A Reflection for the Feast of St. Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr
You can find today’s readings here.
God loves a cheerful giver. (2 Corinthians 9:7)
Like everything else in the Christian life, the real challenge of practicing material generosity is not the act itself, but the interior work of freedom and detachment that must be nurtured along with it.
It’s good to be generous and charitable: by donating to a person in need, or giving away your old clothes or shoes. But those acts are not in and of themselves Christian acts. A Christian is called to deeper conversion: to become conscious of the link between God’s infinite, self-emptying, generous love and their comparatively miniscule act of giving.
For a Christian, an act of generosity does not exist in a vacuum. It’s not about momentarily appeasing our conscience, making a show for others or cleaning out our closet. It’s not even purely about helping another person or community, as objectively good and just as such an act might be. Rather, it’s coming to believe that our act is but one small note in the symphony of God’s progressive work of perfecting creation.
This awesome realization can and does change people. And the more we let it sink in, the less petty and narrow-minded we become about our own giving. We start to see the God-inspired wisdom in our tradition, as, for example, St. John Chrysostom wrote, "Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs." (CCC, 2446)
Likewise, Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, the first modern “social” encyclical of the Catholic Church, wrote that, “when what necessity demands has been supplied, and one's standing fairly taken thought for, it becomes a duty to give to the indigent out of what remains over… It is a duty, not of justice (save in extreme cases), but of Christian charity—a duty not enforced by human law.” [emphasis added]
For a Christian, all acts of charity and generosity are part of something much bigger. In his second letter to the Corinthians, which we read today, St. Paul doesn’t simply write, “God loves a giver.” He says, “God loves a cheerful giver;” cheerful not because of how generous and big-hearted we are, but because of how much more generous and big-hearted God is.
