The Art of Waiting

Simone Riva - Last hour of class in the fifth grade. As soon as I enter the classroom, the kids say to me, "Prof, for this last hour we need a question from you." Without wasting a moment, I ask, "What's left of the year?" Each person responds by recounting what involved him or her the most. In the end, as is often the case — and as I basically hoped - one of them asks me, "And you, prof, what's left?".

I look at them and say, "The fact that I am learning to wait for you." Yeah, because if there's one thing I've noticed in these last few years, it's this greater willingness to wait for the other person to make his or her own path. 

Willingness that is certainly not the result of some personal training, but rather of amazement at those who do so with me. The art of waiting is really a desirable grace.

As soon as I answered that way, in fact, the boys aroused themselves to listen to how I would explain my statement. I told them about how my way of being in the classroom has changed since my early years of teaching, how it's definitely more exciting to allow oneself to be surprised, rather than expecting everyone to be at the same level immediately and always. Under his breath, one reacts, "You're on, teacher, you're on."

We know how much suffering the demand on the other creates. In us, because we become impatient, and in the other, who never feels at home. God, in fact, has always used the opposite method: He traveled the longest stretch of the road to reach us until He became a companion to man by loving where he was on the path. 

It was so for Zacchaeus, for the Samaritan woman‌ and for the apostles. It is so for all those who recognize the possible violence of pretence and ask for the grace of waiting. Fr. Julián Carrón, in a talk in 2009 in Dublin, deepened this human tension by presenting it as part of us: "Has anyone ever promised us anything? Then why do we wait?"" (C. Pavese, "Il mestiere di vivere," Einaudi, Turin 1952, p. 276). 

Don Giussani has always quoted this question from Italian poet Cesare Pavese to show us the structure of man: waiting. Each of us can recognize in our own experience to what extent our life is filled with expectations, whatever form each person then represents it in.

Therefore, we can say that waiting is the very structure of our nature, the essence of our soul." When we forget the origin of our waiting, it triggers the temptation to burn out in the illusion of owning the moment or others. Just think of how we sometimes look at our quiet children, with the only concern that they will change, that they will settle down quickly. 

Or how we look at reality: we have a project in mind, we do everything we can to achieve it, we carry it out, and soon after, we're already looking for something else because that realized project is no longer enough for us. In our lives, this dynamic recurs again and again and inexorably. 

Cesare Pavese himself, on the day he received the Strega Prize, said, "In Rome, apotheosis. And with this?"

What we seek in everything, even in things that can't help us, is an infinite, and nothing can give us peace if it isn't intercepted.

When He thought of it, God really wanted to overdo it, placing in a fragile creature - who was not, is not‌ and will not be - all the expectations of His heart. Let us enjoy it.
Unrevised translation by the author. Giornale di Monza 06.11.2024