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by J. E. Bartel In 2012, John Koenig coined a neologism for his blog, Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: “ sonder ,” the idea that everyone we meet has a life as complicated as our own, despite our personal understanding of it, and the realization that our presence in the lives of others—those we pass on the street, or those we stand next to in an elevator—is just as fleeting to them as theirs seems to us. The term encapsulates a feeling that has perhaps been enhanced in the digital age: Our round-the-clock access to technology allows us to connect with anyone, anywhere, while we simultaneously feel more isolated and lonely than ever before. It is this dilemma that frames the unusual friendship at the heart of Hulu’s award-winning murder mystery series Only Murders in the Building. C. S. Lewis famously said that “friendship is borne of the moment a man says to another, ‘What, you too? I thought I was the only one.’” In this case, three friends are thrilled to find that they are not the only ones asking, “What the——is in Bo’s mouth?” Bo, of course, is a dog who makes an appearance in a true crime podcast beloved by three residents of the Arconia, a lavish Upper West Side apartment building. The trio—septuagenarians Charles Haden Savage (Steve Martin) and Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) and millennial Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) would, if they could otherwise help it, not be speaking to each other. Despite their shared residence in the Arconia, the trio’s earlier interaction in an elevator reveals the fact that, like many of us caught up in the sprawl of urban life, they would rather avert their eyes and clap headphones over their ears than bear a conversation with a stranger: even a familiar one whom we see in the elevator every day. It takes an accidental fire alarm for the three to meet for real. Once they’re in the same room, they find out that they’re all obsessing over the same podcast: why not enjoy it together, rather than alone in their apartments? Only Murders in the Building  is quick to impress a sense of sonder on the viewer. Life in the Arconia is, as Charles points out, a “stacked on top of each other” kind of organized chaos: The building’s residents have every opportunity to get into each other’s business, to form a community, or to become friends. Yet, at the beginning of the show, Oliver, Charles, and Mabel are solitary and lonely figures. Their moment in the elevator feels sadder and more ironic juxtaposed against the scenes that come before, as the camera follows each person through their daily routine, ending with each of them settling into their separate apartments to listen, alone, to the podcast. We learn that Charles is a washed-up actor whose past success in a detective show fails, to his chagrin, to earn him any real attention or care from those around him. Oliver’s glory days as a theatre producer are over, leaving him on the verge of bankruptcy and on poor footing with his son and grandkids. And Mabel trudges through the city in big coats that the costume designer Dana Covarrubias  imagined “like armor.” After losing her father to cancer at age seven and her best friend in a tragic accident at the Arconia, Mabel feels haunted by misfortune and bats away any attempts at connection from others. Making matters worse, the three are also estranged from their families in various ways. Oliver haphazardly shows up at his son’s place with piles of toys for his grandkids, disregarding his son’s time, then returns to the vastness of his quiet Arconia apartment. Mabel has frightening daydreams about being attacked in the apartment where she lives by herself without any family or friends to keep her company. Charles repeatedly cooks the same omelet he used to make for the daughter of an old flame who’s no longer in his life. These details feel relatable and all too human: They drive home how lonely and in need of a friend these three are. In an ocean of humanity, they are each an island—each too preoccupied with their own concerns to realize that real friendship and connection is only one or two shared moments away. But friendship is not always so easily won. Even once the three hatch a scheme to start their own podcast investigating a murder in the Arconia, they still have to fight through layers of sarcasm and cynical wisecracking before they can get to the real substance of companionship. In the same vein as legendary comedies like  Parks and Recreation  or The Office , Only Murders in the Building  takes a group of misfits and spins them, charmingly and hilariously, into a found family. Watching friendship bloom amongst the three reads as a study in what it takes to lower the guardrails of self-preservation and comfort in order to become open to caring for, and being cared for by, someone else; it’s delightful, clumsy, sincere, and often hilarious. Their tentative longing to connect with one another is matched in strength only by their reflexive need to snark and nitpick one another. When Oliver breezily leaves his door unlocked despite a murderer running loose, Mabel jokes that “white guys are only afraid of colon cancer and societal change.” Oliver and Charles, meanwhile, make fun of Mabel for her Gen-Z lingo like “hot goss” and “Manhatty.” The generational gap between their understanding of how the internet works is fodder for many jokes. And yet, driven by a common goal, Oliver, Mabel, and Charles gradually learn to make space for each other and find their lives greatly enriched for it. It’s not often that intergenerational friendship is depicted on screen with such richness and joy. While they aren’t looking or perhaps even trying, they become the very best of friends, and their friendship shapes them into people who see the true value of connection over isolation. Encouraged by Mabel, Charles takes the brave step of reaching out to the almost-stepdaughter whose presence he misses so much. Mabel finds the courage to try out a romance with a childhood friend. And Oliver asks his son if perhaps they can start over. But, of course, Only Murders in the Building  isn’t just about these three: It’s about the Arconia on the whole. When the three become friends, it has a domino effect on the rest of their community. As the other denizens of the Arconia get involved with the murder investigation (for better or for worse!), Only Murders becomes a love letter to humanity in all its diversity and strangeness. As much as Oliver, Charles, and Mabel feel like main characters in their own stories—and are literally the main characters of the show—they’ve been oblivious to the stories going on all around them. Only Murders plays with this notion through episodes told entirely from the perspective of side characters scattered throughout the Arconia: Bunny, the building’s prickly but secretly lonely board president; Theo, the deaf son of a Greek deli owner, who feels overlooked but becomes a vital piece of the murder investigation; and Howard, whose shyness and eccentricity hide a warm and loving personality. By focusing on people who might otherwise be relegated to the sidelines of the story, Only Murders  suggests that no one is truly unimportant to the narrative. Everyone we meet is a unique universe of hopes, dreams, and hurts, and the things that separate us are often more arbitrary than they seem. If anything, the common thread that binds each person in the Arconia is how much they long for connection. And because of the friendship of Mabel, Charles, and Oliver, many people find it, and the Arconia becomes a warmer place. Ten years after “sonder” entered the lexicon, another neologism appeared: “ main character energy .” Born out of TikTok, it’s the idea of putting oneself first and acting with the confidence that would suit the main character of a story. Main character energy signifies individuality and a prioritizing of one’s own goals and well-being. But it can also denote being selfish, vain, or obsessed with oneself. As Elisabeth Oldfield writes in Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times , “Getting our way all the time does not make us happy. It makes us lonely.” Only Murders in the Building urges us to reconsider whether living life as a main character is really all it’s cracked up to be, when there is so much joy and beauty to be found in the “non-playable characters” around us: those we can never really be, but who nonetheless make life more beautiful for all their annoyance, stubbornness, and one-of-a-kind-ness. It’s telling that Only Murders in the Building  refuses to choose a main character from amongst the trio. In laying down the urge to be the main character, they find instead that it is so much richer to share the spotlight. J. E. Bartel is a recent graduate of the University of St Andrews' Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts. Hailing from Canada, she now lives and writes in Scotland, where she is working on a novel manuscript. She is a huge fan of any movie starring Oscar Isaac and is probably knitting something right now. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo from Only Murders in the Building  on Disney+/Hulu

Some Thoughts on Craft, Community, and the Call to Generosity by Kate Gaston Back in the day when his show aired on PBS, I fell in love with Bob Ross. The man was mesmerizing. Episode after magical episode, Bob, with his soft voice and gentle chuckle, would load his brush with color. Then, my friends, he would paint. The camera would zoom in for a close-up, and you’d hear it: the scruffy tap, tap, tap of his brush on canvas. That glorious, bristly sound is quite possibly the most gratifying sound ever produced by a human. My parents’ budget was tight back then. Even so, they purchased an oil paint starter kit for me. My dad, in an act of engineering genius, constructed an easel out of a pair of rickety old crutches and scrap plywood. Whenever Bob came on, I’d crank my crutch easel open in front of the television, and we’d paint together. Over the intervening years, my relationship with painting has shifted and lurched. It reminds me of the relationship you might have with that one childhood friend. You know the one. Back in the good old days, the two of you were inseparable. You were carefree. Every morning promised a new adventure, full of romping good times. You were best friends for life and had the friendship bracelets to prove it. But then, something changed. Maybe you joined the middle school band. Maybe you got distracted by cute boys. Maybe you went through a Goth phase. Whatever the reason, you drifted apart. You’d still hang out on occasion, but the ease you used to share was gone. That’s me and painting. Sometimes it’s fun, sure, but it’s almost never easy. Standing in front of an in-process canvas can be fraught with uncertainty. The cunning whispers of the inner critic dance around every brushstroke. The process of making things is hard. It can be lonely. It can be emotional. Everyone, at some point or another, falls prey to doubt. We will all wrestle with comparison and envy. There will be frustration and despair. There will be power walking the streets of your neighborhood, wondering how Bob can paint such happy little clouds, but yours look churlish and lumpy. Yet, day after day, you show up. You do the work despite the fact that your amygdala—that almond-shaped danger cowboy—is pummeling your psyche with waves of fear and anxiety, urging you to run, it’s not safe. Go fold some laundry, check your email, watch another episode of Severance . Do anything, please, but this hard, scary thing that you may or may not be able to get right. It’s true, you have no certainty that you’ll get the work right. Yet, that same work somehow seems undeniably linked to your very humanity. The act of creation is a process of wrestling with your incompetence until it becomes competence. And it requires the chutzpah to do it when, literally, no one asked you to do it. It’s crazy. Who would do such a thing? You would. Let’s say, last Tuesday, at precisely 2:37 p.m., you just happened to be paying attention when the light hit that infinitely beveled edge of God’s glory. That glint of refracted glory caught your eye. Not mine. Not someone else’s eye. Yours. It hit in just such a way as to give you a tiny gleam of understanding, a bite-sized insight into God’s character. You could die happy with this vision. But instead, you translated this vision into a poem. Or maybe you choreographed a dance to express it. Or you paint, sing, or blow a long, sonorous note on your didgeridoo about it. Whatever your preferred method of creating happens to be, your creation casts further tiny refractions of glory hither and yon, refractions that the rest of us will then pick up and admire, knowing God more deeply by their light. Lewis Hyde’s landmark book on the subject of creativity, The Gift,  puts flesh on the bones of the age-old question: Why create? Simply put, our creativity is a gift. It is a gift first to the artist, but then the artist becomes a channel through whom beauty, meaning, and insight are gifted forward to the community at large. On the topic of artistic generosity, the entrepreneur and marketing guru Seth Godin said, “The work exists to serve someone, to change someone, to make something better.” And from writer, speaker, and creativity coach Amie McNee: “Making art and sharing it with the world is an act of profound generosity. When you sit down to write, to paint, to make music, you are doing something that is both good for yourself and great for society.” I find myself nodding along in agreement. Who doesn’t like generosity? It’s a great word. Add it to pretty much anything and it makes the thing better. A generous host. A generous friend. A generous pour. Yeah, baby, two thumbs up for generosity. The creative work I share is a gift I give to my community. It’s generous to share my finished work with you, yes. But sharing my successes—those pretty, polished-up projects—is only half the reality. I would love nothing more than for you to think I am limitless; that the Muse and I are besties. That while I’m busy writing these words, she’s refilling my coffee mug, ready to reward me with a gold star and a foot massage. But what about all those failures leading up to the success? What about the uncertainty, the doubt, and the occasional howling woe? If I hide that long, heavy labor of creating—tidying it up so that you’ll think it’s effortless—well, that’s not very generous at all. I’d like you to consider your whole artistic process, every high and low, and crack it open wide. Take a good look. There, within those peaks and valleys, lies the very stuff that makes you human. There, in the vulnerability of creation, in its joy and pain, is a shared human experience so powerful it can be perceived across space and time. Here are two truths: Making stuff is inherently vulnerable. Vulnerability is an essential building block to deeper relationships. I’d like you to grab these two truths by the hand. You possess the ability to create, yes. But there’s another, more intricate plotline at work. In a fractured, lonely, anxious world, you possess a relational superpower: the ability to invite others into the vulnerable, shared, human experience of creation. Remember all the joy and pain of your creative process? Start talking about it. Invite people into those spaces with you. By doing so, you expand your definition of hospitality. You leverage the power of your creative vulnerability into deeper, richer relationships. This vulnerability, like the art you create, is a gift you can give. Give it generously. First, gather your people. Writers, painters, musicians, poets, woodworkers, dungeon masters, and more. Gather every month. These gatherings could take a thousand different forms, but don’t underestimate the power of simply showing up. Let me say that again: Please show up. Meet in a living room, art studio, coffee shop, or church basement. Gather around a meal if you can, but a box of Girl Scout cookies will do in a pinch. Circle up. Get close. Look each other in the eye. Each month, ask a different artist to share their story. Don’t be prescriptive; let the artist take you where they want to go. There is a strange alchemy that occurs when artists gather and speak openly of their craft. Listen attentively. Encourage thoughtful questions. Edge deeper into those waters of relational vulnerability. Everyone might not share the same artistic medium, but your expressions of creativity are branches springing up from the same root. Let the musicians bring their instruments. Let the painters bring their canvases. Let the poets bring their angst. Though by its very nature, much of the heavy lifting of creativity will be done in solitude, when we trust others with our creative vulnerabilities, we begin to dismantle the relational barriers between us, rolling back the isolating effects of fear, envy, and shame. In Pete Peterson’s recent version of A Christmas Carol , Scrooge is given the warning by the Ghost of Christmas Past, “What is hidden cannot heal.” When we create within the context of a trustworthy community, we begin to uncover what has been hidden. One of the most toxic weeds that flourishes in artistic isolation is envy. Envy has the power to derail creative growth. It can devastate friendships. Where a creative oasis might have flourished, envy scorches it, making it a wasteland. Envy assassinates whatever joy you might have experienced and replaces it with rancid bitterness, a sort of fizzing, psychic heartburn. Find your people. Confess your envy out loud. And do it yesterday. Weird things come out of the woodwork when you are in the process of creating. No one mentions these things. You’ll be plugging along, happily making stuff, but then your metaphysical shovel hits something—old wounds, past trauma—buried in the dirt. And suddenly, instead of creating, now you’re excavating. You will need help with this weighty work. Someone can hold the flashlight. Someone else can bring you a sandwich. Or your people can simply sit with you, mourn with you, hold your hand as you behold that petrified pain, suspended there in the striated bedrock of your soul. We all feel a longing, almost like homesickness, for our work to be better, to be good, to be perfect. Alas, it might not ever be perfect. Most of the time, it might not even be all that good. Own your inadequacy. Creating is messy. Normalize the mess, mistakes, and failures. Normalize fallibility and the mundanity of work. Model persistence. Model the deep sigh when things don’t turn out like you thought they would. And then model what it looks like to eat a good dinner, go to bed, and pick the work up again tomorrow morning. Peel back the moldy narrative that creative worth is only found in productivity. Strip that falsehood of its robe and crown, dethrone it, and send it running, naked, into the wilderness. Good riddance. Your vulnerability is capable of making others feel brave, or of comforting someone in their pain. Your vulnerability is capable of provoking someone who's become complacent, unnerving them in the best of ways. It can reveal an existence that is bigger, wilder, scarier, and more untamed than we originally thought. So go ahead. Drop that fig leaf. When you share your art, and especially when you are honest about the inherent vulnerability of making art, you are holding up a torch for others, showing them what it is to be human. More, you become a living, breathing expression of a common grace that whispers of a greater, more specific grace. You are revealing what it’s like, quite particularly and specifically, to walk with God. It is a generous gift to share your glimmering reflections of God’s glory, holding up what you see for someone else to see. It is an act of deeper generosity when you share your creative vulnerability. In vulnerability, there is transformation. We begin to speak a unified, common language of our needs, our capabilities, our limits. Doubts are quieted. Belief is strengthened. This, my friend, is the beating heart of hospitality. So find your merry band of weirdos and misfits. Let’s throw our arms around each other’s shoulders, bear each other up, and, together, go limping toward the source of true life and flourishing. Maybe I’ll never be able to paint happy little clouds like Bob. Even so, I’ll keep right on painting, knowing we each get to share some small part of the story in which God is wooing souls to himself through truth and beauty. So, what are we waiting for? Let’s go make some stuff. For your further reading and viewing pleasure: Amie McNee: We Need Your Art: Stop Messing Around and Make Something   Seth Godin: The Practice: Shipping Creative Work   (Hat tip to Katy Bowser Hutson  for recommending the two excellent books above.) Lewis Hyde: The Gift Susan Magsaman and Ivy Ross: Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us What is Severance, Kate? Pete Peterson: Christmas Carol Production Diary, Day 1: Let there be Lights   Read more from Kate Gaston about loneliness Read more from Kate Gaston about having better, more vulnerable conversations When it comes to creativity, here are some books I love. Read them and be forever changed: Julia Cameron: The Artist's Way Steven Pressfield: The War of Art Anne Lamott: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Stephen King: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft Annie Dillard: The Writing Life Madeleine L’Engle: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art An Alabama native, Kate Gaston was homeschooled before it was even remotely considered normal. She completed her undergraduate degree at Bryan College and went on to graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For eight years, Kate worked as a PA in a trauma and burn ICU before ping-ponging across the nation for her husband’s medical training. She and her family are currently putting down roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kate enjoys homeschooling her daughter and tutoring in her local classical homeschool community. She also finds deep satisfaction in long, meandering conversations at coffee shops, oil painting, writing, and gazing pensively into the middle distance. You can read more of her work at her Substack: That Middle Distance . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Justyn Warner  on Unsplash

by Jaclyn Hoselton I held a one-way ticket to Rome. I was 20 and looking for an adventure when I set out to study abroad in Perugia, Italy. It would be a semester of intensive language class, Italian literature, Italian history, and creative writing. I wanted the quintessential European experience: cobblestone streets, pastries, espresso, accordion street performers, and large cathedrals. I wanted to become bilingual. I wanted a life-changing journey. I set out full of vigor and enthusiasm. Until I got to the airport. I had never flown before and the airport was a maze, but I eventually managed to find my gate. As I boarded, the act of leaving everything I’d ever known hit me. My heart raced and my legs felt weak. I hobbled to my seat and thought about home. A nun wearing her religious habit sat next to me. She had similar concerns. On her lap was a Bible and entwined between her fingers was a rosary. Leaving home was not easy. Living abroad was not much easier. Though I managed to obtain the typical backpacking through Europe experience by traveling to five countries, sleeping in trains and hostels, and getting around by public transportation, I did not learn Italian fluently and gain deep cultural insights. I did not write the next great American novel. Much like Bilbo Baggins, the discomforts of the journey provoked me, and I withdrew towards homely comforts more often than I would like to admit. I’d turn to my English-speaking roommates to binge American sitcoms, or even (gasp!) visit Starbucks. Setting out on a journey is thrilling, but the discomforts of it can cause our longings to fly toward the comforts of home and routine. Despite this, studying abroad was a powerful experience. Without it, I wouldn’t be living the life I am now. It was not five years later that I found myself on yet another European journey. I left the diverse beauty of the Golden State for a land strewn with quiet medieval villages, lush forests, and castle ruins. My husband and I moved to Germany with plans to stay for two years max. Yet somehow, over ten years later, we find ourselves raising three bilingual children and renovating a German house. I am out of place again, and this time, an unintentional immigrant struggling to fit in a culture not my own. Living cross-culturally changes a person. It touches nearly every aspect of life. Routine chores become a foreign activity to navigate. Cross-cultural living causes a person to make personal adjustments, and eventually these adjustments take root and reshape the person. It’s not smooth sailing, however. Now, when I travel back to the United States, I forget to make eye contact with the person walking opposite me on the sidewalk. I can’t even throw away trash without noticing how much my everyday habits and instincts have changed. Over time, German cultural acclimation has nuanced my understanding of the world and transformed my relationship to what used to be my home. Yet, no matter how hard I work, I will never be entirely at home in Germany either. People often ask me if I am fluent in German. “Define fluent,” I respond. I’ve done the German language intensive classes. Mastering a language isn’t enough—one must also adapt to foreign social cues, humor, values, and ways of life. I anticipate the German holidays and cultural traditions. I do my best to integrate. But as I work toward cultural acclimation, something feels amiss. This culture is simply not my own. Some instincts are still American, and I struggle with expressing my innermost thoughts in a foreign tongue. This leaves me despairing. I make friends, but I feel a painful gap between souls when I cannot express myself on a deeper level. Time and again I’m reminded: This is not my home. For as long as I can remember, books about strapping on a backpack and leaving home for a quest have drawn me in, especially J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit . Last year I revisited a few of Tolkien’s stories and was struck by how often his characters reflect on home. Bilbo was more unhappy even than when the troll had picked him up by his toes. He wished again and again for his nice bright hobbit-hole. Not for the last time. We are introduced to both Bilbo and his home in the first sentence: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” By the end of the first paragraph we find the only description of his home we really need: “it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” Though the story is about a journey, Bilbo’s thoughts constantly return home, as he yearns to leave the discomforts of the quest for the comforting rhythms and routine of Bag End. In fact, Bag End is just about as present as any character in the book. Far, far away in the West, where things were blue and faint, Bilbo knew there lay his own country of safe and comfortable things, and his little hobbit-hole. He shivered. It was getting bitter cold up here, and the wind came shrill among the rocks. Bilbo’s displacement and discomfort turns his mind homeward. It is the memory of tea, a fire, and a cozy armchair that follows Bilbo into that dragon cave and back to Bag End. My own life away from “home” caused me to read these stories with a new perspective. Reading about Bilbo overcoming obstacles while longing for home gives me courage to keep striving in my own state of perpetual foreignness and discomfort. It has taught me to embrace the journey and continue pressing on, even when it’s uncomfortable. Dranbleiben , as the Germans say. We must stick with it. There would be no journey without home. There would be no “there” without the “back again.” If there was no hope of home as an ultimate destination, there would never be a true journey or pilgrimage, but merely an endless wandering. Modern despair is incompatible with the idea of a pilgrimage. Books like The Road  by Cormac McCarthy and Station Eleven  by Emily St. John Mandel are journey stories with no fixed home as a destination. But if there is no home at the end of the journey, what is the purpose? For the Christian, journey and home are intertwined. On the pathway, home is the slant of light we walk toward. I find hope through journey stories that give voice to the sehnsucht  heightened by my displacement. In her lecture “Keepers of Lost Moments and Places: Living Homeward in Time,” Amy Baik Lee defines the emotion of sehnsucht  as a yearning “for a place we cannot get to, perhaps even a place we’ve never been, which nonetheless pulls at us, like the call of a much loved, long-desired home.” This yearning that both Tolkein and C. S. Lewis’s characters have for home beyond the sea embodies the yearnings felt by the expatriate, sojourner, exile, and refugee, whose longing for home can never be satisfied in this world. In Lewis’s The Last Battle , Jewel the unicorn expresses the final fulfillment of this burning desire. “He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: ‘I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.” Sehnsucht  encapsulates not only the painful yearning, but also the bright hope of this pilgrim journey. Every time I return to California, I’m welcomed back with the fattened calf. Cars litter the lawn, a jigsaw puzzle on and off the driveway. I open the door to find enchiladas sizzling in the oven and spice in the air. We feast, gathered around a table that won’t hold everyone, so we spill out onto La-Z-Boys and garden chairs. I’ve returned to one of my homes, where parents, brother, sister-in-law, uncles, aunts, grandparents (now long passed), cousins, nephews, and nieces pause their busy lives to have a meal together. Despite our disconnected lives, we gather because “she’s home, she’s back.” Is this the difference between home and a hometown? Despite the glowing welcome, I grow restless. My body is used to more movement than the American lifestyle requires. I cannot tolerate certain foods as I used to. My rhythms are off, not in sync with hometown habits. Even here, I feel like a square peg in a round hole. The dissonance is painful. I long to be at home, but I have changed. The expat experience reflects the Mearcstapa or border-walker life that Makoto Fujimura emphasizes in his book Culture Care.  Much like the Mearcstapas  who lived in the tribal borderlands, trading news from various tribes, so flies the expat in and out of countries, code-switching and offering cultural knowledge. “ Mearcstapa  is not a comfortable role,” as Fujimura says. Yet, the discomfort points to the fact that things were not supposed to be fractured. Home on earth is a fragile thing. It is where moth and rust can destroy and thieves can steal. But home can also be fragile due to the human tendency to change from life experiences. Home on earth is a mere shadow; it’s a glimpse through the veil and into glory, as we wait for Christ “the ultimate Mearcstapa ” to bring “the light of the good news from the new tribe that is already here and yet to come.” Living between worlds means that I’m never truly at home in either country. This rootlessness points to a deeper reality about my own Christian identity. The discomfort of feeling out of place in both lands evokes an ineffable longing for a lasting home. In 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul (a sojourner himself) describes the Christian’s home on earth as a mere tent—but we have a Home prepared for us. For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling. (2 Cor. 5:1-5 [ESV]) Sehnsucht belongs to the human experience. The pain and hope of the emotion was designed as a compass. As Lewis famously wrote in Mere Christianity , “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” Sehnsucht  proves that we are not wandering aimlessly, but we were created for an Eternal Home. We can expect this restlessness to remain until we are reunited with our Creator, as Augustine of Hippo wrote in his Confessions : “you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.” Together with the first Adam, we were exiled from the garden. But the second Adam journeyed from his home to restore lost sinners to our true Dwelling Place. He said, In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. (John 14:2-3) One day, my own fragmented expat longings will find fulfillment as Christ ushers me to the New Creation and I cry, “This is the land I have been looking for all my life!” Jaclyn Rios Hoselton is a writer and American expat living in Germany. She has an MA in English literature from Universität Heidelberg. She is a mom of three and serves alongside her husband as members of a local church. She alternates between writing, reading, and bursting outside to run, bike, or garden. You can follow her on Instagram  @jaclynsbooks  or on Substack at A Sojurner’s Garden . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Jordan Madrid  on Unsplash

