I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith, and the love, and the hope, are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: so, the darkness shall be the light of winter lightning, and the stillness in the whisper of running streams. – Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), EAST COKER (No. 2 of ‘Four Quartets‘)
As I pondered the subject of Advent on this unusually mild and sunny Friday afternoon, November 22, my recollections drew me back to a very sad day of remembrance sixty-one years ago, November 22, 1963. As a fourth grader at the time, the principal of my school announced over the Intercom the death of President Kennedy. A few classmates burst into tears; most remained quiet – some out of fear to express their emotions openly; the rest as though they did not know how to react. As you might expect, we were all sent home.
In the aftermath, a young aide to the martyred president, Daniel Patrick Moynihan commented sadly that “to be Irish (“human”) is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” One need not experience life as heartbreak, nor be like the sad, desultory tramps that wait for a Godot* who never arrives.
*Waiting for Godot is a play written for stage by Samuel Beckett that was first publicly staged in 1953. Contrary to a popular interpretation, the two main characters, Vladimir (“Didi”) and Estragon (“Gogo”), are not “waiting for God”. As the play was written in French, the word for God is Dieu. It has been suggested that Godot, when spelled as Godeau, represents a relatively common surname in French. One may conclude that “Godot” represents a hope that never arrives. The best description of the play has been explained as neither the experience of broken heartedness, nor the non-arrival of some unknown special guest; but rather a play in which nothing happens that, nevertheless, keeps audiences attentive, in their seats. And since the second act is a reprise of the first, (more of the same), nothing happens, again. Samuel Beckett has written a play that has more in common with a Seinfeld television episode in which “nothing happens,” rather than its billing as a tragicomedy.
Waiting is not a passive virtue. Waiting without hope,** as portrayed by the two main characters in Godot, is a type of hope that is neither an active virtue, nor a passive, submissive acquiescence to the order of things. It is a vice known as acedia or sloth. It is not merely the despair of a weak will, but a paralyzing sadness – an unwillingness to assert ourselves. A fortiori, acedia can also be a “sin of flight” – a lack of courage, or being sluggish, when waiting becomes the line of least resistance. As it is a vice, acedia is also a capital sin, in that it begets other vices and sins, such as restlessness, talkativeness without point, and despair – giving up on God and Man.
**For those who know Spanish, you may have noticed a contradiction or fallacy, in T.S. Eliot’s wait without hope in the epigraphic quotation above. When translated from English to Spanish, it reads esperando sin esperanza, which can be rendered back in English as wait without waiting, wait without hoping, or hope without waiting, or hope without hoping. In the language of logic, the subject’s predicate contradicts the subject. If, instead of the word without, you substituted the word with (in its Spanish rendering, con), the subject does not predicate anything, meaning that the statement is a tautology – it repeats itself, therefore is redundant and totally unnecessary.
T.S. Eliot in the epigraphic quote above, expresses his faith as waiting for love, faith, or thought in the darkness and stillness of things. It means being open to new things which entail a certain kind of waiting, which is discussed below.
WAIT FOR? OR WAIT ON?
Normally, the topic of Advent begets many descriptive manifestations – as anticipation;arrival; celebration, expectation, preparation, readiness – and other terms too numerous to mention. They express a new beginning, newness, renewal – that makes Advent the most special season of all seasons, waiting to celebrate the birth of Christ. If we follow T.S. Eliot’s leads, and we wait with love, hope, and thought, we will be waiting for the wrong things. But how then should we wait, and what are the right things to wait for? The distinction can be found in the difference between waiting for and waiting on, which offers a better or more excellent way of waiting.
WAIT FOR
Wait for implies that, for example, one is in expected anticipation of receiving a gift. In other cases, it entails waiting eagerly for an event in future time, such as the last day of school, or the first day of hunting season. This is a type of waiting which is an expression of gratitude.
Waiting for something that is expected but unwanted, such as a tax bill or summons is a hard kind of waiting for what is expected, but unwanted; while waiting in anguish for news of a loved one who is away at war can be one of the loneliest, terror-filled agonies that can only be endured.
The following poem captures desolation in its essence in the most violent of conflicts – war itself. A substitute title could be given to it: Wait, no matter what
Wait For Me
Wait for me and I’ll return, only wait very hard.
Wait when you are filled with sorrow as you watch the yellow rain.
