Patience is a virtue, or so we have been taught. But if we really think about it, it’s a virtue which is far more important and practical than first realized.
Most of us limit patience to that quality which allows us to grit our teeth when the children are tearing the house apart. Like every mother who has lived the experience, it’s easy to utter an exasperated prayer: “Lord, give me patience — and I want it now!”
We laugh at that and in the process acknowledge our shared humanity. All of us know patience is more than a stoical acceptance of difficult moments which somehow get clustered together. But if we know that, we seldom dig deeper in discovering the virtue’s hidden dimensions.
For real patience involves depth. Real patience requires a letting go. The real virtue exemplifies acceptance and forgiveness — of self and others.
When I speak of “letting go,” I am referring to the typical manner in which so many of us carry around in life the undesirable baggage of resentment and hurt. We literally clutter our minds and souls with trivia, to the point that we block out the beauty in life.
We store up all kinds of hostility and hatred, waiting for the day when we can cash in our hurts. We unconsciously plot for the moment when we can complete the game of “Now I got you, you son-of-a-gun!” We are emotional stamp collectors waiting for the time when we can redeem our frustrated feelings.
But that moment sometimes never occurs. Or if it does, so what? What is tragic is the price we pay for such indulgence. Years of appreciating the truly meaningful things in life, like love, can be strangled by a resentful spirit. In the end, bitterness causes self-destruction. An individual who allows a patient and understanding spirit to be a lifelong attitude savors the medicine that leads to a convincing freedom.
This is not to say we can’t be angry or assertive. Actually anger and confrontation can be healthy, removing the danger of repression. But I heard recently that anger lasts about 40 seconds before becoming hostility and resentment. Recognizing the difference is important.
But if it is often difficult to forgive and understand others, we are rarely patient with ourselves. Patience, and its real value, is intimately bound up with a proper sense of perfection. It is scary how people burden themselves in an incredibly relentless pursuit of perfectionism.
Jesus told us to be perfect as His heavenly Father is perfect. But he also made some statements which clearly announce other realities. Statements like “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Perfectionism would have us believe we have no need of the Lord’s redemption. Perfectionism would have us make ourselves gods, beings in no need of divine intervention or help.
Being perfect means paradoxically acknowledging our sinfulness, being patient with ourselves — knowing the truest sense of the term is a healthy dependence on the Lord’s providential care for us and working toward the Kingdom by pursuing the good in life and knowing the road traveled — will always involve struggle and personal discipline.
Ironically, we become perfect when we learn to pick ourselves up and start over again convinced we have a God in heaven who loves us even in our faltering ways.
Isn’t it consoling to know the most human of the Lord’s closest associates became the Church’s first leader! If God can be patient with him, what does that say to us? Denying the validity of our ideals and values when faced with inevitable sinfulness is not the answer. Neither is perfectionism which disallows a proper appreciation of patience.
A psychologist by the name of Albert Ellis is famous for maintaining that people can live the most self-fulfilling, creative and emotionally satisfying lives by disciplining their thinking. I believe digging deeper and seeing the truly virtuous aspects of patience is an example of such disciplined thinking.
Perhaps Father John Sanford summarizes best a fuller meaning of patience. He writes, “Becoming whole does not mean being perfect, but being completed. It does not necessarily mean happiness, but growth. It is often painful, but fortunately, it is never boring. It is not getting out of life what we think we want, but is the development and purification of the soul.”
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