"Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life." Simon Weil
"Most of us think of waiting as something very passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands. The bus is late? You cannot do anything about it, so you have to sit there and just wait. It is not difficult to understand the irritation people fell when somebody says, 'Just wait.' Words like that seem to push us into passivity.
"But there is none of that passivity in scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively...Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment." Henri Nouwen (from Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, p. 31)
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