by Bruce Davis, Summer Minister

A sermon given June 27, 2004

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Some people have such abundance, whatever their material fortunes may be. Such a one was my friend, John Enright, who died of cancer in Sonoma, California, a few days ago. John was not just a mentor and teacher. He was a brilliant and enlightened man. Through his life he gave everything he had away. And yet, there can be no question that he died with a feeling of abundance in his heart, and with a satisfied mind.

He’d just spent four weeks in a skilled nursing facility, dying in slow steps. At the end, he decided to go home—a very modest, first floor apartment that he shared with his wife, Kyoko. In a long phone conversation with me she told me the whole story of his last three days of life. Lying there in the nursing home, he’d thought that he might never see his home again. When he actually got to the front door, he declared, “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” He had his bed put before the window, and on the evening before his death he extolled the beauty of the rising moon beyond the other houses. Kyoko added that it had been a moonless night. Such was his sense of the abundance.

What John gave away, more than anything else, were delightful exercises in personal and spiritual growth. It was his particular genius. Thousands of people have been moved and transformed by his mercurial good-humor. Yet few know his name. Other organizations, including Life Spring and the Forum, “borrowed” his work freely. They made lots of money. He did not. He seemed to care more that many people were benefiting from his teachings. He ignored the piracy of what we call intellectual property.

I am not lauding John’s lack of fiscal foresight and business savvy. Having less is not intrinsically better than having more. Indeed, having more, if it is used wisely, can do great good in the world. It’s just that in having less, John always had so much. There was always plenty left over to give away. Having less never impeded his generosity.

These deaths of people who are important to us…. I’m going to miss him.

John used to teach that there are two subjects that make us particularly uncomfortable. Sex and money. We are as unlikely to talk about the details of our finances as we are to talk about the details of our sexual activities. So, if you get a little nervous talking about money this morning, know that it’s natural to do so. Rest assured, we won’t be talking about sex.

Some people seem to be born generous. They seem to give easily of what they have. But I am not naturally generous myself. I will usually make sure that I have more than I need, before I start giving things away. It’s not my fault. You see, I inherited a gene from my Grandma MacDougall, a scrimping and saving gene, so that I hold onto my resources and my stuff as if my life depended on them.

Georgina MacDougall, my father’s mom, did not invent this gene, but she used it to great advantage during the Great Depression. Only, after the Depression, when money began to flow again, she kept to her art of frugality. When I was about nine, I was surprised to see drawers in her kitchen full with used tinfoil. She’d use some, wash it, and put it away again. When my curiosity bested me, and I questioned her about it, she admonished, “Now Brucie. We save things because we never know when they might come in handy. We don’t waste things.” I’m afraid the lesson stuck. I bet I have a hundred screwdrivers at my house: in the kitchen, in the shop, in the car…. Whenever I go to a garage sale I pick up a couple more. You just can’t have too many screwdrivers!

Somehow my baby sister, Betsy, was spared the MacDougall gene. She’s the most generous person I know. By using her as a role model, I have been able to become more generous myself.

Ten years younger, Betsy would hold a seat for me on the school bus. In the baby boom sixties, our school district couldn’t build schools fast enough, so they put the kindergarten in the high school. In the afternoons we’d share transportation with them. I’d hop on the bus at the last minute—you know, one more stop at the locker, one more hallway conversation. There she’d be, smiling and pigtailed, with an aisle seat for her big brother. Since the bus was always full, she’d have to say again and again, “Sorry, this seat’s saved.”

Even at that age, Betsy just couldn’t wait for birthdays and Christmas. Not to get presents but to give them. So, she didn’t wait for special occasions. Suddenly you’d be the recipient of a “happy day” present. You’d be presented with a special treasure, and her brown eyes would shine with love and delight. Over the years she has taught me that sharing money or material things is one good way to give voice to the love we have for other people. The quality of the gift does not depend on its quantity. Instead, it depends on the loving intention within us at the moment of giving.

