the Giving of Almes

Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.... (St. Matthew 6:19-21)

You can't take it with you. (proverbial saying: c.f. I Timothy 6:7)

But perhaps you can: I sometimes fancy that the treasures we will have in heaven are those things that we have given to the poor in this life. I think that C.S. Lewis said something similar about books: the only books in heaven are the ones that we loaned or gave away.

One of my regulars is the one-legged Marine that stakes out a busy intersection on my bicycle route to church. Yesterday was a home football game, and he was hard at work before dawn in order to catch the incoming fans, with his wheelchair decked with two American flags and a pennant for the local college team, and his artificial leg with the seal of the U.S. Marine Corps painted on the front of it. I always give him a little something.

We have become friends over the years from our brief encounters. I see him sometimes walking his dog in front of the cheap motel where he and his wife live, and visit with him for a few minutes. "I hate asking for money," he once told me. "And if it was just me, I wouldn't. But my wife needs her heart medicines."

We said our good-byes for the season yesterday, for my bicycle is going into winter storage this week and our paths do not cross when I ride the city bus. He told me that he and his wife have started going to church - not ours, but a storefront church closer where they live - and he wished God's blessings on me. I wish the same for him and his wife.

Then there is E., who caught me after church today at the Chinese restaurant. He came right in and sat across the table from me. "God sent me here," he told me, asking for $20 for a bus ticket. "I didn't know it for sure until I saw you through the window." Now, E. has been caught stealing from purses at the church. So I am not enthusiastic about helping him. And that $20 is more likely to go to drink than a bus ticket. But then again: "It's getting cold. And I can't get in the shelter here. If I go [sixty miles east, to the next town that has a homeless shelter], I think I can get in there." So maybe he will get on that bus. And how was I going to sit there, dressed in my fine white shirt, suit and tie, eating my fine dinner, with a man across the table from me telling me he was cold and hungry, and all this just seven days after hearing about Dives and Lazarus in last Sunday's Gospel?

And there is R., who went through a long struggle to get his SSI psychiatric disability - well-deserved in my opinion, for he is not remotely close to sanity. This week he lost his wallet, with his SSI card and all his cash, including his rent money. He has been by the church every day looking for me, and I have given him odds and ends - a partially-used transit bus pass, little bits of money. He wants five people who will each "loan" him $100; otherwise, they will evict him on Monday. I am not one of those people. But I gave him a little bit.

And there is D., another veteran, a drug addict. We helped him some; he tried to steal one of our chorister's leather jacket, and I suspect he stole another chorister's coat on another occasion, with wallet in the pocket (neither jacket nor thief were ever found). After talking with the VA people, I no longer give him cash. But when he comes by on a Sunday evening [not that often nowadays, but occasionally] and says he is hungry, I walk him across the street for a couple slices of pizza, and sit with him for a little. And pray with him. When I forget this last, he reminds me: "Aren't you going to say a prayer?"

And walking back to the church from the restaurant today, I saw a woman whom I had helped once this summer; she is mostly disabled (mentally as well as physically), and that day her motorized wheelchair ran out of juice, right in the middle of a busy intersection downtown. I was getting on the bus to go home, but no one was going to help her (the cars were blowing their horns at her, and driving around on both sides. None of the hundreds of university students who were busily going to their classes offered to help). So the two of us pushed her dead chair to her assisted living facility, going at the extremely slow pace at which she is able to walk. Today, I do not think that she recognized me, and I hurried across the street to avoid dealing with her.

For that is what happens. I want to lock the doors, go down in my basement office, and hide from these people.

The hard part about giving alms is that it is not just a one-time thing. If you give money to someone, most often they come back and ask for more. Again and again. For years. And you have to relate to these people as Children of God on an ongoing basis, even when you very much would rather not. It is easier to just write a check to Church World Service for people on the other side of the world, whom you will never encounter.

Some years ago, the parish had a system of "caregivers" who would interview the people who asked for help, connect them with social service agencies in the community, and screen out the drunkards and drug addicts, thus freeing the clergy from any direct interaction with the poor. [To be fair, one of our priests has always been involved with a weekly free breakfast for the poor, and rightly considers it central to her ministry. Blessings be upon her.] The "caregiver" program worked for a while, but all of the volunteers eventually burned out. After that, the policy was that our parish would no longer help anyone. If they came and asked for help, the staff was instructed to say (in essence): "Too bad. Go try the Crisis Center."

This was, in my view, a scandalous offense. How can we claim to be Christians and act this way?

As it happened, I had stopped donating to the parish around 2002, for reasons I would prefer not to describe. But "the tithe is the Lord's." Thus, I had a lot of money available. I gave most of it to places such as the Heifer Project, the Carter Center, Church World Service, the American Indian College Fund, and a couple of the local aid agencies. But I also had a fair amount of cash which I was willing to give to the poor, so I resolved to try and pick up the slack, so that the Name of Christ would not be blasphemed on account of our parish.

My situation is now different; I made a pledge to the parish for 2013, the first time in ten years, and thus I no longer have a lot of extra money for the poor. It is not yet a tithe, not even close, but it feels like a lot because there had been none, and I hope to increase it for 2014. And the parish does now help people as we are able.

But I still have these hangers-on. And I believe that I am at the least doing no harm in helping some of them in small ways; a few dollars here, a few there. I can now do no more without slighting the parish - on which I depend for my livelihood.

It is hard to set limits. The church staff helps, especially our office manager and the secretary, both of whom are also heavily involved in helping those who walk through our door.


I say all this not in any way to justify myself. I do not know if I have done any good for anyone. Maybe I am simply enabling their dependency, as the Republicans would say, and keeping them from taking responsibility for their lives. And very probably, my direct gifts do less good than would be done by donations to the local agencies, all of them starving for money and overflowing with people they cannot afford to help.

But we place ourselves in spiritual peril every time we harden our hearts and turn away from the poor man who seeks our assistance. Worse, we dishonor our Lord.

The only real answer is that of St. Francis: Give it ALL away, and yourself live as the poorest of the poor.

And I am not ready to do that.

----

Today was Evensong Sunday, the first Sunday of the month. In the month's rehearsals, the one Evensong amounts to as much choral rehearsal time as the four or five Sunday morning Eucharists all put together. It is similar for my organ playing; I try to play a larger work from the organ literature for the Evensong prelude, and it is about as much work as the voluntaries for the rest of the month's services.

The organ piece was the Priére by Cèsar Franck, an intense work of about thirteen or fourteen minutes' duration.

I played it seven years ago - badly, in spite of much work on it. This time, with my revised approach to organ practice, it went very well. I consider the improvement a validation of my practice method. I spent about eight hours over the course of about a week revising the fingerings, then did my careful work-throughs with slow repetitions of short passages, modified rhythms, and final review of each day's work by means of a slow play-through. All told, I was able to work through the piece at the organ only four times, over the space of about nine days -- and that was sufficient, even with almost no pre-service warmup on it this afternoon. I hope that this gives me more confidence in future work.