Morning of Recollection
Patient Endurance
Order of the Holy Sepulchre – Middle Atlantic Lieutenancy
Franciscan Monastery; Washington, D.C.
March 4, 2023
Introduction
Recently, my priest-secretary, Father Tyler and I, travelled to Mexico for a Board of Directors meeting of the Knights of Columbus. We arrived at Dulles Airport only to learn that the flight to Mexico City had been delayed by an hour. “Not so bad,” I thought, as I continued working on my laptop. Well, one hour turned into two and two turned into four. In the meantime, one of my fellow travelers exploded in anger, and began hurling epithets that would not be rated “PG”. Father Tyler said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t look at her!” For my part, gallows humor seemed to be the best outlet for my frustration.
Finally, after a five-and-a-half-hour delay, we boarded the aircraft. The aircraft itself, an old Airbus, looked as though it been through the mill, and the flight down to Mexico was turbulent – itself an endurance contest. We arrived in Mexico about 3:00 a.m. and got to bed about 4:00 a.m. As you can imagine, this experience tried my patience. I know that many of you are frequent travelers, so I’m sure you have had similar experiences.
Lord, Give Me Patience
There are lots of situations in life, as we know, that call for patient endurance. All we need to do is to take the daily commute or battle rush hour traffic. How tempted we are to show anger when we are cut off by a reckless driver. Or what about getting stuck at a traffic light behind a driver who is texting? As one of my compatriots puts it, “That really grinds my gears!”
Daily annoyances are one thing, of course, but often our need for patient endurance is much more serious. Often, we need patient endurance in our relationships. How easy it is even for a loving couple to be impatient with one another. It might be over annoying habits or more serious faults. And then, at times, there are those who irritate us – maybe a co-worker – We may not know why these folks are so irritating – we only know that they are. Then, there is the realm of suffering – when a spouse or a child is seriously ill, or when there is reputational harm, or when there are financial setbacks, or especially when we suffer the death of a loved one. Growing up, I marveled at the patience of my parents who lovingly cared for my brother with special needs. That has helped me in my priesthood to appreciate all the more couples and families that care so lovingly for children with special needs. As I often say to such parents, “It’s a vocation within a vocation.” And what can we say of those who have suffered heroically – whether for their faith, their country, or some other worthy cause – I think of a martyr like St. Maximillian Kolbe or Saints like St. Bernadette Soubirous or St. Therese, who bore their physical and spiritual sufferings with heroic love.
Or think of those who have worked tirelessly for peace in the Middle East, in spite of ongoing frustrations and setbacks. As members of Holy Sepulchre, the sufferings of our fellow Christians in the Holy Land should be top of mind. Think of the poverty, the extreme inconveniences, the lack of opportunity, the second-class citizenship – that so many of our brothers and sisters experience. For them, live must seem like a perpetual Lent, and thus part of our Lenten sacrifice must include greater generosity to the Church in the Holy Land and to the works of education and mercy which the Latin Patriarch and the Order sponsor.
Lent Is More than an Endurance Contest
Lent is a time for regrouping and recouping our patient endurance. But for that to happen, we mustn’t regard Lent itself as a mere endurance contest, a forty-day period which, by hook or crook, we just need to get through. Sadly, many people don’t take Lent seriously and so for them, the 40 days come and go without much notice. Many others begin with good intentions, but their Lenten resolutions trail off just about now, the end of the first week of Lent.
But if we take Lent seriously – and I am presuming that all of us do – then we may experience it as an endurance contest. Years ago, my old boss and mentor, Cardinal Hickey, gave up coffee for Lent. Since he is in eternity, he won’t mind if I tell you that he quickly became unbearably impatient and grouchy. After only two days, I said to him, “Your Eminence, you penance is killing me! Have the coffee and forego the scotch!” The same can be true of ourselves. For example, when we fast, we’re hungry, and thus perhaps hard to live with. That sort of defeats the purpose of Lenten penances.
The bodily disciplines we undertake in Lent may help train us in virtue, but that really isn’t the whole Lenten story, only a part of it. Almsgiving, fasting, and prayer are the means that the Holy Spirit employs to pry open our hearts – if, for some reason they have been closed – or to open them more widely, to the One who is our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Far from being just an endurance contest, a season designed to try our patience, Lent is a time rich in God’s grace that enables us to rid ourselves of all that hinders us from sharing in God’s life and love. Bodily penance is one of the means the Spirit employs to purify our hearts, and to renew and deepen our relationship with God and everyone else in our busy lives, including those who have wronged us and those whom we have wronged. Let me add here that forgiving “those who trespass against us” requires a great deal of patient endurance on our part, especially if we were grievously wronged.
Lent, then, is a season for falling more deeply in love with God, a time to draw closer to Lord, to experience a deeper spiritual intimacy with the Risen Lord who suffered, died, and was buried out of love for you and me. As St. Paul exults, “He loves me, and he gave his life for me” (Gal. 2:20). But there’s a corollary: The more deeply we fall in love with God, the more we will be like God, and the more we are like God, the more we will love like God.
