What are you looking for?

[Editor’s note: This post was written about a month ago. Do not be led into a space-time paradox by the opening line.] [All photos by Aedan Peterson.] Can I tell you about last night? Part of the reason for this self-indulgent post is that our time in Wales is possible in part to an anonymous donor, and this is the best way I know to show my gratitude. We’ve been gone for more than a month now, and so much has happened that I won’t burden you with the details. The highlights: a wonderful 3.5 weeks in Sweden, during which time I made good progress on The Warden and the Wolf King and visited the ruins of the cottage where my great-grandfather was born. Then I got a kidney infection, an illness that knocked me out of the game for six fevered days and ended in a hospital visit on the island of Gotland. I recovered, and we pushed on to Norway, then hopped across the channel to London, where, like good Americans, we did everything we possibly could between the four concerts last week. That means the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, a play on West End, the British Museum, the National Gallery, Platform 9 3/4, and too many London Underground train rides to count. Needless to say, I didn’t get much Wingfeather writing done that week. (I’m leaving out our visit to Oxford for now, because there’s no time. But trust me: it was magical.) During the London stay we had a single show in Wales, so we took a train from Paddington Station to Bridgend. When we got off the train we were greeted by two great guys, Phil and Von. Phil is a South African pastor, Von is an American musical missionary. Stepping out of the station in Wales after having spent a hectic-but-awesome week in London was like easing into your favorite chair after a good day’s work. The countryside! It’s impossible to avoid comparing it to the Shire. I even heard that Tolkien may have based the Shire on Wales (and hobbits on Welsh folk, a comment that rankled the one whom I mentioned it to). We spent the day in the ancient town of Llantwit Major, played a blast of a concert in an old church (along with a local folk band called Valhalla), and even paid a visit to a 1,000 year old pub in the country, which was started by monks. It was a lovely day. The next morning we took a deep breath and boarded the train back to London for two more concerts. I SO wish I had the time and energy to tell you everything, and that you had the time and energy to care. We’ll have to save it for Hutchmoot or something. The reason I mention that excursion to Wales is to demonstrate how excited we were for some real rest at a place called Bryn Cottage in Newport, Wales after the glorious bustle and energy of London. At a concert this spring I mentioned Bryn to someone who I think had spent some time in Wales, and they insisted on paying for our week here. My mind was blown, and they wouldn’t let me refuse. So let me tell you about it. We drove four hours from Oxford, west toward a setting half-moon. The kids fell asleep, and for the last two hours it was me, Jamie, and the GPS lady’s comforting voice telling me when to exit the roundabouts as we drove into this unexplored land after dark. By that ancient, mysterious sense in our bones I was aware without looking at a map that somewhere to my left was the sea. Later, looking at a map, I learned that it was the Irish Sea. The roads wound between steep hedges and stone walls, and Jamie and I wished the sun was still out so we could see the ocean or the rolling hills or whatever beauties lay beyond our headlights. At last we reached a town called Fishguard, where the road narrowed even more and led us between old pubs and flats and walls, built long before the invention of the automobile. I held my breath to aid the car through the narrowest spots. Down, down into Lower Fishguard, closer to the water and boats, closer to the rivers and streams that poured into the quay, then up, up again into the countryside. Jamie read our directions aloud. “Seven miles from Fishguard, as you pass the 30 mph sign, turn right at the sign for Cwm Gwaun and drive up the hill past the cattle grid. Take the right fork, steeply uphill to where the tarmac turns to cobblestone, then take the first lane on the right to Bryn Cottage.” By now, of course, we had roused the kids. When we turned up the hill we saw in our headlights two wild horses, a mother and her foal, with long, beautifully unkempt manes and tails. Following the directions was like reading a treasure map in the dark. And a treasure it was. We climbed wearily out of the car at 1 a.m. and marveled at the stars. The milky way was a swath of mist overhead, hushing the Petersons and the wild horses and the rolling hills alike. I had to use my phone flashlight to make our way through the iron gate along the stone pathway to the red front door. We were sleepy and giddy at the same time—and a bit creeped out, I confess. Who knew what ghosts were sleeping in the old cottage? The ceilings were low, and I bumped my head more than once on beams and doorways. We more or less collapsed into bed, all of us wondering what the sun would reveal when we woke. At 8:00 a.m. I sat up, happy as a kid on Saturday morning, and ducked my way downstairs and out the door. The morning was bright and cool. The first thing I heard was the bleat of a sheep not twenty feet away. It was irritated that I was interrupting his breakfast. After the shock of my companion’s presence, I looked around and the world that lay under that blue sky. We were on the slope of an enormous hill. “Mountain” feels like the wrong word, because it’s so pastoral; green as a garden, and soft as a pillow. Below us stretched pastureland divided by stone walls for perhaps two miles before the earth fell away in cliffs to the sea. The cottage overlooks Newport Bay, flanked by Dinas Head, a peninsula on the left, and Newport Sands on the right. Imagine the Igiby Cottage, but wisely built well away from the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. Then I heard more bleating, and now a company of wild sheep trotted into the front yard, fertilizing and eating in equal measure. Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars! Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens! Let them praise the name of the Lord! For he commanded and they were created. And he established them forever and ever; he gave a decree, and it shall not pass away. Praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and mist, stormy wind fulfilling his word! Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! Beasts and all livestock, creeping things and flying birds! Let every creature in the sea And every flying bird Let all the mountains, all the fields And valleys of the earth Let all the moons and all the stars Throughout the universe Sing praises to the Living God Who rules them by His word Hallelujah! Glory be to our great God The kids had been playing a made up game of tag, hopping from rock to rock and howling with laughter as they tried not to step in sheep droppings, but when they saw the sun about to go to sleep and heard Fernando’s praise, they each stopped and watched in the gloaming and glory. Words. Music. Beauty. Praise. Rest. We were meant for these things. Thank you, Anonymous Giver, for last night. Thank you, God, for the anonymous giver, and for thinking up this place called Wales.

Jennifer Trafton needs no introduction here, but I’m doing one anyway because of my zealous commitment to the rigid terms of the Story Warren/Rabbit Room Peace Treaty of 2012. Jennifer is the author of The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, a wonderful tale about a girl named Persimmony Smudge (you love it already, I know). It’s a Smith family favorite. Jennifer is also a popular creative writing teacher for children in the Nashville area. But do not despair, non-Nashvillians. She recently launched a creative writing website which now features on-line classes! If you have a child who loves stories and dreams of writing, Sleeping Giant: Creative Journeys For Kids is just the thing. Please enjoy this insightful, funny, and inspiring post! –Sam I’ve been in a tempest of lesson planning for summer camps, library workshops, and online classes. Part of the planning has involved looking back over the past year and figuring out which activities have worked well for the kids I’ve taught and which haven’t. I want to share with you one that worked—because it occurred to me that it would be an easy and fun activity for a family to do together. The inspiration came from my favorite book on writing craft (so far), Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. An avid word collector, Wooldridge describes cutting words and phrases out of magazines and taping them onto blank raffle tickets. One day, for fun, she and her kids put these “word tickets” on objects all around the house: abandon boundary on a globe, anger on a burnt-out green candle, answers on a squash, diamonds on a scrub brush. “Suddenly,” she writes, “it seemed the objects could speak. They’d become poems themselves. Their labels changed the way we saw them.” The object + word-ticket combinations created surprising metaphors—bridges between seemingly unconnected concepts. This appealed to my imagination in a dozen different ways, because of course metaphor is the love language of artists. That is, essentially, what we do—we connect things. We connect words, notes on a scale, strokes of a brush, movements, ideas, outer landscapes of things with inner landscapes of the soul. I began thinking about a further set of connections that I make as a writer of fiction: bridging the bridges, leading the way through the metaphors to a destination. To get from a green candle to anger, or from a squash to an answer, it takes a poem. But to get from the burnt-out wick of fury to a wisdom-dispensing vegetable, it takes a story. When I was growing up, I turned my bedroom—and my entire house sometimes—into other places. My bed was a mountain or an island. The space under my desk was a witch’s cave where unsuspecting Barbies were held captive and hung upside-down by their pointy toes. The bookshelves were treacherous cliffs. The bathtub was a vast ocean. The sink was a pool where dolphins and humans lived and played in harmony. Every parent knows that the best toy ever invented is a cardboard box, because a box can be anything at all—a bed, a spaceship, a car, a robot, a castle, a dragon’s lair, a pirate ship. You just have to think outside of it and inside of it and under it and over it and through it. Once my bed was an island, my bathtub an ocean, and every available shoebox an adventurer’s hideout, I didn’t stop there. I sent my dolls through these new landscapes on quests. I strung symbols together into epics. So for a few of my classes this spring I decided to take Poemcrazy’s exercise in metaphor or stretch it a step further into the realm of story. Before the kids arrived, I wrote dozens of words on slips of paper and taped or laid them all over the space where I was holding the class—in one case this was a living room, in other cases a bare classroom or a church fellowship hall. The more surprising the combination of word and object, the better—vast on a teacup, tickle on a window pane, dinosaur on a coffee maker, mountain on a fuzzy, holey, white bedroom slipper. When class began, I asked the kids to walk around with their notebooks and pencils. And this is what I told them: This is not the room you thought it was. It’s a landscape—a city, a nation, a planet, a world—that only you can discover. Go explore it. Each time you find an object with a word on it, take those two ideas—slipper and mountain—and knock them together in your imagination. Perhaps in this landscape there is a mountain shaped like a shoe, or a fuzzy mountain with a hole in the middle, or a mountain that can only be approached by stepping on a trail of white marshmallows, or the mountainous bedroom slipper of a giant. Notice. Imagine. What treasure lies here? What danger lurks there? What is this place? Take notes on what you find. After they had explored the landscape, they took the class on a quest through it—in writing. A quest needs an object, a goal, a destination, so I first gave them a list of possibilities: ·     The Beginning of All Adventures ·     The Last Dinosaur’s Funny Bone ·     The Place Where Dreams Live ·     The Island of Lost Socks ·     The Silver Key to Happiness ·     The Answer to Every Question ·     The Upside-Down Moon ·     The First Footprint ·     The Secret Colors of the Rainbow ·     The City of Forgotten Memories ·     The Gruesome Pit of Grossness ·     The Saddest Smile ·     The Place Where Stories are Born Some chose to come up with their own quests. Then they wrote instructions telling the rest of us how to navigate the mysterious landscape, overcome its dangers, unlock its magic, or appease its inhabitants in order to reach the destination. The results were hilarious, lovely, and sometimes profound: Start at the ticklish waterfall and collect a silver wave of frozen air, then hop on one foot to where the dancing snake and the snail with lightning nostrils meet every time a brick falls into the Inky Pit. To get to the place where stories are born you must first leap through the picture where two worlds meet. Go over Monarch Mountains and let out the deranged dinosaurs. Find the Pit of One Thousand Ants and ask the one in the corner where you can find the King of the Trees, who will give you the Stone of Oozing Twist. Open the door by saying, “Crunch, crunch, crunch,” and you will be on the Upside-Down Moon. But beware! The dragon lurks in the stacked caves. Hidden in a secret chamber in the waterfall oozing with magic, you will find the Gruesome Pit of Grossness. Ask the moon monarch for her windswept chair so you can fly over the vast desert and over the silver waves to get to the place where stories are born. When you reach it, ask for Mr. Bartholomew and he will give you the key to where stories are born . . . in your imagination. So on a rainy day this summer, try this with your family: Fill the kitchen table with small pieces of paper (Post-It notes would work) and have everyone write words on them—any words at all—nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, silly words, beautiful words, dangerous words. Then elect one person to be the Hider of Words. Send everyone else into a separate room to wait until the Hider has put your words on objects all over the living room—or downstairs, or whatever part of the house you choose. Then go be explorers, taking notes and writing Quest Instructions—or entire stories—about this familiar yet utterly new landscape. See how this same room with the same set of words conjures up completely different places and adventures in the imaginations of each family member. It’s not simply a game. It’s not even about writing at all, or only secondarily so. It’s about making connections. It’s about training our eyes to behold the many layers of reality. Look further. Look deeper. Look inside. This activity reminds me of the region of the seven dimensions in George MacDonald’s novel Lilith, where two things can exist in the same place—the flowers of one world comingle with the piano in the drawing room of another world, giving a “peculiar sweetness” to the music. Once we have flown in the moon monarch’s windswept chair, will we ever look at that old armchair the same way again? The Romantic poet William Blake talked about “double vision”—seeing another layer of reality and meaning beneath the outward appearance of things. He took it much too far, in my opinion, to the point of devaluing the material world, but I was thinking about this concept of double vision when I stood in front of a hill in England one summer and saw a snoring giant—the seed of a story that grew into my first book. That is one of imagination’s gifts to a child and to an artist: the ability (a fragile one, easily trampled by the literalism of adulthood) to “see a world in a grain of sand” as Blake put it, or an ocean in a bathtub. How flat the world must be to those who see a chair as just a chair, a hill as just a hill, a box as just six cardboard walls around an empty soul.

