Unassuming Presence—God’s Patience and Our Own

As someone once put it, patience is like rose petals that waver in the breeze, drift to the ground, and brave a footfall. The petals are only seen as they are trodden on. Patience is a daisy taken for granted in its bloom. Patience is a child sighted, smiled at, but soon forgotten.

If patience is unassuming, the adversity that summons patience is often confronting. Adversity presses upon us. We cannot help but attend to adversity, whether it affects us in specific circumstances or whether it characterises culture more broadly. Ours is an age of climate change, pandemic, economic uncertainty, disintegrated and disintegrating mental health, and fraught politics, domestic and abroad. In everyday life, we’re generally in a hurry and suffer time itself as a burden. We campaign against time, wishing to reduce waiting time to zero, or we rail against it, especially when it fails to yield peak experience or measurable result. It seems adversity is at every turn, but we cannot turn from it.

How we deal with adversity defines our faith. In this essay, I commend patience to you as a virtuous way of navigating adversity and as a mark of mature Christian faith. “By your patience (hypomonē) you will gain your souls,” Jesus says (Lk 21:19). Patience profits the centre of our being. We need patience to meet our urgent times with maturity.

As I proceed, I’ll consider two features of patience. First, there is patience’s unassuming nature, which has to do with waiting and/or suffering, or being acted on rather than acting. It is associated with powerlessness of a sort. Second, patience abides or holds the line in adversity. Theologian John Webster’s definition further serves our understanding: “Patience is that excellence of character [or virtue] by which, for the sake of some good end, we tolerate difficulties, and encounter obstacles to present happiness with equanimity, collectedness and steadiness of purpose.” Patience reveals itself in the attitudes of equanimity, collectedness, and steadiness of purpose. To these three attitudes, I add joy. Webster’s definition also helps us see that “some good end” grounds patience and makes of it a virtue. That is, because of the end’s goodness we wait or suffer or are found powerless; because of the end’s goodness we abide and hold the line.

I begin with two portraits that throw patience into relief, and show how particularly Christian patience stands at odds with the Roman context of the early Church and how it remains at odds with our own context. This is both a potted history of patience and an account of modernity. In the second section, I pursue a conversation with St Augustine and others. I look at Augustine’s understanding of history as a “record of desire,” and consider how God is patient and how God establishes our patience (and not without us). In particular, Augustine thinks of patience over and against coercive power. In the last section, I counter suspicions that patience is passive, individualistic, and private. To do this, I nest patience within the unique community that is the Body of Christ.

Patience was a feature of the early Church. The Church grew slowly during the first two centuries after Christ before expanding rapidly in the late third and early fourth centuries. Throughout, patience was a central virtue as Christians faced various difficulties: scepticism, ostracism, and occasional persecution numbered among the occasions for believers’ patience. For instance, at least two small treatises exhorted patience at the time of, or just after, persecution. In this section, we learn about patience by taking a close look at two of its contraries. The first places us in the first century after Christ.

“Other persons have been conquerors of men, no doubt, but Sergius conquered even Fortune (Fortuna) herself.” Marcus Sergius Silus features in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Pliny details exemplars of courage (virtus) in a section dedicated to the achievements of humankind, and before treating Sergius as his supreme example, he writes the following: “In these [earlier] cases it is clear that courage played a great part, but Fortune played one greater still.” Sergius succeeds where others have failed: he not only overcomes men but Fortune. Fortune was a fickle goddess who governed life, for good or evil. At times, Fortune frustrated best-laid plans, but ultimately she dealt death, and in doing so, made naught of humanity’s courage. Yet, according to Pliny, Sergius topples Fortune. The struggle costs Sergius an arm, and his replacement prosthetic becomes a sign of his virtue. What sort of man is Sergius? Sergius is fit for office. He is worthy of the Republic’s praise, worthy of conducting her affairs, and worthy of mediating between the people and the gods. He has taken on the gods and survived. He has proved himself in the moment of truth.

For Pliny, Sergius shows courage (virtus) rather than patience (patientia). Courage emancipates; it liberates from bondage. It is the virtue of the active and free. Fortune binds, but Sergius broke Fortune’s bonds. Yet there is more—Sergius stands in for Rome herself. Rome conquers Fortune and lives free. If courage was supreme in Rome, especially in the early centuries of the Republic, patience was more problematic: is it a virtue at all or, if so, in what circumstances? Patience was often associated with slaves (and women) and with powerlessness insofar as slaves were subject to their masters’ wills. It therefore had chiefly to do with folding before another or before circumstance and in being overcome (though it was compatible at times with courage). In Rome, generally, human excellence lay in conquering adversity rather than undergoing it, and no good end could make sense of powerlessness and subjection.

Let’s continue with the relation between Fortune and virtue because this helps us understand the marginal place of patience in modern times. Some 1400 years after Pliny, the European Renaissance “rediscovered” Rome’s understanding of the interplay between Fortune and virtue. Though Pliny could claim a moral victory over Fortune by praising Sergius and Rome, human virtue could only dampen the effect of Fortune’s overwhelming and irrational power. As a rule, virtue fought famously against Fortune but ultimately faltered. Soon, though, a dominant strand of modernity turned the tables on Fortune. The world, on this understanding, was and is available to human manipulation and control, to order and to discipline. Human beings stabilise the world. From this perspective, Fortune is a relic and a feature of a lost world—the world of chance and uncertainty.

In overcoming Fortune, we late-moderns are as Sergius. But we have one up on Sergius’s moral victory: we have taken the field entirely—nothing now stands up to us, our purposes, or our desires. We are agents and not patients. We overcome adversity and do not undergo it (or we squirm and wish it away at all costs). We do all we can to avoid subjection to any authority. These tendencies and more are apparent in various places and ways: we pride ourselves on the ability to craft a life and a future, developing and mastering materials to hand; we utter phrases like “life is what you make it” and “you can achieve anything you set your mind to” and “the world is yours” as if these are truth itself; and we tell stories about the self-made person who emerges from obscurity and overcomes adversity to attain success. Simply, we value activity at almost all costs—our self-creation depends on it—and effective activity is near to saintliness. No purposes are beyond us; we struggle only against time. Circumstances are ripe for the conquer.

But is this basic vision true? Is the human being radically creative and even the prime mover of history?  Do the human powers of intellect and will single-handedly forge human flourishing? To say “yes” is to express that pride that would have us be more than creatures. And this conceit reflects poorly on patience. If in fact we enjoy the energy and power of demi-gods, it is no surprise we consider patience unequal to our dignity and see it as an irrational constraint on our freedom and even a cowardly capitulation to others or to circumstance. No good end can justify patience because we possess the power to accomplish whatever we put our efforts toward.

By contrast, the second portrait downplays the power of the will and yet it remains at odds with patience. Let’s take in “The Tired of Life” by Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler to help us grasp this portrait. Hodler shows five elderly men on a bench: the men are clothed in white and wear a haggard look. Each is more or less stooped, and two of them, maybe three, manage to return our gaze. Hodler has us wonder at the difficulties these five endured, especially as it appears adversity has won out or at least exacted a stiff toll. Sadness is a meek sort of word, but it speaks to the appearance of the five and to the apparent victory of adversity and the unravelling of character. Our five seem cowed and even trapped by experience.

Sadness is understandable if we grant that the world is irrational and chancy. In such a world, virtue only weakly avails. But this vision of the world is finally false. An anecdote comes to mind: one summer afternoon in 2008 I sat in a farmhouse kitchen on the outskirts of Prettin as a man told me how Jesus Christ met him in a wartime field hospital. He had shrapnel wounds and lay next to an SS officer who blazed and called God a liar. But God met the farmer and called the farmer to him. The kitchen blinds couldn’t keep out the sun that hot afternoon—light filled the room. The incarnation of Jesus Christ lies at the centre of the Christian vision as God orders all history to himself. The world is not irrational but graciously ordered.