People like Betsy, who are givers at their very heart, seem to be immersed in a flow of wealth. The more they give, the more they get. The more they get, the more they give. Flowing with the giving and the receiving, their abundance seems to be less about what they have or what they own but rather what statements they are able to make in the lives of others with their resources. Money becomes one aspect of their voice in the world. It redefines affluence as the flow of resources rather than an accumulation of riches.

Like most of us, Betsy had no money after college. She took a temp job, typing, to earn money for graduate school. One of her temporary gigs was at Microsoft. Within a year they’d bought out her temp contract and promoted her to the management of a product line, stock options and all. The happy day presents kept coming to those close to her, but now it was such things as a year of tuition for a family member who needed it. After a decade and a half, she’d spent all of her Microsoft energy and retired with her pockets pretty full. Within several years, she’d given a surplus of those dollars away, to individual people in her life, to urban community development, to international artists’ collectives, and to various non-profits. Her philanthropy earned her an article in a Seattle daily, naming her as one of those people who use what they have to do good—a “benefactor” in the best sense of that word. What she kept for herself was not “a lot.” But “enough.”

These words come to the core of the issue for me. How much is enough? How much will I and my family need in the future? If I’m laid off and can’t find a job, what then? Such questions don’t have easy or formulaic answers. How long should I stay with a lucrative but personally unsatisfying job? For another year? For five years? Until mandatory retirement? Until I get the next stock option? Until I make as much money as I possibly can?

If we are anxious about having enough (enough money, enough stuff) then we will not easily give much away. Generosity depends on our confidence that in the future there will still be “enough” whatever that may be.

My life and my sister Betsy have conspired over the years to help me understand what the dimensions of “enough” are for me. Mary and I had purchased a beautiful and wild piece of land on Willapa Bay on the Washington Coast about fifteen years ago. It was a peaceful refuge for the family, but especially for me, helping me to deal with the stress of clinical and administrative medicine. Over a period of several years this property began to take more time and more energy than we could afford to give it. The continuing expenses of the place helped me to justify my overwork and high salary. It is a common cycle. We work hard. We therefore deserve a beach house, or a mountain cabin, or a boat, or a vacation in Provence. Which increases our expenses. For which we must work harder even than before. I spent at least a year denying this cycle, trying to justify our ownership of this parcel of heaven. Finally Mary and I decided we just couldn’t do it any more.

Betsy led Mary and me in a smudging ritual, using burning sage to help us begin to let go of our attachment to this second home. What came to me that morning was a life-changing moment of epiphany. Overhead, a pair of osprey circled on the wind, hunting at the water’s edge for a fish or a small rodent. They spiraled over the property we owned, and then over the neighbor’s, and on down the beach, and it dawned on me that we didn’t own the property. Or we did own the property, much as the osprey also did. Or neither of us owned the land but were owned by the land. I remembered Chief Sealth’s wisdom:

This we know, the earth does not belong to us;

We belong to the earth….

We did not weave the web of life;

We are merely a strand in it.

Selling that vacation property was the first of many steps in simplifying our lives. Mary got us started in the practice of simplification. Endeavoring to overcome my genetic predisposition to hoarding, I have become her student in this practice. We reduced our small treasure trove, especially getting rid of those things that demanded more time, money, or energy than they were worth to enrich our lives. Ironically we discovered by having somewhat less, by letting go of stuff and activities that we’d once deemed indispensable, we found more time, more money, and more energy to put into those aspects of our lives that were most important to us. Our money began to serve our common voice.

Unfortunately voluntary simplicity is often touted in terms of voluntary frugality. Instead, I think it is really about intentional living. Because we had recaptured our resources, getting off the treadmill, so to speak, we could let our money speak in new ways. If we really watched unnecessary expenses, I would be able to shift careers, from medicine to ministry. Mary would be able to shift into her passion, teaching nurse practitioners. We foresaw living a new definition of abundance.

Whatever we do with our resources, our money turns into our voice in the world. If we want the voice of our money to clearly speak the values we hold dear, we must give of our resources with timing and finesse, so that our benefaction is powerful and directed. In my work as a leader in medicine, we would assess the values of a healthcare organization by how it spent its money. Its yearly budget was a better expression of its values and vision than any formal mission statement. One organization might fund smoking cessation or offer special care for pregnant teens. Another might put most of its resources into highly technical tests and procedures. One organization might cover services that would pay health dividends to the community over decades, while another might enter and leave a city within five years, capturing short-term profits. This is how money expresses an organizational voice, whether in a corporation or a family. 

There is a bank in India you may have heard of, called Small Industries Development Bank of India, which exemplifies the timing and finesse of benefaction. By making small business loans, especially to women who wish to create crafts and other goods in the home setting, this financing company has found a way to make a huge and sustainable difference for Indian families and villages. It is an example of getting the right money to the right place at the right time.

As Mary and I simplified our holdings, we realized that we would have fewer opportunities to give large gifts in the future. Without fully answering for ourselves the impossible question about how much might be enough in the future, we allocated a relatively large sum to be given away in one gift to our church. We gave because we wanted to simplify. We gave because, for that one time, we could. But, we didn’t anticipate the results of our giving.

For years as members of the University Unitarian Church in Seattle, we had pledged annually. We had given freely of our time and energy, teaching classes and participating in the lay leadership of the congregation. But when we gave the larger gift to the church, suddenly we felt differently about the whole community. Suddenly, we felt ownership in the church in a new way. In giving the money to the church, we realized that we were the very ones receiving the money as members of the church. It was an epiphany for me in the phenomenon of generosity. It was a moment of “giving-receiving” where the two movements become part of the same flow. I remember walking across the floor in the social hall, feeling a different relationship with the floorboards than I’d ever felt before. I felt the same sense of relationship with the church, owning it or owned by it, that I had felt during that epiphany on the shore of Willapa Bay, with the osprey wheeling their way down the peninsula.

Many UU churches repeat the following in unison at the time of the Sunday morning offering. Suddenly these words rang true in a new way.

This church is a community of ourselves.

Its energy and resources are our energy and resources.

Its wealth is what we share.

When we give to the life of this community,

We confirm our lives within it.

I realized that there is no church out there. The church we love and support is the very church we are.

For me this is the spiritual practice of giving, and when we do it well, the love ends up going both ways. I remember a song our children used to sing:

Love is something if you give it away, give it away, give it away.  Love is something if you give it away. You end up having more. Love is like a magic penny. Hold it tight and you don’t have any. Spend it, lend it, you get so many, they roll all over the floor.

Relationships with loved ones combine the giving with the receiving. When the relationship is at its richest, we feel the giving and the receiving going both ways all the time. Sometimes the currency of this loving exchange is compassion. Sometimes it’s personal support. Sometimes it’s stuff. Sometimes it’s money. The spiritual implication here is this: the more you give the more you get. Giving with loving intention to the beloved returns love to you, increased many-fold.        

Who shall we say is the Beloved? Surely it may be another person. Or it may be a community, as we refer to our church as a beloved community. Or the Beloved may be the very Spirit of Life itself. In this context affluence is redefined as the loving flow from here to there and back again. In the Kaballah, the mystical tradition that arises from ancient Judaism, God is known as the Holy One who embodies this flow. God is the “giving-receivingness” that is the essence of all life. If we imagine the myriad gossamer strands of the interconnected web of existence and picture a two-way flow, giving and receiving, along each strand, we might glimpse for a moment how Love binds each to all.

What we give to our world is ourselves. What we get back is ourselves magnified by Love. May it be so.  Amen.

Great Spirit, giving-and-receiving One,

Help us to enter the flow of love that you are

Freely and fully and consciously.

Help us to become generous people,

Who in our giving generate new possibilities and new life

For others in our world,

Especially those most in need of our gifts.

Help us to be proud of our voice

In the human family.

Amen.

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Copyright 2004, Bruce Davis.  All rights reserved.