Remember the love

[Please note: ACIM passages quoted in this article reference the Foundation for Inner Peace (FIP) Edition.]

On Sunday, the Unity church choir I sing in will be performing a beautiful song called “Seasons of Love,” from the musical Rent. (For a U-Tube video of the movie version of the song, click here.) I find in this song a wonderful theme that is echoed in A Course in Miracles: When we look upon our past relationships and all their ups and downs, above all we should remember the love.

Before I get into the song, let me give a brief synopsis of the plot of Rent (spoiler alert!). Based on Puccini’s opera La Boheme, Rent is the story of a year in the life of eight struggling Bohemian artists in New York’s East Village. All of them experience various joys and sorrows as the year goes by. Among them are two doomed HIV-positive lovers, Roger and Mimi. They come together, break up, and their story reaches a heart-wrenching climax when Mimi dies, but then miraculously comes back to life to hear the song Roger wrote for her, in which he tells her at last that he has always loved her.

Well, that is the way-too-short version, but it is enough to set up the song “Seasons of Love.” The song, a kind of philosophical commentary on all that happens in the course of the musical, asks the question, “How do you measure a year?” In literal time, a year is, as the song repeats again and again, “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes.” But you could measure a year in a lot of other ways:

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee. In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.

Roger and Mimi, the doomed lovers, could measure their year by the painful events in their own relationship:

In truths that she learned, or in times that he cried. In bridges he burned, or the way that she died.

But the song ends up advocating an entirely different measuring stick. It asks: “How about love?” Why not “measure in love”? We could measure a year in all sorts of ways, but in the end, the truest way to look upon a year – or a life – is to “remember the love.” For in the end, love is the only thing that matters.

This reminds me so much of what the Course says about how to look upon the past, including all of our relationships with other human beings. We could choose to focus on all the pain, resentment, and disappointments. But instead, the Course advocates a completely different focus:

To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past, and those that were given you. All the rest must be forgotten. (T-17.III.1:1-2)

We see the same theme here as in the song: When we look upon the past, we should remember the love. This is forgiveness: the recognition that love is the only thing that is real, the only thing that is true, the only thing that matters.

If we do choose to remember only the love, our suffering over the past will be undone and all we will see is the beauty, blessing, and love that was the past’s only reality:

How can you who are so holy suffer? All your past except its beauty is gone, and nothing is left but a blessing. I have saved all your kindnesses and every loving thought you ever had. I have purified them of the errors that hid their light, and kept them for you in their own perfect radiance. (T-5.IV.8:1-4)

What would our lives be like if we applied this measuring stick to every relationship, every encounter, every event in our lives? Of course, we will still remember the painful events in the ordinary sense of recalling that they happened; Jesus, after all, still remembers his crucifixion. But what if we chose to remember only the love as what was real and true about our pasts? We would be wholly transformed.

So, perhaps right now you might want to bring to mind a relationship from your past and, with the Holy Spirit’s help, remember the love. Can you see the beauty and blessings there? Can you remember the kindnesses and loving thoughts? Can you see how Jesus has purified that relationship of all its past errors and revealed the light those errors concealed? Even if it is a relationship that ended, can you see that in truth, it didn’t really end? After all, as the song says, “the story never ends.” Or as the Course says, “All who meet will someday meet again, for it is the destiny of all relationships to become holy” (M-3.4:6).

Let us all join in the final words of this glorious song, which could have been taken straight from the pages of the Course:

Oh you got to, got to remember the love! You know that love is a gift from up above. Share love, give love, spread love. Measure, measure your life in love.