Dear God: On Patience and Unknowing

But this philosophy doesn’t jibe well in our overachieving, rushing, impatient American culture. The ones who succeed pack their schedule full of company board meetings, PTO meetings, triathlon-training meetings, how-to-build-your-own-teepee meetings, how-to-get-your-kid-to-wipe meetings. You get where I’m going meetings. Just kidding.

I have no doubt you have an easier time with other cultures, like the ones who enjoy siestas in the middle of the day. As much as I love to nap, I have too many things to do, people to save, wars to accidentally fuel by applying my codependent battle-stopping strategies. I’m a human being stuck in human-doing mode.

I guess I’m afraid, God, that once I stop producing, I will become a lazy, passive chick, no good for anything, that once I sit down, I won’t be able to get up again. As a person programmed with “all or nothing” thinking, I have difficulty with Nouwen’s notion of “living actively in the present,” meaning that I get to keep the perks of an active mind and body if I don’t attach to it all kinds of expectations. In other words, patience isn’t synonymous with “passivity.” On the contrary, patience requires hard work, discipline, and perseverance.

Living patiently is like writing simple sentences with active verbs. It’s a life exercise akin to the one I do with college students at the writing center of the Naval Academy once a week.

A student writes this: “I was sitting here while my friend was doing her nails, and then I was standing.”

Blah.

We circle the verbs “was sitting,” “was doing,” and “was standing.” We replace them with two active verbs, “stood up” and “observe,” so that our revised sentence reads this way: “I stood up to observe my friend’s purple nails.”

Now, granted, the purple nail polish would go against Navy uniform code anyway, but you get the idea.

Right now my sentence in life reads a little bit like this: “I stood up when she let me, if it was okay, near the bathroom to observe my friend’s purple nails if she didn’t mind, if she liked me, if it was okay to look, and if she wasn’t going to say something demeaning to me because I hadn’t even cut my nails in like five months.”

My verbs are active, but I have way too many clauses.

God, I’m thinking that you don’t want me to go all passive--to “was sitting,” “was doing,” and “was standing”--but instead be active in an empty space, to trash all the conditions.

To be patient, then, demands of us that we renounce our sense of control and knowledge--of the past, of the present, and of the future—and that we become like a curious child who imposes no judgment on the past and no expectation on the future. It means becoming a fool for You, God: relaxing my grip on the outcome, and bowing out of philosophical and theological debates about who You are and what You’re about. Being patient means to know that I don’t know, and to be okay with being ignorant before you, like John of the Cross writes:

Ignorance does not grasp what wisdom is; and in God’s sight those who think they have some wisdom are very ignorant. … Only those who set aside their own knowledge and walk in God’s service like unlearned children receive wisdom from God. . . . Accordingly, a man must advance to union with God’s wisdom by unknowing rather than by unknowing.