Wait when the wind sweeps the snowdrifts.
Wait in the sweltering heat.
Wait when others have stopped waiting, forgetting their yesterdays.
Wait even when from afar no letters come for you.
Wait even when others are tired of waiting.
Wait even when you are told that you should forget.
Wait even when my mother and son think I am no more.
And when friends sit around the fire drinking to my memory
Wait and do not hurry to drink to my memory too.Wait for me and I’ll return, defying every death.
And let those who do not wait say that I was lucky.
They will never understand that in the midst of death
You, with your waiting, saved me.
Only you and I will know how I survived:
It was because you waited, as no one else did.– Konstantin Simonov (1941)
When I say ‘no matter what’ I mean having the willingness to endure sacrifices and pain, even if there is no glimmer of light on the horizon. Although originally composed as a poem, Wait for me was almost immediately taken out of its poetic genre and acquired the performative power of a prayer, recited by millions as an invocation: for women – for the safety of their men returning home from the war; and for the men on the front, it was declaring that the love they have for hearth and home that is such that he will endure any suffering to return to the woman he loves. It is, I may add, a powerful expression of the mystical power of a woman’s love for man, as Mary rejoiced in her being chosen to become the mother of God.Next, there is a type of “waiting for” that is neither expected anticipation, nor expected but unwanted. This is inertia – staying in one place or continuing in one place, to abide – or bide one’s time. It can be expressed in the saying, ‘waiting for your ship to come in’. An example would be waiting for the big jackpot. Some, in their waiting, are like those waiting in port for the Flying Dutchman, a legendary ghost ship that can never make port and is doomed to sail the oceans forever.
WAIT ON (UPON)
To wait on, (or wait upon), is an active virtue. Waiting upon the Lord [Isaiah 40:31], for example, is not a passive type of inactivity. To wait upon something is to approach it with preparation, readiness, and what French philosopher Gabriel Marcel calls the virtue ofdisponibilité – the extent or degree to which a person does all he can to make himself available [to being dependable, for example]; or to make oneself more accessible [being easier to approach, with less formality and a welcoming attitude] for others. To wait upon requires presently attending to all preparatory matters, that is, attending to those matters that require follow up – to hold oneself in readiness (for some future endeavor); to be on ‘standby’ – available or ready to serve well in some capacity. Remember: waiting entails practice makes perfect – to make use of “waiting time”, that is, to be vigilant, watchful, and wakeful until the opportunity arrives to realize all you prepared for during your time of waiting.
WAITING IN HUMAN HISTORY
Since the birth of Christ, we have had over 2000 years of human history. An observer might wonder, “what has changed”? Maybe the French writer Alphonse Karr was correct in concluding, in 1849, when he wrote, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” He wrote this after a year of turbulent revolutions across the European landscape, ending in, more or less, the same old power brokers and oligarchs in charge. In 1989, many of us remember a similar year in which every communist government in eastern Europe collapsed, virtually without bloodletting. China almost became undone in revolt at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, while the army gathered in force to all but crush the revolt out of existence. This was followed by a coup and shutdown of the Soviet Union, ending at midnight, January 1, 1992, ending 74 years of Communist rule, going down not with a bang, but in a whimper. Many at the time called this a new world order; others called the apparent victory of the West as the end of ideological conflict, nay, the end of history itself. The post-Cold War period, some thought, was to become a new age of democratic triumphalism, for democracy is indeed behovely, in which all manner of things shall be well, which has been assured to us from the purest of the most pure of motives.
So, what may we hope for, or wait upon, in this new order for the ages? The triumph of democracy has not halted The Abolition of Man, which continues apace since C.S. Lewis first reported his observations on the state of Man in 1943. In fact, it seems to be hurtling out of control in an age of tolerance, individualism, and pluralism. C.S. Lewis, in his time, perceived that the ongoing corruption of language, especially about values talk, would produce a dumbed-down*** culture of the empty phrases and lies of political correctness (PC).
*** The term dumbing down originated in 1933 with the motion picture industry by screenplay writers. It was meant to “appeal to those of little education or intelligence.” Dumbing-down usually involves the diminishment of critical thought, by undermining standard language and learning standards, thus trivializing academic standards, culture, and meaningful information, as in the case of popular culture.
