Recently, I came upon two rather embarrassing pictures of me in my youth - I would guess I was about 7 or 8. There I am, the future pacifist, standing in our front yard decked out in an army uniform (after all, I grew up during the war - that's the Second World War). In one picture I look soberly at the toy pistol in my hand; in the other I take dead aim on the enemy - the future preacher as soldier.
Not far from this scene of militant patriotism is the little white clapboard Universalist Church in which I grew up. There I learned "Tell me the stories of Jesus, I love to hear..." There were the words of Jesus about turning the other cheek; the Beatitudes blessing the peacemakers as children of God. There were calls to sacrifice - if one asks for your coat, give your cloak also; forgive 70 times 7. You want to enter the kingdom of heaven? - give all you have to the poor. It was altruism, pure and simple. Those experiences were the inspiration for one of my central preaching motifs: "To be is to be for others."
Having uttered these words many times from this pulpit, now I have to wonder about them. Are they an appropriate code for living? Are they realistic? Must we constantly be for others? Looking back on my life - the idealism of my Sunday School upbringing and the realism of growing up during the bloodiest war in human history - collide in one great question: How does one live the good life?
There are two cultural icons that raise the question in dramatic and disturbing fashion. Years ago I read Shel Silverstein's book The Giving Tree, a contemporary parable of the altruistic life. It's about a little boy, a tree and their relationship over a lifetime. The tree gives up everything for the boy - until at last there is nothing left of her but a stump for the little-boy-become-aged-man to sit upon. The end. It is the end of the story, but not the controversy.
I read this story to my Ethics Seminar last Thursday night - without introduction. A few had read it; most had not. I wanted to get an honest and unfiltered response. We had a lively and illuminating discussion. It went something like this: One woman who had read the book hated it. Here was the tree - female in the book - giving generously of herself to an ungrateful boy who kept on taking and taking. The frontispiece carried these congratulatory words: "Shel Silverstein has created a moving parable for readers of all ages that offers an affecting interpretation of the gift of giving and a serene acceptance of another's capacity to love in return."
Another class member had read the book years ago, had loved it, but was now having second thoughts. The discussion revolved around altruism - the total sacrifice of the tree and the self-centered boy who simply took and took and took.
It is not difficult to relate this to ordinary life - we all know persons who seem totally selfless. We all know people who seem totally selfish. Since the tree in the story is female, and sacrificial giving has tended to be a woman's role, feminist theologians find The Giving Tree a powerful illustration of patriarchy.
We struggled with this issue: at what point in our giving do we give away so much there is nothing left of us - and consequently, nothing more to give? I knew a minister who fit this pattern perfectly - he served in a time when ministers were paid almost nothing - and he still gave of what little he had - like the poor widow of whom Jesus spoke who generously gave her mite. In the end, after a lifetime of sacrificial giving, my minister friend became an embittered old man.
We all know that parents must give unconditional love to their children, and are "very happy" to do so. But we expect these children to grow up to reciprocate that love - to give back - not in a tit-for-tat fashion - but to become loving persons in their own right. We try to model the behavior we wish to see in them. In our discussion I recalled a moving picture-essay of some years ago - "Gramps." The essay began with a picture of the author's grandfather holding him as a baby in his arms. The last picture is of the author carrying the withered body of his grandfather and laying him on his death bed. It was a poignant depiction of the life cycle and the reciprocity of love. But in The Giving Tree everything is uni-directional - the tree gives and the boy takes. The tree dies giving, while the boy ages but never matures morally.
We widened the concept of the giving tree. Might it not also be a message that humanity cannot simply keep taking from nature - exploiting her abundance - without using her resources carefully? We wonder what Shel Silverstein had in mind: a pious parable of unconditional giving; a satirical critique of selfish humanity; a warning about abuse of the earth.
We'll never know - we know only that the book is controversial - subject to intensely held convictions and diametrically held positions. Some find it sad that critics rip apart a touching and popular book, overanalyze it and misconstrue its meaning. Personally, I find the book ethically wanting - a sentimentalized view of a morality that can corrupt. At the least, it is highly provocative, and it stimulated a deeply felt discussion of how we ought to treat one another.
On the 35th anniversary of The Giving Tree we have another cultural icon for self-less giving - the popular movie Pay It Forward. The film is based on the novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde, who was inspired to write it when, 23 years ago, two strangers put out an engine fire in her car. "They were gone so quickly that I never got to thank them, there was no way to pay them back. So I told myself that the next time I saw someone in trouble I'd do something." "Pay it forward" changes our normal idea of reciprocity - pay it back, return the favor - or the all-too-common idea of paying someone back for a wrong done to you.
