Patience is a challenging virtue for me. There was a time in my life when I wouldn’t wait in line for Confession if the line was more than a couple people. I would only go if there wasn’t a very short line. God has brought me along, since then thankfully, so that now I have a deep appreciation for this sacrament and I will gladly wait any amount of time for it. I use the time in line to pray my Rosary, give thanks, to talk to God. My impatience has been transformed with new eyes to see the ‘waiting’ as something good and useful.
My daughter-in-law recently inspired me to start making sourdough bread. Since then, several people have told me that was something they did during Covid. Somehow I missed that! I am enjoying this new hobby even though it takes quite a bit of patience as there are roughly 10 steps that take place over 1-3 days. As an example, the bulk fermentation phase for the dough takes 8-10 hours.
A friend encouraged me to go to a local grocery and simply buy a sourdough loaf. I think he was missing the point of my desire to make sourdough from scratch. The waiting, the anticipation, the creativity, the challenge, and the joy of sharing something homemade afterward is what makes it interesting to me. The process requires a lot of patience and I see that this is good for me. I just said to my friend that the hardest part of bread-making is waiting an hour for it to cool after it comes out of the oven.
Patience is also key to a fruitful spiritual life. St. Cyprian struggled so much with patience that he wrote a book about it, On the Advantage of Patience.
He said that we have to be convinced that patience will benefit us before we can truly embrace the virtue. He speaks about patience in the suffering of poor health, the drudgery of work and by the people who irritate us. He speaks of the importance of patience when we are making big and important decisions in our lives.
He advises that we seek to grow in self-control, gentleness, love of neighbor along with other companion virtues. He reminds us that God is patient with us and with our mistakes. St. Cyprian said, “Wait for each other.” This sounds like a new daily prayer for me.
The words of scripture tells us that patience is a fruit of the Holy Spirit and that patience is so much better than pride. Many of the psalms and proverbs extol us to grow in this important virtue. From Proverbs 16:32: “Better a patient person than a warrior, one with self-control than one who takes a city.”
So how do we grow in patience? Practice it. Like anything else, a muscle being exercised, or a new hobby (like bread-making) started, we have to give ourselves time, gentleness and grace to begin to adopt this virtue in our everyday lives. When we fail in patience, we have the opportunity to learn from it.
Recently, a batch of my bread dough didn’t rise. I was baffled and not happy about the time and ingredients lost. I thought maybe this hobby wasn’t for me. But I researched what I might have done wrong and learned that I had ‘rushed’ the starter. It wasn’t ready. I needed more time to grow. This little bit of failure was a very good thing for me as a reminder to slow down and it also reminded me of the need to try and fail, try and fail, as I did as a young athlete. It reminded me that perseverance is also an important companion virtue to patience. I suppose this growing in patience and perseverance never stops no matter what season of life we are in — it just changes in shape and form.
As we move through life on this side of heaven, in anticipation of going home to Jesus someday, may we persevere with patience and hope, as St. Paul prescribes in Romans 8:12, “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Amen.