XXV — CHARITY

Presence of God. — O Lord, grant that through charity I may truly share in your life of love.

Meditation

1 — Faith makes you adhere to God by means of knowledge and therefore concerns above all your mind. Hope makes you adhere to God by means of the conviction of possessing Him one day in blessed life and therefore concerns above all your desire for happiness. But charity takes your whole being and, through love, launches it toward God. Faith tells you who God is; it reveals to you the mystery of his intimate life in which you are called to participate. Hope tells you that this God wills to be your good for all eternity. But charity makes you reach Him immediately by that unitive power which is proper to it. “Charity,” teaches St. Thomas, “properly makes one tend toward God by uniting man’s affection to God, so that man may live no longer for himself but for God” (I-II, q. 17, a. 6, ad 3).

But what is this charity that has the power to unite us to God, to make us live in intimate relationship with Him to the point that “he who abides in charity abides in God and God in him” (1 Jn. 4:16)? It is a created participation in charity, in the infinite love with which God loves Himself, that is, in the love with which the Father loves the Son, with which the Son loves the Father, and with which both love one another in the Holy Spirit. Through charity you are called to enter this current, this circle of eternal love that unites the three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. Already faith, by making you participate in the knowledge God has of Himself, makes you enter the intimacy of divine life; but charity makes you penetrate still more deeply, inserting you, so to speak, into that movement of love, of incomparable friendship, that exists within the bosom of the Most Holy Trinity.

Charity launches you into the center of God’s intimate life; it makes you capable of associating yourself with the infinite love of the three divine Persons: through it, together with the Father, you love the Son; together with the Son, you love the Father; and you love the Father and the Son in the love of the Holy Spirit.

2 — You also love God through hope, but you love Him above all as your good, as the source of your happiness; you love Him for the help and assistance you expect from Him. Charity, on the contrary, makes you capable of loving God for Himself, because He is infinite goodness, beauty, wisdom, in a word, because He is God. The love produced by hope, though most precious, is still imperfect precisely because it is a love of concupiscence, by which God is loved for the benefits received from Him. But the love of charity is perfect because it is pure love of complacency and benevolence, that is, a love that delights in God’s infinite good and wills this good, not for one’s own advantage, but for Him, for his happiness, for his glory. Charity raises your love so high that it makes it capable of truly loving God as He loves Himself, though not with the same intensity. God loves Himself with infinite complacency and benevolence: the Father delights infinitely in the Son’s infinite good and infinitely wills it; in turn the Son delights in the Father’s infinite good and infinitely wills it; and likewise the Father and the Son with respect to the Holy Spirit, and vice versa. Among the three divine Persons there is therefore a most pure love of friendship by which each delights in the other’s good and happiness, and each wills the other’s glory. Charity makes you capable of loving God with this love of friendship, that is, of loving Him first of all for Himself, for his glory, for his happiness. It is true: you, little creature, can add nothing to God’s intrinsic happiness and glory; nevertheless charity urges you to commit yourself with all your strength to please Him, to give Him delight, to procure for Him, so to speak, the joy of seeing you correspond fully to his love. It urges you to consecrate your whole life to Him, to give yourself to Him without reserve. It urges you to seek first his will, his interests, his glory, setting aside your own will and personal interests. Now you understand better St. Thomas’s sentence: “charity unites man’s affection to God, so that he no longer lives for himself but for God.”

Colloquy

“Consider, my soul, with what joy and love the Father recognizes his Son and the Son his Father. Contemplate the ardor with which the Holy Spirit unites Himself to Them, and how none of the Three can be separated from such love and knowledge, They being so completely one. They know one another, love one another, delight in one another. Now, what need is there of my love? Why do You want it, my God? What do You gain by it?

“O love, O name that I would like to repeat everywhere, and that alone can give me courage to repeat with the bride of the Canticle: ‘I have loved my Beloved!’ Love alone can give me the right to think that You, my God, my Spouse and my Good, have need of me...

“Love, however, must not be the fruit of imagination, but must be proved by works.... O Jesus, what does a soul inflamed with your love not do? Whoever truly loves You loves all that is good, wills all that is good, praises all that is good, favors all that is good; associates only with the good in order to help and defend them; in short, loves only truth and what is worthy of being loved. Whoever truly loves You, O Lord, cannot at the same time love earthly vanities. His one care is to please You. He dies of desire to be loved in return by You and consumes life in longing to love You more.

“O Lord, deign to give me this love at least before I die! It would be a great comfort to be able to think, at the moment of death, that I must be judged by You whom I have loved above all things. I could then come before You with confidence, even with the burden of my debts, persuaded that I am going not to a foreign land but to my homeland, to the kingdom of Him whom I so love and who so loves me” (cf. T.G. Es. 7, 2; P. 4, 11 and 12; Cam. 11, 3 and 8).