So on your patience evermore attending, New joy wait on you. Here our play has ending.
So ends Shakespeare’s Pericles and so ends a lesson: joy attends, or serves, the patient. The ending plays, I think, on a double possibility in the meaning of patience: just as now the word can mean calm endurance, but also permission or indulgence.
Wise old John Gower appreciates the audiences endurance and indulgence in coming to the play. They chose to come (indulgence) and then they stayed and so he wishes them joy. Not surprisingly in a play co-written by Shakespeare the joy that comes with patience is a central theme.
God works slowly in a person’s history. Sometimes justice comes over eternity after death, as in King Lear, but often justice with mercy is seen in this life. God brings merciful justice as quickly as can be: joy comes in the end.
Joy is sometimes good cheer, but often is bliss: either a glimpse or the final vision of Beauty. The hero of the play, and after three hundred years perhaps a spoiler warning is not needed, endures and does the right thing throughout the play. Pericles immediate reward is often bad: exile, apparent loss of all he loves, and pain. Pericles goes on doing what is good and God makes all things whole: “Although assailed with fortune fierce and keen, Virtue preserved from fell destruction’s blast, Led on by heav’n, and crowned with joy at last.”
Those who endure to the end are saved. That much is hard to do, but very simple for a Christian to see.
What is harder is the indulgence that chooses to attend the play! We must participate in history, but we need not put ourselves on the side of the story. We can ignore the tale God is telling and fail to listen to the lines. We can look at our phone during key scenes in this life and so miss the signs of what God would have us do. All the world’s God’s stage, we are players, but we ignore the hero’s journey we might take to be a fool.
Some give up, lose patience with God’s story, but many more never bother to attend at all. We are groundlings that turn our backs to the stage. The story happens, even happens to us, but we will receive no joy, because we have lost the plot. “Attending” itself has a double meaning: paying attention and showing up. Some of us try not to show up at God’s play. Others of us show up and pay no attention to what God is doing.
We will never find joy coming along side of us. God will make all things whole for all who attend patiently. The rest of us miss the play, learn nothing that might save us and so find ourselves punished. The worst of us attend, but defy the story, we side with villain and so are consumed by our own endless insatiable desires: “the due and just reward.” This is the fate of Antiochus and his daughter. More pathetic is the person who is destroyed although his contemplated evil is “not done, but meant.”
If we want joy to come, we must attend to God’s story, cooperate with and follow God’s signs, and so come to joy, often happiness in this life and certain bliss in the world to come.
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