How Many Songs?

Second Sunday of Advent


“Time, which is now enclosed between the two advents of Christ--His first coming in humility and obscurity, and His second coming in majesty and power--has been claimed by God for His own. Time is to be sanctified like everything else, by the presence and the action of Christ.”
                             
                                                                        Thomas Merton




“How many songs do we have left?” my ten year old daughter asks during Mass. “I don’t know,” I reply.  She measures time with songs.  Sitting in our pew, with my arm around her, listening to a hymn of inherent voices falling over us from the choir loft like beaded drops from a laden sky, I thought about her question, about how we don’t know how many songs we have left in this life.  That this singing is sanctified by our Lord and God, by Jesus coming into the world and His coming again.  The two Advents of Christ measures us between in the music of living.  Our song, an air through our being and the notes we make in the moments, reminding me again, our time is not our own but belongs to God.  What a shift of how I perceive time and our being in it: to unfurl our praising from spools of love like bright ribbons into the air of now.  The song my family sings from our old, wooden pew blending with the voices from all the pews lining up around the world; making a joyful noise unto the Lord: our emptiness becoming song before Him.