THE SACRAMENT OF WAITINGBY FR. JAMES F. DONELAN, S.J.

The English poet John Milton once wrote that those who only stand and wait also serve. I think I would go further and say that those who wait render the highest form of service. Waiting requires more self-discipline, more self-control and emotional maturity, more unshakable faith in our cause, more unwavering hope in the future, more sustaining love in our hearts than all the great deeds do that go by the name of action.

Waiting is a mystery - a natural sacrament of life - there is a meaning in all the times we have to wait. It must be an important mystery because there is so much waiting in our lives.

Everyday is filled with those little moments of waiting - testing our patience and our nerves, schooling us in self control. We wait for meals to be served, for a letter to arrive, for a friend to call or show up for a date. We wait in line at cinemas and theaters, concerts and circuses. Our airline terminals, railway stations, and bus depots are great temples of waiting, filled with men and women who wait in joy for the arrival of a loved one - or wait in sadness to say good-bye and give the last waves of the hand. We wait for birthdays and vacations - we wait for Christmas. We wait for spring to come - or autumn - for the rains to begin or stop. And we wait for ourselves to grow from childhood to maturity. We wait for graduation, for our next job, our next promotion. We wait for success and recognition. We wait to grow up - to reach the stage where we make our own decisions.

We cannot remove this waiting in our lives. It is part of the tapestry of living - the fabric in which the threads are woven that tell the story of our lives.

Yet current philosophies would have us forget the need to wait. Don't wait for anything. Life is short - eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you'll die. And so they rationalize us into accepting unlicensed and irresponsible freedom - premarital sex and extra-marital affairs; they warn us against any attachment and commitment - against expecting anything from anybody, or allowing them to expect anything from us; against vows and promises; against duty and responsibility; against dropping any anchors in the currents of our life that will cause us to hold and wait.

For most of all, waiting means waiting for someone else. It is a mystery, brushing by our face everyday like a stray wind or a leaf falling from a tree. Anyone who ever loved knows how much waiting goes into it - how much waiting is important for love to grow - to flourish through a lifetime.

Why is this? Why can't we have the 'right now' that we so desperately want and need? Why must we wait - 2 years, 3 years, 5 years - and seemingly waste so much time? You might as well ask why a tree should take so long to bear fruit - the seed to flower - carbon to change into a diamond. There is no simple answer - no more than there is to life's demands - having to say good-bye to someone you love because either you or they have to grow and find the meaning of their own lives - having yourself to leave home and loved ones to find your own path. Good-byes, like waiting, are also sacraments of our lives.

All we know is that growth - like the budding, the flowering of love - needs patient waiting. We have to give each one time to grow. So we give each other that mysterious gift of waiting - of

being present without making demands of asking rewards. There is nothing harder to do than this. It truly tests the depth and sincerity of our love. But there is life in the gift we give.

What do we lose when we refuse to wait? When we try to find shortcuts through life - when we try to incubate love and rush blindly and foolishly into a commitment we are neither mature nor responsible enough to assume? We lose the hope of ever truly loving or of being loved. Think of all the great love stories of history and literature. Isn't it of their very essence, that they are filled with this strange but common mystery - that waiting is part of the substance - the basic fabric - against which the story of true love is written?

How can we ever find either life or true love if we are too impatient to wait for it?