Foolish Generosity

In seconds I drop off a bag of Halloween candy at a local YMCA for a community Trunk or Treat. Buoyed on the breeze of efficient, contact-free giving, I back out from my parking space and am about to peel away, when a lady emerges from a nearby car and motions for me to stop. My first thought is that I have somehow nicked her fender, especially when she begins, “I know this is not an ideal situation …”

In the drizzle, Lang Lang’s Debussy trickling through my speakers, she bends toward my window, gray hair loose to her shoulders. Her eyes are an intriguing green, or blue. She wears a woolish sweater and grasps her car keys in rough-hewn hands.

As I carefully stare at her, keenly aware of my baby in the back seat, she tells me her story. She lives in her car, she says, and at any moment it will break down. All she needs is a ninety-dollar repair. I look at her car. It looks clean and sound, much newer and trendier than my nearly decade-old Ford Focus. I sort of sigh inside. Yet another con.

I’ve heard plenty. At gas stations mostly, people would ask for a few dollars for bus fare or something to eat. I’d respectfully listen to the spiel all the while knowing my answer: no. No, I would not be tricked. No, I would not enable addictions. The right thing to do, the loving thing, would be to say no. I’d tell them I didn’t have cash (which was true most times), a convenient excuse to drive away.

In the YMCA parking lot, the woman in wool continues: homeless shelters won’t help with car repairs. She found a mechanic who would fix her car for “paperwork” she promised to do in exchange. (At this point she looks to the left just a hair.) I don’t believe her. Not one word.

But I keep listening.

For the past year or so, I’ve been meditating on the Old Testament prophets. Throughout these books God reveals the sins of his people, pleading with them to turn from their waywardness and receive mercy. One of the most egregious sins is their neglect of the vulnerable: the widow, the fatherless, the foreigner, the poor. Again and again, God commands his people to take special care of the needy in their midst.

For years I have largely chosen to ignore people who beg: the man jingling change in a Styrofoam cup on the sidewalk, the sunburned woman holding a cardboard sign at a freeway exit. When I taught in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, some missionaries and locals offered advice that only ossified my cold-hearted habits: Mothers who beg borrow babies. The wheel-chair bound often fake their paralysis. Giving to children only encourages them to skip school to beg. Based more on my own internal proclivities (to caution, to fear, to greed) than on the advice itself, I made a decision: I would not be duped. Too often, I gripped my purse tight. Too often, I looked away.

But lately, I’ve been questioning myself. Did Jesus glance at the hungry faces before him, smile politely, then ignore their repeated pleas? Did he check his emotions and avert his eyes while a mother draped in a languid baby asked for bread again and again and again?

Photograph by Photoongraphy

Only this morning, I read in Micah 4 how God, after judging his people, will gather the lame, the outcasts, the weak, and the afflicted as his chosen remnant. He’ll welcome sex workers, drug addicts, people with AIDS, lepers, transgender teenagers, IRS employees. And homeless con artists in wool sweaters.

The lady in the rain says she can show me the paperwork, the itemized bill the mechanic has given her. And I’m her only hope.

I don’t believe this either. She isn’t going to trick me by tickling my savior complex. (If I am this woman’s only hope, her situation is indeed dire.) I know this woman’s problems are much bigger than the car repair I don’t believe exists. She’s likely jobless and homeless. There’s no way giving her a few dollars could meaningfully help her in the long run.

I give to organizations, time-proven, God-centered institutions grappling with the root causes of poverty. But when looking at individual, breathing, hungry faces, I freeze. I grip my wallet in a kind of icy control. My cold refusals, I’m realizing, are deeply contrary to the Jesus I am called to imitate, the Messiah who not only looked the needy in the face, not only showed them love in the form of healed bones and broken bread – but actively, intentionally sought them out. Looking at the woman in the YMCA parking lot, her hair dampening in the drizzle, I think, this is the kind of person I should be learning to pay attention to. This is the kind of person I am called to have eyes for. This is the kind of person I should be attracted to: a homeless woman with rough, empty hands.

I wonder what those hands have held. Popsicles turning to slush in the summer sun. Notebooks doodled in algebra and unicorns. Plates of eggs scrambled on a Sunday morning. Receipts, clean towels, photographs. Other hands. A nuzzling newborn, as I once held my son.

I know if I give to the greenblue-eyed woman I am a fool. I know I won’t be sustainably helping her. All the evidence – her classic petition, the formulaic unfolding of events, the new-looking car, my prior experience – shouts that I will be duped by a time-worn con. But maybe such foolishness is part of the way of compassion.

