“I’ve come to realize how we live in a time when hope and patience are lost spiritual practices, and they need to be found. We live beyond the time when it makes sense to ask for God’s blessing and then expect to receive it, as if manna still falls from the skies for hungry people. We still have preachers who hold onto this ancient language, and toss it like scraps to the starving, but for most everyone I know, it either no longer satisfies or doesn’t satisfy for long. God simply doesn’t work that way anymore.
“So, we wait. And in our waiting, we share with sincere people everywhere hope and expectancy, rather than certainties. We are sure in our hope, that it is the meaning and purpose of our lives. For me, this is Christian. It is the way of Jesus in the Gospels. For a Jew it may be Jewish. For a Muslim it is Islamic. For a Lakota, it’s Lakota. Waiting and hoping are also the ways of Tao. As Alan Watts wrote a half-century ago, the Taoist is to embody wu-wei, which means ‘non-action,’and is, in his words, ‘going with the grain, rolling with the punch, swimming with the current.’
“So Thoreau carried me into the woods in ways that allowed me to finally understand such quiet, unambitious places. I hiked greater distances. I paid closer attention to plants, bugs, scat, trees and markings on trees, and I took note of the birds and mammals who were there with me. This attentiveness I learned from Thoreau’s own note-taking, which is what fills so many pages of those Journal volumes. His was a native wisdom gleaned from the natural world. The natural world contains and sustains our lives; it and its rhythms are not just the environment of our living, but of our being. Take the decaying of leaves in autumn, for instance, of which Thoreau said in one of his final essays, “we are all the richer for their decay [that] prepares the virgin mould for future cornfields and forests, on which the earth fattens.” This affected how I prayed and the fewer words I used to do it, since I began to see presence and attention itself as a prayer.
“All these inspirations place high value on waiting and patience, and they have transformed how I approach my faith and practice. I spin and toil less than before, unconcerned about expectations and permissibility. I contemplate more, responding to the demand of my natural environment which says slow down and listen. Hope has largely replaced belief. These inspirations of waiting and patience are not a way of giving up religion – not at all – in fact, they expect a great deal of God or whatever word we use that means ‘God.” I lean into Source, Spirit, Light, Darkness, Wind, Sun, Someone. If not attending church meant you were called an atheist in Thoreau’s day, then so be it. He was unconcerned with such things, and wrote in his Journal of
‘Reverently listening to the inner voice [without] a particle of will or whim mixed with it.’
“Waiting and patience place hope in the Divine’s abiding presence and goodness. These are not ideals foreign to Christians, Jews, and other religious people, but they are often thwarted by the words and instructions of our catechetical traditions. Expecting the sun to rise again in the morning is the best phrase I can use to describe what I do now that’s religious. It is a simple practice I learned from Thoreau’s Journal that runs much deeper than faith, producing in my expectation of that grace that opens, still without fail, in my life again like spring flowers.”
