On Love and Charity

 Love one another. Is this enough? Love your enemies, too. The theological virtue of Love is a path, loving others through love of God as the strength of love for God makes all loves possible. Then again, your enemies are trying to destroy you. What would happen if enemies love each other? Peace on earth? Embrace an enemy today?

Be good to them that despise you: to say you’ll pray just makes them angry. Love is an action. Preach the liberation of the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind. Free the oppressed.

Love saves. Mainly it saves you. The desperate love of parent for child; the passionate love of the Song of Songs: love is hardly love without emotion. Charity, however, may seem unloving love, cold as charity a proverb. Who is my neighbour? Share dignity with charity: receive the same.  Let charity be shown to you. God knows the need.

Love saved the weeping woman at Christ’s feet. “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven: for she loved much.” Or with Tyndall: “To whom lesse is forgiven, the same doeth lesse love.” Who is my family? More love, more family. You are one of all of Us.

On Christmas Present

 

Advent: a season of repentance. For beginners, we could look at greed. Greed of Empire. Personal greed. Even greed of space.

It’s famously more blessed to give than to receive, and charity’s a word of bad repute. Why? What’s the relationship between justice and moderation? How to avoid ostentation? Generosity depends on having. What’s the cost to the receiver? What’s taken away? What obligation purveyed? What conditional love displayed? Is this gift really necessary?

Many motivations and intentions. You can give time, strength and attention. Everybody wants your attention, can’t get enough. Much of it in grievous situations. Grief on the move. And harmony, the resolution of discord, that must be led back over and over, in progressions.

The obligation is not to the receiver, but the giver. It will test your values. There’s no top to the pile of causes stacking up on my desk, appealing for money and support. What’s the relationship between courage and wisdom?  How best to relieve suffering? Or nourish, or inspire? Which most appropriate decisions can you make, knowing the others have a right to your help? (As you to theirs.) Christmas present is love for me and thee and they.

On Charity aka Love

Love, like friendship, seeks the good of a friend. For Aristotle, friends seek the good in one another. Charity, says Aquinas, is the friendship of man towards God, and such love is reciprocal. How did Charity, the supreme virtue, become so poisoned?

            Unlike exclusive loves, divine charity includes our fellows. All persons, neighbours, are subjects of God’s charity. How, then, did we come up with statements like ‘I love my gay friends, but…’ or ‘I love my black friends, but…’ or ‘I love my Muslim friends, but…’? And these friends are always many.

            Conditional love is judgement. I myself have been told, ‘We don’t approve of you; it doesn’t mean we don’t like you.’ Approval and disapproval are judgements. Of course you don’t like me. I feel your coldness.

            Conditional love for a child is disabling. A child who is never good enough. If only a child was different. Such love denies God’s generosity. Think of what you’ve been given in this child, faults and all. The appropriate response is gratitude.

            Think of what you’ve been given in this neighbour. This gay, black, or Muslim, disapproved of neighbour. Seek the good, earthly good, for your friend.