Alms is not only giving money out of your wallet. Alms is to accept a fellow human being to sit next to you, without alienate him/her with your thoughts. 
Do you have a colleague who is going through a tragedy in his life? You should know how to comfort him, how to soothe his pain. For the poor you can do a short prayer: ”Lord have mercy on so and so”, if you cannot give them something, because you are on the bus and they on the street.
The true question is in what state is our heart regarding the pain that is all around us.
The largest sin that we will have to apologize during Judgement is this: ” Why I did not give more attention to my fellow human beings?
Elder Arsenios Papatsiok (1914-2011)
Translated by Dr. Nick Stergiou
