Sister Doreen’s Reflections
The October Anglican Church of Canada Calendar scripture reflection:
“Be patient, then brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains. (James 5:7)
Other scripture passages about WAIT:
“But those who wait upon God get fresh strength. They spread their wings and soar like eagles, they run and don’t get weary, they walk and never tire.” (Isaiah 40:31 Message Translation)
“Wait for God – stand tall and let your heart take courage! Yes, wait for God.” (Psalm 27:14 Inclusive Language translation)
Wait! I smiled to myself when I took up my Heart Meditations to read them once again and ponder them anew for today so many years afterwards. I thought back then to my reflection about a waiting heart, and how having patience was the world’s toughest virtue, and today I believe that it really is still the toughest virtue! Words like fresh strength and courage jump out to me today from the scripture passage selected, and as I take a backward glance at my own journey, I see that the gifts of trying to take hold of waiting, of patience, has indeed been the experience of fresh strength and courage. It offers the gift of courage, and the challenge of patience!
Waiting, having patience, when enduring difficult situations (a long road to recovery), difficult people, a difficult season in one’s spiritual life, without giving into anger, being annoyed, disappointed, or giving up hope as I wandered through my own wilderness introduced me to a God of infinite patience! Our God of unconditional, tenacious love is a patient God, always waiting for us to come home, always waiting in welcome! The gifts that a waiting heart held for me as I ponder the Isaiah and Psalm passages take form in hope, anticipation, and trust. I found that patience, humility and gentleness along with perseverance were what I needed in the strong work of trying to form a waiting heart. Henri Nouwen characterizes our generation in these words: “We have become children of an impatient world …”.
Looking back and reading my heart meditations this waiting heart meditation still holds today in offering a strong gift about the nature of love and what it means to serve rather than to rule, to care rather than to control. It is also true that what I wrote then in my heart meditations is still very relevant today: we do live in an impatient culture, and an ‘instant’ generation, from instant coffee to instant presence in news happening somewhere else in the world. Our pace of life has increased dramatically and proportionately to the explosion of knowledge, technology, and mobility. The expression ‘life in the fast lane’ could probably be applied to most of us – there is always another book to read, room to clean, phone call to make, project to finish, meetings to attend. So today I agree, we successfully crowd out the ‘still small voice’ of God so essential to a waiting heart. My question then is still my question today – wait! It takes courage! Does the Lord of Life require so much of us that we cannot find time to join God in a little divine rest?
As I thought about my desire today of having a waiting heart, I remembered something Henri Nouwen in one of the daily meditation articles of the Henri Nouwen Society “Radical Waiting” (December 1, 2023) wrote: “To wait with openness and trust is an enormously radical attitude toward life. It is choosing to hope that something is happening for us that is far beyond our own imaginings. It is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life. It is living with the conviction that God molds us in love, holds us in tenderness, and moves us away from the sources of our fear. Our spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction. This, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.” It led me back to my heart meditations of long ago:
- Finding the priceless pearls of wisdom buried in life takes time, struggle, study and patient waiting. It takes courage.
- When I do the hard work of letting go of my clever agendas and become empty and quiet, waiting before God, I begin to experience the Spirit as life-giving and freeing.
- Waiting does comfort and heal, frees me from harmful habits, moves me into new patterns, challenges me and energizes me.
- Waiting has also made me passionate for working for the kingdom of God on earth now.
- Waiting is the hard work of restraining my inner self to wait for what is ordinarily not seen. It is there that I hear the still small voice of God whispering to me ‘You are my beloved, in you I am well pleased.’
- What I want, what I desire is a waiting heart where I can listen more deeply and see Jesus in myself, and in every other person.
The waiting heart will take us to those moments on the mountains and will also follow us into the valleys of misunderstanding and hardship. These waiting heart encounters with the safe love of God help us anticipate God’s glory just around the corner in our sometimes hard and dark valleys of life. As I struggled through the years after my heart attacks and open-heart surgery, I knew that I needed to remember that I will always be faced with an enormous paradox: the reality of God’s unconditional love that embraces me, everyone and all of creation and the reality of the desert, the absence, the not yet in our own lives and the life of the world. I have wrestled with an absence until it was God who became renamed in the struggle. I do this time and time again. The craving for God in my soul is the primal evidence of the existence of the God who is seeking me. While I may feel nothing but God’s absence, the mere fact that we seek God proves that God has already found us. And it is only in silence, the courageous waiting, that I can come to trust this – to trust the WHY, the questions, that burn deep in my soul. I knew then and I know now that it is when we wait – that toughest virtue – wait in our heart with a vision of the new reign of God, that we see God as one who cherishes us unconditionally, as one for whom we are utterly important, as one who knows our every need, shelters us in our vulnerability, and wishes us only good. God has birthed us into being, treasures us with infinite tenderness, listens to us with infinite patience, and reaches out to us at every moment of our life. The waiting heart, we are invited to dwell in this realization. We are invited to let it through osmosis get into our very being and know it in our inmost heart. And we are invited to live it. Courageously!
Just a sharing of one verse of Hymn #531 Common Praise book of the Anglican Church of Canada to end this reflection:
You who dwell (wait) in the shelter of the Lord, who abide in his shadow for life,
Say to the Lord: ‘My refuge, my rock in whom I trust!’
And he will raise you up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breath of dawn.
Make you to shine like the sun and hold you in the palm of his hand.
