All sharing, in my opinion, begins with an experience of love.
No matter how small the item shared, if the experience of love does not precede it, the gifting becomes awkward.
How often have we been faced with asking for something and the other person agrees reluctantly and we don’t know what to do?
The exchange of love, if we could part the curtains for a moment, would be seen as probably more important than the gift itself.
That’s probably what lies behind the native custom of potlatch. It’s the bonding that happens in a totally-loving exchange that motivates the gifting. Love wants to flow, to embrace, to pour itself onto and into the other. And gifting is one important way that love flows in a society.
Notice how disconnected we’ve become because we’re all on our cellphones? Notice how we also seem to notice each other less, hold the door open less, pass each other things less.
This is not a sharing society. This is not a society that’s building social capital.
Everything goes better with love. Certainly, everything social does. Everything occupational does. Everything familial does.
Just think for a second. Isn’t what I’m saying love offers what “religion” says religion offers? Believe what we believe and everything in your life will improve?
Does it? But it does with love. Substitute for “religion” “love.” Now our lives do seem to get better.
Tie all the other stuff up in one big bundle. It all exists at the intellectual level of life and you know that I consider intellectual knowledge dry oatmeal.
In the end, love is not an intellectual thing. If it is, then it’s about as love-filled as dry leaves are. We have to do better than that.
Even if we move it up to love as an experienced thing, even if we simply feeeeeeeeeeel love, draw it up from our hearts and just feeeeeeeeel it, that will make the gift-giving of another kind than simply a reluctant, “OK, here you are.”
At some point we have an “Aha!” moment and see something about love. For that moment, we’re acting from a realized state (realizations do not have to be large, life-changing moments).
At that moment, there’s the opportunity for love to really show its stuff and get the place really jumping. Realized, love can then flow through us like the raging Mississippi.
For most of us, experiencing the love, as it wells up from our hearts in a pleasant glow is how it manifests for us. It’s not a raging Mississippi, though it someday will be.
It moves us to want to extend a helping hand. It inspires us to want to offer another some of our goods or disposable income. It persuades us to let down our barriers and extend the scope of our compassionate caring.
From long years of sorrow, I no longer make loans to anyone. If I have the money, I gift it. If I don’t, I don’t. I soured too many relationships trying to have loans repaid.
If I look back on the fifty odd years in which I lived life out of my promise to God, (1) I’d say things have worked out pretty well. There has always been money and I haven’t needed to learn about RRSPs/501 k’s. I haven’t needed to worry about retirement. And you know where I’ve ended up in terms of living spaces. Thank you, Michael and my guides.
You can ask people around me: I continue to gift and I will until … well, forever. It’s like push-ups to the heart. It’s like consenting to be and consenting to being seen as being a person who values nobility of character.
Gifting is the action that points to an investment in love. What are you waiting for? It’s spring. Time to be doing pushups in the area of love.
Time to be flowing love out to the world in all ways.
Footnotes
(1) When I was eighteen, I said to God, “I will do your work if you will take care of the finances.”