Learning to Give, Curriculum Division of The LEAGUE

Before I answer that question, let me give you a citation I don’t want to forget. About thirty years ago, a book titled The Gift Relationship was published. The author’s name was Richard Titmuss, and the book was a comparative study of the blood donation systems in Great Britain and the United States. The difference between the two systems is that in the United States we pay some people to give blood, while others donate freely, but in Great Britain, everyone donates and no one is paid. And the fascinating outcome of the study was that, proportionally speaking, the blood supply in Great Britain is larger and of higher quality than the blood supply in the United States. The book makes the case that because the appeal for blood donors in Great Britain is a pure gift from one human being to another, they get more blood and better blood than in the United States where we commercialize it to some extent. Now, ask me your question again!

Well, for me “generosity of spirit” is one of the most important phrases you could use to describe virtue in another person or to name a worthy goal toward which to grow in one’s own life. I just think it’s fundamental that, without generosity of spirit, we really don’t have much except a hard-scrabble life, a zero-sum game, and a “war of all against all,” each one trying to get his or her share or more of the pie. So generosity of spirit to me is the upstream movement against all the logic of economics and institutional life and power relationships. It’s this upstream movement that simply says “I’ll give it away and I don’t need anything in return”—it’s not a quid pro quo. And what I’ll give away is sometimes material, but often it’s time, energy, personal presence, or some sort of blessing to another person.

When I am able to be that way in the world, two things happen in my experience. One is that generosity of spirit becomes its own reward. To exercise generosity simply makes you feel larger as a human being. The second is the paradox that generosity may get results as long as you don’t do it for results. Things come back to you from it.

One of my favorite stories about this is about a fellow who called me a few years ago. He said “I’ve been writing books like you, but I don’t get calls to go give talks like you do. I know that you make a lot of your living a lot from giving those talks.” So his question was: “What’s your secret?” I said I’ve found that while the books are helpful to establish your reputation as some one who’s thinking in a particular field, actually it’s magazine articles that really get the word out; more people read a magazine article, it tends to get copied and passed around. I’ve gotten more calls to give talks from articles than from books, although the books create some kind of underlying credibility. So I told him, “Maybe you ought to think about doing that.” And he said “Yes, but you don’t get any money for a magazine article.” And I said, “Right, you give it away.” And he said, “I’m trying to make a living here. I can’t give it away.” And I said, “I don’t think you hear what I’m saying. If you give it away, you get a lot back.” It was really a logic that he seemed not to understand!

One more experience of generosity of spirit. My Dad was a businessman in Chicago, with a company that he had started working for as a bookkeeper during the Depression. Fifty-five years later he was owner and chairman of the board. As he rose in the leadership of that company, he would sit me down every now and then and say: “Now, Park, you’ve visited our office and you’ve visited our warehouse. You’ve seen the cartons of our product and you’ve seen our delivery trucks and our office building and the desks, and you’ve seen the calculating machines and the typewriters. Some day, when I go to sell this company, all of that will be listed on an inventory of assets that someone will have to pay for if they want to buy the company, and those tangible physical assets will add up to a certain amount.

“But there’s going to be another item on our inventory of assets that isn’t physical and tangible, one that will have a dollar value attached to it that is larger than all the physical tangible stuff. The name of that other item is ‘Good Will.’ That’s a technical accounting term that is put on the books when you sell a company to represent the reputation you have in the community for doing your work with integrity, coming through on your promises, treating people decently, for all those things that the term suggests. And that item is going to have a larger dollar value than all the tangible assets this company holds. I’ve spent 55 years here building up Good Will for this company, because that’s where the real value in our business is. I’ve seen people who didn’t understand that who did everything backwards, destroyed Good Will, and destroyed their company in the process.”

I’ve never forgotten what Dad said. It was about generosity of spirit and the way the world responds to it in practical terms—as well as being an end in itself and a satisfaction in itself which is something my dad always had in his business life. He just felt good about doing business this way, and he would have done it this way even if it hadn’t translated into a better bottom line.

I think I learned about it from having people in my life like my father who simply practiced generosity of spirit—role models, mentors, elders, exemplars—and I have been blessed to have many of them along my way. Again, some of their generosity was material, but a lot of it was spiritual.

