Here & Now

By KAREN NELSON
Writer, Editor.

I became a staff musician in a large Catholic parish when I was fourteen. I had a good voice and boundless energy to give to God and church. Nineteen years later, I was a Sunday cantor, adult and children’s choir director, composer, liturgist, and moderator of the parish council for $200 a month. I led worship every week, every year without fail, every Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost, Advent, Lent, Christmas, sick or well, rain or shine.

When life moved me to another state, God led me to another church, a large Presbyterian one, providing a living wage for 40 hours a week to help administer all their worship services and holiday seasons, which I did faithfully for another twenty-seven years. I had less boundless energy but a steady supply of hope to weather all the ups and downs. God was faithful, and I was privileged to be part of many heartfelt celebrations of that community through the decades.

In retrospect, not counting the two services every Sunday, that’s forty-six years of approximately 140 Easter and 185 Christmas services. Forty-six Lents and forty-six Advents. That’s a lot of Hallelujah Choruses and Silent Nights.

That’s a lot of Hallelujah Choruses and Silent Nights.

I became deeply embedded in the life of that Presbyterian church, just as I had been in the Catholic one. It was invigorating and exhausting, inspiring and depressing. I hated it. I loved it. I was part of the diaspora of church musicians and laity everywhere, daily preparing the way of the Lord for the people of God. But it wasn’t until about ten years ago that I had what I would call my first real Advent.

* * *

Driving home in the light snowfall from the midnight Christmas Eve service, after having helped reset the church to prepare it for the morning crowds, I idly counted the streetlights as they flickered by, dim and lonely haloes of light on an otherwise dark and empty road. It was almost 2:00 a.m. The only sound was the click-swish of the windshield wipers and my own occasional tired sigh. I let my mind wander and drifted into reverie.

I can’t explain how it happened, even now. No heavenly light was breaking in, no choir of angels, no voice of God. In one moment, I was alone with my thoughts; in the next, I was not. In the car, Presence was sitting quietly so close I looked in the rearview mirror, fully expecting to see a face. But there was none, just the empty back seat with my winter coat flopped over the back.

In that sudden fullness of companionable stillness, I felt Someone share with me the solid grip of the steering wheel and the slow circling of the stars. It was too sweet to fear, too strange to understand. I was still just me, but now completely connected to…everything. I was in a great choir that included the shadowed trees, the night creatures moving in backyards and alleyways, the snow falling, the coldness of the air, the light and the dark. The shift of my foot on the gas, my arm rising in the turn, was part of some sort of orchestra much grander than anything we had ever presented in worship. I felt as though I might be in this car driving home forever, content because of the music in me, music that was itself a complete silence. It made no sense. It made perfect sense.

That night, I was included in a small measure of the greater melody that the universe rings out in every galaxy in endless harmonies, all day and night, one song over and over: We’re waiting for You, You who are already here.

I try to keep my heart open as often as I can now, listening for that song that is a sort of eternal Advent, a hymn to the Presence here and not yet. Every Christmas Eve after that, until I retired, I hoped to share that music again on the drive home. Once again, I did. All the other times, not. Yet every year, that one drive home in the dark was a beautiful song in which to rest my soul, a time to breathe in that paradox that is waiting for the fullness of Grace to finally flow in its full symphonic beauty, even as we hear distant echoes of it now.

Lord, you are with us, and we wait for you. This is Advent, the masterpiece of Waiting, and the most beautiful music I know.