Waiting

You know those anxiety dreams, the ones where you suddenly realize you’re standing in front of a class naked, or you can’t key in the right phone number for love or money, or you can’t find your house? I’ve had versions of all of those, but in my most frequently recurring anxiety dream, I am in a situation where someone is waiting for me and I can’t get to them. I can’t even let them know that I’m going to be late. They are just waiting, waiting, waiting. And I am beside myself.

Some dreams require translation; this one does not: for several very good reasons, I hate making people wait. Not surprisingly, I am also not a very good waiter when there’s no good reason for someone to leave me a hostage to their belatedness. It’s not impatience that I feel; rather, it’s the experience of being made to feel that you don’t really matter.

So thinking about Advent as a time of waiting has never quite worked for me. Why would God make us wait in a space of anxious uncertainty in which we are left wondering whether we matter? Surely we matter to God. 

And thus it is that for some time I have been searching for a new theology of Advent, or at least for the waiting part of Advent.

It came to me this fall, in the middle of a productive few weeks at work. There are many writers, me among them, who, when they are in the thick of a project, exist in a state of what I’m going to call “heightened suggestibility.” When I am in this state, as I was for a while this fall, all manner of things, big and little, come to me unbidden, offering their significance freely, and mattering in ways that at times feel overwhelming. I am profoundly, intensely aware of the number of things around me that are asking to be part of the whole I am working towards. 

It occurred to me that perhaps this is a bit like what the “waiting” of Advent is. Not an anxious time of uncertainty, but a liminal time of exquisite alertness to the evidence, even in the bleakness of this season, of the grace that is freely offered, discernible in things both big and small, but not fully manifested “till one greater man restore us” (that’s John Milton, who knew all about this kind of waiting). 

We wait, in other words, in the company of grace, alert to the unbidden reminders that God is coming, and that we will never not matter.

Lisa Schnell, December 2024

Lisa.Schnell@uvm.edu