"Wait" | Reflection by Warner Marshall (Vestry Class of 2022)

For this season of Lent, the watch word is to “wait”:  wait through quarantine, wait for a vaccine to appear, wait for the ability to visit wife, or family or friends, wait for a safe time to go out and help others, wait for an answer, an end to it—a lone voice singing hymns with a machine in an empty house. 

To wait with no expectations as to the outcome is an act of humility, I think, but one must fight off the slide toward gloom and enervation that can come with it.  For the strong, waiting could become a spiritual discipline, but for the shaky among us it can be a hollow ordeal.  Like always, I suspect that we swing from one pole to the other continually, and are never all of anything.  I know I’m not.

When I was young I put great stock in these lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets:”

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”

May God grant us all the strength to make this strange hiatus time into a kind of soulful treasure, and not just a trial by emptiness.  We could use some help with disorientation too. Amen.

Photo Caption: “In the Attic,” painting by Andrew Wyeth, 1965

Words in the Wilderness - Walk through the season of Lent with Trinity, one word at a time. Every day (except on Sundays) we will post a photo and a brief refection written by someone in our Trinity community. https://www.trinitynewhaven.org/words-in-the-wilderness