With the onset of his blindness, Milton’s talent of writing was useless. What now? How could he serve God when glaucoma or a detached retina had taken away his sight? How could he fulfill his calling when his circumstances so thoroughly conspired against him?
Milton knew that God was not well-pleased with those who bury their talent in the ground. But is He the kind of God who demands we make bricks without straw? “Does God exact day-labour, light denied?”
In response to this fear, Milton leaned in to what he knew to be true. “God does not need either man’s work or man’s gifts.” Those who submit themselves to Him serve Him best. While He does have thousands working busily and visibly in productive callings, “they also serve who only stand and wait.”
The wisdom of that last line is a comfort when hopes are disappointed, when affliction is ongoing, when discouragement is deepening — “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
When nothing seems to be working, when everything is two steps forward and three steps back, when plans are doomed to failure — “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
When the body faints in utter exhaustion, when the heart gives up in dismay, when the soul is as parched as the desert — “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
And so Milton submitted himself to the will of God and waited. Two years after he composed this sonnet, the blind poet was inspired to begin a work that has been named the finest epic poem in the English language.
With the help of secretaries, Milton dictated the 10,000 lines of Paradise Lost. He described the ruin of our first parents, Adam and Eve. He described the overweening pride of Lucifer, the one who refused to submit and bear God’s “mild yoke,” the one who thought it “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
Today, at Paideia, we read Paradise Lost in high school, we educate children with the truths of Milton’s epic, and we attempt to “repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.”
And in repairing those ruins, we learn that those “who best bear his mild yoke, serve him best.” And that sometimes, the way to submit and serve, is to “stand and wait.”
