(photo: Tom Delaney. Sherburne County, Minnesota, 2025)

The heat of the days is giving way to coolness, and the hours of sunlight have declined. All living things are now drawn into a time of taking their rest. Everywhere you can see the wisdom of Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John (12:24):

Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless a grain of wheat
falls into the earth and dies,
it remains just a grain of wheat.
However, if it dies,
it bears much fruit.

Autumn is in many ways not just the end of the year’s vitality, but the beginning of a multiplied vitality in our next year. It is a visible and all pervasive principle of nature, and we are not separate from it in our own existence and being. Can we sense ourselves letting go of the past, and even our present? Do we have a good sense of our earth, and the seeds we plant? Do we trust Jesus’ promise that by letting go and allowing our “grain of wheat” to die, we will see our world transformed and become more fruitful?

… Don’t worry, it’s not a process I completely understand either, but at least we’re all in it together.

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I started Live and Forgive while I was completing a program in forgiveness education and group facilitation through the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. Dr. Tyler VanderWeele is the director of the Human Flourishing Program and an accomplished researcher and scholar in the fields of human flourishing and forgiveness. VanderWeele reliably makes the connection of forgiveness to human flourishing and can reinforce his points with extensive research findings. Remarkably, VanderWeele and his colleagues at the Human Flourishing Program also have the capability to render philosophy, faith and scientific research into practical resources and supports for engaging communities in forgiveness and doing the things that lift whole communities into their own flourishing.

Recently, Tyler VanderWeele co-authored an article with Matthew Lee in the International Journal of Wellbeing entitled Love and Human Flourishing. The paper succeeds a 2023 article by VanderWeele in the Journal of Ethics in Social Philosophy entitled On an Analytic Definition of Love. The John Templeton Foundation has supported VanderWeele’s research on the construct and assessment of interpersonal love since 2022. Another product of VanderWeele’s extensive inquiry and research is his new book entitled A Theology of Health, published through University of Notre Dame Press, which explores the connections between principles of faith and health, including mental health, as well as overall wellbeing. VanderWeele and colleagues at the Human Flourishing Program have a commitment to allowing open-source public access to the resources they develop in both the areas of human flourishing and forgiveness. Likewise, the full text of VanderWeele’s new book is available for free viewing at Project MUSE.

In their recent article Love and Human Flourishing, VanderWeele and Lee propose something of a new paradigm for research in human flourishing and forgiveness that centers upon the human experience of love. The coauthors pull together the various conceptualizations and observed connections of love with wellbeing and human flourishing into a cohesive orientation toward research focused on love as both cause, effect, mediator and connector in human experience, both at the personal level and at the community level. The range, depth, and unavoidable complexities of an analytic discussion of love in connection with human flourishing are navigated remarkably well by the coauthors. They do emerge with an understandable paradigm for the undertaking and interpretation of research into love that can make sense in simple, straightforward, and commonly understandable terms — what I like to call “but stop conversation” clarity and simplicity. The world needs things rendered in bus stop conversations if there is going to be any hope of actually applying the research and scholarship to real world problems and for people in hard situations.

Today I would like to share with you what I saw as highlights and important points of the text. I am both directly quoting and paraphrasing the words of the authors, and in most points I am adding in how the point specifically links to forgiveness. Here are the highlights and important points with relevance to forgiveness:

