Wait Without Hope

On Lent, T. S. Eliot, and Not Erasing Winter

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.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.    
 
-- from “East Coker” by T. S. Eliot

I don’t know about you, but it’s been a long, cold winter here in Virginia. And let’s just say, not all my family members are happy about it. Which has prompted me to inquire with them: What exactly is winter for?

Every year, about this time of year, I lead our Virginia Beach Fellows class (and my own family) through a prolonged season of fasting and prayer. These are believers in their early twenties, usually fresh out of college. Most are unfamiliar with fasting. We don’t go without food altogether. The assignment is to fast from certain foods and all liquids besides water (coffee is the toughest for most folks to do without), as well as from one or two forms of daily technology use (social media, entertainment, music, podcasts, etc). The purpose, I tell them, is to make space for God. In this light, I tell a riddle:

What is an English word that literally means “to lack an empty space,” not merely a word that means “full,” but one that specifically means “to lack a lack?”

It’s not an easy riddle—usually no one gets it without a couple of hints—but the word is: incapacity. This, I tell my students, is our problem: we lack a lack. We are becoming incapacitated at the level of our souls. Souls can atrophy, not because they have too little nourishment, but because they have too much and the wrong kind. Like the Rich Young Ruler, we may be sincere in our desire to inherit eternal life, but when it is offered we find we have no room for it. We are already full. The gift is free, but we still can’t afford it.

Part of the purpose of fasting, then, is to make ourselves poor in some small way so that we have capacity to receive the kinds of gifts that only God can give.

At the beginning of the fast, I have my students read “East Coker” from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Eliot is not exactly known for his perspicuity, but even at first glance you can probably sense the relevance of this section:

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.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

Why wait without hope or faith or love? Because our hope and faith and love are not as purely directed as we’d like to think. We’ve put our hope in many things. We’ve believed many things, loved many things. Despite being warned that we cannot serve more than one master, we have done it anyway. Now we must put aside even the good things that have too quickly become ultimate, so that the ultimate thing can become ultimate again.

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

If the problem of the atrophied soul is that it cannot afford a free gift because it is too full, then the answer is that the soul must be emptied in order to be full. Poverty becomes the new currency. Silence becomes the soil for a new song.

This is what the Sermon on the Mount says over and over again: Why not pray or fast to be seen by others? Because then you will have “received your reward in full” and will not have room for God, who rewards you in secret. Why give more than you’re asked? Why not let your left hand see what your right hand is doing? Why forgive and bless your enemies even as they curse you? Not because you earn blessings like merit badges by doing so, but because you make space to receive what cannot be received any other way. And yes, that space, that void, may remain a void for some time, as you wait for God to fill it with Himself. But, as Eliot says, “the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”

How long can the modern person wait for God? How long before we fill the void of anxiety, disappointment, injustice or even boredom with one of a thousand ready-made solutions? If Jesus taught his disciples anything, it was this: Let the void come. Don’t avoid it. Don’t fill it too quickly with your own cheap remedies. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The void is where God meets you and fills you.

But Jesus went further still: Despite his disciples best wishes, he made the void. He became the void.

I doubt the Twelve were surprised when Jesus told them that his second coming would be like a thief. As far as they were concerned, he had already come like a thief. He had taken their lives, he had stolen their loves, he had robbed them of their best hopes and expectations of who the Messiah would be. And why? So that they would have the capacity to receive something far better. He was the thief who loved them.

“For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” (John 9:39)

Though it may have confused them at first, eventually the Twelve would understand this saying better than anyone, because they had lived it. Where they could see, Jesus had struck them blind; where they had been blind, they were finally beginning to see.

“Those who see” and “those who do not see,” as it turned out, were not two distinct types of people, but two possibilities within every human heart. And Jesus was the Robin Hood figure who not only robbed the rich to give to the poor, but took it a step further, making those from whom he had stolen rich again in the end. This is the merciful cycle of God: He opposes the exalted and exalts the humbled. But once the exalted are humbled, they are finally fertile soil for exaltation…that is, if they stay, if they wait in that place of humility. The waiting is key. And, unfortunately, the waiting is often less like a moment and more like a season.

Which brings us to perhaps the most confusing part of this section of Eliot’s poem:

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth. 

What do these images have in common? They are all images of winter, painfully hinting at spring. Lightning in a winter sky, wild thyme and strawberry buried somewhere beneath the snow, perhaps even beneath the ground itself. And why does the laughter in the garden echo? Because the garden is bleak. Very little grows there in the winter months. And therefore, winter has an amplifying effect on our senses. We hear more and see further when the landscape of our lives isn’t padded with the fruitful vegetation of life.

As I write this, I am peering out the window of my house at a winter sunrise over the distant bay, a sight I can see only this time of year, when all the trees that lie between have lost their leaves and appear to be dead. The trees are only pretending, of course. But in their pretense of death, I see what I could not see any other way.

This is what winter affords. This is also what fasting affords. There was a time, not long ago, when most of the world lived according to distinct seasons. Their spaces were not temperature controlled. Their attention was not screen-controlled. Their day-to-day lives were not homogenized by the powerful blessings and curses that these and other technologies have afforded us. Their work took on different patterns in winter than in spring or summer or fall. They prepared for winter before it arrived, and when it arrived, they prayed that they would make it through.

Their children grew up with these seasonal rhythms. They understood intuitively that winter was the time when the ground did not produce, when stores would become thinner by the day, when keeping warm was itself a daily chore. They understood that winter could be especially hard for the elderly and for pregnant mothers, that some would possibly die. Winter, after all, was the season of death. But it was also the season of new birth, the womb out of which spring is born.

Most ancient people already lived by some sort of rhythm of feasting and fasting. But winter was its own kind of “forced fast.” It was nature’s way of making space, of making capacity, both in the ground and in the ground of the human heart.

Needless to say, our cultural moment is particularly allergic to this kind of seasonality. Just as our jobs tend to demand the same thing from us in January as they do in June—when our kids are babies as when they are full grown—we, as consumers, tend to demand the same comforts, amusements, and pleasures all throughout the year. We eat ripe strawberries all winter long. No wonder our jobs expect what they expect: production must keep up with consumption. We feast daily without fasting ever. But feasting without fasting is not feasting at all; it is addiction.

Without the forced rest of seasons, without the yearly liturgy of fasting and feasting, the ground of our souls becomes a Dust Bowl, over-stimulated and under-nourished, dry and sparse, blown this way and that by the faintest breeze.

We have done our very best to erase winter. But, in the end, we have not so much erased it as merely held it at bay. The cold stillness of winter still looms on the not-so-distant horizon of our bustling civilization and our own busy hearts. We have delayed its coming, but it comes nonetheless. And when it comes, it may be all the worse for us because we’ve held it back, because we’ve become unfamiliar with its ways. It comes to individuals, to communities, to nations. COVID was one such mega-winter. There will certainly be others. And if we are not prepared—if we are not “seasoned” by the seasons we welcome—we may be broken by the crises we can’t avoid.

Fasting is not fundamental to the Christian life. You can be a Christian without fasting. But you cannot be a Christian without suffering. Fasting is the embodied practice of welcoming, voluntarily, that poverty of spirit which will nevertheless come, whether we welcome it or not. God’s ways are severely merciful. Fasting makes space for death to do its work in little ways, so that when death comes in bigger ways, we can recognize its redemptive pattern. Fasting is practice; grief is the game. Likewise, winter is nature’s fast. When we welcome winter rather than erasing it—when we welcome its stillness, its thin-ness, its non-productiveness—we become fertile soil for the Sower’s springtime seed. This is how winter can be the most fruitful season of all.

P.S. Lent begins this coming Wednesday, February 18. This is traditionally a time when Christians fast and pray in preparation for Easter, confessing their sins, remembering their mortality, and awaiting the resurrection of the dead. If you’d like to know more about why Christians fast or how you can begin, see the essay/podcast below: