Don't spread love abroad

The woman’s name is Osa. She’s toothless and spry and probably 70, and when I meet her, standing barefoot in the dirt by her corrugated tin hut, she’s wearing the brightest purple sateen dress. She’s perhaps the happiest woman I’ve ever met. She thanks us soundly for the food gift we brought, and when we ask what needs she has that we could pray for, she can think of none. “I have everything that I need, and God has been so good and faithful to me,” she beams. This is in marked contrast to what her milieu suggests, and to the circumstances of many of her peers in the neighborhood – the poorest of the poor of San Pedro de Macoris. Her smile overtakes leave me, and I leave the interaction inspired, humbled. What a woman. What an outlook.

When I ponder my experience with Osa (and other poignant moments), serving in the Dominican Republic this week, I feel gladness that my daughters are with me on this trip. At sixteen and fifteen, they can well enter into the depth of these moments, with all their complexity. Dirt-road villages laden with trash alongside every road and filling every “back yard.” Zealous dancing and fervent song. Windowless houses made of thin tin and planks, with holes in the roof and emaciated dogs slinking from shack to shack. Exuberant yet barefoot children wearing threadbare clothing, offering sometimes shy smiles and sometimes bold hands. Gorgeous brown eyes and carefully braided hair, with beads. Belly-shaking laughter. What is one to make of these things?

We are here to serve. To unmake ourselves as the center of our own lives, at least for a time. To understand the lives of those who face different challenges than our own – greater ones. To take from our plenty and offer some to those with less. Without grandeur or condescension. With sincerity, on both sides. We learn as much as we convey, and we gain as much as we give. Probably more.

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How does it work, though? What do I hope my daughters understand about service, that they may not already know? Natural law helps us, revealing:

• There are those to whom we have a duty or obligation to give – respect to an authority, care and nurture to a child, obedience to a parent, work to an employer, fulfillment of commitment to one to whom it’s been pledged. We must meet these obligations; justice and integrity demand it. Beyond this, though, is charity: the virtue of giving to others who have unmet needs… in cases when we have the right not to give. It’s an unrequired act of goodness.

• Dignity is at the center. Since all humans share the same nature and partake in the same moral order, we give to and receive care from others. We do to others as we would have them do to us. With dignity at the center, charity rightly proceeds as an act of the good of friendship.

• Motive matters. If we serve others to look good, pad our resume, or impress our boyfriend, it’s not actually friendship or charity but self-interest. Selfishness can look like philanthropy. This is no virtue at all.

• Motive can change, can be corrupted. Pride that was absent at first can easily creep in when performing a non-obligatory act. Any good can be corrupted; this is vice.

• Our primary commitments are and must be to those closest to us. If we fail to help our sick neighbor next door, we ignore the common good within our community. This isn’t reasonable. If we ignore our literal neighbor, we have no business helping the sick in a farflung location. Subsidiarity requires this; we must order our loves.

What gratitude I feel for the organization we serve with this week, led by people who serve their neighbors well at home in our town – and also engage in continuous relationship with on-the-ground partners in a developing country. We can invest in our US-based community and also invest deeply in a part of the world that has far fewer resources and opportunities. Good at home, and good abroad – focused, not scattershot or haphazard. This, to me, seems optimal. Our hyper-connected world allows for a depth of partnership of this type that can be authentic. Ultimately communities in both the US and the DR benefit.

As with me. And my daughters. New relationships have formed for us in our DR days, and many will endure.

We are so much the better, wiser, richer for our time here, coming to intimately know the people with whom we spend this week. Our hearts are enlarged. Our perspective is expanded: meeting Osa and scores of others like her, and being changed by them. Giving them a bit of food and taking interest in their lives and needs – and being received, gaining friendship. Lending us perspective. Helping us understand a different culture. Letting us see humanity through an enlarged lens. This is the gift that the virtue of charity continues to give (since all virtues reliably cause flourishing).

John Wesley said, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.” We have limits and must live by them (so this can be over-done). But Wesley’s words are good advice, because a life oriented toward service is a blessed and rich life indeed.

I remind myself of this, and I impress it on my daughters, on our last night in the DR. Bring this home with you, dear ones, and forget it not. We are all enlarged when the virtue of charity grows in us, so may we do that which we are not obligated to do. May we remember that the God who made us all humans makes it possible, more than we think and with greater positive impact to our hearts than we can know. What a gift.

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