Giving means saying yes to beautiful mess

Introducing the new Substack from St. Martin-in-the-Fields: a love letter to those who love humans

Henri Matisse, “La Danse”

Here’s an awkward truth: at first glance, things went pretty badly for the world’s first philanthrope.

You remember Prometheus. He made humankind out of clay, then defied Zeus by giving us, clods that we were, both fire and hope—a solid gift haul that opened the door to human culture. And what was his reward for his troubles? For the love of humanity—the philanthropy—that drove his generosity (this being the first time that word was used)? Zeus—ever ready with a questionable leadership decision—ordered that he be shackled to the high, craggy rocks in Earth’s remotest land.

What a strange story to share at the start of a Substack series about, among other things, charitable giving. What’s the moral? What’s the suggestion? That gift-giving opens the way to personal pain and penury? That generosity stands to be punished? That there’s always an overlord waiting to shackle the kind-hearted, metaphorically or otherwise?

No; it’s that a gift is only ever the start of a story. Sometimes, the story a gift sparks is immediately apparent. Prometheus’s gifts to humanity fostered the greatest of stories: human culture itself, in all its imagination and expansiveness and solace and joy. But there’s more. There’s always more; there are always unseen, unexpected stories that spring from gifts like tender roots, if you dig for them. In this case, Prometheus’s gift to humans also gave him his own identity. If he hadn’t made his gift, and hadn’t accepted the punishment for it, we’d never have known his name. He’d never have become himself. For Prometheus too, the gift was the making of him.

Modernity encourages us not to see hidden and complex stories like this, or at least not to value them. It has no time for complexity where there could be convenience, nor for paradox or friction or the unexpected or hard-to-see. It can sometimes seem to have little time for humanity, full stop. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa defines modernity as a culture of acceleration, of relentless pursuit of speed and efficiency in every realm: transportation, communication, social relations, work, and on. And this dogged pursuit of efficiency robs us of so very much. In Rosa’s estimation, it drives the modern age’s profound senses of both alienation and, paradoxically, time scarcity. It delivers us to one of the great conundrums of our day: that the more quantifiably efficient our lives and technologies become, the less time and pleasure we seem to have.

The culture of acceleration and questionable convenience seems to have reached the way we treat gifts, too. This becomes clearer in relief; when we consider how gifts might function in a different kind of culture. Consider this story told by the late David Graeber:

An anthropologist who studied people in central Nigeria showed us how we were completely clueless. She doesn’t really speak the language and she gets a house, and immediately women start showing up from the neighborhood and dropping off little baskets of stuff: somebody bringing some okra, somebody bringing some fish. And she doesn’t know what to do so she takes out her little notebook and eventually somebody takes pity on her and starts explaining how things work. The person says, “Well, you know, you give something back to these people. But the key is you have to figure out exactly what it’s worth, and then give them either something slightly more valuable, or slightly less valuable. So if it’s worth twelve shillings, you give them something worth eleven or thirteen, never give twelve. Because if you give twelve, that’s like saying, ‘go to hell, I don’t ever have to see you again.’” So everyone has to be a little bit beholden.

“Everyone has to be a little bit beholden.” Nothing could be further from the logic of exchange under modernity, which pursues neatness and closure above all else—even when the interaction isn’t, in fact, supposed to be an even exchange in the first place. In recent years, the field of philanthropy has seen huge advances in transparency. New metrics and scrutiny have made charitable efficiency ever more evident, ever more quantifiable, ever more central to the decision-making of donors. Of course, there’s enormous value in such studies. Charities should be held to account, should faithfully serve the causes they pledge to serve.

But the drive for transparency can also have the unintended effect of curtailing the story that wants to unfold. Having done due diligence on a charity’s efficiency ahead of time, givers of gifts can comfortably consider the transaction complete once the gift has been made. Sometimes, this is desirable. People are busy and resources of all kinds, not least time and money, are scarce.

Other times, mightn’t it be nice to see where the story goes? To step outside of the data and breathe some air together? To remember that shoots and roots of relationship spring from every gift, whether we see and tend them or not?

St. Martin-in-the-Fields is beholden in the best, most life-giving of ways to all those who donate to its mission and its work, and this Substack is an offering in honour of those shoots and roots of relationship. It’s a form of love letter to all those who give to any cause. We’ll be opening up our side of the relationship: the beauty, the surprises, the culture, and, too, the complexities and paradoxes and beautiful frictions that are made possible by gifts. We’ll share about the wildly and richly varied human lives that cross through and are changed by St. Martin’s; about the music and arts that not only breathe life into the church but also create an opening to a more imaginative world; about the work of creating a brighter future by supporting what’s right in the present; even about the importance of recognizing and welcoming the less exalted sides of humanity—about the church’s historic commitment to meet people in their fullness, shadow and all. This and so much more.

Ultimately, a gift is a way of saying yes. Yes to the recipient, and yes to the stories they will choose to create with that gift. And though the modern age would have us believe that this yes can be streamlined, can be homogenized, is ultimately just a form of data—the truth is, the yes is profoundly human, and so impossible to reduce or quantify. It can’t be streamlined; only storied, only celebrated. Consider this, then, a first foray into the wild woods of the varieties of yes. A messy account of the glorious profusion and humanity people say yes to, when they say yes to St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

By the way, we don’t really know what happened to Prometheus in Aeschylus’s telling—the version of the story that gave us the word “philanthropy”. At the end of Prometheus Bound, he’s still chained, still holding resolutely to his love of humanity in the face of escalating punishments from Zeus. But this play was only ever the start of a trilogy, the remaining two parts of which are now lost to time.

Which means that the story of what happens to those who love humans is ours to write.