For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa / Courage, Control, Kairos Time, and Roasting S'mores as an Exercise in Patience / Patience Coda

Episode Summary

You can't just chatter about patience. If patience moderates our sorrows, then it's ultimately a deeper spiritual virtue that can't be instrumentalized to feel better—it's more deeply connected to a joy and hope that recognizes to what and to whom we are in demand, to whom we're responsible, brings closer attention to the present moment, and acknowledges our limitations and lack of control. In this episode, Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa review and reflect on the six episodes that made up our series on patience: why it’s so hard, what’s good about it, and how we might cultivate it. These six episodes explored patience in its theological, ethical, and psychological context, offering cultural and social diagnosis of our modern predicament with patience, defining the virtue in its divine and human contexts, and then considering the practical cultivation of patience as a way of life. This series featured interviews with Andrew Root (Luther Seminary), Kathryn Tanner (Yale Divinity School), Paul Dafydd Jones (University of Virginia), Adam Eitel (Yale Divinity School), Sarah Schnitker (Baylor University), and Tish Harrison Warren (priest, author, and New York Times columnist).

Episode Notes

You can't just chatter about patience. If patience moderates our sorrows, then it's ultimately a deeper spiritual virtue that can't be instrumentalized to feel better—it's more deeply connected to a joy and hope that recognizes to what and to whom we are in demand, to whom we're responsible, brings closer attention to the present moment, and acknowledges our limitations and lack of control. In this episode, Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa review and reflect on the six episodes that made up our series on patience: why it’s so hard, what’s good about it, and how we might cultivate it.

These six episodes explored patience in its theological, ethical, and psychological context, offering cultural and social diagnosis of our modern predicament with patience, defining the virtue in its divine and human contexts, and then considering the practical cultivation of patience as a way of life.

This series featured interviews with Andrew Root (Luther Seminary), Kathryn Tanner (Yale Divinity School), Paul Dafydd Jones (University of Virginia), Adam Eitel (Yale Divinity School), Sarah Schnitker (Baylor University), and Tish Harrison Warren (priest, author, and New York Times columnist).

Show Notes

Production Notes

Part 1 Show Notes: Andrew Root

Part 2 Show Notes: Kathryn Tanner

Part 3 Show Notes: Paul Dafydd Jones

Part 4 Show Notes: Adam Eitel

Part 5 Show Notes: Sarah Schnitker

Part 6 Show Notes: Tish Harrison Warren

Episode Transcription

Evan Rosa: For the life of the world is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: One of the things that these conversations about patience had started to clue me into was the importance of being attuned to the proper activity or thing for which this time is. The bedtime routine with my children, that time, thinking of it as somehow commensurate with work productivity time, would be a categorical mistake of a sort. It would be an unfaithfulness. And so that, that impatience derives from a lack of attentiveness to the temporal texture of our lives in relation to God. It makes it hard to chat about patience. It, for me, at least stands as it, as an important chastening. This is not a kind of puzzle really kicked around. It is certainly not a kind of tool to be acquired and employed for the sake of one's own purposes. There's something far deeper and graver. And because of that more closely connected to joy.

Evan Rosa: This is for the For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living the life worthy of our humanity.

I'm Evan Rosa, with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And I'm Ryan McAnnally-Linz with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. 

Evan Rosa: Thanks everybody for listening to: For the Life of the World. Today, Ryan and I are going to be wrapping up and doing some summary reflection about the series on patience that Ryan and I have produced over the last six weeks. And for those of you listeners who have been with us the whole way through, thanks for joining us in that process. I know from both of our perspectives, Ryan, it was just a really wonderful experience of tapping into a kind of long and overarching narrative around a virtue that is maybe inherently long and overarching.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It seems fitting that we took a lot of time on this 

Evan Rosa: Yeah we spent plenty of time with this. That series has now come to a close. What are some of your first thoughts and reflections about what it's meant to you and some of the things that have stood out. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: As maybe you might expect, I feel like I've gathered a lot of questions along the way.

In addition to any answers that I may have found and like personal questions, you know, Adam Eitel's emphasis on "patience" as "responding to sorrow," that kind of refocused for me and honestly it opens up a bit of a, a question for self-reflection. Like, okay, if maybe in my day-to-day life, like I happen right now, aside from, you know, the long, long dragged out pandemic experience, not to be dealing with intense sorrow. I'm tending to be thinking mostly about impatience and patience in that day-to-day ordinary grind sort of stuff and the context of academic life. But boy, that made me ask, "Am I really just trying to build like a veneer of patience?" Like where are the deep wells, you know, is this maybe something more central and more profound than I actually had thought when I got started?

Evan Rosa: The fascinating thing about Adam's point there too, is that when you consider it a kind of virtue ethical framework, where for a given virtue and the accompanying biases that go with that virtue, the domain that they are a part of the context that it's for. You don't normally don't think about these things, but here's one of those cases where it actually is just imminently practical to, to help reframe what we would normally think of as patience correcting busyness or hurry or tapping your foot in a line and realizing no, there's a kind of diagnosis. It's more psychological than that when you place it in this different context, that the domain of patience is actually one of mitigating or moderating our sorrows. Now that I also found that deeply impactful. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And here's the thought that it sparked for me, and I've been wondering if, that if, the drives to hurry and the kind of the productivity drumbeat side of impatience couldn't be an important respect also, a manifestation of sorrow? 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Here the big, the big thought is, oh, maybe this is just, maybe there's an aching sorrow over mortality and the kind of chronic time-bound character of mortal human existence that has as one of its many little fruits, the sense that I'm always running out of time. And that wasting it is it's irrecoverable, irredeemable. It's always frittering away. So I have to, I just have to like master it. It provokes that kind of control-oriented stance that we talked about with Tish Warren. 

Evan Rosa: Those control moments really resonate with me because, well, I think I am in my own way, I'm acquainted with sorrows and like a form of mild depression at times. I recognize in me the immediate habit, which I would describe as a habit of impatience. To simply control what I can and find the smaller things of life that are easier to fix, that are achievable goals or the kind of fixable problems that you normally encounter. Which is to say, not that those things are bad. In fact, they can get the ball rolling for me, often. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah get a little momentum built up so...

Evan Rosa: And furthermore, I think, you know, there's this related advice of, you know, acedia or acedia that Sarah Schnitker brought up in her episode that does come along with a form of spiritual sorrow or depression. And that is often the antidote. You simply go through the motions until those motions, a kind of snowball effect. But Adam's point about joyful contemplation and kind of moving in that direction does speak to me in so far as, to make progress in patience beyond merely the quick fixes or fixing all the small things in life is reframes and puts my attention on what real patience must involve inevitably, is saying yes to the struggle to receive it and acknowledge the fact that it is a spiritual virtue that needs to be cultivated with the kind of contemplation and prayer and meditation that, that he was talking about.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. Yeah. Those kinds of little habits of doing what one can and focusing in on that, like all due respect to that can be good and important, but where I feel the risk of that in my life is as a covering over the deeper, bigger stuff. They mask our fundamental existential kind of lack of control and can wind up being a way of telling ourselves the story that I think a lot of, well, I was going to say modern, but I don't know, I think also noble Roman sort of self-stories is very stoic, sort of thing to say, that one is in the end master of one's own destiny, captain of one's own ship, all of that sort of stuff. There are things you can do in your regular everyday life that doesn't change the big, deep thing of the kind of given-ness of your existence. And to the extent that elicits a sort of sorrow, I do think there is a kind of deeper patience, a way of suffering one's finite fallen createdness, with attention to God as the one who not only has given that createdness as good, but also is Redeemer who lives and who sustains us and who draws us to everlasting life.

Evan Rosa: So patience as courage, I know that you brought up at that mark you, and that was really convincing. And I would say that's precisely what is needed there to move beyond the more just trivial or ordinary or elemental things of life and actually address the deep sorrow or the deep injustice, you have to just construe patience as courage. And I felt called to courage in that sense. And then in the book of James does quite a bit with this and the "established your heart," passage from James 5, kind of connected with me. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Would you read that? It's not coming to mind immediately. 

Evan Rosa: So the passage is James 5, it's verse 7: "Be patient therefore beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crops in the earth being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient, strengthen your hearts for the coming of the Lord is near." And that's that kind of, that, that message of strengthening or establishing one's heart, I think other translations have it, is that, that call to something deeper, that call to moderate your sorrow. And there's something on the path to joy there, that is, that is meaningful to me personally. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: But it's not, it doesn't ignore the legitimate reasons, the good reasons for sorrow.

Evan Rosa: More recently telling me about this experience you had around the campfire.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. To pull it back to the, to where my thinking usually is. So I was around a campfire in a friend's backyard and it came time, I don't know how it came time, but it came time to make smores and somebody had brought... 

