Advent 2.3: Full and thrumming

Well, I wondered when this posting-every-day-of-Advent was going to hit a wall in terms of inspiration; turns out it's today. 10 days in--not too shabby, in the grand scheme.

Even as I write new pieces this season, I've found myself returning to Advent posts that I wrote five and six years ago, and feeling fresh meaning in them at a very different place in my life. So I want to share one of those pieces today.

I wrote this during Advent six years ago, when I lived in Charlotte, in a cozy brick duplex full of character that has since been heartachingly replaced by a massive ugly overgrown thing that barely fits in the small square corner lot. It was my first year living by myself, my first place of my own, and for that it will always hold a special place in my heart.

The other bit you should know is that I worked at a church just down the road, and this was my first Advent season putting together the worship bulletins. So here we are, a flashback to Advent 2011 (when I also felt less of a need for capital letters and, sometimes, punctuation).

At work I type hymn titles;
they get stuck in my head:
come, thou lo-ong ex-pect-ed je-e-sus
I look up and rain is pounding
born to set thy pe-e-ople free
all I want is a fireplace, cracklecozy
from our fears and sins release us
and union cafe hot chocolate
let us find our rest in thee

I am trying to feel out this time of wait, weight
the ad-vent, in-vent of something new?
I would like it to be more than the sudden
rush, whoosh, jump thump stump, but --
how do you weight, wait, wake, awake
at a desk, in your car, in your sleep?
Hours sleep, seep away and I feel, wait, WAIT!

My favorite time of day, I think, is lunch:
I stand in my tiny sun-soaked kitchen,
reheating beans and rice; water spins in my kettle.
Terri Gross's fresh air voice wraps 'round me.
I feel frozen with potential in this one quiet hour,
imagining what I could do if the sun never set,
and yet --
wake, awake, for night is flyyyyying...

(How can it be both?)

Advent, full and thrumming.
Christ-child coming.

Advent 2.2: More on the middle

Yes, the middle verses we sing without music, relying on one another to keep the melody, to expand the harmonies, to get through, back to the refrain we know. Because sometimes--most?--that's what the middle means: just getting through, and we're not even sure how. No instruments to lead us or show the way; no strong accompaniment to help us fake it til we make it, or give us an excuse not to sing at all. Only our own wavering voices pushing onward, stumbling over wrong notes aplenty. Until we hear another voice next to us, or behind us, that holds the tune. And we start to hear it, to feel it, more deeply within ourselves--their strength shines its way into us. Soon we realize that we are beginning to find the notes in our own soul. Maybe they were already there and we'd lost them; maybe they hadn't ever existed until now, or not that we knew. But it's those voices echoing around us that help us find our way again.

Yes, when the middle verses first arrive, we think they're all about waiting, and maybe we can't wait to be finished--slogging along until we get the triumphant organ back for the joy-filled final stanza where God surely resides, when we can lean on the sturdy backdrop once again. But as we find ourselves approaching the end of the middle, we realize that what first felt like a slog actually turned into something holy and good. That having to journey through the notes without a map started out lonely, but then we listened to the mingling of voices: soft and strong, melody and harmony, coming to know our place among them, kept steady and courageous by them.

We realize that God is present in the middle verses more fully than we could have ever known.

Advent 2.1: Middle verses

Oh, friends, it's true: so much of why I love the church is wrapped up in song.

I'll admit, I cling to a particular type of singing. Contemporary worship music never grabbed my soul; I was never the type to raise my hands and close my eyes; partly my personality and partly because I wasn't raised on it, it didn't take up space first in my heart.

So give me the red Methodist hymnal and its sacred tunes, some peppy some slow, complex with harmonies and sheet music that I can (mostly) follow, set down on paper from the hearts of women and men from centuries ago or yesterday, the same questions, same wonders, same love. Songs that I connect with people, places, and moments that have given me God. Songs that lift my heart when I'm low or reaffirm my hope for the world.

Advent only heightens my musical immersion, perhaps because I have so many of those associations with this sensory season.

On Sundays year-round on most every hymn we sing, our organist, Timothy, will stop playing for the middle verses.

Today during our Lessons and Carols service, I realized that when he does this, it's an act of trust and an act of grace--trust that we will keep the song going on our own, grace that we actually do. I live for the mixing of our voices, the blending of harmonies above our heads, rising higher and diving deeper than we can understand--but somehow, I still feel it, the heights and depths of what I cannot fully understand.

In this music that we create, every voice matters, echoing our life together and the life--whatever life--that exists beyond us.