It was summer at the lake, and my mom and aunt had promised to pay me and my cousins one dollar each if we memorized 1 Corinthians 13. Walking back and forth between the living room, where my mom sat on the blue armchair to listen to us, around the kitchen and through the bedrooms, I kept repeating it over and over to get it into my head:
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing … (1 Corinthians 13.1–3 NIV)
The music of the verses, with the parallel if-then statements and dramatic images like “the tongues of angels,” wove itself into the summer air thick with the smell of lake water, the roar of distant motorboats, and the humming cicadas.
I was sun-kissed and freckly, mosquito-bitten and bright-eyed. Those days, my curly hair was constantly damp from swimming in the cool lake. My feet were calloused from walking barefoot on the corrugated paving stones, wooden dock, wave-wrinkled rocks, and ticklish grass. Those murmuring summer days, azure and verdant, are pressed on my mind like stamps in a book. First Corinthians 13 is pressed on my mind and heart along with them, lovely and lyrical.
Sometime in those years, after Bible stories at night, my parents read us Patricia St. John’s Treasures of the Snow. That book taught me that “love” and “charity” are synonyms. The main character’s grandmother has her read 1 Corinthians 13 out loud and instructs her: “instead of the word ‘charity’ use the word ‘love.’ They mean the same thing, but you will understand better.”[1]
The copy my parents read from was a gift from my grandparents. “With LOVE,” my Grandma wrote on the inside cover.
I thought of this passage when I looked up the word “charity.” It wasn’t until an Intervarsity Bible study workshop in college that I learned that the love of 1 Corinthians 13 is agape love, God’s love that He calls the church to have for each other, not romantic love.[2] After learning that, it doesn’t surprise me to know that the Vulgate often translates the Greek agape as the Latin caritas, which turned into our word “charity.”[3] It makes sense that the word used for God’s love became something active, particular, and concrete. Charity is always a gift, whether material or physical, such as forgiveness, resources, words, time, energy, or even life itself.
“I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity,” snaps a character in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, as he rejects the gift of being able to stay in heaven.
“Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity,” urges the spirit the ghost is talking to.[4] The spirit returns the ghost’s foul expression back to its original meaning: the blood of Christ, the sacrificial gift of Divine Love.[5]
Over the recent spring semester, my women’s Bible study explored 1, 2, and 3 John. I never realized how closely these short letters are tied to the Gospel of John with their repeated pattern of light and darkness, love and hatred, obedience and rebellion. John writes like a composer who returns to the same leitmotifs[6], impressing them on his audience’s mind. He also writes like a father teaching beloved children. The repetition is not redundancy, but wisdom: John wants us to remember.
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4.8–10 NIV)
I gave a brief talk on 1 John 4 to open our discussion and was shocked at how difficult it was to summarize, much less analyze, John’s words. My best efforts seemed like a feeble imitation of his quiet thunder. The best I could do was to repeat what he repeated and tie it back to the loving gift God gave us in making us His children.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. (1 Corinthians 13.4–5 NIV)
I can hear my child-self reciting it over and over, walking around the L-shape of plaid couches and past the stone fireplace. I need that repetition in my adult life too.
I always wince when I get to 1 Corinthians 13.5: “love keeps no record of wrongs.” That part of the song is a hard one to listen to. I am a consummate professional at keeping a record of wrongs. Asking God to teach me forgiveness is another prayer I will likely need to repeat for the rest of my days.
During those summer days at the lakehouse, there was someone who was frequently with us who showed me the active, particular love of charity: Grandma.
Grandma gave in many ways, but two of them were tangible: food and books. She was a gifted cook with a wide range of tools: melon scoops, Jello molds, bread baskets, juice glasses, egg beaters, and cheese graters. We would pick wild strawberries, small and bright as rubies, and bring them in, and she would serve them in tiny glass bowls with cream. Once, when I was just beginning to be able to eat again after days of heatstroke, she made me scrambled eggs, golden and delicious. She embodied charity at the table, through feasting.
Another outpouring of Grandma’s charity was books. I remember picking up Alice in Wonderland, Just So Stories, and a volume of Sherlock Holmes’s tales from her collection at the lakehouse. One of the three tall wooden bookcases we have there now is full of her books: Scripture commentaries, missionary biographies, children’s stories, and etiquette guides. Treasures of the Snow was not the only book she gave “with LOVE.” Like her meals, these books were feasts for the soul, gifts that were born from the gifts entrusted to her.
Divine love or charity is so alien to us after the Fall, so radically self-sacrificial, that I think we need an eternity of repetition to understand it. In this lifetime, God gives us that repetition through His Word, including the letters of authors like Paul and John. These men were so different: Paul uses fiery rhetoric and complex sentences, while John dwells on divine mysteries with poetic simplicity and repetition. Both are devoted to Jesus, who literally embodied charity, especially in the scandal of His Cross: the Bleeding Charity that changed everything.
The Lord keeps repeating the leitmotifs of His love. He repeats them in Creation: He knew how much I would love those green mountains, that blue lake, and the bliss of summer before He set the pillars of the earth. He repeats the leitmotifs in His followers: my grandma is one of many who have used their gifts to give. The music of His charity is endless and generative, like echoes that grow louder instead of softer, and more beautiful with time.
Editor’s note: The New International Version translation does not capitalize pronouns referring to God; these have been added by Cultivating editors.
[1] Patricia St. John, Treasures of the Snow.
[2] I recommend BibleHub’s word study on agape in New Testament Greek.
[3] For more on this, see Etymonline.com’s discussion of ‘charity.’
[4] C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, HarperOne, 2001.
[5] I don’t use foul language, but I love how Lewis takes this expression and reverently turns it back to its original, glorious meaning, a reference to Christ’s blood.
[6] A leitmotif is a series of musical notes that signals a recurrent idea or character, like the Darth Vader theme in Star Wars.
The featured image, “A Moment of Bliss,” is courtesy of Sam Keyes and is used with his kind permission for Cultivating.
Alicia Pollard is a follower of Christ, storyteller, and Bible teacher. She lives in New England, where she loves hiking through forests and climbing mountains. She studied Theology and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she explored the Deadly Sins of Sloth and Anger, the relationship between faith and imagination, and the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and T.S. Eliot. In the past, she hosted a podcast, “Leaf by Lantern,” which explored retelling fairy tales through the lens of Scripture.
In her spare time, Alicia loves spending time with family; reading fantasy, mysteries, and sci-fi; writing fiction; and sometimes photographing mossy rocks or the sun rising over lakes. She blogs about yearning, books, and glimpses of transcendence at aliciapollard.com.
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