Vigils Reading

GOD’S LOVING PATIENCE

From “The Living God” by Fr Romano Guardini

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God is almighty and infinitely rich. His riches and His omnipotence are

His patience. How good it is that God’s patience is as great as His omnipotence!

That is why He is always able to forgive again, always able to give us a fresh

chance, always able to begin His work again from the chaos of human freedom.

Let us, however, come to the real point. We have been speaking about

“the” world, about men and women in general. But God’s patience is His

patience with me. And I am to some extent able to judge what that means. I can

judge because I know how difficult it is to be patient with myself…

Unless we delude ourselves, or have succeeded in reconciling ourselves to

our own paltry and petty world, we all know this kind of suffering even though it

may not have actually made us ill, and…where is the border line between health

and sickness? We all know the misery, the bitter sterility, when day after day

and year after year passes and things never change. One tries for so long to

overcome this situation but it refuses to yield. One appears to have overcome it

for a time perhaps and then it suddenly returns. And sometimes it seems as

though after wearing oneself out trying to overcome it, seven demons have

taken the place of the original one.

If God’s attitude to us is the same as our own attitude to ourselves, then

the outlook is black indeed. If God takes as poor a view of me as I do myself, if

God does not bear with my bungling, my dishonesty, my constant failures with

greater patience than I do myself, then I am bound to give up in despair. But

God is love. And in Him my nature is truer than in myself. In me it is corrupt; in

Him it is pure. In His most holy patience He holds in His love my nature which I

myself disfigure so terribly and squander so thoughtlessly. From this loving

patience He sees and bears me. He has infinite confidence in me. He believes

that I am capable of making progress.

We sometimes feel that we must get away from ourselves, that we must

escape from the old into the new and the real, that sometime or other there must

come what the Bible calls conversion, a decisive turning to God. But it does not

come, and meanwhile life wastes away. The older we get the faster it goes and

the more difficult we find it to believe that things can ever be any different.

Perhaps the greatest thing about God’s patience is the infinite possibilities of

love and grace which He holds open to life as it hardens in its cowardice and

runs on to its end.

Can you take this in? This unspeakable, impossible possibility of “hoping

against all hope” which, the more body and soul harden as life ebbs away, must

come exclusively from the mind and spirit, from the Holy Spirit of God? This is

the ultimate depth of God’s patience to which we can pray, that He may keep

open for us the possibility of spiritual renewal when all other possibilities have

ceased.