At Christmastime we all seek to show our love for others, often in expensive fashion, sometimes just in the messages we send in our cards or, in growing fashion, in emails. But we can show it at all times in all sorts of apparently small and insignificant ways.

“Whatever you do, do it with love,” St Paul tells us (1 Cor 16:14). St Therese of Lisieux founded her life as a nun on this saying and developed it into a way of perfection that all of us can follow. In her Autobiography she wrote:

“The only way I have of proving my love is to strew flowers before Thee--that is to say, I will let no tiny sacrifice pass, no look, no word. I wish to profit by the smallest actions, and to do them for Love. I wish to suffer for Love's sake, and for Love's sake even to rejoice: thus shall I strew flowers.”
It is the simplest of philosophies, of ways of living the Christian life: every little thing we do for others, think of others, everything we do as a matter of living our daily lives we can do for love. St Paul, elsewhere in I Corinthians (10:31) says: “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.”

All we have to do is to do anything with love. But that is difficult. It is easy to do these “smallest actions”, but hard to remember that we should do them for love. Love for whom or what? Love for God who gave us our being, for the other person for whom we act or even for the one who slights us and we welcome that in love. St Therese tells the story of how, when she worked in the laundry in her nunnery, an elderly cranky nun used to repeatedly splash her with dirty water. After reacting at first as most of us would, she came not just to put up with it but even to welcome it as a tiny sacrifice of love.

These small actions are to be found significant also in Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed … Above  Tintern Abbey when he speaks of:

“… that best portion of a good man’s life, / His little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love.”

Let us all scatter flowers with St Therese and not only at Christmas!

A little while ago, I came across a poem by a French writer, Charles Péguy. No! I’d never heard of him either. The poem has the title “The Portal of the Mystery of the Second Virtue.” A long title for a long poem but that virtue has a short name, Hope. It is the second of the three theological virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity. St Paul tells us frequently in his letters that it is faith that will save us and that the greatest of the three is charity. Hope is a little more difficult to separate in those letters as it is bound up with other themes of justification, righteousness, and the final triumph of Jesus over sin at his second coming.
 
Charles Péguy compares the way we see Hope to a little girl being pulled along by her two grown up sisters, Faith and Charity. They are the virtues on which our attention is most focused, the virtues which  open heaven to us now that we have been redeemed by Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross. The little girl we know and like, but she hasn’t the maturity or power to save us. She holds on to her big sisters. But Charles opens his poem with this line:
 
“The virtue which I love most of all,” says God, “is hope.”
 
Faith, God says, doesn’t surprise me. I show myself in my creation: in the sun, the moon and the stars, in all my creatures, in the voices of children and the calm of valleys, in the sacrifice of the Mass, in life and in death. Nor does Charity surprise me. You would have to have a heart of stone not to be charitable to the poor unfortunate creatures we see, or to refuse charity to your brothers.
 
But Hope, God says, astonishes me. I am astonished that these poor children see all that is happening and believe that everything will be better tomorrow. This little hope which seems to be nothing at all.
 
The Christian people see only the two big sisters and not the little girl, but…
 
It is she (Hope), this little one who drives,
For Faith sees only what is
And she, she sees what will be
Charity loves only what is.
And she, she loves what will be.
 
Faith sees what is
In time and in Eternity
Hope sees what will be
In time and in eternity
That is, the future of eternity itself
 
Charity loves what is
In Time and in Eternity
God and neighbour;
As Faith sees
God and creation.
But Hope loves what will be
In time and eternity.
 
That is, in the future of eternity
 
Hope sees what is not yet and what will be
She loves what is not yet and what will be.
 
In the future of time and of eternity.
 
 
Advent is the time of Hope when we anticipate the coming of our Saviour, the who will redeem us from our sins and lead us to our future with God in eternity. Our hope is for grace in this life and to come to share in the glory of God in the next. As Christians, we are a people of hope, a hope that gives our faith and charity a direction. And it also gives us peace: as Psalm 4 says:
 
“In peace shall I sleep, Lord, in peace shall I rest
  firm in the hope you have given me.”