The Sacrament of Waiting

by Fr. James Donelan, S.J.

The English poet John Milton wrote that those who
serve only also stand and wait. I think I would go
further and say that those who wait render the highest
form of service. Waiting requires more discipline,
more self-control and emotional maturity, more
unshakable faith in our cause, more unwavering hope in
the future, more sustaining love in our hearts that
all the greatest deeds of derring-do go by the name of
action.

Waiting is a mystery - a natural sacrament of life -
there is a meaning hidden in all the times we have to
wait. It must be an important mystery because there is
so much waiting in our lives. Everyday is filled with
those little moments of waiting (testing our patience
and our nerves, schooling us in self-control). We wait
for meals to be served, for a letter to arrive, for a
friend to call or show up for a date. We wait in line
at cinemas and theaters, concerts and circuses. Our
airline terminals, railway stations and bus depots are
great temples of waiting filled with men and women who
wait in joy for the arrival of a loved one - or wait
in sadness to say goodbye and give the last wave of
hand. We wait for springs to come - or autumn - for
the rains to begin and stop. And we wait for ourselves
to grow from childhood to maturity. We wait for those
inner voices that tell us when we are ready for the
next stop.

We wait for graduation, for our first job, our first
promotion. We wait for success and recognition. We
wait to grow up - to reach the stage where we make our
own decisions. We cannot remove this waiting from our
lives. It is a part of the tapestry of living - the
fabric in which the threads are woven to tell the
story of our lives. Yet current philosophies would
have us forget the need to wait. "Grab all the gusto
you can get!" So reads one of America's greatest beer
ads - get it now! Instant pleasure, instant
transcendence. Do not wait for anything. Life is short
- eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow you will
die. And so they rationalize us into accepting
unlicensed and irresponsible freedom - pre-marital sex
and extra marital affairs - they warn against
attachments and commitments - against expecting
anything of anybody, or allowing them to expect
anything of us - against dropping any anchors in the
currents of our life that will cause us to hold and
wait.

This may be the correct prescription for pleasure -
but even that is fleeting and doubtful - what was it
Shakespeare said about the mad pursuit of pleasure -
"Past reason hunted, and once had, past reason hated."

Not if we wish to be real human beings, spirit as well
as flesh, soul as well as heart, we have to learn to
wait. For if we never learn to wait, we will never
learn to love someone other than ourselves.

For most of all waiting means waiting for someone
else. It is a mystery, brushing by our face everyday
like a stray wind of leaf falling from a tree. Anyone
who has loved knows how much waiting goes into it -
how much waiting is important for love to grow, to
flourish through a lifetime. Why is this? Why can we
not have it right now what we so desperately want and
need? Why must we wait - two years, three years - and
seemingly waste so much time? You might as well ask
why a tree should take so long to bear fruit - the
seed to flower - carbon to change to diamond. There is
no simple answer - no more than there is to life's
other demands - having to say goodbye to someone you
love because either you or they have made other
commitments; or because they have to grow and find the
meaning of their own lives - having yourself
to leave home and loved ones to find your own path -
good-byes, like waiting, are also sacraments of our
lives.

All we know is that growth - the budding, the
flowering of love needs patient waiting. We have to
give each other a time to grow. There is no way we can
make someone else truly love us or we them, except
through time. So we give each other that mysterious
gift of waiting - of being present without asking
demands and rewards. There is nothing harder to do
than this. It truly tests the depth and sincerity of
our love. But there is life in the gift we give. So
lovers wait for each other - until they can see things
the same way - or let each other freely see things in
quite different ways.

There are times when lovers hurt each other and cannot
regain the balance of intimacy of the way they were.
They have to wait - in silence - but still present to
each other - until the pain subsides to an ache and
then only a memory and the threads of the tapestry can
be woven together again in a single love story. What
do we lose when we refuse to wait; when we try to find
shortcuts through life - when we try to incubate love
and rush blindly and foolishly into a commitment we
are neither mature nor responsible enough to assume?
We lose the hope of truly loving or of being loved.
Think of all the great love stories of history and
literature - isn't it of their very essence that they
are filled with this strange but common mystery - that
waiting is part of the substance -the basic fabric
against which the story of that true love is written.
How can we ever find either life or true love if we
are too impatient to wait for it?

Waiting is a good thing only if something is worth
waiting for. How will you know if it's worth it? Gut
feel. What if you don't trust your gut? Pray. You will
be enlightened. Trust me. Is it wrong to expect while
waiting? It's not wrong, but it will increase your
chances of heartbreak and disappointment if things
don't work out in the end. Is it good to expect while
waiting? It is better to HOPE. What's the difference
between hoping and expecting? HOPING means you're open
to either side of the coin landing though you're more
inclined to believe that things will turn out well.
EXPECTING means you're thinking single-track... which
won't do you much good at all. What's the difference
between waiting and expecting? EXPECTING is waiting
for something TO DEFINITELY HAPPEN. WAITING is staying
where you are, but not necessarily expecting something
to happen definitely.

Do you need assurance from someone you're waiting for
while you're waiting? Ideally, yes. But realistically,
do you really want assurance from this person? It's so
easy to just point at something and make that the
reason why you're waiting ("Because she said..."
"Because he told me that..."). With WAITING, all you
really can rely on are three things: your gut feel,
your heart and mind. Just YOURSELF, not anyone else.
So should you wait? What does your gut say? How does
your heart feel? What does your mind think? If they're
saying different things, keep asking yourself these
three questions (and pray!) until you get a solid
answer.

THEN you'll know if he or she is worth waiting for.