Patience Is More Than Waiting

Helen Syski contemplates the roles of becoming and timing in the virtue of patience. 

“Oh!” Surprise was quickly replaced with clarity as I looked at the pamphlet with the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary.  

The Mysteries were all paired with a virtue: Agony in the Garden with contrition, the Scourging at the Pillar with purity, the Crowning with Thorns with moral courage … and the Carrying of the Cross with patience?! That one definitely took me by surprise.  

And yet, the truth of its fittingness rolled in quickly, along with a new respect for the virtue of patience. Patience was not just waiting; patience became active, purposeful, and full of strength. 

Patience as Becoming  

Romano Guardini defines holy patience well:  

Living patience is the whole man, standing in the tension between what he would like to have and what he has, between what he ought to accomplish and what he is able at any given time to do, between what he wishes to be and what he really is. Working out this tension, again and again gathering things together in relation to the possibilities of the moment: that is patience. So we might say that patience is man in the process of becoming, with a true understanding of himself. (Learning the Virtues that Lead you to God, p. 44). 

The virtue of patience requires that we gather our reality again and again to ourselves, rather than escape from it. It requires that that we hold both the good and the bad, the pleasurable and the uncomfortable. It is difficult because we are standing in tension between this world and the next, our present sufferings and our destiny in heaven.    

When we try to live patience as a lack, as incompletion, as the not-yet, we find ourselves exhausted. The tension between what we want to be and what we are draws and quarters us spiritually and physically. But when we frame that tension as becoming, this tension becomes the energy that holds a soldier at the ready in combat or a dancer performing. It is our soul poised to live for the Holy Spirit, ready to respond to His bidding, living out our calling from God and becoming who He made us to be. 

Patience as Timing  

We see it in our toddlers, frenetically nagging and trying to push past any attempt to make them wait. But are we really any more patient ourselves? We may be less obvious about it as we age, but that internal pressure is still felt. When we approach patience as inaction, that pressure builds to an internal explosion or implosion, depending on our personality and circumstances, and both are self-destructive!  

Matthew Kelly’s collection of Venerable Fulton Sheen quotes lends us a gem:

Patience is not an absence of action; rather it is ‘timing,’ it waits on the right time to act, for the right principles and in the right way. (The Wisdom of Fulton Sheen, p.7).  

When we see waiting as timing, it becomes consecrated to the Holy Spirit. Patience becomes poignant rather than insipid. It is preparatory, it is our soul strained to listen for His command, to enact His wisdom; it is active. It is acceptance of reality, of order, of “no,” that we may come to direct our reality as a purposeful yes to God. 

Added to the suffering we are used to contemplating in the Carrying of the Cross is Christ’s burning desire for Salvation to be fulfilled. How He must have yearned for the Resurrection, for freeing souls, for reappearing to His disciples, for their understanding and spreading His Good News! How His soul must have groaned as He staggered by each soul, knowing the grace was almost available to free them all! But in patience He toiled up Calvary, becoming that Salvation in the mysterious way of the Incarnation, leaving the timing in the hands of the Father. 

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Copyright 2025 Helen Syski
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