During this season of Advent we are watching and waiting. Watching for signs of the Kingdom of God as we await His glorious παρουσία (however we might discern or imagine the details of what this might mean). There seems to be a lot of waiting in many aspects of our lives, and perhaps there is great value in sacralising that by focussing on it for a liturgical season and seeking the grace that might be found in it.

The music that I am waiting with this week is a relatively recent composition by Sally Beamish, to an original text by Katrina Shepherd called In the stillness. Generally thought of as a Christmas Carol I find it unmistakably belongs to Advent – we may be in a Church, preparing, even, for Midnight Mass, with candlelight and a choir – but we are waiting for the presence of the child ‘soon to be born’.

The music inhabits that space of waiting; a short anthem in a gentle homophony coloured by very gentle points of harmonic tension. Not so static as to be unmusical, but neither is it so eventful as to suggest present activity rather than hopeful expectation. Like much Christmas music there is a close risk of the saccharine, rescued perhaps from being kitsch only when heard by those who believe in the coming moment of the incarnation as a truthful proclamation that God cannot possibly be as we might have thought – that imagined ‘god’ would not countenance becoming human; the belief that He did forces us to change our preconceptions.

A short post, this week, about a short piece of music, but the music is no less beautiful for that. If I might have inspired you, go and listen to it; sit with it, and pray for the grace to be found in waiting.