A young man received a rather luxurious sports car as a Christmas gift from his brother, who was a fairly successful businessman.
One day, when he went out to buy something, as he was leaving the store, he saw a child standing next to his shiny new car and admiring it.
“Is this your car, sir?” the boy asked.
The young man nodded and said, “Yes, my brother gave it to me as a Christmas gift.”
The boy was astonished.
“You mean your brother gave it to you, and it didn’t cost you anything? Wow, how I wish…”
Of course, the young man thought he knew what the boy was going to say: that he wished he had a brother like that. So, not letting him finish the sentence, he said, “Yes, it’s wonderful to have a brother like that.”
The boy immediately corrected him and said, “No, no, I wish I could be a brother like that.”
Generosity is a virtue that, as this story tells us, produces a holy envy. There are envies that are bad and envies that are good.. Generosity produces envy because it expresses a desire that lies deep within us. It is difficult to put into practice because it clashes with other inclinations we also have within us, which we must renounce in order to make that desire a reality.
Generosity is a going out of oneself, forgetting oneself in order to pay attention to the needs of others. It is a ceasing to focus on our self-love in order to focus on love for others. Therefore, generosity is an expression of true love that clashes against self-love, and hence the difficulty in putting it into practice.
Generosity, being based on true love, makes us great as persons; because it is true love, and not selfishness, that magnifies us as individuals. On the contrary, selfishness, which is the opposite of generosity, diminishes us as persons because the disordered love of oneself destroys charity or true love. We must practice the sacrifices of generosity if we want to grow as persons, if we want to have souls as great as that of Jesus Christ, who sacrificed His life for the good of us all.
