Article April 8, 2019 Issue

The power of being magnanimous

Susan Booth Mack Snipes

Originally published in The Christian Science Monitor’s Christian Science Perspective column, January 24, 2019.

When I was young and my family would go out to dinner with another family, it astounded me when the two fathers would see who could be the first to grab the check and pay for the whole meal. “Why would anyone want to pay for another family’s meal?” I wondered.

Of course, as I grew up, I better understood the joys of being generous and found it more and more natural to want to give whatever I could to others. But still there was that sense of a zero-sum game in my thought—a sense that if I were generous with my resources, there would be less for me and my family.

And then one day I came upon this arresting statement by Mary Baker Eddy, my favorite author and the woman who founded The Christian Science Monitor: “He who is afraid of being too generous has lost the power of being magnanimous” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 165). Even as I read this statement I could sense something powerful behind it, something that lifted the idea of generosity above simply calculating how much one could afford to give to others. This quote points to a source of resources so abundant that there’s enough for all. Christian Science explains that this source is the divine Spirit, God, who provides limitless good, spiritual ideas, and inspiration for each of us.

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