Our world of planet-wide instant messaging has little patience with delay. If you celebrate Eucharist this Sunday you'll hear something from the Letter of St. James about patience. I suggest you open your Bible and read the whole letter. It's short enough to read in one sitting and you'd read it comfortably in five minutes, even if you're impatient.
You'll find there some tried and tested nuggets of practical wisdom: 'Everyone should be quick to hear, slow to speak... Be doers of the word and not hearers only... If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue, his religion is vain. Judgment is merciless to one who has not shown mercy... Just as a body without a spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead. No human being can tame the tongue. It is restless and full of poison. You are a puff of smoke that appears briefly and then disappears....' James strikes me as someone who did not suffer fools gladly, or even patiently.
Writer Ron Rolheiser tells how Carlo Caretto was asked what one thing he learned after many years as a hermit in the Sahara desert. 'Learn to wait - for everything - for love, for fulfillment, for consummation, for God.' I guess Carlo Caretto had little option in the vast wastes of the Sahara, far from the maddening crowd, other than to learn how to wait!
Novelist Scott Fitzgerald felt the three worst things in life are: To lie in bed and not to sleep, to try to please and not be able, and to have to wait for someone who does not show up. To wait is to be passive, vulnerable to the vagaries of a situation over which we have no control. The more we are wired to be in control, the more we suffer when we are not in control. Our English word 'patience' derives from the Latin word for suffering 'passio'. If suffering begets self-knowledge, as Bernard of Clairvaux taught, then the practice of patience is a necessary spiritual tool.
I hate to wait. I'm impatient, wanting to get where I'm going, NOW. Traffic jams tend to make me tense. Sometimes I try making a decision to be patient when I'm feeling impatient. Instead of getting tense, I try deciding not to. Instead of yelling at people and getting mad, I try deciding not to. Instead of driving too fast, I decide not to. One thing I try to do when I'm trying to be patient is THINK. One of the reasons Gandhi was able to get the British out of India is that he didn't act impulsively. He was patient. He waited until he knew what he needed to do, and he waited for the right time to do it. He thought long and hard about what he was going to do until he got a good answer. He didn't rush it. He didn't act prematurely. In the end he struck gold!
St. James offers a tall order when he says, 'Be patient, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord,' and gives the example of the farmer waiting patiently between seed time and harvest. I guess farmers in James' day didn't multi task on smart phones and Twitter to help them kill time painlessly! Christianity is a religion of waiting - waiting in joyful hope. It requires the virtue of patience. Despite all our wonderful and moral qualities, patience is not one of them. The effects of our impatience can be seen everywhere - in the violence that comes from anger, in a world characterized by heart attack and stroke, and not least in the widespread breakdown of relational commitments.
Finally, words put by Shakespeare into the mouth of that monumental villain, Othello:
"How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
Thou know'st we work by wit, and not by witchcraft;
And wit depends on dilatory time."
PASTOR EMERITUS
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