Like Silverstein's book, this movie is at the center of raging controversy. If you haven't seen it - here's the plot. I will tell the ending (if you intend to see it you may want to stop your ears). Kevin Spacy is Eugene Simonet, a Las Vegas social studies teacher who gives a very unusual year-long class assignment: think of something that will change the world and then go do it.
One of his eager students is Trevor McKinney, played by Haley Joel Osment. Trevor takes the assignment to heart and decides to do a good deed for three persons hopeing they will go and do likewise - a pyramid scheme with an altruistic flavor. Trevor brings a street addict home for supper, thereby outraging his single mom - Arlene McKinney - played by Helen Hunt, a semi-recovering alcoholic who works in a topless bar by night and waitresses in a casino by day. His second project is to get his mother and teacher together - and in this he ultimately succeeds. Trevor's final good deed proves fatal - he attempts to protect a classmate from school bullies. He is stabbed to death by one of them as he tries to rescue his young friend - presumably proving the cynical words of The Rev. William Sloan Coffin: "No good deed goes unpunished."
Pay It Forward is a tear-jerker; it has been pilloried as "an insultingly shallow weeper-of-the week,"[1] as having "stick-figure characters," "creaky plot machinery" and being a "remorseless assault on your tear ducts."[2] It has been labled "unceasingly manipulative entertainment . . . reprehensible . . . the most shameless clichés of emotional and physical damage," and attacked for "blackmailing audiences into joining the let's be nice 'movement.'"[3]
It is not great cinema. It is overly pious, overly sentimentalized, and overly promoted, but it does raise the same question as The Giving Tree. How much can we give without giving ourselves away? Trevor becomes almost a Christ-figure, making the ultimate sacrifice in "laying down his life for his friends," as we read in the Christian Gospels.
At this holy season we are enamored of Jesus. He is crooned in department stories, portrayed on Christmas cards and preached from pulpits. What Christian minister has not urged his or her congregants to emulate him? But not so fast! This is not an easy message because Jesus, insofar as we know him, was the ultimate altruist. In the end he gave himself away. Are preachers actually inviting their listeners to become martyrs - to literally follow the nearly impossible teachings of Jesus? If each of us emulated him, what would be left of us? He emptied his life for a cause. But what about us ordinary folk?
Carl Jung wrote of the problems in following Jesus. We should try to serve "the least of these." But said Jung, ". . . what if I discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself - that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness - that I myself am the enemy who must be loved - what then? . . . . Are we to understand the "imitation of Christ" in the sense that we should copy his life . . . or in the deeper sense that we are to live our own proper lives as truly as he lived his in all its implications? If is no easy matter to live a life that is modeled on Christ's, but it is unspeakably harder to live one's own life as truly as Christ lived his."[4]
For me Jesus is "the man for others," the one who perhaps best of all the prophets expresses my mantra that "to be is to be for others." And yet, Jung, among others, warns me of the danger of taking this too far. I can be so committed to others that I give myself away. Then, not only am I without a spiritual core for the living of my own life, but I also have nothing left to give others. We might call that "altruistic burnout."
Altruism comes form the Latin alter - the other. To be concerned for the other contradicts our natural tendencies to be self-regarding. Anne Wilson Schaef, a student of addictive behavior and co-dependence, however, warns us that through our well-intended altruism we may enable bad behavior - enabling addictions of many kinds. The road to hell can be paved with good intentions. A mindless altruism can be the road to disaster.
On the other hand, being for others can nourish the self. As the late songstress Malvina Reynolds put it, "Love is something if you give it away - you end up having more." But not always.
Jesus of Nazareth spent his life trying to pull people out of their obsession with self. One of his noblest teachings was the Parable of the Good Samaritan - a parable often parodied.
T. V. comedian Dick Van Dyke once wrote an article for Family Circle Magazine on "How Children Think about God." Asked what we can learn from the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a five year old replied: "It teaches me that when I am in trouble, somebody should help me."[5] We understand that reaction from a child; we hope we can outgrow that response in adulthood.
We live on a moral continuum from unadulterated selfishness to pure altruism. Sometimes we are closer to one; sometimes to the other; most of us most of the time are somewhere in the middle. Our task is to stretch ourselves toward self-giving without giving up our own identity as moral and spiritual creatures.
Mark Twain once complained about the "annoyance of a good example." That is what Jesus is, what all the prophets of the human spirit are. They annoy us with their self-giving capacity - they stretch us. However, most of us are not prophets or saints or martyrs - we are ordinary people who have needs - one of them being to give. One being to receive. There are no easy answers here. To be is to be for others. We must both be and be for others. That balancing act makes it hard to be human, but that is what we are called upon to be.
The Good Samaritan revisited. There is a man beaten and bleeding at the side of a treacherous mountian road. No one is there, save one traveler, who responds to a question from the suffering man: "Good Samaritan? You've just missed one. The next one's due in about twenty minutes."[6] Let's hope that person is one of us.
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