Learning patience

I was in Sagada with several mostly single friends this weekend, up in the highlands for a much-needed break. In between trekking rice terraces and climbing into caves and pondering the meaning of life, we discussed our prolonged singlehood. One of the guys, having girl-asked-him-to-wait issues, asked me, “What does patience mean to you?” I couldn’t answer right away, as I’ve never been a patient one myself.

He said that he once heard a priest say it meant “long suffering,” a definition I didn’t take well. I’ve had my own bout with patience, and yes, I had to suffer long. But towards the end of that challenging chapter, I felt the joy in it as well; I felt the part that had become service.

Apparently, though, what my friend said isn’t at all far from the truth. In the King James Version of the Holy Bible, patience is, indeed, written as longsuffering. In fact, in the original Greek, the word for patience, makrothumia, is from the word makro (long) and thumos (suffering).

The conversation I had with my friend reminded me of one of my favorite films, The Lake House. I remember writing about it here before, but in case you have forgotten or you haven’t seen the film yet, Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock play architect Alex Wyler and doctor Kate Forster, who meet through letters in the mailbox of a house by a lake, but live in different points in time.

After the trip, I looked up my piece on The Lake House, and, following one file after another, dug up one of my favorite essays on waiting, “The Sacrament of Waiting” by Fr. James Donelan, S.J. In the essay, he writes, “Waiting is a mystery—a natural sacrament of life. There is a meaning hidden in all the times we have to wait. It must be an important mystery because there is so much waiting in our lives.” He then goes on to enumerate the instances we have to wait: For a meal, for seasons, for adulthood, for maturity, for people. For love.

In his essay, Fr. Donelan has no answer for the question why we must wait. But he does say this: “All we know is that growth—the budding, the flowering of love needs patient waiting. We have to give each other time to grow. There is no way we can make someone else truly love us or we love them, except through time. So we give each other that mysterious gift of waiting—of being present without making demands or asking rewards. There is nothing harder to do than this. It tests the depth and sincerity of our love. But there is life in the gift we give.”

Then, he asks, “What do we lose when we refuse to wait? When we try to find short cuts through life, when we try to incubate love and rush blindly and foolishly into a commitment we are neither mature nor responsible enough to assume? We lose the hope of ever truly loving or being loved. Think of all the great love stories of history and literature. Isn’t it of their very essence that they are filled with the strange but common mystery—that waiting is part of the substance, the basic fabric—against which the story of that true love is written?”

I suppose The Lake House isn’t even among those great love stories of history and literature — I’ve a long catch-up list as far as great literature and great films are concerned, but that film did capture the beauty of patient waiting. For Alex and Kate to finally get together, Alex has to see Kate in four years. They both have to trust — and wait.

From that essay, I’ve picked up what I now consider my adopted meaning of patience: It is being present without making demands or asking rewards.

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