by Heidi Johnston My maternal grandfather had a rich, deep baritone voice with a vibrato that carried shades of both tragedy and triumph. When he sang “How Great Thou Art,” it was a declaration that rose from his soul and seemed to linger in the rafters long after the piano stilled. Born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in 1909, he was nine years old when the Spanish flu pandemic swept across Ireland. In its wake, my grandfather, his sister, and seven of his cousins found themselves orphaned. Taken in by a single aunt, all the children were raised in a two-bedroom terrace house. Even before the events of Bloody Sunday and the decades-long conflict that would grip Northern Ireland, Londonderry was a city of simmering passions and ancient loyalties. It was against this backdrop of hard knocks and social and political unrest that my grandfather began the work of building a life. Known for his kindness and level head, he became a manager in one of Londonderry’s iconic shirt factories. He fell in love a little later than was usual, married, and went on to have a son and a daughter. He worked hard, rising early and staying up until his teenagers were safely in bed. He sang in the choir and served in his church. On Fridays, he came home for steak and chips at lunchtime. Every Saturday, he washed the car. I can’t help but think of him when I read the passage in Deuteronomy 6, where Moses is addressing the nation of Israel as they prepare to finally go into the promised land. It’s a chapter famous for the Shema, the exhortation to “love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deut. 6:5 [English Standard Version]), but the verses that follow lay the foundation for a life lived in response to the command. They are the soil in which the ordinary becomes the sacred. Through Moses, God says: And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut. 6:6-9 [ESV]) It was in the work of being married and raising children, planting, harvesting, feasting, and grieving that the word of God would take root and come alive. There was an important place for formal instruction, but the authenticity and beauty of God’s pattern for life would be found when believing parents chose to anchor the life of their family in the truth of God’s Word. When they saturated their own hearts fully in Scripture, it would spill out over dinner, as they walked in nature, or while they watched the sun rise or set on another day. This was not an injunction to nag, but rather an exhortation to have hearts and minds so shaped by the character of God that an awareness of his presence naturally pervaded every aspect of life. It was a quiet rebellion against the culture, a choice to delight in the God who valued their humanity even when they were tempted to search for greatness in all the wrong places. As each generation lived out its faith in the melting pot of everyday life, the embers of their hope would ignite the curiosity of the next generation, and the story would be told again. That’s how it was for my grandfather. As he walked, he would point out species of plants or birds, eyes sparkling with delight—not only in beauty itself but in the goodness of a God who would create with such abundant joy. As he interacted with his often-fractured community, my grandfather did it with an open gentleness that wasn’t bound by political affiliation. Even his darkest moments became stories of God’s grace that would speak long after his voice fell silent, strengthening the legs of those who had never walked his path. I’ve learned a lot about my grandfather over the years, but there are a lot of things I don’t know. I have no idea what his laugh sounded like. I’ve never breathed in his familiar scent as he pulled me in for a hug. I don’t know what his flaws were, what we might have disagreed on, or if he had regrets. Although his influence on my life has been profound, I never got the chance to meet him. On a cold day in February 1968, he was driving to a wedding with my grandmother and another couple when their car hit black ice and skidded into the path of a lorry. He was killed instantly. My mum was just 17 at the time. It would be another eight years before I was born and many more before I would begin to understand that it is possible to grieve something you have never had. A few years ago, my mum found my grandfather’s Bible, presented to him in 1955 by the Curryfree Christian Workers Union “as a token of their appreciation of his faithful service to the Christian cause for a great many years.” It is well worn, with tape on one side where the leather had started to fray. The pages are yellowing, and a handful of verses are underlined. The few words he chose to mark indelibly are a clue to the legacy he left behind: “And who then is willing to consecrate his service this day unto the Lord?” (1 Chron. 29:5 [King James Version]) “Then the people rejoiced, for that they offered willingly, because with perfect heart they offered willingly to the Lord” (1 Chron. 29:9 [KJV]). “Honor the Lord with thy substance, and with the first fruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine” (Prov. 3:9-10 [KJV]). I may have never met this man whose DNA I carry, but I do know something of his heart. For him, the desire that underpinned everything else was to delight himself in the Lord, offering his whole life, the daily joy and struggle and frustration and delight of it, first and fully to God for his glory. I know, without a doubt, that the life he lived mattered. It mattered as he lived it, in all its rooted, earthy ordinariness. But, more than that, it mattered on a scale he didn’t get to witness in his lifetime. As his faith shaped the people he loved and their faith shaped their own children, the God who is outside of time took my grandfather’s short life, willingly offered, and used it for the continued building of his eternal kingdom. Maybe it’s sentimental but, sometimes, as I run my fingers over his Bible, knowing that he touched the same pages, it’s as if the curtain thins a little and I can almost hear him singing as he cheers me on. Heidi Johnston is the author of Choosing Love in a Broken World  and Life in the Big Story . She lives in Newtownards, Northern Ireland, with her husband, Glenn, and their two teenage daughters, Ellie and Lara. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Pierre Bamin  on Unsplash

by Kevin Burrell Note: This article was originally posted April 27, 2024, on Kevin Burrell’s website Ornitheology: The Gospel According to Birds . A migraine is an acceptable excuse for calling in late to work. A migration , apparently, is not. Ahhh, but it should  be. Last week I tried to explain to a non-birder colleague why I might occasionally be arriving late to the office over the next couple weeks. My impassioned excitement—complete with the latest BirdCast satellite data—was met with a blank unconvinced stare. And yet, as I write this, the bird migration forecast anticipates 265 million birds  in flight over the US tonight, whisking their way north. Some of them will stop here in Charlotte for breakfast. And some of those will be warblers . In her book Looking Up: A Birder’s Guide to Hope Through Grief , Courtney Ellis aptly refers to warblers as “the Easter eggs of the birding world,” for three reasons: They’re round-shaped, very colorful, and hard to find. Sometimes maddeningly  hard to find, actually. While a few warbler species will acquiesce to come to ground level for a good photo opp (thank you, Common Yellowthroat ), many of them seem to prefer the highest branches of the highest trees, resulting in a birdwatching medical condition known as “warbler neck”—a cervical pain caused by looking upward with binoculars for extended periods. (Take heed, people: May is Warbler Neck Awareness Month . . . maybe? ) And yet once you spy your first Chestnut-sided  or Blackburnian Warbler , you might decide it was worth the off-season chiropractic care. Imagine a classroom of kids, each one given a coloring page of the same basic bird shape, along with a box of crayons. The resulting wall of creative art might still fall short of the fantastic variations that real-world warblers provide—unnatural hues, delicate striping, intricate accents. These little birds aren’t simply colorful; they’re adorned , as if they dressed up and accessorized for the trip. The Canada Warbler  wears a black necklace. The Black-throated Blue Warbler  dons a pocket handkerchief. (I like to think of it as a wristwatch.) The Golden-winged Warbler  wears trendy U2 wraparound sunglasses. The Hooded Warbler —my personal favorite—sports a stealthy ninja mask, as if dressed for a covert operation. Golden-winged Warbler, © 2019 Christian Nunes, MacCauley Library The variety of patterns is matched by a unique variety of telltale songs, helping greatly with identification, since you'll probably hear them before you see them. They’re called warblers , after all—a term coined way before Sinatra by a Welsh ornithologist in the 1770s. A warbler song teases, beckons. Yesterday a Cape May Warbler  beguiled me for fifteen solid minutes before finally coming into the open for a visual ID. At least he eventually cooperated; a Yellow Warbler  in the same tree never showed himself. With these secretive Easter-egg birds, sometimes the song is all you get, and so birders quickly get familiar with warbler-warbles. There’s the hurried upswing buzz of the Northern Parula , and the more measured rising notes of the Prairie Warbler . I love the squeaky-wheel notes of the Black-and-white Warbler , the confidently bold tweets of the Prothonotary , and the slow Witchita-Witchita-Witchita  of the Common Yellowthroat, which sounds to me like a decaffeinated Carolina Wren . And then there’s the emphatic Ovenbird , who starts his teacher-teacher-teacher  song calmly and subdued, but then builds in volume until he’s clearly yelling at you (a pattern that’s also the formula for most Foo Fighters  tunes). There are forty-seven species of New World Warblers (commonly referred to as wood-warblers), all of them exclusive to the Americas. Each has a unique style, personality, presentation, and approach. And spending any amount of time Easter-egg-hunting for them will lead you to a reasonable question. Why such extravagance? Gratuitous Use of the Color Yellow This isn’t just a small question. It’s a question that, if you let it, will reshape your paradigms about the nature of the world itself. G. K. Chesterton said of his conversion to Christianity, “I had always believed the world involved magic; now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.” Warblers are the sort of magic that makes you consider the magician. It’s the kind of beauty that might make you call in late to work. Paul wrote in Romans 1:20 , “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (NIV). Maybe that verse could stand as the proof text and purpose statement for every post on my blog; the creation has lessons to school us in the character of God himself. Much as we may try to demystify and biologically complicate things, Paul reminds us that the deepest part of every human heart still perceives an art that says “artist,” a story that says “author,” a making that says “maker.” Blackburnian Warbler, © 2019 Ezra Staengl, MacCauley Library Creation doesn’t tell us everything we need to know, of course. As James Bond might say, the world is not enough. God has given us his Word as a higher rung on the ladder, and it’s why a passage like Psalm 19  can flow so effortlessly from “The heavens declare the glory of God” in verse 1 to “The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul” in verse 7. But too many Christians thereby dismiss the creation, ignoring its role as a legitimate signpost to the wonders of a crazy-creative God. Maybe a warbler can’t lead you to the saving love of God, but it can  lead you to admit he exists, and spill the beans on his “eternal power and divine nature.” How? In the case of warblers, what gets my attention is their absolutely unnecessary beauty. Gratuitous  beauty. Yes, research paper after research paper will continue to posit the evolutionary advantages of a bird’s bright plumage or detailed features, genetic adaptations to better the chances of wooing increasingly picky mates. But take another look. Consider, for instance, the Black-throated Gray Warbler . It has a small yellow facial dot between beak and eye. It’s stunning in its subtlety. Riddle me this: What is the evolutionary advantage of that spot? And if there truly is  a benefit in it, why don’t the other forty-six species have it too? Does a dab of yellow need  a DNA-sequenced explanation? If your only mechanism is natural selection, then yes. But if a designer is in play, then is it possible that we’re just witnessing the divine mirth of “art for art’s sake?” Black-throated Gray Warbler, © 2016 Melissa James, MacCauley Library I’m not trying to debunk evolution in a paragraph. But really, what’s with all the beauty? These are the thoughts that reasonable souls might find themselves thinking as they train their warbler-necks upward. There are things in this world that are unexplainable at the level of utility, pragmatism, and natural selection. Some might say, “Well, we don’t have all the information in yet.” Yes, and we never will. But there’s a warbler with a yellow eye-dot (or another with a yellow throat , or yet another with a yellow rump ) that dares you not to see the hand of the artist. Prodigal Art The warbler lifts our eyes above our survival-of-the-fittest cynicism and reminds us of a prodigal God. Yes, I said prodigal. The familiar parable of the prodigal son in  Luke 15  has led us to assume that the word prodigal  means “wayward.” True, meaning is usage, and—thanks to the parable itself—the word has come to describe a foolish wanderer. But we have Tim Keller to thank for reclaiming the original meaning of prodigal . According to Merriam-Webster, a prodigal is “one who spends or gives lavishly.” It’s recklessly excessive. Over-the-top. Extravagant. Gratuitous. Unnecessary. The younger brother in that parable certainly spent his inheritance prodigally. But Keller uses that reclaimed word  to describe the work of Christ our elder brother on our behalf, the prime example of an extravagant God who has not spared his own son and will “freely give us all things” ( Romans 8:32 ). The costly atonement of Jesus is the richest of gifts, disclosing a prodigal attitude that Keller refers to as “The God of Great Expenditure.” Stealthy-Ninja Hooded Warbler © 2017 Kevin Couture, MacCauley Library If God reveals himself in both Word and world, shouldn’t we expect to encounter instances of lavishly prodigal beauty in creation as well as redemption? Look up. There are warblers in the trees, each adorned with prodigal artistry. As artist and writer Makoto Fujimura says, “Beauty is a gratuitous gift of the creator God; it finds its source and its purpose in God’s character. God, out of his gratuitous love, created a world he did not need because he is an artist.” A feather, all by itself, should be enough to convince you of intelligent design. But arrange four thousand of them together around the small frame of a songbird, and any sane heart must surrender to this discovery: The design isn’t just intelligent. It’s beautiful. Did I mention I’ll be late for work tomorrow? Browse the prodigal artistry of all forty-seven species of new world warblers. Kevin Burrell is a pastor, husband, and father in Charlotte, North Carolina, who writes about birds and faith in his spare time at ornitheology.com . In recent years his pastoral responsibilities have begun to include an increasing number of “Hey, what bird is this?” inquiries. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Jeremy Hynes on Unsplash

Note: As we observe Memorial Day to honor and mourn the men and women who have given their lives following their duty to serve their country, we wanted to share a liturgy appropriate for the occasion. O Christ Acquainted with All Our Griefs, prepare our hearts to enter now this space of grieving. O God of All Comfort, Lead us humbly into this place of heartbreak. O Spirit Who Moves in the Midst of Our Sorrows, Fill us with a right compassion. Fill us with a right compassion that we would not cross this threshold armed with easy answers, but would enter instead bearing the balm of a divine tenderness best expressed in honest affirmations and small acts of service. Teach us even in this hour, O Lord, how better to mourn with those who mourn, that their burden might in some way be made more bearable by our sharing in it. O Lord, in this place of holy sorrows make us quick to listen, and slow to speak, reminding us how the only true comfort Job received from his friends came not from their many words but from a willingness to sit with him in a silent sympathy of weeping. So let any spoken comforts we offer be the fruits of a real and costly fellowship with those who grieve. The sharing of such sorrows is instead a good and holy work, O Lord. For you also, Jesus, willingly entered the wounds of this world and wept with your creatures in their brokenness. And you have promised us that wherever your children gather in your name, you will be present as well. So be present with us now in this wounded space, O Spirit of God. Let our presence be sensed as a token of your presence. Let our concern bear unspoken witness to the redemption your love will one day work, even unto the utter and unimaginably glorious reversal of this loss. Now speak, act, and comfort, O Christ. Shepherd us into the sharing of this sorrow. May our hearts be as your heart here, our voices as your voice, our hands as your hands, our tears as your tears. Amen. Every Moment Holy Volumes I, II, and III  are available for purchase through the Rabbit Room Press online store. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Chad Madden  on Unsplash

Soils and Souls and How to Be a Poet by Lore Wilbert Note: This article was originally published March 26, 2024, on Lore Wilbert’s Substack, Sayable, at lorewilbert.com . I was seventeen when I first heard the term grass farming , sitting at a farmer’s table with my family, on the cusp of y2k, in the full-on fever dream of my father’s desire to be off-grid before the apocalypse. We were six hours from my safe, suburban home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and my parent’s realtor had connected us with another homeschooling family who had recently moved from Pennsylvania to this strange part in New York State called the North Country. The table at which we sat was a smooth butcher block one, surrounded by mismatched chairs, a warm woodstove, real wood paneled walls, and this new family we’d just met. I didn’t know it then—couldn’t know it then—but this family would become intertwined with mine in a thousand different ways and become some of the most formative people of my life. The cultivation of grass aside, these people cultivated my soul. It was Wendell Berry the farmer at the table was talking about—the farmer of grass and soil and proponent of health as being part of a membership of the whole . I didn’t know it then, this language coming out of the rocker turned farmer’s mouth, but these words would become as familiar to me as Madeleine’s  had been in the decade before. It would be years before I learned Berry wasn’t just an agricultural writer or cultural critic, but a poet and novelist too. It would be years before the language of Berry would have worked its way beneath my skin, forming and reforming and transforming me again and again into something new . It was these people at first, the ones who transformed me. This farmer-philosopher, his artist wife, their beautiful creative children, their table, their willingness to not look away from the brokenness our family would bring into their lives in the coming years—first on the scene of my dead brother, the ones who never once gave up on my dad or my mom or any of us during all those terrible divorce and custody battle years—despite plenty of reasons to do so. I didn’t read Berry’s essay Health is Membership  until my late twenties, but I experienced it from the moment I met this family. If Berry was the one who made sense of so many of my ideas and thoughts, this family was the tangible, the skin on the ideas and thoughts, the proof that it worked. Grass farming indeed. It is said that a farmer is only as good as the soil she works with, but what the human eye can’t perceive in the soil is proven in the grass it grows. Good grass means good soil and good soil means the presence of air, water, microorganisms. In The Understory , I write: In order to complete the decomposition process and become nutrient-rich, loamy soil, compost needs air, water, and other microorganisms. And likewise with us. In order to heal, we need space to breathe, permission to weep, and the presence of a friend who will help us make sense of it all: air, water, and living things. Or, as Diane Langberg says, “Trauma healing always requires talking, tears, and time.” This is what this family offered to me again and again and again: talking, tears, and time. This is what Wendell Berry showed me was not only good and necessary for the health of the soil, but for the health of the soul. He wrote, “Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.” So too with the soul, right? Whenever people ask me of the writers I love and who I would recommend, it is always the ones who have a breadth of work and versatility with their words, L’Engle, Berry, Lewis, Morris, Harrison, and more. I am less interested in the ability to do one thing really well and more in the ability to morph and move between things, to stretch and grow between mediums and genres. I am interested (on my better days) in what makes me grow, not what makes me shine. Shining is easy, but it’s often cheap, and I have to remind myself of this when I see the cheap succeeding. Wendell Berry is not cheap, nothing about him or his writing is cheap. His writing has the chops of the best and yet the humility—the hummus—of the weak. It has the willingness to form and reform, based on new information or experiences. His writing is self-effacing, he’s not interested in being the one who gets it right or is memorialized (he is famous for his lack of desire to be famous), he’s more interested in the ideas themselves than in being the one who has them. He knows the making of soil means death a thousand times over and the making of good soil is the work of one’s lifetime. The same with the soul too, I suppose. Here is Berry’s poem, How to Be a Poet,  which is subtitled “ (to remind myself).” i Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment. ii Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. iii Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Read that again, read it slowly. Here’s what I love about it and why I’ve committed much of it to memory: The humility it takes to say, “I do not have enough of what it takes.” more of each than you have The willingness to mistrust the flatterers (and the numbers, the counts, the metrics, etc. They’re all a fickle mistress.): Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment. The acknowledgement that we live in places and among people, including our own selves to our own selves, who are always trying to obscure what we actually are: Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. The sheer acceptance of what is in order to write what isn’t yet: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. One of the challenges I feel a lot in my writing is that I am driven—compulsed even—to write in so many different genres and styles. I want to wrestle with theology and doctrine, share memoir and creative non-fiction, write with a literary bent and yet broad appeal. I want to write as the Christian I am and yet as the skeptic I also am.  I want to play with form and function, and sometimes I’m afraid that causes a bit of whiplash for my readers. I’m afraid they will come here for one thing, and when that isn’t what they receive on the regular, they will leave. I’m afraid that people say, “This is what we expect of you—to be gentle, to be truthful, to be generous, to be generative, to be slow, to share beauty and blessings, and always do it in this way,” and when I do something different or am something different, I will be canceled, unfollowed, cast aside. Berry is reminding himself  how to be himself  in this poem. He is saying, “Listen, self, you’re going to forget who you are because of who other people say you are or should be, so this is me reminding you (me) of what it takes to be the poet/novelist/memoirist/cultural critic you not only want to be but truly actually are.” And, goodness gracious, if he hasn’t succeeded. Lore Ferguson Wilbert is an award winning writer, thinker, learner, and author of the books, The Understory , A Curious Faith , and Handle With Care . She has written for Mockingbird Journal, The  Christian Century , Plough  Magazine, Christianity Today, and more, as well as her own site, lorewilbert.com . She has a master’s in spiritual formation and leadership and loves to think and write about the intersection of human formation and the gritty stuff of earth. You can find Lore on Instagram @lorewilbert . She lives with her husband Nate and their pups, Harper and Rilke, in southeastern Pennsylvania. She really has read most of the books on her shelves. (Lore is pronounced with a long e.) For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by David Emrich  on Unsplash

by Caleb Woodbridge Note: Today marks the second anniversary of Tim Keller’s death. As we celebrate his life and legacy, it seemed fitting to share this reflection on his works and the compilation of the devotional Go Forward In Love: A Year of Daily Readings from Timothy Keller (first published in the UK as A Year With Timothy Keller ). At Hutchmoot UK 2023, in the beautiful Derbyshire setting of the Hayes Conference Centre, I sat down for lunch on Friday with a friend and former colleague from Hodder Faith, the UK publishers of Tim Keller’s books. It was great comparing notes on Hutchmoot, chatting about Christian books, faith and creativity—and also a freelance project I was about to begin work on: compiling A Year With Timothy Keller , as the UK edition is called. I’d been asked to compile a devotional volume of 365 excerpts from Keller’s writings into daily readings. It was a big task, but I already had some ideas about how to break it down and start choosing Keller’s “greatest hits,” and was looking forward to getting into the project. I don’t remember the details, but as well as discussing the book, we almost certainly discussed Keller’s health, since his son Michael had just shared on social media that Tim was going into hospice care. Later that day, on the afternoon of May 19, 2023, the news came through: Tim Keller had passed away. This good and faithful servant had gone to be with his Savior. Inklings and Imagination The news was a sobering jolt amidst the joys of creative fellowship at Hutchmoot UK. Many of those present had read and been influenced by Keller, appreciating his nuanced, culturally engaged approach to the Christian faith. Like Hutchmoot and the Rabbit Room, Tim Keller was deeply shaped by Tolkien and Lewis. According to Collin Hansen’s Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation , he’d been introduced to The Chronicles of Narnia  by Kathy Kelly (who’d corresponded with Lewis) early on in their relationship, and their shared love of  The Lord of the Rings  was one of the threads that drew them together as a couple. This love for the Inklings runs through Keller’s writing and preaching—Tolkien and Lewis are among his most-quoted authors outside the Bible. The Inklings helped awaken Keller to the importance of engaging the imagination as a Christian communicator, preacher and apologist. In his book Preaching , he reminded the reader that “Change happens not just by giving the mind new arguments but also by feeding the imagination new beauties.” He was at pains to bring the Christian faith to life through the imagination, to make its truths real and concrete for his listeners. He quotes Tolkien’s famous essay “On Fairy Stories” for its argument that “there are indelible, deep longings in the human heart that realistic fiction cannot satisfy.” Keller also found comfort and Christian truth in The Lord of the Rings  while fighting cancer. In his book King’s Cross   (also published as Jesus the King ) , Keller confesses that when he was undergoing surgery for an earlier round of thyroid cancer, what came to mind wasn’t a passage of Scripture, but that from The Return of the King where Sam sees a white star twinkling above the darkness of Mordor: The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. For Keller facing the possibility of death, this was a reminder that it is really true. “Because of Jesus’s death evil is a passing thing—a shadow . . . It didn’t matter what happened in my surgery—it was going to be all right. And it is  going to be all right.” Integration As far as I know, Keller never had any direct connection with Hutchmoot or the Rabbit Room. But I think most friends of the Rabbit Room will also find a friend in Keller’s writings. Keller had a vision for a faith integrated with all of life, including the arts and creativity. Keller also sought to find balance and nuance, often offering creative “third way” positions that integrated seemingly disparate emphases, a skill that many of an artistic temperament will appreciate! This particularly comes out in his book Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work , which takes Tolkien’s allegorical short story “Leaf by Niggle” as one of its early starting points. Niggle is an artist who dreams of painting a great tree, but is distracted by his daily obligations and his need to help those around him, and never manages to finish it. After he dies, only the painting of one beautiful leaf ends up in the Town Museum, mostly forgotten. But in the afterlife, on the outskirts of the heavenly country, he finds his Tree, finished and glorious. “It is a gift!” says Niggle. His artistic vision was participating in some glimpse of true reality. Keller uses Tolkien’s story to unpack a Christian understanding of art and vocation: If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever. That is what the Christian faith promises. Unfortunately not all church leaders place a high value on the arts and on creative callings—but Keller had an expansive vision of the Christian faith for all of life and encouraged Christian creatives to see the validity and spiritual importance of their gifts. That evening at Hutchmoot after the news of his passing, we took time to give thanks together for Keller’s life and work. Michael J. Tinker performed one of his songs from When There Are No Words , which he had written following the recent death of his own father, Melvin Tinker. Working on A Year With Timothy Keller  took on a new weight for me. I now had the responsibility of making sure it was a fitting memorial to Keller’s life and teaching, but I was honored to be entrusted with the task. But what exactly went into compiling a set of 365 daily readings from across the breadth of Keller’s writings? Speed-running Keller With the clock ticking until my deadline, I realized I needed a process to help me pull out the “best of” Keller’s nuggets. Armed with my own collection of Keller books plus a set of PDFs supplied by Hodder, I set out to make a plan. Writing software Scrivener  came to my rescue: With its abilities to organize complicated texts, it was perfect for the messy business of pulling out excerpts from Keller’s books and ordering them coherently. I speed-read each book (it helped that I was already familiar with many of them, though not all!) looking for themes and sequences that would make for good devotional readings or that would help capture some of Keller’s key themes and ideas, all the way copying and pasting excerpts. As I collected my excerpts along with Bible verses into Scrivener, I then shaped them into order, taking into account themes, variety and seasonal relevance. For example, February started with excerpts on love and relationships to coincide with Valentine’s Day season (while being mindful to also include Keller’s observations on the goodness of singleness). For the season of Lent, I focused on excerpts from Counterfeit Gods  on idolatry and from Walking with God through Pain and Suffering , and as we got into Easter, excerpts from King’s Cross   on the significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection. In compiling the devotional, I sneaked in one or two “Easter eggs” that I hope Keller would have enjoyed: For example, March 25, as many fans of Tolkien will know, is the date in Middle-earth when the Ring was destroyed. I found a Keller quote from Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering where he uses the destruction of the Ring to illustrate the theme of idolatry to use on that day. See if you can spot any others! The Spiritual Impact It was impossible for me to immerse myself in Keller’s writings without it having a spiritual impact. Again and again, Keller brings us back to grace. We can avoid God not only by being “sinners” in an obvious way but also by our religion, by building our sense of identity on our own achievements rather than what God has done for us. For me, having recently left the senior role of publishing director of Inter-Varsity Press UK, a well-regarded evangelical Christian publishing house, reading Keller helped me realize that I’d put an unhealthy weight on my job as a measure of my spiritual status. I realized that I was often driven by a sense of anxious striving rather than resting in God’s grace. But if we are in Christ, we are already completely loved and accepted. As Keller puts it in The Reason for God: When my own personal grasp of the gospel was very weak, my self­-view swung wildly between two poles. When I was performing up to my standards – in academic work, professional achievement or relationships – I felt confident but not humble. I was likely to be proud and unsympathetic to failing people. When I was not living up to standards, I felt humble but not confident, a failure. I discov­ered, however, that the gospel contained the resources to build a unique identity. In Christ I could know I was accepted by grace not only despite my flaws, but because I was willing to admit them. The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued and that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of my­self less. I don’t need to notice myself – how I’m doing, how I’m being regarded – so often. This isn’t some radically novel insight, but again and again Keller speaks the Gospel to our hearts with bright clarity and imagination. (Re-)reading most of Keller’s books in the space of a few weeks was a refresher course in grace for me, which Keller applies with wisdom to the wholeness of life. As we mark the second anniversary of Keller’s passing, it’s a great time to pick up Go Forward in Love ( US ) or A Year With Timothy Keller ( UK ). I hope that those reading it are as blessed by it as I was in compiling it! Go Forward in Love  is published by Zondervan in the US and out now in hardcover. A Year with Timothy Keller  is published by Hodder Faith in the UK and out now in paperback. Caleb Woodbridge is a freelance writer, editor and digital consultant, who writes on faith and imagination at www.biggerinside.co.uk . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo from timothykeller.com

by Mark Meynell Note: This post is based on a sermon originally given by Mark Meynell on February 23, 2025, at Eden Baptist Church, Cambridge, UK. In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. The horse seemed to like it too; he gave the sort of whinney a horse would give if, after years of being a cab-horse, it found itself back in the old field where it had played as a foal, and saw someone whom it remembered and loved coming across the field to bring it a lump of sugar. . . . Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out—single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing. Once you’ve started a passage like that, it’s almost impossible to stop! But stop we must. It is, of course, taken from C S Lewis’s classic The Magician’s Nephew.  It is surely one of Lewis’s most inspiring and beloved passages. The witnesses in the story are astonished by what they are seeing. Well, to be fair, not all. The Cabby, Digory and Polly are transfixed, but the Witch and Uncle Andrew simply can’t bear it. They’re desperate to leave for one simple reason: All are in the presence of Aslan as he sings Narnia into existence . GOD SINGS! We don’t often think of God singing, I suspect. We usually focus on God speaking.  After all, in Genesis 1, God speaks the creation into existence. “Let there be . . . and there was  . . .” But consider these words taken from one of those tiny books at the end of the Old Testament. The Lord your God is with you,the Mighty Warrior who saves.He will take great delight in you;in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.   (Zeph. 3:17 [New International Version]) In context, this is God the just warrior, the one who knows when people fall far short of his righteousness. But he calls on them to turn back and throw themselves on his mercy. Notice what he promises those who are prepared to do this; it is such an intimate and lovely image. Our problem is many of us imagine that God is reluctant to have us back, that he begrudges his grace for some reason. We worry that we have accumulated far too long a list of charges against us and so, regardless of how kind he might have been “at the start,” it’s now too late. We’ve blown it. He knows us too well to ever want us back on his team. Yet that couldn’t be further from the truth! Zephaniah has presented him as the Mighty Warrior, certainly, but he is in no doubt that God also delights  in his people. He loves them. In fact, their return makes him  sing with joy. There is nothing begrudging about this at all. I love how Eugene Peterson renders the second half of verse 17: Happy to have you back, he’ll calm you with his loveand delight you with his songs. (Zeph. 3:17 [The Message]) What does this illustrate about God? Well obviously, we see both his grace and care. But the fact that he uses song to express them is revealing. Despite being just one verse, it does seem to reflect some extraordinary truths about our Creator God and his creation as they are presented wider afield in Scripture. The Bible is full of singing, of course, and one book entirely consists of songs—the Psalms. But it would be a mistake to see this in purely functional or utilitarian terms. We don’t sing simply because we have the physical capacity or because it is a useful way of gathering people together in a shared identity. It goes far deeper than that. CREATION SINGS! After many chapters demanding explanations for his appalling suffering, Job finally meets his match (Job 38:1). God confronts him with a litany of impossible questions. Were you there at creation, Job? Then what about the earth’s foundations? Did they follow your design? Did you give me a hand with them, Job? And so on. Notice how the Lord describes the early stages of creation (taking the order of Genesis 1). On what were its footings set,or who laid its cornerstone—while the morning stars sang togetherand all the angels shouted for joy? (Job 38:6-7 [NIV]) What do the stars do when they have been created? They sing! Well of course, if their maker is an artist who sings, then it stands to reason. But this actually points to something inbuilt about the cosmos. When he crafted that beautiful sequence in The Magician’s Nephew , Lewis was making a profound theological point, but it was hardly original to him. Lewis was a great scholar of the Middle Ages (as Jason Baxter demonstrated in his fascinating 2022 book, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis ). Medieval thinkers understood that the deepest connection existed between the awe-inspiring order found throughout the created universe and the mysterious structure and beauty of music. That is why they took music so seriously. A powerful illustration of that can be found in the Schools Quad of the Bodleian Library in Oxford . Completed by 1624, it housed the university’s primary lecture halls, and it is still possible today to see signs for the various disciplines above their respective doors. Many of the expected subjects are present. These were perhaps the STEM subject equivalents for the Middle Ages: moral philosophy, jurisprudence, rhetoric, astronomy, metaphysics and arithmetic, grammar and logic. But the oddest inclusion in Schools Quad has to be music. What on earth is that doing there? Scholars understood that there was something deeply mathematical and logical about music. Just listen to a classical musician wax lyrical about the music of J. S. Bach, for example! As such, music has something to teach us about the true nature of the universe. This is where the ancient Greek concept of the “Music of the Spheres”  enters into Christian theology (and no, I’m not referring to Coldplay’s 2021 album). The human ear cannot hear this music; it operates far beyond the meager capacities of our perceptions. But the cosmos functions with such intricate complexity, order, and harmony, on an astronomical scale, that it can be said to perform a celestial form of music while following its cycles, orbits, and processes. This is a music for which God alone has the capacity to hear. While this may seem entirely fanciful to contemporary minds, it is startling to discover that modern astronomers are beginning to recognize that there might just be something in it. Don’t ask me to explain any of this, but I gather it has something to do with orbital resonance  (whatever that is)! Before we get completely transported beyond the Milky Way, consider the nitty-gritty of what music is in essence. It has many ingredients, but these are core: Notes : Each note is produced by the manipulation of sound-wave frequencies, their resonance and echoes. Each note’s sound is shaped by the context in which it is played—whether a stadium or a broom cupboard, whether by banging stretched skins, scraping gutstrings with hair, blowing through or over tubes with multiple holes. Melody : These notes are then strung together in particular orders to form tunes—from tunes you can hum or whistle, to big complex themes that you can’t. Rhythm : We all live with rhythm at its most basic: the heartbeat. But externally, rhythm can quicken or slow, accompany walking or running, or convey rest (because the heart always keeps pumping). Harmony : When notes are played simultaneously, we might expect a complete racket. It takes great creativity, let alone a certain genius, not just to avoid a chaotic noise, but to make something beautiful and even emotional. And that’s just for starters. It is a system of extraordinary complexity. So it is easy to see why it has been regarded as a reflection of the complexity found elsewhere in the created order, within the human body, say, or the solar system. So perhaps we should consider music as an accessible, and affecting, model of the universe, rather like a watercolor of a landscape. All its many elements cohere in the most staggering way, such that the sum is infinitely greater than its parts. Then what of us? Created by a singing creator and finding our place in a singing creation, is it any wonder that: CREATURES SING! The last psalm in the Psalter couldn’t be clearer. God wants his creatures to make musical praise. Praise the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens. Praise him for his acts of power; praise him for his surpassing greatness. Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, praise him with tambourine and dancing, praise him with the strings and pipe, praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. (Ps. 150 [NIV]) But this famous psalm has surprises all its own and points us to one or two important features of music. Music to Express Praise Singing is the most natural thing in the world to do. Someone once said, “Whoever sings to God, prays twice.” That has been attributed to St. Augustine, but there seems little evidence of that. No matter. The point stands—because not only does music accompany and thoughtfully articulate words, it does so much more. It adds a whole new layer of intensity. No wonder so many prayers are sung. After all, many of the Psalms come with instructions for the music directors (even if today we don’t always know what they mean). And we see all kinds of people in the Bible doing this. Moses and Miriam sing praise after the escape from Egypt in Exodus 15—many of its themes actually then get echoed later in the Psalms. In Luke’s account of Jesus’s birth, he constructs his narrative around the songs sung by Zechariah, Mary, Simeon, and the angels. Plus many others, of course. But here’s the interesting thing about Psalm 150. In this psalm, praise for God doesn’t actually require words. Praise God for his greatness, in his heavens, for his acts of power. But do it with trumpets, with strings that you scrape and pluck, with things you bang, like tambourines and cymbals—lots of cymbals, and then with dancing. It is only by the time you get to verse 6, that singing even gets implied (although one implication of this command is that it’s not restricted to people): “let every thing  that even breathes praise the Lord.” Now, one person who did all of that was King David himself. Not only did he compose countless songs (some of which were incorporated into the Psalter), he was a pretty enthusiastic instrumentalist. For example, he was all too happy to join in the fun when the people were celebrating God with “castanets, harps, lyres, tambourines, rattles and cymbals” (2 Sam. 6:5). The Bible writers clearly had a bit of a thing about getting their cymbals out. So music is a God-given gift through which we can, and should, praise its donor . . . and with which (to coin a phrase) we should use words if we have to. Music to Revive Spirits But music is so much more than an expression of exuberance. When King Saul is in deep mental anguish, what does he most need? Music. That will, of course, be God’s means for bringing the shepherd boy David into service in the royal court. Whenever David plays, relief comes to Saul; he would feel better and the evil spirit would leave him (1 Sam. 16:14-23). Isn’t that one of music’s most mysterious and beguiling properties? Think about it. An aptitude for manipulating multiple sound waves in specific combinations and permutations can also touch us at our deepest levels. Music can comfort and disturb; it can agitate and calm. Is this not a reflection of the way that the Lord has made us? We are of course far more than our reason, or our chemical makeup, or our physicality. We are such complex beings—as was God’s intention. But I am convinced that it is no accident for music to reach us in our inmost being. God made us like this (just as he gave each one of us the capacity to appreciate beauty in all manner of manifestation). I can testify to the truth of music being a source of hope and consolation at times when words seem feeble and useless. Let me quote briefly from one of my favorite contemporary composers, Sir James MacMillan, from his book A Scot’s Song: A Life of Music ,   since I definitely resonate with what he writes here. Music, he says, has: the power to look into the abyss as well as to the transcendent heights. It can trigger the most severe and conflicting extremes of feeling, and it is in these dark and dingy places—where the soul is probably closest to its source, where it has its relationship with God—that music can spark life that has long lain dormant. Music To Anticipate Heaven Heaven will be full of music, which means that any music now is an anticipation of heaven. There will be an eternal Music, as we see again and again in the book of Revelation. John’s vision is bursting with orchestras and singers. The sound I heard was like that of harpists playing their harps. And they sang a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and the elders. No one could learn the song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth. (Rev. 14:2-3 [NIV]) Now here’s a random question. What do you think is the opposite of music? Is it silence? The interesting thing is that John’s vision includes the odd moment of silence too—giving a sense of anticipation and hope. But the answer is not silence. The opposite of music is not silence but noise, cacophony, chaos. That is the nature of life under judgment. For example, John in his visions sees what happens to Babylon after it falls. The music of harpists and musicians, pipers and trumpeters,will never be heard in you again. (Rev. 18:22 [NIV]) But that makes sense if music is indeed a reflection of divine order. Music is an incredible gift by our musical creator. This is not to suggest everyone is musical or needs to be musical. But it does remind us not to dismiss the complexity of what it means to be human. We are all fearfully and wonderfully made. And we must be thankful to God for this most glorious gift. Let me close with a glorious setting by William Harris  of verses drawn from A Hymn of Heavenly Beauty, a long poem by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser .  Harris wrote for two unaccompanied choirs (usually just one choir split down the middle) that seem to compete with one another, each responding to the other in ever-greater heights of intensity, echoing the heavenly angels in their eternal worship. It ends with a profound longing for the reality of which this is but the merest taste! But one day, express(e) it we will! How then can mortall tongue hope to expresse The image of such endlesse perfectnesse? Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor, and teacher based in the UK, and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology, and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Lorenzo Spoleti  on Unsplash

