Good Morning Everyone!! Happy Monday!! Sisyphus’ boulder is back at the bottom of the hill. The last full work week of 2025 is complete (if you’re lucky). Let’s get into this short week.

Since we have Christmas coming up, there’s a lot of fitting themes to explore this week. Because the liturgical season of Advent is wrapping up, we’re going to start with waiting.

Today, for our main course, we’re going to highlight the importance of waiting through the lenses of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. To burn that off, we’re going to do a simple exercise that brings anticipation to a mindful place. To wrap it up with our Book Nook, we’ll open up Augustine’s Confessions for more key insight on this topic.

Let’s dig in, Thought Breakfast is served!

Many people hate waiting. Whether it’s in line at the store, or for our upcoming vacation, we tend to feel the space in between now and the future as empty time.

In Catholic thought, waiting is rarely ever a passive experience. Even in the Bible, God often delays to expand the capacity for whatever’s about to come; not to withhold anything or anyone. This shows us that what comes too early often cannot be received properly, and waiting enlarges the vessel.

St. Augustine shows us that waiting is active formation, shaping the soul to receive what it cannot yet hold.

Augustine saw his impatience as a symptom of his misaligned desire. Suffering from lust and addiction, he was rushing toward the created goods because he didn’t trust God’s timing. Waiting exposed to Augustine what he was clinging to, what he feared losing, and what he demanded prematurely. His prescription, then, is to trust that fulfillment has an order beyond your capacity to comprehend; then you will be waiting properly, without rush.

Aquinas, on the other hand, views the subject with far less emotional attachment. For St. Thomas Aquinas, time is a tutor of the will. In his adoption of some Aristotelian ideas, Aquinas treats virtue as something that cannot, under any circumstance, be rushed. Habituation of these virtues requires time. During that time, the will matures through repeated restraint until virtue becomes a habit. Therefore, waiting physically trains temperance, hope, and the obedience of desire to reason. God’s grace works with time, not against it.

The season of Advent reframes waiting as hope, not impatience. Christianity as a whole asserts that waiting is not anxious anticipation, but rather a confident expectancy. Advent teaches us that God comes, but not on demand. Further, that readiness matters more than speed.

The modern world treats waiting as a problem to eliminate. We fill our boredom desperately by any means we know. Christianity treats waiting as a space where transformation happens. What if the delay is part of the work?

Try to answer these questions to yourself, keeping it as simple as possible:

“I was held fast, not by another’s irons, but by my own iron will. The enemy held my will, and from it he had made a chain and bound me. For from a perverse will came lust, and from lust obedience, and from obedience habit, and from habit necessity.”
- St. Augustine, Confessions VIII.11

Augustine is demonstrating here his internal transformation. He frames his waiting as a tension between desire and fulfillment. God delayed his conversion not to punish him, but to expand his soul’s capacity to receive.

Formation happens in delay because the self is reshaped before the gift of maturity, wisdom, or whatever it may be arrives. Waiting teaches us humility; where we recognize dependence rather than control.

Turning back to Advent, longing for the Messiah precedes the Incarnation thereof. Preparation precedes arrival. To wait well, then, is to allow desire to be purified instead of extinguished (going back to last week). The danger is not in waiting; the danger is in trying to fill waiting with substitutes.

Munch on that for today. Let the waiting for Thursday do nothing but build your excitement. Have as great a Monday as you can and come back tomorrow for another steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast!!

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Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast