5

GiVE.

Like most everyone I suppose, I have an overwhelming capacity to choose my own interests over everyone else’s, even as I claim to love them. I didn’t require audible divine intervention to deduce that parasites suck.

Who doesn’t already know all villains are ultimately takers? The bad guys are always plundering for their own cause. Criminals and cheats and creeps are always in it for what they can get out of it, even when they’re adept at discussing their true motivation.

After lunch at a restaurant one Sunday afternoon a man came up and said, “I just wanted to say, you have the most beautiful family.” I was flattered.

We traded back and forth on what brought us to the area, the weather, all that. He was very kind. And then something happened to his voice. It transitioned from a normal inflection to a commercial baritone. A plastic fatherliness. He took a step toward me, his eyes fixed like weapons, and said,

“You know, friend…”

He was stuffing his business card into my hand as he cupped my shoulder. On the card was the name of a multi-level marketing firm, their slogan said something about dreams or the sky’s the limit or whatever.

“…you’re going to find there are times,” he continued, “when taking care of this wonderful family of yours isn’t going to be easy. You’re going to need an opportunity to increase your wealth and achieve your dreams…”

My stomach went knotty, like I imagine some men’s do when they discover the eager prostitute is a cop.

The entire conversation, all the compliments and interest in my life; bologna wrapped around bitter dog medicine. Kindness set up as a folding table on which this peddler intended to hawk his wares.

The tick had gotten his mandibles in painlessly.

My blood was the point all along.

And we don’t thank ticks for their painless invasion anymore than we thank burglars for not waking the baby.

But it wasn’t that the guy was trying to recruit me into his business that made me feel like I needed a shower. It was that he was trying to to do so in a way that made it appear as though my interests were his chief concern. I would have considered it neutral to positive if the guy would have just come out with it; “Hey there, I’m inviting people to have conversations with me about my business because, well, it’s how I put food on my table at both my houses. The business model is such that I benefit from having solid people working for me, and frankly the structure serves you well too if you work as hard as I do. Here’s my card. Can we chat to see if we think we can trust each other?”

It wasn’t that it was self-interested. It was that it was self-interest disguised as love. What makes a man deceive me about his intentions but for a society that rewards the leech for adhering itself painlessly?

How come demonizing selfishness doesn’t cure us of selfishness but only adds to us deception?

“…do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus.”

The taker needs to be terminated and replaced with a giver, or so goes the logic. Religion, and most of what we dub spirituality, posits the elimination of selfishness as the pathway to personal transformation and holiness. After all, it’s our brazen selfishness that made God so angry with us in the first place. Become selfless, and in so doing, become good. Ticks and mosquitoes on one end and God on the other. Choose this day whom you will be.

This has been the point of dozens of my own sermons, though in hindsight I suspect I never once believed myself. I extolled the holy loft of austere selflessness as Christianity’s trajectory while my chief, if well veiled, concern was that the congregation would think my sermon on the issue had been first-rate. Think nothing of the self, I’d intone while obsessed with how everyone thought I was doing. It’s a funny thing, preaching on selflessness and then googling your name afterward. Like most people, I failed to recognized the subtle, more influential voice whispering constantly under my sanctimony.

Who but me is going to look out for me?

There’s a deep jittery terror that if I become anything other than a well liked taker, it’s suicide. There just isn’t enough kindness or cash or forgiveness or time or rides to work or patience for listening without talking or credit or extra energy or Saturdays to spend in the neighbor’s U-Haul or support or benefit of the doubt to go around. What if I give and don’t get?

There isn’t enough of the things I need most! I must protect and extract!

Crap. But I also can’t allow others to see my selfishness. That would also count against me.

Is this why we call each other “person,” a Latin term that literally means “mask”?

To this level of consciousness is preached the vacuous moral of selflessness. And in response to this preaching we get anxious, selfish persons who learn to master the art of sucking incognito.

St. Paul said the evidence of the Spirit is things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. This is the kind of verification put forth by the guy credited with writing about half the New Testament that a human being is on track and growing.

Previously he’d been quick to offer as proof of his spiritual aptitude things like his education, his circle of friends, his pedigree. But now it was this; The Fruit of the Spirit. Hard evidence something more than our own ego or desperate survivalist is at the helm.

It’s an image of fruit hanging off the branch or weighing down a vine, above ground where others can see and enjoy and know for sure exactly what kind of tree they were dealing with. The fruit gives away the tree.

If the evidence or fruit were other supernatural abilities or right positions taken on specific issues, St. Paul was apparently unaware of them. In fact, none of the ideas he presents are tricks which draw attention or things that are primarily for the self. The confirmation in his mind the Spirit of God is working in someone’s life is a list of words that have to do with others being the main trajectory of our intention. Others made beneficiaries of my existence.

Fruit is something freely offered by the plant to birds and squirrels and bugs and Dole. They give it away as an accessible gift to whomever or whatever needs it, with no demand for reciprocity. It blesses the world around it with no guarantees for itself. No promises. No thank yous required. Take the fruit and enjoy it. Don’t want it? I respect that. You’d let it rot? That’s ok, I’ll simply grow another fruit tree where you stomped it into the ground. Maybe you’ll eat from that one. You owe me nothing, for my life doesn’t come from you. I make fruit either way. It’s what I am.

But there are other facets to the metaphor of fruit that are far less glorious, just basic biology.

The fruit contains the plant’s DNA. Its identity is packed into its offering. The tree’s fruit is for others, but its own existence is seeded in the offering. It’s never tried to hide this.

The tree requires water, soil, sun and protection from urban sprawl. It gives, but it also has its own welfare to consider. Any tree who decided to be all give, sweet fruit without seed, produce without sun and rain, is an idiot. A dead, withered, idealistic idiot tree.

This is what I’m learning from God and mosquitoes and welts on my person; human selfishness isn’t to be eradicated. It cannot be. It’s to be seen, observed and properly calibrated. If we try to eradicate it, and moralize the impossibility of selflessness, we get deception masked with altruism. One person forced to become a clever duality in order to survive.

There’s always self in my actions. I am in everything I give. Despite the negative connotations to the word, everything we do is a measure of selfishness. Too much self and I’ve become a tick or a devil. A user that sees the world as its pharmacy, its feeding trough, its relief. However, an attempt at obliterating the self all together as religion often insists and pretends, and now I’m a frustrated liar who has needs and desires hidden from view, from others and from the self. A living being pretending to be something he or she isn’t: inanimate or God.

The paradox of attempting selfless living is it drives the focus unendingly on self; self-abdication, self-discipline, self-condemnation, self-measurement and subsequent self-adjustment. Self, self, self, self. That is, the so-called selfless folks are often the most self-obsessed people I’ve ever met. I’m still a card-carrying member of that club, but I don’t attend the meetings. It takes a lot of energy to disappear something that isn’t going anywhere. Maybe this is the reason one of the definitions of pious is “unlikely to be possible.” It isn’t. And in the absence of real magic all we’re left with is sleight-of-hand.

Paul knew this. “Let thieves no longer steal,” he said to his Ephesian brothers and sisters. “Instead, let them serve others with those hands.” Religion says cut a thief’s hands off. Christ inspires us to take the impulse to take and harness it to serve. A sword bent into a garden hoe. It’s always been this way.

When we learn that the live stream of intel that selfishness can provide is a tool, not a terminal disease, suddenly our ability to love one another in truly insightful, realistic ways reaches a whole new level.