Sabbath Devotional: Gut Charity

I read recently that the word used in the Greek Bible for compassion correlates to the gut. Translated, it describes a movement in the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys. Thus, when Jesus is moved with compassion towards the multitude, it’s a bodily movement, welling up from the deepest parts of him. I don’t mean to parse vocabulary, but I think that is also an accurate description of the experience of charity.

Charity is more than warm feelings. It is more than good thoughts. It is soul heaving, deep gutted love.

Five years ago, my Uncle Ken died very unexpectedly. His death was traumatic for his family — my mother’s side — not the least because his life was similarly traumatic for them. Ken was not an easy child, or an easy brother. He spent much of his adult life distancing himself from other people. He had no wife, no kids. He lived alone in my mother’s childhood home in a remote unincorporated town in southeast Idaho. As far as I understand, he made and kept few friends there and was frequently beset with debilitating bouts of depression. Because he could not afford to heat the entire house, he would spend most of the winter in his bedroom with a single kerosene heater for company. When he was particularly lonely, he would call his family sometimes; some conversations went well, some did not.

Ken made some rather catastrophic mistakes in his life, and they carried a heavy wake. Certainly, my mother was deeply wounded by his poor decisions.

By some miracle, Ken was persuaded to attend the family reunion, held two years before he died. I was pregnant at the time and preparing for a move to Boston to begin my graduate program. It was at the reunion that Ken gave me a baby blanket. White, with a little heart on each square. He told me my mother had sent it to him at a time when he was particularly low. She had intended it as a symbol — that there was still goodness and joy and light possible in his life. Having never had a child to wrap in his sister’s hope, he passed it on to me. My mother told me later it was the only blanket she ever knitted as she found crochet significantly less labor intensive. I have little doubt that it was a profoundly difficult blanket for my mom to knit. It was a labor of heavy love, welling up from the inner places.

When Ken died, my mother grieved. She spilled her grief into journals and canvases. She wept through the carefully and generously constructed life sketch she delivered at his funeral. It was clear from her eulogy that Ken had made his share of mistakes, she wouldn’t deny it. But she insisted there was more to her brother than all that, and he was loved.

That summer, the whole family gathered at the house in Idaho, where the depths of Ken’s inner turmoil were painfully manifest. The walls were unapproachably stuffed with random assortments. There were boxes of receipts spanning multiple decades stacked next to a box of every bag of brown sugar Ken had purchased since moving back home, washed, folded, and kept. In his bedroom, there was a space on the bed just wide enough for his body, with books and discs and expired calendars littered across the rest of it. And there was the kerosene heater. It was devastatingly pathetic.

And I imagine there was some degree of pity that day and the many days following as my mother carried out box after box after box to the trash pile. Pity for Ken. Pity for her parents — as she told me tearfully when my sisters and I drove out to help one Saturday, this was not the home she was raised in. Pity for herself, too perhaps. It was a painful place to visit. But mostly the image of my mother weighed down with the heavy remnants of her brother’s life strikes me as the epitome of charity. Deep gutted charity.

When Christ was lifted up on the cross, his body was crushed by the weight of the world. Hanging halfway between heaven and earth, it was gravity’s pull on his heart, his lungs, his liver, his kidneys that ultimately killed him. The atonement was a movement from the deepest places, enacted on behalf of a world that was cruel, imperfect, and in desperate need of Christ’s deep-gutted love.

Love that is kind and generous even when the world is crumbling. Love that accepts injuries and does not fear insults or pain or death. Love that does not blush when saying I love you and is never embarrassed. Love that knits hopes together like hearts on a blanket sent in the mail. Love that lifts the boxes of our ruined lives and says there is more to you than this. Love that calls us brother, sister, child. Love that is secure and unmovable like an iron rod. Love that rises up and is greater than everything else and can be killed again and again without ever dying. 

The road of charity is never easy. It is a heavy love. But I believe Christ is with us in our efforts to wield it — across our neighborhoods, through our wards, and always, always with our families — and to carry it with us through the deep places. And when we greet him face to face, we will know Love, even as we are known and loved.

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Artwork by Alice Abrams

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Sarah Perkins is the peaceful root director at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.