Reciprocity and the $#%#$% golden rule

From a letter to a friend. On the subject of reciprocity and how unbalanced flows of love and charity make people uncomfortable. It still makes me laugh that I drove another friend to the airport twice, and explicitly asked for whatever would be paid back to me to be paid forward to others...and STILL got a box of macadamia chocolates in return. Oh well, even though I slap my head and shake it in amusement, those macadamias were darn good.

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...That makes me laugh and cry at the same time. We, as human beings, have been so conditioned by the golden rule of reciprocity that we take the gifts we're given as obligations. It's even been well-documented as a psychological phenomena, and flagrantly abused in the marketing of silly little consumables to us. We have somehow, as a people, learned that a debt must always be repaid, that there must always be a balance of charity...and that it's simply "impolite" to be more of a receiver than a giver.

Perhaps I shall someday be proven wrong, but I believe that we'll never be balanced...there will always be people in our life that we cannot repay, and if we are to be those kinds of givers, there is no wrong in that. We give freely because we ourselves received so freely the love of a savior. And our calling is not to reap returns on our charitable "investments"...it is to go forth and create wealth for others. That means for us to not expect payment in return, but to expect those debts to be paid forwards in charity to others. Donald Miller captures that when he talks about how, in modern society, we have indeed started treating love like currency...like something to be bartered amongst people like dollars and cents. And deviation from that norm makes people uncomfortable.

What are we to do about this? We know it to be a chain of the world, and yet somehow we must live with those reactions from others, and respect their calls for us to be less generous with ourselves...to lessen that obligation that they implicitly feel. I have no solution to this. Sometimes I wish I had the power to inspire others with that same understanding of charity. But in the meantime, there is little that can be done.

I posed the question a month ago to another--does the average human being have the strength to give if he expects not appreciation, but scorn in return? No. Does the average christian? Some, maybe. If anything, it goes against our fundamental understanding of prudent time allocation...they're acts that others consider wasteful.

But if that is the case, then God bless those who are wasteful with their love...those that devote their lives to caring for the poor, the sick, the hopeless. Without them, we would not know or appreciate miracles when we see them. And we would not know or understand the love of a savior.

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And with that, I must say again...so much of christianity is counterintuitive...economically irrational. And I am too much of a youthful idealist to accept that we live in a world where we are unable to give without receiving something back. I could easily detach myself from my ideals and say that I am nothing more than a grand egotist, who wants to somehow hold others indebted to me in some sort of perverse demonstration of power over them. I have created a system of pretty words and heartwarming concepts so that I may continue enslaving others in my pursuit of self-gratification and give self-worth to my otherwise miserable and powerless life.

And with that sentence, I pose to you, reader, that I have once sought to charge God with the same. And that if I am faced with a world where I use bitter language to demystify our love for others as self-gratification, as a drug that we create for ourselves in order to maintain our state of "happiness", as some peculiar means by which we exhibit our power and influence over each other...I would much rather tell stories of a carpenter who died for me. It's much more inspiring and useful in creating love in the average man.