Advent—waiting for the Coming of the Christ Child
We wait for many things, do we not? Usually with some anxiety we wait for the call to board an aircraft, for a diagnosis to come through, for exam results, for a friend to arrive, for a baby to be born.
Is this waiting a time of Chronos for you, just the meaningless ticking of a clock? Or is it Kairos time, opening yourself to the peace-filled space where enlightenment can occur? In the hustle and bustle of this pre-Christmas period, try to find a still point in our rapidly turning world, a place of sheer silence, for this is where Alaha or Sacred Unity, (Aramaic for God) can reveal Godself to you.
There is a play, Waiting for Godot, where the waiting was pointless, even absurd. And just last week, I waited with a man whose complicated wheelchair had run out of battery and whose phone was dead. I called his regular maxi-taxi man, who couldn’t come for forty-five minutes and then brought him water for his thirst, but he kept fretting about when the taxi would come. As I waited with him, I suggested he join me in contemplation of the gift of all the shades of green this generous Spring was revealing around us, but he could not do anything like that; negative waiting as opposed to positive waiting—energy sapping rather than life enhancing.
And so, we wait to remember the extraordinary gift of God’s embodiment in Jesus, one of us. But surely this event is more than a re-enactment, a performance. It needs to be a ‘transformance,’ something that changes us utterly for the better; not as an intellectual understanding, but in our ability to relate to ourselves, to each other and to everything that is.
So, wait in expectation, wait in hope, open to gift, open to revelation.
I like this meditation on advent very much.Yes, “Kairos” versus “Chronos”.The phrases “negative waiting” and “positive waiting”, though, are not quite clear. Do you mean, two ways of thinking: 1. “I know that something very good will happen, I can think about it now now, this is very good” versus “nothing good is happening now, I can’t do anything now, this is very bad”? No, that’s probably not quite it. How could one better explain that contrast between the two ways of thinking that you have in mind?