The Waiting (Portion Ki Tisa)

The waiting is the hardest part

Every day you get one more card

You take it on faith, you take it to the heart

The waiting is the hardest part

            -Tom Petty

For the Israelites at the foot of Mt. Sinai, the waiting really is the hardest part.  Forty days after Moses ascended into a dense cloud atop the mountain, he has yet to return.  Tired of waiting and fearing the worst, they panic.  In the mounting fear, terrified of being abandoned by both God and God’s chosen leader, they turn to Aaron and plead with him to build them a golden calf to stand in Moses’ place.  Aaron, deep in the throes of his own anxiety, obliges.  The rest is history.

But we should not be overly critical of the Israelites.  It is, indeed, extraordinarily difficult to wait out our seasons of suffering and discontent.  When we descend into our own dark nights of the soul, we, too, are tempted to push away the pain with forms of instant gratification.  We anaesthetize ourselves with all sorts of numbing agents, or settle for other easy but ultimately inadequate forms of short term relief.  We forget—or cannot bear— the truth of Talmud’s wisdom: “According to the labor, so is the reward.”  As writer Sue Monk Kidd notes in her beautiful book, When the Heart Waits, real spiritual growth demands patience.  If we wish to emerge like butterflies, we must learn to successfully endure the long, uncertain darkness of the cocoon.

This week, consider: where do you find the kind of courage that might sustain you in life’s seasons of darkness and doubt?  How can community help you to grow through such times?

Meanwhile, here’s a relevant section of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem, “I am Waiting”:

I am waiting

to get some intimations

of immortality

by recollecting my early childhood

and I am waiting

for the green mornings to come again   

youth’s dumb green fields come back again

and I am waiting

for some strains of unpremeditated art

to shake my typewriter

and I am waiting to write

the great indelible poem

and I am waiting

for the last long careless rapture

and I am perpetually waiting

for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn   

to catch each other up at last

and embrace

and I am awaiting   

perpetually and forever

a renaissance of wonder