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'Many Winters I Have Seen'
The following was written in October 2005...
"God is offering an invitation." These words by Sue Monk Kidd, in her When the Heart Waits, directed my memory back to my childhood. I could see knees bent onto the floor before the altar at my home church. Actually, the pulpit served as an altar. The pulpit was a semicircle platform about two feet high. The podium, behind which our pastors delivered sermons, stood in its center. After sermons on Sunday mornings and nights, the pastor always gave an invitation. He invited persons to come forward for any reason the Spirit might lead. During "invitation time," we knew the altar was always "open" for us to pray. Occasionally a person or a few persons would walk forward and kneel.
As a teenager, I became quite familiar with the altar. I was in the turbulent years of adolescence when frequent trips to the altar ensued. At invitation time, I would undergo a deep ache within and a numinous urge to go pray. After months of impassioned seeking, a call to preach became clear. After praying about the call and seeking advice from family and pastor, I made my call public on a Sunday morning at invitation time. Months of waiting, seeking, and praying had evolved slowly into discernment of vocation. A critical transition had been navigated, a fresh direction embraced. That was Fall 1976, and the painful wait is still vivid to me.
It is as though the perplexity of that time always lingers fresh in my mind. But the seeking, praying, and at times crying before the pulpit are precious memories.
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Kidd's words returned me to that sacred place of prayer in the little rural church in the Handtown community. But her words seemed to say to me that I was presently in another altar-call time. But why? What for? Kidd's next words seemed to sum up the past year of my life: "A call to waiting." Altar-call times are always times of putting life in neutral.
It seemed waiting was what I had been doing for so long. Waiting a year to finish my job after deciding not to renew my contract. It was a joyful year but also very difficult. I felt committed to my students, but my heart seemed absent. I felt lost, suspended in the air, deeply hurt.
It took months to decide to return to school for another degree; it took months to decide what degree to seek. It took months for the university to affirm my acceptance into their program. I sought work for months without success. Among the possible job opportunities was a small rural congregation. I served it as interim pastor for six months. They wanted me to let them vote on me to be the permanent pastor. I waited long to discern God's leadership. I finally let the search committee consider presenting me for a vote to become their pastor. The committee decided not to present me for a vote after discovering several of the members wanted someone who would be able to work better with the youth.
Shortly afterward, I was invited by a man in a nearby town to be the director of a spiritual retreat center he was planning to start. I waited and prayed about the opportunity. It was an extended period before I was clear about whether it was for me or not.
After my last interim pastorate, I waited and waited to get a call to preach. There was no call for some two months. All this time, the months were passing by toward the day when pay from my past job would cease.
I had traveled daily almost every morning for several months to a local church to seek God and open myself before God. Hundreds of hours were spent at that site. Several days were spent at a nearby prayer retreat seeking leadership and strength.
I had engaged in copious hours of reading about the spiritual disciplines and the need for patience and waiting. I spent many hours in quietness delving into my own inner Self, seeking to find answers to identity and purpose and ultimate meaning.
It seemed my life had turned into a waiting game. Every door seemed to slam in my face. Friends seemed unable to do anything but offer encouragement. For once, I seemed totally blocked from making overt progress. This seemed like a forced stop, given to me for some unknown reason. It seemed as if God had turned the ignition of my life and shut off the power for me to move, taken the keys, and hidden them. For once, I was unable to wiggle free. I felt paralyzed. I did not wish to blame anyone, only to accept and see where the game would lead. I was given the gift of contentment, despite moments of fleeting fear.
Kidd's words about God's invitation seemed to be more than a call for me to wait. The words said my waiting was a gift from God, a fertile time, a good time, a time of catharsis, the place to be in the present. God's invitation was not to go to the altar, they were reminders I was already at an altar. God was saying, "Stay at the altar of your innermost Self. Remain there with faith in My goodness and purpose for you."
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One blessing of this interim time was my becoming acquainted with the Tao Te Ching. The spiritual classic instructed me about the need to let life unfold. It helped me become acutely aware of my compulsion to control life. I immersed myself in Lao Tsu's teachings and appreciated how they parallel many of Jesus' teachings. But I was discovering waiting before God can never be learned from a book, regardless of how wise and sacred its teachings.
