WAITING
David Robb
July 24, 2005
Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?
But if we hope for what we do not see we wait for it with patience.(Romans 8: 24-25).
Shortly after emigrating from England to the United States, the poet W. H. Auden experienced something of a religious awakening. This, it appears, followed his encounter with the work of two profound religious thinkers —Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, both of whom were at the time members of the faculty of Union Theological Seminary here in New York City. Auden began to incorporate some of these ideas and his own religious imagination into a long verse drama he called "For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio," based on the narratives of the Christmas story, in the New Testament. At one point in the drama, just moments before the appearance of the angel who announces the birth of Jesus, he has one of the shepherds say this: "What is most real about us all is that each of us is waiting."
I remember coming upon that line for the first time and feeling, at first, frankly annoyed, then somewhat disturbed, later puzzled, and eventually intrigued. My initial response was one of dismay. After all, who likes to think the most real thing about oneself is that he or she is waiting? Americans especially prefer to think of ourselves as active rather than passive participants in life. Our reigning philosophy appears to be "Carpe Diem: Seize the Day!" And, in fact, one of the great attractions of being a part of this society lies precisely in this buoyant energy, this bubbling, churning optimistic faith that we can make just about anything happen if we just set our minds to it. That energy is infectious. Indeed, such energy is usually far superior to passing through life thinking of oneself exclusively as a passive victim of circumstances or bad luck.
Yet in a deeper sense, I came to believe that Auden was right: what is most real about us all is that each of us is waiting. Of course, if you believe that "waiting" only implies passivity and drift, then you would probably be right to object. But I doubt that Auden intended to imply anything like that. Upon reflection it dawned on me that there are many different ways to wait. Waiting does not only mean passivity or inactivity; it does not always suggest an anxious state of worry. Neither does waiting have to imply only ennui, boredom, or indolence. Waiting is frequently a condition of high expectancy, infusing life with great energy, purpose, and love. Waiting in that sense is close to what we mean when we speak of hope, for what is hope if it is not a kind of creative waiting. To live in hope is to live in the power of the future without yet possessing it. If we include all of those aspects within the substance of what we mean by "waiting," then Auden appears to have been quite accurate: "What is most real about us all is that each of us is waiting." That which defines each one of us most importantly is the kind of hope that we allow to shape us, the hope that renews us, gives us substance, and meaning, and purpose to our lives. So Descartes only got it partly right: not just "I think, therefore I am," but more importantly, "I hope, therefore I am." It is hope that that is most real about us all. And waiting in hope.
i
Many of our religious traditions have a great deal to say about waiting. The writer of the 130th Psalm, for instance, says:
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.
My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the
morning, more than watchmen for the morning. (Ps. 130: 5-6)And St. Paul, in his letter to the young church in Rome, wrote:
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope.
For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what
we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Rom. 8: 24-25)Waiting, it would appear, is a spiritual discipline, a necessary condition for becoming and remaining human. And as, Paul Tillich once pointed out, waiting in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is the principal human condition before God:
The condition of man's relation to God is first of all one of
not having, not seeing, not knowing, and not grasping. A
religion in which that is forgotten, no matter how ecstatic
or active or reasonable, replaces God by its own creation
of an image of God.(The Shaking of the Foundations, [NY: Scribner's, 1948], pp. 149-50)
That is one of the reasons we are so often offended by religious conservatives and fundamentalists of every religious persuasion. They always seem to be so convinced they are on such intimate terms with the Creator that they actually possess God. They speak with absolute authority about what God demands, not only of them, but of us as well.
They strike us in the same way Mark Twain was struck by one of his characters whom he described in this way: "He had all the confidence of a Christian, holding four aces."
But Tillich goes on to remind us that there is an implicit paradox in the act of waiting. For if waiting means that we do not yet have or possess whatever it is that we wait for, it is at the very same time a way of having:
The fact that we wait for something shows that in some way we
already possess it. Waiting anticipates that which is not yet real.
If we wait in hope and patience, the power of that for which we
wait is already effective within us. He who waits in an ultimate
sense is not far from that for which he waits. He who waits in
patience is already grasped by the power of that for which he waits.
