ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, turned his firepower on the very rich this week, claiming that the super wealthy aren’t contributing enough to society. According to Mayor Johnson, they are far more interested in buying large houses and grouse moors than making any difference to the world around them.
His comments came at an event run by Michael Bloomberg, Boris Johnson’s New York counterpart, and a leading philanthropist.
We certainly don’t have the same approach to big donations as America does, as anyone who has ever visited art galleries there will know. Boris Johnson put this down to a rather English aversion to ostentation which makes people reluctant to give away huge sums of money in this country.
In fact, as Boris Johnson admitted, there are wealthy people who give away considerable sums to good causes. Figures collated by charities found that 201 philanthropists gave £1 million or more in 2008. But charities rely on the donations of people on much lower incomes with around half the population giving about £10 a month to their favourite causes.
How do you choose which cause? Day after day we’re all inundated with requests for money, whether it’s the people of Syria, or research into blindness, or children with cancer. When there is so much need, people can feel overwhelmed, or even become immune to the causes, suffering from a kind of charity overload.
But does philanthropy really only require money? Isn’t a donation too easy? Tipping a few coins into a collecting bucket, or even writing a sizeable cheque is one thing, but engaging with people is quite another.
Two wealthy businessmen that I know have given away sizeable sums to good causes. But what I most admire about them is that they get their hands dirty; they both often volunteer for homelessness charities, working with the homeless themselves.
In the Gospels, Christ makes it very clear in his comments about the widow’s mite that giving is important but that the widow who gave a small amount which took sacrifice on her part is much the greater alms giver than the wealthy.
As Christ showed being with people and empathising with them is a much greater cost to ourselves than money. He was willing to be with people deemed unclean at that time because of their illnesses, women considered prostitutes, people on the margins of society – something for which he in turn was vilified by the supposedly respectable members of society. Those sorts of encounters might seem a long way from what monetary gifts we’ve come to think of as philanthropy. But given what the word means – love of humanity – they seem much closer to true charity than writing cheques, however worthwhile and important that might be.