The passion of waiting

I have been re-reading Henri Nouwen's The Path of Waiting. I think it is among the best of the many books that I have read on waiting, a kind of brief, succinct summary of how large waiting does loom---should loom---in our life.

Nouwen relies on an Anglican priest, W.H. Vanstone, who wrote The Stature of Waiting, also a wonderful book that reminds us that, beginning with the trip to Jerusalem, Jesus "handed himself over" to the Judeans and to the Romans, and waited to see what would be done to him.Wwould they become followers or executioners?

Waiting has for a very long time been a big part of my life. 

I laughingly call the years in New York, from 1988 to 1992, "Waiting for Mario."  These were years of hope for me as I waited for a fine governor to decide whether to run for president and as my staff prepared a universal health care plan that he could use in that race. 

I was waiting for the big universal health care wave to come to shore, the one that Bill Clinton tried to ride. And we are all waiting for that wave, once again.

Waiting is of course expectancy, waiting for what we hope will happen. It is a big part of politics.  I first encountered waiting as a key idea in politics in the Eugene Burdick novel, The Ninth Wave, a popular book in the late 1950s about a young political manipulator, a man who believed in waiting for the huge "ninth wave" that washes everything to shore, changing everything.

I have always thought that universal health care, properly designed, could be that ninth wave that carries us to a more progressive future. I still do.

But for the most part, we moderns think of waiting as a bothersome nuisance, as expecting something to come to us that we don't have: waiting for the check in the mail, the plane to take off, or the warden at midnight.

Modern waiting is a kind of emptiness waiting to be filled with the future we wish for. Modern waiting is the attempt to control our futures very specifically. 

But spiritual waiting is open-ended, a waiting to be surprised and even amazed.  Spiritual waiting is attending to something that has already begun in us, something that has been planted in our hearts and is changing and transforming us. 

Spiritual waiting is waiting as passion, the passion of answering the longing of our hearts and the passion of undergoing the suffering that can occur when we act on that longing.

The suffering part of waiting is the part I conveniently ignored.

This is the hard part of spiritual waiting, the "letting be" or "letting go" part of riding the wave. Once you decide to enter a course of action, answering your heart, you buy a train of consequences that are out of your control. You "hand yourself over."

Anyone who has ever run for office, win or lose, knows that you hand yourself over to the public.

Whatever your motives, you are acting to try and achieve some important goal. But you also are entering into the waters where things are definitely out of control and the challenge is to accept that lack of control.

This is the "letting go" and "letting be" part of waiting, and it is this part that I have trouble with.

In Bisbee, after I took office as mayor, when I occasionally complained to friends or acquaintances about the trials that sometimes came my way, quite a few would respond, "You asked for it!"  And they were right.

When we set out on a course of action in any endeavor, we must wait for what happens, what will be done to us , how we can be wounded, in response. And it is often in undergoing the suffering of what happens to us that we learn the most.  That's the paradox of the passion of waiting.


I have over the years since New York engaged in "scribble, scribble, scribble," about a national health plan.  I have written scores of articles that I never send in. And among friends  I do go on about health care reform until their eyes glaze over.

And it is only recently that I have come to realize that I have never really accepted the decision of Cuomo not to run or the sudden and shocking devastating stroke suffered by my boss, David Axelrod, the New York State Commissioner of Health and the hero of my professional life.

I never accepted the things that happened that were out of my control, after answering the passion working on my heart.  And the result has been a huge obsession, a self-pitying effort to vindicate myself. 

And self-pity is precisely the worst turn to take when the world responds to our choices. Self-pity is a tell-tale sign that we want back in control of our future.

The Serenity Prayer has two part: a prayer to accept the things we cannot change and the courage to change the things we can. When we are given the courage to answer our hearts we also pray for the acceptance of what happens next that can be some serious suffering.

In the end, we all wait for life itself, the passionate ways that life is always working within us, urging us on and the passions of the suffering that follow. You don’t get the one without the other.

That is life itself, entering into the waters of waiting and answering your heart and finding the surprise, the joys and the unwelcome suffering and trials of what happens, and sometimes the suffering can be your greatest gift.