"Pregnant" Waiting
Compare waiting in a doctor’s office, or for a webpage to load, to eagerly awaiting reunion with the one you love. The first fills us with an oppressive sense of restless passivity. There is a banalization of time we do anything we can to escape: scrolling through our phone, thumbing the heap of glossy magazines on the waiting room table. In the second kind of waiting however, we savor the interval. Whenever our mind wanders we delight to recall the memory of the one we await; and that he will soon be here.
Guerric describes waiting that is a “joy.” He uses the word “laetitia” which also has the sense of “fat, rich, fertile”: a “pregnant” waiting. Someone described monastic life as “a vast and fruitful loneliness.” The vast and fruitful lifelong waiting of the monk is full of suspense. The monastic practices all cultivate the “memoria Dei,” like a lover reading through old letters, gazing on photographs to kindle and refresh his longing for the one he awaits.
Such waiting is a “joy” because we are waiting for one who has already come. “Already my being is with you.” Our true nature is already lodged in the glorified Christ and we have only to wake up slowly to where we already are. His coming to us is our coming to him; it is our coming to ourselves, awakening in his light. Bernard writes: “In giving me himself he gave me back myself.” We “come to ourselves” continually, from the prodigal son’s “coming to himself” in the land of unlikeness to the full realization of our true self “hidden with Christ in God.”
Monastic life unfolds in an exquisite, agonizing suspense… punctuated by the occasional foretaste of reunion. “In a dark moment [the monk] is taken, suddenly like a hooked fish or an ensnared bird”; we forget ourselves completely, snatched up into the Other.
The english translation given here for “expectatio” is “waiting”; like “expectation” it suggests a more passive stance toward an absent reality. The french translates with “attendons, attente;” we are attending a Savior; paying attention to, waiting on…one already present, if “in a mirror dimly.” We hold ourselves in readiness, poised to act at the least indication of the Lord’s will, waiting on and attending to the needs of the poor in our midst.
The quality of our attention to the signs of his presence, our refusal to distract ourselves, to break the suspense of waiting, makes the difference between a life spent waiting helplessly for a webpage to load and one of eager, active longing for reunion with our beloved.
Fr. Isaac Slater, Genesee