There is no way to get flash to pause like you want. What you can do is set up a Timer and an event listener.
Rough draft code:
Code:
var nodes:XMLList; //the nodes you're interested in. populated outside this snippet.
var nodeArray:Array = new Array();
for each (var node:XML in nodes){
nodeArray.push(node);
}
var xmlTimer:Timer = new Timer(1000, nodeArray.length); //1 second
xmlTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, processANode);
xmlTimer.start();
function processANode(e:TimerEvent):void{
processXML(nodeArray.shift());
}
Where processXML is your node processing function.