We have come to the nub of the issue: different visions of the world give these portraits their meaning. From the Christian’s perspective, both portraits fail to acknowledge adequately God’s active providence and the place of our creaturely will. The first portrait seeks to overcome difficulty at all costs and so overestimates the power of the human will. It rejects the unassuming nature of patience. The second portrait faces life’s difficulties with excessive sadness and so underestimates the will and neglects God and his promises. It fails to abide and hold the line. While sadness in itself is neutral, excessive sadness upends equanimity, unsettles, and rules out joy. It leads to despair, which is ignorant of hope and reduces life to the horizon of everyday reversals and eventually death. Excessive sadness saps motivation and lames, and therefore forecloses on patience, which is an exercise of the will. Patience is an active choice, and it prepares us, or readies us, to receive good things. We have to be ready to receive good things well. Patience, then, does not rule out dynamism, and, as we practice patience, we find it is compatible with courage, for instance, which braves circumstances that threaten death or serious injury.

Augustine understands the world in a distinctive way. For him, all history is a record of desire. Human beings desire, and history is the story of desire and its objects. The world is a populous field more or less open to our desires. What we desire and the order of our desires are decisive: are our desires ordered to God or are they disordered by neglect of God? History, in other words, is the story of love—ordered and disordered, true and false. Disordered desires and false love never rest. As an illustration, Augustine considers how the circular shape of money is appropriate: “What is as unreliable as something that rolls? … money itself is coined in a rounded shape … it will not stand still” (Expositions on the Psalms, 83). Yet love in its fullness lies at rest. Only God can stabilise creatures and provide the rest they are ordered to. Desire signals this, for it is a divine creative initiative: God creates us for himself (cf. Confessions, 1), and only he satisfies our desire. As “our whole joy,” God summons and waits on our desire (Exp. Ps., 84).

But what has patience to do with the record of desire, then? Here, firstly, we need to consider God’s own patience. We can and should use the language of patience to understand God’s purposes for his creation. Patience specifies God’s love and characterises God’s wisdom. In love, God turns toward his creation as he sustains it and draws it to himself, bringing restoration and healing. The turn is purposeful: God plans and executes his purposes according to his own wise lights. The incarnation is the decisive act of God’s healing plan. It is not fated, written in the stars by Fortune, but determined from eternity by the loving, wise God who wills it. In this decisive act, Jesus Christ incarnates the patience of God’s love and wisdom. Jesus brings God’s purposes to a point and raises the stakes on God’s bid for our love. In the incarnation, God reveals the mystery of his will in the summons that is, simply, Jesus Christ crucified, risen, and ascended. Jesus asks—yes, he calls—for decision, but he gives time and space to us as he waits on our response. The incarnation embodies divine patience and is the condition for the re-orientation of our desire.

In all aspects of his turn to creation, the sovereign God waits on creatures, bidding faith while eschewing coercive power. As Augustine puts it, God endures rejection and scorn for a time. God reserves final judgement, and in fact, insists on it in his own good time. God waits on his creation, and he waits in spite of our inattention, resistance, and defection. God’s patience thus takes the form of letting-be: God gives space and time for his creatures to return to him and flourish in him and in their contexts, so that they might come into the fullness of their God-given creatureliness.

