As We Try the Patience of a Prince

I

I think I once read somewhere that patience - at least in human affairs - is inseparable from sensitivity to another's limitations. We may be tempted, and for reasons that seem altogether "legitimate," to drive someone else to move at a pace that may be wholly foreign to their nature. Or else inconsistent with their present level of energy or alertness (suppose, say, that they just got up). And so we hold back. We refrain from pressing them, or at least not too hard. We take care not to demand from them the "utmost" that we know them to be capable of (as if that were a thing one could know, or that could be measured and quantified). Above all, we don't blithely assume there are no limits to how far we can go with certain other people, or to what we can, or should, get out of them. 

But if this modest virtue is inseparable from any sound definition of patience, then surely no one has been more patient with me than God. No intelligent being has been more forebearing of my halting, snail's pace, hopefully not non-existent rate of spiritual progress these past 10 years: my dismal attempts at fasting and abstinence and mortification. And worst of all during this present season of Advent: one in which, I'm told, we do well to look forward, not just festively, but penitentially - and soberly - to a coming of the Prince of Peace very different from His first. 

But if He's been so all-but-absurdly patient with me, then how much more so, I wonder, with those who are far more "deserving" - or at very least, making far better use of the grace He extends to them. Let me consider, then, with utmost gravity how others' prayers are sustaining me well beyond any tiniest merit of my own. That they are no slight part of the patience of God, but are indeed its continous, overflowing channels and instruments. And not just to me, of course, but to the whole world. Speaking of which - one might contend - let's not forget our Father's arguably vastly greater patience with the "undeserving" world at large. And how often, on our side, that patience is ignored, taken for granted, despised.

II

And now let us approach the question from a rather different perspective. Let's suppose that some among us, in their wise human estimates, were to determine that such patience is in fact wasted on such an undeserving world. That we have much too kind a creator-God. That He is far too considerate of our slowness and frailty; far too delicate towards our unreadiness to be goaded on to the race's proper excellence and perfection; above all, that He's far too little confident and optimistic of our capacity to be driven/expedited/accelerated to that ever-imperative "next level."

In any case (as some more globally ambitious soul than I might argue), what a relief that the rulers of this present world are nothing like Him. Thank "God" that they're (1) either far less patient with our poor human clay, or else (2) are possessed of far greater faith in our power to transcend our human limits. Or could it be, beyond all this, that they've convinced themselves that this boundless faith (optimism?) in both our and their own limitless endurance is just what the Doctor ordered. I.e., it is precisely the sort of strength best able to prepare our world for the entrance of a species of god to whom I've alluded before: one whose paramount virtue - and all that he respects, apparently - is strength. And not just any strength, but in particular a kind most clearly expressed by what most of us would experience as exasperation, and harshness. And impatience. And all because he, and they, are vastly better judges of what we poor masses can handle, absorb, adapt to, than we ourselves could ever be.

You don't believe me? Why, look around you. Anywhere. Observe what a world of - not just strongmen (whatever that means) - but WAR LORDS we live in. All our Putins, Zelenskys, Erdogans, Netanyahus, Sinwars, Macrons, Starmers, etc, who - whatever the merits or justice of their original position/grievance/crusade - insist on pressing either their own populations, or else some carefully chosen proxy-nation, ever deeper into the labyrinth of war. As if their own peoples and closest allies had, or were supposed to have, a limitless tolerance for military conflict. And not just for the hardships and uncertainties of war, but for its volatilities, atrocities, traumas, horrors. To say nothing of runaway debt, rampant inflation, and an ongoing, razor's-edge proximity to the prospect of thermonuclear annihilation.

III

But why not? one may ask. After all, as Lady Gaga and others of comparable wisdom have attested, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

And yes, I'm aware that the normal human being can be a creature of extraordinary, maybe even superhuman resilience. And in the face, it may be argued, of every kind and degree of discouragement, degradation, atrocity, horror. Including those of war, together with its zealously uncompromising war lords.

