It is hard to measure up. In our lucid moments, we admit this. Rarely is there a day when we cannot echo these words by Henri Nouwen: There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, and unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations. A gnawing sense of being unfulfilled underlies our filled lives. It would seem that St. Paul understood this better than many when he said: “Woe to me, wretch that I am, the good I want to do, I cannot do; and the evil I want to avoid, I end up doing!” Nobody does it perfectly, and accepting this, our congenital inadequacy can bring us to a healthy humility and perhaps even to a healthy humor about it. But it should bring us to something more: prayer, especially the Eucharist. The Eucharist is, among other things, a vigil of waiting. When Jesus instituted the Eucharistic celebration, he told the disciples to keep celebrating it until he returned again. The early apostolic communities cannot be understood outside of the matrix of intense expectation. They were communities imminently awaiting Christ’s return. They gathered in the Eucharist, among other reasons, to foster and sustain this awareness, namely, that they were living in wait, waiting for Christ to return. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that the older he gets, the less confident, in some ways, he is becoming. “I don’t always know whether I’m following Christ properly or even know exactly what it means to follow Christ, and so I stake my faith on an invitation that Jesus left us on the night before he died: To break bread and drink wine in his memory and to trust that this if all else is uncertain, is what we should be doing while we wait for him to return.”