Forgiveness

Gentle visitors, these days your humble Contributor is instructed in the quality and virtue of forgiveness chiefly by way of apparel and apparatus. 

We are rightly admonished to forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven, a multiplication that yields a certain sum (490 to be precise, by the old tables long committed to memory) but intended to suggest a much higher number. 

Now, some slacks hanging in your humble Contributor's wardrobe are well on their way to reaching this number of pardons.   The key, in this regard, is that a tag sewn to a seam reports that the waist band is "x" -- that is, a number reflecting  a certain circumference; when, in fact, it will accommodate "y"  -- a greater circumference -- and, with some effort, "z". 

This sort of apparently lazy geometry would not have pleased Sr. Marie Gerard who, in the dark ages of the last century,  insisted that we young scholars measure things arightly -- until, at least, one demonstrated to Sister that the same, larger though imprecise number suggested by the aforesaid parable was likewise exhibited here -- that is, a greater forgiveness.  

But, the appreciation of this fact is lost on a schoolchild, coming instead only with age, with which, in turn, often comes a change in geometrical approach to the person, which might well be correlated to a marked  slacking (unrelated to the slacks), and which we might express this as follows: a decrease in energy is directly correlated to an increase in mass.  The slacks forgive this physical impropriety by means of a hidden elasticity or generosity in their make-up.

Similarly, today I received, as a gift, a graphite cudgel which promises to be forgiving.  The instrument is intended solely for that strange practice whereby grown persons wander into a field and strike repeatedly at a globule with a stick until they drive it into a small hole some one or two furlongs off.  No doubt, in the distant future, anthropologists will study this odd occupation and wonder whether it was part of a religious rite of mortification or a sign of the general madness that consumed those pitiful peoples.  That the Irish were so closely associated with it would support either supposition.

In any case, a normal club of this type assumes that the striker (say, your humble Contributor) intends the orb to go just as it is addressed -- that is, careening recklessly into a wood  or thicket or stagnant pool; whereas, the forgiving club assumes that the striker intended no such wayward, untoward thing, and, by means of its accommodating design makes straight the path of flight, thereby defying the laws of physics and aerodynamics.

But, all is well: for just so does forgiveness defy enumeration and calculation.