Lessee. Since I last posted, the Beautiful Young Man and I visited London and Dublin, and then returned to Nashville. As are many of you, I am now in the thick of work deadlines, holiday plans, and a dragged-out-and-dragging-me-down bout of flu-turned-bronchitis, so we'll wait until after Epiphany to get back to those photo diaries, yeah?

In the meantime: the subject line of this entry is from the sermon Rev. Gail delivered yesterday at church, "Giving Birth to Hope." It being the first Sunday of Advent, it had been advertised as a reflection on motherhood -- but Rev. Gail spoke also about women's relationships with their bodies, women enduring and then escaping battering, and how "God is with us when the people we know make it real" (i.e., in their actions, in everyday kindness and radiance).

The chamber choir sang Clif Hardin's arrangement of "Veni, Veni Emanuel." You can glimpse part of our rehearsal via this YouTube clip (caveats: this was the same evening as our first read-through of the piece, and a bunch of us were singing through colds, including me). Rev. Gail quoted from the version in the UU hymnal in her call to worship:

O come, you wisdom from on high,
from depths that hide within a sigh,
to temper knowledge with our care,
to render every act a prayer.

(I always have to suppress a small giggle when I see the UU version. There was another Advent service a couple of years ago when I blithely [and loudly] started to sing the lyrics I'd learned as a child -- which were not the ones in the hymnal, which I didn't realize until several lines in. Oops. As the choir processed up to the stage, the director stepped behind me and hissed "Traditionalist!" into my ear.)