In this episode of the Next Step Podcast, musician Brendan Knorp and Visual Faith™ Ministry Artist Ann Gillaspie join author Justin Rossow to talk about the text, the music, and the art in Chapter 3: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel from the resource Light in the Darkness: A Hymn Journal for Advent & Christmas.
Before this episode gets quite off the ground, Justin gets to ask Brendan about the origins of the A Light in the Darkness CD, now availableon your favorite streaming services as well ason YouTube. It turns out, Brooke and Brendan have been making Advent music together for years!
As part of that introduction, you'll also hear Brendan talk about his role in formatting the hymn and songs for the Hymn Journal series from Next Step Press and how meaningful it was to see his work on music layout become the backdrop for artwork in our online community.
After that opening discussion, Justin will pray and Brendan will read the Zephaniah 3 passage on page 25 of the hymn journal. Zephaniah 3 is a key verse for Chapter 7 of the bookDelight! Discipleship as the Adventure of Loving and Being Lovedby Justin Rossow. You can hear the author read that chapter, titled "He Will Rejoice Over You With Singing," beginning with the podcast Songs of Belonging.
Ann, Brendan, and Justin will highlight some of their take-aways from that Zephaniah 3 reading before Justin turns the page to the devotion, titled "Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel."
After we listen to the first two verses of the song "Emmanuel" from Brooke and Brendan, Justin gets to ask some more specific questions about the development of this song and it's unique guitar accompaniment. Brendan mentions the unique guitar tuning required by the piece (available here for those interested) and talks a little but about how the song evolved over the years, mentioning a recent video of Emmanuel.
After we hear the last verse of the song, Justin and Ann explore about the O Antiphon Bible Margins project starting on page 29 of the hymn journal. This isn't the first time Ann has brought her gift for Bible Margins to a hymn journal. You can read more about how you might use or adapt this faith practice in Ann's blog, "Bible Margin Art: Comfort in the Midst of Crisis."
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