Charity is a love that fortifies the ones we love in the secrecy of their own being, their own integrity, their own contemplation of God, their own free charity for all who exist in Him.
Such love leads to God because it comes from Him. It leads to a union between souls that is intimate as their own union with Him. The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to Him. We can come to understand others only by loving Him who understands them from within the depths of their own being. Otherwise we know them only by the surmises that are formed within the mirror of our own soul.
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God knows us from within ourselves, not as objects, not as strangers, not as intimates, but as our own selves. His knowledge of us is pure light of which our own self-knowledge is only a dim reflection. He knows us in Himself, not merely as images of something outside Him, but as "selves" in which His own self is expressed.
He alone holds the secret of a charity by which we can love others not only as we love ourselves, but as He loves them. The beginning of this love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them. Can this be charity?
Thomas Merton "No Man is an Island", London, 1955.
