It is easy to think of our charity or tithing budget as being allocated out of our surplus, but we give ourselves a generous accounting of the essentials that must be satisfied before we can give to others. When St. Basil speaks of giving to the poor, he speaks not of prudent savings but of waste:
“The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.”
What St. Basil describes is not charity but justice. The unused shoes are not mine to give—they belong to the one who needs them. When I carry them out of my house and place them in another’s hands, I am not a magnanimous figure, bestowing gifts, but a penitent thief, asking forgiveness. […]
Augustine saw a neediness on the part of the giver that balanced the vulnerability of the receiver. As glossed by Peter Brown in Through the Eye of a Needle, Augustine linked the duty to give alms to the daily petitions of the Lord’s Prayer:
“‘Daily’”—cottidiana—was the ever-recurrent word Augustine used, whether he spoke of sin, of prayer, or of almsgiving. The human condition demanded this. The soul was a leaking vessel on the high seas. Little trickles of daily sins constantly seeped through the timbers, silently filling the bilge with water that might yet sink the ship if it were not pumped out. And to man the bilge-pump was both to pray and to give alms:
‘Those who work the bilge-pump lest the boat go down do so [chanting sea shanties] with their voices and working with their hands. . . . Let the hands go round and round. . . . Let them give, let them do good works.’”
In her own reflection on this passage, Catholic author Eve Tushnet writes that being asked to give feels like a mercy to her when she is burdened by sin. “I have many grateful, difficult memories of being in the middle of some bout with one of my various sordid sins and being asked for money or seeing someone in need whom I could help,” she writes in her newsletter The Rogation Dragon. “It feels like being allowed, like being given the undeserved chance to serve someone.”