Evan Rosa: As it always does. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: As it always ought to, honestly, someone had brought, you know, especially designed smores sticks/skewers for this, right? Um, I usually use like an unwound coat hanger and somebody had brought the massive marshmallows or what, like two, two and a half inch diameter and a good two and a half or three inches long. And so my friend Tyler called over a marshmallow, got it onto his skewer, and I watched honestly in just complete awe as Tyler sat by the fire, his marshmallow perched on his hand... the skewer. And he rotated it at a constant rate, never stopping, never moving it up or down with respect to the fire. Just a constant rate that as though he were like the rotisserie machine at the grocery store, carefully attending to how it looked with each revolution. Waiting and waiting. And he roasted this marshmallow for, I kid you not four or five times, as long as I have ever roasted a marshmallow in my life. 

Evan Rosa: And my family, there's a lot of burning happening. We're at 30 seconds on the tops.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, uh how fast can you get the marshmallow done, ideally without scorching it? But if you've got a scorch it, you do right? But he did this. When at long last, it was this perfectly uniformed golden brown on every single side, he took it off, he got some of the chocolate, he carefully opened the marshmallow and slid the chocolate inside, so that the chocolate would melt inside the melty, marshmallow. 

Evan Rosa: Wow this tutorial is.. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I know you did not realize podcast listeners, that you would get a smores tutorial in this little coda on patience. Put it between the Graham crackers and it was done. And this whole time having been working on this series on patience, I was sitting there having a surprisingly spiritual experience. It struck me that, that Tyler kind of understood that the kind of human participation in generating created goods, requires an understanding of the time that it takes and a devotion to that time. There, there was no foot tapping going on. I find myself always running ahead to the enjoyment of the smore and wind up with a lesser smore as a result. And this might be overstretching it, but I grew up in a church background that made a lot of the Kairos Kronos distinction. These two types of time.

Evan Rosa: Why don't you rehearse it here, just in case others have not grown up in such an environment?

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Roughly done, it's something along these lines: kronos is like clock time, tick tock, tick tock. There it goes. And kairos names, the kind of the, the fullness of a time for a thing, it being the opportune moment. So, so for Michael Jordan, the closing seconds of a playoff basketball game is a Kairos moment for a great shot. There is a clock there's chronic time going on there, but on a different plane. Michael Jordan, Damian Lillard, these folks have that kind of, they're tapped into a different kind of time. 

Evan Rosa: The same kind of time that my dad probably was referring to when there's four seconds left in the game and you just keep saying, there's plenty of time. There's plenty of time. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: There we go. And so there's Kronos and Kairos. And so, so when it, you know, it will say something like "in the fullness of time, God sent his son," that's a kind of Kairos kind of time. And. I was thinking about this in observing my friend Tyler, because it seemed to me that on a kind of purely chronic account of things, there's not much to be said for spending a lot of time on that smores. The question of opportunity cost is all consuming, because it's always, you know, what's the most advantageous thing that could be done with this time. Time is always slipping away. And I found myself saying they may be one of the things that these conversations about patience had started to clue me into was the importance of being attuned to the proper activity or thing for which this time is a less uniform account of time that says, for instance, you know, the bedtime routine with my children, that time is for that. And so thinking of it as somehow, like commensurate with work productivity time would be a categorical mistake of a sort. It would be an unfaithfulness. And so that, that impatience derives from a lack of attentiveness to the temporal texture of our lives in relation to God.

Evan Rosa: I think this is observable for any parent during the bedtime routine. And hipsters might want to say like the slowness with which you brew coffee or driving the slow lane intentionally, or just taking a deep breath at the line in the supermarket or whatever. I think constantly being on the lookout for those passages of time, that create opportunity. That's an element of what's going on in patience here and is representative in the marshmallow-smores story, but I think it's one of those ways where it's constantly being mindful of that. Constantly being drawn into that and being given a different way of seeing the ordinary elements of life. A different way of seeing things that we would normally rush through. Stopping down and slowing down and paying attention does cultivate patience, but really like insofar as patience is a part of a larger whole good lives, it's this really wonderful, inviting way of thinking about it. And so it absolutely connects with me. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So none of that is to valorize slowness as such, right? Because there are times there are moments that are for swift action. And I think it's good to be released to realize that there can be "patient- hurry," but an attentiveness to a rhythm that's not a lockstep beat, so it's not the consistent thump, but more the kind of rhythm that you get over the course of a classical symphony, where passages will slow down and speed up. And it's a matter of being, a-tuned and in-step to that, rather than saying just slow the whole thing down. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah, that's interesting. One of my thoughts about what patience does as a moderating virtue, and this is where I'm going to get real geeky audio nerd, a little bit, so some people this might be over your heads. So, sorry about that. But you also get to learn a little bit about what a compressor does in audio and, but what a compressor often does is it, you set a threshold and there are different types of compression, but you set a threshold. And every time the audio signal peaks above that threshold, the compressor kicks in and what it does, is it just moderates or mitigates the sound signal that's coming through. And basically, like what cultivating patience can be, an audio engineer is appropriately setting the threshold for how much sorrow rightfully belongs in our life. How much urgency rightfully belongs in our life? And then you really just need to adjust the compression to be sensitive enough. And that's like a lot about what a kind of virtue ethical approach is any way, as a context-sensitivity to moderate our passions and moderate, in this case, our sorrows and allow for, allow for some additional production, so to speak, to overlay on those signals and attenuate them and, and bring them back down so that it sounds nice in a life that goes well.

Well, what we agreed to do is go through each episode and do some processing. There were definitely amazing moments, more than we could cover in just a wrap up episode for each individual episode. Listeners go back, listen to them. But what Ryan and I have done is we've highlighted a few things that you can follow along, even in the show notes from each of these.

So if you'd like to see all of those show notes from the episodes in this series, you can find them in the show notes for this very episode. And we're just going to roll through some of those, some of the quotes, some of the points that our guests made that seemed to be particularly interesting. And we're going to start with Andy Root of Luther Seminary.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: All right. So, so I wanted to pick out this one quote from when Andy said that struck me as really, really insightful about one of the many perverse ways that we relate to time and busy-ness in certain social contexts these days. And he said, "To say that I'm busy, is to indicate that I'm in demand."

Andy Root: We talked to each other, like, especially in academia and you're like, "Hey, how are you?" You're like," I'm good. I'm busy. I'm good." And they both communicate something like, they'd be like, "Yeah, I'm doing good, but I'm busy." And in some sense that is correlated with the goodness of my life is going good 'cause I'm busy. And in a lot of fields, but you know, particularly in academia, The response of, yeah, things are good. I have really nothing to do and I have so much space and I'm just, I'm really not in demand. No one is really asking me to present papers or no editors have asked me to write a chapter for a book - that can communicate that something's wrong in a lot of fields, but I think particularly in academia, that to say that I'm busy is to communicate that I'm in demand, that that, that I'm reaching out into the world, that people want my performance of the self in some ways. That I'm performing well, because I'm busy, and because I'm in demand, I have some people looking at me or aware that I'm performing this. So busy-ness becomes, like you're saying a measure of the good life.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So I like, I get fewer emails than a lot of the people I know that most of the people I work with and that should be, I should take that as a good thing. I don't actually know anybody who's like," You know what? I get so many emails as a great thing for my life." But I would be lying if I didn't say every once in a while, I have a twinge of self-worth anxiety, right? Like why is everybody else getting more emails than me? Like why aren't there a bunch of people asking for my time today? And I think Andy puts his finger on that, that there's a kind of time gets bound up with our, with our like status and recognition, competition, that's so, so prevalent in, you know, particularly with highly educated social spheres today: professionals and whatnot. So that, that struck me as really important. Does that resonate with you at all? 

Evan Rosa: It does. I think the desire to be in demand is, you know, that is that desire to be significant for something and for someone. And what's fascinating about this is, you know, when you pair that with what Andy said about the sacred weight of time and resonance, which are the correctives to feeling like, or to, to baptizing our busy-ness and that it really points out the importance of feeling in demand for the right reasons. And what are you in demand for?

What are the actual demands upon you. One, they're probably far less than we create for ourselves. They're artificial in so many ways. But, but it really reveals this need to feel recognized, this need to feel important and how we build up an artifice of that, when we frame our importance/hurry around productivity, around what we do. And if we were to find that sacred weight, then I think, we would find that we are in demand for something much different. In fact, you're in demand to be present to the people that are with you. You're in demand, to the paying attention to nature in a different way. You're in demand, to be in tune or in resonance, in the flow with the spiritual, with God. And I just think that's very different. 

Yeah. And that we started with this particular episode, I thought it was just so important for starting with the context in that way. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It's interesting that you talk about a kind of relation to the present there. That reminds me of our conversation with Kathy Tanner. She had a lot to say about the ways that contemporary economic structures and the culture, the spirit that goes with them - shape our experience of time and that sort of way of being present, that you were just talking about, seems really different from the kind of approach to the present that she drew out. Is there anything from that episode that you wanted to raise? 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. That episode was amazing because I just had never connected economy to patience before. But I've just never thought that anything related to finance or money had much to do with the question of waiting. But really, I mean, now that I've listened to that episode and now I've thought about it a lot more, it's perfectly fitting, of course. And it all the way it goes back to that cliche of time is money. And the temptation to think that it, in fact is. And the very much, the very important need for a Christian approach to time and money, for that not to be the case. So there's this point in the conversation that you had with her, where she talks about, um, there being no profit in waiting.

