What are you looking for?

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 . 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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 .

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. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Jakob Braun  on Unsplash

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.

by Jonny Jimison Note: The latest volume in The Dragon Lord Saga , “Dragons and Desperados,” releases March 31, 2025 . You can preorder your copy today from Rabbit Room Press. Everyone should read The Arrival  at least once. It looks like a lushly-illustrated picture book, it reads like a graphic novel, and there are no words, only pictures. Granted, no words means that there’s no telling what the protagonist’s name is, so I’ll simply refer to him as “the man.” The Arrival  begins with the man reluctantly leaving his wife and his little girl to seek a new future for them in a faraway country. While searching for work and food in a bewildering and unfamiliar setting, he slowly makes his way with the help of strangers who take a moment to help him understand a new setting, a new food, or a new job. Each one of these strangers has their own  story of their own  arrival, and each time they lend a hand, they move the man forward on his journey toward belonging in his new home. The man has to work hard to understand his new surroundings, much less find a home in them. Similarly, The Arrival  invites you to engage personally, to search a little deeper to understand. This is not a journey that you read—it’s a journey that you experience . One of the biggest ways that author Shaun Tan achieves this is by abstracting the entire story. There’s no dialogue, so you have to imagine what the characters are saying based on context clues and body language. The written language on signs is a made-up series of glyphs, so you have to make your best guess, even as the man does the same. The language of this land is foreign to the man, so it’s foreign to the reader as well. This ambiguity extends beyond language, though—the architecture, the animals, the customs, everything  in this land is weird and different. It’s deliberately and delightfully surreal, with just enough context to say “I think  I might have some idea of what that thing is, but …” Despite all that has been abstracted, it’s the super-specific details that tell the story. For example: At the beginning of the story, as he prepares to leave his family, the man carefully wraps and packs a family photograph. Then he makes a little origami bird as a parting gift for his daughter. That origami bird becomes part of the language of the book, representing the man’s connection to his daughter and one of the few methods he has of communicating in a strange land. And the family photograph almost becomes like a character itself—we return to that framed photo over and over again, just like the man returns to it, homesick and lonely and clinging to his purpose: a better future for his family. Tan is an artist with a lot to say, and he uses every trick in the book to say it without words. But my favorite trick of all is how he zooms in and out. Close up of the family photograph. Zoom out.  The man is looking at the photo as he sits in his ship cabin. Zoom out.  We’re outside the ship, seeing him through his porthole. Zoom out.  His porthole is one of dozens, all housing a similar story. Turn the page —and we’ve zoomed out again. The ship is one small ship on a huge sea in a big world. The same thing happens again when the man moves into his apartment in the new land. This time, instead of the outside of a ship, we zoom out to the outside of a building, where his window is one of dozens, and there’s just  enough detail that we can make out which window is his. But as we continue to zoom out, his window becomes harder to spot. Then we flip the page to a wide shot of the whole city, and … who knows which building  is his, much less which window ? Tan uses this device over and over, sometimes zooming out, sometimes zooming in. The message is clear: Zoom into just one life, and you’ll find a story of depth and detail. Zoom out to thousands of lives, and you have a land teeming with thousands of untold stories. How can one man belong in such a huge, immersive, disorienting environment? By zooming in. Which is what some of the other characters choose to do. Again and again, the man is assisted in his journey by strangers who choose to pause and give him directions, or show him the ropes of a new job, or introduce him to friends. Each time, the stranger begins as a face in the crowd, but then we start to see more—their face, their posture, their attitude. Despite the lack of language, we get to know them as the man gets to know them. Then something incredible happens: We get a handful of pages sharing the story of their  arrival, each one a harrowing, unsettling story of the circumstances that led them to this wild, intimidating immigration experience. These mini-stories are incredibly powerful for a couple of reasons. For one, when the flashback ends, we return to the present day. Here is the person who lived that difficult story, and they have survived. Some are thriving and some aren’t, but all of them show evidence of having made this new land their home. This is where they work, rest, and play, where they share meals with loved ones and play games with friends. The man is living the hardest days now, but there is hope. The flashbacks are also powerful for us, the reader. After pages of working to understand this strange land and living the man’s confusing journey in it, there’s something cathartic about getting a real, concrete story about this new stranger, almost as if the story is reaching back out to us in return. Yes, the flashbacks are surreal, silent, and often heartbreaking … but here, where there was once a sea of strangers, is real human connection. We finally started to understand something, and it was the most important thing: another human life. That is the hopeful message of The Arrival . In the author’s own words: One of the great powers of storytelling is that it invites us to walk in other people’s shoes for a while, but perhaps even more importantly, it invites us to contemplate our own shoes also. We might do well to think of ourselves as possible strangers in our own strange land. What conclusions we draw from this are unlikely to be easily summarized, all the more reason to think further on the connections between people and places, and what we might mean when we talk about ‘belonging.’ Oh, and I’ll risk a spoiler here: The man reunites with his wife and child by the end of the book. This migrant story has a happy ending. May it always be so. Want to explore a little deeper? The quote from Shaun Tan is taken from an article on his website.  Read the entire article —it’s well worth it. Now that we’ve explored the themes and ideas of The Arrival , read my accompanying post  that explores the artwork in more depth. 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. Click here to join or learn more . Photo from The Arrival  by Shaun Tan

The Bible is a literary book. If we can’t read the literary dimension of the Bible, we’re missing a lot of it because so much of the meaning happens on the literary level. This means that if we are going to take the Bible on its own terms, we need to learn to read it artistically. What Does It Mean to Read the Bible Artistically? The Bible is a work of art and, just like every work of art, there are meanings on the surface and meanings waiting at greater depths. The deeper meanings only yield themselves over time and only according to their own rules. It follows that part of being a good reader of the Bible, then, is to learn its rules. I’m suggesting that some of those rules (and the meanings they unlock) can only be accessed with an artist’s eye and an artist’s mind. As an aside before going any further, separating the meanings in the Bible into “surface” and “deeper” is a bit of a false dichotomy. I’m not saying that meanings that stand out clearly are less important than meanings that take more time to reveal themselves or are communicated literarily. Nor am I saying that the “deeper” meanings are the “real” meanings. God has scattered his truth over creation and across the pages of the Bible with a broad hand. His revelation is not limited by the level of literary sophistication (or even literacy) on the part of those who approach his word. In saying there are surface meanings and deeper meanings in the Bible, I’m trying to make a point that there are deeper meanings. The Bible is not a set of IKEA instructions, designed to be completely understood by anyone at a glance. There are meanings in the Bible that reward long discipleship to the genres and books at hand. In other words, it is literature. Saying That the Bible Is Literature Is Different Than Saying the Bible Is Only Literature In the past, some have said that the Bible is literature in order to say that it is only literature. Used this way, the word “literature” means it is not sacred scripture, not authoritative, not divinely inspired, or not historically accurate. It is just, you know, literature. Like the Homer’s Odyssey or Dante’s Inferno. Modern biblical scholarship has often sought to draw a distinction between the Bible as scripture and the Bible as literature as if the literary dimension of the Bible can be isolated from its nature as the word of God. Some scholars have set the human and divine elements of Scripture against one another as if the former could nullify the latter. That isn’t what I’m saying. My point is that God communicated his truth through the medium of cultural writing conventions, limitations imposed by the evolution of writing technology (oral tradition letter writing, proverbs, vellum, etc.), the boundaries of genre, and a thousand little surprising and profound applications of literary devices on the part of the authors of the Bible. To the One With the Hammer of Modernity, Everything Looks Like a Rationalistic Nail Modern people sometimes to have a problem with reading the Bible artistically. It is not automatically the case that just because you believe the Bible is the word of God and that you read it with the best of intentions, you will be able to understand what it is saying. Rather, the opposite is true all too often. We read the Bible with modern eyes and that often means that we misread the Bible because of those same eyes. The thing about human beings is that we apply our paradigms to everything we interact with by default, often without being aware of it. We see through a glass darkly and that smoky glass is made of our preconceptions, biases, cultural dispositions, upbringing, experiences, and a whole mess of other things. The things that make us who we are both illuminate and obscure reality. That is even true when it comes to the Bible. To read the Bible as a modern Western person is to grapple continuously (though often unconsciously) with the way we’ve been taught to read and think. That is, we try to break things down into their constituent pieces so that we can categorize and understand them. Only once we have systematized their essential pieces can we distill their meanings and assign them their places in a larger, rationalistic framework. However, meaning also lies in the relationships between things, not only in their discrete components. The words, paragraphs, passages, and books of the Bible are too carefully arranged to be able to break them apart without marring much of the meaning they contain. To preserve that meaning, we have to read them in context and so much of that context is operating on the literary level. So we are back to reading the Bible with the eyes of an artist, not only the eyes of an analyst. Can’t I Just Read the Bible Literally instead of Literarily ? Yes and no. “Literal” is a tricky word when it comes to the Bible. When people throw the L-word in, they are sometimes trying to talk about taking the Bible seriously or whether it is inerrant or the authoritative word of God or if it happened in real history . The word “literal” can be a stand-in for those other words and can act as a tribal marker or ID badge that can be waived around for identification purposes. “Do you believe the Bible is true?” “Yes, I take it literally. Every word.” The problem with taking everything in the Bible literally is that it isn’t all meant to be taken that way. The Bible is a book of books and the individual books that comprise the one, greater Book belong to different genres, are written in different styles, employ different literary techniques, achieve different aims, and often belong to different centuries. Each genre has its own rules, each section of the Bible has its own rhythms, and each book has its own ways it needs to be read. But to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if the only tool in your literary toolbox is labeled “literal,” you are going to smash all that other stuff to bits. So to begin to answer the question, “Should we read the Bible literally?” I would start with another question: “Which part of the Bible?” Let’s start with genre. The Bible has at least eight major genres: law, history, wisdom, poetry, gospel, epistles, prophecy, and apocalyptic. And several of these break down into further categories when applied to the various books of the Bible. Some books even contain multiple genres inside themselves. Some genres should be read more literally than others. As historical biography and eyewitness accounts , the Gospels have many passages that should be read literally, but even the historical aspects are full of symbol-laden language, literary devices, and organization that is the result of internal structure. For instance, did the cleansing of the temple happen at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry (as in John’s gospel) or at the end of his ministry (as in Matthew’s gospel)? Is that even the right question to ask about that event? Should we rather be asking why John and Matthew put their accounts of the cleansing of the temple where they did according to the other unfolding themes of their gospels? Or take the example of the book of Proverbs. Reading it takes a bit of sophistication. It is an inspired book, like all of the Bible, but that doesn’t mean that if you do what a proverb says, the result the proverb predicts is guaranteed to happen to you. They are wisdom sayings that are generally true. This is especially the case when you have two proverbs next to each other that say opposite things. How do you take that literally? I know a man who nearly broke his faith because he kept doing what the proverbs said but not getting the promised result. Was God lying to him? Was the Bible a farce? Or was he bringing expectations to the book that didn’t fit what the book of Proverbs is? Apocalyptic literature, like the book of Revelation and parts of the book of Daniel, turn into mushy nonsense when you try to read them literally because they are usually a kaleidoscopic mashup of images from elsewhere in the Bible. Instead of trying to figure out if, say, the locusts in Revelation literally correspond to modern attack helicopters. You should instead build up your understanding of the image of locusts in the Bible and then bring that understanding back into the context of Revelation to begin to wonder what it is communicating because that is one of the rules of that specific genre of literature in the Bible. You Have to Read the Bible Artistically Because It Is Full of Literary Elements The Bible often uses propositional statements to convey its meanings (“Thou shalt not murder”), but it also uses literary elements to get its points across. A “literary element” is a meaning-laden convention of writing or storytelling that conforms to the rules of a certain style or genre. Rhyme and meter are literary elements in the medium of poetry, for example, or the way young adult fiction uses cliffhangers, or how mystery novels build toward the big whodunnit reveal at the end. Every culture produces and employs literary elements—often so naturally that natives of a language don’t even notice them. When someone says, “It’s raining cats and dogs outside” (literary element: idiom), we don’t wonder why animals are falling from the sky. We know that it is just raining hard. The Bible is no different. If were to list the literary elements in Scripture, the list would be long indeed. If we were to list the moments those elements combined to create deeper meanings on the literary level, the list would need several volumes. If we were to list the deeper meanings themselves, the items on the list would outnumber the stars and the list would remain mostly incomplete. Nevertheless, I do not want to end this essay without at least giving some concrete examples of what I’m talking about. Consider this brief list of literary elements that the writers of the Bible use to get their meanings across: Character : Yes, the Bible has lots of abstract concepts in it, but it is also full of characters, people making choices that have consequences for themselves and others. Many of these characters take on meanings beyond themselves that echo through the rest of the Bible (think of Abraham as the archetype of faith or Job as the archetype of suffering). Setting : The important settings in the Bible are almost characters themselves and take on a significance greater than just the backdrop of the stories. By way of examples, think of the meanings attached to all the things that happen in the wilderness, or the sea , or on mountaintops , or in gardens . Plot : Plot is the careful arrangement of events in a narrative. The Bible has micro-plots and macro-plots. For instance, you have many micro-stories of various kings that all exist on a larger narrative arc of the failure of Israel’s kings and the appearance of Jesus, the true and ultimate king, who is given a crown of thorns, a bloody purple robe, and who is enthroned on a cross beneath the words, “King of Israel.” The macro-plot of the theme of kingship is built of a hundred kingly micro-dramas. Symbolism : Symbolism is the figurative use of one thing to represent another thing. For instance, here are two examples: “God is my rock” or “I am like those who go down to the pit.” We understand that God is not a rock and death is not really a pit, but there are things about God and about death that are like a rock or a pit. Repetition : In the Bible, repeated is related. The texts of the Bible are in constant conversation with one another. Later texts hearken back to and draw meaning from previous texts. Later writers build upon and expand meanings found in the very texts that have shaped their own imaginations. Biblical writers constantly repeat themselves to create the dense web of literary allusions we call Scripture. Design patterns: See this and this and this . Themes : Certain big ideas unfold throughout the course of the entire Bible, such as kingship, sonship, sacrifice, priesthood, anointing, messiah, the temple, the tree of life, sabbath, exile, holiness, the law, and on and on. These themes interweave the books of the Bible and build to a double crescendo in the Gospels and Revelation. Brevity : The Bible (and especially Genesis) packs dense layers of meaning into a small amount of text. For instance, the story of Melchizedek is 58 words in English, but the writer of Hebrews uses it to overthrow the entire Old Testament priestly system. Nuff said. Symbolic numbers: Have you ever wondered why there are so many sets of three (the Trinity, days Jonah was in the whale), seven (days of creation and many others ), twelve (tribes, apostles), and forty (years in the wilderness, days of Christ’s fasting) in the Bible? When we approach these numbers with our literary lenses on we can both notice them and become equipped to ask the next question, “What do the numbers mean?” Jesus was an Artist There is a curious moment in Matthew’s gospel: “And the disciples came up and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” And Jesus answered them, “To you, it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them, it has not been granted. For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.” (Matthew 13:10-12) and then the narrator adds the comment “All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables, and He did not speak anything to them without a parable.” (v. 34) Why did God incarnate spend so much of his time telling stories? Why did the gospel writers think it was so crucial to his method of teaching that they devoted so much space to Jesus’ parables their own (carefully curated) works of art? You would think that if Jesus wanted to get his point across, he would have just stated things plainly. After all, he had a lot to cram into those three years with his disciples, shouldn’t he have chosen to communicate in the most clear, concise way possible, i. e. propositional statements instead of stories? Or is that our modern, rationalistic bias showing again? Let’s give Jesus credit where credit is due. He was smart. He was the perfect teacher, infinitely wise, patient, and creative. If there was a better way to get his message across, Jesus would have found it. We can assume, then, that Jesus taught in parables for a reason. Toward the end of his time with his disciples, he also said to them, “I have more to teach you, but you can’t bear it yet.” (John 16:12) This implies that he knew what they could handle and he was shaping and pacing his teaching accordingly. Perhaps his parables were like “time-release truth capsules” that would enlarge inside his hearers as they remembered them again and again across the span of their whole lives. And let’s give the gospel writers the benefit of the doubt too. It might be that they thought conveying Jesus’ teaching by preserving his stories and parables was the best way to present the life-transforming message of the gospel. Perhaps they wanted to give future believers the same opportunity that was given to them, namely, to approach God’s truth with an artist’s eye, with patience, curiosity, and wonder. What if the whole Bible is like that? What if it is meant to be stood under and watched rather than mined for nuggets of truth that can be applied to one’s life? What if we were meant to learn to read it with an artist’s eyes? Andy Patton is on staff with the Rabbit Room and is a former staff member of L'Abri Fellowship in England. He holds an M.A. in theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He writes at The Darking Psalter  (creative rewordings of the Psalms paired with new poetry), Three Things  (a monthly digest of resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God), and Pattern Bible  (reflections on biblical images in the Bible). Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Kate Gaston Note: On Thursday, March 20, Kate is hosting a lunch discussion titled Questions as Creativity: Faith, Loneliness, and the Hospitality of Conversation  via Zoom, exclusively for Rabbit Room members. Support our work and join this event. You can also connect with Kate and the Rabbit Room at the upcoming Inkwell Evening in Nashville at Belmont University for a night of arts and ideas on Friday, March 21. It’s Sunday morning. You slip through the double doors of the sanctuary just as they are closing, bulletin in hand. You beeline to your spot. The second-to-last row, three seats in. No one notices your arrival except the guy sitting on the opposite end of your row. The two of you share a nod, acknowledging your back-of-the-sanctuary-solidarity. You like it this way. The not-being-noticed. It’s the reason you arrive late, skirting around the crowd gathered for the pre-worship coffee hour, dodging the handshakes, and the wide, bright-eyed smiles of the church ladies. You know from experience that you won’t escape the morning unscathed. The handshakes and smiles are inevitable. You know it’s coming: the passing of the peace. As the service lurches forward and the moment approaches, you decide today is the day for a conveniently timed dash to the restroom. By trial and error, you’ve found if you time it right you can avoid the whole ordeal, returning to your seat for the doxology, the conclusion of the whole awkward business. You prepare to stand and make your getaway. But then, in the split second before you rise from your seat, the guy sitting on the opposite end of the row, the one with whom you’d shared the comradely head nod, stands and slips toward the exit. You can’t believe it. He stole your move. Flummoxed, you remain seated. You can’t very well stand up and follow him out now. It would look too obvious. The feelings of camaraderie melt away as you realize, with a deep sense of foreboding, that you’re about to pass that peace whether you want to or not. The moment arrives, and the congregation stands as one. You notice, not for the first time, that for some members of the congregation, the invitation to pass the peace is received with the alacrity of a starting pistol. Within seconds, these people are on the move, shaking hands, giving hugs, slapping backs. There’s a certain gleam in their eye as they make the circuit of the sanctuary, peace-passing like it’s an Olympic sport. You know, rationally, that this span of time lasts less than five minutes. You know, too, that all that’s required of you is to stand, shake a few hands, and act normal, to blend in by mimicking the social behaviors of the other humans. So with resignation, that’s precisely what you do. You stand and greet the couple in front of you. You shake their hands. You ask how they’re doing. They’re fine, they say. And you? Oh, you’re fine, yes, just fine, thanks. Silence descends. The three of you form an awkward hypotenuse. The ol’ Sunday morning standoff. Thankfully, at that precise moment, one of the predatorial glad-handers interrupts, and the mantle of conversation passes effortlessly to his shoulders. Entirely unprovoked, he tells you about the shrimp scampi he ate for dinner last night, and before you can formulate any sort of quippy pasta rejoinder, he gives you a hearty slap on the shoulder and glides toward the next row of church-goers. “Peace of Christ,” you murmur, a moment too late. I’ll confess: the passing of the peace has always seemed a bit of a mystery, plunked down in the middle of the service for no discernible reason except to dissect, with surgeon-like precision, the introverts from the extroverts. It’s a moment when that particular division of temperaments seems a particularly large one. It is, historically, a divide full of barbed misunderstandings, a chasm into which tumbles our compassion, our empathy, and our embrace of each person’s Imago Dei. Into this chasm, too, topples our wide-eyed wonder at the breadth and depth of God’s creativity. He’s made us each in his image, and each of us possess such mind-bogglingly different callings, strengths, and temperaments. If we accept the premise that each of us reflects some aspect of God’s creative glory, it follows we should embrace these varied reflections rather than giving them the stiff arm. We should welcome the uniqueness we each bring to the table rather than eying each other with mistrust and dismissal. Though Sunday morning is prime time for evangelical posturing, the assumptions we make about good Christians—how they look, how they sound, how they act—follow us, specter-like, through the week. These assumptions lurk behind our preconceived ideas about how we should be offering hospitality. They skulk around our psyches, kicking up guilt and shame, convincing us we can never offer hospitality like we think we should. These assumptions hamstring our ability to love people from the strength of our own giftings. We often believe—even if it’s a subconscious assumption—that there is only one right way to love people. And that one right way to love people requires an awful lot of gregarious small talk. We assume, somewhere deep down in our social substratum, in order to love people well we must be extroverts. Or at least pretend to be extroverts. As Susan Cain writes in her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,  we all suffer from a biased belief that sociability is next to godliness. It’s time to broaden the boundaries we’ve so meticulously built, to pull up the stakes we’ve planted. We must exercise a broader imagination toward how, exactly, the Body of Christ works. We are his hands and feet, yes, but we must also accept we are his kneecaps, liver, elbows, and toenails. There are many pieces that make up the whole body, pieces we’d desperately miss if we found them missing. God made parasitic worms, puppies, and slime mold; he made aardvarks and kangaroos. He made extroverts and introverts. Why, exactly, did he make these things? Because it pleased him to do so. We take our kids to zoos and aquariums to gape at the creatures in all their bewildering uniqueness. The world would be a changed place if we applied the same sense of wonder toward the specimen sitting next to us in church. That human is a whole mixed bag of mysteries, of thought and feeling, of fear and wisdom. As much as I like to pretend otherwise, I am a finite creature. There are strengths I don’t possess. There are gifts I can’t give because I don’t have them. But hallelujah and thanks be to God, those glorious refractions of glory go humming out into the world with your gifts, your words, your thoughts, your hands. This admission that I’m limited is a hard pill to swallow. It’s hard to swallow because I believe I’m a unique, beautiful flower. This isn’t wrong. I am  a unique, beautiful flower. The trick is remembering I’m only one of roughly 8 billion unique, beautiful flowers. I, like most humans, tend to take my specialness a hop, skip, and a jump too far. We are inclined toward navel-gazing, and we become quite pleased with ourselves in the process. We are naturally predisposed to believe the way we see the world is the right way—perhaps the only way—to see the world. The dynamic between introverts and extroverts is one of the many places this tension arises. We allow the differences between us to represent moral failings rather than simply being what they are: differences. Here’s a hard truth, applicable to all of us: Whether we’re an introvert or extrovert, we will always experience tension extending ourselves beyond our comfort zones for our neighbor’s sake. But extend ourselves we must. Adam McHugh, in his book Introverts in the Church, wrote, “Jesus said go make disciples. He didn’t tell us how to do it. He just said to do it. Do it however it works best for you, however you’re gifted to do it.” At the heart of the matter is this simple fact: No one gets a pass on making disciples. You don’t have a choice about whether or not you are a “people person.” By your very nature as a follower of Christ, you are a people person. Again, McHugh writes, “We who follow a crucified Messiah know that love will sometimes compel us to willingly choose things that make us uncomfortable, to surrender our rights for the blessing of others.” Love must often be sacrificial in nature. It will require something of us. That cost will be different for you than it will be for me. When it comes to obeying the command to go make disciples, your personality preferences don’t matter. They matter tremendously, however, in the specifics of how  you obey this command. Remember that we all, whether we like it or not, hold a bias toward how we think a good Christian acts. Take a moment to observe your own biases. Push against them, and test them for weaknesses. In your heart of hearts, you probably don’t believe Jesus loves outgoing people more than others. But do you still find yourself acting like he does? Or perhaps your bias swings in the opposite direction. Do you assume someone is spiritually shallow because they talk more than you? Do you subconsciously believe that true holiness must always be hushed and internal? Or is it possible that an anecdote about shrimp scampi can be precisely what a stranger needs to feel he has a place among the people of God? If you see someone sitting alone, do you assume they are standoffish? Selfish? Rude? If a person is not involved in outwardly industrious forms of hospitality, do you assume that person is failing in their Christian duties to love their neighbor? Or do we make space for the possibility that the gift they bring to the Body of Christ might be, say, intercessory prayer and that their silence is a sacred one? When we live with people in community, week after week, year after year, but don’t make time to know them, we begin to make assumptions. Believing these assumptions are true, we assign these people their boxes. And once we place someone in their box, it takes intentional work and curiosity on our part to release them. One of our primary means of resistance toward assumption-building is the same tool we use to spring people from the boxes we put them in. We ask questions. Specifically, questions to which we don’t already know the answers. Curiosity is difficult to maintain in the context of community. But we must trust that the person we’re tempted to write off as a “lesser Christian” is experiencing communion with the Holy Spirit just like we are. Communion that is no less real simply because we aren’t privy to it. Allow for the possibility that God is working in ways beyond your comprehension, and beyond what’s true to your experience. Accept the reality that your experience—your singular data point of human experience—doesn’t prove the rule across the vast expanse of mankind’s existence. Let’s return to the concept of sacrificial love. Love will require something different from an introvert than it will require from an extrovert. For some of us, words come quickly and easily. It doesn’t necessarily follow, however, that those words are always the right words. It might behoove us to stop talking. To consider that maybe, just maybe, we should choose silence as our act of hospitality toward the person who might not be willing to speak over us. Further—and this stings, doesn’t it?