The Oil of Charity

For me, this is the essence of how we are to live our life in Christ ... certainly it is how we will show Him to others.

The theological virtue of charity has to illuminate all our acts, everywhere and in every moment: when we are feeling well and when we are sick, when we are tired, in moments of failure; when we are with people we get on with well and also with those we find more abrasive or difficult; at work and at home; in a word always. The well-disposed soul has always got a lively, firm and resolute determination to forgive, to endure, to help and an attitude that always moves it to perform acts of charity. If this desire of loving, and of loving disinterestedly, has taken root in the soul, it will have the most convincing proof that its communions, confessions, meditations and its whole life of prayer are in good order and sincere and fruitful (B. Bauer, In Silence with God).

The oil that keeps charity alight is prayer that is attentive and full of love: intimacy with Jesus. It is not hard to see what charity is often not practised even by many people who call themselves Christians. But if we then consider things from a supernatural point of view, we can also see what is the rood cause of this sterility: the absence of a continuous and intense, person-to-person relationship with Our Lord Jesus Christ, and an ignorance of the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul, whose very first fruit is precisely charity (J. Escriva, Friends of God).

In Conversation With God Vol 4