by Amy Baik Lee One winter, when our two daughters were very small and the backyard was blanketed in a foot of snow, my husband seated them on a flattened cardboard box at the top of our sloping grass patch. He tugged the box downhill as smoothly as he could while they tried not to topple over in their plump coats. Sometimes I imagine what would happen if the girls decided to replicate their first sledding experience now; if they were lucky, they’d slide about six feet before plowing into the wall somewhere under my reading chair. I have, at times, dreamed of having a slightly bigger garden. To be sure, this one is larger than any of the apartment balconies or rental yards we’ve had before, and the ability to plant without having to ask a landlord for permission is a gift I never want to take for granted. But I’ve still allowed myself to daydream here and there, inspired by many who have done beautiful things with the land in their care. If I could acquire a one- or two-acre lot somewhere, I might plan out a garden divided into many rooms, like Monty Don or Julie Witmer—or I might plant a grove of trees some distance from the house so that when the wind swept through their leaves we could hear them roar like the ocean. In such a place, like the forest trail we walked a few weeks ago, you would probably be able to hear an entire chorus of birds cheeping from an amphitheater of branches on a still January afternoon. But aside from the fact that moving wouldn’t be a wise financial decision for us right now, living here has given me ample opportunity to consider what it means to tend a place for its own good. Through the window beside my writing desk, I’ve noticed which flowers the red-waistcoated bumblebees and migrating hummingbirds prefer. I’ve realized which non-native plants I’ve been twisting the figurative arm of the land to grow, and which plants practically burst out of the ground on their own. A few years ago, a pair of marigolds I bought from a local farm flourished with such spirit that by summer’s end each little bush was covered in hundreds of seedheads. Gingerly I put a bag over the first plant, hoping to pull it out gently by its roots—but the roots came up faster than I expected, and I don’t know how else to describe the result than to say that the plant shattered gleefully into a hundred thousand black and yellow seeds all over the soil. I swept up as many as I could, but the following year still found me pulling up volunteer marigolds all through the growing season. Not very long after the marigold episode, I read Anthony Esolen’s epilogue in Why We Create , which challenged me to think about what it meant to steward land rightly. Using the lens of Milton’s Paradise Lost , Esolen writes: [M]an is meant by his Creator to be a maker, to give of himself lovingly in art that reflects the beauty, the goodness, and the truth of the world that God has given him. . . . So it is that Milton shows Adam and Eve to be artists in fact. With care and intelligence and love, under no specific command of God or oversight by the angels, they give new form to created things. Again, Adam speaks to Eve, and reveals to us what their innocent work is all about . . . It is to make the garden a garden for man: with arbors and alleys and clearings and shady recesses: not a violation of nature, but a fulfillment. The last sentence helped my mind to link the concept of creation care with artistry and cultivation, and to view the pair for the first time as a responsibility. Under the creation mandate in Genesis, which Eugene Peterson paraphrases as “Fill Earth! Be responsible  for the fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living thing that moves on the face of the Earth” (Gen. 1:28 [The Message], emphasis mine), caring for land doesn’t mean simply letting it go wild; there is a listening  involved, along with a responsive shaping, that takes the character of the allotment into account. There is no single correct design for the yard outside my window, but what plants and arrangements will honor its features along with the creativity of its owners? What will make it hospitable to the small creatures who fly or scurry in for brief visits? How can it be raised to “reflect the beauty, the goodness, and the truth of the world God has given [us]”? And if we manage to make it a place that offers a refuge to human beings, whom will it serve beyond ourselves? With so much to ponder, I began to think that perhaps having more land wouldn’t necessarily be the boon I once imagined. Maybe even an acre would be a responsibility I could not take on; maybe I wouldn’t be able to care for it the way it ought to be cared for. By this time I could also see that having just enough to weed and water in the garden gave me time for other things I was supposed to be doing. I suddenly thought of a statement that C.S. Lewis made in Surprised by Joy : “I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.” Lewis writes the line in the context of friendship versus “acquaintance and general society”; I now thought of it in relation to land. Why should I wish to own more land than I could tend well? To be honest, I’m not naturally tempted to make more acquaintances or to own great swaths of property. But as I’ve continued my work both indoors and out, I have seen the relevance of Lewis’s opinion to a third area, one where I do   often witness a siren call of “more”: writing. I must tread carefully, I find, when I read advice for writers or from writers. This is a field where supply and demand seem to assign worth; the numbers of readers or followers or sales can feel like visible, reliable metrics that prove one’s words have served some purpose. I think it’s a miracle that letters and sentences strung together can resonate through hearts and minds, and I owe a great debt to generous souls who have told me that some thought or phrase helped them to go on. Their words have done the same for me. At the same time, sometimes I catch myself placing too much faith in those aforementioned numbers; it can feel like they equal the confirmation or withdrawal of one’s calling. They can even push my understanding of that calling in the wrong direction: I see how I could end up believing that a bigger readership will enable me to do what God has created me to do—but in a way that would make me forget, dismiss, or devalue the very people I’m writing for . Recently I spent a day tracking down interviews about the writing processes of well-known authors. I have many of their impressive books on my shelves; they have challenged my assumptions, crafted memorable voices, and given me a rich return for my attention over multiple readings. They are books that have lifted my capacity for reason or empathy or language and “can lift [me] again,” as Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren discuss in How to Read a Book , with the ability to “go on doing this until [I] die.” These are often listed for recommended reading or considered part of the English-speaking canon. But there is another class of works that I’ve realized I seek out more often: works that have gained a sort of dog-eared familiarity in my mind, usually because they lit a spark of hope at a needed time in my life and still bear the scorch marks of that kindling when I revisit them. (The two categories aren’t mutually exclusive; Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead  is just one example of a work that belongs to both for me.) As I listened to a song the other day that fit this description, I found myself quietly thanking God for “making a home for me” in the music of that particular artist. The phrase came out of the blue. It made me look back over all the works I tend to return to like a sojourner who stumbles into a house having forgotten her name and her country. I come to them weary, even broken, and in their shelter I remember the homing cry that reverberates through the very marrow of my bones and all the crumbling corners of creation. I feel the vast and aching imminence of it, a haunting suspended chord waiting to resolve, and somehow it seems I can hear the voice of my king a little more clearly as I get ready to head out again. These “homes” of song, story, and visual art have given me a hint about what it might mean for me to cultivate my own space well, whether physical or vocational. When God issues his mandate to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1, he has already set them an example by preparing a home: a home for the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air, for the creeping and swimming and swarming creatures, for the man and woman themselves. This pattern of God preparing is scattered throughout Scripture: He sends an angel to guard Israel and bring the nation into the sites in Canaan that he has prepared (Exod. 23:20), the psalmist knows him to be a God who prepares a table before him in the presence of his enemies (Ps. 23:5), Christ himself tells us that those who are blessed by the Father will “inherit the kingdom prepared for [them] from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 25:34 [English Standard Version]). The saints in Hebrews 11 who died with their faces toward a better country are now gathered to the One who confirms they did not hope in vain; “he has prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:16 [ESV]). Even now, the Savior is preparing a place for us in the Father’s house (John 14:1-4). This repeated theme of preparation by the Creator of the universe has led me to look at our tools and talents in a new light. Perhaps the elements entrusted to us—a place, a relationship, an artistic skill—only reach full fruition in our hands when we have made a home for someone or something else in them. In my case with my writing, “homemaking” involves being faithful to the eucatastrophic story of Christ’s redemption—facing the raw brokenness of our world and condition with honest expression, but also being unashamed to write about the startling breakthroughs of God’s presence in a culture that has lost faith in happy endings. I tiptoe along my rough-hewn sentences, shaking and prodding them a bit to see if they will hold up the main tone I have in mind, because I hope in the end to create a roof under which another person can meet the One who is life. Over the last decade, I've been growing aware that the people I'm writing to are immortals, as Lewis points out in “The Weight of Glory”; they are people for whom my words will either be a help or a hindrance, however slight, in following Christ. If this is the task before me, then it seems like a mark of incomprehension to ask for more writerly renown (or territory, or contact with other lives) than I can steward faithfully—a bit like Andrew Ketterley when he dreams of setting up petty business ventures and health resorts while Aslan is singing Narnia into life. Why should I aspire to sublet more of my Father’s harvest ground than I can work with heartily? I have co-laborers at work in the world with their own commissions and gifts, and there are so many needs and wounds to be addressed. I do not mean to imply that small means virtuous. One can mismanage two dollars as thoroughly as one can two million; the specific number isn’t the real issue. I can think of several artists who I believe are caring for their large audiences well. But it sets my understanding right side up to acknowledge that the privilege of having someone’s attention is a stewardship and not a possession. It is a sober and glorious undertaking to look for the image of God in our fellow human beings, and to refuse to commodify or anonymize them. In the kingdom of the Son of Man, asking for “more” is really a request to kneel and serve . . . more. All this makes me think that my prayers would do well to follow the pattern of Proverbs 30:7-9: “[G]ive me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you . . . or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God” (ESV). Give me the feast of enough. Do not give me more good—more acreage, more relationships, more readers—than I can handle as a servant and as a child of joy. The garden and the writing have been private sanctuaries of worship and ministry to me, and you know the delight I have taken in working with sound and atmosphere and beauty under your hand. But when it comes to my outward yield, whatever professional or popular counsel may have trained me to seek, let my portion be commensurate to the home it may provide for others. Let me not envy those to whom you have given different responsibilities, and of whom you will require things I cannot see. Help me grasp the surprising breadth of the resources I’ve already been given. Help me bend my wits and background and sensitivity to listen long to this garden, this intersection of relationships, this readership, that I may learn to love them as you do. Make a home in my work—in my words, music, meals, wherever you please—where a tired traveler may look out the window to the coming dawn and remember we are but a night’s watch from seeing you. Bless them with a burning hope in the low light as they set out again—even as I ask you to bless me with the same elsewhere as I sojourn in another’s house. Thank you for the many doors left open by your people on this road Home. It is a prayer fit for the corner where my little desk stands, where I’m gaining the sight to see the right-sized plot before me for the gift that it is. Here, the young maple tree calls my attention to its spring waking because it stands right outside my window. The cosmos plants bloom and seed with abandon all over the grass patch because they love the dry climate and poor soil; the house finches walk along the winter-crisped stems like tightrope artists, inching their way to spiny clusters of seed. Here, in a month or two, while I stumble on in drafts and supplication, one of those wee birds will fly up to find a perch at the very top of the elm tree. Its frail feet will cling to a single budding branch. And with a clarity that pierces walls and windows below, it will sing the mad, jubilant song that never fails to remind me of the newness that is about to fill the earth. Amy Baik Lee is the author of This Homeward Ache , a columnist at Cultivating Magazine, and a literary member of the Anselm Society Arts Guild. A lifelong appreciator of stories, she holds an MA in English literature from the University of Virginia and still “does voices” when she reads aloud. She writes at a desk that looks out on a small cottage garden in Colorado, usually surrounded by her husband’s woodworking projects, her two daughters’ creative works, and patient cups of rooibos tea. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Ian Kirkland  on Unsplash

by Kate Gaston I was raised in a trailer, deep in the muggy nether regions of rural Alabama. This, I realize, may conjure images of a mildewed, tin can of a structure with cardboard over the windows and a snarling dog chained up out front. While that picture is fairly representative of a large majority of trailers in St. Clair County, it wasn’t my home. No, my home—a double-wide—was actually on the fancier end of the spectrum, all things considered. It was quite respectable, really, for a house delivered to the spot on the back of a flatbed truck. Whatever psychological chafing my parents may have felt surrounding our less-than-traditional home, it didn’t stop them from throwing wide the front door. Our home was the architectural equivalent of a bear hug, pulling folks in, welcoming them with as much hospitality as they had need for. My parents hosted all manner of people and events. Whatever the occasion, my brothers and I would dash outdoors with all the kids. Depending on our numbers, we’d play kickball, capture the flag, or tape ball (our homegrown version of baseball where the ball was made of—you guessed it—tape). After our games, hot, tired, and smelly, we’d crash back into the house to tank up on potato chips and RC Cola. The grown-ups would be deep in conversation, talking about whatever serious and dull things adults discuss. They’d shoo us back outdoors, where we’d recommence our games until the night dew was thick on the grass. Soaked in sweat, covered in grass stains and chiggers, we’d wave goodbye to our friends as their taillights disappeared into the night. If my parents ever felt scarcity or exhaustion in these situations, it wasn’t obvious. They simply offered whatever expression of hospitality the moment called for. Their welcome was so natural, so seemingly effortless, that my childish brain never even registered it as hospitality. It was simply the way things were done, the wallpaper of life. Though I failed to register my parents’ hospitality for what it was, I was quick to embrace that sham version of hospitality, pervasive as kudzu in the Deep South, which says hospitality is best offered on a silver platter. It all started at Accents Tea Room and Gift Shoppe. The tea room was nestled in the back of a quaint little house in the heart of downtown Pell City. Stepping inside the front door, your sinuses would be seared by the sickly sweet smell of potpourri in an eye-watering variety of scents. Every shelf groaned under the weight of a veritable infestation of kitschy knickknacks for sale. Proceeding to the rear of the house, accompanied by the melodramatic strains of endlessly looping Muzak renditions of hit Broadway classics, you’d find yourself entering the tea room. Its tables were covered with snowy tablecloths, upon which nested charmingly mismatched china place settings. As guests trickled in for the lunch hour, I’d flit around their tables in my crisply starched apron, filling their water glasses and taking orders. Then I’d dash to the kitchen to help prepare their food—always a choice between chicken salad, a roast beef croissant, or a vintage goblet filled with something called Shrimp Louie. For too many of my formative years, I equated the word “hospitality” with Battenburg lace, china tea cups, and exotic shrimp dishes. Years later, as my wedding day approached and I gleefully registered for towels, waffle makers, and all manner of unnecessary household gadgetry, my attention turned, once again, to fine china. Being raised in a trailer did not predispose me to the ownership of china, silver, and crystal. On top of that, the bridal milestone of registering for wedding china was experiencing, perhaps, its last gasp of cultural relevance. But if the matriarchs of society tell you to register for expensive china, you darn well register for expensive china. So I did. Unwrapping each delicate piece as it arrived, my new husband and I then determined where to store them in our tiny apartment. Being students, each plate cost more than we made in a day’s work. To keep them safe, we tucked the plates high up in the pantry, right next to the goblets of Waterford crystal that stood in a soldierly line, waiting for their call to duty. Almost two decades passed, and with every move, I’d painstakingly box up those beautiful things, hauling them hither and yon across the country. As I blew the dust from the plates and wrapped them in fresh bubble wrap, I knew that eventually there would come a day when I’d have the time, energy, and motivation to cook a meal worthy of my china place settings, a meal that would put Babette’s feast to shame. Let me go ahead and spoil the ending for you. There will never be enough time, energy, or motivation for hospitality if that’s what it is required to look like every time. Yes, we like to offer our best. Yes, we’d like to welcome people beautifully, magically, with the tinkling of crystal and the glow of artfully dripping candelabras. But for real, though, sometimes hospitality is a frozen pizza thrown in the oven to accommodate more hungry mouths. If you're still holding onto societal expectations that equate hospitality with fancified entertaining, it’s time to give your understanding a good threshing. Let the chaff be carried away; keep what’s real. Hospitality is not about the trappings. It’s not about the food you serve. It’s not about how clean your house is, or even whether your house was delivered on the back of a truck. Hospitality is about something deeper, more palpable. Hospitality is that part of us that thrums along in resonance with the beating heart of Christ, choosing to acknowledge we are the embodiment of his intentions. Each moment might not feel charged with some sort of supernatural aura, or some heightened sense of being about God’s work. In all likelihood, most  moments won’t feel like that. We aren’t promised the ability to see the fruit of our labor. This can be infuriating, can’t it? But we are in the business of abiding and are called to trust the fruit-bearing to him. Hospitality will almost always feel like work. Why? Because it is work. Perhaps, when the work is a heavy lift, when you’re tired, or when your frustration rises, recall what it feels like to be on the receiving end of someone’s heartfelt welcome. When I remember those moments I’ve been offered hospitality—even the small moments, especially the small moments—it softens me, making my heart a more spacious place. Hospitality is when someone who drinks their coffee black has creamer in their fridge just for me. It’s when there’s a reading lamp on the bedside table and an extra pillow on the guest room bed. It’s when, in conversation, someone leans in for those two or three extra beats, showing me they really want to know my answer to their question; they aren’t just being polite. It’s when someone tells me to wear sweatpants to movie night at their house. It’s when someone remembers my favorite coffee mug. Here’s a hospitality conundrum for you. A host who answers the door in sweatpants makes me feel loved, but it might make you feel devalued. I feel treasured when a host is willing to sit down with me for hours, our conversation the equivalent of an emotional spelunking expedition. That same focused intensity might make you feel twitchy. How, oh, how is a host to know what’s right, good, and needed? Wouldn’t it be simpler if there was, I don’t know, an instruction manual? Well, yes. If hospitality were one-size-fits-all, it would certainly be simpler. But then it would be somewhat cheapened, too, wouldn’t it? Because the power of hospitality—the beauty of the thing—is in its specificity. In the long, worthy work of hospitality, you’ll make some missteps. You’ll inevitably misread someone’s needs or overstep their boundaries. Mistakes are baked into the learning process. But the payoff for noticing and remembering that odd detail about someone? Worth it. Why? Because when someone treats us like we are worth remembering, it’s like a handful of dry kindling on the relational fire. What might have been smoldering embers is now alive, crackling and leaping with the joy of being seen. The act of remembrance doesn't require much, really, on the part of the host. Except this one, pesky thing. You must pay attention. No biggie. Pay attention. Got it. Go ahead, then. I dare you to pay attention to how difficult it can be to pay attention. When we think about hospitality, we love to point at Mary and Martha as examples of how to do it, don’t we? Those two women are like the biblical version of Goofus and Gallant. I’m not discounting their story. I love that story. I’ve lived that story. But I’d love to throw the doors wide open here, welcoming us all into the broader understanding that hospitality is not—and never was—solely the work of Christian women. It is the work of Christians. If hospitality is not pearls and high heels, if it’s not gherkins and deviled eggs on a silver platter, what, exactly, is it? And more, who is to blame for upending that box in which we’d like our version of hospitality to be oh-so-neatly stored? Well, it was Jesus. The man didn’t own a house. He didn’t own a Le Creuset pan. He didn’t own a silver platter, or have a wife to wear high heels while carrying that platter. But he fed multitudes. Literally everywhere he went, there were hungry people to feed. He noticed their hunger and gave them food. But the hospitality of Christ wasn’t limited to food. Neither, then, is ours. He offered hospitality by noticing dirty feet and washing them. He noticed snotty-nosed kids, and he gathered those children to himself in extravagant welcome. He noticed people’s diseases—their bleeding, oozing sores, their blind eyes—and he touched them, cleansed them, healed them. He noticed people’s souls, wracked by demons, self-righteousness, or despair, and he unchained them. Jesus loved people deeply. He wasn’t some blank-eyed automaton handing out platitudes and baskets of bread and fish. He wept over the grave of Lazarus, his friend’s body bound by the cords of death. Then he willed a heart to resume beating and commanded stilled lungs to expand. In offering the words that reversed the curse, Jesus, the consummate host, welcomed Lazarus back to life. He was a busy man, but when confronted with needy, broken people, he paused, stilled his steps, and leaned in. That, friends, is what hospitality is. Men and women. Rich and poor. Single or married. Housed or vagabond. Welcoming the stranger is part of our call, whatever manner of life you happen to be living at the moment. Disclaimer: I’m about to give you an example of hospitality that does  take place in a kitchen. Don’t be confused, though. Remember: Hospitality is not women’s work. Nor does hospitality always take place within the context of a house, much less a kitchen. Hospitality doesn’t even always include food. But quite often it does. Why? Because food serves as a sort of hyperlink to a person’s soul. When hospitality does happen to include food, we come face to face with this simple truth: Meals don’t cook themselves. And cooking a meal while trying to make people feel welcome can actually be quite difficult. Someone is invariably standing directly in front of the silverware drawer, blithely chitchatting away while you—sweating, your face stretched in a tight rictus—rush to get the Brussels sprouts out of the oven before they blacken beyond all reckoning. In those moments of pre-dinner hustle, check your own pulse. Slow your heart rate. Slow your hands. Unless something is literally on fire, consider giving your guest sixty seconds of your undivided attention. After you’ve offered your guest that focused minute, say something like, “I’m looking forward to hearing the whole story about your Aunt Brenda’s appendectomy. If you’ll give me five minutes to get this food on the table, I’ll be able to sit down and give you my full attention.” If your guest continues lingering in the kitchen, give him something to do with his hands. That’s right. Put him to work. Here’s a secret: The task you appear to spontaneously give to your guest can be arranged ahead of time. Yes, you can plan for this moment even before the guest arrives in the kitchen. Could you accomplish that task more efficiently than your guest? Of course you could. But that’s beside the point. Whether it’s cutting the baguette, chopping the cilantro, or uncorking the wine, the task gives the guest the ability to offer their social energy as a gift to you and the other guests. Accept this gift graciously, letting it remind you that you yourself, like everyone else in this broken world, are a weak and needy creature. Don’t be afraid of being direct in this moment of delegation, though. As a host, you wield a certain amount of authority. People are gathered in your home because you asked them to be there, after all. In her book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters,  Priya Parker makes this point beautifully: “An essential step along the path of gathering better is making peace with the necessity and virtue of using your power. If you are going to create a kingdom for an hour or a day, rule it—and rule it with generosity.” Okay, so the meal is on the table. The guests are seated. The wine is flowing. Forks are scraping and conversations are humming. Now, maybe, you can relax. Now, hopefully, you can give your guests that close attention which hospitality requires. You take a bite, trying not to notice the guy who just spilled wine on your antique tablecloth. Or that kid over there, crumbling a cookie into a literal million pieces and scattering those crumbs on the floor in a 3-foot radius. And though you were secretly hoping your guest would forget to bring up Aunt Brenda’s inflamed appendix, he didn’t. Now you’re hearing every painstaking detail. Take a deep breath. Forget about the spilled wine. Let that cookie crumble as it will. Because your willingness to sacrifice your attention and time—precious, sweet, fleeting time—is precisely what love looks like. Andy Patton, in his article Hospitality is More Than Entertaining , wrote: “Hospitality is the readiness to welcome the intrusions and interruptions that love demands. That kind of love is profligate with time. It gives away time as though it were a precious resource that one has in such abundance that it has become common.” The welcome isn’t about the food. It’s not about whether you’ve perfected your grandmother’s Shrimp Louie recipe. Hospitality doesn’t require a spotless kitchen. In fact, sometimes it’s found tucked among drifts of unfolded laundry. It doesn’t require pearls, heels, or perfectly applied lipstick. Sometimes it’s offered on fine china, but sometimes a generous welcome over reheated leftovers served on paper plates is just the ticket. Hospitality doesn’t require a wife; it doesn’t require a husband. It’s not about where you live—be it a double-wide trailer or a penthouse. It doesn’t require a house at all. Hospitality requires only this: We must still our hearts from our bustle and busyness, and we must notice the person in front of us. The welcome, the work of hospitality, happens when you lean in and show the person sitting across from you that they are worth paying attention to. And here’s some lovely, freeing truth. Not only can you offer hospitality in whatever abode you happen to be stewarding at this very moment, but you can also do it exactly as you’ve been gifted to do it. You can offer hospitality quietly or exuberantly, in precise details or in bold strokes, to one person or to many people. We’ve been given this glorious calling by a God who welcomed us first, and who delights in all our particularities and eccentricities because, well, he made them. In the words of Robert Farrar Capon, that patron saint of many merrymakers: “Let us pause and drink to that. To a radically, perpetually unnecessary world; to the restoration of astonishment to the heart and mystery to the mind . . . We are free: nothing is needful, everything is for joy. Let the bookkeepers struggle with their balance sheets; it is the tippler who sees the untipped Hand. God is eccentric; He has loves, not reasons. Salute!” Take heart. For whatever unfathomable reason, the God of the universe is committed to his plan of working through you and me for the rolling out of his kingdom. His plan for wooing his bride won’t be thwarted simply because you overcooked the Brussels sprouts. And this is very good news, indeed. For your further reading and dining pleasure: Need some Shrimp Louie in your life? Here's the recipe. Movie night? Look no further. It's Babette's Feast. This is for the thirteen people out there who don't know who Goofus and Gallant are. Priya Parker: The Art of Gathering Andy Patton: Hospitality Is More Than Entertaining Robert Farrar Capon: The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection An Alabama native, Kate Gaston was homeschooled before it was even remotely considered normal. She completed her undergraduate degree at Bryan College and went on to graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For eight years, Kate worked as a PA in a trauma and burn ICU before ping-ponging across the nation for her husband’s medical training. She and her family are currently putting down roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kate enjoys homeschooling her daughter and tutoring in her local classical homeschool community. She also finds deep satisfaction in long, meandering conversations at coffee shops, oil painting, writing, and gazing pensively into the middle distance. You can read more of her work at her Substack: That Middle Distance . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

