Charity, Giving and Deserving

I have always struggled with the idea of ‘the deserving poor’ a term and an attitude i do not like, but what can we give, and what do we deserve.

Ever had the hand stretched out to you ’50p for a cuppa tea’ or seen the down and outs on the tube/subway or in your city or town.  Many people do give but many try to control their giving by offering to buy food or a bed for the night or exert some other control because they are afraid their money will go for drugs or alcohol.

Recently I read something about charity and expectation, how we expect those we give to to deserve the money somehow, but real charity is to give without expectation.  Very often we give because it makes us feel better, I have been known to drop a fiver into the lap of a homeless person begging, but is that for them or for me??  Real charity, this article said, might to be to place a five pound note or a five dollar note in the gutter in random places, so you never know who gets itor what they do with it.  If you have ever found ‘free’ money then you will know what joy this brings and how it lacks the strings of other money given or earned.
Of course this kind of charity does not help the foundation of large bodies like Oxfam or Amnesty, but I felt the writer has a point.
Why do we give, who does it really benefit, why do we want our poor our homeless and destitute to be deserving?  I always think of jesus with the tax gatherers and prostitutes and his outraged followers question why he spent time with these undeserving types, and his response was that these were the very people he had come to help.  Perhaps next time you give could you put aside the attachment to deserving or undeserving and just give something.  How hard must it really be to stretch out your arm day after day and beg, yes beg for help and find that help not forthcoming.
I find this also relates to another question, how deserving are we…ask yourself next time something wonderful happens to you and you can’t quite believe it, whether in your heart you think you deserve it, maybe inwardly you don’t believe anyone should help you, that good things could happen to you…well think again, we weren’t put on this earth to suffer, thats a distorted choice we make, we were put here in my opinion to live a good life, to enjoy to love to help each other…without judgement.  As I have said elsewhere, it is judgement that defeats us, our judgement of others and ultimately our judgement of ourselves….in the words of Desiderata…“you are a child of the universe and you have a right to be here.”
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1. Sell or share (against the ‘Boot Fair’)
2. A View of Christmas
3. Cherry Blossom Politics
4. Little Gidding – T.S. Eliot
5. We need to do something about government…

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