invited to stay with our questions, to live with them so that they will connect us with the Lord who can be met along our vocational paths and glimpsed in unexpected gifts.
B. Learning to Wait—in Expectation
Simone Weil said that “waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.”13 But most of us find that waiting for anything can be very annoying and frustrating. In our society, we are not patient waiters.
We live in an age of acceleration, in an era so seduced by the instantaneous that we are in grave danger of losing our ability to wait. Life moves at a staggering pace. Computers yield immediate answers. Pictures develop before our eyes. Satellites beam television signals from practically anywhere, allowing distant images on different continents to appear almost instantly in our living rooms. Complex life issues are routinely introduced, dealt with and solved in neat thirty-minute segments on television. Space travel, mobile phones, instant coffee, disposable diapers. In almost every way, we are enclosed in a speeding world. We are surrounded by fast lanes, express mail, instant credit. Faster is better. Ask almost anyone. Quick and easy are magical words with enormous seductive powers. Advertisers know that if they put them on a product it sells better—whether the product is instant potatoes, instant money or instant pain relief. We’re told that we can walk off ten pounds in two weeks, melt five inches in five days, or just take a pill and do it overnight.
A young monk once asked Abba Moses, one of the desert fathers, how to find true spiritual growth. “Go, sit in your cell”, said the monk, “and your cell will teach you everything.”14 Somehow, we have lost this important secret in the spiritual life—that in stayedness, as George Fox called it, we find the realm of transformation. In the stayedness of waiting, we find the questions emerging that we need in order to grow. The Scriptures are filled with stories about the importance of waiting. In the Old Testament, we see Noah waiting for the flood waters to recede; Daniel waits through the night in a den of lions; Sarah waits in her barrenness for a child; Jacob waits for Rebecca’s hand. The Israelites wait in Egypt, then wait forty more years in the desert. Later, they wait seventy years in Babylonian captivity. Jonah waits in a fish’s belly. In the New Testament, Mary waits; Simeon waits to see the Messiah; the apostles wait for Pentecost; Paul waits in prison.
Furthermore, the Bible is rich with language urging us to wait. “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isa 30: 15). “For you I wait all day long” (Ps 25: 5). “My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning” (Ps 130: 6). “If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay” (Hab 2: 3). “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom 8: 25). Sometimes, I wonder if waiting is the missing link in our spiritual growth, the lost and forgotten experience crucial to becoming fully human, fully Christian, fully ourselves.
One day, while reading the Gospels, it occurred to me that when important times of transition came for Jesus, he entered places of waiting—the wilderness, a garden, the tomb. Jesus’ life was a balanced rhythm of waiting for God and then expressing the fruits of that waiting.
We can easily view waiting as mere passivity. However, the words passive and passion come from the same Latin root, pati, which means to endure. Waiting is both passive and passionate. It’s a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into the self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves allowing our questions to emerge, listening to disinherited voices within ourselves, and facing the wounded and broken parts of our lives. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and developing the courage to live that vision.
A retreatant at St. Meinrad Archabbey tells the story of how difficult it was for her to quiet herself and become still. One day she noticed one of the monks sitting perfectly still beneath a tree. He was the picture of waiting. Later she sought him out. “I saw you today sitting beneath the tree—just sitting there so still. How is it that you can wait so patiently in the moment? I can’t seem to get used to the idea of doing nothing.” He broke into a wonderful grin. “Well, there’s the problem right there, young lady. You’ve bought into the cultural myth that when you’re waiting you’re doing nothing . . . . When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.”15
One time, Jesus told a parable about the ten maidens waiting for the bridegroom (Matt 25: 1–13). Five came prepared with extra lamp oil to wait through the night. The other five didn’t plan on having to wait, so they brought only the oil that was in their lamps. Naturally, their lamps gave out. When they left to go buy more oil, the bridegroom showed up, and they missed him.
On one level, the point of this story is that we should always be prepared. But it is also a story about the importance of waiting—waiting through the dark night of our questions. The idea is that waiting precedes celebration. If you don’t show up prepared to wait, you may miss the transcendent when it happens.
It is also important to see in the Scriptures that we have a God that waits for us. The parable of the prodigal son could also be named the parable of the waiting father. It tells us much more about God than anything else—a God who watches and waits with a full heart for us to make our homecoming.
Henry David Thoreau wrote at the age of twenty-five, “nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.”16 He decided to turn away from the lives of quiet desperation he saw all around him and march to his own different drummer. On February 8, 1857, Thoreau wrote this in his journal: “you think I am impoverishing myself by withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature.”17
What has happened to our ability to dwell in unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist in the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it bring something new to birth? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground of waiting. And if you look carefully, you will see that they are also the seedbed of creativity and growth. As Thomas Merton observed, “the imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.”18 Creativity flourishes not in certainty but in questions. However, security is always very seductive. For most of us, it is much more difficult to venture out of our comfort zone. We prefer instant knowing rather than deliberate waiting. When we learn to wait, we experience that where we are in the moment is truly what is important and precious in life. We discover, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “a lifetime burning in every moment.”19 Through our journey of waiting, we come home to live out a new, more authentic vision of who we are. As Eliot also wrote: “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time.”20
God is offering each of us an invitation. A call to waiting. But we have to be patient. We have to let go, tap our creative stillness, and let the right question emerge. Most of all, we have to trust that the Lord is always present to us helping us live into the answer.
C. Learning to Become Still
Another factor that is important in asking the right questions in life is learning to become still—quiet—reflective.
