This was precisely St. Thérèse’s insight: It is easier to love people in the abstract than to tolerate the person at your table, the one who makes funny noises when she eats or who scrapes his knife on the plate in an annoying way. It is such trials that refine our capacity for love. For we learn forgiveness only when there is something to forgive; we learn patience when our patience is sorely tested.
The Saint’s Guide to Happiness
Robert Ellsberg
Category: FORGIVENESS
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“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
―C.S. Lewis,The Weight of Glory -
For the humble, the severity of the offense and the existence of an apology are extraneous factors in terms of one’s willingness to forgive. This new perspective on forgiveness offers freedom (a favorite theme of Dostoevsky) in that the one offended has the power to forgive in each and every circumstance and is not constrained by such factors as the severity of the offense or the presence of an apology. It is a freedom based on knowing who we are, what God has done for us, and what we desire to give Him in return. Always aware of the ten thousand talents that we owe God, always aware that He has forgiven us with His grace and loving kindness, always aware that all of us will stand together one day before our Maker, we come to understand what ultimately matters is not so much what was said to us or done to us, but our faithfulness to Christ’s love, our imitation of His forgiveness, and our humility before the weaknesses of others.
Fr. Alexis (Trader)
Less Injustice or More Humility: Two Perspectives on Forgiveness -
You understand that many of our faults are voluntary in different degrees, though they may not be committed with a deliberate purpose of failing in our allegiance to God. One friend sometimes reproaches another for a fault not expressly intended to be offensive, and yet committed with the knowledge that it would be so. In the same way, God lays this sort of faults to our charge. They are voluntary, for although not done with an express intention, they are still committed freely and against a certain interior light of conscience, which should have caused us to hesitate and wait.
—François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
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“For I have often seen people who had offended God and were not in the least perturbed about it. And I have seen how those same people provoked their friends in some trifling matter and then employed every artifice, every device, every sacrifice, every apology, both personally and through friends and relatives, not sparing gifts, in order to regain their former love.”
— St. John Climacus
SO GOOD QUOTES 