“Patience” is like the family of lilies, which sadly I have in short supply. When the lily blooms, it lights up the darkness. For several days now, I find myself impatient and irritable. I can’t bear the slightest provocation. Is the lily in me withering? Patience gives way to impatience and fidgetiness; paradoxically during the season of Lent, when “patience” ought to be the hallmark of a good Christian, has proved to be a testing time. To add to this, the noise decibels in and around the Church are also feverishly on the rise. With the blaring of mikes in and outside the Church for a Lenten Retreat or for a routine Sunday Mass (with the sound of giant funnels) attempting in vain to reach the city limits, life has become disagreeable for aged people like me who live so close to a Church and are exposed to a constant barrage of sound. And it continues, despite umpteen supplications and missives.
“Patience” is one of the cardinal Christian virtues that we long for though people of my ilk find it difficult to attain as age catches up. Margaret Thatcher once famously remarked: “I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.” But what shall a poor parishioner like me do if not suffer further with the babble of Lenten retreats? Just a modicum of “piano or pianissimo”, instead, would be music to everyone’s battered ears.
Mother Teresa rightly said, “In today’s fast-paced-society and self-centred-culture, patience” is quickly disappearing. (Could she have been referring to me?) A few may have that monumental quality bearing the blast but clearly not everyone is equally endowed. Is it too much to beg not to stretch your neighbour’s endurance? The following lines express well, “Fed on a damask cheek, patience pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy, (somewhat like mine) impatiently sat in a distant spot, smiling at grief.” Oh God, I would say, I don’t ask you to make me a saint but do please give me the “PACIÊNCIA” and understanding to bear with those who merrily wish to test staying power.
The Bible understands “patience” as a Christian virtue rooted in the totality of Christian truth. “Patience” begins with the affirmation that God is sovereign and in control of human history, working in human lives. With eternity on the horizon, time takes on an entirely new significance. The Christian understands that full satisfaction will never be achieved in this life, but he looks to the consummation of all things in the age to come. Furthermore, we know that our sanctification will be incomplete in this life, and thus, Christians must look to each other as fellow sinners saved by grace, in which the Holy Spirit is at work calling us unto Christ likeness. Permit me to say that the lion’s roar is sometimes more bearable than the howl of our modern mushrooming Christian preachers.
There are a few precepts to keep in mind said Robert Schuler. “Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods (pardon if I say I am in one of those right now).” The Church noisemakers say, wait, be patient, the storm will pass. The spring will come. I know, yes, but will the first rays of morn bring a tinge of spring?
“Patience” is apparently embodied in images of the Mother Goddess always in a state of fertile abundance, of earthen pots filled with a fullness of a good harvest. One moment of patience may ward off a great disaster. One moment without patience may ruin a whole life. If those bloody American leaders had waited for at least a week in early August 1945 for Japan to surrender, the “Little Boy” that killed more than 3,00,000 would have not brought in mayhem.
It is not easy to master patience as long as God only is able to count the apples in a seed. No one else. You can extract patience from a human being but to a bearable extent. The dancer-choreographer Chandralekha, who in her life and work was able to seize ideas from many worlds to create her dance ballets, used to narrate stories about her initiation into the Japanese system of movement. As she described it, she was totally absorbed by the precision of a famous Noh dancer who spent a whole evening making just one fluid movement across the stage. “How do you move without us being able to see you move?, she was asked. No enlightening came at that moment. She just tried to enact the scene with all the power of her eyes and hands…but that night she sat in front of a lily that was about to bloom in a flowerpot. She sat there watching it, hypnotised by it and finally just before dawn – as she seemed to nod for a second, her eyes opened to find at last that the lily had bloomed lighting up the darkness vouching that patience, after all, is a two-edged sword.
(Dr Francisco Colaço is a seniormost consulting physician, pioneer of Echocardiography in Goa and a column writer)
