the facts answer

A Waiting that Enables Our Childlike Heart to Surface
We are always waiting for something. But, on Christmas eve, we discover that the things we desire are mere placebos, and that our unnamed expectation remains as a promise.

by John waters

Many times it strikes me that the most familiar words are the most potent, if only we can begin to hear and see them in a different way.
I have in mind words like “desire,” “need,” and “hope,” which speak both of the preoccupations of man focused on what sustains him in this three-dimensional world, and also what sustains him… period. The same thing, of course, but the way we generally use words does not support this intuition.  An implosion of the resonance of language has provoked the dualisms that have alienated modern man from his own heart.
“Waiting” is another such word. What else of ultimate import does man do but wait? It is the word that most accurately and acutely defines our condition.
We wait all the time for things: buses, trains, medical attention, cappuccinos-to-go–for things we need and things we desire. These moments are mere samplings of the great wait that defines us.
In Ireland, to put things simply, we have misunderstood our needs and desires in some vital way that has caused us to rip the heart out of our economic system as a hurricane might tear a gazebo from its moorings. We are waiting for a man from the International Monetary Fund to tell us what we must do to atone for our confused sense of need and desire–which, hitched to things we can touch and feel and possess, has ripped a hole in everything that can be measured or counted.  Now that it is clear that riches are not, after all, our destiny, we once again return to the great question of existence, to the deepest sense of waiting.
As a child, I loved the days of Advent even more than I loved Christmas. For me, even today, Christmas Eve is the most wondrous day of the year, the day when my expectation is at its zenith. Even in my agnosticism, this never waned. No amount of skepticism has proven capable of extinguishing the desire. And no degree of obsession with the material has managed entirely to occlude the idea that there is something unique about this particular awaiting.
We wait, ostensibly, for Santa, for the tokens we call presents, to see the happiness of our children renew for us the sense of expectation we once found all but unbearable. But these are mere placebos for the true awaiting. They allow us to feel again that which we long to feel, without naming it with words that might draw the wrong kind of attention to ourselves.
We are blessed that we have one day to act, as a focus of our waiting. No matter how much it becomes burdened with banal expectations, it is not reducible. Even under the full assault of our culture it cannot completely be misunderstood.
We are most peaceful when we wait like children, for something we comprehend only in the knot of our own desire, and for which our happiness provides the most incontrovertible evidence.