For four years now, Andy Gullahorn has hosted a weekly event called Bowling Lunch. It’s exactly what it sounds like: men gather in a bowling alley, eat lunch, and bowl. Andy keeps a spread sheet of everybody’s scores and sends out a weekly email showing the current standings and communicating any administrative issues. The regulars have nicknames, typically assigned by Andy (Frank the Killer, Beyonce, Smoothie, Patasaurus, etc.). And once a year Andy hosts an awards ceremony complete with speeches, trophies, and printed certificates. About two hundred men have attended Bowling Lunch since its inception. It’s a funny mix of people–musicians, retirees, the self-employed, the under-employed, and even a few people with real jobs. When the Anglican Archbishop of Rwanda visited Nashville, Andy invited him to Bowling Lunch. His Grace had never bowled before; still, he beat Andrew Osenga. Bowling Lunch is a laugh a minute. And why wouldn’t it be? You’re bowling in the middle of the day. You’re eating bowling alley food. You’re hanging out with some very interesting people. But now I begin to come to my point. Yes, Bowling Lunch is a laugh a minute. And yes, the whole concept, like the American Idol Fantasy League that Andy operated a few years ago, seems like a big joke. But it’s more than that. Something quite important happens at Bowling Lunch. Grown men, a notoriously lonely lot, connect with one another over terrible hot dogs and two games of bowling. I don’t want to overstate the case; Bowling Lunch isn’t church. But it is a place where men from many walks of life feel that they belong. Recently my teenage son went right by himself and had a great time bowling with a couple of retirees, a singer-songwriter, and a property manager. If you were to scan the crowd at a Bowling Lunch, you’d be hard-pressed to guess what they share in common. What they share in common is that they all know Andy Gullahorn. And Andy seems to take quite seriously his role as the bringer-together of this rag-tag group of fellow pilgrims. I tell the story of Bowling Lunch because I think it offers real insight into the rest of Andy Gullahorn’s work. Andy has a well-deserved reputation for being a hilarious guy–the kind of guy who would originate Bowling Lunch and the American Idol Fantasy League. If you’ve ever seen him perform live, you know that his patter between songs is on the level of a stand-up comic; you laugh even before he starts talking. His funniest songs are among his best-known songs. But underneath all that hilarity is real depth and spiritual sensitivity and a genuine interest in other people’s lives and struggles. At Hutchmoot last year, when Andy and I did a session called “The Gospel Uses of Comedy,” I asked him to play his song “I Haven’t Either.” Halfway through the song, people were crying laughing. By the end of the song, a few of them were crying crying, moved by the song’s honesty about the realities of living with a broken self. Andy’s new album, Beyond the Frame, includes one of the funniest Gullahorn songs of all time. “Skinny Jeans” posits a theory that might explain why Andy isn’t as well-known as, say, Justin Bieber. The other day somebody remarked on Facebook that “Skinny Jeans” is reason enough to buy and listen to Beyond the Frame. That’s true as far as it goes, but the person who comes to this record in order to be amused is liable to get gobsmacked. Consider the first words you hear when you listen to Beyond the Frame: Nothing. All you hear is silence. Feels like you’re alone and Drifting off of the map. But many souls have gone Down this road you’re on. At least I have. Life isn’t all bowling and skinny jeans. Andy puts the listener on notice: this is going to be a record about hard things–marital trouble, the death of loved ones, addiction, persistent shame, the growing doubts of middle age. But even more importantly, this is a record about bearing one another’s burdens, acknowledging our common humanity and our shared need of a Savior. You’re not the only one who’s been down this road, Andy says. He’s been down it too. In the liner notes, every song is dedicated to somebody, usually a person or persons whose story inspired the song. Those little headnotes make the songs feel more personal and intimate even than songs of straight self-revelation would. It’s no rare thing for a singer-songwriter to explore his own suffering in his music. The most striking thing about Beyond the Frame is Andy’s willingness to explore the suffering of his friends, to dive into that suffering and to find hope like a glimmering pearl in its depths–not the false hope of easy answers, but hard-won hope. Beyond the Frame is a deeply compassionate album. Like a good friend, these songs enter into the world of a hurting fellow pilgrim and feel his pain, but they also take a step back to speak words of wisdom that the sufferer may not be able to speak to himself. I especially love “Favor Is a Foreign Tongue,” which addresses a person too bound up in shame and addiction to receive proffered grace: You’ve got friends trying to help, reaching out to you, But it’s not adding up with the little you think you deserve. You’re content with a loss ’cause you’ve got nothing left to lose, So you burn every bridge ’til they can’t reach you anymore. … I hate to imagine what happened to that little child That convinced you that goodness was too good to be true. Who knows what it was; maybe drugs had the final say When you took any trust and pawned it like a wedding ring. Oh but there’s so much more that I wish you would steal away, Like the mercy and peace and forgiveness you can have for free. The hope of Beyond the Frame revolves around the truth that we don’t have all the answers; we cannot see what God sees. That’s what the album title means. The refrain from the title track is haunting and a beautiful end to an album that has looked at hard things without blinking: I took a picture of the Grand Canyon So I could remember that day. But the beauty of the Grand Canyon Stretches way beyond the frame. The person in the midst of hardship can’t see the whole picture. But neither can the person who hopes to offer comfort. We speak the truth to one another, we remind one another of the big picture as best we can, but the more important thing is to come alongside one another and bear one another’s burdens. I hope I haven’t portrayed Beyond the Frame as grim. It isn’t. Yes, it addresses hardship and suffering, but it does so in a way that brings the hope of the gospel to bear. Maybe this will help: Imagine if the coolest kid you knew in school also happened to be among the most compassionate and wisest and most generous-hearted. Wouldn’t you want to hear his record? [Beyond the Frame is available in the Rabbit Room store.]

A few months ago I saw a very interesting  piece in the New York Times called “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” It was written by Paul Elie, the author of a most excellent quadruple biography of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day, titled The Life You Save May Be Your Own. (Elie is also an editor at Flannery O’Connor’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Elie’s article generated a lot of discussion when it was published last December; now, in the spirit of better-late-than-never, I offer it up for discussion in the Rabbit Room. Contemporary literary fiction, Elie argues, treats Christian belief “as something between a dead language and a hangover.” Forgive me if I exaggerate. But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called “Christian convictions,” their would-be successors are thin on the ground. So are works of fiction about the quan­daries of Christian belief. Writers who do draw on sacred texts and themes see the references go unrecognized. A faith with something like 170 million adherents in the United States, a faith that for centuries seeped into every nook and cranny of our society, now plays the role it plays in Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House”: as some statues left behind in an old building, bewildering the new ­occupants. It’s a strange development. Strange because the current upheavals in American Christianity — involving sex, politics, money and diversity — cry out for ­dramatic treatment. Strange because upheavals in Christianity across the Atlantic gave rise to great fiction from “The Brothers Karamazov” to “Brideshead Revisited.” Strange because novelists are depicting the changing lives of American Jews and Muslims with great success… Now I am trying to answer the question: Where has the novel of belief gone? The obvious answer is that it has gone where belief itself has gone. In America today Christianity is highly visible in public life but marginal or of no consequence in a great many individual lives. For the first time in our history it is possible to speak of Christianity matter-of-factly as one religion among many; for the first time it is possible to leave it out of the conversation altogether. This development places the believer on a frontier again, at the beginning of a new adventure; it means that the Christian who was born here is a stranger in a strange land no less than the Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Soviet Jews and Spanish-speaking Catholics who have arrived from elsewhere. But few people see it that way. People of faith see decline and fall. Their detractors see a people threatening rear-guard political action, or a people left behind. Elie goes on to make an interesting point about Flannery O’Connor’s well-known claim that the novelist with Christian concerns has to shout and use large, startling figures to get the attention of indifferent readers. These days, Elie says, real-world believers are shouting more and drawing larger, more startling figures–from pulpits, in political rallies, on the Internet. “In response, writers with Christian preoccupations have taken the opposite tack, writing fiction in which belief acts obscurely and inconclusively.” There’s our beloved Marilynne Robinson, of course. But, Elie argues, “[Gilead’s] originality conceals the fact that, as a novel of belief, it is highly representative: set in the past, concerned with a clergyman, presenting belief as a family matter, animated by a social crisis.” It’s hard to find literary fiction that depicts Christian people wrestling around with what it means to be a Christian person in the twenty-first century. Even here, in the Rabbit Room, where we are intensely interested in what it means to be a Christian person in the twenty-first century, none of us who write fiction are writing about the world where we actually live and move and have our being. Andrew is writing about Aerwiar; Jennifer is writing about The Island at the Center of Everything; Pete is writing about the Revolutionary War; I’m writing about feechiefolks. To widen the net to include Hutchmoot speakers, Walt Wangerin has told stories about talking animals, Phil Vischer has told stories about talking vegetables, Nate Wilson writes about dragon’s teeth, and Leif Enger writes about the 1960s and earlier. I’m not being critical. We write about these things because we want to write about them, and our readers seem to like reading about them. Even if  authors with Christian convictions were writing piles of literary fiction about twenty-first century America, many of us would still be reading fantasy and historical fiction because that’s what many of us in the Rabbit Room community like to read. Still, it’s an interesting question: why are so few Christian authors writing straight non-fantastical novels about twenty-first century America? I realize that “Christian publishing houses” publish lots of contemporary novels. I would prefer to leave those books out of this conversation because they are published for and marketed to a specific subculture and don’t really aspire to speak to the culture at large. I hope our conversation doesn’t become a discussion of the relative merits of the fiction to be found at Lifeway stores. You can read the rest of Paul Elie’s very insightful and nuanced essay here. My summarization and quotation don’t do justice to it. For additional reading, you might check out this article from First Things by Randy Boyagoda, which is what reminded me of the Elie essay in the first place. (The first sentence of Boyagoda’s article reads, “I’m sick of Flannery O’Connor.” But it gets better.) I’d love to hear the thoughts that are provoked by this thought-provoking article. Note: NYTimes.com is a subscription site, but it lets you read 10 articles per month for free.

[Hello, Rabbit Room. This is S.D. Smith, international human being, presenting you with another post from your allies at Story Warren. Most of you know Julie Silander, she of RR Book Club fame, she of Hutchmoot fame, she of seemingly innumerable encouragements spreading secretly all over this community…um, fame. Julie has been a queen-city-sized dose of encouragement and wisdom to my family, so many of my friends, and an indispensable contributor to Story Warren. She also writes pretty well, for a dancer. –Sam] Let me tell you about my two-year-old. He loves life. He wakes early in the morning, eager for the adventures of the day. He is inquisitive about the way things work. He transforms long-forgotten remnants of this and that into tools, and he builds wood-block cities where the good guys decimate the bad guys on an hourly basis. He has a kind, generous heart and notices everything extraordinary that adults religiously dismiss. He has a sense of wonder and whimsy for which I yearn. He exudes the very essence of life. I love my two-year-old. But the thing is, he just turned thirteen. It happened when I blinked. As my eyes refocus on this newer version of my boy, I’m acutely aware that so much has changed. He has almost matched me in height.  He is the one recommending books to me, and I learn as much from our conversations (or more) than does he.  My son is closer to a man than a boy, and the rate of change is just getting kicked into high gear. Yet when I consider the best part of that two-year-old, the truest, most human, most alive part of his soul, it is still just as present eleven years later. The best part of my son is that which is eternal.  It doesn’t slip away with years, although I’ve been granted the privilege to see it grow and develop.  His joy, his compassion, his curiosity for life, his kindness and his creativity. Those things remain.They were formed from a substance more foundational than atoms. They are not bound (or marred) by the passage of time. The best part of my vibrant son, of my elderly grandmother, of you, and of me, won’t vanish with the years. It can’t be ended by a milestone birthday. Or even by a funeral. Most of us have felt the twinge of (or gut-wrenching) sadness that accompanies the milestones commemorated in our photo albums. We sigh, and with a mix of melancholy, nostalgia, sadness and yearning, we chant the parental mantra, “Time Flies.”  Yet take heart. Yes, time flies. But I don’t want to stop it. I want to climb on its back and soak up every inch of the scenery. I want to drink in the laughter, the tears, the soccer games, the visits to the ER, the blues skies and the torrential rains that this world has to offer. For when the cosmic clock is finally grounded, I will climb off its back, grateful for the wild and wonderful (full-of-wonder) ride. So enjoy your toddlers, your teenagers, your grandchildren. Don’t miss one bit of the ride due to fear or regret. For the day is coming when the tarnish of time will be removed  from us all. And underneath will be revealed the beauty, the creativity, the wonder, the whimsy, and the perfected love that was imprinted on our souls from the very foundations of the universe.

