Another Kind of Waiting

“When angry, count to 10 before you speak.”

“Think before you speak.”

“Look before you leap.”

Wise words from wise people: stop and think before you act, perhaps to prevent an action which you might regret. My favourite ‘stop and think’ advice has to be “Before you criticise someone, try walking a mile in their shoes. That way you'll be a mile away and have their shoes!”

Advent is a powerful time for reminding us what we are waiting for. But as these sayings remind us, there are more reasons to wait than just waiting for something; sometimes we wait because of something, holding back from something... “Before you set out just check the forecast will you?” This might only involve waiting a minute, or even ten seconds – just to make sure we’re not making a mistake. This waiting is just long enough to show us that everything might not be as it seemed, and allows us to act from a more thought through or informed position.

We find Joseph receiving his own ‘wait a minute’ call in Matthew:

When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." (2.18b-21)

In general the sayings collected above are good common sense advice that might be plastered round any anger-management course or self-help manual, but Joseph could have followed every good piece of advice given on prudence and would probably still have resolved to dismiss his pregnant fiancée. The angel’s words however are tailored just for this man whose world has just taken a battering. Joseph was asked to hear a higher perspective on what was happening to him, to stay from his course of action: “stop, wait, know what God is doing.” For Joseph it was an angel, for others it has been different. For me it has been scripture, the preacher, the songwriter, the friend or the silence, all of them carrying the voice of Christ. It is Christ who knows our hearts and our ways.

Anyone can ask us to stop and think, but only those with an extra perspective on our lives will be able to tell us why. Advent reminds us, as we consider both Jesus’ coming and return, that God indeed has that all-embracing perspective. In Advent we hear the voice of the one who is the beginning and the end – might that voice, this Advent, be saying ‘wait a minute!’?

Waiting for God

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard examines two aspects of stalking animals: stillness and pursuit. She employs them both to catch a glimpse of the fish and the muskrats that live in the creek. Dillard writes about seeing. She writes of encountering nature and the divine. Like Moses in the cleft of the rock she waits motionless and watches, for fish and muskrats and, we suppose, for God; or like Jacob at the Jabbok she pursues her quarry with patient, unrelenting persistence.

‘You have to stalk everything. Everything scatters and gathers; everything comes and goes like fish under a bridge. You have to stalk the spirit, too. You can wait forgetful anywhere, for anywhere is the way of his fleet passage, and hope to catch him by the tail and shout something in his ear before he wrests away. Or you can pursue him wherever you dare, risking the shrunken sinew in the hollow of the thigh; you can bang at the door all night till the innkeeper relents, if he ever relents; and you can wail till you’re hoarse or worse the cry of incarnation always in John Knoepfle’s poem: “and Christ is red rover . . . and the children are calling / come over come over.” I sit on a bridge as on Pisgah or Sinai, and I am both waiting becalmed in a cliff of the rock and banging with all my will, calling like a child beating on a door: Come on out! . . . I know you’re there.’ (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Perennial Classics edition, 1999, 207)

(By the way, I have read a few of Knoepfle’s poems but have never come across the one Dillard quotes – does anybody know where I can find it?)

Advent is about waiting, not only for Christmas but also for God. It is about opening our eyes and ears, attuning our spiritual senses to the presence of the Spirit. We can do this in at least two ways: We can sit or kneel quietly and, ceasing all other activity, turn our attention toward God. We can also, during the course of everyday living, pay greater attention to the people and circumstances around us, actively looking and listening for traces of God there. We need both approaches. When we follow them we might find, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
and every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes –
the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

(Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Aurora Leigh’, The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Macmillan, 1897, 466)

Taken together, these two ways might produce a kind of virtuous circle. The practice of Morning Prayer attunes our senses to the presence of the divine. As we live attentively, we discover God in the everyday and so return our prayers in thanksgiving. As Abraham Joshua Heschel puts it, ‘Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.’ (Heschel, Man’s Quest for God, Aurora Press, 1998, 5)

Advent gives us an excuse to practise.

‘Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!’ Psalm 27.14

Waiting in the Ark

I went to see '2012' at the cinema the other day. It was pretty awful in an entertaining sort of way, as you'd expect from Hollywood, and managed to cheerfully massacre a Noah-and-the-Ark metaphor that was running through the film. I turned to my friend towards the end and said 'For the love of all things good and true, don't let there be a dove with an olive branch at the end of all this'. I'm glad to report that the film managed to stave off such an excessive touch of cheese. Not that it made much difference in the end - the camel's back had already been broken several times over!

This incident however reminded me of a poem which I had written during a quiet day at the end of my term here at Regent's, and I felt the sting of hypocrisy! But since it's on the theme of advent waiting, and picks up on Ark imagery, and the idea of richly waiting for a new world, I thought I'd share it with you.


Adventus


He holds the fretful bird
Within the ribcage of his hands
Feels its tug and shunt;
Its pinions animated by frustration.
Like a Noah he stands over it, absorbed,
Unyielding, as its leapings lapse
Into spasmodic assertion,
Are loosed into warm wax, soft down.

But the tiny flame still beats under his fingers' curl
Dark eyes askance, watch him lovingly.
They are both waiting now forever,
At the window, and their waiting
Is a splurging fountain of gestation;
A pregnant sprig.

But then ... they appear

After W.H. Auden had visited the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, and seen Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s c.1558 work, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, he went away and penned the following cynical words:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

William Willimon recalls Brueghel’s painting, and Auden’s poem, in his book On a Wild and Windy Mountain, wherein he observes that we trudge past bleeding crosses with a shrug of the shoulders, that Good Fridays are so commonplace among us as to be unnoteworthy, and that tragedy achieves nobility only in the theater. ‘Everydayness and ordinariness’, he writes, ‘become our best defenses, the most effective relativizers of the tragic in our midst. Some young Icarus falls from the sky every day, so one had best get on with the business at hand until the extraordinary comes. For now, go to work, eat, make friends, make money, make love, mind your business – that’s the best way to cope, for the time being, with the expectedness of the tragic. The old masters knew best’ (p. 15).

Willimon proceeds to compare Landscape with the Fall of Icarus with another of the Dutch masters' works: Numbering at Bethlehem. He notes the ordinariness of the depiction, a day mundane and unpromising – in its highlights at least – and nothing beyond the expected.

But then … they appear.

They appear. ‘An inconspicuous, thoroughly ordinary young woman on a little donkey led by a stoop-shouldered, bearded peasant who carries a saw. Here is Mary, with Joseph the carpenter, come to town to be counted. They are so easily overlooked in the midst of ordinariness. Old masters like Brueghel’, Willimon rightly suggests (and we might add Rembrandt), ‘were never wrong’. Rather, they understood, and bore witness to in their work, the truth of Emmanuel, the scandal of the unostentatious God living – and dying – with us, of God stained with the sweat of human bondage and soaked – baptised – in the blood of human violence, of God incognito. ‘They understood our blindness not only to the tragic but also to the triumphant in our midst … In life, the Presence goes unnoted as we thumb through the evening paper. And so we wait, sitting in the darkness of the everyday until something extraordinary breaks in. Someday God may break into this world, we say. But for the time being, it is best to work, eat, make love, pay taxes, fill out government forms, and mind our business. The old masters knew it best’ (p. 16).

I have posted elsewhere on the pseudonymous activity of God, suggesting that ‘in the economy of holy love, the locus of greatest clarity equates to the point of greatest incongruity and surprise’. It is precisely that we may ‘see’ what Willimon so beautifully refers to as ‘the triumphant in our midst’ that we are graced, and that that we might witness to the day when good will triumph over all, certain that the grace of holy love will win at last because it did not fail to win at its most decisive time. In the meantime, such seeing typically requires what is another great advent theme: waiting, or what R.S. Thomas, in his poem ‘Kneeling’, called ‘moments of great calm’:

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great role. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

Waiting

WAITING

I love Advent – a time of waiting in breathless awe and expectation of what God will do. But God is a God of surprises and nobody expected a small helpless baby, born to ordinary people who would soon become refugees – these were not the expected circumstances surrounding the birth of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

