Here it is another month and the need for another topic. I hope you will join me in regarding patience again. I seem to need it more than ever and to trust the “slow work of God” as Telihard De Chardin put is so eloquently long ago.
Phrases posted on Facebook July 2025
You know how we can drift a few seconds while driving a car and find we have drifted into oncoming traffic. Then, thank God, we can make a quick correction. Patience is like that when we have things coming at us too fast. Five seconds of patience gives us time to set a better course than to be in head on crash.
I love watching good crafts persons. They seem to have an innate4 capacity for patience,
never hurrying a process which inherently needs time. I watch their hands at work and see
patience. No, a dance of patience!
Maybe you, too, will agree with me that to be patient with ourselves is the most needed capacity for patience there is to have.
For me I think learning to be patient (at least a little more patient) is “learning to be gentle and happy without cause”. The internal quote here is from the Sufi Pir Elias Amadon.
“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.”—May Sarton
The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceness as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea. — Anne Morrow Lindberg
“If one is not in a hurry (i.e. patient?) even an egg will start walking.” Ethiopian proverb
“Be patient where you sit in silence . . . Dawn is coming.” — Rumi
There are so many wise ones in the world . . . your dog, for instance, who has learned the patience to wait for the crinkling of the kibble bag and the swish of dinner running into the bowl. Your dog trusts you (distracted human) to care for him. We, too, need to trust one another to care for each other. It’s what makes patience possible.
This quote from An Interrupted Life, the Diaries of Etty Hillesum breaks my heart and opens it. The patience she describes is luminous. “Of course, it is our complete destruction they want! But let me bear it with grace. There is a hidden poet in me, one who experiences life there, even there, as a bard and is able to sing about it . . . Let me be the thinking heart of these barracks. And that is what I want to be again. The thinking heart of a whole concentration camp. I lie here so patiently and now so calmly again, that I feel quite a bit better already. I feel my strength returning to me; I have stopped making plans and worrying about risks. Happen what may, it is bound to be for the good.”
Recently I lost patience with a neighbor. I am not happy about that, no! But it gives me another chanced to grow a little more patience with myself. We all know that kind of patience is not one of the easy ones.
When things are difficult, unclear, scary or when we are anticipating something good we can’t wait to have, we need patience. That’s not easy. We need to heal what I think of as our time sickness. Speed and immediate solutions are the demands of our culture. The only things I’ve ever found to heal that sickness is acceptance and fully entering my discomfort, plus the understanding that time can be a friend.
Wanting more than we have or more of what we already have puts us in “want”, that is, a state of perceived lack. Can we grow some patience around this way we create suffering? The Bible tells us that “to them that have, more shall be given” and that would include more patience. If we recognize that we already have some, we will be given more. I’m signing up for that!
