Give to Everyone Who Asks of You

For two years immediately after finishing college, I served in an AmeriCorps program with a group of 100+ other young adults. They were a bright, energetic, and above all else, idealistic group of people. "Idealism" was literally in the job description, and it was a principle that came up daily as a part of the organizational culture.

(I say this to show that the conversation that follows does not involve any cynical, jaded souls, but two people who cared deeply about and worked to improve the lives of others.)

One day during this time, I was at the office with a friend, and conversation turned toward giving money to people who begged on the street. I expressed some ambivalence about it; "It's hard to know what the money is going toward, and it might be better in general to give to charity," I mused.

My friend, on the other hand, stated that he thought it was wrong. Not questionable, not a gray area: wrong. He pointed out that many people begging on the street suffer from addiction to harmful substances; he felt it was his responsibility to not feed these addictions by giving away money that could possibly be spent on substances to abuse.

I have no memory of whether I responded with any kind of counterargument. But I have done a great deal of thinking about conversation since.

Eventually, I concluded that I had been wrong. And that my friend had been wrong, too.

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"When the Bible refers to the poor, I think of those who are downtrodden emotionally or romantically, not those who are poor financially."
— Bible Students Say.. (@BibleStdntsSay) April 7, 2014

Any Christian argument against giving to the needy is going to run up against a number of, to put it mildly, strong arguments from scripture pointing in the exact opposite direction. Perhaps the most famous and wrenching is a parable Jesus tells, in which he depicts himself reprimanding a group of people at the end of time, saying "You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me." And they ask Jesus in turn, "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?" And he tells them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me." When we refuse to give to the poor, in other words, we refuse Jesus himself.

More so even than this image—Jesus, destitute and in need of my help—the scripture that I am mentally confronted with whenever I refuse money to a beggar is the direct command* Jesus issues to his followers: "Give to everyone who asks of you."

It's such a simple command: Just give. Don't think. Don't judge. Don't worry. Give.

And, simple as it is, it can be quite hard to actually do.

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As was mentioned, one obstacle to giving to the homeless is the fear that it will feed addiction. "It's a waste of money," "It does more harm than good," etc.

A few months ago, I read an article, written by a real, live, homeless person, that altered my view of addiction and homelessness. I'll let his words speak what I can't really do justice to:

I've coined a phrase for the kind of sleep you get on the street: "the one-eyed sleep of the homeless." When you sleep in public—well hidden though you may be—anyone can walk up on you in the middle of the night. It may be another homeless person looking for a good place to sleep. Or one of the nighttime criminals who beat the homeless and steal from them. Or the police, looking to move you out of  your spot. You never know what to expect, and it makes sleep difficult. Sometimes I'll see a homeless person dead asleep in the middle of the day on the sidewalk along some busy thoroughfare, but I don't know how they do it. Unless they've simply collapsed from exhaustion. Or maybe they're drunk or high.

Alcohol and drugs do play a big part in street life. I've tried to stay away from drugs and have succeeded for the most part. Drink, however, has been a different story. We all have our poisons, something that helps carry us through, that gives us pleasure, whether good for us or not. But when you're homeless, you definitely need something to take the edge off being exposed, every minute of every day. It's difficult to explain this to someone who has never had to live outdoors in the midst of several thousand people roaring around them at all hours. ("Homeless in the City," Theodore Walter, emphasis added)

Substance abuse is a coping strategy for the homeless, who deal with unbearable quantities of stress. In giving someone money, I trust that they're going to use it to get what they feel they need to keep going one more day, even if that includes substances that may not be good for them in the long run. They know their needs better than I do. I remind myself that if the recipient of my money is suffering from addiction, my money may help keep them from feeding that addiction in more dangerous ways, like theft or prostitution. Above all else, I remind myself of Jesus' commands: to give to the one who asks, and also to judge not lest I be judged by the same standard—how often, after all, have I spent money on things that are not healthy for me?

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For me, the other major obstacle to giving is more selfish: I tend to worry that I am being conned somehow. I know I have been conned out of money with a slick story at times, and it's a terrible feeling.

But what this feeling boils down to is pride. I get mad that someone fooled me into handing over my hard-earned money after I hear a made-up story. Which, when I think about it, is essentially what I do every time I go see a movie or buy a novel. Even if the story coming out of the stranger on the street is marketed a bit more aggressively or is somewhat less entertaining than I'd like, no story I ever hear is going to be worse than A Rat's Tale, a movie that features marionette rat puppets and terrible rat puns like "aloe verat"** and which is, I can assure you, totally real and not made up, because my sisters and I sat through the whole thing in a movie theater as children.

However little the recipient may seem to need or deserve my money, I remind myself when handing over my cash that it is unlikely that a successful person with access to steady work is going to be out on the street begging. If someone asks for money, there is a high likelihood that they need some, no matter the way they go about asking.

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Last year, I decided to try out the traditional Lenten discipline of almsgiving.† I made a conscious effort to always have cash somewhere I could get it easily on my person, and anytime I saw someone begging or was approached by someone asking for money, I had some to give. Each day, I relieved myself of some of my cash by placing it in a different pocket, and told myself it was no longer mine: I was simply carrying it for the next person I met who needed it. I found this practice to be such a relief to my anxieties over giving that I have never stopped since. I recommend it to all who would take seriously Jesus' command to give.

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*This command is found in both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew. The first half of the command in each version is essentially identical, and the second half somewhat amusingly demonstrates the differences between the two authors—Mathew has a tendency to soften Jesus' more extreme social teachings in Luke (or perhaps it's the other way around?); see, for another example, the contrast between the Beatitudes in each. 
**Not only is "aloe verat" a real, live, terrible rat pun from this film, it is in fact the MacGuffin that drives the whole plot.
†I will admit that in writing this post, I worried about Jesus' command to give to the needy in secret. I actually kept my Lenten discipline to myself for a long time, and only told someone about it when it would have required a lie to keep it secret, at which point it seemed like I might be taking the whole secrecy thing a bit far.

Photos:
1. Chris Sampson
2. Edouard Manet, "Beggar with Duffel Coat" - This is one of my favorite pieces of art at Chicago's Art Institute; it's one of a pair of portraits that Manet painted in which he portrays beggars as noble philosophers.