[The Isaiah House Christmas was a huge success, thanks to many of you who gave gifts. Marti and I came home full, and both wrote about our experience. I’ve chosen to put hers first. Mine will come tomorrow.]

All my working life I have held and acted on the deepest conviction about “giving,” whether one calls it charity, mercy, philanthropy, duty or some other word. It’s a conviction I can readily implement in a national campaign, but cannot, for the life of me, put into words.

It is a picture in my head, some very glorious and high attribute that is too wonderful for me to do anything but stutter about. So I have pursued the power of the mighty and the funds of those who give freely with this nearly incommunicable belief that it is their weakness and poverty that I am seeking to crack, like a chrysalis.  It doesn’t always happen, and monies and actions do their good anyway. But this vision – call it a desire to see the immediate effects and proof of the proposition that it is actually more blessed to give than to receive – is what has always driven me, and when it is realized brings a magical satisfaction.

When it works right, the manner of the gift is a positive transformation for the giver – what we might call a redemptive thing. Some intended grace and joy, some spiritual substance or other that I will never articulate well, is restored to the giver as their gift leaves their hands.

There are other multiplications. Something transpires between the giver and the recipient which transforms both in some way not measurable in fishes or loaves.

And some element of the gift speaks to the one receiving it at a deep level of need, so immediately felt if you are poor and outcast. Loaves and fishes, yes, and with them crowns and signets, tokens of significance.

So people of moderate means heard about there being no Christmas at Leia’s Isaiah House, and went to find their poverty to give lavishly out of it with a heart-release of cards and letters and stories to women completely unknown to them. And small crowns and signets were arranged and wrapped, and earnest words so carefully read, in a setting of decency and momentary freedom from sheer circumstantial oppression, so that it all could be received.

The multiplication was there on all sides, and it took so very, very little to do.

The air is cold. The stars speckled the sky. These good women, having drawn a hard lot, somehow misplaced and driven out to its forgotten edges, while they recognize that they stand on the holiest of ground, their home is where they aren’t right now.

Squinting up to the almost cloud-covered North Star one woman said to me, “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we are looking for the answers too.

Thank you, my very dear friends, for the generous gifts of personal worth.