There is a dog I sometimes take for a walk
and turn loose in a
field,
when I can’t give her that freedom
I feel in debt.
I hope God thinks like that and
is keeping track of all
the bliss He
owes
me.
~Rabia of Basra (d. 801)
I am a heretic on the virtue of patience, particularly when it is confused, as it so often is, with endless self-sacrifice. This confusion has been handed down in the Christian tradition by the routine translation of the Greek hypomone as the passive concept of patience, which silently bears all manner of injury and inadequacy. But the Greek compound speaks much more to energetic persistence and steady work, inward in nature and always under (hypo) the canopy of God’s will though it may be. “In hope we were saved. But hope is not hope if its object is seen; why does one hope for what one sees? And hoping for what we cannot see means awaiting it with hypomone."
Kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery in her childhood, Rabia was not deluded by the romance of long-suffering. The fire of sustained passion and resistance she lit still burned 500 years later on the beloved Rumi’s pen. Urgency, when carried with clarity of thought and action, is what separates the living from the dead, and the work of liberation from the mire of complacency: “A chief evidence of the grace of God--which always comes to us in, with and through each other--is this power to struggle and to experience indignation. We should not make light of our power to rage against the dying of the light. It is the root of the power of love.” It is telling that all this talk of patience in the gospels and letters plays out in the midst of the most urgent narrative--the careening train headed for Calvary and the second coming, the faithful and the fearful hanging on to the boxcars for dear life.
Dear life. Because really what is impatience, if not God reclaiming that divine territory within us that we have been slowly, imperceptibly ceding to trivialities and the hazy “dream of separateness”?
Lately I have been insatiable. It is, by its nature, a comprehensive experience. I can’t possibly read enough, listen enough, write enough, touch enough, love enough, talk enough, move enough, breathe enough. Sleep is a quaint preoccupation or a spiraling dust cloud. The searing light of this energy has been casting long, cold shadows over necessary but uninspired tasks. There is something about waking to power that rouses this ravenous spirit in us, at once incoherent and single-minded.
The deal struck in this experiment of divine embodiment is that God needs space in us to rest, but more so to hunger. This is the primordial formula: we are six parts toil of creation, one part sabbath. This is the root of our blessed intemperance, tempered just enough by balm and the soft breeze of patience to renew its fire. Our work, whatever its materials may be--words, chords, calculations, revolution, love--is right to call us from slumber.
