Blessings of Receipt

In the contemporary world it is at least as blessed, especially for the powerful, to receive as to give — and much harder to do.

Robert Greenleaf, from his essay “Is It More Blessed To Give Than To Receive?” from SEEKER AND SERVANT.

I wonder if the political campaign fundraiser who I just got off the phone with is trying to tap into the blessings Greenleaf was referring to when she asked me to donate to her candidate’s campaign coffers. I’m not sure though that the gifts that Greenleaf was referring to revolve around money being given to the up and coming powerful.

Instead he was referring to a comment by someone from Africa labeling Americans as arrogant in they way that they pour aid into poor countries and along the way lose their humility to be able to accept the gifts that the people of these country have to offer us. I wrote about some experiences I had with this situation in my recent blog called “The Immortality of Giving”.

This is a topic that seems to keep showing up, so I thought I would delve into it some more. Krista Tippet looked into the issue in a recent Speaking of Faith public radio program “The Ethics of Aid: One Kenyan's Perspective." She led off the broadcast with the statement that “there is little uncontested overarching evidence that hundreds of billions of dollars of aid over the past 50 years have made a significant long-term difference to the health and wealth of people on the African continent.”

Her guest Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina has some good answers to why that seemed to be the case.

[A]lot of people arrive in Africa to assume that it's a blank empty space and their goodwill and desire and guilt will fix it. And that to me is not any different from the first people who arrived and colonized us. And I just want to reemphasize that this power is just about as dangerous as hard power. […] Because very often it arrives with a kind of zeal that is assuming 'I will. I will do it. I will solve it for you. I will fix it for you,' you know, and it rides roughshod over your own best efforts. To me the good efforts that have been done have been the ones that have been sensible and worked.

Any countries that have done well for themselves and have managed to do positive things and that have changed the lives of large parts of their countries have done so on their own effort. On the effort of their own citizenry with ideas that come from that citizenry and therefore get all manner of support from government or from all kinds of other places. That's the way it works.

And so as Greenleaf reminds us, we will not “have a chance to achieve the possible wholeness of existence, as individuals and as a nation, simply by being aware — unless that awareness (the awareness of the potential immorality of giving) opens the way to a new basis of relationship between aid giver and aid receiver”.

We need to be willing to receive before we can truly give, whether it is dealing with the neighbors in our backyard, or on the other side of the world.