Technically, I suppose, this one doesn’t rate as an Advent song.  Still, it is the most beautifully truthful song I have heard this Advent season. 

If I’m honest, my own confident professions of God’s imminence--the ones preachers make as routinely as breakfast--don’t always match the reality of my heart.  Amidst my own frailty and that of others, I look just as awkwardly as everyone else for a glimpse of something holy, something angelic, something star-like to make love’s birth more immediate.       

But then today, while waiting for the lift, I stared at an infant asleep in a stroller, her bare feet curled together, small and perfectly formed.  Moments later, alone, I recognised holiness and it took my breath away.

There is something about this coming of God in a child that changes the view, that interrupts the horizon, that invades the most ordinary and routine places of life ... forever.  Everything is holy now.  Everything.

Peter Mayer’s ‘Holy Now’ may not make the Christmas carol list on Sunday, but it’s a gift to me.

‘When holy water was rare at best

I barely wet my fingertips

but now I have to hold my breath

It’s like I’m swimming in a sea of it

It used to be a world half there

heaven’s second rate hand-me-down

Now I’m walking with a reverent air

‘cause everything is holy now’