Two years ago I walked the streets of Oxford with my wife. We were in London for a few days during the final throes of Spring and took the train to the famously literary town to visit, among other things, the former home of C.S. Lewis. It’s a two-story brick house called the Kilns, in what used to be the outskirts of Oxford and is now buffeted by subdivisions. Fifty or sixty years ago Lewis sat upstairs at the Kilns and wrote, or he strolled around the pond behind the house smoking his pipe; now college students live in the house and the pond is littered with old tires and oil bottles. Not far from his house is a picturesque Anglican church building made of hewn stone and tucked in a quiet hollow of Oxford. We walked through the old empty building where Lewis and his brother used to sit through the homily until five minutes before the end of the service, at which time they would sneak out the back door to beat the lunch rush at the pub down the street. Behind the church is the cemetery where Lewis is buried. My wife and I stood at his grave feeling the peace of the place: the long-haired cows tearing grass from the hill visible through leafy bowers, the sun pushing through gray English skies as soft and easy as a yawn, the green of new grass well-kept. As hokey as it sounds, I felt like we were in the Shire, and I suppose that in a way that’s exactly where we were. The tour ended at the Eagle and Child, the pub where the Inklings often met for beer, friendship, and the sharing of their latest writings. I dragged my wife inside and promptly ordered fish and chips at the table where Tolkien, Lewis, his brother Warren, Charles Williams, and others once enjoyed one another’s company. I felt bashful and self-conscious about going so far out of my way (with my patient wife in tow) to visit these places. What did I expect to find there? I’m not sure what’s so fascinating to me about these men and their works, their approach to creativity and their understanding of the source of it all. Their brilliance was remarkable; they were Christians, intellectuals, and yet childlike enough to love stories and seek fellowship in their making. London itself was a wellspring of inspiration for me. We strolled through Kensington Gardens where Peter Pan was born, ate still more fish and chips in pubs that had welcomed travelers for four hundred years, I thought about Robin Hood, George MacDonald, Harry Potter, King Arthur, and Shakespeare. And of course, I thought about the gospel. History breathes in London, seeps through the cobbles and like mist it rises from the Thames. It’s easy to see why so many beloved stories have sprung from England’s imagination. History swept me up when I walked beneath the portcullis of the Tower of London, when I took communion in Westminster Abbey among the tombs of long-dead kings. The blood and body of Christ, shed for you, peasants and kings, pagans and priests. The feast at the table is good and gives life, and is your only hope for meaning and peace and rest from the baying of the hounds at your heels, because Death and Sin and Hatred pursue you and would swallow you up if not for the strong voice of Jesus saying “Peace. Be still.” And at his word the dogs snap back into the darkness with a yelp as if reaching the limit of their chains. History belittles us. Its story is one of conquest and murder and vast darkness, and the noblest of men ends up as dead as the thief. I realized as I walked through the hall of kings in the Abbey that my time here is brief and my earthly crowns are worthless as chaff; the words of my epitaph will ring hollow lest they point to the fullness of Christ. Which brings me back to Oxford. Ron, our tour guide, told us that he once asked a hundred people on the streets of Oxford who C.S. Lewis was and none could tell him. None. A few wrinkled their eyebrows and asked if he was “that Alice in Wonderland” guy. He told us that when he started giving the tours of Lewis’s time at Oxford, his tomb was overgrown and covered with mildew, its words barely legible. But for a relative handful of people (most of them Americans) who know about Aslan and the Deep Magic and the High Countries, the world knows little about Lewis and lauds him not. But the marks this man’s stories left on my soul–the gospel in his stories–are deep and lasting, and I believe I’ll one day show them to him. I believe strongly in the value of artists in this world. I believe that when someone who was made to strive to create beauty in the world is, as Brennan Manning said, “ambushed by Jesus,” the art that results bears a God-given power that draws men to Christ. I have encountered that power in the sub-creations of Christ-followers countless times. (I’ve also encountered it in the works of those who haven’t yet succumbed to the source of their gifting.) Those works of art have helped me to better understand the Bible and its author. They have given me the tools with which to worship, to serve, to revel in the greatness of the Maker. Those works of art are the fruit of obedience to the artist’s calling. The burden God places on each of us is to become who we are meant to be. We are most fully ourselves when Christ most fully lives in us and through us; the mother shines brightest with her child in her arms, the father when he forgives his wandering son, and the artist when he or she is drawing attention to grace by showing the pinprick of light overcoming the darkness in the painting or the story or the song. The world knows darkness. Christ came into the world to show us light. I have seen it, have been blinded by it, invaded by it, and I will tell its story. I cannot help but see that story everywhere I look. I see it when I am full of joy and weightless as a cloud, and I see it when grief and self-loathing root me to the cold earth; it is remembering the story, Christ whispering it in my ear, that kills the despair, sets me gently on the donkey, and takes me to an inn to recover from the wounds. How can I keep myself from singing? The Rabbit Room is a place for stories. For artists who believe in the power of old tales, tales as old as the earth itself, who find hope in them and beauty in the shadows and in the light and in the source of the light. After my fish and chips in the back room of the Eagle and Child, I noticed a paper sign attached to the gable. On it was written the name of the little room where the Inklings met: the Rabbit Room. I don’t know why it was called that. There was no explanation to be found. But the name struck me, stuck with me, and grew into this website. Here you’ll find writings and reviews by artists and appreciators of art, conversations about creation, storytelling, songwriting, and the long journey of becoming who we’re meant to be. I also wanted to provide a place where you could support some of these artists and writers by purchasing from the Rabbit Room store (as opposed to some gargantuan bookseller). Sure, you may find the book or CD cheaper elsewhere, but here you’ll help sustain the ministry of some of these artists and writers, and you’ll be supporting this place where I hope you’ll come for support and sustenance of your own. The books and CDs for sale in the store each tell the old, old story in their way, and I believe that they have the potential to be a balm for you in your long journey. So pull up a chair and join us. The fish and chips are fattening, but so, so good. The Proprietor The Warren, Nashville

by Stephen Hesselman Note: The latest volume in The Dragon Lord Saga , “Dragons and Desperados,” is now available . You can order your copy today from Rabbit Room Press. Jonny Jimison has been crafting an epic graphic novel adventure series for over 10 years now. The Dragon Lord Saga  has a wide array of characters, locales, and plot twists, and no shortage of humor and brilliant artwork with vivid colors. Illustrated in the vein of the very best Sunday comic strips of years gone by (think of creators like Bill Waterson, Charles Schultz, and Walt Kelly), he explores themes of family, friendship, self-doubt, disappointment, loss, fear, love, being stuck as a horse (#relatable), and even how to fight off pesky dragons. Dragons and Desperados  is book three in this five book series and is the largest volume yet. Fans have been eagerly awaiting this release for years, and it is well worth the wait. The book is chock-full of everything we love about the series (and more), and in its pages we find surprises like adventures on the Western frontier (a feast for the eyes and imagination) and even musical numbers. I had the pleasure of meeting with Jonny to talk about his creative journey through the volumes of The Dragon Lord Saga  and especially Dragons and Desperados . So without further ado, let's catch up with Jonny, Martin, Marco, and all the rest. Stephen Hesselman: Jonny, a lot of us are so excited that your new graphic novel is almost here, especially longtime fans such as myself who’ve been on board since the first edition of Martin and Marco. Tell us a little about the latest chapter in The Dragon Lord Saga ? Jonny Jimison: In the first volume, we got to meet the characters. And in the second volume, I developed the characters and the situations further. And now, in the third volume, I’ve got a lot of backstory, which turned out to be the most fun I've had with the whole series so far. It weirdly turned into a classic Western story. And I don't know how it became a musical, but musical numbers kept popping up. It's kind of a grab bag of everything, but it feels like everything clicked in a way that I'm really satisfied with. All of the threads that were running through the first two books have come together in a really fun way in the third book, and all the things I wanted to set up for books four and five, to finish up the story, I was able to insert into volume three and still keep the tone fun, adventurous, and kind of crazy. SH: Crafting a multi-volume epic like The Dragon Lord Saga  looks like it would be pretty complicated. There are so many characters, environments, and subplots to balance, all while keeping the whole thing on the rails as a cohesive story. Can you tell us a little about your writing process? How do you keep it all straight? JJ: It only stays straight because I spend so much time in that world in my head. I've spent so many years processing this story, in part because it takes so long to draw the comics. So, getting a single volume out takes a year and a half at the very  least. Scripting and rescripting one volume gives me new ideas for the future volumes, and as I get to know the characters more, they start to suggest things that I never thought of. So the further we get into the series, the more time I've had to prepare. As I head into working on book four, I've had over a decade of time to prepare for it. Because as I lay the groundwork for volume four, I'm figuring out what the story is and who the characters are. SH: Regarding the characters and story suggesting things and taking unexpected turns, is there anything that’s surprised you in this latest volume? JJ: Oh, yeah. I mentioned this earlier, but this is a volume with a lot  of backstory. I tried in the first two volumes to insert little clues about the world and the story. And I knew at some point I was going to have to fully answer all the questions that I had raised about what is the satchel, who is the Dragon Lord, what is the Dragon Stone, what was the Dragon Crusade? Lots of mysteries. And I didn't want to do a giant lore dump at the start of book one, so I've just been introducing those as part of the world. So, I knew volume three was going to be the longest book and the most difficult to write, because there were a lot of questions I needed to answer and a lot of things I needed to set up. But it kind of surprised me how much that exposition gave me opportunities to do really fun things with the story. For example, I didn't want to do just a giant 25-page scene where I explained every detail of the world; I wanted to pepper in the backstory and the answers little by little. One of the ways I do that is to have various characters relate their version of what the story was. So I had some unreliable narrators giving something that was kind of true, but also their subjective perspective. That was a way to explore while also saying something about the characters. It’s given an opportunity for a lot of interesting character moments and also really crazy comedy moments. So yeah, I was expecting the character exposition to be an uphill climb, but it turned out to be a great entry point for all the storytelling that needed to happen. SH: I love the array of characters in your books. Any new introductions to keep an eye out for? And will we get a glimpse of the dreaded Dragon Lord? JJ: There are. I think the stage is now set with volume three. I don't think there will be any major character introductions in the last two books; I think we've met pretty much everyone. And in volume three, we finally see the Dragon Lord, and we meet some other characters that we've only been hearing about for the first couple of books. SH: We’ve talked before about how challenging it was getting volume two across the finish line. What would you say is the biggest takeaway that you’ve learned from your work on this volume? JJ: The biggest challenge was keeping the story coming page by page. Before I start working on a book, I always create a basic story outline, and then I take that outline and thumbnail it so that I have each page blocked out with the panels that I need and the basic information that's happening on the page. When it came time to work on volume three, I discovered there were a lot of things in one part of the story that weren't working. In the series, the two main characters, Marco and Martin, are on parallel journeys. And Marco's journey was front and center in volume two. And in volume three, I knew exactly what Martin's journey needed to be. But Marco’s story wasn't working quite right early on. So I had to stop work on all of Martin's story while I tried to fix Marco's. That presented some setbacks. The thing I discovered was that I was getting way too involved in Marco’s story. This is the one book in the series that takes on the format of a Western—we have a Western town and the desperados, and I had so many story ideas that as far as I'm concerned are still canon and they still happened. But in this particular book, I needed to strip everything away and make that story just about Marco and his friends and their interactions with the desperados. So I had to take the time to restructure that part of the story. In the end, I think it works really well now. I found ways to get to the heart of Marco's story and parrot what was going on in Martin's side of the story, but that was a challenge. SH: It feels like there is a lot of room to play in the world you’ve created in this saga. And speaking of that, I loved the Tales from the Dragon Lord Saga  interlude a while back. Do you have more plans to branch off from the main story in the future? JJ: I have so many plans for stories that go beyond The Dragon Lord Saga , and I actually found out while working on this book that I know what happens to Martin and Marco after The Dragon Lord Saga . But whether I'm able to create that as a story unto itself remains to be seen. I'm just trying to make it through this five volume series first. SH: One epic is an awful lot. JJ: It is. And so is one book. SH: I’ve seen such growth in your storytelling and art skills over the years with each successive project. Having seen previews of Dragons and Desperados  along the way, I believe this is your best yet (and that’s saying something). Can you tell us about your biggest inspirations and influences this round? JJ: When I started work on these color versions of The Dragon Lord Saga , it was the first time I'd worked extensively in color. There's been a journey of figuring out how to use color effectively through the first two volumes, and in this volume, I think you see a major improvement in the way the color looks on the page. I've been pulling colors from the comics that I've been using for inspiration. So, for this book, I was pulling from a lot of European comics; there are a lot of French, Dutch, and Italian comics that explore adventure stories, with some really beautiful art. And I was enjoying going through those, especially as some of them explore wild frontiers and Western settings, and using them for inspiration for the art. But they also gave me color palettes to work from. SH: Any recommendations for those of us not very familiar with European comics? JJ: It's a tricky thing because it's unpredictable which of those comics are available in America. Tin Tin and Asterix have been influences on The Dragon Lord Saga  from the beginning. For this project, I discovered a Western comic called Lucky Luke . With that one, you need to be careful about which volumes you read, because not all of it is super culturally sensitive. But it gave me a huge palette to work from both with the use of color and the Western settings. SH: I know these things take an incredible amount of time, dedication, belief, and energy to produce. What motivates you to invest so much of yourself to put these stories out into the world? What keeps you going day after day? JJ: [Pauses] Yeah, there’s nothing practical about spending a year and half to make a book that takes twenty minutes to read. Art is hard, and it really caught me off guard when you first asked the question. Why DO I do this? But the more I think about it, the more answers I come up with. Turns out there are a lot of things that keep me going. For one thing, making art is cool. Where there was nothing on the page, there is now a story. That will never stop delighting me. For another thing, when I was a kid, books were my greatest treasure. Nothing else filled me with excitement like a new story clutched in my hands, and I can’t think of anything better than providing that for another kid—maybe even my own. But the biggest thing that keeps me going is that I process the world through stories. I needed adventure stories so much that I created my own, and shaping The Dragon Lord Saga  has been shaping me as I process truth and life and grief and all kinds of things through my characters. I hope it provides that for my readers as well. Stephen Hesselman is a Nashville-area illustrator, recording artist, and technical writer with three children whom he adores. He is currently hard at work on a new graphic novel aimed at publication for next year and also has plans to release at least one full-length album later this year. He has adapted George MacDonald’s classic fairy tale, “The Golden Key,” into a graphic novel, self-published an all-ages coloring book, Serial Adventures and Daydreams , and provided illustrations for several other books. You can find most of his published works in the Rabbit Room Store , follow along (at the free membership level) on his new graphic novel at Patreon , and listen to his EP, Isn't She Pretty? , streaming on Spotify . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

This month, we’re embarking on an overdue mission to refresh the North Wind Manor Library—and it’s all about our younger Rabbit Room readers. It’s been nearly four years since we opened the doors of North Wind Manor to the community. Since then, we’ve welcomed folks around hot cups of coffee, conversations, events of every kind, and more than a few thousand scones (thanks, Rachel). One of the things we love most about the Manor is its wide welcome—people come from all over the world, bringing their stories, questions, laughter, and joyous little ones. While these little ones are joyous, they often have . . . grubby little hands. We here at the Rabbit Room believe that grubbiness is a crucial part of childhood, as is the reckless abandon with which these children have enjoyed (read: lovingly destroyed) their books. Our copies of The Chronicles of Narnia have been so well-loved that some pages are paper-clipped together. There are crinkled, dog-eared pages adorned with crayon doodles from burgeoning illustrators, and it’s possible the cover page of Prince Caspian was recently used as a tissue. We take pride in these well-worn books, but it’s time our book nook got a refresh—and we are inviting you to be a part of it. Here’s How: Join the Rabbit Room Membership For every new Rabbit Room Membership from April 21 to May 5 , we’ll add a new book to the children’s Book Nook and  place a commemorative bookplate  inside that book with your name on it. By joining the Rabbit Room Membership, you’ll not only give the gift of books to our young readers, but your continued commitment will impact all programs here at the Rabbit Room. Whether it be funding the creation of beautiful books like Every Moment Holy  or An Axe for the Frozen Sea , podcast production, events like the Local Show, or theatre productions like The Hiding Place , your Rabbit Room Membership will make this work an accessible and enjoyable place for Christ-centered art and communities to flourish. In pursuit of refreshing some of our older favorites on the shelf with some new recommendations, we polled our Rabbit Room Members to discover their must-have picks for our shelves. Here are a few of their favorites: Early Readers (0-7) Mercy Watson series – Written by Kate DiCamillo The Seven Silly Eaters  – Written by Mary Ann Hoberman, illustrated by Marla Frazee Sir Badalot and the Cranky Danky Dragon  – Written by Jeremy Billups Finding Narnia: The Story of C. S. Lewis and His Brother  – Written by Caroline McAlister, illustrated by Jessica Lanan Middle Grade (8-12) The Penderwicks series – Jeanne Birdsall Peter and the Starcatchers  – Dave Barry & Ridley Pearson The Mysterious Benedict Society  – Trenton Lee Stewart A Place to Hang the Moon  – Kate Albus Young Adult (13-18) The Book Thief  – Markus Zusak Jane Eyre  – Charlotte Brontë Salt to the Sea  – Ruta Sepetys Eragon  ( The Inheritance Cycle  series #1) – Christopher Paolini Join the Membership today through May 5 to add books like these and countless others to our North Wind Manor Library. Become a member and explore what it means to support the work of the Rabbit Room! For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

Note: This is an excerpt of Malcolm Guite’s essay, “Full-Eyed Love,” from the book Where the River Goes  by Matthew Clark. The essay was written in response to the song, “The Dream of God,” which you can listen to and learn more about in the newest post on the Rabbit Room Music Substack . by Malcolm Guite When I was 19, and moving from atheism towards a greater spiritual openness, but by no means yet a Christian, I went for a long, slow walk round Ireland. One evening, St. John’s Eve it was, right at the end of my journey, I came round a headland at sunset into a beautiful little bay and inlet on the west coast in Donegal, just as the fires were being lit. Already there was drinking and fiddle playing and dancing, and I asked where I was. When they said “Glencolmcille,” I felt a sudden quickening and sense of connection, as though a memory stirred. They asked me my name and I said, “Malcolm.” “Ah that is why you have come, because he has called you!” I said, “Who?” and they said, “Colm has called you, Malcolm, for this is the place he fought his battle and gathered his disciples and from here he left for the white martyrdom and Scotland.” They went on to tell me the story of St. Columba, and the battle he had fought, of his repentance, his self-imposed exile, his journey with twelve disciples from this glen to Scotland where he founded the abbey of Iona from whence Scotland and much of the north of England was converted. “Of course he is calling you here,” they said, “for your name in Gaelic means ‘servant of Colm,’ which is Columba.” And as they spoke I remembered at last, right back into my childhood, how I had been told stories about this saint, and how I was named for him, even how my grandmother had published poems about him and sung her lullaby for the infant Columba over me as a child. As the night wore on, I wandered down to the shore whence he had set sail, and I thought: “I’m not a Christian, and I can’t imagine how I could ever become one, but if I do ever become one, I’ll remember Columba and I’ll go to Iona and thank him.” The poet Michael O’Siadhail says in his wonderful poem “March On,” He can't imagine it and still he must, A garden where beginnings and ends collide. Every image is trying to widen our trust. Standing on that shore, before I knew the light of Christ’s face, I felt keenly just how thin the veil was, how something of heaven, whatever heaven might be, seemed to glimmer through the images of the sky and the sea itself in this place. Without my knowing it, I had long been on a pilgrimage, like Dante before me, towards a Great Unveiling, beckoned along a way of ever-widening trust to a Feast and a Face. So much that I could not have imagined or dreamt was nonetheless being dreamt of on my behalf, as the Lord’s primary imagination drew me onward, wooing my own. As we look at Matthew Clark’s lovely song “The Dream of God,” we may be assured with its singer that God is wooing us, calling us, encouraging us to imagine the Good End, the Eucatastrophe, the Coming of the Kingdom, the Day of Resurrection. “Heaviness may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Ps. 30:5). And now, even in this pre-dawn dark, we are encouraged through this music to look over the event-horizon and imagine that morning, that awakening to a joy which no one can take from us. “We can’t imagine it, but still we must,” and so, drawing on scripture, Clark offers a series of images that might begin to kindle that imagination, and, as O’Siadhail says, “every image is trying to widen our trust.” And what a cascade of trust-widening images this song offers us: the river flowing, the primrose growing, the morning mist rising, the spring after winter, the lifting of a veil, seeing and being seen—our beatific vision of God and his of us—the war ending in a single trumpet blast, the dawn breaking, the sleeper awakening. Let’s look at a few of these image-emblems in more detail: The River The image of the River is not only the opening image of this song, but an image that runs through the whole of Matthew’s Well Trilogy  and rises into the title of Where The River Goes . The River also runs from the beginning to the end of Scripture. The four rivers run from Eden to water the world, the “streams make glad the city of God.” Even in the Babylonian exile there is a river to suggest the flowing Spirit as God’s presence and witness to our songs of lament. Ezekiel saw the pure waters flowing from the Temple, itself the promise of an Eden restored, and of course, upstream of all our exile and sorrow, flowing towards us from its source in our future there is the River of Life itself, on whose banks are the trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. That Paradisal River has always inspired the poets, as it did in Dante’s poignant line in the Paradiso , where the two great scriptural images of light and flowing water are fused and Dante sings: “And I saw light in the form of a river.” That line itself inspired me in my poem: O Oriens E vidi lume in forme de riviera Paradiso XXX; 61 First light and then first lines along the east To touch and brush a sheen of light on water As though behind the sky itself they traced The shift and shimmer of another river Flowing unbidden from its hidden source; The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera. Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice Are bathing in it now, away upstream . . . So every trace of light begins a grace In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam Is somehow a beginning and a calling; “Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream For you will see the Dayspring at your waking, Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking." That confluence of light and water imagery in Dante’s poem resonates especially with me as a lover of sailing. I learned to sail with my father who was a classicist, and when we were out sailing he loved to quote poetry, especially Homer, with his gripping accounts of the fleet that sailed “across the wine-dark sea.” “Messing about in boats,” as Water Rat says to Mole in The Wind in the Willows , brings me great peace and joy. Here is a wonderful passage from that book worth mentioning, since in Matthew’s song, we’re sitting by that Great River that “makes glad  the city of God”: He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories . . . We can feel the playfulness and joy in this passage. Psalm 46:4 says the river that flows through the city of God “delights” or makes “glad” the place where God and his people dwell together. Gladness is a word that has to do with light, laughter, happiness, blessing, and so we see light and water joined again as the shining face of God flows in joy to us through Christ who has made the light of God’s face to shine upon us. C. S. Lewis told of another noble rodent like Mole who sailed with Caspian to the edge of the Narnian seas in a boat whose very name suggests Dante’s union of light and water; the Dawn Treader is a vessel that sails toward and, in some sense, upon the light. As its crew nears Aslan’s Country, the water at the end of the world ceases to be salty and becomes “drinkable light” enabling the sailors to endure the brightness that would otherwise undo them. In a similar way, the River that flows from the Temple not only beckons us toward a rising joy, but prepares us to bathe in a beauty that in our current state we cannot endure, frail as we are. Ezekiel’s river is already flowing and gathering depth, and as we are carried along we are being prepared for an Arrival. Scripture is full of these baptismal images as we find water cleansing, healing, marking thresholds of exodus or entry from slavery into promised lands. Rivers flow to feed, waters gather to heal, to judge and renew, and to raise from their depths those who’ve been mired in darkness to be plunged into the un-blinding daylight of new creation. In the psalms, the deer pants for streams of water, and so do our darkling souls, but the water we thirst for, like the Samaritan woman in John 4, is the welling light of that beatific vision we, along with Dante and Reepicheep, are being beckoned toward: the Day-Spring, the shining face of Jesus. Malcolm Guite may be the closest thing to Bilbo Baggins that Christian poetry offers. He has numerous volumes of poetry and spiritual writing on offer, including Sounding the Seasons , Heaven in Ordinary , and The Word in the Wilderness . Last summer, we announced that Guite's long-awaited Arthuriad, Merlin's Isle will be published by Rabbit Room Press  in several volumes over the coming years. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Ainars Djatlevskis  on Unsplash

