Week 3 of Advent: Waiting expectantly

As we continue to journey through the Advent season, Sr Penelope explores the theme of Advent as expectant waiting for Someone we both know and don’t know at the same time, inspired by a painting by Richard Cartwright –  The Garden in Spring.

Richard Cartwright is a very successful contemporary artist and it is easy to see why this is. He takes the inspiration for his paintings from the everyday world around his home in Bristol, and on one level they are easily comprehensible as pleasing pictures; yet somehow his pictures always point to some deeper reality within the human spirit. Always working in the quiet solitude of night, he paints out of that mysterious place within each of us, where our solitude – the essential loneliness of the human heart, so often experienced as an anguished silence and emptiness, meets God.

Certain themes recur throughout his work. One such is the theme of the enchanted garden – perhaps the primeval garden, Eden. This is either enjoyed for its own luxuriant growth, or has as a focal point a table, bare but for the cloth covering it. Sometimes there is also a single chair placed invitingly beside it. ‘ The Garden in Spring’ is a good example of this: Everything in the picture has the air of expectant waiting for someone unknown to us, who will surely come.

Advent is precisely that. We both know who He is – but at the same time we do not know. Our only certainty lies in the fact of that coming: ‘That He will come is certain as the Dawn’; and shrouded in Mystery we try to prepare ourselves. We wait. We want our table to be ready for a hospitable welcome, yet all we can do is to spread the cloth. If we are honest, we know that trying to load it with our own merits and good deeds is futile and a ‘red herring’. Only He can arrange the banquet, the centrepiece of which is surely the priceless gift of our inner poverty; an open heart ready to receive all from Him.

“Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.”

From the poem by George Herbert, Love

Now it is not my table, but His, and I for whom He waits patiently until I can trust Him enough to come out of the shadows and let my poverty be seen for what it is, accepted, and thus able to be transformed.

“You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.” (Ibid)