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Morning Reflection
July 18, 2025
Patience
Patience is the long breath of passion. In his patience, God shows once again that it is his love which makes him a passionate God. For in his patience, God proves himself as the one who exists for his creature, as the one who exists for others. Patience means that God has taken time for himself, in order to grant time and space to others.
Eberhard Jüngel: quoted in Patience: A Theological Exploration
Reflection by Peter Vanderveen
I’m often surprised by the thoughts that come to mind when I’m idly waiting for something. This week I had a brief moment before an appointed meeting, and I chose to glance through a book on my desk, which is quoted above. It had been there for several weeks, untouched – probably because it’s nearly 600 pages long. Its heft alone is a bit daunting. But in the two minutes I had, I thumbed through most of the chapters, pausing here and there at random paragraphs that caught my eye. And I was struck by the richness and the breadth of the book’s exposition. I decided that I needed to read it in full.
Reading a 600 page book is no small task. It takes time in an age when time is always short, for almost everything. And I suppose it’s only appropriate to have to exercise patience to read a book on patience. But what the book shows, expansively, is how integral patience is to gaining a deep and edifying understanding of the world. In our impatience, we have reduced patience to no more than a periodic discipline of the will; it’s a hedge against our toddler-like irritation when we are forced to wait for something. But there is an alternative, which is to give patience a far more basic place in our lives, as a principle virtue, and, thereby, to allow the immensity of the beauty of the world to unfold as a constant and ever-increasing gift. Waiting is a means to epiphany. And my impetus to read the whole of the book came from my conviction, which came unexpectedly, having scanned a few pages, that 600 pages could only be a beginning, a skimming of the surface of things. And I want to live in a world of such depth.
Much of the book is a reflection on the complex story of the Bible and what it contributes to our sense of patience. And here, too, there’s so much that we choose to ignore and dismiss in the Christian faith and its traditions. Impatient for ourselves alone, we have lost the art of reading Scripture carefully and thoughtfully and passionately – all its pages. And we are poorer for this. For the Bible is the attestation that God is profoundly and blessedly patient with us, from generation to generation. God gives us incredible space to fashion our lives, always in wait for what will be his concluding response of redemption – which will be the revelation of the true grace of all time and our part in it. Imagine that the cosmos, from beginning to end, is first and foremost “the long breath of God’s passion.” Shouldn’t this change the shape of your day, affording you an uncommon patience for whatever comes?
Prayer (included in the liturgy, patiently, each Sunday)
God of Peace,
Lift us now by the power of your Holy Spirit
to your presence,
where we may be still and know that you are God;
and guide us by the light of that vision
to know the things that belong to our peace,
so that our lives may reflect it
and our actions may establish it,
and our prayers may enable us to be your servants,
in times of tension and in places of conflict.
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