Daily Thought For December 19, 2016

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The Importance of Forgiveness
 
     Tolerance leads us to live a loving openness towards others, to look on them with constant kindness. It reaches the depths of the heart and knows how to look forward and find out that goodness which is in every person. 
     Only he who is humble is capable of maintaining an understanding attitude. Otherwise, the tiniest faults of others are magnified, and one tends to justify and minimize one's own greater faults and errors. Pride is like a curved mirror that distorts the reality of things. 
     He who is humble is objective, and thus can be respectful and tolerant towards others: forgiveness of others' faults comes easily to him. The humble person is not scandalized by these flaws in his neighbor. There is no sin, writes St Augustine, or crime committed by another which I myself am not capable of committing through my weakness; and if I have not committed it, it is because God, in his mercy, has not allowed me to and has preserved me in good. Moreover, we also learn to discover so many virtues in the people about us, who teach us by their hard work, their self-denial, their joy, that we shall not dwell too much on their defects; only when it is absolutely necessary shall we advert to them in order to help them with fraternal correction.
 
from In Conversation with God by Francis Fernandez Volume II p.132

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