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October 26, 2008
Nancy Baker
Unitarian Universalist Congregation in
Milford, New Hampshire
Patience is More than a Virtue
Once there was a group of little chickens in a farmyard taking
instructions from a hen on the scratching process. It
wasn’t going well. “You must learn to be
patient,” the hen pronounced. “I don’t want to
learn to be patient,” said a chick. “I want to be
patient now!” The underlying assumption of this humor
is that patience takes time. This morning I’d like to
suggest to you that it takes only what the moment requires.
Patience is not a virtue or a discipline or a disengagement from the
needs of NOW. Patience is state of hopeful expectation.
For centuries we’ve been taught that patience is virtuous.
Patient people are good people. How come then that we can name
the seven dwarves and the seven deadly sins, but we seldom have little
trivia contests about naming the 7 heavenly virtues? Can anybody
name the seven heavenly virtues? [Faith, Hope, Charity,
Fortitude, Justice, Prudence, and Temperance] Did you notice that
Patience is NOT one of the 7 heavenly virtues. Actually it is one
of what are called the 7 contrary virtues, the ones meant to
specifically counter the 7 deadly sins. These are: Humility
against pride, Kindness against envy, Abstinence against gluttony,
Chastity against lust, Patience against anger, Liberality against
greed, and Diligence against sloth. So, here patience is the
counter to anger. Interesting, don’t you think?
Here is the origin of the notion that anger is an impulsive reaction to
the frustrations of now, and that patience somehow gets us to LATER
when we’ve all calmed down and are thinking more
rationally. Frankly that doesn’t work for me. Why
can’t I be proactively patient?
When we can’t get it right, when we can’t pin it down with
words we are sure of, we look for synonyms. Patience. Can you
think of a synonym for it? If you go to Roget’s Thesaurus
you find a wide range of possibilities listed: forebearance, suffering,
endurance, leniency, tolerance, perseverance, forgiveness,
unexcitability. All of these synonyms get at some aspect of
patience, but when you apply the test of substitution, they just
don’t work. I’ve lost my patience, you might say, but
would you say, I’ve lost my suffering, I’ve lost my
endurance, I’ve lost my tolerance, I’ve lost my
forgiveness, or, doggone it, I’ve lost my unexcitability??
And none of these synonyms gets at the root meaning of the word, which
has a delicious ambiguity about it. For many years I taught
Latin, so know that the verb patior in Latin is very curious one. It is
what is called a deponent verb, meaning that it has passive forms, but
active meaning. And, it means both to suffer and to allow. How
can we be passive, yet active; suffer, but enable?
There is a Taoist parable that points out why patience lies in the
center, somewhere in that state between being engaged and being
resigned.
An old farmer had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse
ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit.
“Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.
“We’ll see,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses.
“How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.
“We’ll see,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was
thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their
sympathy on his misfortune.
“We’ll see,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young
men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they
passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well
things had turned out.
“We’ll see” said the farmer.
In this parable we might mistake patience for the good sense to know
when to just let the natural process be. Taoism is a discipline that
uses what we westerners tend to think of as a patient attitude.
So, is patience a discipline? You might think so, and
that’s when we fall again into the synonym trap. Patience
is not a synonym for persistence, as the children’s story this
morning illustrates. The tortoise was persistent because he used
his own strengths to advantage and kept at it. He was patient
when he thoughtfully refrained from engaging in an exchange of insults,
instead offering the rabbit a way to save face. Then the tortoise made
a commitment to just be himself with the whole animal world watching.
The outcome was less about winning a race than about affirming the
essential self of both contestants. Acceptance is a word we might apply
to outcome; patience is a word that sits at the heart of process.
When we say that we are losing our patience, it implies that we had it
in the first place, and that our grasp on it is slipping. That is
such an odd statement. If we really had patience, we
wouldn’t let the driver on the cell phone in the other lane, or
the last week of an election campaign, or our two year old in need of a
nap, erode our self control. Patience is too often something we
recognize or appreciate only when we think we’ve lost it and need
it back. And then we want it NOW. We try to prevent it getting away by
“counting to ten” or by trying to force our focus beyond
frustration, where we think control lies. Patience is so very
difficult because no one else can have it for us. We can’t
buy it or borrow it. If patience is a form of control, it is self
control, and it must be effective as a strategy, not as a
reaction. A Buddhist parable offers an example:
There once lived a great warrior. Though quite old, he still was able
to defeat any challenger. His reputation extended far and wide
throughout the land and many students gathered to study under him.
One day an infamous young warrior arrived at the village. He was
determined to be the first man to defeat the great master. Along with
his strength, he had an uncanny ability to spot and exploit any
weakness in an opponent. He would wait for his opponent to make the
first move, thus revealing a weakness, and then would strike with
merciless force and lightning speed. No one had ever lasted with him in
a match beyond the first move.
Much against the advice of his concerned students, the old master
gladly accepted the young warrior's challenge. As the two squared off
for battle, the young warrior began to hurl insults at the old master.
He threw dirt and spit in his face. For hours he verbally assaulted him
with every curse and insult known to mankind. But the old warrior
merely stood there motionless and calm. Finally, the young warrior
exhausted himself. Knowing he was defeated, he left feeling shamed.
Somewhat disappointed that he did not fight the insolent youth, the
students gathered around the old master and questioned him. "How could
you endure such an indignity? How did you drive him away?"
"If someone comes to give you a gift and you do not receive it," the master replied, "to whom does the gift belong?"
We opened the service this morning with a four corner chant, Be Still
and Know That I am. While Psalm 46 in Hebrew Scriptures is its
source and it is meant to be an affirmation from a higher external
power, it is also a powerful call to use our own strength and patience
to recognize the resources that lie within each one of us. If I
am still, I am not struggling against myself, making myself vulnerable
to outside forces that would undermine the best in me. There is
no 12 step process to patience. Patience is the riser and the
tread in every step of a whole and healthy self.
