Marilyn Englander: Charity

It feels good to help, but Marilyn Englander wanted to remind herself of the true spirit of charity.

Every few months, my husband and I sit down to assess our charitable giving. We review all the pleas that have accumulated and triage, regretting our limits. After the checks are written and the envelopes mailed, we feel so good–about ourselves!

But–this is not the true spirit of charity.

Charity is much more than giving money or donating time. It’s a guiding spirit of empathy, generosity and tolerance seated deep in your heart. This provides a different lens for seeing others. It takes practice to see this new way, however.

Chatting on the phone with an elderly friend, I reminded myself: she is lonely, her health is shaky, I need to reach out. As she recounts a silly story about her dog for the umpteenth time, I feel annoyed and restless. But if I dig a little deeper in myself, I find that we share a fragile humanity: burdens of loneliness or pain, fears of the encroaching diminishments of age. It’s not a gift I bring her each week, but rather a gift we share with each other. I try harder to listen to her in comradeship, not pity.

It’s a challenge to correct entrenched uncharitable attitudes about others: that person who drops dog waste by the walk, the high school student who steals my parking spot. I clean up the waste angrily, yet, maybe it was a pre-dawn fumble between coffee mug and leash, or maybe it’s my bit to keep the neighborhood clean, and someone else picks up my dropped tissue. Or I can notice how that teenager returns to his car at noon every day, to eat his sandwich alone. My parking spot’s a small haven for him, merely a convenience for me.

I begin to learn that charity must be an overarching theme in my life. It’s both grander and more trivial than I imagined as we wrote those checks. We need more of it from each of us.

With a Perspective, I’m Marilyn Englander.

Marilyn Englander is a North Bay educator.