Watching And Waiting

Entering Into The Thick Of Life

I visited the AGO this week with my daughters to view the colourful and creative art exhibition of Pacita Abad whose work embodies “the Philippine concept of “borloloy,” a Tagalog word that loosely translates to “excess ornamentation.” Abad joyfully adorns her paintings, clothing, and surroundings with buttons, beads, mirrors and cowrie shells. Interestingly (from my perspective as a diver), Abad was also a skilled scuba diver who dove the waters of the Sulu Sea and created wonderful large-scale ”trapunto” paintings expressing the vibrant colours and marine life of the dynamic underwater world.

At her heart Abad was a woman who was committed to social justice and held the “belief of the transformational power of creativity” (AGO exhibition on Pacita Abad). An important theme which she consistently communicated was the power of “watching and waiting” and doing so actively and not passively. Not just blithely “watching life” go by, but “waiting” with an intensely engaged presence that impacted the “now” in which she lived.

I believe we can learn from the modelling of Pacita Abad. How to “watch and wait” with power, not impotence; strength, not weakness; vigour, not lethargy; and most of all, passion, not passivity.

No doubt as we move farther into 2025 we will all have copious occasions to watch and wait. Either at the grocery store, drugstore, doctor’s office or the perennial traffic jams of living in a big city. Whatever the nature of our waiting may we learn to fill it with positive energy and not negative complaint so that we wait with true hope and not simply wishful thinking.

To that end I am helped by the wisdom of Father Nouwen who spoke from the Community of Daybreak about the capacity of dynamic waiting,

“True patience is the opposite of a passive waiting in which we let things happen and allow others to make the decisions. Patience means to enter actively into the thick of life and to fully bear the suffering within and around us. Patience is the capacity to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell as fully as possible the inner and outer events of our lives. It is to enter our lives with open eyes, ears, and hands so that we really know what is happening. Patience is an extremely difficult discipline precisely because it counteracts our unreflective impulse to flee or to fight.” (Henri Nouwen)

In these first weeks of 2025 may we embrace a fulsome “watching and waiting”—a seeing that prepares us for action rather than a spiritlessness that promotes apathy.