Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Season of Advent places an emphasis on waiting in patience and in silence. We often do not know what is really going on in the overall plan for our lives. One metaphor used for this is the farmer who waits for the fields to produce the crop he has planted many months earlier by seed.
There are plenty of opportunities for patience in our lives these busy days. Being stuck in an airport because of flight delays, road and rail travel in chaos due to bad weather, even longer queues than normal at the checkout. However, most of the we don’t like waiting. And often when things go against us, or we get frustrated we certainly don’t wait in silence. A lot of the time, we hurry and we push. We split time into tenths of seconds. When stressed we get anxious when a traffic light turns red and holds us up for a bit.
If we practice with these small opportunities for patience we may grow in the wisdom needed to see the overall plan in our lives. The model for this type of patience at this time is Mary, about to give birth. Like all the figures in Scripture she can be seen as a model for our interior and psychological life, showing a wisdom that leads to true happiness. She prepared to give birth, faced with the difficulties of travel at that time. She did not know what was happening to her, who this child to be born was, what her overall life purpose was. But she trusted and, we are told, " pondered all these things in her heart". At times all we can do is wait and trust, not knowing, living in the present moment.
