Really Patient?

March 13, 2018
Beloved:

            I was nearly a hundred pages getting there, but once one gets the hang of his writing voice, Brother Thomas à Kempis is a remarkably sensible read for a wannabe disciple of Jesus.  I don’t mind his partisan pronouns, as he was writing specifically for his cloistered brothers.  He could no more have imagined women reading his little notes than that they’d be for sale at amazon.com five-hundred-plus years later.  This morning’s passage, from Book Three, chapter 19, titled How to tell if you are really patient, says this:

                              "Perhaps to you your sufferings don’t seem to you so very little; 
      "If so, see whether it isn’t your unwillingness to suffer which is magnifying them to you."

And this:
                               "A man is not really patient when he is willing to suffer patiently
                      only as much as he thinks fit and only at the hands of those he chooses.
        If he is really patient, he won’t mind who makes him suffer . . . it is all the same to him.”  

            Brother Thomas might have read my own heart’s secret thoughts:  how I seethe and complain to do for some people yet glory to be asked by others . . . ; my sly hopes to be noticed as a saint while pretending to myself I’m not . . . .  I am the worst of all offenders and yet able to fool myself completely, so as to escape both the labor and reward of discipleship.


Between his handy quotes, Brother Thomas expounds upon our human, dogged commitment to our own good intentions.  Our faith in our own strength rarely wavers  despite our dismal record of success, at patience most of all.  We seem sure we can do what Jesus wants of us, no matter his great effort on our behalf.  The audacity of our pride cannot be overstated, I suppose . . . or, more truthfully, the depth of our fear, at the reality of our own helplessness.  Yet for that, Brother Thomas comes through again at chapter’s end with a simple sentence prayer:
   “Lord, let what seems improbable for me to do by nature become possible by your grace."

​            I pray the day finds you leaning into the grace of God.