Charity

One

Two Kinds of Love

How would you define love? 

It’s not easy. We use love in a lot of different ways, and it’s not always easy to see what they all have in common. So here is a definition: 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,” or, “I love summer vacation,” describe this first kind of love. It’s where we want some good for ourselves. 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, and that’s the love of wanting good for another person.

So, for example, if I were to say, “I love my kids. I’d do anything for them,” it would indicate that what I desire is good things, happiness, for my kids. Examples of this second love are the way all parents are supposed to love their children, the way Mother Teresa loved the poor, or the way we should all love our enemies. It refers to a willingness to act for the good of someone, to work for their fulfillment.

The theological virtue of love, of charity, is to love God for His sake. Charity is to try to do some good for God. It’s a love of God, but it’s also a love for God. It’s where we love God for His sake, and not just for our own benefit.

Two

Every deep relationship should be a combination of wanting some good for myself and wanting good for the other person.

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 for her sake, for her good, to love her 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. And our legitimate, creaturely, self-directed love for God is called hope.

But our relationship with God can’t just be about what we get from Him, it can’t just be self-directed. For the relationship to be complete, we can’t use God as just a means to our end. We have to love Him because we care about Him. Because we love Him, for His own sake.

That’s charity, and it’s a part of our Christian life that we ignore far, far too often.

Three

Our tendency to use God selfishly

No relationship works long-term if one person makes it all about themselves. If one person does nothing but talk about themselves, or evaluate every situation based on what they get out of it? But don’t you and I have a tendency to do that with the Lord?

When we pray, do we just talk about ourselves the whole time? Do we just discuss our lives, our needs, or 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 attitude? 

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

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.”

What a terrible father that would be! We’d say, “You know, being a father isn’t just all about you. That’s really the wrong attitude.”

And being in a relationship with God isn’t supposed to be just all about you either. It’s also about showing your 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

Asking God for the grace to love Him

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 can see, can’t you, that every relationship, every friendship, has to be a two-way street? Love has to go both ways.

We can’t just presume on God’s love for us and disregard our need to cultivate a love for Him.

The greatest way to show another person we love them is to spend time with them. Teresa of Avila says prayer is, “taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us.”

Finally, love is to do some good for someone. What good can we do for God? Jesus said, “If you love me you will keep my commandments.” We love Jesus and do good for Him by always striving to do and accept his will.