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| Simeon, by Diana Orpen, Meditations with a Pencil (1946). |
Expectantes in beatam spem.
“Waiting in joyful hope.”
It’s part of an ancient prayer which the priest prays at every Mass. It’s proper name is the embolism, and it’s an expansion upon the last line of the Lord’s Prayer: “deliver us from evil.”
In it (you’ve heard it a hundred times) we ask God to deliver us from evil, grant us peace in our days and deliver us from all distress as we await the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in joyful hope.
What does that mean? Waiting in joyful hope?
On the one extreme is the fool, who waits when he doesn’t expect anyone to arrive. But on the other extreme is the one who waits in sure and certain hope, with bated breath, with a quickening heart and with joy!
Like Anna. Saint Luke calls her a prophet…but a prophet with a backstory. Seems she has married for seven years when her husband died and ever since then, she’s been wandering around the Temple, day and night, worshipping God with fasting and prayer” Oh, and one last detail: she’s now 84 years old…so she’s been wandering around the temple for fifty years, day and night, waiting for God to come.
Lotsa times, we’re a lot like Anna. Having lost what we loved after too short a time, disappointed by what life had to offer. And in our disappointment we turn to pleasure or power or internet fantasies to fill up our emptiness. But not so Anna! After she buried the love of her life, she went back to Church, where in the cold stillness of the Temple, she kept looking for God behind the shadows, waiting for him to come. She never stopped hoping, and her hope was fulfilled.
Not far from Anna stood Simeon, another senior citizen “waiting for the consolation of Israel” Simeon is a curious name, it’s a Hebrew word with slavic roots, which means quite literally God is listening. As he was. God was listening and Simeon was waiting. A really good match.
And when he finally gets to hold the Christ child in his arms, Simeon sings a Canticle, which is the last song sung by every priest before he goes to sleep. It’s called the Nunc Dimittis and its the song you sing at the end of the waiting:
Nunc,
Now,
dimittis servum tuum, Domine,
Let you your servant go in peace, Lord
secundum verbum tuum in pace:
In peace, according to your word.
And we’re kinda like Simeon too. Simeon, who was longing for rest, perhaps even eternal rest in the arms of the God he knew was listening. We don’t know what made Simeon’s arms weary and his heart ache. We don’t know why he longed to rest, but we do know he was weary, just like us.
Us, the children of pandemic, often the sons of disappointment and the daughters of discouragement. God knows how tired we get sometimes and how much we long to rest. And how in fitful sleep we wait for him to bring relief.
Simeon waited, just like Anna. And then God came. And in that nunc, in that now, gave him rest. As Simeon always knew he would.
Perhaps in his waiting, Simeon would pray David’s ancient Psalm:
I believe I shall see the LORD’s goodness
in the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD, take courage;
be stouthearted, wait for the Lord!
The same song sung in the voice of the Baptist in the desert: Wait! He is coming! The one of whom Isaiah prophesied: the one who heals the broken hearts, frees prisoners, wraps us in a mantle of justice and makes joy spring up like a garden spring.
And so we wait, not just for the Lord who will come at the end of time, but for the God who will come in our next breath and in every breath of our lives. The God who makes our lives a continuous Advent of expectation, a sure and certain expectation that he cares.
A joyful hope born of the assurance that he knows my name and that his love for me is greater than I will ever know. It is the love of a Father, who never stops thinking about me, caring for me, longing for me, desiring to come, to be with me, to stay with me.
For his love is a gratuitous love, of which Carlo Carretto once wrote:
“[God’s] coming is bound to his promise, not to our works or virtue. We have not earned this meeting with God because we have served him faithfully…, or because we have heaped up such a pile of virtue as to shine before Heaven. God is thrust onward by his love, not attracted by our beauty. He comes in moments when we have done everything wrong, when we have done nothing…when we have sinned.”
Those words, perhaps more than any others, sustained my faith as a young seminarian…for they assured me that God’s love for me is omnipotent and insatiable, even when I forget him and even when I run away.
So, as we remember his coming in a manger and look forward to his coming at the end of time, let us not neglect his coming in our hearts. For in between yesterday and tomorrow is the today of his love, the nunc of Simeon and Anna and even of you and me.
