Good Intentions

How can you tell what your intentions are when you do something good? I thought about this today when I was grocery shopping. I make it a rule to put something in the food bank barrel every time I go to the store. Today I kind of cheated because I put in an extra bar of soap I had laying around the house that someone had given me but I didn’t especially want. Usually I put in a can of tuna or beans or mac and cheese or baby food, something pretty small, often on sale.

I started doing this about a year ago when I had a client (back when I was a therapist, remember that?) who was not only having some pretty difficult mental health issues but who also was moderately malnourished because he didn’t make enough money to buy very much or very good food. A lot of our sessions would be spent by my giving him the addresses and phone numbers of various Seattle food banks and assuring him that they would be happy to give him some groceries even though he had a job, and that he really should eat something, and that it was fine for him to get some extra help that way. He didn’t think that he deserved it. I always think about this kid when I’m at the hippie natural foods store where I shop. I hope that whoever gets that can of tuna or mac and cheese or whatever has a good dinner that evening and that they don’t have to be hungry. Then I bag up all my yummy groceries and go on with my day.

Something else I do sometimes is buy lunch for one of the Real Change vendors outside the store when I’m shopping. This was the case today…we had passed by someone with a cardboard sign near the freeway exit and I felt badly for not stopping…not just for not stopping, but for averting my eyes and continuing my conversation with Carl, for ignoring this person…so I resolved to get a sandwich for the woman selling the papers outside at the store. I think there was a shift change during the time I was in there because she was gone when I got out. The guy who had taken over was very nice; he asked me to exchange the ham sandwich I got for turkey “or something kosher” because he was a Seventh Day Adventist. He was happy to have some lunch and asked me if I didn’t want to buy another paper for a friend.

Carl said I was very nice to have done that. He’s seen me do it before: sandwich or soup, usually, a Luna bar, fruit leather. Something that will keep a little bit and that doesn’t need a knife or fork. An apple, lemonade. One time a latte. I always put in something sweet. Usually the person says “thank you and God bless!” I told him I didn’t know if it was nice or not but sometimes I am compelled to do that, and this was one of those times, and so I did.

See, it’s difficult. Does it seem to you that I’m patting myself on the back over here? “Check me out, I am an extremely generous person who not only doesn’t burn homeless people by throwing gasoline on them and setting them on fire while they are asleep in their tent cities, as happened in The Fisher King and also to a homeless man I knew in Miami when I was doing a food delivery thing when I was in high school, but actually gives them food, out of the very goodness of my heart. Yay, me! Aren’t I a good person? Check out my selfless self, y’all. Yes. Me, good. Very, very good.” How do you casually mention something like this?

Because the thing is, I was totally patting myself on the back. I was totally thinking all that above there. I was thinking how good I was to be putting in an apple, because, you know, it’s probably hard to get fresh produce when you live on the street, and I wanted whoever I bought lunch for to have a balanced meal. Isn’t that sort of weird? Doesn’t it seem sort of noblesse oblige to you? Can you ever do something helpful…I’m going to try to think, for the purposes of this entry, in terms of “helpful” instead of “good” just because thinking about whether people are good or can be good is a topic that’s a little too dense for me on a school night. Anyway, it’s clear you can do something helpful with less-helpful intentions…it seems obvious to me that at least some of my intentions this afternoon were to make me feel good and warm and fuzzy. Is that wrong? Better than making myself feel good by stabbing someone else, right? You’d think. I am wondering if having less-helpful intentions (“Damn, I’m good”) somehow negates the real physical good benefits (“Someone gets to eat”) of a helpful action.

What I told Carl was that one part of the Bible that has stayed with me through various spiritual and religious upheavals and difficulties is this one story somewhere…um, those of you who have been to seminary or who are currently in seminary, please email me and tell me which book it’s in…I can reliably say that this particular story takes place in the New Testament, but that’s about it. Come on, seminary people, I know who you are and you know who you are and I’m a little too tired right now to look it up, so do me a favor, okay? And while you’re at it, tell me what kind of tattoo I should get. Anyway, in this story somewhere in the Bible, Jesus is talking about how there is going to be, in heaven-and-hell-type terms, a big distinction between those who fed him when he was hungry, and clothed him when he was naked, and visited him when he was in prison, and those who…didn’t do any of that. And I guess the people who he’s talking to say something along the lines of “Well, wait a minute, when did we ever see that you were hungry and not feed you?” and so on, which is a pretty legitimate question, if you ask me, considering that Jesus (being homeless himself) was probably sleeping on one of their couches at the time. And he says that whenever you see anyone that’s hungry and you don’t feed them or naked and you don’t clothe them, etc, it’s as though you’re not helping him out, and that that has dire spiritual consequences, what with hell and everything. I also thought about ancient Greeks and Hebrews, for whom the line between the physical and the spiritual world was apparently much thinner than ours, and how they were always giving people places to sleep and food and things who turned out to be angels or gods or something. And then I thought about what it would be like to be homeless my ownself and how it could happen to me and how I would want to be treated and what I might want for lunch. So, long story short, part of why I did that maybe sort of helpful thing was because you never know who could be disguised as a Real Change vendor, and also it’s not so inconceivable that I might be homeless one day. Well, honestly, it feels inconceivable, but you never know.

I still feel weird about it though, I still can’t decide if I should even be writing about any of this, because another thing from the Bible I remember has something to do with not proclaiming on the Internet about how you’re such a good person, not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing. Trying to figure out the relationship between action and intention, trying to decide if it’s okay to tell people about some of the nicer things you do. Okay, can we just decide all this in the next entry or something? I’m really tired. You all be good now…and tell me all about it, okay?