Charity and Hope

Today's Reading

Read 1 Corinthians 13:4-7: "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

Then read Romans 5:3-5: "Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

Reflection

Lewis now examines the "theological" virtues — faith, hope, and charity — virtues that are distinctly Christian, not merely part of natural morality. Today we focus on charity and hope.

Charity (love in the New Testament sense) is not a feeling. Lewis is emphatic about this, and his practical advice is characteristically direct.

"Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him."

This turns our usual approach upside down. We wait to feel loving before acting lovingly. Lewis says: act first. The feeling will follow the action, not the other way around. This is not hypocrisy — it is training. Just as a pianist's fingers learn to love the music through disciplined practice, so the heart learns to love through disciplined action.

Paul's portrait of love in 1 Corinthians 13 is almost entirely behavioral, not emotional. Love is patient, kind, not arrogant, not rude, not resentful. These are actions and dispositions, not feelings. You can choose to be patient when you do not feel patient. That choice is love.

Lewis then turns to hope — and defends it against the charge of escapism.

"Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do."

Lewis argues that Christians who think most about the next world are precisely the ones who do the most good in this one. It is when people stop believing in heaven that they become most desperate to turn earth into a substitute paradise — usually with disastrous results.

Romans 5 traces a chain: suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope. Hope, in Paul's vision, is not wishful thinking but the mature fruit of a faith that has been tested.

Going Deeper

Charity and hope work together. It is hope that sustains charity when loving your neighbor is exhausting and thankless. And it is charity that gives hope its practical expression — the hands and feet of a vision that extends beyond this world.

Today, practice both: do something concretely loving for someone difficult, and remind yourself that this world is not all there is.