During the four weeks leading up to Christmas, the Christian Church celebrates the season of Advent, a time of waiting and anticipating the coming of the Christ child. Often during these weeks, we focus on the different aspects of waiting on God to act. However, this year, as I reflect on this waiting, I am wondering if we got the waiting all wrong. Something is not quite right about this understanding of waiting, waiting on God to act. Maybe it is the other way around, that God is waiting on us, waiting on us to become vulnerable so that God’s spirit can enter our lives and bring transformation to us and our world. However, as I worked on this blog, I came to realize that both types of waiting are true: we are waiting on God AND God is waiting on us. How can these both be true? Within Christian Scriptures, we read many verses about those who are waiting for God to act. Here is one such example found from the Old Testament in the book of Isaiah. “It will be said on that day, ‘See, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation’” (Is. 25:9). This notion of waiting on God to act is very pervasive in the Bible and is a common belief among Christians and religious people. This understanding of waiting on God is often behind the Advent season. During each Sunday of Advent, Christian congregations are waiting in anticipation of God sending the Christ celebrated each year imaginatively and mythically with the birth of the Christ child of Jesus. In this Christmas celebration, we are both celebrating the birth of the historical Jesus who was born 2000 years ago but also the birth of the Christ child within each of us. As we realize the birth of the Christ child within us, we realize that God’s spirit lives within each of us, that we are one of God’s beloved children, and that God is inviting us to join the people of light seeking to positive change to our world of darkness. I see this type of waiting on God in many aspects of my life. Some of my clients are waiting wondering when God is going to heal their cancer. As we watch the traumatic tragedy unfolding in Israel and Palestine, many wonder when God will intervened. When will God confront the rich to help those who are poor or homelessness as is evident in the rising rate of homelessness in Waterloo Region? When will God address the mental health crisis happening among teens and young adults in our country? I could go on for the number of issues in our world are endless. There are lots of people who are in need of God acting, who are waiting for God to establish Heaven on Earth. During our weekly Advent services at church, our churches are saying prayers that express this waiting on God to act. This was true at my church a couple of weeks ago when we prayed: Leader: Together we wait. People: How long must we wait? Leader: No one knows when the time will come. So, go! Keep alert, strengthened by God’s faithfulness to you As this prayer says, “how long must we wait”…on God to hear our prayers and act? But is the theological assumption behind this prayer true? Is the reason these issues are not being addressed in our world because of God, because we are waiting on God to act? I actually jumped ahead and peaked at the worship resources for my church on the Sunday after Christmas…to see what we would saying on that day. Here is what I found. Leader: Together we rejoice! People: Our waiting is over! Leader: We’ve seen the One, the light to all peoples, who grew in strength and is filled with wisdom. The favor of God is upon him! Go! Rejoice! God is here! As these words express, we imagine in this Christmas reading that our waiting on God is over. However, we know that this is not totally true. In most cases, the waiting goes on. This suggest that we are not just waiting on God during the Advent season. There is another form of waiting occurring. I want to suggest that instead of people only waiting on God to act, God is also waiting. God is waiting on faithful people, like Mary and Joseph, the parents of Jesus, people who are willing to become vulnerable enough so that God’s spirit can enter and transform their lives. God is looking for people who are open to the Christ child to be born within them, that is, risk allowing God’s spirit to enter their soul so that healing and empowerment can happen. In doing so, they will discover that God truly loves them, that they are one of God’s beloved children, and that God is inviting them to become part of a growing people of light addressing the issues of darkness within our world. True, we are waiting on God to act. This is evident in our longing. But, God is also waiting on us to become vulnerable so that God can respond to our longings and respond to our prayers. This dual waiting is very evident within psychospiritual counselling. Clients come to their first counselling session often after a long time waiting on God to act and bring positive change to their lives. Eventually, their longing for healing becomes so great that they realize that maybe God is waiting on them and so they come to counselling with the hope that maybe we, as psychospiritual therapists, can help them work on their healing. However, the reason God is doing the waiting is because most people find it very hard to be vulnerable to anyone, let alone be vulnerable to God’s spirit. This is very evident in the first sessions with a client. People often come into counselling very guarded and resistant to becoming vulnerable even though a part of them longs to be seen by someone who truly understands their pain. I have found the Internal Family System (IFS) of counselling very helpful in understanding this confusing interplay that happens within clients between their longings for help and their resistance to letting help in. IFS perceives this resistance as a Protector part within our personality that keeps us from settling into this place of vulnerability. A Protector functions like a sub-personality. When our sense of “I” merges with a Protector, all our thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and behaviors are shaped fully by the painful memories and associations connected to this Protector. We can be happy and free one minute but when a Protector gets triggered and we discover ourselves merging with it, that happiness and freedom disappears and we find ourselves under the trance of the Protector, very anxious or angry or numb or stoic. It is important to realize that these Protector parts are doing a protective role, and a big part of this role is to avoid vulnerability. Some of these Protectors are mental protectors that are designed to keep us in our heads and avoid us feeling too deeply emotions in our hearts. Other Protectors are behavior protectors designed to keep us