PATIENT WATCHFULNESS
A stage of the coming of the Lord on the
cloud was marked by the fall of Jerusalem, because it forced the Church to open
her ranks irrevocably to the nations, and to shape a spiritual cult purified of
the Temple’s particularism.
Forty years had passed since the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. The apostles were dead and the church was being
persecuted. Christians had begun even to betray each other. Some ran out of
patience and even out of the church. And still Christ had not returned. What on
earth (or rather, in heaven) was he doing? The answer is that Christ had
decided to come to his beleaguered faithful, not with trumpets and weapons, but
in the writing of the gospels (apart from the sacraments). The gospels almost
certainly would not have been written if it had not been for that crisis. They
witness to the fact that Jesus comes from deep within the creativity and wisdom
of the community.
Every stage, then, linked to all the stages
in the humanisation of the planet, is also a stage in the coming of the Son of
Man. Each conversion of heart by which man opens himself to the action of the
Spirit of the Risen One, and relies a little less upon the “flesh”, each
conversion is a new manifestation of the coming of Jesus. Every Eucharistic
assembly, united “until he comes again,” is the recipient of the glory and
power of the Son of Man on the cloud, and is indeed the stage par excellence of
this coming.
Watchfulness is a virtue precisely of the
man who concerns himself with the lordship of the Son of Man, and who watches
it germinate in each person and in all things.
Waiting, characterised by alertness and vigilance, is essential to the spiritual life.
Waiting as a disciple of Jesus is not vacuous and vague. It is a waiting with a
promise in our hearts that makes already present what we are waiting for. We
wait during Advent for the birth of the Messiah. We wait after Easter for the
coming of the Spirit, and after the Ascension of Jesus we await his return in
glory. We are always waiting, but it is a waiting in the conviction that we
have already heard God’s footsteps and seen his footprints on the sands of our
history. Waiting for God is an active, alert – yes, joyful – expectancy, and as
we remember him we create a community ready to welcome him when he comes.
This requires courage. For the Greeks
courage was above all the virtue of the warrior. For St. Thomas Aquinas it was
above all the virtue of joyful endurance. G.K. Chesterton said that we all owed
our existence to the courage of our mothers who endured pregnancy for nine
months. It is the courageous endurance of bringing that child from babyhood to
adulthood. It is the patient endurance
of the teacher in the inner city or village school who stays the course. It is
the patience of the diplomat or politician who does not give up on the peace
process. It is the courage of the priest who sticks to his priesthood even when
his best friends have left it, or of the Catholic who struggles with the
Church’s failures and shortcomings. It is not a matter of gritting one’s teeth
and expecting the worst, but the realisation that God comes from within. He may
well be there already depending on how you have learned the art of expectancy.
So how do we wait for God? We wait
with patience. But patience does not mean passivity. Waiting patiently is not
like waiting for the train to arrive, the rain to stop, or the sun to rise. It
is an active waiting in which we live the present moment to the full in order
to find there the signs of the One we are waiting for. The word “patience”
comes from the Latin verb “patior” (= I suffer). Waiting patiently means
suffering through the present moment, tasting it to the full. Waiting patiently
always means paying attention to what is happening right before our eyes and
seeing there the first rays of God’s glorious coming.
Waiting patiently in expectation does
not necessarily get easier as we become older. On the contrary, as we grow in
age we are tempted to settle down to a routine and say, “Well, I have seen it
all…I am going to take it easy and live the days as they come.” But in this way
our lives lose their creative tension; we no longer expect something really new
to happen. We become cynical or self-satisfied or simply bored. The challenge of
ageing is waiting with an ever greater patience and an ever stronger
expectation. It is living with an eager hope. It is trusting that through
Christ “we have been admitted into God’s favour…and look forward exultantly to
God’s glory” (Rom 5,2).
“He watches for Christ, who has a
sensitive, eager, apprehensive mind, who is awake, alive, quick sighted,
zealous in seeking and honouring him, who looks out for him in all that
happens. He watches with Christ, whoever commemorates and renews in his own
person Christ’s cross and agony, and gladly takes up the mantle of affliction
which Christ wore here, and left behind him when he ascended. Then they watch
and wait for the Lord, who are tender and sensitive in their devotion towards
him, who feed on the thought of him, hang on his words, live in his smile, and
thrive and grow under his hand. They are eager for his approval, quick in
catching his meaning, jealous of his honour. They see him in all things, accept
him in all events, and avoid the cares, the interests, and pursuit of this
life, still would feel an awful joy, not a disappointment, did they hear that
he was on the point of coming.”
15th. December 2007
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