I
am incredibly delighted to introduce my first guest post here at Hopeful
Patience! I greatly admire Elissa Bjeletich, whose work I discovered through
Ancient Faith Radio. She co-authored the wonderful new book Tending
the Garden of Our Hearts: Daily Lenten Meditations for Families, which I
reviewed a couple of weeks ago here and on Ancient Faith Publishing's website (https://store.ancientfaith.com/tending-the-garden-of-our-hearts-daily-lenten-meditations-for-families/). Elissa and her husband, Marko, have five daughters and live outside of Austin,
Texas. Elissa directs and teaches Sunday School at Transfiguration Greek
Orthodox Church, writes books and hosts podcasts, contributes to curriculum
projects, and works at an Orthodox summer camp. In light of her new book, I
asked her to write about how the practice of Great Lent helps us develop
hopeful patience.
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Patience does not come to me naturally; God has been
teaching me faithfully for many years, and I am a poor student. I am ever so
slowly learning to embrace patience, to (occasionally) live joyfully in this present
moment without pining for other moments I imagine are still ahead. Too often, I
have shortchanged the present time, as if it were just a stopover on the road
to something else.
When I was teenager, I was pretty sure that nothing I did
really mattered because I was not yet an adult. As soon as I finished college,
I could not wait to get going — to get married, to buy a house, to have
children. I considered slowing down and enjoying my life as it already was, and
promptly rejected that idea to resume pining and plotting to get where I was
going. I hated the waiting.
The funny thing is that once I got there, once I was a
married woman with children, there was always another thing. Another child,
another move, another stage that had to come so that I could stop waiting.
And then it happened. People started having serious
problems. My third daughter had a cleft lip and palate. I began to spend a lot
of time in waiting rooms. My daughter smiled at people, sparked conversations.
Our life was happening in waiting rooms. I began to really face this question
of waiting in a whole new way. Were we losing time because we were waiting — or
was waiting just the place where I was living life? Had waiting always been the
destination?
My fourth child, my son, died on his 45th day. I asked
myself, what were those 45 days? They were the days of his life. And they were
beautiful. We don’t know how many days we’ll receive, and we may not accomplish
anything in this world. Is a 45-day life worth living? Of course it is. Of
course it was. I knew that the grieving would take a long time and could not be
hurried. I could not hurry it. I could not push forward. It was time to wait,
and to learn how waiting could be processing. Grieving was the thing I was
doing, not the thing that I was waiting to finish.
By the time my sixth child, Mariana, went into liver
failure and was placed on the transplant list, perhaps we were experts at
waiting. We waited for a liver and then we waited for a month for her to come
out of her post-surgical coma. Waiting wasn’t as hard any more. I had made
peace with it.
I recently read a guest post by Dr. Daniel Opperwal on
one of my favorite blogs, Nicole Roccas’s Time Eternal. [https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/timeeternal/the-joy-of-waiting-time-and-psalmody-in-st-benedict-guest-post/#more-1114]
He wrote, “[…] we learn to actually love
this waiting; it becomes a joy, not a burden, when it is ornamented by our
voices lifted in ancient prayer. To fall in love with the waiting is the birth
of patience […]”
Those words ring in my heart: To fall in love with the
waiting is the birth of patience… What
if we can learn to embrace the waiting, to fall in love with it? I am at peace
with the waiting, but what if I could love it? Would I finally then experience
that holy gift of the Spirit, patience?
As we prepare to embark on Great Lent, I am struck by its
relationship to waiting. I converted to
Orthodoxy twenty years ago, and my fast was always limited by the fact that I
was constantly pregnant or nursing for years. But eventually, I was free to
fast, and it was hard to learn that discipline. I found that my first fasts
were mostly about the waiting for the feast ahead, about getting through this
hard time (Lent) so that we could enjoy the good time (Pascha). But then as
Bright Week faded I would find again and again that I missed the fasting. I
missed the evening services and the quiet prayers. I missed the fast. Over the
years, I have found that when the Sunday of Zacchaeus alerts me that Great Lent
is on the horizon, I can’t stop smiling. There he is, up in that tree. It’s
about time. I can feel it. I am ready for Lent; I need Lent; I love Lent.
It’s not about enduring Lent so that we can reach the
Resurrection; it’s about falling in love with Lent itself, with the waiting.
And when Judgement Sunday arrives, and we see Christ enthroned in His glory,
separating the sheep from the goats, we are reminded that we’re not just
waiting for Pascha: we await Christ’s Second Coming, the General Resurrection
and the True Pascha.
Embracing Great Lent means embracing the human condition:
we struggle and suffer as we await the glorious coming of our Lord, the final
destruction of death and the resurrection of all.
We will always be waiting, until the end of days. If we
can fall in love with the waiting, we have a chance at abundant life.
Establish your
hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. (James 5:7-9)
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