“In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed forever.”  – 1 Corinthians 15:51-52 We were not meant to die. We were meant to live. We were meant to live forever. That may sound absurd to many, given that we all do, in fact, die. But as a Christian I believe death is an intruder. I believe it is the wage of sin (Rom 6:23) and an effect of living in a broken, fallen world. (Gen 2:17, Rom 5:12) I don’t believe this is a blind faith either. As a pastor I spend time with many grieving people, and one prevailing emotion they all seem to share is that the death of a loved one feels wrong—like it’s not supposed to be this way. I believe they’re right and I believe the way our bodies fight to heal themselves when they’ve experienced something traumatic supports this idea that we were not meant to die, but to live. A few weeks ago I had open-heart surgery. Something happened to me while I was on the operating table that has me thinking about how we were meant to live and not die. No, I didn’t talk to an angel or spend five minutes in heaven or have a prophetic vision. I had a stroke—a small one known in the medical world as a reversible ischemic neurologic deficit, or RIND for short. RIND’s last from 24 to 72 hours before the symptoms, which include paralysis, mental confusion, and slurred speech, begin to resolve. Once the symptoms do resolve, there are rarely any lingering side effects. RIND’s are caused by a disruption of blood flow to the brain. Blood wants to clot when it comes into contact with anything outside the body. Since my surgery required that I be hooked up to a heart and lung machine, my doctors put me on a blood thinner before starting the procedure in order to keep my blood from clotting when it passed through the pump’s plastic tubing. Usually the blood thinners do their job, but the body’s design to protect and heal itself means that sometimes even a blood thinner can’t stop a tiny clot or two from forming when human blood comes into contact with a man-made material. Most likely this is what happened to me. A tiny clot formed when it hit that tubing and then traveled up into my brain where it got stuck and shut a few things down. *** Coming out of the fog of sedation is very disorientating. I remember opening my eyes and seeing my wife and my parents a few hours after surgery. A nurse asked a bevy of questions to determine my lucidity. Did I know where I was? Did I know why I was there? I answered her as best as I could before drifting off again. A couple of hours later I woke, this time much more aware of my surroundings. The nurse asked how I felt. “I can’t feel my left foot,” I told her. She asked, “What do you mean? Like it’s asleep?” I said, “No. I can’t feel it at all.” She asked me to wiggle my toes. I couldn’t. Not even a little. It wasn’t just numb. My left foot was hanging limp off to the side like it didn’t even belong to my body. This presented me with a greater issue than just a lame foot. Without that foot I wouldn’t be able to begin the slow process of rehabilitation in the way they wanted me to. One of the early steps in recovering from heart surgery is to get back on your feet as soon as possible. I couldn’t do this without my legs. Not only was I unable to walk, I was unable to stand up on my own. Since my sternum was now a broken bone held together by titanium wires, I wasn’t able to use my upper body to push up out of a chair, which is how most of us perform that task without a second thought. I needed my legs to do all the work and I didn’t have them. It took three nurses to lift me out of bed for the first time, and two to hold me up as I tried to walk the five feet between my bed and the chair. Though I was in the care of amazing doctors and nurses in one of the best hospitals in the world (for which I am nothing but grateful to God and all involved) anyone coming out of open-heart surgery is, by definition, a mess. Add a little stroke to the mix, and when I woke from surgery I was even more messed up than I might have been otherwise. At the risk of sounding like I’m piling on, for the sake of the point of this article permit me to mention a few more complications and symptoms I experienced during this process. I experienced a loss of basic motor skills. The day after surgery, I tried to reach for a cup of water sitting on a table to my right. I needed it to wash down a small handful of pills. It was easily within reach and both of my arms worked just fine. But in that moment, as much as my brain was trying to tell my arm to reach for the cup and pick it up, my arm would not obey. It was as though my arm and brain were no longer communicating to each other when it came to the matter of picking up that cup. I could do many other things with my arm just fine. I just couldn’t reach for that cup. I also experienced a loss of speech faculties. During the first couple of days when someone would ask me a simple question, I couldn’t always speak the answer I was thinking. When I meant yes, I’d say no. When I wanted to say I was thirsty, I’d say I wasn’t. Some of these symptoms were due to the RIND and some to the sedation and medications in my system. And some, no doubt, were simply by-products of the trauma of open-heart surgery. But this was the picture of my reality for the first couple of days after surgery. *** How did my body respond to all of this? It fought. It fought with abandon. It fought like it was meant to live. Within a matter of hours after discovering my paralysis, I was able to wiggle the toes on my left foot. Within a day, I could move my ankle. Over the course of three days, I went from being unable to sit up on my own to walking the hospital halls with a walker and a special boot. On the fourth day I ditched the walker. On day five, I got rid of the boot. My arms soon fell in line and began to obey my brain’s commands. My answers to peoples’ questions starting representing what I was actually thinking. The five-inch scar down the middle of my chest began to heal and the soreness in my throat from the breathing tube went away. Are you impressed? Do you imagine the hospital staff gathered at the foot of my bed in awe of my progress? While they certainly were pleased, they were far from calling me a miracle. Why? Because my recovery was progressing precisely as they had expected. They’d seen guys like me bounce back like this a hundred times over. They even told me before going under the knife what the first five days would hold for my recovery, and as it happened they were spot on. They said I would get exponentially better with each passing day. And guess what. I did. How did they know this would happen? They knew because this is what a body does when it goes through a traumatic ordeal. The first thing it does is fight to put itself back together as quickly as possible, opposing anything that might stand in its way. The walls of my heart have begun covering my internal stitches with scar tissue to strengthen what the surgeon’s scalpel had weakened. My body has applied the nutrients from the food I’ve eaten to calcify the break in my sternum, leaving it stronger than before. My brain recognized the clot and immediately began to dissolve it. Even my pain has played a role. Pain is the body’s way of enlisting our cooperation in the healing process. Had my natural curiosity led me to want to touch my scar, I could have infected it easily. But it hurt to touch, so I didn’t. Even now, it hurts when I try to use my upper body to push myself up out of a chair. That’s because my sternum is still fusing together and doesn’t want me undoing what it’s done so far. Out of habit I just use my legs now. (Happily, my left leg has fully recovered.) *** Over the course of these past few weeks I have been living in a body at war with itself, and in my case my body seems to be winning the fight to heal. Sadly not everyone wins this fight in the flesh, like my friend Alice. That’s part of the brokenness of our condition. Death comes for us all. Still, even the weakest among us fight against death in a host of ways. With every attempt to eat, they fight to supply their body with strength. With every fever they fight against disease and infection. With every sensation of pain, they push against the darkness closing in and feel the battle raging in their flesh and bone. For every person I’ve ever known who has died, they died fighting death. And this, I believe, is because we were meant to live. C.S. Lewis said, “If I find in myself a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Even though I know that everyone dies in the flesh at some point, nothing about that seems right to me. Nothing. The longing in me, and I’d wager in you too, is that we would not die, but that we would live—forever. This world, as it stands, cannot satisfy that longing. All it can do is sound the distant echo of another world—one where, though I die, yet shall I live—and that by faith in the Son of God. We were meant for this. Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt 1: The Sacramental Echo Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt 2: The Letters Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt. 4: Struck Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt. 5: Scowling at the Angel https://twitter.com/russramsey http://www.facebook.com/russ.ramsey

I’m reading straight through the Gospel of John early in the morning these days. It’s my second time this summer. I finished it once, paged right back to the start and savored the opening again: in the beginning was the Word. There are some books of Scripture I want to learn as I would the mind and soul of a beloved friend; with concentrated and affectionate attention. I want their narrative to shape my own story, their words to form my sight of the world. Isaiah is one of those. The Psalms. And definitely John. John’s Gospel is a luminous book. The other Gospel writers seem to tell the story more from the outside in, relating the miracles, the teaching, those high and holy days of Jesus’ life from the viewpoint of what was seen. John tells it from this inside. He tells what it means. At least that’s the sense I get as I read. I feel often that he had an interior room within himself, a place where the Beloved spoke with him. From there he looked out on the spectacle and brilliance of Jesus’ days and perceived, not just the events, but the meaning of each, the great Reality unveiling itself in each action, word, and miracle. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us… John is a storyteller of superb skill, and the first time through this book I became aware of a certain theme in his narrative; the way that Jesus invaded sacred or traditional spaces and retold their meaning with his words. He walked straight into days and spaces like the temple, the Sabbath, a Samaritan well, and by his narration freed them of the fear and false law that obscured the living presence of God within them. Take, for instance, the cleansing of the temple, the significance of the statement, “don’t make my Father’s house a place of business,” as if grace could be bought and sold, as if God’s favor were an object for which we could barter. Clean out, not just the doves and coins and dirt, but the assumptions that attend their presence, the consumer idea of salvation. In the cleansing of the temple, Jesus was renewing not just the physical spaces, but the ideas of the people who inhabited them. Because of this realization, on my second read-through of John, I encountered the story of the wedding at Cana in a whole new way. And it rather stole my breath. I had always assumed this first miracle ought to be special since it was the first flung challenge in the darkness, a sword of light unsheathed as Messiah began his unconventional conquest of men’s hearts. But the whole thing, if simply read straight through, is somewhat underwhelming. Jesus seems reluctant. Mary seems pushy. And after all, it’s just wine. What’s more, I’ve rarely heard this story taught with any sense of excitement. Maybe its just my own perception, but I think we tend to view this first miracle as a practice run, the flexing of Jesus’ miraculous fingers on insignificant wine before the real work began. A divine token to mark the first try. But early the other morning as I read this story for the second time in a month, read it with a mind not hurried, but willing to savor, I saw anew. I saw, I think, as John meant me to see, the way in which this story is is the prelude to the epic of the gospel, an embodied poem that told the tragedy of the world and hinted at a coming eucatastrophe. The story of the very world is told, I think, within this tale of a rural wedding feast. A feast that Messiah was about to save. For in the beginning, not just of Jesus’ ministry, but in the making of the world he had come to save, there was a wedding. Body and soul, God and man, a joyous joining that was a love story told by God himself and called life. Joy was the order of existence. Laughter the beat of heart and gladness the thrum of the very earth. The wedding that was creation was meant to inaugurate a world of harmony, of order, and continuous new creation. But the wine of life ran abruptly short when sin crashed into the midst of God’s feast. And it was God’s beloved who brought the sin, who spilled the wine and spurned his love so that life itself ran suddenly short. And the marriage was brought to the very brink of collapse. But God was not a husband to be so easily defeated. No lover He, to be so quickly cast aside. The ages of the earth marched on and it seemed that the feast was ended, the joy forever disrupted, the wine run short. But God never abandoned his Beloved. The feast was delayed, but by his own love it would be renewed, for even as we wept, he was planning the great gift that would save the wedding and cause the wine to freely flow again. The gift was himself, bundled up in flesh and blood, invading the earth so that he could take the hands and save the heart of his beloved. And when he came, the event he chose to announce his arrival, to inaugurate his work of redemption? A wedding feast. There was Jesus, the answer to the broken heart of the world about to announce his presence at the celebration of a marriage. He seemed to be just one more young man at a rural wedding party, but he sat amidst a broken people and knew that he was the answer to every yearning of their hearts. The host and maker of the universe, if they but knew it, was the unassuming guest at a marriage that would become the event to announce the reconciliation of the world. All was set. The story was about to be renewed. I love that Mary set the tale in motion. She saw the lack of wine and knew the shame at stake. But I think her insight carries a larger understanding. Perhaps  Mary, with her remarkable, contemplative heart, intuited the symbolism of that moment. She was the human mother of God, more aware than any other human on earth of what had come, what dwelt so silently among the fallen and was about to be revealed. Perhaps when she confronted her Son with the disaster, she knew she was speaking of a larger lack, speaking to the deepest void in the human heart when she said, “the wine has run short.” Jesus, in a voice I fully believe was playful and grave at once, says, “what is it to me?” A lively challenge. A parry and thrust, a question that could be our devastation if she really had to answer. For in the end, what ought it be to God? God gave humankind the world and we, the Beloved, cast it away. We flung his love back in his face and by our own choice squandered life itself. We are a band of impossible ingrates forever choosing against the one lover in all the world whose great affection gave us our being. What is it to God? Why should he stoop to save us from disaster? But the mother of God knows. She knows that it is everything to God. I can almost see her steady eyes as they peered from a face shaped by a lifetime of “pondering these things.” This woman who has known the Holy Spirit and borne the baby God into the world looks steadily at Jesus, the Word made flesh, Messiah come. If this weren’t everything to God her Son would never have been born. She smiles at her holy child and turns. “Do exactly what he says,” she tells the servants. And her words are an affirmation of faith in the action and grace of her lover God. He has come and he will save. Despite the stupidity of his Beloved, the fallen hearts, the corrupted loves, he has come to renew the feast, to save the marriage. And the lost ones will be saved if only they will do what He commands and believe in the love of the great, redeeming Bridegroom. Jesus, with just half a smile I feel sure, acts. He points to six great vats set aside for… what? Ritual cleansing. Vats set aside to hold the water that has been humankind’s attempt to make themselves enough before God, to keep the wine of mercy from running short. Throughout the long ages of sorrow, we have struggled toward God, reached for the mercy he still offered. Humanity has always attempted to become enough, to keep life and love and joy alive. But the wine always fails. And now, those symbols of man’s struggle and man’s failure to ever be clean or enough, the perennial symbol of his “fallen shortness” are what Jesus chooses for his first miracle. “Fill them with water,” he commands. Brim them afresh at the bridegroom’s command. “Then,” he says, “take a dipper full to the steward and let him taste.” And the water is turned to wine. Because Jesus has come, the struggle is about to end, the thirst will be slaked, and the wedding feast of the world will swing back into being. The revelry will be such as the world has never seen. Jesus has come, and the wine of life will never run short again. This symbolic act began the ministry of Christ. “You have saved the best for last,” sputters the astonished steward, stumbling up to the wedding party, holding out a wine finer than any he has tasted in his life. And the best One in the world sits quietly amidst his people. Mary grasps the arm of her son, feels the pulse of his warm, sweet, human blood, touches the skin that houses God himself and knows that the wedding of the world has been restored. Perhaps she aches as well, knowing somehow that the wine required for this restoration is the blood of her son. But its giving is the seal of an eternal love, a marriage that never again will be broken. The feast begins anew, never now to end. The final word of the great lover God, the best word, is Jesus. And the wine of life will never run short again. See what John is teaching me?

