The Rabbit Room

Christmas Through The Lens of Easter

One of my greatest joys as a writing pastor is that every year I am obliged to spend several weeks focusing on the two most earth-changing events in history--the birth of Jesus Christ, and his death and resurrection. You cannot make sense of one without the other. I'm currently working on a Lenten Narrative to follow last year's Behold the Lamb of God: An Advent Narrative. With the season of Lent starting this week, I thought I'd offer here a chapter from Behold the Lamb of God: An Advent Narrative that looks at the incarnation of Jesus through the lens of his purpose for coming: to defeat the death I deserve and raise me to newness of life with him in his resurrection. Behold the Lamb of God: An Advent Narrative Chapter 24: The Hearts of Many Revealed

The old man was a member of the old guard, the last of a generation of faithful ministers in Jerusalem’s temple. He was something of a fixture—the kind of man who seemed to have always been there. It was hard to say whether Simeon smelled like the temple or the temple smelled like Simeon, but the minds of those who passed him in the street would often drift to notions of smoke and blood and a guilty resolve to attend to their worship more regularly.

The old guard to which he belonged was on a permanent watch. They were waiting for something in particular, something unique, something wonderful. The years had taught Simeon patience, so he was good at waiting. Still, he felt an unrelenting sense of urgency. He always had. He was waiting for the consolation of his people Israel. He had been waiting a long time, and his people even longer.

How to Make a Record, Part 3: Following Clues

In part one, I talked about the outset of the journey. Part two was a look back at the lack of pattern over the years, which explains the appropriate lack of readiness, which, while uncomfortable, can be very good thing. In this post, thanks to your excellent feedback, I'm going to try and get more specific about the process and try to answer some of your questions. Right off the bat, let me address this question a few of you asked: Which comes first, the lyrics or the music? This question has been asked of songwriters for as long as there has been songwriting, I imagine. The answer isn't very satisfying, I'm afraid, which may be why it keeps coming up. The answer is "Yes." Or, if you prefer, "D) All the above." Sometimes the lyric comes first, sometimes the music comes first, and sometimes they come all at once, like the doorbell and the phone ringing at the same time. When someone claims to have discovered a foolproof method for creating art---other than a willingness to work very hard at it---I doubt either their honesty or their skill. I'd dig into that more, but I want to get us back to the studio. Reading through your questions, I realized the best way to approach this may be to choose a song from the new record and give you a play-by-play of what we ended up doing.

Christian Storytelling, Part IV: The Biblical Drama

Christian Storytelling: Part I Christian Storytelling: Part II Christian Storytelling: Part III In Part III, I proposed N.T. Wright's view of the Scriptures as the first four acts of an unfinished drama as a potentially profitable alternative hermeneutic to the normal ways evangelicals handle the biblical texts. Since I only included a brief paragraph from Wright's thought on this method, I'll take some time today to put some skin and muscle on the skeleton.  I'll note some of his own remarks and push them a bit further myself. Wright quotes will come from his lecture, How Can the Bible be Authoritative? (or PDF, if you'd like). First, let's allow Wright himself to explain a bit more:

One Minute Review: Chronicle

Chronicle is a movie that could easily fly under the radar. All I could tell from the trailer was that stuff flies around and someone is really worried about Andrew. Is it any more than that? The One Minute Review knows for sure.

Leonard the Lonely Astronaut – Live in Space

Note: Two open spots! Andrew Osenga is winding up his work on Leonard the Lonely Astronaut next week. The good news is that you're going to have a whole bunch of great music to listen to very soon. The bad news is that it's time to tear down the spaceship where the album was written and recorded. That's right, the HTV Reveille is being decommissioned and will probably break apart somewhere over Baja Burrito in Nashville when it re-enters earth's atmosphere. But . . . Before it does, there will be a concert. On Thursday, February 23rd @ 7:00pm we're going to film Leonard the Lonely Astronaut Live as an upcoming Rabbit Room videocast, and we need twenty-five hardy travelers to attend. Andy will play solo and perform several songs from the album and, yes, he'll be in full astronaut uniform. But before you suit up and get in the car, consider this: the spacedock (warehouse) where the ship is kept is not heated, and it might be in the 30's or 40's when the show starts. We'll have some space heaters (punny!) but be prepared to shiver. Bring coats and blankets. After all, it's cold in space (so cold we could serve revenge! --oblique Kahn reference). Also keep in mind that this is primarily a short video shoot of 5 or 6 songs rather than a full-fledged live show. Full disclosure because we don't want anyone to drive down from Canada and be disappointed when it's over in 45 minutes. But if that sounds like a fun way to spend a Thursday evening, come on down! Space is strictly limited so we can only take the first 25 folks that sign up. Edit: Thanks for signing up, folks. Please let us know if you need to cancel so we can give someone else the opportunity to come.

