Patience with everything

Lent begins on Valentine’s Day as if this year is impatient to get under way. I’m sure there is still Christmas chocolate in my cupboard, but here we are, preparing for Easter already.

The dates for Lent and Easter have shifted each year with the lunar calendar since 325 when the Council of Nicaea determined Easter Sunday would be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. Early records suggest fasting was a significant Lenten practice, initially for new converts, then later as a church-wide habit. By committing to fasting and self-denial, the faithful developed and demonstrated their devotion.

What Lent now looks like varies enormously from church to church and congregation to congregation. Traditionally, Protestants have emphasized a voluntary, individual approach over prescribed collective fasting. John Calvin suggested that abstaining from food could prepare the individual privately for prayer and promote humility and gratitude, as well as discipline the body. Bodily hunger could become a signifier for our hunger for God, and fasting could become an exercise in control and patience.

It’s not the destination

We often think about patience as waiting for something specific. With Advent and Lent so close together this year, it might feel as if we are continually in count-down mode, with patience merely a trick to pass the time. But patience can be a practice in itself, disconnected from any desired destination. What if we could learn to be patient with our hearts as we are patient with small children? We walk slowly with children and don’t count the days until they are grown. We work to give them space and watch as they learn and grow. What if, as a mark of our faith, we could cultivate similar patience with our own hearts? What if we could make patient space for ourselves, trusting that God is at work in us as well as around us?

‘Love the questions’

In the first days of the last century, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke corresponded with Franz Xaver Kappus, an Austrian military cadet who was eager to learn to write poetry. In his letters, Rilke gently suggested how Kappus might learn to hold his urgency lightly.

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for answers. They cannot be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present, you need to live with the questions. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer some distant day.” 

The two men never met in person, but three years after Rilke’s death, Kappus published the letters in a slim volume titled Letters to a Young Poet. It is a book I return to, one that echoes when read slowly, so it might be a good book for a Lenten February. The cold days call for slowness. Ice sits long on the sidewalk and the gardens sleep. Springtime feels distant. We cannot rush these winter days, only practice patience.