I’ve always been somewhat enamored by the idea of “holy impatience,” a concept I was first introduced to when reading a biography of the same name about William Sloane Coffin—great prophet of civil rights, social justice and the social gospel. I suppose that the idea of holy impatience can be summed up in a quote by Martin Luther King Jr., who said that “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but rather through continuous struggle.” Essentially, holy impatience is what happens when our concept of the world as it is runs up against the world as it should be. It is the notion that God has equipped us, as disciples of Christ, to do the work of feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and welcoming the stranger—not just through acts of charity, but through our continuous advocacy for real social reform that pushes the world as it is just a little closer to the world as it should be. Holy impatience. Such an idea is certainly biblical—just look at Jesus turning over the tables in the temple. There are times when holy impatience is necessary, for we cannot stand by and do nothing in the face of immense suffering and injustice. There is work we are called to do. Christ has no body on earth now, but ours.
And yet, we must take care, for it is all too easy for our holy impatience to become less than holy, and more self-righteous and condescending. We get so caught up in our own notions of how things should be, that we start to become judgmental of everyone who may disagree with us, or even those who may agree in theory, but aren’t necessarily ready, for any number of reasons, to act in the radical ways we would prefer. And the bible is very clear about what happens when we judge others, right?
Furthermore, as I’m sure every one of us knows very well, our impatience—holy or otherwise-- is so often what can lead us to be unkind towards others. We become impatient with our spouses and our children, and we speak to them unkindly. We become impatient with our leaders, and we berate them publically, rather than seeking conversation and dialogue with them. We become impatient with those we disagree with, and we condemn them as immoral villains, rather than people who simply hold a different view about how to make the world better. On the clergy side of things, we become impatient with our congregations and we complain that if only they would let us do what we wanted, that progress could occur. Or we become impatient with our institutional church structures for being too rigid and incapable of the kind of radical change we believe is needed. But if there is anything that is not biblical in that long list of impatient sins, it is most definitely the latter few. For it was the apostle Paul who said in his letter to the Corinthians that we must “wait for one another.” For Paul, this was said in the context of holy communion, and it is the same for us. We share holy communion with one another every week (for some of us, every month), and in that holy act, we are saying that we are together as one body, that we will wait for one another and walk together with one another, even if sometimes that means that the impatient ones among us most slow down a bit so that we can take others with us. And developing the patience to do that—well that is holy, and it is most certainly kind.
And so on day eight of these 100 days of kindness, I pledge to be more patient with others—my husband, my fellow Christians, and perhaps most especially in this political climate—those with whom I disagree. I will be patient, as Psalm 27 says, and I will be strong and take heart, knowing that God is there in the waiting. God is there in the patient longing of our hearts for a better world. God is there in the space between the world as it is and the world as it should be. And perhaps, more than anything else, I can be kind to myself in my own efforts towards change, because it’s not up to me alone. It’s only up to me to love and serve others, and hopefully show them that there is a better way through kindness and compassion. In the meantime, I will wait for them. Let us all wait for one another in patience and in loving-kindness.
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