Giving So It Matters

By Bishop V. Gene Robinson, AlterNet. Posted December 22, 2005.

Editor's Note: This is an edited version of the keynote speech delivered by Bishop V. Gene Robinson at OutGiving, hosted by The Gill Foundation and Liberty Hill Foundation in Los Angeles on Oct. 8, 2005. In 2003, the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson was elected the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church.

In this talk, I want to help you to remember the good that giving away money does, and to invite you to reflect again on why you give.

Two caveats: I don't care so much about how much you give, but about how much of what you have that you give. America gives a lot of money overseas, but it's actually the next to the stingiest industrialized country in the world. So it's not the dollars that matter to me, it's what portion of what you have do you give and what does it do to your soul?

Second of all, I will really beg your indulgence and ask your permission to be just a wee little bit religious, because that's who I am and I can't tell my story without bringing that into it.

Guilt is a terrible reason for giving, but gratitude is an extraordinary reason for giving. I don't care what religion you are or if you have no religion at all. The spiritual health of your soul is measured by how blessed you feel.

My giving is based on feeling blessed. I grew up in Kentucky. I'm the only member of my family to have escaped. I grew up poor and I consider that a great blessing. I didn't live in a house with running water until I was 10, so if you wanted water you'd crank it out of a cistern. If you wanted hot water, you put it on a pan on the stove. My parents were deeply religious. They were tobacco tenant farmers, sharecroppers -- about as close to slavery as white people have come to in this country.

I weighed 10 pounds when I was born and I have a tiny little mother. She had RH negative blood and the next to the rarest kind and there was none of that blood around, so they couldn't do a C-section. It took six doctors and forceps to finally deliver me. I was completely paralyzed on my right side and my head was all crushed in. The doctors came out and told my father that they needed a name for my birth and death certificates.

So he took the name that they had picked out for a girl, Vickie Jean, and just changed the spelling, figuring it wouldn't matter on a tombstone. So my actual name is V-I-C-K-Y G-E-N-E. I still can't use my credit cards without people saying, "I'm sorry, sir. You can't use your wife's credit card."

As I hope is obvious, I did live. I was paralyzed for about a month and then they gave me to my parents to take me home. They were told I would never walk or talk or have any use of myself. On the night before my consecration as a bishop, my mother -- who had always said to me that she believed God had saved me for something -- gave me a little card, and all it said was "Now I guess we know what it was."

Pretty astounding. How could I not be grateful? How could I not feel blessed?

How thankful are you? How blessed do you feel? Probably all of you have worked hard. Some of you inherited money because of an accident of your birth. Some of you benefited from the best schools, travel and social standing. Every time you write a check, a large one or a small one, let it be a reminder to you about how grateful you are for how blessed you feel.

There are two bodies of water in Israel, in Palestine. The Sea of Galilee is fed by the snows of the mountains and it's a wonderful sea teaming with life, partly because water flows out of it just as fast as it flows into it. And there's another body of water in that place that keeps all the water for itself. And it is called Dead. It is not teeming with life. It feeds on itself until there is nothing left.

That's the kind of option we all have. Our giving needs to be in response to this gratefulness that we feel. The most surprising thing for me in terms of my own giving was to discover when I finally made the decision to be a tither that I was the greatest beneficiary.

There's a lot in scripture about leprosy. It was a much-feared disease in Biblical times, and one of the very interesting things about leprosy is it does something to the nerve endings in your hands and feet. Much of the disfigurement that you see in lepers comes from the fact that they can't feel pain in their hands and their feet. So you can put your hand on a red hot stove and it doesn't communicate to your brain that your skin is literally on fire.

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