Salesian Literature

Chapter 9  :  The relic of charity in a soul that has lost it

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We do many things for the love of God as a result of having charity; this means that loving God becomes almost second-nature to us.  That habit is not charity, however; it is merely an habitual inclination due to many repeated actions.

 

The conscious effort, over a long period of time, of saying mass or preaching, for instance, can insinuate itself into our dreams, where we go through the same motions; but these things, in dreams, are neither conscious nor an effort – they are simply reflected images, you might say.  Charity likewise, through many repeated acts, imparts a certain facility which still remains when charity is lost.

 

In a town near Paris, in my student days, we came across an echoing well which repeated several times anything that was spoken into it.  A person who had never experienced this phenomenon before might have presumed that it was done by someone in the well; but we knew better. Science taught us that our words come back, not from another man down the well, but from the various hollows in which our voices collected, echoing from one hollow to the next, up to a dozen times, before the sound was spent.

 

No longer voices of ours, those murmurings from the well; only lifelike reflections.  Very different too; if we said a long sentence, they only repeated some of the words, shortening or slurring syllables, in tones and accents utterly unlike our own.  They did not even begin to form our words, until we had quite said them all.  No human speech, after all, but the hollow, empty utterance of stone; yet so faithful a reproduction of the original human voice as to leave an ignoramus deceived and mistaken.

 

So charity, I mean, as a guest in a docile soul for some time, produces a second love, which is not charity, although it springs from charity.  It is a natural love so akin to the supernatural that, if charity is later lost, it still appears to be there, its reflection left behind.  A snare to the uninitiated – like the painted grapes of Zeuxis to the birds, so accurately had art mirrored nature!

 

But there is all the difference in the world between charity and the natural love which it awakens.  The voice of charity utters, then translates into action, all God’s commandments; the natural love that stays, when charity has gone, sometimes echoes God’s commands, but never translates any of them into action – except, perhaps, one or two occasionally.  Charity stresses every syllable, every detail in the keeping of God’s commandments; natural love always leaves some out, especially purity of intention.  Charity, in tone, is always clear, dulcet, graceful; natural love is always too high in earthly things, too low in heavenly ones, and never sets to work until charity has done.  And all because natural love, in the absence of charity, lacks the supernatural strength to assist the soul in that highest of all activities – loving God more than anything else.

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