Why do we give to the poor? Why do we give our time to serve others? What prompts us to do it?

If it’s a flip of a coin into a tin cup on the street it could be as simple as an impulse. If it’s a donation in response to an appeal from one of us relief and development agencies it might be guilt (some of us are pretty good at awakening that).But there are other more honorable things such as a sense of duty, love and compassion, sharing and I have met some for whom it is actually a heartfelt calling. All of this is OK.

But what happens when it’s your best friend or brother that is going through difficulty. Then it gets more personal and the prompts are much deeper and given more serious consideration.

It would appear that our relationship or closeness has a significant bearing on the types of prompts as well as our reaction to them. Another way of looking at this is that it can really depend on the person in need’s standing with us.

I’ve been ruminating on this since I received a “Weekly Reflection” awhile ago from The Merton Institute. It’s been sitting in my inbox waiting for me to pay attention. But I had left it there because I knew it was something I had to deal with personally.

Read it and see what it says to you.

“Persons are known not by the intellect alone, nor by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.

To shut out the person and to refuse to consider him as a person, as another self, we resort to the impersonal "law" and "nature." That is to say we block off the reality of the other, we cut the intercommunication of our nature and his nature, and we consider only our own nature with its rights, its claims, and its demands. In effect, however, we are considering our nature in the concrete and his nature in the abstract. And we justify the evil we do to our brother because he is no longer a brother, he is merely an adversary, an accused, an evil being.

To restore communication, to see our oneness of nature with him, and to respect his personal rights, integrity, his worthiness of love, we have to see ourselves as accused along with him, condemned to death along with him, sinking into the abyss with him, and needing, with him, the ineffable gift of grace and mercy to be saved.”

Thomas Merton. Seeds of Destruction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961): 254-255.
 
“The basic thing in Christian ethics is to look at the person and not at the nature... Because when we consider "nature" we consider the general, the theoretical, and forget the concrete, the individual, the personal reality of the one confronting us.”

Seeds of Destruction: 254

If our connection with others is in “the abstract" our response will be different than if “we have to see ourselves as accused along with him, condemned to death along with him, sinking into the abyss with him, and needing, with him, the ineffable gift of grace and mercy to be saved” as Merton so aptly puts it.

The faith community I was raised in had a practice of calling everyone “brother” or “sister”. But it seems to me that if we are to “restore communication…..to respect his personal rights, integrity, his worthiness of love” we must take this brother thing and even our relationship with all mankind beyond rhetoric. We must look beyond the shabby clothes of the homeless, the swollen bellies of the hungry, and the empty eyes of those without hope and see “the concrete, the individual, the personal reality of the one confronting us”.

For many of us our faith presents us with a higher calling when it comes to our role and responsibility in the human race. To be able to live this out the way we are called to we need to see beyond pictures of abstract individuals who could benefit from a gift we are prompted to give and we must allow ourselves to be confronted with the personal reality of a brother.