Dear Readers of Good Letters:
Last year I took the opportunity on Thanksgiving day to thank you for reading Image journal’s “Good Letters” blog. It’s been another amazing year as our team of bloggers continues to produce moving, enlightening, and lovingly-crafted prose. The number of those who subscribe to this feed has more than doubled in the past year, so the word is getting out.
Today’s post is the text of the annual appeal letter we send out to all of our supporters. I do hope you will give a few moments of your time to reading it. If you have found something meaningful here we hope you might be willing to express your own thanks by making a tax-deductible contribution to Image by year-end. Our bloggers write for love of Image‘s mission, not for money. They pass along the gift. Read on to learn more about why “the gift must always move.”
Many of you may know Lewis Hyde’s much-loved book The Gift, but I only became acquainted with it this year and I found it utterly compelling.
Praised by Annie Dillard, David Foster Wallace, and a host of other artists and thinkers, The Gift demonstrates that some of the most important things in life, including art itself, do not thrive in the cash economy but inhabit a separate and invaluable space. In the cash economy, exchanges do not involve true connection—but gifts forge a bond between giver and recipient.
Hyde writes: “gifts bespeak relationship. Not just the simple binary relationship of two men in a cafe, either, nor that of friends and lovers: gifts do not just move, they move outward into some larger circle.” Unlike the cash economy, “in a gift economy, wealth is decreased by hoarding, for it is the circulation of the gift within the community that leads to increase—increase in connections, increase in relationship strength.”
Gifts transform us. And they move us to pass them along. We experience this every day at Image, not only through the generosity of artists who give us their work for a song but in the way their gifts move through—and build—a community of relationships.
We encounter this when you write to us, or when we meet you at a Glen Workshop or Image Seminar, or read your comments on our blog or at ArtsandFaith.com, or see your effusive response on an evaluation form.
“Finding Image has been such a formative turn for me—the dialogue it has initiated in my life is turning things topsy-turvy in the most desirable ways.”
“Thank you for providing a space such as The Glen offers. I truly believe that it is in the combination of formal and informal conversations, the presentations, the meals, the walks, and the natural environment, that new life is nurtured and cultivated.”
“If I had the funds I would permanently enroll myself in Glen Online and just hit the ‘refresh’ button every time my term expired. My writing received a real boost from this experience.”
“Whenever I read Image, I feel like I have become a better person…more wholly myself, as a result. It always brings me back to the self I want to be.”
The gifting doesn’t begin with us: it begins with you and with the artists of faith who share their work with us. It is our privilege to bring you together, to facilitate this precious exchange of gifts.
Of necessity, we all inhabit the cash economy. But here, too, we at Image strive to be good stewards. In 2011 fully two-thirds of our budget will come from business revenue. That represents our respect for the sacrifice that each gift involves.
In the end all of us—the staff, you, the artists we feature—all give more than we receive, at least in terms of the cash economy. But I hope and pray that in the realm of the gift economy we all receive more than we give.
After all, faith itself is a gift, and it asks to be shared. And when it is shared, it increases the stock of goodness in the world.
Hyde again: “[W]hatever we have been given is supposed to be given away not kept. Or, if it is kept, something of similar value should move in its stead…. [T]he gift may be given back to its original donor, but this is not essential…. The only essential is this: the gift must always move.”
Your generosity will enable us to continue enlarging the stock of goodness, truth and beauty. Please consider our monthly giving option. This allows you to spread out your gift and provides us with an extra boost each month. Just click “Donate” on our sidebar menu and you’ll see the options for American and Canadian donors.
Your donation of $25, $50, $100, or more, will help us to keep the gifts moving. Thanks from all of us at Image. Blessings on you and yours.