There’s this United Homeless Organization guy giving his (very loud) spiel outside my subway stop every morning. One of his stock phrases is “remember, charity begins at home!”
Now, I’d always thought that meant, “help out your own family before giving money to strangers!” Am I wrong? Is he?
I think he’s wrong, but he may be talking about giving to American homeless before funding the rebuilding of Iraq or adopting orphans in Nicarauga. So, did you slip him a fiver?
Not only didn’t I slip him a fiver, but when he shouted, “Your spare change could buy someone a hot meal tonight,” I said, “yeah, me.”
Then I had one of those horrible “oh, god, did I think that or actually say it?” moments.
I HATE when I can’t tell if I said it out loud. Unfortunately, I usually DID, in fact, blurt it out for all to hear.
As I mentioned in another thread, I always give money to beggars. I may need the karma some day!
I have never quite managed to say what I really want:
UHO: Help feed the homeless! Please help feed the Homeless!
Me: Who are you feeding them to?
There is a passage in the Episte of Timothy which is sometimes cited as the equivalent of saying “charity begins at home”; St. Timothy says that a person should first see that his own parents are looked after before concerning hmself with the welfare of others generally.
This is the meaning I have always ascribed to the saying, and it is the sense most people seem to mean when they say “charity begins at home”; that a responsible person should be careful first to see that he is not neglecting his own family responsibilities. An obvious example would be homeless advocate Mitch Snyder; he was lauded for years for his unstinting devotion to the poor, and was even depicted as a kind of modern saint in a film starring Martin Sheen. Then, after his suicide, it came to light that he owed a ton of back support to the wife and children he had abandoned.
The oldest citation usually given for “charity begins at home” is to the Roman playwrite Terence, who used the phrase, or a near equivalent, at the start of Act IV of his comedy The Woman of Andros. There a character observes (paraphrasing loosely) that the lowest kind of bastard is the jerk who is reminded of his promise by someone who is depending on him to come through and replies “charity begins at home”. Here the phrase is an equivalent of “look out for Number One”, or “I’ve got mine, Jack.”