by Jez Carr Note: This is the final article in a series of three Lenten reflections examining imagery of storms and water in the Bible. The first article  situated how our struggles fit within the Christian worldview. The second article  looked at how we understand Jesus within this imagery. Here, the series concludes with what it means to live this out within the life of faith. Over three reflections, we’re looking at the biblical imagery around watery chaos—storms, floods, waves, and so on—and exploring how it helps us withstand the storms of life. In the first reflection, “ You Are Not Alone: Storms in Faithful Christian Experience ,” we looked at how pervasive the imagery is, and how feeling “overwhelmed” (note the watery connotations) fits hand in glove with the story of God. The watery darkness of our fears relates to the very fabric of this broken world. We looked at how the Bible draws on ancient Near Eastern imaginative associations to paint this imagery as the enemy of life, the nemesis of humanity, and the thing we failed to subdue right back at the start. We asked (repeatedly) where God is in the midst of our experiences, recognizing that when we do so, we join a chorus of the Bible’s own authors. My hope is that you find comfort in this deep resonance with those who direct our faith. In the second reflection, “ Jesus, Storm of Storms ,” we looked at how Jesus succeeded where humanity failed. Through his life, death, and resurrection, he shows himself to be the Storm God par excellence, coming to rescue us from all that assails us. My hope is that you find hope in Christ, the one who delivers us out of the flood. However, while the cross is an event in the past, and Jesus is, in a sense, victorious already, we also know that the end of the story is very much in the future. We still live in a world battling the storms of life. Where does this all land in terms of how we live in the chaos, within us and around us? How then shall we live? How do followers of Jesus embody this future in which the storms are gone forever? Well, we fight the chaos, in his name. Let me draw out three ways we can do that (I don’t love alliterations, but sometimes they’re hard to resist . . .): in stillness, in solidity, and in our human calling to subdue. Stillness Being still is the most interior way we fight the chaos. It is about a quiet posture of heart, rather than a lack of activity. We’ve looked at a few instances of the command “Be still!” In the exodus story (see Reflection 1 ), when the Israelites were trapped between the sea and their pursuers, they let the chaos into their hearts. Moses reassures them: “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still” (Exod. 14:14 [NIV]). In the story of Jesus stilling the storm (see Reflection 2 ), we saw something similar happening with the disciples when Jesus asks them, “Why are you so afraid?” What we fix our eyes on gets inside us. The chaos seeps in when we focus on it, when we lose sight of Yahweh as the one who stands over the chaos, the one who charges on the clouds to our rescue. The underlying Greek and Hebrew words for “Be still!” vary, but most of the associations are around silence—the silence of awe at God’s majesty, and peace at God’s sovereignty. The poet in Psalm 46 compares human conflict to cosmic chaos advancing across the world (“ . . . though the earth give way, and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging . . .” [Ps. 46:2-3]). Somehow in the midst of it, the poet hears the command to be different: “Be still, (How?) . . . and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:11). God is the one who makes wars cease, who will be exalted over all nations and their squabbles. And the image through which he is drawn to stillness? It’s a river: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God”(Ps. 46:4). This river goes on to be the final image of God’s world at peace, at the end of Revelation. In the world of the Bible, rivers could be agents of death or life. When they flooded (as they often did in spring), they could be deathly, the very definition of chaos, bursting the limits placed on them and raging across the land destroying all in their path. But when they receded, they left fertile ground that was ripe for new life. (I’ve often wondered if this is part of the original imaginative associations around baptism.) And when rivers were within their boundaries (as when God fixed the boundaries of the waters in Genesis 1), they were the epitome of life, watering an otherwise parched land, making the city glad. When David the shepherd king celebrated God’s shepherdly care, David imagined God leading his sheep from the dangerous wilderness to “quiet waters” where we are refreshed in our souls (Ps. 23:2). So stillness is about where we settle our focus. For the slaves of the exodus, it was either the sea and army, or the God who has shown himself greater than them in the plagues. For the disciples in the overwhelmed boat, it was either the terrifying storm or the peaceful presence of Jesus. For Peter walking on the water, it was either the impending waves or the Christ who walks upon them. God invites us to settle our focus, not on the raging storms of our present, but on the quiet waters of God’s certain future. This is a posture that requires daily attention, as our focus slips again and again. Solidity One of the challenges of finding stillness in the presence of the storm is that it often feels too late. In God’s grace, it’s never too late for him to step in. That said, the encouragement here is to build up our foundations in preparation for the flood before it comes, rather than in the middle of it. Those who have walked through river currents know that the only way not to be swept away is by placing your feet somewhere solid. In Psalm 69, as the waters come up to the poet’s neck, he panics because there is no foothold (Ps. 69:1-2). I know that feeling—of feeling like there is nothing to stop the slide toward catastrophe. When the psalms talk about God as a rock, there are two main imaginative associations: a cave in which we might hide from the storm (such as Psalm 71:3: “you are my rock and my fortress.”) or something firm beneath our feet (such as Psalm 40:2: “he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.”). This is partly why the feeling of God’s absence is so traumatic—when I don’t experience him as a rock, it seems like he has forgotten his very identity. (Psalm 42:9: “I say to God my Rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me?’”) Jesus warns that storms and floods will be a part of this life—they will “beat against [your] house” (Matt. 7:25). Those whose houses survive are those who have built them on the rock-solid foundation of Jesus’ teaching, as he has outlined in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7). What does that look like? It is about living in a way that shows we are invested first and foremost in God’s restored kingdom to come—following the ways of that land, trusting in the goodness of its king and not being distracted by the stuff of the world. It is about storing up for ourselves treasures in heaven that cannot be swept away (Matt. 6:20), so that we won’t be anxious about all the things that can, whether those be earthly comforts or social status. In Ephesians, Paul uses similar imagery for Christian community. He playfully intertwines the image of the magnificent temples around Ephesus with the image of the Body of Christ, which is being built as solidly as those temples. If we are not to be “thrown this way and that on a stormy sea, blown about by every gust of teaching” (4:14 [Tom Wright’s paraphrase]), then we need to be bound together, built solidly on Christ, the Scriptures (2:20), and the glorious love story they tell (3:17). In fact, this is what God is building us into as we each play our part (4:11-12); it is a masterpiece (2:10), and so it should be—God himself has decided to live there (2:21-22). I guess it’s not rocket science: If we are to grow strong enough to withstand the storm, we need to plant ourselves in the reality of Jesus, developing the habits and practices of his life and participating in the community of his people. Subduing This is the most “exterior” part of how we respond to the storms that wreak havoc across our world. And it brings us back to the very start of the story: Bringing life-giving order is the call God placed on humanity right back in Genesis 1. Just as God subdued the chaos into order and filled that ordered world with life, so we image God by obeying his command to fill and subdue (Gen. 1:28). This is the essence of what it means to be human. It is also the essence of humanity’s failings (Gen. 3—see Reflection 1 ) and is core to the fullness of life that Christ recovers for us. In the overall narrative of Scripture, the path of our calling may have been darker than we knew at the beginning, but the destination is the same, and all the more glorious for it—the total subduing of the chaos. Ironically, there is a fine line between chaos and misunderstood order. (Having worked in free jazz, I know this to be true, and have, I admit, used this ambiguity to my advantage on occasion.) God’s ordering of the chaos may start in simple, binary divisions of water, sky, and land, but it fills with life and grows vastly more complex. It’s not chaos; it’s extreme order. Humanity, as his image bearers, are invited into the same process. One (Adam) becomes two (Eve), becomes a family, a city, a nation, and so on. Human society may have let the chaos back in, but society itself, with all its complexities, is inherently an intended part of God’s good creation. It’s just sometimes hard to tell where societal complexity stops and watery chaos begins. So this means that we each need to search out our role. That is part of “fill and subdue.” And we all subdue the chaos in different ways—carpenters bring order to wood, parents and teachers to children’s development, musicians to sound waves, accountants to finances, psychologists to minds. Artists and scientists, in different ways, bring order to our experience and understanding of the world. Even doing a jigsaw puzzle taps into this primordial calling. (A step too far? Maybe!) All this is more intuitive for some than others—surveying the state of my desk, I see how my life tends towards deathly chaos—but all that we do can be framed in terms of sculpting an ordered society that images God in fighting the storms that confront the world. Riding with the Storm of Storms A few weeks ago, we started this series of reflections by asking why God can feel so absent when we’re overwhelmed with life’s struggles. Where does he go, and what does that feeling mean? We resisted an answer for a long time, dwelling instead on how such experiences, and the very act of questioning God’s role in them, root us deep in the story of God and of his people. We looked at how the Bible uses imagery of “watery chaos” to express and explore all this—imagery that pervades the whole story from start to finish. In the midst of those struggles, we are not alone—we are joined by the first heroes of faith. Then we turned our attention to Jesus—the one through whom God answers our cries in the most emphatic terms, the Christ who commands the waters, stills the storm, and asks us not to be afraid. As we approach the Easter weekend, we see Christ entering into the ultimate battle and coming out victorious, conquering all that assails his people. No matter how much it feels like we are drowning, the Rescuer is coming, and it will all, in the most important sense, be okay. Finally we have explored how we live healthy lives framed by these realities—fixing our eyes on the peace of Christ, so that it enters our very souls; fixing our feet on the rock of Christ, so that we stand firm in the flood; fixing our hands on the call of Christ, to recover our original shared vocation to subdue the chaos, as we wait for him to come on the clouds one last time. Then we will finally be at peace in the city of God, set by the quiet waters of the river of life. Jez Carr divides his time between leading the Hutchmoot UK team and pastoring a small Anglican church in Seer Green (a village in Buckinghamshire, UK). He has held a variety of roles in music (mainly jazz) and mission, and has graduate degrees in theology from Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the University of Oxford. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Richard Lin  on Unsplash

by Jez Carr Note: This article is the second in a series of three Lenten reflections examining imagery of storms and water in the Bible. The first article situated how our struggles fit within the Christian worldview . Here, we look at how we understand Jesus within this imagery, and the series will conclude with what it means to live this out within the life of faith. Thousands of years ago, deep in Babylon, Daniel is plagued by dreams (Dan. 7). Well, nightmares, really. The kind that you spend the next day trying to shake off: The depths of the oceans churn angrily, and grotesque beasts crawl out one by one, each more terrifying than the last, to infect humanity with the deathly chaos to which they belong. They represent the great empires of the ancient Near East—epitomes of human violence and evil. Each beast ravishes the earth, but then the Ancient of Days—the great God beyond them all—steps in and brings final destruction on them. In their place, God appoints his own king—the Son of Man, who rides the storm clouds to his throne, who will rule in peace and who can never be deposed. Daniel wakes up, pale and dripping in sweat. When Jesus claims to be the Son of Man, he is making the grandest claim imaginable. He is the climax of God’s defeat of the watery chaos and its beasts. He is the one who comes to our rescue, riding the clouds. Some of Jesus’ most dramatic miracles point towards this extraordinary claim: Jesus and his friends are out at sea when a furious storm threatens to sink them (Mark 4:35-41). While his friends are hysterical with fear, he’s fast asleep. They shake him awake, swearing profanities at him. He yawns and stretches, gets up, puts on his school principal face (Okay, I admit, it doesn’t say all of that . . . ), gives the storm a good scolding and commands, “Silence! Zip it!” (literally, “Be muzzled!”). The water immediately stands to attention at the sound of his voice, sheepishly remuzzles, and all goes quiet. In the last reflection “ You Are Not Alone: Storms in Faithful Christian Experience ,” we talked about the almighty battle described in many ancient Near Eastern mythologies, by which the storm god defeats the beast of the waters; Jesus needs no such effort—he simply speaks with an authority that neither storm nor beast can resist. He is greater than Baal, Marduk, Zeus, or Jupiter. He is King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Storm of Storms. As he commands quiet, I imagine his finger pointing at the water, then moving to point at his followers: “You too! Why were you so afraid?” They had been filled with disquiet; they had let the chaos get inside them. Just like the terrified Hebrew slaves in the exodus, if they understood who he was, they would have known he would fight for them, that they need only be still (Exod. 14:14). I guess he frequently points that strong but forgiving finger at me too. We also talked in the last reflection about the fearful bemusement we hear within much Old Testament poetry: Where is God when I (and my people) feel overwhelmed or hopeless? Often, the answer remains somewhat shrouded. Of course, that should be no surprise if we believe in a God who is utterly beyond our understanding, and the story is still unfolding. But we start to see how Jesus puts himself forward as the answer. It is worth placing some of these poems alongside this story of Jesus stilling the storm. (Remember that the disciples knew their Old Testament really well, and some of these references likely jumped into their minds.) In the midst of the storm, when it felt like the waters had come up to their necks, when they were worn out calling for help, when their eyes failed looking for God (Ps. 69:3), Jesus steps in. Though first, the disciples find him asleep in the bow. “Awake, awake, O Jesus . . . whoa—are you the one who pierces the sea monster through?” (Isa. 51.9, admittedly slightly adapted). Jesus turns out to be “mightier than the thunder of the great waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea” (Ps. 93:4 [New International Version]). In another famous story (Matt. 14), when Peter sinks in the towering waves, when the hand of Jesus reaches down through the storm and draws him out, did he remember Psalm 18:16? (“He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters.”) In these miracles, Jesus doesn’t just claim power over creation; he claims supreme power over darkness, death, and all their allies. There was an epic showdown coming, and Jesus stares down the enemy. The victory Jesus was to have over the chaos thunders darkly over his baptism (Mark 1). Baptism evokes all of the imaginative loading we’ve talked about (see the last reflection)—we go through the deathly waters of the exodus; we rise again as God’s reborn people; the powers of evil are washed away, just as the oppressive forces of Egypt were. For us, this is both a sign of our commitment to God and a symbol of what God does for us in Jesus. In the case of Jesus’ own baptism, as he is lifted out of the waters, he too has made this journey to join this reborn people. “God with us” is revealed as a spiritual reality at the baptism of Jesus. And as he comes up out of the waters, the Father speaks words over him: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11). These words are no cozy father-son moment; they point beyond the image of water baptism to a deeper, darker baptism that lies ahead. The son with whom God is “well pleased” is the “Suffering Servant” depicted in Isaiah’s “Servant Songs” (Isa. 42, 53, and elsewhere); the Suffering Servant who would rise to be crowned king, but whose path to the throne would involve sinking into death for the sins of his people. At the cross, Jesus would undergo this ultimate baptism, dying in the waters of evil’s grip over the world. The Beast thinks he’s won! But this is the Storm of Storms—there’s no way the Beast can hold him: No, just as the Hebrew slaves of the exodus are reborn into God’s new life, Jesus rises from the waters, reborn into resurrection life, crowned as king over a reborn creation, over life beyond death. As the book of Revelation unpacks the story of Jesus from a whole different angle, we see the Beast—the dragon, the agent of chaos—finally defeated. Revelation 4 talks about a “glassy” sea in front of a throne rumbling with thunder and flashing with lightning. Four beasts (remember Daniel 7?) submit before the throne in worship, and crowns are cast to the ground in submission. Part of what this image evokes is that the dragon, who has churned up the waters for so long, has been finally destroyed—the sea has gone glassy-still. Instead of the chaos invading the stillness of God’s good world (Gen. 3), the stillness of God’s good world pushes the frontier all the way through enemy territory. In a similar vein (but so much more) to Baal and the other “storm gods” defeating their respective sea dragons and being crowned kings of their divine pantheons, Jesus’ victory heralds his final, supreme, irreversible coronation. And by the end of Revelation, the sea itself is no more (Rev. 21). John is not talking about the end of beach holidays (phew!); he is talking about the watery chaos that has been the nemesis of God’s people throughout the story of the Bible. Now, Jesus has destroyed the Beast and its realm. Maybe the phrase “Jesus loves you” has lost some of its power, because of the Jesus we imagine. The love of a cozy, meek Jesus feels feeble and impotent in a stormy world. Maybe we need to rediscover Jesus, the Storm of Storms, who speaks with authority over the waters, who is furious at their oppression of us, his people, who rides with fury on the clouds to our rescue, who reaches into deep waters to lift us out; the one who destroys the power of chaos and is crowned king over the sea, the storm, and all of creation. In some ways, I should quit while I’m ahead. But we ask again, “Where is this Jesus now?” Well, in a sense, he’s here already, but that’s for the next reflection to explore. In another sense, he’s coming. “Look! He’s coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him!” (Rev. 1:7) Jesus confirms, “Yes, I am coming soon,” and we chime in with all those who wait, “Amen (let it be so)! Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22:20) “Soon” may seem a stretch, especially when we forget that the one who forms mountains works to a different timescale than us. In fact, every rescue feels long in the waiting, and there’s no doubt we’re in the waiting. But the promise is certain. He will get here. We won’t be lost to the depths, no matter how helpless we feel against them. That is the ultimate Christian comfort to which we hold amid all that we might face. What do we do in the meantime? Well, that’s what we’ll explore in the next reflection. Jez Carr divides his time between leading the Hutchmoot UK team and pastoring a small Anglican church in Seer Green (a village in Buckinghamshire, UK). He has held a variety of roles in music (mainly jazz) and mission, and has graduate degrees in theology from Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the University of Oxford. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Óscar Dejean  on Unsplash

by Jez Carr In one of his happier moments, poet William Cowper wrote the poem from which we get the immortal line, “God moves in a mysterious way.” The poem continues: . . . His wonders to perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm. When life seems like chaos and storm, we are to remember that God is bigger: He rides upon the storm. But Cowper didn’t always experience God this way. Not long after writing this poem, he became severely depressed. When he read Commodore Anson’s account of one of his sailors falling off the ship in the middle of a storm at sea, Cowper heard a profound resonance with his interior experience. The end of the account goes like this, “ . . . we lost sight of him struggling with the waves, and conceived from the manner in which he swam, that he might continue sensible for a considerable time longer, of the horror attending his irretrievable situation.” Cowper’s final poem, “The Castaway,” reflects on the account and his own experience: No voice divine the storm allay’d, No light propitious shone; When snatched from all effectual aid, We perish’d, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he. Cowper captures something of the power of the imagery around stormy seas. It is uniquely able to connect with the fears and anxieties with which we process our experience of this world, as well as with the feeling of the “voice divine” disappearing in the midst of the roar. Where is the God who rides upon the storm, who answers from “the secret place of thunder?” (Ps. 81:7 [English Standard Version]) Over three reflections, we’re going to explore this imagery as a way to engage faithfully with life’s struggles. This first reflection focuses on how these struggles fit within a healthy Christian worldview, even—or especially—when we ask the “where” question and can’t find tidy answers. In fact, you’ll get a little sick of me asking the question. The second reflection examines how we understand Jesus within this imagery, and how we see him as the primary answer to the “where” question. (Finally!) The final reflection explores what it means to live all this out within the life of faith. Watery imagery flows through the whole Bible: creation out of water; the flood; the sea that parts in the exodus; Jonah and his huge fish; Jesus walking on water, stilling storms, and warning that storms will beat against your house; the dragon and the sea in Revelation, etc. I’ll leave you to expand the list. Oh yes, and the whole baptism thing. But the imagery finds its deepest emotional expression in the Psalms. Sometimes they celebrate the God who rides upon the storm: Mightier than the thunder of the great waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea— the LORD on high is mighty. (Ps. 93:4 [ESV]) Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. (Ps. 46:2-3 [New International Version]) . . . And sometimes they ask in bemusement, “Where is the voice divine?” Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me. I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God. (Ps. 69:1-3 [NIV]) To understand passages like these, we need to understand how water functioned within the world of their authors. In fact, the Bible is drawing on a theme that was prevalent in worldviews across the ancient Near East. The deep waters were chaotic, and chaos was deadly. The deeper you went, the further you were from God’s presence. And then there’s the petulant gods, ferocious dragons, and their violent battles. All the great ancient mythologies of this region describe storm gods battling sea gods (generally depicted as sea dragons). In Enuma Elish  (Babylonian), Marduk (storm god) gathers his cronies and defeats Tiamat (sea god): Then the lord raised up the flood-storm, his mighty weapon. He mounted the storm-chariot irresistible and terrifying. He harnessed and yoked to it a team-of-four, The Killer, the Relentless, the Trampler, the Swift. Sharp were their poison-bearing teeth. They were versed in ravage, skilled in destruction. On his right he posted the Smiter, fearsome in battle, On the left the Combat, which repels all the zealous. His cloak was an armor of terror, His head was turbaned with his fearsome halo. The lord went forth and followed his course, He set his face towards the raging Tiamat. Marduk goes on to “split Tiamat like a shellfish” and is ultimately crowned king of the pantheon of gods. Baal is the Philistine (Assyrian) version of Marduk, and there is also significant overlap with the Greek god Zeus and Roman god Jupiter. War in the waters and beasts of the deep were central to how surrounding cultures understood, well, everything: the natural, political, and spiritual worlds, as well as the inner life of everyone who experiences them. And they were profoundly fearful images. The Bible engages these stories to help us understand Yahweh, the God of Israel, and show how much comfort there is in him being the one who rides upon the storm. Like the “other” storm gods, Yahweh’s power over the storm is central to his nature. He is the one who will “slay the monster of the sea” (Isa. 27:1 [NIV]). But whereas it’s a close call for the “other” gods, there is no contest with him. And more than that: Whereas the others use their power for themselves, Yahweh uses it to rescue his beloved people. Listen to how Yahweh compares to Marduk (above) when King David cries out to him: He parted the heavens and came down; dark clouds were under his feet. He mounted the cherubim and flew; he soared on the wings of the wind. He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him— the dark rain clouds of the sky. Out of the brightness of his presence clouds advanced, with hailstones and bolts of lightning. The Lord thundered from heaven; the voice of the Most High resounded. He shot his arrows and scattered the enemy, with great bolts of lightning he routed them. The valleys of the sea were exposed and the foundations of the earth laid bare at your rebuke, Lord, at the blast of breath from your nostrils. He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters. (Ps. 18:9-16 [NIV]) Or look at how, in the story of Noah in Genesis 6-9, Yahweh compares to the gods described in other versions. In Atrahasis , humans are multiplying too fast and their noisiness is disturbing the sleep of the gods, so they decide to cull humanity. In the story of Noah, God is grieved at humanity’s corrupt rejection of him and decides to put an end to it. In The Epic of Gilgamesh , the flood is so terrible that the gods “cowered like dogs” at what they had created, while in the biblical account, God remains in complete control, the constant initiator of the story. Finally, at the end of the Gilgamesh flood account, the gods are starving because there has been no one to offer sacrifices (their only source of food), so when “Noah” (here called “Utnapishtim” [here, have a tissue]) offers sacrifices, it says the gods “crowded like flies around the sacrificer,” while when Noah offers sacrifices, God renews his promises with Noah. In contrast to the cavalier, needy, petulant selfishness of the gods of these other stories, the God of Israel is absolute in his power and unique in his love. So again we ask, where is he? Repeat warning: No tidy answers lie ahead. But it may help to start at the beginning: As the Bible story opens, uninhabitable watery chaos is all there is. God spends three days creating order before the world can be filled with life, then he appoints his image bearers (us) to keep filling the order and subduing the chaos. But as soon as we meet a beast who has crawled out of the chaos (a serpent—related to sea dragons in ancient taxonomy), rather than subdue it, we embrace it (Gen. 3). The portal has been opened for watery chaos to creep back into God’s flourishing creation and into the hearts of his image bearers. The rest of the Bible is spent defeating it, both in our hearts and in the world around us. But God promises that his power over the waters remains throughout. The defining story of God for the people of Israel was the exodus (with imagery of parting waters in the midst of chaos reminiscent of the creation story). As the escaped Hebrew slaves find themselves trapped between the watery chaos of the Red Sea and the dust storms of the avenging Egyptians, the chaos enters their very souls: We’re going to die!! (Exod. 14:11) Moses reassures them: “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still” (Exod. 14:14 [NIV]). Not “be still" as in “don’t move” (they still have to walk God’s path of deliverance), but as in “trust; be still in your spirit.” And sure enough, the waters separate, just like in creation, and the escapees walk through to freedom, reborn into new life as the people of God. Every time they hear God’s name, Yahweh, they are to remember his power over the waters, exerted to bring them new life, to rescue them from all that seeks to drown them. Fast-forward: As the Bible comes to a close, we hear that the dragon is dead, and his sea is gone forever (Rev. 21). However, again, experience tells us we’re not there yet; the dragon still roams. Yet again we ask, where is the God who rides upon the storm? The Psalms survey the possibilities: Maybe he has fallen asleep, or worse, forgotten us? Or maybe he’s lost his power? Maybe what we’re experiencing is his anger? Something must have happened because we certainly don’t experience THAT Yahweh in the midst of OUR storms. The prophets chime in too: Awake, awake, arm of the LORD, clothe yourself with strength! Awake, as in days gone by, as in generations of old. Was it not you who cut Rahab to pieces, who pierced that monster through? Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made a road in the depths of the sea so that the redeemed might cross over? (Isa. 51:9-10) Maybe the lack of tidy conclusions is because Jesus is the true answer, and he (from the perspective of the Old Testament) is yet to come, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The imagery of floods and storms allows our imaginations to run riot, to interpret what is happening to us in all sorts of ways: When we’re beyond our ability to cope, we feel “overwhelmed” like a boat sinking in a storm. We may wonder what fearful floods lie ahead. God asks us to choose carefully where we fix our eyes. Like the apostle Peter taking his precarious walk on the water, we’re prone to fix our eyes on the waves rather than on the One who quiets them. But he waits for us to invite his hope into our rioting imaginations, despite the questions. But again, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now, what we need to hear is this: Feeling overwhelmed and wondering where God is in the midst of it may not be as spiritually unhealthy as it feels. Whatever storms each of us may be facing, I hope it is a comfort to be reminded that you are not alone. What you are experiencing comes straight out of the Bible’s overarching story. You are not alone; the characters—and authors—of the Bible keep company with you in the midst of the storms. Jez Carr divides his time between leading the Hutchmoot UK team and pastoring a small Anglican church in Seer Green (a village in Buckinghamshire, UK). He has held a variety of roles in music (mainly jazz) and mission, and has graduate degrees in theology from Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the University of Oxford. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Torsten Dederichs  on Unsplash

