Almsgiving: Practice of the Presence of the Person

Almsgiving: this old word was part of the old three-leafed Lenten practice of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We’ve spent a lot of time on fasting in this blog, seeing it not as punishment, but as a ring that reminds us again and again of relationship. And we’ve encouraged engagement in prayer through Entering the Stories and the nightly Examen. But I’ve said nothing about “almsgiving”.


Prayer was defined as “the practice of the presence of God” by Brother Lawrence, a 17th Century French monk. And we have been, in our entering the stories and examining our feelings during the day, coming to know “the God in us”, the times when we felt movements of our most authentic selves, the times when we resonated with what I’ll call “God vibes”.
Almsgiving is the practice of the presence of the other person. “Alms for the poor…alms for the poor” was the cry portrayed in old movies, showing the poor prostrate in the street, their hands held up for a coin dropped by passersby. But I believe what we’re called to is different.

I grew up in near-poverty, while my hard-working father returning to a laborer’s job after World War II spun his worn tires in the sand of recession struggling for economic traction. Moving at age three into a slowly building post-war subdivision, we lived far from the streets where we would see people, rich or poor. As pre-schoolers, accompanying our mother on the bus into Chicago for groceries once a week was our only routine exposure to others who were different from us; even then, those we saw were not unlike our similar neighbors in the nearby Catholic church. I don’t remember a single time that any of my relatives gave money to the “poor”. We dropped no coins into outstretched hands. We saw no outstretched hands. Money was something to be conserved, penny by penny.
Just as in this blog we’ve spent time peeling the dried outer layers of the words “prayer” and “Fasting” to reveal their nourishing inner flesh, I feel the need to do the same – for my own sake on this journey we share – with the word “almsgiving”. With this good man Jesus we have in this week’s story an example of almsgiving, of practicing the presence of the woman caught in adultery, of seeing her as a person, of feeling her pain, of valuing her humanity, her personhood.  For the years at the end of my working life that I worked with the homeless in Detroit, I received from them a great gift, again and again. I discovered that simply seeing them as people aroused in me a joy in their humanity, a delight to be with them, even in the guise of the chronic ally homeless who lived literally on the street, in layers of worn clothing that smelled even worse my high school gym locker at the end of the school year. Like fasting and prayer, this awareness awakened in me an energy to respond, to reach out, to share not an external coin, dropped-and-not-placed into their hands to avoid touching them, but the warmth of my face, my voice, and my outstretched hand empty but of the touch that they longed for. “Coins” in the form of tangible goods come from time to time as they are needed, and as they are available. But they are placed-and-not-dropped into the hands of these my acquaintances who I’ve come to know by the fact that I caught them in the act of homelessness.

Please read the Good Story of the way Jesus responds to the woman caught in the act of adultery. Let’s consider how we give alms today, this week, this Lent. (Click for a link and scroll down to the Gospel)


 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.