Love Lies in Wait

Love Lies in Wait

By Professor Anthony Maranise, Obl.S.B.

If one person waits, and waits patiently, without pressure or demand, simply to spend time with another, to be present, or to remain available in kindness, that waiting is a testament of love and commitment. Few will spend themselves that way unless the other truly matters. Time given without expectation of reciprocity is not a small courtesy. It is love made visible.

We should say this without apology. A good deal of contemporary speech, especially the looser habits of modern “therapy culture”, have trained people to mistrust endurance. Waiting is misconstrued as clinginess or obsession. Fidelity is treated as a failure of boundaries. Those words have a legitimate use when someone is being coerced, used, or denied a clear no. However, they are sorely misused when they cannot distinguish pressure from presence. Love that waits does not corner, guilt, or hover. It remains available and leaves the other free. To call that clingy is not wisdom. It is a cheapening of love.

Such persons are, to use the old phrase, “playing the long game”. I do not mean a strategy for later possession. I mean a fidelity that does not require an immediate return. To stay over years, in work or in affection, is to say that the person, or the calling, is worth the duration. “The long game” is endurance – literally one’s precious time of life that they cannot reclaim – freely offered as a gift.

I have known this in my own life: in academic labor that asked for years before it bore fruit, in writing that matured slowly, and in at least two significant relationships in which I remained available without pressing. Those “seasons of life”, if you will pardon the cliché, taught me the cost of waiting. As a person who could stand to cultivate the virtue of patience a bit more, these costs certainly seemed excessive, if not annoying. But, they also imparted unto me meaning of a most incredible sort.

Those costs illuminated for me a sentence I have heard, read, and taught countless times as a believing theologian, and only now, I think, have begun to understand. Saint Josemaría Escrivá wrote: “When you approach the tabernacle, remember that He has been waiting for you for twenty centuries.” I had received the line personally as well-intentioned piety. I had not received (or perceived) it as “the long game” of God Himself.

The tabernacle is not a monument of ‘delay-on-display’. It is Christ already there. Twenty centuries is not some veiled metaphor for patience. It is as specific as it is literal.

God waits for each one of us, as if we were the only one He’s ever loved. He does not grow tired in his joyous expectation of our coming to Him, either for the first time, or between each visit – whether we present ourselves before Him out of desperation and desolation or out of immense gratitude, celebration, and rejoicing.

By the standards of our age, such waiting might be construed as unnecessary, unusual, or even some (again, thank you, “therapy culture”) strange form of ‘delayed gratification’ in a world that knows nothing but the instant sort.

Conversely, by the standards of the Gospel, it is the shape of unconditional mercy. The love of Jesus is so deeply personal that its profundity can scarcely be comprehended. He loves each of us as if that soul were His only object of devotion. He loves perfectly, which we, mere human beings, are incapable of doing on this side of eternity.

Our waiting is mere analogy, not equivalence. We grow tired. We hope to be answered. We mix love with the need to be met. The Lord does not. The Blessed Sacrament is where “the long game” has been kept and is still being kept: a faithfulness that began before we arrived and will not fade should we ever choose to depart.

If our human waiting can reveal love, however imperfect, then divine waiting reveals Love Himself – the utter perfection thereof. The years given to a craft, a vocation, or even a person are not wasted when they teach us how to recognize the depths of God’s personal love for each one of us.

We approach the tabernacle not as interrupters of a sacred silence never to be disturbed, but as the welcomed ones for whom God Himself has been eagerly awaiting all along.