Dear Reader,

Simone Weil writes in Waiting for God, “In our acts of obedience to God we are passive; whatever difficulties we have to surmount, however great our activity may appear to be, there is nothing analogous to muscular effort; there is only waiting, attention, silence, immobility, constant through suffering and joy.” Waiting, for Weil, is a passive activity that nonetheless requires our full attention; waiting, not seeking, is the only activity available to the human person who wants to find goodness—to find God.         

Weil’s description of the absolute focus and commitment required in this waiting reminded me strongly of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I have been slowly making my way through this summer. I have marveled at the endless waiting—for something, or nothing, to happen—that Dillard describes. At her endless attentiveness to the life and activity around her, no matter how small or insignificant. For Dillard, as for Weil, waiting and attention go hand in hand.

We cannot reach God, Weil writes; “If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up.” In his essay for this issue, “The Art of Graceful Waiting” (pg. 50), Colm O’Shea feels his way to the conclusion that waiting for creative inspiration has much in common with waiting for grace. “If searching for God seems too great a task, or too opaque,” he writes, “then opening a sketchbook, sitting at a keyboard (piano or computer), and cultivating a simple curiosity and openness to the light and sound vibrating all around us, all the time, may feel more achievable.” In other words, if searching for God is too much, just wait. Just pay attention.

In “Balancing in the Dark” (pg. 30), Leslie Gelzer-Govatos describes the complicated emotional calculus of making a home somewhere when you don’t know how long you’ll be able to stay. Marie O’Shea writes in “A Wilderness of Peace” (pg. 18) of the boon of laying down our need for order and control. In the Fare Forward Interview (pg. 6), Courtney Ellis told us how waiting for birds has changed her life and saved her sanity. And the issue concludes with two beautifully written but heartbreaking essays. I am not ashamed to say that I have shed a few tears each time I have read them. In “Holy Everything in Between” (pg. 104), NICU chaplain Britt Luby describes what it’s like to wait, helpless, alongside the parents of children who will never live to grow up. Alexander Pyles, in “Frankie’s Garden” (pg. 116), writes from the other side of that experience, telling the story of the brief life of his son Frankie, who survived for only 24 hours after birth, and whose life was entirely worth it.

Waiting is not easy—it is often borne as a painful burden, and all too often it ends in suffering. But I believe that waiting may be also a severe mercy, a necessity for us timebound creatures, a gift that we cannot do without. As you explore the pages of this journal, I hope that a little of that gift will open itself to you, as it has to many of our writers for this issue.

Fare forward,
Sarah Clark
Editor-in-Chief