Walking Song hit the streets today, and here’s a new episode of Table Talk in which Ron Block discusses what it’s like to step center-stage and play the front-man, opens up about the experience of co-writing with Rebecca Reynolds, and performs the title track with Sierra Hull. (There may also be an accounting of hats.)

Today we celebrate the birth of two awesome things: Ron Block, and his new record Walking Song (co-written with Rebecca Reynolds). That’s right, today is Ron’s birthday so wish him well and buy him a copy of his record. He’ll love you for it. CDs and downloads of the new album are now available in the Rabbit Room store. If you missed it last week, be sure to read Jonathan Rogers’s most excellent review. Once you’ve read the review, listen to this. Thank me later. “What’s Banjo?” by Ron Block and Ethan Blockhttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Banjo.mp3 Check back later for an exclusive video performance of “Walking Song” by Ron Block and Sierra Hull. Happy birthday, Ron, and congratulations on the incredible work you and Rebecca have done.

I have always been a five year-old about birthdays. I love them, and I get very excited about celebrating the day that God in His mercy chose to give me life. The most ordinary things seem tinged with magic, and I pray I will never grow out of that. But I am also very awed by the shining, unwritten gift of a new year. There is something a little untame about the enormous possibility that stretches before me, and a deep unction rises to take responsibility for my choices in the spinning round of days to come—to name my year with purpose and intention and love. To mark each age with significance and deep attention to the subtle ways in which God is bringing me into my own, as a woman and as His child. So, while all birthdays are important to me, this one seems especially so. Today, I enter the final year of my thirties. I’ve joked with Philip about how I’m turning 39 for the first time, but, in all seriousness, I’m not bothered a bit about growing older—I love the increasing freedom that comes with the passing of years, and the gradual shedding of non-essentials—be it the shedding of ideas or possessions or insecurities. My thirties have been a remarkable decade. I have had adventures and opportunities my 29 year-old self could not have imagined. It’s also been a quietly turbulent decade, in the good way that all true soul-growth is turbulent. I have been stretched in ways that sometimes seemed past endurance, and I have found God more loving, more tender, more unreasonably patient with me than I ever would have let myself hope He would be. My joys, too, have deepened into this widening space within, so that I begin to feel that all the tugging and pulling and broadening—which can be so uncomfortable in the moment—has only been God’s secret design of making room for even more joy. And so, as I enter into this last year of my thirties, I want to pay close attention. To listen to the story my own life is telling me. To pause long enough to see a pattern and notice how divinely suited it is to my personality. I cannot help feeling that I am on the threshold of something very important, and I don’t want to miss it. One thing that has been growing on me steadily of late is the thought that I want to live this last year of my thirties the way I really wish I’d lived all of my thirties: namely, actively believing the things that God has said about me. Believing that God loves me as wildly and extravagantly and unconditionally as He does. Believing the names He has given me. Believing that acts of love, howsoever small, are undying. Believing that it’s allright to say ‘no’ to things my heart is saying ‘no’ to and to live in a way that, as Macrina Wiederkehr so beautifully put it, is kind to my own soul. I have mentioned here before, to great empathy from my fellow introverts, a passage from Elizabeth Goudge’s A City of Bells, which I first encountered with a rush of tears and a burst of camaraderie, both for Goudge herself (whom I know the words describe) as well as her petite heroine: Henrietta, at heart a contemplative person, enjoyed alarums and excursions for a short while only. For her a background of quiet was essential to happiness. It had been fun to stay with Felicity, to be petted and spoiled by all her friends…to have lovely things to eat and to go to the zoo whenever she liked, but it had completely upset her equilibrium and she felt as though she had been turned upside down so that everything that was worthwhile in her mind fell out. She, like everyone else, had to find out by experience in what mode of life she could best adjust herself to the twin facts of her own personality and the moment of time in which destiny had planted it, and she was lucky perhaps that she found out so early……she found herself listening only to the lovely silence and it seemed to her that in it she came right way up again and her dreams, that had deserted her in London, came flocking back, so that with joy she flung open the doors of her mind and welcomed them in. Never again, she vowed, would she live a noisy life that killed her dreams. They were her reason for living, the only thing that she had to give to the world, and she must live in the way that suited them best. I am learning—again, and yet, as never before—how crucial it is for me to live in the way that suits my dreams, not only for my own equilibrium, but because this is the place in which I find God. When life gets out of hand—whether by excitement or stress or illness or over-commitment—two things happen in me, immediately and insidiously: I stop writing, and I stop dwelling in the peace of the love of God. You would think I’d see it coming, it’s happened so many times before. But it always takes me off guard and pulls the rug out from under my soul. I get muddled so easily, yanked off center by the varying forces at work in our age, and find myself wondering where my dreams went. Or, worse yet, wondering if they ever were. It’s because of this tendency towards muddle (“Beware of muddle!” warns Mr. Emerson so poignantly in A Room With a View. “Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.”) that I am taking the passage into 39 very seriously. I am taking heart to look more keenly into the things that make me alive—and to guard them with my life. I am willing to own, perhaps as never before, that what may not be “too much” for another person is justly “too much” for me. I am learning that I am much more of a sailboat than a steel trawler, excruciatingly (exasperatingly?) sensitive to the breezes and currents of life, but that when my sails catch the wind of the love of God, my work becomes seemingly effortless. Becomes, in the words of Kahlil Gibran, “love made visible.” In order to catch that wind, however, to know that divine conveyance, I must be out on the open seas with Him, riding wild waves of that Spirit which “blows where it listeth…,” in a solitude that can be terrifying at times. In recent weeks, I’ve felt a desire kindling that seems nothing short of a dare: What if, it whispers, you do indeed give the last year of your thirties to an unprecedented level of solitude with Him, for the love of God? Of communion and intimacy and wonder? What if you venture into the contemplative life you’ve dreamed of, a life that is a little more cloistered and a lot more loving? What if you actually took the time to recalibrate the compass of your life? What if you took a Sabbath Year? For me, a Sabbath Year means an intentional rest from the things that pull me off center, chief of which is my expectations of myself. It means laying aside, if only temporarily, some of the things I love in order that I may tend my soul more carefully. I’ve already made my little list of “offerings,” which, candidly, I’m excited about. (Though, equally candid, I’m tempted to say with each emerging item, “Ah, Lord! That too?”) But for as long as I can remember, I have not only admired, but panted after the monastic ideal: the dream of a cloistered heart that retreats from the world in order to love the world. More than that, even, a heart that values silence and solitude with God over all the “showier” aspects of religious life. A heart that is not afraid to love God extravagantly, whether other people see it or not. I have been drawn towards this ideal for years and years, encountering its recognizable essence in the people I most admire with a gasping sense of validation and joy. And I have been drawn, likewise, in these foothills of my forties, into the conviction I need to segue into this Sabbath Year with the great Christian tradition of a 40-Day Fast. This whole idea has been growing on me since last week, when one of my best friends sent me an email that said, in all simplicity, “Go dormant, Lanier.” All day yesterday I felt the longing growing within me, a living thing. A thing I am both exhilarated by and terrified of: the longing for the Great Silence. The specific longing to retreat for a time from the internet world and fully inhabit the smaller world of a bounded life. I realize, even as I’m naming it, that I’ve wanted to do this for a very long time, but I’ve lacked the courage. Suddenly, perhaps out of my great need, the courage is there, and the knowledge that the world is not waiting on tenterhooks for the next words to fall from my fingers and splash (or drip) out into the internet. It’s okay to be silent for a while. And so, kind friends, beginning Monday, July 29th, I am going quiet on the internet. For forty days, no email, no Facebook, no Twitter (which I actually have no idea how to use anyway). No browsing about on Ruche and accidentally buying things. No obsessing over Instagram pictures. No drinking from the great, flowing fountain of words and ideas that make the internet such a miracle to me. I need to step back into silence and heal from the trauma of “too much” for a while. I want to use this time to pray for clarity and wisdom in the choices my husband and I are making with our lives, to remember what it means again to be a child of God. To not only hear His voice, but know what questions to ask. In short, to find my bearings once more. And, that done, to put out to sea with Him. I dearly appreciate all of you, and the ways in which you have contributed to my journey. Hobbit-like, I wish I could give every one of you a present for my birthday. But know that I am sending my great love out into the great world of this crazy internet, and that I am looking forward to connecting once more in a few weeks. (I’d cherish your prayers, if you think about it.)

Oy, lads and lasses. I’m writing this from the front steps of a little flat in Edinburgh where the Petersons are shacking up for the week. This evening we walked the Royal Mile down from the castle to the sound of a dude playing bagpipes, and it was as awesome as it sounds. Something else awesome? The accents. I can barely understand what the Scots are telling me (especially the cabbie), but I’m happily oblivious. I just answer, “Aye,” and occasionally scream, “FREEDOM!” Last week my family and I had the opportunity to spend the afternoon in Oxford, England, where of course we stopped in at the Eagle and Child, the pub which inspired the Rabbit Room. It feels a bit like a tourist trap nowadays. Not only were there Lord of the Rings quotes on the walls, but I’m pretty sure every accent I heard in the place was American. We’re such suckers for this kind of thing, apparently. But still! That little back room with Lewis and Tolkien pictures on the wall, the fireplace, the copy of the document whereupon the Inklings, after eating a particularly good ham, signed their names and drank to the health of the proprietor of the Eagle and Child, casts an undeniable spell. It’s an irresistible stop for any traveler who loves Narnia or Middle-Earth. So this guy named Evan Weppler was visiting Oxford about a month before us, and when he learned Team Peterson was planning to visit the original Rabbit Room, he came up with a great idea. I didn’t tell the kids what it was, but I told them something pretty cool was going to happen when we got to the Eagle and Child. We found our table in the Rabbit Room, ordered our food, then I told them, “Watch this.” I looked over the books on the shelves until I found a little white one about the Trinity. I flipped it open and out fell a folded note that said, “To the Peterson family.” Evan told us a little about his visit, told us about an early edition Lewis book he found at an Oxfam down the street, and wished us well. It was like getting a secret message from Barliman in the Prancing Pony, and it made our visit that much better. Thanks, Evan, for thinking of us. When we left, bellies full of fish and chips, we walked to the Bodleian Library, which currently has an exhibit called “Magical Books.” Someone on Facebook recommended it, and I’m glad they did. It included Lewis’s hand drawn map of Narnia, as well as several original Tolkien paintings. They even displayed Tolkien’s handmade pages from the journal Gandalf finds at Balin’s tomb. Remember the part where he reads the dwarven script about the goblins being in Moria? “We cannot get out. The end comes…drums, drums in the deep…they are coming.” Tolkien, in a burst of delightful nerdiness, decided one day to have craft time. The pages are made to look burnt and bloodied, and the script is written in dwarfish—it even has the pen trailing off at the end, when the goblins interrupt the scribe. I love picturing Tolkien the Oxford professor hunkered over a desk, tongue sticking out like a little boy with a coloring book while he made the pages. Then we drove to Magdalen College, where Lewis taught. While there I saw a Twitter message from a guy named Micah Coston, who lives in Oxford. (You may remember the artist Katie Coston, his wife, who made the very first round of Rabbit Room mugs.) I’ve never met Micah or Katie, but I tweeted back that we were heading to Addison’s Walk, in case he had time to say hello. There’s nothing quite like bumping into someone you know (however tangently) when you’re on the other side of the world. We walked through Magdalen’s campus, one of the most  beautiful places I’ve ever seen, which boasted one of the biggest trees I’ve ever seen (the plaque said it was planted in 1801). We saw the great hall, where Lewis would have eaten meals, and found the windows of his classrooms. From Surprised by Joy: You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England. Then we passed through the gates to a walking path along a little river. It’s called Addison’s Walk, and it was there that Tolkien, Lewis, and Hugo Dyson walked one night and had a conversation that was crucial to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. From They Stand Together: September 1931: He [Hugo Dyson] stayed the night with me in College… Tolkien came too, and did not leave till 3 in the morning… We began (in Addison’s Walk just after dinner) on metaphor and myth – interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining…. We continued on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot…. We strolled the path on a beautiful summer day, and when we came around to the entrance again, there sat Micah Coston (a friend of Brannon McAllister, Justin Gerard, Corey Godbey, and some other artsy Greenville folks you may know). He very graciously walked us past Merton College and Christ Church cathedral, an impromptu tour guide with a comforting American accent. We bid farewell to Micah, then drove out to the Kilns for one of the most delightful parts of our visit. The Kilns, where C.S. Lewis and his brother Warnie lived, sits a little way out of Oxford, next to an old pond that’s now called the C.S. Lewis Nature Preserve. If you saw the film Shadowlands you may remember Anthony Hopkins strolling around the pond. I drove past it a few years ago but didn’t have time to schedule a tour; the house is now occupied by students, so you’re supposed to call ahead if you want to see it. Well, we got there and walked the nature trail, peeking awkwardly through the hedges at the house. I didn’t know exactly when we’d be in Oxford, so I couldn’t make an appointment. It was 8 p.m., and I was bummed that we had come so far and my kids couldn’t see inside the house. So I called. The woman who answered the phone was very kind and told me they were closed, but we could make an appointment for later in the week. I said, “Well, this is weird, but we’re right outside. Could we at least walk around a bit?” She said, “Meet me at the door by the path and I’ll let you in.” It was such a gift. She let us interrupt her evening and welcomed us in for an abbreviated tour. Then we drove a quarter-mile to Trinity Church, where Lewis is buried, and snagged a few seeds from the maple tree beside his grave–we’ll see if they grow in Tennessee. A quick Google search pointed me to three of the houses where Tolkien lived. Alas, we spotted no hobbits. It was getting late, and we had a 3.5 hour drive to our lodging in Wales, so we had to bid farewell to Oxford, “the city of dreaming spires.” Four hours wasn’t nearly enough time. Four weeks would have been more like it. But we saw some amazing things and met some great people, and hopefully planted some seeds of wonder in my children’s hearts. I hope you make it to Oxford someday, and that you have more time than we did. When you get to the Eagle and Child, there’s a note waiting for you. Look at the bookshelf to your right, just as you pass under the Rabbit Room sign. There’s a skinny white paperback book on the Trinity with a note inside. It says, On this day, the 15th of July,  in the Year of Our Lord 2013, Andrew Peterson, Jamie Peterson, Aedan Peterson, Asher Peterson, and Skye Peterson had scrumptious food in the Rabbit Room, the Eagle and Child, Oxford, England, with gratitude to the Inklings, whose friendship and stories have shaped our lives, to the glory of God. Let fellow Rabbit Roomers sign below. Safe travels, pilgrim. It’s a dangerous thing to go out your front door. If you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where the road might take you.

In the annals of Rabbit Room-inspired collaborations, Ron Block’s new album Walking Song, co-written with Rebecca Reynolds, ranks just below Pete and Jennifer Peterson’s marriage. Ron and Rebecca got to know each other online through Rabbit Room discussions. Rebecca thought Ron was a theologian; and though she had picked up on the fact that he played an instrument or two, she didn’t realize that he was a banjo superstar and a professional musician. Since Ron had always been complimentary of her writing, and since she had always wanted to try her hand at songwriting, she asked her new guitar-strumming theologian friend if he would be interested in writing some songs together. Which reminds me of a story my wife heard when she lived in Aspen, Colorado—a story I earnestly hope is true. A fellow she knew was invited to a shi-shi party, and since his parents were in town from the Midwest, he brought them along. Standing by the punchbowl, his father struck up a conversation with a silver-haired man who looked to be about his age. “Hi, there,” he said. “I’m Herb Knudsen. From Iowa.” “Hello, Herb,” said the other man. “I’m Ralph Lauren.” Herb pushed up his glasses and asked, “So, Ralph, what do you do for a living?” I digress. It was a mercy to Ron and to the listening public that Rebecca didn’t know better than to ask such a bluegrass icon to write with her. They were well into their writing partnership before Rebecca realized that Ron had guitars and banjos named after him, and that he had won Grammys and Dove awards. It made for real freedom, for Ron as much as for Rebecca. As Ron says in the album’s liner notes, “She gave me the freedom to fail. We were sitting there having a good time and writing a song, and there was no pressure. And if we didn’t come up with anything, it wasn’t a big deal. We didn’t waste the time; we learned something. At my age, to feel like I’m just beginning to understand what it means to write songs, that’s a gift. It’s a newness all over again.” The music on Walking Song is as brilliant as Ron Block’s listeners would expect, and the lyrics are as brilliant as Rebecca Reynolds’ readers would expect. Rebecca has a gift for writing lyrics that sound old without sounding contrived. Of the eleven original songs on the album, six or seven marry traditional-sounding music with traditional-sounding lyrics. “Nickel Tree Line,” with its coal train shivering and whining, is my favorite. Imagine what Hosea’s friends would say about Gomer if they all lived in Kentucky. Then imagine that Gomer sings like Alison Krauss. These traditional pieces build meaning from particular and concrete images in the way the best folk songs do. The poetry is ambitious while still remaining within the parameters of traditional bluegrass language and imagery (language and imagery which Rebecca identifies as more Aristotelian than Platonic; perhaps we could prevail on her to expand on this theme in the comments below). In the less traditional songs, including “Let There Be Beauty,” and “Chase Me to the Ocean,” the poetry is freer and even more ambitious. The chorus from “Let There Be Beauty” demonstrates how far Ron and Rebecca can get from traditional Bluegrass tropes when they choose to: So let there be beauty For beauty is good The made and the making And the bliss understood. So let there be beauty For beauty is free Come swim in the waters. Come drink from the stream. As for Ron Block’s music, anybody who has been listening to bluegrass in the last twenty years knows it’s going to be great, and it is. Ron’s playing is versatile, vibrant, and technically precise while still being incredibly expressive. His interpretations of three traditional tunes (“Devil in the Haystack,” “Shortnin Bread,” and “What Wondrous Love Is This?”) make you proud to be an American. His work on “The Fields of Aidlewinn” reminds the listener that Bluegrass, that most American musical form, owes plenty to the Scotch-Irish tradition (indeed, what could be more American than the Scotch-Irish tradition?). The musicians on this record are precisely the musicians you would expect to turn out for a Ron Block project—on every instrument, they are among best to be found in Nashville or anywhere else. Buddy Greene on harmonica. Jeff Taylor on accordion. Sam Bush, Dan Tyminski, and Sierra Hull on mandolin. Stuart Duncan on fiddle. Jerry Douglas on dobro. Barry Bales on bass. And Alison Krauss, Kate Rusby, Evelyn Cox, and Suzanne Cox are positively angelic on background vocals. Walking Song is a monument to great writing and great musicianship. But at least as importantly, it is a monument to friendship, which is one of the great forces of good in the world. This is what Rebecca wrote about this effort of friendship: Even though I think we will grow as a songwriting team, developing out of our weaknesses, maturing in our strengths, we will never have another first album. This is our sweet, first spark of creativity, wrought in innocence. Just two friends making castles in the sand. That’s a rare catch in a world bent on achievements. No matter what bigger or better thing we make in the future, I will always love Walking Song for that. It is the core of what I think art should be. Friends reaching out to friends, offering some small good thing to a broken world. Hear her, friends. #RebeccaReynolds #RonBlock #WalkingSong

“When times are good, be happy; but when times are hard, consider this: God has made the one as well as the other. Therefore, no one can discover anything about their future.”               – Ecclesiastes 7:14 In less than twenty-four hours I will be lying unconscious on an operating table. My wrists and ankles will be in restraints and I’ll have a breathing tube down my throat. My chest will be open and a machine on a cart beside me will perform the work of my heart and lungs while a surgeon and his team attempt to repair, or if that’s not possible, replace my heart’s mitral valve. Mitral valve repair is a relatively safe surgery, especially for a guy my age—major for me but routine for my surgeon, I’m told. I am confident everything will go according to plan, and I’ll emerge from the anesthesia sore but ready and eager to rehabilitate. Nevertheless, I have agreed to let a team of highly trained medical professionals stop my heart tomorrow in order to remove a part of it, and then sew it back up and start it again. So in light of that reality, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks writing letters. *** Ten years ago I met a woman named Alice. She was in the late stages of a very aggressive cancer. She moved to the Kansas City area so she could spend the last weeks of her life close to her daughters. One Sunday Alice and her girls visited our church. She wore a floral print bandana on her head because the chemotherapy and radiation had taken her hair. I introduced myself after the service and she asked if I could meet her for a cup of coffee. We met the next day and Alice told me some of her story. She had experienced more pain, loss, and grief in her fifty-one years than anyone I could recall, and that was all before she found out she had cancer. Somewhere in all her Job-like suffering Christ had taken a hold of her and, as she said with the joyful sincerity of a child, had promised not to let her go. I asked what brought her to our church. She said, “I want you to bury me.” *** In 1 Corinthians 4:1-5, the apostle Paul argues that what other people think about you doesn’t matter. He goes on to say that what you think about yourself doesn’t really matter either. All that matters is what God thinks about you because He is the only One who sees you as you truly are. I believe this is true. One of the sad burdens many of us carry in this life is accepting the lie that our worth is determined by what other people think about us. It is an incredible power we hand over to others—many never knowing we’ve done so. Whether it’s the young man trying to win the affection of the pretty girl, or the middle-aged man sinking into depression because he believes he has failed to accomplish anything anyone would ever regard as a legacy, or any one of us choosing our spending habits or clothing or words in order to be accepted into someone else’s tribe, we all want to belong, and we go to great lengths to establish our worthiness. The burden here is that we often lose ourselves in this process. Conversely, one of the great joys in this life is found in those rare relationships where neither person is trying to prove anything because they know, with confidence and a clear conscience, who they are to each other before God. Picture one of your most complicated relationships as a desk filled with all the clutter of your combined fears, ambitions, smoke, and mirrors. How freeing would it be if someone swept their arm across that surface, clearing away everything until all that remained was just the two of you as you really were—no distractions, no props, no clutter? Few things sweep away the clutter of our fears like coming face to face with our own mortality. Life gets simple in a hurry. *** “I want you to bury me.” Those six words swept across the table between Alice and me at our first meeting so that from the start we knew who we were to each other. She was a woman about to die and I was the minister who would hold her hand and speak words of truth until she did, after which I would commend her body to the earth and her soul to the Lord she loved and trusted so deeply, and comfort her family. At that coffee shop I told Alice I had never performed a funeral before. She told me not to worry. She’d been thinking about what she wanted and that we could plan it together. So we did, down to the songs, the scripture readings, and the balloons we released at her gravesite. I have always counted it a gift from God Himself that my friend Alice, the woman in the casket, helped me compose the first funeral I officiated as a young pastor. *** What does any of this have to do with my heart surgery? One of the things Alice asked me to help her do during the last week of her life was to compose letters to her children, letters I would give to them at her graveside. What goes into a letter from a dying mother to her weary, angry, grieving adult children? Intimate things I will not spell out in detail here, except to say that along with those intimate things, she also wanted to talk about ultimate things. What did she want for their lives? What prayers rose to her lips when she thought about them moving into their mid-twenties? “I want them to know Jesus,” she said. “Tell them I know this hurts. I know life has been hard lately. I know they’re confused and possibly angry with God. But tell them my deepest desire is that my children would walk with Jesus and know the comfort of His love, just as I have.” Alice knew she wasn’t long for this world. As far as I know, I have no reason to think such things about myself in my present situation. A lot would have to go wrong for me to be in any sort of mortal danger. But still, “no one can discover anything about their future.” Knowing what I know about what my doctors are going to do to me tomorrow, I’ve written some letters to my wife and my children about intimate and ultimate things. What Alice wanted for her children is essentially what I want for mine. I want them to receive what Job said—“Shall we receive good from God and not receive sorrow as well?” (Job 2:10)—as words of comfort and not bitterness. They will know good times but they will also certainly know sorrow. This life is filled with sorrow. When sorrow comes I pray they will have the humility to remember that God is still with them, though they see through a glass darkly. I pray they would see that all of history points to a gracious, loving God whose ways are higher than ours, but are nonetheless filled with unmatched mercy and grace. I pray that when calamity befalls them, they would not stand shaking their fists at the heavens demanding God give an account of himself. I pray they would trust him to be their Man of Sorrows, the one who has borne their grief and carried their sadness. (Isa 53:4) I want them to need Christ more than they need anything or anyone else in this world—even their dad. I want them to know that the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ are God’s inscrutable manifesto concerning what he thinks about them. I want that to be the truth in which they live and move and have their being. And I want the same for myself. I can be an impatient man. I can get lost in my work, my ambition, and my agenda. But these are the days where my Maker has used a blood-borne bacteria and a damaged mitral valve to sweep away the clutter and silence the noise, even if only for a while, so that I might put pen to paper to express my ultimate prayers and intimate hopes for my family’s lives. So for this congenital malformed heart valve I bless the name of the Lord, come what may. (Job 1:21) A dear friend is holding these letters for me and I look forward to getting them back so that I might deliver them in person. Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt 1: The Sacramental Echo Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt 3: Meant to Live Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt. 4: Struck Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt. 5: Scowling at the Angel __________ https://twitter.com/russramsey http://www.facebook.com/russ.ramsey

