In the Waiting
drafted thoughts on the beginning of Advent
People have lived in the waiting for millennia. Waiting for the Messiah to come After the void within produced a void without. Waiting by wandering to a land promised, amongst questions and chaos. Waiting in faith and faithlessness, certainty and doubt. Waiting in darkness, homelessness, abandonment, surrendering to what was, while hoping for what might be: Redemption (whisper that aloud). A babe born of a virgin with flesh and blood that’s thicker than water. The incarnation where water flows freely in and through the sacred ordinariness, holding the world’s wonder and beauty, the void within and without. And still we wait. Still, I wait for the coming of something that feels cartoonish, fictional, otherworldly Trumpets, the dead rising up from the grave, golden streets where sheep and goats are separated in their faithfulness to an other-centered way of becoming, of remembering. The time in between one coming and the next is so long that we’ve forgotten what we’re waiting for. We’ve forgotten how to live in the connectedness of all things, of all people. We’ve forgotten that the Messiah was flesh and blood that’s thicker than water, and that same metallic thickness flows in each of us amongst tissues and tendons, muscles and molecules sustained by God’s breath breathed into animated dust and water. God’s breath within the native and the immigrant, the foreigner and the citizen, the member of this cult and that cult, within each town, city, state, and nation. In the waiting, we’ve forgotten Christ human, an eternal thought in the mind of God transformed into Word and life and death and life. Spirit moving in the boundless void filled with breath, animated flesh and blood that’s thicker than water, between what was, is, and is to come. Though we celebrate each year the waiting and most silent of nights, we forget why it even matters in the days that follow.
Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash



What a powerful “word”, Darcy. Thank you! It evokes yearning, hope, despair, the ways we miss things and each other, beauty, love and so much more.