Sunday, December 24, 2006
Opinion
Give me patience, right now
Recently, a woman in Rock Hill, S.C., had her 12-year-old son arrested by the police. His crime? He opened a Christmas present early...
By Mark Douglas
Recently, a woman in Rock Hill, S.C., had her 12-year-old son arrested by the police. His crime? He opened a Christmas present early. He was arrested for impatience.
That a 12-year-old should be impatient isn’t surprising. The practices of delayed gratification are hard lessons to learn even without involving the police. Of course, actually calling the police on your 12-year-old is its own form of impatience: At wits’ end over what to do with her unruly son, the Rock Hill mother pursued a course of action that seems to be driven by a desire to resolve all his disobedience at once.
But it’s hard to damn her in isolation when the culture that surrounds her is, itself, so disinclined toward patience:
The businessmen who listen to the news on the car radio as they speed through school zones with a soda in one hand and BlackBerry in the other, on the way to jobs with companies that send all their mail via overnight delivery in order to compete in a lightning-paced global economy, thereby ensuring the kind of market-share necessary to secure their fiscal future: faster travel, faster food, faster communications, faster money and faster advancement—all in an attempt to make fast their future.
The environmentalists (who are rapidly replacing wild-eyed, corner-standing, sandwich-board wearers as the culture’s chief doomsayers) who continually make claims about what’s going to happen to sea levels tomorrow if we don’t immediately control carbon emissions. And on the other side are all those who don’t reduce, reuse or recycle because it’s inconvenient to walk those few extra steps to the recycle bin, drive a few miles less or believe scientific study after scientific study on the causes and impact of greenhouse gases.
Those who crash-diet, fad-diet and liposuction their way to the appearance of health because an actual healthy lifestyle takes too big a chunk out of the day.
The religious types who favor faith healers, rapture artists, preachers of prosperity or heretics promising us our best life now (I’m sorry—wasn’t that what Satan tempted Jesus with in the wilderness?) because the slow, hard work of transformation and the demands of discipleship just take too much time.
And we think the actions of a frazzled South Carolinian are over the top? We’re a culture of over-the-top responses, and such responses—whether they involve calling the cops on your kid, administering shock and awe rather than doing the hard, boring and admittedly uncertain work of torquing up diplomatic pressure as you allow weapons inspectors to continue their task, or damning a country to chaos and its citizens to fear, death and exile—are all expressions of the refusal to wait.
It’s not that our impatience is necessarily unreasonable. There are real needs, concerns and threats that accompany us through life and are likely to call for fairly immediate response. Sometimes, we must admit, patience isn’t a virtue so much as an avoidance of responsibility.
But how will we learn at which times to respond and which times to wait if we never create the time necessary to learn the subtle processes of discernment that helps us make such distinctions? Patience is a precondition (necessary though insufficient) for developing the kind of wisdom that can help us distinguish between (and deal with) the things we can prevent, the things we can mitigate, the things we must endure and the things that will kill us. And since a disproportionate amount of what happens to us individually and collectively falls in that third category (and eventually we’ll all come into contact with something in that fourth category), it makes sense to practice at patience now.
Christians—at least in principle—have been practicing at waiting now for a month of Sundays (not to mention 2,000 years); Jews have been practicing at waiting even longer. And Jews and Christians are pikers compared to the faithful of many Eastern religions. They haven’t just been waiting, mind you—anyone can do that, given a decent length of heavy rope and a chair to tie them in—they’ve been practicing waiting. They’ve been trying to get better at patience in order to accrue the benefits that follow. And at least until the day after this paper officially hits the racks, kids all over the United States—excluding a certain 12-year-old in South Carolina—have been waiting as well. Maybe we can learn something from them?
There’s much more to say in this column (although I’d really love to be done with it). But I just can’t begin a new section this far into the current piece. I guess we’ll have to wait until next week.
SPMark Douglas is an ethicist at the Columbia Theological Seminary.