This week’s essay is a repost from last year that still feels all too timely. I hesitated a bit to share it again because the urgency of the situation in Gaza seems to stretch the limits of this argument—that a practice of waiting is integral to our practice of justice. Is this not an invitation to make excuses for inaction?
But then I thought about how often I have heard it implied lately that we cannot reasonably call for a ceasefire unless we can outline a clear solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict and the elimination of terrorism. On the contrary—we can call for an end to massive state-sanctioned violence while also understanding that a lasting, positive, and total peace between the two groups (and the world) is decades, if not centuries away. It would require whole people groups and nations to reimagine their identities, their perceptions of their enemies, and their understanding of how safety, justice, peace, and healing can be achieved. That is, in many ways, much harder work than simply continuing the cycles of violence.
The war on the civilians of Gaza represents a loss of patience for the long and difficult work of peacemaking.
We work as we wait, and we wait as we work.
The Christian liturgical season of Advent begins in two and a half weeks. It’s traditionally a time of preparation and waiting for the Light of the World to arrive. In the process, it’s a penitential season, like Lent, when we’re meant to reorient toward God and return to our truest vocations as humans.
Advent is also a time when we ask, How long, O Lord? Like the first-century Jews who waited faithfully for their Messiah, we Christians also still await the Kingdom of God; we still witness hatred and violence and wonder whether God witnesses them, too. In Advent we practice hope without sentimentality, faithfulness without mindless resignation, and the kind of deep trust that dares the intimacy of asking these questions of God.
This all means that, while outside December is all jingle bells and twinkle lights, Advent as the Church traditionally understood it is actually a pretty heavy lift. (The celebration part comes later, with the twelve days of Christmas and several weeks of Epiphany.) This is an immense relief to me. I grew up with a church year that was all triumph and candy all the time, which was not a church year where I felt allowed. But a liturgical year that begins with Advent is a year where I and my seasonal depression, my haunting questions, and my wintertime habit of turning down over-bright lights can all belong.
As I’ve been meditating on seasons and cycles, it’s stood out starkly to me that repentance in particular requires us to take a wintry beat of turning inward. We cannot deeply repent—return, unlearn, revise, transform—while we also have twelve other projects underway. Deep repentance is not merely about feeling regret or tweaking our actions; a true commitment to change asks us to revisit and reimagine everything about the ways we show up to the world. It makes a real mess of our planner timelines and project boards. Yet this “continual conversion” is essential to the abundant life to which Jesus calls us; it lightens heavy burdens and clears space for what is new.
For years I’ve been a creature of Christian Social Justice World. In my spheres, there’s a certain (well-earned) suspicion of navel-gazing, conscience-soothing religion that uses contemplation as an excuse to avoid action. It’s easy, especially for privileged people, to get a little too enamored of inner peace and fail to seek peace with and for our neighbors. We can easily get caught up in spiritual rhetoric and forget to attend to the actual bodies of actual people in the actual places where we live.
But some of our boldest prophets also make a mistake when they focus relentlessly on outcomes and actions. They are forever calling people (with the extreme urgency that algorithms reward) to a sort of shallow repentance, a purchased proof-of-righteousness, a breathless activity that sometimes actually prevents us from unlearning our collective sins.
There’s an all-too-common (and commonly applauded) response to violence and injustice that uses frantic activity as its own sort of avoidance—the very opposite of the solidarity it claims to practice. Over time, I’ve come to see that—apart from any theological or sociological arguments I could make about this approach—it is just not working. In fact, it’s the perfect recipe for how to most efficiently burn each other out.
I am not in the business of constantly interrogating people’s motives; I’ve merely observed (in myself!) that this is not a sustainable one. Eventually, denial-by-fixing fails us and harms others. Eventually, we have to face the fact that no matter how hard we work, or how thoroughly we sacrifice, or how harshly we judge other people, we cannot fix violence, injustice, and suffering.
In fact, if we want to be effective or “radical” or deeply in community, we must learn to accept almost the opposite truth. Many of our elders have tried to teach us that living and working and hoping for justice also requires us to make friends with the discomfort of waiting.
Our work—for some of us, the vast majority of our work—is planting the seeds of trees we will not live to see fruit. In this life we will never not be waiting and longing for a new day. Our work is Advent work. Our lives are Advent lives.
Advent teaches us to wait while we work, and work while we wait. Our task when we meet our breaking world—or our suffering friends, or our brokenhearted selves—is not to erase everything bad.
Our task is to stay.
From early 2019 to late 2022 I was learning to stay with myself, with my body and her pain, with my life as it has been given to me, through the very personal experience of infertility.
The Advent guide I wrote as a result is not particularly political. Seasons of introspection, self-care, reflection, and deeply personal embodiment and liberation are essential to our ability to stay. When we shift our goal to staying engaged, compassionate, courageous, strategic and kind over the next several decades, it begins to feel a little nonsensical to apologize for taking time to tend and integrate our hearts, souls, and bodies.
On another level, I also notice that learning to wait in my own body and life has become a template for learning to wait alongside the world. Waiting well is not pretending that our unfulfilled dreams aren’t painful. Waiting well means holding that grief, and our hope for something better, alongside the truth that we are more than what we don’t have. We can live in longing but also with purpose, humor, connection, acceptance. We can work toward what we desire while also choosing to find fulfillment in the process, not just the outcome.
It is in offering compassion to our own grief that we discover it won’t swallow us whole forever. It is in stubbornly refusing bitterness that we allow the world room to be more—much more—than a dumpster fire.
I am not a gun violence victim or a gun control activist, or an LGBTQ+ person or terrorism expert. But I am learning how to stay by the sides of those who are. How to make the phone calls to legislators without being overcome by bitterness. How to excavate and compost the violence and patriarchy and transphobia that live inside me. How to stay in dialogue with family members with at least a little less self-righteousness. How to show up when I’m asked without needing to be the hero. How to care for those in the trenches so they can stay.
And today, all over again, I am learning how to grieve, how to turn unafraid toward the darkness one more time, because to let it hurt—to remain human in the face of evil—is in fact the opposite of despair, and it is the work that Jesus does in the incarnation, and it is the impossible buried seed of Advent hope.
peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey
P.S. This post is your very roundabout reminder that I wrote you an ebook called MenstruWaiting: An Adventurous Advent with the Women of the Gospels and the Four Phases of the Cycle, and it’s free! If you want to share this journey with a friend, please forward them this email. Paid subscribers normally receive two extra essays per month from me, and during Advent will receive bonus weekly emails with prayers and practical suggestions for integrating your life with each cycle phase.
This was beautifully said. I'm struggling w/ frustration from the voices claiming calls for ceasefire are too "simple minded" or just "virtue signaling." I appreciate the reminder to sit with the discomfort of waiting, even through the temporary ceasefire that has now been called.
I love this, and yet again needed the reminder that my work is most often as a seed planter and cultivator of tiny saplings.