Waiting in Joyful Hope

The following is a talk I gave for an Advent Evening for Women at a Family of Parishes in Cincinnati, and I thought I would share it with you too.

We’re going to spend some time reflecting on waiting and hope, as the title suggests, because these seem so relevant right now. I don’t know about you, things seem particularly tumultuous in the world right now, and hope seems more important than ever – finding it, stirring it up, sharing it – all the things. Because things are so bad, I feel like I’m just waiting for things to get better. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. . . .

I know everything can be ultra busy and rushed, but this beautiful season does invite some much-needed stillness too. My hope for us is that we will find a little stillness and reflect on the way that we wait, because it’s in that waiting that we find the hope that comes from God.

I don’t want to keep you waiting, so let’s jump in and talk about waiting. This may sound like a public confession, but I’m the world’s most impatient person. I live in Cincinnati and work in Kentucky, so I have a lot of chances to practice waiting as I sit in traffic, and it’s not making me more patient. But there’s a deeper kind of waiting than waiting in traffic or in line at the store, right?

There’s the kind of waiting we do when we wait for better times to come. Or we wait for the birth of a child, or a wedding day, or for a loved one to come into town. We might have a kind of existential waiting, like waiting for peace instead of war, or the hungry to be fed, or an equitable society.

This kind of waiting carries a twinge of longing with it, a hope of fulfillment to it, for a time when that for which we long will come to pass.

This is the kind of waiting we do during Advent. It’s a holy waiting, and there are ways to enter in, ways to do this that help to increase our hope. In fact, I think a lot of times our hope comes from persevering in this waiting space.

I wish I could tell you it’s easy or give you a click-baity headline like “How to Make Your Waiting Turn into Hope in 5 Easy Steps,” but if I tell you that, don’t believe me. Everything in the spiritual life is good, but it’s not usually easy. At least for me.

One of the things that does help me is to try and deepen my trust while I’m in this waiting space. I’m a Sister of Divine Providence, and my community has a prayer called the Act of Abandonment to Divine Providence that helps us to surrender to God, which includes how to wait with God in a stance of trust. I want to focus on the line that says:

Peaceful and contented in all, I will allow your Providence to govern my life without worry or overeagerness.

How does that land with you?

It seems to me to be the ideal kind of waiting, but it’s challenging. I tend to ping back and forth between worry and overeagerness, and neither of those dispositions helps me to wait well or to feel peace and contentment. Worry is a distrustful headspace in which I project myself into a future full of difficulties that may or may not even come to pass. What if this? What if that? That’s not even real. Overeagerness is a distrustful feeling. When I’m overly eager, I don’t trust God’s timing. I want to control the situation. I’m afraid the thing I want won’t come to fruition, afraid that God won’t bring that for which I’m longing.

Does this resonate with you at all, or am I the only one who worries or pushes into overeagerness?

Worry and overeagerness are stances of distrust, but they do tap into longing, don’t they? We worry because we’re longing for something, even if it’s just a touch of security in this uncertain world. That’s fair. We’re overly eager because we’re longing for something to come to pass right now.

Longing is not a bad thing, even if it can make for impatient waiting. Longing tells us what’s important to us, what our deepest desires are. Often our longing can show us what God wants for us or reveal God’s call for us. Longing is something to pay attention to. If I can get in touch with my longing, I can open myself to whatever God has in store for me. I think the season of Advent itself has a twinge of longing to it.

Let’s look at how this plays out in the lives of some people that we know and love – those at the first advent and birth of Christ, the originals, the OG Waiters in Joyful Hope, if you will. Mary and Joseph knew what it meant to wait with longing. In fact, they were part of a community waiting in longing, the chosen people to whom God promised to bring a savior. And there they were in an occupied country, deeply rooted in prophetic scripture that promised to deliver them. And they waited.

In that long waiting, it seems to me that there had to be some trust, right? It was taking so long that it wouldn’t do any good to be overly eager. Maybe they worried, or maybe it was just something in their peripheral thoughts while they went about their daily lives.  Mary and Joseph had bigger things to contend with, after all.

We don’t know how they felt about their personal waiting – maybe they soldiered on with perfect trust, or maybe they also slipped into worry and over eagerness. Maybe Mary thought: What will people do when they find out I'm pregnant? What will Joseph do? Once Joseph agreed to take her into his home, did he worry about how he would be received? Did he fear for her safety? Once they were journeying to Bethlehem, was he afraid that he couldn’t provide for her? Did Mary worry that they wouldn’t have a midwife? How did they feel when there was no room at the inn, and it seemed like she was going to give birth in a cave with animals? And were they both just so eager to get it all over with that they could hardly see straight? We don't know.

Maybe they felt all of that but also knew that God was with them. Maybe, despite the difficulty, they were able to trust in the promise of God because they were living it out. That for which they had been longing, that for which generations of their ancestors waited, was coming to fruition through them, so what was there to fear? Maybe they had a sense of the fullness of time because there it was unfolding within them. They were thinking beyond themselves with love and compassion to all the people in the future, and their perspective was wide, and their hearts were open.

All of this is true for us too. The coming of Christ is not a one and done event; the unfolding of God’s promise is happening continuously within each of us too. We too may have minds that spin with worry or an edginess to move things ahead, but the reality is that it doesn’t matter if we’re worried or overeager – God is with no matter how we are, as much as God was with Mary and Joseph. I can’t always control my thoughts and feelings, but when I can move out of my worrying toward others in compassion and love, my perspective widens. If I can surrender to God’s timing, that edgy feeling may turn to an excitement in which I’m passionate and ready for whatever God has in store. How we wait teaches us our longing and deepens our trust. And our trust helps us to hope in the fulfillment of God’s promises.

