Rev. Josh Pawelek
What are you waiting for?
I assume most of us encounter these words less as a genuinely curious question and more as a directive to stop procrastinating. If you’re really serious about making a change in your life, doing something new, getting out of your rut, your bad habits, pursuing your passions and dreams, going back to school, finding a new job, retiring, committing your life more deeply to the people you love, to service, to movements for liberation and justice—whatever you’ve identified as a possible new direction for your life—what are you waiting for? Get off the couch. Seize the day! Grab the moment! Take the bull by the horns. Don’t just stand there, do something! In the words of our 19th-century spiritual forebear Henry David Thoreau, it’s time to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life!”[1] In the words of the Nike company, “just do it!”
What are you waiting for?
As if it were always that simple.
Our larger culture places high value on action, on doing, producing, performing, achieving, accomplishing. In those moments when we have no good answer to the question—what are you waiting for?—chances are we’ll feel something negative about ourselves, in the very least a tinge of guilt, and at worst, full-blown self-loathing.
I’m reminded of a story from the late Dutch priest, Henri Nouwen. He called it “A Story of Waiting.” “I was invited to visit a friend who was very sick. He was … fifty-three years old [and] had lived a very active, useful, faithful, creative life. Actually, he was a social activist who had cared deeply for people. When he was fifty he found out he had cancer, and the cancer became more and more severe. When I came to him, he said to me, ‘Henri, here I am lying in this bed, and I don’t even know how to think about being sick. My whole way of thinking about myself is in terms of action, in terms of doing things for people. My life is valuable because I’ve been able to do many things for many people. And suddenly here I am passive and I can’t do anything anymore….’ As we talked I realized that he and many others were constantly thinking ‘How much more can I still do?’ Somehow this man had learned to think about himself as a man who was worth only what he was doing.”[2]
I’m reminded also of words from the late spiritual writer Philip Simmons who, in his essay, “The Art of Doing Nothing,” argued that “we [human beings] want to know we matter, we want to know our lives are worthwhile. And when we’re not sure, we work that much harder.”[3] That is, when we’re concerned at some deep level about our worth, we gravitate toward doing. As if we have to prove ourselves. What are you waiting for?
Sometimes we wait for good reason—we’re unsure of how to proceed; we’re uneasy about the risks; we’re concerned about the impact our doing will have on others. Sometimes we wait for good reason, yet it appears to others—and perhaps to ourselves—that we’re somehow flawed, paralyzed with fear, trapped in our own inertia, confused, unmotivated, lazy. Even when asked with care, what are you waiting for? becomes a negative judgement, a subtle indictment of our character.
Let’s lean back from judgement for a moment. Let’s be curious about the impulse to wait. I want us to more fully understand the spiritual value of waiting. I want us to recognize there are things worth waiting for that matter more than whatever we think we should be doing. Maybe procrastination, in some instances, is a sign of wisdom. Maybe waiting is a spiritual skill. But how would we know? We’ve attached so much negative judgement to it, it’s hard to imagine it as anything other than a character flaw.
My colleague, the Rev. Jen Crow, preached a sermon some years ago entitled “Waiting as an Act of Faith.” She said, “I bring you a counter-cultural message, especially in this season of what can become holiday madness—a message of stillness, of waiting, of trust and hopeful expectation, a message that encourages us … to consider the phrase …. Don’t just do something … stand there.”[4] Or sit there, lie there. Pause, rest, breath, pray, be still. Wait.
The Christian liturgical year begins today. It’s the first Sunday of Advent, a four-week season of waiting prior to Christmas. Expectancy and hope infuse this waiting as the Christian world anticipates celebrating the birth of Jesus, the savior, the peacemaker—God incarnate. Of course, this spiritual waiting mixes and merges with waiting for Christmas presents, Santa Claus, reindeer, etc. For children whose families celebrate Christmas, waiting for presents is both excruciatingly annoying and exquisitely joyful. That joy alone tell us there is something precious in the waiting.
The Christian liturgical calendar rests atop more ancient spiritual calendars based on northern hemisphere agricultural cycles—planting, growing and harvesting, followed by waiting through long winter months. The natural world tells us this is a season of waiting. Earlier I shared words from the Rev. Karen Hering: “Hidden in the heart / of late autumn’s barren / fields is the ripening / of seasons yet to come. / Roots clinging to frozen ground / wait patiently / for their next long drink. / Seeds fallen from last summer’s blooms / sleep beneath blankets of quilted leaves / and feathered snow.”[5] Now that the harvest is done, roots, seeds, fields and people are waiting.
The darkness of the post-harvest season also beckons us away from doing toward introspection and reflection—hallmarks of the spiritual skill of waiting. In the words of the Rev. Mark Belletini, “Less Light. / A time to carefully focus on things / that the spotlight has missed…. / Less light. / No need to look frantically / for what we might be missing. / Eyes closed and breath steady…. / Less light. / A blessing to all who never quite find time / to sit in the dark silence during the noisy summer…. Less Light. A gift of the tilting earth.”[6]
If we were pre-industrial, agrarian people, and we had completed our late autumn tasks, harvested and stored food supplies for the winter, prepared wood for the fires that will keep us warm, we would now be entering into a long period of waiting, not just for the return of the sun at the solstice, but for eventual spring thaws and the resumption of outdoor life. We would be accustomed to waiting. We would know how to do it! We would likely look forward to it. We would have methods for passing the long winter hours, teaching our children the ways of our people, telling stories of who we are and where we’ve come from. Our physical activity would naturally be less than in the other seasons. We would likely sleep more. We might not even think of it as waiting. We might just think of it as living.
