An old man, a family friend then in his late eighties, once said of old age, ‘It seems that people of my age are always waiting.’ In one way he meant that being almost totally dependent on others to care for him, or to ferry him about, it seemed to him that he spent most of his time looking out the window to see if those who would make his lunch, or the helpful neighbour who would give him a lift to visit a friend had arrived. The old boy is now ninety-two, and still waiting, maybe in the hope that an estranged son might call by, or will the man come and fix his television today.

But he’s also waiting at another level. He can’t have too many summers left to look forward to, and having seen most of his friends and family buried he must surely be aware that it will soon be his turn; what will it be like? Is there really a life after this tortuous existence? Will all the things he was so sure of be proven true? If he was wrong will he ever know?

The odd thing is that having spoken at length to many old people I have arrived at the opinion that for most of them, few of life’s big issues remain black or white; they have blurred into various shades of grey, there’s little they can be sure of any more, for the shifting sands of time have caused their once solid paradigms to crumble. And so they wait, for what, they don’t really know.

Having said that, most of us live our lives in the waiting mode; we don’t like what we see but we lack the ability or the courage to bring about change. We are in a job we hate, but rather than do something about it we wait in the hope that things will sort themselves out. We are in a bad relationship, but we live in hope that our partner will reform – or go away, or we yearn for the return of the good old days. In other words we live most of our lives in the future, or in the past, with the result that many of us will go to our graves without ever having experienced the thrill of life in the now.

It’s no different in the world of religion. I was guest speaker at a men’s conference a few years ago. Over the three-day event things went well, very well in fact, until the very last seminar when I attempted to make exactly this point by dissecting a hymn that the men seemed to know well but which I hadn’t heard before. It was written by William Booth, and here are some of the offending words:

Look down and see this waiting host,
And send the promised Holy Ghost;
We need another Pentecost!
Send the fire today!

 

I found the words offensive because ‘the promised Holy Ghost’ is here and has been for over two thousand years! The suggestion that the church is dead – which it largely is – and needs resuscitation by another Pentecost implies that the first one failed, or that the promised Holy Ghost was a damp squib. We were saying, ‘This life of faith is anaemic, but it’s not our fault. God must do something more for us!’ and so rather than enjoying the beauty and the power of the moment we choose to live in the hope of a brighter tomorrow; we sit on our hands, waiting. That’s what bothered me; what bothered them was that Booth’s hymn was their anthem, their war cry, but nobody had told me.
The answer surely is the balance in Reinhard Niebuhr’s Prayer of Serenity:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

 

You can contact me online: adam@adamharbinson.com