I have often struggled with understanding the theological virtue of Charity.
In every day life, there are many calls for us to be “charitable.”
I probably get at least one piece of mail a day asking me to contribute to this or that cause. We also get frequent phone calls (or at least we used to before caller ID and no call lists) requesting donations. Our Catholic schools always have something they want us to give to, the envelopes for my parish include many additional requests beyond the Sunday collection, and my fraternity has a reminder at every monthly meeting about the programs it supports.
All these qualify as charity in the modern world, but the theological virtue of charity means something deeper than this, something which I find it difficult to give voice to.
In preparation for our SFO study group last Sunday, one of the assigned readings was the introduction to the encyclical Charity in Truth, by Benedict XVI.
The Pope says this:
“Charity goes beyond justice, because to love is to give, to offer what is “mine” to the other; but it never lacks justice, which prompts us to give to the other what is “his,” what is due to him by reason of his being or his acting…………charity transcends justice and completes it in the logic of giving and forgiving. The earthly city is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy, and communion.”
When I consider this, I understand it to be, at its very essence, a description of the life of Jesus.
The link to the word gratuitousness defines it as something given “beyond obligation.” That describes exactly what Jesus did (although not in return for services rendered). He gave everything of Himself, beyond any reasonable sense of obligation we might assign to Him, and He did so purely because He loved us.
St. Francis, in his quest to follow the example of Jesus, did something similar. He embraced poverty completely, leaving himself bereft of the ability to give anything material to his fellow man. And then, out of that poverty, he proceeded to give his entire spiritual being as well.
In our study group, we were asking, “Why you, Francis?” What was it about you that made your life so compelling that we still hold you up as an example today?
The ability to give everything must be part of that answer.
There’s that word again, “everything.” It first came up in the post on Matthew Chapter 13.
“When he (the merchant) found one (a fine pearl) of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.”
The idea of charity must now be linked to that word.
Charity, in the theological sense, is something more than just another way to say love.
We are called not to give just what it takes to achieve justice. We are called to give well beyond that, to give everything that is rightfully ours to the other (not just our material, but our spirit as well) because we understand that this is how Jesus taught us to love by the example of His life.
The theological virtue of Charity, then, is the ability to give everything of one’s self in the name of love.
How, in the context of my life, can I possibly love well enough that I give everything to others the way that Jesus, Francis, and the merchant did?
From time to time and many times daily, we all feel the self-emptying pinch of that total self giving demanded by the Gospel mandates of Jesus and the example of Francis. In comparison, giving up things, money, etc., is nothing to the giving up of that which is closet to us . . . self!