Generosity

Looking at things differently

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Somewhere along the way we have gotten into the habit of thinking in highly legalistic terms: every obligation or important thing that’s asked of us, including our relationships, appears to us as just the minimum of what we need to do to not be bad people, or we talk about it all as if everything is owed us and we owe nothing.

The most pure relationship we’re given, marriage, we view as if it’s a conflict that we either keep to a low simmer or we’re doomed to endure its boiling over. “Biting my tongue” is asking a lot, we think, and the most we can muster — and what good does it do? Children and the work they represent are just barely tolerated, and the idea of more seems insane.

But it’s funny… if you think about the word generosity, it changes everything. I am not sure how. I think it has to do with thinking, “I could do or offer a little more, out of the goodness of my heart!” Rather than always trying to figure out how to do less.

Once when I was a very young wife complaining to a priest about my husband (as young wives do — he wasn’t doing anything wrong), he very gently said, “You aren’t being very generous, are you? Can you try to be generous?”

That one word really changed everything, at least deep inside me, if not in how I appear to others! So I won’t say I’ve mastered this approach, but when I remind myself of his words, it really helps me, and I thought it might help you too. I love my husband; I love my family; I love my life, imperfect as it (necessarily) is.

What about trying to be generous?

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