All the evidence shouts that I will be duped by a time-worn con. But maybe such foolishness is part of the way of compassion.

Surely, God has given humans the gifts of discernment and reason. Surely, he guides us in some circumstances not to give. Jesus calls us to be wise as serpents. But he also calls us to be innocent as doves. The Bible’s only other occurrence of this Greek word for innocent is in Philippians 2:15, where it is paired with the word children. I pray for divine discernment; I’m also learning to allow myself to be taken advantage of, to be as guileless as children are. To give space for childlike foolishness in my habits of generosity.

The desert father Abba Zosimas tells the story of an old man who was robbed by thieves. When they said, “We have come to take everything in your cell,” he replied, “Children, take whatever you think you should take.” The robbers took everything, leaving only a small sack. The old man ran after them crying, “Children, take this too, which you left behind in my cell.” They were so shocked at his guilelessness that they returned everything and repented.

Justice might say the old man neglected to hold the robbers accountable for their actions. He had every right to stop an action that was wrong. When burglars broke into our home a couple of years ago, we assessed the damage (missing PlayStation, Nikes, beer, burgers, buns) and promptly called the police.

I’m challenged by the humility of the old man. Not only does he think little of his possessions, gladly giving them up, he also calls those who would rob him children. This naming immediately shifts their relationship from victim and perpetrators to parent and children. In calling the robbers children, he accepts a father’s responsibility to care for them. He sees through their aberrant actions to their profound vulnerability. He knows their problems are far bigger than a monk’s scanty offerings could cover; but he offers them anyway, gladly and freely.

In Ethiopia, people address strangers as family relations. A woman is mother. A man is father. A girl or young woman is sister, a boy or young man is brother. Child is what God the Father calls me. In accepting the name of child, I acknowledge the reality of my own vulnerability, one I’ve hidden under layers of adult responsibilities and symbols of power (car, house, credit card).

My thoughts are brought back to the woman in the rain. What if I named her mother? As if I, her daughter, was called to care for her. As if she, my mother, could nourish me and not the other way around. Then I wonder: How would it change our relationship if I acknowledged that we were both children, both fraught with need, both fools, both playing at this game of Trick or Treat in the YMCA parking lot?

Looking back at my habits of giving (or rather not giving), I see the greed corroding my heart, a tight-fistedness rooted in the fear – and even disgust – of people made in the divine image, endowed with dignity just as I am. Maybe it is not I who have been sent to help this woman; maybe she has been sent to help me, to offer a step toward the healing of my parsimony. Perhaps we are both in need of healing and can both find, in each other, a way to redemption.

Robbers (I presume) work quickly. Abba Zosimas’s old man doesn’t have time to calculate pros and cons to figure out the most expedient course of action. Instead, he acts out of a compassion so deep inside him that it spontaneously pours forth in gushes. Like the father running toward his prodigal son (although in this case the old man’s sons were running away from him!), he runs.

In response to such strange grace, the robbers repent. The old man’s foolishness is redemptive. It leads those who would harm him to new life.

We see such foolishness in biblical heroes. Noah builds an ark nowhere near water. Abraham all but slaughters his only son on a handmade altar. Jochebed puts her baby in a basket and sets it loose in the Nile River. In the New Testament, Paul writes that all saints are called to be fools.

Believers have an example in Christ himself. He allows himself to be duped by Judas. He does not defend himself in court. If anyone had rights, Christ did – and he gave them up. In following him, I am called to relinquish my rights too: my rights to be in control, to be financially secure, to be street-smart or worldly-wise. Those smarts and securities are illusions anyway. God calls me child, after all.

I came to the YMCA to do a good deed: a clean, convenient one, unattached to human hands and faces. But I see now that God has invited me to something different: less a good deed and more a step in a dance. A dance whose choreography is unique for each person, giver or receiver. A dance that is messy and complicated, one that doesn’t always feel breezy and cool.

As I watch the woman’s face, I know what I should do. I have known it almost since she began her story. I unzip a pocket in my son’s diaper bag in the front passenger seat and pull out a bill. I was hoping it would be a small denomination, but it happens to be more than I expected. Doubt gives me pause. But in spite of feeling profoundly foolish, in spite of regrets that will likely plague me, I press the bill into her hand, say something awkwardly about the love of Christ, and drive away.