Give Yourself a Break

Forgiveness, Healing, Love, Marriage, Relationships 0

It is important to be gentle with and accepting of yourself throughout your relationship.  You are just as flawed, misguided, and hurtful as your lover, and you both need a good dose of TLC.  While the idea of self-forgiveness might be a “duh” to many of you, the point still needs to be made.  Self-forgiveness enables you to move on with kindness after grieving your flaws and the ways you have hurt your lover.  When you forgive yourself, you look for your good qualities, appreciate the love you offer, and accept with humility the harm you cause.  You also change your story to reflect your positive intention and your effort to do the best you can with what you have to work with.

Self-forgiveness is not that different from forgiving your partner. . . .

Nobody is perfect, and everybody will make many mistakes.  Some of us make mistakes that cause harm, and others make mistakes that only cause a mess.  Because you and your partner are human beings, you will make mistakes, fail occasionally, and sometimes even harm other people.  Your need to be perfect is an unenforceable rule, one that can never be met.  Needing to never hurt your lover is an unenforceable rule.  Demanding that you always be successful in all aspects of your relationship is an unenforceable rule.  When you accept that you are human, you are able to offer forgiveness to yourself and remember that you have the resources at your disposal to improve yourself and help others.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 209-210, 215

Strong Views of God’s Love

Forgiveness, God, Love 0

What makes us universalists is not that we have unusually weak views of sin but unusually strong views of divine love and grace.  Where sin abounds grace abounds all the more.

I have argued that eternal conscious torment is not a just response to sin; and in the eyes of some, this amounts to an underestimate of the severity of sin. . . .  However, just because I do not think that a sin incurs infinite demerit, it does not follow that I deny it incurs very serious demerit. . . .

For the universalist, hell is something to be avoided at all costs, just as Jesus warned us.  To object by saying, “Well, if hell is not forever, it doesn’t really matter if someone has a spell there,” is like suggesting that because you will recover from the long and painful illness, it isn’t worth taking precautions to avoid it.  It is like telling an Old Testament prophet not to bother warning Israel to repent, because God will always restore them after the judgment anyway.  The prophet would reply that it is better to avoid the judgment in this first place, and the prophet is surely correct.  I wonder if I could pose a counter-question to our critics:  “Is it perhaps you who fail to take God’s love and grace as seriously as it deserves?”

It seems to me that the only major Christian doctrine threatened by universalism is the teaching that those in hell have passed beyond the point of no return; and, as this belief is quite detachable from the web of Christian belief without doing any damage to the rest of the web, I can only conclude that, although it is a widely held doctrine, it is peripheral in its structural role in Christian theology.  I can be removed and replaced without doing harm to Christian theology.  Indeed, if I am right, once we remove and replace it with a universalist view of hell, we have a much more coherent web of beliefs than we had before.

— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 165-167

The Father’s Heart

God, Love 0

The heart of the father burns with an immense desire to bring his children home. . . .

God, creator of heaven and earth, has chosen to be, first and foremost, a Father.

As Father, he wants his children to be free, free to love.  That freedom includes the possibility of their leaving home, going to a “distant country,” and losing everything.  The Father’s heart knows all the pain that will come from that choice, but his love makes him powerless to prevent it.  As Father, he desires that those who stay at home enjoy his presence and experience his affection.  But here again, he wants only to offer a love that can be freely received.  He suffers beyond telling when his children honor him only with lip service, while their hearts are far from him.  He knows their “deceitful tongues” and “disloyal hearts,” but he cannot make them love him without losing his true fatherhood.

As Father, the only authority he claims for himself is the authority of compassion.  That authority comes from letting the sins of his children pierce his heart.  There is no lust, greed, anger, resentment, jealousy, or vengeance in his lost children that has not caused immense grief to his heart.  The grief is so deep because the heart is so pure.  From the deep inner place where love embraces all human grief, the Father reaches out to his children.  The touch of his hands, radiating inner light, seeks only to heal.

Here is the God I want to believe in:  a Father who, from the beginning of creation, has stretched out his arms in merciful blessing, never forcing himself on anyone, but always waiting, never letting his arms drop down in despair, but always hoping that his children will return so that he can speak words of love to them and let his tired arms rest on their shoulders.  His only desire is to bless.

— Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p. 95-96

Love the Sinner

Core Value, Forgiveness, Love 0

Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction:  how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?  But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself.  However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself.  There had never been the slightest difficulty about it.  In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man.  Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.  Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery.  We ought to hate them.  Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid.  But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves:  being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.

— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, quoted in A Year with C. S. Lewis, edited by Patricia S. Klein, p. 226

Positive Intention

Core Value, Forgiveness, Love, Marriage, Relationships 0

Positive intention is shorthand for talking about why you want your relationship to succeed, or what you are going to do to make it work, or how you can grow from a challenging experience.  It is the opposite of complaining.  Positive intention helps you see the big picture of a successful relationship and stops you from focusing on the little picture of disappointment or grievance. . . .  I want you to share stories with yourself, with your loved one, and with your friends and family that reflect a strong and positive commitment to your marriage.  These stories do not have to be long or detailed, but they should anchor your relationship in the idea of goodness and the continued possibility of success.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 204

Speaking to Others with Kindness

Compassion, Forgiveness, Love, Marriage, Relationships 0

Whenever possible, you want to speak of your lover and your relationship with kindness.  That is the overarching message of this book.  Look for any way you can be kind to the person you share your life with.  Don’t be tempted to say nasty things when your lover screws up or to put your lover down when he or she fails….  Setting boundaries and expressing ourselves is good, but talking about our relationship negatively and highlighting our lover’s failings is bad….

Remember that what comes out of your mouth says more about your character than it does about your partner’s….  We think that we are describing our lover’s weaknesses, but our words and actions are actually showing our own….

The truth is that we can choose how we talk to and about our partner.  Sadly, many people choose to discuss their lover negatively….  A lot of relationships struggle with the cost of holding a grudge and the sense of blame it causes.  Getting rid of the blame quickly and regularly is hugely important if you want your relationship to thrive and move forward.

Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 201-203

Recommitting

Forgiveness, Letting Go, Love, Marriage, Relationships 0

A good relationship is worth the effort of letting go of an annoying trait in your partner and being as kind as possible to this person you are connected to.  Those two ideas are central to your marriage vows.  A marriage is a choice to recommit to your partner every day.  Every spouse, whether recovering from a brutal betrayal or simply dealing with a sloppy partner, decides every day wehter to get up and dance with that partner again.  Every marriage goes through periods when each partner is not sure about continuing it. . . .  Forgiveness is based upon a continual recommitment to your relationship.  Forgiveness comes after grieving your losses, and it allows you to move forward in your relationship with happiness and a positive attitude.  This is true whether the losses were big (your spouse is a drug addict) or little (your lazy partner never does the grocery run) or somewhere in between — as when you accept the fact that you married a slob, you have grieved the neat person you should have married, and you have recommitted to the lovable human being you chose to be with.

Recommitting is an ongoing process; you have to recommit every time your lover says the same dumb thing again and you react with your same exasperated sigh.  You have to recommit when your lover is late yet again, or leaves a cheap tip for the third time in a week.  If your partner does something annoying but ultimately insignificant, acknowledge your dismay or loss for an instant and then connect right back again.  Try saying something to help put the annoyance in perspective and get back in the game.  You could remind yourself that “she’s worth it,” or “it was no big deal.”  Most of the time you don’t even need to let your lover know he or she has done anything wrong.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 199-200

If Juliet Got Left

Life, Love, Relationships 0

I thought about Juliet some more.

I wondered what she would have done if Romeo had left her, not because he was banished, but because he lost interest?  What if Rosalind had given him the time of day, and he’d changed his mind?  What if, instead of marrying Juliet, he’d just disappeared?

I thought I knew how Juliet would feel.

She wouldn’t go back to her old life, not really.  She wouldn’t ever have moved on, I was sure of that.  Even if she’d lived until she was old and gray, every time she closed her eyes, it would have been Romeo’s face she saw behind her lids.  She would have accepted that, eventually.

— Bella, in New Moon, by Stephenie Meyer, p. 370

Happily Ever After

Joy, Life, Love, Marriage 0

Every fairy tale, it seems, concludes with the bland phrase “happily ever after.”  Yet every couple I have ever known would agree that nothing about marriage is forever happy.  There are moments of bliss, to be sure, and lengthy spans of satisfied companionship.  yet these come at no small effort, and the girl who reads such fiction dreaming her troubles will end ere she departs the altar is well advised to seek at once a rational woman to set her straight.

— Princess Ben, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Love Changes Us.

Love 0

I had this unoriginal thought as I walked out the door and toward my van:  love changes us, makes us into people whom others then want to love.  That’s why, to those of us without it, love is the voice asking, What else?  What else?  And to those of us who have had love and lost it or thrown it away, then love is the voice that leads us back to love, to see if it might still be ours or if we’ve lost it for good.  For those of us who’ve lost it, love is also the thing that makes us speak in aphorisms about love, which is why we try to get love back, so we can stop speaking that way.  Aphoristically, that is.

— Sam Pulsifer, in An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke