This past Sunday, I shared some thoughts with Fr. Erick about giving the “dreaded money talk” to his parishioners.
Scientists tell us that every second, inside the sun, the equivalent of 4 million elephants are being transformed into light, an irretrievable, one-time gift. The sun is giving itself away. If this generosity should halt, all energy would eventually lose its source and everything would die and become inert. We, and everything on our planet, alive because of the generosity of the sun.
The sun reflects the abundance of God, a largesse that invites us to also be generous, to have big-hearts, to risk more in giving ourselves away in self-sacrifice, to witness to God's abundance.
But this isn't easy.
Instinctually, we fear and we horde. Because of this, whether we are poor or not, we tend to work out of a sense of scarcity, fearing always that we don't have enough, that there isn't enough, and that we need to be careful in what we give away, that we can't afford to be too generous.
But our God is generous, and wasteful beyond our fears and imaginations. Nature too is stunningly overwhelming and generous. We see this in the biblical parable of the Sower: the Sower, God, whom Jesus describes, is not a calculating person who sows his grain carefully and only into worthy soil. This Sower scatters seeds everywhere: on the road, in the bushes, in the rocks, into barren soil, as well as into good soil. He has, it seems, unlimited seeds and so he works from a generous sense of abundance. We see that same abundance in the parable of the vineyard owner, where the owner, God, gives a full day's wage to everybody, whether they worked the full day or not. God, we are told, has limitless wealth and is not stingy in giving it out.
God is equally generous in forgiveness. In the parable of the Father who forgives the prodigal son we see a person who can forgive out of dignity and calculated cost to self. And we see this same largesse in Jesus himself as he forgives both those who executed him and those who abandoned him during his execution.
God, from everything we can see, is so rich in love and mercy that he can afford to be wasteful, over-generous, non-calculating, non-discriminating, and big-hearted beyond our imaginations.
And that's the invitation: to have a sense of God's abundance so as to risk always a bigger heart and generosity beyond the fear that has us believe that we need to be more calculating because things seem scarce.
My good friend Steve who comes every two years to maintain our water conditioner, choose to return a second time when I found moisture on the floor behind the tank. He diagnosed and repaired the problem and when I asked “how much for the repair?” he simply said “no charge.” Instead of money for his time and travel, in exchange I gave him two referrals. One to Hickey Freeman to get nice clothes for a wedding and the name of the washer and dryer company that farmers use that’s built to last. He was estatic and truly grateful with this gift of information.
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends who are “big hearted.” I have never met a truly generous man or woman who didn't say that he or she always received more in return than he or she gave out. To be generous and big-hearted we have to first trust in God's abundance and generosity. What will you give today that resembles God’s gift of love for you?
