I Love You

I've recently re-discovered a band called The Blue Nile.  They were a trio out of Glasgow, Scotland.  I used to have the CD of probably their best album, Hats.

Somehow in my many moves to and fro, I misplaced that CD.  I found the complete album on youtube a week ago and have listened to it nearly every day since.

It's a 7-song, 39-minute album that begins with the yearning song "Over the Hillside."  The horns on that track slowly and majestically unfold to a heart-lifting crescendo.  Another of my favorites is the rhythmic and stirring "Headlights on the Parade."  The album ends with the gentle "Saturday Night."  However, all of the tracks are lovely.  When I'm not listening to the album on youtube, the songs keep playing in my head wherever I go.

Paul Buchanan was the singer and main song-writer in the band (that's him front and center in the picture below).  His singing style is passionate yet restrained.  There's a delicious tension in most of his songs.

The Blue Nile

I saw in an interview one of the other band members commenting on Buchanan's songs and saying, "Really, every song could be titled 'I Love You'."  I've listened to numerous other songs of theirs from other albums this past week and yes, I think "I Love You" just about sums it up. 


The Choice Food of Advent

I read this meditation earlier this week in Magnificat:

How busily employed you must be during this holy season in preparing a lodging for the Guest who is coming to you!  I fancy I can see you, as solicitous as Martha, and yet as peaceful as Magdalen, preparing to give to your coming Savior the service both of soul and body; and he is worthy of both, for he is your God.  O blessed time, which brings before our minds the truth that God came in the flesh to dwell amongst us, to enlighten our darkness and to direct our feet in the way of peace, so that being made his brethren, we might share in his inheritance!

Earnestly indeed may you long for Christ's Advent, and prepare your heart to be his dwelling-place, for men wished for his coming ages before his birth, so that the prophet styles him "the Desired of all nations."  Jesus gives himself to none but those who anxiously look for him.  Choice food is thrown away on such as cannot taste it, and so those who long not after God's presence cannot value him as they ought.  Our Lord hears "the desire of the poor" (Ps 10:17) and bends his ear to listen to the sighing of their hearts after him, for that is all he cares for in the children of men.  When their sighs reach him, he comes into their souls; nor can he refuse himself, for, as he tells us in the Canticle (4:9), "Thou hast wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse, thou hast wounded my heart with one of thy eyes and with one hair of thy neck."  What can be more tender than that which is wounded by a glance of the eye, or more weak than what is bound by a single hair?

by Saint John of Avila