Recently, I’ve been thinking about the Advent song “Stay Awake, Be Ready”—whether a warning or a source of comfort, I don’t really know, but the fact remains, it’s been on my mind. In grade school, the Presentation Sisters who ran the place let us clap twice like so: “Stay awake (clap, clap), be ready (clap, clap). You do not know the hour when the Lord is coming.” How our little hearts delighted in the simple art of clapping! The lyrics follow the Scripture passage Matthew 24:42: “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”
Waiting for clearance to leave for Ireland has felt not unlike that. Stay awake, be ready. You do not know the hour when the Irish Department of Justice and Equality will get back to you regarding your preclearance application status. I’ve always feared—more in relation to the original passage from Matthew’s Gospel, but recently too, now, in relation to the waiting to be allowed to go and work for the Church in Ireland—that the hour or the day when the Lord decides to come would find me fast asleep. This fear might be more unfounded if I didn’t have such a history of sleeping through earthquakes, fire alarms, and tornado warnings (thank you, South Bend, Indiana). But in all seriousness, this fear drove me to packing all my winter-ish clothes (anticipating the “Sunny Southeast” of Ireland to be maybe less than sunny) away in a suitcase nearly three months ago, and more recently, I packed a vast majority of what I will be bringing to Ireland almost exactly a month ago in an attempt to be found not asleep, but ready to go as soon as I was called.
Then I remembered 1 Samuel 3, in which God calls out to Samuel four times before Samuel delivers the now-famous line: “Speak, for your servant is listening.” At first, my thinking was more “if God can take the time to call Samuel four times and pardon the three times he hit the snooze button, then surely, he’ll give me a few rings before leaving me adrift.” But that’s not the point at all.
Throughout this process, I have been called more times than I can count (per my fallible human memory; I can count very high for an Arts and Letters graduate), and so have my seven fellow House of Brigid peers. I was called a little over a year ago, when my friend Kelly encouraged me to apply for House of Brigid. I was called again around January or February when I found the House of Brigid application I’d set aside, surefooted on my path toward graduate school. I was called again to enter the interview room, and again when I accepted the opportunity to serve with House of Brigid some time after that, and again throughout the summer whenever checking in, chatting, playing games, or bemoaning the waiting with my House of Brigid fellows.
Waiting does not mean standing still. Humans are not stagnant creatures; we were certainly not made with stillness in mind (I would argue we were also not made with jogging or general cardio in mind, but I digress). I would like to sit still and quietly, awake and ready, for that for which I wait, but I cannot do that. This can be challenging in the time of a pandemic, but in the age we live in, one of instant communication and technology that truly surpasses all and every expectation for entertainment and engagement, there are even fewer excuses for stillness and plenty opportunities for connection and motion, if only we try. Don’t get me wrong, stillness is so important—for example, the beautiful gift of sleep—but we Easter people in particular are not made for idleness. So let us pray as much as we can, let us hope for that which is good in the world, and let us wait, because we have a lot of waiting to do.
