Poetics of Waiting

Abstract

This article consists of three parts, excluding the Introduction and the Conclusion. The first part “What is it ‘to wait’?” is a lexicographical study on the word ‘waiting’, in various Indo-European languages. This lexicographical adventure that passes through some dense foliage will not only clarify the different connotations in the phenomenon of waiting, but will also lead us to the second part of the paper – “Waiting and Time Consciousness”. Here, the art of waiting is examined through the looking glass of Time as understood by the philosophers Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Heidegger. The questions of how we wait and why we wait are addressed in this section. The third part looks at the presence-absence of the waiting spirit in the post-truth era that we are living in. Titled, “We, the Hollow People”, this section highlights what happens to us when we forget to wait, forget to stand and gaze. The Concluding part “Waiting for God Who Awaits Us” speaks of Christians as “waiters”, waiting with and for God, the other, and also on oneself, not on lofty mountain peaks, but right down on the “bathroom floor”.

Keywords

• Keywords: advent, expectation, hope, time Consciousness, waiting