The Slow Road That Still Wins
The morning I decided to pray again was achingly ordinary. The radiator hissed, the coffee was overdone, the kneelers still hurt. I told myself I would keep silence for five minutes, which quickly became two, which became shuffling and staring and distracted muttering. That, apparently, was prayer too. Because the version of me that did nothing would have just stared at my phone and stayed clever but unmoored. So I sat longer than comfort allowed. Not much longer, but enough to feel my stubborn heart resist and then tremble a little toward yes.
Slow progress feels unimpressive in the body. You wake intending to be gentle, and within an hour you are irritated and petty again. You resolve to pray the Office and instead drift into doomscrolling. You plan to reconcile, yet settle instead for mild avoidance. Progress is rarely cinematic. It is usually as inglorious as washing a dish that will be dirty by nightfall. But the soul knows the cost of doing nothing, the quiet stagnation that sets in when we stop choosing to try. The stillness that once invited God becomes the silence of withdrawal, until you suddenly realize a year has passed since your last honest moment.
In the Christian imagination, progress is never simply self-improvement; it is conversion. Not polishing the self but turning the heart. Saint John Cassian called this the lifelong “training of thoughts,” a kind of spiritual craftsmanship. He knew that interior life unfolds like slow carpentry, the grain of the soul shaped blow by blow, each correction a small trimming of pride or fear. Saint Gregory the Great thought similarly. For him, patience was the most muscular of virtues, not weakness but a disciplined strength, the refusal to abandon the field simply because the fruit takes a season to appear. Gregory saw that both shepherd and flock are made holy not in sudden triumph but in the length of fidelity.
Saint Anselm would have nodded. He described faith as seeking understanding—a motion of the heart that keeps searching when clarity hides. Belief for him was not possession of answers but a willingness to walk while hungry for light. In that sense, progress requires humility enough to stay in the half-lit places. That humility deepens in Catherine of Siena, who taught that love must be renewed daily through acts of courage too small for applause. Every conversion begins again each morning, she said, by lighting the fire with whatever dry twigs one can find. Love is fed more by persistence than by passion.
When you see life through those ancient eyes, you realize that small, faithful steps are moral victories. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote of “the ladder of humility,” each rung some modest yielding of ego to grace. Holiness, he said, is cultivated step by step, never by public declaration. God’s repairs are deliberate, not hasty.
To persist when the change feels microscopic is an act of courage. Patience, in this sense, is not temperament but theology; it names the faith that time itself is inhabited by God. Each repetition, each small improvement, says: “I still believe You are here.” It is easy to mistake that for mere endurance, but it is actually trust disguised as routine.
Discouragement, of course, is the oldest saboteur. It whispers that because you fell again, you must not be growing. It convinces you that holiness should feel like smooth ascent. Yet the saints insist otherwise. Jean-Pierre de Caussade urged his readers to stop chasing the extraordinary and consent to the sacrament of the present moment, the very next duty done with love. Dom Chautard warned against “frantic activism”—the busy illusion that effort alone sanctifies us. Grace, he said, must be guarded within before it can flow outward. Even failure, received humbly, becomes the compost from which new virtue grows.
Perhaps the slow road feels unbearable because it humbles our pride. When we wobble, we interpret it as verdict rather than information. We want mastery, not mercy. But as Cassian’s elders taught their monks, falling and rising are both parts of the lesson; perseverance is not perfection, it is faith made visible in motion. Conversion is less about speed than about direction.
The Church, in her wisdom, blesses such direction. The liturgical year circles patiently, training us to accept time as teacher. The confessional opens again and again to the same weary penitent, and grace never sighs in impatience. Romano Guardini wrote that true formation of the person is slow integration, the wedding of impulse and ideal through lived time. Gerard Manley Hopkins saw God’s presence shimmering within the drudgery of days, if only we would look with reverent attention. Hans Urs von Balthasar envisioned each vocation as a drama slowly revealed through obedience. And Catherine Doherty, who lived holiness in community kitchens and city slums, counseled her friends: do the next thing with love. That was her theology of sanctity…small fidelity accepted as sacrament.
If we believe that God works through ordinary means, then the road itself is grace. Walking becomes prayer. Habit becomes formation. Even repetition becomes liturgy when offered to Love. The blessedness of the road is that it reveals God’s patience mirrored in ours. Every Mass, every season of Lent, every whispered Act of Contrition, is God tutoring us to see that He never withdraws from the slow learner.
So bless your slow road. Bless the halting prayer, the inconsistent effort, the apology half stuck in the throat. Bless the day you begin again after losing heart. All of it counts. The pace does not scandalize God. What matters is the direction, the leaning once more toward the One who walks beside you unnoticed until you finally realize He always was.
Because grace keeps pace with honest effort. And heaven will be filled, I suspect, with people who never ran, who just kept walking.