One night, years ago, while tucking my brother and me into bed, my father started on the subject of stealing. Whether my brother introduced the topic or my dad simply felt the need to talk about it, I don’t recall. Dad expressed his utter contempt for thieves, saying that the lowest person on earth was one who would take something that did not belong to him. My dad’s words clobbered me, for that very day I had stolen a toy car from my friend, our next-door neighbor. That afternoon in my friend’s room, while contemplating the theft, my internal dialogue went something like this: “I don’t have one of these. I want this one. I will slip it into my pocket when I leave. It’s just a toy. He won’t miss it.” The purloined object was a small, black Matchbox Trans-Am. However, upon hearing my father’s feelings on thieves it might as well have been an anchor the way it made me sink, causing my palms to sweat out of the self-awareness and guilt that was drowning me. I did not dare tell dad how terrified and guilt-stricken I was, imagining he would no longer love me were he to know that I, his eldest child, had dabbled in burglary that very afternoon. That night while trying to sleep, my father’s speech tore at me. The following morning I sneaked out the back door without a shred of honor and tossed the stolen car over the fence into my friend’s yard, believing that somehow this gesture was enough to absolve me of any guilt or responsibility. I never told a soul. I am certain the toy was never found, was probably mowed over infinite times, and for all I know lies there still, buried beneath soil. A good thing gone bad. My days of theft, regrettably, did not end with that Matchbox toy car. I am a repeat offender. I habitually steal valuables from myself, whether it be my own joy and memories, or the contentment of my soul. I often wonder what it would be like to silence the chaotic anxieties inside me for long enough to breathe without a care in the world, to inhale and exhale without constriction, to resist the urge to pilfer my own heart based on my belief that God is predestined to pull the carpet out from under me. Maybe it’s the 200-proof midlife responsibilities talking, maybe it’s the caffeine, maybe it’s the physical exhaustion of working outdoors in the sapping summer heat, but like a young prince who cannot fathom the idea of giving himself away, I wander off glumly, staring out into the horizon but rarely taking steps towards it. I am a malcontent, a person long-tormented by the multitude of gifts adorning his abundant life, blind or oblivious to them all. The hope of heaven should be enough to release a soul from worry—over money, over material goods, over the war of artful words and creative subjects—yet I continue to steal, a thief who cannot come clean. I want to be a bad thing gone good. I know that my dad would not cease to love me because I stole a toy from a neighbor. Shame, however, is a burglary all its own. Living in the shadows, we forget the lonesome hope of ever finding contentment. I would never scold my hopes, I would never curse my dreams, I would never scorn the tangle of disappointments for they are the artful, Christ-laid stones along the path leading me to points of grace. Burial beneath a world of toil and trial is the miraculous way in which God redeems. It is the merciful method by which he steals our sad anxieties and reminds us that he has chosen to forgive and forget all our thievery, self-loathing, and shame. We are asked to do likewise. Behold, this miracle of forgetting is still in the world.

If you were fortunate enough to support and score a copy of the newest Rabbit Room Press title, Subjects With Objects, then you know how enchanting the mix of Jonathan Richter’s painting and DKM’s poetic commentary can be. The book is both intriguing and inspirational, much like its writer, the mysterious poet known as DKM. In this Rabbit Room interview, I’ve probed the mysteries behind those initials to learn a bit more about the man as well as to discuss the beauty of the project itself. The bad news? We’re still no closer to knowing who he is. The good news? There’s more Subjects with Objects to come. Who exactly is DKM? Can you unveil any of the mystery behind the initials? In the standard English Alphabet, one typically has 26 letters to choose from. Occasionally one is able to slip a 27th past the gatekeepers, and if it’s late enough or those in authority are drunk enough, then there have been a handful of recorded cases of this or that writer in this or that obscure corner of the English-speaking world managing to wedge in a 28th letter (most-often disguised as one of the lower 26). Shakespeare is even rumored to have discovered a 29th and 30th letter during the writing of King Lear, but if the stuff of such legend has any basis in fact, those letters were quickly repressed or purposely obscured in translation. In order not to incur undue attention from those who monitor such things however, I restricted myself from the outset of the Subjects With Objects project, not only to the 26-letter variation, but to a subset of that: only those letters that have an utterly vertical line in their design. The reasons for this should be obvious, so I won’t condescend to explain them here. Plus, it wouldn’t be safe for any of us. At any rate, having narrowed my letter choice to 13 candidates for a 3 letter combination (any more would have been cost prohibitive!), I was faced with 2,197 (13 x 13 x13) possible letter combinations. To save time, I simply chose the first one I could think of: DKM. It has a decided lack of elegance. It was clearly the antithesis of mellifluous and therefore well-suited to being a repository of mystery, as it were. When people go by initials, it’s mostly JJ or AJ or DJ or JK or RJ (Are we beginning to see a pattern here..?). Something simple and easy to say and, let’s be honest, something that prominently features a “J.” There, I’ve said it. Somebody needed to. Let the chips fall where they may. Much rarer in recorded history are those who have been branded by three initials in the public imagination: MLK, FDR, LBJ, JFK, RFK, but again we begin to see a definite pattern: One must either be president of the United States, be running for president, or at least be a controversial national political figure before one is granted the three initial formation. So in adopting the DKM moniker, I was both subverting tradition, and making a statement: You do not know who I am. You will not know who I am. I might be hidden in the light, or the shadow. I might be your grandfather, your neighbor, or one of thousands of unfollowed bloggers in the grey Northwest. I might be a hacker, an anarchist, an artist or a theologian. I might be a fact, a fiction, or a fact masquerading as a fact masquerading as a fiction. In short, as DKM I might be anything you hope or believe me to be, and its exact opposite—at the same time. As DKM I am free to haunt the dim recesses of your imagination, poking and prodding as is necessary. I am the ghost in the machine, at the end of the day inexplicable even to myself. Also, it makes book signings 70% quicker, with less chance of hand cramps. It’s either presidential or serial killer-esque. Either way, why not enjoy the spotlight? First, I can’t allow your veiled insinuation to slide unchecked. Serial killers are commonly known by 3 names, not 3 initials. There is a vast difference. In the case of serial killers we seem to crave as much knowledge of the dark inner workings of their psyches as could possibly be coaxed to the surface, and therefore we instinctively think that by labeling them with the longest name possible, we will thereby gain additional insight into the subtext of their stories. Ah, yes, of course. Having been saddled with the middle name Orville it makes sense that he would have trod such a dark path in adulthood. That sort of thing. So please don’t confuse the situation. This is 3 INITIALS. Three initials bespeak influence, power, and a certain veil of mystery. There. Now that’s settled. We’ll move on. This book is it’s own thing, and has an existence entirely apart from its authorship. Perhaps it never was authored, anyway. It might have simply “arrived,” if you know what I mean. Stranger things have happened. Anyway, if people were forced by virtue of one man’s insistence upon onymity to associate the book and its quasi-prophetic contents with an individual identity, the power of the tome would almost certainly diminish. It is the stuff of the subconscious anyway, the stuff of dreams that upon waking are only half-remembered. It is neither my place nor my intent to stand between this book and it’s readers. So from the beginning I strove to remove myself from the process, erasing all tracks. Except for when I occasionally respond to an email from the wrong account and someone learns my name. Then again, that might just be a dodge. In fact, it almost certainly is. So nevermind. Anyway, on the most basic level, I number myself among those who have been personally affected by the substance contained within the pages of Subjects With Objects. Anonymity allows me to simply be a fan of the work and I must confess that I am. Partially because I still don’t know exactly what the book is or where it’s odd power is centered. But I revel in the mystery. Also, there’s the rise of Jonathan Richter as a force to be reckoned with in the art world. I observed the peculiar genius of his vision more than a decade ago and have been threatening for much of that time to enact some plan for making his artwork recognizable on an international scale. This is perhaps a beginning to the implementation of such a benign conspiracy. And I think it provides a certain balance to a collaborative work to have one creator in the spotlight while one remains in the shadows. What is it about Richter’s work that resonates so strongly with you? I spent many years professionally creating works for a genre of expression with somewhat narrowly defined parameters. I found that (with a few life-giving exceptions), any expressions that were attempts on my part to explore and/or document what I believe to be the wild and wide-ranging fullness of what it means to be a human being set down in the midst of a broken but still glorious creation replete with wonder, story, heartbreak, tragedy, beauty, joy, hope, and redemption, were typically met with something less than enthusiasm. Often with a blank stare. Companies do need to make a profit. But creating with mass commercial viability being the overriding influence on creative choices can quickly kill any power that a piece might have to actually stir something deeper than sentimentality in a listener, reader, or viewer. T-Bone Burnett once penned a lyric that stated “I have to meet the man who can crack this world of justice like a safe/Someone with the courage to allow room for good things to run wild.” I eventually stepped back from that industry, because there was so little room there for “good things to run wild.” And I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore because of that. Richter though, has always refused to let his work be anything but the beautifully disturbing and frighteningly indefinable stuff that it is. He has lost commercial opportunity because of it. He has been paid his share of kill fees by art directors who realized after the fact that they wanted something more controlled than what they got. Personally, I experience Richter’s paintings as something that demand my attention. They shout. You know when you see the crazy homeless guy on the street, a little on edge, angry, shouting at you or at the world or at some unseen ghost from his past or present, and you sense that he poses some danger but also perhaps some obligation as a fellow human, and that tension between your obligation toward some act of interaction and mercy and your desire to run away as quickly as you can, thoroughly unsettles you? The Subjects With Objects paintings can maybe do something like that. It is difficult to view some of the subjects without a knee-jerk aversion. But once we do really look at them, we see the brokenness and twistedness of our own humanity staring back at us. We recognize something shared between us and we grieve for them, and then, in a mysterious juxtaposition, realize that we’re grieving for ourselves. I think Richter’s paintings resonate strongly with me because they force me to interact with them. They don’t spell anything out too easily, and yet, the meaning is implicitly there. And I believe we have pretty good precedent for creating art that is not aimed at the broadest common denominator. We have a pretty compelling model for telling stories (via whatever medium) that require one to enter into to them if one is to be rewarded with understanding. We should more often resist the pandering impulse to say “And what that means is…,” but instead simply say “For him who has ears to hear….” I think it’s okay to leave it at that. I think it’s more powerful to leave it at that. To leave room for the good things to run wild. Was there a part of you that was nervous about adding text to the paintings at all? No, because initially there were no expectations. We decided to do a collaborative art & text project, but we had no notion of where the finished pieces would land in terms of tone or direction. The sky was the limit. Or so we thought. In actuality, the paintings themselves served to dictate what sort of written expressions might pair in a believable way. As I stewed on the various pieces, the possible interpretations usually began to narrow down pretty quickly. Reaching a final phrase could take days or weeks though, and often involved a process of returning to it every so often to see if there were any new secrets to tease from it. Only now that the book is finished and I’m faced with a new crop of paintings to interpret do I begin to feel a sense of inadequacy to the task. This time around there’s a certain expectation that didn’t exist before. So Subjects with Objects is definitely the first of a number of collaborative projects? Actually, it’s not the first book project we’ve collaborated on, but one of the first that’s come to fruition. Over a several year stretch Richter and I created multiple book projects together. The problem was, they tended to fall pretty well outside the common section headings of the bookstore aisles. We didn’t pitch any of them to more than a couple of publishers, but the reactions were very telling. One editor at a given publishing house would love it, and the rest of the staff would have no idea what it was even supposed to be. So we just continued to cook things up on various backburners at a low simmer. And then, along came Kickstarter. Crowdfunding was the answer to the question we had not been foresighted enough to ask. It gave us opportunity to take an unusual book like Subjects With Objects directly to the people who would most appreciate it, and to let them provide the momentum to actually make the project a reality. For that collaboration we are so, so, so, so, so, so grateful. Did I mention how grateful we are to all the funders who made this project happen? Anyway, we’re already planning Subjects With Objects, Vol 2. Because most of the Vol 1 paintings are already sold, in order to have enough material for another gallery show and for coffee shop shows that we have lined up, we must by necessity produce a new SubWOb crop. Whether that will be the next book we publish though, remains to be seen. There’s another collaborative art & text project called The Lost Rhymes at the Center of All Things Now Found Again that we’ve had tremendous initial response to, that we’d love to toss to the Kickstarter crowd as well. There’s also an animated feature idea we’ve been messing with for several years, and I just returned from a trip pitching it to a couple studios in Hollywood. That sort of thing is always a long shot, but Richter is a phenomenal stop-motion animator and we’d love to see that project eventually make it to screen. Additionally, we’re currently building a Subjects With Objects website (at the moment www.SubjectsWithObjects.com is just a glorified placeholder). We’ll have the art prints and originals available there, as well as dueling twitter feeds, info, and blogs. But the thing we’re really excited about is an event we’re calling SubWOb LiVE! We did a test run recently at a Nashville pub that a couple dozen people came out for, and we’re improving on the format for the next one. We want SubWOb LiVE! to become a real community event. We’ll hold them in public spaces. Richter will be there painting new pieces. We’ll have a musical guest each time. And a conversation host who will lead a guided roundtable discussion featuring a guest of peculiar interest. Food and drinks will be available. There will be some giveaways. A lot of fun. Each event will be recorded for podcast. But it’s really all about creating a space where community can begin to happen. We’ve really been inspired by what the Rabbit Room has managed in that regard, both online and with the Hutchmoot conferences. We want to figure out how to take some of that Rabbit Room mojo and reinterpret it in a SubWOb setting. #DKM #JonathanRichter #Kickstarter #SubjectsWithObjects

