Charity Means Love

It snowed for the first time this winter yesterday. I was exhausted by it. Procrastination is always exhausting, but the constant “winter is coming” variety is even worse.

The cause of my procrastination exhaustion was the 3 or 4 winter coats in my closet waiting for a trip to the St. Vincent de Paul.

They are not my old coats, nor are they the old coats of my children or other relatives. They are clean warm coats of indeterminate origin that someone asked me to donate on their behalf. It’s one of those things that just happens to a person.

Faith, hope and the other thing

The three virtues are faith, hope and charity. In many languages, the word for charity is synonymous with the word for love. Perhaps, if we just called it love in English, there wouldn’t be so many things to hate about charity. It would not be linked to generosity, or to performed selflessness or to deciding worthiness when assessing need.

When I was a teenager, my father died of leukemia following 11 months of harrowing chemotherapy, much of it spent in a hospital 70 kilometers away. My 37 year-old mother had to learn to run our family business single-handedly and how to drive very quickly. She also did one other heroic thing. She bought my father a new winter coat. This last issue is a bigger deal than it sounds. In the 80s, there was no fast fashion and while there were sweat-shops, clothing companies did not subject textile workers to the same levels of desperation they do now. Clothing, especially men’s clothing, was much more expensive. Mortgage rates were also higher, so a lot of families were house rich and cash poor. I imagine many parents were like mine and just went without. For my mother to buy her sick husband a new winter coat was loving and must have involved sacrifices. He liked it, I remember. It was longer and grey and waterproof.

When my father died the following November, my mother donated most of this clothes. His coat, though, we saw again. We lived downtown, I worked at the public library where homeless people – and there were many fewer homeless people then – were always welcome. So, when my father’s coat appeared on its new owner’s back, I saw it.

“Hold on!” I can hear my critics say. “How do you know it was the same coat? It might have been the 80s, but there was mass production and you have no proof it was your father’s coat.”

This is absolutely true, of course. It could have just been an identical coat, but it reminded a teenager in mourning of loss and desperate circumstances. Let me just say, I did not want my father’s coat as a keepsake. I did not think we should keep it for my brother or pass it along to an uncle or family friend. My mother did the right thing. Seeing it on its new owner, though, was a reminder that charity is so limited. Life is often terrible. My father died. The homeless man I saw in the library, walking past the cathedral, standing in line by the Salvation Army had a warm winter coat because of charity, but he didn’t get enough love to get a home…at least, not that winter. In loss, even the act of giving, failed to show enough goodness in the human heart.

The lack of love in charity has revealed itself again and again. Once, while helping to prepare for the arrival of family from Syria, I was tasked with finding beds for their apartment. I’d been promised two from trusted sources, but at the last moment there were issues with travel and house guests and a close relative who suddenly declared need of a bed. It was fraught and I had to appeal to the greater community for help. Oh, and help came. Shortly after we sent the truck to do pick up, we learned that the beds we’d been given were missing pieces, or just broken. People had, in effect, just seen my urgent appeal as an opportunity to get rid of their garbage by dumping it on the “less fortunate.”

Charity cannot replace needed change

Love’s failures can be hidden by charity’s masks of generosity and gratitude. We teach our children to give old toys to “poor” children in Christmas wrapped shoe boxes while making room in their own space for new gifts from Santa. We don’t teach ourselves not to max out credit cards for presents to friends and family who really don’t need another thing. We clear out dusty canned goods from our cupboards because other people have no choice but to eat the canned pineapple and beans we’ve never gotten around to using. We never have discussions about what food security for every member of our society would look like if we changed our views of taxation and income distribution. We give with public expressions of largesse and experience need silently with shame. Charity lets us avoid those complex discussions and decisions that might just be translated into a shared political will to create change.

There are many more homeless people now than there were when my mother donated my dead father’s coat. Rent and housing costs are so high that more of us are facing the threat of homelessness than ever before. Life is hard and getting harder, but there is enough pain without permitting even more death from exposure in the community. So, the coats in my closet have to get to the St. Vincent de Paul without further delay. Still, until we have those discussions and make those decisions to create change, donation will be just charity. It won’t be love.