What are you looking for?

For a child reared in the back alleys and knotted lanes of East London, to slip unnoticed out a window as dawn breathed blue beneath the stars was easy as taking a breath. The man and woman in the next room did not even stir. To patter down the tree-lined street of an Oxford neighborhood was even easier, and to slip into the shadows at sight of an adult, like a slim, swift shadow himself, was easiest of all. When the neighbors were questioned later that day, not one of them remembered seeing a small boy, freckle-faced and thin, though many had passed him unaware on their way to work or early church. Bren loped through the dim streets, loving the ease of his stride. He did a small dance, and shook his skinny arms as if to rejoice that no hand held his own and curbed his movement. When he crossed the bridge by Magdalene College, he knew himself safe and free as one of the birds cutting circles through the cold dawn sky. The morning crowd was at flood tide; at the least scent of danger he could disappear within it, darting through its flow like a minnow disappearing in a stream. In the city, with the hard cobbles firm under his feet, with the shouts of the morning merchants like a chorus of trumpets and the air taut with the wakening day, he was at home. He stood a moment to watch the does graze in the misty Magdalene deer park and then he was off in a scamper. The tide of noise and the rising light were in his very bones and he scampered down the streets twirling circles as he did. He followed his nose as he always had in London and it led him straight to a bakery in Cornmarket. He spotted a plump old woman with a face creased in all the right corners for smiles and kindness. His blue eyes widened to an enormity that gave the impression of starvation and he gave her a shy smile. “Please ma’am, just a bit of bread? I’m so hungry.” The woman’s face creased with instant motherliness. He presented a far more piteous sight than he knew. His small face was thin and wizened, not by hunger, but a fear too great for his size. She saw the dart of his eyes toward her giant of a husband, and knew that he was too wise in the ways of hard men. With a glance of caution herself, she snatched two rolls and put them in his hands. “There you go love,” and she rumpled his hair with the lightest touch and shooed him off with a smile. He scampered away but something in his throat swelled and his eyes stung so that he blinked them hard and fast. For two months he’d known only cold eyes and hard hands from the people who told him they were saving him, a refugee child, from the dangers of wartime London. He’d take bombs any day. Even bombs at the orphanage. But the thought of his hosts spurred him to a faster trot. They would know he had escaped by now. He ducked down two side streets and into a graveyard where he sat behind a giant, moss-eaten headstone and tore into his roll with a swiftly-beating heart. The sun reached over the church roof to pour a dazzle of golden light over his head. Calmed by its warmth, mouth full of bread, Bren considered his next step. His escape of that morning had been sheer impulse. The resolve had come as a flare of hope in the darkness of his bewildered, childish despair. The sudden joy he had tasted, the wink of the angels, put life back in his bones and the first move they made was toward escape. Now, the only plan he had was his desire to get back to that dim, friendly cave of a place. He opened the small bag he’d brought with him and rummaged through it, gratified at touch of a pocket knife, a half burned candle, a packet of matches, the penny-whistle that was like a friend to him, and a thin woolen blanket. Food was his first need, followed by a cap to hide the mop of rusty curls that quite distinguished him in a crowd. A few tunes on his whistle would earn him enough pennies to begin and then he could search the old stone streets until he found the entrance to the college he planned to invade. All he had to do then was scheme a way to get past the porter. By the sun’s slow set behind the hoary old walls and sharp-nosed towers, he would be safe in the destination that glowed in the back of his mind as brightly as the new day sun. He leapt to his feet, dusted the crumbs off his jacket and shouldered his pack. In half an hour he was happily ensconced on a street corner with his penny whistle summoning the sunlight to dance and chasing the birds in giddy circles through the sky. Pennies were scarce with the war on but when the hurried travelers heard that merry, haunting music and saw the piqued face and star-bright eyes of the boy who made it, they reached for their pockets. By noon, Bren had four coins winking in his palm. The last one had barely clattered to rest when he was up, whistled stowed, pack slung as he ducked through the crowds back toward High Street. The afternoon he spent in scouting out the best deals for his money. It took him three shops before he was satisfied with his purchases and gratified at the plumpness of his pack. This, however, exhausted his cash. He roamed the streets, ducking his head to hide his bright hair. He was very afraid that if he tried to enter the college without a hat, he would be remembered, and if his pursuers came searching, recognized. When he sat for a moment of rest on a park bench and found a tweed cap right beside him, he gasped. It was as if an angel had dropped it from the sky. He took it in his numb little hands and plopped it on his head; it perfectly covered the mop of curls. Could the angels in church ceilings communicate with those in the sky? He felt sure they must and off he scampered with joy in his heart. (The poor gentleman who had stepped away to retrieve his wind blown newspaper would have been quite shocked to know that angels had appropriated his hat.) When the murky glow of the early winter dusk made a twilit land of the streets, and the windows of the shops burned like hearth fires in the gloom, Bren turned his steps toward the college gate behind whose walls his shelter waited. When he arrived, he loitered about the entrance, careful not to catch the porter’s eye.When regular knots of well-bundled people began to drift through the gate, headed for Evensong, he stood in the shadows of the taller men, kept his head down, and shuffled through. Once in, he stopped, breathless. His heart quickened, his cheeks reddened with the sudden rush of joy that flooded his heart. He was almost there. Above him, the first stars laughed their congratulations and he sped like a small star himself through the shadowed courtyards and cloisters. When he reached the great wooden door far back behind the oldest walls of the college, it’s oaken beams strapped by iron as if to guard a mighty secret, he slipped into a far corner of the courtyard. As the dons and their wives passed him on their way into the chapel, he pulled off his cap and spit in his hands and ran them through his unruly hair. He scrubbed at his face and hoped it wasn’t dirty. With a last tug at his jacket he gave up, squared his shoulders, and slipped through the giant of a door. Light gripped him the moment he entered, a strong arm of brightness that reached toward him from the candlelit nave. A thousand whispers scampered to greet and tug him toward the inner, sheltered room of the chapel. He ran for the entrance, careless of curious glances or donnish frowns, and when he got inside, for one swift moment, he stared up at the rafters. The angels grinned down at him and he thought he saw the tip of one wing tilt a hello over air filled with candlelight and the swoosh of long robes. A laugh rose in his belly and he could not keep it down. He grinned. He chuckled. He almost danced a jig. But the raised eyebrow of an impatient elderly gentleman reminded him of the need for caution. He doffed his cap and slipped into a high corner pew. He sat just under a stained glass portrait of a woman holding a sheaf of wheat. Her face was round and homely and glad and he loved her. He loved everything he saw and everyone near him. As the rest of the congregation filed in, he swung his small feet and feasted his eyes upon the gem-toned windows and counted the rows of martyrs and kings that lined the alter wall in a great tower of saintliness. Just before the service began, a tall, pale woman slipped into the seat beside him. She stared at him a moment, then gave him a smile that made him feel he had arrived on his own doorstep after a long and arduous journey. But he quickly dropped his eyes and tried to look as if he was part of the family on his other side lest she realize that he was alone. The service began. The tall priest with the dark hair and the face of a disappointed boy sang out the prayers and Bren watched him closely, surprised to realize that he moved with the same dejection that Bren himself had known through all the past months. How could anyone be downcast in so friendly a place, Bren did not understand. But he forgot the priest in his eagerness for the service to end, for the only really risky part of his scheme was about to begin. When the last note of the organ died away, he shuffled out with the rest, chin tucked down, face appropriately solemn. But when he reached the narthex and the others were distracted by buttoning their coats against the cold that huffed through the open door, he slipped behind an old statue. For a moment, he held his breath and peeked round a stone arm. No one even glanced his way. He sighed and crouched deeper into the shadows. All he had to do was wait. An hour crept by in which he heard the last voices echo and die in the deepening night. He heard the giant groan of the chapel door and the crash of its closing as all the bolts and locks leapt into place. He waited until silence crept into every corner of the church, until the night and quiet were unbroken by a single sound. Finally, he was alone. Out he crept into the blackness. Not a single light burned, but he felt his way straight to the gate pulled across the arched entrance to the chapel. He held his breath and slipped through the iron bars and the great quiet of the chapel gathered around him. He shuffled forward a few steps and craned his neck, trying to see his angel friends. But the darkness was very thick. His steps sounded like the lonely drip of water in an eerie cave. For the first time that night, he felt suddenly cold. “Hello?” he whispered toward the ceiling, “are you there?” Just then, the thick swathes of night mist parted outside and several things happened at once. A full moon glimmered through the stained glass windows and filled the nave with fairy light. Bren leaned forward to touch it, and just as he did, there was a loud rustle in the ceiling far above him and a low note of song. He looked up. The angels in the rafters were awake. Their wooden wings swept the air and swayed like trees in a mighty wind. They reached long, wooden arms toward Bren, waving and beaming a wordless greeting to their friend. “Hello!” Bren shouted, his high voice like a bell ringing his amazement as he waved frantically back. “You are real! I knew I saw you wave.” His answer was the tumult of great wings fluttering swiftly as giant butterflies so that the roar of their movement was like the pound of the ocean as the angels opened their mouths to reply. No words came forth, only music, eight voices, each holding a single note in perfect harmony as the sound of it swelled, filling every corner of the church until it seemed one with the silver light. And the music came to Bren as meaning itself, an instant infusion of welcome and exultation that needed no words and felt familiar as his own thoughts singing in his head. “Glory to God in the highest,” he suddenly sang, and startled himself, for the angels music had been so loud in his ears he felt an urgent need to join them, but the idea sounded so different when it came from his mouth in words. “Glory, glory, glory!” he chuckled and spun in circles, face lifted to the ceiling where the angels watched him and laughed their tuneful mirth and sent storms of angel breath whirling warmth through the church in gusts that blew the hair from Bren’s face. A screech and scratch from the corner distracted him and he whirled toward the altar to see the first of the statues on the east wall shrug a stony shoulder and shake its head as if to cast off a long sleep. Bren ran down the aisle and stood just beneath them as the church filled with the smooth grating of a dozen statue saints awakening. The middle statue spoke first. His stone curls were cropped close over a wide, square forehead and he had a nose that was a small mountain over a mouth like a wide river and he brandished a fist and looked as if he would step straight down from the wall if he could. “I am Peter,” he growled, “and on this stony head my Master has built his church. Do you know that, boy?” And he stared fiercely at Bren until Bren nodded a vehement yes despite the fact that he knew nothing about it. He was glad when the statue next to Peter interrupted him. “The Word became flesh,” he whispered dreamily, eyes raised as if to a vision, “and he dwelt with us, with us. Boy,” and his eyes too dropped to Bren’s and he reached out his long stone fingers as if to offer something to the child who stood beneath him, “do you understand?” “The kingdom has come!” shouted the next shadow, before Bren could answer the dreamy one. This statue stood stout and tall with mischievous eyes and muscular arms that he flung to the sky as he closed his eyes and reveled in his proclamation again, “the kingdom has come!” But Bren did not wait to hear what the other statues might say, for a sudden sway in the light turned his eyes to the windows. The moonlight rushed through the jeweled panes so that the room glowed with orbs of emerald and ruby set amidst a million pearls of moonlight, but the light now began to bend and whirl into a river woven of rainbows that leapt through the darkness. The people in the windows were moving. Their gemlike arms and bright, jeweled faces turned toward Bren as they stretched themselves like children waking from a long sleep. Bren turned to look at the window with the woman holding her armful of wheat. She caught his eye and smiled. He ran across the aisle to her window and clambered on top of a great monument and stood on the stone belly of a sleeping knight who showed no signs of waking yet. He reached up to touch Ruth’s feet. She beamed down upon him, shaking her bundle of wheat so that tiny bursts of gold dust mixed with moonlight shimmered down around his hands. She set her head to one side and her eyes grew tender and she looked so much like the image he made of his lost mother in his mind that he felt tears in his eyes. She blew him a kiss. He laughed and leapt away with a wave, running from window to window as the people came fully awake. The window folk could not speak any more than the angels, but a faint chiming attended their movement so that a choir of fairy bells joined the hum of the angels. Bren barely stopped for breath, scampering back and forth between the windows. The prophets on the north aisle glared upon him with fierce, sapphire eyes, and jagged eyebrows, but when he gave them a tiny bow their faces erupted in smiles. Moses held his stone tablets a little higher, Isaiah and his glass angels lifted their arms and Aaron struck his staff hard into the glimmering, emerald mountain at his feet. In the south aisle, the disciples were in an uproar of argument and laughter, Bren could see it in their vivid faces, almost hear the exasperation that Peter thundered at Andrew, and the quite intellectual discussion between Philip and Thomas. Many of them broke off mid-word or gesture to wave at Bren or give him a brisk, manly nod. But John, the gentle one nearest Jesus, turned from his introspection to kneel on his glass knees so that his face was nearly level with Bren’s own. Bren met his gaze bravely, steeling his muscles a little, for it is a strange thing to have one’s soul searched by the gaze of a saint in a stained glass window. But John like what he saw. He gave a short nod and a long smile and his gleaming hand pointed toward Jesus, who stood a little apart from the busy disciples. A bevy of radiant children frolicked round him, and his golden face darted back and forth between theirs. As Bren obediently inched toward them, Jesus turned abruptly from the midst of their tumble and looked straight into Bren’s eyes. To meet that gaze was to look at the heart of the noonday sun or all the stars combined and for a moment it blinded Bren. All he knew or felt was light, a diamond light that did not burn or chill him, but rather filled him as if with breath, breaking in even to the secret rooms he locked within his heart. No door of thought could keep that light at bay and as it rose within him, he felt that he was becoming the light, no longer separate from its brilliance. All of the sudden he could see again, and what he saw were two eyes, merrier than any he had ever known, the eyes not of a saint, but of a child, and with a single dart they invited him into the whirl of light that the children made on the stone floor. For what felt to him a small eternity, he danced in the woven, glittering rainbow of the children. Their color and bell-like laughter spun a circle that seemed to reach out and envelop him so that he was almost part of their world. He laughed and jigged and caught the merry glances of ruby and sapphire and emerald eyes and felt the brilliance of the face that smiled above them all. Round and round he spun, swift came his breath, swifter still the mirth that was greater than any he had ever known. He danced and laughed until he could not breathe and stumbled back, panting. Exhausted, he took a few paces back and looked round the church. The angels above still hummed their golden music, like giant, holy honey bees at rest in an ancient hive. The statues continued their pontifications, to each other if they could, or the air in general if no one else was in reach. And the window people sparkled and danced and argued and waved in the strength of their light. Ruth caught Bren’s eye and he trotted back to the pew beneath her, slumping into the wooden seat and leaning his head against her gleaming feet. She put a hand to her heart and shook her bundle of wheat again and again so that the gold dust shimmered over him in tiny flecks of light. A sigh, a deep, gentle breath of relief came from deep within him, from one of the rooms that the light had opened in his heart and Bren forgot the fear that set his muscles taut and ready to run. The darkness was gone and he was at home. He needed to find a hiding spot and make a small camp so that he could remain within his refuge. But comfort delayed him. He rested there on the pew, warmed by Ruth’s light and the angel’s breath, with the faint lullaby of bells all around him. Before he could resist, he fell fast asleep.

Today was a hard day. Ben Shive’s “A Last Time for Everything,” kept running through my head as I watched the news updates from Connecticut. In Ben’s book, The Cymbal Crashing Clouds, he tells the story behind the song and I think it’s especially appropriate today. I’ve excerpted it below in images to maintain the unique formatting of the book. “A Last Time for Everything” by Ben Shivehttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ALastTime.mp3

Tell us, ye birds, why come ye here, Into this stable, poor and drear? Hast’ning we seek the newborn King, And all our sweetest music bring. ~ Charles L. Hutchins, Carol of the Birds I had been looking for them for weeks, from the first real shock of cold weather in early November, expecting at any moment to be brought up short in the midst of a day’s round by the sound that is at once the most wistful and the most exhilarating I have heard in nature. To be arrested with the wild, sweet declaration of change in the air and the turn of the seasons. To be held fast and fixed in a spell of wonder that is the yearly migration flight of the sandhill cranes. I remember so many late afternoons in autumn, the yard around us violet with gathering shadows and the day’s last gilding just ebbing from the treetops as we stood with heads thrown back in a compliment of complete silence, watching the tiny black mass swirl and mount its heavenly way before pressing southward in a somewhat ragged ‘V’, always cherishing the jumbled cacophony of cries that must be deafening at close range and yet has about it all the poignancy and bewildering exactitude of change-ringing at such a distance. They have always been a herald, a harbinger that electrifies me with aliveness and anticipation, and I love them for it. But they have never been so late, in my memory. And I hadn’t realized just how intently I’d been listening for their glad tidings until it came. It was one of those days that every second seemed to count. Every hour so carefully planned so as to press the last oil of productivity out of every moment. A day of loved preparation, no doubt, but ever teetering dangerously in the balance between ‘bustle’ and ‘huffing about’. The last sugar cookies were cooling on the racks and I was just measuring out the ingredients for gingerbread when I stopped as if I’d been tapped on the shoulder and caught my breath over that familiar ache of joy. I set down the jar of molasses and flew out the kitchen door, into the keen chill of a December afternoon, and whirled about, searching the sky. I think I felt them before I saw them, in much the way that a person senses they’re being observed. For just as I turned in their direction, they appeared with a gliding sweep above the proud hedge of hollies that border the kitchen yard. At first I was too fascinated to realize that I had never seen them at such close range: their bodies were grey, not black as they always seemed, and I could even make out the darker tips of their enormous wings. I wondered wildly for a moment if they were going to land in our pasture, until it became obvious that the slow and solemn circle was on the ascent. Perhaps they had taken off from the watering hole out front—had been there for quite some time while I was inside and all oblivion, up to my ears in flour and colored sugar! I stood transfixed as they mounted heavenward, as stately as a liturgical procession, with the occasional bird-shout of praise for good measure. And as they reached a certain height and came into a level with the slanting rays of the departing sun, an absolute miracle transpired. Each time the wheeling throng passed through the light, a wash of pure glory set them ablaze, running over them like the ripples of some heavenly watercourse, so that every wing was sheathed with silver and every feather a flash of gold. On and on they soared, higher and higher, passing from shadow to splendor in a recurring parable of unearthly beauty. Light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death… Soon after they forsook the charmed hold of light, and in a matter of a breathless moment or two they had unfurled themselves into perfect formation. And like a giant bracket with one leader at the fore and two lieutenants flanking him on either side, they passed swiftly over my head in reverent silence and glided away towards the south. I was shaken as I went back into the kitchen and regarded my late occupation. It seemed almost silly to reassume something as earthly as the baking of cookies after so heavenly a benediction. And yet, not silly. Sanctified, somehow, in the purifying glow of this holy Advent which appropriates all willing things unto itself and makes of a flight of birds or a flour-dusted kitchen a sacred thing and an intersection of the lay and the liturgical. Philip and I later talked long by the fire of why I was so moved: why the advent of a flock of birds would bear such a palpable weight of glory to my waiting heart. Why their shrill, metallic cries would seem the very voice of one calling in the wilderness. “It’s because we see them every year,” he said, “and we know what they mean.” That is precisely it. It’s that same paradox that Lewis talks about in The Screwtape Letters in speaking of our thrill at the change of seasons juxtaposed with our love of the familiar: He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. And that is precisely why Advent is such a present promise and Christmas a yearly miracle. If our own hopes and longings are a recurring theme, how much more so is God’s everlasting “Yes!” to our eternal “Why”? The ‘Yes’ is Jesus, of course: Jesus in a manger; Jesus on a cross; Jesus coming again with power and great glory. Jesus coming in familiarity and great particularity to our present need and thrilling us with a hope that defies reason. The sandhill cranes were not late, any more than the God Who made them is late with the delivery on His promise. I’m so glad that they mingled themselves with my expectation this year and that Advent is the season they exulted over with their jubilant song. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Celestial fowles in the air, Sing with your notes upon the height, In firthes and in forests fair Be mirthful now at all your might; For passed is your dully night; Aurora has the cloudes pierced, The sun is risen with gladsome light, Et nobis puer natus est. ~William Dunbar, Rorate caeli desuper

Father Eric knelt to pray in the college chapel just before Evensong a few days before Christmas. The long, high dark of the church leapt away behind him, a dusk he used to love for the star-like glimmer of the stained glass and the whispers that filled its watchful heights. Tonight though, it was only a vast, chilled cave at his back. Even the rustling far behind him in the shadows did not turn his head. It would have once. When he first came to be chaplain he knew, sure as he took his own breath, that the great angels carved in the dark wooden rafters of the ceiling sometimes stirred. He could swear it. A half smile, a teasing beat of a great wing just to keep him lively as he went about his work in the echoing old place. They laughed at him, they sang, even if he only caught the faintest echoes of their song when he entered and they froze in holy mischief. Once, the whole world hummed with music and the birds told of a country far up in the sky and the trees he passed in the lane looked as if they knew great secrets if he could only learn their language. But now, all was silent. The music was gone, the angels did not laugh or stir, and the rustling in the far back pews was only old Father Jonas with his wild eyes and shuffling steps, setting the hymnbooks straight and lighting the candles for the choir. Since the letter had come a month before, Eric felt that a great door had slammed in his face, for the world had become a silent place in which he was utterly alone. The day the letter came, he had staggered into his chapel and knelt, as he did now. His own voice echoed off the stones in the awful dusk of that afternoon, rose to the rafters and when he was exhausted, died. That was when the hush began, a silence so mighty he felt that he must have gone suddenly deaf. At his first cry the angels froze and the music ceased. Now, he set his elbows on the alter rail, put his chin in his hands and let his shoulders slump like a very small boy. His clerical collar cut uncomfortably into his neck, and the crèche scene next to the altar caught his despondent gaze. The choir boys loved the life-sized figurines and this year, in defiance of the rationing and restraint imposed upon them by the war, they had decked the figures out in brilliant old shawls and cast off clothes. But all Eric saw was the empty manger at heart of it all. It was empty by long tradition, of course, for the children could not place the baby within it until Christmas day. But a deep line of fear rutted his face at the sight. “Where are you?” He barely formed the words under his breath. He was a priest, but his heart was as empty of God as that manger and no angels or wise men sang to announce the coming of a child who would fill it. The only news that came to him was war and pain, and it came not in angel’s songs but in telegrams whose tiny typewritten letters unraveled his faith thread by thread. The words of Advent echoed in his mind, the words he proclaimed as priest in the services of this season; “come, Lord Jesus, come.” But the holy child had come thousands of years before, and died, and gone, and what good had it done? For the world warred on and pain was a thief in the night that no soul could escape and the child did not halt the breaking of the earth. The empty manger gaped up at Eric. The holy child was missing from his heart. Eric’s brother, the only family left to him was missing, a soldier lost in battle. And now Eric’s faith was missing too, as if it had gone in search of the others. His trust in God had always been the simple one of boyhood, a marveling at the beauty of the world, a giddy sort of joy that knew someone must be thanked for the splendor of it all. But there was nothing left to marvel at anymore. “Come, Lord Jesus,” he whispered, as if to test the words one last time, “come and save us.” But not a breath of response stirred about him, even in the secret places of his heart. Feeling fully adult for the first time in his life, old, creaky in all his bones and stiff in his skin, he rose and forced himself to an almost militant stance. They would soon come, all the old, faithful dons and their polite, grey-haired wives with saintly faces, and the choir boys whom not even war could scare into solemnity, and the few (very few) students more intent upon choir songs than pub tunes and another pint. He must play a grand charade for them tonight. Let them keep their faith as long as they could, and he his good position. Ellie, his wife, would be there too, slim and pale and looking a little too transparent for his comfort. He could not set the sorrow of his disbelief in her hands for there was a burning, heavy lump of it there already that set the navy tint of grief at back of her eyes even when she smiled. She met him now, at the wide arch that led into the freezing narthex where the choirboys gathered and a few candles shivered in the dark. How sword-straight she stood, with her neat, dark hair pulled back and her face paled by sorrow. Her beauty had never been the kind to shout at one. Her bearing was so quiet, her hands so calm that most people passed her by before they had time to glimpse the great brightness of her eyes and the smile that came like the rising of the morning. She was like his angels in the rafters, a secret glory. He could not bear to lose her too. She reached out a gloved hand to him and he bent to kiss her cheek so that she would not read the thoughts in his eyes. “Ready darling?” she asked, pulling his robes straight, “did you snatch a few good moments of prayer before Jonas showed up?” Her eyes were playful even in their quiet, her hands gentle, and he was grateful for laughter to cover his face as a mask. “Yes indeed, though I think he chased a few more mice than usual, it was quite the racket, ah – there’s David, I must speak to him about the anthem,” and he left her quickly. “I’ll see you after service,” he called back over his shoulder, watching her take her place in the high pew under the south window, its stained glass gleaming with the gold of wheat piles and the ruddy face of the diligent Ruth. Ellie always sat there, insisting that Ruth, the steady worker, kept her mind from wandering quite so much. She was never meant to be the prim wife of a college chaplain. His Ellie was like a living flame in the wind, a presence ever alight with the brightness of her own impassioned thought, her quiet, burning love of all things beautiful, of art and song and dance. She was a London girl, a writer’s daughter, raised in the vivid company of dreamer’s and artists until she married him. But then, he had never thought of himself as a staid and solemn priest. They both thought it a great, divine joke when he was installed in a position of such grown-up solemnity. At first, his laughter, his childlike sight of little wonders, and her fire had made his work, and their tiny home of stone and ivy within the college walls feel like a fresh story told at the end of an ancient tale. Life was a grand drama to Ellie and she told her own vivid imagination into the chapel world. In the ancient silence, she heard the echoes of prayers and the cries of babies baptized and the sighs of lovers wed, and she wove it into a living story for him. And of course, back then he could still catch the angels at their games. Now, as the choirboys gathered in rows and the choirmaster scolded until they were halfway straight, he took his place near the end of the procession, under the garish gold cross on its pole that always looked ready to crash upon the heads of the people below it. Perhaps, he mused, grief had finally made adults of him and Ellie both. She held silence to her now as if it was the child she had lost, and though she loved him, she could not lay it down and be glad. Well, no more could he. Life had finally made them the upright, solemn church couple they ought to be. Eric took a last glance up into the dark rafters. The angels were stone faced. He tucked his chin into his collar and shuffled ahead behind the choir. As the first hymn played, the congregation stood in a swish and rustle that filled the chapel with whispers. They shivered as they sang and drew a little nearer their seatmates. Usually they did not notice the chill. The starlight of the stained glass and the soaring of the music wove a circle about them that shut all worry away. But that night the music seemed thin and the light weak. The cold came at them like an invader, staining the air and battering them where they stood so that they felt accosted by a force much larger than themselves. Father Eric, whose ecclesiastical jollity and badly hidden mid-service grins at his wife usually provoked such pleasant gossip, looked grim and grey as the oldest man among them. He sang the prayers in a cold, harsh echo that startled rather than solaced them. Perhaps it was to be expected. It was the war, they supposed. The news was worse of late, the bombs in London heavier. They glanced up as the service progressed; the flames of the candles battled the darkness and the shadows leapt above them in a grotesque dance. They felt very small. The eyes of the angels in the windows looked shifty and the stone saints seemed very, very cold. They simply could not concentrate, and when the mischievous choirboys settled down to the anthem, their eyes wandered off uneasily into the shadows crouched in the high corners. They fidgeted and buttoned their coats and paid almost no attention to the ending of the service until Father Eric’s voice rang out in the last prayers: Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night… A few of the women jerked a curious glance in his direction, wondering if – heaven forbid – their chaplain had tears in his eyes. This was unheard of, but the grating unsteadiness of his tone made them suspicious. There was, of course, the awful news about his brother to be considered, and that disappointment with the baby a few months back, but priests were expected to leave their personal complaints at home. A glance at Father Eric’s stony face reassured them and they dropped their eyes in relief. The minute the service ended, they hurried out of the chapel into the night. The bitter cold of the open sky was a relief. But one small person looked back over his shoulder and dragged his feet as he went. The tall, gaunt-faced woman beside him jerked his hand so that he winced and hurried his steps. But he did not turn his gaze from the long, dim nave. The candlelit shadows had encircled him like the strong, sweet arms of the mother he barely remembered. For a few rare moments, he had forgotten to be afraid. And there were voices; the church echoed with lively whispers that set his eyes darting up and round and through the darkling corners. The candlelight glinted off the faces of the saints like a merry wink, and the music still seemed to leap and sing and echo in the shadows. The woman gave a final, exasperated jerk of his arm. A great sigh escaped him and he glanced back for the last time. He gasped. The angel in the rafters just above him had waved its wing and winked.

“At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the peoples of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.” Matthew 24:30, TNIV Peter Jackson, the man most responsible for the great Lord of the Rings film trilogy, is about to premier the first part of his The Hobbit in the U.S. These movies are, of course, based on the splendid books by J.R.R. Tolkien. In preparation for the Hobbit movie, my daughters and I are watching all nine hours or so of the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings. While watching The Fellowship of the Ring the other day, I was struck by something that Boromir says. As you may recall, Boromir is from a country called Gondor. Many years ago, the King of Gondor left his people and did not return. Since then, they have been governed by a succession of men who’s title is “The Steward of Gondor.” The Steward’s job is to keep the throne open for the eventual return of the true King. The Steward is a lot like us. Our King, through his ascension, has gone back into Heaven. He tells us that he is coming again. In the meantime, we are left to watch after the Kingdom on his behalf. Of course, this parallel is very incomplete. We are not alone. Christ is present with us, we have the Holy Spirit, etc. But I hope you get the point. Over the years, some of the people of Gondor have given up on waiting. The current Steward of Gondor essentially acts as if he is the king, and a demanding and difficult one at that. Boromir happens to be the eldest son of the Steward, so he is set to become Steward when his father dies. When Boromir meets a man named Aragorn, and learns that Aragorn may be the rightful heir and true King of Gondor, he is not happy. In the film version, he practically spits out this great line: “Gondor has no king; Gondor needs no king.” How many times have we felt that way? When things are going well it is easy for us to think that we don’t need a King, we don’t need a God. When things are going poorly, when we are fed up and God does not seem to be hearing us, we might also say that we don’t need him. Sometimes we pay lip service to wanting a King, but our lives and actions show that we would rather not have one. What is true of us as individuals has also been true of large groups of people. Nations, companies, schools and even churches have essentially said “We don’t need God, we can do this on our own.” As the Lord of the Rings story progresses, Boromir gets to know Aragorn. He finds someone who is strong yet compassionate, wise yet humble, a leader who is a servant. A moment comes when it looks like Boromir may die (I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it at that). He looks up at Aragorn and says “I would have followed you, my brother… my captain… my king.” Boromir didn’t want a king because he had never known a good one. He had only known self-serving rulers. But as he got to know Aragorn he came to respect him, trust him, and even love him. Perhaps we are like Boromir. Perhaps we would rather take care of ourselves because we don’t know a better alternative. But what if there is a better alternative? What if Jesus Christ is a good and loving and merciful king? That could be a king worth following, even a king worth turning over charge of our life to. Advent is about waiting for the King. It is about saying “I have no king, but I need the King.” Today let me suggest turning to King Jesus, asking him to reveal himself. As we spend time with him, perhaps we too will get to know a good King whom we might trust with our lives.

Just in time for Christmas, we’ve got a new batch of mugs in the store. Supplies are VERY limited (there are fewer than forty), so get ’em while they last. We’ve secured some special shipping boxes that we hope will prevent the breakage we’ve experienced in the past. Also be aware that our inventory system is imperfect at times, especially when multiple people are trying to buy a single item. If the mugs oversell, we apologize and will refund the unlucky late-comers as quickly as possible. Our mugs are each unique, hand-crafted works thrown by the pottery-wheel wielding potters at Sunset Hill Stoneware. The current set includes the following: “The Frederick” comes in two varieties: Old Wear (pictured at top) and The Hermit (pictured bottom). “The Walt” comes in two varieties: Beryl (pictured top) and Tuck Tucker (pictured bottom). “The MacDonald” comes in two varieties: Goblin King Green (pictured at top) and Sir Gibbie (pictured bottom). “The Eliot” comes in two varieties: Dry Salvages (pictured at top) and Burnt Norton (pictured bottom).

Trevin Wax (is it just me or does that sound like a Jedi name), with The Gospel Coalition, recently put up a great interview with Jonathan Rogers in which they discuss O’Connor’s work and Jonathan’s new book, The Terrible Speed of Mercy. Great reading. Here’s an exerpt: Though O’Connor was writing from a distinctly Christian worldview, religious readers didn’t seem to understand her any better than the literary elite, and they liked her less. She was misunderstood because she was writing into a culture that expected Christian truth to be nice and safe and tidy, and she refused to accommodate those expectations. The Jesus of O’Connor’s fiction is a “wild ragged figure,” not the sort of fellow you would invite to Sunday dinner unless you were ready to get your table tipped over. I’m reluctant to use the term “prophetic” to describe O’Connor’s work, but I will say that her fiction is uncomfortable and offensive in some of the ways that the Old Testament prophets’ words were uncomfortable and offensive to their original audience. For that matter, Jesus’s parables are calculated to offend and are easily misunderstood. Read the entire interview here.

Every year we transition from Thanksgiving to Advent, a strange segue in many ways. But there’s at least one thread that passes through these very different celebrations. The Pilgrims left the Old World, hoping to find in the New World a place where they could worship in liberty. A place to be with God. They did and did not find it. Since the first century, Christians here and everywhere have been living in the tension of having, and waiting to have, the New World. Come, Lord Jesus. Advent is a period of focusing on the longing we feel for the true New World, when the dwelling place of God will be with man and each man will sit beneath his tree and we will be home again on earth. New Earth. We long for that New World, the new heavens and new earth, completed recreation in and by the Second Adam. He was conceived as a man as the Holy Spirit hovered over the formless void of the virgin Mary’s womb. So began the New World. He arrived and nothing has been precisely the same since. Glory to God, the King has come. So he came and rescued his own from a threat mightier than the Roman occupation, mightier than all the armies of man joined in war. He came to destroy the works of the Devil, offered himself as a ransom for many, and inaugurated the Kingdom of God. When he performed miracles, he was not suspending the laws of nature, but authoritatively (under his Father) reasserting them. Jairus’s daughter cannot die in the New World. Ceremonial cleansing pots teem with wine in the New World. But he left, evacuated. He flew away. Didn’t he? He ascended, with all authority in heaven and on earth. He is the King of Kings in reality. There really is a Jewish King in the Sky. He rules with all authority and must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy is death. And when that damned foe finally falls we will know we are in the New World. And by many other signs, like the ubiquity of justice and peace, will his kingdom be known. And we will know him. And the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. I don’t know exactly how or when it will all happen, but I’m confident in the one who will accomplish it all. And the work is begun. We are the new creation. We are the seeds of the garden growing. Come, Lord Jesus. Come. Come and rule, long-expected King of Heaven and Earth. New World without end. Amen. Amen.

