Month: June 2025

Patience

Dialling ourselves down to the pace of God is hard. It would, perhaps, be harder still if God didn’t himself hold all the cards. When it comes to prayer, or matters of seeking justice, or applying hope, we don’t choose to wait. We would rather we didn’t wait. But waiting is thrust upon us.

God is a wait-er. Adding weight to this is the understanding that God is himself somehow a superposition of Three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If one is Three, one of the Three might wish the other two would hurry up. Or one might want to hurry because of the sufferings of one of the other two. But no: the Three are perfect in patience as in all else and they are agree together so much that really they are One.

So what we call patience is actually learning to move with the pace and perspective of God. We pray and wait. We struggle and wait. We grow restive and… still wait. Our dinghy, blown by the wind of God, isn’t sailing very fast. But we set our sail and carry on at the pace supplied by the breeze, eyes on the destination.

The danger with all this waiting is that your love grows dulled or your hope withers. So we have to keep our eyes on the prize,renewing the reasons for hope, even while we contine to wait. But there’s more.

Paul E Miller in his excellent little book A Praying Life points out that waiting periods are not just the dead zones between things actually happening, but the realm of love: he writes, ‘the waiting that is the essence of faith provides the context for relationship.’ It is the place for trust, intimacy, thanksgiving and holding each other’s hands. It is the place where things come to their full flowering, or their heavy crop of fruit.

Waiting is also quiet. Those who wait are not put on stages, not admired for their achievements. To wait is to be obscure, to be chipped away at, to be refined and seasoned and mellowed and reshaped.

So it’s a gift. Like others of God’s gifts (singleness, endurance for example) it may not be what we would initially want. But it has the consequence, other things being equal, of making us what God wants, God-fashioned. Which is plenty worth it.

Creating beauty when ugly is all around

The restoration of Notre Dame cathedral, which opened in December 2024 after the fire in 2019, involved 2000 craftspeople, 250 companies and around US$900m.

Rebuilding the destroyed roof (which was nicknamed, The Forest) and was made of oak, involved a national call for oak trees. Many needed to be perfectly straight, 20m long and 50cm in diameter. A thousand trees were ultimately selected and harvested.

Then they needed 1300 cubic metres of limestone; and using ancient crafts, the structure was rebuilt (some restoration continues even after the cathedral was opened). As large projects go, it was a great success.

A reporter from the New York Times wrote:

“Each day we have 20 difficulties,” Philippe Jost, who headed the restoration task force, told me. “But it’s different when you work on a building that has a soul. Beauty makes everything easier.”

I can’t recall ever visiting a building site that seemed calmer, despite the pressure to finish on time, or one filled with quite the same quiet air of joy and certitude. When I quizzed one worker about what the job meant to her, she struggled to find words, then started to weep.

(quoted by Diana Butler Bass in her substack.)

Despite being a secular country, France rightly took pride in the restoration of this iconic building, the spritual heart of Paris. It may have contributed to winds of fresh interest blowing through Catholicism. Last Easter day (2025) 10,000 adult Catholics were baptised in France, twice the number of 2023 and the highest number since records began to be taken 20 years ago. Seven thousand teenagers were baptized, ten times the number in 2019.1.

‘Beauty makes everything easier’: fascinating.

Bouncing in the kitchen

One of my favourite passages in the whole Bible is the meeting between Mary, the mother-to-be of Jesus and Elizabeth in some unnamed Judean village (Luke 1:39-56). Mary (single, teenage, pregnant and claiming God did it) was presumably in hot water and it is perhaps no wonder that she went ‘in haste’ to her relative in the hill country.

And so we have two women, or a woman and a girl, hugging, laughing, crying, bouncing around inside Elizabeth’s house.

In AD1, according to the all-knowing artificial intelligence, there were the following empires:

  • The Roman Empire
  • The Han dynasty in China
  • The Parthian Empire, rival to Rome
  • The Kingdom of Aksum (East Africa)
  • Maurya and Stavahana Dynasties (Deccan region of India)

All proud empires and in the case of the Romans under Augustus and the Han, in something of a golden age. But the bouncing women in the kitchen, and the children growing inside them, would surpass and uproot them all.

And the women knew.

I think prayer is like that. That even now, amid children and shopping and figuring out what’s for dinner, people in prayer are receiving promises that will re-landscape the world. The proud will be humbled, the mighty brought down, while the humble are treated, by God, like royalty. Prayer is the ultimate slow activity, lowly, hidden. Receiving and bearing promises from God is lonely. That was why the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth was so happy: two people weighed down with God’s promises each met and recognized a sister in the believing and in its burden. Their acts of prayer and faith were acts of lowly love that rocked the world and outlived its empires.