can do is to set our own horizons. Commonly, human beings choose peace as a horizon – peace as a higher order of civilisation. What this might look like is anyone’s guess; it’s up to us to fill in the gaps and update as circumstances change. Individually we move through life in small ripples, giving as we go and continually adjusting our horizons, both personal and societal.
In everyday life, for individuals, more giving can have all sorts of beneficial effects. Here are some:
Closer connection with the Divine
Openness to the richness of other religions or forms of spirituality
Better health through more intelligent and disciplined eating and more exercise
More support for and from family, friends or community
Better maintenance of property and the environment
More useful learning
More courage and perseverance in the face of difficulties.
The more we give the more we get, though sometimes (as in the case of Christ) it may not appear so.
Conclusion
We all, even our heroes, have to struggle to maintain our true course through life. Negative mindsets are always at hand and ready to drag us down. Why not be more positive and ready to embrace giving as our primary mindset?
When we think of love, we usually think of romantic love or parental or self-sacrificing love. This is all very well, but it fails to capture a lot of the smaller, less consequential aspects of life. The sharing of an umbrella, giving up our place in a queue, keeping the tone of a business letter friendly even when there’s some dispute, not disturbing the neighbours with loud music at midnight – all these are marks of goodwill which make our society a civilisation. If not actual love, they are examples of giving, which one might say is on the same spectrum.
The meaning of giving can be stretched even further. Arguably, work too is giving – giving one’s attention to a worthwhile thing that has to be done. Mindfulness is giving for essentially the same reason. Paying attention to an argument is giving. Giving is a positive commitment of the self in the pursuit of some good.
If we think about giving, we have to think too about taking, whether it be active taking from someone or just a passive receiving without any hint of reciprocity. Spiritually, what value should we put on taking? Inevitably, life is full of this kind of negation. There are things that threaten us, things that offend, and things that we just don’t like. We have the discretion to hit the cancel button, just so long as we don’t do so willy nilly or without due cause. The very process of giving these things proper consideration is itself an act of giving.
Giving is not just something that is nice to do, the mark of a civilised person, though this is true enough. It has a resonance in the life of the spirit. The greatest stories of religion and mythology are transactional. Some involve conflict or war or some kind of denial, but others most wonderfully tell of creation and uplift. It is these latter stories that inspire us most, stories like the crucifixion of Jesus, the outreach to the poor and sick by St Francis of Assisi, the generous teaching of Gautama Buddha and Confucius, the pacifism of Mohandas Gandhi, the nation-building exercise of forgiveness by Nelson Mandela. It is in these stories that giving rises to its true heights and becomes part of the greater unfolding of creation, the bending of the will to truth that keeps us all going and ultimately transforms us, sometimes beyond all recognition.