Advent Day 5

Advent is the night of the Christian year. As a Jew begins the day at sunset, so Christians begin the church year in the darkening quiet of ever-deeper winter, hushing our frenzy, readying for Christ.

When my friend Justin was very young, and I was tucking him into bed, he asked me, “Susan, how long does night take?”

What an amazing question, and one I had forgotten to ask for a very long time! At the start of the night of our year, we might well ask it now: How long does night take?

If you’re sick and in pain, one night takes about a hundred years.
If you’re alone, and waiting for love, one night takes forever.
If you’re a child, and night seems a waste of perfectly good playtime, the night stretches on to eternity.
If you’re a reluctant Messiah, a sweating blood in a garden while the whole city parties, the night is terrifying long.

Night is all about waiting, and waiting is about helplessness. Waiting for dawn or light or hop or love or relief, we are helpless to turn back the darkness or hurry the new day. All we can do is nothing. All we can do is wait. But that very helplessness makes every time of waiting, if we will let it be so, a time of waiting for God. Every wait can become holy, artful, and lovely, a waiting for God.
We have no choice: Advent makes us wait. But Advent asks us how we are waiting. With anger, resentment, sleepliness, boredom, and despair? Or with desire, become waiting is all about that too? Desire. If we let ourselves feel our desire and bravely name it, then waiting can become the birthplace of hope, and faith, and, especially, love.

Advent is the church’s night watch, our season of waiting. The helplessness and desire in waiting make every wait, in the end, a wait for God. The good news of Advent is that if we wait, while we wait, in the waiting, God comes. The waiting itself is the thing, the very place we can meet God anew.

I’m terrible at waiting! I hate to be put on hold on the phone, or held by a slow driver, or made to wait in the grocery line. And our instant, hurry-up world doesn’t teach me patience.

But waiting is “mysteriously necessary to all that is becoming” and especially to the becoming souls. So every time of waiting is soul-work, and a wait for God.
I once heard of a ninety-five-year-old woman who fell in the snow on her way to church and couldn’t get up. She could have become angry, frightened, and cold. She could have given up, fallen asleep. She could have died! Instead, she made snow angels. She filled up her waiting with energy and action, beauty and warmth, and it kept her alive.

Near his end, approaching Jerusalem, Jesus gives us a clue to such brave and holy, artful waiting. The people are full of Passover joy in the hope a messiah will come, but he, sensing danger, is waiting with dread. Trudging along he sees a fig tree, heaving with buds, and his eyes are drawn upward where he notices, suddenly, spring. Remember the promise of spring, unstoppable after winter’s death, he says: “When everything around you is dark with violence and fear, stand up, raise your heads; your redemption is near.”

Stand up. Raise your heads. Look to heaven. Hold to spring when winter draws down your gaze and your heart. In this very darkness, especially here, God is near.
Every time of waiting is a wait for God: a wait for peace in the Middle East, the results of a test, the conception of a child, or that child’s maturing; a wait for love, or an end to grief, or pain, or life itself, or the rapture of the Lord. If we will keep company with our waiting, keeping it warm and alive with desire and hope, keeping it awake, like a mother attentive to her baby’s breath, feeding it with faith, if we will look up and not lose heart, then while we wait, in the waiting because of the waiting, god will come.

How long does night take? When waiting is holy and artful, filled up with God, just long enough.

Written by Susan Bock