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