Weekday

THE PATIENCE OF GOD
From a treatise by St Cyprian 6
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Dearly Beloved in the Lord, when we speak of patience and when we preach on its benefits and advantages, what better way to begin than to point out the fact that now, just for you to listen to me, patience is necessary. For you could not hear and learn without patience. Only then is the word of God and the way of salvation effectively learned, if one listens with patience to what is being said. For nothing is more to be preferred to it in all the ways of heavenly discipline, when it comes to seeking the God-given rewards of our hope and faith. Patience is the virtue we should maintain in a special way and with extreme care, whether we find it beneficial to our life or to the attainment of glory. Either way, it befits us who strive to follow the Lord’s precepts with fear and devotion.

How wonderful and how great is the patience of God! He endures most patiently the profane temples, the earthly images and idolatrous rites that our ancestors set up in insult to His majesty and honor. He makes the day to rise and the sun to shine equally over the good and the evil. When He waters the earth with showers no one is excluded from His benefits, but He bestows His rains without distinction on the just and the unjust alike. His Patience has an unbroken equality toward the guilty and the innocent, the religious and the impious, the grateful and the ungrateful. On one and all alike, the seasons obey and the elements serve, the winds blow, fountains flow, harvests increase in abundance, the fruits of the vines ripen, trees are heavy with fruit, the groves become green, and the meadows burst into flower.

And although God is provoked by frequent, yes even continual, offenses, He tempers His anger and patiently waits for the day of retribution which He once foreordained. And although vengeance is in His power, He prefers to be longsuffering in His patience, that is, waiting steadfastly and delaying in His mercy so that, if it is at all possible, the long career of malice at some time may change, and we, however deeply we are infected with the contagion of error and crime, may be converted to God even at a late hour, as He Himself warns and says: I have no pleasure in the death of anyone. And again: Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, patient, and abounding in steadfast love, and repents of evil.

6
De Bono Patientiae, CCL IIIa, cc 1,4; pp. 118-119.