PC language is the most prominent source of lies. Its hollow rhetoric and the media simulacra of screen, chat, and web forums have created a virtualization of life in space that isn’t there. It is an immaterial world, like a ghost, inhabited by ghosts. In this world of ours, reality is living in a culture of fakery – in an era of non-being, so that fantasies, given to us as information, are already becoming more important to us than reality itself, as illusion overcomes the real.
Rather than peaceful fullness of time “unhistorical history,” **** history has returned with a vengeance, as dying continues, owing to cleansings, drones, and the modern slavery of human trafficking, with no sign of a letup in the campaign against warring “benighted” nations that choose to follow their own paths. The peace in our time has virtually led all nations back onto the wheel of history, like it or not.
****See my previous post on OLGA OF KIEV: FROM AVENGING ANGEL TO CHRISTIAN SAINT, in which I make reference to Historian David Landes discussion of Hegel’s historicism in his philosophy of history. Hegel believed that some societies have no history, even though their history has included all the night riders of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. To Hegel, this is mere duration, a stability of violence, without development. (The same could be said for Hegel’s native state Prussia, a duration of “blood and iron” warfare practiced by the Hohenzollern ruling family with the Junker aristocracy.)
THE DRAGONS OF SECULARISM
Neither Secularism, nor an anemic servile Christianity that in a Manichean fashion looks to the latest fads in psychology, social justice models, or environmental solutions with their emphases on salvation in this world – both alike will be disappointed in their search for meaning. We may be living in an age in which historic Christianity has failed to offer answers to life’s most compelling questions.
We may be experiencing the darkness before the dawn, which awaits the rising sun of the coming day. Or will ‘women clothed with the sun’ [Christian remnants in increasingly hostile and pagan societies] be driven by the dragon into the wilderness of catacombs and empty houses, having been ‘forsaken by God’? Yet those with ‘staying power’, even in their catacombs of apparent powerlessness, know that despite suffering and societal decline, we are to keep joyful, knowing that all shall be well, despite Knots of Fire, for Christian existence is a story, in which we don’t presume to know the ending. Christianity, after all, arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire, in a world swarming with skeptics and scoundrels, in which the church had to repeatedly go underground, as remnants of a subculture, but, nevertheless, kept popping up, rearing its head.
As a young man growing up in our Gotham City, New York, I have been taught that one of the highest virtues is civic obedience; and one of the worst sins is despair. But these are merely “natural virtues”, like justice and temperance, which are “sad” virtues. The virtues of the Christian are the theological virtues, mystical virtues, or virtues of grace – faith, hope, charity – which are the exuberant virtues, but are also the ‘unreasonable’ virtues. For faith means believing the incredible, hope means hoping when things are hopeless, and charity means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith, hope, charity are the theological virtues because of ‘things as they are’, in a battle that denies arithmetic. Hope is activated in times of earthquake or eclipse. Charity, as a theological virtue, requires charity to those who don’t deserve it, but still, we must pray for them, for many of them know not what they do. Charity, only to the truly needy, is a pagan concept.
As I am no longer a young man, I now look to the youth in life’s green spring, in the full strength of their young years, to energize a world very different from the one I used to know. In reference to President Kennedy’s Inaugural address, the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God, is more in question than ever before. I beseech, implore, those who are around long after I pass – to bear with courage the burden of a long twilight struggle, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, vigilant as watchmen – to undo the heavy burdens of others in order to let the oppressed go free.
REMEDIES FOR THE ADVENT SEASON: CONCLUSION
I not too long ago was given a book entitled Little Russian Philokalia: St. Seraphim of Sarov. It is a book full of practical advice at its most succinct. That is the value of this book, which is more of a prayer book or Vademecum (guide or collection) of sententious aphorisms. Advent is the perfect season to start. The book is in print and available online. May your waiting be renewed with many blessings!
Here is a sample of his aphorisms:
Don’t let your mind be idle and unproductive. This leads to boredom, which leads to sorrow.
Pray. Abstain from idle talk. Avoid conversation. When your activities fall into order, boredom will have no place in your heart. If unchecked, boredom can lead to anguish of spirit, or despondency. Despondency is weakness that leads to faintheartedness – lacking courage, being timid. Faintheartedness leads to idleness. Idleness leads to indolence – avoiding activity or exertion of any kind. Indolence is one step short of the capital sin of acedia or sloth.
To counter all these tendencies, guard your heart against unfitting thoughts and impressions.
