The season of Lent is well upon us, and as these winter days slowly, hopefully, soon turn into spring, many of us are trying hard to stick to Lenten intentions.Perhaps you’re committed to a new spiritual practice, leaving an old habit behind, or the tried-and-true resolution to avoid chocolate (again). However you’re spending this Lent, the chances are high that your attention will be called to the practice of patience.

As we live into the spirit of this church season, Jesus’s own forty days of temptation in the wilderness, we’re grappling with the nature of this virtue. How and when is patience holy, and why is it so hard for many of us to practice? The Rev. Tish Harrison Warren, Anglican priest, author, and writer for The New York Times, joined Ryan McAnnally-Linz on the For the Life of the World podcast to discuss just this.

“And there's a humility in understanding that, well, the world does not revolve around me here.”

Patience as Humility in Understanding

Patience, Tish shares, might appear to us in a variety of forms, including trust, contentedness, or endurance. Primarily, though, she believes patience looks like someone who has “accepted their posture of waiting.”

"There's different ways to talk about patience,” Tish shares. “[Patience] could be when you're in a hurry, and you're frustrated, and you're in the line at Target and the person in front of you realizes last minute that they forgot something, and so they have to go back and get it. Or maybe their credit card isn't working for some reason, and so they have to call the manager. These moments where you're like, ‘I need to go!’

“And there's a humility in understanding that, well, the world does not revolve around me here.”

We inhabit a world that is always asking us to wait, and this ask for patience becomes particularly heightened for Christians, Tish says.

“It's kind of self-evident to everyone that we're waiting for good things: we're waiting for our kids to grow up, or for a promotion. But we're also waiting for death. We live in a posture of waiting, but, of course, with Christians it's even more so, because we have this idea of the eschaton. We’re waiting for the return of Christ and we're waiting for things to be set right. We are always waiting, and patience is an acceptance of that or a trust in the midst of that.”

“We can scale all of human knowledge, but still not know what’s going to happen by breakfast tomorrow.”

Relinquishing Control of Our World

Our “waits” are often put in tension with very-human desires to control all moments in our lives, both the ordinary and extraordinary. Practicing patience, Tish describes, requires us to practice the uncomfortable feeling of giving that control away. She describes having the uncomfortable realization that:

“We can scale all of human knowledge, but still not know what’s going to happen by breakfast tomorrow.”

Tish quotes Hans Urs von Balthasar as she explains how patience must be grounded in the reality that God does control our time, where we don’t. She reads,

“God intended man to have all good, but in God's time and therefore all disobedience, all sin, consists essentially in breaking out of time. Hence, the restoration of order by the Son of God had to be the annulment of that premature snatching of knowledge, the beating down of the hand outstretched toward eternity, the repentant return from a false, swift transfer of eternity to a true slow confinement in time. Hence, the importance of patience in the NewTestament, which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity. More central, even, the humility, the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or theTitan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism, the meekness of theLamb which is led.”

Our attempts to break out of time, Tish says, are futile; it isn’t within our creaturely design.

“We can practice meekness because we believe we're being led. The central place of patience in the Christian life does come from a deep humility that we don't control things.”

“We can't [breakout of time] because we're creatures, we aren't made for that. But the universe is not, therefore, careening out of control without any kind of meaning. And our lives are not careening out of control.

“We can practice meekness because we believe we're being led. The central place of patience in the Christian life does come from a deep humility that we don't control things.”

Social media and activism culture often lead to a longing for immediate change in our world. Being patient can feel like the antithesis of this activism work, Tish shares, but it does not require that we be passive or complacent.

“Patience can get a bad rap that Christians are just trying to teach folks to be bovine in their passive acceptance of suffering. And I don't think that's true. There’s always a witness for seeking light, for seeking active redemption, for seeking active change and bringing active peace in the world. But I also think that's always tempered by a very real idea that sin is deeper and darker than we think. And so we're not going to be able to fix this fast or fix this easily.”

Should We Be Patient with Injustice?

“We have to be slower to call people who have less power to patience. Patience shouldn't be weaponized, but I also don't want to let go of the fact that patience is an actual and real virtue.

Tish turns to the work of her friend, Esau McCaulley, to grapple with a scriptural perspective on activism and patience. She shares that in his book, ReadingWhile Black, Esau reflects on St. Paul’s writing to treat your slave like a brother, rather than suggesting the abolishment of slavery outright, embodying gradualism.

“What Esau was saying is you can't get around the fact that there's just some gradualism that's there in scripture, in the approach to real evil, that evil is not undone in a moment… And yet, there are these bombs planted that dismantle the entire system, if you actually start taking them seriously.”

Ultimately, Tish sees patience as the crucial work of knowing yourself and knowing your temptations. Understanding this virtue in ourselves can become a profound part of Christian activism.

“We have to be slower to call people who have less power to patience. Patience shouldn't be weaponized, but I also don't want to let go of the fact that patience is an actual and real virtue.

“There's another side of this where we can say everything is urgent. The moment of our culture calls for kind of constant advocacy. I think that we can therefore make patience not a virtue. And I want to hold on to the fact that love really is patient. 

To listen to more of Tish Harrison Warren’s conversation with Ryan McAnnally-Linz, listen to Episode 41 of For the Life of the World.