As this new year unfolds, I’ve been thinking about the virtue of patience and the vice of impatience a lot. What brought this to the forefront of my thoughts was the passage from St. James during the Third Sunday of Advent last month.
“Be patient, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You too must be patient. Make your hearts firm, because the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another, that you may not be judged. (Jm 5:7-9).”
When my pastor, Msgr. Stephan Moloney, preached that Sunday last month, he said, “Waiting is difficult for us modern Americans. The slightest frustration of our plans can put us in a rage. Unexpected and unforeseen delays are like torture for us. By far, the most often-confessed sin I hear from adults is impatience. It is a virtual epidemic (Dec. 14, 2025).”
As I considered this through the holidays and into the New Year’s Day, I recalled some specific examples of people being impatient – the number of times I’ve seen people running red lights deliberately, driving dangerously fast and putting others in jeopardy by almost hitting them. Rudeness in various places came to mind also. And I mean really rude people. Those recollections led me to comment to myself, “Wow, that’s really gloomy.”
We all have our lists of sad stories like those – things we’ve all seen, things we’ve all been on the receiving end of, and on and on. So, I think I’ll skip further ruminations on the negative stories and focus on what we can do to help.
During that homily, Msgr. Moloney also cautioned against dwelling too much on the negative and wallowing in impatience: “If we find ordinary patience so difficult, how will we endure the storms of life and the things that shake our faith as we await the coming of the kingdom?”
St. Paul in his letter to the Romans summarized Jesus’ great commandment: “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law (Rom 13:10).”
Unhealthy impatience and its results are exactly what Jesus’ commandment is getting at. Endangering others and not being willing to take a little pause – giving in to rage over little things – and so many other things like those are the complete opposite of the way Jesus tells us to care for others, which is loving them like we love ourselves.
When we see those incidents of selfish impatience, we see examples of people unwilling to love others as they love themselves. There is a self-absorption at work that has nothing to do with loving others whom we encounter. In each of those kind of situations, we see that if those angry people had the gift of even a little patience, there would have been much more peace and harmony rather than negative feelings by those who could not calm themselves and negative feelings by those on the receiving ends of those injurious incidents, insults, and those whose safety are endangered on the streets and highways.
In 2018, during one of his homilies, Pope Francis said that impatience ignores proper limits. He urged that congregation that day to understand that patience means bearing our difficulties – bearing our crosses – and not forcing our difficulties onto others (Daily Mass, Casa Santa Marta, Feb. 12, 2018).
That means if I’m frustrated because of slow traffic, I’m not to take it out on others. If I’m in a hurry, I’m not to ignore safety rules. If something is wrong with what I ordered, I should ask for the error to be corrected pleasantly and with a smile. I have the right to expect an error to be corrected, but I don’t have the right to be uncharitable or even hateful about it.
In that same homily, Pope Francis said, “There are many limits in life, but impatience doesn’t want them, it ignores them because it doesn’t know how to dialogue with limits. There is some kind of fantasy of omnipotence … ”
Those words from the Holy Father remind us that patience means we need to recognize and accept that nothing is perfect and we are going to run into difficulties and delays. So, let’s commit ourselves to dealing with those frustrations with kindness and charity instead.
Jesus gives us another way by telling us that where two are more are gathered in His name, He is there with them. Think about that (Mt 18:15-20).
I’d like us to go forth into this new year with this in mind: Let’s try to make our everyday encounters with others into gatherings in Jesus’ name, encounters that invite Jesus to be among us so that our interactions with others are holy.
Let’s make patience the key to getting all of our encounters with others started the right way – the way of Jesus Christ. Let’s all start giving others the gift of acting with patience. Let’s also relax, take it easy, slow down a bit. Let’s make it easier to let Jesus into our hearts and minds – Him in us and us in Him. God is infinitely patient with us, especially when we sin and do wrong. Let’s return that favor to the Lord.
One of my prayers in this new year is that our acts of patience will be those little flames of hope that ignite the bright lights of charity and love, shining the path for others away from the seductions of evil and toward our infinitely loving and patient Lord.