THE HOLINESS OF WAITING
Rev. Tom Owen-Towle
November 26, 2006
By now, across the land, tinseled trees and Santa Clauses are glittering in place. Little wonder then, that after almost two months of an unremitting promotional barrage, we’re in a state of combat fatigue, if not bankruptcy, by December 25th.
It’s not only the hectic pace and the commercial overload of the season that disturb us. On a deeper level, we’re racked with a basic inability to wait–we exude a fundamental impatience. We’ve got to have everything now, at once, and for as long as is humanly possible. December is the season of racing and dashing rather than pausing and pondering.
A story from Unplug the Christmas Machine shows a mother finding her daughter crying in the closet on Christmas Day–just after she’d opened all the gifts she’d asked for. When the worried mother asked her daughter what was wrong, the girl answered, “if I had known this was all there was to Christmas, I wouldn’t have worried so hard and so long.”
We adults can and must assist the little ones in learning the fine art of creative waiting…of preparing their souls to enjoy life’s precious moments.
We need to tell our children: “Hey, we’ve got to get our hearts ready. After all, would people make a beautiful dinner for friends and then say, ‘We just can’t wait’ and go ahead and eat the scrumptious dinner on their own, before the guests came? Would a bride, so anxious to show her friends her wedding dress, wear it to the office, a month early? Would parents, awaiting a new baby, put up the crib, fold diapers, and hang a mobile, but unable to wait any longer, race out to borrow the neighbor’s baby?” I don’t think so.
To be sure, we’re not constitutionally unable to wait, we humans. We’re able to inch up to the holidays: count days, keep secrets, slow down, soak in sounds and sights. We can wait. And I’m not just talking about the children, because we adults ourselves are prime models of haste, as well, especially during the holidays.
So, today, as the Advent Season is launched, literally the season of waiting…I want to make a case for the holiness–not just the necessity, but the holiness–of waiting, and since we haven’t even entered December yet, we’ve got plenty of time to practice the skill of waiting imaginatively and compassionately.
For starters, let’s remember that waiting isn’t provisional time, servant to another moment yet to come; rather waiting is time in itself. Waiting is valuable per se. Waiting gives us a chance to brood creatively. Waiting has its own elegance and richness. We wait so that our souls can catch up with our bodies, so that the rhythm can take shape before we start to dance.
Simply review your life. Aren’t some of your earliest and fondest memories of waiting: kicking heels on the garden wall, waiting for one of your parents to come home from work on Friday afternoon, knowing you might be going out to dinner as a family? Waiting with other kids in line for the Saturday matinee movie? Waiting for the train to arrive, bringing your grandparents from out of town? Waiting around on the sandlot for the ballgame to start? All costumed and just waiting to go trick-or-treating in the dark on Halloween?
Yes, sometimes it was nervous waiting, but, in general, we’ve all experienced moments of waiting as a fun, cool, energizing time. Yet today, with instant gratification in our refrigerators, instant entertainment on our TVs, instant transportation in our cars, we spend too little time in actual slow-motion anticipation, in expectancy, in preparing our hearts, in simply waiting.
You see, waiting can prove to be a gift, not a curse–a gift of time. Time to waste: to waste in the discovery of a world, and the people in it, in all their weird and wonderful variety.
Remember “it’s the time you’ve wasted on your rose,” wrote Antoine St. Exupery in The Little Prince, “that makes it so important.” Oh yes, it’s the time you waste on your self in meandering around the neighborhood on an extra slow walk. It’s the time you waste humming alone. It’s the time you waste leisurely soaking in a book or bathtub. It’s the time you waste on your partner, giving a lingering back rub. It’s the time you waste kicking at pebbles, watching the stars and the birds, noticing all the quiet–unimportant yet essential–things that happen every day all around you.
Yes, it’s the time you waste serving food at the homeless shelter, it’s the time you waste on your grandkids playing in the park, it’s the time you waste paying an unexpected visit to an infirm Summit member, and it’s the time you waste engaging a stranger at the store. In wasting such time, we often uncover the core meanings of our lives.
And during the holidays, it will likely be the time you waste weaving a scarf or sculpting a candle, writing a heartfelt note on a holiday card to a friend. It will be the time you spend curled up reading, or on your knees praying, or on your feet singing to some person whose holidays might be less, even lost, without a rousing batch of carols. All these things, and more, can furnish your life with leisurely, slow-down rituals in unhurried preparation for the coming of the Festival of Lights.
Waiting is so hard for us modern-day racers, but wait we must. For we owe ourselves, more than any other gift, a nourished soul. Did you know that a person arriving at a traditional Japanese monastery is turned away at first? It always takes three days to get in. So during that time of waiting, visitors are forced to sit alone in the woods or take a langorous walk in the snow. And what happens? While waiting, lots of inner events take place.
Yes, that’s it, we wait during this season so that more inner events can unfold in the midst of all that outer hoopla. Our inner life can be fed in the pregnant stillness of waiting. For the true gifts of the holidays aren’t out there, but in here, if we but wait patiently and allow them to be born.
So I ask you: what is it that you need to brood about, wrestle with, give birth to…in the tranquil darkness of your being during December? What do you need to wait upon; and who might you be waiting for? Can you take some time, sufficient time, to sit quietly, muse deeply, sing softly, simply breathe in and breathe out in a peaceful corner of your home?
