The Virtue of Charity

Today and tomorrow we will reflect on the virtue of Charity because I do not understand it at all; even more, I don’t live charity toward God and neighbor. So here we go. The two chief characteristics of God’s love are selflessness and sacrifice.  Consequently, in the virtue of Charity, our love must embody these two attributes. Of course, the fact that we must be selfless does not imply that we can never consider our own needs and desires. The virtue of hope is founded on fulfilling one’s own need: “I want to get to Heaven; I need to get to Heaven.” Hope is the desire for supernatural good insofar as it will make oneself happy. This is totally appropriate, but it also needs to be complemented by charity, which is the desire for supernatural good insofar as it’s something that’ll make God and neighbor happy.

To have a proper understanding of selflessness, we need to first distinguish between two kinds of love. Love itself can be a difficult idea to get a handle on, given how many kinds there are and how often we use the word “love” with no reflection on its precise significance. The broadest definition of love is: To want some good for someone. Pretty much every time someone uses the word “love” it involves a movement towards some good thing for some person. But there are two ways to want some good for someone. The first way is wanting some good for yourself. Phrases like “I love coffee,” “I love the mountains,” “I love the Kansas City Chiefs,” all describe this first kind of love. It’s based on wanting one’s own happiness. But there’s another kind of love which involves wanting some good for someone else. So, for example, if I were to say, “I love my son; I’d do anything for him,” it would indicate that what I desire is for my son to be happy. 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 doesn’t refer to concern for our own enjoyment, but rather a willingness to work for someone else’s fulfillment.

Again, these two loves, the first of which is self-focused and the second of which is other-focused, are complementary. Ideally, one should experience both. Consider the love between a husband and wife. When the man says, “I love you,” to the woman, he normally means a) “You make me happy,” and b) “I will try to make you happy.” If, on the other hand, all love were to be reduced to the first kind of statement, that is, to self-focused love, then the love doesn’t mean very much, and it’ll eventually collapse just as soon as one of the parties doesn’t feel like he’s getting anything out of the relationship.

Living out Charity always demands sacrifice. If you’ve ever made someone else’s happiness a priority, you know it isn’t easy.  In fact, the proof of charity is measured by sacrifice. If we have a selfless love for God and neighbor, we’ll be willing to suffer in order to serve them. That’s the ultimate test of love, as Our Lord Himself states, “No one has greater love than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

What does all this mean practically?  How can we concretely practice a selfless and sacrificial love?  Well, the first step is to stop thinking about our faith, our religion, and our lives as Catholics as if it was just about us. We have to keep in mind that our number-one purpose in life is to serve God, to please Him. So we shouldn’t evaluate our spiritual life based on whether we get anything out of it. Many people do this; they quit praying, or going to confession, or going to mass, because “it wasn’t doing anything for them.” That’s an indication that they’re lacking the virtue of charity, that their relationship with God is fundamentally selfish.