To Charity or Not to Charity

“faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity”

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.For now, we see through a glass, darkly

Interesting words of poetry and wisdom that all our mothers told us, literature has recited to us, and life has reminded us of throughout our lives. Our mother’s generation came from a culture still deeply entrenched in religious over-lordship so the prevalence and quoting from scripture, even if not consciously thought through, is to be expected.  We absorbed these homilies and in various forms, incorporated them into our personal lexicons.  But we did this without really knowing their origins and what the entirety of their words really meant when viewed as a whole.  They are from the following Biblical passage:

1 Corintians:13

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

I struggle with this “charity” thing.  Charity and Forgiveness get lumped together in a hodge-podge of emotional baggage that is thrown into deep steamer trunks of history and that have not been unpacked, maybe ever.  I occasionally pry open the creaky lid and rustle through a few layers of jumbled emotional clothing; wrinkled, compressed, and musty from years of storage and neglect, only to be consumed and distracted by the moths of discontent that come swarming out and cloud my mind and my better judgement. 

“Though a glass darkly” is an apt description of the mess in the trunk and the mess in my mind.  As the passage instructs us; now that we have put away our childish ways (at sixty-seven I would hope but this does not imply a guarantee) we should be looking at our pasts with a clearer eye to their relevance and at our participation in them.  It’s the “darkly” part that seems the most problematic to me and the cloudy lens through which I still view my past.  No rose colored anything about my personal history; just a smoky, shape-shifting uncertainty about what I want my take on my life to be……now…..reflectively.  I had seriously hoped for a clarity of vision looking back.  

Honestly, I am full up on Faith and Hope.  Really. I could not have lived this long, suffered the illness, injury, and losses I have endured and not be hopeful; hopeful that there IS something relevant in these slings and arrows that will aid in cementing together the pieces into a whole.  I have that much Faith.  I do. When this cosmic “whole” might make its appearance is an unanswerable question, as yet.  But I do have Faith…..and Hope.  It’s that ringer Charity that vexes and perplexes my current position on life.

Must we forgive (charity?) all our past injustices before we can be truly charitable?

Injustices, both real and perceived, are a tricky bunch of baggage.  We carry them forever; in our memories, in our personal histories that we tell ourselves, in the stories about them we relate to others.  They are core to our personality.  We have shaped our narratives around them, twisting tales to present them in a better light, to make us seem more the victim than the perpetrator in order to shield our psyches from their insidious danger and damage.  Living in the moment, confronting these issues as they occurred, might have cleared the decks of a lot of them and relegated them to just “ooopses” in our life story but few of us at those tender ages had the gut-fiber to live that honestly.  And so, we are left with that one really toxic jewelry box of gems; gall-stones of guilt, fraught with import and consequence yet seemingly buried and too hard to access anymore.

And if we were to haul them out, what then?

They involve specific people, places, and times where something went off the rails.  Feelings were hurt, things were said, actions were taken. Perception was everything, but that specific view of those times has now transmogrified into a gem-stone of itself. Like bugs caught in amber and compressed into history they are now hard, solid, visual images of hurt and pain that we can, or cannot, take in hand and turn them ‘round and ‘round and inspect them hoping to see…what? Ourselves at that age?  Our friends whose actions demeaned and altered our relationships? Our own behavior?  Short of taking a hammer to these time-travelling baubles we are stuck with them, frozen in our minds and our times.  My instinct is to toss them back in their box, click the lock, and bury them back under the rest of the dirty laundry of our discarded lives…….and then close the trunk once more.

But the lapsed Episcopalian, pseudo-Catholic, Society of Friends-reared person that I am, still has a distant glimmer of the truth of these old axioms and proverbs. 

Guilt.

I should and could be doing something to right the past wrongs that populate my story; my own as well as others.  But I question just what this might accomplish. An assuagement of my own behavior or an unwelcome intrusion into people’s lives whose actions, theirs and mine, have long been “forgotten”?  Would airing the dirty deeds of long-past transgressions help in any real-world scenario? And help who?  I suspect mostly only my own lingering jabs of hurt and pain; things I have certainly learned to put in a place causing the least amount of ongoing damage.  In a pure, karmically-driven world, it would seem that the charity of forgiveness is the ultimate healing.  But that takes two.  Can we count on the others in our past to see our acts now as driven by honorable intentions? Or will they take them as a re-hachement of painful episodes best left lie?

Their lives.  Their choices.

My life.  Too many unanswered questions.

And so, we are back to the text at hand:

“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”

Seriously?  I have mastered Faith and Hope like a pro.  I get NO credit for doing two-thirds of the work?  “and have not charity, I am nothing”.  That seems a little harsh, particularly for one who is striving as best I can to find charity in my own soul.  Let’s look at the real-time, today’s definition of charity:

“the voluntary giving of help, typically in the form of money, to those in need.”

I will say right now that as a senior on a fixed income I will not be running through the rolodex of the wronged and doling our checks like a game show.  It may very well surprise many, many, of the people in my past but the connectivity between the sudden largesse of cash and the transgression of the past will not be evident or appreciated; the cash, yes, the closure…not so much. I refer back to text once again:

Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

Charity may never faileth but I prophesy this:  tongues will wag, the stories that the charity will invoke will be told and retold, and the knowledge that “shall vanish away”will, in fact, only become immortalized in yet another form, one that we have no control over but that we are now responsible for in today’s ongoing world. 

I will leave charity as something that I reserve first for myself.  I will forgive myself for my past, honor its existence in that it created my present and resolve to exhibit charity, in all forms, going forth into the rest of my life.  I will treat my fellow humans all with a charitable frame of mind and when I cannot muster the full faith and credit of its intended meaning, I will resolve to remain silent by not passing judgement in the immediate here and now.

I’ll leave with the following, again from the text:

(Charity)Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;”