charity

 The author, a physician, bought a Christmas gift for a patient -

"...I couldn't help but notice the pleasure I was getting out of him and that vest. It didn't seem quite right, somehow, but there it was. This got me to thinking about charity - its motivations, its emotions, and how, after hospitality and community, charity was the third principle of Laguna Honda.

The charity I meant was nothing organized. It was not in the hospital's mission statement, or on its website, or in the PowerPoint presentations of middle management. And yet charity, in the medieval sense of a 'personal action evoked by dearness and contributing to the well-being of its giver as well as its receiver,' was as much built into the place as its arches, bell tower, and church.

Charity came into the West when Saint Jerome translated the Greek word agape by the Latin caritas, which became the English charity. Today agape is usually translated as 'love,' but agape was more nuanced; in ancient Greek it meant 'to treat with affectionate regard.' Caritas, charity, is closer because the root of caritas is cara - "dear" - as in expensive and cherished. So caritas has the sense of 'dearness' - of a love that is precious and sweet.

In English, charity evolved over the centuries. At first it meant 'the love of God', later it meant the actions that expressed that love - in specific, caring for the sick poor. In the Middle Ages, charity was accepted as doing as much for the giver as it did for the receiver, the 'goodness of charity being a bond of love that draws us to God.'

And even when the monasteries in England were disbanded, this insight - that caring for the sick poor was a spiritual good for the giver - continued to inspire charitable institutions. It was one reason why the state built hospitals to care for the sick poor, and why we still believe and act as if taking care of the sick poor is something that a society should do. 

...But in addition to this organized charity, and at least as important, was personal charity, and the longer I was at Laguna Honda, the more of it I saw. There was the nurse who roasted an entire pig on his Sunday off for a homesick Tahitian patient with breast cancer. There was the doctor who took a music-loving patient to the opera. There were the birthday dinners for patients that staff paid for themselves; clothes brought in, cats adopted. ...But...what was the motivation? And was the pleasure charity gave me good or bad?

The Greeks called that emotion eleos, I later discovered, and defined it as the 'feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil that befalls one who doesn't deserve it.' The pleasure I felt was, in part, the relief of pain by giving. Eleos gave the Latin eleemosyna, the French aumone, and eventually even our English alms. The emotion of eleos was why Laguna Honda had been built as an almshouse in the first place and why it was still an almshouse, despite its name, because eleos - alms, charity - was still one of its main motivating forces.

Charity assuages eleos and it is selfish, at least in part. And there is more selfishness in it than simply the relief of one's own pain; there is a complicated pleasure in it, which is what gave charity its bad name and what made it, as the third principle of Laguna Honda, a secret. Its motivation is always suspect - acts done not necessarily for the good of the receiver but of the giver. That was why at Laguna Honda charity was hidden; and although I saw a lot of it, I never heard it mentioned. It was passed along only in actions. Yet...everybody did that sort of thing."

                                                          -   from God's Hotel, by Victoria Sweet