Patience in Adversity

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“But before all this happens, you will be seized and persecuted. You will be handed over to the synagogues and to imprisonment, and brought before kings and governors for the sake of my name. That will be your opportunity to bear witness.

“Make up your minds not to prepare your defense, because I myself shall give you an eloquence and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to resist or contradict.

“You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, relations, and friends, and some of you will be put to death. You will be hated universally on account of my name, but not a hair of your head will be lost. By your patience, you will win your souls” (Luke 21:12-19).

When Our Lord talks about the end times, He talks to us about patience.

He predicts the destruction of Jerusalem, which is going to come to pass some forty years later. His Second Coming will be in power and great glory.

In this particular passage, Our Lord warns His disciples of impending persecution. He exhorts His followers to persevere with patience, no matter what should happen: “By your endurance you will gain your lives and your souls” (Luke 21:19).

In the years that followed, the apostles meditated on Our Lord's warning. He told them. “A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you” (John 15:20).

Even the worst tribulation has a role to play in God's providence. One permits contradictions because they can be the cause of greater goods. The early Roman persecutions strengthened the primitive Church and deepened her supernatural spirit.

All this was to fulfill what Our Lord predicted. He said, “In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

Life presents us with all manner of problems and trials. Some are great, but some are also of little consequence. With the help of God's grace, the soul can be strengthened by every trial.

Certain contradictions can come from other people. There can be direct attacks, or veiled threats from people who don’t understand our calling, or there can be public opposition from a pagan culture, or from people who are declared enemies of the Church.

Other contradictions can have their origin in the limitations of our human nature. We might experience financial difficulties, or health problems, or grave family problems. At times we might become sick or exhausted or completely discouraged.

If we are to persevere in times of adversity, we need patience. We should be cheerful, no matter what happens, because we have our eyes fixed on Christ.

He has encouraged us to move forward, to live in His peace. Our confidence should be anchored in the fact that Christ has been triumphant.

St. Augustine says that “patience is the virtue that allows us to bear adversity with a serene spirit. … We should prize this serenity of soul, because it allows us to obtain greater goods.”

The Christian should learn how to endure physical and moral hardship without complaining.

Usually, we are presented with many different opportunities to practice this virtue in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life.

There was a kid who was being driven home from school by his mother, a Standard Two or Grade Two child. There was a traffic jam and the mother was getting a bit exasperated.

The Standard Two child pipes up and says, ‘Today, Mommy, we got a talk about patience. The teacher told us that we're in Standard Two; we can't expect to be in Standard Eight. We have to take one day at a time and we have to accept the contradictions of everyday life.’

And this and that, and the child rambled on for quite a few minutes, giving his mother a talk about patience— about this virtue that he had learned in class today.

The mother listened patiently. When he finished, she said, ‘I felt like turning the car around and going back to the school and paying more fees.’

Patience is a powerful virtue. The struggle to live this virtue can relate to very mundane things: a character defect that keeps resurfacing in ourselves or in others. Undertakings that don't go as we had planned. Unexpected changes in schedule. Bad manners of a colleague at work or on the road, People who mean well but don't understand. Traffic jams. Delays in public transportation. Too many phone calls. Forgetfulness. Queues.

All of these are occasions for us to grow in humility and to become more refined in our charity.

This virtue should not be understood just to mean passivity in the face of suffering. It is a dynamic virtue. We're called to bear well the contradictions of ordinary life.

It is not a matter of stoically accepting the blows of outrageous fortune and accepting our fate. Patience belongs to the virtue of fortitude. It's a character strength. Fortitude is the virtue whereby we face difficulties, put up with problems.

When we practice patience, we strive to accept pain and trial as something coming from the hand of God. Therefore, it is good.

St. Thomas Aquinas says, “We therefore seek to identify our will with the Will of God. The virtue of patience enables us to endure persecution of every kind. Patience should be the foundation of our hope and joy.”

There are many ways in which a Christian can practice this virtue. The first battleground can be in the area of our own behavior.

It is so easy to become disheartened by our defects. Patience with ourselves. Good wine improves with time. Sometimes we have to give ourselves time to grow in this virtue or get better at something else.

We need to exercise patience in our interior struggle based on our unshakable confidence in the love that God has for us.

We know He is beside us in our ups and in our downs, in our failures and in our successes, like little children. If we are trying to overcome a character defect, it won't happen overnight.

St. Francis de Sales says, “Our victory will ultimately be won by the cultivation of humility, of a trusting confidence in God, of greater docility.” St. Francis liked to remind people that we need to have patience with everyone, but first and foremost with ourselves.