Sure. I was the first person in my family to go to college, a kid who was very insecure about himself as a student, let alone as an intellectual or someone who has something to say, there were professors who exercised enormous generosity of spirit toward me by nurturing things that they saw in me that I couldn’t see in myself. They extended themselves to me in ways that went way above and beyond the call of duty—inviting me into their homes and family lives, for example, not for the purpose of shaping me up but because they somehow knew that I needed to have some ground under my feet in order to be liberated to use my gifts here at an institution that you I found intimidating. That was huge generosity of spirit. In this sense it was an extension of their spirits into my inner life. And these were all people who seemed to me at the time to be very secure in their roles, very self-confident. They could have hidden behind that professorial mask and not been able to see into me. But now, in my elder years, I think they may have been people who were like me when they were young and could see the signs of my distress and who knew that I needed that kind of support. I think of that as great generosity of spirit—to know what “the question behind the question” was, to know my deeper need, and to extend themselves to me very selflessly with everything they had, their families, their homes, the quality of their lives.

One of the books that comes to mind when I think of generosity of spirit is Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. It knocks me over when I think of this elder, like the elders I had, who starts getting letters from this callow kid who is basically asking a bonehead question, “How can I become a great poet like you?” And Rilke, with enormous generosity of spirit, answers letter after letter after letter. As I read those letters, my first thought is what a generous person to do this for a “no-account” young fellow, someone who doesn’t matter much in the literary scheme of things. I mean, Rilke’s not going to get anything out of writing these letters from the critics of his day! But then the other thing I think as I read those letters is that Rilke was getting great satisfaction out of crafting deep and searching responses to these innocent and sometimes shallow questions—he was hearing the question behind the question. He knew that beneath the stilted self-presentation of this young man was something deeper and truer, something of essential humanness. And, of course, the “moral of the story” is that this collection of sheer literary generosity is arguably the best-known and most adored of all of Rilke’s writings today!

I think so. I think it’s this particular generosity of spirit that enables a good teacher to take the “stupid question” that gets asked in class and, five minutes to later, to have made the questioner feel brilliant by working that question into a meaningful question and giving it a meaningful response. And then, of course, a good teacher engages us in that response in a way that takes us into questions much larger than our present capacities, but questions we can grow into as the teacher keeps holding us in this way.

What instantly comes to me for whatever it’s worth is that I think, particularly when I was in college, I was perceived by some of my classmates as sort of a safe person to bring their problems to. Even though I was running scared about my own abilities and my own ability to do reasonably well at a competitive academic institution, I always took time for those people. I don’t think I would have said to you at the time that this was generosity of spirit, but looking back I think it was. I think I did it because somehow, without my being to put words to it, it made me feel better about myself. “I may not understand calculus, but I think I understand this friend, this fellow student, and maybe I can offer a helping hand.” I remember there was one fellow who was flunking a course. He was taking it his senior year and he was kind of a borderline student and he was desperate to graduate. So I offered to tutor him for free, to help him get through the course; it wasn’t my knowledge he needed, I think, but my affirmation, my support, my belief in him. He squeaked through, and on graduation he and his parents came to me and gave me this big package. I opened it up and it was a concordance to the Bible that was signed, “With gratitude for your help to John.” I still have that book on my bookshelf, forty-four years later.

Things like that were just so intrinsically rewarding that it never really occurred to me not to do them. Then I think there was a next wave of being opened to generosity of spirit when I started fathering children, biologically and by adoption. Here, you find yourself in a situation where generosity of spirit is sort of like a command from outside of yourself that you must choose from within yourself! Here’s this kid, he’s helpless without you, you know you have to help him, but what you find coming up in yourself is a lot more like generosity than duty. You simply find yourself willing to stay up later and burn more midnight oil and work overtime in order to meet the needs of this helpless person. It is a great moment in life when you can freely choose a command that comes from your circumstances!

Then I think I started getting clues to my vocation from the fact that there were certain kinds of work in which I just instantly invested generosity of spirit without hesitation, without ever asking myself if I had it in me to go the extra mile on such-and-such a job. One of those jobs was writing. If I got a writing assignment, I would work any and all hours of the day and night to see that it was done deeply and well, until I was satisfied with it. I see people who don’t invest in themselves in their work with generosity of spirit. They’re always watching the clock, and they check out as soon as they meet the minimum requirements. I understand that some people have jobs that drive them crazy, but I take it as one of the signs of vocational “right fit” that generosity in work just flows, and it feels very different from the workaholic’s obsession.

