In East Coker, the second in T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets the following lines attract and repel me in equal measure.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Try as I might, the conundrum of these words registers deep in my gut – where I intuit them sounding a warning. I dislike waiting. The unpalatable truth seems to be that some things are only made possible when we have the patience to wait for them.

The experience of waiting is for many of us today a kind of agony because we are now shaped by a culture in which waiting has been abolished. From download speeds to the endless deluge of things arriving same day- or at most, next day from Amazon our new Godfather in the sky – instantaneous getting gratifies us as our capacity for enjoyment vanishes along with our ability to give attention to anything for more than a few seconds – minutes at most. We become more impatient as our tolerance for waiting erodes. What use have we for the enigma posed by Eliot’s words in a culture where fewer and fewer things are considered worth the inconvenience of having to wait for them?

Yet, Advent is the season of waiting. We curtail its waiting as much as possible. Advent no sooner begins when Christmas overwhelms us. Every year, with Advent Sunday barely in the rear-view mirror, I’m asked by the staff – is it all right to put the Christmas trees up now? Because I’m thinking about the pressure to get things done in time for Christmas I say yes, but don’t switch on the lights until Advent 4. Of-course I realize my desire to preserve the prominence of the visuals of Advent is out of step with the culture – I mean I’ve had the Christmas tree up at home for weeks now.

Eliot used to famously – and to my mind somewhat disingenuously – deny any particular meaning to his words over and beyond the immediacy of their impact on the reader in the moment of reading. Who knows what Eliot intended with these words from East Coker – which incidentally is the name of a picturesque Somerset village? If he is to be believed, then he didn’t intend any particular meaning to be read into these lines – beyond what one critic referred to as his narcissistic gloom.

In a way Eliot has achieved his intention. Left to puzzle over the meaning – his words are still immediately impactful. I receive them deep in my gut as some kind of profound warning about the choices and the inevitable disappointments which usually accompany improbable hope; the folly of misplaced affection for things, causes, and people I love; faith misdirected as a defense against my need for unending denial.

At this point in the 21^st century, what is the state of our capacity for hope? We have become increasingly fearful of the future as we see the world unraveling around us. A consequence of the erosion of our capacity for waiting is we no longer think ahead. You see the point of waiting is preparation. Increasingly addicted to short-term thinking – as a society we satisfy the needs of today with short-term patches – seemingly without concern for tomorrow. We become increasingly uneasy at any prospect of a future – preferring to live in a state of self-sustaining denial of a future. The future becomes more and more a source of fear.

Our capacity to imagine and to dream now seems to be limited to the preservation of the status quo – as with fingers crossed our whistling in the dark becomes deafening. As evidenced by the recent message from COP23 and our general malaise concerning the realities of climate change – our hope is reduced to staving off the eventual reckoning for at least a little bit longer. The majority in the House crows loudly about border security but shows little interest in long term immigration reform. It dilly-dallies over funding for Ukraine oblivious to the future cost of facing down a Russian juggernaut should the defense of Ukraine fail. Politics is now the game of empty posture – of impeachment enquiries without the evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. That old line about Nero fiddling while Rome burned comes to mind.

Our aversion to waiting focuses our attention exclusively on today so that in crucial areas of our public life we are failing to invest in the future. The future is tomorrow’s problem and we thank God we won’t live to see it. Our generation of decision makers – of world shapers – has become so self-preoccupied that they – and we because we put them there – no longer care about the world our children and their children are likely to inherit.

Proverbs 29:18 is a reminder that Where the vision fails, the people perish.

For us, hope remains a word out of place. It’s a word that conjures risk in a risk averse culture. Whatever hope might be – we console ourselves it’s certainly not practical. In our society hope is a word out of place because it beckons us to dream dreams and see visions of a better tomorrow. It summons us to the audacity of shattering the projections of impoverished imagination limited by utilitarian practicality?

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Whatever Eliot intended or didn’t – his words are impactful – and therefore we are justified in finding our own meaning in them. I hear them as a warning that without the patience to wait – without a tolerance for surviving a delay between wanting and getting – without a capacity to await the objects of our hopes, to with patience nurture our loves, our faith will always be misplaced. When we no longer know how to wait, we deprive ourselves of time to reflect and to prepare. We seem to have forgotten the old adage that all good things come only to those who wait for them.

In the vision of Isaiah chapter 61 we hear God inviting us to dream moving beyond the poverty of only what can be imagined within imaginations limited by a lack of courage to have faith. God is inviting us to bind-up one another’s wounds and cease from wounding one another further. God is longing for us to liberate ourselves from being captive to the short-termism of our current addiction to self-interest and self-protection. God is calling us to rebuild the ruins of our civilization, to inhabit the spaces long forsaken; reminding us that no good end can be achieved through evil action; that no peace can be ensured without its foundation in justice.

Isaiah 61 comes from the prophet – the third of that name – who is addressing the returning exiles now freed by the emancipation edict of Cyrus the Great in 539 BC. The hope embodied in Trito-Isaiah’s words is of a new society in which healing, freedom, compassion, joyful celebration, repentance, and justice will mark the end of exile.

Of course, there is always a discrepancy between hope and reality. The difficulty of the task, the scarcity of resources, the animosity of the surrounding peoples towards the returning exiles engendered a society where the rich diverted the scarce resources away from the reconstruction of the Temple and the repair of the city wall in order to build fine houses for themselves. A culture of oppression of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful quickly reestablished itself. We read of this painful situation described by the prophet Zechariah, Nehemiah, the governor entrusted with the rebuilding project, and Ezra, the scribe responsible for implementing the religious reforms that were the fruit of the pain of exile.

The hope to which Trito-Isaiah speaks is the hope of a future of expanded inclusion for all of humanity within the promises God had hitherto only made to Israel. The purpose of this vision of future hope was not that it be realized immediately, but that it would reset the compass settings in the direction of its ultimate fulfillment in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  It was a vision of hope that would come only through the process of waiting.

Hope is not only a dream for a future better than the past. It is that of course. But through the experience of waiting – we prepare – allowing for a future directed hope to resets our direction of travel in the present. Waiting is not a passive state of just hanging around. Waiting is a state in which we are actively engaged in a process of preparing for the future by action in the present. Our present-time action is guided and directed by the vision of that for which we hope.

Future hope comes through waiting – which is a state of actively preparing the conditions for hope’s fulfilment. But the important point here is to note that future hope guides by resetting the compass settings - altering the direction of travel in the here and now. Therefore, the quality of the vision of that for which we hope matters. Misdirected hope – Eliot’s hope for the wrong thing – only sets us in a wrong direction of travel through decisions made or not made; opportunities grasped or missed in real time. Between the realization of future hope and the present lies the experience of waiting – a process of preparing for that which is already influencing our actions in the present. In waiting we are never that far from the hope we are waiting for.

To paraphrase Eliot – true hope, real love, and effective faith come together in the experience of waiting.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.