G.K. Chesterton: “The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.” C.S. Lewis: “Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’” Annie Dillard: “Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the surface of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.” Kate DiCamillo: “Dear God, thank you for warm summer nights and candlelight and good food. But thank you most of all for friends. We appreciate the complicated and wonderful gifts you give us in each other. And we appreciate the task you put down before us, of loving each other the best we can, even as you love us. We pray in Christ’s name, Amen.” Sally Lloyd-Jones: “Behind what you were doing, underneath everything that was happening, God was doing something good. God was making everything right again.” N.D. Wilson: “What is the world? What is it for? It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched. Assess it like that. And when you’re done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe.” George MacDonald: “To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing.” Flannery O’Connor (on the deterioration of her body): “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” J.R.R. Tolkien: “Where there’s life there’s hope, and need of vittles.” Thomas Merton: “To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us – and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.” Frederick Buechner: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” Wendell Berry (excerpt from his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”): “Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” Marilynne Robinson: “It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave – that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

This is an excellent painting. The lighting, the composition, the execution—they’re all excellent. I look at it and don’t know what is going on exactly, but I love it. I want to know more about it. I want to know what compelled the painter to make this image. So I look at the title. The title is “The Old Shepherd’s Cheif Mourner,” painted by Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873). I enjoyed the technical excellence of the painting, but it wasn’t until I read the name that I truly appreciated the painting’s narrative excellence as well. I look at the painting again, and now the dog’s face takes on a heartbreaking sense of loss. Layers of story now begin to unfold around the image for me. Most of the time I dismiss titles as unnecessary nonsense by which lazy artists prop up technically inferior work because it lacks the ability to stand on its visual merits alone. And while it’s true that in the past there have been instances where artists have taken a shortcut to applause by coming up with names for their work that sound fashionable or hyper-intellectual, there have also been hapless artists who just wanted to paint something simple, like a lake, because it made them happy, but who then felt compelled to add some title implying that the image is really a statement on the post-industrial consumerism or the plight of the proletariat in eastern Bulgaria or some fashionable elitist cause. All because they were afraid of their work being labeled sentimental or anti-intellectual because it was representational and wasn’t shocking. This appreciation of psuedo-intellectual titles seems to have fallen away somewhat in the past few years. (I personally thank Frank Frazetta and video games for this.) But there even exist online name generators to lampoon the whole idea of this sort of naming. Consider this site, which will generate three pieces of abstract art at random, all with suitable titles. However, this cultural reaction against fancy names has its drawbacks–mainly that we may forget the great value of a title. I certainly do. In my efforts to avoid trying to sound pretentious I generally name my work something like: “Painting #2,” “Monster #15,” “George Washington Field-Tackling a Bear #34,” and so on. But there’s a classical use for titles. And that is to take an image that is already technically excellent on its visual merits alone, and then provide the viewer with further context and insight into it. “The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner” is an excellent example of how a name can add to an image, and not be a replacement for technical excellence in one.

[Editor’s note: This post is adapted from Jonathan Rogers’s portion of the Hutchmoot 2012 session entitled “The Gospel Uses of Comedy.”] I love a good tragedy. Hamlet and Oedipus and Medea and Dr. Faustus and Macbeth have plenty to tell us about the human condition. But I don’t think they show us any more than Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp—loose of limb and baggy of trouser, continually embarrassed, forever getting in over his head, getting out again, escaping ruin not by wit or social influence or main strength, but by happy accident—by a kind of grace. The tragic hero falls because he cannot come to terms with his own finitude. The comic hero survives because he can. The comic hero is able to say, “I’m only human,” which needn’t be a cop-out or an excuse for bad behavior, since there was a time when God himself became human and dwelt among us. You’re only human. Halleluiah! For human beings are exactly who God rescues in Christ. I might as well start where everybody starts when talking about laughter in the Bible: Genesis 17-19 and the laughter of Abraham and Sarah, whose sardonic, self-protecting laughter got swallowed up by the laughter of joy. Russ Ramsey writes beautifully about this story in Behold the Lamb of God, and so does Sarah Clarkson in a recent Rabbit Room post. I commend both pieces to you. For that matter, I commend Frederick Buechner’s writing on the subject, in Telling the Story: the Bible as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. You probably know this story already. Abraham was a hundred years old and Sarah was ninety. God had promised decades earlier that he would make a great nation of their offspring, but it wasn’t looking like it was going to happen, since they were childless. Abram had the one son Ishmael, whom he had fathered with Sarah’s serving woman Hagar in an effort to help God do his job, but Sarah still hadn’t borne any child of promise. When God told Abraham once again that his wife was going to have a baby, he fell out laughing: “Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, ‘Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety, bear a child?’” What he said next is just as telling. “Oh that Ishmael might live before you.” Abraham laughed at God’s plan and offered his own in its place. Shortly thereafter, the three angels appeared at Abraham’s tent and announced again that Sarah would bear a son within the year. “So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?’” Abraham laughed. Sarah laughed. I don’t wish to suggest that either laugh was an evil laugh or even a consciously disrespectful laugh. It was probably involuntary laughter. Still this was laughter of self-protection, plastering over decades of disappointment and sorrow. It was sardonic laughter. It was the laughter of people who were saying, “Yeah, right! I’ve been around the block before. I know how things work around here.” You know how this story pays off. A year later, Sarah had a baby, and she laughed again, this time not sarcastically but out of irrepressible joy. I love the way Buechner talks about it: It all happened not of necessity, not inevitably, but gratuitously, freely, hilariously. And what was astonishing, gratuitious, hilarious was, of course, the grace of God. What could they do but laugh at the preposterousness of it, and they laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks. They laughed sardonically when they heard the prediction. They laughed for joy when the prediction came true. So they named their boy “Laughter.” It’s a beautiful story. I love it. The spiritual ramifications are tremendous. Again, read Russ, Sarah, and Buechneron the subject. But I want to draw your attention to something that Russ, Sarah, and Buechner mostly spare you from. I want to pay attention to the path by which Abraham and Sarah got from point A—the bitter laughter of the old and disappointed–to point B—the joyful laughter of a couple who understand how outlandishly they have been blessed. Consider the simple biological facts of where babies come from. Remember, there is no suggestion whatsoever that Sarah got pregnant through immaculate conception or by any means other than the tried and true method. What I am pointing out is that some time within three months of the angels’ visit, a hundred-year-old Abraham and a ninety-year-old Sarah took the necessary steps to make a baby. Pause for a moment and envision that. It may help to close your eyes. Take as long as you need. I first pondered these peculiar facts after hearing an old radio preacher in Georgia some twenty-five years ago preaching on this text. I have forgotten everything about the sermon except one sentence spoken in a husky, suggestive voice: “Abraham looked over at Sarah, and she looked-ed good to him, and Sarah looked over at Abraham, and he looked-ed good to her . . .” Do you think I’m making a dirty joke? Listen, I’m not the one who made the joke; it’s all right there in Genesis. Abraham and Sarah thought they knew how things were going to work out. They understood how the world works: you win some, you lose some. They had come to terms with the fact that they weren’t going to have any kids, in spite of what God had told them so many years before. In God’s apparent failure to keep his promise, they formed a Plan B, and they were working it. Abraham had impregnated Hagar, Ishmael was born. It wasn’t what they originally had in mind, but it was working. Abraham and Sarah had settled into the dignity of old age. Then Abraham looked over at Sarah and she looked-ed good to him, and he looked-ed good to her, and next thing you know they’re engaged in most undignified behavior, and Sarah is pregnant with the child of the promise. She had laughed at the angels, but now the joke is on her—90 years old and pregnant!—and she laughed and laughed. Surely she said, “The joke’s on me—Halleluiah!” And Abraham surely said, “I’ve been such a fool! Halleluiah! … Halleluiah that I have been so wrong about how this universe works!” There’s a deep pleasure in the gospel that nobody talks about very much, and it is the pleasure of saying, “Oh, What a fool I have been! I was so sure I knew how this thing was going to turn out. I shaped my life around a foolish assumption that the world was telling me the truth about itself and my place in it. I was so wrong! Halleluiah! I lived in fear of things that had no power to harm me! I thought I had to exert my will and get my way! But now I don’t have to anymore. Halleluiah!” If I were a preacher, I would have an altar call, and all you would have to do would be to come down to the front and say, “Oh, what a fool I’ve been! I took myself so damned seriously!” I’m not using that word “damned” casually. Is there anything so damning as excessive self-regard? I love what G.K. Chesterton has to say on this subject: Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has always been the instinct of Christian art. . . In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down” into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. . . . Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. . . . For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity. The surest sign of a fool is a terror of being laughed at. And, ironically, that’s part of what makes him so laughable. I realize that there is a delicate balance that I haven’t paid much attention to. We need to acknowledge the deep dignity of our fellow human beings. For that matter, we need to acknowledge our own deep dignity, and laughter in many cases (or perhaps I should say laughter in many kinds) doesn’t help us acknowledge or honor that dignity. Consider the oft-quoted passage from Lewis in “The Weight of Glory”: It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare . . . There are no ‘ordinary’ people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. My point, really, is this: all these immortals also have bodies. They live here in this world in bodies that make noises and smells, that sometimes fall down and sometimes lift them up, that fail them, that sometimes lead them into temptation and sometimes carry them into battle or into a hospital ward where they serve and love other immortals in their bodies. Every funny thing you ever saw or heard was funny because of some incongruity—and usually, this specific incongruity: you are a little lower than the angels, and yet you live here in this imperfect world in this imperfect body. Comedy acknowledges that we are body and soul both. So if the history of Israel begins with a bawdy joke, so be it. Abraham—Exalted Father—and his Princess Sarah were the butts of a joke we’re still telling 3500 years later. The punch line isn’t just that Abraham and Sarah were ridiculous—the laughers becoming the laughed-at. The punch line is that they are themselves welcomed into the great joke that is the Kingdom of God—where (to borrow from Buechner) salvation can’t possibly happen because it can only impossibly happen.

This week I checked out Wendell Berry’s The Country of Marriage and stumbled on a poem I hadn’t read before. Just a few days ago my kind neighbor Tommy gave me permission to harvest a few maple seedlings from his property and I spent an afternoon replanting them around the Warren with these same hopes for the blessing they might be to my children’s children. Once again, the sage words of the Mad Farmer gave me a clear picture of what it means for us to be keepers of his creation, standing amidst a breadth of old beauty that we didn’t ask for and don’t deserve. I’m tempted to draw out a metaphor, like I did in my song of the same title, but I think maybe it’s good (especially in light of the glorious autumn all around me in Nashville right now), to let the trees in the poem stand in their own bright significance as members of God’s creation. PLANTING TREES In the mating of trees, the pollen grain entering invisible the domed room of the winds, survives the ghost of the old forest that was here when we came. The ground invites it, and it will not be gone. I become the familiar of that ghost and its ally, carrying in a bucket twenty trees smaller than weeds, and I plant them along the way of the departure of the ancient host. I return to the ground its original music. It will rise out of the horizon of the grass, and over the heads of weeds, and it will rise over the horizon of men’s heads. As I age in the world it will rise and spread, and be for this place horizon and orison, the voice of its winds. I have made myself a dream to dream of its rising, that has gentled my nights. Let me desire and wish well the life these trees may live when I no longer rise in the mornings to be pleased by the green of them shining, and their shadows on the ground, and the sound of the wind in them. Check out Wendell Berry’s books currently in the Rabbit Room Store.