The biggest block to finding generosity of spirit in one’s self is never to have had it modeled for you, so you don’t even know what it looks like because you’ve never known anyone whose life was animated by that movement of the heart. But once you’ve known somebody who practices generosity of spirit, it’s hard not to be touched by it and not to realize how fulfilling it can be.

As to what would most help someone find their own generosity of spirit, I think it’s self-knowledge—the kind of self knowledge that says without generosity of spirit, life is crimped and cramped and mean. But with generosity of spirit you experience a largeness of self that is just plain soul-satisfying and liberating. It doesn’t matter whether or not you get something back from it. It is its own reward.

One of my definitions of “spirituality” is the eternal human yearning to be connected with something larger than one’s own ego. As I’m fond of saying, that definition doesn’t solve the problem because you can get connected with a lot of stuff that’s not good. In fact, you can connect with evil. The Third Reich was driven by this desire to get connected with something larger than one’s own ego, in this case, the demonically defined “blood, soil and race.”

It’s an open definition which I think is honest because the spiritual impulse can take people in a whole variety of directions, 360 degrees on the moral compass. But on the positive side, to exercise generosity of spirit is to constantly be getting connected with something larger than your own ego, with the needs of other people, with this sort of underlying fellow-feeling that helps to create the human community with its “hidden wholeness,” to use Thomas Merton’s great words.

If you look at this kind of self-knowledge from the other side, you see that it’s what allows us to do an accurate, truthful and often painful diagnosis of where is our pain coming from. The tendency when we’re in pain is to say that it’s coming from out there somewhere, that we’re victims of something or someone. For example, the fellow who called me on the phone and asked how to get more speaking engagements: I think he thought there was some sort of conspiracy to keep him off the circuit. But if you go deep into the sources of your own pain or deprivation, it’s often the absence of generosity of spirit. It’s this crimped and cramped hoarding of one’s spirit. “No, I’m not going to write magazine articles because you don’t get paid for them.” And that ends up as a self-fulfilling prophecy in a certain smallness and meanness of life.

What I really wanted that fellow to understand—and what I think he did come to understand in his own time and own way—was not simply that there’s a good marketing linkage between getting stuff out in a more portable form than a book and getting invitations to talk. I wanted him to understand that there’s a quality of self that says, “Well, of course, I’d be glad to scatter these seeds anywhere there’s a field that wants to receive them, and whatever they grow, they can be harvested by you or you or you, by whoever comes along. I will reap some of that harvest myself, but it doesn’t have to all be mine. It can be yours, too.”

What quickly comes to mind, Mark, is a statement by Thomas Merton that I’ve always loved. It’s not in his books but on one of the tapes made when he was novice master at the Abbey of Gethsemani. He says something like this: “We are called”—I think he uses the phrase “as Christians,” but one could say just as human beings—“We are called to give away our hearts. But first we must have our hearts in our own possession.” And I he goes on into a riff about how we live in a world that dispossesses us of our hearts. We end up living self-alienating lives or divided lives, lives in which we allow our hearts to be possessed by something other than ourselves.

As usual, Merton is right on target. I cannot give a gift that I do not possess. So if the question is how do I come into more generosity of spirit, or how do I start practicing generosity of spirit, I think the first thing is I have to ask is, “Am I in possession of my own spirit or am I alienated from it? Have I given it away to some other purpose or cause?”

For example, earlier today you and I were talking about “the logic of institutions” and how easy it is to let that logic crimp and cramp your spirit, how easy it is to let an institution own, or at least rent, your heart. How to reclaim your heart so that you can be generous with it, reclaim it from whatever kind of captivity it may be in—well, that often requires a long inner journey. God knows there are a lot of things in life for our hearts to become captive to!

I think a good diagnostic question is, “Is my spirit somehow in captivity? Do I need first to set out on a freedom march, a campaign to liberate my spirit, so that I can offer my spirit up and freely give it away?”