I spoke about the English poet John Keats and his idea of negative capability that gives gusto, enthusiasm, energy, joy, to life. This is the joy of the gospel. It doesn’t mean we’re always happy, it doesn’t mean that we always get what we want. That would be totally unrealistic. But ‘gusto’ is a good word to describe what grows out of this deep waiting, this patience with the reality of nature and the nature of reality. We so often want to speed up reality because we become impatient, and then we begin to get out of line with reality itself. Because we can’t speed up nature, it takes a certain amount of time for seeds to grow, for a child, for a baby to grow in the womb, takes a certain amount of time for us to learn a new language.
(The Art of Waiting by Laurence Freeman OSB)