Kathryn Tanner: So there's no waiting, that's the other part of it. So the GameStop thing: that's not a patient process. People are doing what they're doing, in order to see an immediate rise in the stock that is then going to have a negative effect on hedge funds. They are shorting the GameStop. Yeah. You're always expecting something to happen rapidly, immediately and if it doesn't, you're not going to profit in the way that you otherwise would. No profit in waiting

Evan Rosa: And that just, um, not just for the other kind of homonym with the prophetic, but I just loved that phrase: there's no profit in waiting. And of course, that's a kind of polemic statement around like trying to describe the current state of affairs. When you take finance-dominated-capitalism, and you overlay it into a kind of moral scenario, where that's a kind of fact of the matter when you assume finance-dominated-capitalism, there's just no profit in waiting. But of course, like, what then is the value of waiting? 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I mean, we were very much at risk here of, of taking something that Tanner said in a defined context and with where she's right and turning it into sort of like a truism. So I acknowledge that, that caveat, but then go on to say that, that it does, it actually captures a widespread sense, sort of, that those economic scenarios where that's true, where it's no longer the case that the profit isn't precisely in waiting for the fruition of your investment, but now happens in a more "bang bang" sort of type attachment to every single fluctuation of the moment. That those sorts of economic relations they seem to illumine something that's true about life, right?

And they just, they play into the sort of cultural scenario that, that our conversation with Andy set up and that makes it, I don't know, it just stands very much in contrast to the steady drumbeat of the Hebrew Bible that calls upon the people to wait upon the Lord. 

Evan Rosa: And be led and be led. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah it's not about it is not about taking the reins and, you know, we can't wait: the Babylonians are in the way we got to go to Egypt and get some help! It's and I mean, this is not easy kind of stuff to ingest and follow in one's life, but there, but somehow we have to wrestle with that kind of, that witness that maybe it will not be easily recognizable profit, but there is precisely something crucial in waiting.

Evan Rosa: Yeah. Yeah. And the other, one of the other elements, the key takeaways, and in your conversation with Kathy, for me, was about stability. That we live in this volatile world and this is what set up our episode on God's patience, which we'll talk about next, but that stability and steadfast love, that steadiness that you're referring to. I think one of the quotes that also stood out to me from Kathy was, "something has to hold firm in order for you to take risks." 

Kathryn Tanner: There are sociologists and political theorists who talk about: something has to hold firm, in order for you to take risks. And that means risks with unreliable people and blah, blah, blah. So that it's not like it's not an either or you direct all your attention to something that is risk-free or that is completely stable or eternal or whatever, but that they're connected to one another, that in virtue of being committed to a God who doesn't change and who's stable, that enables you to throw yourself into an unpredictable, volatile, and fallen world and not feel that you're going to be destroyed by that.

Evan Rosa: And that holding firm it hearkens back to the establishing and strengthening your heart kind of thing, for me. But that stability is so much about what I think, it communicates so much about patience, Christian patience in particular, is that where you, what is, what grounds the stability? It's not profits in this case. And when you do pay attention to something that is deeper and more long-lasting, of course, the eternal steadfastness of God, what you're getting is that kind of stability that will take you through volatility. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, and it's not you or something of yours, that holds firm. The stability is extrinsic. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah, it's set outside of you. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Not extrinsic. Eccentric, because this is to say that God isn't just like alien from you, but you don't own God, God is always giving Godself to you, which is maybe a good point to just turn and talk a little bit about, about Paul Dafydd Jones. 

Evan Rosa: What was so cool about this transition was that basically where Kathy left off, Paul picked up. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah, I mean, I would love to get them together to talk theology. Cause I, I get the sense that they have some like doctrine of God disagreements and various, uh, I don't think that you would, could perfectly synthesize their theological systems to the extent they have them, but from our very, yeah, from our purely opportunistic vantage point of trying to glean a little bit about patience here. I think it was a really great juxtaposition. 

Evan Rosa: What stood out to you from this conversation?

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I mean, there's so much, I remember it being kind of, I just surprising twisting and turning of a conversation, but I wanted to highlight one thing. That we talked about the Psalms already a little bit, and Paul said this: Thinking about the parts in the Psalms that involve straight up accusations against God. This is where you go to God and say, "Look, you're not holding up your end of the deal. Come on!"

Evan Rosa: This Psalms of Complaints. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And he has this to say, he says, "God gives ancient Israel the time and space to accuse. God is patient with expressions of trauma, expressions of guilt, expressions of deep anguish. And God is so patient with them, that they get included in the Canon. And that's gotta be right, at some level. 

Paul Dafydd Jones: The Psalms of lament and complaint can get, as we know, incredibly dark, incredibly bleak, one operation of divine patience could be the God that gives ancient Israel the time and space to accuse God. God is patient with expressions of trauma, expressions of guilt, expressions of deep anguish. And God is so patient with them, that they get included in the Canon. Like some of the most powerful, skeptical, doubtful, angry moments are found in the Psalms. So God's letting be at this moment to let it happen, includes within it God's honoring of grief and trauma, such that those moments become part of the Scriptures. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: This is not an easy thing to hold into a system by any means, but the fact that in some respect, the word of God includes the people of God's accusation against God is remarkable. 

Evan Rosa: It is. And it's remarkable in part, because what we need to remember here is that this episode is about God's patience. And we were just, we thought like, we would go from God's patience and then human patience. But what's fascinating, what's exposing itself to me even right now is that's God's patience in response to human impatience as well. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. 

Evan Rosa: So we're impatient with our trauma and, impatient with our anguish. And we want things to get better. We're impatient with injustice and we can't wait, but it's fascinating to see the response there and that they're present in the Scriptures, such that they can formulate a life of prayer and a life of meditation. You know, there's some really fascinating psychology, as well, about being angry with God.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I'm not aware of this. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah, there's a psychologist named Julie Exline who specifically works on, on basically the impact of doing just this kind of thing on, on one's one's wellbeing. And it turns out that it's overwhelmingly positive something that we're normally quite afraid to do, quite afraid to get angry with God. There is, there's really interesting evidence that it's an important part of one's emotional life, to be able to express that even toward God and, and often helps people get through trauma much, much better. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Oh, that's fascinating. That seems like it might get us at least relatively close to the kind of perceptive psychological remarks we got from an ethicist, Adam Eitel, in our conversation with him thinking about Thomas Aquinas on patience. And 

Evan Rosa: I mean, that was a powerful episode because of his personal experience over the last couple of years. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: But this kind of connects to the anger thing, because he says the moderating sorrow is not to suppress it or develop an effected callousness or disenchantment, jaded relation to the things one really loves. 

Adam Eitel: Sorrow, if it's not checked, can easily devolve into anger, hatred, and fear. What it means to moderate sorrow, isn't to suppress it or to develop some kind of effected callousness or disenchanted jaded relation to the things that one actually really loves.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And the expression of anger towards God, seems to me, totally consonant them with a certain kind of patience because it's not. Hey, that's just, that's gotta be part of maintaining a not jaded relation to the things one really loves. It's gotta be part of living in a world that's in important respects out of joint and yeah...

Evan Rosa: Yeah I mean, honestly, it's fits with my metaphor from earlier, which says, you know, like the threshold is set, not at the basement level of sorrows, right? The sorrows are present and our sorrow compressor should really only kick in when it becomes out of moderation like too much. And you have to be very sensitive to these contexts, but the fact is, not all as well. And there are these sorrows, there are realities to them. And so the expression of them is part of the whole emotional picture of what it means to be human. And this particular quote from Adam, I feel like is a very hard one. And that's what, one of the things that marked me about the conversation with Adam. I know that you two are close friends as well. And he was very open and vulnerable in his, in his episode, um, talking about the loss of his son to stillbirth. And that was a very moving and poignant moment for me, where I feel like, his other comment around, you can really only say something about patience from within the struggle to receive it. 

Adam Eitel: I was trying to finish this chapter on patience, and our son was, he was stillborn. He was, you know, he was 39 weeks. He was in some change. He was, yeah, he was, his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. And he died and that hit me like, like a truck, and then a bolt of lightning, and then a tsunami and, you know, wash, rinse, repeat. It was, it was, I'd never experienced something so traumatic and it just, it whittled us down to, to nothing. And if it were not, I think, for all the thinking I'd been doing, the writing of that I'd been trying to do about this virtue, I don't know how I would have been able to withstand the onslaught of the sorrow.

Evan Rosa: Again, pardon one's words, very difficult to be able to say that with the kind of historical experience that he and his family have gone through. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Hmm, it makes it hard to chatter about patience. Yeah and I think it's, for me, at least stands as a, as an important just chastening, the, this is not a kind of puzzled to be kicked around or, I mean, it is certainly not a kind of a tool to be acquired and employed for the sake of one's own purposes. There's something far deeper and graver and because of that, more closely connected to joy, than all that. Yeah.

