Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

What Are You Waiting For?

 

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
December 10, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

One of the top ten least favorite activities of everyone I know has got to be: waiting. Is there anyone who likes it? I have endured periods of forced anticipation, such as waiting to hear if I’d gotten a job I desperately wanted, by chanting quietly to myself, “Patience is a virtue. Patience is a virtue.” But patience isn’t winning any popularity contests either. Most of us want to have more of it, but we’d like to need less of it.

So here comes Christmas, and spread out before it is a four-week festival of waiting. That’s right, a holiday just about waiting, with a capital letter and everything: Advent. It is known to us mostly via the childhood practice of the Advent calendar, a countdown to Christmas in which each day is constructed as a little window that contains a little treat, maybe a piece of chocolate or just a picture or a joke. Each day while you wait for the unbearably big excitement of Christmas morning, you get the smaller one of opening another window in the calendar. That’s one approach to waiting: bribing ourselves along, day by day or hour by hour. Check off the calendar. Count the weeks.

This is not a bad approach when you’re ten years old and what you’re waiting for is Christmas. After all, it will eventually come. You just need to pass the time.

Whether this is the best approach to the other things we’re waiting for in our lives depends on what they are. Will they come if we just sit tight? Is there something we should be doing to make them happen? Do we even know what they are? What are you waiting for in your life right now?

Sometimes, “You just have to wait.” As the old song says, “You can’t hurry love” — some things just have to unfold in their own time. Ask anyone who’s expecting a child. Ninety-nine percent of creating a new human being is waiting. There is no hurrying it along; time and the body know what they are doing, and if we tried to speed up the process disaster would result. Something that is far beyond our comprehension and power is completing a new human, step by step, in perfect order, with a wisdom that we can only watch in wonderment. When the child is ready to be born, the body will somehow know that it is time, and work, labor — action — will begin. Until then the best thing we can do is to wait.

This time of solstice is about gestation and birth as well. For six months, the days have grown darker and shorter, and it might seem as if they will dwindle to nothing but night. But the turning of the seasons has never let us down. The light will return and the change we long for will come. We have only to wait in the darkness with patience and faith.

And then sometimes you have to make something happen, and waiting is not enough. The poet Faith Wilding wrote a 15-minute play, a monologue in which a woman’s life is portrayed as nothing but waiting.

Waiting for my first date
Waiting to have a boyfriend
Waiting to go to a party, to be asked to dance, to dance close
Waiting to be beautiful
Waiting for the secret
Waiting for life to begin …

Waiting for my wedding day …

Waiting for my baby to come …

Waiting for my child to go to school …

Waiting for my children to come home from school Waiting for them to grow up, to leave home

It makes a grim picture. All the things she longs for, it seems she must simply wait for. She is completely passive, an object, not a subject; a person with no agency, no power to bring about what she hopes will happen next. And whenever it happens, she is already waiting for the next thing. A life passing away without any now, only a next, until finally there is nothing to wait for but the end.

Waiting for the struggle to end
Waiting for release
Waiting for morning
Waiting for the end of the day
Waiting for sleep ¹

We can wait all our lives for our lives to begin and then suddenly bump up against the end and realize we have waited too long. Is there a sadder story to be told?

In contrast, we have this advice from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in his ambitiously titled poem “A Psalm of Life.” Life, Longfellow says, should be rich with action:

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
  Life is but an empty dream! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
  And things are not what they seem …

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
  Is our destined end or way, But to act, that each to-morrow   Find us farther than to-day …

And so his whole poem is a call to action.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
  In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
  Be a hero in the strife!

Longfellow was a Unitarian and, of course, an American. This drivenness is our heritage, part of the Protestant work ethic, and the American impatience to be on the move, and our theology. If we don’t like something about our lives we are less likely to “wait and see if it will change” than to take it into our own hands and change it. Even the weather, which of all things is beyond our control, inspires us less to patient forbearance than to action: if there isn’t enough rain, we seed clouds; if we are threatened by hurricanes and tornadoes, we explore technologies for taming them. As a religion, we put a heavy emphasis on ourselves as agents. Salvation by our own characters — not by the lottery of a capricious heaven. Whatever we make of our lives is what they will be, we tell ourselves.

We give passivity a negative connotation, action a positive one. Longfellow’s poem is as stirring as Wilding’s is depressing.

And yet, thinking about those situations in which we must wait, there may be a third way. Even Longfellow’s poem suggests this with its very last line, which takes quite a twist. He is rushing to a climax of action:

Let us, then, be up and doing,
  With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,

And then, he concludes with this peculiar advice:

Learn to labor and to wait.

“Learn to labor and to wait.” To wait? That sounds more like a mode for cattle than for heroes. It sounds passive, like Wilding’s sad woman with her empty life. But clearly Longfellow thought it was a key ingredient to action. So let’s spend a little more time with that paradox.

It sounds familiar. It sounds like a teaching that is much, much older than Longfellow’s poetry, a teaching from halfway around the world that was just becoming known to Americans around the time he was writing. Maybe Longfellow never encountered a word of Lao Tsu, but he intuited the same wisdom as we now read in the Tao te Ching.

The Master does nothing,
yet he leaves nothing undone. ²

Men, traditionally, have been urged to act, women counseled to wait. Taoism, the religion of balance, the philosophy that gave us yin and yang, the equal balance of masculine and feminine, tells us,

Know the strength of man,
But keep a woman’s care!
Be the stream of the universe. ³

If you want to accord with the Tao,
just do your job, then let go. ⁴

We labor and we wait. We balance action and stillness. When do we act and when do we wait? That is a matter for discernment. If we pay attention to the way things are — the Tao — we will know when to get out of their way and just let things unfold, and when to be agents of change.

Christianity has this teaching too, and it teaches it through Advent. Advent has a dual meaning. On the one hand, as an annual holiday, it is simply a waiting for something we know is going to happen, because it already did: the birth of Jesus. Waiting for Christmas is just about waiting. There is no rushing it and no doubting that it will come. There is nothing to be done, only something to be patiently anticipated. And then Advent’s other meaning, the aspect that takes centuries, is the waiting for Christ’s Second Coming. The time of that is unknown; perhaps, depending on your faith, whether it will ever happen is unknown. Some Christian teachings say there is nothing to do but wait for Christ’s return, and then others say we bring Jesus back into human life with everything we do — or keep him away. A modern Magnificat cries to Mary,

Teach us to learn from you
How to bring Christ to earth. ⁵

The great Catholic activist, Dorothy Day, wrote in one reflection right before Christmas, “It is no use saying that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ … Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts.” ⁶ For Day, it was very simple: we make room for Christ here and now by giving hospitality to others: a warm bed to the homeless, food to the hungry, comfort to the sick and imprisoned. Christianity teaches us, not only to wait for a heaven that is to come, but to act here, now, to bring that heaven to earth.

Trust and faith are balanced with action. And so the tradition of Advent, like Taoism, counsels discernment. One Christian writer says, “A novice master once responded when asked about a life lived in Christian authenticity . . . that to be a Christian was not to know the answers but to begin to live in the part of the self where the question is born. . . . He was speaking of an attitude of listening, of awareness of presence, of an openness to mystery.” ⁷ (UUs are everywhere.)

So, is this the moment for waiting or for action? It depends what you are waiting for. During this time of reflection, these weeks of Advent, we can each gratefully take the time to discern what is waiting to be born in our lives. And then we will know whether it is the time to labor, or to wait.

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