Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: Giving from Abundance

Mayo Tsuzuki
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

When I was a grad student at Berkeley, I was fortunate to find a room in a communal house on the coveted north side. There were four of us, and each of us had taken different paths to Berkeley for different studies, but we were all uniformly poor and struggling with various forms of financial aid to make ends meet. We relied on our shared expectations of respect, equality and fairness to keep the household running and liveable on meager means. This meant we all shared in the chores of food shopping, dinner cooking and housecleaning, divided the costs of the house equally, and also tried to respect each other’s individual physical and sound spaces. The house ran remarkably well, the residents remarkably were stable, and we lived fairly independent lives although in close quarters.

One year, a young woman from India moved in to replace one of the housemates who had graduated. Cherie had never lived in a communal living situation, and in fact, had never actually lived on her own until now. As the other female in the Berkeley house, I was kind of like her Google or Wikipedia for living in Berkeley. “How do I get to this building on campus?” “What is the BART?” “Where is the food market?” “I saw some students who locked themselves in cages on Sproul Plaza today. Why are they doing that?” When she asked me, “Where should I leave my laundry and when does it get done?” I stopped short. We do our own laundry and you take it down to the corner laundromat, I explained, wondering what kind of world did she think American grad students lived in?

Over several months, we became good friends. I learned that although she was newly married, she and her husband had agreed that she should live and audit classes in Berkeley while he worked and lived in Silicon Valley. They were having a rough time for some of the usual reasons of an arranged marriage built on respect and shared family backgrounds though not much understanding of each other’s hopes and expectations. It turned out her family background was quite a different world than I could have ever imagined.

Cherie’s father owned a successful international surgical steel business and their associates were among the wealthy, the diplomats, and the upper castes of Delhi society. Her family had many servants, to do the cooking, the cleaning, the shopping, the mending, the errands, and certainly, the laundry. She herself had a personal servant, whom she would call every morning as soon as she rolled out of bed to bring her her morning coffee.

When she joined our Berkeley house, it was the first time she was learning to do everyday chores and cooking. Far from looking down on such things, she dove into this new life and associated new responsibilities with a gusto and excitement of someone with a treasure map on the hunt for undiscovered gold. She called home to learn how to make her favorite recipes so she could attempt them for us on her dinner nights. These were the kind of wonderfully aromatic curry recipes that she started five hours earlier in the day using her mother’s homemade garam masala shipped to her and ingredients she found in local Indian foods stores in Berkeley. She was having a blast doing things for herself and the house for the first time in her life, and we were treated to a very responsible housemate, not to mention some amazing Indian cooking.

During her stay, she received packages from home and a couple of visits by her father. She presented me with sterling silver earrings one time. Then, it was a beautiful tunic and pants outfit. Another time, it was a colorful hand-embroidered pillowcase. Later, a small brass candy dish and some more pieces of jewelry. I felt an imbalance, that I was receiving more than I could not possibly return. It was uncomfortable.

Of course, Cherie never asked for and would not accept the return of any of the things she gave so freely. It was odd to me. Isn’t it an imposition for her father to act as sherpa for people he doesn’t even know? Doesn’t she want things to be fair and equal between all of us? Doesn’t she understand that I cannot afford to give to her anything of equal value? Doesn’t it mean that I owe her something? None of this seemed to matter to Cherie. She insisted that these things were very inexpensive in India, that it was no problem at all for her father to cart these items — he would bring them for her regardless of whether she gave any away — that she wanted me to enjoy them as much as she did.

I was puzzled. On the one hand, I truly appreciated receiving these things. On the other, I was uncomfortable that it made our relationship seem irresolvably unbalanced. Some years later, I experienced an A-HA moment of understanding about Cherie. She enjoyed giving because she did not feel any imbalance in doing this. While she gave things that she enjoyed having for herself, she did not experience any LOSS by giving them away. She had what she needed and did not NEED more, and she gave from a sense of that abundance.

Now, I don’t mean that Cherie was spoiled rotten and did not understand the value of things or of the work involved in earning money to buy nice things. Cherie’s giving attitude did not come from a place that carefully kept a balance sheet of giving and receiving in the friendship. The giving came from an attitude that “I have what I need, and I know this will give joy to my friend, and I CAN give it without needing something in return.”

I tried a thought experiment on this new concept about giving. I imagined what it would feel like to feel content with what I have and then give to someone who would really enjoy it some imaginary thing. What about giving to someone who really needed this thing? In my head, it felt wonderful. Instead of thinking about the balance sheet and all past and future transactions, I focused instead on the moment of giving and the act of giving someone joy and perhaps something even more essential.

Donating blood is a perfect example of this kind of giving from abundance. Assuming you are healthy and can answer in the risk-minimized way to the list of screening questions, your body can manufacture the pint of blood that you donate in one visit in another eight weeks. You have what you need. But, you can give LIFE to someone who does not have what they need. This is a gift that one hopes never needs repayment to you, and you can certainly give it without needing the score to be even. But, imagine what life means to someone else and their loved ones!

 

Sermon: A Sense of Abundance by Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern