4 WAITING Continued from page 3


in a sense, a spiritual time of pregnancy. With Mary we await the coming of the savior. If we had to make our advent wreaths out of just one tire from our car, I think we would all be staying home. We would have to wait.


So you see, a symbol is not just a cute centerpiece. It isn’t just something that meanwhile we have turned into a liturgical symbol, but it points to something very literal. It says, hey, if you’re missing a wheel or two, you can’t really live the way you used to. You stop. You stop. And if we stay home and if we curbed our rushing about and if we celebrated this as the season that we’re given, as a time of waiting, we would see that waiting is a holy thing. Something Americans hate more than anything.


How is waiting holy? Because nothing that is of value comes without a season of darkness, growing, becoming, being out of sight, ripening, roasting, brewing. Not a fine wine, not a good stew, not a strong plant, and certainly not a healthy baby, or a good poem. If you write an essay, the first stuff you write is process and it’s all over the map. And you say, “that’s not it.” You stew over it and you go to bed and you dream about it and you wake up in the middle of the night and you say, “a-hah!” And the next morning you say, “what was that again?” And, slowly but surely, it ripens into something good.


We want our stuff and we want it now. The less we have to wait, the more we want. We


Hopeful W


Waiting for Harvest: Agrarian societies inherently understood the practice of waiting


-- for harvest time, rain, seasons to ripen and crops to mature. Author and illustrator Gertrud Nelson helps us understand how our own seasons of waiting can become holy.


can check out our own attitude toward waiting by seeing how we drive when the light is turning yellow. Or when we are waiting for the paint to dry, or the x-rays to be read, or the EKG to be studied.


Advent Meditations and Prayers


One of the most important things in our prayer is the eagerness and confidence with which we throw ourselves open to his perpetual coming. There should always be more waiting than striving in a Christian prayer.


~ Evelyn Underhill


Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life. ~ Collect for the First Sunday of Advent


Trusting in God does not, except in illusory religion, mean that he will ensure that none of the things you are afraid of will ever happen to you. On the contrary, it means that whatever you fear is quite likely to happen, but that with God’s help it will in the end turn out to be nothing to be afraid of.


~ Jonathan Aitken


Lord, which is the more precious of these two blessings, that all things are means through which I can touch you, or that you yourself are so universal that I can experience you and lay hold on you in every creature?


Do you recommend anything for those moments when you find yourself waiting? Catch yourself, first of all, because we’re just knee-jerk about it. Say, “oh, what is it that I need to wait for? This is just a little practice for all those holy times in my life when I have to wait for the good thing to come into being.” Be mindful and embrace it. Practice it. It takes practice. See it as practice.


~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin


It is when things go wrong, when the good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.


My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning. O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, with him is great power to redeem.


~ Madeline L’Engle ~ Psalm 130:6-7


O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: by the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God. ~ Prayer for Quiet Confidence, BCP, 832


Compiled by Forward Movement in The Stillness We Seek by Cathy George, Copyright 2011 Used by permission.


Do you have any stories from your own life that could illustrate this? Certainly, having given birth to three children. There’s a point at which you’d like to lay an egg in the closet and come and pet it every now and then, instead of walking around with this thing. What’s so interesting is that nothing could be closer to you than that fetus growing inside and nothing could be more strange because you do not know


who this is. We can’t wait anymore now. We find out what the gender is. In my day, you still waited for that enormous surprise. But now we want to know everything and we want to know it as soon as that child shows any signs of life. We know that if you start giving birth too soon, the child is in terrible danger. So when the child is finally in full bloom in nine months, it knows now is the time to be part of life. For me, that is probably the last waiting we have left. Well, maybe wine makers know it, and beer makers, and you know it when you make a stew. It’s always better the next day. It’s blended better. We talk about stewing over things. We see it as neurotic, but maybe it just needs to bubble and simmer and sit on the back burner of our psyches and become something.


We hate waiting for Christmas so much that we start Christmas at Thanksgiving. By the time Christmas comes, we are sick of it. The tree’s already dried out. We want it out of the living room. It’s impractical. It’s needling all over the floor. Or we have a fake one so there isn’t even the smell of the forest. The tree is the tree of life. Not the tree of artificiality. It comes in from the forest and reminds us. Also it is the tree of the cross. Death and life of a piece.


Isn’t Advent is about waiting for the coming of Christ in his final glory? That’s right. It’s double Advent. A double coming. It’s both. It’s the coming of Christmas. The incarnation, the flesh. It’s totally my favorite. To think about God saying, “okay they’re not gonna get it unless they have something to touch and to pinch.” Heaven and earth marry. God and humankind marry. In fact the normal human woman is a good enough partner for God and brings forth the Immanuel, God with us. The incarnation teaches us -- God is with us. He doesn’t need to be lured in out of the sky.


What is the kingdom of heaven? It’s Jesus’ dream for all these human beings to get it. And every time we have a taste of that kingdom of heaven, and even if it only lasts for four seconds, that’s the coming of God in glory also. I think of that final judgment WAITING Continued on Page 5


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