Lulu Cooks and Tells: Patience

1. PRAYER

Lord, grant me the strength to embrace patience in moments of waiting and uncertainty. Calm my heart when frustrations arise, and help me to trust in Your perfect timing rather than my own. Fill me with Your grace so I may respond to others with kindness, understanding, and love. Amen. [1, 2, 3]

2, MEDITATION

https://youtu.be/RLFQG_syi9I?si=cyoT3eeXEHdYLtn3

3. SONG

https://youtu.be/jKj7J9nzRKg?si=Ot7zduka3komdttg

4. NARRATIVE

Fr. Richard Rohr defines patience not as passive waiting, but as the "shape of love" itself. Rather than struggling to fend off irritability, true patience is enduring life's brokenness, mystery, and dualistic tension with quiet resolve, trusting that both humanity and history grow slowly. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Rohr’s core teachings on patience center around a few key perspectives:

The Shape of Love: In The Universal Christ, Rohr argues that without patience, religion devolves into merely enforcing rules. Patience is how we actually embody love for ourselves, others, and God. [1, 2]

"The Suffering of Reality": Patience derives from the Latin patior, meaning to suffer or endure. It is the practice of holding together an always-mixed reality without falling into perfectionism, judgment, or resentment. [1, 2]

Accepting the Pace of Growth: Humans change slowly and often move "three steps forward, two steps back". Rohr believes we must respect this evolutionary pace and wait patiently rather than expecting people to show up fully transformed overnight. [1]

Embracing Chaos: Patience is essential for spiritual transformation. When we encounter the "dark night" or chaos, patience allows us to let go of control and trust that the trajectory is moving somewhere ultimately better. [1, 2]

You can read more about his thoughts in the Center for Action and Contemplation Daily Meditation or check out his book, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder. [1, 2, 3]

Would you like to explore how Rohr applies patience to specific concepts like forgiveness, the "dark night of the soul," or transformation?

Waiting with Patience
Friday, July 21, 2017

If you are to live on this earth, you cannot bypass the necessary tension of holding contraries and inconsistencies together. Daily ordinary experiences will teach you nonduality in a way that is no longer theoretical or abstract. It becomes obvious in everything and everybody, every idea and every event, almost hidden in plain sight. Everything created is mortal and limited and, if you look long enough, paradoxical. By paradox, I mean something that initially looks contradictory or impossible, but in a different frame or at a different level is in fact deeply true.

I am talking about just holding the tension, not necessarily finding a resolution or closure to paradox. We must agree to live without resolution, at least for a while. This is very difficult for most people, largely because we have not been taught how to do this mentally or emotionally. We didn’t know we could—or even should. As Paul seems to say (and I paraphrase), hope would not be the virtue that it is if it led us to quick closure and we did not have to “wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24-25).

I think this “opening and holding pattern” is the very name and description of faith. Unfortunately, faith largely became believing things to be true or false (intellectual assent) instead of giving people concrete practices so they could themselves know how to open up (faith), hold on (hope), and allow an infilling from another source (love). We share a contemplative practice each Saturday in the Daily Meditations so that these virtues can be “practiced.” But God gives us real practices every day of our lives, such as irritable people, long stop lights, and our own inconsistencies.

We must move from a belief-based spirituality to a practice-based spirituality, or little will change in religion, politics, and the world. We will merely continue to argue about what we are supposed to believe and who the unbelievers are.

Consider the wisdom taught in the ancient aphorisms and stories of Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Sufism, Zen, Buddhism, the Jewish prophets, Jesus, Paul, and the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Much of their teaching feels abstruse, naïve, or irrelevant to us today. With only rational, dualistic thought available to most of us, we are unable to decipher koans, proverbs, and parables. For example, the man coming at the last hour receives the same reward as the one who worked all day. This makes no sense at all to a dualistic mind or to anyone who rushes toward a quick judgment. So we reject the story and merely forget that Jesus said it.

We need contemplative practices to loosen our egoic attachment to certainty and retrain our minds to understand the wisdom of paradox.

Gateway to Silence:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. —Proverbs 3:5

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 107-108.

5. MEDITATION

https://youtu.be/Mr2LnZOkxRs?si=qged8_RVPs85eWMu

6. SHARING

7. INTENTIONS AND PRAYER

A Prayer for Patience

Patient Father, there are many things I do that would justify an impatient response. Thank you for choosing to show me grace. Help me notice when I have the opportunity to do the same to others. Remind me of your love for the person I’m interacting with and how my words reflect you. Give me the wisdom to have conversations with others about my frustrations, and help me grow in my ability to be patient, knowing I would want the same in return. Amen.