BY Sabine Peterka
Scrambling with some F/friends one Sunday morning to be on time to Meeting for Worship, one of them commented, “It’s funny that we’re trying not be late to a meeting that is just waiting; it’s not like anyone is waiting for us, but everyone is waiting and we’ll join them in quietly waiting whenever we get there.”
What does it mean to have waiting worship?
As a frequent bus-rider, I spend lots of time waiting and I wonder if bus stops can be sacred spaces. They certainly don’t seem holy at first: You stand on a corner in blazing hot sun in the summer or unshoveled slush in the winter. On the off-chance there is a shelter with a bench, it reeks of pee. You check the MCTS bus tracker on your phone and instead of the “5 minutes away” you naively expected, it just says “Delayed.” And now your journey is in the bardo. The waiting begins.
At the bus stop, finding the joy and meaning in waiting often feels difficult. I like to challenge myself to a solitary game of “I Spy” as a way to pay attention to the landscape: I spy a sign of climate change, I spy systematic government neglect, I spy a marketing trick. Sometimes there are other people in waiting:
A child dancing across the street to no music I can hear, flinging himself around parking meters, collapsing exhausted in a strip of grass before jumping to his feet again to prance up and down the sidewalk until his mom emerges from a building.
A woman in the dark asking me to help her get a screwdriver in her glove – a secret weapon of self-defense – while she tells me of her trauma. After we get the glove situated, she touches my hair and when I flinch, she says, “Don’t worry, I won’t use the screwdriver on you! I’d defend you.”
A neighbor on election day reminding me to vote, if not for myself, then on behalf of his little granddaughter.
A kid climbing onto my bike seat (yes, I finally got brave enough to learn how to use the bus bike rack!) while his mom tries to keep his three siblings from running off too far or into any oncoming traffic.
An old guy telling me how the University has changed the neighborhood. He lived in an apartment on that now-empty lot until it was bought out.
A fellow passenger and I: strangers feeling like action movie co-stars as we get off one bus and run through a major construction zone to make our transfer to another line, only to realize it’s been delayed. “You have a pretty smile,” he says, ruining the moment because I’m not into meet-cutes.
I could tell story after story from my time at bus stops; there’s a lot to take in when I can see through the boredom. In waiting, I have a chance to notice something overlooked or make an unexpected connection or simply bear witness to the scene around me. Whether in the silence before a message in the Meeting House or the time on the corner before the bus arrives, the waiting holds something of its own.