What Are We Waiting For?

My oven died yesterday afternoon.   The repair man is unable to come until Monday which, if you do the math as I did, you’ll realize is a week to the day before Christmas Eve.  And this is just to assess the situation.  When I will have a functioning kitchen is anyone’s guess!

For obvious reasons, the situation heightens my awareness of how often in life we find ourselves waiting.  Waiting and hoping.  Not only for obvious goods like working ovens.

Often, we don’t know what we wait for.  But that sense of something lacking, or out of sorts, is so keen.  I spend many hours listening to others share the long corridors of waiting down which they walk in darkness; I have mine.  Whether we are conscious of it on any given day or not, I believe that we are continually waiting for messengers and their good news.

Advent is the season that elevates and, in a sense, beatifies the ubiquity of waiting.  Then along comes Christmas to lend us a story line.  We wait for the arrival of the Christ child.  On good days, the effect of this story is that mere waiting becomes hopeful expectancy.  We can assent to waiting, then.  It ends well.

But if we push a bit further and dig a tad deeper, this arc – of longing, waiting, and fulfillment – can beg the real question. What are we waiting for?

As any parent knows, the arrival of a child isn’t the end of waiting as much as it is the beginning of mystery — moments of anguish as piercing as those of joy.  One kind of waiting is replaced by many others.  Life is never more balanced on the knife edge of uncertainty than it is for a parent.  The only thing that makes the new Olympiad of waiting and powerlessness endurable is the presence of an overpowering love.

If we are serious about it at all, then, waiting is to make ourselves completely vulnerable to the unknown.  It requires not a soft landing and a familiar endpoint, but acute and courageous attention.  Anything can be a portent.  A tone of voice, a strange knock on the door, a word glimpsed on a package of bread (this morning, on my Iggy’s loaf bag: “Honesty”).

To wait in this way is to refrain from acting as if our day’s program for happiness, purpose or efficiency is so airtight, so pleasing to ourselves that we don’t leave a little space for the God of Surprises to illuminate what we didn’t even notice was dark.

At the moment, of course, my idea of a miracle is the power to touch a computer screen and crank my oven to 350 degrees so that I can bake Christmas cookies for the party next Sunday afternoon.  With a flick of the wrist, to finish the lasagna I’ve promised a friend just out of the hospital.

But I recognize that this is just crawling back into my comfort zone.  So too is my falling for the easy image of the child in the manager that will decorate the altar in a few days.  Both are drive-by plot summaries on the way to a robust meal, nothing more.

The truth is that the message lives outside our comfort zones. It is messy, often painful.  It will reorder our lives – whatever “it” is; whenever “it” comes; whatever “it” says.  For this reason, the messenger is almost always shot or crucified.

If I practice the honesty my bakery bread admonishes today, the messages I most need to hear are those I least wish to.  “It” is the voiceless faces of starving children in Yemen. It is the strung-out denizens of my city who spend their days on a frigid strip of concrete and chain link fence known as Methadone Mile with its trash and rags and utter desolation.  It is the shock and trauma of students of color at the college where I teach, after a series of racist events there the night before exams began.

It is when I am able to attend to these, that the miracle actually occurs.  Suddenly, the intrusion into history of a message of transforming love and liberation has the outsider context that it needs, always and forever, to make sense. To be heard.  This is precisely the still point, where the answer to waiting becomes the invitation to hope, and the call to change our lives.