I want to help out of pure love, but human motives are messy

A friend of mine found herself in serious financial trouble this week because of something that wasn’t her fault.

She’s a single mother with children to support. She works hard and she has a lot of pride, so she wasn’t asking anybody for help. She was simply upset and overwhelmed by what had happened.

I saw her after work tonight and she told me about the situation. I listened for a while, then I handed her $200.

She immediately tried to refuse it.

“I can’t take this,” she said.

But I knew she needed the money badly enough that her pride was trying to say something that reality wouldn’t allow. I told her she was going to take it and we weren’t going to make a big deal out of it.

I thought she was going to cry.

Not because it was some enormous amount of money, but because she was overwhelmed by the idea that somebody would help her when she needed help. No strings attached. No expectation of repayment. No hidden agenda.

That’s what I told myself about my motives. After I left, something uncomfortable began bothering me.

I wanted to believe that I had given her the money simply because I cared about her and her children. And I do care about them. I know that much is true.

But another part of me wondered whether my motives were really that pure.

Did I help her because I genuinely loved another human being who was hurting? Or did part of me enjoy being the person who got to rescue somebody?

Did it feed my ego to watch somebody feel grateful toward me? Did part of me enjoy feeling like the generous person in the story?

I honestly don’t know.

And that uncertainty disturbed me more than I expected.

Years ago, my narcissistic father used to do things like this sometimes. He would help people financially or give them gifts when they were in serious need. As a child, I thought it reflected generosity.

What I didn’t know then was that he had been embezzling millions of dollars from his employer over a period of years.

Pretty much all of the money he gave away was stolen money.

Looking back, I think part of what he loved wasn’t helping people as much as it was feeling that he was a good person. His generosity became a way of reassuring himself about who he was. It was a way of feeding his own dysfunctional ego.

That realization haunted me tonight.

Not because giving somebody $200 from my own pocket is morally equivalent to what my father did. It obviously isn’t.

But because I recognized something uncomfortably human in myself — and part of me was terrified to think I could be reflecting any part of his pathological behavior.

It made me think about how badly we all want to see ourselves as good.

In the sixth chapter of Matthew, Jesus warns about doing charitable acts in order to be seen by others. I don’t think the warning is only about public recognition. I think it’s about the deeper human temptation to turn goodness into a performance for our own ego.

And that raises a hard question for me.

Would I have still given that money if I could have somehow guaranteed she would never know where it came from?

I want to believe the answer is yes. But the fact that I can’t answer that instantly and confidently leaves me unsettled.

Modern culture often treats motives as irrelevant. Pragmatists argue that if somebody receives help, then the inner reasons for the person providing help don’t really matter.

But I think motives do matter.

Not because human beings will ever achieve perfectly pure motives. I’m no longer sure that’s possible for creatures as emotionally tangled as we are.

Love, ego, compassion, pride, insecurity and the need for moral reassurance are often hopelessly mixed together inside us.

We like to divide people into categories — selfish or selfless, good or bad, sincere or hypocritical — but human beings are rarely that simple. Most of us are struggling with mixtures of contradictory motives. As I am right now.

Part of me helped that woman tonight because I genuinely care about her and her children. And part of me enjoyed being the man who got to help her.

I wish I could separate those two things cleanly. I wish I could look into my own heart and confidently declare that my motives were completely pure.

But I can’t. That’s what unsettles me.

I think most of us desperately want to believe we’re better than we really are. We want to believe our love is entirely selfless, our generosity entirely noble and our concern for others untouched by vanity or ego.

But human beings are messier creatures than that. I know that I am.

Somewhere inside us, genuine love and selfishness seem to grow tangled together like roots beneath the same tree.

Maybe part of maturity is simply learning to stop lying to ourselves about that fact. Maybe the best we can do is to be honest with ourselves about our struggle to be the good and loving people we want to be.

Maybe we can never be good — as we would like to be — but we can strive to be better. To be more pure. To be more noble and decent and loving. At least we can try.