God’s letting-be determines the interplay between patience and power in the incarnation. And this interplay reveals, above all, the unassuming nature of patience in two ways. Firstly, the pattern of Christ’s life redefines power. Christ displays his power in assuming human flesh, entering ministry, and living among humankind as well as in ascending from his earthly ministry. Supremely, Christ wills the sacrifice of his life: in him, power is defined by humility. Secondly, the greater Christ’s patience, the less power is manifest. On the cross, Christ most fully embodies the decisive feature of his patience: he refuses to respond to his agony and shame by a display of power. Christ is pushed out of the world and onto the cross, as one modern theologian puts it. Unlike Peter in Gethsemane the previous night, Christ is patient. Peter sliced off the ear of one come to arrest Jesus, and as Augustine has it (Tractates on John, 112), Christ admonished Peter for his impatience. Peter sought to defend his Lord, but his violence asserted a claim Jesus did not make. Jesus’s power remained hidden, and his kingdom, not of this world, “overcame the proud world not by the ferocity of fighting but by the humbleness of patiently enduring” (Tract. Jn., 116).

Christ’s patient endurance forgoes one form of power while manifesting another form—God’s humble, healing power. Augustine was fond not only of stressing God’s humility in Christ but also of using medical language. We are God’s patients. Christ is our physician. By and through the incarnation, God operates on us and brings healing, even if the operation is far from painless for Christ in his human flesh or for us. Augustine puts it this way:

The Lord comes; he cures with rather bitter and sharp medicines. For he says to the sick man, “Bear it.” He says, “Endure it.” …

You were trembling in fear even though bound; [Christ] was free, that one, and unbound, he drank what he gave to you. He suffered first that he might comfort you, as if saying, “What you fear to suffer for yourself, I first suffer for you.” This is grace, and a great grace. Who praises it worthily? (Tract. Jn., 3)

What is “great grace”? For no other reason than love, the healer without blemish drinks “bitter and sharp medicines” before applying them to us, his diseased patients.

The suffering is ultimately worthwhile, says Augustine. The good end of union with God redeems suffering. In Expositions on the Psalms, Augustine turns again and again to Romans 8:22–25 in speaking of suffering and patience. Here, as in Galatians 6, patience is associated with the work of the Holy Spirit. We long and groan as we live apart from “our whole joy” and, in hope, strain to receive God face to face. In addition to the self-inflicted wounds that are our sin (e.g., Exp. Ps., Ps 85), this life by its very nature demands patience—distance from God is inherently painful for creatures. Augustine in fact reads an exhortation to endurance on every page of Scripture. This, then, is patience’s entry in the record of desire: we hold the line as we strive for God and as the Spirit works patience in us. Patience abets true love in that it orders our desires, despite obstacles, to their proper object in God.

This is to say, in a way, patience is so unassuming that it is almost transparent, even anonymous. It serves, for instance, the more primary Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love. Patience supports faith, by which we cleave to Christ in the face of difficulties circumstantial and self-inflicted. It stokes hope by maintaining anticipation, despite adversity, for that face-to-face meet with Christ. It taps the fund of our love for what is, at this point, only hoped for, sustaining love for God and others in spite of obstacles. Patience leaves the field to others.

By contrast, impatience seeks to command space, for the impatient heart’s desire alights upon what is provisional and temporary, treating it as if it were final and enduring. It seeks to own and control. Put another way, the impatient heart is in a hurry—wearied by God’s patience, the heart takes hold of what it can master. In Augustine’s words: “this is what being in a hurry means—paying no heed to what God has promised, because it is a long way off …” (Exp. Ps., 83). Just as God commands no comparable territory—he waits patiently instead—the patient heart seeks no territory of its own. The patient heart is in heaven even while it is fully and bodily present here and now (Exp. Ps., 93): “Let every one of us run until we arrive, for we run not with our feet but with our desire” (Exp. Ps., 83). That is, the patient heart rests in God’s eternity by the power of the Holy Spirit, and specifically, it rests in the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Christ.

The patient heart might rest, but it is not idle. We are to practice patience. Augustine’s imperatives express this: “Be patient, put up with it, stand fast” (Exp. Ps., 91). It is an exertion to stand fast with equanimity, collectedness, steadiness of purpose, and joy. The exertion is possible for us because Christ’s patience has given us life, first, and because Christ shows us how to practice patience.