So, let’s talk about hope. What even is it? From a Catholic perspective, and maybe for other Christians too, hope is a theological virtue and a deep-seated trust in God's promises. It’s a gift from God. It’s often mistaken for optimism, but it’s not the same. False positivity and optimism are kind of promoted these days, but they aren’t necessarily what we’re called to lean into, although they feel better than despair for sure. However, feelings are fleeting. They tell us good information about what’s happening within us, but hope is not a feeling – it goes deeper than that. It’s steadier than our fleeting emotions.

From a secular perspective, too, hope is not a feeling. Someone who has taught me a lot about the sociological understanding of hope is Brené Brown. In her book Atlas of the Heart, she writes, “Hope is a function of struggle – we develop hope not during the easy times but through adversity and discomfort” (100). Also, hope can be learned. To hope, people need to have some kind of agency, some way of moving toward their goals or, as we might say, moving toward the fulfillment of our longing. To hope, we must be able to trust that what we’re doing or working toward can come to pass.

The sociological and church definitions of hope go together quite nicely. From both perspectives, hope is not a feeling but a practice. It comes when we have agency and trust, and it’s learned through adversity. We know it comes from God.

This puts me in mind of that quote from the letter to the Romans:

. . . We even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us.

It’s not about searching for a hope that endures. It’s the other way around. It’s our endurance that gives us hope. We increase our hope through our perseverance and the ways in which we respond to life’s challenges. The thing is, every time we persevere, we confirm God’s presence with us, and we deepen our trust. Then, with the next life challenge – and there always is one – we enter in with a little more trust. The more we trust, the more we naturally hope that God’s promises will be fulfilled.

Back to our original waiters, who also may be our OG Hopers, the Greatest Hopers of All Time. Mary and Joseph certainly had to endure uncertainty and discomfort. We know this story, and so the familiarity of it may make it seem like it was easy, but I bet it wasn’t easy for the ones living it, when they didn’t know the end of the story, when a manger wasn’t a pretty thing to put up in their house by a tree and their story was a lived reality fraught with fear and struggle. They had a certain amount of grit to move through this experience. It may seem like they were powerless in their circumstances, but I wonder if they did have agency in the way they followed God's call for them. An unwed pregnant girl is extremely vulnerable anyway, but in that society, it meant total defenselessness. And yet, Mary did have freedom. The all-powerful creator of the universe came to her and asked for her consent. “Well Mary, I want you to give birth to the savior of the world. What do you think?” She said yes, not only to a request from God but to bringing to fruition that for which she longed – and that for which her family and her community and her entire people longed. Was she afraid? Probably. However, she could trust that the one who was asking her to do this would help her to do it. All things are possible with God.

During Advent, we know God’s promise of the Christ Child will be fulfilled. Of course we do. We don’t enter in each year and think – oh gosh, I wonder if Jesus will be born or not. Maybe Mary will say no to the angel this time. Maybe Joseph will divorce her after all. Of course not. We don’t enter the season for the historical context; we enter into the movement of the Holy One who not only gave us a savior once but who continues to pour God’s own self into our lives over and over and over again, year by year, day by day, moment by moment, by heartbeat by heartbeat. We can be filled with hope and wonder at Advent again because the Christ, God-with-us. Is. Still. With. Us.

And has never left us. We long for this presence, and maybe that longing is the root of all our longings, and each year as Advent brings us to Christmas, we can remember that God does bring fulfillment to our longing.

Which brings me back to waiting. We talked before about waiting with longing, waiting with worry or overeagerness or care and excitement – however we come to it. This kind of holy waiting may feel powerless like there’s nothing we can do. However, holy waiting is active. If we’re in touch with our longing, we also know what we’re hoping for. Our hope comes from God, and it invites a kind of participation. Maybe there are preparations we make, getting a room ready, making plans, talking with others who are also waiting with us. If it’s a kind of existential waiting, like waiting for peace instead of war, or an end to ICE raids, or an equitable society where people’s needs for food and shelter can be met – well, there might be an invitation for direct action too, something to do to bring about that for which we long.

And we can pray. Prayer may look passive, but even contemplative prayer is active, especially when we do so in openness and trust. So, hope is a gift from God. We can’t self-manufacture it, but we can make a practice of hope. In the way that we are with others, in the way that we are before God, in the way that we endure and persevere – and trust – we deepen our hope.

It seems like a movement that circles back upon itself – the more we wait in a stance of trust, the more we hope, and when we hope in God and endure hard things, we experience how God shows up for us, and that deepens our trust. And we wait in hope.

I’m going to close this space with a song. It’s called “Waiting for the Dawn” by Salt of the Sound. I hope it helps you to pause and reflect on waiting, longing, trust, and hope in your life.

For reflection:

• Do you ever worry? Have you ever felt overly eager for something? What’s that like? Where is God in that? What helps you to slow down and deepen your trust?

• For what are you longing right now – for yourself, the people you love, your larger community, the world? What’s God saying to you in that longing?

• Where are you finding hope these days?

• To what is God inviting you this Advent?

By Sister Leslie Keener, CDP

Leslie is the director of God Space, a community-building spirituality ministry in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. She’s a Sister of Divine Providence with a Masters in Ministry and a Certificate in Spiritual Direction and Retreats from Creighton University. She directs retreats, meets with people for spiritual direction, hosts the Providence Podcast, and serves as the vocation director for her community. She enjoys music, dancing, and spicy food.