I just started teaching an Ethics class and as I was reading an article on Friday I came across a few concepts that spoke to me and that I think shed some light on why it can be such a struggle to maintain a God centered life. In an article titled, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Peter Singer says that we have developed a system in which a clear line between charity and duty has been drawn. Giving money to an organization that helps people or society in some way is considered charity and a good thing, but not giving money is not seen as a bad thing. So, the person who gives charity will be thanked and praised, but the person who doesn’t is also not condemned.
As a society, we talk all the time about the need to be good people, but yet we live in a system that treats helping others as the exception to the rule. The rule being that we must do our duty, which is a word we don’t like in America, we like the word obligation. If we choose not to buy our children new school clothes we are judged as bad parents, and we are equally judged if we can’t afford to buy them new school clothes.
In his article Singer says, “Moral attitudes are shaped by the needs of society, and no doubt society needs people who will observe the rules that make social existence tolerable.” American society is built on the principles of capitalism, and capitalism is built on the principle of competition and not just financial competition, but competition in all things and that scares me. What I fear is that morality is being eroded and reduced to a form of competition, that people may no longer value community and instead see society as a thing to be consumed and as long as they pay their dues then they are entitled to whatever they want. The dues being taxes and tolerating the neighbors annoying kid, though even that skill seems to be waning.
What this all boils down to is the need for change and I don’t mean the important societal and legal changes we have struggled with for the last two centuries as a nation. What I mean is that we need change our programming to be in alignment with our hearts. Charity should not exist, the only reason it does is because we have been conditioned to believe that duty or meeting our obligations is the norm and our obligations end with our spawn. We live in a society that says we are obligated to care for ourselves and our children and that is it. We can certainly debate the finer points of that statement, but at the end of the day we will find that all of our laws and all of our ingrained social norms and mores point to it and they point to the fact that if we aren’t able to ourselves and our children then we are obviously doing something wrong, and the rest of society is under no obligation to help us. Hence why we invented charity, which while often given freely, comes with the expectation of praise for doing so, in the form of gratitude.
I often struggle with the idea of a personal prayer life. I find personal prayer to be a difficult concept, and for a long time I felt that I was not a good Christian because I didn’t get down on my knees and pray every single day. While I now understand that a formal daily prayer ritual is not required, a part of me still thinks that it is. I tend to ascribe to a much broader definition of prayer; I see the running dialogue in my mind as prayer. I think about people all the time, I wonder how they are, I hope they are well, I wish them well. Sometimes months after I learned of something I will begin to wonder again how they are. Two years ago, I was asked to pray for someone’s mother, I never learned how it turned out, but I still think about it; that thought is my prayer.
You might think I am jumping from one topic to the next, but I promise you this is all related. What I have learned, just this week, is that I have internalized my faith and a part of that process has been internalizing prayer. As I read Peter Singer’s article I realized that for me, my obligation, my duty as the British would say, is charity; but for me it is no longer feels like charity because it is my rule, not my exception. I try to approach all things with the belief that the intentions of all involved are good. Is that always true? Absolutely not! Yet, that is what I do. Some may call me naïve, and I say let them because I feel as liberated as I have ever felt. I feel at peace, and I finally feel comfortable with my prayer life because I have become comfortable with the fact that my view of God has shifted from the almighty being in the sky who must be praised, to the gentle spirit who resides within me. With this shift, my feelings of guilt about not bending the knee in prayer every day have subsided and my perceived relationship with God has been transformed from one of transactions, obligations, and hope of charity, to one of shared mutuality and love.
I suspect that many, if not most of us, think of God’s kingdom as a place without pain, or poverty, or all the other things we don’t like about this world. I know that I have said as much from the pulpit, but what Singer’s article helped me realize is that those assumptions are based on our observations of the world we have created. Poverty exists because we have created a standard of living that is nearly impossible to achieve. War exists because we are unable to negotiate peaceful solutions to global issues. Hatred and bigotry exist because we have adopted beliefs that there are normal ways to look and act. Racism, classism, and all the other isms exists because we have adopted beliefs that some groups of people are better than others. While I am certain that God’s kingdom will not have any of these things in it, I also believe it is an important step to realize that this assumption is not rooted in faith, it is rooted in our desire to see the world the way we wish it to be. That wish may very well be based on our faith in God, but it is an assumption none-the-less, because we do not know what God has planned for the Kingdom. I am not saying that we shouldn’t fight injustice in the name of God, nor am I saying that the desire to do so is inconsistent with our faith; but I am curious if the fight to change society, as we have defined it, is actually what Christ called us to do or if God’s goal the entire time has been to get us to change our way of thinking so that the injustices will simply fall away.
To put it another way: is the fight against injustice an obligation or is it charity? If we claim it is our obligation, do we view the perpetrators of the injustice as the bad guy, as a thing to be stopped? If so, then our desire to fight the good fight may be nothing more than charity because defeating the bad guy is not what Jesus taught us to do; it is what our culture has taught us to do and it truly boils down to nothing more than feeling good about ourselves because we did the “right thing”. We are not called to do “the right thing”, we are called to love one another and that means everyone, including the “bad guy”; whether they are the annoying kid next door; the hot headed know-it-all; the heroin addict; or the deacon that preaches too long. To purely love someone means that you rest in one another, that you are bonded to each other in ways that language cannot describe. It means that you don’t make assumptions intentions or lifestyle or anything. You just hold them in your heart as a living being and trust that God will do what needs to be done through your interactions. Let love be the obligation so charity doesn’t need to exist. Amen.
Learning by Fire! 