My newsletter article for May....
Dear Beloved People of God,
Patience is a virtue the Simmons family has been trying to practice over the last few months. With the housing market being pretty slow, we’ve been waiting on our house in Kentucky to sell so we can purchase one here in Waukesha. In the meantime, we are living in a two-bedroom apartment which serves largely as a small set of walls to bounce off of for our two children. We trust that God will take care of us,and that all will happen in due time. We also remember that two-bedroom apartment is certainly better living space than what most of the world lives in. But still, we can’t help but ask, “When?” Brendan is even more persistent at asking this question. He wants to know when he will get back his bed and his toys and be able to jump around and play rough. We’ve all heard that patience is a virtue, but it is surely one of the hardest to develop, whether you are five or eighty-five.
But for Anglicans, patience is a cardinal virtue. We often talk about the Via Media (The Middle Way) as a pleasant theological construction describing the path between the protestant and catholic traditions that Anglicans took. For people like the poet and Anglican priest George Herbert (1593-1633), the middle way was an active choice that meant you stayed in communion with people who had wanted to burn you at the stake during the reign of the previous monarch. In a meditation about the floor-stones of his small country church, he wrote:
“MARK you the floore?
that square & speckled stone,
Which looks so firm and strong,
Is Patience:”
For Herbert and other Anglican poets and writers of his generation, patience was literally the basic building block of the church. Since then, the patience that slowed down religious persecution during the English Reformation has become the hallmark of Anglicanism. Sometimes, this has been detrimental, as in the reluctance to speak out against slavery. Martin Luther King, Jr., was especially exasperated with the Episcopal Church and our obsession with patience. In a speech in Montgomery, he said,
“For many years we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.”
King’s critique showed us that sometimes patience can be negative if it is used to maintain an oppressive status quo. This realization has modified our thinking as American Episcopalians. Patience is still a virtue, but is tempered with the understanding that no group should be allowed to suffer indefinitely in order to allow us to procrastinate about a difficult decision. Because of our traditional Anglican value of patience, we feel decisions should be made deliberately and with sufficient time for debate and counsel, but our newer appreciation of justice often piques our conscience and asks us, “are we delaying just for the sake of delay?” These two polarities play themselves out at every level of church politics, from the congregational to communion-wide.
So patience IS a virtue, as is justice. I’m not sure justice enters into the equation about when our house sells in Murray, but we will continue to hone our patience until such a time as the market as the market cooperates and the Lord blesses.
Yours in Christ,
David+
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