Around the world today, we open a new liturgical year.  We move from Cycle A where we have listened to the Gospel of Matthew for the past year and now we move to the Gospel of Mark and Cycle B.  The cycle of a liturgical year is the cycle of the life of Christ.  We are invited to participate in his mysterious life, recognizing that in the life of Christ we find all kinds of wisdom and insight to help us in our lives.  This season, Advent, is a word that means “coming.”  It is normally a period of four weeks, but this year it covers three weeks, to prepare for Christ’s coming into the world.  We are asked during this season to take some time.  There are few commodities more precious or seemingly less available in our culture than time.  Time, once gone, cannot be recovered.  We’re asked in these weeks to take some time away from the “busyness” of our lives to reflect on the real work of life that we have ahead of us.
Christ is with us, fully alive, every time we come to communion.  But, Advent is also a time to bring Christ to life in other ways….  The child who came from Mary’s flesh in a stable; the grown man who walked the roads of Palestine teaching and touching, caring and curing; the “criminal” who left this life with nails in his hands and feet—this is the same person we receive in communion.  He is alive as God’s only Son, alive with the life of a human being who has reached the perfection of humanity, who is everything God wanted the human to be when God fashioned the first man and woman in God’s image.  One of the things that happens with Advent is that we enter a period of waiting and watching.  Waiting for the Christ Child to come.  To come among us.  To be one with us.

Wait.  The need to slow down, too contemplate.  The need to have patience.  Too have hope….  We know that the Messiah is coming.  We are told that Mary is with child.  Nine months carrying a child is a long time!  Nine months that you are carrying a gift around in your body that you are responsible for.  “The idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting” (Andy Warhol).

Psychology of Waiting…

How much time have you spent standing in line?  How many days of your life are spent waiting in line at airports, shops, grocery lines, or government offices?

Many businesses are concerned about customer frustration with waiting times.  Banks, hotels, restaurants, and airlines know how upset the modern customer can become if asked to wait for even a short time.  Rage has become a function of sometimes rather minor delays.  And, of course, waiting is often the cause of road rage.

People in line at major international airports now tweet their frustration.  There are occasional revolts of otherwise normal, well-behaved people who simply have “had enough.”  They shout, they sing, and they rush the barricades to humiliate their tormentors.

Products are consumed, but services are experienced in real time.  Delay is often the most important factor influencing restaurant evaluation.  People take their business elsewhere, where they get what they want: instant gratification.

Try visiting a place where you have no choices, like a government agency.  You aren’t really a customer, although you may be called that.  You cannot take your business elsewhere.

The way we should be looking at those who endure the long, tedious and time-wasting waiting process is that we should be proud of this quiet, orderly, and dignified display of one of our great virtues, that of patience.  Too many people suffer from “hurry sickness,” dysfunctional impulsiveness, and childlike impatience, and could learn a great deal from the fair play and equality of learning to wait.  “Everything I learned in life, I learned in kindergarten,” comes to mind.  After all, postponement of gratification is one of the signs of maturity.

To the modern person, waiting can be described simply as aggravating, demoralizing, and frustrating.  It causes tension and is expensive.  People who study waiting behavior have come up with certain laws and observations that have consequences:

1. Occupied Time feels shorter.  So give people something to do or distract their attention. Make them walk round and round on maze-like paths.  Give them television to watch, music to listen to.  The worst is letting them grow surly and listless; they then mumble to each other about starting a revolt.
2. Uncertainty makes waiting seem longer. Tell people (roughly) how long they have to wait and they are more accepting of the delay.  The subways and buses know this.  The guesstimations need not be accurate; precision does not matter.  Information takes away the ambiguity and gives a person confidence that the system is still running.
3. Anxiety makes the wait seem longer. “Will it ever come?”  “Will I make my meeting?”  “Will I make the connection?”  So explanation and reassurance works.  Again, music might help.  Too-frequent apologies don’t.  Best to be the reassuring parent, as when your child says, “Daddy, Daddy, are we nearly there yet?”  And miles from your destination and profoundly lost, you confidently proclaim, “Nearly, hon, almost there!”
4. Unanticipated and unexplained waits are worse. Some organizations have figured out the explanation bit.  “Your flight is late (and we profoundly apologize) due to the late arrival of the other plane.”  Yes, but why was that?  Best appeal to “act of God” explanations, which suggest possible danger.
5. Unfair waits are much more aggravating than equitable waits. Nothing is worse than seeing someone semi-legitimately avoid the wait.  The best example is the The Fast Trackers who buy their way out.
6. Solo waits seem longer than group or social waits. This is a difficult one, but the waiting room is the best example

We have all become used to speedier delivery of all services.  Amazon will deliver the package to you the same day by drone in some localities.  When frustrated by delay, we express our anger openly.  And it is getting much worse as our expectations of immediate gratification are growing.

The key is, we will wait, we know things will happen.  But it will not happen in our time.  We can’t predict when of these things are going to happen within a split second.  Only God knows.

Now, I will leave you with my perspective of waiting as I have seen it.  I like tea once in awhile.  Do you know how long you have to wait for the tea pot to boil so that you can have a cup of tea?  You know the water will boil, but how long?

It can be like waiting for family to fly in for the Christmas Holiday.  You know they’re going to arrive, you just don’t know when.  There could be flight delays due overbooking or weather, flight cancelations due to bad weather conditions, there could be a change of airport for landing such as into Missoula because of fog at Glacier Airport.  But, most of the time, they will arrive late, but safe.

It can be like waiting for a pregnancy to come to term…  We know there will be some bad mornings, some struggles, some back pain, some weight gain, irritability, and etc.  And it will take at least 36 months, normally to get to the point where we can either have a natural, induced, or a C-Section child birth.  But, it will happen with Dr. Lavin and God’s help.

Here is a few more examples:

• How many times, when you are looking at some video, it says, “wait for it!”
• Simon and Garfunkel’s Song, “Slow down, you move too fast! You’ve got too make the morning last!”
• Brad Paisley and Andy Griffith song – “Waitin on a Woman.”
• My last one – the period of waiting for your children to come back to the Catholic Church after they have left, for whatever reason.

The challenge of the first week of Advent is to be alert, to be on guard, to be conscious.  In our Gospel reading today, we hear the final address of Jesus’ ministry in Mark, which looks forward to end times.  On a more basic level, it is seen as advice for individual Christians to live by as they look forward to their own transition from this world to the next.  Watch! Be alert!  “You do not know when the lord of the house is coming.”  There’s certainly nothing morbid about living each day as though it will be our last.  One day we’ll be right, and we’ll be relieved to be ready.  It’s a timely message for this First Sunday of Advent when we look to the Lord’s comings: all around us every day, in the people we meet, in creation, in our mortality, in his birth at Bethlehem, and at the end of human history.  Watch!  Be alert!  God is nearer than we think.