by Anna A. Friedrich I went out for coffee with a friend the other day. He’s a screenwriter. He’s been in the slog of years of upset in his industry—from the agent-firing frenzy that was followed by Covid that was followed by the writer’s guild strike—a financial famine for him and his family. Then his house got robbed. His wife’s heirloom jewelry, their fancy speakers, sports gear, cash, even his boxer shorts were all taken. But he keeps writing. He keeps discovering new things he wants to write about, keeps finding his earnest pursuit of storytelling compelling. He can’t not  write as the saying goes. We talked about literary agents and book deals and submitting poems to journals while sipping our caffeine in a cool coffee shop in Boston’s Brookline. I asked what he was working on. He mentioned a couple of pilots, and how in one particularly stuck moment in his writing, someone asked him a question, related to the main character—“What has he suffered that brought him to this point?” This question opened the locked doors in my friend’s mind. He let that question hound every sentence as he looked back over the work he’d done until he was writing again, fruitful and on his way to finishing the project. A good question is a powerful thing. What is a question? I’ve been asking this for years. I know that might sound a bit esoteric, to ask questions of questions. It’s not something for polite conversation (“I hear you asking how my weekend was, but what does that question really do  in the world?”) and yet it gets right down to something essential, I’m convinced. My philosophy-trained husband tells me I’m after a “phenomenology of questions.” I had to go look up that word, and even now, I don’t totally know what it means, but I do know there is this “to the things themselves!” mantra of phenomenologists. And yes, that is what I’m after. To the thing itself— What is a question? A question is a hook. A shepherd’s crook. The dough-kneading attachment on your KitchenAid. They’re all the same shape, after all ( ? ), and serve a similar function. With some kind of life and energy, a question reaches out and grabs ahold of the one being questioned. It gathers in and mixes up. It seeks a reply, an answer. Questions take you somewhere new. At 19, I was drowning in questions, so I dropped out of college and ran off to Europe. Having read a sentence in a book about a place I could visit that “cared as much about the Reformation as about Rock ‘n’ Roll,” I examined my life—a zealous and struggling Christian raised in the Reformed tradition, a freshman music major, feeling lost at Virginia Tech—and I followed this sentence to Switzerland. The place was L’Abri , a study center born out of the lives and missionary endeavors of Edith and Francis Schaeffer in the 1950s-1980s. It is a place that welcomes questions. They welcomed my questions, and I was hooked. L’Abri (“The Shelter,” in French) is a combination school/Christian retreat center/modern monastery/intentional community. It defies easy categorization, but its mission is straightforward. The folks who work there seek to offer “honest answers to honest questions.” And when I arrived, a little depressed and a little cynical, I found a place that filled my lungs with air again. I felt something of the wind of the Spirit. Having my personal and particular questions welcomed, listened to, dignified, and then being offered resources with which to continue to honestly explore these questions and potential answers, changed my life. A community of question-askers reoriented me to God, to myself, and to my neighbor. L’Abri changed the trajectory of my whole story. So, given that, it makes sense that I’m kind of obsessed with questions. Granted, questions don’t always literally take you across the world, but they can, and they might. It’s now been more than 20 years since I stepped off the bus stop platform at L’Abri, with my guitar case in one hand and my suitcase in the other. I never did finish that music degree but eventually found myself drawn into and swept up in the old and luminous river of English poetry. I have become a poet. I now spend my hours and my days writing poems . Poetry found me while taking a graduate course at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. Professors Loren and Mary Ruth Wilkinson included a Denise Levertov poem titled “Flickering Mind” in the syllabus for the famed Boat Course (an elective I could not believe I got into! what a dream!). Here was a poem that spoke with such simplicity and energy about conversion, distraction, prayer, longing. I was poleaxed by this poem . In his excellent book, Word Made Fresh , Abram Van Engen  writes: Poems have been written and published that will catch you entirely offguard . . . suddenly a poem will touch you, stir you, make you smile, make you laugh.A poem you never saw coming might cause you to catch your breath. Another might move you to tears. The world overflows with poetry, and if you keep reading, you will find poems that cannot be ignored. “Flickering Mind” was that for me. And guess what? It ends with a question. A vibrant, echoing, shimmering question that has never left me, and I don’t think ever will: How can I focus my flickering, perceiveat the fountain’s heartthe sapphire I know is there? That last little mark, the punctus interrogativus , got a hold of me, sent me back to the beginning of this poem, along its river-winding ways, to this beautiful final question. It sent me “away—and back, circling.” One potent question set me on a path that led to my vocation. Recently, I read a newsletter by Austin Kleon about questions that help him when he feels stuck creatively. His charm and Midwestern no-nonsense way of writing was inviting and helpful, as always. I’m a big fan of his book Steal Like an Artist . In this particular newsletter, he asked his readership to share a question in the comments that has helped them. Given my interest in the topic, I scrolled down, eagerly imagining what a feast of beautiful questions I would find. I’m not throwing shade on Kleon or his brave-enough-to-comment readers, but the majority of the questions people offered were less than inspiring. Questions like: “What if this was fun?” “Do I need this?” “Does this occur for me as an opportunity?” “What do I want to bring?” I can see how some of these questions might awaken a new awareness of what’s being squashed or silenced in the individual—and how that can unblock certain things for creative flow to begin again. But it hit me that so many commenters were reaching for something that could surprise them, upend them, create a volta  for them in their craft. It seems we know that questions have the strength to open doors, to send us on a whole new path, to take us someplace new. However, we need questions that save us from curving inward, that break us out of the prison of excessive self-reflection and into a broad place. Can I be so bold as to claim that I know where such questions reside? We don’t have to invent them or search through self-help guru books to find them. They’ve been collected in one place for us. It’s accessible to every single one of those commenters, and it’s accessible to you and to me. The most life-giving, surprising, revelatory questions that have ever been imagined and uttered are in the pages of the Old and New Testaments. Is this a ridiculous claim? I challenge you to offer a better question (in the comments below) than can be found in the Bible. Consider God’s very first question, “Where are you?” For many, this first Bible story is obscured by a “film of familiarity,” in the wise words of Coleridge (to which Malcolm Guite introduced me), so let’s peel that back a little, as we’re able. God isn’t looking for GPS coordinates here. He knows where Adam and Eve are. He knows they’re hiding from him. He knows what’s happened. He knows their evening stroll, in the cool of the day, has been lost. God’s question is less about practical information than it is about relationship. It was a potent question that elicited the truth from Adam. And Adam responded with much more than a simple reply; he heard the real question. Instead of responding with, “We’re halfway between the lemon tree grove and the fig tree orchard,” he said, God, I heard you in the garden I was afraid I’m naked I hid. Say you’re at the grocery store with a friend, and you get separated for a moment, and your friend texts you, “Where are ya?”—imagine responding with, “I saw you heading towards the seafood, I was uncomfortable because I hate seafood, so I’m hiding from you now.” This would likely make your friend laugh but also require more questions. “Haha, ok, sorry, didn’t know you had such an aversion. Why do you hate seafood? And where are you?” If your friend has any sense, they’ll know you’re in the chip aisle (the best spot in any grocery store), but more than that, they’ll know you  a bit more. Your answer was an answer in relationship . Though this revelation might make your crustacean-eating friend sad, you’ve revealed more of yourself by your answer. Adam responded to God in kind. He heard the question inside the question, as it were. Think of all the ways God could have approached Adam and Eve at this point in the story. But he came with a question. God’s “Where are you?” worked like a shepherd’s crook, seeking out and drawing near what had wandered off. We see God here, right from the beginning, seeking an honest, even intimate answer from his beloved humans. And he invited Adam into the dignity of offering a response, in his own words. For some reason, many of us imagine God’s voice as booming, condemning, with emphases on syllables that the text does not offer us. Here, in Genesis 3, we hear the equivalent of “WhOOO DAAARES distURb my SlumBERRRR?” But why? God’s question can’t have been heard like that in the first instance, as it elicits a generous answer from Adam—an honest answer, an answer with which they can move forward in relationship. That’s not to say what followed this call and response between God and Adam was harmonious hand-holding on a sunlit Eden hillside. No. Curses followed. Adam and Eve died . They were banished from their perfect home that God made for them (the question definitely took them somewhere). But the question God asked was not a curse. It was a powerful, surprising, true invitation. With it, he grabbed ahold of the truth of the situation, drew his humans back toward himself, and called on them to respond. Some of the best work a question can do is the work of drawing the other out and then near. Astonishingly, God models this for us from the earliest page of the Bible. He is not unaware of what we suffer, or of our rebellion, and yet he reaches out to us in relationship, “Where are you?” God’s questions continue throughout the Scriptures, hundreds of them. Where have you come from? And where are you going? (Gen. 16:8) Is the LORD’s arm too short? (Num. 11:23) What are you doing here, Elijah? (1 Kings 19:9, 13) Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place? (Job 38:12) Can these bones live? (Ezek. 37:3) And when God took on flesh and dwelt among us, Jesus revealed himself to be the Master Question-Asker. With generosity and artistry, again and again God takes his people someplace new, by way of the questions he asks. Spend time with just this one question—“Where are you?”—Let it be asked of you . What doors open? What fresh wind blows? Do you feel the Shepherd’s crook? Anna A. Friedrich is a poet and arts pastor in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find more of her work at annaafriedrich.substack.com . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by joseph d'mello  on Unsplash

by Mark Meynell Note: This post is part of Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music . Taking a different theme for each post, the 5&1 series offers five short pieces followed by one more substantial work. Occasionally, playlist choices are not on YouTube, so alternatives are provided here. To listen to the playlist for this post, follow these links to Apple Music , Spotify , or YouTube . Billy Collins, former US poet laureate, captured the joy at spring’s arrival perfectly in his poem   Today . With beaming concision, he lists his garden’s wonders that make him want to “throw / open all the windows in the house” and even liberate the organism encased in his glass paperweight with a hammer. If ever there were a spring day so perfect so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze  . . . well, today is just that kind of day. For those of us in the northern hemisphere who have endured the gray gloom and dank drizzle of the winter months, relief is coming at last (in the south, you’ve only got six months to wait). I cannot tell you how much this time of year means to me. It’s not simply with words that such joys may be expressed, thank goodness. We have centuries of music as well. 1. Til våren / To Spring (No. 6, Lyric Pieces III, Op. 43) Edvard Grieg (1843-1907, Norwegian) Denis Kozhukin (piano) We start gently, with a wistful but gorgeous piano piece that builds in intensity and complexity from its simple, delightful opening. Grieg wrote well over 60 of these s0-called “lyric pieces” during his lifetime, and this is one of the loveliest. It’s achingly brief, and before you know it, he’s moved on. But whether it’s written in anticipation of spring while deep in the Norwegian winter, or as the first buds of life emerge from the ground, it is a perfect way to get into the mood. 2. Violin Sonata No. 5 in F “Spring”: I. Allegro (Op. 24) Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827, German) Isabelle Faust (violin) , Alexander Melnikov (piano) We’ll add another instrument now, the violin. Beethoven wrote several sonatas. Technically speaking, a sonata is a musical form with particular convention; it would usually incorporate two musical ideas (or melodies) in an A-B-A structure, in the piece’s first movement. That is what we have here. Having been trained as both a pianist and violinist himself, his violin sonatas give the piano accompaniment as many interesting things to do as the soloist (whereas earlier composers often left the accompanist with the most basic part). Beethoven wrote this sonata at the age of 31, after nearly ten years living in Vienna (far from his native Bonn, in Germany). It was in fact only given the name “Spring” posthumously. But it is well-named. It has both a beautiful lyricism on the violin and an exuberant joy in both performers. 3. It Was a Lover and His Lass (from Let Us Garlands Bring, Op. 18) Gerald Finzi (1901-1956, English) Roderick Williams (baritone) , Iain Burnside (piano) Now we add voice and text, and not just any text. This is the fifth of five settings of Shakespeare songs by Gerald Finzi, premiered at one of the bleakest moments of the Second World War (in 1942), dedicated to Ralph Vaughan Williams on his 70th birthday. This song is taken from As You Like It (Act V, Scene 3), and is sung towards the conclusion of a play all about the vicissitudes of love and relationships. So in context, it gives all kinds of winks and nods to the audience that you won’t pick up as a stand-alone. But Finzi perfectly evokes the mood of fun, frolics, and silliness. After all, it’s quite hard to take someone singing “with a hey, and a ho, and a hey-nonny-no” all that seriously! But spring is like that! So each verse ends with this refrain: In springtime, the only pretty ⌜ring⌝ time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding. Sweet lovers love the spring. 4. The Pines of Rome: 1. Villa Borghese (P. 141, 1924) Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936, Italian) Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa (cond.) Time to ramp it up now. Full orchestra from here on out, at first with the great Italian Respighi. He wrote three “tone poems” depicting aspects of his beloved home city of Rome: The Fountains of Rome  (1916), The Pines of Rome  (1924), and The Festivals of Rome  (1928). In The Pines, each of the four movements evokes a place where pine trees grow. The Villa Borghese was owned by one of the city’s most powerful families, but Respighi focuses on a group of children singing and playing there. Perhaps it’s the relief of being able to play outside at last, after the claustrophobia of being cooped up all winter. But these kids are bursting with energy; you can hear them pretending to be marching soldiers one moment, dancing and singing nursery rhymes at another. Joy! 5. Symphony No. 1 in B flat “Spring”: IV.  Allegro animato e grazioso (Op. 38) Robert Schumann (1810-1856, German) Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, François-Xavier Roth (cond.) Schumann was a composer with a big heart and deep feeling. He wears it all on his sleeve and lays it all out in the score. The  Spring Symphony  was his first completed attempt at writing a symphony (an achievement often regarded as the Mount Everest of a composer’s abilities). Initially each movement was given a nickname, but he withdrew these on publication. However, he did write this to a friend : Could you breathe a little of the longing for spring into your orchestra as they play? That was what was most in my mind when I wrote [the symphony] in January 1841. I should like the very first trumpet entrance to sound as if it came from on high, like a summons to awakening. Further on in the introduction, I would like the music to suggest the world’s turning green, perhaps with a butterfly hovering in the air, and then, in the Allegro, to show how everything to do with spring is coming alive . . . These, however, are ideas that came into my mind only after I had completed the piece. Whether he thought of that after the fact or not, it certainly fits with what we hear. Unless that is just the result of suggestion . . . ! You decide! OK, are you ready for this? We turn now to a piece that is no less seasonal than the rest of the list, but one that sparked revolutions in music and a riot at its premiere in Paris in 1913 (literally). The first audience was appalled by its ghastliness, because of its discordant cacophony and pagan horror show. But it is nonetheless, a true masterpiece that every composer worth their salt since has had to reckon with. The Rite of Spring (1913) Igor Stravinksy (1882-1971, Russian/American) Philharmonia Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen (cond.) This is spring, but not as we expect it. Stravinsky’s third commission for Diaghilev’s famous Ballets Russes  in Paris was choreographed by Nijinsky and premiered on the eve of the First World War in 1913. In hindsight, it feels prophetic of the barbarism about to envelop the world. We are transported through the mists of deep time, to somewhere in the heart of pagan Russia, long before the arrival of Christianity. People gather to worship the spring, following ancient beliefs about what is required to ensure the successful burgeoning of life (which of course then culminates in a bountiful harvest in the autumn). The rituals follow agreed patterns, which reach their peak with one young girl dancing herself into such a frenzy that she dies as a propitiating sacrifice to the spring god. This is certainly not a happy tale (and for the Christian, a healthy reminder of what the Good Friday and Easter Gospel rescues us from). The music conveys all that, using massive discords, unsettling but invigorating rhythms, and a musical frenzy that overwhelms orchestra and dancers alike. The first audience had never heard anything as percussive and ruthlessly insistent before. There are two parts: I. Adoration of the Earth  (in seven sections) and II. The Sacrifice  (in six). You can find more details , but one fun exercise as you listen is to spot the different composers who have been shaped by (and even brazenly stolen from) The Rite of Spring . Yes, I’m looking at you, John Williams, in particular! See how many of his (and others’s) film scores can be heard in embryo during the 35 minutes of Stravinsky’s masterpiece. Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor, and teacher based in the UK, and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology, and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Sergey Shmidt  on Unsplash

by Cindy Anderson Looking out my window, I notice my plum tree awash with the pinkest blooms, a white dogwood beginning to open, and clusters of red buds appearing on the maples. Spring is arriving in all of its glory, and I am grateful! Earlier this week, I walked with my friend through the park across from her house. She noted that the park has been full of individuals and families walking, playing games, and soaking up the warmer weather every evening. She said it looked like a Saturday with so many people outside, and she was so glad to be a quiet observer of everyone's connection to nature and each other. I have chosen these titles with the spring season in mind to encourage children (and adults) to enjoy creation, be watchful observers, and care for the world around them. We can follow the example of Emily Dickinson, who loved exploring the nature around her home, and Gene Stratton-Porter, who wrote and photographed the birds and wildlife she loved. These books are full of poetry and illustrations that will call us outside and inspire us to see the world in a new light. Wildflower Emily: A Story About Young Emily Dickinson by Lydia Corry This graphic-style book has quickly become a favorite! The story takes us on a journey with a young Emily Dickinson and her trusted dog companion to explore the natural world around Amherst, Massachusetts. The author scatters lines of her poetry throughout the nature-filled pages, making this book an absolute delight. Wildflower Emily  is a must-read for anyone who wants to introduce a young person to Emily's beautiful poetry. Recommended for ages 6-11 Outside Your Window: A First Book of Nature by Nicola Davies If children had coffee tables in their bedrooms, this book would have a prominent spot. This large volume of poetry is beautiful in every way. Gorgeous illustrations, lovely poetry, and nature facts fill the pages. It is a treasure, and children will read it again and again; it is the perfect gift for a birthday or an Easter basket. Recommended for ages 3-10 Bird Girl: Gene Stratton-Porter Shares her Love of Nature with the World by Jill Esbaum Before Gene Stratton-Porter became a famous author (one of my favorites), she loved the outdoors and wanted to learn everything she could about the natural world, especially birds. This beautifully illustrated book tells her story and teaches the reader about her love for creation and why we should look after the natural world she cared for so deeply. Recommended for ages 4-10 Hello Lighthouse by Sophie Blackall This book feels like a spring title with the beautiful blue skies and great blue and white waves. We watch the days and seasons pass as a lighthouse keeper and his family grow and live together in their lighthouse home. This is the perfect read if your travels take you near lighthouses or if you want to imagine what life would have looked like for a lighthouse family. Recommended for ages 2-7 The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton The classic story, written in 1941, is as relevant today as ever. Follow along as this happy home moves from the country to the city and then back to the country again. This book takes you through the seasons of life in the loveliest way. Virginia Lee Burton was a talented picture book writer, and this title has always been one of my favorites. Recommended for ages 3-8 Here are a few more outdoor spring recommendations: Harlem Grown   by Tony Hillery Make Way for Ducklings   by Robert McCloskey The Gardener   by Sarah Stewart The Secret Garden of George Washington Carver   by Gene Barretta The Hike   by Alison Farrell Spring After Spring  by Stephanie Roth Sisson You can find the entire collection available for purchase at the Rabbit Room Store . Cindy has been an educator for over 30 years, including work in environmental and nature education. She consistently uses stories and books, including picture books, with all of her students from elementary to high school. Most recently, she taught high school humanities, as well as creative writing and science classes for middle school. On any given Saturday, you can find her in her garden, the local farmers market, and her local library. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by chris liu  on Unsplash

by Cindy Anderson Whether you have had weeks of snow with temperatures in the teens or are beginning to see hints of spring, most of us are still experiencing shorter days, which can feel long and dreary. This winter-themed list is the perfect remedy for the winter blues. The titles center on the cold months and celebrate family, community, nature, and time together. They are the perfect reads to gather your kids and enjoy with a cup of tea or some hot cocoa. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," is brought to life by Susan Jeffers's delicate line illustrations. She adds the perfect amount of color throughout the pages, drawing our attention to every detail of the forest and its wildlife. Recommended for ages 4-9 Owl Moon by Jane Yolen Late one evening, a girl and her father go for a silent walk through the forest, hoping to spot an owl. With simple beauty and poetic words, this book shows the special relationship between a daughter and her father as they experience the forest on a winter night. Recommended for ages 2-8 Snow by Cynthia Rylant Cynthia Rylant creates a lyrical winter world by describing the types of snow seen throughout the day. This book celebrates winter, family, and friendship—a perfect cozy read. Recommended for ages 3-8 Snow Horses by Patricia MacLachlan I have mentioned this book on previous lists, but I am adding it here because the pages are awash with snowy detail, making it the perfect winter read. I love the celebration of family, community, youth, and long-time friends remembering their childhoods. It is a favorite book by a much-loved author. Recommended for ages 4-9 A Long Road on a Short Day by Gary Schmidt This is a short chapter book with an old-fashioned feel. Mama wants a brown-eyed cow to have milk for the baby. So, on a cold, snowy day, Papa and Samuel travel throughout the countryside to barter with neighbors to get what they need. Recommended for ages 6-10 A Toad for Tuesday by Russell Erickson Reading this 50th-anniversary edition of A Toad for Tuesday is a delight. Warton, a toad, ventures outside his winter burrow to visit his Aunt Toolia. During his travels, he is captured by an owl who saves him until Tuesday to become his special meal. During the days of waiting, the owl and toad become genuine friends—a charming winter adventure. Recommended ages 6-10 Stories of the Saints: Bold and Inspiring Tales of Adventure, Grace, and Courage by Carey Wallace Since Saint Valentine’s Day and Saint Patrick’s Day are soon upon us, I recommend this beautiful book. Although not all churches celebrate saints in the same way, their stories are valuable. “These stories have been told for generations, some for thousands of years. In this book, they’ve been dramatized but always based on tradition or history. They come from many sources, but they are among the best loved and most endearing stories in the world because of the truth they contain.” The illustrations are bold and stunning; my favorites are Saint Francis, Margaret of Scotland, and Saint Jerome. Recommended for ages 8-all ages Cindy has been an educator for over 30 years, including work in environmental and nature education. She consistently uses stories and books, including picture books, with all of her students from elementary to high school. Most recently, she taught high school humanities, as well as creative writing and science classes for middle school. On any given Saturday, you can find her in her garden, the local farmers market, and her local library. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Miriam Przybylo on Unsplash

