Active Patience

MAURICE KENNEDY

Jesus said, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled;" and Mrs. Eddy writes in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 1), "Desire is prayer." Those who have this whole-hearted, earnest desire, which is a hunger and a thirst for righteousness, are truly praying; and prayer is the way to demonstration and understanding.

Such seekers do well to watch lest they entertain impatience, thereby inviting discouragement. The alert student will seek and prize the sustaining quality of patience, in order that he may make steady and sustained progress in the understanding and demonstration of Christian Science. The quality of quiet, active patience lies at the root of true progress; and we find it a great help to the attainment of such patience to remember at all times that Truth is in reality as true now as it ever was or will be; that God's work is done; that He maintains His creation; and that what so-called material sense calls growth or progress is just the unfolding to consciousness of the divine idea, which exists, and has forever existed, at the point of perfection.

This confident laying hold, through trust and faith, of the great fact that all of God is everywhere and always present, enables us to live fully and gladly in the love and harmony of the present, and to welcome the unfoldment of infinite Truth as it dawns more fully day by day in our thought.

The consciousness that good is the present fact, that a complete revelation of good to us is as certain as the rising of to-morrow's sun, and that in the meantime, whatever the claims of so-called material sense, there is no real evil lurking anywhere—this consciousness destroys the fear, the strain and the stress produced by the false argument which constantly urges that we are not secure where we are; that we have not enough understanding; that we must attain to some ideal point of advancement, at which we can rest on past achievement and be safe: that we must hurry and push, for happiness is still round the corner and harmony and security are somewhere on ahead, and that discord and disaster are in hot pursuit.

This acknowledgment of ever present good shows us that we do not have to run away from discord or go anywhere to find harmony. It enables us happily and steadily, without haste or hurry, to work out our problems day by day, to do our daily best right where we are, towards working them out from the standpoint of God's ever-presence, omnipresence, and omnipotence. Such steady, trustful patience is active and practical, and achieves demonstration; and demonstration alone can prove the correctness of the understanding whereby we feel more and more assured that we are set upon the rock of Christ, Truth, and find ourselves better equipped to meet and to solve the so-called larger problems. It brings about, in short, a continuous unfolding of that dominion which has always been ours as the children of God.

On page 5 of "Unity of Good" our Leader urges us to "seek the divine Science of this question of Truth by following upward individual convictions, undisturbed by the frightened sense of any need of attempting to solve every Life-problem in a day." These words, so comforting and so lovingly mindful of our need, tend to steady and sustain our eager striving thought, and aid us to gain and keep that patience which is not just a passive waiting, but is active and alert, that patience which is also quiet, unhurried, and unfrightened—a mental progression inspired by the glad conviction that omnipotent Love is guiding us and working with us all the time, and all the way, wherever we may be.

The rich reward of such active patience is an ability to see more clearly and more surely, day by day, that evil is never anything but a false mental argument, and that fear is always about something unreal, for Love is All-in-all; an ability more and more gladly and confidently to heed the further loving injunction of our Learder on page 242 of Science and Health, "In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error,—self-will, self-justification, and self-love,—which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death."

"Thy will be done"! To know this as a glorious fact is to accept and possess all good. God's will is for man to have the fullness of Life, the comfort of Love, the power of Truth. God's will is done; and error has no power to hide His glory from my sight.—Walter Emmett Peck.

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