Being With: how our motivations influence our methods

Our conversation at OMNI this week centered around the overwhelming needs of the world, and how one should go about making a difference in the lives of those with less.

I'm becoming increasingly aware of just how much our motivations to act influence the methods we end up using. The why of what we're doing - at the end of the day - ends up informing the how of what we're doing. If you have settled on a reason of why you need to intervene and act in any specific matter, the specific methods needed to fund your outcome will become self-evident.

That's why I think it is so important to talk about why we need to engage the injustices all around us.

What's should our motivations be – our reasons?

Allow me to name two very popular reasons for interacting with the needs of the world, and then discuss their merit and spiritual sustainability.

The first of these two motivations center around our need for people to belief as we do, and we satisfy this need by helping and giving, and then very adamantly expecting of those benefiting from our charity to convert to our specific convictions of faith – almost exclusively because we have been charitable to them.

This is what my unbelieving friends nonchalantly calls “the Christians' hidden agenda of bait and switch.”

I have a couple of problems with this approach, most of which have to do with the lack of transparency when helping others, and the inevitable disappointment people experience when they find out that the charity they received from another human being was in actual fact conditional in its nature– an experience that just confirms what they have come to believe about the harshness of the world already.

If you make the conversion of your subject the ultimate point of your charity, your methods will reflect a factory-like approach of production-line manufacturing, your subject will quickly turn into an object, and very soon you'll have people refusing your help.

The second, more honorable, motivation we have for helping those in need has to do with the very real betterment of others – the improving of the quality of life for those with less. I must be honest, I'm having trouble to fully articulate my opinion on this motivation. The closest I can come to explaining this, is just to acknowledge my deep dissatisfaction with the clean and clinical approach we take when “helping” others, when so much more is actually expected of us.

Writing the monthly check to the orphans, without getting to know their names or visiting them in their rooms, amounts to something not unlike sex without the commitment or the closeness. It leaves all involved feeling empty with a very real suspicion that we're missing the point. Distributing resources without any kind of relational connection is not helping, it's the actual suppressing of potential and long term value and meaning.

This brings us to a third way – a third motivation or reason that might just move us to engage the pain of the world in an authentic and honest manner.

You see, it's not the resulting conversion, nor the improved quality of life, that's the point. Those are mere spin-off's of a greater purpose. The real point is the “being with”. The intersection of lives across ethnic and economical divides carry the real meaning behind ideas like charity and aid.

Nowadays I'm rethinking my own personal finances as a tool for help, and instead I'm viewing my resources as a platform for connection.

No wonder Africans are growing increasingly uncomfortable with mere money flowing into the continent from the west. A whole generation of young Africans are adopting the creed “we need trade, not aid”.

They need us to engage them, not uplift them, much less convert them.

In his book, The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne makes the following remark: “Giving to the poor will get you celebrated, joining the poor will get you killed.” Mother Theresa, one of the greatest humanitarians of our time, was brilliant at articulating this mindset. Defending her stance against building state-of-the-art medical facilities over the Sisters of Mercy convent in Calcutta, she said: “Our purpose is not to heal every person that comes through our doors. Our mission is to allow them to die with dignity and honor, something most of them have never even experienced while they were alive and healthy.” Coming off the back of her iconic statement: “I can't do any great deeds, I can only do small deeds with great love”, she also acknowledged that: “the greatest poverty hasn't anything to do with material want, but the most severe sense of loss is a poverty of the soul.”

So, I want to suggest that the point of helping others in need has to do with the being with them, and in being with them the textures of our own hearts soften. When we intentionally posture ourselves beneath those who are positioned below us, in the eyes of our western worldviews at least, we create a space where we can meet God in the eyes and hearts of those who are living the kinds of lives, where only they can teach us so much about dependence and trust in God.

It was Bono who said that: “God is with the poor, and when we are with them, then maybe He is with us as well.”

I am slowly but surely moving from a worldview which states that we need to care for the poor, to a awareness that we need the poor to teach us about spirituality and God.

Another gem from Mother Theresa: “It's not the poor that survive by the charity of the rich, but the rich that survive by the grace of the poor.”

We need to regularly be with those with less.

Our souls need to be constantly reminded of the pain in the world, to allow our hearts and minds to stay open and receptive for all God wants to do in and around our lives on a daily basis.

Sociologists have received researched results, proving that for every organization or person to be moved to change the status quo, they need both a sincere sense of compassion, and a healthy dose of self-interest. Compassion to become aware of an injustice, and self-interest to help them realize that their very own survival is intertwined with the wellness of everybody else. Realizing the meaning of the African concept of ubuntu, which states that "if it doesn't work for everybody, it doesn't work for anybody", turns awareness into action.

If our compassion gets us to care about things, it is our self-interest that will actually move us to change things.

Knowing that we are just as impoverished spiritually when we don't care for those with material wants, might just finally get us to reprioritize our finances, time and attention.

Andrew Sullivan explains the reason and logic behind having to be with others beautifully – even latching it onto our understanding of who Jesus was, and what He came to do on earth:

“The point of this incarnation of God taking on flesh and blood was not surely to construct a catalog of offenses by which we are to judge our own lives at any moment, to force us to thrash and thrive in a constant ordeal of self-criticism and guilt. The point of God taking on flesh and blood – the point of Christ – is not so we have a new list of ways to feel bad about ourselves.

The point was merely to be with us.

And by being with us, to show us better how to be human, how better to embrace our lives, by accepting the divine around us and inside of us.

How better to be human.”

James 1 v 27 says that: “Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.”

If I can paraphrase my own interpretation of this scripture, it might sound something like this: “Real spiritual understanding and awareness – getting to know Jesus better – is totally dependent on our ability to be with those with less, and to daily identify with the pain of the world. And not to conform to popular culture, but instead, to create it.”

If you have nothing to give to those in want, give of yourself – its the best gift, and it is the point, after all. When all else fails, it is our beingness that truly facilitates lasting change in other people.

So, give yourself before you give of anything else.

And in your giving, be open to receive.