Truly Generous?

One of my colleagues puts a quote in her daily attendance reports. Many of them make me smile or think and I appreciate them. Recently this was her quote:

"Real generosity is doing something nice for someone who will never find out."
~Frank A. Clark~

I like this quote, but there was something about it that also sort of rubbed me the wrong way, and I had to mull it over to figure out why. I think there is truth in this statement. But I think there is also a potential danger in this mentality.

While mulling this over I remembered a passage from The Screw Tape Letters by C.S. Lewis (a series of letters from a Devil to his nephew, who is an apprentice to be a devil - in the passage below, the Enemy is God, the patient is a human being).

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will.

So, I think that doing good for those who will never know can be a true sign of generosity. But if none of  our generous acts are directed to those closest to us than we are not fully generous.

This was a nice reminder for me - to make an effort to not keep all my good intentions in my mind (or located in the circle of fantasy to use C.S. Lewis' language :) And, it is a good thing to remember that as humans we will have pieces of malice AND benevolence in us. The question is, which one will we choose to act on in any given moment, and towards whom?