But now imagine for a moment a creature so at once primally and extendedly helpless as the human. One so radically unknowing and trusting, so utterly dependent upon environment, care, cultivation, dare we say nurturance? And now further imagine that one of such exquisite fragility and complexity can only be improved, as it were, by being brutally simplified and "streamlined". Imagine that it isn't just hardened and annealed, but actually made stronger, and even wiser, by trauma: by being bathed, from its youngest age, in all manner of shock and terror and horror; by being submerged, in short, in everything most destructive of what most of us would call innocence. 

To argue such a point isn't merely to trust in the social usefulness of cruelty: it is to raise most forms of cruelty into a sort of supreme and transcendent kindness. And yes, within the terms of its logic it does make a certain sense. A fundamentally hostile universe, we might presume, is one in which only the most reciprocally hostile intelligent species has much chance at survival. And what better way of withstanding and overcoming the world's cruelty than by learning and studying how to be cruel to one's own self, and to one's own kind? Especially when you consider that the testing is bound to come sooner or later. Better to start now and control the process, then to encounter it down the road and be unprepared. After all, assuming there's no horror that, regardless of one's age, any human worthy of survival can not just survive, but fully rebound from and even be strengthened by, it might well be asked: Can temptation, can testing ever start too early? And on a larger scale - and in the teeth of a radically adversarial universe - can any species ever be too hardened, too callused, too deadened: in a word, too strong?

And yet there remains, I believe, something even the strongest among us fears. On the most elementary level, my best guess is that his worst nightmare is the reaching of the limits of his own strength. Or worse yet, discovering beyond any shadow of doubt the insufficiency of that strength. Or maybe even its hollowness, and emptiness. After all, isn't the whole point and reward of being strong - and of progressively enlarging and extending one's strength? - that one doesn't need to acknowledge limits of any kind? And so might it be argued that the ultimate discouragement, and disappointment, is the discovery that there is any human limit that's insurmountable?

IV

Shall I tell you, then, what I suspect our Great Global World  today is most afraid of?

What that world  most fears is the real nature of everything we are, and the real nature of everything we do. It is terrified that either of these things should be revealed in their true predicament - i.e., their real nakedness and poverty, and helplessness before God, and apart from God. Because then that Great World itself would also be revealed both in all its appalling uselessness (that most damnable of all modern sins) and in all its desperate, unassuageable need for God. 

And of course, what is true of the World is indelibly true of each one of us, from the least to the very greatest. Even among the World's most obdurately, prosperously wicked "great and good," there abides this need. I will go further than this. Even in the most evil of people, in the most (self-)imprisoned souls, and at back of the wickedest acts, there is a kind of transparency of need and lack, of simplicity, of orphanedness and homesickness, whenever these souls are brought into relation with God. And, of course, whenever God is brought into the heart of them.

My point is that we humans are creatures of need - creatures of whom need is our very essence - LONG before we are either creators possessing rights, or producers having duties. Upon this simple truth  - that we depend, and that we receive, long before we can either do or plan or arrange, create or produce - upon this hangs everything that makes us distinctly human, and that makes distinct the human things we do. In other words, in our human needfulness for God is contained:

1) everything that distinguishes us from both angels and animals (who do not "need" or "depend on" their Maker in anything like the way we do); 

2) the entire quality and validity of all our works, whether paid or unpaid. 

Not everything about our works, of course. Not everything that's proud and shallow, or cruel and empty. But rather, whatever in them is deep: whatever is storied and layered and rich, whatever is humble, whatever is kind and loving and true. Both in all that we humans create and, yes (if you can imagine it), in all that we produce.

At the same time, if that's not something most apt to strike terror in the heart of our Great Global World, I don't know what is.

Indeed, if I may venture to say so, I think it does well to be afraid. Because surely, if there's anything less equipped to prepare this World for the return of a Prince of Peace - whether to make good use of His long-suffering patience, or to endure His yet more long-suffering justice - it is the mere human "strength," the productivity, the all-sufficiency we've been laboring to acquire these past 30 years?