Practicing Patience (John Inazu)

My dad with my son, Sam, a few months before my dad’s death.

My dad with my son, Sam, a few months before my dad’s death.

 

But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.  (Romans 8:25)

One of my academic mentors, Stanley Hauerwas, has observed that patience “draws on the Christian commitment to know how to wait in the face of difficulty.”  Christians are able to wait because we place our hope in Jesus and our time is in his hands. 

Many of us, maybe all of us, will have new opportunities to practice patience in the coming weeks and months: patience with ourselves, our families and friends, our neighbors, our bodies, a virus.  And many of us are going to find that we are a bit out of practice with patience.  We’ve veered toward hot takes, instant downloads, and same-day delivery.  We’ve chosen tweets over conversations and followers over friends.

I lost my dad to lung cancer just over a year ago, and I thought a lot about patience—and my lack of it—as I watched him die.  At one point, as I slept on the floor next to his bed, he would sit up to cough, sip water, use the bathroom, and lie back down.  The process would have taken me a couple of minutes.  In my dad’s weakened state, each episode took forty minutes.  Then there was no more getting up. And in the days before he died the moments of waiting with him were both slower and more agonizing.  There was little to do but hold his hand and rub his back. 

Seeing my dad suffer was not easy for me, but neither was slowing to his pace.  Even though I write and speak frequently about the importance of patience for democratic practices, addressing strangers was far afield from these vulnerable and uncomfortable moments with my dad.  And even as I counsel others to be more patient, I was unaccustomed to slowing down in my own life.  I schedule my days with razor-thin margins and too often find myself running between meetings and classes.  Even those final months with my dad were punctuated by frantic flights and missed connections every few days between St. Louis and Colorado Springs.

My experience with my dad’s slower pace was not entirely unfamiliar to me.  My children are wonderful and unmerited gifts, but they are also ongoing lessons in patience through temper tantrums, bedtime rituals, and forgotten homework deadlines.  Friendships have proven to be similar laboratories for cultivating patience as I navigate ambiguous communication, forgotten milestones, and missed expectations with those dear to me.  But these moments with my dad, which I would not trade for anything, were different.  They taught me anew about marking time, being present, and learning patience.  They reinforced, in Tish Harrison Warren’s apt phrase, what it means to recognize “the liturgy of the ordinary”—encountering God’s presence in our seemingly mundane and sometimes unpleasant routines.  And they remind me how much patience depends on hope in things unseen.  As the Catholic author Henri Nouwen once wrote: “There is always reason to hope, even when our eyes are filled with tears.” 

 Yet, in some ways, sitting with my dad in those forty-minute stints was one of the easiest forms of patience for me to practice.  I imagine that many of us feel this way: we are most able to muster patience when those we love suffer.  But what about more ordinary forms of patience?  What about when our loved ones are not suffering but just annoying?  What does patience look like with local strangers who refuse to follow CDC guidelines, or distant strangers who frustrate us with online musings?   Have I really begun to comprehend what patience looks like toward them?  And doesn’t my faith tell me that my love for others doesn’t depend upon how well they love me?

Perhaps the answer to these questions begins with paying attention to smaller things.  I am not a very patient person, but maybe sitting quietly with my dad in the middle of my otherwise over-scheduled, gadget-filled, efficiency-driven life was the first step to cultivating patience for more difficult people.  Maybe the more time we spend learning patience—and finding hope—in the midst of suffering, the less we will be prone to outrage and anxiety.  And maybe that is a claim no less true of our collective politics than of our personal journeys.  The coming weeks will give us plenty of opportunities to learn about these possibilities.

John Inazu is the Executive Director of The Carver Project and the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

Other selected writing by John Inazu:

Return to The Carver Connections main page.

 

 

 
John Inazu1 Comment