From the release of his incredible Leonard the Lonely Astronaut to his face-melting performance at Hutchmoot 2013, it’s been a great season for Andy Osenga. This week Andy announced that he’s venturing out this fall on a house show tour. If you’ve caught any of his recent StageIt shows, you already have some idea of how intimate his music can be. Head over to Andy’s website to catch all of the details and see how easy it is to host a show yourself! In addition, a portion of the proceeds from the tour will benefit the ministry efforts of Young Life. If you’re new to Leonard, you can hear Andy talk more about the new album here in our Rabbit Room interview. Also catch part of his performance at Hutchmoot below: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD4R952Bx4E] #AndyOsenga

I am often tempted to start sentences with the phrase, “What’s wrong with this country is…” and then finish with the fascinating facts about what I think is wrong with this country. Then I usually want to add how mad I am about it. I’m fed up, I might say. Can we last must longer if we do this? I might add. I may even allude to sacred forefathers sacredly rolling over in their sacred graves. This is because it’s pretty clear there’s lots of those wrong things. As we say in Appalachia, “Things is fouled up.” But, I believe this has roughly always been the case. A golden age of American purity has never yet occurred. Thomas Jefferson owned other human beings, (human beings who had been kidnapped and sold) for instance. Tempting as it is to spend a lot of energy decrying the state of the States, there is an unhealthy angle to this oft-repeated lament. The problem is that we are wrong to see problems everywhere around us and not another place. We—and I mean me and you and us—would do well to take a cue from G.K. Chesterton. In an oft-told story, it is said that The Times of London sent out a questionnaire to noted figures of the era asking them to answer the question, “What’s wrong with the world?’ Chesterton’s answer was unique in both brevity and insight. “Dear Sir, I am. Yours, G.K. Chesterton.” We would do well to at least incorporate into our evaluations of the “horrible state of things” the reality that part of the problem is us. What is inside us and what we do as a result. I’m sad and angry about the state of things in America, from losses of liberty to the ongoing slaughter of the smallest children, a horror advocated and (grotesquely) celebrated by many of our highest officials. But we are wrong to think we are only part of the solution and never part of the problem. Many political celebrities make their living by fueling anger and outrage. They do this by telling us a story about the problem and the solution. They give us a version of hell (often the other ideology or party’s rule) to fear/oppose. They then set before us a savior (the celebrity or/and the celebrity’s ideology), followed by a heaven to be gained (the rule of the right party/people). In other words, we are dealing with religion. On the right, the left, and the exotically self-righteous middle. Actually, it’s not just “moderates” who are exotically self-righteous. There does seem to be a real heavy dose in those who might describe political loyalties in the Facebook terms, “It’s complicated.” But we are all prone to pride and to see everyone else as the problem and ourselves—and people like us—as the savior. This is because, in our hearts, we naturally set ourselves up as kings. But that’s the problem, not the solution. What’s wrong with this country? I am, of course. We shall have to find a savior elsewhere. I would do well to remember it. We have all heard the expression, “It’s not you, it’s me.” The truth about what’s wrong with the world—and my own country—is not that it’s not you, but it is me.

Like a white gull, caught in the cross-purpose of an opposing breeze, I hang, suspended upon grief and this searing joy. Weightless, effortless, aloft on these mercies, I hover ‘twixt heaven and earth, love greater even than that which wrings my heart burgeoning beneath these wings. Such gift, this graceful breath, inkling of the ageless I was made for. Ah, then! unbound at last from Time’s enslavement, my heart will be home in Undying. A liberated thing, from which sorrow has chastened the last temporal taint, feathers sheathed gold in the sacred fire of that morning light. No tears shall spring but they are summoned by joy, when Love’s sweet satisfactions are complete. Not yet, but the holy warmth of this early sun, stealing with summer gladness over my upturned face, swears that such things will be—this and the shout of gulls and the salt tang of sea, hinting verities scarce imagined. And while I wait— here where yesterday rests most thankfully and tomorrow sleeps unthought of— my soul is awake, keeping time, so lucid it might be heaven itself. Here, where hope first found wings, hope rises anew, replumes, resurrects immortal. Wounded with love, exultant in sorrow (for sorrow, after all, only means one has loved) my cloistered heart rekindles to the day, inhabiting eternity in this present moment. One great pulse of wings, one mighty cry of desperate joy, and I am off, flying free.

I read Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb last year and it sort of rocked my world (or maybe it stirred my pot?). Ever since, I’ve been fascinated by the notion of food and communal eating as a kind of sacrament. Reading the book even moved Jennifer and me to cook our own “supper of the Lamb” on Good Friday and invite close friends to share it with us. It was a special evening that I won’t forget. It’s funny, and amazing, how a book can open up an idea like that and suddenly you find yourself surrounded by ordinary things that seem a little more magical than they did before. Something as simple as dinner can be a holy thing. I came across a great article on this theme, gustatory grace (yes, I had to look it up), and had to share it with you folks. It’s from The Paris Review and it’s about food, film, literature, and grace. Read and enjoy. Here’s an excerpt: One way of understanding the sacraments, perhaps best articulated by liturgist Gordon Lathrop, is that simple things become central things. When Christians refer to the bath and the table, they refer not only to the specific sacraments of bathing and eating, but they point also to the sacramental character of every bath and every table. The setting apart of one table and one bath shows forth the splendor of all tables and all baths. That setting apart is the calling of Christians but also the vocation of the writer. The attentiveness of the writer is shown in how that writer lifts to the level of extraordinary the most ordinary of people, places, and things. Click here to read the entire article.

I can’t remember if we’ve ever posted this here before, but I was just reminded of it and had to share. Andy’s got a new record called Beyond the Frame coming out in about a month. This song isn’t on it (it’s on his last record, The Law of Gravity) but “Skinny Jeans” is. You’re going to love it.

Chris Slaten is a name that might sound familiar. He’s been lurking in the corners of the Rabbit Room for almost as long as I can remember, and for the past several years, Ben Shive has been working with him, producing his new recording project. When I finally got a copy of his CD in the mail, I anxiously put it in and listened while driving home in my wife’s car. I loved it immediately. It sounded like a sweet mix of Paul Simon and Josh Ritter. When I got home, I left it in the car on purpose so it would ambush Jennifer the next time she went for a spin. When she came home later, she got out of the car demanding to know the name of the gorgeous CD and who it was. She too had fallen head over heels for it. Now it’s your turn. Chris has released the record under the pseudonym “Son of Laughter” and you can read more on the story behind the name at his website. The title of the record is The Mantis and the Moon. It’s available now in the Rabbit Room store for just $5 and it may the best CD to ever feature an insect so prominently. I think you’ll love it as much as I do. Here’s the title track. Enjoy. “The Mantis and the Moon” by Son of Laughterhttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Mantis.mp3 Chris is currently booking a series of house shows. If you’re interested in hosting one, please contact him at sonoflaughtermusic (at) gmail (dot) com.

[Editor’s Note: I met Matt McCullough a few years ago when I joined a tiny group that meets each week to read “books we should have read but haven’t.” Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of reading through a lot of great books with Matt and he’s become a good friend. One of the books I’m most proud to have introduced him to is Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. Matt’s a pastor at Trinity Church here in Nashville and he’s also a fine writer. I commend to you the following post and urge you to pick up a copy of Jayber Crow if you’ve never read it.] Once each quarter I teach a new members class for people interested in joining our church. It’s become one of my favorite responsibilities as a pastor. I’m a believer in church membership, no question. But I’ll be honest: every time I teach the class I cringe a bit along with my audience at some of the things we discuss. Concepts like authority, exclusivity, and discipline just don’t sound right on a pre-reflective, aesthetic level. They evoke a yuck factor ingrained in us by the often unnoticed influence of our Western culture—literature, film, music, pop psychology—and its celebration of the unfettered individual. (Chapter 1 of Jonathan Leeman’s The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love is helpful for tracing out examples of this influence.) I know that some of these ideas have always been distasteful to fallen humans. Self-denial is nauseating to the self-centered. That said, I don’t think we’re guilty of ear-tickling if we look for counterbalancing images, images that make sensible the beauty that’s in a community defined by the goals of membership. And to that end I’ve really come to appreciate the world created in the novels of Wendell Berry. Retraining Our Tastes Berry is not the sort of author to whom you turn for help crafting your church’s statement of faith. His works aren’t the right genre, and he isn’t the right author. But novels are especially well-suited for retraining our aesthetic tastes, for putting flesh on ideas that otherwise may remain sterile and abstract. Set in an isolated Kentucky farming community called Port William, Berry’s works portray the beauty of a bounded life, a death to the options of Elsewhere, the embrace of a concrete place and its people. It’s no accident that Jayber Crow, my favorite of Berry’s novels, is subtitled The Membership of Port William. Like all common graces, a community fostered by the willing limitation of one’s horizons can turn idolatrous, breeding an insularity Alan Jacobs has recently described as unchristian. And it’s also true that there is a darker side to small town life. Those familiar with the works of William Faulkner will find Port William to be an ideal world by contrast. And yet Berry’s novels are especially useful for illustrating the liberating submission that’s always involved with membership. In Jayber Crow, Berry’s characters show what it is to belong to a community, by which I mean more than the welcome and affirmation typically communicated by the word today. To belong to a community is to be at its disposal, to have given over all you have to be used for whatever your community needs. It is to be implicated substantively, not just sympathetically, in the ups and downs of a place and its people. It is a submission of yourself—your identity, your interests, your ambitions—to the needs of those to whom you’re bound. The book’s heroes reject the notion that you make your own identity rather than receive it. They know and embrace who they are through their connection to things larger than themselves: their community, the land, the march of history, the mysterious purposes of God. They find joy, peace, and freedom in accepting their subsidiary status. One of the barriers to this sort of belonging, of course, is the selfish ambition that dwells deep in all of us. Rather than submitting ourselves to community, ambition drives us to subordinate all things to our personal gratification or our relentless effort to build a name for ourselves. Berry’s villains in Jayber Crow depict this impulse vividly. They’re not the sort of villains who steal, kill, and destroy. They’re characters like Cecilia Overhold, a woman who marries into Port William from the upper crust of the town next door and can never forgive “the failure of the entire population of Port William to live up to [her] expectations” (209). She’s described as a woman who “thought that whatever she already had was no good, by virtue of the fact that she already had it” (209); she lives as if “there is always a better place for a person to live, better work to do, a better spouse to wed, better friends to have” (210). In the midst of a vibrant, gracious, and happy community she is discontented, angry, and lonely. Troy Chatham is perhaps even more to the point. His character emerges in detail as a young farmer who rejects the old ways, never imagining that “the reference point or measure of what he did or said might not be himself,” never belonging to the place but convinced the farm exists “to serve and enlarge him” (182). Throughout the story, Chatham leverages the present for the future in his all-consuming desire to “be somebody,” using and abusing all the resources he could claim in service to his exalted self-image. He is a man who utterly fails to recognize his limits or his dependence on what is outside of and bigger than himself. Jayber Crow is a nostalgic book, and—for all its beauty—a sad one. The world it describes is for the most part a lost world. It was held together by traditions no longer valued and an isolation no longer possible. Which is to say much of its staying power rested on personal preference for its traditions and to some extent an ignorance of alternatives. Pale Reflection Bound in time, Berry’s world offers but a pale reflection of the local church ideal, a community where members’ submission to each other is rooted in the message of the gospel and the power of God’s Spirit. Against his redeemed community, Jesus has promised us, even the gates of hell are no threat. But Berry’s stories bring to life truths at the heart of the community we’re aiming for when we emphasize church membership. A thriving, covenant-shaped local church requires precisely the sort of self-abnegation Berry celebrates and is opposed by the same self-exaltation he portrays in all its ugliness. Too often we try on new churches like we try on new clothes and for much the same reason. We’re looking for style and fit, for what meets our needs and makes the appropriate statement about who we are. We put our churches in service of our desire to be somebody, and our commitment doesn’t outlast the better options of Elsewhere. But this posture—beside its offense to the cross—leads to self-absorption, restlessness, and isolation. By contrast, there is freedom in coming off the market. There is sweet rest in belonging to one people, for better or worse, and there is the opportunity for displaying costly, Christlike love. We’re called to die to our narrow interests and to what we might hope to enjoy or become on our own. But we’re called to a truer life in our identification with Christ and his body on earth. On the terms of 1 Corinthians 12, we must embrace our status as a mere hand, ear, or foot, helpless apart from the other members and happy so long as Christ is exalted and the body is thriving. This is boundedness, for sure, but it’s liberating, and it’s beautiful. [This article was originally printed at 9Marks. Jayber Crow is available in the Rabbit Room store.]

