Sweet Anticipation
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I had the exquisite experience recently of being in the midst of a community of hope.
People there were chatting excitedly about the future. They talked about possibility and potential. They weren’t burdened by whatever ills befell them in the present. There was lightness and laughter all around me, and I couldn’t help but feel buoyed by their shared sense of excitement and anticipation.
It was truly infectious, and I couldn’t resist joining them.
I’d like to say that where I was at the time was coffee hour after our service. Or during a meeting of our Board or of our lay leadership. Or that it was in the monthly meeting of my minister’s support group. But it wasn’t any of those. I was waiting in line to buy a Powerball ticket.
There is not, I’m afraid to say, a more hopeful, happy place in America today than that. People were sharing their hopes and dreams with each other. “What would you do if you won?” I heard a range of responses from “buy a boat” to “see the world” to “set up educational trusts for my kids and grandkids.” I will admit that my wife and I have played this “what if we won” game for years as we dabbled in the lottery when we deemed the jackpot worthy of our small contribution.
I’m not going to stand here and advocate that you buy lottery tickets as a spiritual practice. I know that the lottery is a form of regressive tax, one that hits the hardest those who can least afford it. But I do think playing the lottery from time to time can help lift us out of our doldrums. The gift of the lottery, for all of us except the winners, is the gift of hope, anticipation and excitement. Fleeting though it may be, a lottery ticket reminds us what it’s like to dream, to dream without restraint. As long as the lottery isn’t the primary component of your retirement plan, and you “play responsibly,” as they say, perhaps buying a quick-pick now and then isn’t such a bad idea.
It is a strange coincidence that here in Pennsylvania one of the largest lottery jackpots in history arrived close to the start of the Christian season of Advent. Advent is a time of preparation and waiting. A time of anxious anticipation. A time of dreaming of what is to come. At its most literal, it’s the time before the birth of the Christ child when we are called to, as the carol goes, “prepare Him room.”
As one author put it, Advent is “a time of waiting for a hoped-for future, waiting for the time of bleakness to pass and the new joy to arrive.” I guess when you put it that way, Advent and the lottery (or at least the time between buying a ticket and the drawing of numbers) can be seen as parallel practices.
Advent, of course, isn’t about waiting for wealth to descend upon us from the heavens. Nor, for many of us, is this a time when we prepare for the arrival of the Christ child. Yes, we anticipate the arrival of Christmas, that sacred and secular holiday celebrated by many of us. We string up lights, put up a tree and shop for gifts for our loved ones. For most of us, though, it’s not a season of patient waiting. Far from it. It can be downright frenetic for too many of us, I’m afraid. But for the moment, I invite you to breathe. To relax. To call to mind the sweetness of anticipation and to remember what it’s like to wait patiently for your future to arrive.
Anticipation and expectation are beautiful, pure emotions. Think back to when you were a child, and those days leading up to your birthday. How you looked forward to a day that was made just for you, when you were the center of attention. A day when you would be given gifts from your parents and friends. When a cake with blazing candles was to be set before you, with everyone singing just for you, wishing you nothing but happiness.
Those days leading up to your birthday might have been even better than the actual birthday itself. Maybe you didn’t get the gift you really wanted. Or perhaps your mom didn’t have time to bake your favorite cake and brought one home from the supermarket. Reality rarely lives up to our fantasies, and that can be a bitter pill to swallow.
That’s what makes anticipation so sweet. In our dreams we can create a hoped-for reality that may or may not materialize. I remember several years ago when I began to dream of owning a motorcycle. Of the rides I’d take through the winding country roads of New England on crisp fall days. Of the feelings of freedom I’d have. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself as a modern-day vagabond with a tent and sleeping bag slung on the back of the bike, riding the roads without a map or destination. I spent hours and hours anticipating what it would be like. And it felt so good.
So, one day I spotted a used bike sitting on someone’s front lawn with a “for sale” sign on it and, after some negotiations both with my wife and with the seller, I bought it. And I rode it, a little. Back and forth to work a few times. An occasional Saturday sojourn. But mostly the bike sat in the garage, gathering dust. I came to realize that such solitary pursuits like long rides in the country didn’t fit well with my role as the parent of young children.