Whenever we have contact with other people, we will encounter opportunities to exercise this virtue. This is certainly the case when we try to help people to receive spiritual formation or when we look after people who are sick.

We also have to exercise patience with regard to unexpected events that can happen to us or interfere with our plans: sickness, poverty, extreme heat or cold, the minor misfortunes of everyday existence, crossed telephone lines, traffic jams, or having forgotten something and left it at home, an unexpected visitor. All these little contradictions can cause us to lose our peace.

Yet this is where Our Lord is waiting for us, right there in the ups and downs of ordinary life. This is the raw material of our sanctity. It is where we have to try and struggle to sanctify ourselves and to sanctify others.

St. Paul tells us that “charity is patient” (1 Cor. 13:4). Our apostolate is a clear manifestation of charity.

We need to be patient with other souls—patience when we don’t see the fruits from the seeds that we may have sown in our children, in our friends, in our environment.

Fr. de Torre in the Philippines used to say that patience is a great social force. Often, we need to give the good seed time to grow. Sometimes that is a lot of time.

Our Lord wants us to sow His seed with a great peace of mind. We are sowing for the future, we are forming souls, we are building up great human beings.

We can remember that Our Lord has prepared the field beforehand. He has cultivated the earth. He has prepared the soil.

We can be mindful of the rhythm of the seasons. Sometimes, to plant a seed, we have got to wait for the right time and place, and that takes patience.

We should not give in to discouragement. Things do not change overnight. “Our hope should rest in the Lord” (Ps. 33:20). He is the one who gives the growth. He will make a tiny shoot grow into a fine ear of wheat.

Our Lord gives us many examples of how to practice this virtue. He was very well aware that the crowds did not grasp the full meaning of his teaching, “seeing they do not see and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand” (Matt. 13:13). “Too slow a wit, too dull of heart” (Luke 24:25).

But yet Our Lord manifests a tireless devotion to those same people. He travels the length and breadth of Palestine. He knows that someday, somehow, ‘all my words, all my efforts’ are going to yield abundant fruit.

This is a great example for every father and mother of a family who may think that all their effort and example is falling on deaf ears. The silent apostles are a good example in the home. It is never lost.

We see from the Gospel how the twelve apostles had their great limitations. Our Lord tells them on the eve of His Passion, “I have yet many things to say to you. But you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12).

Our Lord was very understanding towards His disciples. He makes allowances for their limitations. He goes the extra mile with them. He had patience with the defects and the less than perfect ways. He did not give up on them.

In the years to come, those same men would be the pillars of the Church. In our home, in our family, we are hopefully building pillars of the Church. Our home can be a seedbed of vocations, a domestic Church.

Patience and constancy are necessary for any work of spiritual formation, either aimed at ourselves or others. James Stenson, the educationalist in the States, says how parents have to repeat things 500 times for their children who only get the message on the 501st. That takes an awful lot of patience and constancy.

A patient person accepts the workings of God's providence and operates within that general framework. They see that maybe this thing was not meant to work out now; maybe this was not the fruit that God was expecting.

One time in the early development of Opus Dei, St. Josemaria with two or three other people made a journey overnight to a Spanish city called Villadolid to get in contact with some young people there.

They made a lot of phone calls. They contacted a lot of people. But nobody came to the spiritual activity that they were trying to organize, after all their efforts.

St. Josemaría said, ‘Look, we used all the human means. We came here. We’ve prayed. We’ve sown the seed. We haven’t lost out.’

They went back to Madrid happy and peaceful in spite of that there seemed to be no fruits. Today there is a bustling apostolic activity in that city.

We are building for the future. Patience is closely allied with the virtue of humility, to accept our own defects and also, the defects of others, which may be very glaring.

One writer says, “A Christian who practices the manly virtue of patience won’t become disconcerted by the fact that most people are indifferent to the things of God, and the fact that most people do not think about eternity. But the truth remains that many good people have deep longings to encounter God. Their inner desire could be compared to a wine cellar, in which locked away is a very good wine.” Many souls are like that.

“The farmer must accommodate himself to the seasons and the soil. Hasn’t the Master likened the Kingdom of God to a householder who went out to hire workers for his vineyard? (cf. Matt. 20:1-7)” (J. L. R. Sanchez de Alva, The Gospel of St John).

If truth were told, we would have to see that Our Lord has been incredibly patient with each one of us. We have to be sure to exercise that same virtue towards others in the apostolate.

St. Paul tells us, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13:7). If we live this virtue, we will be faithful. We will become holy and help others to be holy—all the people that may become entrusted to our care.

