Patient Trust - The Slow Work of God

This poem, "Patient Trust," pairs well with the beautiful, contemplative video of a Celtic Pilgrimage by John O’Donohue. I’ve included the 3-minute clip that I especially love, and a link to the full video is provided in the description. (It’s copyrighted and has to be purchased.)

I especially love the part where John talks about The Burren (because of his accent, it sounds like “the barn.”):

The Burren is a landscape of limestone. It's hundreds of millions of years old. It's almost as if this whole landscape was actually dreamed up, designed, and shaped by some magnificently wild God. Part of what gives the lovely fluency to the limestone is that the ocean, the Atlantic, comes in under The Burren. So that there's this elemental music moving up through the stone all the time in the breathing of the ocean sound. The way the ocean is in ancient conversation with the stone is really amazing.

A “magnificently wild God.” The ocean under the rocks, “so that there's this elemental music moving up through the stone all the time in the breathing of the ocean sound.” The ocean breathing under the rocks, the music of that breathing is the only way you know the ocean is moving beneath. It makes me think of how often we are unaware of God's movement in our lives.

A couple reminders that God is with you and working in your life even when it doesn’t feel like it. Because He loves you.

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—

and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;

your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,

let them shape themselves, without undue haste.

Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today what time

(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)

will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit

gradually forming within you will be.

Give Our Lord the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you,

and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