Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa / Courage, Control, Kairos Time, and Roasting S'mores as an Exercise in Patience / Patience Coda

You can't just chatter about patience. If patience moderates our sorrows, then it's ultimately a deeper spiritual virtue that can't be instrumentalized to feel better—it's more deeply connected to a joy and hope that recognizes to what and to whom we are in demand, to whom we're responsible, brings closer attention to the present moment, and acknowledges our limitations and lack of control. In this episode, Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa review and reflect on the six episodes that made up our series on patience: why it’s so hard, what’s good about it, and how we might cultivate it.

These six episodes explored patience in its theological, ethical, and psychological context, offering cultural and social diagnosis of our modern predicament with patience, defining the virtue in its divine and human contexts, and then considering the practical cultivation of patience as a way of life.

This series featured interviews with Andrew Root (Luther Seminary), Kathryn Tanner (Yale Divinity School), Paul Dafydd Jones (University of Virginia), Adam Eitel (Yale Divinity School), Sarah Schnitker (Baylor University), and Tish Harrison Warren (priest, author, and New York Times columnist).

Show Notes

• Moderating sorrows
• James 5:7: "Be patient therefore beloved until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts. For the coming of the Lord is near."
• The patient way to make a s'more
• An unexpected s'mores tutorial
• Kairos vs Chronos: often overdone, it applies when you're talking about patience.
• Time with kids at bed time is incommensurate with work productivity time; comparing the two is a category mistake.
• "One of the things that these conversations about patients had had started to clue me into was the importance of being attuned to the proper activity or thing for which this time is—a less uniform account of time that says for instance, you know, the bedtime routine with my children that time is for that. And so thinking of it as somehow commensurate with work productivity time would be a category mistake of a sort. It would be an unfaithfulness. And so that impatience derives from a lack of attentiveness to the temporal texture of our lives in really relation to God." (Ryan)
• There can be "patient hurry"
• Patience is like audio compression: it sets a threshold that is sensitive to the sorrow in our life and moderates or mitigates it.
• Episode summaries
• Patience Part 1, Andy Root: "To say that I'm busy is to indicate that I'm in demand."
• Feeling busy = feeling important
• Recognition
• Attending to the present, accepting a different form of "being in demand."
• Patience Part 2, Kathy Tanner: "There's no profit in waiting."
• Connecting economy to patience.
• "Something has to hold firm in order for you to take risks."
• Stability and the steadfast love of God.
• Patience Part 3, Paul Dafydd Jones: "The Psalms of lament and complaint can get, as we know, incredibly dark, incredibly bleak. One operation of divine patience could be that God gives ancient Israel the time and space to accuse God. God is patient with expressions of trauma, expressions of guilt, expressions of deep anguish. And God is so patient with them that they get included in the Canon. Like, some of the most powerful, skeptical, doubtful, angry moments are found in the Psalms. So God's letting be at this moment and letting happen includes within it God's honoring of grief and trauma, such that those moments become part of the scriptures."
• Psalms of complaint
• Psychologist Julie Exline on anger with God
• Anger with God is consistent with patience
• Patience Part 4, Adam Eitel: "Moderating sorrow is not to suppress it or develop an affected callousness or disenchanted, jaded relation to the things one really loves."
• It's hard to chatter about patience.
• Patience and joy
• Patience Part 5, Sarah Schnitker: Identify, Imagine, and Sync
• Normativity and a truer cognitive reappraisal of one's emotional state
• Patience Part 6, Tish Harrison Warren: "God intended man to have all good, but in his, God's, time and therefore all disobedience, all sin consists essentially in breaking out of time. Hence the restoration of order by the Son of God had to be the annulment of that premature snatching at knowledge, the beating down of the hand, outstretched toward eternity, the repentant return from a false, swift transfer of eternity to a true, slow confinement in time. Hence the importance of patience in the New Testament, which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity. More central, even the humility, the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism: the meekness of the Lamb which is led."
• Control and Meekness: Meekness is controlled strength

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Part 1 Show Notes: Andrew Root