Evan Rosa: I think that's right. And I think that's an important reason to foreground our next episode, which was on the psychology of patience. In particular like the positive psychology of patience. And the reason I'm saying it's important to have that kind of comment like that from Adam first and your point about, well, really the inability to chatter about it, the inability to merely instrumentalize it, to make one's subjective wellbeing increase, or something like that. You have to foreground it with the kind of existential struggle before you start talking about the benefits of it or the measurement of it. And yet, I feel like the conversation with Sarah Schnitker, a psychologist at Baylor. You know, I feel like she brings so much theological and philosophical sensibilities to one, that the definition of patience that she's trying to measure, but also the exploration of it, that serendipitous kind of connection point, where, you know, she's a psychologist, she's coming at it from a scientific perspective and wanting to measure patience and, and find ways to create interventions based on that research, such that you can implement a practical way of becoming more patient. But fitting that we first could hear from Adam and be grounded in a deeply existential struggle, that that kind of helps us to understand the weight again, the sacred weight of what is at stake.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Could we talk, could we talk for a minute about a kind of conundrum that Sarah's presentation of a kind of structure for a patient's intervention sort of brought up for me? So she, she laid out three basic steps: Identify, Imagine, and Sync.

Sarah Schnitker: "It requires patience to have a lot of patience." This is a famous quote. It's not something that you can snap and have over at night, but our research suggests there are strategies that we can implement to help people become more patient. So an easy way, I like to talk about this, even though it's not an easy process, is the Identify, Imagine and Sync steps.

So first it's important that people actually identify what they're feeling when they're in a waiting situation or suffering or frustrated and to identify that and not necessarily have judgment of it, but just to say, okay, this is what's going on. And then what we like to talk about, is then start using your imagination to think about the situation in a new way.

So the fancy word for this is cognitive reappraisal and there's many studies showing that cognitive reappraisal is one of the most effective ways to regulate our emotions. And then that leads to really this third step of syncing. And here, I mean, sync with your purpose. So we need a compelling reason why we are suffering or waiting or bearing under this frustration.

And I think this is actually where we often go awry in our culture is we try to just use these nifty psychological tools of having to reappraise or I'm to think positively. But you need something deep and strong to latch onto. And we like to talk about creating a narrative, that supports the meaning of suffering.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So there's these two ladder steps where you got to reframe the thing. You got to put it in a different light that I find myself thinking, "Well, sure, but that can only work if you actually recognize that different light, to be a truer light." Okay. Like you can't just make up a story, where this bad thing that happened is actually good. You can't just make up a story where the silver linings wind up outweighing the bad. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah, I think the cognitive reappraisal there, I mean, it really does need to be itself moderated by something normative that you want to be in touch with reality. You want to be in touch with the truth and therefore what helps is to, is to open oneself up to in cognitive reappraisal. What's often happening at an emotional level is you're not in touch with a reality. You're not in touch with the truth. Instead your emotions, they far outweighed one's rational elements and need to be moderated in an important way. Cognitive reappraisal, ought to only work when it is in fact a truer reappraisal - that you are connecting back to the real, back to the true. And, and I would say that to varying extents, this is gonna apply to step three, to at the Sync with your person. Right? Not just any purpose will work, of course. If you're syncing with an ulterior purpose or an evil purpose, that there's no good that's going to come from that. You could just be, I think one of the, one of the examples that came up here was a "patient assassin" or something like that. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Right now. That's yeah. 

Evan Rosa: And that's a perfect, yes, very patient willing to wait, moderating the emotions, indeed. We call them patient, but this is the important sentence: that you have to unify them toward an overarching good. And, and so, I mean, I wonder what she would say about that or that, that might have to be an open question that we're left with. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Last conversation we had was with Tish Harrison Warren. What jumped out at you from that one? 

Evan Rosa: Oh gosh, that I wish he was my priest. You know, I'm like, I've come from an Anglican background and I completely understand why the New York times has come after her now, too. I thought one, her willingness, well, let's just point this out: you asked her point blank at the beginning of the conversation, "Do you think you're a patient person?" And I think, I think what came out of that was one or wonderful willingness to just be open and vulnerable about it. But also, also the point that, you know, we always see other people as more patient than ourselves, and often we are not good barometers of our own virtue. Maybe that's indicative of our own lack of true humility, of true self knowledge, perhaps, but that, that struck me as, as an important point to start off with that, you know, we do need to be patient with ourselves to some extent in our pursuit of it. And you always things, other people have it, or have it much better than you do. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I think for me, what's standing out now is the, the willingness to face up to our lack of control and, and not to see the pursuit of patience as a kind of, very clever way of somehow out maneuvering our lack of control and getting into a position of control. And, but instead to seek imperfectly, haltingly, often not very well to live in a way of being willing to be led as. And, that I, I don't know how much time you have spent in your life seeking the leading of God. In my experience, for whatever reason, if reason is the right category here, it's not the sort of thing that tends to just come right away. It's not the sort of thing that tends to come in like absolute clarity when you want it. And so, the kind of seeking to be led is in a large and large measure, a matter of waiting and attending and being frustrated by it and being led, even in and through that. 

Evan Rosa: Yeah. And that's that related virtue of meekness, that is implicated there. And I wanted to replay that, her reading of that Hans Urs Von Balthasar's quote. So let's listen to that. 

Tish Harrison Warren: Some of what Christian patience is rooted in is the idea that time is not ours. Even our time, the moments and days of our lives, ultimately, belong to God. So Hans Urs Von Balthasar has this great quote. This is, this is what I was thinking of when the whole time you were asking me this question is, um, is he says, "God intended man, to have all good, but in his (God's) time and therefore all disobedience, all sin consists essentially in breaking out of time. Hence, the restoration of order by the Son of God had to be the annulment of that premature snatching at knowledge, the beating down of the hand, outstretched toward eternity, the repentant return from a false swift transfer of eternity, to a true slow confinement in time. Hence the importance of patience in the new Testament, which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity, more central, even than humility, the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the Titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism, the meekness of the Lamb, which was led." 

Evan Rosa: I love that quote, Ryan, just because, I mean, wow. I mean, it's beautiful language. The virtue that lies beyond heroism is meekness. 

And what Hans Urs Von Balthasar is offering us here is, is something that I really think speaks to the cultural moment where, where we're just constantly tempted to transcend our limitations. And so this is really about control. You know, this is her point about control and the transcendence of our limitations is on offer all the time. With respect to knowledge, we have awareness of world events like we never have had before. We can get things extremely fast using the computer in our pocket. And, and meekness is, I mean, it's this related underappreciated virtue similar to patience. And I mean, one of the, one of the things that I remember hearing about meekness from a sermon, probably a long time ago, is that there is a strength to meekness, but there is it's controlled strength now. Like about the paradox here is like the controlled strength or meekness of the Lamb, which is led, right? It's like, where does the control and the strength actually come from, it comes from being led. It comes from the being laying down in the pastors of the Shepherd. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: The good Shepherd.

Evan Rosa: Indeed. Any other closing thoughts from you? 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: There's a temptation to try to wrap a bow on it, but I think that would be somehow, not in keeping with the untidiness of things. And so, so if we can end it here in a sense, unfinished, that seems about right to me. 

Evan Rosa: That's fine with me too. Ryan, thanks for joining me for this. And really, I just want to say, like on behalf of all the listeners too: Thank you for initiating this particular series. I think it really is so fitting that we did it at this point in the pandemic, but it's one of those timeless questions, no pun intended, that we need to be continually reminded of. So thanks for having the attention to and the need for these kinds of reflections on patience. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And thank you for producing this and putting this altogether and thanks to everyone who's listening. 

Evan Rosa: Thanks everyone. 

Over the next few weeks, what we're going to be doing is preparing for a kind of Fall launch of the podcast. And so we're going to be running a few conversations like this that are a little more open-ended, a little more free-flowing. And starting on October 2nd, you can look for an episode of featuring philosopher, Charles Taylor. Bryan and Miroslav Volf interviewed him recently, and we're really excited to share that with you all. So subscribe, if you are not yet a subscriber. And if you are already a subscriber, thanks everyone for listening. And we'll be back with more next week.

For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Ryan McAnally-Linz and me, production assistance by Martin Chan and Nathan Jowers. I'm Evan Rosa and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. New episodes drop every Saturday with the occasional midweek. If you're new to the show, we're so glad that you found us. Remember to hit subscribe, so you don't miss any episodes. And if you've been listening for a while, thank you friends. If you're liking what you're hearing, I've got a request. Would you support us? It's pretty simple really, and it won't take much time. Here are some ideas. First, you can hit the share button for this episode in your app and send a text or email to a friend, share to your social feed. Second, you could give us an honest rating on Apple Podcasts. How are we really doing? Finally, you could write a short review of the show in Apple Podcasts. Reviews are cool because they'll help like-minded people get an idea for what we're all about and what's most meaningful to you or listeners. Thanks for listening to listening today friends. We'll be back with more this coming week.