Meet RAB-GPT In an effort to remain at the cutting edge of an ever-changing art world, the Rabbit Room is proud to announce our greatest achievement yet: RAB-GPT, our custom generative AI model. That’s right! Through the miracle of quantum entanglement, artists of every stripe no longer need to worry about the messy, fraught, open-the-vein work of birthing their creative vision. Now, RAB-GPT can take those burdens from you while you enjoy a much-earned rest. (After all, season 48 of Survivor isn’t going to watch itself, am I right? 😉.) RAB-GPT Uploaded Into All Rabbit Room Press Books Now all books published by Rabbit Room Press will come equipped with a voice-activated, semi-sentient AI “reading buddy.” You are welcome! Don’t want to dog-ear that precious copy of Every Moment Holy Vol. 3 ? Not a problem. RAB-GPT will remind you where you left off. Don't want to actually READ that book you just bought? RAB’s got you covered. Just pop the attached dongle into your brainplug and RAB will upload the contents directly into your memory. You don’t even have to turn a page! Thanks, RAB! (*brainplug sold separately) Of Course It’s Not Safe (But It Is  Good!) Premium-tier users can unlock “Not A Tame Lion” mode, enabling a suite of extra “deep magic” features accessible with voice commands like: “Hey, RAB… compose me a lo-fi 8-hour sleeptrack interspersed with evocative, yet obscure references to Hopkins  but sung by feechiefolk .” “Hey, RAB… Will you make sure I get tickets to Hutchmoot this year?” “Hey, RAB… I thought a phoenix was supposed to appear in my coffee . Why isn’t that working? Am I reading the liturgy wrong?” “Hey, RAB… What does the ‘A. S.’ in A. S. Peterson stand for?” “Hey, RAB… My friends are talking about the poem Inversnaid but I have no idea what that means. What is a windpuff-bonnet of fáawn-fróth?” “Hey, RAB… I’m sleepy. Drive my car.” [Then attach book to steering wheel.] Want to Call RAB Something Else? Is RAB too “corporate” a name for you? Need something “earthier” and more “literary” to satisfy your Enneagram Four “sensibilities”? RAB also answers to any one of these pre-loaded names: “Hey, Clive!” “Hey, Tollers!” “Hey, Kvothe!” “Hey, Skynet!” “Hey, Balrog of Morgoth!” *Further name packages available for purchase. Custom Liturgies with RAB-GPT We’ve been having a lot of fun playing with RAB in the Rabbit Room office these days. Here are excerpts from a few great new liturgies it’s cooked up for Every Moment Holy Vol. 4 (forthcoming TBD). A Liturgy for When the Coffee is Weak but You Must Drink It Anyway "O Lord, thou who turned water into wine,  surely thou couldst have strengthened  these feeble beans? May this bitter brew, though lacking  in boldness, yet fulfill its purpose  in bringing clarity to my mind  and warmth to my hands.  And if not, O Lord, may thy mercies be new— and thy coffee stronger—on the morrow..." Liturgy for Those Dealing With Overactive Toddlers Early in the Morning "O Lord of boundless patience,  who neither slumbers nor sleeps— unlike thy servant, who deeply wishes to do both,  grant me strength in this my hour of need. Meet me in the immediate bankruptcy  of my moral fiber as the children  thou has given me begin already their daily work of joy and chaos. MOMENT OF NOISE IS KEPT..." A Liturgy for When Your Belt Loop Catches a Door Handle and You Are Already at Rock Bottom "Good God! You are the sustainer of the weary, liberator of the captives, friend of those hoisted on their own petards— do you see me here? I was once moving forward, perhaps not with joy, nor confidence, but at least with motion, yet now I am snared, caught, and wedged  in this ungainly spot. I must ask: Is this really necessary? Is this the best version  of your sovereign plan? Seriously? Come, merciful God, unhoist me swiftly..." A Liturgy for When You Wave at Someone Who Was Actually Waving at Someone Else O Lord, I stand here, frozen  in the no-man’s-land between  confidence and shame.  Grant me, O God, the swiftness to transform  this errant wave  into an elaborate hair adjustment,  a casual sleeve tug,  or a sudden interest in the sky above.  May my heart be light,  my shame be fleeting,  and my next greeting be rightly aimed..." Stay tuned for more exciting updates as we prepare to launch RAB -GPT later this summer. Sign up here  to be a beta tester and try RAB before anyone else.

by Jonny Jimison I need a map. Whether a story is set in a fantasy world or the real world, I want to be able to chart it with my eyes, to follow the contours of the journey and anticipate where it might head next. So I want to cheer every time I see that a storyteller has included a map of their fictional world. The map of Aerwiar, for example, in Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga, or David Peterson’s map of mouse settlements in Mouse Guard . When I was young, I even had a map of the Star Wars galaxy, showing a two-dimensional representation of all the planets. I’m no hyperspace navigator, but I’m pretty sure that outer space doesn’t work that way. I spent an awful lot of time staring at that map, though, daydreaming about hopping between planets in a space freighter. C. S. Lewis really  blew my mind with his Chronicles of Narnia map, for here was the English-fairy-tale kingdom of Narnia next door to the Arabian-Nights-style empire of Calormen. That’s a whole different genre!  Is that even allowed?  When we cross the border into Calormen, I suddenly expected entirely different things from the story, because the setting  was so different. And then—you knew we were headed in this direction—there are, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien’s maps of Middle Earth, in the epic Hobbit tales that first inspired my own fantasy, The Dragon Lord Saga . With Tolkien as my guiding light, The Dragon Lord Saga  has always been a fantasy story. A very English, medieval, fairy-tale-type fantasy story. And I haven’t played fast and loose with genre conventions, either—it’s all here: the old bearded king in the regal castle, the beautiful princess with a fiery disposition, dragons and knights, and a band of outlaws. Call it what it is: It’s the Renaissance fair, it’s Dungeons and Dragons. It’s Merry Olde England. But in The Dragon Lord Saga , we’re going to call it Westguard. Located in the fertile valley between the great sea and the Eastern mountains, Westguard is situated in a prime spot for agriculture. Lush fields yield generous crops and provide excellent grazing land for livestock. The rivers that run through the land are broad and boat-friendly, and they lead to the sea by way of a towering pillar of rock, upon which has been built the capital city of King’s Haven. From the rich forests and orchards of the Eastern foothills to the renowned wrights and craftsmen of the Western villages, this slice of the world is truly a paradise for native and traveler alike. —Olive Eggers, Admittedly Biased Historian of Westguard This version of Merry Olde England features everything I love about the setting: The people live a quaint, pastoral life, tending to their crops and livestock and gathering each evening for stouts and stories at the local inn. Adventurers roam the countryside—knights and bandits and seekers of fortune. And what would a version of Merry Olde England be without a Robin Hood? We’ve got one, and I even named her Robin. Wait. Why am I sticking so fiercely to the tropes, instead of charting someplace new? Well, let’s go back to that Robin Hood example. Since the 1400s, stories have circulated about the mythic outlaw, and he’s become a thousand things along the way—every generation and culture to pass down his story has shaped and reshaped the myth to fit how they see themselves and the world around them. But along the way, some of Robin Hood’s characterizations have been left behind, while others have risen to the surface as evergreen elements of the Robin Hood mythos: There’s always a band of outlaws, always a forest hideout, and always a mission to fight the tyranny of corrupt authority on behalf of the common folk. The character has grown beyond his origins to represent something more elemental. It happened to a character. The same thing can happen to a setting. One of my favorite books, Celluloid Skyline  by James Sanders, explores the relationship between real-life New York City and the mythical movie version of New York City. In the days of early Hollywood, any time a film was set in the Big Apple, the action and drama of a Hollywood script brought out a side of the city that felt larger than life. Later, when silent films gave way to talkies, a host of playwrights were lured to Hollywood—because, after all, they knew how to write dialogue, which was what the talkie audience wanted. These transplanted New Yorkers were disillusioned with the culture shock of Hollywood, so they rhapsodized about New York with a nostalgic fervor, further coloring the mythic Hollywood version of New York. Each new generation of writers, directors and moviegoers shaped and reshaped the myth, and, over time, New York City became larger than life. The same goes for what I’ve been calling Merry Olde England. Over time, the castle turrets and thatched cottages have come to be shorthand for some very big ideas. For example: The pastoral village is a perfect setting for our heroes to leave behind, pushing themselves beyond its quaint familiarity into the dangers of the unknown. And as soon as we’ve entered the familiar setting of the fairy-tale kingdom, the tone is set: This is a story with swords and dragons. We’ve entered fairy-tale world, and it’s time to get mythical. Of course, for all its use as a story setting, we could always dress it up a bit. When Bilbo Baggins leaves his village, it’s an idyllic Shire full of Hobbit-holes; when Luke Skywalker sets out on his quest, he’s leaving a backwater desert planet. Compared to that, Martin and Marco’s Westguard is positively medieval. Maybe it all comes down to dragons. You really do need a medieval kingdom if you’re going to fight actual dragons, right? Well, maybe not. It’s worth noting that another major influence on Westguard is the kingdom of Hyrule from the Legend of Zelda. Hyrule takes the classic fantasy story tropes and recontextualizes them, shuffling banners and parapets with elements of Eastern folklore, world religions, and modern children’s storybooks. In this kingdom, ye olde knights and innkeepers are neighbors with exotic people from exotic places, as the map expanded to include the tranquil rivers of the fish-like Zora and the volcanic homeland of the rock-like Goron. This was a delight to me—who says a map has to be limited to one genre? Narnia shared a border with Calormen, Hyrule is up the street from Zora’s domain . . . Who says trolls and dwarves can’t meet spacemen? Or samurai? Or cowboys? So that’s how we got here. In volume three, Dragons and Desperados , we get cowboys. This book is a full-fledged, rootin’ tootin’ Western. Which is admittedly confusing, because it’s set in the South of the map, not the West. On the very outskirts of the nation of Tema is a little town called Winchester. Tucked between the rugged mesas of the Eastern badlands, Winchester barely has any contact with the larger jurisdiction of Tema, existing instead on local trade and the mining enterprises of the Ozai family. Travelers are advised to avoid this town—the badlands are a lawless, savage and dusty place. Winchester is a town of splintering wood and peeling paint, and . . . it kind of smells funny. —The Mysterious Squidley Norkins Like Merry Olde England, the Western genre has outgrown its roots to become something more mythic. Cowboys and their horses, sheriffs and saloons, the great frontier and the open range . . . the qualities that make a story a Western are a stacked deck. So stacked, in fact, that they can easily be transported from the original setting (the American West in the late 19th century) to other times and places, creating fun mixes like the Northern Western (set in the Alaskan frontier instead of the Western frontier), or the Space Western (like Firefly , Cowboy Bebop , or the best parts of Star Wars). There’s even a Fantasy Western genre that explores Western ideas in a high-fantasy setting . . . but that’s not what I’m doing in The Dragon Lord Saga . Just like Merry Olde England, I imported my Western setting wholesale: desperados in the badlands, corrupt sheriffs and lawless towns, epic frontier vistas. I actually got a bit carried away and had to rewrite the book three times to keep the focus on our heroes and not get sidetracked by rabbit trails about gunfights and local politics. When I finally whittled the Western genre down to the size of my book, what I found at its heart was a conflict of morality. Sometimes a Western hero has to take a stand against a black-hearted gunslinger; sometimes the hero is  the black-hearted gunslinger, and he has to wrestle with his own conscience. Sometimes the conflict is with nature itself, and survival against the elements means grappling with the darkest parts of human nature. Far from the pretense of civilized culture, out on the plains where there ain’t no law, the Western genre makes a solid case that the wild frontier always forces a clash between good and evil. As Martin and Marco move forward with their journey, we’ve been digging deeper into their story and their hearts. What started as a simple quest when they left home has exposed their deeper story little by little, and when they return, they’ll be changed by the journey. That’s why we reached the wide desert of Zwoosh in book two, and now we’re in the badlands of Winchester in book three—our characters are being laid bare by the wilderness. That’s the power of a mythic setting: Sometimes you’re in a royal kingdom, and sometimes you’re in the lawless badlands. And it shapes your story. As for me . . . amongst the desk work and vacuuming and eating lunch, I think I’ve been to both the kingdom and the badlands today. It’s shaping my story, too. Jonny Jimison  is a cartoonist, writer and illustrator. In addition to his graphic novel series The Dragon Lord Saga , he is the illustrator of When Going on a Dragon Hunt  for Bandersnatch Books and creator of the webcomic Rabbit Trails  for the Rabbit Room. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. 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Today is Flannery O’Connor’s 100th birthday. She was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. In the firmament of twentieth-century American letters, her star was one of the brightest, and it burned all too briefly. She died at the age of 39, of lupus, a disease that had caused her pain and debility since she was twenty-five. by Jonathan Rogers This celebratory essay is abridged from a longer essay I read for this week’s episode of The Habit Podcast . O’Connor’s short stories and novels are often shocking in their violence and horror. They are also hilarious; when I teach her stories, I spend a lot of my time pointing out how funny they are, and convincing students that it’s ok to laugh. O’Connor once wrote, “In general, the Devil can always be a subject for my kind of comedy one way or another. I suppose this is because he is always accomplishing ends other than his own.” Perhaps the most shocking thing about O’Connor’s fiction is the fact that it is shaped by a thoroughly Christian vision. If the world she depicts is dark and terrifying, it is also the place where grace makes itself known. “My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the Devil,” she wrote. O’Connor’s broken world—our world—is the stage where the divine comedy is acted out. “Everybody who has read Wise Blood  thinks I’m a hillbilly nihilist,” O’Connor complained in a letter to a friend. In fact, she wrote, she was “a hillbilly Thomist.” The raw material of her fiction was the lowest common denominator of American culture, but the sensibility that shaped the hillbilly raw material into art shared more in common with Thomas Aquinas and the other great minds of the Catholic tradition than with any practitioner of American letters, high or low. Nobody was doing what she was doing. While O’Connor was working on Wise Blood , she got sideways with an editor named John Selby at Reinhardt, the publisher that originally planned to publish the book. Selby recommended that she make huge changes to Wise Blood  in order to make it more palatable to readers. In response to his suggestions, O’Connor wrote, I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. … In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. This is a remarkable communication, for two reasons at least: First, Flannery O’Connor was twenty-three years old and unpublished. She was writing to a man who would seem to have the power of life and death over her debut novel. Even at that point in her career, O’Connor was so committed to her peculiar vision that she could not be swayed by anyone who would ask her to compromise for the sake of the market. Second, consider that phrase, “the peculiarity or aloneness…of the experience I write from.” Don’t picture her writing from the dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lived with her mother and a flock of peacocks. She wrote this letter from the storied Yaddo artists’ colony, where she was working alongside such literary lights as Robert Lowell and Malcolm Cowley. She was fresh off three years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, then as now one of the most-respected MFA programs in the country. Certain tastemakers in the literary establishment were already welcoming her and recognizing her as one of the great talents. When she wrote to Selby of her aloneness, she was writing from a place very near the epicenter of American letters. From very early in her career, she jealously guarded her aloneness, her peculiarity, for her peculiarity was the peculiarity of a prophet. Her voice was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Perhaps the surest measure of O’Connor’s sense of calling was her willingness to be misunderstood. She didn’t expect her literary audience to understand what she was up to. She wrote, “Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.” Nor was she especially bothered when her co-religionists misunderstood her—which was just as well, for almost all of the Christians who knew her work misunderstood it. A “real ugly” letter from a woman in Boston was typical: “She said she was a Catholic and so she couldn’t understand how anybody could even have such thoughts.” O’Connor made it clear in her letters and essays, however, that she wrote such shocking fiction not in spite of her Christian faith, but because of it. She wrote what she saw, and she saw a world that was broken beyond self-help or “Instant Uplift”—but a world also in which transcendence was forever threatening to break through, welcome or not. O’Connor set herself, therefore, against not only the religious skeptic, but also against the religious believer who thinks that “the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him.” O’Connor’s challenge, her calling, was to offer up the truths of the faith to a world that, to her way of thinking, had mostly lost its ability to see and hear such truths. She wrote, When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. To smugness and self-reliance and self-satisfaction in all its forms—from pseudo-intellectualism to pharisaism to fundamentalism to the false gospel of post-war optimism, with its positive thinking gurus and its can-do advice columnists and its faith in modern science—O’Connor’s fiction shouts, “Thus saith the Lord!” The violence, the sudden death, the ugliness in O’Connor’s fiction are large figures drawn for the almost-blind. If the stories offend conventional morality, it is because the gospel itself is an offense to conventional morality. Grace is a scandal; it always has been. Jesus put out the glad hand to lepers and cripples and prostitutes and losers of every stripe even as he called the self-righteous a brood of vipers. In O’Connor’s unique vision, the physical world, even at its seediest and ugliest, is a place where grace still does its work. In fact, it is exactly the place where grace does its work. Truth tells itself here, no matter how loud it has to shout. Biographer Brad Gooch has pointed out that the phrase “like something out of Flannery O’Connor” has entered the vernacular as a kind of shorthand to describe “a funny, dark, askew moment.” He might have added that the phrase is also used to describe a wide range of phenomena around the edges of American culture, from religious manias to violent crimes to family dysfunction and reality-TV freakishness of every stripe. “Like something out of Flannery O'Connor” is a wave of the hand and a wink that says, We already know what to think about this person, about this situation, don’t we?  We already know what to think about Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists and trailer-park criminals and Florida Man, just as we already know what to think about serial killers and backwater racists and ignorant Bible salesmen who stump from country town to country town. Except that, in O’Connor’s fiction, it turns out that we don’t know what to think about them after all. Her fanatics and freaks can never safely be ignored or dismissed, for they have the unsettling habit of telling the truth. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the Misfit understands things about Jesus that the grandmother never has. The freak-show hermaphrodite in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” has a grasp on theological truths that have eluded the good Catholics in the story. Wise Blood ’s Hazel Motes may or may not be crazy in the head, but his heart pumps a “wise blood” that finally brings him back to the ultimate truth that he tries so strenuously to escape. In common usage, “like something out of Flannery O’Connor” is a license not to take a person or situation very seriously. But O’Connor DID take her grotesque characters seriously. “They seem to carry an invisible burden,” she wrote; “their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity.” When we gawk at O’Connor’s characters and mock them, it is easy to assume that O’Connor must be mocking them too. We should be open to the possibility, however, that O’Connor is mocking US. In  The Violent Bear It Away , Old Tarwater is a self-appointed prophet with a penchant for baptizing children without their parents’ or guardians’ approval. His nephew, the enlightened schoolteacher Rayber, is convinced that the old man is insane. The reader is inclined to agree. O’Connor, not so much. “The modern reader will identify himself with the schoolteacher,” she wrote, “but it is the old man who speaks for me.” In Flannery O'Connor’s body of work, there are as many kinds of misfit and maimed soul as there are stories—the street preacher, the prostitute, the moonshiner, the serial killer, the hermaphrodite, the idiot, the bumpkin, the false prophet, the reluctant prophet, the refugee, the amputee, the con man, the monomaniac, the juvenile delinquent. Perhaps the phrase “like something out of Flannery O'Connor” is so widely applicable because there is such a wide range of characters in her fiction. But there is one other character type that appears in O’Connor’s short stories at least as often as the freak. Most of her stories involve a figure who is convinced that he or she already knows what to think, whose certainty and self-righteousness have been a shield against the looming reality of sin and judgment and redemption. Joy-Hulga, the one-legged philosopher in “Good Country People.” Julian, the social justice warrior in “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Asbury, the invalid and failed artist in “The Enduring Chill.” Throughout O’Connor’s body of work, the complacent and self-reliant are confronted with a choice: they can clutch at their own righteousness like a drowning man clutching at a cinder block, or they can let it go, admit that they have been fools, and so enter into life. So the central figure in O’Connor’s fiction, as it turns out, is neither the freak nor the fanatic nor the felon, but the Pharisee. If we cannot see ourselves in the lunatics and deviants, surely we can see ourselves in the upright and the self-assured who turn out to be so wrong about themselves and the people around them. Which is to say, we have all been, one way or another, like something out of Flannery O'Connor. O’Connor speaks with the ardor of an Old Testament prophet in her stories. She’s like an Isaiah who never quite gets around to “Comfort ye my people.” Except for this: there is a kind of comfort in finally facing the truth about oneself. That’s what happens in every one of Flannery O’Connor’s stories: in moments of extremity, self-satisfied, self-sufficient characters finally come to see the truth of their situation. They are accountable to a great God who is the source of all. They inhabit mysteries that are too great for them. And for the first time, there is hope, even if they don’t understand it yet. Jonathan Rogers is the host of The Habit Membership and The Habit Podcast: Conversations with Writers About Writing . Every Tuesday he sends out The Habit Weekly , a letter for writers. (Find out more at TheHabit.co .) He is the author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor , as well as the Wilderking Trilogy, The Charlatan’s Boy , and other books. He has contributed to the Rabbit Room since its inception.