• Doubling down and the temptation to make up for lost time
• Hartmut Rosa and Modernity as Acceleration
• Acceleration across three categories: technology, social change, and pace of life
• "Decay rate” is accelerating—we can sense that things get old and obsolete much faster (e.g., phones, computers)
• Riding the wave of accelerated social change
• "We’ve become enamored with gadgets and time-saving technologies."
• “Getting more actions within units of time"
• Multi-tasking
• Expectations and waiting as an attack on the self
• "Waiting feels like a moral failure."
• Give yourself a break; people are under a huge amount of guilt that they’re not using their time or curating the self they could have.
• "You’re screwing up my flow here, man."
• When I’m feeling the acceleration of time: “Get the bleep out of my way. My humanity is worn down through the acceleration."
• Busyness as an indicator of a good life
• “To say that I’m busy is to indicate that I’m in demand."
• "Stripping time of its sacred weight."
• Mid-life crises and the hollowness of time
• Patience is not just "go slower”
• Eric Fromm's "having mode" vs "being mode" of action
• Waiting doesn’t become the absence of something
• Pixar’s Soul, rushing to find purpose, failing to see the gift of connectedness to others
• Not all resonance is good (e.g., the raging resonance of Capitol rioters)
• How would the church offer truly good opportunities for resonance
• Bonhoeffer and the community of resonant reality
• Luther's theology of the cross—being with and being for—sharing in the moment
• Receiving the act of being with and being for
• Instrumentalization vs resonance
• Bearing with one another in weakness, pain, and suffering
• Encountering each other by putting down accelerated goals to be with and for the other
• Flow or resonance in one’s relationship to time
• Artists, mystics, and a correlation with psychological flow

Part 2 Show Notes: Kathryn Tanner

• Listen to Patience Part 1 on Time, Acceleration, and Waiting, with Andrew Root (July 24, 2021)
• What does patience have to do with money?
• Is time money?
• What is finance dominated capitalism?
• Viewing economy and our relationship to time through past, present, and future
• "Chained to the past”—debt is no longer designed to be paid off, and you can’t escape it
• “Urgent focus on the present”—emergencies, preoccupation, short-term outlook, and anxiety
• Workplace studies
• Poverty, Emergency, and a Lack of Resources (Time or Money)
• Lack of time and resources makes you fixated on the present
• A Christian sense of the urgency of the present
• Sufficient supply of God's grace
• The right way to focus on the present
• "Consideration of the present for all intents and purposes collapses into concern about the future."
• The future is already embedded and encased in the present value of things.
• Stock market and collapsing the present into future expectations
• Pulling the future into the present
• Gamestop and making the future present, and the present future
• Patience and elongating the present
• Fulsomeness, amplitude, expansiveness of God’s grace
• Race, savings, and dire circumstances
• Patience as a means to elongating the present
• Stability, volatility, and waiting
• “There’s no profit in waiting"
• God's steadfast love and commitment
• Kierkegaard's Works of Love
• Augustine’s unstable volatile world and the implication of investing only in God's love and stability
• "Something has to hold firm in order for you to take risks."

