Waiting on God

Westminster Abbey, 22 January 1988

We all knew what it means to wait on a person in need; we also know what it means to wait upon the Queen. In both senses, to wait on a person means to be totally attentive to any need, to bе totally and unreservedly concerned with any соmmand that may come to us: to be present.

And this is what it means to be waiting on God. I know that it is an easy temptation to think that waiting on God means to wait until God acts; and indeed, that is also true, because what we wait for is an act of God, but not an act of God which He would perform outside of us, in stead of us, but something which He will do within us, (to) us and through us.

So that the first thing which/that we must become aware of is that waiting on God means to give all attention to Him; to every word He has spoken, to every example He has given, to every command He has left for us to fulfill, to be attentive and always present to Him.

This means that we must learn what Brother Lawrence called the exercise of the presence of God: to learn to live continuously, in every respect in a way related to God either in repentance, or in the joy of knowing Him but always in obedience to Him, in an attentive listening.

And this we must learn in two ways. On the one hand in prayer; on the other hand in receiving all that life offers us as an occasion to do things, to say things, to act with God, in His own name, under His direct guidance.

To wait on God in prayer means very often, to train oneself to be silent before Him. We too easily tend to rush into prayer to tell God all that is in our mind, or to recite prayers behind which we hide as it were, using words that are beyond us, proclaiming thoughts that were sometimes proclaimed bу Saints but which we do not share being too immature; or singing hymns which do not truly express our actual, real condition and – what is worse! – do not even express what we long to be, but are an expression of what the Church lives by, while we remain as it were, on the outskirts.

The first thing which we must learn therefore is to take our stand before the Lord God and say, “Here am I, O Lord!' – in the same way in which the Mother of God spoke to the Archangel, saying, “Here am I, O Lord, the handmaid of the Lord; be unto me according to Thy word” – and be still. Doesn't a Psalm tell us, “Go into yourself and be still? Doesn't a Psalm tell us that we should listen, and look, and bow down our head; listen with all our being, looking to (toward) the ways of God, and bow down in obedience ready to fulfill His will, whatever this will may happen to be; at times – frightening to us, at times – incomprehensible. And also listening to what St Paul calls “the ineffable grownings of the Holy Spirit within us”, attentive to feel and perceive that God is active, that within us there is His presence and that His/this presence shapes in us new knowledge of Him and direct us to ways, to actions, to words, to thoughts, to feelings which are His own or are at least, increasingly, in harmony with His.

Silence and listening; and the two words are inseparably one, because one cannot be silent in the void; one cannot decide at a given moment that no thought, no emotion will stir us up. What we can however, is to still within ourselves those thoughts which are natural to us, those thoughts which occupy our mind, and 1 i s t e n to God's words and God's thoughts. So that after a moment during which we will bе quiet and still, it may well be a good thing to open the Book of the Gospel and to read a short passage with the awareness that at this particular moment God is s p e a k i n g tо me: what is He saying to me? And /only/ having heard Him speak can we turn to Him and answer. And our answer may not mean what we w i s h to say; how often is it that we read a passage of the Gospel and remain cold-hearted; ourг mind does not take it in, our heart does not respond. And even more often, even when we understand, when our heart is (captivated) by the beauty of what we hear, our will says, NO! I cannot do it! I will not do it, I don't w a n t do it... Greater people than us has spoken that way; remember St Augustin, when he was converted from his very wayward (?) life to God: he knew what was right, he felt it in his heart; somewhere in him he had a desire to follow; and yet he felt he could not do it. And he turned to God in prayer which he relates in his Confessions, and said to Him, “Lord! Give me chastity, yet – not immediately!” He felt he could not turn away from his previous ways – he had nor got the courage, the determination.

So, very often, if we are honest, which is not always the case – if we are honest we would say to the Lord, 'Lord! I understand what you say; my heart says it is true and beautiful; and yet, no! I cannot undertake to do it'. At other moments, we may not have understood; but how often we should say 'NO' to God's direct challenge of our own selves. And this could very well be a beginning of a prayer, because if we are honest enough, wouldn't we be horrified when we perceive that God Himself has spoken to me, and all I have got to answer, is, 'NO!’- and nothing else. There is a great deal we can say then in horror before ourselves, in incipient repentance, in bгоkenheartedness, in begging – yes, begging! – for courage, begging not to be abandoned by God whom we turned away from.

This is a way of waiting on God; and I have started with this because I believe that this kind of situation, occurs a great deal more often than we imagine in our spiritual life. We imagine habitually that we can always summon some amount of prayerful awareness, that if we read prayers to which we are used, and which we find 'lovely’ -'lovely' being a very superficial and poor dimension of 'beautiful' – that will be stirred into some sort of pious mood. It's not a pious mood we need; what we need is the determination to be what the prayer say. And this we must lеаrn.

Thеrе will be other moments when we will have received wholeheartedly, with all our mind and soul, and will, and being the word of God. We can turn in prayer with gratitude, with joy, and also (legging?) ourselves to become a kind of person for whom the words spoken by Christ are life itself. Do you remember the words which St Peter spoke, when Christ had spoken to the crow and many of His disciples turned away from Him; He turned to His disciples and said, ‘Will you also go away?' – Peter answered: Where should we go? Thou hath the words of eternal life' – not words that depict it, but words that convey it, words that bring life into the deadness of our souls, words that miraculously make us into living being, That is important.

