Providence in the Pandemic

“Why?” “What is the meaning of this pandemic?” “What is God saying to the world through Covid 19?” “Is this some sign, a special message?” A valid question with myriad answers in public and private discussions. The search for a global interpretation of this exceptional and tragic experience is more than understandable.

At the same time it may also be fruitful to ask the personal question: “What is the Lord saying to me in and through this experience?” Nothing happens by accident. Everything falls within what is permitted by the loving Providence of God. But divine Providence is not just God’s overall care for creation as a whole, but has to do with each one of us personally as beloved children of God in Christ (cf. Catechism 303). Perhaps it would be worth following Our Lady’s example by keeping and pondering in our hearts what is happening in these extraordinary times (cf. Lk 2:19. 51).

The Lord is probably saying different things to different people through the current situation. For many this experience is surely a providential opportunity to grow in patience, in small or great matters. “Will I be able to go back to work?”  “Will we be able to take a family holiday soon, or go to visit our relations overseas?” “When can I get back training with the team?” “What about our social life?” Often there is no clear answer just yet. No definite plan can be made. There is nothing for it, in many aspects of life, than to embrace the present fully… and with patience. For some, the pandemic is requiring a much deeper and essential level of patience, through being sick, caring for the sick, or being bereaved, or even dying.

Perhaps this lesson in patience is timely in a society where we are so focused on productivity, results, meeting our targets, and having immediate responses and access to information – “I want it yesterday!” We are being helped to simply be, in the here and now. We are rediscovering that we have our being from Another. We find that in reality we are not in control and, mercifully, that we do not need to be. Rather we can live truly free lives, abandoning ourselves to God’s love. As Benedict XVI put it: “We can fall, but in the end we fall into God’s hands, and God’s hands are good hands.”

Patience and Passion

The words “patience” and “passion” both come from the Latin words pati (“to suffer”) and passio (“suffering”). Patience is a form of the virtue of fortitude or moral strength. St Thomas Aquinas teaches that “a person is said to be patient because he acts in a praiseworthy manner by enduring things which hurt him here and now and is not unduly saddened by them”. For a Christian, living in a patient way is a free decision to share in the suffering-of-love of Jesus in his “Passion”. Being patient is thus a participation in Christ’s love for the world and a collaboration with him in the work of salvation.

Patience is always necessary. In his essay entitled “God’s patience”, Romano Guardini observes that “life without patience is impossible. For patience bears with the imperfect and uses restraint in dealing with the defective. Yes, he who created this existence made patience the condition of human life in this world”. The fact is that this world, for all its beauty and goodness, is not perfect and nor is any one of us. This is why Guardini says that “impatience is a protest against facts”. This imperfection of the world is perhaps more palpable these days due to the pandemic and its accompanying restrictions, and therefore the time is ripe for us to grow in the supremely Christ-like virtue of patience.

Patience and Holiness

Holiness consists in identification with Jesus Christ. Our Lord freely exercised patience in embracing the limitations of the human condition. “He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil 2:6-7). Moreover Jesus was patient in his daily life of work as a carpenter during the thirty years of his hidden life, and then in the intense effort of his public ministry. Jesus was patient in the face of rejection (cf. Jn 1:11), and supremely so in his Passion and death. With sovereign freedom and patience, Christ “bowed his head and gave up his spirit” only when his hour had fully come and when all was had been accomplished (Jn 19:30).

In The Way (no. 815), St Josemaría offers a concise recipe for holiness: “Do you really want to be a saint? Carry out the little duty of each moment: do what you ought and concentrate on what you are doing”. It sounds so simple, and yet we find that in practice, daily faithfulness to the ordinary bits and pieces, some of which are exciting and more of which are not, requires heroic patience.

It is sometimes said that the hardest thing about seeking holiness is putting up with ourselves! Indeed it does take patience to keep our hope alive when faced with our bad habits and dominant defects, and with temptations from outside or inside ourselves as well as the danger of tedium or weariness. There is an ancient Irish prayer from the oral tradition of Connaught, asking for the three theological virtues. It is a prayer of great wisdom surely born of the lived experience of seeking holiness:

“Dóchas, creideamh agus grá

bíodh go brách ‘na stiúir do m’chroí,

agus cuir leosan foighid, a Dhé,

ba chabhair thréan don triúr í”.

[Hope, faith and love,
may these always guide my heart,
and put along with these o God
patience, it will be a sturdy help for these three”.]

