Monday, December 2, 2024

Advent | Waiting is the Womb in Which We Are Formed Well

 

Tale of 3 Cities Mural in Honor of Spencer Barr outside Custard Factor in Digbeth during Mental Health Awareness Week

I think it’s during the wait in the dark,
more than any other time,
that Christ is being formed in us.
In a sense,
waiting is the womb of the Kingdom
in which we are formed.

+ Marlena Graves,
A Beautiful Disaster


Advent beings with an always needed reflection on waiting with hope in the darkness, whether it's a mental, emotional, spiritual, and/or physically tangible darkness. 

As expressed by Fleming Rutledge
in her instant classic,
Advent: The Once and Future
Coming of Jesus Christ:

Advent begins in the dark
(and involves waiting in the dark)
... our hope lies in ...
the God of Advent
who drew near to us in Jesus
and who will come again
to take away the darkness forever
and be our eternal light.

Waiting. Hoping. Surviving. I think the mural above does a beautiful job of expressing the head space we're often in when we wait. The sun is still shining somewhere. There is a promise illustrated through a rainbow illuminating the layers of light. But there is is also a storm raging as thunder distracts us and lightning strikes too close to home. I also appreciate the poetry to complement the mural and moment:

I'm waiting for sanity,
As I paint my clarity. 
"The world is a charity, 
The poem ends here."

During our Surge Table this month, we will look at the god of consumerism and the generous Christ. The theme will come up as a counter to entitlement and greedy spending of time and money on entertainment and escape will be "waiting" along with the prayer, "Jesus, Jesus ... You are more than enough." An adaptation to the thoughtful poem above in light of this theme of waiting could be:

I'm praying for sanity,
As Jesus brings mystery. 
"His Story is charity, 
His Kingdom is near."

As Surge helps me again listen to seeds of wisdom in relation to waiting, I return to a series of quotes that have benefited me the most the past 4+ years. These wise words are by Marlena Graves, one of my favorite recent authors, who penned A Beautiful Disaster: Finding Hope in the Midst of Brokenness. And during this season of Advent, the time of learning afresh how to wait in the dark with a spark of hope, I continue to find Marlena's words to be potent.

I think it’s during the wait in the dark, more than any other time, that Christ is being formed in us. In a sense, waiting is the womb of the Kingdom in which we are formed. 
Most of the time, we don’t exactly know how we are being formed. But while we wait and learn to pay attention to the details of life right in front of us, we discover that God’s grace is “always hidden under the strangest appearances,” as the 18th century Jesuit priest, Jean-Pierre de Caussade says. Life all around us is full of nooks and crannies, of delights and wonders – some of which have always been there but we’ve yet to see. The season of waiting slows us down so that we notice … and we don’t want to become so agitated that we leave the womb before it’s time.
If waiting functions as the womb of the Kingdom, then we must be on our guard when our souls become agitated and we lose our peace. ... Waiting can also teach us to joyfully appreciate what we have instead of despising it because of what we don't have. Ah, waiting! It is the gift that keeps on giving but a gift that not even the best of us welcome, at least not initially. Waiting becomes a form of fasting from our need to exert control over our circumstances and others. When we experience delayed gratification, we begin to surrender our need for control. However, relinquishing control can bend us out of shape because we don't know how to function otherwise.   
God uses waiting to enlarge our souls. While we are waiting on God, He is often waiting on us. He is waiting on us to fully surrender ourselves to Him. Once we surrender, we can move forward. In this womb, this wilderness experience, we are being, and also becoming, who we are ... Moreover, the poor in spirit are able to recognize and receive all the riches of God's grace. 
Waiting tempers disordered passions and allows us to deal well with reality. We might come to understand that things aren't as bad as we thought or are far worse than previously imagined; God uses the wait time to develop in us fortitude that keeps us from being destroyed by our circumstances. We realize that we don't need this or that thing or relationship to be whole, whereas before, when we had what we thought we wanted and weren't waiting on anything, we never thought we could live without it. ... In our contentment, we are able to reach the point where we can say to God, "Not my will but yours be done," and mean it.

Other Quotes from A Beautiful Disaster


Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespected hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them.
The blessedness of waiting is lost on those who cannot wait, and the fulfillment of promise is never theirs. They want quick answers to the deepest questions of life and miss the value of those times of anxious waiting, seeking with patient uncertainties until the answers come. They lose the moment when the answers are revealed in dazzling clarity.  
Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting – that is, of hopefully doing without – will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment.
Not everyone can wait: neither the sated nor the satisfied nor those without respect can wait. The only ones who can wait are people who carry restlessness around with them.


Many blessings of peace and presence for you,

Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan

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Location: Worcester, MA, USA

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