But then, there is another way in which waiting on God is essential. It is not enough for us to receive His message, it is not enough for us to respond with our heart to this message; we must also not only be the hearers but the doers of the word of God, of His will. It means that when we have received a message in our hearts, when we have responded we m u s t realise that at t h a t point God and us are at one, of one mind and one heart and of one will; and that if we do not apply to life what our heart has recognized as being true, we are not only sinning against God, we are sinning against our own self, we are going against what we in our deepest self know to be true, we are destroying ourselves, we are making the image of God within us into a caricature. And so, it's a matter of having learned what God expect of us, to become the doers and not only those who applaud it.

And that leads me to another way in which we must wait on God. If once and for all we accept the fact that we must live in this world on Christ's terms, be in this world His presence to the extent in which He is present within us, – that we must accept the fact that every circumstance of our life, every person whom we meet is a God-given occasion for us to be Christ's messengers and Christ's servants.

We usually imagine that only the good situations are of God and the trials are of satan; it is not true. If according to Christ's own /call/ we are a light in the world – even a spark of light, not a beacon!, just a little light – then our place is in the darkest point of the world; if we are the salt of the world, our place is where there is corruption, in order to heal it. If we realize that we are given faith and hope, and gratitude, and joy, our place is where there is n o faith, n o hope, n o gratitude, n o joy, our place is where God must be through us, not where God is already with us.

And if we take life in this particular way then we would realize that every trial indeed – even every temptation, every evil situation in which we find ourselves, is a moment when God says, 'I trust you enough to send you into this situation to be My presence, to be My action, to be M e because I will be with you'. Obviously, our presence has not got a convincing, glorious power of the coming of Christ. But there is something which we can do in every situations we can be the doorkeeper that opens a door to Christ, for Christ to come; when there is strife between two persons in our presence, we can turn to God and say, 'Lord – come, and stand in our midst; I can do nothing, but worship in your presence and you spread over these people in discord that peace which the world cannot give, that peace you alone can give… If we only did that in the ugly situations in which we find ourselves, we would open a door to God, and He would come, and act; and peace, and purity, and truth would/could spread.

So, that we have got a function in that respect; but we must always remember that we are sent by God into the darkness of this world, but that we can face this darkness only if we commune to the light of God. And this can be done only through listening attentively to His word and becoming doers of it through praying to Him and communing with Him through prayer. There is no moment when God is away from us – but we are away from Him. And we must learn to wait on God, to be at His disposal – whatever the situation, whatever the events of our life, and to consider every person is sent to me either to give me a message from God or to receive the a message through me from God. It may be a warning, it may be a cry for help – it may be anything. (You) remember perhaps what a Russian folk story tells to us, that the only important moment of life is present moment because the past has gone and the future has not yet come; the most important person in the world is the one person with whom I am at this particular moment; and the most important act of my life is, within this present moment to do for this present person the right thing... If we only received every person as given by God! If every person was to us God, knowing at our door! I remember a western saint, a woman who wrote in her diary, 'Lord! I cannot be with You all the time in prayer or in Church service because I am appointed to do so many things; but everything I am doing is done for people, and everyone of these people is an image of You; and by doing the right thing for them I am worshiping and serving You.

How does this relate to our prayer for unity? O, in a, way which, I believe, is very simple! We all would be one if we were Christian, not only in words but in the totality of our being and in all our actions. If we were Christian to the marrow of our bone there could be no separation between us; our knowledge of God would be one, our worship of God whatever form it takes, would be the same: a total communion with the Living God; and our action in the world would be that of God Himself; we could not be separate by anything. And this is a problem which, I think, we all have got to face: waiting on God in order to become so perfectly supple in His hand, waiting on God in such a way as to hear His voice speaking to us clearly in the Gospel and clearly in our conscience, clearly in the cry of those who need Him in and through us. Then, unity would come.

But it will never come, unless we become, each of us singly, and all of us together, Christian: not only by name but as a vision for the world that surround us of what Christ is.

So, let us reflect on this our Waiting on God; let us try to learn how one can be silent in His presence with this acting, passionate silence of the listener; and let us listen in order to be the doers of God's will and then everything will come r i g h t: not by our actions, not by diplomacy, not by forgetting the integrity of the Gospel and trying to adjust it to our times or tastes; if we have got to adjust anything, it is temporary things to things eternal. And then, if we have the courage to stand alone and be /countered/ we will discover how many we are who s t a n d, and others will be able to believe, to believe in Christ who such courage, such faith and such joy of sacrifice to His people.

I would like to end with a short prayer after a moment's quiet.

O Christ, Who didst bind Thine Apostles in a union of love, unite us likewise, Thy sinful but trusting servants, and bind us firmly to Thee, give us strength to fulfill Thy commandments and truly to love one another: by the prayers of Thy All-Pure Mother and of Thy Saints. Amen.