The Lord direct your hearts in the patience of Christ!
The Trials of Patience
Cooling the Fever of Sadness
Read the chemical description of different substances and you will find the chemist has accurately determined and is careful to point out what he calls the boiling point of each. That is the point where a liquid dissolves into vapor, where water bubbles into steam. The precise point is not the same in different substances and depends on their nature. What the chemist does for matter, patience does for the soul. Patience determines the boiling point of the heart. Sadness is the element which patience busies itself with, and surely patience has much to do to keep sadness from filling the heart with seething agitation and bubbling turmoil, to keep the worries of life from violently displaying themselves in angry words or deeds. What the Lord said to Isaias of the Jewish people is true of all people: “The whole head is sick and the whole heart is sad.” Patience can never rest. It must watch the heart in trials and in pains. It must guard the sensitive feelings against sufferings, against sin and even against the heaviness of self. May Saint Paul’s prayer still find answer: “And the Lord direct your hearts in the charity of God and the patience of Christ.”
Facing the Evils of Life
That there is a great deal of evil in the world does not call for proof and to the impatient man none seems to be profiting by it except the officials of the weather bureau, the newspapers, some doctors and all the undertakers. The impatient man believes he could make a much better world than this and run it in much better fashion, and, as far as he himself is concerned, he is probably right. He would satisfy himself at least for a while. His neighbors, however, would pray for the speedy restoration of Divine Providence. The impatient man would first try to improve the weather. He does not care to be seen shaking his fist at a rainstorm, an occupation in which it would be humiliating for him to be photographed and handed down to his children’s mantel-pieces. But he has often wished to do violence in his heart to the present arrangement of weather. After bettering the climate, he would likely try his hand at improving his neighbors. “Even Job,” he has often said to himself, “had not that one living next door.” It is always thus with impatience. Its wrongs are exceptional. The moderns have surpassed all ancient records, and it is his belief that the calamities of Job have been equaled and outdistanced in his regard through the sufferings brought upon him by the small boy across the street. You may have noticed that there is nothing else particularly interesting in the universe for a fly, after it happens to cross the scent of a carrion. You have there and then the whole history of that fly. It stays in that carrion and becomes the ancestor of a long line of flies, who never stray from the old homestead. An impatient man has, like a fly, a very narrow outlook. He confines Divine Providence inside of his front gate, and his permanent occupation is to keep a close, persistent watch upon some small wound that he has festered by his fretting. He would surely make himself and every one else happier, if by patience he would raise the boiling point of his heart.
Lasting Through the Stress of Time
It has been noted that if evil disappeared from the world, many virtues would go with it. Patience would be the first to go. It will not be practised in Heaven. It will win there finally a well-deserved rest. As long as it remains upon earth, there will be no day off for that toiling virtue. Even if health and climate and our finances are what they should be, they after all do not produce the greatest sadness and do not subject patience to the greatest test. Job’s discursive comforters brought his characteristic virtue to a higher degree of excellence than bankruptcy, disease or disaster.
Coping with the Character of Others
People speak of incompatibility of temperament as though it were a modern discovery of the divorce court. It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that two perfectly compatible persons have not yet existed. You may join parts of a machine together because they have been molded to fit. Rough broken stones will settle together and macadamize after a time. But no two characters have been cast in the same mold, and if you eliminate the virtue of patience, there is no steam-roller huge enough to crush two individuals into complete compatibility. The most ardent friendship that has been years in growing, that has been pledged at the altar and blessed by God, will not outlast the honeymoon unless the virtue of patience weld the marriage bond into perpetuity. All this talk about compatible temperaments is neither more nor less than a confession of the absence of patience. Read temper for temperament, and no further proof is needed for the statement. Physical temperament, family temperament, racial and national temperament are so many fine names of impatient temper. At the most, your temperament may be conceded to be your way of getting mad. The artistic temperament has been of tenest quoted and perhaps next to the term, liberty, it has served to cloak the largest number of vices. Excessive sensitiveness and impoliteness and inflexible adherence to one’s own ways of talking and acting, and, in general, exaggerated selfishness, are some of the ugly things which parade as manifestations of the artistic temperament. Patience will cure the worst cases of temperament, restore to the world the fast disappearing virtue of compatibility, cement friendship, keep couples married, harmonize a family and bless home with abiding happiness.
