We need to guard against misunderstanding the meaning of patience.
Be patient!’ I can hear my dad saying it on any number of occasions and about any number of things as I was growing up.
Puzzles, chores, learning to play the guitar, jobs in the garden, waiting for everyone to get ready before a family outing. I was not a patient kid. I’m not much better as an adult. I always heard those words as a test. That reflexive hearing, I would come to recognise, was an expression of my assumption that whatever I was desiring and seeking could and should be in my grasp now.
Later I understood myself as having wanted the ‘pay-off’ without going through the difficult business of working for it . . . of waiting for it.
IMPORTANT
This sense of patience as the virtue that accompanies the working and waiting for what we want captures something important.
We cannot grasp immediately what we want all the time. But there are dangers in a belief that the universe will bend our way and we’ll get what we want, all in good time. Such an understanding of patience can lead us to believe we deserve all we want, and that we will eventually grasp all we desire, just as long as we wait.
We ‘grasp’ when we understand as final and absolute something that is finite and provisional. In other words, we grasp when we make gods of things and then think we can have them for ourselves. Our sense of patience is misapplied if it is understood as the waiting for all we wish to grasp for ourselves.
Our grasping is problematic because no finite thing can fill the ‘God-shaped hole’ in our lives. The hole that is our longing and desiring for peace and wholeness. At the same time, all created things can point us to God. Held lightly they can suggest all the goodness that God offers us. On the other hand, if we think we can grasp something we have made a god of, then maybe we think we can grasp God. Then we might risk assuming that God is somehow within our grasp. If only we are patient, we will possess him.
SPACE FOR GOD
The 20th century Jesuit theologian Fr Karl Rahner SJ wrote that we study God not to grasp God but so that we might make the space for God to grasp us.
That’s what we should be patient for. Our patience, at its best, is the self-emptying and slow waiting for God to grasp us. That might sound comforting in its way. But it is also challenging and even confronting because it pulls us away from the easy certainties of what we want now and acknowledges that God is the prime mover.
When I was undertaking a silent retreat in my first year as a Jesuit, one of the things I was initially confronted with was the fear that I would be asked to do things as a Jesuit that I did not want to do. This fear settled fairly easily for me. I had a sense of adventure and had joined the Jesuits because I thought they could help make best use of my gifts.
What then confronted me was a fear not only that I would be asked to do things that I did not want to do, but that what I wanted would change over time. That by being a member of a religious order, by praying regularly, making my annual retreat, what I viewed as important and valued would change over time. That was much scarier.
SLOW CONVERSION
The possibility that our desires might change as we let God lead us means we need, I think, to be patient with ourselves. To allow ourselves to experience the slow conversion by which we come to desire what God desires for us. We need to wait patiently on God, even as we wish to experience his closeness more fully now. We need to trust in St Paul’s conviction that nothing, present nor future, height nor depth, ‘will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord’. (Romans 8:38-39)
If we have such hope then we can be patient in a way that is not about waiting begrudgingly for what we want now but is characterised by openness to how God will be with us through time and beyond time.
Another 20th century Jesuit, the Frenchman Fr Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, has a beautiful prayer to help us see the need for this kind of patience: ‘Patient Trust’. It ends:
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense, and incomplete.
Julian Butler SJ is a Jesuit undertaking formation for Catholic priesthood. This article first appeared in the winter 2026 edition of Madonna magazine.
