The Latent Power Of Patience
We live in a consumer society which not only promises, but actually delivers, instant gratification of our desires. 1 Click on Amazon and it is yours, shipped immediately from a Fulfillment Center and guaranteed to arrive within the briefest possible time. Twenty-five years ago, the rock band Queen voiced the expectation that technology and marketing have since literally delivered: “I want it all / And I want it now!”
What effect does instant gratification of our desires have on us? It deprives us of the experience of exerting the latent power of patience in hopeful waiting. To those who never wait, patience is never needed. But patience called forth by waiting in hope builds both expectation and anticipation of the joy experienced when the end is finally attained, the goal reached, the prize received.
Our Advent hope rests upon the assurance that “although (the Lord) does command that he should be awaited with patience, in another place He promises that He will be coming quickly” (Guerric of Igny, The First Sermon for Advent). With these words, Guerric invites us to remember that the Lord promises not immediate gratification, but the opportunity for our expectation to grow in patience from both the yearning created by His command to wait, and by His promise that what we already possess in faith will be quickly ours – “though it may well seem very long to any of us who are in turmoil, whether from labor of from love.”
In fact, it is the Lord’s waiting – His patience with us, hoping and expecting that we will respond to His love and mercy revealed to us in Christ – which encourages and sustains us as we await His coming. Blessed indeed may we be who wait for the Lord, but more blessed be the Lord who waits for us.
Fr Ed Hoffmann, Snowmass