Suffering of whatever kind is a special school of patience. However it is not the suffering itself that forms the person’s holiness, but rather his or her attitude in its regard. A sentence found scratched by prisoners on a wall in the Tower of London reads: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear with adversity”.

The Power of Patience

Patience bears witness to Christ, since to embrace the limitations and sufferings of life with hope and serenity is ultimately a profession of faith in the love of God.

In his charming autobiography Adventures in Two Worlds, the doctor and novelist A.J. Cronin (1896-1981) recounts that during his university days he was sceptical of his Catholic faith: “When I thought of God, it was with a superior smile, indicative of biological scorn for such an outworn myth”. His attitude changed however as he came into close contact with the “patience” of his “patients”: “But when, as a qualified doctor, I went out into the world, to the mining valleys of South Wales and, in the practice of my profession, saw life at first hand, observed the courage and good humour of my follow creatures struggling under great hardships, for the first time I began to penetrate the world of the spirit. As I assisted at the miracle of birth, sat with the dying in the still hours of night, heard the faint inexorable beating of the dark wings of death, my outlook became less self-assured. Through the slow pangs of experience, new values were made apparent to me. I realised that the compass of existence held more than my textbooks had revealed, more than I had ever dreamed of: In short, I lost my superiority, and this, though I was not aware of it, is the first step towards finding God”.

Bernard Nathanson (1926-2011), who was once infamously known as a leading proponent of abortion and subsequently converted first to the cause of life and subsequently to the Catholic faith, also indicates the evangelizing power of patience in his autobiography The Hand of God. A significant step towards his religious awakening was the patient witness of pro-life people outside abortion clinics. He recounts: “Now, I had not been immune to the religious fervour of the pro-life movement. I had been aware in the early and mid-eighties that a great many of the Catholics and Protestants in the ranks had prayed for me, were praying for me, and I was not unmoved as time wore on. But it was not until I saw the spirit put to the test on those bitterly cold demonstration mornings, with pro-choicers hurling the most fulsome epithets at them, the police surrounding them, the media openly unsympathetic to their cause, the federal judiciary fining and jailing them, and municipal officials threatening them – all through it they sat smiling, quietly praying, singing, confident and righteous of their cause and ineradicably persuaded of their ultimate triumph – that I began seriously to question what indescribable Force generated them to this activity. Why, too, was I there? What had led me to this time and place? Was it the same Force that allowed them to sit serene and unafraid at the epicentre of legal, physical, ethical and moral chaos?”

Patience in Proclaiming Christ

Patience is not a go-slow. Nor is it stoic inertia. Rather, patience is to move at God’s pace. The patient suffering of Jesus, his slow steps towards Calvary, his trembling limbs and his faltering breath as he carried the Cross, were bringing about the most radical and wonderful revolution ever, the redemption of the world.

Patience means listening to God, moving forward with his rhythm, which is not slow or weary, but full of energy and enthusiasm for the Gospel. In 1928 St Josemaría found himself with the divine call to found Opus Dei, but bereft of people, money or influence to carry out such a mammoth task. He wisely discerned where the strength for the Work of God would come from. For this reason he asked the sick and dying in the hospitals of Madrid and the poor of the city’s slums to pray for his special intention. Those who were suffering, those who had “patience”, were those who could bring this work forward at God’s vibrant pace. The same is always true in the life of the Church.

Patience is a gift

We have seen that patience is a virtue. It is also a divine gift, one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit (cf. Catechism 1832). So while exercising our patience we can also ask for the grace to grow in it. John Cassian (360-435) relates that an old man in Alexandria was surrounded by the mob uttering insults against him for being a Christian. He stood in the middle, like a lamb, suffering in silence, with great peace of heart. They mocked him and gave him blows. Among other things, they shouted at him with scorn: ‘What miracles has Jesus Christ performed?’ He answered back: ‘One of his miracles is that suffering the injuries that you are doing to me, I feel no indignation or anger against you, no irritation or passion within me’”.

It is always time for patience, but perhaps especially and providentially at the moment. We need patience in order to love, in our daily work and in our apostolate. We need patience to move forward in building up the Church in us and around us. Patience is humble, serene, quiet and powerful. It is the presence of the Holy Spirit and a real proclamation of Christ. “In patience, it seems to me”, says Guardini, “we come, at last, to that lowliest thing of all upon which, nevertheless, all earthly life depends. He who is keenly aware of this truth has nothing more to lose, for has already relinquished everything. It lies deeper than all else. It is the very heart of the matter”.