Here in New England, March is the month between winter and spring. You never know what you are going to get – sleet one day or a sunny warm day the next. This is just one situation where I have to be patient but there are many others. I imagine it is the same for you. Patience is my topic for March.
Phrases posted on Facebook, March 2024
It’s always because we want something other than “what is “ that impatience starts drumming its steel fingers on the table top. It wants what it wants when it wants it. It seems as if the whole body becomes a castanet. Impatience is noisy. It keeps up the clatter and does nothing useful.
Waiting and patience are hand in glove. It is the quality of our waiting that is the key. To wait with humor, hope and kindness makes of patience a holiday. To wait wit dread and impatience makes patience into a drudge and a heavy burden.
There is waiting on another i.e. to be a wait staff ready to do what is necessary. Some people have the heart of patience and can perform that kind of service. I like to think about what it would be like to decide to be wait staff not so much for a person but for love itself. It wold be an honor and not an obligation. I think we would find that we could do what we are led to do without effort or the need for reward.
When things don’t turn out as expected, then a dollop of patience is good medicine. Patience though is more than swallowing hard and putting up with difficulties. I believe that at the core of being patient is a trust that no matter how things look right now there is a larger plan working for and in each of our lives. Letting that trust guide us we will manage much better.
The reward for patience is more patience. That’s not a little reward. It is a verification of a constantly growing capacity to deal with ordinary and extraordinary bumps in the road.
The other day I was marveling at the patience of my house plants. They wait to be watered. (I try not to forget!) They accept whatever light that comes through the window . . . grey or sunny. They make new leaves and sometimes gorgeous blossoms. They patiently grow and die living patiently with what is given. Their deep silence silences me and I want to learn to be that organically patient.
I think being organically patient comes with a lot of letting go. Here’s a quote from my book, Companions one the Way. “Tucked into our nighttime sheets we can take the time to let go. Letting go is a basic kindness for our souls …. Everything isn’t up to us.”
What has become has become over millennia . . . the slow work of God as Tielhard de Chardin might name it. Slow becoming is patience at work. When we trust both slowness and becoming . . . allow them their way, not our way . . . would we not find ourselves in the realm of possibility and love?
When I set myself up with an agenda of how things “should” go, I feed the impatience beast waiting inside. How many times does this lesson have to be learned? Fortunately there are second, third etc. chances to know that the right thing is happening just now and what really belongs to each of us can’t be kept from us.
Without difficulties, without recognition of our faults, without unexpected frustration we would not grow. It is the very tension that motivates us to seek transformation and balance. How could we proceed without patience? To daily ask patience to be our dear friend is a good prayer.
I think that when we dwell long enough in patience we discover that it is actually a place of rest. At least for the moment we have given up the useless effort to resist what is happening just now. Instead we can open to the possibilities of kindness.
In patience there is an inner consent to wait for things to turn around and be better. It is also a silent, dynamic hope that makes that waiting possible. Both, in the end, are gifts, Spirit at work. It is Spirit that has eternal patience.
Knowing I have a deep desire for something, I place an image of it in an “incubating” place.
It is a way to hand my desire over to a greater wisdom and to trust that over time it will become a reality. This is all about patience. I may get what I desire as I envisioned it or not, but something of value does come and is a cause for amazement and gratitude.
A happy Easter to all who celebrate this day. After much suffering transformation is sometimes possible. After much effort, with no sign of progress, something new may arrive. It takes patience and trust that a change for good is happening out of sight. To be patient then can be a welcoming prayer for whatever is waiting in the eves to be of benefit and blessing. May it be so.
