Wallup.net
Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it. Ann Brashares
What does the anticipation feel like? The sensation of staring into the void, the awareness of an end’s impending arrival? Burning and being extinguished simultaneously? Teo Yi Han
One of the greatest strains in life is the strain of waiting for God. Oswald Chambers
Life can seem like a gloomy wait in the thick of black shadows. And still there are those who smile at the darkness, anticipating the beauty of an eventual sunrise. Richelle E. Goodrich
“For a while” is a phrase whose length can’t be measured. At least by the person who’s waiting. Haruki Murakami
We never live; we are always in the expectation of living. Voltaire
So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking. Gary Paulsen
Whatever happens, do not let waiting become procrastination. Neeraj Agnihotri
Tides do what tides do–they turn. Derek Landy
Here we are at the beginning of another Advent season, another opportunity to remind ourselves, as several thoughtful figures have recently sought to do, that we should not let the struggles of the present annul feelings of anticipation that the promise of a brighter, more equitable and peaceful future can somehow be realized.
Somehow.
As with other years, this season leading up to Christmas seems to be more about preparation than anticipation, making our lists and checking them twice rather than discerning the times and its sometimes-frightening messaging. Such times require more from those of us who would once again dare to welcome into our lives in a few short weeks a baby lying in a barn whose presence in our world still yearns to teach and guide more than we are collectively willing to be taught and led.
But this season is less about the manger per se than about that which we long for, that for which we wait. As we peer into the vastness of both a large and awesome universe and of our own inner realities, as we search for fresh signs that life on this planet, however damaged and threatened at present, is truly worth preserving by each of us, we must also acknowledge that the promise of such a world has not sufficiently informed our judgments or guided our actions. We live for the most part as though the reality we recognize today is the one we will encounter tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. A virtual carbon copy, if you will, of the tasks and their schedules which largely make up our weeks and months, tasks which reflect habits of the heart of which we are scarcely aware and mostly loath to shift in any event.
But the tides are, indeed, continuing to turn. Whether we choose to be moved to response by that reality or not, the planet we inhabit continues to become busier, warmer, less biologically diverse. Rights are being rolled back. Institutions of governance and finance are proving themselves to be less effective, indeed less trustworthy, than we had hoped they might be, often claiming more in the way of “leadership” than they are actually providing. Collectively, we still seem keen on soiling our own beds, on snuffing out much of the life on earth that has made our own life possible and thus jeopardizing prospects for those we have brought into this world (and those they will choose to bring as well).
And what of our religious life at a moment when so much of the humility and awe of our erstwhile divinely inspired universe has degenerated into mean-spirited and petty reflections of communications from a “God” many of us simply don’t recognize; a deity which seems to be stuck in age-old patterns of advocating violence and revenge rather than kindness and service; a God who has apparently authorized people of deep (if not altogether unjustified) grievance to take to the streets with their deadly weapons and smote those who offend their own sense of righteousness, who are at least as quick as the rest of us to pass judgment on others but not on themselves, and who somehow have allowed themselves to believe that the baby in the manger whom we anticipate yet again this Advent represents a call to vengeance rather than compassion, of rampant materialism rather than reconciliation, of goodness somehow better reflected in our pigmentation than in the works of our hands, hearts and souls.
Thankfully, for many of us still, this is not what we long for in this season. This is not what we wait for nor what we hope for. Some still long instead for that time when the manger chill becomes a season of warmth, when the healing of body and mind can help us cast out our demons of hatred and violence, when the multitudes can be fed in a world of plenty as intent on sharing as on consuming, when the rumbling sounds we have come to hear so often are from many feet walking along paths of justice and mercy rather than from climate-induced devastation or from rockets slamming into apartment complexes.
We have written of this before and wish it did not bear repeating, but we must remind our readers and ourselves that our assessments in life our largely a function of our expectations. And we do acknowledge that our expectations of humans remain considerable, even as we probe the depth of our own unhelpful habits, even as we continue to search the night skies and our own souls hoping to find more inspiration for ourselves and others, the “more” which can better enable, yet alone ensure, a planet fit for our children, all our children.
We do indeed expect more of ourselves and of others, and this in spite the debris which I and so many have scattered over a too-broad section of our lives We also expect more of institutional and political officials who continue to insist on the spoils of “leadership” while habitually overpromising and under-delivering. We also expect more of self-justifying religious leadership which seems to be making this spiritual thing up as they go along, dragging us into places more arrogant than humble, more judgmental than kind, faith which presumes much but which dodges much of the emotional content of this Advent season and those moments which convey dimensions of a deeper and more common human aspiration.
And we understand that anticipation worthy of the name is not to be equated with passive waiting, certainly not the waiting to be confused with lethargy or procrastination, clearly not the waiting which brings us pain or simply condenses our lives into smaller and smaller spaces. Rather it is about living such that what we anticipate is already alive within us, already burning and consuming what stands in the way of the changes we have mostly waited too long to make, already encouraging us to align ourselves, our actions and faith, with those times which could well be just around the bend, those times which can finally bring to pass the full promise of the manger.
There is much to learn in this Advent season, much to fix as well, in the world and in ourselves. What I wish most for each of you, for myself also, is the waiting which transitions into anticipation and which further transitions into a deeper commitment to discernment and service. The sun will surely shine over us after this long season of darkness. We can live in these moments as though its rays have already begun to melt away the Advent chill.
gapwblog 