Christ gave us two great commandments: to love God and to love our neighbor.
Charity fulfills both commandments.
Through charity, we want others to share our friendship with God.
An example from family life gives an analogous situation: as husbands, we promise to love our wives.
The love of our wives bears fruit in our children, and so, the love of our children arises out of the love of our wives.
Our children share in that loving union, and the goods of our stable union with our wives redound to the benefit of our children.
Something like this is at work in the gift of charity.
God gives us the ability to love him and share life with him as a friend.
But that good is so amazing that we want to share it with others.
When a Christian loves his neighbor with supernatural charity, he is not motivated by fluffy sentimentalism.
Whether he is responding to his neighbor’s spiritual or physical needs, he wants his neighbor to be his friend in Christ.
If our neighbor is a friend of God, and we are friends of God, we are united in a bond of supernatural friendship.
The gift of charity which draws us upward to God, therefore, impels us to bring others along.
The “talent” of charity that we have been given is both a weight that draws us upward and a magnetic force that brings others with us.
This image helps capture the dual nature of the love of neighbor: there is a fundamental upward direction to this love; we want our neighbor to share in God’s love.
But there is also a horizontal component.
We want to be in true relationship with our fellows. We are not just using our neighbors as instruments to get us to God.
We genuinely care for them, as God cares for them.
We want for them what God wants for them.
The magnetic image of charity also highlights another aspect of love of neighbor: love radiates out in various degrees of intensity.
Those people whom we can love most effectively are the ones we are obliged to love most intensely.
While we should pray that everyone will know and love Christ, we need to work to make that a reality especially for those who live with us.
Similarly, while we should respond to those in need generally, we have a special obligation to respond to the needs of those closest to us.
If a man is dying on my doorstep, I am more obliged to him than if I hear there is someone dying thousands of miles away from me.
In all cases, however, the two-fold motivation of Christian charity is the same: drawing a person toward God and loving him or her as someone meant to share God’s love.
Spend a few minutes reflecting on your call to love your neighbor.
Who are the people most immediately put in your life that you need to love in charity?
What ways could you love them?
Pray for those people and ask God to help you love them as he does.
