There is no patience without love

Commentary

The people we live with represent the opportunity to be patient and, at the same time, the risk of losing our patience. When we have patience, we create the space and time the other person needs, considered in his totality – defects included. When we replace it with anger, we close that space and time; we do not let them be anything else than what we want them to be. We will reach Heaven based on our patience, which results from charity. One must ask God for it. So many people often ask for it, yet nothing happens! Why? What are they doing wrong?

Perhaps they want to have patience as something independent from love. I insist on this possible error: attempting to have patience separated from the desire to love better the people with whom we live, the desire to love them more. This type of patience is repression, and it will embitter you in the end. It is love that is patient and does not get irritated. Suppose giving oneself and embracing one´s neighbor is alien to love. In that case, we fall into the danger of conceiving patience as repression of one´s own way of being, with no other purpose than to endure resignedly and impassively the tiresome defects that we think we see in our neighbor. Without love, which opens us to others – concrete and real people – patience as self-centered perfectionism can lead to repression full of aggressiveness, more or less contained, contempt, and eviction towards the other. In short: patience is a peculiar kindness and beauty of the gift and embrace that love is. Without love, what is present is anything else but patience. Even a certain arrogance of having to put up with, without them deserving it, “people less valuable and more bothersome than us”…