Waiting is learned amid the flowing current of life's ceaseless passing. Waiting is not a spectator role. Waiting occurs amidst life's rapids and noise and unpredictability. Lingering among unanswered questions and signless paths is part of life.
A wonderful text was brought back to my consciousness, one I had not read in some time. The Israelites sang, "Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him..." (Psalm 37.7a, AV). The words "rest" and "wait" were encouraging to me. "Rest" in Hebrew can be read "be still" or "be silent."
"Wait" in the Psalms text means "wait longingly, hopefully, intensely." The verb is reflexive and denotes what the worshipper does to himself or herself; in other words, we have to decide to let ourselves wait. Waiting is always our choice. Also, the verb is intensive and refers to the ecstasy of joyful activity or the anguish of pain. Israelites used the term for dancing joyfully and writhing in childbirth. I was surprised at how English translations had toned down the meaning of the Hebrew text. They seemed to say, "Calm down." But the Hebrew acknowledges the deeply-felt pathos often involved in waiting. Waiting can be a joyful process or a painful one, sometimes both joyful and painful.
The psalmist does not affirm pain and longing are necessary or unnecessary, good or bad. It simply is. Waiting longingly is a positive interim, a faith-full stay. It is a waiting which is in the now but embraces the not yet. It sees newness beyond the horizon when others see only life on this side of the horizon. Spiritual waiting is a fertile time of cultivating fallow soil, refocusing blurred vision, and centering our contorted Selves. Soulful waiting is dogged stay-ness in the womb of creative silence until the auspicious time for the birth.
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A clergyperson told the story of two frogs with two different fates. They were playing at night on the rafters of a dairy barn. Each fell into adjacent pails of cream. They began jumping, hopping, scrambling to survive. One struggled harder and longer. The other finally gave up. The next morning the farmer entered the barn to find one frog lying dead on cream and the other exhausted but happily resting on butter. The clergy member gave his moral: we stop living when we let problems overwhelm us, and we live when we stop jumping, hopping, and scrambling to survive.
The idea of struggle appeals to the rugged ideals of our culture, inherited partly from frontier times. Many of us refuse to believe life is not meant to be miserable. We hear things like, "No pain, no gain." We have been conditioned against playfulness and child-like spontaneity. But religious faiths across cultures and history teach struggle is the worst thing to do in many situations.
Maybe the greatest and hardest lesson is learning patiently to let life unfold, to let go, to surrender. Again we have been conditioned against surrender. When we were children, we heard things like, "Never give up." Learning to give up control is more difficult in a culture that teaches impatience, manipulation, and power. The goodness and kindness of life are not trusted in American culture. We are taught to fight to protect ourselves from life. Yet to be patient, one has to exercise a radical, culture-denying belief in life. Hurry is inimical to life. Healthy living, like all nature, gradually unfolds. To hurry the process is dangerous.
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Maybe God's call is for us to live at the altar, always waiting before the Lord and the unfoldment of life. Maybe in our busyness, there is to be an altar deep within us which we never leave. Could it be waiting does not entail passion-less passivity but a relinquishment often marked by intense longing and dogged hope? Waiting is a summons to zealous engagement in life. Waiting enriches us and our service to the world. We keep serving within the wait.
But will we choose to flow with the unfoldment of Providence? Is it possible the best thing we can often do is refrain from doing and let the way unfold before us? Scripture seems to say so: "For he who has entered His [God's] rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His" (Hebrews 4.10, NKJV).
The summons to waiting is spoken of repeatedly in the Tao Te Ching. The wisdom of Lao Tsu is expressed eloquently in the following description of poised centeredness in the Way of the Divine.
The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.
*Stephen Mitchell. Tao Te Ching. 29.
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*(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2020
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse. The book is a collection of poems based on mystical traditions, especially Christian and Sufi, with extensive notes on the teachings and imagery in the poetry.
*To contact Brian, write to LotusoftheHeart@gmx.com .
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