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Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar suggests that impatience is at the root of all sin. He explains the central role of patience in the Christian life: God intended man to have all good, but in . . . God’s time; and therefore all disobedience, all sin, consists essentially in breaking out of time. Hence the restoration of order by the Son of God had to be the annulment of that premature snatching at knowledge, the beating down of the hand outstretched toward eternity, the repentant return from a false, swift transfer of eternity to a true, slow confinement in time. . . . Patience [is] the basic
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“I always felt like I was waiting for the gift. But I’ve come to see that the waiting is the gift.”
The singular mark of patience is not endurance or fortitude but hope. To be impatient . . . is to live without hope. Patience is grounded in the Resurrection. It is life oriented toward a future that is God’s doing, and its sign is longing, not so much to be released from the ills of the present, but in anticipation of the good to come.
“He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”3
imagine the communion table stretching on for miles, to remind us that when we take Communion, we mysteriously feast with all those who are in Christ.4
“We do not know the whole fact of Christ incarnate unless we know his church, and its life as part of his own life. . . . The Body is the fullness of Christ, and the history of the Church and the lives of the saints are acts in the biography of the Messiah.”
“You have to suffer as much from the church as for it. . . . The only thing that makes the church endurable is that somehow it is the body of Christ, and on this we are fed.”7
Those who were winning at life saw no need for this life-disrupting Savior. The people of God are the losers, misfits, and broken.
Lesslie Newbigin put it, “None of us can be made whole till we are made whole together.”9
Pleasure is our deep human response to an encounter with beauty and goodness. In these moments of pleasure—of delight, enjoyment, awe, and revelry—we respond to God impulsively with our very bodies: “Yes, we agree! Your creation is very good.”
Coffee was first invented by Ethiopian monks—the term cappuccino refers to the shade of brown used for the habits of the Capuchin monks of Italy. Coffee is born of extravagance, an extravagant God who formed an extravagant people, who formed a craft out of the pleasures of roasted beans and frothed milk.
“You don’t need to give anything up. Your whole life is Lent right now.” He told me to take up the practice of pleasure: to intentionally embrace enjoyment as a discipline.
The cry of “Encore!”—the demand for more and more and ever more—can turn a healthy pleasure into an addiction. We become insatiable. Our ability to enjoy something is diminished to the extent that it becomes a false god.
“The liturgy is the place where we wait for Jesus to show up. We don’t have to do much. The liturgy is not an act of will. It is not a series of activities designed to attain a spiritual or mental state.” In worship, we show up, we abide, and we rest. And as Galli says, “If we will dwell there, remain in place, wait patiently, Jesus will show up.”
Eugene Peterson says, “The Hebrew evening/morning sequence conditions us to the rhythms of grace. We go to sleep and God begins his work.”14
Each night when we yield to sleep, we practice letting go of our reliance on self-effort and abiding in the good grace of our Creator. Thus embracing sleep is not only a confession of our limits; it is also a joyful confession of God’s limitless care for us. For Christians, the act of ceasing and relaxing into sleep is an act of reliance on God.
