Today's reading from the handbook concerning the secret bag hinges upon the virtue of generosity. According to the Fathers of the Church, the source of the virtue of generosity can be found in God the Creator. God gratuitously creates man in His own image and likeness. In turn, man is moved to gratitude by this free gift, and, because of his gratitude, mirrors God's generosity in his own actions. Then, those generous actions create gratitude, which spurs generosity in others. The mirroring action of generosity and gratitude continues on and on until the end of time.
One particularly famous example of this mirroring action comes from the Scriptures, from the Book of the Acts of the Holy Apostles. In that book, certain prophets living in Antioch prophesy that a universal famine is going to come upon the world. St. Luke goes on to note that the famine did, in fact, happen during the reign of the Emperor Claudius. But, at that point, when the famine was first prophesied, the Church in Antioch decides to take up a collection to support the Church in Jerusalem. Collections of this kind were then also done in all the Churches, which Paul and Barnabas and John Mark, as well as the other apostles, founded in the Mediterranean basin. It is clear from the account that the collections are acts of generosity, but they spring from gratitude, because the new Gentile Churches were deeply grateful on account of the faith and hope that they had received through the original Mother Church of Jerusalem.
If we go to literature and hagiography to discover generosity and gratitude, we find that this mirroring is found at all times and in every place, in every culture, and it has certain undeniable effects. In order to understand those effects, we should look first to the greatest paradigms of Christian generosity, the martyrs. The martyrs, overcome by gratitude and love for God, freely decide to lay down their lives for Him. This, the greatest act of generosity, spurs further mirroring in creation around the martyrs, which leads to an endless cycle. In gratitude and admiration for their generous acts, we offer our prayers to the martyrs. They respond to our prayers with generosity, pouring out miracles upon suffering mankind. Mankind returns to the martyrs with greater gratitude and greater generosity in prayer and love of God, and, in response, once again, the outpouring of gifts continues and increases.
The corollary reality, which we also observe is that the generosity-gratitude mirroring perfects the saints in their humanity. They seem to become more and more human, even as their sufferings increase. What does this mean? Certain human beings become admired as models by others, because it is perceived that their virtues have made them more perfect manifestations of human nature. Thus, just as the Lord Jesus, being the perfect man, is the model for all, so too the saints become models for others, because they are perceived as more human through their love and generosity. In the opposite way, literature shows us examples of greedy human beings, who become progressively less and less human, until they devolve into a bestial and demonic state. There are famous examples of greedy people in literature, who become less and less human in the course of the story (e.g. Midas, the king of Lydia).
After the Lord Jesus, there are few better examples of generosity and gratitude than St. Nicholas of Myra. Many are the anecdotes from his episodic life, which show him doing acts of kindness to others, on account of his great love of God: redeeming girls from lives of prostitution by throwing wallets full of gold through their windows at night; hearing the prayers of sailors in danger at sea and appearing to them to give them peace and calm the storm, even though this incident was still during his earthly life and was accomplished by the rarity of bilocation; miraculously reassembling the bodies of the boys being pickled in the salting tub, raising them from the dead and bringing those guilty of murder to justice, to name just a few. Most human beings would look upon the example of Saint Nicholas and affirm that he is more human than any of us. And this holds true even for those who would not believe the literal details of the story.
But what about generosity that is unseen and unsung? This is, after all, precisely what the secret bag is. There is much in Christian Tradition that suggests that this is precisely the generosity that yields the greatest mirroring effect. Because it is seen only by God, it is directed to God the Creator, and is rewarded only by God with an increase in virtue that is unaccountable and inexplicable by any other. Thus, it is designed like a token, a particle of the generosity of the saints, which is the mirror of the generosity of the Lord Jesus, Almighty God, Who entered this world and took on human nature, suffered the pains of human nature to reclaim the human race from the realm of Death and destruction. Just as it took God's special revelation to make our redemption known, so too the saints' long-suffering generosity was hidden from the eyes of all but revealed by God's design.
When you put your hand in the secret bag, recall that you are participating in the mirror chain of generosity and gratitude that goes back through the ages to the Creation of the world. Your generosity is hidden, because the majority of God's largesse is hidden. What He has revealed is only to begin that mirroring process. In the same way, that which is hidden of our acts of generosity, He can make known if, in His wisdom He desires it to lead to gratitude and emulation. Yet, either way He rewards, because what He sees is the work of His Son.
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