From Your Minister
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I’ve spent a lot of time in waiting rooms in my life. Waiting for doctors, waiting for dentists, waiting for my tires to be rotated. Waiting for my airplane to board, waiting for my table at the restaurant, waiting for my number to come up at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Waiting.
Sometimes only for a few seconds, sometimes for an interminably long time, to hear: “The doctor will see you now.”
On reflection, I realize I’ve also spent time in a lot of phantom waiting rooms, waiting for something that will never happen. Waiting for justice to roll down like waters. Waiting for my father to apologize for his violent temper. Waiting for my partner to decide to become a different person.
It’s as if I’ve been sitting in the dentist’s office waiting for my name to be called so my party can go eat a gourmet dinner. Sitting in the tire rotation place waiting to board a plane. Sitting at the DMV waiting for a medical diagnosis. Phantom waiting rooms. Waiting for something that is guaranteed not to happen.
Years ago I worked with a therapist who had grown up in a Buddhist monastery in Japan. He told me that when he was about twelve, the Abbot at the monastery woke him up very early one morning and told him with urgency: “Go to the tea store, quickly, and buy some rice!” Obediently, he ran into the village, waited for the tea store to open, and asked for rice. He returned to the monastery to say that they did not sell rice at the tea store, only tea.
The next morning, the Abbot woke him still earlier. “Go to the tea store, run faster, and buy some rice!” When the boy protested, the Abbot walked silently away. So the boy got up, got dressed, and went to the tea store again, this time running. “I am sorry, sir, they only sell tea.”
The next morning, the Abbot woke him earlier still, and said, “Run as fast as you can to the tea store to get some rice!” The sleepy boy sat up on his mat, staring at the Abbot in disbelief. Something on his face must have made it clear that he knew no matter how quickly or how early he went to the tea store, they would never have rice. The Abbot patted him and told him he could go back to sleep.
That story became a central metaphor in my work with the therapist. As I would be puzzling about how to say something just right to someone in my life, asking them in exactly the way that they might finally give me what I wanted, he would say, “Do you think if you get there earlier they will have rice?” Or simply, “Run faster!”
Phantom waiting rooms. Waiting for something we claim to want, but will never get if we keep waiting where we are. The most frustrating waiting rooms, of course, are the ones that purport to deliver what we’re looking for. Doctors who don’t really take a good look at our bodies but focus instead on the pharmaceutical drugs they hope we will use. Parents who we need to take care of us when we are vulnerable, but clearly their own problems are consuming all of the energy they have. Preachers who drone on and bore us, concentrating more on displaying their own brilliance than offering us the healing words that we need. These bad experiences may convince us that we’ll never get what we want, so we might as well be passive and wait.
Ask yourself: What have you waited for so long that you begin to think it doesn’t exist, or that you can never have it? And then ask yourself: Where am I waiting for this? Have I spent months or years camped out in front of the tea store, hoping that one day they might decide to stock rice? In these critical days in which we live, the time for phantom waiting rooms is over—if it ever existed. Our planet needs us to be awake, to be alive, to claim our power as active forces!
It is my deepest hope that each person reading this, no matter whether in a prison cell or a luxurious home, has stopped looking outside for what can only come from within. So often we are waiting for other people to offer us love that we can only offer ourselves. We can find this love, no matter who and where we are, if we open to the spark of divinity, that wisdom that lives within each of us. From there, as we learn how to nurture our deepest selves, I pray that we may find ways to serve our wider world, to care for and support one another, and to be strong enough to hold on to what we know to be true, no matter who tells us we are wrong.
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