What is eternity? Is it real or imagined?
Years ago, I was hanging out with a friend while she prepared dinner and we waited for her husband to get home. Her then five-year-old daughter came into the kitchen and asked when we would be eating. “Five minutes,” my friend replied, whereupon her daughter crumpled to the floor and wailed, “Five minutes?! Five minutes?!” An eternity.
When my brothers and I were just a little older than that, we would sit at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning, the two older ones in front, my younger brother and I two steps above, waiting for permission to go downstairs. Eternity.
One of my grandmother’s used to say the definition of eternity was two people and a ham. Eternity is defined by Merriam-Webster as: forever, infinite time, the state after death: immortality, a seemingly endless or immeasurable time. Eternity has the sense of being both definable and indefinable, a state that can be applied to a myriad of emotions, a word used in exaggeration about circumstances. By definition eternity is challenging.
Longing, waiting, and anticipation often accompany eternity, sometimes joined by impatience. There is a painful disparity in waiting in quiet or joyful anticipation for what seems an eternity measured against waiting in silent agony for an unwelcome event or outcome or waiting on hold or in traffic in frustration for what seems an eternity.
Advent is a time of waiting and expectant joy for many, and in the best moments, a time of peaceful stillness, connection. For others it’s a time of stress and a season to endure, a time where some are excluded, a season that can bring both welcome and unwelcome versions of eternity. And for some it eternally holds no waiting or meaning at all.
Like the one great sea that varies in temperament depending on where it is in the world, we hold the dark, stormy and unpredictable within along with the deep, calm and steady. We hold that for ourselves as well as for others, including those we might call strangers who are anything but. This holding is gift and challenge requiring what nature constantly demonstrates in a steady rhythm: presence, stillness, attentiveness, patience, listening, watching, waiting, silence, inherent faith that we are tethered together in a boundless sea of eternity.
Divine Ready 