I am waiting for many things right now. For winter to taper off, for the daphne and lilac bushes and the dogwood and cherry trees to bloom all over Portland. For the replacement of our aging fence, rotten and storm-blown and long-negotiated with our neighbors. For graduation, in June, from acupuncture school.
But mostly, I am waiting for this baby, and I’m waiting to formally enter the Church.
It is not easy to wait. My skin is stretched taut over my ever-growing belly, and even though I’ve been here before, I have doubts about my body’s ability to make even more space for this new human in the next nine-ish weeks. (Where are an additional five pounds and five inches of baby going to fit exactly?) All of the familiar and really unattractive discomforts of pregnancy are present, from anemia and fatigue to the pain of walking with loosening joints and the baffling whims of heartburn. Yet alongside these challenges, there are enormous joys: watching my older children learn and grow; the baby’s kicks and hiccups, visible and so entertaining to their siblings; and our curiosity about the unknown, yet fully-known little person about to join our family.
Truly, all of this waiting is joy and gift and privilege. And yet I am counting down the days until my due date, which is not long after the Easter vigil, when I’ll finally— finally— receive the Eucharist for the first time as a new Catholic.
“We are always waiting,” Ronald Rolheiser writes in Our One Great Act of Fidelity: Waiting for Christ in the Eucharist. “The Eucharist is meant to help us with that. Among other things, it is meant to be a vigil, a coming together to wait for someone or something new to happen to us. We meet in Eucharist to wait with each other.”
It’s easy to focus on my own impatience when the days seem long. So I’ve been trying to make room for this image of the Eucharist as a space, a physical location of communal anticipation and hope, communal waiting. What happens if I have faith that the Eucharist is big enough to hold my own small longings and pains as well as the suffering of others, the collective sadness and fear in our local and global communities, and the long wait for justice?
The number of the dead in Syria and Turkey climbs unbearably high, towering over the stories of people rescued from beneath the debris of the earthquakes, after waiting for hundreds of hours for help to arrive.
In the Horn of Africa, historically destabilized by conflict and climate-driven drought, mothers wait in long lines for food and medical care for their malnourished children, their nations teetering on the brink of another horrific famine.
In Ukraine, families wait for an end to the conflict, for a return to peace and stability and a life in freedom.
And in our own neighborhoods here in the U.S., how many of us struggle with monthly expenses, waiting for work that just doesn’t materialize? How many of us wait for adequate healthcare, relief from addiction, for healing from chronic illness, insomnia, depression, or long COVID symptoms? How many of us wait for safe shelter, exhausted by the grind of trying to survive on the streets?
I will admit to allowing feelings of despair consume me some days when I read the news, when I check in with a friend or drive down the street. I’ve decided I don’t want to stay in that place of hopelessness anymore, though, because I think it’s false. I think that underneath, it’s an excuse to maintain a false separation between me and another human being. Especially, I’ve realized that I’ve been waiting to have all the answers before I move toward relationship with neighbors experiencing homelessness. I’ve started to challenge myself to stop and take the time to have a conversation with people asking for help. I am carrying cash and gift cards as well as food and tents and blankets with me, so that when I ask someone, “What do you need the most right now?” I have a better chance of helping them meet that need.
I really don’t think this is the best I can do. I am not even sure it’s the “right” thing. But I have to start somewhere, to begin to truly wait with and for Jesus alongside others. What I truly long for is relationship— with Jesus and with the people he came to align himself with— and I am trusting that this is the Eucharist we are called to wait in, as followers of Christ.
In Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, Father Gregory Boyle writes about Sister Elaine Roulette, the founder of My Mother’s House in New York, who was asked, How do you work with the poor?
“ ‘You don’t,’ she answered. ‘You share your life with the poor.’ ”
“It’s as basic as crying together,” Fr Boyle continues. “It is about ‘casting your lot’ before it ever becomes about ‘changing their lot.’ Jesus stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified— whichever came first.”
Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday, is our walk toward the cross with Christ. Like Advent, when we wait for his birth, the season of Lent represents a period of great waiting. For 40 days we wait, together, for Christ’s death on the cross, and for the new, abundant, and inclusive life that rises from his empty tomb.
We are all invited to receive mercy and extend that mercy to others, no matter how undeserving and poorly-equipped we may feel. This became beautifully real to me recently while sick with a stomach virus, watching all three seasons of The Chosen. Over and over again in this mini-series on Jesus’s life, the disciples question their worthiness to be followers of Christ. They struggle to make sense of what it is they can offer. And Jesus keeps redirecting their attention away from themselves and their doubt, and toward faith in him and the kingdom he is building. Over and over, Jesus’s followers and critics alike struggle to see the kingdom. Even after witnessing miracles, the kingdom just doesn’t look like what they expected.
“Can we stay faithful and persistent in our fidelity even when things seem not to succeed?” Fr Boyle asks. “I suppose Jesus could have chosen a strategy that worked better (evidence-based outcomes)— that didn’t end in the Cross— but he couldn’t find a strategy more soaked with fidelity than the one he embraced.”
In Boyle’s book and in his work, as in the stories in the bible and in the news, there is so much needless death. So much evidence of suffering, evidence that this work of sharing our lives with one another just isn’t working. But I think maybe the kingdom— and the mystery of the Eucharist— is how it works in each individual life, held together with others. Maybe we can’t see how it matters on the big scale, but we can have hope— we can taste and see— that it matters to the person in front of us.
A poem arrived in a dream recently, something that hasn’t happened since I was pregnant with my oldest, over eight years ago. In the dream, I was sitting with a friend and their deep sadness and anger. Then the friend turned into a regular patient at the clinic who I had been treating for about a year. These were both people whose pain I felt unable to do much about, who I cared deeply for and felt I was “failing.” Then the friend and the patient turned into Jesus in the garden, the night of his betrayal, when his friends couldn’t stay awake with him, and then deserted him. I woke up and tried to write down what I remembered.
Pain Poem
Can you be comfortable with me
here, inside pain’s walls, without
making a home
for yourself?
And in its dark garden,
studded with anemones of fear,
in the shadow of its lilies,
will you keep a watch with me?
Will you let me sleep
on this bench, discouraged,
and not give up on me?
And remind me of all
I am, all of me
that isn’t pain?
Beautiful, Melissa.
I will be praying for you in your waiting. Your poem is so powerful, it is a gift to all of us who wait with those we love who are in pain.