Can you just sit serenely as Mary did awaiting the birth of her baby Jesus? Remember, Mary just sat and pondered all these things in her heart.
And so I invite you to ponder the gracious and generous delights of your present life. I invite you to ponder the peculiar possibilities you might pursue in 2007, given enough courage. For, if we fail to take ample time to ponder, you and I will be swallowed up in the frenzy without rather than experiencing the serenity within.
I beseech you to travel beneath the pervasive blaze of the season and dive into the quietude of your being. Brood, reflect, ponder. Brood about the brokenness in your life and that of the larger world. Brood about what you plan to do with your one precious life and your remaining years on this planet, starting here and starting now. Brood not to despair, but brood to cleanse and ground your being…readying your heart for a soulful response.
Simply don’t settle for a thin, tantalizing, tinsel-filled holiday season. It’s so tempting to maintain a jolly front during the holidays when we often ache to mourn openly or quietly or both. Never forget that attendant with the birth of Jesus came the slaughter of innocent children. Joy and tragedy were interwoven back then and ever shall be for awake, responsive, caring religious travelers.
I once saw a most unusual crèche. The little carved figures were not painted, but made of three different colors of wood. One of the wise men, for example, had a gown as pale as ivory that fell in curved folds around his brown feet. There was power and vitality and grace in the carving of each figure. The crèche was from Africa.
And more than that, the woods were not mahogany or rosewood, as you might think at a glance. For these figures were carved from thorns, thorns from the egun tree in Nigeria. They were big thorns, very wide at the base, but sharply narrowing, and they grow in Nigeria in the three colors used in the crèche.
Carving Christmas from thorns furnishes a strange, haunting yet beautiful metaphor for deep spirituality. Perhaps the thorn is the death of a loved one, and this may be your first holiday without them. Or the thorn is someone who moved away, or we’ve moved away from them. A severed relationship or a new illness diagnosed: these and many others can be dreadful thorns. And in their presence holiday time may no longer simply be a matter of continuing cozy, comfortable family customs.
A new holy season must be carved carefully. Every one of us, I think, in some way or another, could benefit from carving such thorns…that our holidays might prove to be deeper, more truthful, more spiritually expansive experiences.
So, yes, let us wait. Let us wait. I know we hanker to get up and go, to seize the day. Yet holy scriptures, in every land and every era, admonish us to wait. “Could you not watch with me one hour?” Jesus rebuked his industrious, antsy disciples.
Yet so much of that first Christmas was spent in waiting. I mean, those two opening chapters of Luke’s gospel–two of the longest chapters of the entire bible, are full of people waiting: Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds of Bethlehem, Simeon and Anna, just waiting and then waiting some more, for enduring peace to be born.
We questing Unitarian Universalists know well that we never ultimately arrive on our journeys, that we’re ever waiting and searching, searching and waiting for new truth, new growth, fresh joy and fresh challenge coming our way. We can never grasp either the fullness of the Great Spirit or the fullness of any great holiday, but we can experience glimpses of the sacred in the unlikeliest of haunts, if we but wait expectantly, ponder calmly, and probe deeply.
Therefore, let us watch and wait, center in and center down, pray and breathe and sing. Yes, along with deep breathing, I recommend heavy singing. In England, at this time of year, children go from door to door singing: these young carolers are called “waits”. While we’re waiting, we too can sing.
Clearly, the Prince of Peace and all other compassionate carriers in human history have done what they could to deliver peace and justice. Yet two thousand plus years later, we’re still waiting; primarily, because we humans haven’t done all that we must to unleash peace on earth and goodwill toward people.
Down deep in the marrow of our souls, we know that ours is still a waiting world, and that you and I must become eternal waiters. For no matter what truths we attain, love we perform, excellence we achieve, we’ll end our lives somewhere in the middle, as partial beings–waiting, waiting, waiting. And that realization is heightened this time of the year when it’s danker and darker than usual and when it’s so seductive to run from our inner darkness…straightway toward the glaring lights.
But wait we must and wait we can. And while waiting, let’s be perceptive. Instead of eliminating our routines, let’s illuminate some of them. See what can be, not simply what has been. Look beneath the surface, beyond the literal, behind the ruts of the season.
And let’s be conceptive, yes conceptive. Generate a new custom or commitment, utterly outside the boxes of your past. And conception means a shared enterprise, so collaborate, give birth alongside someone else to something unspeakably fresh and beautiful.
Finally, while waiting, be receptive. Be expectant, open your spirit to those gifts which might just emerge…from waiting more patiently than ever before.
Clearly, the bedrock message of Christmas is about birth. Not only the actual arrival of a particular child, but the time of pregnancy which I think is the best analogy for what it is to live spiritually, in a state of wakeful waiting. We’re called, during December, to remember to live in a fulsome state of expectation, to wait as if something precious and beautiful is growing and will soon be bursting upon the scene…to bless our world.
So I wish for all of us, the capacity during this time of Advent, to be perceptive, conceptive and receptive; for remember, long walk part of gift…and deep waiting part of season. Big part.
Tom Owen-Towle
November 26, 2006
