Every night, I try to take an hour and settle into the night and read something spiritual. Sometimes it’s Henry Nouwen, sometimes the Kabbalah, sometimes St. Augustine, sometimes Merton.

Tonight it was Merton and his wonderful book No Man Is An Island, which I first read up on the mountain when I  came here.

It was a liberating thing for me to discover what Merton already knew, which is that we don’t have to be saints to do good.

And that charity is love itself. I read a chapter in the book on charity, it hit close to home.

We have only as much as we give, wrote Merton Chapter in 9, The Measure of Charity.

“We are called upon to give as much as we have, and more: as much as we are,” he wrote.

The measure of love is theoretically without limit. The more we give the more we shall be.

The greatest practitioners of charity, Merton added, are those who are least; that is, they have kept little or nothing for themselves, retaining nothing much more than their desire to give.

I don’t think I’ll get that far, but I want less and less all the time, and hope to give more and more. I’ve been involved in a lot of giving, and it lifts my heart right up to the skies every time.

I’ve worried about money for much of my life, and only recently did I understand how futile and barren a process that was. I was never happy when I was making a lot of money, I am happier than ever as I give more and more of my money away, and turn away from the process of having a lot.

I appreciate the importance of money and health care, but I don’t wish to live my life solely for the acquisition of either, that is just another kind of slavery.

I’ve turned away from the work that has always sustained me and supported me, I have to pay my bills in a different way. And I am, and I will.

I find that charity in itself is free. But charity, in order to be meaningful, needs an equal. It can’t be content to love others as inferiors, to judge others, to hold others in contempt,  it raises everyone to the same level.

For Merton, the human idea of charity began with Jesus Christ. I do not worship Jesus as a God, or as the son of God, but this idea of him as the creator of charity is powerful, and it makes sense to him.

Before him, say the historians,  there was little mercy in the world.

I never saw Christ in that way.

“Jesus did not come to seek God in men,” writes Merton. “He drew men to Himself by dying for them.”

All charity he wrote, comes to a focus in the life of Christ because the charity was the point and purpose of his life. Charity is the love of others, the standing in other’s shoes.

Christ, writes Merton, is the father and inventor of Charity in the modern world.  Be good to each other, he preached.

The first thing we do when we find a measure of grace in our hearts is to desire to be charitable.

Charity, wrote Merton, is the divine in life, it makes all of us sons and daughters of our own Gods.