On Patience

Extract

In our age of frenzy and unrest, when peace and tranquility are threatening to leave Europe altogether, it is a good thing to reflect for a while upon patience, and thus reflecting to recover that spirit of quiet and detachment, which is an essential condition of our spiritual regeneration.

Patience is not a popular virtue. It lacks the splendour of charity, or the persuasiveness of humility. Its light pales beside the brilliance of an heroic virtue such as courage. To the superficial observer its attraction is only slight. This low estimation of patience is not unfounded in fact. St Thomas Aquinas teaches that this virtue is not only second to the theological virtues; it ranks lower than prudence and justice, fortitude and temperance. For these either establish man in the good life or restrain him from the more serious obstacles to virtue, while patience only enables him to suffer evil without being unduly cast down by it. Thus patience appears as an almost negative quality, no more than a necessary condition for the practice of virtue and the development of the spiritual life.

Yet patience is by no means an insignificant virtue. God Himself attached to it a promise which is well worth pondering, “In your patience you shall possess your souls.’’ The Church, in her wisdom, reminds us of that virtue in the very periods of the liturgical year, which are marked by slow development rather than by outstanding events. The “Dominus autem, dirigat corda et corpora nostra in caritate Dei et patientia Christi” of the Apostle is a prayer appropriate to that hidden life of the spirit, which continues quietly under the surface, whose fruits will only be revealed in the next world.