Waiting

My car is in for its service and MOT this afternoon so I’ve time to kill. I’ve never written a blog in a garage before! Several of us sit here waiting. The coverage of Mrs May’s confidence vote is on the television. My beloved MP Ms Rudd is on as I write. She’s supporting the PM later she says. She just called today’s events “shenanigans” - gosh, I agree with her on something!! 

Waiting, life is full of waiting... 

I don’t know how parents manage a month of Christmas these days when Santa appears in November and children need to be kept calm as the number of sleeps until the actual big day seem endless.

We are naturally impatient. I was in a building the other night wanting to get out of its door. Hundreds of people were trying to get in. They didn’t want to wait for me to pass through them! Go on an underground train in London. People don’t wait for the next one coming in two minutes time even though there is no more room on this one. Why do we have to wait two minutes? We want to go now. 

I am not a great fan of our Prime Minister but I think today she has been treated appallingly. She’s always had a poisoned chalice after the former PM who I hold responsible for this whole Brexit mess by calling a referendum in the first place and is now in his shed writing his memoirs, did a runner. Mrs May has some steel, at least in public, although in private she must be suffering. Tonight, she waits for the verdict on her leadership and her future. I can only compare it to ministerial invitations. Waiting to hear from the Circuit Stewards after a process of consultation whether you should be invited is a desparate wait. 

People wait in uncertainty all around us. I’m in the middle of endless medical tests and appointments. I wait for the results anxiously. I’m now under the care of two consultants, one thoracic and one neurological. Both will have news in the new year for me. One in particular after telling me with no warning what might be going on, will either reassure me or scare me when I see her next. What she told me I was not expecting. I only missed some of those dots in an eye test at Specsavers! I am getting more and more anxious to be back at work but I have to wait. It’s been a hard thing to come to terms with. 

People wait for news. Silence is unbearable. We all need to know what is happening even if others who have the power over us haven’t any answers yet. I often think of those relatives of soldiers in world wars pre social media or texting. They waited not knowing if their loved ones were okay or would ever return. 

I’m not doing the Christmas story normally this year. I’ve not yet sung a carol nor have I been to church very much. I’m trying to get into the characters a bit by simply reading their story and imagining what their experience of divine encounter was. Three people, often overlooked in the narrative, speak to me deeply about waiting. 

Joseph, well he has a bit of a nightmare waiting! None of this baby coming business was to do with him. But he decided to be faithful and make the journey. Waiting in anxiousness for birth, waiting as a hard journey to exile has to happen, waiting for it to be safe to return. 

Simeon and Anna are my favourite participants in incarnation. They waited patiently for the consolation of Israel. They never left the temple and believed one day they would see God come in a new and dynamic way. They prayed and they waited and people who did religion every day in that temple probably laughed at their stupidity but they kept at it believing it would be. And in one of the loveliest prayers of the church we use now, the elderly Simeon says, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; to be a light to lighten the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel.” Certainty and peace in the waiting. 

When I was a child I was made to wait. We had one holiday a year and you waited for it. You had one birthday a year and you waited for it. Christmas was one day. You bought things when you had saved up to buy them. The joy of having was after the waiting. The instant world means we take a lot for granted and maybe we need to take waiting as a spiritual discipline much more seriously. 

If life was sugary sweet and fluffy bunny then we’d have everything we want when we want, and we’d never know that yearning we have to go through so often in life. I don’t know how I can sit here and just write but two pieces of writing come to me surrounded by elderly men getting frustrated their cars aren’t ready NOW! 

One is by the fabulous writer Kahlil Gibran

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. 

Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed. 

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.

Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.

When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

And how to be sustained in the waiting when as Gibran says there is, for today, more sorrow than joy, well, what’s the message of Christmas? You don’t need the church to just glibly tell you this wrapped in tinsel as though it suddenly makes all your problems disappear, you need to hear the story lived out in people’s lives: I turn finally to the writer Shane Claiborne: 

“A few years ago I remember a pastor friend telling me they tried something a little different for their Christmas services. Instead of the usual holiday décor and clutter of the sanctuary, they brought in a bunch of manure and hay and scattered it under the pews so the place would really smell like the stank manger where it all began. I laughed hysterically as he described everyone coming in, in all their best Christmas attire, only to sit in the rank smell of a barn.

They even brought a donkey in during the opening of the service that dropped a special gift as it moseyed down the aisle. Folks looked awkwardly at each other. Some were offended, some snickered, and some left. But for those who stayed… it was something like they’d never seen before. It was one of the most memorable services they’ve ever had.

They were reminded of the real meaning of Christmas — God entered the crap.”

In a world that today waits, as Mrs May waits, as we wait for Brexit or not, as we wait for test results, as people wait for cars to be fixed, as we wait in the uncertainty for certainty perhaps the only certainty we have is that God is with us in the crap. Crap is a great word! I’m not doing worship at the moment but I can write it! 

Maybe the not yet is a divine gift in this time and maybe as one poet put it the meaning is in the waiting...