Waiting as an Act of Faith
This past week, I mentioned to a friend that I was writing a sermon on waiting as an act of faith - and even though I could see her trying hard to restrain herself - she nearly fell out of her chair laughing - this friend and I, you see, go way back. She knows my struggles - my thoughts - those interior conversations I have with myself when things are good, and when things are hard. She knows that when the difficult times come - the times when I feel most lost and alone, when confusion and fear and pain slide over me - she knows that I am there with the best of them - crying out for an answer, looking for a timeline - longing for clarity, wishing to know all of the whens and the hows and the whys of how things will turn out. This friend of mine knows that for me to simply be still and wait when the next step is not yet clear - to put down my list of things to do, my lofty, goal-oriented expectations of myself and just sit, just be, if only for five minutes is one of my greatest struggles. And so when my friend finally managed to compose herself after I shared my sermon topic with her - she barely got the words out, asking, "You will be preaching that sermon to yourself, won't you?"
And of course, I will. I take Emerson's mandate seriously - that preaching ought to be life passed through the fire of thought - and so I can truly say that I walk with you today. Waiting as an act of faith - actively choosing to be still, to be patient, to choose not to act - is a topic for all of us.
We live in a culture that resounds with the message - Don't just stand there, do something - a message of constant movement. We experience a daily barrage of words and of expectations - piles of mail, tv shows and advertisements, messages on our computer and our phone, advertisers, family, friends, and employers all telling us to be or to do something - sharing their expectations of us as we scramble to write down the never-ending lists of what we need to do. There is no doubt in my mind, this is a harried culture - a culture that emphasizes communication, information, and action over reflection, constant movement over stillness.
And so it is that I bring you a counter-cultural message today - especially in this season of what can become holiday madness - a message of stillness, of waiting, of trust and hopeful expectation - a message that encourages us instead to consider the phrase that my friend repeats like a mantra some days - don't just do something - she says, stand there.
Don't just do something - stand there.
Now, before we get too far along here - I want to assure you that this is not a sermon advocating procrastination, it is not a sermon asking you to hang back when you feel called to act, it is not a sermon telling you to abandon your responsibilities. Times and situations exist in our lives, in our church, in our world community - when waiting and patience will not do - when waiting is simply nothing more than an act of cowardice. What I am talking about today is the place of patience, the place of stillness and silence - in a spiritual life - in a life that strives constantly to align its actions with its most deeply held values. This kind of patience requires wisdom - it asks us to discern which situations in our life - in the world - might benefit from patience, which might benefit from action, and which might require an artful combination of the two. So what I am asking us today - is not to always lean one way or the other, as our particular culture might demand - but instead I am asking that we might, as Scott charged us last week, expand our imaginations a bit - cultivating the practice of patience, of stillness, of waiting so that when those occasions inevitable arise when we feel rushed to fix something, to change something, to DO anything - whether for ourselves or for anyone else - we might allow in that wisdom of patience and CONSIDER, just consider waiting as an option.
When we actively choose to wait - when we surrender to the reality that some things take more time than we'd like, that sometimes we cannot know how and when something will turn out, when we surrender to the reality that sometimes we are not as far along as we'd like - in those moments when we choose stillness and patience over frustration, anger, and impatience - there is no doubt in my mind that we are engaging in a counter-cultural act, and I believe we are also engaging in a spiritual act.
I believe, along with Mahatma Ghandi, that "There is more to life than increasing its speed." There is more to life than increasing its speed. There is more to life than blindly falling into the stream of our broader culture and letting it carry us away - missing perhaps, the truth and the wisdom and yes even the faith that I believe exists deep within each and every one of us.
Don't just do something - stand there, my friend says.
Standing there in the silence - with all of the rush of our lives swirling around us - standing there - waiting, actively doing nothing - we may find ourselves overwhelmed by the silence within, we may find ourselves overwhelmed by the chatter within - and we might over time just hear the voice of our soul coming through like a whisper. Parker Palmer describes the soul as something like a wild animal. Shy and easily frightened, the soul can only be heard when we cease our stomping around the woods with our flashlights and sit, instead, quietly at the base of a tree, waiting as so many of the bird watchers among us do, quietly for it to appear.
The waiting can be awfully uncomfortable, though. Our muscles start to ache, we get cold and tiredof being still, we long to shift our gaze to see what might be over the hill, we begin to think that if we just moved to the next tree - then the thing we hope to find will appear. And this is where I agree with the French philosopher, Max Picard, when he writes that "Silence is the central place of faith."[1] It is in silence, often, that we are most uncomfortable, and it is in silence that trust, that faith, that our sometimes shy and whispering inner voice might emerge. It is in silence that we might wait with hopeful expectancy - and it is in silence, in those times of waiting, that many of us find ourselves face to face with fear, face to face with discomfort. In those moments perhaps we may be left only with silence, with an emptiness that frightens us.
