Waiting in Sacred Space

The retreat director’s instructions were simple enough: “Sit quietly for twenty minutes. Don’t try to pray. Don’t try to think holy thoughts. Just be available to whatever comes.” Simple instructions, perhaps, but sitting in that circle of silence with fifteen other retreatants, I discovered something unsettling. I had forgotten how to wait.

Now when it comes to Not waiting for something, I’m quite good at that kind of waiting. Waiting for the coffee to brew, waiting for traffic to move, waiting for test results or phone calls or the right moment to have a difficult conversation. That’s the waiting of anticipation, of problem-solving, of preparing for what comes next. But this was different. This was waiting without agenda, resting without purpose, being present without trying to accomplish anything at all.

My mind, trained by decades of productivity culture, immediately began offering suggestions. “While you’re sitting here,” it whispered, “you could plan tomorrow’s schedule. Or pray for your family. Or contemplate on that scripture passage from this morning.” It was as if my interior life had become a helpful but anxious assistant, unable to believe I might actually want to just sit and be available to whatever God might want to offer in the silence.

This kind of waiting—what the contemplative tradition calls “sacred space”—requires a fundamental shift in how we understand our relationship with time, with God, and with our own souls. It asks us to trust that sometimes the most important thing we can do is nothing at all, or at least nothing that looks productive from the outside.

Zooming to scripture for a moment … I think of Mary, sitting at Jesus’s feet while Martha bustled about with important tasks. Martha’s complaint was reasonable: there was work to be done, and Mary was just sitting there. But Jesus defended Mary’s choice to wait in his presence, to create sacred space for listening rather than doing. “Mary has chosen what is better,” he said, and it’s a choice that still confuses us in our achievement-oriented world. Many homilists have tried to explain this over the centuries … and still do.

The soul, it turns out, is like a garden that requires a different kind of attention than we might expect. We want to plant seeds, water plants, pull weeds—to do something purposeful. But the deepest cultivation happens in the waiting, in the patient attention that allows us to notice what is already growing, what needs tending, what wants to emerge without our forcing it.

During that first retreat silence, I began to understand why the mystics spoke of “divine darkness” and “unknowing” not as problems to be solved but as sacred territories to be entered. When we stop trying to figure everything out, when we release our grip on the need to understand and control, we create space for a different kind of knowing to emerge. The kind that comes not through thinking but through being, not through analysis but through presence.

This waiting is not passive. It requires what I can only call active openness—a quality of attention that remains open and alert without grasping or chasing after anything in particular. Like a photographer waiting for the perfect light, we position ourselves and then allow what wants to happen to happen. (Now that’s my kind of waiting!)

In centering prayer, we learn to return gently to a sacred word when thoughts arise, not because thoughts are bad but because we’re practicing a different way of being present. We’re learning to rest in God rather than work for God, to receive rather than achieve. It’s a form of prayer that makes no sense to the part of us that measures success by output, but it speaks to the deeper part that longs simply to be held.

The breath becomes our teacher in the practice of waiting. We don’t try to control our breathing or make it special—we simply notice it, allow it to carry us deeper into presence. In the rhythm of inhale and exhale, we find an ancient pattern of receiving and releasing, of being filled and emptied, that mirrors the spiritual life itself.

Sometimes what arises in the sacred space of waiting is difficult emotion—grief we’ve been avoiding, anger we’ve suppressed, fear we didn’t know we were carrying. The temptation is to suppress these feelings, to analyze them, to make them disappear. But waiting in sacred space teaches us a different response: to simply be present with what is, to hold our own experience with compassion, to trust that feelings, like weather, will change if we don’t resist them.

This practice challenges everything our culture teaches us about time and productivity. We live in a world that equates busyness with importance, constant activity with purpose. The idea of spending time doing nothing—especially nothing that produces measurable results—feels almost wasteful. Yet the contemplative tradition insists that this kind of waiting is not only valuable but essential for spiritual growth.

I remember a conversation with a friend who was going through a difficult divorce. “I just need to do something,” she kept saying. “I need a plan, I need action steps, I need to fix this.” But sometimes life calls us into liminal space, those in-between times when action is not what’s needed. Sometimes we’re called to wait in the darkness, to trust the process, to let God work in ways we cannot see or understand. I know, that’s hard to swallow and accept.

This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of waiting in sacred space—being comfortable with the mystery, with not having all the answers immediately available. Our problem-solving minds want to know what will happen next, want to control outcomes, want to ensure that our waiting will produce specific results. But sacred waiting asks us to trust divine timing rather than human urgency, to believe that sometimes the most faithful response is to remain present without needing to fix anything.

The Formidable Waiting Game

The obstacles to this kind of waiting are formidable. Beyond the cultural pressure for constant productivity, there’s our own deep discomfort with silence and stillness. In the quiet, things emerge that we’ve been too busy to notice. Unresolved grief, unacknowledged longing, uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our relationships. The noise of our daily lives often serves as protection from these deeper realities.

There’s also what is almost an addiction to urgency—the belief that everything important must be addressed immediately, that waiting is somehow irresponsible or lazy. We’ve trained ourselves to respond instantly to every notification, every request, every internal prompting. Learning to wait, to be still, to resist the impulse to react can feel like learning a foreign language.

But in the practice of sacred waiting, we discover something surprising: that our souls are not empty spaces that need to be filled with activity and achievement, but already complete presences that need only to be recognized and received. The peace we seek is not something we must create but something we must allow, not something we earn but something we inherit by virtue of being created in God’s image.

This is not to say that waiting in sacred space is always peaceful or pleasant. Sometimes what we encounter in the silence is our own resistance, our boredom, our restlessness. Sometimes we meet parts of ourselves we’d rather avoid. But even these encounters are sacred, opportunities to practice the kind of unconditional presence that God offers to us—acceptance without judgment, attention without agenda.

The practice I’ve learned to treasure is simple: spending minutes each morning, sitting quietly sipping my morning tea without trying to accomplish anything spiritual or meaningful. Not prayer in the traditional sense, not meditation with specific techniques, just availability. Available to whatever God might want to offer, available to whatever my soul needs to communicate, available to the mystery of simply being alive in this moment.

Sometimes these ten minutes feel empty, unproductive, and pointless. I still savor them. Other times they overflow with insights, peace, or unexpected clarity about some challenge I’m facing. But the fruit of the practice is not in what happens during the waiting but in how it changes the quality of presence I bring to the rest of my life.

When we learn to wait in sacred space, we begin to recognize that all of life offers opportunities for this kind of presence. Waiting in line becomes a chance to practice patience. Sitting with someone who is grieving becomes an opportunity to offer the gift of non-anxious presence. Times of uncertainty or confusion become invitations to trust the process rather than force solutions.

The most profound discovery is that waiting in sacred space is not primarily about us receiving something from God; though that certainly happens; but about us learning to be the kind of people who can receive, who can be present, who can trust. It’s about cultivating the interior spaciousness that allows us to respond to life from a place of centeredness rather than reactivity.

This practice does not make us passive or disengaged from the world’s needs. Instead, it grounds our action in something deeper than anxiety or the need to prove ourselves. When we know how to wait in sacred space, our doing flows from being, our service emerges from love rather than obligation, our responses arise from wisdom rather than impulse. In a world that often feels chaotic and demanding, the discipline of sacred waiting offers an alternative way of being. It whispers the ancient truth that we are human beings, not human doings, and that our deepest identity rests not in what we accomplish but in whose we are. In the sacred space of waiting, we remember that we are beloved before we are useful, cherished before we are productive, held before we achieve.

Reflection and Photograph Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS