a Month of Virtue: Charity: 30 Days to More Loving Heart

"And now there remain faith, hope, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity."Most of us have heard those words so often they have lost their edge. But what if charity - real charity, the theological virtue - is almost nothing like what we have always assumed it was?A Month of Virtue: Charity is a thirty-day Catholic formation book for anyone who has suspected that their love for God is too small, their love for neighbor too conditional, and the word "charity" too worn thin to carry what the Church means by it.Each day offers a brief reflection drawn from Scripture and the saints: from St. John the Evangelist's startling identification of God with charity itself, to St. Thomas Aquinas on friendship with God, to the furnace of the Sacred Heart, to St. Thérèse of Lisieux discovering that her vocation in the heart of the Church is simply to love. Every reading is followed by a single verse from the Douay-Rheims Bible, one small and concrete resolution for the day, and a short closing prayer.The thirty days move in four arcs. The first week recovers the precise meaning of charity - not humanitarian sentiment or warm feeling, but the supernatural virtue that loves God for His own sake and the neighbor for God's sake. The second week explores charity before God: adoring, resting, abandoning oneself to His will, receiving Him in the sacraments, asking with Peter on the shore: Lovest thou me? The third week turns outward - to loving neighbor in God's image, to the order of charity (beginning at home), to love of enemies, to Thérèse's fraternal charity in the smallest things, to the domestic life as the primary school of love. The final week moves inward and upward: toward rightly ordered self-love, charity's power to sustain a long spiritual life, the purification of love toward its pure form, the Cross as charity's fullest measure, charity as the beginning of heaven even now, and - on the thirtieth day - a full consecration of the whole soul to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.This is the twelfth and final book in the A Month of Virtue series. It is also the crown: every virtue the series has formed - patience, humility, trust, gratitude, courage, temperance, purity, mercy, wisdom, faith, hope - finds its animating principle here. St. Thomas Aquinas called charity the form of all the virtues. Having spent a year or more with these books, the reader now has the name of what all that formation was reaching toward.The book stands fully on its own for new readers. For those who have completed the series, it is the word the whole series was always working toward.

Pagina's: 164, Paperback, Independently published