—we must be willing to consider that the other person might have a more nuanced viewpoint than we do. For those who tend to verbally process their thoughts and emotions, pay attention to the level of energy you’re bringing to the conversation. The bounding, Labrador-like enthusiasm of unbridled extroversion can overpower a social situation. Notice the faces of the people you’re talking to. Are their eyes widening and pupils dilating in mild panic at your frenetic verbalization? If so, that’s your cue to pipe down. When in conversation with someone quieter than you, you will feel the conversational void yawning open, screaming to be filled. But when you feel the compulsion to fill the void with words, resist. Here’s a fun experiment. In your next conversation with a quiet friend, allow space. Literally, count to ten before you say anything. See what happens. Maybe it’ll be awkward. Okay, it will definitely be awkward. But you might be surprised by what happens when you don’t glean all the way to the edges of the conversational barley field, when you leave silence as a margin. Silence can be a powerful means of communicating welcome. It can be restorative. But it requires courage to relinquish our stranglehold on the first word. And the last word. And all the words in between. Exercising silence as a form of hospitality will require, for many of us, a lifelong practice of discernment. In the same way a thoughtless extrovert can siphon all the social energy from a room, an introvert's unwillingness to lean into a relationship sends a palpable message, too. Whether you intend to communicate it or not, refusing to spend a measure of your energy broadcasts the message that the person in front of you isn't worth your investment. Just as it takes courage on behalf of extroverts to intentionally create conversational margin, it will take courage for introverts to step forward and offer the gift of their thoughts. When you, as an introvert, welcome the outsider into your internal landscape, when you trust them with your perception of the world, this is a gift of hospitality. Yours is a topography of nuance, of complexity. It is a place of finely-tuned attention and thoughtfulness which I, as your neighbor, might desperately need. Introverts, recognize there is power in your quiet, focused greeting. You aren’t required to chat with everyone in the building. Your gift is in attending to the person in front of you. Let that be enough. Because it is. Whether we’re inviting someone into our homes or into a conversation, many of us believe that the more people we gather, the more magic happens. For people who are energized by people, squeezing another body into the mix can feel like social steroids. This arms-wide-open approach presupposes that the gift of hospitality is simply in the invitation. Have you ever had the experience of repeatedly inviting a friend to your 90’s-themed dance party—the party you throw every Friday night, complete with costumes and karaoke—only to have them just-as-repeatedly reject your invitation? While it would be easy to write them off as a stodgy troglodyte who doesn’t know how to have fun, consider that your invitation might not be expressing what you think it’s expressing. Walking into a crowded room full of noisy, talkative strangers in costume doesn’t feel welcoming to, oh, half the population of the world. Quite the opposite. It can feel downright unwelcoming. Perhaps you intended for your invitation to be received as love. But forget for a moment what you meant  your invitation to convey. Ponder instead how your friend receives hospitality. You think your open invitation is hospitality, but your friend experiences it as an absence of personal welcome. Granted, you can’t tailor every social event to every person in your life. Nor should you. Keep having those 90’s dance parties. But take note of the friend who sends her regrets week after week. Karaoke won’t do, but an invitation to coffee or a walk at the park might be just the ticket. If you’re questioning how to use your gifts and temperament effectively, consider ways you’ve struggled to be engaged in community in the past. These struggles don’t have to be for naught. When we feel unseen or misunderstood, when we feel the ache of loneliness, the struggle represents a net gain in experiential knowledge. We could simply chalk this up to “you live, you learn.” But it’s more than that. You learned something about yourself, yes, but you’ve also been shown something about the culture you’re inhabiting. The lack of engagement you suffered signifies a dropped stitch in the social fabric, a gap between what is  and what could be . When you notice the absence of that thing, whatever shape it takes, you have a choice. You can accept the absence as a part of life and move on. That’s not the wrong choice, necessarily. You’ll encounter many such gaps in your life. The alternative is, of course, to do something. Frederick Buechner’s iconic quote is right on the money: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” In the past, I’m guilty of reading these words with an eye peeled for my calling—that unicorn of a thing. What is it? Will I know it when I see it? What if I miss it? What I overlooked in my fervor to discover my calling is the reality that my deep gladness exists before the calling. My deep gladness is already part of me, just as it is for you. It abides within us, singing through our bones and marrow. We can’t miss it because it’s humming through all those eccentricities that make us who we are. What is that thing that brings you deep gladness? Is it your conversation, your ability to ask questions, your ability to see the big picture, your ability to use intuition, your ability to empathize, your ability to problem solve, your ability to organize data, your ability to spelunk into the deep emotions without getting lost in them, or your ability to think analytically? These are gifts, first and foremost, to you. The way the neurons fire in your brain is not a mistake. The way you engage the world is not a character flaw. Your temperament is not a social failing you must endeavor to overcome in order to assimilate into a vanilla-pudding world. Be spicy carrot cake. We need spicy carrot cake. What might this look like for you, exactly? I have no idea. The best I can offer is this: pay attention. Notice your energy rising or falling. Notice that thing you’re longing for. Notice the ideas pinging around your heart and mind. Pay attention to your own unmet needs, and then, if rectifying that rift in the social fabric is worth it to you, get to work. Are you a bullet-point person? This one’s for you: Identify a need. Is the need strong enough to warrant an expenditure of social energy? If yes, proceed to question 3. If not, carry on with life as usual. If the need is strong enough to warrant an expenditure of social energy, do you have social energy to spare for it? If yes, proceed to question 4. If not, ask yourself if social energy is being wasted in other areas of life. If social energy is being wasted elsewhere, just stop it. If the need is strong enough to warrant an expenditure of social energy and you have the social energy to spare for it, make a move: Invite the friend to your aquatic Zumba class on Tuesday afternoon. Play the piano at the nursing home for an hour this week. Initiate the coffee date. Join the prayer ministry at church. If there’s not one yet, create one. Buy the beautiful stationery and write the letter. Pick the book for the first Whiskey and Dead Philosophers discussion night. Write the haiku for the poetry open mic. Realize you are terrible at haikus and write something else. Schedule the D&D campaign. Polish your broadsword. Let your passion be a catalyst for creating that thing that currently doesn’t exist. Utilizing your creative energy to reweave the fabric of our communities? This is the closest we mortals will ever get to creating ex nihilo . A word on social energy, if I may. Repairing a rift in the fabric of society is not easy work. Remember, the place of calling is where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. And hunger represents an emptiness, an urge to consume. There will be a net loss as calling requires something of us. But be of good cheer; the energy will be there for the taking when you need it. Perhaps not always when you want it. But certainly when you need it. People are time-consuming, irrational, emotional messes. You will occasionally feel tapped out by their needs. Again, you’ll be required to pay attention. Notice your energy dwindling. Recognize and acknowledge your finite, limited, creatureliness. Honor your need for solitude. It’s good and right, sometimes, to step away. Preferably before you feel resentment tapping on your shoulder. Determining your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger will be a lifelong dance. Sometimes it’ll jive along beautifully. Sometimes it’ll be an awkward, left-footed affair. It is worth it, though, to be the hands and feet of Christ. Let people be the thing on which you’re willing to spend energy. Then go home and take a nap. I’m embarrassed to admit how many years I’ve been passing the peace without knowing what it’s all about. Theologians and seminarians alike have made it their life’s work to parse each wrinkle of the liturgical service. I’m not about to swerve into their lane, but I am going to share the thing which catalyzed, for me, that lightbulb moment. Passing the peace is not a chance to fill your coffee cup or have a quick catch-up with your friends. The key to understanding it is in paying attention to what comes just before it: the assurance of grace. Sunday after Sunday, an assurance of God’s grace is pronounced over a roomful of lucky sinners. The message is, on its surface, simple. It’s this: In Christ, we have peace. When we receive that peace—extrovert and introvert alike—we then, mysteriously, bizarrely, embody that peace. As we shake our neighbors’s hands, we speak that peace into their hearts. As a congregation, we speak good tidings of great joy; we speak a cavorting chaos of peace. And then, just as quickly as we diverged, our cacophony is gathered back into one unified voice as we sing the doxology. Whether we shake all the hands and slap all the backs, or whether we slip quietly out the double doors, we remain this embodiment of peace for our neighbors. As Sunday rolls into Monday, each of us, with our wildly differing gifts and temperaments, welcomes the stranger. We offer hospitality, and in doing so continue to offer the ongoing, mysterious embodiment of Christ’s peace. It is, perhaps, the only means of peace some of our neighbors will ever know. More often than we’d likely care to know, we are God’s best plan for each other. So smile and shake a hand if that’s your thing. If it’s not your thing, find your thing. And once you do, pass that peace like you were created for it. Because, my friend, you were. For your further reading pleasure: Susan Cain: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking Adam McHugh: Introverts in the Church Frederick Buechner: Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC Find yourself wasting social energy or experiencing bondage of the will? Stop it. Need inspiration for your next campaign? D&D Beyond 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 Karl Fredrickson  on Unsplash

by Houston Coley Shockingly enough, the word on everyone’s lips throughout this awards season has been a devoutly religious one: “Conclave.” I would’ve never expected a movie about the election of a new pope to be the one that grabbed the attention of both audiences and awards voters this year, but whenever the broader culture engages a movie that touches on subjects of faith, I’ll always find myself leaning in. I knew that I would probably enjoy Conclave  as soon as I heard the line in the trailer about the importance of mystery in the experience of faith. As a sincerely religious person, I’m often disappointed and appalled by the didacticism and underwhelming moralizing of so many depictions of faith in cinema. It’s so rare to find a film about spirituality that asks honest questions rather than providing formulated answers and paints religious characters who feel real and flawed and complicated just like anybody else. So I liked the speech in the trailer. Simply agreeing with what a film is saying, however, is not the same as genuinely communing with it as a work of art. I didn’t know how much I would actually resonate with the movie until I finally saw it. By my count, it’s been a fairly fruitful year for authentic depictions of faith being represented in film. On my birthday back in May, I got to see Ethan Hawke in-person premiering his film Wildcat  about the life of Flannery O’Connor—and I felt deeply seen by the way that it embraced the offbeat Southern Gothic strangeness of Flannery’s stories and the honesty of her struggle with reconciling her identity as both an artist and a faithful Catholic. Nobody saw it, but The Book of Clarence  was actually pretty provocative and sincere in its depiction of Christ through the eyes of a swindler. And even Furiosa  felt like a quasi-Biblical epic about the firstfruits of a righteous kingdom. By the same token, I wasn’t certain exactly how much Conclave  would touch on subjects of faith with any degree of real contemplation; despite the compelling trailer, the film could’ve easily turned out to be a typical Agatha Christie whodunit with an incidental backdrop of The Vatican. Many of the reviews I’ve read have painted the movie as a sort of “Real Housewives of The Papacy” melodrama caper about priests gossiping behind closed doors. Without a doubt, the film has its share of subtle tongue-in-cheek humor—a sardonic curtsy and an evil vape pen steal the show. Even so, I’m increasingly convinced that the reason people are playing up this camp/comedy interpretation is because they don’t quite know how to engage with the film’s actual setting and subject matter in a sincere way. Excitingly, the setting and subject are not incidental. Conclave  is not a by-the-numbers murder mystery with faith sprinkled in to spice things up, nor is it just a campy “priests gossiping” melodrama or an entirely politically motivated allegory for the 2024 election; it is a movie whose text is quite deliberately interested in exploring the relationship between God’s will, man’s agency, and the church’s institutional identity. From the opening minutes, it is clear that the film has no interest in obsessing over the mere existence or nonexistence of God. Other movies have explored this well, but this one takes the piety of its protagonist as a given part of the world. Near the start, Stanley Tucci’s Cardinal Bellini says the late Holy Father never had any doubts about God. Instead, Bellini remarks, “what he had lost faith in was the Church.” This is what Conclave  is truly about. Conclave asks prescient questions about the purpose of the Church in the world—and about how its identity has shifted over 2,000 years. Robert Harris, the author of the original novel, said in an interview: “My preparation began by reading the Gospels, which are revolutionary. And the contrast between that and this great edifice of ritual and pomp and power and wealth of the Church is striking.”   Harris’s narrative takes seriously the reality of the supernatural but interrogates how humans often close ourselves off to that reality in the institutions we construct. One of the central conceits of this story is the idea of “sequestering.” In a captivating montage near the start of the film, cardinals arrive from all over the world with the singular intention of shutting themselves away from the outside. The windows are covered with mechanical (almost militaristic) shutters, devices that might communicate with outsiders are confiscated, large swathes of police stand guard outside, and everyone speaks in hushed voices for fear of others listening in. I was not raised Catholic, but growing up in the Bible Belt, this divide between the “outside” and the “inside”—or “secular” and “sacred”—felt palpably familiar. It’s part of a broader notion that true spirituality is primarily found in the absence of “the world,” which is known to be sinful and corrupt. But as Conclave shows us, even within these sacred and sequestered walls, sin and corruption persist. Perhaps they are even more  present when the egos of men are forced into close quarters, and the neighbors they are meant to love become an abstract point of rhetorical debate. Indeed, witnessing the sheer sterility of the Casa Santa Marta  and the people locked inside, it may seem like God is absent from the space within these walls. All natural light—the first good thing God ever created—has been locked out. The colors green and blue—those two colors that God so favored when he crafted the earth among the heavens—are nowhere to be found. Even birds are locked in cages, chirping away aimlessly without attention given. Like the birds, music has been confined as well—to the Sunday Mass only. The church has attempted to create a box where it can encounter God and reach an important decision without the influence of anything outside its walls, but in doing so, it has effectively shut out God himself. It’s always perplexing to me that anyone would think God should be encountered without engaging the people and the beauty of the world he created. The Bible itself is a book that is far from sterile or sequestered, rich with the five senses of earthy human experience. Bread and wine, birds and fish, farmers and shepherds, weddings and births, blood and water, trees and flowers—all play key roles in the metaphors Christ uses to describe the kingdom of God. If anything, the ministry of Jesus is a picture of a scruffy prophet taking the word of God from within the walls of a religious institution out into the mountains, seashores, and countryside for the poor and unclean. The writer Wendell Berry said, “I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is . . . a book open to the sky. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural.”   If I was attempting to discern the will of God, I think it would involve deliberately engaging with the world he spoke into being: taking long silent hikes with my friends, observing the lilies and sparrows, making music and art, reading both scripture and literature, speaking with strangers young and old, and journeying to a decision not shielded from the world but shaped by it. This kind of embodied meditation is not completely foreign even to the Catholic Church; many have found it on the Camino De Santiago , the ancient pilgrimage stretching across Europe and ending in Spain. The Bible has a rich and compelling throughline of people attempting to fit the divine into a manageable box, both physical and spiritual. The narrative is rife with men demanding systems and sacrifices, temples and tyrants, strife and scarcity—and God warning them against it every time. Despite all this, he never abandons them. He continues to work within the systems they erect, however broken and unjust, to bring about gradual justice and redemption. In the same way, despite all the dehumanizing darkness and claustrophobia of the conclave, one thing is still clear: God is not wholly absent. Regardless of man’s distancing from God’s world and voice, he is working regardless to turn the tables, make small the mighty, and lift up the humble. The presence of God is glimpsed in a myriad of ways throughout the film: the sincere and purehearted prayer Cardinal Benitez offers before dinner, inviting his colleagues to remember “the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, and the sisters who prepared this food for us”; the Holy Father’s pet turtles, impossible to fully domesticate or keep in their neat and tidy enclosures; Cardinal Lawrence’s impassioned homily about faith and mystery, which seems to suddenly flow from his lips in a moment of divine clarity and synthesis; the genuine apology and forgiveness between Lawrence and Bellini after their ambitions get the better of them; and of course, the eyes and ears of Sister Agnes, watchful and perceptive of every ego and injustice. Sister Agnes, it may be noted, is the only character with plants (and birds) in her personal office. When she shares the truth about Cardinal Tremblay’s betrayal, we even hear the sound of a raven cawing outside as she leaves the frame. Of course, there’s one moment when the presence of God feels all but undeniable. It’s the moment where the ceiling itself falls in, filling the air with the two earliest elements of creation: dust and light. The aftermath of this divine intervention feels undeniably powerful; some, like Tedesco, argue for an even more militaristic defense against the “outside.” Others, like Benitez, see the moment as one to ponder the church’s relationship to the world. When the cardinals gather to vote one last time, the windows above the room remain blown open by the blast. As they sit in a contemplative daze, something changes. The air begins to move and stir, reaching deep into their hearts. Rarely have I witnessed such a perfect cinematic distillation of the ancient understanding of the Holy Spirit as “breath” or “wind.” And not just wind, but song.  The birds, free from their cages just like the nuns soon to return to the world, begin to sing again through the open windows. The cardinals cast their vote accordingly, with renewed relationship to the space beyond the walls. In an act of providence, a kind and humble man is elected—a man who, much like the trinity itself, exists outside the easy boxes we might try to fit him inside. And then the windows and doors finally open, letting the light stream in, and sending God’s people back out into his wide world once more. Houston Coley is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and self-described “theme park theologian” currently living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the artistic director of a nonprofit called Art Within. 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 Greiter  on Unsplash

by Philip Yancey   A Lenten Reading Group ​We are re-releasing the recordings of a special Lenten conversation. Last year, the Rabbit Room hosted a five-week Lenten reading group. The group discussed Lenten themes, including suffering, illness, and mortality through the lens of Philip Yancey’s Undone: A Modern Rendering of John Donne’s Devotions . Special guests included Jonathan Rogers, Pete Peterson, and Doug McKelvey. Download the Companion Guide Download the pdf companion guide, which includes excerpts from the book, discussion questions, and an appendix with additional reading suggestions. Week 1—Preface to Chapter 6 Reading: Preface - Chapter 6 Resources: Read the complete text of John Donne's original Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions . Zoom Discussion: Watch the conversation on Zoom Week 2—Chapters 7-12 Reading: Chapters 7-12 Resources: Read a brief account of John Donne's life and historical context. Zoom Discussion: Watch the conversation on Zoom Week 3: Chapters 13-18 Reading: Chapters 13-18 Resources: Watch the film of Rabbit Room Theatre's 2023 production of The Hiding Place . (To watch, select “Rent for $5.99” at checkout and enter the promo code UNDONE ) Host your own watch party using the PDF film discussion guide. Zoom Discussion: Watch the conversation on Zoom Week 4: Chapters 19-25 Reading: Chapters 19-25 Resources: Liturgies based on Undone  from Every Moment Holy vol. 3 Free download: “For Relapse” Free download: “For the Tolling of the Passing Bell” Free download: “On a Day of Recovery from Sickness” Video of the Liturgy “A Prayer of Intercession Against the Kingdom of Death”  (from Every Moment Holy vol. 2  read by Joshua Luke Smith.) Zoom Discussion: Watch the conversation on Zoom Week 5 Reading: Chapters 26-30 Resources: Listen to interviews with Philip on: The Habit podcast. The Wade Center podcast. The Trinity Forum The Living Church podcast No Small Endeavor Read Philip’s blog on Undone . Zoom Discussion: Watch the conversation on Zoom 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 .

