Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, in a bid to encourage foreign aid to the world's poorest countries, told the leaders of the eight wealthiest and most influential countries on the weekend that lessening the burden of poverty should be seen as an investment, not doling out charity.

Needy people throughout the world, it seems, can be turned into better future consumers of Western goods and, as a result, we may hope to reap a profit in the years to come.

I'm sure he meant well, but it shocked me. It shocked me even more when most of my friends and associates said they understood why he did it: That's the way the world is -- cruel and absurd, but highly focused on profit and production. The Prime Minister was simply selling the idea of foreign aid and debt forgiveness in the language of business people around the world.

Charity, it seems, has become a dirty word.

Or has it?

Many of the couples who come to church to be married like to have the Scripture readings come from the old King James version of the Bible. Most want one of the readings to be St. Paul's famous Hymn to Love,which begins: "I will show you a still more excellent way . . ."

People often balk, however, when they find that the word "love" appears nowhere in the King James version of that particular reading; the word "charity," preferred by the translators of the day, is used instead.

St. Paul, writing in Greek, used the word agape, one of four Greek terms for different kinds of love.In this case, it means a rugged and active form of love. It does not assume that there is anything intrinsically lovable about the recipient of such love, nor is the lover compelled to love because of an abiding and uncontrollable passion. The lovers love or give or help because they are able to love and because they have decided that the task is worthy -- no matter what the return.

The premise is that the lover is free and is capable and possesses a certain conviction to add something to the life of the person he loves. He has a reservoir of energy and resources and he chooses to apply those resources to a person or to some task because such an act is worthy and the person who will receive his care is worthy.

On a personal level, such love is often associated with loyalty, and with providing for another person's emotional or physical needs. Such love can be extended to strangers. It takes the form of a desire for justice. On the level of one's own city, it concerns itself with the provision of adequate public health services, with the educational needs of low-income children, with the provision of hot meals and shelters and all the services required by needy people. The reading, needless to say, was never intended, by St Paul, to be a fixture at the wedding services of young people still swooning over each other and drawn inexorably to each other by the sound of the violins inside their heads or the urgings of their loins -- young people who know everything about eros but almost nothing, yet, about agape.

Every time we interview a potential new board member at the Old Brewery Mission, or pull together a committee of volunteers to raise funds, or to put out a newsletter, or to serve a meal, or to develop a program for our permanent residents, we hope to find an individual or a group possessed of a genuine interest in the well-being of people they have no natural connection to and who will never be able to return the effort or the interest or the money expended on them.

An interview with such a potential board member or volunteer will be marked by their curiosity about how things in the city of Montreal work (or don't work) and how they can be fixed. We'll notice that the person is keen to discover where his or her talents fit in to the larger program of the Mission. They might well wonder aloud if they've got the right aptitudes to work alongside us in a voluntary capacity.

Some executives have been reluctant to identify their company with the phenomenon of urban poverty. Occasionally, there is a donor who needs to know why it would be in the interests of his or her company to ally themselves with our cause -- preferring, instead, to place their money in activities associated with education and health care or with the care of people a decade or two younger than our clientele -- people who will, at some point, find themselves able to turn around and repay their debt to society.

Many of our clients cannot be turned around, and we don't spend much time trying to convince such potential volunteers. We move on and ask somebody else.

We live in an age where the public domain is shrinking rapidly. The message seems clear that much of what our governments have done in past years will now be done by private charities and non-governmental agencies depending on individual and corporate donations, on volunteer labour and on a high degree of local involvement by loving people who need now to be identified and given work to do.

We would be lost if we could not locate a substantial community of capable people who understand what charitable activity is all about and who are hungry to be the sort of people who add something good to the life of the stranger. They understand themselves to be capable of acting lovingly and charitably toward people in our streets who have found themselves on the margins, who have been thrown out of hospitals, out of jobs and out of marriages and who would find themselves alone, unsheltered and unfed without our board members at the Mission, our volunteers and our donors who don't, for the most part, need to have the case stated for them in terms of a future payback.

The leaders of our wealthiest nations are now being asked, by representatives of our poorest nations, to consider such gracious action on a global level. They are being asked -- and through them, we are being asked -- to modify a cycle of indebtedness that pins the poorest nations to substandard education, housing, medical services, corruption and need. We are being asked to concern ourselves with the stranger in Mozambique and not only the stranger in Montreal -- someone who would, otherwise, see the same indebtedness passed on to subsequent generations.

Like an old musical instrument hanging on the wall that hasn't been picked up and played for a very long time and that was, quite possibly, played very badly the last time it was picked up, the word "charity" suffers from all the wrong associations. Until a better word is found, however, the rugged word that the translators of the King James Bible chose instead of love cannot be replaced with mere sentiment that seizes us for a time, then is lost. Nor will it be possible to talk of making a financial investment in another country since some of the most important decisions that need to be made about the granting of aid and the restructuring of debt will probably cost us much more than they give us in return.

The sentiment expressed by the Prime Minister was a crude reflex, increasingly common in our highly focused and profit-driven world. It is a natural way of looking at things, even an understandable way of viewing the world; but, given the resources and the abilities at our disposal, it is hardly the more excellent way.

Father Robert Warren is executive director of the Old Brewery Mission in Montreal.

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