Two Way Traffic

More reflections on the Parable of the Rich Fool in Luke 12...

All life-giving spiritual processes travel on two-way streets.  I can receive forgiveness only if I can also forgive.  I can accept love only to the degree that I can give love.  If I am unwilling to benefit from the help of others, I will be fundamentally unable to give help unconditionally.  If I cannot give without expectation of benefit or return, I will be unable to receive anything without condition of repayment in kind.

Miroslav Volf makes the connection, for example, between giving and forgiving in his great book, Free of Charge.  It was surprising to me at first to find a book that combined the themes of forgiveness and generosity.  Then it became clear.  These are both "parallel processes" in an emotional and spiritual sense.  More than that, giving and forgiving emanate from the same emotional and spiritual centers of our beings.  Both are rooted in the grace of God in Christ.

The Rich Fool has blocked the spiritual road marked "Giving and Receiving."  His life is not taken from him in order to punish him for his greed.  It is the practical outcome of a lifetime of keeping things to oneself.  Since he is unwilling and now unable to give of himself to others, he is unable to receive himself again.  So he comes to a point in his journey where there is no self left.  When he has his interior dialogue, he is talking into a great void that echoes with futility.  He has refused to give for so long, that his "self" has atrophied to nothing.

People involved in twelve-step recovery programs know that helping others is critical to the ongoing journey of recovery.  "Helping others is the foundation stone of your recovery," notes the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, "A kindly act once in a while isn’t enough. You have to act the Good Samaritan every day, if need be."  This is not to prove one's personal worth or to demonstrate the power of recovery.  Giving help opens the path to receiving help.  Generosity of self is always the path to healing.

The Rich Fool keeps all things to himself.  Most important, he keeps himself to himself.  He can't build big enough barns to make room for that selfishness because it adds nothing to him.  Instead, that cramped spirit depletes him to the point of utter emptiness.  The Hebrew for fool ("nabal") has about it the sense of emptiness and futility rather than stupidity.  The Rich Fool has, in existential terms, bet on the wrong horse.  And that wrong horse was the Self.

The prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi captures well the reality of the two-way spiritual path.  "For it is in giving that we receive," the prayer reminds us, "it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in dying that we are born to eternal life."  It is not that in giving we are rewarded with gifts or that in pardoning we pay for our pardon or that in dying we merit eternal life.  It is, instead, that without those actions we simply cannot access the the goodness, the reconciliation, and the resurrection offered to us in Jesus Christ.

We can give and receive, or we can dry up and die.  Will I live today on that two-way street?