Mother Siluana Vlad: We don't have patience because we don't have love
We are not able to reach God, the likeness of God, the joy we yearn for, if we don’t cultivate our patience.
Father Dumitru Staniloae distinguishes three types of love: normal, natural love, the love of fallen man, of psychological man; Christian love, the love of the Christian who lives in communion with Christ and with the other members of the Church; and God’s love, which is His power, His energy, it is He Himself Who is love, and Who gives Himself to me too. And so I - at different stages of my existence - can love in these three ways: with my own goodwill for the first two, and with God’s benevolence and my willingness to receive His power for the third one.
Natural, normal, psychological love is a power that is activated when we have an interest, when we want to love, when we are motivated to love. Thus, it is an egotistical love, motivated by the desires and will of the ego, of the fallen man. We usually love when we enjoy what someone does for us, and we stop loving when we don’t like what the other does for us. We are very different in this respect: some people are more loving, other people are less loving. Some people are loving to the point of sacrificing themselves, but this is still a psychological form of love - they can sacrifice themselves out of pride, out of the pleasure of standing out, out of the satisfaction of being loving; so it doesn’t necessarily mean they surpassed natural love.
Natural love has different stages, depending on each person’s education as well, because these capacities that God put in us develop with the help of our will, but also with the help of those older than us - the ones who raised us, the ones who educated us.
If people were educated in the spirit of love, if they were loved and received love back when they expressed love, if they were taught to activate their love, then those people will be more loving. People who were wounded, neglected, berated, abused, those people yearn for love, desire love, because there is a yearning for love in each person - but they fail to love. Moreover, in time, even though they will receive love from many others around them, they will fail to recognize that love, they will not believe it is love, because they don’t know what love is, they are not able to recognize it.
So this is the lowest stage - the stage of natural love, psychological love, a love that is not activated by God’s grace.
Christian love is the capacity of people to offer themselves up to others and to receive others in their souls; it is the capacity of people to love, activated both by their will and by the grace of God. When I notice that I can’t love if I get bored, if I don’t get satisfaction out of it - then I realize that this is an ill form of love, and I pray to God to heal me. He became man, He died, He rose again, He ascended into Heaven, and He gave us His grace, His Body and Blood, his full grace in the Holy Spirit so that we can receive His love - this power of His - so that we can activate our love together with this power of His.
This love is the love described by the Holy Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 13: love that endures all things, love that does not seek its own - read this hymn every day, and let us mourn that we are not yet Christian from the point of view of love. But we want to be! Every time we read or hear this hymn, our hearts leap for joy that this is the dignity to which we are called.
Divine love is when a person becomes holy and says: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20)
Christian love also has several stages. Out of love for Christ, for His sake we stop yelling at other people, we stop wounding others, we stop hurting others. We do this because we love Christ, because we have felt His love, and we want to respond to His love. And so this yearning for Him and His presence activates our love, makes us loving too. And then we grow - we grow until we reach the highest level of Christian love, which is love for our enemies. What comes after that, Divine love - the Saints will enlighten us then.
Now about patience. Love is patient, love “endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). What is patience? Patience is a virtue, that is to say, it is a power that God gave us so that we can be like Him. Virtues are powers that God gives to us as potential, through creation - powers such as love - and then we activate them with His grace.
This relationship of love between us and God has two aspects: one of them is called Providence, and the other one is called Judgment.
Through His Providence, God raises us, He leads us to the likeness with Him, to the joy He promised us, and to which we are called to contribute; He calls us by comforting us, through favorable events, through help in time of need, when we call on Him. This is Providence - it is a positive help if I may say so.
The other aspect of God’s love is Judgment, through which God loves me and works with me through sorrows, pain, and unpleasant events. It’s not that He gives me sorrows, but He teaches me and gives me the power to know myself, to know my inability to love, to repent, and to turn back to Him through those sorrows. So this is Judgment.
Patience is the capacity of a person to endure unpleasant things. Through this patience, we heal our soul from the passions of the incensive part of our soul.
We have two powers of the soul that are called passionate: the appetitive (or desiring) power, and the incensive (or zealous, when it is used right) power. With the appetitive power, we look for pleasure, for what gives us pleasure - these are our passionate cravings. The healthy appetitive power is to desire God and all the good things that we experience in His presence.
The other aspect, the other dimension of our soul is the incensive power - also called anger. It is the capacity, the power to reject evil. God gave us this power to reject evil; when God created Adam in the Garden of Eden, evil already existed, the fallen angel was already evil and was able to tempt man, or try to hurt him. And man had this incensive power to reject evil.
At the same time, the incensive power also helps us strengthen our desires, and gives us zeal. I want to do something, but I have no zeal, I have no energy - and the incensive power is the energy I need so I can support my desires.
[Translator’s note: you can read more about the powers of the soul in the Orthodox tradition here: https://www.unseenwarfare.net/anatomy-of-the-soul]
Therefore, patience is the virtue by which I, a human, heal myself of the passions, the illnesses of my incensive power - which are anger and sadness; and from these two come many other offspring. We heal ourselves of these passions through patience.
We are not able to reach God, the likeness of God, the joy we yearn for, if we don’t cultivate our patience, if we don’t love God’s pedagogy which is His Judgment, if we don’t love the suffering through which God examines each of us and gives us the possibility to know ourselves, to see how close or how far we are from God, to see what we really want: God’s gifts or God Himself. And then we know ourselves through this suffering, and we correct ourselves if we truly desire God and His joy.
And so, love endures all things. We wouldn’t have the capacity to endure if we didn’t have love. When we can’t endure when the baby is crying, when someone does something we don’t like, when someone offends us - this means we don’t have love. And never mind that we don’t have love toward our enemies, but there are moments and even days when we don’t have love toward our own children, for whom we can sacrifice our lives when we can think straight. We don’t have patience, and so we don’t have love for our own mothers, for the ones dear to us - we love them, we mourn them if we lose them, but we don’t have love, because we don’t have patience with their infirmities. And we don’t have patience because we don’t have love. You see, it is a vicious circle.
And so we need to take care of this hole in us, to fill this hole, to nourish this capacity of ours with God’s grace, with His energy. Because otherwise, we won’t have anything to give.
Translated from Romanian. Original recording from May 21, 2020: