Day 16. Waiting. Listening.

photo: pixabay.com

Here is a favourite Christmas carol...

Wexford Carol

with Alison Krauss and Yo-Yo Ma

Advent is an expectant season. We wait poised for what Frederick Buechner names “the extraordinary moment.” He utilizes the image of an orchestra conductor waiting... waiting until he has the full attention of the orchestra, the full attention of the audience. It's that exact moment just before the music begins.

“The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart . . . The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.”

~ Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

photo: pixabay.com

“I shall attend to my little errands of love early this year,

So that the brief days before Christmas may be unhampered and clear

of the fever of hurry. The breathless rushing I have known in the past

shall not possess me. I shall be calm in my soul and ready at last

for Christmas. I shall have leisure — I shall go out alone from my roof and my door;

I shall not miss the silver silence of stars as I have before.

And oh, perhaps ... if I stand there very still ... and very long

I shall hear what the clamor of living has kept from me — The Angels' Song!”

~ Grace Noll Crowell

"Leisure," Poems of Inspiration and Courage (1928)

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Wishing you peace on this third Sunday of Advent

With love,

Brenda

xox

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