Escaping for a day from the irritations of the Coronavirus, the Grand Priory Day of Recollection at Wardour Castle Chapel took place a couple of weeks ago, well-attended as ever.
The Recollections were led by our esteemed Chaplain, Father Stephen Morrison, Canon Regular of Prémontré, and we are delighted to offer his reflections upon Charity, something the Order needs to hear regularly, below.
The day took place with suitable 'social distancing' (not of course in St Thomas Aquinas's far more interesting use of that term, which is itself part of the Order's spirituality SEE HERE) which somewhat mucked-up the lunch arrangements, but members of the Order of Malta are a resourceful lot, and country picnics need be no hardship, bien arrosés.
Those who variously were unable to attend at the last moment were much missed, and prayers were offered for them, but the most notable and prominent absence to this annual event was 'Podge', Patricia Lady Talbot of Malahide, not to mention the great tradition of her truly delicious Lemon Drizzle Cake. Lady Talbot was the intention at Holy Mass. May she rest in peace.
This year is, of course, the 500th Anniversary of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and as the Chapel had been unable to celebrate the event properly in the Summer, opportunity was taken to wear the 'Westminster Chasuble', the Mass being a Votive of the English Martyrs. This vestment, originally from the Benedictine Abbey of Westminster, though much altered, adorned with Tudor portcullis and roses, and the pomegranate of Queen Catherine of Aragon, and flemish embroideries of Passion scenes, had been taken to the Field of the Cloth of Gold for Cardinal Wolsey's Pontifical Mass before the two young Kings. It was in the care of Lord Arundell of Wardour, who brought it back to England, and, due in part to the Reformation, has remained at Wardour ever since.
We are grateful to Grand Prior Emeritus Fra' Ian Scott for the photograph, much in the tradition of his predecessor!
CHARITY
1. The Love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ
2. The Love we owe to God and are commanded to show to our neighbour
It may surprise you to know that I hardly ever preach on Love, on Charity. If that sounds odd, perhaps every single sermon on a religious topic is in fact about Love; about God’s love for us, and ours for Him and for our neighbour. Explicit or not, the central mystery of the Christian Revelation is Charity. Our late confrere Fr Cadoc never preached on Love, or rather, he always did, without ever saying the word. Why? He didn’t want to be misunderstood. Love is a word that has become cheapened by public discourse, a word we use as much for ice cream as we do for God; it has become “fluffy” and imprecise; we speak of the highest loves and the humblest loves in our lives using the same word. “Charity” is the word preachers tend to use to describe the virtue… but even that is misunderstood in the world as meaning simply “philanthropy.” We use the word “obsequium” to refer to our charitable care for Our Lords the poor and the sick; what we really mean is the practising of the virtue of charity. When priests say glibly “Jesus loves you” – the phrase has become so sickly sweet as to be meaningless… whereas, it is the most meaningful mystery, indeed the deepest and most unfathomable of all. How, then, can we properly speak about love, avoiding the extremes of either excessive dryness or formality on the one hand, and sentimental schmaltz or soppiness on the other? So today, I’m going to break the habit of my preaching – and boldly speak of Love. In two parts – this morning, on God’s love for us, and this afternoon, our own growth in love, through loving God and our neighbour.
Love is one of the Theological Virtues:
“So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” 1 Cor 13:13
It is with some trepidation, dear confreres, that I attempt to speak of it…
because St Paul pointed out that the greatest of the theological virtues is love. It is not hard to see why; in his great ‘hymn to love’ in the first letter to the Corinthians, Paul has pointed out love’s qualities, finishing with its immortality: “Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.” Love is perfection – of course it is; Love will not pass away – of course it won’t: for God is Love: Deus Caritas est. Faith and Hope are virtues, that is, gifts from Him to us, which are designed to become habits in us, in order that we might know him and glimpse him: through faith and hope, in this world of ignorance and blindness, he has given us light and knowledge, assurance and consolation. But when He gives us Love, He gives us His very self. It has been said before that Faith purifies the intellect which seeks God, giving it knowledge. Hope purifies knowledge by founding it upon those treasures yet unseen and as yet not completely known which God has prepared for those who love Him. Love, then, perfects the will, by causing a union of wills – ours with God’s – which is a pretty good definition of what being in love with God is – union with Him. A union of wills, of hearts, of minds. It might be called a union of lives, or of life – since Charity is the life of God, St Thomas did not shy away from declaring that charity is the life of the soul, and a participation in the Holy Spirit. The death of Love in us through sin is the death of life in the soul; but life in us, love in us, is a union with God’s life, with God’s love. Love is the greatest virtue, the result and summit of which is a Holy Communion, a sharing in the Divine Nature. Love is also the greatest because it is the object of Faith and Hope: We believe in God, and we hope in Him. But when we love, Love Himself becomes our goal, because God is our final end; there will be no need for Faith and Hope in Heaven, in the sense that we will not need to ask for those virtues, our union with God having been perfected – there will remain only Love, and for all eternity.It almost goes without saying that we require these theological virtues above all in our own times. We need love. It seems almost daft to say so, doesn’t it? But our own sad age cries out in a particular way for all three of these virtues. Each time I preach about the “crisis” around us, whether in the world at large or in the Church in particular, I change my mind about the nature of the crisis. Most often I think, you will hear me say that we are living through a crisis of Faith. I need hardly list the reasons… The tyrannical regime we labour under: Relativism, Religious Indifference turning to Religious intolerance, fundamentalism (both religious and secular), secularism, atheism, scientism, and all the false gods of our own invention which demonically enslave us; religious ignorance among the baptised; poor catechism; a poisoned and castrated culture and civilisation; the rot which has set in upon Christendom; It is clear that we lack, and sorely need, the virtue of Faith; the Faith of our Founders, the Catholic Faith, and the Virtue of Faith to believe in it. But on other occasions, I am convinced that we are living through a crisis of Hope. Determinism, ‘carpe-diem-ism’ because we don’t believe in anything transcendent, nor in the immortality of the soul; drugs and escapes from reality; the inevitable failure of “Progress” and the industrial and technological revolutions; the collapse of economic order and the oppression and moral corruption of the poor; all of which lead to despair… We urgently need the virtue of Hope. And on other occasions, I am convinced that the crisis we are living in is a crisis of Love. The world has forgotten what real love is. The “dumbing down” of love through excessive romanticism, banal popular love-songs, the forgotten virtue of friendship, the tawdry enticements of hedonism and eroticism, and the worship of sex as merely ‘recreation’, the libertine agenda in all areas of human sexuality; divorce and the systematic disintegration and destruction of family life and Christian marriage, the neglect of duty, the disappearance of good manners and chivalry, public celebrations of unkindness, internet trolling, self-gratification, egoism writ large, warmongering and the stark lack of forgiveness in society, in the Church and among nations, a society of throw-away consumerism, the death of art, and the distortion and perversion of all society and culture into a sewer so that human attitudes and products become something ultimately (forgive me) masturbatory – pointless, turned in on self, closed, a massage of the ego, without any self-sacrificial giving – all of this promoted, preached, encouraged by the world… in a word, idolatry… It is clear that we are living through a crisis of Charity, of real Love.
So much for the Bad News… The Good News can be summed up in one word: Love. We know this… God is Love, and He has revealed Himself, given Himself, offered Himself, sacrificed Himself, shared Himself: The Gospel is his definitive and full command: Love me! Love me back! Charity is the answer for all the problems I’ve just listed. And not just if we learn to practise it (that’s our topic for this afternoon): God has already answered those problems, already taken pity on them, foreseen and forgiven them, already sent a solution: these must be the most famous words of the Gospel, still to this day: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”
St John would reiterate this thought throughout every single piece of scripture with his name on it: “See what love the Father has lavished on us… ….By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” And at the end of his first letter, to show that Love is the answer to all those problems we can easily discern and diagnose, but with which we lamentably cooperate and find ourselves sometimes entangled in, St John simply concludes his epistle of Love with the words: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.”
Here we are, on a day of recollection and retreat; here we are, gathered in the Chapel, before the throne of Love Himself in the Tabernacle; here we are, a family of brothers and sisters who love one another; here in the Order of Malta, that crucible of love, this factory of virtue… let us consider once again what Love is; who Love is; and what our vocation is: for it came from Love, it leads us unto Love, and just as it has been received from Love, it is given inLove. Today, as we examine our consciences and accuse ourselves of a frequent lack of charity, we are nonetheless surrounded, buoyed up, lit from within, and enfolded in, Divine Charity Himself. We would not dare to speak of it, were this not so.
