How We Wait
by Peter A. Friedrichs, guest contributor
Awaiting Tiana’s Showboat Jubilee at Disneyland. (photo: huffmans/Flickr)
Advent is a time of waiting. For Christians, it’s a time of waiting for the arrival of the Christ child. For others, Advent is a time of waiting for a hoped-for future, waiting for the time of bleakness to pass and for new joy to arrive.
We spend a lot of our time waiting for a “hoped-for” future. Waiting for the arrival of our own newborn child. Waiting to get that promotion at work. Waiting in line at the checkout counter. Waiting for the light to change. One writer I know said, after returning from a recent trip to Disneyland, that she realized that an amusement park is 10 percent thrills and 90 percent walking and waiting. “I realized,” she writes, “that that same equation works for most of life … including Christmas. So one of life’s greater challenges is to enjoy the 90 percent.”
We can wait with eager anticipation, like a child who can’t get to sleep on Christmas Eve. We can wait with boredom, allowing our mind to wander and even forgetting what we’re waiting for. We can also wait with frustration, like the driver who honks his horn at the car ahead of him because the light turned green two whole seconds ago. We also can wait with supreme patience. There’s a reason we call that “the patience of a saint.” It’s very hard to achieve and sustain. How we wait says a lot about who we are.
While it’s good to look ahead to some hoped-for event, there’s a danger in all this waiting, too. The danger is that, in waiting, we become so “future-focused” that we forget the gifts of the present moment. We overlook what we have in anticipation of receiving what we want. And then there’s the danger of disappointment. When we pin our hopes on a wish or a dream, we can be crushed if it doesn’t come true.
In the spirit of the season, Simon John Barlow, a British Unitarian minister, urges us to wait for a particular gift in a particular way: “Prepare the way to welcome your inner-Christ child — the being of love and light, the spark of holiness that lies deep in us all. Seek the signs of hope and promise in your life and the world around you — the stars that point the way to the Light of God. Make your way to the stable of peace and acceptance in the secret depths of your heart.”
In this season of Advent, I wish you good waiting. Waiting that allows your hearts to soar to a longed-for future and your feet to stay planted in the goodness and gladness of today. May this season bring you joy in your present, in your presents, and by and through your presence.
Reverend Friedrichs is a Unitarian Universalist minister in Media, Pennsylvania. After working as an attorney for nearly 20 years, he followed his call to ministry and was ordained in 2006. You can listen to his sermons on his congregation’s website.
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The (Advent) Road Between “Already” and “Not Yet”
by Debra Dean Murphy, guest contributor
The Advent tension is a way of learning again that God is God: that between even our deepest and holiest longing and the reality of God is a gap which only grace can cross.
—Rowan Williams, A Ray of Darkness
I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Road this Advent, and am struck by some thematic parallels between this bleak book and these dark December days of longing and foreboding. The correlations are subtle, tenuous, even arguable, perhaps — and not intended, I’m confident, by the author himself. Maybe it’s more like a shared sensibilitity: Advent’s unflinching gaze at the trouble and pain to come, given clear-eyed expression in the ancient prophets’ warnings; the sober, spare narration of terrifying desolation in The Road; and the palpable urgency that informs and animates both.
Yet hope is wrested from the scattered wreckage. Advent’s apocalyptic warnings locate the strange mission of a strange Messiah who’s “winnowing fork is in his hand,” but whose own dying will undo forever the power of sin and death. The violence and despair of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic landscape and the unspoken calamity that created it do not have the last word.
Hope and human goodness and a glimmer of divine grace seep through the cracks of the scorched, dead earth. “You shall fear disaster no more,” says the prophet Zephaniah in one of the appointed Advent texts. McCarthy’s nameless father and son seem to claim this foretelling for themselves as their savage, beautiful story comes to a close.
In Advent we walk a tightrope, taut (and fraught) with the tension of living between the times — between the “already” of the first Advent of God and the “not yet” of its completion. The Advent scriptures and liturgies and hymns bring this tension alive, teaching us, as the archbishop of Canterbury writes, “something of God’s own simultaneous ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to all religious aspiration and expectation.”
But tension — along with ambiguity, paradox, and mystery — are not what we want from our religion. Middle class Christian piety pays a kind of lip service to Advent (the wreath is a nice touch, we think), but darkness, foreboding, “unquenchable fire”? Please. We are on our way to the manger, for heaven’s sake. The tree’s been up for two weeks. You’re scaring the children with all this talk of vipers and the wrath to come.
But Advent asks us to see and speak truthfully, to reckon honestly with our troubled times, to share in the righteous anger of a God who will, as the gospel of Matthew says, “decide with equity for the meek of the earth.”
We make the journey through Advent a bit like travelers on an unknown road, but not as those without hope. For in the fullness of time the desert will bloom and rejoice, our weeping will turn to joy, and all flesh, we pray with fervent Advent longing, shall see it together.
Image caption: “A Stranger, The Second Advent” (photo: cawa/Flickr, used under its Creative Commons license)
Debra Dean Murphy is an assistant professor of Religion and Christian Education at West Virginia Wesleyan College and serves on the board of The Ekklesia Project. She regularly blogs at Intersections: Thoughts on Religion, Culture, and Politics.
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