Things Take the Time They Take

Scripture Reflection

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:37-44

We wait for life to make its mark, and time then etches itself upon our lives. When I was 4 years old, I couldn’t wait for Christmas to come. Each year, too, it was for my birthday to come around that I waited, all so I could grow up to be like everyone else. Once school began, I could hardly wait for vacation time, and then I waited for graduation, and finally for the freedom to be on my own. Isn’t that how it was with you too? We wait for life to do what life always does at its own pace.

Over the years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in such a way — waiting to be old enough to get a driver’s license, for the Packers to win a Super Bowl, for the wonderful taste of summer when winter seemed to lock us all into a deep freeze, for political winds to shift and bring in the fresh air of new hope for the future. In some years, it was waiting for a new car, and in other years for a new parish. Sometimes, it was waiting for a friend to come, and other times waiting in a doctor’s office while watching everyone else being called ahead of me. And sometimes it’s been waiting for God to show up, though mostly I’ll admit I wasn’t sure if I’d know what that could or would look like — only something different than how I was at that moment, I presumed.

If Advent is supposed to be a time of waiting, then I’d have to say that in so many ways my whole life has been an advent of one sort or another — not always waiting for God, but sometimes for that, too.

And so it’s been all those somethings that I’ve spent time waiting for that have in their own time come to pass — from a child’s dreams for Christmas to a grownup’s wondering about God and a scattering of much else in between.

The prophet and poet Isaiah says, “In days to come … they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.” We wait for peace, too, though if we’re honest about it, we wonder if it’s ever really going to come.

Mary Oliver, another poet from another time, mused about all such waiting in a very brief poem that’s over almost before it begins. The poem is titled “Don’t Worry.”

“Things take the time they take. Don’t worry, How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?”

It’s true. Things take the time they take.

If you know anything about St. Augustine, you know he walked his share of roads. He tasted life — from the boyhood thrill of stealing pears out of someone’s orchard to the grownup thrill of falling in love and the daunting thrill of becoming a parent. His were many roads and paths and back alleyways — some forked, some with dead ends and most without knowing the ultimate destination, until, like all of us, he found himself arriving at one place or another, only to begin again. Things take the time they take for us to become who we are called to be.

As much as we wait for life to come to us, the truth is that life happens to us as we’re busy about our waiting. And if so with life, so also with God who happens as we’re busy doing other things, though mostly without our noticing. Some of us are captured by it all and some of us are left behind, as the Gospel this week suggests, but God does happen in our rummaging about, woven in amidst all the distractions that make demands upon our time.

For most of us, it is the silence that stirs us to notice. Sometimes it is the forced silence as when we are laid low by illness. At other times, it is the silence that comes masked as boredom tempting us to flee, and yet again it may be the silence of 3 a.m. as we lie awake unable to sleep.

Most often, the waiting for God to come does take on the cloak of silence. It will capture you whether you welcome it or not. So then sit with it, wait with it, make friends with it. It is holy, and because we become like those with whom we spend time, then it too will make you holy. Things take the time they take, and amidst it all God happens. Be at peace.

For Reflection: