Faith, hope and charity

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Consider the big three: faith, hope and charity. The first two can be entirely selfish, but not the third. The first, faith, is belief without evidence. The second, hope, is belief with evidence. The third, charity, is belief in oneself or others.

Faith is all you have when no evidence of what you believe is available. Faith is related to hope since it is the belief that someday the evidence you long for will become available. So, faith is a subset of hope.

Hope is searching for and clinging to any evidence you can find that things will turn out okay or get better. Hope is similar to faith in that both are based in an abiding desire for something better.

Charity, in some ways, does not appear to belong in a list with the other two, since it is not obviously related to desiring something better. However, if we look at it more closely, we see that it can be construed as putting ones energy into creating conditions for things to get better for someone else or yourself rather than merely having faith or hoping for things to get better. It is in this way that charity is superior to faith and hope. It is selfless when applied to others and self-forgiving when applied to yourself. I am defining charity not as giving things to people in need, but in a more general sense, as loving others, loving life in all its forms, including yourself.

Even though charity should be our goal, charity alone is hollow without hope, and hope is not possible without evidence of things getting better. Faith is available whether one has hope or not and whether one has evidence of things getting better, or not. Faith gets us by when things are the bleakest. Once evidence becomes available, hope takes over and once we have ample hope, we can begin to turn our attention to the needs of others. But even faith relies on charity.

As I have said, charity includes love for ourselves, but we should also broaden the meaning of faith to include belief in others and our meaning of hope to include hope for others.

If I have faith in you, that means I believe in you without evidence available for why I should do so. If I have hope in you, I have some evidence on which to base my belief in you. For example, I may have faith you can drive across the country even though I do not know what sort of driver you are. But once I get a report from you that you have stopped halfway for a night’s stay in a hotel, your success gives me hope my faith was justified.

If I extend charity to you I might do so without any faith in you or without any hope for you. Charity for others is sort of like faith in oneself. It is being gracious toward someone, perhaps even in the presence of evidence that the person is not worthy of your faith in him or her or hope for him or her.

If I have faith in myself I am believing in myself without evidence that I should do so, but if a little evidence becomes available, I am given hope. More basic than faith is charity toward myself. If I do not have charity toward myself, I will not likely be inclined toward faith in myself and thus I will never be able to muster hope because I will not be searching for evidence to support my faith.

The Apostle Paul said charity was the greatest of these and I would have to agree. Charity lays the groundwork for faith just as faith does for hope. You might say faith and hope are relatively luxurious perspectives because they both assume charity. If I have no charity for myself or someone else, I will not spend the energy necessary to develop faith and if I have no faith, I will not be looking for evidence enough to establish hope for others or myself.

Charity is better than the other two both in that it is selfless when it applies to caring for others and in that it is necessary for the other two. Until you consider what underlies hope, you might be inclined to believe hope is the most fundamental.

It might also be said that one cannot love or extend charity toward oneself or others without faith or hope, but I do not believe this to be the case. If I have faith in you that assumes I have charity toward you, otherwise, why would I bother? If I have not charity for someone else or myself, I will not care enough to adopt a position on the issue of whether things will get better for that person, with or without evidence.

Fortunately, we spend most of our days in hope, because others had faith in us that grew out of the charity they bestowed us. And others get their hope from us too, because we had faith in them before the evidence was available and we did that because we loved them or had charity toward them.

Charity without the other two is a pretty bleak circumstance, but it is what we rely on once we have lost faith and hope. On some level we might all be considered hopeless and even faithless. After all, we are nothing but these individual selves seeking to make our way in a vast universe with no real evidence on which to base decisions on which way to so things will turn out well for us. We do not even know how we might define “turn out well.”

So, charity is what is left once all hope is gone and after we have lost our faith. We extend charity toward ourselves and others in the absence of the other two and wait for our belief in ourselves and others to return so we can begin the process of finding evidence on which to base hope.

Those who have lost hope can survive on faith. Those who have lost faith can survive on charity (love for ourselves or love we get from someone else). Those without charity cannot survive.

On this the first day of 2014, at the least, I wish you a supply of charity on which to build faith enough to sustain you until you find hope - evidence things are getting better.