In The Echoes Return Slow, poet R.S. Thomas wrote of faith: You have to imagine a waiting that is not impatient because it is timeless. Davis sees this as the same sentiment Tillich expressed in a sermon on “Waiting” in his 1948 collection The Shaking of the Foundations: “He is God for us just in so far as we do not possess Him. … We have God through not having him.” Later Tillich adds, “Waiting is not despair. It is the acceptance of our not having, in the power of that which we already have.” For Thomas, the struggle was to learn just that: waiting is not despair. |