Let us boldly approach the Throne of Grace, therefore, and ask that the mystery of God’s Love might be revealed to us.
St John again: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins.” That’s what we will consider this morning (in the time remaining to us) – God’s love for us – and this afternoon, our Love for one another, Love of neighbour, growing and living in charity. The distinction is already blurred – as we well know; for while Charity is God’s essence, we know that loving Him means keeping His commandments; so if we are to acquire this virtue which is the very life of God, of course we must love our neighbour. Perhaps it’s easier to begin by reminding ourselves of God as the source of all Charity.
God is Love, and God is a Lover. That He loves us may be seen from the event of the Incarnation. How He loves us may be seen in the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. God is Love, and God is a Lover. That same Love which desired an object, that Love which is the dynamic and eternal movement we now know to be the Blessed Trinity, spilled over to share His Love and His glory with the whole of Creation… and at the head of creation, Man, created in His own image and likeness. This subject-object dynamic is key to Charity, because our theology of Creation is based on the notion that Love never exists “alone” – even in God Himself there is no notion of “solitude”. The Divine Persons love one another, the Love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father is the Holy Spirit. Love is what all the processions that we speak of within the Trinity really is. The essence of God the Trinity is anything but alone; Love is a Communion at the heart of God, one which He shares with His creatures. The angels, the universe, the human race – God made them in Love, to love Him back. God gives, and we receive; we give back, and God receives. Thus there is a union of God’s Will with my Will. I am made to know Him and love Him, and when I do, to use the words of St John, God abides in me, and I in Him. The Love of God “made manifest in Jesus Christ” is the fullness of this giving. The sources of Revelation (Scripture and Tradition) take us on this journey from Creation and Election to Redemption: and so it is Christ who, through our adoption in Baptism as children of God by the New Covenant, leads us back to the Father with the same Love with which He Loves the Father.
What are the implications of the Love of God made manifest in Christ? And what are the implications of this “how God loves us” which we see on the Cross? The Love of Christ, given in self-immolation on the Cross as priest and victim, cannot be bought or stolen; Love can only be given and received. But the Love of Christ can be refused; when we face the Cross, we are offered this gift, and we, dear brothers and sisters, have received it, and offered it back. Christ’s self-offering is perfect – the Mass is perfect Love from Son to Father. But our own return of love for such amazing love, sometimes seems inadequate, especially if our participation in the Mass is inadequate. In our poor, sinful humanity, our own offerings of love have been imperfect, and inconsistent. We do not make a perfect offering of our Wills at all times, or in eternity like the Angels did. Christ, who is both human and divine, loves his Father perfectly – and joined to Him, so will we. But only in Him! That is why Christ entered time and space, that is why he gives us time to convert, turn back, and re-consecrate ourselves to Him. Each day He gives us affords us another opportunity; each Holy Mass we attend, each Absolution we receive, each temptation we avoid, each grace we accept, each virtue we acquire… so many opportunities, and so many we sometimes missed! Today is itself an opportunity – another one – to make that exchange a permanent reality: God loves me, I love God. Jesus on the Cross loves me, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament loves me; I want to be like St Paul, crucified to the world in order to love Him better. I want to be a Eucharistic offering of Love back to the Father. I want to love God more, I want to love God forever, I want to love him, “and never more to leave Him” as the Stations of the Cross reminds us… He gives me Himself, I give Him myself. I give him my human loves (affection, devotion, the friendship of my soul, detaching myself from petty loves in order to attach myself to Him), and I return to him the gift of divine Love he has planted in my soul… by the virtue of charity.
This mystery is at the heart of the Mass. And it is a very Norbertine theme to preach on… St Norbert always preached about the Blessed Sacrament as being at the very heart of our whole lives: trying to Love God as much as He loves us in the Blessed Sacrament. R. H. Benson defined this in “Christ in the Church” as follows: “Real love seeks not to possess, but to be possessed. Not, so to speak, to devour the beloved, to satisfy self with the beloved, but the exact contrary – to be devoured and to satisfy.”
This can be said easily of our Eucharistic Lord, who wishes us to possess him, devour him, and be satisfied by him. But us? The challenge for us – our task, our vocation – is to make it a reality for us too. We need to learn to love Eucharistically.
