The Offering
What each person puts in the middle of the table, freely, each week.
Each week, at The Turn, each person puts something in the middle: money, food, hours, a skill, a tool, a ride, whatever is real for them. Nobody sets your amount. Nobody asks what you gave last week. A tenth is the old measure and most people begin somewhere near it and grow, but the figure is yours and it is expected to change with your season.
What gathers is the Circle's commons. The Circle spends it on its Quest and on its own — a member in trouble, a tool the work needs, the cost of gathering — and at each turning it sends a meaningful share inward to its Home, which does the same. That inward flow is Voluntary Tithing, and the direction matters: inward, to the table you sit at, never upward to anyone who rules you. There is no centre to tithe to and no imposed percentage.
The Offering is one of the twelve words a person is given at the door, and it is one of the five things the Game actually asks of a player. It is small on purpose. A Circle that has put something in the middle every week for a season has, without anyone planning it, built three things: a real commons it can point to, a habit of giving that does not depend on anyone's mood, and the plainest possible proof that Abundance is produced rather than waited for.
Two disciplines keep it clean. It is free — an offering extracted or socially compelled is a subscription with better manners, and Consent governs here. And it is counted honestly — line 8 of The Season Sheet asks what was gathered, what was kept, and what was sent up, with its unit. Everything else the Pillar builds — LUV, The waterfall, a federated commons — is this act at larger scale, and stands or falls on whether the small one was done truthfully.
Also called: the Offering · what goes in the middle Stands on: Gift · Commons · Consent · Sovereignty Opens onto: Voluntary Tithing · TimeEnergy · The Turn · The Season Sheet · Abundance · Mutual Aid In play: table · door · Home Sources: The Little Book of the Great Game, second draft — The Twelve Words (word 8) and The Way Up (canon-grade for the Game's own layer) · Voluntary Tithing (wiki root; canon-grade) · The DNA of Heaven, Parts V and XII (Fable synthesis — "each week, each person puts something in the middle of the table") · lionsberg.wiki: The Twelve Words Open: none found.