Ubi Caritas

I am learning that it is impossible to grow more loving without first growing in charity.  Charity is what unblocks Love's dam; it is to Love what wine is to conversation, or grease to a pan, or wax to cross-country skis - Charity is Love's lubricant.  Love doesn't flow as easily without Charity; and so comes the saying: where Charity is found, there is Love. 

We tend to think that being charitable is something we can quantify in tangible terms: giving "x" amount of money to a certain cause, or donating our old clothes and books and furniture, or sharing our house or our car or our food with people in need.  But being charitable can also mean being giving and generous with those things we can't quantify; giving of our patience and understanding and sympathy and forgiveness, and I think it's when we're really generous with these intangibles that we really grow in love for someone else.

Think how much we all love newborn babies, for example.  We are so giving towards them!  We get into their heads and try to imagine what life is like for them as a means of explaining their temperament.  If they want to be held for hours on end we say "of course, imagine - they've just traveled from one world to another."  If they are crying we commiserate and cuddle them, "after all," we say, "being born can't be that comfortable."  We grow in love towards our newborn babies in large part because we are so charitable towards them that we can empathize with them and want to do everything we can to make them feel secure.

Does the perception that kids become more badly behaved as they grow older stem, in part, from a lack of charity on our part?  What I mean is that when our children are newborns we tend to think that they're all good.  If they're doing something irritating, like crying or clinging, we tend to rationalize that it's because they don't feel right on the inside.  But as babies grow up we lose that charitable take on behaviour.  A kid acting out doesn't have a problem that we can help them sort out, they are a problem.  Take the young adults we hear about every September who are off to university or college for the first time and who binge drink and take part in all kinds of humiliating initiation pranks and chant lewd verses to songs they would never have sung a month ago at the cottage in front of their parents - are they a lost generation, or can we see that a whole whack of kids feel so insecure that they'll do anything, even stuff that's harmful and embarrassing, just to feel like they fit in?  Which response makes you feel more loving?

We had a humbling experience this summer that really made me revisit the importance of charity in all our relationships as a means of facilitating love.  One day on our summer vacation our little 18-month-old just changed personalities.  This normally sunny little boy who rarely cried unless there was a reason became horribly cranky and he wouldn't let me put him down, and he squirmed when he had to get his diaper changed and screamed when I put him in his high chair.  We couldn't see anything wrong with him - he didn't have any cuts or bruises - so we concluded that he must just be in a bad phase, the terrible twos must have started six months early.  The next week we were visiting my parents and my dad, who is a doctor, noticed a lump that had formed on this boy's collar bone.  It turned out he had somehow fractured his collar bone and the tricky thing with injuries to the collar bone is that you don't see the bump (which is the growth of the new bone over the injured area) until about a week after the damage has been done.  Our baby didn't show any signs of physical distress on the outside and our lack of charity prevented us from seeing that his crying and clinging was because of pain he was feeling on the inside.  We had passed off the effects of a fractured collar bone as "bad" behaviour!

We automatically become a lot more loving towards people if we decide that they are basically good and that any "bad" behaviour is actually a sign that something is not right with them on the inside.  This doesn't mean we don't call people on their bad behaviour, but a commitment to charity does make it easier for us to approach others from a more loving place and get at the root of whatever problem is making life difficult for them at the moment.