More and more, as the world makes its ascent towards progress and advancements in so many areas of life, the one thing that we seem to be getting worse and worse at is the ability to wait and be patient. There appears to be something inversely proportionate at work here – the more our technology makes new breakthroughs in efficiency and technology, the less we human beings are able to see the virtue and importance of patience and to embrace any form of waiting. It does seem that the higher the number of Gs there are in terms of internet speed, the lower our ability to wait. An App for waiting seems to be doomed to failure.
Virtue in one’s life is always a mark of holiness. Since patience is a virtue, then it has to follow that impatience and the inability to wait, in its various forms, is an enemy of holiness. The mystic monk Thomas Merton was once asked what he felt was the single worst problem confronting civilization, and his answer was simply “Efficiency!”
Merton was intuitive in saying this. This isn’t only applicable to things of the electronic nature. Just on the level of life itself, there is so much to do, so many targets and deadlines to meet, so many lists of ‘to-do’s’ to check off. It’s a perennial turbine that we have to keep turning, and the hamster we keep running furiously in the wheel, or so we imagine. Yet, we know that often that it is when we dial things down a little, when we take our feet off the accelerator pedal of life, that we begin to notice that there are benefits to be reaped in not rushing and in taking things slow. Just look at the many times you have appreciated going on that much needed retreat where you (reluctantly at first) put away the cell phone and managed to truly be incommunicado from the frenzied world of “I-need-it-done-by-yesterday”. Suddenly things come into focus and you notice the things that you had inadvertently allowed to whiz you by as you took the fast lane in life’s highway. You have stopped to smell the roses.
It is this deliberate effort in slowing down, and wanting to be willing to wait that Advent helps us to welcome, attain and inculcate. Of course it’s going to be challenging (more and more so these days) because the world wants efficiency and screams it from just about everywhere you turn.
Scripture, if we take time to pore over it purposefully, will reveal that God isn’t in a hurry. In the entire expansive recounting of salvation history, not only has God taken his divine time to act, he has also taken his divine time to reveal himself in the person of Jesus Christ. The heroes of our faith from Abraham, to Moses, to Jacob, to Joseph, to all the prophets and finally to John the Baptist all shared the experience of having waited. Patience, and the developing of the virtue of patience, cuts clearly through every single one of them. The fact that God chose to come into our human lives through a human mother, requiring the gestation of a full nine months of pregnancy, and taking the path of human development and growth to reach human adulthood is itself testimony that there is something about slowness in growth and the passage of time that God delights in, and that God approves.
While I do think that there are a lot of problems with the commercialization of Christmas, I have also come to see that it may be a tad simplistic to just decry this with slogans and banners like “Put back Christ into Christmas”. With man’s voracious appetite for amassing material excesses with no end in sight, commercialization of this original sacred time is always going to be hijacked. Let’s face it – the devil hates Christmas, and will do all he can to thwart its sacred reality.
But we know that Christmas isn’t in the gift that can be bought but in The Gift that bought our souls from damnation. We can do something with our practice of patience in Advent, but notonlyin Advent. The entire Christian lifeis peppered with the need to cultivate waiting. While Advent has a strong lesson in waiting as a liturgical season, it should not be only in Advent that we should be learning to wait. The teaching of the virtue of chastity and chaste courting before marriage is in itself a lesson in patience. So is the Catholic tradition of fasting and penance and all forms of bodily mortifications. All of them help us to develop not just patience, but temperance, charity and love.
Let Mary be our model and example of patience at Advent because her fiat at the annunciation inaugurated a life that allowed God to work in and through her despite things going unexpectedly wrong. If our earthly mothers have struggled to teach us patience in life, we need to appreciate how much more is our heavenly mother willing to help us in our quest for patience, and through it, to attain holiness of life.
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