Lord ‘put ah hand’

How true as we begin the season of Advent.

Advent invites us to enter into the mystery of waiting which has both its negative and positive aspects. Waiting is generally seen as negative.

The success of world activity is determined by its speed as evidenced by the email, cellphone, Whatsapp and assorted technologies. Our bosses want things ASAP; we want violent crime to stop ‘Now!’, the economy to recover overnight, and our youths want to ‘grow up’ ever so quickly.

Advent, however, is of a different pace. To understand its mystery we have to look at mothers patiently waiting to give birth, hoping for a healthy and safe delivery at a time when our maternal and infant mortality rates are unacceptably high. Mothers cannot rush pregnancy; they have to partner with God, with time, and waiting.

Nature also teaches us about waiting: mangoes bear in their own season and poinsettias that adorn our churches at Christmas bloom in December.

In temperate countries, people have to wait through fall and winter before spring comes.

The Son of God also had to wait in the darkness of the tomb until the Father raised him on high.

Waiting creatively is a great grace. There are sins against waiting.

One is violence. We find God is taking his merry own time. We cry out: ‘God, put ah hand!” and he doesn’t. Then we take things into our own hands. We give in to a criminal mentality and create our own brand of justice: revenge, extortion, murder, corruption, religious extremism.

In relationships that we cannot control-especially those involving wives and girlfriends, we use force: domestic abuse and often death. But relationships do not go sour overnight and fixing them will not happen overnight. We have to pray for the Advent grace of waiting, trusting that God will work in his own way and his own time.

Another sin against waiting is despair. We have to admit waiting brings its fair share of angst-existential fear or dread.

Many feel this way following the election of Donald Trump: will illegal immigrants be sent back home? Are we looking at rising international political tensions and the possibility of war? We find ourselves not only hoping but hoping against hope, as we do for the children of the Middle East, defending ourselves against the charge of a heartless God. Our angst reaches the point where we too scream from our own crosses: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But all lamentations of this sort were redeemed at Calvary so that we too can say to despair and its bedfellows: ‘I know that my Redeemer lives!’ Advent hope springs from a resurrection that went into hell.

Our comfort therefore is real and the hope we offer sincere for we know that God, in his own time, does “put ah hand”.