Everything that Saint Paul says of Love, we see in the Eucharist. “Love is patient and kind;” – Jesus waits for us in the Tabernacle, and welcomes us with gentleness. “Love is not jealous or boastful;” – Jesus is humble in the Tabernacle, making himself small, and not trumpeting his presence (that’s our job, to lift Him up!) but silently calling to us. “Love is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;” – Jesus is honest in the Tabernacle; he wants to feed us, but does not force Himself upon us; though He is forgotten, neglected, spurned, even desecrated sometimes, He loves us still. “The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.” Jesus suffers when we suffer, Jesus is our Suffering Saviour in the Tabernacle, and our long-Suffering Saviour too. “Love does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” It is not hard to see how the Love of God has been made manifest in Jesus Christ. The Eucharist shows us just how much God loves us. As St John again said of Jesus at the Last Supper: “Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” During that First Mass, Christ’s prayer to the Father is that this Communion of love might become a reality. Even though he is aware that Judas – that you and I – would betray him, even while participating at this Holy Table, he prayed: “Father, I desire … that the love with which thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
The Mass is the greatest sign of the Love of God made manifest in Christ; but there are of course subsidiary signs of that same Love. All the other Sacraments, for a start… but also those things we already know to be gifts of His Love; our guardian angels; the friendship of the saints; inspirations of all kinds to attract us towards the Good, the True, the Beautiful: As St Francis de Sales, that great doctor of the Love of God, said: “Love is the movement, effusion and advancement of the heart toward the good.” We see this Love too in all the works of Providence – in our lives, our families, the talents and opportunities offered to us, and so on. We see it even – perhaps especially – in our crosses and sufferings – where it is a special grace indeed to see the love of God in action, effecting within us a perfect resignation to His Will.
So we have many signs of the Love of Christ for us, and principally in the Cross and in the Tabernacle. Let us see two other iconsof charity. The first is the Blessed Virgin Mary. God loves us so much that He sent his Son, born of a woman. The prevenient grace which effected the Immaculate Conception of Mary shows how God loved us – in view of our Redemption, God gave us a Mother at the same time as He gave Christ one. How Christ loved us – on the Cross – is also a mystery which involves Mary as Co-Redemptrix. She who is sinless, she whose will is perfectly united to Divine Charity and filled with it, cooperates in our Salvation by desiring our Salvation as much as her Son desired it.
The point of the Gospel narratives of Our Lady is simply to underline how Christ desires our Salvation, and how Mary desires it with Christ. I sometimes struggle to preach on Mary when we have the Gospel passages where her Son almost seems to ignore her. (Just me?) “Here are your mother and brothers…” “Yes, but anyone who does the will of God is my mother, my brother…” “Blessed is the womb that bore thee!” “Blessed rather those who hear the word of God and keep it.” Now, of course I don’t think that Our Lord ignored his mother. And yes, she is the answer to all those injunctions of Our Lord to hear and do God’s Will. Absolutely. But perhaps I want to see the human affection, as well as Divine Love, that Jesus had for Mary. When someone says to Him “Your mother’s here”, I want him to run to her, and give her to all of us, and honour her publicly. As Fr Cadoc pointed out to me, it is an improper desire, and not one that Revelation has sought to give us. Mary is honoured in Heaven beyond our imagining, but before we get to the last two glorious mysteries, we have to pass through all the sorrowful ones. I mustn’t let romanticism get in the way. It’s why our late confrere Fr Cadoc rarely preached about God’s love for us… at least, explicitly. He didn’t ever want to be misunderstood as preaching about fluffy puppy-love, us falling down and God kissing us better, or any other simplistic notion of what the mystery of Salvation is all about. God’s love for us is to desire and to effect our Salvation in Christ. Mary is perfectly united to that Will of His, and plays the New Eve to his New Adam, assisting Him in his Passion by her com-passion, as he – our heavenly Bridegroom - re-creates (“behold, I make all things new”) and reproduces: “Woman, behold your son; son, behold your Mother.”
All that the Love of God desired for us was our salvation, and in desiring that, He gave us Mary. Yes, Christ had the greatest possible love, affection and respect for Mary, as his dear Mother. But that’s less important to the Evangelists (who were, we may presume, as well as being inspired by the Holy Spirit, prompted too by His Spouse, Our Lady). For the Gospels, Christ’s love, and Mary’s love, is manifest in the desire to save us. Fr Cadoc, whenever he preached about God’s love did so almost exclusively by preaching about Mary, and by preaching about God’s Will to save us, a will to which she was perfectly united. Mary loves Jesus so much, and he loves her so much. Their embraces on this earth are as nothing compared with the embrace they now have in Heaven, one which – thank God – includes us too.
The second icon is the devotion to the Precious Blood. This, truly, is a devotion which encapsulates the essence of God, the outpouring and self-offering of his unending Charity – the Blood of the New and Eternal Covenant, shed for the forgiveness of sins. How much did God love us? To the shedding of His blood.
This, surely, is the answer to all those problems in the world I listed at the start, and the remedy to turn from vice to virtue; the Blood of Christ, surely, is the cleansing and absolving fountain which the arid and filthy world thirsts for. The best work on this subject, for my money, is that of Father Faber (The Founder of the Brompton Oratory). My goodness, what a book that is. He called it “The Precious Blood, or the Price of our Salvation.” In it, he even points out how he prefers this devotion to that of the Sacred Heart (gasp!) – because it was not the Heart that redeemed us (so to speak) but the Blood of Christ. Faber describes the Blood of Jesus in terms so vivid that the book appears in technicolour when you read it. He speaks of the fountain source of the Precious Blood in Mary, and of the “procession” as he calls it of the Precious Blood throughout the world, and ultimately through Christ’s veins and out of them upon the Cross, soaking the underworld, then back to the Body of Christ in his Resurrection, and glowing now through his “translucent” body in Heaven, to the joy of the Saints, still working miracles of conversion and salvation throughout the world, entering every chalice at Mass, causing as it were great waves of charity. Well, it’s a powerful image of what the Love of God is. I leave you with the final paragraph of the central chapter of his book, which is, I think, some of the finest text Faber ever wrote. He speaks of a sort of vision he had one day at the seaside (a very Fr Faber beginning), and the powerful ecstasy he felt at considering just how much God loved him.
“I was upon the seashore; and my heart filled with love it knew not why. Its happiness went out over the wide waters and upon the unfettered wind, and swelled up into the free dome of blue sky until it filled it. The dawn lighted up the faces of the ivory cliffs, which the sun and sea had been blanching for centuries of God’s unchanging love. The miles of noiseless sands seemed vast as if they were the floor of eternity. Somehow the daybreak was like eternity. The idea came over me of that feeling of acceptance, which so entrances the soul just judged and just admitted into Heaven. To be saved!I said to myself, To be saved!Then the thoughts of all the things implied in salvation came in one thought upon me; and I said, This is the one grand joy of life; and I clapped my hands like a child, and spoke to God aloud. But then there came many thoughts all in one thought, about the nature and manner of our salvation. To be saved with such a salvation! This was a grander joy, the second grand joy of life: and I tried to say some lines of a hymn; but the words were choked in my throat. The ebb was sucking the sea down over the sand quite silently; and the cliffs were whiter, and more day like. Then there came many more thoughts all in one thought; and I stood still without intending it. To be saved by such a Saviour!This was the grandest joy of all, the third grand joy of life; and it swallowed up the other joys; and after it there could be on earth no higher joy. I said nothing; but I looked at the sinking sea as it reddened in the morning. Its great heart was throbbing in the calm; and methought I saw the Precious Blood of Jesus in Heaven, throbbing that hour with real human love of me.”
2. Growing in Charity
We heard St Paul this morning, speaking of Love as the “greatest of these three” theological virtues, in 1 Corinthians. He also summarizes Faith, Hope, and Charity in his epistle to the Romans, chapter 5 (listen out for all three):
“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”
Faith, Hope, Love. Well, dear brothers and sisters, it’s time to consider the virtue of charity as something for us to acquire and grow in. Like the others, it was infused into our souls at Baptism, “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us,” in Paul’s words.
Charity, the life of the soul and a participation in the life of God, must grow in us. And this is our vocation!
Saint Augustine spoke for all of us when he confessed to God, before the whole world, “Late have I loved thee, O beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved thee! For behold, thou wert within in me, and I outside. And I sought thee outside and in my unloveliness fell upon those lovely things that Thou hast made. Thou wert within me, and I was not with Thee.”
Our love has been late… and since our conversion is a process, let our love grow as we live out our vocations within the Order of Malta. Each day ought to be a growth in charity.
One particular expression of charity in our own vocation is seen in fellowship, in communion, in being of one heart and mind on the way to God. Our togetherness is key to our charity. “Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.” Part of that hymn is inscribed on the Altar at one of our parish churches in Chelmsford: congregavit nos in unum Christi amor. The Love of Christ has gathered us together as one. Friendship, companionship, brotherly love: the love of Christ unites us together. When there is so much division in the world, in society, and even in the Church, our entire work for the sick and the poor requires that we remain united in love, if we are to live out the virtue of charity towards our neighbours. If we cannot love each other, how can we love those we are called to serve?
The Gospels remind us: when the Son of man comes, will he find Faith on earth? Will he find hope? Will he find love? He asks us to persevere, but with the terrible warning that “because wickedness is multiplied, love in most men will grow cold. But he who endures to the end will be saved.” I’ll never forget Fr Abbot preaching about that line, as perhaps the most chilling of all Christ’s admonitions in the Gospel… our charity can go from blazing furnace, to lukewarm, to chill. Our Lord even expects that many – most – will have grown cold in love. So in our perseverance to the end, in the hope of Salvation, how do we grow in charity? How do we warm up? We may speak of passions as being “hot” and mostly refer to sinful passions… but what about genuine charity? The Sacred Heart of Jesus is referred to as “fornax ardens caritatis” – how do we become a burning furnace of charity too? How do we warm up our ardour?
Saint John, the great apostle and evangelist of love, is surprisingly terse about it. “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.”
Right… Easy. Isn’t it?
Well, some of the commandments are easier than others. The word “burdensome” is our key… His commandments are not burdensome. His yoke is easy, his burden, light; Augustine seemed to understand it, in that most misunderstood phrase of his, ama, et quod vis fac– love, and do what you will. Simply love. Love of God and love of our Neighbour are the commandments given to us, and they’re not burdensome per se, but they will demand everything from us. But since we’ve given everything to this holy endeavour, let us take heart and take courage. The reason that we are members of this Order, is in order to love and to be loved. Our confreres are our means of salvation, and we theirs. Our working together can sometimes be a penance, as we knock the hard edges off each other. But all penance should help us love more, not less. It should make our service of the sick and the poor more heartfelt, not less. Why is it that sometimes petty disagreements affect our work? If we bear grudges, we will serve grudgingly. Equally, if we neglect our duties of loving and serving God, we will fail to love and serve our neighbour. In fact, we have said so today, in our timetable: we have recited the divine office together… something which is a sung offering to God in love. For Saint Augustine, such a sung offering is the highest form of praise, and the property of the lover: Cantare amantis est. It belongs to the lover to sing. Now, whether we sing it or say it, we try to grow in love through our praying of the Sacred Liturgy.
Now, before we examine practising Charity, a quick return to God as the source of Charity. The favourite word in the Old Testament for God’s love is that hard-to-translate word, Hesed. I like the phrase “loving-kindness” in English. It’s true that the Roman tradition through the vulgate prefers “Misericordia.” For his love endures forever – quoniam in aeternum misericordia ejus. His mercy is his loving-kindness of course. “The Lord is compassion and love” – as another psalm reminds us.
No language is capable of expressing in one word the depth of God’s charity. Even in Latin we have both “caritas” and “amor” and “misericordia” and “dilectio” and “pietas”, and the liturgy uses them pretty interchangeably; at least, every attempt to distinguish them tends, in my view, to become a little pedantic.
And the same is true in English. But one solution is simply to take one of those words, and run with it. Fr Faber, whom I quoted from this morning, famously preferred “kindness” to all the others. He does speak of charity, he does speak of love; but he especially liked kindness because it can refer not only to God’s love for us (admittedly less so of our love for God), but principally for our love for our neighbour. Charity towards others is kindness.
When I first joined the monastery, “be kind” was the simplest instruction I ever received. It has several implications and manifestations, however, and we’ll look at some of them. As a key to growth in charity, and to “warm up” our coldness, this is the remedy: be kind, and manifest to others the kindness of God.
Various saints are known for kindness: I think particularly of St Francis de Sales, and St Philip Neri. Kindness and gentleness in both of them did not in any way preclude tough-talking when needed, nor did it imply an unmanly pandering to the sinful whims of weaker souls. Pope Benedict wrote a whole encyclical on the theme, Caritas in Veritate: telling the truth with kindness and loveto a loveless, unkind world.Kindness, for the saints, was the way to reach those souls. God is kind; he puts up with us, and is attractive to us. When we see kindness in others, it is instantly attractive to us. So it is with God; his kindness is gentle and compassionate, long-suffering, and charitable. To grow in virtue ought to mean that we grow in kindness. Hardships and crosses are meant to increase, not decrease, our charity. Love is meant to grow warmer, not colder. The warmth of love is kindness.
I finished the last talk with Faber’s exhortation to see the Precious Blood as the icon par excellence of the Love of God as it has been revealed to us. In his little book on kindness, he sees sin as what makes the world unhappy; the forgiveness of sin and the conquering of sin is therefore what makes it happy. With so much unkindness (ie. lack of charity) in the world, an increase of kindness is what would make it happier. Before dwelling on how we might contribute, he points out that Christ our Saviour is the instrument of our beatitude, by His Cross. He is assisted in the continuance of his Redemptive act in the world by kindness. Fr Faber: “Kindness is energetic and successful in preparing and enlarging Our Lord’s ways as Saviour. It is constantly winning strayed souls back to Him, opening hearts that seemed obstinately closed, enlightening minds that had been wilfully darkened, skilfully throwing the succours of hope into the strongholds that were on the point of capitulating to despair, lifting endeavour from low to high, from high to higher, from higher to highest. Everywhere, Kindness is the best pioneer of the Precious Blood.”
When we are kind, we admit that God has been kind to us by shedding his Blood for us. How can we not, then, show kindness to others? And kindness breeds kindness…and so love spreads and grows.
This is the principle at the heart of our care for others. Another of Fr Abbot’s instructions in my noviciate was “always think the best of your confreres.” That means not judging one another. So easy, isn’t it, to make a rash judgement about someone else, especially when we know him or her so well, and work closely alongside them. But, we are to always think the best of them. To do so is kindness. After all, we do not know what struggles may assail his soul, and what trials he goes through in the parts of his life that are hidden from us. We are not aware of all his resolutions and renunciations. We are not aware, usually, of the state of his soul; and if we have an idea as to his inner life, or even his mental health, whether he’s in a state of grace, or which virtues he still needs to acquire, we mightbe right, but we could be very wrong. If we’re wrong, then we have condemned an innocent. But even if we’re right, we ought not to convict him in pride and self-satisfaction without a prayer for his conversion. Thinking the best of each other ought not to preclude fraternal correction – which can be a hard act of kindness to accomplish. But thinking the best of each other allows us to live with each other kindly. It is a kindness to “bear with one another” just as God “bears and forebears” with us, in the words of one of Fr Faber’s hymns.
Not only is kindness in our attitudes, but also in our words. How easy it is to quip, to tease, to scold, to discourage. Sometimes we don’t even need to say anything to do those things. But how lovely it is when our words are a blessing to each other – even in cheerful jesting and teasing, good humour, encouragement, compliments, thanks, affirmations. All of these are kindnesses, including – and especially – when they require some effort for us to remember to say them, or to alter our mood in order to say them sincerely. And, I’m pleased to say, this is a kind Order! It’s what everyone notices about us, especially when we’re in Lourdes... It’s (hopefully) why people want to join us. I’m not dwelling on this to scold – heaven forbid – but to encourage. We have a reputation for kindness! Thank God!
Fr Faber points out something else about “cleverness” in remarks too, which made me think. It’s something of a warning against unkind words. He says: “It is harder for a clever man to be kind, especially in his words. He has a temptation, and it is one of those temptations which appear sometimes to border on the irresistible, to say clever things; and, somehow, clever things are hardly ever kind things. There is a drop of acid or of bitter in them, and it seems as if that drop was exactly what genius had insinuated. I believe, if we were to make an honest resolution never to say a clever thing, we should advance much more rapidly on the road to Heaven.” I think we all know the sort of comments he means… Now, some stories are harmless fun, of course, and I don’t suppose he meant us never to be witty. But we are all capable of plumbing the depths sometimes, as well as touching the heights, with the words we choose.
