KEEPING VIGIL

“I will keep vigil with you.” It was my new spiritual director speaking. He had listened to me ramble on and on about what was not happening in my spiritual and vocational life. I’d been talking for most of an hour and I was even boring myself. There was a silence. I didn’t have anything more to say; I had touched on everything I could think of that I should say to him. It was quiet for awhile. Then he took a breath and shifted in his seat, rearranging his imposing monk’s robes around him. “I will keep vigil with you.”

I was at a loss. “Protestants don’t have vigils”, I stuttered. “I’m not really sure what that means.” He asked if I had ever experienced the Vigil of Easter or the Vigil of Advent. Well, yes, I had been at Easter Vigil. He explained that monks get up in the night to wait, fully expecting to be surprised by what God has been doing in the dark. It is not just waiting, he said, it is keeping watch for something wonderful that you know is coming. I had to sit for a few minutes to absorb the difference between waiting and keeping vigil. It seems that keeping vigil is a way of being engaged in what’s already on its way, even though you can’t see it yet. There is a quality of certainty in the expectation that appeals to me because it is so much more active than the passive “waiting” that has been so frustrating and depressing during this time. I love the thought that he will be watching, praying, expecting with me, preparing for whatever my own great surprise will be.

I’ve been thinking about vigils, about my own experience of prayerful waiting. Perhaps this is not such a new experience after all. I remember sitting by my beloved Aunt Anita’s bedside in the hours before she died. I thought I would read or knit while I sat in the room with her. But I could do neither. Somehow being in that time with her took all my concentration, all my awareness. Something awesome was happening to her as she lay so still. I could almost see and feel it. I was somehow part of it, and privileged to be there. I remember the time at the end of my pregnancies, the big countdown to the day when I would undergo the transformation of labor and meet my child. Somehow I already knew that child, I could put my hand on its head as it moved across my belly from hip to hip. I knew when it was awake and when it was asleep. But she was still a complete mystery as a human being. She and I were keeping vigil together, awaiting the surprise of meeting each other.

So vigil-keeping is not as unfamiliar as I first thought. We Protestants have been there, too. We know that God is always faithful to the promises that sustain us. We know that God’s steadfast love always leads us forward into the next surprise if we can keep awake through the quiet of the night. “Stay with me, remain here with me, watch and pray”, are the English words of a Taize hymn that repeats and repeats in the dark as worshippers approach the cross in the candlelight. Keeping vigil is lonely sometimes, but it’s not such a bad place to be.