Communion is almost always more impactful than charity. Giving your leftovers to the less fortunate can never compete with breaking bread with your brothers and sisters.
I can’t stress enough just how critical this is to everything we do at New York City Relief. This is the center of the center. A few years back, I met a guy in New York Penn Station. He approached me because he saw that I was giving new socks and toiletry-kits to a few of the other men and women experiencing homelessness across the hall. He walked over and very bluntly demanded, “what you giving out?”
When people who engage the homeless in an attempt to do a good or charitable deed encounter entitlement or a lack gratitude it is not uncommon for us to get irritated. It’s amazing how fast our hearts can jump from generosity to judgement.
Honestly, when he demanded to know what I was “giving out” I was not at all impressed with his attitude. He was not expressing nearly enough appreciation for my efforts.
But that’s the problem!
The problem with my good deeds, or my charity, is that they are more often about me than they are about the people for whom they exist.
When I bring charity to the table expecting the poor or homeless person to recognize and validate my generosity by a certain level of appreciation, and they don’t respond the way I expect or, dare I say, need them to, I often start to resent them because they are not fulfilling their end of this self-absorbed transaction.
Now let’s contrast “charity” with communion. Knowing myself and my own propensity for judgmentalism, I quickly moved past my resentment and asked the name of my demanding new friend. I asked him where he was from. I asked him what kind of socks and toiletries he could use the most. Then I told him I was hungry and I would be honored to buy him something if we could sit down and eat together. He agreed.
When we sat down to break bread at a nearby KFC and I asked if I could thank God for the food that we were about to enjoy the entire dynamic of our relationship changed.
Yes, I paid for his food, but we were sitting at the same table, eating the same meal. Instead of me owning the role of the powerful benefactor we were breaking bread together as equals.
In that moment of communion we were no longer two needy souls feeding on each other, him on me for socks and necessities and me on him for validation and self-righteousness, we were two needy souls feeding on Jesus.
While we ate, he shared with me that he fell out of a window from several stories up when he was 3-years-old because he was staying with his elderly grandmother and she lived in a room with no bars on the windows. As a result of that fall, he suffers from chronic seizures. His family didn’t have the resources to take care of him so he ended up in the street.
He went on to tell me that just 24 hours earlier he lost track of his girlfriend when he went into the hospital because he had another seizure. It’s easy to lose people when you have no common meeting place to lay your head and no phone to touch base.
He shared and he shared some more. It was beautiful.
Did you know that when you give someone who is financially poor something for free that they are actually paying for it with emotional capital? They are paying you with their pride, and trust me when I tell you, pride isn’t cheap.
So the next time you volunteer at a soup kitchen, food pantry, homeless shelter, or drop-in center, remember that the people you serve are not receiving “hand-outs.”
Remember that in exchange for your time and resources, they are giving you the privilege of being in the position of the one who serves, and by accepting your generosity, they have paid with their very selves and they owe you nothing more.
