When the heart has to wait

Here are a few notes (Sue Monk Kidd – When the heart waits) I took awhile ago. I thought rewriting them would be helpful to me and maybe you when you read this. Love me xx

The life of the Spirit is never static. We’re born on one level only to find some new struggle toward wholeness gestating within. That’s the sacred intent of life, of God, to move us continually toward growth, toward recovering all that is lost and orphaned within us and restoring the divine image imprinted on our soul.

A cocoon is no escape. It’s an in-between house where the change takes place. When you wait, taking the long way, you are trusting that there’s a transforming discovering lying pooled along the way. Thoreau – “nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.” Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it birth something new? Jesus experienced a sense of Gods absence. “My God, where are you? Why have you forsaken me?”

God making a home with us during our waiting, sharing the experience no q asked. Creating a “merciful being together”.

I feared waiting because such pauses in life brought me close to the dark holes and empty pockets inside me, to the rigidities and self-lies I had fashioned.

Contemplative waiting is consenting to be where we really are.

We have to learn to stand still in order to continue our journey…. The more we run around, the more we lose touch with ourselves, the less of us there is …. Allan Jones

We tend to align ourselves with the rhythm and pace around us. If you want to stay in your waiting, you’ll need to refrain from the frantic pace around you.

We can go on and on, waiting for the next “happening of life”. Hurrying toward it, trying to make it happen. We live from peak event to peak event, from brightness to brightness, resisting the flat terrain of ordinary time – the in-between time. Waiting is the in-between time. It calls us to be in this moment/season, without leaning so far into the future that we tear our roots from the present.

“A lifetime burning in every moment” TS Elliot.

An attitude of expected beingness – not intent upon results and not concerned.

Giving up our need to control and manipulate, we can relax and relate to life with a faithful knowing that if we cease to act, life itself will not cease. It may, in fact, grow full.

In waiting (Meister Eckhart) we find God new and immediate in every moment, not something “out there” to be grasped some other time.