Make Believe Makes Believers

My son plays happily. He flits easily between two worlds: the world that is and the world he imagines. His conversation assumes the extraordinary. His play is an adventure in make believe. How like faith. Perhaps nothing is more like faith than play. This “admission” would no doubt make Christians raised in an era of apologetic zeal begin to sweat. It may also delight anti-theist scolds, those champions of unhappiness and pretense. But it is no great surrender to say faith is like play. If in a young boy’s imaginative play he sees himself brave and trustworthy in the good fight, then we are glad if he grows into a man who is like that in “the real world.” Likewise, if a little girl tenderly cares for a baby doll, devoting herself to its care while at play, then grows up to become a loving, tender mother, we are happy. And we should be. I call that good.

How to Make a Record, Part 2: The Edges of Things

Like I said in part one, this isn't meant to be a definitive piece on record making, because there are a zillion ways to approach it. I just did the math and realized this is my eighth studio record. That doesn't include live stuff or Walk or the Slugs & Bugs CDs, nor does it include occasional shorter recording sessions like "Holy is the Lord" (for City on a Hill) or the appendices A, C, or M. I only say that to say that as I look back at all those sessions, one of the only patterns that emerges is a lack of pattern. This may be super-boring, but just for fun I'm going to try and remember a thing or two about the making of those records. Walk (1996): I mention it here because even though it was an independent record, it was my first time in a legit studio with legit musicians. It was recorded in three days by my buddy Mark Claassen, who was interning at a studio that let us use a room after hours. To be honest, I remember little about the process except that it was maddeningly rushed. Also, we had no idea what we were doing (but we felt really cool doing it).

On Possessing Beauty

On the second-to-the-last day of September, in the year of our Lord 2011, I came into possession of a hill in the English countryside. I marked the event that evening with all due solemnity and appropriate honors. My husband and I had ostensibly walked out in the late afternoon to watch the sunset from a neighboring slope, but with a few quick modifications, and all the young joy of a first-time hill-owner, I adapted it into a celebration. I cut a few swinging strands of ivy that hung over the rutted path we took from our cottage, and as soon as we had spread our blanket on the grassy prospect, I sat down and began weaving them into a coronet. Philip grinned a little ruefully as I studded it with tiny thistles—the bane of any pasture-keeper’s existence; the amethysts and jasper of the woodland lapidary. But when I opened our tea caddy and produced, not the expected and well-traveled thermos and tin cups, but a bottle of champagne, his smile registered genuine surprise. “This is a momentous occasion,” I said gravely, attempting to loosen the cork and then passing it to him in a sudden fear of flying consequences. “It’s not every day you come into property.”

What is Love? Part II – Gethsemane

What Is Love? Part I - Definitions No discussion of love can be complete without regarding Gethsemane. In this second Garden, the divine love of the Father in the spirit of Jesus wrestled with the soul of Jesus, a war inside one body. This Man who had gone around saying “I and the Father are one” and “When you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father” saw a separate will within himself, self-preservation rising up, self-love. “If there is any other way, let this cup pass from me.” I don’t want to die by execution, have my soul be despised, rejected, and to become sin and have my spirit separated from my Father. Anything but that. Was it wrong to feel this way, wrong to desire a way less painful? Obviously not. Temptation is not sin. “Let this cup pass from me.” He wrestled, like Jacob with the angel, but Jesus wasn’t saying, “I won’t let you go until you bless me.” It was, “Please, if there’s any other way, get me out of this.”

Kingdom Poets: Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea is the author of ten collections of poetry including Pursuit Of A Wound (2001) which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has also published a novel, A Place In Mind (1989), and two collections of essays. Lea is the founding editor of New England Review, where he served from 1977 until 1989. He has taught at several colleges, in Europe and the United States, including Yale, Wesleyan, and Dartmouth. He is the new poet laureate of Vermont. Jeanne Murray Walker wrote of his new collection, Six Sundays Toward a Seventh, “In this book Sydney Lea invites us to take a spiritual journey . . . By the end of Six Sundays, the narrator and the reader step together into radiant light. What is so moving about Six Sundays is not only its wrestling with spiritual questions, but also Lea's affirmation that life is a spiritual journey and that this journey is of paramount importance.”