English
EspañolI do not love you because you are perfect and flawless. I love you because you are you. Because you are my husband or wife, my father or mother, my brother or sister, my grandfather or grandmother, my grandchild. I love you with your human characteristics, virtues and flaws, talents, and limitations, which I also have. This acceptance of ourselves reveals the treasure of mutual patience.
Text
“Patience takes root when I recognize that other people also have a right to live in this world, just as they are.” (The Joy of Love, n.92)
Commentary
Living together in my family, I have dealt with very different characters and personalities. We are five siblings, and each is quite different from the other. This is normal.
I often remember my intolerance towards the different attitudes and reactions of my siblings in a specific situation or because they did not act as I expected. Deep down, perhaps I was demanding that they be like me, in an arrogant outburst of thinking I was better, blind to my shortcomings. Like everyone else in the world, I was not born a master but an apprentice and greatly flawed.
Nevertheless, to love them well and truly – which is what I want – I must reflect before judging them, try to understand them, and accept that we will not always agree, that they will not always respond as I would like them to. My siblings have the right to their different way of being, to their personality, to their spaces and times. When I set out to respect them and genuinely do that, inner patience is born within me. It is the patience of love. It reminds me that I am not the perfect and unique canon that measures others, that I am not a superior being free of miseries. They must also have enormous patience with me. Good love must lead me to help them improve, yes, but with a humble attitude, offering myself to their freedom, never humiliating, and accepting that I also have much to correct.
Without ceasing to be imperfect and limited, the fact that we authentically love each other already improves us.
