'What is this gift of Charity?'

Lent begins tomorrow.
Perhaps part of our Lenten discipline should be to try to get behind the sheer 'wordiness' of our modern Christianity and abstain from some of the polemic which swirls around us (and, admittedly, for which some of us are responsible!) and make a resolution to pray in silence, each day, before the Blessed Sacrament.
Our words can only take us so far......

"What is this gift of charity? I stand before the altar today, I spread out my hands as though to call something from the skies, and I ask for charity. In asking I say that unless I receive it, i may seem to myself to be alive, but God will see that I am dead. Am I dead, then, or am I alive in his eyes? Have I this gift? Will God give it to me? What is it, to begin with? Not only doing the decent and helpful thing, for, says Christ's apostle, I might go to the extreme of visible generosity, I might give all my goods to feed the poor, and yet lack charity. Still less is it mere tolerance and a show of amiability. It means that a caring for God and my neighbour becomes the stuff of my being, the mainspring of my will, not something joined on from outside. God does not have love, he is love, and to have love we also must become it. Why then, if to be alive I must have love thus, it is plain enough that I am dead. Let me be dead; I come to this sacrament to take part in the resurrection. I throw myself into the hands of God, and God is known to be God by this token: he raises the dead."

           Austin Farrer: 'Quinquagesima' from The Crown of the Year.