DOGS ARE ABLE TO FORGIVE with an ease you and I seem incapable of. There may be many reasons for this, but I want to suggest that time, or rather the dog’s indifference to time, has something to do with it. Time is linear. It moves in a straight line. Past, present, and future can be plotted in a concrete and measurable order. This doesn’t mean a whole lot to the dog. Their indifference to time is pretty much absolute. Everything is immediate, flush, present, and perhaps above all, relevant. Past, present, and future are intangibles, so the dog has little use for them. The dog, therefore, doesn’t have a past, at least not like you and I have a past. And if I have no past, where am I to list all the offenses against me? Where is the record to be kept? To remember an offense, you must have a past to keep them in.

This makes it easier for me to understand how God can forgive my crimes against him. In his love, he has chosen to forget them. He made a law that he himself cannot break. He set legislation against his own omniscience. He’s allowed himself to forget. Imagine that! My offence becomes lost in his forgetfulness. Only time—linear, sequential time, record keeping time—allows any of us to look back, to look forward, to forget, to remember, to keep records. Eternity frustrates this order of things and renders time a nonissue.

The dog doesn’t have to work so hard to understand this.  

You and I have a more complicated relationship with time than the dog does. Yesterday has no power over the dog. They do not burden themselves with souvenirs, emotional or otherwise. Time isn’t insufferably linked to her psychology as it is to ours. 

Of course, I could be wrong about all of this. The dog’s ability to forgive may be due simply to her outrageous capacity to love, which is always beyond explanation. Perhaps love has such sovereignty over the dog that it suffers no obstacle. And unforgiveness is an obstacle. As the godfather might have said, “Unforgiveness is a stone in the shoe of love.”

Love keeps no record of wrongs. It can keep no such memories, for there is no time to put them in. Proving the point: To err is human. To forgive is, well, canine.

 

The above excerpt is an adaption from a chapter entitled If I Love You, Who Cares What Time It Is?