SPIRITUAL LIFE COMMITTEE

MISSIONARY SERVANTS OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY

Monthly Reflection: November 2003

The Virtue of Patience

Rev. Edgar Solano, S.T.

God has a plan of salvation for all. In such a plan God creates for a purpose, he does not merely create for the sake of creating. Thus, in the history of salvation we are witnesses to how God’s fruitful action engulfs the whole world as He relentlessly invites us to participate as mature persons and take responsibility for creating and propagating structures and processes designed toward the sharing of the common good.

We know how much God loves us and he has shown in so many ways that His love is neither passive nor romantic but one that challenges, though full of mercy and without conditions. There is nothing we could ever do to make God stop loving us. Nonetheless, as long as we live in this good world, God is constantly inviting us to be transformed. The lover is himself made whole in the fulfillment of the beloved so much so that it can also be said, the lover is wanting for as long as the beloved suffers and is not whole.      

How many times have we experienced this in real life. When you have fallen in love, there seems to be no way you can take hold of your feelings.  There are times when you feel so taken up, it’s hard to contain yourself, you want to withdraw yet withdrawal hurts because there is no way you can withdraw from love. Love is never like changing clothes that you take on or off as you wish…Love enwraps you.

Another dimension of love is this: it brings the beloved to excellence. This is one labor no lover may regard as just a task. In fact, the lover is compelled to do this with a keen sense of adoring devotion for it is in so doing (and for as long as the beloved says, “yes,”) that the lover himself experiences what is counteractive to suffering: happiness, joy, delight, fulfillment, a sense of completion, pleasures, etc.

This is where we can now talk about the practice of the gift of patience. Although it would appear at first as a personal attribute, we know that indeed the gift of patience  contributes towards the growth of any human community. Let’s begin with an important premise:  that the practice of patience as well as of other virtues promotes the building of a good community and the enrichment of the common good.

Whoever arrives at such conclusions pleases God and himself too. He lives as a mystic, he becomes a person of principles.

It is difficult to understand what patience is from a general viewpoint and easier to describe what it is not, as outlined for us one time by Fr. Vincent Fitzpatrick, alluding to the words of Father Judge.

Each of us has had moments of impatience. We have experienced times when everything inside of us just snaps. We use phrases to describe this as, “my cool just broke,” or “I was annoyed,” “I exploded,” or “today was such a bother when…”

Apart from such moments of sporadic outbursts, more worrisome is when we obsessively want to be continually impatient to a point that we make being impatient our way of being. 

Father Judge invites us to work on the virtue of patience by pursuing the opposite of those negative things that we habitually do. This is a pivotal work that reinforces our development as persons, and above all that renders us grateful to our loving God who desires that this and other virtues spread over all the world, not magically, but through the responsible commitment by mature persons of fulfilling the work of the Father and by so doing are in turn replenished with strength.

Stop sacrificing for the sake of doing sacrifice. Rather, act from mature judgment. Stop acting merely as an individualistic I.  Rather, become a loving response to love. Do not act merely out of material realities. Rather, be realized out of the certainty of faith. In the end, be this DYNAMIS- the power of God in all who believe.

This last paragraph may be too loaded, brothers and sisters…but please, be patient.

 

Questions for Reflection:

1.      What concrete efforts do I practice as signs of patience?

2.      Consider some persons in your life whom you regard as  wo/men of patience.

3.      What are the things that make me so readily impatient?