Patience, Docility, and Hope

In yesterday’s essay I suggested that Lent recalls our dignity by reminding us of our responsibility. We make ourselves good or evil through our actions, and while our actions are certainly conditioned by various social and historical factors, it is only the individual person who makes himself good or evil. Lent reintroduces us to ourselves as responsible agents, and is a season during which we can recover the dignity of recognizing who we have made ourselves to be.

Of course, while it is an unalloyed good to recognize our freedom and to honestly acknowledge how we have constituted our character, Lent is also a time of profound sorrow. After all, who of us has not distorted ourselves and our freedom in some way? Who has not defaced the image of God we all bear?

The symbolism of Lent is quite clear: forty days of examination, penance, and almsgiving to mirror the forty days of Jesus in the desert and the forty years of Israel’s wandering. (Not to mention forty days of rain for Noah, Moses’ forty days of fasting, Elijah’s forty-day journey, Jonah’s preaching in Nineveh, as well as episodes with Ezekiel, Goliath, and more.) In addition, there is the ordinary human wisdom of giving us sufficient time to come to terms with ourselves. Man is a giddy thing, full of self-deception, cowardice, confusion, and bias. We don’t see ourselves as we actually are—although it is quite easy to see the character of others, in part because we do not wish to know ourselves.

A quick scan lets us see surface faults, the obvious things. These might be quite bad, of course, but generally are symptoms rather than underlying causes of our distortion. The so-called capital vices, those vices that (alas) efficiently act as sources and nourishment for other defects, are often more resistant to our notice, for they hide out in the depths of our desires and false loves. Noticing them is not easy, but once we do so they are occasions of great sorrow—how have I become this sort of person? 

Naturally, the shock of recognition—of seeing distortion where health was expected, and the subsequent sorrow—can cause people to despair. Not only have I become this sort of person, but how would I ever stop being this sort of person? It seems impossible. But sorrow is not an occasion for despair—it is, rather, an opportunity for profound hope.

In his bull for the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope, Pope Francis notes the close relationship between patience and hope. Our own time, he suggests, lacks patience; it “has been put to flight by frenetic haste,” which also contributes to hopelessness. If we are impatient, we will be frustrated, perhaps even despairing at how difficult it is to reform our lives; if we are patient, we recognize that moral reform is the project of an entire life, an unceasing effort to habituate ourselves to the good. As he says, this requires “moments of greater intensity,” such as Lent, to “encourage and sustain hope”; but those moments of intense reflection do not suggest anything like an instant decision to change followed immediately by change. If we have taken years to distort ourselves, it will normally take years to reform. Repentance is the start—not the conclusion—of moral development.

I’m generally uncomfortable with the idea of self-forgiveness as an antidote to despair. If forgiveness is required it is generally because someone else needs to forgive the wrongdoer. The one who has done wrong, in addition to being forgiven, has the responsibility to make amends, to rectify things, and to amend and rectify his or her own character and disposition. Rather than self-forgiveness, I’d suggest patience with one’s own self as a better course. This will take not only forty days but forty years, and if one is to have hope in the path from distortion to integrity, immaturity to maturity, one must be patient. There’s no switch to flip; there’s just a long, perhaps painful, constancy.

Without patience, hope will dim. But we fallible beings are not inclined to patience, especially if we have sorrow at our distortion. When recognizing with sorrow and contrition their capital faults, persons desiring goodness do not tend to view those faults with patience. Perhaps they realize the great effort and constancy needed to overcome and amend them, but it is their very desire to become good—the very sorrow at their badness—that prompts a sense of urgency and haste that, given the slowness of reform, might lead to despair.

It’s important to remember that Lent is offered by the Church as a universally mandated liturgical season, as opposed to a generic suggestion that it would be good from time to time to do some self-examination. Most of us, I suspect, are not naturally eager to search out our faults, mortify ourselves, and give alms, and it is very wise that we are instructed to do so. In mandating the season of Lent, the Church asks us to be teachable. The verse before the Gospel of Ash Wednesday suggests as much, telling us to be docile: “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” Docility, though, admits the reality of authority; we are docile and teachable in the presence of authority. The Church teaches us to keep this particular season in specific ways (e.g., the days of fasting and the Friday prohibition on meat); the docile person not only performs the required actions, but does so from a disposition to be taught and corrected. Docility restrains our impatience. If we assume a kind of stoic independence, we examine ourselves as both judge and physician of our faults. 

However, if we do as wise authority teaches, in a disposition of receptive anticipation, we are decentering ourselves as judge and physician. This is because we are attempting to see ourselves as authority sees us, and attempting to cooperate with the healing offered by authority rather than what we suppose ourselves capable of mustering. This allows for, and requires, detachment and resignation about our own capacities, sagacity, honesty, and ability to change. When we assume that we are capable of change, and find ourselves either incapable (or perhaps capable only of proceeding at a glacial pace), we can despair. But when we do as we are told, by a tradition that knows us far better than we know ourselves, we detach from our own frustration and can patiently accept the counsel and healing offered to us. Authority asks for docility, docility allows for patience, and patience augments our hope.

So, it’s Lent, again, and that’s good news. We are asked to acknowledge our moral agency along with our responsibility for distorting ourselves—without shifting blame to any other—and then to repent, in patient docility, sustained by a hope that distortion can become integrity and our sorrows turn to joy.

Image by Dabarti and licensed via Adobe Stock.