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Historically, I do not think there has been a time such as ours when it comes for requests for donations. Is there a bad cause that I am asked to give to? Not one of them is a bad cause, in that it is hard to refuse sending money to Haiti, to children left homeless, to people with all kinds of disabilities, to causes and candidates we need to support. Then there are the causes that would like us to be involved in organizing, showing up for demonstrations, to write this letter, that opinion piece, and on and on it goes until one can collapse from volunteer fatigue.Is this what we have come to? A country that can only help and survive when the people are asked in addition to their taxes to pay for almost every wrong and every new need out of their own paychecks, such as they are?
I would love to be able to say as my parents used to say to me at the end of the year that they had piled up a long list of places to send their money because they needed those charitable deductions for their income tax return. I shuddered then because I could not quite believe the hypocrisy of that way of giving.
I do give, when I can and when it is for something I know will help. When I received that stupid rebate check from the government a few years ago, I spent it on bagging lunches every day for the homeless in my neighborhood until the funds ran out. I could not on my own support such an effort. And no one around me seemed at all interested in contributing.
It is difficult to help people these days.
Then there are places that just want me to work for them as outreach and to write this letter and send my thoughts to this senator. Well, that might be nice, except a) this is time-consuming work and b) you never hear one word back from them.
I have finally come to this awful realization. I am tapped out. More than tapped out financially, which I am, I am also tapped out empathically. I do not want to see another picture of a disfigured child or to be told how awful the drinking water is or how things will change if I put some effort into helping out.
It is not that I do nothing. What I have learned to do and this may not be of interest to many people, but this is my solution, and as far as solutions go, it is for now, what I can do.
I use my daily prayers to pray for those I truly want to be helping. I pray that they are helped, that if they cannot be helped that they are spared too much pain. I pray for my favorite causes and politicians to have success in being re-elected and to be able to resist the forces that stand in the way of them doing the peoples' work. I pray for the divisions that keep us from talking to each other in a civil tone to die down so we can at least stand next to each other and acknowledge we all live here, on this planet and will all suffer equally the fate of it.
And lastly and on a more selfish note, I pray that the work I do will succeed so that what I think of this world and how it can be repaired will continue. I pray that Sullivan Street Press maintain its values, does the good work we have set out to do and that others find us and our call of interest to them as well.
That is what I can do and I am finding something in this daily prayer practice of great benefit. It allows me to work and to care without feeling like a tightwad. I know that there are reasons that prayers work and I am interested to be a part of that service to the world in which we all live.
Love and peace to us all.
