Everywhere I go, people are busy with their cell phones: scrolling through emails, muttering messages, playing games or watching some video snippet. Filling time with our cell phones is now possible, and so we do it because others are doing it. On the Metro, in line at the grocery store, or sitting in a doctor’s office, people no longer stare into the distance, resting in space. Simply waiting.
Not until I came to Church of the Saviour did I have words for waiting as a spiritual practice. The inward journey was a mystery to me. I had thought of doing nothing as wasted time. I had thought of prayer as “talking with God” – and I did most of the talking. Spending time in silence was filled with planning or reading. Then I was introduced to silent retreat, followed by Advent as a whole season of waiting.
I could understand Mary’s pregnancy as a season of waiting, compressed by the liturgical calendar into the four weeks before Christmas. And the overlay of expectant waiting for the mysteriously named “Son of Man” seemed reasonable enough, even though I’m not expecting an apocalypse any time soon – unless it comes in the form of global warming or nuclear catastrophe.*
But every year, the return of Advent has invited me into the darkness of winter and hibernation with a sense of expectation. I gather an armload of grasses and brambles at Dayspring to make a winter bouquet for my meditation spot. I pull out Gayle Boss’s wonderful book, All Creation Waits: the Advent Mystery of New Beginnings, and I read the stories of how waiting is woven into the web of creation. For each day, there is another gem: muskrat, black bear, chickadee, honey bee, loon, wood frog, wild turkey. After reading, I just sit with the wonder of her words, letting my eyes rest on the evocative illustration which accompanies each vignette, waiting.
I suspect this Advent season of waiting is an extension of practicing sabbath, of resting in God, trusting that new life will come again. And I’m beginning to believe that such waiting is, in fact, the seedbed of hope.
–Marjory Zoet Bankson, Editor of InwardOutward.org
