Issue 3: “Patient Trust”
"Poetry is a nightingale that sits in the darkness and sings."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
Our mission at the Matthew 25 Initiative is to equip and sustain Anglicans serving alongside the vulnerable. The work of justice and mercy is often difficult work. Holding beauty and naming pain and hope is what M25i does well. Walter Brueggeman writes, "A poem utters the unutterable and thinks the unthinkable." Join us in this new series, "For the Soul." Out of suffering often, comes the most powerful worship. In places of brokenness, we encounter Jesus.
"In him was life, and the life was the light."
John 1:4
Patient Trust
By Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Justice and mercy work in tedious and uphill, embodied in ordinary sacred tasks, bureaucracy, policies, institutions; facing obstacles that seem to proliferate:
companioning in long lines to get the voucher for neonatal classes
filling out paperwork for job applications, advocating for a man who has been discarded because of his past
waiting as the body's organs begin shutting down while offering last opportunities for forgiveness and peace
making 32 phone calls to help someone determine the best form to fill out from the immigration protocol
cutting out paper shapes while tutoring the kids who have no clear pathways out of poverty
making coffee in the methadone clinic
showing up for the mundane wrapping of food and moving of donated boxes
driving to find a home for a forcibly displaced pregnant mom and taking her pile of clothes to be laundered because there are no beds in the shelters
repeating and practicing English words with someone who needs skills for his new life in North America
canceling the hopeful to do list of the day to just sit with the tears that pour out from the bad news of a son's court hearing
Many of these end in joy and hope, but it is often a long road to get there.
