I wrote this song with my wife - poet, Fran Westwood - and our good friend and collaborator Brandon Davis for a Christmas Eve service in 2019. At the time our city of Toronto was deep in its (ongoing) housing crisis during a particularly vicious winter. People were dying on our streets, while the news was full of families being separated at

I wrote this song with my wife - poet, Fran Westwood - and our good friend and collaborator Brandon Davis for a Christmas Eve service in 2019. At the time our city of Toronto was deep in its (ongoing) housing crisis during a particularly vicious winter. People were dying on our streets, while the news was full of families being separated at borders and the politics of race were heating up all around us. We wanted to bring all of this with us into the service - into the nativity, as it were - because where else are we to look for Immanuel, but on frozen city streets, blocked from warmth and shelter, among the homeless, the orphaned and the displaced? 

This is really a song for Advent - for tender, whispered hope held out against the night. It's for all of us who find ourselves breathing our secret prayers into the darkness hoping someone is listening, waiting for the light.