Generosity Inoculation

My Dearest Bilchly,

Your patient’s church is starting a sermon series on giving? Disappointing. A few weeks of emails like those discussed previously would have prevented this. But of course, tempters today are not what they used to be.

It would be best to prevent your patient from giving at all, but that is probably a lost cause. Your patient is advanced enough in the ways of the Enemy that he is unlikely to hear a sermon on giving and then disobey in an obvious way. But if we cannot stop the actual disease of his “generosity,” we might at least inoculate him against real virtue. Two treatments come to mind.

The first approach is to make sure the vain little creature makes a great external show of being generous. Charity auctions and public gifts are particularly useful here. The more public and noisy the giving, the better. The Enemy Above memorably lampooned this sort of behavior when he was on earth, but if your patient is as ignorant of scriptures as you’ve led me to believe, he may not know the dangers of letting his left hand know what the other is doing.

The second approach is to entice him to make a great internal show of giving. If no actual crowd applauds him, he may yet applaud himself. This will make the act of giving emotional and painful for him, a grand and difficult gesture for which he sees himself an unsung hero, deserving of the public recognition he “selflessly forfeited.” This kind of occasional gift from the patient, given grandly, can give him the idea that he is generous when he is, in fact, quite the opposite. Make sure he checks that devious little box, “One-Time Gift,” on the form. Whisper the sweet word “philanthropist” in his ear when he writes the rare check.

The ultimate danger lies in allowing your patient to develop a real heart of giving. Not just the habit of giving, but a genuine trust and dependence on the Enemy. If that happens, our cause is lost.

I’ve damned men who thought themselves quite generous. They “gave so much to their families” by filling their homes with the trappings of wealth and success, but never gave away an amount of money that forced any real change in their lifestyles. I chuckle to think of them. Each of those greedy fools still warms my heart with hellfire.

Unselfishly Yours,

Uncle Mulcifer