God’s Patient Endurance
If we search Scripture, we readily see that God loves us with patient endurance. Psalm 86 praises God because he is “slow to anger and rich in kindness.” God created us in his own image and endowed us with freedom so that we could reflect his truth, goodness, and beauty, and to return freely the love which he showered upon us… in a word, we were created for friendship with God. As we know, sin entered the picture and disrupted our relationship with God and introduced bitterness and discord in our human relations. Looking at the mess we made of his good and beautiful creation, we might think that God would have long ago given up on us as a failed project. After all, our infidelity, our sinfulness, our refusal to be what God created us to be – reflections of his glory – this wounds the God who loves us with a pure, passionate, and unchanging love. We should not ignore those passages in Scripture that speak of how our sins wound the heart of the God of love. Those passages help us understand better God’s enduring mercy. Indeed, God who loves us with supremely patient endurance.
To be clear: God did not give up on us but doubled down by sending us his Son. Assuming our humanity, God’s Son revealed most fully his Father’s patient endurance. Jesus preached a message of repentance. He told us the parable of the Prodigal Son. He healed the sick and raised the dead as a sign of his power over sin and death. But in the end, the Lord of glory was crucified. On his shoulders, he, the innocent Lamb of God, bore the totality of our sins. He revealed the ugliness and enormity of human sinfulness. The wounds of his heart penetrated the heart of his loving Father also. As we look upon Christ crucified, we see the very image of patient endurance. It is what St. John the Evangelist calls, “love to the very end” (John 13:1). Only one who loves with supreme patience and endurance lays down his life for others. This is what we must keep before our eyes as Lent begins: Jesus’ patient endurance. The Father’s patient endurance. And the persistent love of the Holy Spirit.
A Fruit of the Spirit
Patient, enduring love is not merely a matter of gritting one’s teeth. It is, first and foremost, a matter of opening our hearts to the Holy Spirit. If we check St. Paul’s list of the fruits of the Holy Spirit in Galatians (5:22-23), we will see that “patient endurance” makes the list, along with charity, joy, peace, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, and self-control. If we open our hearts to the Holy Spirit, we will share in the love of Christ and will progressively live and love like Christ … in a word, we will be his witnesses. The imitation of Christ hinges on participating in Christ’s life and love, especially through Word and Sacrament, but also in our works of charity, and in the Lenten disciplines we freely assume and perseveringly continue to do. But in our experience, my friends, this is easier said than done.
In 1st Timothy, St. Paul says plainly, “Christ died to save sinners…” (1 Tim 1:5). This was the point of the agony Jesus suffered and the death he endured. We may sometimes feel otherwise about our sufferings. We may feel they are pointless. We may not know what they mean. When we are put to the test, we feel like we’re groping in the darkness, and we ask the Lord, “why are you allowing me to suffer in this way?” This is especially true of physical, emotional, or spiritual suffering that is not the direct result of any wrongdoing on our part. Patient and enduring love, therefore, has another dimension: it is a sharing in the Cross. When a well-meaning friend or advisor tells us to “offer it up” or piously tells us that, in some generic way, we’re sharing in Christ’s sufferings, we may become perplexed, and sometimes even angry.
Yet, if we believe that God’s love is provident and that it is tailored, so to speak, to each individual soul – (after all, each of is, in St. John Paul II’s words, “an unrepeatable reality”) … then perhaps what we are called to do is simply to trust in Jesus – that whatever form our cross might take, whatever we’ve been asked to endure is for some good purpose that he, the Lord, knows, even if we do not. Perhaps the Lord’s good purpose will become evident in a year or two, or perhaps we will go home to the Lord without its ever becoming evident. In the meantime, we must trust that God will not allow us to be tested beyond our strength (cf. 1 Cor. 1:13). Patient endurance means hoping against hope, remaining with the Lord even when we are disconsolate, even when we cannot fully understand what he is doing with us and in us.
This is difficult for us because we like to be in control of our lives, and as a norm, we pretty much succeed in doing so… until something comes along that shows us we are not in control. Patient endurance, a fruit of the Holy Spirit, expresses an absolute trust in the Lord, even when we do not know how long a particular suffering may last, and even we do not really see a way to get beyond it or around it. This is when the Psalms come alive for us, especially those Psalms which cry out to the Lord for help in time of distress, those which speak of being compassed about by one’s enemies, those that speak of God as our sole possession and as our Rock.
Patient endurance, then, has its own reward. Not necessarily the tidy solution we might have longed for, but a newfound intimacy with the Lord who suffered for us, a deeper grasp of his love for us, a sense that the Lord has invited us to share more deeply in his own mission. For as St. Paul wrote to Timothy: “If we die with him, we shall also live with him. If we persevere, we shall also reign with him” (2 Tim 2:12).
Patient Endurance Rewarded
So back where we started … my recent pilgrimage to Mexico. The trip that began so inauspiciously turned out to be an amazing experience. Not only did we have an excellent meeting of the K of C Board of Directors, but much more importantly, we journeyed to Guadalupe, where, in the presence of the image of Our Lady, we re-consecrated the Order to her, Our Lady of Guadalupe. After Mass, the officers of the Order, including myself, had the opportunity to venerate the tilma with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe up close. We were led up a staircase in the sacristy of the Basilica that brought us into immediate contact with this sacred image. There, I found myself pouring out a welter of prayers to Mary – for the Archdiocese, for my brother priests, for vocations, for guidance through current challenges, for people who had asked for my prayers, all this and much, much more.
No one understands our challenges better than Mary who stood beneath the Cross. Through her intercession, whether we invoke her as Our Lady of Palestine or as Our Lady of Guadalupe … may we open our hearts this Lent more widely to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who makes it possible for us to say amid every challenge: “Now, it is not I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). May God bless us and keep us always in his love!