This painting by Fernando Aritzti is always part of my Advent preparation–‘it represents the love of God for our African American people in a voyage of time and space. It shows the history of these people from their beginnings in Africa.
On the lower left side is a Zulu warrior with shield, looking up into the sky; below him stands a princess also looking up; to her left are two slaves, one standing and the other sitting on the ground.
This grouping of figures is the representation of millions of Africans who were brought in shackles from the motherland. They are watching their beloved land disappear over the horizon - a homeland they will never see again.
In the lower center of the painting are plantations of the deep south where slaves laboured in the fields for many years in the most dehumanizing conditions. These figures look steadfastly up into the sky.
On the lower right side of the painting the figures represent their African descendants. Though their lives have changed significantly since the civil rights movement, still today they are victims of prejudice in most levels of society.
Their pain-filled existence has not been overlooked by the loving and compassionate God.
On the center right side are the souls of the deceased ascending to God as the Son descends from God's hand. "Emmanuel" - God among us. My painting endeavours to emphasis the facet of God made human- the great gift of incarnation for all people of the world in time and in space.' Fernando Arizti writing in Christ for All People: WCC publications

Waiting for what?
For all to have clean drinking water.
Waiting for what?
For all to have food.
Waiting for what?
For women to be treated equally to men.
Waiting for what?
For workers to receive a fair wage.
Waiting for what?
For the rich to share their wealth.
Waiting for what?
For the caste system to end.
Waiting for what?
For baby Jesus to be born.
This is some Advent.
Waiting for rather a lot it seems .

Rosie G Motion

More Reflections on Advent as Waiting

Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. (Luke 2:25)

Waiting
Is a species of death
Is the longest side of resurrection’s arc.
Waiting
Is a transparency of soul
An active passivity; a participation.

At Advent we remember that we are waiting with Simeon in the temple for the coming of Jesus. We are not only waiting in the great temple of history, but in the temples and histories of every situation, relationship, and conversation; every work and endeavour; whether these be cruel, joyful or mundane. We wait like Simeon for the ‘consolation of Israel’ in all the myriad little Israels of our day-to-day lives. This is a form of giving up and letting go. It is the act of saying ‘I don’t have the answers’, of ‘ultimately I am powerless and need God here’. It is a ‘by myself I can do nothing’ (John 5:30, 15:5). In this sense,
Waiting is a species of death.

With Jesus, death is never the end; in fact it is the very beginning of something new he is doing. That’s a fact spelled out at the empty tomb, but it is also expressed in the miracle of the incarnation – in the birth itself. The birth pangs are the sign that life is coming; so it was with Mary, so it is with the groaning world, so it is with our broken lives. And if we wait, though we die, we also find ourselves swung up into life and redemption. It is a miracle with G-force. In this sense,
Waiting is the longest side of resurrection’s arc.

Sometimes Jesus’ relationship to the Father is described as one of ‘transparency’; that in his human nature he was utterly transparent to the reality and presence of God, who showed and worked through him perfectly. Our spotless window. Philosophers get a little too excited about this sort of imagery but it’s useful and quite beautiful really. So we should be like Jesus right? Transparent to our Father. To consciously wait is to look for the coming of Jesus, and to become more and more aware that his presence is shining in the room. In this sense,
Waiting is a transparency of soul.

By ‘waiting’ I don’t mean some abstract and philosophical state. I mean – actually waiting. Sitting in a chair and saying in your head: ‘Right, I am going to wait for God’. I suppose it is what mystics might call attentiveness, but it’s not really that complicated. It’s thinking ‘I am waiting for God’ as I brush my teeth, or drive the car, or watch my body fail, or enjoy a conversation with a friend. It is opening these moments up to God. It is dying to them and miraculously receiving them back from the hand of the Father. This goes against our inherent busy-bee instinct: ‘I don’t like waiting’, ‘I could be doing something useful’, ‘this is such a waste’. But as we wrestle these struggling urges in our waiting, we feel something rising – first expectancy, but then something else. We feel God’s boiling, silent power smiling at us. Try it! Hold yourself down long enough! It’s not a case of my will (I am active), or God’s will (I am passive); it is ‘I will God’s will’. It is handing over the reins at Gethsemane; it is lying in a manger. And when we act like Jesus we take part in Jesus, our deaths are held in his death, and our resurrection is assured in his resurrection (Romans 6:5). In this sense,
Waiting is an active passivity; a participation.

And, after all those years, Simeon held the tiny baby in his arms. He looked down and saw the salvation of the world was resting massively in his open palms. And we shall too! Happy Christmas!