“Our days are happier when we give people a piece of our heart rather than a piece of our mind.”

No-one seems to know who said this, but it is wise advice and it fits in beautifully with the focus of the next week in the parish – Generosity.

Every year in the parish we hold a generosity week, and this year it will take place over the eight days between two Sundays – September 10^th and 17^th. The first is Generosity Sunday and the second is Gratitude Sunday. Generosity and gratitude are intimately linked.

What do we mean by generosity?

Generosity means giving. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “a willingness to give help or support, especially more than is usual or expected”. The Bible emphasises its importance again and again; in fact one source suggests that ‘giving’ is mentioned more than 1,500 times in the Old and New Testaments, though I did not try to count.

This giving can mean many things. Money, time and service are three that often spring to mind but there are more, some of which are discussed below.  Giving, of course, can come from a sense of obligation:  I am commanded to give (by the Bible, the Church, an appeal) and therefore I must. This can be good for self-discipline, which has its place, but on its own is unlikely to lead to sustained giving. Obligation can lead to resentment, and resentment is a bit of a generosity-killer.

So how can generosity be kept alive?

Love God and love your neighbour

Christian generosity is a response to God and to the commandment to love God and love our neighbours as ourselves. If we love our neighbours as ourselves then we will want what is best for them, we will want to share.

This can be tough as we may feel, particularly in hard times, that we haven’t got enough to share if we are to look after ourselves.

A grateful shift of perspective

Maybe one way of helping us here is to consider what we have to be grateful for. Research has shown that this is actually good for our health and gives us a more positive outlook on life. A useful daily exercise this week could be to think of 10 things we have to be grateful for. The exercise can help shift our perspective, making us less anxious and therefore more willing to share.

Focusing on a loving God can also inspire generosity. “We love because God first loved us”, wrote John in 1 John 4:19. God is a loving parent whose love can spill over into God’s children and out to others.

How, though, can we see God’s love for us? We can think about the times we have seen God’s love in our lives. And we can think about Jesus told people not to worry. He said: “Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you.” (Luke 12:27-28, NRSVA). I know that we often fail to do this but trying to do so can help us.

How might we be generous?

Giving money, time, service are starters for being generous, and incredibly important, but generosity is also an attitude of mind which involves the way we think about and treat people. Do we look on other people in the best light, believing that they too are humans trying to make sense of life, just as we all are.

There is a phrase in psychology called ‘unconditional positive regard’ which involves showing complete support and acceptance of a person no matter what that person says or does.(Note, this doesn’t mean accepting all behaviours or colluding with them, or allowing people to overstep boundaries, it means simply accepting the person). Trying to show this helps us look far more kindly on others than we might otherwise do.

Generosity involves the time we give to other people, the attention we pay them and the way we speak to and about others, both in person and on social media which can be a place of great cruelty as well as great support.

Generosity also encompasses how we treat people who we do not understand or who do things we cannot understand, who seem different, ‘other’.

It also encompasses how we treat the planet. Do we treat it just for our own benefit or do we think about how our actions affect others, including those not yet born.

An attitude of heart

Generosity like this comes from an attitude of heart and mind.

I think that it is also linked with what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13: ‘If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing’. (NRSVA). It is linked to our perspective and changing our perspective may take time and sometimes it may feel costly.

I’ve been using a ‘Stages of change’ model to think about how we can change habits so that we move from thinking about changing habits, to preparing to do so, to actually doing it, to maintaining the changed habits, and I believe it can be used to help us become more generous.

So, we might think we want to be more generous then prepare to be so by, perhaps, talking to others about what we could share, or why we have enough  or what we could do; or maybe by learning about what is going on in other people’s lives, or forming some sort of relationship with others which is actively focused on trying to learn about them.

Then we could take action in whatever way seems appropriate, which may be in giving of time, money, attention, service. It will be different for different people. When we do things enough times it becomes natural to us and then that becomes an ingrained habit. So generosity can become part of the way we see the world.

When generosity becomes a part of the way we see the world, then we will have bigger hearts to give pieces of to other people, and the world will be a happier place.

Stella Wiseman