The Act of Waiting
Did any of you walk into church today and see the Advent candles surrounded by greenery where only last week we displayed our harvest of blessings, and mutter “Oh, no! Not Christmas already! The Christmas displays in the mall and the ads on every form of media are bad enough. Do we have to have Christmas at church already? We’re still eating Thanksgiving left-overs. It’s not even December. It can’t be Christmas yet.”
You’re right. It’s not Christmas yet. But, while I share the dismay bordering on disgust that ever earlier appearances of retail holiday displays generate, still I know in my heart that the season has begun, that the Advent wreath belongs here this morning, that our closing hymn, an Advent hymn, is a proper one for this date. It’s not Christmas yet. It’s Advent. The first Sunday of Advent. Whether you shopped for gifts on Black Friday or Small Business Saturday or not. Whether you’ve begun listening to Christmas music or are holding off a bit longer Whether your tree is already up or won’t go into the stand until Christmas Eve. Whatever your state of readiness, the season of waiting begins today.
The first job for which I received a paycheck was detasselling corn the summer after seventh grade. A cousin and I stayed with our grandparents, and joined a crew that worked the fields around their small town. I hated that job. I hated being away from home. Other than my cousin I didn’t know any of the other kids. The fields were cold and wet early in the morning, hot and dry later in the day. The corn was way over my head, making it difficult for me to reach the tassels, so I was often the last person in the crew finished with my row. An allergy to the corn made my arms break out in a rash, and soil ground its way into some not yet healed poison ivy rash on my shins, leaving scars I have to this day. Each night before bed I crossed another day off a little calendar I’d scribbled on a bit of paper, marking the days until I would get to go home to have braces put on my teeth. No teenager ever looked forward to braces as much as I did that summer, because they were my way out of the corn field!
Crossing squares off a calendar–paper, digital or mental–to count down the days and weeks to a long-awaited event is a ritual most of us are familiar with. Any high school student knows the number of days until graduation from the beginning of the first semester, and by spring most other students and teachers could tell you the magic number, too. People looking forward to retirement often keep similar counts. This time of year, in our culture, it’s the holidays to which folks of all ages are counting down the days–children with a great deal of impatience and barely contained excitement, and adults with a growing sense of panic at the thought of all that must still be down in preparation for Christmas, and with some misgivings about the disappointments and grief that are sure to come in the midst of a season that’s supposed to be joyful. Whether we’re breathlessly waiting for a celebration or impatiently waiting for it to be over again for another year, so we won’t be bombarded with reminds of it everywhere we turn, each of us has these December holidays circled in red on our mental calendars, and we’re crossing the days off as they pass. Advent calendars are physical manifestations of those mental calendars.
“Is it Christmas yet? When will it be Christmas?”
“See all these little windows? We’ll open one each day and when there aren’t any more windows, then it will be Christmas.”
What I used to think of as aids to help with the questions that pester parents this time of year, have become big business and aren’t just for kids anymore. The first ones I remember having as a kid were paper, with a simple drawing behind each door. Later our family’s traditional Advent calendars were chocolate-filled versions sold by our junior high school German Club. For the past few years one of my friends has been sending Advent calendars as early birthday gifts. Two years ago it was a tiny New Yorker magazine cover puzzle every day for 24 days. Last year it was a different tea each day. Tomorrow I’ll open a door to reveal the first of 24 jams and spreads–a delight some of my friends have been raving about in recent Advent seasons.
Advent calendars remain a very concrete way of marking time for young, impatient mids. But thinking about them this year, it occurs to me that more than that, with little toys, chocolates, simple craft projects behind the doors, Advent calendars are teaching children (and reminding adults) that that big day they’re waiting for, the one with the presents and all the hoopla, isn’t the only special day. Rather, each day offers gifts of its own–a toy, a piece of chocolate, a puzzle, a project or a jar of jam. Each window opened hints that there are delights to be discovered today, here, now, in the meantime.
These calendars embody the message of the cartoon that shows competing sandwich boards: Jesus is Coming; Buddha Is Here Now. Subtle lessons, perhaps but it is not insignificant that Advent calendars open up and reveal, rather than simply crossing days off, discarded and done with on the race to the Big One, like my countdown to the end of corn detassling.
Like most kids, my siblings and I had trouble waiting for all kinds of important events. Our mom devised a game to help us wait when we expected a visitor at our home. We’d sit on the front steps or near the living room window and play “My Car.” The first car to appear on our street would be my sister’s car, the next would be my car, and the next one my brother’s car, and then Kathy’s again, and mine, and Chris’s, until at last the desired car appeared and pulled into our driveway. Whichever child was lucky enough to exclaim, “my car!” that final time got a small reward–the delight of the first hug from Grandma or the right to tell Dad a bit of family news he’d missed while at the office, or the honor of holding the baby first, if our visitors happened to bring a baby along. (That was the best reward!)
