Charity

ONE

We've been meditating on faith and hope. Now we meditate on charity. 

So how would you define love? It's not easy. We used love in a lot of different ways, and it's not always easy to see what they all have in common.

Here's the definition of love: Love is to want some good for yourself and some good for others. 

That means there are two ways to love. You can love by wanting some good for yourself. Phrases like, I love pizza, I love summer, I love the Kansas City Chiefs, or, I love being in a romantic relationship all describe this first kind of love.

It's a self-directed love, which is fine, but then there's the other kind of love which is deeper and is often more difficult. That's the love of wanting some good for another person. 

So for example, if I were to say I love my kids and I'd do anything for them, it would indicate that what I desire for them is good and happiness.

Examples of this second kind of love are the way all parents are supposed to love their children, the way Mother Teresa loved the poor, or the way we should love our enemies. It refers to a willingness to work for someone else's good. This is the love we encounter in the theological virtue of charity.

It's a love of God. But it's also a love for God. It's where we love God for His sake, for His good, and not just for what we get out of it.

TWO

Every deep relationship should be a combination of self-directed love and other-directed love. For instance, I'm happy to admit that I love my wife with a self-directed love. She makes me happy. She's good to me. She's good for me. I need her and I love her, and I like her. And I want to be with her for my own sake. That's as it should be. 

But I'm also called to love my wife with an other directed love. I should consider her well-being. I should be working for her happiness. I should commit to loving her without constantly asking myself what I'm getting out of it. Otherwise. I'll just be using her and when I don't feel like she's meeting my needs, satisfying my user requirements, the relationship will simply fall apart.

 So here's the point with God: Our relationship with Him is about our well-being. It's supposed to have an element of self-directed love. We do love God because we know He's the only way we can ever become truly happy.

Our legitimate self-directed love for God is what we call hope. But our relationship with God can't just be self-directed for the relationship to be complete. We can't use God as just a means to get what we want. We can't use Him just as a means to our happiness.

We need to come to the point where we love God, not for what we get out of it, but just for His sake. That's charity: to love God just because He's God and to want to do some good for Him to please Him, to make Him happy.

THREE

We have this tendency to use God selfishly, but no relationship works long term if one person makes it all about themselves, if one person does nothing but talk about themselves or evaluates every situation based on what they get out of it.

 But don't you and I have a tendency to do that with God when we pray? Do we just talk about ourselves the whole time? Do we just discuss our lives, our needs, our struggles? How can we claim to love God when we never show any real concern for Him? When we never ask what we can do for Him? When we never even tell him that we love Him? 

What relationship could survive that way? 

Charity is sometimes defined as friendship with God, but what would we say about a friendship where one of the friends did nothing but use the other to get what they needed?

FOUR

Now, imagine if we treated our other relationships the way we treat the Lord. 

Think of how many people say, “You know, I tried religion, I tried praying, I tried going to church, but I just didn't get anything out of it, so I stopped going.”

Imagine if we took that approach to other relationships. 

Imagine a father who said, “You know, I tried spending time with my young child. I tried bouncing him to sleep at night. I tried to hold him sometimes. I tried to feed him. I tried to smile at him and play with him, but I didn't really get anything out of it. So I don't spend time with him anymore.”

Well, that would be a horrible father! We'd say, “You know, being a father isn't just about you! That's really a terrible attitude.” And being in a relationship with God isn't supposed to be just all about you either. It's also about showing our love for God. If you can't do that, then why bother calling it a relationship? It certainly isn't a relationship of charity.

FIVE

So let's be honest, charity is hard. It's hard to love God for His own sake. It's very natural for our love to be purely self-directed.

And that's especially true when it comes to the Lord. But you see, we can't do that. 

We know that every relationship, every friendship, has to be a two-way street. Love has to go both ways. We can't just presume God's love for us and disregard our need to cultivate a love for Him. So what can we do to really love God, just for His sake?

Well, I think one of the greatest things, one of the greatest ways to show love for another person, is just to spend time with them. This is the power of prayer. We don't spend time in prayer so that we will get something from God. We make a commitment to spend time with God in prayer, just because we love him.

St. Teresa of Avila says, “Prayer is spending time frequently with Him who we know loves us.”

Wouldn't that be great if God said that about us? That he's spending time with us because he knows we love him?

And finally, love is to do some good for the other. But what good can you do for God? It's not like He needs anything. But Jesus said, “If you love Me, you'll keep My commandments.”

 If we love God, the good that we can do for him is try to please him, to try to do his will. That's charity.