I wrote a moment ago of the sense of what we owe to our parents, a debt that seems almost insupportable sometimes. It would be insupportable if we could not pay it on to somebody else. Were it not for this central fact our gratitude would be a curse not a blessing. But in fact those who gave to us, our parents and all the rest, are best pleased if we pay over their gifts to somebody else. That is how we can best repay them.
If this is a right conception of the source out of which comes the energy that has set us going and will keep us going, I think we can trace out a justification for the principles of social work which I have tried to present in this book and will now summarize:
1. We want to do social work because we have got something that we must share, something that is too hot to hold. There is a false emphasis, approaching sentimentality, in saying that our social work is done because of our love for the individual people to whom we give. We have a hope that some day we may know a few of these people well enough to say that we love them. But that is hope, not fact or present impulse. Hence it is not right (although it is not a fearful error) to say that we do social work for love of the particular individuals whom we try to help. We are looking for an opportunity and are grateful for the opportunity that social work gives us, to pass on the gifts which we are grateful for, not as has sometimes been said, to people whom we love but to every one who needs them.
That may seem a very slight difference of emphasis. I think it is a very important difference of emphasis. We are in a much more self-respecting position if we do not have to think of ourselves as having already conquered at the beginning that which we aspire to win in the end, a personal affection for all our patients. If we remember that our patients are (unconsciously) doing us a favor in allowing us to pass on something to them, and that although we may have found a genuine need, still we are grateful to them because they want what we have to give, then our work is humble and free from taint of Pharisaism.
2. The second principle is: give as one passing on that which is not our own. That is familiar enough in relation to money. Any one who has any money and any capacity for thoughtfulness, knows that his money is not his own. Whether it happens to be literally in trust or not, the only right he has is the right of rightly choosing what he will do with it. He holds it rightfully just so long as he needs to find the chance, the best opportunity for passing it on.
Such a sense of trusteeship we ought to feel about everything that we have and want to give: beauty, information, education, affection, and courage. One should give them (if he can!) not as one who has any special merits, not as one having property which is one's own, but as one who has received without any possible deserts an incredible wealth and would like above all things to share it because it is not his own.
3. We ought to give and build, because the effects of any giving that is not also building will not last. Our bodies and our souls are what they are because of what has been given and built into them by nature and by man. The same energy which burns in our bodies and knows in our consciousness should make us desire always to give and build by giving, because we have ourselves been built up of such gifts.
4. We ought to give and take. That is another aspect of giving as one who passes on. We can give only what we have taken. Hence if we allow our lives to get cooped up, narrow and stifled, so that we are not taking in steadily, or not getting fresh energy out of what we have already taken in during the years that are past, we soon have nothing to give. I have written of the ugliness and the depression that I have seen too much in social workers' lives. That is partly because they are often led into giving without providing for any adequate source of renewal. They are not taking in enough to have anything to give out. They give until they are drained dry, squeezed out.