The Gift of Not Giving?

You never know what treasures you’re going to find in the First Things archives. In this case, it was a symposium on “The Ethics of Everyday Life” from the ancient days of 1995. The stakes were not as high nor the tensions as great as for other FT symposiums , but still the disagreement was marked, even impassioned. The contributors? —an A-team assembly including Amy and Leon Kass, Midge Dector, Gilbert Meilaender, Mary Ann Glendon, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Richard John Neuhaus. The topic? —a children’s story, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree .

The responses are varied, and worth a quick perusal if you have any interest in children’s literature—or in the complexities of self-sacrificial love, explored in deceptively simple sticks and stick-figures. Interestingly, the reactions divided more-or-less by gender.

“What it tells us—hardly the message I would wish to be conveyed to my grandchildren—is that life after childhood is a progressive, and progressively distasteful, falling off,” writes Midge. “This isn’t a happy story,” adds Jean. “It’s a sappy one . . . . I do not aspire to stumpdom.” Mary Ann is still more emphatic: “The fact is that tree’s qualities would make her a terrible mother—a masochist who, quite predictably, has raised a sociopath . . . . Is the story meant, then, to be an allegory of divine love? If so, the author has got his Bible mixed up with his Sears Roebuck wishbook.”

Leon Kass, in contrast, praises the ideal of self-sacrificial mother-love portrayed in the story, and Timothy Jackson is similarly struck by the tree’s ineffaceable love, “the carved heart with ‘M.E. + T.’ inside”; “We must think the tree happy, not like the absurd Sisyphus but like the Suffering Servant.” William May, especially, sees in Silverstein’s tale the profundity of a masterpiece:

The tree begins, to be sure, offering a love that resembles philanthropic love; its gifts do not cost. It provides utterly costless shade, and it gives of its leaves and its fruit (both highly renewable resources). But then the story turns darker. Or does it turn toward the transcendent, the sublime? The tree presses on to a level of giving which the philanthropist can only interpret as self-diminishing, self-destructive. But the tree apparently doesn’t see it that way. It says that it is happy.

What is this claim? The slaphappiness of the compulsive giver? Or something more? The clearheaded affirmation of a self that cannot diminish itself through its own expenditure because self-expenditure is its unfailing core? And so the tree offers its branches, its trunk, even its stump: “‘Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest.’ And the boy did. And the tree was happy.” What kind of tree is this? Some sort of cross between the human and the divine? I am stumped.

Is it possible to love too much? Dangerous and destructive, or admirable and sublime? Do God’s generosity and love know no limits and, if so, should ours? I won’t pretend to arbitrate, but, finding my sympathies aligning with my sex, I can’t help thinking of an observation my pastor once made: No prayer goes unheard and unanswered. Ever-attentive, God responds to all our pleas. Sometimes, however, his answer is a gentle No . “Tough love,” I have heard it called—the love that truly desires what is best for another, even when it hurts. As any parent knows, this is the hardest love to give.

Our understanding and judgment are frequently stumped; our hopes and desires are sharply limited. God’s wisdom and love, I trust, are not.