Jonathan Simcoe

On this spot, on the night of 31 October 1981, Lily and James Potter lost their lives. Their son, Harry, remains the only wizard ever to have survived the Killing Curse. This house, invisible to Muggles, has been left in its ruined state as a monument to the Potters and as a reminder of the violence that tore apart their family.

He dug with a kind of fury, relishing the manual work, glorying in the non-magic of it, for every drop of his sweat and every blister felt like a gift to the elf who had saved their lives.

Ruess was, in the words of Wallace Stegner, “a callow romantic, an adolescent esthete, an atavistic wanderer of the wastelands”:

Walking this gnarled shore one summer afternoon, I blundered upon a matrix of faint stone rectangles embedded in the tundra: vestiges of the monks’ ancient dwellings, hundreds of years older, even, than the Anasazi ruins in Davis Gulch.

While previous generations gave out of a sense of duty, today’s and tomorrow’s givers do so based on a perceived sense of value.

The good news is, this sense of value isn’t necessarily about “what’s in it for me?” but “what good is this really doing?”

If we want people to give, we need to regularly show them the real-life results of that giving,

“In your gift we find our rest,” Augustine concludes. “There are you our joy. Our rest is our peace.”