Gifts freely given

On a late night a few weeks ago, when I was very tired and a bit emotionally broken down, a gift arrived.

It came from Lisa Waites, who sat down the row from me during a class at the Atlantic School of Theology a few weeks ago.

It was a song. Or, more precisely, a prayer song.

That morning, I had been covering a manslaughter trial, a tragedy where one friend shot another in a hot and dusty Afghanistan tent.

In the evening, alone in a hotel room, finished with my reporting, I opened the electronic file that was titled God of... and from the little blue, white and orange media player icon, music from my composer friend flowed out of the small speakers of the laptop.

"Give us a bigger vision, Lord! Help us to truly see..." she sang, her voice rising, while her piano played just a few notes, forming a simple pattern that suggested a chant behind her melody.

I felt some fatigue slip away.

"God of life and God of death, God of pain and and pleasure, In our suffering make us holy," she sang.

I wrote back to ask if I could record the music onto a disk and use it as the closing music to play after 20 minutes of silent meditation at Christ Church the following Monday night.

Of course, she said, “It is a gift, freely given."

Lisa recorded that song on the grand piano in the chapel at the Atlantic School of Theology. That took my mind back to a lecture I'd heard there five years ago, with Fr. Lawrence Freeman speaking on the topic of Christian gift giving.

Freeman, a Benedictine monk, is the leader of an ecumenical movement of silent prayer, and he tours the world giving talks on this topic to the 1,500 small groups who use the practice.

On Oct. 24, 2006, the topic was “Inner Peace, Outer Peace,” and _ as always _ Freeman related Christian ideas to the need for prayer at the center.

At one point in that talk, he picked up a little stick, used to strike a metal that sent a chime, and he held it up, asking us to imagine it was like the hub of a wheel.

His hands held it between two fingers and he asked us to imagine our actions extended out from its unmoving centre.

From that center, that contemplative center of a genuine prayer practice, flows our ability to act, our ability to be Christian. “If there’s no stillness at the hub of the wheel, then it can’t turn,” he said. “Contemplation and action are intimately related.”

Inner peace, leads to outer peace, leads to authentic gifts.

But, what makes motive so important? Why did it matter that Lisa’s gift to me came so spontaneously and freely?

In his talk, Fr. Freeman spoke of the parable of the rich young man who asks Jesus about how to win eternal life (Mark 10:18). The young man, in a somewhat condescending way, asks Jesus, “Good teacher, how do I inherit eternal life?” You can almost imagine him emphasizing the word “Good.”

Jesus must have noted a tone in the voice of the young man, and he first responds to the adjective, “Good,” by cautioning the man to take care in how he lightly addresses someone in that way, reminding him, “Why do you call me Good? No one is good, except God alone.”

Then he answers the young man simply, telling him to follow the basic commandments revealed in the First Testament.

When the man informs him he has kept all of these, then Jesus looks at him, realizing the young man’s arrogance is falling away and “he loves him,” and then he tells him he must give up his wealth.

In my understanding of this, it’s not solely the giving up of wealth that is at stake here. What Jesus has detected initially in this young man, was a desire to do good things in order for his sense of self justification and self worth. He is trying to teach the young man to drop all of these motives, and give up these underlying drives in his search to be good. Just seek to be good, as God is good.

Similarly, Freeman pointed out, in the second scriptural instance of a person asking Jesus how to win eternal life, the answer is to love God, and love your neighbour. The person asks, “Who is my neighbour?” and this leads to Christianity’s crucial parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), in which we learn the neighbour is who we choose him or her to be.

“What Jesus went on to deliver in this parable was a religious statement which crystallizes his mission and vision that is so powerful, so memorable and so obvious that the world would not be the same again…In the story the Good Samaritan is not our neighbour we find in our own comfortable group…Our neighbour is the person we choose to be our neighbour… Jesus is shattering the whole link between ethnicity and ethics,” said Freeman.

It is this relationship of intimacy between the Samaritan and the wounded Jew that is Christianity’s core. You no longer simply see a Creature through the lens of human reason and perception, as most modern people do, but you see the other person in relation to God, whose complete peace shatters our assumptions and refocuses perception.

As I heard it put recently, the gift-giving person reaches the state of being able to say simply, “I am,” and ends the sentence there. Titles fall away, and the person is content with themselves, knowing their natural state is to be in union with God through their neighbour.

Freeman pointed out that when gift giving becomes institutionalized, and we have no personal connection to it, it can break up the connection that occurs. This is not to condemn all institional charity, but to note that while it may open a door to relationship, it may also pose a danger that we may simply use institutional charity to avoid this awkward connection.

How many of us, he asked, like to become “collectors of merit.” I see this often, as ribbons are cut and nameplates added to streets or universities. I see it in myself, when I speak of some positive thing I’ve done to help someone else, or introduce myself with an emphasis on some role I’m playing.

In fact, the gift freely given is really a rather rare thing, isn’t it?

“Motives do matter. Purity of heart does matter. Your intention is important. Why? Because only the good deed makes a serious, lasting difference. The Good Samaritan changed the life of the person he stopped for, and his own life is changed.”

Freeman rhymed off the scriptural references, “Give to the person who asks you for something and do not turn away from that person…The left hand must not know what the right hand is doing…When you give to the poor don’t blow a horn…“ This is not a minor topic within our faith.

And he noted similar doctrines are found in Buddhism, where Buddhists are urged to have awareness of one’s thoughts, and to give total honesty to one self, in order to have inner peace.

“This state of mind that allows us to be capable of the good deed takes us to the heart of our relationship with Christ,” he explained. “Saint Paul says, I live no longer, but Christ lives in me.”

“In Christian prayer, we are opening ourselves to the mind of Christ, to Christ within us…and the more deeply and openly we open to Him, the more our clinging to ego identity diminishes.”

And, in this way, we're led to the point where, “the gift is given freely,” as Lisa gave it to me.

The recipient, explains Freeman, gains “the awareness that a gift given can be completely good. God like, because it has no strings attached.”

“If we receive such a gift, it transforms us. It is redemptive. It redeems us from our world condition of ego and demands.”

“It is what we call the gift of the Spirit.”

This is the part of Christianity that can answer to modernity’s assertion of the supremacy of the senses and of the self. Modernity asserts that what you, the self, think is all important, and through your thinking and your ability to perceive, you can come to know what exists.

But as Christians, we need to see things differently. We need to see them in relationship to God, and realize that can change all existence. In describing the theology of Saint Augustine, writer James Caroll, author of Constantine’s Sword, notes, “Relationship is the ground of divine being, an idea that opens up monotheism by moving the meaning of God’s oneness away from unit and towards unity…Only humans capable of confronting the moral tragedy of existence, matched to God’s offer of a repairing grace, are capable of community, and community is the antidote to human woundedness.”

Augustine, "sensed that relationship as being at the heart of God, and he saw it as being at the heart of human hope too.”

Modernity can be uncomfortable with relationship. It doesn’t ask if you are relating what you see to God, and to the good. If you give something, then that’s all that matters, and motive is irrelevant.

Which is why we need to move beyond modernity.

On that night in the hotel room, considering the experience of God, letting it wash over some of the brokenness, I sensed Christ's point on how a gift isn’t so much an object, even if it’s food or drink desperately desired, but the freedom it releases within.

It becomes an infection, and you can’t help but to spread it. As Freeman put it, “We become conscious we can give ourselves in the same way.”