What about in the wider world? What about when our kindness is challenged by difficulties, or met with indifference? What about when we say or act kindly, but are rebuffed? And what about those annoying people who irritate us, either by their manner or the inopportune way in which they demand our attention, or by their apparent lack of kindness, or sense of timing, or sense of the appropriate, or apparent self-absorption? You all know the sort I mean… But there will probably be different people and situations for each of us that really test our charity. We might recall Shakespeare’s words about love: “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken.” Love is sometimes tested, but real love endures all things, even very annoying people. The harder the case before us, the greater the merit in exercising charity…
Some of the tests of our charity are more unexpected. I’m amazed as a driver how often I lack charity on the roads… I’m amazed as a musician how sometimes I would rather eat nails than accompany the office, and sometimes even when I’m doing something I love – teaching, home visits, hospital calls, or even preaching – I can sometimes not be as kind as I ought, or as kind as I intended to be.
Kindness in the works of the Order is essential to our vocation. Fr Faber says: “We often begin our own repentance by acts of kindness, or through them. Probably the majority of repentances have begun in the reception of acts of kindness, which, if not unexpected, touched men by the sense of their being so undeserved. Doubtless the terrors of the Lord are often the beginning of that wisdom which we name conversion; but men must be frightened in a kind way, or the fright will only make them unbelievers. Kindness has converted more sinners than either zeal, eloquence, or learning; and these three last have never converted anyone unless they were kind also. In short, kindness makes us as Gods to each other. Yet while it lifts us so high, it sweetly keeps us low. For the continual sense which a kind heart has of its own need of kindness keeps it humble. There are no hearts to which kindness is so indispensable as those that are exuberantly kind themselves.”
So it is possible to be kind, even when humbled or brought low – by others, or by situations. Sometimes the poorest, the most suffering, and those with the least in worldly terms, are the kindest people we ever meet. But whomsoever we meet, it is always a kindness – an act of charity – to be Christ to them, to preach the Gospel to them, to share the Love of God with them. Our service is a Christ-like, sacrificial kindness. Sometimes it’s easier to be kinder to those who are kind to us. It’s harder to be kind to those who seem cold or difficult to us. That’s when there is real merit in charity, and when it grows in us, by God’s grace. After all, the mystery of the love of God is, as Saint Paul says, that “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” With King David, we are moved (out of love for God, hopefully, more than out of fear of his retribution) to beg for mercy for our failings in charity: “Have mercy on me, God, in your kindness. In your compassion, blot out my offence.” Humbled by our faults, loved by God intensely in our repentance, we receive the kindness of his absolution. Truly, God has been kind to us – and so we must be kind in return. And so we return to the offering of our religious lives, as a sacrifice of charity back to the God who first loved us.
Finally – Therese of Lisieux.
We do not have her vocation; and she struggled to identify hers. But these words of her are applicable to us too, as members of the Order of Malta. Therese defined her vocation as “l’amour” – Love. My final point on the virtue of charity, is that this is our vocation. Therese said: « Au coeur de l’Eglise ma Mère, je serai l’amour. »At the heart of Holy Mother Church, I will be love. ‘at the heart’ sounds in English as if she thought she was the centre of the Church… no, that’s not what it means. It means “within the Church, in my place within the Church, I will be love.” Here in the Order of Malta, through our commitment to the Church in that place which God has given us, we must bethe charity of Christ. We are called to be like Christ, who first loved us, and to be Christ to others, since He wishes us to be ministers of his charity towards men. We do so by being kind, speaking kindly, acting kindly, thinking kindly, in order to attract souls to that irresistible “loving kindness” of our God, which, as we sang at Lauds, comes to visit us like the Dawn from on high, Oriens ex alto.
Some kindness will cost us; it cost Him on the Cross, after all, every last drop of His Precious Blood, the price of our Salvation and the manifestation of the love of God for us. Other kindnesses cost us relatively little – especially if they have become habits in us. And some kindnesses will seem to us trivial, but might be the difference between Salvation and Damnation for someone else… so, let us love, let us be love, let us be kind.
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