If you ever watched Fawlty
Towers, you may remember Manuel the much oppressed waiter. Manuel was from Barcelona, and he was keen to
improve his English. One day he had just
learned the word eventually -- which
he liked a lot and started to use frequently.
In the dining room, when an impatient couple told Manuel they wanted
some water, he replied, Eventually…
If only everything was eventually. Eventually Christmas Day will come…
eventually it will be 2018. But
eventually doesn’t cover it in much of the reality of people’s experience. Waiting for a hospital appointment when
you’re ill and anxious… eventually isn’t much comfort. Waiting for son or daughter or grand children
to call and to spare you a bit of their time…eventually. What does waiting mean if you are a Rohingya
refugee, waiting homeless in Bangladesh, in rain and mud and cholera… if you
are effectively stateless, and governments are simply arguing about whose
responsibility you are…? Eventually…
Waiting, and knowing how to wait, is an important part of
spiritual health. I haven’t learned it
yet. I can’t wait…! Of course, waiting can also be benign and
joyous – as when you are awaiting a child to be born and all is well and as it
should be. Sometimes waiting is totally
ludicrous and exasperating, as when you are waiting in a phone queue to speak
to someone with intelligence and initiative, and all you are getting is hideous
music and recorded assurances that your call is important. Tedious waiting can on occasion be turned to
some interesting subsidiary purpose, such as mentally writing stories about
each person in the dentist’s waiting room.
Hospices, as we know, are by their nature waiting places. Wise people have found how to fill them with
peace and goodness.
Life frequently takes the form of waiting – and so our
prayer, in stillness and silence, is itself a mode of waiting in faith, not
knowing the end from the beginning, not seeking to manage, control or possess.
Mary and Joseph waited for their child. The gospel narratives depict a whole world
waiting for deliverance. At the close of
2017 we wait for deliverance from arrogance and violence, from hatred, fear and
discrimination, from poverty and disease, from the egoism that turns everything
ugly, and from excrescences of religion that distort and disfigure the plain
teaching of Jesus.
My experience when waiting, usually, is that everything else
around is busy, even frantic, and trauma is abroad. Have you
no consideration for my poor nerves, cries Mrs Bennet to Mr Bennet. Mr Bennet always greatly preferred to wait in
silence and solitude.[1] I have
utmost consideration for your nerves, my love, he replies, they have been my constant companion these
twenty years. Christian Meditation could
have enhanced the Bennet family.
If you are still, something is happening in the
distance. If you are not still, you miss
it. Oh,
hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing…
