What Are We Waiting For?
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Advent is often described as a time of waiting and preparation – a message we hear year after year. Yet, as I reflect on this tradition, I find myself asking: What, exactly are we waiting for? Is it the end of one year and the beginning of another; Is it the birth of Emmanuel, God with us, as a baby in a manger, light in the darkness, the saviour; or is it something deeper within ourselves?
Recently, I found myself relating to a character in the movie, “The Miracle Club.” This character has struggled and sacrificed to travel to Lourdes to ask Our Lady for a miracle. Arriving with lofty expectations and assumptions about the pilgrimage site, miracles, and the reality of faith, she is deeply disappointed. Despite her belief that miracles happen every day, she learns the Catholic Church has officially recognized only seventy-two miraculous healings since 1858. Her faith in God and the Church is shaken. The priest who organized the pilgrimage gently tells her, “You don’t come to Lourdes for a miracle, you come for the strength to go on when there is no miracle.”
Like the character in the movie, I don’t want to wait. I want God to fix me and all the broken things in my life – and I want it now. I have been working on this stuff for years. What’s the hold up?
Today I remembered some lines from Mary Oliver’s poem, “At the River Clarion.” She is talking about hearing voices in the river calling her holiness, and writes:
I’d been to the river before, a few times.
Don’t blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
Both St. John the Baptist and Jesus call us to repentance – a change of mind and heart, a change in consciousness. We are invited to begin to see from God’s perspective, from the perspective of the sacred, and the holy. That kind of change takes time. It also takes prayer, study, service to other, detaching from material things, and other changes. Nothing of value comes easily or quickly and I have had to learn that lesson repeatedly.
So, what are we waiting for in Advent? Perhaps we wait for the God who has set up a tent among us to reveal how we can work together on our “stuff.” And maybe this will only happen over time, as we grow in patience, openness, and faith.
As I continue through this season, I am learning to wait – not for a sudden miracle, but for the quiet strength to keep moving forward, trusting that transformation is happening, even when I cannot see it.