Sculpt Your Love With Forgiveness, Not Criticism
Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash
There is a pillar of polished marble at every wedding celebration. You may not see it standing there among the wedding presents, the cake, the dancing, and the unforgettable memories. You may not think it weird as your mind is captured by the beauty and joy of such a spectacular day. But it’s there, as a gift sent by love to each new couple who seeks to embark on what could be a once-in-a-lifetime journey. The marble comes with two chisels, one for you and the other for your partner.
The pillar of marble will never look as pristine as on that day.
The day you get married is the same day you declare your vows. You may have thought some variation of those words a thousand times. Perhaps you’ve written them down in the margins of notebooks or on the backs of the napkins at the Waffle House you and your partner go to every other Thursday morning for pancakes and really bad coffee. But the day you get married, you speak those words. You vow to love in sickness and health, for richer or poorer, for better or worse. It’s amazing how such costly words can be so easy to say.
As your wedding unfolds into the patterns and rhythms of a marriage, that pillar of marble follows you home and is placed in your guest room or perhaps right in your living room if you’re living in the loft in New York City. You learn to live around it. In fact, you get so comfortable with the interruption that you learn to ignore it altogether. It becomes no more than a meaningful decoration that blends into the background of a busy and full life. Until it doesn’t. Until one day, your partner picks up the chisel and decides to chip off a piece of the marble.
All it takes is a word. Sometimes not even as much. It can be a glance, a shift of the shoulders, a slight leaning away when she goes in for a kiss. Sometimes, with the smallest of thoughts, you find yourself with your chisel in hand, back at the block of marble, looking up at the cracks and fissures spreading in that once beautiful stone.
If you linger long enough and listen intently, you will hear in every marriage the soft but sure sound of stone hitting marble. Of chipping away. The sound of carving, when the hammer hits the head of a chisel like a newly appointed judge practicing the motion of the gavel hitting his wooden pad before the court doors open.
Michelangelo once said of his famous sculpture David,
“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
But you and I aren’t Michelangelo. We’re novices with a chisel. Our finesse is similar to a drunk person trying to put their keys into their front door. We have a tendency to knick and scratch our marble far more carelessly than we care to admit.
But why should you be an expert? It’s not as if you spend long hours standing in front of the marble, practicing your sculpting motions. You, like the rest of humanity, have a standard of grace, of goodwill. You may laugh off a slanted insult or smile through grimaced teeth when your buttons are pushed for the fourth time in the last twenty minutes. But without being intentional, you’ll find yourself coming back to your chisel a bit more easily and a bit more quickly. You’ll start to reach for it almost without looking for it, like the majority of us scroll to the Instagram app when we open our smartphones.
Over time, you’ll grow in your acumen of how to chisel. You’ll know when to take off a lot or a little. When and where to hammer to create the most impact. You may convince yourself you are creating art but, in reality, you are creating a hundred little fissures. Left unchecked, you’ll whittle away the very stone that added weight to the words you vowed to your partner in front of your friends and families.
Unless you learn to forgive.
You and I will never be Michelangelo, looking into the stone and carving perfection. But that does not mean that we cannot chisel something magnificent and beautiful. In fact, it was Michelangelo who also said:
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”
On your wedding day, when you and your partner leave the dance floor, it’s easy to glance at your pillar of marble out if the corner of your eye as you both run through the tunnel of sparklers. It looks dazzling and eternal; limitless. I know because I’ve seen it in that light.
But here’s the greatest secret of marriage that you learn along the way: you only get one marble pillar. No more, no less.
But you also get a thousand bottles of superglue.
In order to have a happy marriage, you have to be as much or more generous with the glue as you as with the chisel.
The true beauty of a marriage is not perfection masking the fissures of a life and love much-chiseled. The beauty of a great marriage, the 60-years-long marriage, is the cracks held together by the superglue of forgiveness.
The chisel is inevitable. You will say, do, or think something that hurts your partner. You will not escape that reality and to think you will be the first human being to do so is folly and blindness. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is optional. It is restorative and redemptive. It is the only thing in your marriage which can truly put chipped pieces of marble back onto your pillar.
It may take time and it will surely be messy. The process of gluing the small fragments of marble back onto your pillar will never be easy. But it’s essential.
People may say they want the fairytale romance but it’s not realistic. It’s not relatable. If you asked me to show you my love, I’d show you my cracks. I’d show you my hands that are calloused from the chisel and fingers that have cuts and scrapes from picking up and placing the chipped marble back onto the block.
I’d show you the glory and the grit, the frustration and the freedom. I’d show you a sculpture created by my humanity and humility.
If you want to know love, if you want to experience a rich marriage, don’t show the world the sunset or the picnic or the perfectly styled family photograph you picked for your annual Christmas card to remind people that you’re happy and beautiful. Show me your marble pillar and I’ll tell you if you know what love is.