The Book of Joy

our health. A large meta-analysis by Morris Okun and his colleagues have
found that volunteering reduces the risk of death by 24 percent.
Compassion and generosity are not just lofty virtues—they are at the
center of our humanity, what makes our lives joyful and meaningful.
“Yes, there are many, many, many ugly things,” the Archbishop
explained. “But there are also some incredibly beautiful things in our
world. The black townships in South Africa are squalor ridden and
because of despair and disease, including HIV, children are orphaned. In
one of the townships, I met a mother who had collected these abandoned
children off the streets. She’s got nothing much in the way of resources.
But the minute she began doing that, help began coming for her to carry
out her work of compassion.
“We are fundamentally good. The aberration is not the good person;
the aberration is the bad person. We are made for goodness. And when we
get opportunities, we mostly respond with generosity. She has got
nothing, but that didn’t stop her. And she had about a hundred street
children she picked up in a three-room house. And before long people got
to know about it who were able to say, ‘Okay, we will help. We will build
a little dormitory for them.’ Others said, ‘We will give you food.’ And
hey, presto, she had a home. And she’s becoming a legendary figure. But
she wasn’t driven by wanting fame or anything of the kind. It was just
that she saw these children and her maternal instinct said, ‘No, this won’t
do.’ And so yes, I mean, one shouldn’t pretend that people don’t get
overwhelmed by the sense of impotence, but do what you can where you
can.”
At the Archbishop’s eightieth birthday, Rachel and I had gone with the
Archbishop and his family to visit the orphanage and to celebrate with a
giant cake. As some of the children sat on our laps on the floor in a room
that was filled with dozens of other children, it was very hard not to want
to adopt them all. The older children held the younger ones in their arms:
They had all lashed their lives together in the shelter of the compassion
and generosity of the mother who had taken them in. I remembered the
Archbishop saying that when he would visit townships, people who had
nothing, absolutely nothing, would still open their homes and their hearts