. . .We are [actually] stronger when we wait than when we possess.(The Shaking of the Foundations, op.cit, p. 151)
ii
In addition to being a minister, I am also a psychotherapist. It is often the case that clients come with an expectation that I will have an answer for whatever it is that is troubling them. They are not certain what it is that I do, but whatever it is, they trust that I will have an answer that might be of help to them. Most of the time I am afraid that I am quite disappointing. That is not because I am uninterested in helping them. It is because I know that any answer that I provide will not really be especially helpful. It is because I know that whatever answer they seek is already forming in an incipient stage somewhere deep within them even though it appears to be inaccessible in the present moment. And so a large part of what I do in the practice of psychotherapy is to help my clients to wait.
Not to wait in an anxious way, but to wait with patience and a quiet expectation that, as one of the Beatles' songs once put it: "There will be an answer; let it be."
I confess that it was not always this way with me. There was once a time when I was more confident (actually quite a long time ago now), a time when I believed that helping others meant sharing my wisdom with them. It has taken me quite a long time to unlearn that, and to accept that my answers are not usually all that wise, and for the most part, not very helpful. At times I still slip back into those old ways and forget what it has taken me such a long time to learn. But whenever I am tempted to provide an answer rather than help a client to discover the answer that is emerging from within him or her, I am often reminded of an incident from my formative years in ministry.
After spending two years in graduate theological studies, I opted to spend a year as an intern working in a parish before returning to complete the degree program. I was accepted as an intern by Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. But in addition to living and working in that community, I also elected to participate in a Clinical Pastoral Education program through the chaplaincy office at Bellevue Hospital. There I was introduced for the first time to psychoanalytic literature and to supervised experience working with patients. As I had opted to work with psychiatric patients, I was working closely with the medical students who were training to become psychiatrists.
Early on I was assigned to work with a patient whom I was told was in a catatonic state and had not spoken to anyone for several years. Very little was known about her or what had precipitated her radical withdrawal. I could scarcely believe my good fortune.
I was convinced that if I were just patient enough I would be able to succeed in bringing her back into communication where countless other professionals had been unsuccessful.
On my first encounter with Mary, I sat and introduced myself politely. I had brought a notebook and pencil to record her responses. Then I began, gingerly at first, to ask some basic questions, hoping to break through her defenses. There was, of course, no response. Undaunted, I kept trying until by the end of that first session I think I was grilling her. But to no avail. She simply stared straight ahead and never uttered a word.
The following day, back I went. This time I tried to engage her in small talk—how the food was, whether she was comfortable, how long she had been there—things like that. But just as before: no response. She just sat there staring ahead, and if she was aware of my presence, she managed to keep her enthusiasm well under control. Day after day I tried this same tactic, until my supervisor began to suggest that it might just be a tad too aggressive. During the second week, I began to adjust my approach and my chatty strategies. By the third week I was visiting her every day for an hour and merely announcing my presence and bidding her a polite goodbye at the end of the hour. For nine months I visited Mary in this way each day for an hour without speaking a word—just sitting quietly while trying at the same time to remain attentive. I will not try to convince you that I felt comfortable doing this. I certainly did not think I was being helpful. But slowly I was beginning to learn something about the value of just being there. In the end I looked forward to spending that hour each day quietly with Mary who never once looked at me, acknowledged my presence, or uttered a word.
I remember hearing the story about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the great jurist, who was once hospitalized for a serious illness. His physician visited him one day, and he was flitting about checking medications, examining the charts, consulting with the nurses, checking vital signs, and generally behaving like a martinet. After observing this behavior for some time, Mr. Holmes finally became exasperated and bellowed out:
"For God's sake man, don't just do something. Stand there!" Well, for nine months in 1964 in the psychiatric wards of Bellevue Hospital I guess I was learning in my own way not just to do something. I was learning that sometimes it is quite important just to stand there. On my final day I sat with Mary and explained to her that my time in the hospital had come to an end, and that I would not be coming to sit with her any more. I told her that I had been grateful for our time together, and that I would miss our visits. Then an extraordinary thing happened. Without ever looking at me or uttering a sound, Mary just ever so gently reached her hand over and barely touched mine. That was all, a slight gesture to say "thank you." In fact, I had been grateful for our time together. It had taught me a great deal about being quiet, about being present to another without having to know everything about her, and mostly how to wait patiently.
Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former president of the Czech Republic, a man who spent several years in prison for his political views, once wrote, "Hope is not prognostication; it is an orientation of the heart." Of course we know that there are times when waiting is not the only or even the best approach. There are times in which we are required to act with courage even when all the evidence is not yet in. But most of us tend to act too impulsively. Most of us need to learn the art of patient waiting, an orientation of the heart that will allow the answer to germinate quietly within before rushing off to act. "For," as St. Paul put it, "who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it in patience."