Salesian Literature

Chapter 2  :  How the soul’s love grows cold

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Sickness or injury can deprive the body of vitality, deprive it of movement or feeling; only death can still the heart.  So it is with charity: it may be so weak, so lacking in life, as to be scarcely evident; yet it is whole and entire in the highest part of the soul.  Charity may be hidden under the ashes of a host of venial sins, its flame smothered, but the fire is not out.

 

The fact is that neither venial sins, nor a fondness for them, completely contradict charity’s essential purpose, which is loving God above all things.  All they mean is this: we love something immoderately, though not unreasonably; we give in to creatures a little too much, more than is right – but do not value them above the Creator; we spend more time than we should on what this world offers, yet never actually turn our backs on heaven.

 

Venial sin, after all, is not the reverse of charity; it does not do away with it, partially or entirely.  Such sins – along the path of charity – cause our steps to falter, not to stray.

 

All the same, venial sin is sin; so it upsets charity – contrary, not to charity’s existence, but to its activity and growth, to the ambition it has of referring to God everything we do.  Venial sin defeats this by deflecting our actions away from God’s will, though it certainly does not swing them right over the opposite direction.

 

If a storm strips a fruit tree – there is nothing left, we say, although only the fruit, not the tree, has gone.  So, when charity is shaken by our fondness for venial sin, we say that it has lost its strength.  This does not mean that our habitual love is no longer intact; only that it is not bearing the fruit of good works.

 

“There is no life in him these days,” we say of one whose constitution is greatly weakened; for what is soon to cease seems already to have gone.  So good-for-nothing, pleasure-seeking souls, their hearts set on transitory things, can equally well claim to have no charity; even if they have some, they are well on the way to losing it.

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