A Fiction Prose Reflection, Book II of VIII

byChrisWhite – 2025

On the Series:
In this series, I seek for us to rediscover the eleven cardinal virtues, only differently. The series focuses on the virtues of: Hope, Charity, Prudence, Kindness, Faith, Love, Temperance, Fortitude, Wisdom, Patience, and Justice, accomplished through a fusion of literary prose and carefully chosen lines of poetry. Each reflection reaches into the essence of human experience, drawing on both original verse and timeless lines from poets who gave voice to the sacred. This, the second story, turns to Charity, the quiet power that transcends doctrine, politics, and pride, a virtue not of words, but of hands.

The late winter snow of 1870 had melted in spots, but the season hadn’t quite relinquished its grip. It just loitered about, muddy, overcast, somber, and stubbornly held in the tucks of stone fences and beneath the iron rails of the old, abandoned train track that hadn’t carried coal nor soul in years. That’s where she found him: the boy with the dog.

No name, no explanation. Just a boy, wrapped in wool layers that didn’t match, and a mutt curled against his side like a little brother.

She brought him bread the first time, sliced, soft, still warm from the oven though it had to travel three miles in a coat pocket to reach him. He didn’t say thank you. He didn’t need to. He fed his dog first.

The woman who served him had a name once. It had belonged to her in the days before grief and war. But names were for people who expected to be remembered. People whose family had survived. She answered now to no one in particular, which made it easier to listen when no one else would.

She did not ask where he came from. Did not ask what side his people had stood on. Did not ask what he believed, or whom he blamed. The world had turned itself inside out with questions, and none of them had healed a single wound. All she asked was:
“Are you hungry?”

O Charity, quiet keeper of the weary,
Soft hand that lifts without demand,
You ask not for titles, nor pledges of creed,
But give as the river gives to the land.
Chris White – The Virtue of Charity

Once, before the silence came, people had gathered in a red-brick hall to argue about justice. About rights and wrongs and truths sharp as swing blades. They left with louder voices and harder hearts. She remembers. She had sat in the back, knitting a scarf for a child that no longer needed it.

Now, she knits still. Not for children with names, but for hands that tremble in the cold. She leaves scarves tied to fence posts and tucked behind mailboxes. No notes. No sermons. Just warmth.

And they are taken. Always taken.

“There is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers,” Seneca once wrote, and so she gives without clutch, without receipt. As though kindness were bread cast into water, not to return, but to dissolve and nourish a sea of need.

There is a kind of strength not found in noise. Charity does not command; it invites. It does not win; it restores. When nations rage and tongues sharpen into weapons, it remains, to pour water on scorched ground, to set another place at a broken table.

She saw the boy again in early spring. His shoes were worse now. But the dog wagged its tail when it saw her, and that was enough. 

She gave him her gloves.
He gave her a nod.
And a jagged wound on the world, for just a moment, was stitched back together, not in law or policy, but in the balm of wool and the peace of silence.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind; 
charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up…
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. 
Charity never faileth….           
1 Corinthians 13 (especially verses 4-8)

Charity is not merely giving. It is recognition. It is saying: I see you, even when the world turns its face away. It does not demand penance. It does not require allegiance. It asks only whether the hands before it are empty, whether the soul inside them still hungers.

“No one becomes poor by giving,” Seneca also taught, and she knows this to be true in the marrow of her bones, for with every gift of silence, and scarf, and bread, she feels less empty, more whole. 

Let the proud build their walls.

She will keep walking beneath them, quiet and un-thanked, with bread in her pocket and fire in her chest.

Still you’ll stand, undimmed, unshaken,
Faithful, patient, kind, and just.
Chris White –The Virtue of Charity