For 37 weeks — and, really, for a couple of years before that — my husband and I waited. Not long before Thanksgiving, 16 years ago, our twin sons were born healthy. The waiting was over. So was the stillness.
That Advent was a blur of feedings and changings and sleepless nights, when our newborns confused the moon with the sun, for weeks at a time. That season found me missing home and my family’s Advent rituals, including adding another figurine to our Nativity scene and making batches of springerle cookies, fragrant with anise, from an old family recipe. After baking, my mom spirited the tins of cookies into the basement, off limits until the holiday. So close and yet so far away!
While the infant Jesus and the Wise Men figurines waited in a drawer, we kids also waited for the sweetness of Christmas. But it was a distracted waiting. My childhood Advent season was packed full of Nutcracker performances and choir rehearsals, where we had been singing Christmas hymns since September. Only snowfall, paralyzing lake-effect blizzards blanketing Cleveland, brought true stillness.
All these years later, if there’s one carol that conjures such quietude, where Advent longing can enter my heart, it’s “Still, Still, Still.” The song is a favorite of mine for its angelic strains, whether performed in the original German or in English. But it’s the repetition that works on me this Advent. “Still, still, still” rings like a meditative prayer in a season made frenetic by secular trappings that seek to drown out my faithful yearnings.
As for this particular recording, my fellow church choristers will recognize not only the Cambridge Singers but British composer and arranger John Rutter, who is famous first and foremost for his Christmas music. The tune itself — here, sung a cappella — is a 19th-century Austrian carol meant to be sung together.
“Still, still, still, the night is calm and still,” and I think of the Wise Men, their eyes fixed on a star, walking steadily on toward the child Savior (“Sleeping in snatches,” said T. S. Eliot in his poem “Journey of the Magi”). I think of those sleepless nights with my infant sons and the lullabies I sang to them. And 16 years feels like no time and all, and I wait for the sweetness of Christ born anew, all over again.
Click here to listen to the song. | Click here to find our Advent playlist. | Click here to find more Advent reflections.
