Advent: 'waiting for' and 'hastening' - Faith & Spiritually

Catholic New Times, Dec 1, 2002 by Margo Ritchie

Recently, Daniel Berrigan learned that his brother Phil is seriously ill with cancer. Here are a few lines from the poem by W.S Merwin, that he found helpful in response to this news:

Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is

Or the small groups of Muslim and Jewish women who meet against all expectation to talk, listen and to tell another story than the ones we hear daily.

On the second Sunday of Advent, the letter of Peter includes a telling phrase that invites us into the heart of a paradox. It speaks of us "waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God." This is where we find ourselves--waiting, knowing that our particular imagination about how things ought to be does not make it so. We wait, knowing that our own spin on reality is, at times, small and limited. We wait, knowing that sometimes that is all we can do.

Yet, we also hasten. We know that these times, our own lives, call for response, for engagement, for a love that is large and a risking that is real. We turn to one another.

In the best of the Christian tradition, is not this waiting for and hastening what we have always known about contemplation? Is not contemplation really the experience of letting the truth of who we are in relation to others and to God sink in? Is it not an intentional desire to take in the words of Meister Eckhart, "There is only God in all the world." Is not contemplation about a settling into a vision of the world in which we know' we belong together, not because of some moral imperative imposed from without, but simply by the truth of how things really are. And seeing how things really are, we set about the work of integrity, that is, the work of creating a world that expresses the truth of the matter. Waiting for and hastening. What else might this mean for us during this season of Advent?

Margo Ritchie is in leadership with the Sisters of St. Joseph of London, Ont.