Charity

The genuinely charitable person gives generously from a sense that they too stand in need of charity. Not right now, not over this, but in some other area. They know that self-righteousness is merely the result of a faulty memory, an inability to hold in mind – at moments when one is totally right – how often one has been deeply and definitively in the wrong.

Charity remembers how there might still be goodness amidst a lot of evil. Charity keeps in mind that if someone is tired and stressed, they are liable to behave appallingly. Charity is aware that when someone shouts an insult they are not usually revealing the secret truth about their feelings. They are trying to wound the other because they feel they have been hurt – usually by someone else, whom they don’t have the authority to injure back.

Charity is interested in mitigating circumstances; in bits of the truth that can cast a less catastrophic light on our follies.

In financial matters, charity tends always to flow in one direction. The philanthropist may be very generous, but usually they stay rich; they are habitually the giver rather than the recipient. But in life as a whole, and especially in relationships, charity is unlikely ever to end up being one-sided: who is weak and who is powerful changes rapidly and frequently. You are likely to be, as it were, a patron in one area and a beggar in another. So we must be kind not only because we are touched by the suffering of others but because we properly understand that we too will soon be in urgent need of an equally vital dose of charity in some other part of life.