A Matter of Growth

To the basic “why” posed by those who give as by those who receive care, my own answer has become ever more clearly defined: this difficult life segment is given to you for a purpose. It is full of demands that challenge your deepest resources. Its gifts come to you disguised as burdens. The greatest of those gifts is the opportunity given you to grow. It may be growth in self-control that is offered, or in empathy, flexibility, patience, endurance, assertiveness, and courage. You must look deep within, must dare to observe reactions and responses, and must be willing to change. You must actively reach out for help, be it through a “support group,” religious or secular counseling, or personal prayer and meditation.

You must take hold of this life experience without reluctance, daring to live it fully, to live in this now. You must call up all your reserves—mental, moral, and spiritual. Someday this segment of life will lie behind you. You will want to look back upon it not with regret because you missed what it might have offered you but with joy because you used it well, having recognized it for what it was and making of it... a matter of growth.

But what had I learned of the deeper giving that does not think of itself but only knows and wishes the welfare of the one who is loved? Little indeed.
However, in the years when I was still in my twenties, during the period of profound spiritual change, I had been given an immediate opportunity to put my new learning to the test. My mother, whose giving had been confined to the sheltered circle of the family, had the same opportunity. It came about through the entry of a new and totally different personality into our lives. That person was Mascha. She was a fugitive from Hitler’s insanities in Europe. Fate had driven her from Germany to Poland, to Denmark, to Sweden, and back again to Denmark, where our paths crossed.

¹⁶ Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923)

In Washington, D.C., the tortured journeys ended, and there our paths were to be linked for a long span of years.

If ever anyone was a giver, Mascha was that person. She was a lover of life and a natural, instinctive giver. She gave freely and with joy. Eventually, there came in her life a time when she was able to give lavishly, in material ways. But in those early years, those first tentative years of finding her way into a friendship that gradually grew in depth and meaning, she had very little to offer in the way of what is normally considered a gift. She gave us bits and remnants of the life that had been: candlesticks, a bracelet—touching artifacts linking her with the beauty and dignity of the life that had been swallowed up by unspeakable tragedy.

But how much more she gave us: the bright contagion of her laughter and the pure sweetness of her voice, singing the old German folk songs that were rooted for her in a past when she was proud of the country that her Maschas-born parents had made their own. Most of all she gave us the rare, fine gift of listening. She attended to what one told her in a manner that revealed a sensitive, compassionate nature. I was not alone in my positive response to the unique quality of Maschas ability to listen. Wondering that it had an audience, the inmost self ventured out, regarding the listener with surprise and affection. In this manner real friendships are born.

In making room for a friend—in truly and consciously giving that person a part of one’s life-space—there was the delight of reciprocity, of knowing that one’s place in the life of the other was not given grudgingly or half-heartedly but freely and with joy. And, strange to say, in the expression of all that love required, one was much more fully oneself while no longer so alone.

To be a committed giver, I learned, requires constancy. One cannot give a little bit, off and on, now and then. One must be available to give, always, and at any time—however inconvenient. It requires trust; each must know that the other can be depended upon to be constant, not only in terms of availability, but in the quality of that which is alive within him: his loyalty, his concern, his compassion. It requires honesty: love is not soft and yielding; in its concern for the receiver it may push and prod, demand and confront—it knows both whisperings and shouts.