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| Pink Floyd |
I've got two songs for you tonight. Both, in my estimation, are Advent songs. The first is Time by Pink Floyd. It is largely a re-statement of Ecclesiastes, which may be the most Advent-ish book of the Bible, at least in the way I've come to understand Advent.
I'm still searching for the "hope" everyone likes to talk about during Advent. If it's real, I'll find it. But I'm not going to assume it exists and I'm not going to be satisfied with words like "joy" and "peace." And another thing, I don't think you're allowed to talk about loving enemies until you've hated someone enough that looking at them makes your left eye twitch and standing in their presence makes your lip curl in a way you only thought possible in cartoons or Billy Idol music videos. Anyways (or anyway as Joe Martyn Ricke says), here's the song. Let it land on you like a midnight snow on the 18th day of Advent.
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say
Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
When I come home cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away, across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell
The second song is Stop This Train by John Mayer. This one makes me well up about half the time. That second to last verse always gets me. I think about good friends like Jon, Ben, Jordan, and Daniel. I think about growing older. My parents. Time ticking away. I think about evenings I spent as a child, at the old house, when my mom was my age, and everything feels so fleeting and impermanence wraps me in its cold arms. Still, I think there's hope in this song, a hope that Pink Floyd doesn't offer (and that's okay). There's an Advent lesson in all this, in Mayer's song and in Pink Floyd's. I just don't know fully what it is yet. I'll get there.
No, I'm not color blind
I know the world is black and white
I try to keep an open mind
But I just can't sleep on this, tonight
Stop this train
I want to get off and go home again
I can't take the speed it's moving in
I know I can't
But, honestly, won't someone stop this train?
Don't know how else to say it
I don't want to see my parents go
One generation's length away
From fighting life out on my own
Stop this train
I want to get off and go home again
I can't take the speed it's moving in
I know I can't
But, honestly, won't someone stop this train?
So scared of getting older
I'm only good at being young
So I play the numbers game
To find a way to say that life has just begun
Had a talk with my old man
Said, "Help me understand"
He said, "Turn sixty-eight
You'll renegotiate"
"Don't stop this train
Don't for a minute change the place you're in
And don't think I couldn't ever understand
I tried my hand
John, honestly, we'll never stop this train"
Once in a while, when it's good
It'll feel like it should
When you're all still around
And you're still safe and sound
And you don't miss a thing
'Till you cry when you're driving away in the dark
Singing, stop this train
I want to get off and go home again
I can't take the speed it's moving in
I know, I can't
'Cause now I see I'll never stop this train.
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