Augustine’s “whole Christ” (totus Christus) teaching helps us understand better how we enter the mystery of Christ’s incarnation, and specifically, how we participate in Christ’s life-giving patience. Let’s take Augustine’s exegesis of Psalm 85 as an example. Augustine does something rather strange when he interprets verse 3: “Have mercy on me, Lord, for I have cried to you all day long.” Augustine understands the speaker to be the “whole Christ”—Christ and his Church throughout time. Christ cries out from the cross, and Christ’s body cries out through all human history and beyond. In Augustine’s words:

From the day when Christ’s body began to groan in the wine press, until the end of the world when the pressures have passed away, this one person groans and cries out to God, and we, each of us in our measure, add our own contribution to the clamour of the whole body. You have cried out during your days, and your days have expired; someone else took your place and cried out in his days; you here, he there, she somewhere else. The body of Christ cries out all day long, as its members give place to each other and succeed each ether. One single person spans the ages to the end of time, and it is still the members of Christ who go on crying out, though some of them are already at rest in him, others are raising their cry now, others will cry out when we have gone to rest, and others again after them. God hears the voice of Christ’s entire body saying, I have cried to you all day long. But our head is at the Father’s right hand to intercede for us… (Exp. Ps., 85)

Christ and the body of the Church are really “one single person,” even if there is a difference in “dignity” between the head and body. The Church’s cries throughout time are those of Christ, and Christ’s are those of the Church.

Solidarity is an upshot of the “whole Christ.” In the cross we appreciate the extremity of Christ’s solidarity with us, and we come to see that Christ’s patience, specifically, is not simply an example of virtue that we are to imitate, but the very ground of our healing and our own patience. Christ’s course of medicine, afflicting him and bidding patience, has brought health to his body in spite of searching pain. He promises the course is worthwhile: the pain will abate and disappear, and not only so, joy will flood every vulnerability pain had sought out. In patience there is joy even now. This is not some easy joy—a mood or feeling or sensation—but a deep-seated confidence and even buoyancy that we are in the harness with Christ, and God will prevail in spite of all. Praise gives voice to joy, and in praise we participate in the goodness of the end. In Augustine’s words: “…Let us call out in these words, and send our desire ahead of us: How delightful are your tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!” (Exp. Ps., 93; cf. Phil 3:20)

For Augustine, nonetheless, prayer is the practice that holds desire and patience together. Prayer expresses desire for union with God and waits patiently for it. Patience, specifically, sustains the desire that is prayer, which is grounded in Christ’s own prayer to the Father and animates the “whole Christ.” In communal prayer, “I” becomes “we.” If Christ’s own patience establishes our union with him, which we acknowledge in faith, the Holy Spirit maintains the union as we practice patience and pray (Rom 8:22f). The posture of “patiently waiting and actively striving” is in fact the essence of Christian hope.

This posture is demanding. It requires energy, trust in God, and strong relationship with others. It seems beyond us at the best of times, let alone in times of difficulty. Suffering and grief silence and isolate. Augustine speaks of “the poky little room” (Exp. Ps., 4), which cramps the heart (Exp. Ps., 37). There’s something incommunicable in suffering, which creates distance from others and tempts us to keep our own counsel.

Yet, in such circumstances, let our groans suffice (Rom 8:23). Groans are the “heart’s clamour,” and when audible, are public talk that express our desire and attest our patient waiting. That is, they are prayer, which grounds any integrity between talk and faithful action. By prayer, we learn not only ourselves better, but we learn how to acknowledge, bear, and respond well to the circumstances of our times and cultures, and to bear with and radically stand in for others. In time and through prayer and other practices, by the grace of God, we find that patience profits the centre of our being (cf. Lk 21:19) as it overcomes in this way: it liberates the heart from “the poky little room” of adversity and frees it for service to God and to others. Patience, after all, is transparent to faith, hope, and love.

(Images: Header—”Field of Daisies” by Efim Volkov, Public Domain; “The Life of Weary” by Ferdinand Hodler, Public Domain)