Sunday 4: for waiting

 Do this work until you feel the delight of it. In the trying is the desire. The first time you practice contemplation, you’ll only experience a darkness, like a cloud of unknowing. You won’t know what this is. You’ll only know that in your will you feel a simple reaching out to God. You must also know that this darkness and this cloud will always be between you and your God, whatever you do. They will always keep you from seeing [God] clearly by the light of understanding in your intellect and will block you from feeling [God] fully in the sweetness of love in your emotions. So, be sure you make your home in this darkness. Stay there as long as you can, crying out to [God] over and over again, because you love [God]. It’s the closest you can get to God here on earth, by waiting in this darkness and in this cloud. Work at this diligently, as I’ve asked you to, and I know God’s mercy will lead you there.

from The Cloud of Unknowing

Waiting for the God-Who-Comes is no easy task.  It’s unsettling to feel that I am incomplete until x happens, or I am y age.  Sue Monk Kidd, in her book When the Heart Waits, has written extensively about this uneasiness.  She points out that in soulmaking I cannot bypass the cocoon stage if I want to unfurl my wings and fly:

I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity. When I looked it up in my dictionary however, I found that the words passive and passion come from the same Latin root, pati, which means “to endure.” Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It’s a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision.

Such active waiting involves the combination of patience and anticipation.  Staying on the edge between these two is the work of contemplation, as the fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing, reveals (quoted above). Deliberately being willing to stay in my dark places because it is there I will find God-With-Us is tough.  Christmas is still a few days away, and I need to know again – and be prepared to stay in – the gap between the God-Who-Is, the I AM, the Immanuel, and the apocalyptic act of the incarnation that Christmas Day marks: the God-Who-Comes and Who-will-keep-coming.  This is the God who I keep reaching out toward.

Holding these mystical paradoxes together is part of the work of waiting, of contemplation, of soulmaking. It is a poetic act of living, of making, of becoming one with The Maker, as comedian Frank Skinner often discusses on his poetry podcast.  In an interview with the website Seen and Unseen, Frank states that,

“Christianity is like living the poem… it’s like the Old Testament was a collection of poetry, I’m not saying that there’s no factual stuff within it, but clearly it’s written in a poetic style, with great truths and insights into human nature. And then, with that whole phrase, “The Word became flesh”, it’s like now the poetry gets real, there’s going to be a poem that lives, and it’s all going to make sense…  this is super-poetry, this is poetry that’s actually physical, it actually exists.”  Frank goes on to suggest that we’ve lost sight of this, that humanity have forgotten, or perhaps never fully grasped, that we exist because of this super-poetry, that we exist within it, that “there’s a line waiting just for us”.  

Now the poetry gets real.  That is what we are waiting to celebrate again, and for the first time: that moment where all matter, including me, becomes unified in the flesh of the Christ; where human and divine meet, where all matter in the history of the universe meets in the body of the God-Who-Lives.

Today I am asked to make room to wait and anticipate because ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’ (John 1).  I need to make room because God wants to write poetry in me. 

When the peaks of our sky come together

my house will have a roof

Paul Eluard, Dignes de Vivre

an empty path throngs. (Conon &D. 1/25. f9. ISO 100.)