This emptiness that most everyone encounters from time to time may feel excruciatingly uncomfortable for some of us - and it may feel calming and clarifying for others - but I want to assure you that this emptiness is a natural, inextricable part of any spiritual life. The stories of feeling lost, of feeling empty and confused followed by periods of clarity and trust are as old as time. We need not look far - whether we stay within the Christian and Hebrew traditions and glance back to the Israelites wandering 40 years in the desert, to Jonah's time in the belly of the whale, to Job's incredible loss and discomfort - or whether we consider the course of mythology, of the heroes' journey, of our very own Henry David Thoreau's days of wandering and pondering in the woods of Walden pond - these times of emptiness - these times that call for patience and stillness come to most all of us in different degrees and in different ways.
Deep in the caves of Cologne, in a place where Jews hid during the Nazi Holocaust - these words were found etched into the stone wall. "I believe in the sun even though it is late in rising. I believe in love though it is absent. I believe in God though he is silent..." I believe in the sun even though it is late in rising. I believe in love though it is absent. I believe in God though he is silent.
Faith - something you put your trust in, even when you cannot see it, even when you cannot prove it to be true. Faith that the sun continues to rise and to set there outside of the cave walls, faith that love exists, even when it is absent, and for these folks in hiding - faith in God as well, even though he was silent to them. Faith - present to these people even in the silence, even in the stillness, even in the horrible in-between time of no answers, no timeline, no end in sight. These exiles knew intimately what theologian and scholar Martin Buber calls the eclipse of God, what we might call the natural ebbs and flows in the life of faith, in the life of trust.
For Martin Buber, the image of an eclipse is useful in understanding the different phases of our faith journeys. When an eclipse occurs, we find ourselves bathed in darkness. It appears from our vantage point here on earth that the sun has gone out and without the aid of technology we have no idea how long this darkness will last or if it will ever go away. We have discovered now, of course, thanks to science - that during an eclipse the moon has simply come between us and the sun, blocking out the light - and we trust that as the planets and the moons rotate the sun will reappear and the light will return. Buber believes, as do I, that this metaphor works well as we consider our life-long journeys of faith. "An eclipse of the sun is something that occurs between the sun and our eyes," he explains, "not in the sun itself."[2]
And perhaps so it is with our faith - with our trust - as well - that in times of stillness - in times of silence and even of doubt when we experience the darkness of the eclipse - perhaps our faith remains - shifting and changing as we continue to learn and to experience the full range of life.
As Unitarian Universalists - doubt - change - and on-going growth play a central role in our spiritual lives. There is more to a lifelong journey of faith than a destination, than a particular goal or set of beliefs - and that, I believe, is one of the particular gifts of Unitarian Universalism - We are not only permitted here, but we are expected to change over time - it is expected that as our lives unfold, as we read and learn and experience different things - our beliefs will change as well - our faith - what we place our trust in - will change over time.
In this way, I believe we are spiritual craftspeople. People whose life's work lies in the never-ending journey of aligning our actions with our deepest values, people who seek out experiences that cause us to grow - and we, I believe, like the craftspeople in Rumi's poem, are charged then to look for emptiness. The rotten hole in the roof, the empty pot for carrying water, the open doorway, the times of silence and stillness that offer us a unique opportunity to grow. We won't have to search too far - I believe - for those moments that call for stillness, for waiting - for the opportunity to consider - to perhaps even practice patience.
There are moments large and small that come daily, I believe, in each of our lives when waiting is the better option for us and for all involved - moments when doing something small like taking a deep breath before we respond in a conversation - moments when we might consider allowing ourselves to grow in experience and wisdom before taking on a particular task - moments when on-going discipline with a particular spiritual practice - with our relationships -with the sometimes slow process of forgiveness - moments small and large when patience might allow us to pause, to think clearly, to be gentle to ourselves, and sometimes to try again.
Given the culture we live in - this welcoming of emptiness, of patience, will be no easy task, and it may not come naturally to us.
So, in this season of beginning winter - in this in-between time as the poet named it - I invite you to expand your imagination a bit - to consider how you might welcome stillness into your life, how you might welcome it into your faith - how might you search for and welcome emptiness? Could you turn the radio off in your car, sit quietly for five minutes before you pick up the phone or turn on the tv, take the risk of acknowledging that just for now you may not know exactly what you believe - how might you practice stillness, practice patience with yourself and with others - considering it as an option in all situations, preparing yourself for those times when the natural rhythm of our spiritual lives calls for waiting that might take much, much longer.
As we ease into this practice of patience, this practice of waiting, may we grow in trust that just as light and darkness define each other, just as speech and silence define each other, so do patience and action define one another as well. May we grow in the wisdom of patience, trusting in times of darkness in the ebb and flow of our lives, trusting as the poet wrote, that
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
May it be so, and Amen.
December 11, 2005
- Max Picard, The World of Silence (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), 34.
- Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1988), 23.