English
EspañolWhat is the bravest yet most challenging thing we can do regarding love? Forgive.
One must considerably love oneself in order to possess the sincere mercy and warm tenderness from which forgiveness flows. “No pain, no gain” goes the saying, and if something is precious, it will also demand a lot from us in order to achieve it. When we love, forgiving is worth it all.
Text
“Marital problems are “often confronted in haste and without the courage to have patience and reflect, to make sacrifices and to forgive one another.” (The Joy of Love, n.41)
Commentary
May he who does not have any flaws, limitations, mistakes, and failures raise his hand! When loving our loved ones, it is clear we are all guilty. And yet, despite those flaws, it is still true that we love our families. It is not difficult for us to recognize it. Unless we are conceited fools, as empty as we are arrogant, it is harder for us to accept that our loved ones also have faults and failures while attempting to love us. They, too, are human, and still, we demand perfection from them.
If we recognize that, almost without realizing it and without express malice, we have within us that double standard, we will not only acknowledge the essential need for humility – and its power of understanding – to love and be loved, but we will enjoy being humble, tender and merciful with our loved ones, in the face of their defects and limitations. We will have learned to forgive and, consequently, to be forgiven. And something else: we will have learned to love more and better, with greater realism and depth.
We all have the experience that what is worthwhile is also difficult to achieve. Love, which is worth so much, also requires effort – sometimes a heroic effort – to cultivate it, protect it, and discover how to forgive, thus generously entering into a sincere dialogue and reconciliation. Crises are defined as “lack of resources to face new situations.” For this very reason, crises are opportunities to “increase those resources”: generosity, respect, mercy towards others, to give them a new chance, to help one another.