If patience is not a virtue, and it is not avoidance or a discipline,
what is it? I suggest to you that patience is hopeful
expectation. There is a world of difference between looking at
patience as a guiding virtue or a form of self control, and using
patience to express your faith in the goodness of life itself.
Again, let’s not confuse synonyms here. I’m not
talking about anticipation, which is a kind of emotional longing.
I mean a deeply embedded hope that is an antidote to fear. I mean
seeing hope as patience with the lamp lit. President Woodrow Wilson
once said, “All things come to him who waits - provided he knows
what he is waiting for.” Patience as a virtue is patience
for the sake of being patient, and suffering is its mantra.
Patience as the energy in goal setting is something else, and it is all
about enabling. Patience can be the unbroken thread in the constantly
evolving state of now. Instead of letting fear drive us to
impatient responses, we should let hope steer us to patient
action. This year I’ve heard so many people whom I know to
be well considered and responsible citizens, ones who always inform
themselves on issues and vote thoughtfully, say to me that for the
first time they have a yard sign out front or a bumper sticker on their
car, or they are writing letters, canvassing, or using their precious
gasoline dollars to hear candidates. Right now people are fearful
for our future, and with good reason. Hateful rhetoric does
little to calm those who watch the stock market tank. We want
solutions and we want them right now! Patience doesn’t seem to
factor in, even with those who always seem to take the long view.
But what might happen if we let patience work for us right now?
We might see that while we are suffering financially and are fed up
with the politics of now, we have somehow enabled hundreds of people in
our larger community to speak up for their values and interests, to get
involved, and to invest in the process beyond bubbling a black dot on a
ballot. No matter how negative the rhetoric is and how depressing
the global economy is, and how frustrated we are with the situation in
Iraq and Afghanistan, if we apply hopeful expectation to the situation,
we see that we have been engaging in a different kind of dialogue, and
in this conversation the voices are more varied and committed in more
passionate ways. Regardless of the outcome, what a pity it would
be if we don’t have the patience to see that larger, more varied,
and more passionate dialogue is in itself a meaningful way
forward. So even if you have lost your patience with this
administration and this election, please don’t lose your patience
with the process. Remember the temper driven two year old?
She or he becomes a 15 year old and tries our patience in ways we
couldn’t have imagined and for which no amount of counting to ten
is very helpful. Before you know it, that annoying 15 year old
can vote, and if you as a parent or a circle leader or an involved
adult have modeled how to be an informed, engaged, and thoughtful
citizen, you have used patience in hopeful expectation, and we are all
the better for it. We must be like Whitman’s Noiseless Patient
Spider, “seeking the spheres to connect them, till the bridge you
will need be form’d”, till the gossamer thread you fling
catch somewhere.” Community begins when individuals explore
what is beyond them and find places to connect. In every way that
we engage in community, if we hold on to our values and we instill them
in others as we can, we affirm that we know what we are waiting for,
and we model hopeful expectation, the most powerful change agent there
has ever been.
Many of you know that I spent years in the classroom and have just
retired. Do I miss teaching? people ask. Do I miss the
kids? Yes, yes. What I don’t miss is getting up so
early in the morning, doing lesson planning in out there in the pews,
and having a lapful of papers to correct on every weekend trip in the
car. I was never impatient about those realities, and I never let
them undermine my joy in the essential goodness of teaching. A
teacher can have content knowledge, classroom management, the latest
approaches to instruction, and the respect of colleagues and parents,
but if that teacher doesn’t have patience, she or he is not
effective. For all the years I taught I had a little poster in my
classroom of the words that are quoted on the top of the order of
service this morning.
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love
the questions themselves ... Don't search for the answers, which could
not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps,
then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even
noticing it, live your way into the answer.
It is true. Sooner or later, if you have patience in the process
and a hopeful expectation of a good result, the future that you
envisioned is often the future that unfolds. Our son Andrew
certainly needed our patience, and he always had it. I think Bob
would agree that we never once gave him the sense that our expectations
of him weren’t hopeful, positive ones. Ever the idealist,
Andrew followed me into teaching, but the impatience he had shown us as
a teenager was still front and center during his first year of
teaching. Be patient with it, I advised. Take it day by
day. Build trust and relationships first with patience and then
try to teach stuff. Like every first year teacher he struggled
against his own inclination to let his subject rather than his object
drive the process. He is in his 4th year of teaching now and
recently he and I had a wonderful long talk about patience. My
jaw dropped when he said, “I am probably more patient as a
teacher than you were. Having patience is my whole approach to
the kids.” At first I was a little surprised because
students used to say to me, “you have patience with me even after
I figured I’d used it all up.” But I think this just
reinforces the idea that patience is like compound interest. If
someone has been patient with and hopeful for you, you take that
support and pay it forward, doubled. Patience is perhaps one of
the few gifts that can be offered, but not received in an equal
exchange. The true power of patience is in the act of giving of
it. While it empowers both giver and receiver, patience is the gift
that, in the end, you always keep.
Life poses the questions and living discloses the answers. So in
hopeful expectation of rich answers, embrace the questions and let them
resolve themselves as you are ready for them. If you are patient,
your still strong center will tell you when your answers have
arrived. Patience is not a virtue. It is our hopeful
expectation that actively living our questions will bring answers that
are worth waiting for.
Nancy Baker
Who we are -
FAQs - Worship
services - Meet our ministers
- Religious Education
Programs and support groups -
Calendar -
Directions and Contact Info -
Other UU sites -
Home |
Unitarian Universalist Congregation
in Milford