c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) The opening scene of “Love Actually,” the 2003 romantic comedy that is one of the best Christmas-themed movies of recent vintage, takes place at the arrivals gate of Heathrow Airport in London.

As you see images of reconciliation _ people running into each other’s arms, hugging, kissing, crying, laughing, looking generally relieved _ you hear Hugh Grant talking about how love is all around us, all the time, even (or perhaps most especially) when we’re feeling most unlovable.

“Seems to me that love is everywhere,” Grant says. “Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there.”

During the Christmas season, most of us get caught up in the giving and receiving of material gifts. This has precedence, of course, in the Nativity story, where three Magi from the East brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the infant Jesus.

Still, it’s easy to lose sight of the actual giving and receiving that Christmas is meant to commemorate. Christmas is about being reconciled _ to God and to one another. It’s about new beginnings and second chances.

I would argue the best gift _ the one that’s really wanted, always fits, is the right color and never goes out of style _ that you can give or receive is forgiveness.

While you can’t buy it or wrap it up in a box with a neat bow, forgiveness is hardly a free gift. It costs something to give it and to get it. You can ask for it but, like all those gifts on wish lists addressed to Santa, that doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to receive it.

Forgiveness involves risk and trust, hope and faith, humility and vulnerability.

I’m guessing that’s why, as the Christian story goes, God chose to come to Earth in (literal) straw poverty as a newborn babe _ the most physically vulnerable and fragile of human beings _ in order to make true forgiveness possible and reconciliation available.

The Baby Jesus, the one Ricky Bobby described in “Talladega Nights” as “just a little infant, so cuddly, but still omnipotent,” wielded the power that reconciles humankind to its Creator. He was the tiny vessel of grace that makes it remotely possible that we might forgive each other our trespasses.

To love someone _ and to forgive another person surely is to love them _ is hardest when they’ve hurt us. The chasm between injury and healing can feel insurmountable.

Reaching across that gap to ask or grant forgiveness is superhuman. Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it this way: “Love a man, even in his sin, for that love is a likeness of divine love and is the summit of love on Earth.”

What better time of the year, then, to attempt the superhuman than during the season when we celebrate the moment the Divine reached its hand into the world and God became human?

Say you’re sorry.

Ask for forgiveness.

And if someone asks, try your best to give it.

If you love her, say so.

If you are heartsick, pick up the phone and tell him.

If you miss them, get in the car (or bus or train or plane or on foot if you have to) and go to them.

Give up the grudge.

Call a truce.

Break the silence.

Reconcile.

Give them a hug like you mean it, not the hips-away-shoulders-only-pat-pat kind that says you’re not so sure.

Kiss your mother. Kiss your father. Kiss your brother and your sister and your great aunt and your surly uncle who smells of cigars and too much Brut.

Chase them if you have to.

Risk rejection. Hope against hope. Make a fool out of yourself and don’t care.

Love, actually.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

KRE/LF END FALSANI