Patients, Patience

I was surprised by the essential meaning of “patience”, not as waiting, but as suffering.  As we look at the “Fruits of the Holy Spirit”, those signs that we’ve got the virus, the Spirit of Love, the Godly Groove, we look now at patience.  

When my aortic aneurysm was found six months ago, I became a patient.  Everything changed.  My wonderfully long, deliciously hard bike rides up and down the bayside hills of our peninsula stopped dead, so I wouldn’t.  “I need you to be a slug”, my doc said.  My heavy woodworking, my pushups, my running on the treadmill because walking just didn’t kick out the endorphins . . . . I’ll tell you a secret.  It felt good to stop.  I missed it, but I felt good to be free of that compulsive drive, drive, drive.  The first step of being a patient was not so bad.  I began to write, to enjoy Kathy more, to watch and notice what was happening around me, because there was not as much me going on. 

Being a patient was starting out pretty good.  But being patient was not so easy.  I looked at the aneurism as something that called for quick action, for repair.  My doc referred me to a cardiologist, and she to a surgeon, and he to another surgeon for a second opinion.  But this consultation and referral process was tough, because it was so slow, like watching paint dry, or like watching a flower open.

Evelyn Coffey, the poet and mystic, the sweet, over-the-top appreciator of my woodworking who was our neighbor in Detroit, once stayed awake through the night to watch a gardenia open up.  Someone had given her the flower as a bud, and she had been moved to experience this.  Having slept through too many lectures and homilies, I’m afraid I would have fallen asleep.  But this experience of Evelyn’s haunts me.  When I watched the movie “The Bucket List”, I confess that this experience came to mind as something I’d want to do before I die. 

But the person who came to mind with regard to patience was Bruno, my friend the architect, my friend the passionate Italian, my friend the agnostic, my friend the compassionate human.  Bruno has a son who is in his 50s, who has lived with Bruno since his birth, through brain surgery that removed a tumor and left him with a child’s mind, needing a father for the rest of his life.  From time to time Bruno and I write or call, to see how each of us is handling life after jobs we loved.  A recognized architect who spent the first decade or two of his retirement transplanting his practice from Detroit to Santa Fe, Bruno now sees his life as his son’s dad.  He says of his days that Mark considers himself a recycler, and has real passion for it, real dedication.  So he drives him, lots of days, down the roads around Santa Fe.  He stops when Mark sees stuff on the side of the road; Mark gets out retrieving it, walks perhaps an eighth of a mile, picking up anything that he sees, and then comes back, loading the trunk.  Bruno says, “I’ve learned to bring a good book; I sit and wait for him.  We spend hours doing this.  This is my life now.”

Patients and those who are patient have something in common.  But I don’t think it is suffering, at least not in the Godly Groove, the Spirit; not if they’ve got the virus that Evelyn and Bruno have.  They find that there in that powerlessness there is magic that happens, there is something holy, there is mystery that unfolds like the petals of a flower, like the relationship of a father and a son.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.