-- John Milton
Reading: by Henri Nouwen from a piece entitled “Waiting for God” (Watch for the Light, p. 27)
Waiting is not a very popular attitude. Waiting is not something that people think about with great sympathy. In fact, most people consider waiting a waste of time. Perhaps this is because the culture in which we live is basically saying, “Get going! Do something! Show you are able to make a difference! Don’t just sit there and wait!” For many people waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place. They want to get out of it by doing something.
In our particular historical situation, waiting is even more difficult because we are so fearful. One of the most pervasive emotions in the atmosphere around us is fear. People are afraid – afraid of inner feelings, afraid of other people, and also afraid of the future. Fearful people have a hard time waiting, because when we are afraid we want to get away from where we are. …
Reading: by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney from Willpower – Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (p. 2)
[Researchers have] come to realize that most major problems, personal and social, center on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger. Poor self-control correlates with just about every kind of individual trauma: losing friends, being fired, getting divorced, winding up in prison. …It can destroy your career, as adulterous politicians keep discovering. It contributed to the epidemic of risky loans and investments that devastated the financial system, and to the shaky prospects for so many people who failed to set aside enough money for their old age.
Ask people to name their greatest personal strengths, and they’ll often credit themselves with honesty, kindness, humor, creativity, bravery and other virtues – even modesty. But not self-control. It came in dead last among the virtues being studied by researchers who have surveyed more than one million people around the world. Of the two dozen “character strengths” listed in the researcher’s questionnaire, self-control was the one that people were least likely to recognize in themselves.
Reading: by Marie Howe a poem entitled “Hurry”
We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.
Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.
And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.
Hurry Up and Wait
A Sermon Delivered on December 2, 2012
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
When I was a kid, December was the longest month. I couldn’t wait for Christmas. When I was old enough to know that there would be an abundance of colorfully wrapped packages with my name on them, come Christmas Eve, but still young enough to find unspeakable joy in the prospect of receiving a few carefully selected gifts, those were the years December seemed to last the longest. I remember wishing desperately there was some way to speed up the days, and make time pass more quickly. And yet the more fervently I hoped, the slower the days seemed to drag by.
Now, as an adult, I feel just the opposite. Winter seems to be coming too quickly. It is getting dark much too early, for my taste. And I find myself savoring these unseasonably mild autumn days we are having, before the icy weather arrives in earnest.
December always seems to be marked by a mixture of anticipation and apprehension, a heightened sense of hope, but also a vague sense of fear. For the child, it was simply the fear that my holiday wishes might be disappointed. As an adult, it is the fear of time flying by too quickly, and the growing awareness that the time of our lives is limited. Winter in the world of nature itself is a reminder of our own mortality.
* * *
Today, according to the Christian calendar, is First Advent. It is the first of four Sundays before Christmas. Advent. The word comes from the Latin advenire, which means “to come,” and adventus meaning “arrival.” These are the same roots as the word adventure, which means something is “about to happen.”
In the Christian tradition, the weeks of advent are spent preparing for the arrival of the Christ child, the birth of a baby, and also in preparation for the Second Coming. The first time around Jesus arrives as child savior. The second time around, Jesus returns as judge.
Being judged is serious business. Thus in some Christian traditions advent is a period of fasting, observed just as strictly as the forty days of Lent before Easter. These weeks are a devoted to waiting. Waiting in joyful or fearful anticipation for what is to come.
* * *
Waiting is not easy. Some of us are better at it than others. This has been scientifically studied. And some of these scientific insights are striking.
Perhaps you have heard of the “marshmallow experiments.” Back in the 1960s a psychologist named Walter Mischel studied children’s ability to resist the temptations of immediate gratification.
The experiment he came up with was this: he would bring four-year-old children, one after another, into a room, sit them down at a table, and put a single marshmallow on plate right in front of them. Then he would tell the child: “You can eat this marshmallow right now, if you want. I am going to leave for a while. I have other things to do. I will be back in a few minutes. You can eat this one marshmallow, right now. But if you wait, and don’t eat it, you can have a second marshmallow when I am back. Either way, it’s up to you.” And with that he smiled and left the room.
As you might imagine, some children popped the marshmallow right into their mouths. Others managed to hold off.
Over the years this experiment has been recreated. On YouTube you can watch a clip of four-year-olds sitting at a table, looking at that single marshmallow. Some of them put their hands over their eyes, or turn away, struggling to resist. Others thoughtfully sniff and gently squeeze the marshmallow, picking and poking at it. Some nibble just a little bit. And then a little bit more. You can watch how, for some of them, the temptation is torturous. They wince and scrunch up their faces… The experiment seems more than a little cruel.
Back in the 1960s Walter Mischel learned a bit about how young children handle delayed gratification. As it turned out, though, his research didn’t end there.
You see, Walter Mischel was a father. And his daughters happened to attend the same school on the Stanford University campus, as several of the children who participated in the original study. In the course of conversations at home around the dinner table, Mischel’s daughters would talk about their classmates, and those who had a habit of getting into trouble. Some of the names sounded familiar. Slowly, Mischel realized the kids that were struggling in school, both academically and socially, were often the same ones who as four-year-olds were the quickest to gobble down their marshmallows.
So in a follow up study Mischel tracked down hundreds of the young men and women who had participated in the marshmallow experiment. What he learned is that the four-year-olds who were able to hold out for fifteen minutes without eating the marshmallow, years later went on to score 210 points higher in their SATs than those who caved, and ate their marshmallow within half a minute.
The children who were patient enough to wait for fifteen minutes, grew up to be more popular among their peers and teachers, earned higher salaries, were less likely to be overweight, and had less problems with drug abuse. These men and women have been tracked now for over forty years. And the differences among them are still apparent.
* * *
Roy Baumeister and John Tierney begin their book Willpower, with an interesting observation. “However you define success,” they write, whether “a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions – it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities.”
The two personal qualities that most reliably predict “positive outcomes” in life are intelligence and self-control. As far as we know, it is not possible to increase our innate intelligence. However, it is possible to improve our degree of self-control.
* * *
Some of us – by virtue of the cards we were dealt by nature or nurture – are more likely to eat that single marshmallow in one quick bite, even if we wish we could have had two instead. And some of us are better able to wait, and thus enjoy certain rewards available only to those who are patient.
But all of us, regardless of our knee-jerk reactions, regardless of our habitual inclinations, all of us have the capacity for greater self-control. Each of us has the capacity to be more patient.
One way to think about patience is as an act of willpower. Our willpower, Baumeister and Tierney write, can be built up and strengthened almost like a muscle. With steady exercise and attention, we can improve our habits. Greater patience can be taught and learned. Both scientists and religious practitioners agree on this.
Allan Lokos, a Buddhist teacher, and author of a book entitled Patience – The Art of Peaceful Living, writes, “To become a truly patient person requires effort, and it will be difficult to sustain that effort unless you are genuinely motivated.” Thus he suggests:
“Each day for a week, sit quietly for fine minutes and consider [why you want] to become more patient. Don’t impose reasons on yourself because they seem “right” or because others think that way. Examine your [own] personal experience. Look deeply at what matters to you. Reflect on your relationships, both personal and professional. How does your impatience or your anger affect your wife/ husband/ partner/ children/ friends? Be truthful with yourself: Would it be worth the effort to become more patient? At this point just ask the questions. Let the answers come when they are ready.” (p. 36)
* * *
Patience allows us to live more attentively, and to act more thoughtfully.
We live much of our lives breathlessly, rushing from one activity to the next, from one worry to the next, from one desire to the next. And so, for the Buddhist, the effort to break the anxious cycle, involves, first of all, being less breathless. Many Buddhist meditation practices begin with the instruction that we should simply sit there, and breathe. Don’t do anything. Simply breathe. Don’t try to breathe fast or slow. Don’t try to breath deep or shallow. Simply breathe. And pay attention to your breathing.
Simply paying attention to our breathing is the first step in bringing us back fully to the present moment. Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron tells her students they should “simply stay” in the present moment. Most of us have a deeply engrained habit to try to flee from the present, and become preoccupied with memories of yesterday and worries about tomorrow. Most of us are often scattered and distracted. To pause for a moment and take a breath is the first step in learning patience.
“Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream.” And thus we come back to the immediacy of our experience. (The Places that Scare You, p. 23)
The patience envisioned by the Buddhist, which can bring us more fully into the present moment, is very similar to the patience envisioned by the Catholic priest Henri Nouwen. He writes,
“A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there.” (p. 31)
* * *
What Walter Mischel discovered studying a four-year-old’s struggle with the temptation of a marshmallow, is what it means to be patient. The patient children didn’t grit their teeth, and practice superhuman self-denial. They simply turned their attention to other things present in the room. Rather than remaining feverishly focused on dreams of marshmallow consumption – either immediate or delayed – they relaxed, and were able to realize that there is more to life than the next marshmallow fix.
* * *
Advent is a period of preparation, of anticipation and apprehension. It is a period in which it is very easy to get caught up in frantic activity or feverish worry.
For a lot of younger folks a wish list can become the focus of joyful anticipation. For older folks a bucket list can become a way to cope with our apprehension about the reality of death. And for in-between-folks an urgent to-do-list can keep us tied up in frantic activity, hurrying from one thing to the next. All of these lists are designed to help us organize our lives, but in fact they turn out distracting us from life. All of our lists pull us away from the present. All of them make us slaves to some imagined reward. Each item we cross off our list is just another marshmallow we want to pop into our mouth.
Waiting patiently is not merely a matter of resisting temptation, it is a matter of putting aside all distractions.
Often times our waiting is filled with wishes, Henri Nouwen writes. “’I wish that I would have this job. I wish that the weather would be better. I wish that the pain would go.’ We are full of wishes, and our waiting easily gets entangled in those wishes.”
Waiting patiently means relaxing in the moment, and realizing that everything we need is already right here. It means knowing that what we are waiting for is growing from the ground on which we are standing. It means being fully present to this moment.
As we approach another winter solstice, and once again descend into the darkest days of the year, as we await the return of the sun, and the arrival of a new year, may we do so patiently.
Grateful for time past,
Hopeful for time future,
May our seasonal preparations bring us back to time present,
back to the fullness of our lives, right here, right now.
Amen.
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