Every child and reminiscent adult loves an opportunity to talk about his or her favorite aunt, the one who sees beyond facades parents can’t. Mine was the ex-punk-rock aunt, the one who dated Joey Ramone and always had two basset hounds. Most importantly, she listened with the same big ears as her basset hounds to all of your problems.

So even though the latest Innocence Mission release, Now the Day is Over, is a collection of reworked lullabies (lead singer Karin Peris sings to her children and has quietly been on the shelf since early March), any fan of the Lancaster, Penn., group can attest that it’s always worth mentioning this favorite aunt.

It’s a good call Innocence Mission hesitated before trying to follow up 2003’s Befriended, the band’s epiphany that made many critics’ year-end top 10 lists. Soft, gentle and nostalgic music walks a fine line between cliché-ridden background music and reading alone, tasting tang and sweet of that late-night sliver of lemon meringue pie just as one passes over a great literary conundrum. Songs on Befriended like “When Mac Was Swimming” and earlier shimmering stars like “On the Lakes of Canada” are those rare songs that can be confidently called sublime.

Years ago, the Innocence Mission had a major label debacle. But we won’t talk about that because it has nothing to do with the independent body of work the band has released over the past decade. In that time, the band’s unique sound, now emulated by bands like Over the Rhine, has been augmented by its tackling of two precious themes too often used as a political football — Christian spirituality and family.

Pennsylvania since the days of Quaker William Penn has been the center of true American religious rebellion. It is, however, far more inclusive and radical history than Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed’s story. The state is also the center of America’s Amish and Mennonite communities, which are not exactly stark in their range of practices as many seem to think. Along the gradation, closest to the life most TV addicts know, are the Brethren in Christ and from that denomination emerged a church, originally intended as a fellowship for quiet Christian rock musicians called Circle of Hope.

Circle of Hope members — hesitant to proselytize and not naming themselves Christians but believers — look like any other indie-rock kids or even goths, but their lives in the church are modeled after early, pre-Constantine Christians. At the center, they believe — supported quite firmly in the Old and New testaments — all music, secular and sacred, is inspired by God and, thus, given purpose. Associated with this fold are Over the Rhine, David Bazan (Pedro the Lion), Damien Jurado and the Innocence Mission.

Perhaps this is why Karen Peris and her husband make music that flutters like chimes of angels’ wings but still rolls like a thunderclap.

In every celebration of song Peris sings there is lilt in both her voice and the sound of the guitars that speaks with an honest shadow of a doubt. That said, does a better balance of melancholy and joy exist outside of the lullaby?

In our own lives, everything from Joni Mitchell songs to Curtis Mayfield gets adopted as lullabies. The same goes for Now the Day is Over. Territory covered includes “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Moon River.”

In that same vein, Louis Armstrong’s “What’s a Wonderful World” is an almost impossible song for a musician to make his or her own. When she sings it, Peris is the voice of a mother or father who can look into the abyss of war on a leaderless landscape and imagine the surging smile of a 3-year-old being tossed a red ball by a soldier who has for a moment, set down his weapon, (this reviewer thinks that’s the original intention for the song).

Another favorite interpretive subject, traditional American hymns sung with the understanding that most glory-bes happen in the supermarket aisle, are provided in “It is Well with My Soul” and title song “Now the Day is Over.” It’s that great territory where the holy, sinful, trite and triumphant all mix in that moment where one realizes that all those SUVs about to hit you in the parking lot don’t matter.

Maybe we’ll never see an afterlife without a-holes. But like the reassuring embrace of that aunt who has lived with catharsis and curiosity, the music of the Innocence Mission puts the comfort of a friend, a favorite sister and warm cup of blueberry tea in a really — and presently necessary — holy place.

Now the Day is Over is a whimsical fix for fans waiting impatiently for the real follow-up to Befriended. For newcomers to the world of the Innocence Mission, go into credit-card debt and buy Befriended, Small Planes and Birds of my Neighborhood, its past three discs. All are lullabies for mornings staying curled up in bed before leaping up and into a waking life.

Grade: B