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Waiting has become a public occupation for us all. We wait for phones to ring and lines at checkout
counters to shrink and classes to be over. We wait for the baby to go to sleep and for the
grandchildren to stop by. We wait for the social security check to come and for the neighbors to turn
off the boom box so we can finally think a bit. We wait for the mail carrier to come and the paper to
arrive and the local news to come on. I spend my life waiting for planes to take off and for computers
to come on and for printers to print. They are all mundane things. But as a result, waiting is both a
social disease and a grace in our lives. The trouble is that we have to choose between them. The
trouble is that we spend life waiting without knowing how to wait.

But not in my monastery. Here we are good at waiting. In fact, we liturgize it. Advent — the four-week
waiting period that leads up to Christmas — is a series of events designed not to delay the celebration
of Christmas, but to enhance it. It’s a kind of delayed gratification that culminates in a kind of
satisfaction that is all the richer for the waiting.

We hold weekly Advent vigils where prayer in the candle-lit dark is a metaphor for life in general. We
watch the lights on the huge Advent wreath in chapel brighten from week to week. We don’t play
Christmas carols before Christmas. We don’t hang decorations until Christmas week itself. We wait—and
we prepare inwardly as we go.

And then suddenly, Christmas blazes everywhere: the O Antiphons sing of desire for the fullness of the
spiritual life, the Christmas crib is blessed by the community, the tree is decorated and lit, and the
waiting for new life becomes the thing itself.

Contemplative waiting, purposeful waiting is what makes Christmas an experience rather than simply an
event. It is a lesson meant to color the entire year.