Fr Antonio Pineda
e see in the First Reading this Sunday that even at the very beginning of the Church there were disagreements among believers. The Greek-speaking believers complained about being treated as second-class Christians. This is an important point because it tells us that our faith in Christ doesn’t make us perfect right away, just as it didn’t make the first Christians perfect right away. Spiritual growth is a life-long process. The first Christians had to work through conflicts and selfish tendencies. So do we all.
Becoming a mature Christian is a life-long process, both for us as individuals and for us as a Christian community. If we persevere in this process, never giving up and never falling into what can be a dull routine, we will gradually but steadily grow in wisdom, courage, joy, and holiness. And that is what our hearts thirst for.
One key ingredient that will help us persevere is the virtue of patience. Patience is not a popular virtue in today’s culture. Today’s culture wants everything right away. Even we Christians are trained in this cultural impatience. We want life to be like a movie, in which world champions are made in only two hours. We want life to be like Amazon Prime, which delivers whatever we want overnight. We want life to be like high-speed internet, the instant availability of everything from updates from friends to the streaming of TV programmes.
But the spiritual life isn’t like that. Becoming a mature Christian, and becoming a mature Christian community, takes constant effort over time. That’s patience. God’s grace is like sunlight and rain, and our souls are like gardens. Patience is the gardener who goes out every day, rain or shine, to pull out the weeds, fertilise the soil, mend the fences, and prune the plants. How foolish that gardener would be to give up on his garden before the harvest season! To expect full-grown cherries just a week after the cherry tree blossoms! And how foolish we are when we give up on ourselves or on other people, saying that we can’t change, long before the autumn of life! Jesus never gives up on us, as he will prove once again by giving himself to us in the Mass this Sunday.
When he does, let’s ask him to teach our hearts the precious virtue of patience, patience with ourselves, and patience with others.