by Jonny Jimison The stories I create are inspired by the art that I consume, and I consume what I like. So you’d think that a swords-and-dragons story like The Dragon Lord Saga  was built on the back of some pretty heavy fantasy. For better or worse, that’s only partly true. In all the realms of elves, dwarves, and men, it is often said that modern fantasy stories are, on some level, Lord of the Rings fan-fiction. Tolkien’s shadow looms large over books, films, games, and the Renaissance fairs where I nom turkey legs every summer. Even if you received it second- or third-hand, you probably got a heaping helping of Hobbit with your favorite fantasy. It’s probably not fair to say that all  fantasy stories are a Tolkien tribute … but mine certainly was. The story of the Dragon Lord came to life in my mind as a prose novel, and a pretty derivative one at that—Tolkien’s writings were the inspiration, and not just The Hobbit  and The Lord of the Rings . There was an especially heavy Silmarillion influence, florid language and all. Yes, there were notebooks full of gibberish as I tried to invent my own language. It took a few years to loosen up and let the story become its own thing, but it eventually evolved into an all-ages graphic novel series. A funny thing happened along the way, though. What started as a slavish Tolkien tribute took on a flavor of its own. For those unfamiliar with the story (and a hearty welcome to you), The Dragon Lord Saga  is an adventure story of two brothers—Martin, a knight for the King’s Guard, and Marco, a young stableboy. Martin’s enthusiasm and wanderlust leads him to charge headlong into adventure, but he turns out to be wildly out of his depth. Marco desperately wants to stay home where everything is safe, but despite himself, he ends up on his own hero’s journey. It’s easy to get their names mixed up—they’re used to that. Two volumes of the series have been published by Rabbit Room Press— Martin and Marco  and  The River Fox — with a third volume now available for preorder ! I’m not gonna mince words, friends—volume three is really good. You’re going to want to preorder this one. Anyway. An obvious transformation has occurred: My fantasy novel is a comic book now, and visual story has replaced verbal prose. But that’s just the beginning. As I told the story, little by little, the tale began to find itself, and things began to change. My love for Tolkien is still present in the pages, but I found other favorites flavoring the story as well. Elements of The Wizard of Oz  began popping up as my characters went on far-flung journeys as unlikely as Dorothy’s. The Legend of Zelda  series made itself known in many ways, none more blatant than Marco’s green tunic. And say what you will about Star Wars  as a franchise, but the original 1977 film had a chemistry between its main characters that’s always on my mind when writing character interactions. But let’s take one specific example in a little more detail. Because me, I like cartoons. It’s probably inevitable that Looney Tunes  was an influence on The Dragon Lord Saga . I’ve absorbed so much classic cartoon comedy that it was bound to take my comic book series in a cartoony, slapstick direction. But I never  expected my Silmarillion-fueled fantasy epic to include so much Daffy Duck. For a brief period in the 1950s, Daffy starred in some of my favorite cartoons of all time, all directed by Chuck Jones. In cartoons like “Drip-Along Daffy,” “Robin Hood Daffy,” and “Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century,” Daffy is paired with Porky Pig in a series of genre parodies. Daffy, cast as the epic hero of these scenarios, launches into his role with gusto—only to have his overeager impulses backfire again and again. Porky, meanwhile, plays the simple-minded sidekick (and Greek chorus to Daffy’s antics), whose actions end up saving the day in the end. And then there’s “Duck Amuck.” In this masterpiece of cartoon chaos, Daffy just wants to star in his own cartoon … but an unseen animator foils him at every turn, seemingly just to troll him. In a brilliant deconstruction of the cartoon medium, the animator’s paintbrush erases and redraws the image, the music and sound effects malfunction, and the film frame goes haywire. Over the course of seven minutes, Daffy exhibits confusion, frustration, bargaining, bitter resolve, and finally, a frantic, desperate plea to know who the sadistic animator is that has it out for him. Daffy never discovers the animator’s identity, but we do—it’s a mischievous rabbit in a last-moment cameo. Back to The Dragon Lord Saga . Remember Martin, the knight with a thirst for adventure? I never set out to make Martin a Daffy-Duck-alike, but the Chuck Jones influences just fit him like a cartoon glove. I love how enthusiastic and full-hearted Martin is … but his overeager impulses to launch into heroic adventure only get him in over his head. That’s so Daffy. He even has his own Porky Pig—Martin’s best friend Lingo is the simple-minded sidekick who balances Martin’s fervor with laid-back common sense. The thing is, I never tried to write a Daffy Duck story. I tried to write Tolkien—Daffy just elbowed his way in, by way of all those cartoon viewings that imprinted Daffy into my brain. I also never intended to steer The Dragon Lord Saga  in a Wizard of Oz or Legend of Zelda or Star Wars direction … they just showed up, because my imagination works with what I fueled my imagination with. Seems like a foregone conclusion, but it took me by surprise. It all happened so fast! I reckon this is the way of all storytelling. Why is most modern fiction transparently Tolkienesque? It’s because Tolkien wrote stories that mattered to us, so we read them again and again. They fueled our imaginations and became part of us. The same thing happened to Tolkien—his love for classic mythology fueled his imagination so much that the stories he created uncannily recall Norse tales of magic rings and reforged swords. Influences can be deliberate, but they can also take you by surprise. The deliberate ones are aspirational. The ones that take me by surprise? Those are just truthfully sharing who I am. Watching my unintentional inspirations color and shape The Dragon Lord Saga  is reshaping the way I think about imagination in general: Everything I observe and explore and consume fuels the part of me that creates something new. The world looks different with that lens. Books and paintings and meals and movies aren’t just a way to pass the time—they’re fuel for who I am and what I have to say. Jonny Jimison is a freelance cartoonist and illustrator from North Florida with over a decade of experience in visual storytelling via comics, book illustration, and design. He is inspired by the playful humor of classic comics and the wide-eyed exploration of classic adventure stories. In addition to his all-ages graphic novel series The Dragon Lord Saga , he is the creator of the webcomic Rabbit Trails  for The Rabbit Room, as well as his own webcomics Getting Ethan and Lili and Leon. 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 Andres Perez  on Unsplash

by Rachel Donahue A quick web search of the word “generative” brings a host of returns about artificial intelligence, as though all that were required to generate in this day and age were a set of data and a prompt, and voila! a machine spits out your result like a dot matrix printer. [Cue sound.] What a sad diminishment of a green and lively word. Generative  comes from the Latin generare (“to beget”) and more fully means “having the power or function of generating, originating, producing, or reproducing.” Think of the multiplication of rabbits: the word generations  comes from the same root. Try to forget for a minute any paltry associations with AI, and consider the word generative  in the context of human flourishing and creativity. Have you ever had a big, exciting, scary, delightful idea? An idea bigger than you are? One that sparked more   ideas in both you and other people? Generative ideas  are exactly these: the ones that grow, beget, and multiply. Like rabbits; like rhizomes under the earth; like a current of electricity lighting up a house, a street, a whole neighborhood. What do you do with such an idea? If you’re like me, you daydream and worry and fret about it. You tell God it’s too big, that someone else should do it (knowing full well how it went for Moses when he said this). You daydream some more, and pray, and pluck up the courage to finally tell someone else about it. And you keep daydreaming and telling people until you see that spark—when someone else starts daydreaming about it with you. Isn’t it a wonderful feeling to have someone enter into an idea with you? To imagine together the possibilities of what this idea might become? It makes you feel sane and seen. It gives you hope that maybe one day, this idea that’s been living in your head just might make it out into the world somehow. And it gives you the courage to take a step toward making that idea a reality. But letting an idea out into the world can be a scary prospect. The thing can take on a life of its own and quickly grow beyond your capacity and your control. Humans have limitations, and big ideas can’t come to life through a single person. It would take a whole team of people… And here, right here, is where you must take a huge step of faith to set things in motion that cannot be reversed. It’s the point of no return. Makoto Fujimura, in this interview with the Trinity Forum , says that generative ideas are born out of love, reflecting the generative creativity of God, who is Love . This is the language of begetting: born out of love. Generative ideas are the overflow of love. Just as fathers and mothers beget children, poets beget poems; gardeners beget gardens; artists beget art. Through a labor born out of love, these poems and gardens and pieces of art take on a life of their own. Their existence in the world spreads love and vision, and these in turn beget new ideas in the people who experience them. Can artists or gardeners or poets boast in a successfully generative idea or piece of work? Not any more than parents can boast in the success of a child—which is to say (if they are being honest) that they had a hand in it, but that much of the process is simply the grace of God. In both parenting and good art-making, you have to die to yourself over and over in the process—so much death and sacrifice!—but the love of Christ compels us. Love first set the example, and love draws us onward. A generative idea, then, is not something to be produced or spit out of a cold, calculating machine—it’s something to be stewarded, cultivated, tended, nurtured. A generative idea is a gift; a generative idea is a responsibility. And to properly steward such an idea, we require community. Just as in parenting I need the body of Christ speaking into my children’s lives to help love them and guide them as they grow, as a poet (or artist or gardener), I need the voices of others speaking into my work, helping me to love it well and make it the best it can be. Generative work springs from humility and vulnerability and connection. It grows from the soil of friendship, conversation, and shared loves. I’d like to take a moment to share my own personal adventure with a generative idea, which just happens to be the next big project for Bandersnatch Books . A few years ago, inspired by the poetry tea during Hutchmoot Homebound, my children and I began participating in a weekly poetry tea time with other families over Zoom. Our children would read poems to each other from beloved names like Robert Louis Stevenson and Shel Silverstein, spanning from the beautiful to the ridiculous. I loved watching these children delight in rhymes, puns, and other wordplay. In that same season, I was actively participating in a couple online groups of poets (namely The Habit  and The Poetry Pub ), where I was regularly hearing and seeing delightful poems being workshopped by talented writers. I loved getting to see other poets’ strengths in an internal rhyme or the turn of a line and the way they celebrated one another’s work. It was the marriage of these two loves that birthed a new idea: what if I could introduce these two wonderful groups of people to each other? Wouldn’t that be fun? We happened to own a publishing company, so I thought—what if we made a new, fully illustrated anthology of poetry for children written by my many talented poet friends? It was both a delightful and terrifying prospect. Thankfully, my colleagues at Bandersnatch Books  were immediately on board with the idea. But the question remained: how on earth to begin executing a project of such magnitude? I asked friends in the publishing world for advice and began taking notes. Then at the Square Halo conference  in 2023, I shared my dream with Emily J. Person  and Théa Rosenburg  over breakfast, and that opened the door. Emily had just received her B.F.A. in illustration, and Théa was a fellow writer and a lover of books. Their combined enthusiasm for my idea breathed life into it. I began to hope that it just might come to pass. For more than a year, Emily and I would check in periodically to daydream about what this project could be. It grew a name— I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry —and a structure: six broad categories of poems, including Flora & Fauna, Dreams & Whimsy, Unexplorable Depths, Cautionary Tales, Vittles, and Humans. When I told my poet friends about the idea, they got excited, too. They started playing with words and inviting other poet friends to play with them. I’m still astonished at the way one little idea sparked such contagious joy and creativity. If I ever feared that we might not have enough poems to fill a book, I was a fool. Turns out, these poets love wordplay and childlikeness as much as I do. They each brought the powers of the adult into the playfulness of the child and crafted wonderful, delightful, beautiful things. Sixty-something poets submitted more than 230 poems  for consideration. You should have seen the piles of words as I began to sort them all! After many, many hours of work, an actual book has taken shape, and I’m astonished again at how wonderfully the pieces are fitting together. This project is going to be so much bigger than I had originally imagined. The book will contain 170 poems by 62 poets, with every spread fully illustrated with Emily’s beautiful, whimsical, meticulous work. A love of children inspired the producers of Hutchmoot: Homebound to include a poetry tea time in the offerings. That poetry tea time furthered a love of poetry in our children. Our children’s delight and the good work of fellow poets inspired the idea for this anthology, and the idea for this project sparked play and joy and more new poems, which will in turn spark joy and delight in more children. The generous, generative, creative overflow keeps spreading—all born out of love! As with any generative work, it’ll take a community to make this project happen. We’re Kickstarting   I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry so we can make it big and beautiful and chock full of colorful illustrations. If we reach the stretch goals, we’ll get to add features that improve the book for everyone, like a ribbon, printed endpapers, and foil and emboss on the cover. This book is going to be something special, entirely made by humans, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it. The idea for this project hasn’t ceased to be exciting, delightful, and scary to me, but the farther we get into the making of it, the more I’m learning to lean back and trust the Love that has generated such creativity. People are making good, true, and beautiful things to the glory of the One who made them. Together, we get to spread that love to a new generation with a prayer that it will spark something in them, too. Rachel S. Donahue holds a B.A. in English and Bible from Welch College and enjoys travel, housewifery, and homeschooling while fulfilling her role as Chief Creative Officer of Bandersnatch Books . She's published two poetry collections: Beyond Chittering Cottage: Poems of Place, and Real Poems for Real Moms: from a Mother in the Trenches to Another. She's also the editor of the forthcoming anthology I've Got a Bad Case of Poetry, currently live on Kickstarter . 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 .

Editor's Note: Part of  Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music . Taking a different theme each post, the 5&1 series offers five short pieces (or extracts) followed by one more substantial work. by Mark Meynell Fairy tales are a serious business. In fact, they're almost too serious for children, which is probably why children of all ages adore them. click for playlists Tolkien accepted the point made by the great fairy tale anthologist Andrew Lang: "He who would enter into the Kingdom of Faërie should have the heart of a little child." However, he was adamant that while this entailed some aspects of childhood (like innocence or wonder), it should never imply childishness. "It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality." (From On Fairy-stories) With such potential for drama and danger, it is then no surprise that fairy tales have inspired composers. To get us in the mood, here's a little Humperdinck (no, not the British crooner who stole his name). Stop, Hocus pocus (Act III, Hansel & Gretel, 1893) Engelbert Humperdinck (1853-1921, German) Jane Henschel (Witch), Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Charles Mackerras (cond.) Hansel & Gretel is one of better known of the mediaeval stories collected by the German Brothers Grimm. It contains so many of the archetypes we love: abandoned children impoverished by famine, brooding forests, cannibalistic witches, spells, and treasure. So here is a tiny clip from Humperdinck's beloved Christmas opera. Be afraid... Fun fact: the composer Richard Strauss conducted the première in 1893! 1. The Procession of the Fairy Tales (#22 Sleeping Beauty, 1889, Op. 66) Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, (1840-1893, Russian) Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Mark Ermler (cond.) The roots of the Sleeping Beauty stories are probably French, and they clearly chime with the mediaeval tradition of chivalry and courtly love. Various French writers retold the story (like Charles Perrault in the 17th century), as, of course, did the Brothers Grimm. So when Tchaikovsky was commissioned by the St Petersburg Theatres to write another ballet (after his first, Swan Lake , in 1875), he jumped at the chance to set it. These ballets are now two of the most popular in the repertoire (despite Sleeping Beauty lasting nearly 4 hours!) Forces of good and evil compete throughout the story, the evil fairy Carabosse casting a spell on Princess Aurora as a result of not receiving an invitation to her christening. She will prick her finger while spinning thread at 16 and die. The good Lilac Fairy tries to reverse it, but manages only to make her sleep for 100 years. After which a handsome prince will kiss her... By this section, the tensions have more or less resolved and we are heading to the grandeur of the royal wedding of Aurora to her Prince. Here, various fairy tale characters assemble in a grand march to play their part in the celebrations. 2. Le jardin féerique (from Ma mère l'oye) Maurice Ravel (1875-1937, French) Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis (piano duet) A very different mood now. The sharp-eyed will have spotted that this piece has appeared before (in the Calls of the Birds ). However, in my defence, this is the first repeat of the entire 5&1 series, and this is a very different arrangement. Ma Mère L'Oye (Mother Goose) was in fact originally conceived by Ravel as a piano duet; it is scored for 'four hands' meaning two performers at one piano rather than on a piano each. This is the last of five movements, translated 'The Fairy Garden', but unlike the previous ones, its origins are unknown. It opens with slow, measured paces, as if we have just set foot in the garden and begin to explore. It gradually gains colour and detail, although the pace is unwavering. About half way through, the harmonies start shifting and it builds up into the most glorious climax, with glissandos (rapid slides) at the top, as if we're now surrounded by butterfly-like fairies. 3. Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (Op. 28, 1894/5) Richard Strauss (1864-1949, German) Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly (cond.) We're back in medieval Germany now and follow the exploits of that classic prankster and all-round cheeky-chappie, Till Eulenspiegel. His surname literally means Owl-mirror, but in certain dialects it has rather more dubious connotations. Put it this way: a fair number of his pranks concern ... er ... excrement. Strauss composed this tone poem (a short orchestral piece intentionally depicting a painting or narrative) only a year after conducting the Humperdinck première, so perhaps that inspired him to mine fairy tales too. In only 15 action-packed and joyful minutes, we accompany Till's adventures as he rides from fields to towns, upsetting market stalls, jeering at pompous clergy and academics, flirting with adoring girls. He is given his own motifs that are repeated at various points, the first one on the horns conveying his winking humour. However, he cannot be allowed to get away with this mayhem indefinitely, poor chap, and so he has his eventual comeuppance. He is tried and hanged for his crimes, all of which is depicted in the score. But his spirit lives on because, after all, Till's demise hardly resulted in the cessation once and for all of such prankery! 