Choosing a name for a new arrival is hardly child’s play. It can stir passions and cause rifts. Gathered round the font, parents and others are happy to contemplate the infant and its own personal name. The passions and rifts are in the past.. Was it to have been a flower? A Bible name? A grandparent’s name? How about … Patience? Yes, how about Patience?
The problem about Patience is that we have to wonder why Patience is a name reserved for girls, never for boys? Is there a distinction between male and female virtues? Patience Strong (Winifred Emma May) might have had views on this.
Which makes this particular name intriguing. Here we have subliminal ideas being smuggled in without our being aware of it. The word ‘patience’ comes from the same stable as he word ‘passive’. A patient in hospital is on the receiving end. The word suggests a submissive role in life, a programme of obedience, acceptance, as opposed to mastery, which is the province of the male.
This is all very unfortunate. Patience is a word with weight. It belongs with faith, hope and love. It may not be the first thing we think about when we consider St Paul and his thorough-going determination, but it is a foremost virtue that we can expect to see in both men and women of Christian faith. Agreed, it is a virtue that does not come easily – to Paul and many others. Paul includes it in his lists of harvest virtues (Galatians 5.22). He sets it – together with other virtues – against unpleasant characteristics like selfish ambition and intrigue.
Someone once said of Archbishop Randall Davidson that he was the sort of person who would set up a commission to inquire whether it was the last trump or the last trump but one. Too much patience is as bad as too little. Patience is not equably contemplating the seizure of one country after another by a Nazi dictator. It is not making do with a leaky roof. It is more like waiting until the time is ripe before planting bulbs or dead-heading hydrangeas. It is more like doing the chores year after year to bring up children, as John Masefield’s vicar pointed out to the poacher Saul Kane in ‘The Everlasting Mercy’: ‘To get the whole world out of bed And washed and dressed and warmed and fed, Believe me, Saul, costs worlds of pain.’
Christian faith does not commit us to the remorseless execution of a plan. Nor does it require us to be frenzied and disorganised activists. It takes its time. It permits others to do the same. It allows love to break through. It gives the Holy Spirit space to manoeuvre. It is a delightful virtue, equally at home with a man or woman. Let’s have more of it.
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