“My Car!” undoubtedly made the waiting easier for Mom, keeping us occupied as it did. She was left free to take care of last minute tasks or enjoy a few moments of downtime without us asking, “when are they going to get here?” It made the waiting easier for us, too, helping us to pass the time. More than simply passing time, however, it engaged us in the here and now, even while we eagerly anticipated some future event.
I won’t pretend that sitting on the steps shouting, “my car!” was ever as exciting or rewarding as the arrival of grandparents or a friend with a baby, but it focused our eyes and our attention the world outside our house, and surely in the meantime we noticed people and birds and squirrels and the colors of flowers and the wind in the old elm tree, along with the cars driving by, and learned something about having fun even as we waited for the big event. “My Car!” was an early lesson for us in the theology we would grow up hearing in church every December, a passage from W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being, a Christmas Oratorio:
the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is
not a desert;
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not
be apparent,
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you
cannot explain
Our minister read those words to us so often because children aren’t the only people in need of Advent calendars and My-Car-type games. As one of our readings pointed out, waiting is a vastly unpopular occupation in our culture. All the advances in technology have speeded up the world of the past few decades have, in the end, failed to eradicate waiting.
A character on the sitcom NewsRadio years ago decided he wanted to adopt a baby. Off he went to an adoption agency where he filled out a few forms and expected to walk out the door with a baby. He was appalled when told there was a lengthy waiting list. “Nine months!” he exclaimed. “Who ever heard of waiting nine months for a baby?”
Well, of course, nine months is still the standard waiting period for a baby, and adoptions routinely take even longer. Advances in medicines notwithstanding healing from illness or injury or broken hearts still takes more waiting than most of us have the patience to endure gracefully. Trips to the post office or amusement park or license bureau still involve waiting in line unless we’re very lucky. When the shortest day of the year comes and goes in a few weeks, still we’ll wait a long time for the sun’s return, as it creeps our way, just a minute or two more each day. Test results, phone calls, the release of a new book by a favorite author, election results, and on and on. You could probably add several dozen more items to this list of things we wait for, usually impatiently.
Then in the midst of all the waiting comes Advent. It’s a period of waiting, of expectation and preparation, but it also brings an invitation for us to live fully and deeply and even joyfully here, now, in the midst of the waiting. To wait actively. When all the windows or doors on the Advent calendar are opened, then Christmas will be there, but along the way there is delight in the opening of each window or door. When all four of the Advent candles are lit, then Christmas will be here. But there is a unique beauty in the light of a single candle, as there is unique beauty in the light of two candles, and three candles.
There are perhaps moments in our lives, brief and fleeting, when we are fully and absolutely engaged in the wait for something. Much more of the time, we live in expectation. In desire. We search for the garden and the miracle. For the freedom and happiness retirement will bring. For the joy of a new baby. For the low humidity of winter in Savannah. For a military family member’s safe return from deployment. A college student’s return for the holidays. For remission. Those not-yet events will be cause for rejoicing and celebration when they come to pass. But we would do well to ever be opening other windows in and onto our lives, open to discovering something hidden and whimsical, refreshing, enriching, sweet, sky nourishing, simple or profound in each day, here, now, even as we wait.
This practice of actively waiting can be transformative, especially this year, when we want nothing more than an end to an administration that began less than a year ago, when we long for relief from greed and injustice and hatred for our neighbors, our families, ourselves. The theme for this first Sunday of Advent is Hope. In times like these we access the hope that will sustain us through the wait by opening doors and windows that reveal joy in community, possibility in organizing, strength in coalition building, delight in colored lights, solace in familiar tunes. All of it here, now, just waiting for us to open our eyes, our ears, our hearts.
Advent is a paradoxical time, when we sing of the day with love, truth, light and hope shall come, forgetting that they are already here, deep within our hearts and in the midst of daily lives. We need only open another window and reveal them to the world, and to ourselves.
In fourteenth century Italy, a Franciscan friar, architect, archaeologist and scholar, Fra Giovanni offered the same promise, extended the same invitation:
I salute you! There is nothing I can give you
which you have not;
but there is much, that while I cannot give,
you can take.
No heaven can come to us
unless our hearts find rest in it today.
Take Heaven.
No peace lies in the future
which is not hidden in this present instant.
Take Peace.
The gloom of the world
is but a shadow,
behind it, yet, within our reach,
is joy.
Take Joy.
And so, at this Christmas time,
I greet you,
with the prayer that for you,
now and forever, the day breaks
and the shadows flee away.
May it be so. Amen