I held onto that bike—and the dreams that came with it—for nearly ten years before finally letting it go. The anticipation of owning a motorcycle was so much sweeter than the reality.
Anyone might reasonably wonder: What will it be like when I leave home for the first time? What will my wedding day be like? What will it be like in my new job? Will my child grow up to be a great doctor, or writer, or peacemaker? What does the future hold? These questions, and all the others that we face in our lives, call on us to anticipate, to expect, to dream. Our ability to consider the question What will my life be like if…? is one of the defining characteristics of our consciousness, our humanity.
Many of us are good at dreaming, at hoping, at planning, even executing plans to make our dreams become a reality. But what we’re not so good at is the waiting part, the patience part. “Come, Savior, quickly come,” we sing. We don’t want to have to wait for our dreams to come true. How many of us, I wonder, would buy a lottery ticket for a drawing that is weeks, months, even years in the future?
This time of year, with the days at their shortest and the nights at their longest, we are invited to wait. To sit in the darkness—of the world, of our spirits—waiting for the light to return, for the light of the world to be reborn.
Perhaps we might learn to wait less like parents anticipating the imminent birth of a child, and more like a tree in winter. If we waited like a tree we might give ourselves over to our dreams and not force their arrival too soon. The first thing a tree does is to let go and to stand silent. Shedding its leaves, the tree lays itself bare and opens itself to possibility. Paul Tillich, the Christian theologian, tells us that there are two kinds of waiting: “the passive waiting in laziness and the receiving waiting in openness.” He says that “waiting in openness…demands patience, and patience demands stillness within oneself.” And so, in this season of Advent, amidst all the hustle and bustle, we are called to be still inside ourselves.
Waiting, though, is not a solitary pursuit. We need partners, collaborators in our waiting, to remind us of who we are and who we can yet become, to walk with us in our waiting, coaxing forth our emptiness, our vulnerability, our readiness and willingness to accept what the future holds. In the Bible story of Mary’s pregnancy, she is not alone. Elizabeth, her friend and companion, walks this path with her, helping her to keep hope alive. Together they celebrate the sacrament of waiting. Waiting is something to be celebrated, to be cherished.
There is, I think, a tension between the sweetness of anticipation and the sacrament of waiting. When we hope and dream, our focus is on the future. We are living for the “not-yet.” At the same time, waiting calls for us to be present to and to face the uncertainty of now. The late UU minister Roy Phillips used to tell of a cartoon showing two men wearing sandwich-boards, parading along the downtown sidewalk. One of them wears the sign: “Jesus is coming.” The other shows the words: “Buddha here now.”
That about sums up the tension I’m talking about. Our faith calls us to live fully in the present, in all its beauty and all its tragedy. And at the same time, we’re called to be ever hopeful of a better future. As mundane as this sounds, the essence of this dual reality is captured beautifully in that old Heinz ketchup commercial, where the child tilts the bottle up and waits and waits for the sauce to slowly ooze out, while Carly Simon sings about “Anticipation” in the background. We know how good that ketchup is going to taste once it finally dresses the hamburger, and yet we must be patient and wait for its excruciatingly slow arrival. Its very gooey goodness is what makes it so slow in coming.
The active waiting that Paul Tillich describes— “the receiving waiting in openness,” to use his words—asks us to be both intimately connected to the here and now, appreciating fully what we have in our current state, and at the same time to be fully expectant of what is to come. Hope-filled and hopeful. It’s a tricky balancing act, like having one foot on the dock and the other in the canoe.
Our task, during this time of year and all year long, is to embrace the “both-and” of our existence. To expectantly anticipate and work to form our futures, that which is to come, while we also live fully and faithfully in the present tense, embracing the darkness with passionate patience.
Our hopes and our dreams are in the process of becoming. Our lives, as they are, are precious and powerful, and we must always be present to them in the here and now. “Jesus is coming.” “Buddha here now.” Both are true. May it always be so.
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