CEO

Giving and Pity

By Al Condeluci, Ph.D., CEO
The Voice, Fall/Winter 2000

Friends,

As most of you know, UCP is right in the middle of a $2.5 million dollar capital campaign. Over this past year we have found ourselves working hard to tell the story of UCP to foundations, corporations, and individual donors.

This is challenging work, because the first impulse of a potential donor on a visit to UCP is to feel bad for the folks we serve. This has caused me to think more deeply about pity.

Pity is defined as:

1. A feeling of grief or pain awakened by the misfortunes of others.
2. A cause for compassion and regret.

This definition implies sad feelings caused by someone else’s misfortunes. It suggests a key difference between the person with misfortune, and the person who pities. Further, it is a downward emotion with the unfortunate soul at the bottom of the transaction.

To a large extent, when you feel sorry for someone, you pity them. Although this calls forth compassion, an important variable in bridging the gulf caused by difference, it uses compassion in a downward way. When all the cards are cut, no one likes to be pitied – there is something basically devaluing about it.

In his book, Followers of Jesus, Jean Vanier (1973) reflects on the spirituality of giving related to pity when he states:

Compassion is a difficult thing to live… So often, specialized people are interested in the problem rather than the person, in the handicap rather than the person behind the handicap. These attitudes show a lack of respect and compassion…. They (people who are different) don’t want pity, just as they don’t want rejection, being looked upon as inferiors… Giving (through pity) can be a treacherous thing, because by giving we dominate. Those who give must learn als to receive in humility and love and thanksgiving. (pp. 50-51).

To Vanier, people give for a variety of reasons, but when they give from a sense of pity, these gifts can be tainted.

When I see people give out of a sense of pity, it seems that the giver, once the gift has been rendered, is now absolved of any further responsibility to the person. This notion of absoloving is vital to understanding the perversion of pity. If the real goal of an interdependent community is to accept and welcome each other, the absolving of responsibility is a cancer to the concept. First, it cheapens the exchange by putting a dollar sign on the responsibility to each other. That is, it lessens the equality between people when one feels obligated to give to another through pity driven difference. Second, it drives and reinforces a “we-they” mentality between people. This “we-they” aspect is the direct antithesis of interdependence.

We must work diligently to recognize that difference is difference, nothing more or less. That when we ascribe an emotion, especially a downward emotion such as pity, to difference, the net effect is further polarization and acknowledgement of the factors of difference. We must constantly be attentive to the things that make us similar.

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