As we approach Advent we reflect on waiting.

Who could EVER have imagined what was going to turn BC into AD.

When a few farm workers and three
members of an obscure Persian sect
walked haphazard by starlight straight
into the kingdom of heaven.
-From BC:AD by U A Fanthorpe

Can we imagine what might be possible in our lives? What God can accomplish?

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, and the stillness the dancing.
-East Coker from The Four Quartets, T.S. Elliot

This enigmatic poem suggests the need for emptying our mind of thought.

‘Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts and then thou wilt feel the principle of God’ wrote George Fox in the 17th century.

Emptying our heart of hope, for how do we know what goodness and fulfilment may lie in another direction all together?

Is the music playing behind the door of despair? Patrick Kavanagh, poet

And what of faith, surely this is core to waiting? Is waiting evidence of these core elements of faith, hope and love; so that patient waiting allows the process of an unimaginable becoming.

Is silence the very foundation of waiting, the humus of growth? Is silence the doorway into stillness and awaiting and knowing?

Be still and know that I am God. Psalm 46:10

‘We came to know a place to stand in and what to wait in’ Frances Howgill, early Quaker 1618-1669

‘True silence…is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment’ concluded William Penn (1644-1718)

Rosamond Robertson