Pastor Jim Clarke Pastor Paula McCutcheon

Advent Waiting

Pastor Paula

We have waited in silence on your loving-kindness, O God. Ps 48:8

    I always seem to pick the longest line.  Before I enter the grocery lines I stand back and assess before I enter one.  I try to figure out how long it will take for a certain amount of groceries to be checked through and bagged into bags until the process is finished and I can go next.   I go to the line with the fewest items. Inevitably there is a problem and the manager is called and I wait.  I shake my head and say to myself, you should have gone to the longer line.  Lately however I have been trying a new strategy.

      For sometime I have known that this Advent I would focus on the waiting aspect of the four weeks before Christmas.  I was blessed last year when someone shared with me several articles on waiting from a magazine.  So I have been practicing. I wanted to be able to proclaim I am truly practicing what I preach!  Now when I go shopping I look for the longest lines.  I am tempted by the shorter ones however I invite and welcome the time to wait.  Sometimes I wait in complete silence and sometimes I start up a conversation.  Sometimes when I am waiting at a stop light I look at the sky to see the different colors not only of the sky but of the trees and the leaves.  I watch the breeze moving in the trees and leaves, God’s Spirit emerges. I am still working on waiting at home and in our daily church life together.  It is easier to wait for and with strangers than with my own family and church family! I try to wait before talk because when I don’t I often say things that I wish I had not said!

     Waiting I think most of us would say is very difficult in our fast paced, hurry up culture.  Mary C. Earle shares in an article on waiting that, “The press of hurrying creates harried and hassled souls, disconnected from life and from kindness itself." By contrast, in Spanish, the verb esperar mans both ‘to hope’ and ‘to wait’. She has a native plant called espreranza in her gardens…when the blooms come; she is reminded of waiting in silence on loving-kindness.  She is reminded of something that her usual pace all but obliterates: there is a way of being and knowing that is grounded in timing she did not create.  There is a way of being and knowing that dimly remembers that waiting is an attitude of faith.

     Waiting in silence, creating space for steadfast love to grow within may be the most essential practice of all.  It is in many ways the spirit of Advent.

    Advent is a gift to us to slow down the pace, to practice waiting in silence, so will create space for God’s love to grow in us. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and author, remarked that life is perpetual Advent. He sensed that in waiting trust began to grow. Trust in God in particular.  Trusting and waiting allow the loving kindness that is the essence of God’s own Life to grow in us and to bear fruit that we never expected.

    We have in our liturgical year four weeks set aside to wait.  They begin on December 2^nd.  I invite each one of us to take all the opportunities possible to wait and to see what we notice. Then my hope is that we will take time to reflect on what we noticed and experienced both outside and inside of ourselves during our waiting times.  I do believe that our waiting will transform our own harried and hassled souls as well as the people around us who are also living in the culture of the ‘Christmas Season’ which has no time for Advent.  When we practice Advent waiting we will fill ourselves with loving kindness and kind love will flow from us. Hope will be birthed yet again.

Grant me O God the capacity to wait in hope,

To allow your own loving-kindness to grow in me,

For the life of your world. Amen

    -- Mary C. Earle