OF GIVING AND THE
GIFT
At holiday time, for many a time
to be thankful; for others it is a time of loneliness, isolation and
despair.
And Edna St. Vincent Millay's
“Love is Not All” reminds us. “Many a one is making friends with
Death/ Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.”
King Lear. In his madness, naked
and homeless, finally understands the plight of the poor:
Many years ago I started
supporting some of these outreaches to the less fortunate. Now, on the
glide-path to my final terminal, I consider my giving to be perhaps the
one thing I can feel good about in an otherwise largely self-serving,
hedonistic life.
One of the most moving scenes in
all of literature is the one where a prostitute delivered from stoning,
washes Jesus' feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, then pours
an alabaster box of priceless perfume (her life's savings) upon his feet
to the horror of the pharisees looking on.
Later, hanging there bathed in
sweat, spit, filth and his own blood, the scent of that rich perfume
with which he was so lovingly anointed, would have been that last hint
that perhaps the human race was worth dying for after all. It seems that
Jesus had a special love for lepers, outcasts, losers and little kids.
For he reminded us all that “insomuch as you have done it unto the least
of these, my brothers and sisters, you have done it unto me.
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I think of that poem, “The embankment “… Now, see I that
warmth's the very stuff of poetry./ Oh God make small that old
star-eaten blanket of the sky/ So that I can pull it “round me/ and in
comfort lie.”
London's skid row can be deathly cold, come
winter, if one has no home.
“Poor
naked wretches, where so e'er you are that bide the pelting of this
pitiless storm; How shall your house less heads, your unfed sides, your
looped and windowed nakedness, protect you in seasons such as this? Oh
I've ta'en too little care of this. Take physic King; expose thyself to
feel what wretches feel, that you may shake the super flux to them, and
show the heavens more just.”
For you readers out there who
perhaps have not yet discovered the joy of giving, let me just say, that
once you get into it, you could very well get pleasantly hooked. As it
is written, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." There
are countless worthy causes out there crying out for help:
There are
local food shelves; Salvation Army needs. There are Indian reservation
schools such as St. Joseph's or St Labrae or Circle of Nations; notable
ministries such as Life Outreach Internation which dig water wells for
famine stricken Africans and rescue young women that are enslaved into
sex trafficking. There are even street ministries that go right into the
ghettos to rescue addicts, gang members and hookers, lured into crime to
feed their addictions.
Gene Pinkney/ For The Daily
News/ 12/21/20