busy or keep us from doing things or meeting people that make us nervous. Other Protectors are feeling protectors who prevent us from feeling our tender emotions through expressions of rage, acts of physical numbing or denying our feelings. or doing behaviors that soothe our anxieties like drinking, smoking, shopping, medications, etc. These Protectors, which all people have, perform a very important protective function. They protect us from feeling the pain and negative emotions connected to younger parts within our souls who carry the wounds and traumas from our younger years. These childhood parts are called Exile parts by IFS for they are often hidden away in our psyche, out of sight, out of mind, by our Protectors. However, our Exile parts long to be seen, heard, and healed by God’s loving gracious spirit. Many of our deep spiritual longings come from our Exile parts. One could say that our Exile parts are the parts of us that are waiting on God to free them. Our Exile parts are the parts of us who long for God to come, who long for the Christ to come and minister to their needs. These longings explain the traditional religious notion of waiting on God to act that happens in our church and in our Scriptures. Our Exile parts know, at a deep unconscious level, that God’s spirit is their salvation. And yet, the reason God’s spirit cannot minister to these Exile parts within us is because of our Protectors. Our Protectors are very suspicious and distrusting of God, and this makes total sense. Remember, Protector structures formed in our soul because of attachment wounds and traumatic experiences that were too much for our souls to handle, times when God’s Spirit failed to protect us through our parents, other caregiving adults, etc. Being so young, our soul was too immature to manifest the spiritual resources needed to protect us from harm. Instead, mental and emotional mental structures, coping patterns, what IFS calls Protectors, formed to stabilize our soul so that we could survive. Due to this history, our Protectors keep us from this vulnerable place of being in the Present Moment due to the fear that the pain within our Exiles will be triggered again. Now you can understand why God is in a waiting stance too. God must wait for our Protectors to start trusting God’s spirit more so that our Exiles’ longing for God’s spirit can be realize. Seen in this way, you can begin to see the two sides of waiting. Our young Exile parts are waiting on God’s spirit to come and bring healing and salvation, to them. On the other hand, God is waiting for our Protectors to trust God enough to allow God’s spirit to minister to our soul. This aspect of God waiting on us is what I sense is missing in our churches today as we celebrate Advent in preparation for Christmas. How would churches celebrate Advent differently if we focused on what our Protectors needed so they could learn to trust God more? As I reflect on the individual stories of Mary and Joseph, the parents of baby Jesus, I can see hints of how they both wrestled with their Protector parts. I wish we had more details in our Bibles about their personal faith stories around Jesus’ birth. It would explain, how in the end, God’s spirit was able to heal and transform both their Exile and Protector parts so they could become willing actors in God’s plan. It would also help us today understand better how to help our Protector parts trust God more so that similar transformations could happen to each of us. Here, I have also found IFS helpful in understanding how to help our Protectors trust God’s spirit, what IFS calls the Self with a capital “S”. IFS has discovered that our Protectors also want to be seen, heard, validated, and eventually freed from their tiring and demanding role of protecting our Exiles. When our Protectors feel validated and understood by our deeper sense of Self, they slowly begin to trust God more which opens the door to deeper healing and salvation. Therefore, when we reach the end of Advent with the arrival of Christmas, instead of celebrating only the historic Christ child that was born 2000 years ago, we would also be celebrating the many ways God’s spirit has healed our Protectors and Exiles, and the fruits that come from this. With such healing, more of us would become like Mary and Joseph, people willing to take risks for God through becoming agents of God’s transforming love in the world. As I reflect on the individual stories of Mary and Joseph, the parents of baby Jesus, I can see hints of how they both wrestled with their Protector parts. I wish we had more details in our Bibles about their personal faith stories around Jesus’ birth. It would explain, how in the end, God’s spirit was able to heal and transform both their Exile and Protector parts so they could become willing actors in God’s plan. It would also help us today understand better how to help our Protector parts trust God more so that similar transformations could happen to each of us.
Here, I have also found IFS helpful in understanding how to help our Protectors trust God’s spirit, what IFS calls the Self with a capital “S”. IFS has discovered that our Protectors also want to be seen, heard, validated, and eventually freed from their tiring and demanding role of protecting our Exiles. When our Protectors feel validated and understood by our deeper sense of Self, they slowly begin to trust God more which opens the door to deeper healing and salvation. Therefore, when we reach the end of Advent with the arrival of Christmas, instead of celebrating only the historic Christ child that was born 2000 years ago, we would also be celebrating the many ways God’s spirit had healed our Protectors and Exiles, and the fruits that came from it. With such healing, more of us would become like Mary and Joseph, people willing to take risks for God through becoming agents of God’s transforming love in the world. I hope by now that you are seeing waiting in a totally different way. Yes, there is a part of us that is waiting on the Lord, our Exile parts that desire to be seen, heard, validated, and healed by God. But our Exile parts will wait in vain unless we understand why God’s spirit is also waiting, unable to minister to our longing parts. It is not until our Protector parts are ministered to, not with words of judgement but with words of grace and understanding, that healing begins to happen, and the waiting ends. When that happens, we can celebrate Christmas with more honesty and authenticity as we proclaim the words: All: Together we rejoice! Our waiting is over! The favor of God is upon him and us! Go! Rejoice! God is here! Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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