I sat in my seat like a sitting sitter. I was preparing to watch TV with my eyes. So far, so good. On the TV? The GOP Convention, live from Tampa. Ha ha. Time for scorn. I’m so scornful I even feel scorn towards uber-scornful “above-it-alls” like Jon Stewart. That’s really, really scornful. I was prepared to let my superiority drip off my nose and mingle with my potion of negativity and cynicism. They make that drink, yes. I was sure all the speeches would be dull, insincere, pandering designed to trick independents, and to inspire the brain-dead bought-ins with shallow sloganeering for the sycophantic. In short, I was prepared to judge like a majorly judging judger. Then I saw on Facebook that a friend of mine was one of the people writing the speeches for the convention. Uh oh. I thought about this friend, her face recalled in memory. She’s smart, sincere, sensitive. She cares about the work she does. She believes in doing what’s right, has a passion for her nation. She isn’t a brainless party hack. I’ve heard her thoughtfully disagree with her party’s decisions, or representatives. She’s a nuanced thinker, a clever, kind person working to make things better in America. She’s someone who has encouraged me many times, valued my own comparably unimpressive work, bucked me up with bracing words. Also, she’s a sister in Christ. My plan was falling apart. Now, where I had been prepared for scorn, I was looking for the true words. I was sifting the speeches to locate, and appreciate, the hopeful, the sincere, the eloquent. Familiarity had changed something. Was I suddenly all-in with every word from the GOP Convention? No. But it was very different to experience it with a friend on the inside. My point isn’t to prod a discussion about the GOP, or their opponents (if you really want to hear scorn from me), but to talk about how familiarity can breed compassion. Just knowing one person –one person on the inside– changed my attitude dramatically. It makes me wonder if many of the places I am prepared to heap up scorn would be impacted if I knew someone inside, going through whatever I’m making fun of, struggling with a sincere hope in a battlefield of lies and cynicism. I am amazed at my ability to fail to notice with any real insight things outside of my own little selfish kingdom. For instance, I never notice the make, or model of cars. I just don’t care. Unless I happen to own that car, then suddenly I see them all over. They have been allowed inside the privileged world of my attention. Congratulations, car. Welcome to my vehicular awareness club. But cars don’t have souls. How quick I am to pour on scorn, to withhold compassion, when someone is struggling with a sin that doesn’t tempt me. But when I love someone in that fight, the whole thing changes. The abstract sin that’s so wicked becomes personal in a new way. Sympathy grows within me, scorn begins to evaporate. And not just for my friend. Suddenly, all the people struggling with this sin have become more human in my imagination, because I know and love someone in that fight. The sin doesn’t become less awful, in fact it becomes more threatening, because now it doesn’t threaten “people,” but a person. A person I love. I’m now more likely to see the similarities between the sin that drags me down and the sin that drags them down. Their challenge becomes like my challenge. I hope that doesn’t mean we all surrender those fronts. Compassion and capitulation are different. Hitler must still be defeated, because embracing him is to be swallowed by death. But perhaps it means we’ll consider fighting in a different way. I may be less likely to hoist a sign and more likely to lend a hand. Hopefully I’m less likely to scream judgement and more likely to pray and focus on the liberating Good News of Jesus for sinners. I am humbled by the newly discovered intimacy. Suddenly I’m more able to imagine how I’d like to be treated were I walking a mile in those moccasins. I see it from the inside. I hope this growing awareness is genuinely humbling for me. I’m so proud that I’m pretty embarrassed to even admit what a jerk I can be, how quick I can be to heap up scorn and be dismissive. But maybe you need to hear about that from someone on the inside. ———————- Featured image cropped from Zach Franzen’s illustration.

One night last summer Philip and I were driving back from Birmingham in our little roadster, Happiness Runs. We had been visiting dear friends and a gorgeous sunset was already simmering in the west by the time we managed to tear ourselves away. It had been a weekend of work and wonderful food and iron-sharpening fellowship, and we were feeling so brimful of God’s goodness we both just wanted to sit in silence and enjoy it, like the quiet satisfaction after an exquisite meal. We had the top down as it was such a fine night, and I slid Andrew Peterson’s Counting Stars into the CD player, nestling back in my seat to look at the real stars overhead as we sped eastward towards home. About the time we reached the dark stretch on I-20 that is the Talladega National Forest we started to notice a few splatters on the windshield, and I looked up to see that the starlit sky was now racing and tearing with ragged clouds. The cool thing about a convertible is that if you are going fast enough (ahem, well within the speed limit, of course!) you can drive through a reasonable amount of rain and not get wet. I know there’s some fancy scientific principle at play here, but what this means to me is just an added spice of drama to an already fun ride. (It can also mean a lot of laughter if we fail to gauge our storm and end up getting soaked.) Just as the rain began to fall in earnest and the storm-black clouds swallowed the last star over our heads, the opening guitar notes of The Reckoning warbled out of the speakers. I grinned across at Philip in delight and reached over to turn up the volume. There’s just nothing like the appropriateness of a perfect song matched to a perfect occasion. And as our little car hurtled through the darkness of that long road home, the heavens literally whirled and thundered and exploded in bursts of light over our heads, like some wild-eyed hints of a glory too great to be told. I watched, breathtaken, as the silver tongues of lightning split the sullen clouds, baring for a moment a rose-colored sky, and as the trees by the wayside twisted and bowed in this great dance with the wind. I felt as if, in the splendor of all that tempest and song, we might just drive straight up into heaven itself. It was magnificent, a moment of pure, painful delight. A foretaste of the satisfied longings the music had put a voice to. And the beauty is that it was another person’s gift that had conspired with the very heavenlies to usher me into this suffocating explosion of joy, and, afterward, the deep, rumbling quiet of the knowledge of God’s love. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty incredible to me: that the Maker of the universe would create all these creators in his own image, and then go on revealing bits of himself through the medium of their art. The mighty weather that night, unfolded like a tapestry of omnipotence, made me long for heaven. But Andrew’s music stabbed me with the joy that perhaps heaven was longing for me. I thought about that night and what it meant to me when Andrew closed his album release show in Nashville during Hutchmoot with that same song. It seemed such a fitting image of the ‘Moot itself, and all that The Rabbit Room stands for. All of these wildly talented people, I kept thinking, lifting up their gifts for the love of God and the love of people. What could be more beautiful? Earlier that day, Sarah Clarkson and I had spoken on the art of subtext, the way that the best authors underpin their stories with ideals and graces that literally woo the reader, rather than preaching and proselytizing. Sarah brought up the point that the spiritually-minded writer is actually making a refuge with her work, creating a sacred space within which another soul can encounter God. Like a builder, the artist goes on making these places, filling the rooms with rare and beautiful treasures. And then with a holy self-forgetfulness, they pull the door to on the deep magic between God and another soul and tiptoe quietly away. I saw this very thing in action all weekend long at Hutchmoot. This essential humility coupled with a childlike joy in creation. It graced the meals at our tables; it spiced and seasoned our conversations. It was the noble spirit of the kingdom and the courtly dignity of broken people beautified by an unfathomable love. It was the reason Phil Vischer could stand up before a room packed with starry-eyed artists during the keynote speech and tell them they needed to basically crucify their own dreams—and get a standing ovation. Driving home through the green Tennessee hills after Hutchmoot, Philip and I asked each other: “What was your favorite part, the best moment that seemed to epitomize the whole weekend?” The car was quiet for a while as we both stewed on this question, raising in our minds doubtless a dozen possible answers. But in the end, it was the same thing, the same moment of grace: Saturday afternoon, sitting out under the tent, listening to Eric Peters give an impromptu, unplugged concert. The sessions were over, as was the gift of one of Evie’s legendary meals. I was feeling tired, my introverted self a little drained, and I had told Philip after lunch I thought I’d go find a quiet place to rest for a while and just not talk. But the moment Eric started to play, I sat down again and neither one of us moved a muscle—except only to draw our chairs out into the sunshine and throw back our heads to its warmth. I’m a huge fan of Eric’s music; I told him that Birds of Relocation was basically the soundtrack of my life for 2012. He gives himself in his songs without stint, and that is the very reason why they give such a resonant image of grace and the human heart. But there was something so kind, so generous, in that informal afternoon concert of his—when I knew that he was as tired as all the rest of us, and yet he stood there with his guitar taking requests for over an hour and pouring out living water by the pitcher-full. I felt my springs filling up as I sat there in the warm blessing of the sun, my heart renewed as no amount of ‘down time’ could ever hope to accomplish. It was something akin to prayer; a lovely blend of corporate and private worship. It was the Body of Christ, nourishing and being nourished. But most meaningful to me was the way that Eric would talk about his songs, about his own journey and the broken places out of which the music was born. In the most genuine way he told us we were not alone by telling us how God had met him in pain and darkness, not in spite of it. I tend to always be tripping over the idea that God is waiting for me to get my act together so we can get on with this Christian life. Eric reminded me, yet again, and in a way that I will not forget, that my brokenness is all I have to give to the world—that and the beauty of Christ’s redemptive, re-creative love, which is the very song the world is longing to hear. God doesn’t write novels or paint pictures or compose symphonies—but He makes men and women that do. Human beings have this amazing potential to tell each other the truth; to gather the glimpses of God entrusted to them individually and give them back to the world in flashes of story and color and song. All these reflections of Him cast into the world like the million tiny stars thrown from the heart of a sun-shot diamond. A million, million holy lamps burning within the sanctuaries of our art. I remember praying as I was getting ready for my sessions, feeling more than a little overwhelmed at the idea of speaking to a roomful of people who were all smarter and better educated and more articulate than I am. “Lord,” I said, “I am just so afraid that I’m going to give myself away.” I could almost feel the chortle of celestial laughter in the room. It warmed me to my bones. “Why, yes, my dear,” he chuckled back at my heart, “that is exactly what you are going to do. What else?” That was the essence of Hutchmoot for me this year. Strength in weakness; beauty for ashes. Men and women beloved of God—oh, so beloved of God—giving themselves away for each other. Broken bread and poured out wine and a Feast of which we’ve had only the least glimpse. But oh, what a glimpse it was. Photo by: NASA, Hubble Telescope.

[Editor’s Note: Some of you may remember meeting Jonny Jimison at Hutchmoot. You might have missed the fact that he draws comics—which is awesome. Here’s a look at one of his post-Moot comics. Visit his website for more of his work.]

[Editor’s Note: Thank you for the Hutchmoot reactions you’ve all been posting. I’ve tried to read them all and I’ve enjoyed each of them. Alyssa Ramsey sent this to me last night. She’s done a good job of capturing my own thoughts, so I thought I’d post it here. Thanks, Alyssa. –Pete Peterson] A few days ago I wrote a blog post reflecting on the Hutchmoot weekend. When I finished it and read back over my own words, it was like hoping for an Evie Coates feast but being served Vienna sausages and old socks instead. I had proved Pete Peterson right. At Hutchmoot 2011 he said, “The reader can easily hear the moment you stop telling the truth.” Those words had nagged at me as I attempted to put the experience into written form. I knew I was not telling the truth—at least not about this year. I was writing what was true a year ago, what I wished were still true, what I thought you would believe. The truth is, Hutchmoot was a battle for me this year. Not every moment, but some of them. The trouble wasn’t the planning, or the sessions, or the speakers, or the food. It certainly wasn’t the fellowship. It was that I expected you to be Jesus, and you were not. I want you to know I love you all. Many of you have become friends. And even those of you I haven’t met are brethren to me, dear ones with whom I share the kinship of Christ and rabbits. The time spent in your company was a deep pleasure and our conversations were a delight. But in the quiet moments when I faced my thoughts alone, the enemy assailed me. You don’t belong here. You’re a fraud, and they know it. They don’t want to talk to you, they’re just too polite to walk away. I sat in on Russ Ramsey’s Friday morning devotion and heard him say, “It doesn’t matter what others think of you. It doesn’t even matter what you think of you. Ultimately, what God thinks of you is all that matters” (from 1 Cor. 4:3-4). Yes! I thought. I knew it was true. I found momentary comfort in those words. Yet deep down I harbored the suspicion that God’s thoughts toward me needed to be proved by his saints. And so I set you up for failure. No community of humans can fill a soul’s cavernous longing. They can encourage you, affirm you, support and serve you, and point you toward your purpose. All of this you did. But even the most genuine, loving community will always fail to fill our deepest longings. It must. This is by God’s good design. In his opening remarks, Andrew Peterson read a quote from George MacDonald, part of which said: “In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter.” Community has limits because God will not let his children settle for less than himself. As far as I understand it, God often uses community to draw us to himself, but never to satisfy us. In many ways it is an avenue through which Christ reveals himself to us. But when it is asked to play a part that only Christ can fill, it becomes an idol. This is true of any community—a homeschool group, a sports team, a Bible study class, a band, a writers’ club, a family. These were never meant to substitute for Jesus, or even to supplement him. They were meant to be a fleshing out of divine character: the mind and body of Christ in action. It seems to me that the danger is in allowing a community to function as Christ rather than to demonstrate Christ. When we depend on it for our worth rather than letting it simply remind us what we’re already worth in Christ, we’ve stumbled. To ask any community to be our all in all, even unconsciously, is an injustice, a delusion, and a sin. But God is gracious. Because of his great love, he will allow the communities we idolize to leave us in our insecurities. As Phil Vischer said (if you took notes you can give me the exact quote), God cares far more about owning our hearts than about giving us our dreams—even dreams as small as inclusion and recognition among groups of admirable rabbit-humans. I haven’t told you this for the fun of a public confession. The thought of you reading it nauseates me. I still feel the need to assure you that when I spoke with you last weekend, my heart was full of love and admiration. That is true. But much of the time, the voices of insecurity and fear nibbled at the back of my mind, until in the post-Moot letdown they came raging to the surface. They roared in my ears as I wrote a dishonest essay. But louder still, another voice persuaded me that I’m not the only one—that someone besides me has wept more since Hutchmoot than they did during it. That the lies have chased others home as well. That someone else needs to remember that it doesn’t matter what others think of you. It doesn’t even matter what you think of you. Ultimately, what God thinks of you is all that matters. And what does he think? That you are the righteousness of God in Christ. Chosen and dearly loved. His radiant bride. So how did Hutchmoot change me this year? By not filling my deepest longing. By reminding me that no human being, even the most gracious and loving, will ever fill it. By leaving me only one option: Christ. To my fellow Hutchmooters: I demanded the impossible, and for that I ask your forgiveness. But you were a vessel of Christ’s love and discipline to me, so for that I thank you. From now on, can we be nothing more to each other than what Christ says we are? Because what we are is enough: fellow travelers, and a holy family, and a royal priesthood. And Jesus is King. [Photo by Mark Geil]

Here’s a look at the way we approached the stories of Joseph and Mary for my Christmas record:

Whew. The floors have been swept, the trash collected, the lights dimmed, and the doors locked. The Moot has adjourned for the year. I’m finally home and sitting on my couch, and I’m more than a little wonderstruck by it all. I’m so tired, but I’m so, so full of gratitude and satisfaction. Everything went just about as well as one could hope, and more often than not it went one better. I look forward to sharing the sessions in the form of posts and podcasts so that those who couldn’t attend can get a taste of what went on. But for right now, we’d like to hear from all of you. If you write a blog post of your own about your experience at Hutchmoot 2012, please link it in the comments here. If you aren’t a blogger, we still want to hear from you. So I’ll ask again what Stephen Trafton asked at the end of his Encountering Philippians performance on Sunday: You know you have been changed. How?

Travel safely from far and wide. Arrive in good cheer. Settle in and set your mind to good music, old stories, and lively conversation. We’ve got some surprises in store and I can’t wait for you to see what’s lined up. It’s going to be a mighty fine weekend. But wait, there’s more… Hutchmoot 2012 marks the launch of The Molehill: Volume 1. What’s The Molehill you ask? That’s a very good question. The short answer is that it’s a sort of Rabbit Room journal including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, recipes, and art by people like Walt Wangerin, Jr., Sally Lloyd-Jones, Justin Gerard, and G. K. Chesterton—in addition to each of the Rabbit Room contributors. But to give you a better idea of what this 300-page collection of unpublished work is all about, I offer the long answer in the form of my editor’s letter entitled “Say You, Say Molehill.” I can’t wait for you to see what we’ve cooked up. The Molehill will hit the streets on October 2nd and is available for pre-order in the Rabbit Room store. If you’re coming to Hutchmoot, there’s no need to pre-order; you can pick up a copy when you get here. “Say You, Say Molehill” by A. S. Peterson, Editor, The Molehill Several years ago a good friend, aspiring curmudgeon Jonathan Rogers, stabbed his bony finger my way, stepped onto his well-worn soapbox, and proclaimed: “It’s time the Rabbit Room stopped talking about culture and started creating it!” I’ve forgotten what happened next, but I’ll bet it involved either a waffle or an alligator. A few months later I started to think seriously about assembling a sort of Rabbit Room annual. We made our first go of it thinking that maybe we could get off as easily as dredging up old posts from the website, polishing them off, and binding them in a shiny cover. It would be like a greatest hits record, we thought—only in book form, and with old blog posts. This idea died a deservedly miserable death. But attempting that “greatest hits” idea did have its uses in the end. We went through all of our posts (over a thousand) and pulled out the cream of the crop—those we felt were the best written, or were the most important, or didn’t get the attention they deserved. And when I’d collected all those chart-toppers together, I began editing. That’s when the real flaw in the plan revealed itself. What we hadn’t considered was growth. The Rabbit Room has been around in some form since 2006, and in the four intervening years, we had all become better writers. When I looked at those old posts, what I saw was a herd of greenhorns trying to find their way—I saw underdeveloped ideas, poorly structured essays, horrific punctuation, a heck of a lot of adverbs, and a rat’s nest of aimless metaphors. I don’t suggest that we’ve polished away all those weaknesses (far from it), but I could see a definite progression. That was good news, right? Well, yes, but the bad news was that trying to beat a meandering four-year-old essay into shape didn’t seem to be a good use of my time, nor did it seem to be the best representation of the writers in the Rabbit Room community. It would have been like trying to convince people that Lionel Richie was still cool—a mission that’s simply not worth the effort no matter how profound “Say You, Say Me” seemed back in the ’80s. The writers on our masthead were in vastly different places from where they had been in the beginning—which was the point of the Rabbit Room all along. By locking arms and working in community, we had hoped to sharpen one another. It seemed to be working. Why take a step backward? So we scrapped that first attempt at a Rabbit Room annual. But like the declamation of a prophet, Jonathan Rogers’s words nettled me. When the time came to try again, we decided to stop looking backward. We didn’t want a collection of greatest hits. Had there really been any hits in the first place? I mean, does anyone want to get Jason Gray talking about Halloween again? Or read about Andrew Peterson musing on the intersections of Harry Potter and the Gospel? If you define a “hit” by its comment count, those were certainly our biggest singles. So instead of rehashing something old, we decided to furrow new ground. It was time to start “creating culture” as Jonathan might prophesy. Now let me stop right here and assure you that none of us have the highfalutin idea that the book in your hand constitutes “culture”—well, maybe Jonathan does, but he tends toward hyperbole when he’s dressed in sackcloth and standing on his box. Creating “culture” has, to me, the smack of pretense. I think it’s safe to say that none of the writers included in this book (not even Jonathan) write for the sake of altering the landscape of our society. However, I think we all hold a fundamental belief that good writing and good stories can alter the inner landscape of a reader. And those readers, in turn, will go on to constitute the culture we inhabit tomorrow. The distinction here may be pencil-thin, but it is, I think, important. A story, essay, poem, or illustration intent on “creating culture” is easily swept into a torrent of pretense. But a piece of work intent on honoring its reader (or viewer, or listener) is built on a surer foundation of care, love, and responsibility. So are we “creating culture?” That’s not for us to decide. You, our readers, will bear out that answer. We are in the business of “creating”; whatever impact our creation has on the culture is a matter best left in the hands of each one of you. So what is The Molehill exactly? Our initial idea was to settle on a theme and send out assignments. After all, a journal needs to feel cohesive, doesn’t it? And writers are notoriously fearful of being given carte blanche, most preferring a specific topic or theme to write on. But all our attempts to hammer out a theme produced little more than a list of specious titles like “Creativity and the Creative Soul: Mapping the Artist’s Inner Journey.” Okay, maybe they weren’t that bad, but trust me, they weren’t much better. So in the end, we threw the map out the window and forged ahead blindly. So be it. Let’s see what’s out there. I gave each of the Rabbit Room writers a loose, non-binding assignment based on what I perceived to be his or her strengths, and they took it from there. I even invited Hutchmoot alums Walter Wangerin, Jr., Sally Lloyd-Jones, Don Chaffer, and Justin Gerard to submit work, and to my great delight they agreed. While waiting for those pieces to come in, though, I wrung my hands and worried. How on earth would I be able to put together anything coherent from such a varied cast of characters? I foresaw the coming of a glorious train wreck, and I was tied to the tracks. Then the work started coming in. Walt Wangerin’s was first, and right away, he raised the bar. It was a ghost story. I read it immediately. I loved it. And then I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. Could we live up to the precedent his story had set? But then the rest started rolling in: a short story from Lanier Ivester—an elegant blend of O’Connor and Berry, yet wholly her own; a couple of amazing poems by Don Chaffer; a fascinating memoir from Matt Conner that was born out of tears, grief, and renewal; a trifecta of meditations by Sally Lloyd-Jones from her forthcoming book; a series of hand-drawn recipes from Evie Coates; the good stuff just kept coming. As the raw work came in and I started editing, unexpected shapes began to take form: parallel lines of thought, echoes, complementary ideas, over-arching themes. To my great surprise, an unlooked-for cohesion emerged. While many readers will most likely skip around as they read favorite writers or head straight for topics that interest them, the adventurous reader who begins on page one and proceeds diligently toward the end will, I think, be rewarded by the shape and flow of the journal as its themes arise and interact with one another. So set your mind at ease; what you hold in your hands is no mere collection of regurgitated Rabbit Room posts. While there are a couple of entries that have appeared in other forms, those have been greatly revised, expanded, and refined. Overwhelmingly, the works you’ll find in these pages are fresh and unpublished—All-Singing, All-Talking, All-Dancing. If you stand back and look at it, I suppose you could see this collection as a family photo. It’s a snapshot of a group of people and where they are at this moment in time, in their writing, in their lives, in their spiritual journeys, in their understanding of stories and songs and the world around them. This book is, you might say, an Ebenezer stone erected in the wilderness to mark the passage of a common people. It’s not an end point; it’s a signpost marking the ways we’ve gone. Whether those ways are right or wrong, good or bad, fine art or rough draft—we invite you to make those judgments on your own. N. T. Wright was here in Nashville not long ago and he told us that working for the Kingdom is something like being a stonemason. The architect gives us instructions, saying: make this stone in this particular way, and don’t ask why. And in faith we go about it. We grind and cut and measure with no idea what the purpose of the stone might be. And when we’re done, the architect sees the work and knows its proper use. He tells the strongman on the scaffold to hoist it up, and he tells the man with the mortar and trowel to fit it into place and secure it. And in the end we’ve all done our little parts and there’s a great cathedral that stands tall and blesses the land around it. Out of small efforts, the Architect builds great works. So here we are, an assembly of friends trying to hear the Architect’s voice. We haven’t set out to create a masterpiece. We’re just following instructions. Tolkien’s Niggle painted a leaf that became a tree. God knows what may become of this Molehill. The Molehill: Volume 1 will be released on October 2nd and is available for pre-order in the Rabbit Room store.

