Chair

Patience is the moral virtue that enables us to endure suffering, delays, difficulties and disappointments without losing peace, abandoning what is good, acting contrary to charity, or trusting in God. Our Catechism identifies patience as one of the Twelve Fruits of the Holy Spirit.

Impatience is a vice that can incline us toward sin, but simply feeling impatient is not necessarily a sin. What matters is how we respond. It can be hard to wait for another’s response at times (my weakness.) Sometimes waiting for an answer to a prayer can be hard.

We can be impatient waiting for food at a restaurant, waiting in traffic, in receiving numerous unwanted robo calls, in hoping a friend or relative will respond to a request, trying to help someone who is struggling with an illness or addiction, or finding an end to the senseless conflicts found in the world today.

As I was thinking about this in church one morning, I became fixated on the chair the celebrant sits on at the side of the Altar. As I thought about it, I realized that chairs provide a good reference point to ponder thinking of the virtue of patience. You see, a chair gives us comfort, allows rest, supports us when tired, and is a welcome oasis from fatigue.

I then thought about how Jesus teaches us to rest in His love. We are called to surrender our hopes, dreams, and challenges to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and wait patiently for His loving help. In doing so, we can find peace. He responds in His time, which we know is not necessarily our time. As said the Book of Ecclesiastes (3:1), “…There is an appointed time for everything and a time for every affair under heaven.”

When we rest in Jesus by surrendering all to His loving hands, we can then realize that there is nothing else we can have done that is more helpful for us, and can then rest in God’s loving embrace, which is so much more comforting and everlasting than a chair.

By: Deacon Tom Gryzbek