4. 'Auf Einer Burg' (#7, Liederkreis, Op. 39) Robert Schumann (1810-1856, German) Matthias Goerne (baritone.) & Eric Schneider (piano) Schumann was a troubled and broken soul, sustained above all by the devotion of his truly remarkable wife Clara (herself a brilliant composer in her own right). He suffered from bouts of dark mental anguish, but out of this he could still create music of the most sublime depths and simplicity. 1840 became what he termed 'his year of song' and this number comes from a song cycle (the literal translation of Liederkreis ) of poetry settings depicting the landscape, in true Romantic fashion. In a Castle was written by a contemporary, aristocratic man of letters, Joseph von Eichendorff. The song is sedate, offering ample space to conjure up the scene in our minds. The piano accompaniment is sparse while the melody is almost childishly simple. It's not going to fire up the adrenaline; this is a slow burn. But for those with ears to hear, there are startling subtleties to send shivers down any spine. The original poem had four stanzas, but Schumann sets them in pairs. On occasion, the piano seems marginally out of harmonic sync with the singer, but listen out for the steady development of intensity from lines 5 and 13. Then, on the words Jahre (years) and munter (merrily) he sets a deliberate, if muted, dissonance (the singer's top C clashes with the piano's left-hand D). For we certainly don't expect the the knight to be centuries-old, while the musicians' merriment is enitrely out of keeping with the devastating final word. Not all fairy tales get a 'happy ever after'. 5. Hello, Little Girl  (from Into the Woods) Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021, American) Robert Westenberg (Wolf) & Danielle Ferland (Red Riding Hood), Original Cast NB clip is from the 2017 movie with Johnny Depp as the Wolf (whereas the playlist is of original cast) Chesterton wrote, "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed." Tolkien once said "A safe fairy tale is untrue to all worlds." For the fairy tale to work, the dangers must be real. Stephen Sondheim was clearly enjoying himself when combined a medley of Grimms' fairy tales in his 1987 musical Into the Woods . In this clip, Little Red Riding Hood comes face-to-face with her terrifying antagonist. It's unnerving how many child-eating horrors live in German forests! But it does permit Sondheim to relish the salivating, predatory wolf and contrast it with the bright yet canny innocence of the little girl. Brilliant! The Firebird  (1910) Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971, Russian/American) Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, Charles Dutoit (cond.) In folklore common to many Slavic countries, heroes are often given the almost impossible quest to retrieve a Firebird's feather. No it's neithert r a car, nor a browser, but a magnificent creature whose stunning plumage has the brightness and intensity of flames. A single feather emits sufficient light to fill a great hall (obviously). Prince Ivan catches the Firebird's feather (by Russian artist Ivan Bilibin, 1899) The version that the Russian emigré composer Stravinsky used for Diaghilev's commission (for his Parisian-founded company Les Ballets Russes) , imagines the Firebird as a female human/bird hybrid. Prince Ivan captures her, but to reward his willingness to release her, she grants him a feather. This is just as well because he subsequently encounters the dastardly but immortal Kaschei who has kidnapped thirteen princesses, no less. What a complete rotter! But because Prince Ivan possesses the feather (and obviously knows how to use it), he defeats Kaschei without killing him. Thus the princesses are liberated! Hurrah! Thank goodness there was. a dashing prince on hand (plus feather). Naturally, Ivan marries the most beautiful and this is something about which she was undoubtedly delighted. The ballet lasts around 45 minutes and contains gorgeous melodies with swooping strings and romantic tension. Until Kaschei appears in the 11th movement, it feels much more like the great Russian works of the Nineteenth Century than other, modernist works for which Stravinsky is famous. But the music builds to bring the archetypal battle of good and evil to its thrilling conclusion. Epic! 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 . If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

This is the first in a weekly series that will seek to break down the mists and myths that put people off the vast treasure house that is classical music. Each time, I’ll take a theme and choose 5 pieces or excerpts (from over 600 years’ worth of music) and then round it all off with one larger work. Hence 5&1 from 600! You can take photos or paint en plein air to capture the experience; and I suppose the seriously committed might take out a drone with iMax cameras to make it fully immersive. But music is uniquely able to evoke being out in the natural world, which is why composers have been obsessed with it since time immemorial. 1. Cheerful Feelings On Arriving In The Country (from Symphony No. 6 “The Pastoral”; Op. 68, 1808) Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827, German) The Orchestra of the 18th Century, Frans Brüggen (cond.) Who better to start with than the one whose 250th anniversary is this year? Beethoven’s 6th is much loved for good reason. Unlike most of his works, he actually provides narrative descriptions for each movement. So this is not abstract or “pure” music but is what is technically called “programme music.” That means the composer has particular images or experiences in mind with each musical development. This first movement then captures the sheer relief of escaping from urban bustle into the countryside; we can feel his sense of being able to breathe again and the warmth of the early summer sun as we wander through land bursting with life. The Lark Ascending (1914) Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958, English) Iona Brown (violin) , Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner (cond.) Inspired by George Meredith’s poem of the same name, Vaughan-Williams’ standalone piece for violin and orchestra is sublime. He was renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge of old English and other folk-songs, and the orchestra transports us back into a rustic (dare I say, Shire-like?!) world that would have sung them. But our focus is on the skylark, portrayed by the violin circling and rising high into the atmosphere. Here are the opening lines of Meredith’s poem to give an idea of what the composer was getting at: He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound, Of many links without a break, In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake. Im Frühling / In Spring (D.882; poem by Ernst Schulze, 1826) Franz Schubert (1797-1828, Austrian) Matthias Goerne (baritone) , Helmut Deutsch (piano) Schubert is one of the finest song-writers in musical history, certainly when it comes to settings of poetry. He wrote hundreds of songs and this is one of his most loved. As he goes on his solitary meander, the singer in this deceptively simple song (with its gorgeous piano accompaniment) gets all nostalgic in the places he and his lost love would linger in. Everything is as lovely and beautiful as he remembered. . . but nothing can ever be the same now that she is no longer with him. Follow along with the translation here . Swans Migrating from Cantus Arcticus (a Concerto For Birds And Orchestra, Op. 61, 1972) Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016, Finnish) Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Hannu Lintu (cond.) The arrival of music technology opened up possibilities for all kinds of composers, not just for prog rock or DJ mixing. Now you didn’t need to settle for merely evoking the natural world; you could bring it right into the concert hall. So like many great Scandinavian composers, Rautavaara’s piece brilliantly captures the experience of the frigid north. This piece, from nearly fifty years ago, is spell-binding. The third movement is particularly special, whisking us to a land familiar to few people but a magnet for vast multitudes of migrating birds. Duo for the Bride and her Intended, and Coda (from Appalachian Spring, 1944) Aaron Copland (1900-1990, American) New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein (cond.) While perhaps best known for his Fanfare for the Common Man (which he then brilliantly incorporated into his 3rd Symphony), Copland is credited with crafting the archetypal sound of the American West, copied and emulated in countless movie and TV soundtracks. But he was far more versatile than that. This is from a ballet suite (in 8 parts) about a very simple story of a young couple getting married and building a homestead in the middle of nowhere. It thus becomes a classic parable of the American dream. The 7th part is built around variations of the old Shaker tune, “The Gift to be Simple.” But this movement has a wide range of emotions, capturing both the excitement and nervousness of young marrieds as they start out in uncharted land. An Alpine Symphony—an orchestral tone poem (Op. 64, 1915) Richard Strauss (1864-1949, German) Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan (cond.) This is a big one! You’ll need 50 minutes of time to get the whole thing and an orchestra of 125 players to perform it. But I guarantee it is time well-spent! This is one of the greatest examples of programme music ever written, but I suggest you don’t follow Strauss’s description of each of the 22 sections. Instead, with the knowledge that it depicts a whole day’s hike in the Bavarian Alps starting before dawn, listen and picture it for yourself. You can then compare it afterwards with what Strauss thought he was doing listed here . For music tech nerds, this recording was the first commercial CD ever made!