Advent, the weeks leading to Christmas, is a time of anticipation- remembering the Israelites awaiting the Messiah and acknowledging our own waiting for his return.  It’s a season with enough heft and depth to evoke and hold our grief.  We remember the Israelits waiting and waiting for their deliverance.  We remember the massacre of the innocents when word reached Herod of the infant King’s birth.  And, in days such as these, we can’t ignore the incompleteness, the waiting-to-be-restored nature of our world. We also wait.

Most of what passes for Christmas music sounds vapid to my ears after the news from Connecticut.  Instead, I’ve been listening to the beautiful and sad album from Hymns from Nineveh, Endurance in Christmastime.  This is Advent music.  Here’s the title track, with lyrics that seem tragically prescient .

We’ve lost our fathers. We’ve lost our mothers. We didn’t quite think it would be this hard to endure the christmas time. We’ve lost our siblings. We’ve lost our children. We didn’t quite think it would be this hard to endure the christmas time.

Who can defeat the time we live in? Who can defeat the time we die in? Where shall we go with all the memories of you in the christmastime?

We’ve lost our story and we’ve lost our glory. We didn’t quite think it would be this hard to endure the christmas time. So we carry our heavy load-lights and hang them on the tree and we didn’t quite think they could shine so bright so bright in this christmas time…