Patience is everything
bq. “There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come, but it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!” (Rilke, 3rd letter)
What Rilke says of the poet ought also to be true of the theologian: patience, rather than productivity, should be one’s distinguishing virtue. The theologians worthy of trust are those whose spirits have slowly ripened through prayer and common charity, whose words are forged in the fiery fusion of humility and confidence. Only with such an inner attentiveness is it possible to write genuine theology, not because my deepest self is the true source of all artistic work as Rilke would have it, but because it is only as I come to find myself in God that God himself really becomes fathomable to me.
24 October 2008 |
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Tags: Method
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[...] On the other hand, maybe what theology needs isn’t just patience but a bit more recklessness too. Maybe it’s patience—trying to take everyone everywhere into account, and to understand them in perfect accuracy—that has sometimes made theology such a dreary discipline, “right” perhaps but still totally uninteresting and easy to ignore. When theology is at its most patient or most cautious (attributes which don’t always have to go together but often seem to), it fails seriously to confront people in all our unfailing stupidity and cruelty. [...]