For Advent this year I’ll be meditating on 25 adverbs, each of which seems to offer a bit of direction about how to live now, in this unsettling post-election season, still full of promise no political disaster can destroy. Here is the one for today.
A dear friend and teacher offered me this reminder as she died: “Live boldly. Live generously.” She had loved and encouraged me through many of the uncertainties of early adulthood, and offered this challenging advice not as an admonition so much as an invitation to a life, I would say, a lot like hers. She modeled those virtues in the extra time she spent with struggling students (her “patients,” she called them) and in the simple meals she served on small tables in her tiny apartment and in the imagination she brought to conversations that ranged from dream interpretation to the history of a Dutch river to the hidden lives of women in the rural South where she grew up.
The word generous comes to us through medieval French where it was linked to nobility. The gentry were those who could afford to spread their wealth. The best of them believed in noblesse oblige—the obligation of the rich to care for the poor. To be generous in that sense means to live with an awareness of how richly we have been blessed—so richly that we can afford to spread that wealth, and should. One of the hymns I remember singing as a child proclaimed in a lusty refrain, “I’m a child of the King.” It’s an antique image for an abiding truth: that we are not only creatures of a divine Creator but more intimately, children of a loving God who made us dependent on each other so that in giving and receiving we might learn something of the divine life in which we’re invited to participate.
The deeper root of generous goes back to the Latin genus—race or stock. That broader meaning suggests that the practice of generosity appropriately reflects our relatedness to one another as members of a human family, made from the soil (humus), borne in our mothers’ bodies, and deeply dependent on each other and on the earth we’re given to share as we learn how to be fully human.
Advent is a season set aside for recognition of God’s gift of God’s very self to humankind. The gifts we give one another represent not just seasonal ritual, but a reminder that we are gifts to one another and that all gifts come from and flow to an ocean of love, limitless and life-giving, utterly generous and adequate to all our needs.
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