Music and Silence
Dr. Laura Scow and I have had great fun creating our Favorite Advent & Christmas Hymn Podcast series--you can find the first five episodes (we have three more to go) on the Music @AllSaints YouTube playlist . More than any other holiday, Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without its music. But silence, too, is an important part of our preparation for the celebration of the Feast of the Incarnation...silence in Advent prayer, silence away from the bustle of the world. (Perhaps one of the unexpected things you've found, as I have, about this pandemic Christmas is that it is easier to stay disconnected from the distraction and noise of our typical consumer-focused secular holiday season?) I'm reminded of one of the letters from the demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood in C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, in which he describes how much he hates both music and silence: Music and silence-how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father...
So many emotions. But the greatest of these is - Hope for the future.
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