This is a great article by Henri Nouwen on how to "do" Advent. It'll take you a little while to wade through it, but it's good stuff.
Waiting For God
Henri Nouwen – from “Watch
for the Light”
Waiting is not a very popular
attitude. Waiting is not something that people think about with great sympathy.
In fact, most people consider waiting a waste of time. Perhaps this is because
the culture in which we live is basically saying, “Get going! Do something!
Show you are able to make a difference! Don’t just sit there and wait!” For
many people, waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they
want to go. And people do not like such a place. They want to get out of it by
doing something.
In our particular historical
situation, waiting is even more difficult because we are so fearful. One of the
most pervasive emotions in the atmosphere around us is fear. People are afraid
– afraid of inner feelings, afraid of other people, and also afraid of the
future. Fearful people have a hard time waiting, because when we are afraid we
want to get away from where we are. But if we cannot flee, we may fight
instead. Many of our destructive acts come from the fear that something harmful
will be done to us. And if we take a broader perspective – that not only
individuals but whole communities and nations might be afraid of being harmed –
we can understand how hard it is to wait and how tempting it is to act. Here
are the roots of a “first strike” approach to others. People who live in a
world of fear are more likely to make aggressive, hostile, destructive
responses than people who are not so frightened. The more afraid we are, the
harder waiting becomes. That is why waiting is such an unpopular attitude for
many people.
It impresses me, therefore, that all the figures who appear in the first pages
of Luke’s Gospel are waiting. Elizabeth and Zechariah are waiting. Mary is
waiting. Simeon and Anna, who were there at the temple when Jesus was brought
in, are waiting. The whole opening of the good news is filled with waiting
people. And right at the beginning all those people in someway or another hear
the words, “Do not be afraid. I have something good to say to you.” These words
set the tone and the context. Now Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary, Simeon and
Anna are waiting for something new and good to happen to them.
Who are these figures? They
are representatives of the waiting Israel. The psalms are full of this
attitude: “My soul is waiting for the Lord. I count on His word. My soul is
longing for the Lord more than a watchman for daybreak. (Let the watchman count
on daybreak and let Israel
count on the Lord.) Because with the Lord there is mercy and fullness of
redemption” (Psalm 130:5-7). “My soul is waiting for the Lord” – that is the
song that reverberates all through the Hebrew Scriptures.
But not all who dwell in Israel are
waiting. In fact we might say that the prophets criticized the people (at least
in part) for giving up their attentiveness to what was coming. Waiting finally
became the attitude of the remnant of Israel, of that small group of
Israelites that remained faithful. The prophet Zephaniah says, “In your midst I
will leave a humble and lowly people, and those who are left in Israel will
seek refuge in the name of Yahweh. They will do no wrong, will tell no lies:
and the perjured tongue will no longer be found in their mouths” (Zephaniah
3:12-13). It is the purified remnant of faithful people who are waiting.
Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Simeon and Anna are representatives of that
remnant. They have been able to wait, to be attentive, to live expectantly.
But what is the nature of
waiting? How are they waiting, and how are we called to wait with them?
Waiting, as we see it in the people on the first pages of the Gospel, is
waiting with a sense of promise. “Zechariah,…your wife Elizabeth is to bear you
a son.” “Mary,…Listen! You are to conceive and bear a son” (Luke 1:13, 31). People
who wait have received a promise that allows them to wait. They have received
something that is at work in them, like a seed that has started to grow. This
is very important. We can only really wait if what we are waiting for has
already begun for us. So waiting is never a movement from nothing to something.
It is always a movement from something to something more. Zechariah, Mary, and
Elizabeth were living with a promise that nurtured them, that fed them, and
that made them able to stay where they were. And in this way, the promise
itself could grow in them and for them.
Second, waiting is active. Most of us think of waiting as something very
passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands. The
bus is late? You cannot do anything about it, so you have to sit there and just
wait. It is not difficult to understand the irritation people feel when
somebody says, “Just wait.” Words lie that seem to push us into passivity.
But there is none of this
passivity in scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively. They
know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they
are standing. That’s the secret. The
secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something
has begun. Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the
conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be
present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who
believes that this moment is THE moment.
A waiting person is a patient
person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live
the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will
manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to
happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty.
But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live
actively in the present and wait there. Waiting, then, is not passive. It
involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing
in her. Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Mary were very present to the moment. That is
why they could hear the angel. They were alert, attentive to the voice that
spoke to them and said, “Don’t be afraid. Something is happening to you. Pay
attention.”