But that’s not who we are. We who live in developed, post-industrial, post-modern societies—we who have, for the most part, abandoned intimate relationship with the land, with the seasons, with the cycles of food production—we who have grown accustomed to convenience and seemingly endless supplies of energy and heat and who can therefore expect—and be expected to—work and live through the winter months as if they differ in no way from spring, summer and autumn—we don’t wait well. Either we dedicate enormous energy to doing, because that is what our culture values, or we beat ourselves up for not doing enough.
There’s much we miss when our primary mode of being is doing. What if we learned to subvert the impulse to just do it? What if we learned how to wait well? I ask because I believe spiritual waiting brings us more fully into alignment with the sacred dimensions of our lives. I’m taking a cue this morning from the process theologian Jay McDaniel, who recently wrote a short piece called “A Process Theology of Waiting.” For those of you who aren’t familiar with process theology, know that process theologians view the as a dynamic, nearly infinite and always unfolding set of relationships. Process theologians understand God as the sum total of those relationships—everything that has happened and all that will happen, from the interactions of sub-atomic particles to the interactions of galaxies. As such, God—divinity, the sacred—is continually emerging, continually becoming. And one important response for us is waiting—waiting to notice what is emerging. Whether we recognize it or not, says Jay McDaniel, “much of our life is spent in waiting. This is inescapable, because every present moment contains a future that has not yet arrived.”[7] Imagine that! Waiting is an inherent part of who we are.
If we only ever focus our attention on what we need to do, we deny that part of ourselves that waits in each moment. Though we may want things to emerge more quickly, though we may want answers and clarity now, the sacred typically doesn’t move at our pace. And as Rev. Belletini says, “few paths in this life are clearly lit.”[8] As much as we may feel called to act, we are also called to wait, and in that waiting to notice what is emerging within that dynamic, nearly infinite set of relationships, and to align ourselves with it as best we can. Waiting also a reminds us wee don’t always have control over what is happening around us or to us. As much as we may want to seize the day, sometimes the day seizes us and our task is to adapt with as much grace as we can muster. That takes time and patience. That takes waiting. I like the way Rev. Hering alludes to this: “Fruits of the future, / words unripened into speech, / truth present but unseen, evidence yet to be awakened / by the faithful / unfolding / of time and love.”[9]
Regarding the fifty-three year old cancer patient, Henri Nouwen says: “[My friend] realized that after [a life of] hard work he had to wait. He came to see that his vocation as a human being would be fulfilled not just in his actions but also in his passion [meaning, in this case, his suffering and experience of things happening to him that were beyond his control].” Together they began to witness how the sacred was moving in their lives, bringing something new they hadn’t noticed before. Nouwen puts it in Catholic language, “together we began to understand that precisely in this waiting the glory of God and our new life both become visible.”[10]
Earlier I shared a meditation from Rev. Vanessa Rush Southern. She writes, “I couldn’t hear myself think above the din of my surroundings / and when I finally did, I was surprised by what I heard. / I’d lived my life in restless banter, / but with a pause I met what had eluded me— / the part of me (and Her) that waited to be born.”[11] She refers to a variety of relationships—child, friend, lover, parent, Destiny, God—that had become invisible to her precisely because she did not wait. Like the universe, like the quantum world, like spirit, like God, the fact of our relationships means we are in a constant state of emerging. But if we believe we must always be doing something—anything!—we risk missing what is faithfully unfolding in our lives.
What is faithfully unfolding in your life? I like that as a different way of asking the question. Instead of what are you waiting for? ask what is faithfully unfolding in your life?
You will eventually encounter the question, what are you waiting for? You may be encountering it in this very moment. How will it feel to experience the question not as an indictment of inactivity, but as an invitation to reflect on the sacred dimensions of your life? Whatever you hold as sacred, how is it making itself apparent to you in this moment? How is it emerging anew in your life? How will it feel to experience the question as in invitation to ponder your place in that dynamic and nearly infinite set of relationships? Before doing anything, how will it feel to wait, trusting not only that the sun will return, that the springtime will come, but that something meaningful is always faithfully unfolding in your life, that the sacred will, on its on schedule, break forth, bringing renewal and wisdom?
The harvest is done. Winter is near. Advent begins. This is a season of waiting, and waiting is a gift we give to ourselves that assures us what we need most will emerge in its proper time? May we wait well.
Amen and blessed be.
[1] Thoreau, Henry David, “To Live Deliberately,” Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press and the UUA, 1993) #660.
[2] Nouwen, Henri, “A Spirituality of Waiting.” See: https://bgbc.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/A-Spirituality-of-Waiting-by-Henri-Houwen.pdf.
[3] Simmons, Philip, “The Art of Doing Nothing,” Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life (New York: Bantam Books, 2002) p. 122.
[4] Crow, Jen, “Waiting as an Act of Faith,” Quest for Meaning, December, 2012. See: https://www.questformeaning.org/spiritual-themes/waiting-as-an-act-of-faith/.
[5] Hering, Karen, “Hidden in the Heart,” in Janamanchi, Abhi, and Janamanchi Abhimanyu, Falling Into the Sky: A Meditation Anthology (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2013) p. 57.
[6] Belletini, Mark, “Late Fall,” in Sonata for Voice and Silence (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2008) p. 58.
[7] McDaniel, Jay, “A Process Theology of Waiting,” OpenHorizons.org. See: https://www.openhorizons.org/a-process-theology-of-waiting.html.
[8] Belletini, “Late Fall,” in Sonata for Voice and Silence, p. 58.
[9] Hering, Karen, “Hidden in the Heart,” Falling Into the Sky, p. 57.
[10] Nouwen, Henri, “A Spirituality of Waiting.” See: https://bgbc.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/A-Spirituality-of-Waiting-by-Henri-Houwen.pdf.
[11] Southern, Vanessa Rush, “Advent: A Responsive Reading,” in This Piece of Eden: Meditations (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2001) p. 3.
