Comfortable in Waiting?

A Reflection for XXIII Pentecost (proper 27)                       All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC November 12, 2017                                                                Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25             Psalm 78:1-7               1 Thessalonians 4:13-18          Matthew 25:1-13

Comfortable In Waiting?

One of the themes in the lessons for today is about waiting, so the question I asked myself, and asked you in the question for meditation in the bulletin, was “How comfortable are we with waiting?” 

In the Hebrew Testament lesson for today, Joshua has led the Hebrew children into the Promised Land and calls a meeting in Shechem to make a covenant. In this mythic story, the people have been waiting forty years as they wandered across the wilderness. Their leader Moses had died, most of those who had left Egypt had died on the way, a whole new generation had come and gone waiting. The old joke is that it took them forty years wandering in the wilderness because they were being led by men and men never ask for directions. The wait had been long, frustrating, and painful, but the waiting was not passive but active waiting,  and the time was spent in growing into the people who were ready to say along with Joshua: “As for me and my family; we will serve the Lord.”

The Epistle lesson is Paul writing to the Thessalonians about 20 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. They had been waiting for the Christ to return. Some of the people who were faithfully waiting had died during this time. They had suffered persecution and they waited. It was not a passive waiting but a time of active growth becoming the body of Christ in the Greek province of Thessaloniki. Paul writes to his friends there to thank them for their fruitful waiting. He tells them that even those loved ones of their community who have died in the waiting process will rise from the dead to welcome the Lord on the day of his return.  Paul uses the euphemism “falling asleep” as a circumlocution for death when he talks in the letters about those who have died

There is an old Gospel song called “Stepping on the Clouds”  based on this passage. The chorus goes:

STEPPING ON THE CLOUDS WE'LL SEE JESUS
RISE TO MEET HIM IN THE AIR
STEPPING ON THE CLOUDS HE WILL GREET US
OH THE JOY TOGETHER WE'LL SHARE
I'M GONNA LEAVE THIS WORLD BEHIND ME
GOING WHERE THE DEVIL CANNOT FIND ME
I'M GOING HIGHER, HIGHER, HIGHER
STEPPING ON THE CLOUDS.

I remember listening to that song and singing along with it. I was dating Pat and driving home to Lynchburg from her home in Roanoke late on Sunday nights. I needed to get back because I knew that some of my parishioners were watching my apartment house to see if I did make it home. It was always dark and I usually had the radio set to public radio, but on Sundays they played  “Music From the Hearts of Space” which was meditative music. I would switch to the Gospel music station and open the windows and sing out loud to stay awake.  Sundays were busy. I had the 8:00 service, the 9:00 service for the deaf, the Sunday School at 10:00, a Sung Eucharist at 11:00, some home visits, and then I’d hightail over to Roanoke because I could not wait to see her. We would have dinner and spend time together, and I would leave about 10:00, listening to loud Gospel music for the hour-long drive. I knew the song was about how people in Thessaloniki  longed to be united one day with the one they loved and Paul telling them that wait could be a time of growth and that love would find a way.

I remember my mother talking about how she had married my father in Ohio right after she graduated from college at Chapel Hill in 1941. My father, one of those veterans we remembered in our prayers who “ventured much for the liberties we now enjoy”,  had been sent with the Marines to California and from there to the South Pacific. They loved each other and waiting while they were apart was horrible, but they both grew in their love. When his unit had been called back to California to prepare for the invasion of Japan, she took a leave from her job in Youngstown to take the train to San Diego to be with him for what might have been the last time. My older brother was conceived on that visit - they still planned for the future even when the odds were not in their favor, such was their love.

The Gospel story from Matthew about the ten bridesmaids is about waiting. All of the bridesmaids took the oil with them, all the bridesmaids waited until long after the bridegroom was expected, then all the bridesmaids fell asleep. Remember the phrase that Paul uses about death, “falling asleep”? So maybe this is not just a story about packing some extra oil but about the Christian community joining the wedding banquet, having faith beyond this life.

I did a play years ago called “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett.  The play is about two tramps, waiting for an absent being named Godot; they wait and ponder the meaning of a life of waiting. Two others come on the scene and they see continuing the waiting as an exercise in the absurd. A line is “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." Beckett has stage directions like “Pause followed by silence followed by a pause.” We actors would enter into these directions and, depending on what we found in the pause and silences, the running time of the play would lengthen or shorten by a half an hour. We are all waiting, but it is in how we wait that gives us meaning.

Later, when I was a therapist, it was the silences and pauses that gave me clues to what was happening with my client, and I had to learn to keep my mouth shut and let them play out. In my prayer life I find that there is a lot of waiting, and the waiting is an opportunity to go deeper into the longing for God's spirit. Instead of longing for more of whatever we are waiting for, we have an opportunity to long for God and to use the eyes of the soul to turn to God.

Simone Weil, a French philosopher and Twentieth Century unbaptized Saint, wrote in Waiting for God;

“We do not walk vertically. We can only turn our eyes toward God. We do not have to search for God, we only have to change the direction in which we are looking. It is for him to search for us.  . . At the center of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world . . . The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation .  . .  It is mistaken if it thinks it is anything else. The Incarnation alone can satisfy it”

Years ago I was introduced to the idea of a breath prayer. In Hebrew the word for breath, “Rurah” is the same word as wind and Spirit. In Greek the word for breath ,“Pneuma”, is the same word for wind and spirit. We see this word play in scripture beginning with God’s breathing life into Adam to the Gospels when Jesus is dying on the cross  saying,” Father to you I commend my spirit.” and then breathing his last, to the Resurrection when Jesus breaths on his disciples telling them to receive the Holy Spirit, to the disciples in the Upper Room and the mighty wind comes driving  them out into the word full of the Holy Spirit.

The Breath Prayer is a concept from the Eastern Churches where the person tried to follow the Biblical admonitions to pray unceasingly. There are two parts to breathing; to breathe in and to breathe out. The suggestion is to breathe in with a word or phrase that corresponds to that part of God of whom you wish to be in the presence and the breath out with the word of phrase of what is the desire of that prayer.

The classic line from the Russian Church is to breath in with “Jesus, son of God” and hold your breath and then exhale with “Have mercy on me a sinner.”; as the breaths continue you reduce it to “Jesus” in  and “Mercy” out. There is even a theory that the Ancient name of God, “YHWH” was itself a breath prayer with a breathing in of “Yah” and breathing out “Weh”,  to summon the presence of God, the God who is always here but often we forget.

The Poem I wrote to begin my work on this reflection is called Comfortable in Waiting?, itself  began with a breath prayer waiting for God’s strength.  I use the word “Comfortable” as in the old Prayer Book of “Comfortable Words” which is not about a nice easy chair of vowels and consonants, but is from the old Latin of Cum = with and fortis= strength. Do we get our strength from waiting? What are you waiting for? While you are waiting, where are your eyes looking?

Comfortable in Waiting?

It's not that I'm uncomfortable with waiting

for us to join, but it won't come to pass I fear

and all my wasted time ends by time of tear

dripping down ego's losing face devastating.

The longer I wait, greater the fears it seems

your time and promises of love and worth

only end by me suffering times of dearth

then being aware it's only fantasy dreams.

But all this time I struggle to be faithful

and not lose hope to feel your arms on me

entering a future which we'd once foresee

where we dance together to song graceful.

Be still my heart and help me begin trust

that the waiting makes the time more just.