It’s the beginning of a new month, but before I send my newsletter out, so I am caught between two kind promises: I will love without keeping score and I will forgive with wild abandon. This morning, serendipitously (through Gretchen Rubin’s “Moment of Happiness”), St. Therese of Lisieux arrived in my inbox, saying “When one loves, one does not calculate.”
How odd that I, math-avoidant in so many other areas, bring out the scales when it comes to love and forgiveness. I pettishly wonder about not being loved enough or not showing my love enough. I imagine that I can forgive you this little thing, but not that big thing. It is all about fairness.
Love and forgiveness cannot be measured. They are both big concepts that arch over us with the spaciousness of the night sky. If I move to love, I am willing to lose control, to step into the sky. Who knows where it will take me?
Contrary to popular fictions, love is not always happy and heroic. Sometimes love is grief-filled. Sometimes love is about endurance.
Maybe love and forgiveness are about the same sky. Love is me moving towards you, opening out to you, choosing to be with you. Forgiveness is, after the hurt, being willing to move and open and choose again.
As with so many things in my life, I find instruction in the infinity symbol: love moves into forgiveness moves into love moves into forgiveness…on and on without end. It’s a big sky.
