The Rabbit Room

One Minute Review: Tin Tin

Tin Tin, the European boy wonder, comes to America. Should you check out this adventure flick? The OMR knows for sure. Also check out a couple of other One Minute Reviews: Arthur Christmas: http://vimeo.com/34233535 Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol: http://vimeo.com/34259876

Kingdom Poets: Luci Shaw

Luci Shaw is one of the most significant Christian poets of our time. She takes on topics of significance to people of faith, yet refuses to undermine her art with preconceived, didactic ways of thinking, or sentimentality. One important topic for Shaw is the incarnation. Since childhood, Luci Shaw has annually written Christmas poems; originally the practice was simply for inclusion with her Christmas correspondence. As her poetic skills grew, so did the quality and quantity of these poems. In 1996, she and her friend Madeleine L’Engle released the book Wintersong — a joint collection of Christmas readings. Ten years later Eerdmans published Accompanied By Angels, a book of Shaw’s incarnation poems, many of which had appeared in her earlier books. Since then, this tradition continues to result in fine Christmas poetry. In 2004 Luci Shaw sent me an early version of the following poem...

Every Christmas Has Its Cares

[Editor's Note: Laura Boggs has been a friend since I first met her at Hutchmoot, and she's been a good friend and writing partner of Lanier Ivester for far longer than that. She's a fine writer and you should bounce over to her blog and have a look around right after you read this fine Christmas meditation.] We do it every year. It’s always there, the unspoken expectation that this Christmas will be bigger and shinier and sweeter than the one before. By the end of Christmas Day, when the shreds of paper and ribbon are picked up off the floor and we can’t possibly eat another morsel, if the topics of politics and religion have been successfully dodged and no one got sick and everyone is feeling fat and happy, we might look at each other in triumph and breathe. We did it. We had the best Christmas ever. Again.

All I Want For Christmas (Next Year)

Surprise!

Todd and Christie Bragg gave me a gift, and I’m going to attempt to regift some of what they gave me with these words. Todd turned 40 the other day. It was Sunday, December 18—the day of the Behold the Lamb of God concert at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium. Christie put together a huge after party for Todd in the upper balcony of the Ryman. She invited what looked like at least a hundred friends. But it wasn’t just a party. It was a surprise party. Todd is a drummer in Nashville and he’s worked with countless musicians in this town over the years, so he knows a lot of people. But Todd is not just a drummer with a lot of connections. He’s a very kind and generous friend who, when you’re talking with him, treats you like you’re the only person in the world. So this party wasn’t just a room full of business associates. I imagine most all of them would call Todd not just a friend, but a dear friend.

How to Smile

Four years ago I wrote a song about The Beach Boys’ legendary lost album, Smile, as part of an assignment for a writing group I was in along with the Proprietor and a few other familiar Rabbit Roomers. At the time I knew very little about Smile, but I happened to be in the thick of a Pet Sounds renaissance, so I was already wading in the right waters for Smile to come wash over me. Back then, getting into Smile required fanaticism, a good deal of research, and possibly a little piracy. To be legal, I bought everything I could buy (Brian’s 2004 re-­recordings of the material and some original Smile tracks released on the Good Vibrations box set) and then I scrounged for every bootleg of the famed 1966 sessions I could find. The melodies, sounds, forms, chord progressions, and lyrics turned my brain inside out. Smile was a completely different way of thinking about composition and recording. I had never heard anything like it. Poor Andrew Peterson had to listen to me go on and on. But it was the story of Smile that really opened my heart to the music and made it resonate. The story of the album is one of creation, fall, and redemption. It’s a tragedy about a brilliant kid who wanted to make something beautiful, but who couldn’t face the fierce resistance he met within and without. Or at least he couldn’t face it alone.

For years I have prayed very sincere prayers that Capitol Records would finally release the Smile sessions, and on November 1st of this year, 45 years after Brian Wilson began work on the album, they did. In celebration of this momentous (to me) occasion, it seemed fitting that I should distill the talk I gave on Smile at Hutchmoot 2011 into a Rabbit Room piece. It’s my hope to give you, dear reader, a means to approach the demanding musical oddity that is Smile, and also to recount, in brief, the great tragedy and triumph of one of my musical heroes.

Familiar as the Moon

Left His seamless robe behind Woke up in a stable and cried Lived and died and rose again Savior for a guilty land It's a story like a children's tune It's grown familiar as the moon "There’s Only One (Holy One)" Written by Randall Goodgame, performed by Caedmon’s Call)

A few nights ago I was driving up Franklin Road with the top down. It was a clear, unseasonably warm November night. The moon, high and bright, seemed to chase me over the hilltops. My car stereo was cranked up loud; my iPod shuffled to Caedmon’s Call performing “There’s Only One (Holy One).”

The story of Christ, summed up so beautifully in word and music, unearthed a surge of emotion. It started in my gut and welled up through my throat into my eyes. Those true words: “it’s a story like a children’s tune; it’s grown familiar as the moon” seemed to flow in me.

“To Clear the Mental Ray:” Advent and Transformed Vision

Every year I hope for this season to be full of life-transforming meaning, and every year, I feel like I barely grasp hold of some fleeting thoughts about the season before we’re suddenly unwrapping presents, shouting Happy New Year, and back to work.

What I’m hoping for, what I feel like I miss year after year, is an Advent and Christmas season which is “eye-opening.” St. John said Jesus’ coming into the world “enlightens everyone.” Jesus himself said that our eye is the lamp of the body; a good eye results in a body filled with light.

Commandments and Our New Identity, Part V: Knowing Who We Are

Although we may believe Jesus died for our sins, and has given us Heaven, we often carry the weight of a lie within our hearts, thinking the commands are there to obey by exerting the power of our will; we attempt to find our identity in obedience. We think success in obeying means we are "good," and failure means we are "bad." This is the living death of which Paul wrote in Romans 7. It is the wretched-man existence, not the new creation life of union with Christ. It is a Christian saved from Hell in eternity by grace but trying to get free from the hell of his present sins by the exertion of his own will power.

This is the backwards Christian life. To oversimplify, we think erroneously that we’re saved from Hell so we’re to try by our will power to show God how grateful we are in return by being good, by trying to keep his commands. This must be reversed.

Birds of Relocation: The Meaning of a Title

"A story, some reminiscences... they are the yellow leaves that hang upon these boughs that are not so bare and ruined but that they still dream from time to time of the sweet birds' return." --from The Yellow Leaves by Frederick Buechner

I often provide food to wild birds in the form of sunflower seeds, suet, nyjer on occasion, peanut butter spread onto pine-cones, crumbled crackers and popped corn strewn about the yard. Birds seem to especially appreciate this in the winter months by congregating when naturally appearing food sources are more difficult to find. There are days I covet their freedom: flitting between branches, dangling here and there, pecking at the belly of leaves, frequenting feeders whose owners consistently keep them filled, a creature as free to fly across the open sky as it is to loiter its entire life within feet of its nest of birth. Then there are days -- those gray, paperweight hours -- bitterly cold, miserable by most standards, when I am especially thankful I am not a bird, much less any other wild creature: powerless to warm itself, forced to find shelter beneath just about anything, struggling to keep the heart beating amid numbing cold, breath-stealing wind, no moment free from the search for food. It’s no walk in the park for feathered creatures.