32. The ultimate reason for patience
32. THE ULTIMATE REASON FOR PATIENCE
Why doesn’t God just zap us into Heaven now? Why does He make us wait?
Man’s soul and an angel are ordained alike for beatitude; consequently equality with angels (equality in a common end, not in a common nature) is promised to the saints. . . . Now the soul separated (at death) from the body, if . . . deserving beatitude, enters at once into beatitude, unless there be some obstacle (which needs to be removed in Purgatory). Therefore so does an angel. Now an angel instantly, in his first act of charity, had the merit of beatitude. Therefore, since there was no obstacle within him, he passed at once into beatitude by only one meritorious act . . . because grace perfects nature according to the manner of nature. . . . Man was not intended to secure his ultimate perfection at once, like the angel. Hence a longer way was assigned to man than to the angel for securing beatitude. . . . It is of the nature of an angel (but not of the nature of a man) instantly to attain the perfection unto which he is ordained (I,62,5).
When we wish we were angels, we deny our human nature. Three ways to do this are (1) the wish to have mental telepathy, (2) the wish to be without bodies and bodily pains and death, and (3) the wish to attain beatitude instantly rather than gradually.
We are in a material and temporal universe, with material and temporal bodies, because God chose to create us that way. We are ontological amphibians, with part of our being in water and part on land. Our souls know eternal truths and seek eternal joys because they live in spiritual time, kairos, which touches eternity and is not dependent on matter and space. This we have in common with the angels. But unlike the angels we also live and think and choose in the material spacetime continuum that we call the universe, because our souls are the life of our bodies, and our bodies are in matter and the time that is measured by matter and space, kronos. We are the only spirits that have bodies and the only animals that have spiritual souls. We are the lowest and stupidest angel and the highest and smartest animal, or rather, we are neither; we are ourselves.
A necessary property of having a material body is gradual movement. A necessary property of having a spiritual soul is awareness of something above movement, something eternal. This combination makes patience hard for us, unlike either angels or animals. But it also makes patience necessary.
The best kind of impatience is impatience for sanctity. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” But we must also accept our slowness, and be patient with ourselves and our slowness and stupidity. Why? Because God is! At AA they tell you not to expect instant cures. As Brother Lawrence says in The Practice of the Presence of God, we must not demand to go faster than grace.