A different kind of waiting

 In Advent, we wait for God to come, like Mary waited to give birth. The world becomes God's womb, a dark place, closed in on itself, yet holding a hidden speck of bright light that will soon burst into radiance. A shadow of fear does hang over the waiting of pregnancy--fear that something might go wrong, fear of losing that which is unseen, yet already treasured. But in general, the kind of waiting experienced in pregnancy is expectant waiting, the kind that shows itself to the world in a glowing, enigmatic smile. It is impatient waiting, the kind that bubbles with barely-contained joy.

Last week, I experienced another kind of Advent waiting, however, different from the eager countdown of days before a baby comes. I sat beside my mother's body, awaiting the transport to the funeral home. With no one to talk to, I looked around the small room where my mother had spent the last four years. The bedspread lay crumpled in a chair,no longer folded meticulously across the foot of her bed. Someone had turned on too many lamps, even the ones that she always forgot to light. She lay in bed, as if sleeping, but her spirit had clearly left her face, along with the anxious wrinkles around her eyes. Time stood still in that stuffy little room, a womb in which presence was giving birth to absence. I knew that when the men came with their gurney to take her body, I would not see her face again, at least in this life. I knew that when she left that room, there would be, for me, an empty hole in the world. I waited resignedly and deliberately for that inevitable moment, though, as the minutes crept silently by, afraid to call attention to themselves. It was the opposite of incarnation.

Thinking today about these two different kinds of waiting, and reflecting on mothers, I was reminded of Zbigniew Herbert's poem, "Mother." He likens a child to a ball of yarn, unwinding from a mother's lap to spill out into the world. The mother, however, holds onto the end of the string, winds it around her finger protectively, and waits, even though she knows that the unraveled yarn will never return to her "knees' sweet throne." She waits, as her "outstretched arms glow in the dark like the old town." 

Doesn't God wait for us like a mother? While we tremble in fragile expectation for God, doesn't God stretch out steady and determined arms for us, the children who might never return? As we wait for life, and for death, and for life again, I think that impatient expectation might be over-rated. A moment in those timeless, glowing arms, a holy moment in between the bustle of life and the silence of death, is to crawl back into the lap of God.