Thought for the Day – 12 June – Meditations with Fr Richard Frederick Clarke SJ (1839-1900)
PATIENCE
Meditations for a Month
On Physical Impatience
- Physical impatience is that involuntary feeling of irritation which is aroused in us by some external and physical cause. We are looking for something and cannot find it. We are trying to focus our thoughts and some distracting noise renders it impossible. We are trying to compose ourselves to sleep and some troublesome neighbour wakes us just as slumber was creeping over us.
On account of all such impatience, we should humble ourselves, as being a sign of faults indulged in the past, not of present sin.
2. This sort of physical impatience, anticipating our reason, is very often the result of impatience, pride, self-will long indulged.
The ghost of past sins reappearing to remind us of what we have forgotten and, to keep us humble.
Not always, for St Teresa tells us that owing to ill-health and desolation, she had the greatest difficulty in remaining calm and gentle and in resisting the impulse to speak sharply and disagreeably.
But as a general rule, such physical impatience may be taken, at all events, while we are in good health, as a mark of pride not completely subdued and of self-will, which has not fully learned to submit.
3. How are we to be rid of physical impatience?
Chiefly by schooling ourselves to endure, by bearing willingly, even what we could avoid, by waiting for a long time, ere we knock again, if our first signal produces no effect, by checking the word of complaint or gesture indicative of our suffering. Such little efforts at self-mastery are very pleasing to God; they often cost us a good deal.
They may be concerned with trifles but the victory over ourselves is no trifle.
Learn then to seek to overcome the first movements of physical impatience.
AnaStpaul 