[Jonathan Rogers’s new biography of Flannery O’Connor, The Terrible Speed of Mercy, hits the streets today. Now available in the Rabbit Room store. Don’t miss this great podcast in which Jonathan and Andrew Osenga discuss Flannery O’Connor and her life.] I first encountered Flannery O’Connor’s fiction in a modern American literature course I took in college. Wise Blood, O’Connor’s first novel, was on the syllabus that semester, and I gave the book a week of dutiful attention. I found some of it funny and some of it trashy. The rest of it, I’m sorry to say, was simply lost on me. The course’s professor was our university’s writer-in-residence, a gruff old poet who translated Greek myths and snarled his way through lectures. (I am not kidding. To this day, whenever I think about Wise Blood, I see his twisted lip and bared teeth.) His delivery aside, those lectures on Wise Blood were some of the first bites of solid food I tasted as a reader. Among other things, he covered several of the themes in O’Connor’s writing that other Rabbit Room articles have explored: her faith, her understanding of grace, the purpose of violence in her fiction, and her fascination with what she called “the grotesque.” His lectures helped me begin to read O’Connor’s work with open eyes. I’ve been hooked ever since. (At this point, I think I’ve read all the fiction she published, with the exception of two or three short stories.) Jonathan Rogers has given us a similar gift (albeit with less growling) in his latest book, The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor. Jonathan says he wrote the biography “for all those people who have heard they’re supposed to be getting some spiritual meaning out of O’Connor’s stories but just can’t get there.” The book is an outstanding introduction to O’Connor’s life and work that combines exuberant storytelling with thoughtful literary analysis. Terrible Speed should be required reading for anyone who believes there is such a thing as serious Christian fiction. Flannery O’Connor’s childhood was marked by family tragedy. She was born in Georgia in 1925, an only child. Her father developed lupus when O’Connor was twelve; he died of the disease when she was sixteen. After college, she attended the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop, where she began working on what would become Wise Blood. At the age of twenty-five she was diagnosed with lupus and moved back home to the dairy farm her mother owned outside Milledgeville, Georgia. She would live there, producing two novels and thirty-two short stories, until her own death from lupus at age thirty-nine. Jonathan describes the contrast between Milledgeville society and the characters O’Connor wrote about in her fiction: “Flannery O’Connor and her mother…rose every morning for six o’clock prayers, then rode together to Sacred Heart Catholic Church for seven o’clock Mass. They sat in the same pew every day. “After Mass, the O’Connor women returned to the farmhouse, and Flannery sat down at the typewriter in the front room that used to be the parlor. There—every morning including Sundays—she spent four hours writing stories about street preachers, prostitutes, juvenile delinquents, backwater prophets, hardscrabble farmers, sideshow freaks, murderers, charlatans, and amputees while her mother tended to the business of the house and farm.” The book’s subtitle is “A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor.” As Jonathan notes in the introduction, “The story of Flannery O’Connor’s life is the story of her inner life more than her outer life.” To record O’Connor’s “spiritual biography,” Jonathan drew from O’Connor’s prodigious output of letters to her friends and readers, as well as her interviews and talks. These pieces reveal her sense of humor, as well as the degree of integration between her “theological vision” and her writing. The result is a biography whose pages chime with Flannery O’Connor’s unmistakable voice, as in this excerpt where she describes what Jonathan calls her efforts to communicate “the truths of the faith to a world that, to her way of thinking, had mostly lost its ability to see and hear such truths: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock–to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Many readers balk at the violence in O’Connor’s stories. The biography’s title, The Terrible Speed of Mercy, hints at the connection between O’Connor’s characters’ violent experiences and their readiness to accept God’s grace. The title comes from O’Connor’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away. At the novel’s climax, a reluctant young prophet named Tarwater hears the voice of God as he kneels in the dirt, consumed by a vision of “a red-gold tree of fire”: “Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy.” Jonathan summarizes O’Connor’s perspective on the use of violence in her fiction: “If the stories offend conventional morality, it is because the gospel itself is an offense to conventional morality. Grace is a scandal; it always has been.” Jonathan Rogers has given us something truly special in The Terrible Speed of Mercy: a portrait of a writer who was deadly serious about her art and at the same time devoted, heart and soul, to Jesus Christ. Flannery O’Connor endured great suffering, yet meditated “every day on the province of joy, preparing herself lest she be ignorant of the concerns of her true country.” The Terrible Speed of Mercy is now available in the Rabbit Room store.

Click here to read “The Story We Tell Ourselves Part 1.” In a conversation with a pastor friend of mine who is also a screenwriter, we talked about human nature, hypocrisy, and what makes for a good villain. “We reserve our harshest judgment for hypocrisy. We think hypocrites are weak and petty and so it’s hard for us to relate to them since we think we would never be one. And since a hero story is only as strong as its villain, a hypocritical bad guy won’t do. We won’t care about a hero’s story unless he faces a worthy enemy. The most compelling villains are driven by an ideal that  justifies everything they do, no matter how monstrous. In their own story, the villain sees him or herself as a hero, the champion of a righteous ideal.” This is what makes baddies like Christopher Nolan’s The Joker and Cormac McCarthy’s Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men so chilling and terrifying—they are idealists. Chigurh is arguably the character in the story with the strongest conviction of right and wrong. The purity of his devotion to his ethical ideal—twisted though it may be—is what makes him one of the most frightening villains in recent memory. This bears out in real life, too, in a world of terrorists who believe they are messengers of God and cruel despots who imagine themselves to be the saviors of the people they oppress. Hitler was convinced that he was doing the world a favor by zealously carrying out his final solution. The terrorists of 9/11 gave their lives to a cause they believed was righteous. Robert McKee explores these motivations in his book, STORY­ (considered by many to be the bible of screenwriting): “Human nature dictates that each of us will always choose the ‘good’ or the ‘right’ as we perceive the ‘good’ or the ‘right.’ it is impossible to do otherwise… The choice between good and evil or between right and wrong is no choice at all. Imagine Attila, King of the Huns poised on the borders of fifth-century Europe, surveying his hordes and asking himself: “Should I invade, murder, rape, plunder, burn, and lay waste… or should I go home?” For Attila this is no choice at all. He must invade, slay, plunder, and lay waste. He didn’t lead tens of thousands of warriors across two continents to turn around when he finally came within sight of the prize. In the eyes of his victims, however, his is an evil decision. But that’s their point of view. For Attila his choice is not only the right thing to do, but probably the moral thing to do. No doubt, like many of history’s great tyrants, he felt he was on a holy mission. Or closer to home: a thief bludgeons a victim on the street for the five dollars in her purse. He may know this isn’t the moral thing to do, but moral/immoral, legal/illegal often have little to do with one another. He may instantly regret what he’s done. But at the moment of murder, from the thief’s point of view, his arm won’t move until he’s convinced himself that this is the right choice. If we do not understand that much about human nature—that a human being is only capable of acting toward the right or the good as he has come to believe it or rationalize it—then we understand very little.” The terrifying truth that emerges in all of this—of particular interest to my friend both as a pastor and as a screenwriter—is the fact that monsters rarely recognize themselves as such, which means it is possible for any of us to become the fiend without ever realizing it. It all comes back to the story we are telling ourselves. In 1956, author Leon Festinger coined the term “cognitive dissonance” to describe the discomfort felt by a person who must hold two or more conflicting ideas at once. In his book When Prophecy Fails, he tells the story of a UFO cult that believed the end of the world would happen on a certain date. When the day came and went, the cultists, unable to dismantle everything they had believed, learned instead to accommodate it by telling themselves a new story in which they were “spared” in order to evangelize the lost. Aesop’s fable about the wolf unable to reach the grapes he desires is another classic example of the way cognitive dissonance invisibly shapes the story we tell ourselves. Faced with his inability to reach them, the fox tells himself that he didn’t want the “sour” grapes in the first place. I want the grapes/I can’t have the grapes proves to be too uncomfortable for the fox to hold in his mind, and so he pursues “dissonance reduction” by rewriting the story. The fox—and all of us like him—outfoxes himself, and in him we see how easy it is to become masters of subtle unknowing, not allowing ourselves to know certain things about who we are and what we want. (Worth noting, I think, is the fact that rather than knowing his own limitations, the fox in essence blames the grapes by later calling them “sour and undesirable anyway.” The Roman fabulist Phaedrus’ version of this fable closes with this pointed advice: “People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain would do well to apply this story to themselves.”) Grapes are one thing, but as the stakes get higher, the tales we tell ourselves get taller—and more destructive. I think this is especially true when it comes to our own hypocrisy. When we fail to live according to our own convictions, it’s a devastating blow to our idea of who we are. Sometimes it’s too much for us to know this, and so without realizing it we may choose not to. The ugliness of our own selfishness, the pettiness of our pride, the vulgarity of our lusts, the vindictiveness of our lack of mercy—when we stub our toe on the knowledge of our sinfulness, we more often than not start rearranging our mental and emotional furniture to accommodate it rather than calling the landlord in to remove it. We do this when we judge others, or when we cast ourselves as a victim in our story, or think of ourselves as enlightened martyrs on a stage of fools, blaming those around us as we shift the focus ever away from the log in our own eye. But it is always the flaw in ourself that we don’t see that most enslaves us, so that we will never know the freedom we restlessly long for as long as we choose blindness. In the shadows of our unknowing our brokenness binds us and carries us away into sadder and sadder stories. I met a young man once who left me a message after hearing my song “Remind Me Who I Am”. His wife was a stylist and hairdresser for a tour of one of the biggest names in secular music. It was an exciting and intoxicating opportunity that they were both excited about for her. But after several months on the road immersed in that lifestyle, she called her husband to say that she no longer wanted to be married. She felt too tied down and longed for independence. She told him that God wanted this for her and that it was God who was leading her to divorce him. This was a profound rejection that wounded the young man deeply. The God component was very confusing, too, since she told him that not only was she rejecting him as her husband, but God was too. He told me that “Remind Me Who I Am” was very meaningful as it helped reaffirm God’s love for him as he was healing. I was sad for him, but I was just as sad for the young woman. I doubt she ever imagined becoming the kind of person who would callously discard another human being like excess baggage, invoking God’s name to do it. I’m sure this was not the dream she dreamed for herself on her wedding day. Somewhere along the way her own unhappiness and the personal cost of marriage became more than she wanted to bear, and to escape it she had to betray herself, acting against her own cherished interests and beliefs, telling herself a story in which God—who is grieved by divorce—told her to end her marriage. How far will she run before the truth of what she’s done not only to her husband but also herself catches up to her? She will need great love and forgiveness in order to feel safe enough to come face to face with herself and be healed by grace. Presidential hopeful John Edward’s dramatic fall from favor is the stuff of bad daytime melodrama. His affair with a woman while his wife was dying of cancer is one of the great cautionary tales of our time. With his reputation and all that he devoted his life to now a desolation, when did he finally wake, surprised to find himself in this kind of story? Is this the man that he wanted to become? At what point did his pride and loneliness consume the good man he dreamed of being? Can that good man be recovered? It makes me think of the words the soon to be martyred Sir Thomas More shares with his daughter in the 1966 film A Man For All Seasons: “When a man takes an oath, he’s holding his own self in his hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then — he needn’t hope to find himself again.” I would add that if there is hope for any of us to be found again, it can be found in the supernatural grace and unconditional love that restored the prodigal son. In the stories of both the young woman and John Edwards we miss the point if we merely shake our heads and “tsk, tsk” them with contempt. I remember someone referring to Edwards as the worst kind of human being, “a snake.” But to demonize him or anyone is to make them a scapegoat for our own sin and refuse to know the truth about ourselves: that all of us are vulnerable to becoming the kind of monster we now judge. We can only judge from a position of self-righteousness, and self-righteousness just so happens to be the prerequisite blindness of a monster in the making. A villain lives in the shadow of our hearts, looking for the opportune moment to overthrow us when we are looking elsewhere. Pastor Andy Stanley has said that we need to always be asking ourselves a very important question, “a question that very few people pause and ask because it’s very threatening. The question is: ‘am I being completely honest with myself?’ Here’s what I know about you, because I know it about me, too: you are an expert at selling yourself on something that you really want. You may not be able to sell anything else in your life—you may be a terrible professional salesperson—but when it comes to selling yourself on something you really want, you are very, very good at this! And so we have to always ask, ‘am I being completely honest with myself…’” But even this may not spare us. It is commendable to look long and hard in the mirror for the villain in ourselves, but a mirror tells us only what we allow it to. No, what’s needed is a different kind of mirror altogether. I believe the mirror we need most has been given to us by God, in tandem with his word and the conviction of the Holy Spirit, in the people he has surrounded us with. I’m speaking of the mirror that arises from our deepest unions. My community, my closest friends, those whose authority I submit myself to, my family, my wife—it is the people that God has placed in my life who provide the truest reflection of my character. When I listen to them, their words and love become the guardrails to keep me from careening off the edge of my own life. The proverb goes that “the wounds of a friend can be trusted,” and so I try my best to give my friends permission to wound me with the truth, pointing out the ways I’m living inconsistent with what I believe.  In this way, they help me tell a better, truer story. For the past several years I’ve been grateful to have a mentor in my life who has loved me well, kindly wounding me with difficult truths about myself. Among other things he has helped me see that I’m an angry man. I used to say that I struggled with anger, or that sometimes I got angry, but George has helped me change my language and to understand that I’m simply an angry man. Period. Sometimes my anger expresses itself more clearly than other times, but it is more or less always there—even in the ways I control it! This understanding disabused me of a lie that I told myself and often believed: that I had overcome my anger because I hadn’t lost my temper in many years. Anger runs deep in my family experience, and having grown up in abusive circumstances, I determined that I would be different. And I was. I didn’t have angry outbursts like I witnessed when I was growing up, or if I did they were few and far between, and of course always justifiable. The older I got, the more I believed I had mastered the anger that ran through my family blood line. And in some sense I had. But the deeper truth was that I was still an angry man and that it found other ways to get out. I was at times judgmental, critical, demanding, controlling and always ever self-righteous. I didn’t want to know this about myself, but the truth always emerges. God lovingly confronted me as friends, family, and circumstances converged to help me see what was broken in me: the selfish tangle of ambition, lust, pride, and desire to control that stokes the fiery passions of my heart. I remember well my horror the day I woke to the realization that I had become—in my own way—the kind of man I never wanted to be. It is a difficult thing to look in the mirror and see the monster staring back at you. In the midst of my painful discovery I remember telling Andy Gullahorn that I felt like all of my sin was always leading me to this moment, this difficult season in my life. Andy, who has walked through his own trying seasons of brokenness and come out the other side a better man, spoke these healing words to me: “well I believe that it’s leading you to the moment beyond this moment.” I am now grateful for that season in my life and the way that it exorcised many devils in me. I’ve been spared of becoming the kind of man I never wanted to be. The deliverance is ongoing. At the end of the film “The Dark Knight”, The Batman says, “you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Choosing to be in transparent community with others who we give permission to tell us the truth—whether in mentorship, friendship, or matrimony—can feel like a kind of death. But it is a hero’s death in that it leads to the dismantling of the illusion of our own self-righteousness. Yet the greater story we believe as Christians is that death always leads to new life. In the community of our deepest unions we find ever-increasing freedom from our own brokenness that would otherwise enslave us. May God rescue us when we are our own worst enemies, and when—refusing to die to the delusions of our own bad storytelling—we “live” long enough to see ourselves become the villain we never wanted to be. May God ever grace us with loving truth tellers whose words like a lighthouse keep us from crashing on the rocks of our own jagged brokenness and guide us instead to safer waters and better adventures. And if we wake one day to find a monster in the mirror, may God surround us with people who will love us back from the edge of our own shame and restore us into fellowship, gently reminding us that we are being led to the redeeming moment beyond this moment. May ours be a Cinderella story where when the clock strikes midnight and the glittering illusion of our righteousness disappears we find we are loved not for who we dream of being, but for who we really are. Am I being completely honest with myself? Am I giving others permission to be a mirror in my life? Do I blame them when I don’t like what I see? These questions help unmake villains.

