Life Illumined
Patience: Pedagogy of Ecstasy
Last week I was privileged to contribute to the Imago Dei lecture series at Pusey House, Oxford with a conference under the title: ‘By Patience we Participate in the Passion of Christ.’ How?
Pascal wrote, in words I am fond of citing, ‘Jesus remains in agony until the end of the world. That is not time to be slumbered away.’ Christian vigilance —nepsis — has to do with radical consent to incorporation into this ongoing salvation. Patience in this optic is no mere tarrying; it is potentially a state of relational being, a partaking in recreation. Hopkins hints at this in his wood-dove poem when he, after lamenting the fugitive passage of the dove, a figure of the peace he yearns for, writes: ‘O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu/Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,/That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house/He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,/He comes to brood and sit.’ I love the image of patience pluming, transforming a shivering lump of bony flesh into a creature made to soar and to brood, Spirit-like, upon the chaos-waters of the cosmic and human condition. It is with this stature of patience in mind that St Benedict writes, at the end of the Prologue to his Rule, with emphatic alliteration, passionibus Christi per patientiam participemur.
You can watch the lecture here, if you like.
Van Gogh’s Sower, an emblem of patience.
And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.” Mark 4.26-29.