The Life Tide of the Tithe
A Letter of Appeal
Dear Friends and Family,
Yesterday, I walked Haywood Road to the local market to gather some carrots and onions for dinner. They’re still in season here. Perhaps, they are where you are, too. On the sidewalk outside Malaprops Bookstore, a young man sat on an empty drywall bucket, playing a guitar scribbled with a Sharpie. His hands were dirty. His boots had no laces.
I might not have laid eyes on him—so separated were we by the tourists between us—but from the most delicate appeal to the music of his classical guitar came such a sweet, sauntering melody that it took my breath from me.
I was stopped, hushed, pulled into his touch on the strings, and soon emptied of what spare cash I had in my pocket—so eager was I to give to him, dropping it in his open guitar case, bowing my head in thanks, and in time carrying on, but not before meeting his eyes meeting mine as he continued to play without pause.
There was nothing in our encounter or the impulses I felt that was either transactional or charitable. We were tithing.
He could have been the guitar-playing likes of Joshua Bell at Union Station, all of this an experiment to see who will stop and who will refuse the blessings of the busker. None of that mattered. What mattered was, in that moment, we shared the blessings of the other.
The person who tithes acknowledges that they have been on the receiving end of good fortune or blessing, and they give some of it back. The point is to experience relations of abundance and sharing.
. . .
One puts time, treasure, or talent out in the system in an attitude of faith and trust because one wants to live a life of faith and trust. That’s it. Habitual tithers will say: When your time of need arises, you will be provided for. But the act of giving, at the time of giving, ensures nothing more than voluntary participation in an economy of trust and care. Is this “out there”? Definitely. That’s the point.1
If you listen to the sounds of words, you start to trace them back to their beginning. You get the feel for how they keep kin through time. And you can hear how close they are to the flesh and blood of being, that they’re more sensual than conceptual.
The words tithe and tide have a common sound root di. di signifies giving, and in giving, something is “teased apart” from the whole.
When a tide turns from flow to ebb, the ebb leaves something of the shore in the sea while the flow leaves something of the sea on the shore. That trace left is “teased apart” from its origin and enfolded into the other in the liminal flux of encounter.2 This tiding is at the heart of tithing.
In the early times, tithing meant leaving a tenth for a blessing received. It was a way of recognizing an encounter as mutual giving and receiving.
Of the immediacy of the breath, we see tithing in its most intimate expression. Every inbreath receives the world; every outbreath offers traces of our innermost to the world breath that breathes us. This is so of every form of life, and so, you and I are tithing with trees.
That’s not all. There are two breaths—only two—in which the flow is not a circle but an unending open. These are the first and final breaths.
The first breath reveals the intrinsic impulse to receive. Before birth, the lungs are flat. The sacs contain fluid not air. Oxygen flows between maternal and fetal blood vessels. The infant’s first breath comes on an inbreath. And when it does, it transports oxygen for the first time from the air sacs into blood vessels and from there, into every cell of the infant’s body. On this first breath, the infant receives traces of the world inside, as will be so on every inbreath for the rest of life.
Every breath after the first reveals the intrinsic impulse to let go and in letting go, to give. It is not the hunger for oxygen that initiates each next breath. It is the uncompromising need to release carbon dioxide—an outcome of the activities of being. On every outbreath, with that carbon dioxide, the body offers a little of its innermost to the outer world.
The final breath reveals the intrinsic impulse to leave traces of one’s being behind for having received the blessing of living. The final breath always ends on an outbreath. When we depart, we give one last trace of ourselves to the world.
We are never not tithing.
Today begins a six-week tithe appeal, which will conclude mid-July when I turn 60. I dream sixty of you (more?) will join me in turning the tide on reader-supported publishing by contributing as a paid subscriber—whether as a monthly ($6), annual ($60), or “Contributors’ Circle” ($60–$500) subscriber.
I chose the theme of tithing for this appeal because my sense is we cannot put what we are up to here in any other category. Neither is it transactional in the sense of exchange. Nor is it charitable in the sense of providing favor.
We’ve come to see what we see on the internet as information to be consumed—there for the taking. We’re overwhelmed with email, each a task to clear from our desktops. We’re nickeled and dimed by subscription services, and we’re tired.
Rarely does electronic communication or correspondence touch us as meaningful. Rarely does it give us pause. When it does, we enter the realm of human connection across the vast expanse that carries our breath.
I can only hope these letters touch at that chord, that they swim against the current of the buzz and hum and close the distance between us.
I hope that from time to time, something you encounter in these words takes your breath away and ripples across the horizons of your life.
I pray that from time to time, a meditation or series of meditations ingathers something in us both to unfold new ways of being from the depths of soul.
And I wish for you to know that I write to you—each of you.
I devote my heart and soul and hundreds of hours every month to these letters and Beyond the Comfort Zone offerings. It is an offering of love, and I offer it freely. At the same time, because it is my livelihood, this project relies on your freely offered financial support.
Dear Friend, old and new, if Beyond the Comfort Zone makes your life more meaningful in any way, if it lingers when you walk away, if it invites you to the yonder edges of who and how you might be, I hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber today in the spirit of the tithe, not as a transaction between us.
This appeal would be incomplete without offering my sincere gratitude to you for reading, commenting, sharing, and offering a show of hand that says “I’m here” when you click the ❤️ from time to time. These are ways, too, that we meet one another on this page.
To you who are paid subscribers already, and to you who have become Contributors’ Circle members, you have my most humble and enduring thanks.
Ever in gratitude and with love,
Renée
PS. Next Sunday, we’ll continue our exploration of silence. If you’re on Substack Notes, look for my daily “Passages on Silence” in your feed.
If we were talking about modes of being in this letter, we would hear this root sound and its meaning gather momentum in the Mental structure of consciousness (Jean Gebser, Ever-Present Origin) when the human develops rational thought. Rational thought is the parsing out and dividing up of things, and so, word meanings begin to take on this manner of being, i.e., “giving” pairing up with “teasing apart.” In actuality, nothing in life is teased apart so much as it is shared across horizons of liminal flux. We see the essence of this flux between two modes, such as sea and shore, or even, between two bodies. To see two bodies in liminal flux requires that we take off the materialist lens and see that a body is a field of activity of varying degrees of interchanging matter–energy density and the life force of being.
This moved me to tears, my friend. This idea that our first breath and our last are two halves of a full cycle. I have words for how it moved me. I think it goes back to your discussion of weeping. There was no story in my mind attached to the reason for the tears, I was simply connected to the fullness of all of our breaths. And the idea of tithing is so beautiful! That's how I first discovered Tara here too. I'm sure you've read Braiding Sweet grass. In that book, Kimmerer writes of a gift economy. When we receive every experience as a gift, the natural response is to give back, to tithe. THIS is the way to relationality. Thank you so much for all of these gorgeous words! ♥️♥️♥️
Renée; what I love about this piece is the true realization that giving is so gratifying, especially when giving from the heart, without the need for anything in return; though the mutuality of your experience with the guitar player was lovely, and it speaks to the joy of giving and receiving at the same time in an effortless and beautiful way. True service, meaning giving from the heart, is clearly an essential part of spiritual growth; and yet we, including me, tend to want to receive and often see giving as "work" with little reward. I suspect it's all a part of our narcissistic culture where we're so focused on getting what we want, and not recognizing that true giving gives us all we need. So, thank you for giving so freely of your time, your insights, your wisdom, and your heart to all of us readers. Giving to you or tithing as you put it, is an easy one for me. It does feel like true mutuality between us, and it's precious. "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field; I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other, doesn't make sense."--Rumi