Patience: Virtue or Excuse?
Originally delivered as the Homily for the Festal Eucharist of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple at Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge, 2nd February 2022. The Epistle was Hebrews 2. 14-18 and the Gospel was Luke 2. 22-40.
In one of the windows in the north transept of Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge, the virtue patientia (patience or endurance) is personified as a woman with a glowing halo, wearing a white dress and trampling on another, understandably disgruntled woman in a red dress—a personification, it seems, of the opposing vice ira (wrath or anger). Aside from the strange Mean Girls energy of the scene, there is something instinctively uncomfortable about the exalting of patience in contrast to anger, an unpleasant feeling of being tone policed by a stained-glass window or, even worse, by Christian theology more broadly.
Living in a world and especially in a church still rife with injustices, there seems to be an evident danger that overly enthusiastic prescriptions of patience on the one hand, and a tendency towards pearl-clutching in the face of its apparent opposite on the other, will foster a repressive and easily exploitable environment. The Latin patientia can, after all, carry the more negative connotation of ‘subjection’ or even ‘want of spirit’.1 When we celebrate patience, then, are we recognising people’s endurance in the face of remarkable difficulty, or are we excusing the lack of meaningful action from those with the power to change things, at the expense of urgent liberation?
In today’s Gospel we are met with two quintessential Biblical waiters, Simeon and Anna. Simeon has been promised that he will not die before seeing the Messiah, and the prophet Anna has been worshiping, fasting and praying in the temple 24/7, without the same personal revelation as Simeon, but still anticipating, it seems, a more general promise of redemption. In this reading, and in the Nunc dimittis Simeon sings upon taking the infant Jesus into his arms, we catch the moment of their waiting’s fulfillment, the sight of the salvation and redemption they and so many others had been looking for, finally coming into view.
It can be tempting to read this passage as little more than a powerful affirmation of the virtue of patience, and certainly it makes the joy and release of grasping a long-awaited promise deeply felt. But I think we can hold true to this moment’s beautiful hopefulness while avoiding the trite and rather transactional conclusion that ‘good things come to those who wait’.
A great deal of learning to live as a Christian is learning to live with paradox, to live with a story about our relationship to God and to creation that constantly tells us real truth is less beholden to the sorts of oppositions and contradictions we tend to assume are fixed and immutable. Most centrally, we are told that God can become human without ceasing to be God, and without either of those natures having to compete for space. And, as today’s reading from the Epistle to the Hebrews emphasises, God defeats the power of death by dying—a victory paradoxically accomplished through submission.
Just as it might be tempting to read Simeon and Anna’s stories as compensatory narratives, in which all preceding experiences are absorbed, eclipsed and ‘made up for’ by the ending, it can also be tempting to skip over the part where Jesus died an excruciating death and just revel in the victorious aftermath.2 But for Jesus’s death and resurrection to mean anything at all, as the writer of Hebrews recognises, the suffering and the victory must be held next to each other without any attempt to soften the paradox between them—to neither justify the pain of the Crucifixion because of the Resurrection, nor reject the hope of the Resurrection because of the Crucifixion.
Julian of Norwich seems to grasp something along these lines: as much as her famous conviction that ‘all shall be well’ is ripe for twisting in a trite and compensatory direction, her visions of the Crucifixion sit startlingly, even disturbingly, within the paradoxical simultaneity of suffering and hope, famously describing one of her ‘showings’ as ‘hideous and dreadful, and sweet and lovely’.3 In Julian’s syntax, the hideous and the sweet, the dreadful and the lovely coexist equally and cumulatively, not subordinating each other in any way. We aren’t able to smother them into a narrative in which the hideous becomes sweet, or is sweet; Julian isn’t a masochist, despite occasional appearances. Instead, the pain and the joy are just both there, resisting the urge to explain each other away and, perhaps, speaking more truthfully to a world in which the good and the bad are often inexplicably near to one another.
Returning to Simeon and Anna: if we don’t just rush to or isolate the nice bits, we find a story of two figures deeply immersed in that same world, that not-so-easy disentangling of hope and suffering. Based on the traditional depictions, Simeon and Anna are both very old. Rembrandt’s painting of Simeon depicts a man with heavy, closed lids and stiff hands, a body bearing the weight of waiting. And Anna, we are told, is a widow: as she praises God at the sight of the Infant Jesus, there’s someone that she loved who is no longer there. Perhaps the gospel writer wanted this loss to be on our minds as we read of Anna’s excitement because it was on her mind too. To wait patiently, to endure, incurs disproportionate and indiscriminate costs, costs that therefore cannot be straightforwardly compensated for by the object of waiting, if that object is even received in this lifetime.
All of this is to say, if patience is to be a virtue and not merely an excuse, we cannot be content with gesturing towards an unspecified later date when ‘all shall be well’, while trampling over the loss and hurt and anger that has and is and will be unavoidably felt in the meantime. The writer of Hebrews says that Jesus is able to help those who are being tested because he himself was tested by what he suffered. If that is what patience looks like—enduring in an active and unflinching solidarity with suffering, while holding to a paradoxical hope that it will somehow not be the final word—then perhaps patience as a virtue has something to say to the injustices of this world after all. And maybe patientia and ira can reconcile and become good friends, neither trampling on the other but standing side-by-side in anticipation and pursuit of a better world. If the eternal and infinite God can be held in the arms of an old man, I don’t see why not.
Entry ‘patientia’, Logeion, n.d. <https://logeion.uchicago.edu> [accessed 30 April 2024].
See Graham Ward, ‘Steiner and Eagleton: The Practice of Hope and the Idea of the Tragic’, Literature & Theology, 19.2 (2005), pp. 100-111 (p. 101), doi:10.1093/litthe/fri014.
The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 147; my translation.