On marriage and forgiveness
Marriages today tend to be founded on romantic love. We feel swept away by feelings of rapture. As one writer puts it, ”You look for a person who throws you into a trance, and hope that when you come out of the trance, he turns out to be someone you can like.” We say to ourselves, “I can’t believe that someone that nice, someone that perfect actually loves me.” We say to ourselves, “He/she makes me feel so good about myself,” without realizing that when we say that, we are admitting that we don’t really love the other person. We are using the other person to help us to love ourselves. “If someone that nice loves me, I must be truly lovable.”
But if romantic attraction is the basis for love among courting couples, it is no long-term basis on which to build a marriage. The illusion of perfection in the other will not last. And that is why the essence of marital love is not romance but forgiveness.
Let me by very clear as to what I mean by that. To define love as forgiveness does not mean that a man can inform his wife about his extramarital affairs and when she becomes upsets, say, “The fact that she can’t forgive me proves that she doesn’t love me and that justifies my doing what I did.” Defining love as forgiveness does not require a battered wife to continue to suffer physical abuse at the hands of an abusive husband. Neither does it requires you to let yourself be exploited and walked over without a protest. Forgiveness as the truest form of love means accepting without bitterness the flaws and imperfections of our partner, and praying that our partner accepts our flaws as well. Romantic love overlooks faults (“love is blind”) in an effort to persuade ourselves that we deserve a perfect partner. Mature marital love sees faults clearly and forgives them, understanding that there are no perfect people, that we don’t have to pretend perfection, and that an imperfect spouse is all that an imperfect person like us can aspire to. (“For years, I was looking for the perfect man, and when I finally found him, it turned out he was looking for the perfect woman and that wasn’t me.”)
How Good Do We Have to Be? A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness
By Harold S. Kushner Back Bay Books/Little Brown and Co 1996
Jesus teaches about Criticizing Others:
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you….For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” Luke 6:37-38
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother,’Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” Luke 6:41-42
