compounding of charity and hatred

It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving. ---Mother Teresa---

When I first read C.S. Lewis' argument about the practice of charity, the notion of loving my neighbour became clearer for me. His basic view was that one need not worry whether one feels love for another person, rather it matters only that one acts as if he loved the other person. This acting, if consistent, will become habitual and gradually become the real deal. Said another way, by practising the virtue of charity, you will gradually become more charitable quite in spite of how you feel. This was a keen insight for me, as I used to think I had to feel charitable to be charitable; that feelings and reality were intermingled and almost identifiable. But the truth is that the worldly man treats others kindly because he feels 'like' for them; whereas the Christian, trying to treat all men kindly out of practising charity, finds himself liking more and more people -- including people he could never have imagined liking. This is the spiritual dynamic of charity; that more you act out of charity, the more you will derive; as you love a person, the more your love will grow.

Sadly this same spiritual dynamic works similarly in the opposite direction. Evil acts rot more and more the evil doer. Take the practice of hatred, the opposite of charity. As the hater of Jews acts on his hatred by acting cruelly, as did the Nazis, the Jews end up being hated even more by the haters because they had acted cruelly. Thus the more cruel one is, the more one will hate; and the more one hates, the more cruel one will become. A horrific cycle.

Hence both virtue and vice will accrue at compound interest. Accordingly it is true that all the little things we do be done out of charity; as St. Teresa of Calcutta advises in the quotation, it is the why we do what we do that matters.