“People are always impatient, but God is never in a hurry!” Nikos Kazantzakis wrote those words and they highlight an important truth. We need to be patient, infinitely patient, with God. We need to let things unfold in their proper time, God’s time.
Looking at religious history through the centuries, we cannot help but be struck by the fact that God seemingly takes his time in the face of our impatience. Our Scriptures are often a record of frustrated desire, of nonfulfillment, and of human impatience. It is more the exception when God intervenes directly and decisively to resolve a particular human tension. We are always longing for a messiah to take away our pain and to avenge oppression, but mostly those prayers seem to fall on deaf ears.
Thus, we see in Scripture the constant, painful cry: Come, Lord, come! Save us! How much longer must we wait? When, Lord, when?
We are forever impatient, but God refuses to be hurried. Why? Why is God, seemingly, so slow to act? Is God callous to our suffering? Why is God so patient, so slow-moving, when we are suffering so deeply? Why is God so excruciatingly slow to act in the face of human impatience?
There’s a line in Jewish apocrypha literature, which metaphorically helps answer this question: Every tear brings the Messiah closer! There is, it would seem, an intrinsic connection between frustration and the possibility of a messiah being born. Messiahs can only be born after a long period of human yearning. Why?
Human birth already sheds some light on that. Gestation cannot be hurried and there is an organic connection between the pain a mother experiences in childbirth and the delivery of a new life. That’s also true of Jesus’ birth. It presupposes a gestation process that cannot be rushed.
Tears, pain, and a long season of prayer are needed to create the conditions for the kind of pregnancy that births a messiah into our world. Why? Because a certain kind of love and life can be born only after a long-suffering patience has created the correct space, a virginal womb, within which the sublime can be born. The sublime is invariably predicated on a previous sublimation.
A couple of metaphors can help us understand this.
St. John of the Cross, in trying to explicate how a person can come to be inflamed with altruistic love, uses the image of a log bursting into flame in a fireplace. When a green log is placed in a fire, it doesn’t start to burn immediately. It first needs to dry out. Thus, for a long time, it just sizzles in the fire, its greenness and dampness slowly drying out. Only when it reaches kindling temperature can it ignite and burst into flame.
Speaking metaphorically, before a log can burst into flame, it needs to pass through a certain advent, a certain drying out, a period of frustration and yearning. So too, the dynamics of how a special kind of love is born in our lives. We can ignite into this kind of love only when we, separate, green, damp logs, have sizzled sufficiently in the fire of unfulfilled desire.
Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin offers a second metaphor: He speaks of something he calls “the raising of our psychic temperature.” In a chemistry laboratory you can place two elements in the same test tube and not get fusion. The elements remain separate, refusing to unite. It is only after they are heated to a higher temperature that they unite. We’re no different. Often, it’s only when our psychic temperature has been raised sufficiently that there’s fusion, that is, it’s only when unrequited longing has raised our soul’s temperature that we can move toward reconciliation and union.
In brief, sometimes we must be brought to a psychic fever through frustration and pain before we are willing to let go of our selfishness and let ourselves be drawn into community.
Father Thomas Halik once suggested that an atheist is simply another word for someone who doesn’t have enough patience with God. He’s right. God is never in a hurry, and for good reason. Messiahs can only be gestated inside a particular kind of womb, namely, one within which there’s enough patience and willingness to wait, so as to let things happen on God’s terms, not ours.
Every tear brings the Messiah closer. This isn’t an unfathomable mystery. Ideally, every frustration should make us more ready to love. Ideally, every tear should make us more ready to forgive. Ideally, every heartache should make us more ready to let go of some of our separateness. Ideally, every unfulfilled longing should lead us into a deeper and more sincere prayer. And ideally, all of our pained impatience for a consummation that forever eludes us should make us feverish enough to burst into love’s flame.
As another aphorism in Jewish apocrypha literature poetically states: It is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of the spirit is brought forth!
