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A few years ago, I travelled to Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh, India, to teach classes. My overnight bus to Nagpur was scheduled for 9:30 pm, but it was delayed nearly two hours. I waited at the stop—perhaps dozing off or absorbed in my phone—distracted, not fully attentive. When I finally looked up, the bus had come and gone and was well on its way to my destination. I had missed it.
What should have been a straightforward journey became an ordeal: returning to the pastoral centre where I was staying, then piecing together multiple local transport options the next day. The trip took more than twice as long, in miserable conditions. Because of my impatience and distraction during the wait, I ended up shouldering a far heavier burden than if I had remained watchful.
This small mishap became a parable of a much larger story about impatience in waiting and its deep spiritual consequences.
When the people saw that Moses was slow in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him” (Ex. 32:1).
In that moment of anxiety, impatience and the desire to seize control gave birth to idolatry. Fresh from deliverance, enriched with Egypt’s gold and silver (Ex. 12:35–36), the Israelites craved a visible leader to guide them through the wilderness. They hurried to forge a golden calf—an inert object that had to be carried on human shoulders.
The irony is striking: they wanted a god to lead them, yet ended up bearing a powerless burden themselves. Moses had ascended the mountain to commune with God and to receive the Law written on stone, but he returned to find the covenant shattered before it had truly begun. Impatience had undone it. Three thousand fell, and the path forward lay broken.
Miriam, Moses’ sister and a prophetess, offers a poignant glimpse into the promise and fragility of the Old Covenant. She once led Israel in triumphant praise after the Red Sea:
Miriam the prophetess…took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and dancing. And Miriam sang to them, “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously…” (Ex. 15:20–21)
Yet in Numbers 12, she falters—speaking against Moses out of envy and presumption: “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?” (Num. 12:2). Her challenge to God’s chosen mediator results in her being struck with leprosy, and she must remain outside the camp for seven days. Only after her purification may she return. All of Israel waits for her restoration before continuing its journey.
Miriam’s prophetic song faltered when the test of waiting came. Yet patient fidelity was precisely what Israel was meant to learn in the desert. St. Paul later commends this same attitude to Timothy while explaining his own possible delay: “that you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). Rather than grasping at control, Israel was called to wait humbly and follow God’s plan.
In the New Testament, there is an analogous episode of waiting. The way it turns out can be a lesson to us. Christ, the new and greater Moses, ascends to the Father (Acts 1:9–11), promising “power from on high” (Lk. 24:49). The disciples gather in the Upper Room in prayer: “All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brethren” (Acts 1:14).
This time, the community is patient. Unlike the Israelites, the disciples have no gold or silver to melt into an idol (Acts 3:6). They have “left everything” to follow Jesus (Mt. 19:27; Mk. 10:28). They trust in His promise of a hundredfold recompense “now in this present age…with persecutions” and eternal life to come (Mk. 10:29–30). Stripped of possessions, they possess only faith. Their emptiness becomes the space for divine fullness; their only recourse is waiting.
The blessed mother Mary—bearing the same name as Moses’s sister (Miriam/Mariam)—appears as the true and perfected fulfillment of that earlier figure. Mary knew and believed in God’s promises: from the Annunciation (Lk. 1:32–33), through the inspired greeting she received from her cousin Elizabeth (Lk. 1:43), to her own beautiful Magnificat (Lk. 1:46–55), Mary understood that her Son is the fulfilment of God’s covenant with Abraham.
The contemporary Christmas pop song “Mary, Did You Know?” poses a question that reflects little familiarity with the biblical portrait of Mary. The Gospel itself leaves little doubt: Mary did know, and she lived that knowledge in patient, faith-filled surrender. Her fiat (“Let it be done to me according to your word,” [Lk. 1:38]) extended into the Upper Room, where she pondered in her heart (Lk. 2:19, 51) and taught the disciples how to wait on the Lord: in prayerful communion, without covetousness and without distraction.
At Pentecost, the promise arrives—not as a heavy, earth-bound idol carried by weary hands, but as wind and fire descending, filling the house, and writing the Law on hearts (Acts 2:1–4; cf. Jer. 31:33; Ezek. 36:26–27; 2 Cor. 3:3). The golden calf symbolized human impatience grasping at control: fashioned from material wealth, immobile except when humans bore it. The Holy Spirit descends gently like a dove (cf. Mt. 3:16; Gen. 8:11). Harmless (Mt. 10:16), spotless, and mild, as St. Thomas Aquinas notes, the Spirit gives freedom, purity, and peace (Summa Theologiae III, q. 39, a. 6, ad 4). He brings understanding and emancipation from within.
Here is another identifying parallel: where impatience at Sinai led to the death of three thousand, patient waiting at Pentecost brought salvation to three thousand. The Church turned from dead idol to the living and life-giving Spirit; from broken stone tablets to grace inscribed on the heart. That should fill us with assurance: “Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay” (Heb. 10:37). The blind guide that kept us wandering gives way to the Spirit who carries us, for the Lord’s forbearance is our salvation.
Mary teaches the Church what Israel had yet to learn: to wait upon the Lord without contriving alternatives, trusting that what seems like delay is often the very means by which God brings His promises to fulfilment.
In our culture of immediate gratification, when God seems delayed—in prayer, vocation, suffering, or the world’s brokenness—we fashion golden calves: distractions, self-reliance, false securities. Missing my bus taught me that divided attention while waiting only creates burdens of our own making.
What if, instead, we imitated Mary—letting go of everything, embracing poverty of spirit, and waiting attentively in prayer? We trust that what appears to be delay is in fact mercy, as the New Testament teaches: “The Lord is not slow…but is patient toward you” (2 Pet. 3:9), and “Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay” (Heb. 10:37). In such patient endurance we learn to live rightly in God’s household, becoming pillars of truth until the promise is fulfilled.
Pentecost does not simply conclude the story; it reveals what faithful waiting finally becomes. The disciples gathered in the Upper Room do not attempt to force God’s hand, nor do they manufacture a false god of their own. They pray. They remain together. And at the heart of that quiet expectancy stands Mary, the perfect example of patience. The Church is born from this shared attentiveness. The God who once bore Israel “on eagles’ wings” out of bondage (Ex. 19:4), and who carried His people through the wilderness “as a man carries his son” (Deut. 1:31), now lifts the Church by the breath of His Spirit, turning the burden of the Law into the freedom of life in the Spirit.
Come, Holy Spirit, through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, who prayed with the apostles in the Upper Room as the Church awaited Your coming. As You overshadowed her at the dawn of the new creation, descend again upon us. Carry us where we cannot carry ourselves, teach us to wait with attentive hearts, and liberate us from the impulse to grasp what belongs to Your Providence alone. Gather us into patient hope, and bring to completion in us the life You have begun. Amen.
