11. God's Promises, covenant and waiting

It is because our desire becomes stifled within us, without being able to expand in truth, that God's promise has to come to meet us, and reveal the magnitude of human possibilities. For the promise far exceeds all that we might have been able to hope for on our own.

Our life then, is not abandoned to an empty time sequence of indefinite duration. No, it is placed under the sign of someone's promise, and that Someone is God!

It was rather amusing to note that at the approach of the recent millenium, journalists who were short of publishing material, began to overestimate the topic. They keyed up readers and spectators to look out for some great event. But what were they promising? A big celebration without doubt, but why? For whom? To see them apply the whip, so as to appear very interested themselves, was a pitiful spectacle! With hindsight, this has become still more noticeable.

Christians however, have a different relationship to time, and the words they have to express it are not those of the press. To the degree in which the secular feast of the New Year is hollow, the simple passage of one millenium to the next, the feast of Christmas is charged with meaning. It is true that this day also corresponds to a simple convention; Jesus was probably not born on December 25, but the day has been chosen in order to tell the secret which lies at the heart of all the other days. The Eternal invited Himself into the heart of time. The Creator has come home "incognito", as someone who just slipped in! The living God opens up our lives and fills them with His own special time.

We commemorate the past, for it is the promise of the future. Our hearts are full of living hope: we wait for the day when what is already there will be fully manifested; when all that is in gestation at the heart of our history will be fully accomplished, like a promise in the act of being fulfilled...like a promise! Not just as a project which it would be our task to fulfil!

The man with a project creates his own ego, he calculates: he tends to dominate persons and activities in order to achieve a circumscribed and limited goal. As for the man of promise, he stands by and waits, open to that which has not yet been accomplished; instead he tries to welcome the gift which is offered to him. The man of promise fabricates no idols, nor does he create his own project, instead he waits for it. A promise is not something of which one commands fulfilment, instead it is received and welcomed. It creates a kind of sixth sense, a capacity for looking and listening, an attention to the welling up of the unforeseen - so long waited for. There is no question here of satisfying oneself, for such a one assumes the frustration another will banish. If the humanist conjures up projects, the Christian is more of a watchman. Changed as a result of the promise, a certain opening up, sometimes a discomfort is effected in him, by the eruption of the promised ungraspable thing. With humility and adaptability, he develops an attention capacity which allows him to welcome what comes, or rather the One who comes, as gift. God's promise transforms the one who keeps vigil. Thus it was that Mary conceived the "unconceivable". And we have knowledge of that mystery when it reveals itself to us. Happy are those who are able to recognise it in time.

This attention which presupposes waiting is in direct opposition to sleeping. It is incompatible with work when it is dishumanising, but it is possible to cultivate that delicate art of being a contemplative at the heart of action.

It means being ready, like parents who are awaiting the arrival of a baby, or sick people a visitor, or lovers a rendez-vous. To keep vigil is to desire. It is possible to develop new affective senses, new ears and eyes of the heart, so as to capture the subtle messages that come to us through the hundred and one incidents of life. God's gift does not blow a trumpet. The Nativity takes place in silence and during the night, in the presence of the poor and far from city life. He is discreet, is our God! He could pass by unperceived, if man did not hollow out in the depths of his being, that gentle silent waiting which makes of him an enlightened one.

An "enlightened one"? Buddists too use this word. Thus an extravagant idea comes to my mind: if He can come unexpectedly, at evening, at midnight, at cock-crow, could He not also come in stranger's disguise? Or speaking a foreign language? Or following another religion? This famour globalisation has complicated everything: let us too keep watch!

... and be waiting!