Through patience understood

PETER J. HENNIKER-HEATON

Patience is on St. Paul's short list of Christian virtues.^{See Rom. 5:3, 4;} Few would question its place there; but to some it may seem a negative quality, little better than stoic endurance. Perhaps this view is suggested by an older word for it, longsuffering. ^{See Gal. 5:22;} Actually, patience is positive, vital, often instant in action.

Surely, for instance, the father in Jesus' parable of the prodigal must have had to exercise a vital, active patience. His beloved younger son had left him; rumors may have reached him of the boy's dissipation, then of his poverty and hunger; yet the father maintained his love and expectation. So when the boy at last returned home, the father recognized him in the distance in spite of his changed appearance and ran to meet him with a welcome that wiped out the separation as though it had never been. Nothing passive or negative here.

In 1955, near the close of his earthly experience, Albert Einstein wrote a letter of comfort to a family recently bereaved. In it he said: "For us believing physicists, the separation between past, present and future has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one."^{Letter to the family of Michelangelo Besso, quoted in The New York Times, March 29, 1972;} Christian Science, going further than the physical sciences, recognizes as a present possibility the progressive dispelling of this tenacious illusion. In no area is patience more useful than in helping free us from this illusion and the varied limitations it would impose on us.

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