Bearing with the Defects of Self
So far patience with others; it is much harder still to be patient with oneself. Our limitations, our repeated failures, the value which we set upon ourselves turning out to be worthless, our moral bankruptcy, our very impatience itself, all give patience more work to do than do the world or our neighbors. We grow accustomed to pain and sickness, and our power of feeling is mercifully blunted, but some who are patient with a child or a weak limb, are not patient with their soul and its weaknesses. They resignedly face a defect in the body and do not expect a broken bone to heal in a day; but they are vexed at detecting a blemish in the soul and fret themselves sick because it is not removed at once. Self-esteem is responsible for this gnawing spirit of discontent. How annoying to assumed superiority to find itself unable all at once to be superior in its own soul! If a bad habit is not instantly corrected, the proud, impatient soul forgets that habit must be overcome by habit; it rather acts as a Napoleon would, after conquering a whole country and finding himself baffled by one small fortress. His further advance is checked, his reputation is imperilled, and in his fury he brings all his forces to bear upon these impertinent walls until they are heaps of dust. Napoleonic tactics cannot always be practised in the soul. Patience knows that the sick cannot recover all at once, that the child must wait some time for manhood. Patience will not fly into a rage or yield to despair because defects do not promptly disappear. It knows that virtues are acquired only by long and continual practice. The sadness of disappointed self must not be allowed to set the heart boiling.
The Triumphs of Patience
Attaining to Peace
It will be evident from what has been said that patience is not the virtue of weaklings. The fruit of patience is peace; it might even appear to be mere passivity. It is, however, the passivity which the riveted steel-plates of a boiler have. Beneath their quiet exterior is the immense pressure of steam which does its work and does not wreck, simply because governed and held in submission. Patience is the calmness of strength, keeping a thousand ardent feelings in obedient control. Never were immense passivity and immense activity brought closer together than in “the patience of Christ,” in which Saint Paul prays all our hearts may be directed. Saint John in his Gospel and Apocalypse has made us familiar with the beautiful phrase, “the Lamb of God.” “The Lamb of God”! A perfect picture of patience and an apt symbol of suffering and sacrifice! The lamb is so gentle that a child may stroke its soft, white fleece, and beneath the strong grip of the shearer it opens not its mouth. What could better describe the patience with which Christ faced all evils for us! The ardor of sacrifice throbbed beneath the calmness of the Redeemer. His patience was perfect because it had the most intense sadness to cope with, because it subjected that sadness to the most complete control. Infinite gentleness veiled infinite strength. The passivity of the lamb was joined to the inner activity of a lion. “The Lamb of God” is His patient Heart adequately described for us.
Overcoming Personal Repugnance
Saint John has called Christ the lamb slain from the beginning. Beginning of what? Some answer, eternity; others, time; others, from the beginning of His life. It will be enough to recall here the patience of His Heart in some features of His life. We chafe in contact with others. Sandpaper, no doubt, if it could think, would blame others for their roughness, and, judging from the side presented to its consciousness, would be convinced of its own perfect lack of friction. We are like sandpaper in our complaints about incompatibility. But think of the infinite incompatibility of Christ. Human nature was infinitely opposed to His divine nature, yet His patient Heart brought them together in His own Person. We admire the patience of a Damien in sacrificing himself to the lepers and suffering his healthy body to be united with foul disease. But the distance between disease and health is not a hair’s breadth when compared with the chasm which yawns between Divinity and humanity.
Instructing Difficult Scholars
Our Lord was a teacher all His life. We know what patience is called for in that arduous profession. Day after day ignorance and stubbornness and a host of defects in mind and soul must be made to yield to the touch of patience. “You can bake an apple,” it has been said, “in a few minutes; but it takes months to ripen one.” The class-room must patiently conduct the whole process of growth from the seed to the mellow fruit. Never did knowledge call for more patience in its imparting than in the case of Christ. The pupils He had were not of the best, and the lessons He had to give them were strange and hard. Virginity had to be taught to orientals; humility to sons of Abraham; charity to Pharisees; detachment and love of poverty to Jews, who dreamed of a restoration of the riches and power of Solomon. The patience of Christ was equal to the difficult task. A look was a hard and sufficient punishment in His schoolroom, and He patiently yielded to the stubborn Thomas and finished Peter’s education by giving that generous heart an opportunity to return triple love for triple denial.
Persisting against Temptations
Christ had also to be patient with His own soul and here we get a deeper look into the patience of His Heart. He had to cope with the persistent evil of temptation. He permitted the evil spirit to approach Him and make his malicious suggestions and even to lay hands upon His sacred person and bear it where he wished. In that trial His Heart suffered what self must often be patient against, the thoughts, the suggestion, the persistency of tempting sin. In the case of His Heart the presence of evil was all the more hateful because He was so sensitive to its presence. The artistic temperament is not all exaggerated self. Taste may become so refined and delicate as to cause its possessor exquisite torture when brought into contact with anything which grates upon it. Who shall imagine the sensitiveness of Christ’s Heart in the presence of sin? What would be the fate of a snowflake in the centre of the sun? How long would its fragile fleeces withstand that monstrous enemy? And yet Christ’s Heart was more sensitive to sin than anything we can imagine. Every drop of It shrank in horror from the frightful spectre of sin and fled precipitately through every passage to avoid that evil. “Behold the Lamb of God!” Not one sin alone, but the accumulated iniquity of a}l mankind fell upon that Heart, and a miracle had to sustain It from shrivelling like the spotless snowflake in the fire. Patience framed with Christ’s red lips its most beautiful prayer: “Not My will, but Thine be done.”