We are all familiar with the experience of waiting: for the bus, for someone, for something to happen…. Waiting changes those who wait, it gives us time, it often provides the key to understanding, enables us to be open to the event.
Waiting involves awareness of the past and of the promise of the now and of the hope for the future, it involves deep uncertainty.
We may ask ourselves: if the waiting will be worthwhile? if the promise will be fulfilled, as we expected, or differently? Will we recognise the fulfilment of the promise? While we wait we need to be alert, sensitive, ready, always attentively listening… When we wait actively with open hearts and minds then we are changed by the process. If we strive to wait for God in our life, to be attentive to God in our world, then the presence of Jesus is totally overwhelming but not totally unexpected.
The Incarnation shatters our pre-conceptions, which always tend to keep us in a ‘safe place’, a place where we think we’re in control. God, on the other hand, is always inviting, leading us into God-ness: inviting us to join the dance which is God – which is the Trinity. God is always engaging with people, with systems, events, history… with our little lives…
Zephaniah understood that ’when the Lord is in your midst’ then you need ‘fear disaster no more’ that ‘when your God is in your midst … God will rejoice over you with gladness, God will renew you in love’ and God will ‘exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival’. (Zeph 3:14 -18) What an amazing, almost raucous picture of God rejoicing over us.
Several years ago I found myself in a barren, dark space. All the certainties and expectations of my life were changed, were withdrawn and I had no sense of purpose, of being. After several months a friend introduced me to the bookshop in Aylesford. While browsing the poetry section I came across the poems of St John of the Cross translated by Roy Campbell. I read the translation of the first poem and thought it was doggerel, but the words formed an ‘earworm’ in my brain and, to my surprise, I found myself constantly repeating them:
‘My beloved is the mountains
They reveal him unto me
And the lonely wooded valleys
And the islands of the sea …..’
A few months later I came across Teresa of Avila’s teaching about prayer as just being with God as with a friend, that prayer is not thinking much but loving much….
‘It is better to attempt to live in silence and in hope, and God will take care of God’s own.’ (Interior Castle 3)
“For there is hope for a tree,
if it is cut down, that it will sprout again.
and that its shoots will not cease.
Though its root grows old in the earth
and its stump dies in the ground,
yet at the scent of water it will bud
and put forth branches like a young plant.” (Job 14:7 – 9)
Slowly and with huge gratitude, I realised that I have been generously enfolded by Carmel.
Hope is not for the faint hearted, nor for those who seek to ignore the very real perils of our world: the power wielded by political leaders, the hunger, the growing poverty and helplessness of whole peoples, the very real threat of climate change…. To hope is to understand the realities and to seek change, to work for the coming of the kingdom of God, to do what we can, where we can… Like Mary to hope is to ‘set out and go with haste to the hill country’, to take the first steps of what may well be a difficult journey. Journeying in hope, we are called ‘to follow the divine injunction addressed to Elijah: Get up, eat, and journey on. We cannot surrender to discouragement, but we need to get up in hope, convinced that God is still at work in Carmel, in the Church,’ in you and me, ‘and in the world even in these difficult times…May Mary, our mother and sister, Star of the Sea, show us the way and journey with us, as we continue to live in allegiance to Jesus Christ, her Son, and transmit from one generation to another the joy of living the Gospel in the Carmelite way of life.’
(‘You are my witnesses’ General Council 2019)
Maggie Cascioli
