Ordinary Waiting

Pentecost +27 – Year A

The Sacrament of Waiting
Macrina Wiederkehr

Slowly
she celebrated the sacrament of letting go.
First she surrendered her green,
then the orange, yellow, and red
finally she let go of her brown.
Shedding her last leaf
she stood empty and silent, stripped bare.
Leaning against the winter sky
she began her vigil of trust.

Shedding her last leaf
she watched its journey to the ground.
She stood in silence
wearing the color of emptiness,
her branches wondering;
How do you give shade with so much gone?

And then,
the sacrament of waiting began.
The sunrise and sunset watched with tenderness.
Clothing her with silhouettes
they kept her hope alive.

They helped her understand that
her vulnerability,
her dependence and need,
her emptiness,
her readiness to receive
were giving her a new kind of beauty.
Every morning and every evening they stood in silence
and celebrated together
the sacrament of waiting.

Source: unknown – found on Inward/Outward

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It is this sense of a sacrament of waiting I have been waiting for as we close another church year. Instead, we get an appeal to the base – wrath today, wrath, tomorrow, wrath forever. How does this poem relate to your reading of the "parables" we have been dealing with?

From another perspective, we might compare the pericopes at the end of the church year to the Japanese mono no aware and ask about how this transition to Advent can help us look at these passages. To get a feel for this check out the simple Wikipedia page and Flicker.