• Thomas Aquinas taught that love is the cause of all of the various passions (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.II.25.4;27.4)
• Jesus taught that love of God and neighbor constituted the greatest commandment upon which hung all of the law (Matthew 22:40).
• Saint Paul taught, “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Romans 13:9).
• There is both theoretical and empirical evidence for strategies to build a “civilization of love” (John Paul II, 1991; Catholic Church, 2004:580-583).
• Human flourishing has been defined as a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good (VanderWeele, 2017).
• The promotion of love within society in a “civilization of love (John Paul II) has tremendous, and underutilized, potential to enhance human flourishing.
• Based on Aquinas, VanderWeele and colleagues assert that love involves either a unitive component or a contributory component or both, i.e. either a desire to be united with the beloved, or to contribute to the good of the beloved, or both (VanderWeele, 2023).
• Love involves both seeking to be with the good that is another person (that’s “unitive love”), and seeking good for the other person (that’s “contributory love”).
• One way in which love contributes to the flourishing or wholeness of the beloved is by the affirmation of the goodness of their being, of who they are as persons.
• As social creatures, love itself is simply a basic need.
• Interpersonal love has profound neurophysiological consequences that can affect the body and can affect health.
• The love of others clearly has the capacity to contribute to the wellbeing of others. But it is well-known that loving others can also contribute to a person’s own wellbeing — loving others is a part of our own flourishing, fulfillment of our very being.
• As one contributes to the good of others through forgiveness, this may itself be accompanied by a sense of purpose, or satisfaction, or alternatively a sense of growth or goodness in the exercise of one’s capacities to contribute to the wellbeing of another.
• Loving others and seeking the good of others through forgiveness not only contributes to their own good, but can also prompt and promote similar acts of kindness and love in others as well.
• As part if a forgiveness process, love can bring wholeness and healing to individuals, and can have the capacity to spread, bringing love and spreading wellbeing yet further, even throughout an entire community and beyond, thus enabling the community as a whole to flourish as well.
• Love can be taught and facilitated as part of a forgiveness process when it is understood as viewing every other person as having fundamental value and dignity, as someone for whom it is worthwhile to contribute to, as someone with whom it is good to be with.
• Human persons can be seen and understood as having such value and dignity because they are created by and loved by God. In this way, there is a radical equalizing of dignity and value of persons because that value is not grounded in capacities, but in God, in God’s creation, in God’s love.
• Love of others is itself grounded in and empowered by love of God (Aquinas).
• This grounding of love of others in the love of God can take a variety of forms including love of God helping to empower one to carry out the command to love one’s neighbor; or the experience of God’s love itself making one more loving; or seeing one’s neighbor as someone who is in fact loved by God.
• When love is grounded in human dignity and when such a grounding enhances flourishing, then this provides grounds not only for love of friends and family, but also for love of neighbor, love of stranger, and even the love of enemy needed for forgiveness.
• Love of enemy in a forgiveness process does not ignore or neglect the harm or wrongdoing, but preserves a person’s goodwill even in the face of such wrongdoing.
• When we are harmed, we are often rightly angry, but that anger, when directed properly, is to address the harm and to right the wrong or injustice that has been done. Doing so may involve rebuke or punishment of the wrong-doer, but not hatred, not desiring to harm them simply so that the perpetrator might suffer, but rather so as to correct or prevent further wrongdoing, or to restore justice within the community.
• Living in a community, the opportunities for love, including forgiveness, are ubiquitous. They are present in all types of relationships: with family, and with friends; with colleagues, and with neighbors; and potentially even with strangers and with enemies.
• Love of enemy sees the wrongdoing as itself an indication of the need of the offender for healing and restoration – a need for a re-orientation from ill-will towards goodwill. Such love of enemy will thus include forgiveness.
• Forgiveness itself might be understood as the replacing of ill-will towards an offender with goodwill; forgiveness is in some sense a restoration of contributory love following an offense.
• Love of enemy through forgiveness has the potential to free the one loving from hatred, to end cycles of hatred, and can sometimes help bring about transformation of the wrongdoer, reconciliation, and peace.
• Love for one’s enemies through forgiveness is a pathway towards the end of enmities, towards reconciliation, towards peace and wholeness of all people, towards the healing of communities.
• Forgiveness can be understood as restoration of contributory love following an offense.
• Forgiveness of others is associated with subsequently lower levels of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress and higher levels of happiness, self-esteem, and emotional processing.
• The person who receives an act of goodwill like forgiveness, is more likely to go on to act similarly, making a positive the contagion effect of altruistic action that may extend so far that a positive interaction between two persons can propagate through a social network and ultimately affect the interaction of two other persons neither of whom know either person in the original pair.
• With respect to the promotion of forgiveness and compassion, the evidence is arguably fairly direct. The interventions that have been developed to promote love in these forms have indeed been successful at increasing forgiveness and compassion, and have moreover been successful at improving mental health and happiness, at alleviating depression and anxiety, and at enhancing flourishing more broadly.
• Forgiveness can promote love of neighbor, and even love of enemy, and may also help heal divisions. Forgiveness is a restoration of love of neighbor; the evidence powerfully suggests that promotion of forgiveness could in turn restore love and promote human flourishing.

As you can see, there is a lot in this article to consider about the relationship between love, human flourishing, and forgiveness. In addition, the authors link the principles to leading figures in the Catholic Church’s ongoing discourse on love as the foundation and summit of human flourishing and forgiveness. My hope in presenting these points is to make a more informed practical application in forgiveness possible, both for persons and communities. I think that one of the best observations is that “opportunities to love are ubiquitous,” because it means that we can begin a renewed attention and access to love wherever we are, and today! That’s good news!

Please share these words with someone who needs to hear them today.

This text is an original work of its author Tom Delaney and was entirely composed without the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

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If your parish or faith community is seeking a deeper experience of forgiveness, healing, mercy, and spiritual renewal, Live and Forgive is here to help. To begin the conversation, email Live and Forgive presenter and facilitator Tom Delaney at tom@liveandforgive.com — he will be glad to connect with you for a conversation. Please type in your email and click “Subscribe” below to stay connected and get Live and Forgive articles delivered to you.

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