This virtue has a great power enclosed within it. If we are impatient with our own interior life, to return to Our Lord is often necessary.

“Be patient, therefore, brethren,” says St. James, “until the coming of the Lord. Behold, the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over us until it receives the early and the late rain” (James 5:7).

It is necessary for one to know, to hope, and to struggle with persevering patience. realizing that this is what pleases God very much. He precisely places us in those sorts of situations so that we practice that virtue.

St. Josemaría in Friends of God says, “Make more acts of hope. Let me remind you that in your interior life, you will suffer defeats, and you will have ups and downs—may God make them imperceptible—because no one is free from these misfortunes. But our all-powerful and merciful Lord has granted us the precise means with which to conquer…all we have to do is to use them, resolving to begin again and again in every moment whenever necessary” (Josemaría Escrivá, Friends of God, Point 219).

St. Thomas Aquinas says, “The heart of constancy lies in love: only with love can one be patient.”

“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who decided to settle his accounts with his servants. When the reckoning came, they brought him a man who owed 10,000 talents. He had no means of paying, so his master gave orders that he should be sold together with his wife and children and all his possessions to meet the debt. At this, the servant threw himself at the master's feet with the words, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay the whole sum’” (Matt. 18:23-26).

On our way towards Our Lord, many may be the defeats that we suffer; many of these will be of no consequence, but some will. But the atonement and contrition for those will bring us even closer to God.

The sorrow and reparation for our sins and shortcomings are not useless moods of gloom, because they are sorrow and tears born of love.

It is the heavy thought of not returning as much love as Our Lord merits; it is the sorrow of returning evil for good for one who loves us so much.

We can ask Our Lord for grace to see the opportunities that He gives us to be more patient, particularly in difficult moments.

None of our friends should ever be able to speak to Our Lord in the words of the paralytic. We’re told in the Furrow: “‘I do not have anyone to help me’ (John 5:7). This—unfortunately!—could be said by many who are spiritually sick and paralytic, who could be useful—and should be useful. Lord, may I never remain indifferent to souls” (Josemaría Escrivá, Furrow, Point 212).

Christ has converted everything that was previously death and turned shortcomings and errors into virtue. He is the fountain of those waters that give life to everything.

We can examine ourselves in our prayer and see if we're sufficiently concerned about those who accompany us on our journey through life; if we are concerned about their formation; or if, on the other hand, we have gotten used to their defects as something we've come to regard as incorrigible. Are we really patient towards them?

It can be good to recall that with mortification, we can also atone for the sins of others, and merit for them the grace of faith, of conversion, and of a greater dedication to God.

In Christ lies the remedy for all the evils of which humanity complains. In the Book of Ezekiel, we are told: “This water flows east down to the Arabah and to the sea; and flowing into the sea, it makes its waters wholesome. Wherever the river flows, all living creatures teeming in it will live. Fish will be very plentiful. Wherever the water goes, it brings health, and life teems wherever the river flows (Ezek. 47:8-9).

Christ converts everything into life. We can ask Our Lord for that grace to be patient in all the situations He places before us., patience with every aspect of our being.

“The Lord said to him, ‘Go your way, for this man is to me a vessel of election, to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and children of Israel, for I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake’” (Acts 9:15-16). Ananias, faced with Paul, had to be patient with the plans of God for how he was being used in a certain way.

This virtue is the virtue that helps us to accept, for love of God, generously and peacefully, everything that is displeasing to our nature, without allowing ourselves to be depressed by the sadness which easily comes over us when we meet with disagreeable things. We can be meeting with disagreeable things on a regular basis.

Our Lord was patient with the Pharisees. He was patient with the people of His village who did not recognize Him. He was patient with His accusers. He was patient with the man who slapped Him in the face. We should never think that God's delays are God's denials.

Sometimes He says yes, sometimes He says no, and sometimes He says, Wait. Maybe He has a better solution, or He has greater things planned for us up the way.

We can be patient with close and distant relatives, with the idiosyncrasies of the people that we live with who have ailments and pains and physical suffering; being subject day after day to the same work: small fastidious things, struggling in the little points.

It is not that we should do nothing about them. But we should not be discouraged or upset by them. We see continual examples of this virtue given by Our Lord. Patience is a sign of faith and of hope.

We could ask Our Lady, who was so patient with the plans of God, patient with St. Joseph, with the Magi, with the angels, with the shepherds, as little by little, she came to know those plans. Patience in Bethlehem and patience in Egypt: “remain there until I tell you” (Matt. 2:13).

Mary, may you help us to learn how to practice this virtue in ever greater ways all the time.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and lord, my Guardian Angel intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

UI