If you’re a writer, count yourself fortunate that Mark Twain is no longer around to read your book and write about it (I’m looking at you Stephanie Meyer). James Fenimore Cooper (author of The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, and others) wasn’t so lucky. In a famous essay titled “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Twain skewers Cooper (and his work) without mercy, and while he’s harsh (and hilarious) there’s plenty of wisdom for any writer to take note of in his list of charges. What follows is the first part of the essay in which Twain lists each offense. Do yourself a favor, though, and read the rest of the essay as well. You can find it here in its complete form. Excerpted from “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” by Mark Twain Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record. There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require: 1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air. 2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop. 3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale. 4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale. 5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it. 6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the Deerslayer tale, as Natty Bumppo’s case will amply prove. 7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale. 8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale. 9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale. 10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together. 11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the Deerslayer tale this rule is vacated. In addition to these large rules there are some little ones. These require that the author shall: 12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it. 13. Use the right word, not its second cousin. 14. Eschew surplusage. 15. Not omit necessary details. 16. Avoid slovenliness of form. 17. Use good grammar. 18. Employ a simple and straightforward style. Even these seven are coldly and persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale. Read the rest of Twain’s criticism.

It is what it is? I hurt my back again. It makes me really weak and ineffectual in many tasks. It got me thinking about my moral weakness. My injured back is a good chance to recognize the fact of back injuries, to acknowledge my weakness, finitude, and need. It’s not an occasion to begin to make peace with pain in such a way that I embrace and advocate for back injuries. That would be perverse, against human flourishing. My moral brokenness is a reality to mourn and reconcile in God’s merciful solution and (coming) resolution. It is not an aspiration, or an identity feature to be embraced. A crooked line is seen as such by the existence of a straight one. A bad map doesn’t mean there are no destinations. We are going somewhere. And, while “God draws straight lines with crooked sticks,” he is remaking us into the image of his son. A holy poem. We are bent and broken, but remade to be whole in God. Our weaknesses in every way are a call to imagine the wholeness we are being recreated for. In our weakness, let’s keep our eyes on the horizon, turning bent backs to the darkness. There we’ll see the sun rising on a New World and will all stand tall in that light.

Last summer, I had the great privilege of interviewing one of my heroines, Andi Ashworth, upon the occasion of the re-release of her book, Real Love for Real Life by the Rabbit Room Press. You can find the interview here, and I really urge you not only to avail yourself of the gentle wisdom of her replies to my questions, but to purchase and read and share her book as well. (And while you’re at it, check out Janna Barber’s heartfelt review.) Andi has a perspective on caring as a lifestyle that is truly revolutionary. She brings the most practical expressions of love—things that might otherwise be considered mundane or insignificant—out into the light and shows the opportunity they hold to communicate the love of God to the people in our lives. Her words were such a gentle challenge—at once a cup of cold water and a bracing tonic. I’ve said this elsewhere, but the offering of this book to a weary and care-starved world is a gift of care in itself. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Reading this book and conducting this interview have made me think deeply about the application of these things in my own life. I’ve been affirmed down to a soul level in things I’ve intuitively felt, but have received very little cultural validation in. And I’ve been challenged to remember the preciousness of the lives that so beautifully intersect with mine, and to keep thinking about how I can love them in creative, concrete ways. But I have also been reminded, in a very poignant way, of the manner in which I’ve been on the receiving end of all this practical love. I am quite honestly overwhelmed at the ways the people in my life have communicated God’s love to me. They have been the hands and feet of Christ in the moments of my greatest need. But their gifts have not only shone out in the darkness; they have crowned the happiest times, as well, the most radiant example of which was my wedding day. Philip and I will be celebrating our anniversary next week, and with it always comes the yearly remembrance of the astonishing ways that our people loved us during that time. Indeed, their gifts reached back well into the earliest days of our engagement. I think I’d had Philip’s ring on my finger for scarcely a week when we decided that we wanted to hold our reception at our soon-to-be home, the beloved old farmhouse which he had occupied up until then with a handful of roommates. To be sure, the roommates were scattering: one was going into the reserves and one had seen the handwriting on the wall and began looking at houses almost as soon as Philip and I started dating. But they were leaving eight years of bachelor living in their wake. The house was fine and sturdy, and had been generally well-cared for, but it was going to take an enormous effort to make it livable to my standards (as in not smelling like dirty socks and paring the collection of sofas and cast-off recliners down to an absolute minimum), much less prepare it for a wedding. The place needed a complete overhaul, from the tip of her highest gable to her boxwood-skirted porch. And we had less than five months in which to do it. When the idea initially seized us, it seemed the most natural, the most beautiful thing in the world: to host all our friends on the first day of our life together in what was to be our home. It was like something out of a book, something our great-great grandparents might have done. As soon as we started assessing the situation, however, and making lists, I was completely overwhelmed—to the point that I started second-guessing our dreams. There just didn’t seem any possible way that we could pull it off. And we couldn’t have. That’s where our people came in. As soon as Philip’s parents heard of our hopes, they literally rolled up their sleeves and got to work. I think Philip’s dad almost lived here with him over those months, quietly going about the doing of things I wasn’t even experienced enough to have thought of. Philip’s mother threw her gifts into the reclaiming of a beautiful, well-established yard that had seen over a decade of neglect. And I can’t tell how many times I would come here after a long day, ready for a long night of work on some project or another, to find the kitchen—my one-day kitchen—absolutely redolent with the aroma of a home-cooked meal and my soon-to-be mother-in-law beaming at me as she drew a pot roast out of the oven. There is simply no telling how those happy little suppers around a formica-topped table fed my soul during that time, and gave me energy to tackle my to-do list with a strengthened heart. My parents joined the effort, as well. There was hardly a Saturday that this old place was not abuzz with willing workers; the ring of hammers and power tools were the rule of the day. And my mother was incredible: in between managing my social schedule—which had suddenly erupted into a happy mêlée of parties and showers and dress fittings—and assuring herself that my trousseau met the requirements of a proper Southern girl, and basically trying to keep up with the visions of a very starry-eyed, albeit opinionated bride, she was at the house, pulling honeysuckle vines out of ancient crepe myrtles and weighing in on paint chips and helping me plant my flower garden. My Daddy took about 87 sofas to the Goodwill; my brother cut grass and pruned bushes and trimmed up all our liriope-lined paths so that they would be in full, green lushness for our wedding day. Among about a thousand-and-one other things, Philip designed and built a rose trellis in the side yard, through which our guests would pass (and we would enter our reception) and a friend gave us established rose bushes from his garden so that they would have time to clamber up the latticed sides. It was all so amazing that I really think I was unable to take it in at the time. I was overjoyed and deeply, deeply grateful. But it’s in retrospect that the lump rises in my throat and the wonder burns my eyes with tears. Friends helped us pull up carpet, helped us paint the rooms, helped us move furniture and hang pictures. In essence, they helped us make a home, which is one of the most beautiful things a person can do for another. It was like a long, drawn-out house-raising. And there, in the midst of it all, was my groom, working day and night to prepare a place, not just for our wedding, but for us. For me. Even in all that sweet tumult of work and waiting, the precious image incarnate in Philip’s labor was not lost on me. At my trousseau tea (and, yes, I am telling you, there are still some Southern girls who have trousseau teas!) just days before the wedding, a sweet friend asked what I had left do to. I think she was expecting a litany of final fittings and bridesmaids’ gifts and packing for my honeymoon. But when I told her I was planning on making curtains for the bathroom, she was incredulous. “No,” she said, with as firm a look as I believe her kind brown eyes were capable. “No, Lanier. You are a bride. This week that is all you need to be. I am making your curtains.” She would not leave until the fabric was safely in her hands, and as I passed off all those yards of white muslin, I felt like a physical weight had been lifted off my shoulders. It was an act of pure love, and, as such, bore the fragrance of God’s love to me. She gave me the gift of hours in my bridal week, for which I was deeply grateful. There is hardly a morning I do not think of it, as I pull back those soft drapes on the eastern light of a new day. Philip and I are still incredulous about what happened here the day before the wedding. I had always cherished a dream that the people I loved would all have a hand in my Day of days, would each have their fingerprint, as it were, upon this most unforgettable moment of my life. But I had no idea it would be like this—folks descended on this old place from the four corners of the compass. I remember wandering around in a complete daze, marveling at all the activity, my ever-present wedding notebook hanging idly at my side. One extremely talented soul had been named artistic director of the affair, and he had taken all my Avonlea-ish visions and translated them into living reality. That day he presided over a small army of women on our back porch, up to their elbows in roses and shell-pink zinnias and hydrangeas they had brought from their own gardens. Some were arranging flowers for the reception tables; others were fashioning exquisite little nosegays of old-fashioned perennials for the wire cones to be hung on the ends of the pews at the church. I have a mental snapshot of one of my bridesmaids on the patio amid a sea of daylilies and Queen Anne’s lace which another friend had gathered from her pasture that morning, and just beyond her, a small army of teenagers throwing out fresh pine straw in all the beds around the house. I went inside and found my sister twining thyme and Russian sage into a curving letter ‘I’ to top our wedding cake, and saw one of her friends hanging over the stair railing, grasping a can of Brasso in one hand and an arm of our rather age-patinaed chandelier in the other. Midway through the day, my mother had a meal of fried chicken and vegetables brought in for everyone, with leftover cakes from my trousseau tea, and lots and lots of iced tea. And just about the time we were all indoors and lined up to make our plates—it started to rain. I couldn’t believe it! An outdoor wedding reception was the only thing we had accounted for—there was no Plan B. I stood at the den windows watching the downpour in disbelief. I knew there was much more to getting married than a perfect wedding day. But I had never so much as considered the fact that it might rain! The faithful crew at our house, however, was undeterred. Nothing daunted, they simply finished up their lunch and plunged into a new round of tasks, trudging around in the rain as if there was not a thing in the world to worry about. My sister and another friend soaked themselves weaving ivy garlands and hanging them on the front gate; many of the women were likewise drenched, festooning the reception tent with curtains of tulle and ribbons with rain running down their faces and arms. It rained again the next morning—June can be such a fickle girl in Georgia! I’m very much afraid that by that point I was too far gone with the joy of what the day meant to really care about the weather. (My mother knew she had lost me and my opinions the day before when she had innocently asked what I would like to put the dried lavender in, which would be distributed to our guests to throw as Philip and I left the reception. “Oh, I don’t care,” I said, with a wave of my hand. I think that was her first moment of real panic surrounding my wedding. From there on out, she knew she had to go on without me.) I remember sitting with my coffee on my wedding morning, looking out at the dripping day, asking my mother rather absently why it was raining. “I’ll be right back,” she said. I heard her bedroom door close, and in a few moments it opened again. “Your Daddy said it was going to be all right,” she told me with a brave smile. I little knew then how brave. Quite frankly, that was enough for me. I floated on through the morning in a bridal haze of utter preoccupation. My bridesmaids started arriving, tripping daintily up the front walk under umbrellas, and the beloved friend that had agreed to do my hair managed to set me down before a mirror and get to work. Another dear one, who also happened to be our wedding coordinator, stopped by on her way to the church and repacked my suitcase (which was a complete mess) and the florist dropped off my headpiece. The whole house was a happy beehive of feminine industry, and there I was, useless and cow-eyed in the midst of it all. My mother came in when I was dressed, just as my sister was lowering my diaphanous veil, and her radiant face did not bear the least trace of the anxieties she had known that day. It wasn’t until I returned from my honeymoon that I learned what went on at my house the morning of the wedding. A friend had procured some emergency cabana tents, and he and my dad and brother set them up in the rain. My mother had her work cut out convincing the cateress (a Charleston maven of the old school, who had literally come out of retirement to do my wedding) that moving the reception to another site was not an option. Seeking our ‘artistic director’ for moral support, she found him on a ladder by Philip’s trellis, calmly wiring wild rose canes and blossoms over the lattice. Looking down at her with rain pouring off the brim of his hat, he cheerfully concluded that there was nothing more to do but press on and pray hard. (He actually pressed on so hard that he missed the wedding. I remember catching a glimpse of him at the back of the church when we were having our pictures made, no less dapper for his late drenching, smiling with all of us over the joy of the breaking clouds outside and the summer sunshine that was pouring in through the tall windows.) Yes, it did clear up. The good Lord heard that host of prayers and was kind enough to part the clouds on our account. On the way to the reception, Philip and I saw a double rainbow spanning our way. It was like a kiss from God. And when we pulled up before the house—our house—my mother-in-law greeted us on the front walk with the dearest words in the world: “Welcome home!” So many memories from that day seem to swirl in a cloud of tulle and sweet peas and blushing organza. It was everything I had ever dreamed it would be—from the children in smocked dresses chasing each other under the trees, to the lemonade on the front porch, to the hot tea served from a dear one’s family heirloom of a silver service—because people who loved me had made it so. And in the goodness of God we danced on the lawn in the summer sunshine that day and sealed the vision we shared for the kind of home we wanted to establish: one that would literally overflow with the very love that had launched us into our life together. That love laid a hallowing touch on the smallest details of our wedding, and demonstrated to us in an unforgettable way that, indeed, Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his . . . through the features of men’s faces.