Do you know someone who would give you the shirt off their back? It’s an old saying. I had a grandmother who fit that description. The best way I can describe her is this way: if she became aware that anyone was in need of something, and she had that something, she gave them that something. Without blinking (as far as I can tell). She and my grandfather never had a lot of money. They worked hard for everything. I know that my grandmother lived through the Great Depression, and I suspect that the experience lent itself to her generosity, but a lot of people lived through the Great Depression, and they did not all become generous.
I think that compassion changes what generosity means. The word “generosity” is built off of original words that meant noble birth. The idea was that people of the nobility had great (usually inherited) wealth, and they could afford to give out of their wealth to those who were poor. Our Unitarian Universalist value of generosity has been changed by the infusion of compassion. Our experience of compassion invites us to consider each other’s suffering, allows us to experience suffering together with one another, requires us to notice our suffering, conjures our curiosity about how we might respond to our suffering, and calls us to be courageous in league with each other about the suffering we hold together.
We choose to be generous in life because we recognize the suffering of others as our own. We understand that we belong to one another, and the act of generosity flows from that. A generous act flows from what we see when we look at each other. When I see myself in you, being generous to you is like breathing. I breathe because I am alive. I am alive because I breathe.
My grandmother was not a Unitarian Universalist, but she felt the suffering of others, and it didn’t take her long to reach into herself and her life in order to alleviate that suffering. That kind of compassion driven generosity is a wealth of a different kind.
~Bob Patrick
