The Gift

Christmas Day 2013, Chisholme House

Today Christmas, the ultimate festival of giving and receiving, is a global phenomenon, its moorings loosened from its origin in the birth of a prophet into the religio-spiritual tradition of Abraham.

Now, the cynical and realists might claim that the long reach of Christmas, around the world and deep into our pockets, is because of the extraordinary retail opportunity that it affords. And there is truth in this.

However, without the fundamental human impulse to give and to receive there could be no such festival or retail opportunity. It is this impulse that is the subject of our enquiry here. What is it to give, and what, at root, is a gift?
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Without giving there could be no gift. The object given is transformed into gift through the action of giving. It is then the intention within the giving that defines the gift as a gift, and not, for example, as a payment, a reward or a bribe. Such objects may look like a gift on the outside, but are actually distinct by virtue of the spirit of intention that they bear.

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!” tells us that not every ‘gift’ is what it seems. Beware, in other words, of the intention hidden within, by which it became a stratagem rather than the gift that it seems to be! Beware then of false coin and deception! Ignorance and folly is to be blind to the particular intention present within things and appearances. Their result is the delusion that these things and appearances have value in themselves. Such delusion is the mother of theft, profiteering, corruption and other base expressions of humanity.

So what is the true coin within the gift? What does a gift truly mean? What gift, we might ask, would really make the heart of any person anywhere glad? If there were such a thing then surely all true gifts everywhere would be symbols in their own way of this one ultimately gladdening gift?

When someone I love gives me a gift it is to say, “I am here for you”, ”I am yours” or “I am with you”. I reply truthfully that there is no gift you could give me greater or more valuable to me than you yourself. When someone gives me the gift of their time, their wisdom or experience they are giving me something of themselves, a part that they value. When a child is born, its parents know in that instant that there is no greater gift than this child, naked and sheer, unaccompanied by anything.

Ultimately, gift is self-gift. Everywhere, gifts imply and speak of this meaning in the language of symbol and image.

‘In this world, one thing appears as another’ (Rumi: Mesnevi).

The greatest gift one can give is oneself, not for all time because all time is not ‘in our gift’, but to be present for someone, or something, here and now. Here is where real meeting and exchange takes place. Ibn ‘Arabi’s friend and companion Shams, Mother of the Poor, said of him that of all the people who came to visit her she preferred him, because when he came to visit he came with all of himself, not leaving a part of himself elsewhere. “When he sits it is with all of himself, when he rises it is with all of himself…”

Our being here in this world is from the self-gift of Life to the sheer possibility we always were. As with any other gift we must discover and be sensitive to the intention embodied in the gift of our being.

Then, what do we, what can we give in return? How can we honour Life and our own being here?

Again, the greatest gift is self-gift, to be present for Life, to be present with our possibility of knowing, loving and serving. Just so, our ultimately transformational gift to others is fully to be there for them, for their own possibility of knowing, loving and serving what they themselves truly are.

Peter Young