Part 3 Show Notes: Paul Dafydd Jones

• God's patience
• Apostle Peter: “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you.” (2 Peter 3)
• Tertullian and Cyprian
• "You need to think about who God is, and what God is doing before you think about who human beings are, and what we're called to become."
• Augustine: "God is patient, without any passion."
• Patience: Creation, providence, incarnation, Trinity
• Creatures are given time and space to "reward God's patience"
• This is not God getting out of the way; it's non-competitive between God and world.
• Colin Gunton: for the problem of evil, God's patience is a good place to start.
• "God's patience occurs at a pace that is rarely congenial to us ... the world's history is not unfolding at the pace or the shape we would like."
• "God gives ancient Israel the time and space to accuse.  God is patient with expressions of trauma, expressions of guilt, expressions of deep anguish. And God is so patient with them that they get included in the Canon."
• "Some of the most powerful, skeptical, doubtful, angry moments, are found in the psalms."
• "God patiently beholds the suffering of God's creatures, particularly with respect to ancient Israel, that somehow the traumas of creaturely life are present to God, and God in some sense has to bear or endure them."
• Beholding Suffering vs Enduring Suffering
• God's responsibility for the entirety of the cosmos: "There's no getting God off the hook for things that happen in God's universe."
• And yet God doesn't approve of everything that occurs.
• Confident expectancy: "Moving to meet the kingdom that is coming towards us."
• "God's patience empowers us to act."
• The patience of God incarnate; Christ is patience incarnate
• "Israel is waiting for a Messiah."
• We cannot understand Christ as savior of the world without understanding him as Messiah of ancient Israel.
• God's solidarity with us
• "The pursuit of salvation runs through togetherness with creation in the deepest possible sense."
• Letting Be vs Letting Happen
• "Jesus has to negotiate the quotidian."
• Crucifixion as the one moment of divine impatience with sin
• Theology of the cross as an imperative
• "Christians often are not comfortable with complexity. We want to think in terms of assurance. And we want that assurance to be comforting in a fairly quick-fire away. I think theologians have the task of exposing that as an ersatz hope and insisting that faith includes complexity. It involves lingering over ambiguity. Trying to fit together. multi-dimensional beliefs that are this lattice work—none of which can be reduced to a pithy, marketing quip."
• "Theologians need to be patient in order to honor the complexity of Christian faith. ... That's called intellectual responsibility."
• "Christianity is not going to cease to be weaponized by snake-oil salespeople."
• Staying with complexity and ambiguity
• "The capacity to tell the truth is in short supply."
• "Human beings are called to respond to God's patience. Human beings are called to make good on God's patience. The covenant of grace, which is fulfilled in Christ and which is animated by the spirit, makes that a possibility. It's not an easy possibility of real life. I mean, not just because of sin and finitude, but because of the complexities of the world that we live in. But learning how to respond to God's patience, both through forms of waiting, through forms of activity, and sometimes through moments of intemperate resistance is I think at the heart of Christian life."
• "People should not get in the way of human flourishing ... brought about by the empowering patience of the Holy Spirit. ... That's a gospel moment. That's a kairos moment."

Part 4 Show Notes: Adam Eitel

• The context for Thomas Aquinas and his friars
• "The friars are on the verge of being canceled."
• What is a virtue? "To have them is to have a kind of excellence and to be able to do excellent things."
• Where does patience fit in the virtues?
• Matter and Object
• The matter of a virtue is the thing it's about, and the matter of patience is sorrow.
• Sorrow can have right or wrong objects and can be excessive or deficient.
• Sorrow is elicited by evil, that is, the diminishment of good.
• Patience is a moderating virtue for the passions, similar to courage.
• Patience is connected to fortitude or courage in moderating our response to "the saddest things."
• "Patience moderates or constrains sorrow, so that it doesn't go beyond its proper limit. When we become too absorbed in trouble or woe, alot of other things start to go wrong. That's what Gregory the Great called patience the guardian of the virtues. .... deteriorate." (or to ... guardian of the virtues in that sense.")
• What does it feel like to be patient on this account?
• You can't experience patience without experiencing joy.
• "Joy is the antithesis of sorrow. Its remedy."
• Remedies: Take a bath, go to sleep, drink some wine, talk to a friend ... and at the top of the list is contemplation of God.
• Contemplation for Aquinas: prayer, chanting psalms, drawing one's mind to the presence of God.
• Experientia Dei—taste and see
• "This is scandalous to most virtue theorists ... but you can't have patience, or at least not much of it, without contemplation."
• "Moderating sorrow is not to suppress it or develop an affected callousness or disenchanted, jaded relation to the things one really loves."
• "Patience never means ignoring or turning away from the thing that's genuinely sorrowful."
• Diminishment of sorrow by nesting it among the many other goods.
• Modulate one's understanding of the thing that's sorrowful.
• The sorrow of losing a child
• You can only write about it from inside of it.
• What is it? "Beneath the agitation, some kind of low grade anger, is there some sorrow? What has been lost? What have I been wanting that is not here? What's beneath the anger? What is it?"
• What scripture anchors you? "Find that scripture that anchors you in patience, and let it become yours. Let God speak to you through it.

Part 5 Show Notes: Sarah Schnitker

• This episode was made possible in part by a grant from Blueprint 1543.
• Why study patience from a psychological perspective?
• Patience as notably absent
• Can we suffer well? Can we wait well?
• David Baily Harned: Has patience gone out of style since the industrial revolution (Patience: How We Wait Upon the World)
• Waiting as a form of suffering
• Daily hassles patience, interpersonal patience, and life hardships patience
• Measuring patience is easier than measuring love, joy, or gratitude, because it isn’t as socially valued in contemporary life
• How virtue channels toward different goals
• Patience can help you achieve your goals by helping you regulate emotion, allowing you to stay calm, making decisions, persist through difficulties
• Patience and the pursuit of justice
• Patience and assertiveness
• “If you’re a doormat, it’s not because you are patient, it’s because you lack assertiveness."
• Aristotelian "Golden Mean” thinking: neither recklessly pushing through or giving up and disengaging. Patience allows you to pursue the goal in an emotionally stable way
• Unity of the virtues: “We need a constellation of virtues for a person to really flourish in this world."
• Golden Mean, excess, deficiency, too much and too little
• Acedia and Me, Kathleen Norris on a forgotten vice
• Acedia in relationship: “Even in the pandemic… monotony…"
• The overlapping symptoms of acedia and depression
• Patience is negatively correlated with depression symptoms; people with more life-hardships patience is a strength that helps people cope with some types of depression
• Patience and gratitude buffer against ultimate struggles with existential meaning and suicide risk
• How do you become more patient?
• “It requires patience to become more patient."
• Three Step Process for becoming more patient: Identify, Imagine, and Sync
• Step 1: Identify your emotional state. Patience is not suppression; it begins with attention and noticing—identifying what’s going on.
• Step 2: Cognitive reappraisal: one of the most effective ways to regulate our emotions. Think about your own emotions from another person’s perspective, or in light of the bigger picture. Take each particular situation and reappraise it.
• Find benefits. Turn a curse into a blessing. Find opportunities.
• Step 3: Sync with your purpose. Create a narrative that supports the meaning of suffering. For many this is religious faith
• Reappraising cognitive reappraisal: How convinced do you have to be? You’d have to find something with “epistemic teeth”—is this something you can rationally endorse and know, and can you feel it?
• Combining patience and gratitude practices, allowing for multiple emotions at once, and reimagining and reappraising one's life within your understanding of purpose and meaning.
• Provide psychological distance to attenuate emotional response.
• The existential relevance of faith for patience; theological background of patience
• Patience and a life worth living
• Love, the unity of the virtues, and "the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation" (2 Peter 3)

Part 6 Show Notes: Tish Harrison Warren

• "Part of becoming more patient is noticing how impatient you are. ... It's so not-linear."
• Kids will slow you down and expose your impatience
• Patience often looks like other things—"it looks like contentment, it looks like trust, it looks like endurance."
• Patience and humility: "We are not the President of the United States. Things can go on without us."
• "Our entire life is lived in a posture of waiting."
• Waiting for the eschaton, the return of Christ, and things set right
• The illusion of control—James 4:13-14
• Has Urs Von Balthasar: "God intended man to have all good, but in his, God's, time and therefore all disobedience, all sin consists essentially in breaking out of time. Hence the restoration of order by the Son of God had to be the annulment of that premature snatching at knowledge, the beating down of the hand, outstretched toward eternity, the repentant return from a false, swift transfer of eternity to a true, slow confinement in time. Hence the importance of patience in the New Testament, which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity. More central, even the humility, the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism: the meekness of the Lamb which is led."
• "We are creatures in time."
• Robert Wilken: "singular mark of patience is hope"
• Activism and patience together
• "Patience can get a bad rap, that Christians are just wanting to become bovine."
• Patience but not quietism, a long wait but not gradualism
• The ultimate need to discern the moment
• Clarence Jordan and Martin Luther King Jr.
• The practices of discernment for individuals and communities
• Social media trains us to be impatient
• The meaning of urgent change is changing
• Internet advocacy and a connected world makes us less patient people
• "It takes real work to slow down and listen to another person's perspective, especially if you disagree with them."
• We often don't have the patience to even understand someone else.
• Real conversations with real people
• Silence, solitude
• "Having a body requires an enormous amount of patience."
• "My kids are so slow. They're the one's teaching me to be patient!"
• Little hardships of boredom and discomfort
• "Life with a body and life with real people inevitably involves patience."
• "Patience is something we learn our way out of through privilege and through being, you know, important adults."