I don’t like inconsistency, it achieves nothing! Endurance is however a different matter.
To be involved in struggle requires endurance. Staying with a situation political or personal to enable transformation or liberation cannot be dependant on feeling good. Screaming and shouting about one cause one week and another the next is often a characteristic witnessed among ‘political’ groups who, over time, move from one cause to the next. Hardly surprising that those who shout the loudest but don’t stay seldom achieve change. Endurance is often dull and thankless. It’s like training for a marathon. It is the exercise regime of the heart, the measure of the soul.
Without endurance, without the willingness to keep on keeping on, nothing of change would ever happen. What is endured and won in one century must be so often be won again in another. Just as we think the struggle has been won somewhere, somehow it emerges all over again. Endurance involves being eternally vigilant.
In recent times, many commented on historic slavery and were shocked to learn, when I reminded them, about current sex slavery and economic slavery. We must never assume that equality has been accomplished as long as the pursuit of power exists.
Justice does not come without daily effort. Injustice must be addressed but may not be achieved for eons. The struggle to fight to free the Guildford Four took every moment of fourteen long years. The freedom for the Birmingham Six even longer. Their families, Sr Sarah and myself did not jump on the bandwagon years down the road but endured from day one and resolved to stay even if our mantra had to become “If not for us, then because of us”.
Endurance also requires us to stay with what we know to be right or unjust and not to be wavered by what may be popular or what may keep us in favour with one and not another. Endurance requires consistency. When someone dresses up exploitation to look acceptable or respectable, it is still exploitation. We cannot suddenly say ‘oh well that’s alright then’. I am often left aghast at the contradictory stance of some. To not notice is to be deceived. I always notice!
In circumstances both personal and public, it is the awareness of the power of patience and the energy that comes with endurance that makes the difference in both the substance and quality of our lives.
Endurance is the cement of human development. The ability to say no to myself, to the oppression of others, is the one assurance we have that we are teachable and capable of becoming fully human. We can change and we can be saved from ourselves. I admire those that turn up to my consulting room week after week and sometimes year after year. They have the patience to bear hard things and to work through their pains to their goal of becoming fully human. They have not been seduced by the fallacy of a ‘quick fix’. They are willing to save themselves from their own limitations and follies, from lack of maturity and experience. They have the humility to receive the wisdom of life and in return become wiser as they go.
Enduring for ourselves enables us to endure for others. Being consistent in our thinking and in our being, even when it’s not pleasurable, is what brings change yes, for ourselves and for others.
Br. Stephen Morris fcc