But there is more. Waiting is
open-ended. Open-ended waiting is hard for us because we tend to wait for
something very concrete, for something that we wish to have. Much of our
waiting is filled with wishes: “I wish that I would have a job. I wish that the
weather would be better. I wish that the pain would go.” We are full of wishes,
and our waiting easily gets entangled in those wishes. For this reason, a lot
of our waiting is not open-ended. Instead, our waiting is a way of controlling
the future. We want the future to go in a very specific direction, and if this
does not happen we are disappointed and can even slip into despair. That is why
we have such a hard time waiting: we want to do the things that will make the
desired events take place. Here we can see how wishes tend to be connected with
fears.
But Zechariah, Elizabeth, and
Mary were not filled with wishes. They were filled with hope. Hope is something
very different. Hope is trusting that something will be fulfilled, but
fulfilled according to the promises and not just according to our wishes.
Therefore, hope is always open-ended.
I have found it very
important in my own life to let go of my wishes and start hoping. It was only
when I was willing to let go of whishes that something really new, something
beyond my own expectations could happen to me. Just imagine what Mary was
actually saying in the words, “I am the handmaid of the Lord… let what you have
said be done to me” (Luke 1:38. She was saying, “I don’t know what this all
means, but I trust that good things will happen.” She trusted so deeply that
her waiting was open to all possibilities And she did not want to control them.
She believed that when she listened carefully, she could trust what was going
to happen.
To wait open-endedly is an
enormously radical attitude toward life. So is to trust that something will
happen to us that is far beyond our own imaginings. So, too, is giving up
control over our future and letting God define our life, trusting that God
molds us according to God’s love and not according to our fear. The spiritual
life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that
new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own
imagination, fantasy, or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance
toward life in a world preoccupied with control.
Now let me say something
about the practice of waiting. How do we wait? One of the most beautiful
passages of scripture is Luke 1:39-56, which suggests that we wait together, as
did Mary and Elizabeth. What happened when Mary received the words of promise?
She went to Elizabeth.
Something was happening to Elizabeth
as well as to Mary. But how could they live that out?
I find the meeting of these two
women very moving, because Elizabeth and Mary came together and enabled each
other to wait. Mary’s visit made Elizabeth
aware of what she was waiting for. The child leapt for joy in her. Mary
affirmed Elizabeth’s
waiting. And then Elizabeth
said to Mary, “Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the
Lord would be fulfilled.” And Mary responded, “My soul proclaims the greatness of
the Lord” (Luke 1:45-46). She burst into joy herself. These two women created
space for each other to wait. They affirmed for each other that something was
happening that was worth waiting for.
I think that is the model of
the Christian community. It is a community of support, celebration, and
affirmation in which we can lift up what has already begun in us. The visit of
Elizabeth and Mary is one of the Bible’s most beautiful expressions of what is
means to form community, to be together, gathered around a promise, affirming
that something is really happening.
This is what prayer is all
about. It is coming together around the promise. This is what celebration is
all about. It is lifting up what is already there. This is what Eucharist is
about. It is saying “thank you” for the seed that has been planted. It is
saying, “We are waiting for the Lord, who has already come.”
The whole meaning of the
Christian community lies in offering a space in chich we wait for that which we
have already seen. Christian community is the place where we keep the flame
alive among us and take it seriously, so that it can grow and become stronger
in us. In this way we can live with courage, trusting that there is a spiritual
power in us that allows us to live in this wolrd without being deuced
constantly by despair, lostness, and darkness. That is how we dare to say that
God is a God of love even when we see hatred all around us. That is why we can
claim that God is a God of life even when we see death and destruction and agony
all around us. We say it together. We affirm it in one another. Waiting
together, nurturing what has already begun, expecting its fulfillment – that is
the meaning of marriage, friendship, community, and the Christian life.
Our waiting is always shaped
by alertness to the word. It is waiting in the knowledge that someone wants to
address us. The question is, are we home? Are we at our address, ready to
respond to the doorbell? We need to wait together to keep each other at home
spiritually, so that when the word comes it can become flesh in us. That is why
the book of God is always in the midst of those who gather. We read the word so
that the word can become flesh and have a whole new life in us.
Waiting is essential to the
spiritual life. But waiting as a disciple of Jesus is not an empty waiting. It
is a waiting with a promise in our hearts that makes already present what we
are waiting for. We wait during Advent for the birth of Jesus. We wait after
Easter for the coming of the Spirit, and after the ascension of Jesus we wait
for his coming again in glory. We are always waiting, but it is a waiting in
the conviction that we have already seen God’s footsteps. Waiting for God is an
active, alert - yes, joyful -waiting. As we wait we remember him for whom we
are waiting, and as we remember him we create a community ready to welcome him
when he comes.