On September 18th Andrew Osenga releases his long-awaited concept album, Leonard the Lonely Astronaut. On the same day Jonathan Rogers will release his spiritual biography of Flannery O’Connor, The Terrible Speed of Mercy. What happens when these two worlds collide? Everything that rises does indeed converge. Pre-order Leonard the Lonely Astronaut and get a 3-song acoustic sampler. All pre-orders of The Terrible Speed of Mercy will be signed by the singer—I mean the author. Flannery O’Connor and the Astronaut from The Rabbit Room on Vimeo.

I write this from a seat in the waiting area of Heathrow Airport. My flight is delayed. I find it best to take these things sitting down, with a cup of coffee, and some means of writing. Pret-A-Manget supplied a cappuccino, my faithful little laptop the means to write, and here I am to scribble until my gate finally opens. The post that I’m burning to write is the one (or three) I have all ablaze in my mind about my days on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. But I pause as I begin, struck by the vast differences between the utterly remote reaches of Skye, and the place in which I find myself at present. Here, countless faces bob round me in a waiting room, accents and loudly-spoken annoyances swirl and ebb, the flight screens blink their constant departures. I’m solidly back in the indoor realm of modern day travel, with its swift flow of talk and time. You might think that in here, my two short days in the wildlands of Skye would seem almost not to have occurred. Or at very least, rather irrelevant. But au contraire. Right here, right in this skinny airport seat of navy vinyl, with pop music thrumming in the shop nearby, I can still taste Skye. Breath its calm. Get a bit giddy at thought of the walk down to the shore. For Skye, my friends, is now a place of its own at the center of my heart. Once in a long, rare while, I encounter a place, and a time within that place, whose splendor carves out a room within me. It crafts a space in my soul that is both memory and at the same time, a concentrated presence. Places such as these – a nook in the heart of the mountains, a strip of certain shore by a northern sea, or even a well-known, weathered old home- come to me with a physical presence so vivid I am able to know it as I would a friend. In Skye, I found that friendship. And I think a great part of it was the rightness of it all, the way the lines and colors of the sea and moors feel almost unspoilt by sin. The way the hills lift their shoulders and closed-eye faces in such unflinching solemnity, while the sea is a sprite around them, restless, merry, and never the same mood twice. The quiet of the air is perfect. The wind is an ever-changing song. The beauty requires so very much seeing, such a focus of eye and mind that time suddenly expands. It’s almost like slipping out of chronos for a day or two’s sojourn in a long-houred world of tea in the mornings and long, long walks throughout the day, and the wind wuthering (isn’t that a lovely word?) around the eaves. I stayed in a room with one window gazing down to the sea, and one up the long fields to the row of farmer’s weathered homes. That room was in the home of a woman who went quite swiftly from hostess to friend. Her welcome and grace and friendship were the foundation of my time. Just look at that tea and shortbread for greeting. On the way back, my friend dropped me in one of the villages so I could have a wander, and then walk the long way home through the heather fields, through the farms of “Lower Breakish” and up the road where the sea glimmers a line in the distance. I knew I had a good dinner ahead of me (“pudding” was sticky toffee, thank you very much), so when a local raised his eyebrow at my intention to walk all the way back, I didn’t even flinch. Why should I? I walked right through the staidness of those heather furred hills – heard the great quiet of the water and then its sudden change of mood. I rifled through the gem and gold and treasure chest of fields near the ocean, crammed with so many flowers and grasses and trees burgeoning in the wet air that it felt like a magic island. And I knew the great, vast freedom of air unfettered by all the noises of modern life. Well. That’s about all I can say for now, and I need to go start worrying about my delayed flight. (Because that will do so very much good, right?) I hope you can taste, even the slightest, edge-of-the-tongue tang of what I knew in Skye. Because we should all have such worlds in our hearts. Over and out from Heathrow…

Children have a strong sense of humility about themselves. It enables them to believe that there is someone big out there that can help them Gina Bria—The Art of Family When I heard about Rain for Roots, a new children’s music CD from Sandra McCracken, Katy Bowser, Ellie Holcomb, and Flo Paris, I was inspired. Before I heard a single song, even before they released any music, hope bloomed in my heart. These are fantastically talented women and mothers, and the words “Rain for Roots”—a powerful metaphor—made me think of Emily Dickinson and how the right words, strung together, can make magic. Thankfully, blessedly, even magically, Rain for Roots was worth hoping for. The songwriters collaborated with celebrated children’s author Sally Lloyd-Jones, and the result is a gift, like a ladybug, or a robin’s nest, simple and perfect. I am a huge fan of Sally Lloyd-Jones, both as a gifted artist and storyteller and as a champion for children, and with lyrics pulled from the pages of Lloyd-Jones’s Hug-a-Bible, Rain for Roots brilliantly succeeds at the formidable task of speaking the language of children. First, every song is pregnant with questions. All parents know that questions are a child’s first language, and Sally’s words meet children right where they are. Who made everything? Who died and came alive again? Why did he come? Who heard Daniel when he prayed? Who chose someone really small to fight a giant nine feet tall? Children want to know, and the questions in the lyrics will captivate and entrance (if my four-year-old is any indication), while quietly teaching them how to think about God. As important as the questions are the songs. They are short, and the melodies are simple and beautifully singable. This may be the album’s greatest achievement. It is no small feat to take someone else’s words and knit them into a beautiful song, but Rain for Roots does it again and again. Ms. Lloyd-Jones is a master of her craft, and her words are lively and rhythmic without any fuss or wordiness. But as the women behind Rain for Roots plied their skills and musical intuition to the text, real songs, worthy of children, came to life. The production is simple with a folky elegance, often sounding like moms and dads singing together with guitars and tambourines and the occasional pedal steel guitar, with small children at their feet occasionally singing along. McCracken produced the project with a deft touch and a bent towards that family feel but with enough light production changes to keep things musically interesting, like the angelic background vocals that appear on “Moses.” But even so, on songs like “Moses,” “Jesus Loves Zaccheus,” and others, the strong melodies are the stars around which everything else revolves. And I never tired of the presence of the children within the songs. In one of my many favorite moments, at the conclusion of “God Makes Everything,” Sandra’s daughter Carter (who had been singing along all through the song) says “Yaaaay!” along with a smattering of adult applause. Then Sandra asks “You want to do it again?” and Carter replies, “No, not right now.” That’s lovely, and not what you’d expect to hear on a kids’ CD, and it’s another reason why I loved Rain for Roots. When they do ramp up the production on the closing song, “Noah,” the drums, guitar tone, and gang vocal simmer into a little folk-gospel jam. I appreciated the lift from the quieter production, but it was again the melody that gripped me. Tied to the simple truth that “God’s the one…who does just what he says he’ll do,” it’s the kind of song you roll the windows down for. You’ll want to turn it up and sing loud, with or without your kids in the car. If we let them, children keep us honest. They keep us sincere, they keep us grounded in the moment, and they keep us aware of our own need of a savior. I love writing songs for kids because music can reach down into the soul of those little people and shine light on the beauty they already possess. Rain for Roots does this by raising big questions and giving big, foundational answers in happily memorable melodies. It points to Jesus as Lord of All, and encourages our little ones to see themselves right alongside Moses and Noah and Zaccheus and Daniel, within the great story of God’s redemptive plan. They may not put it that way for a long time, but that’s exactly what’s happening. With such an outpouring of skill matched with love and purpose, Rain for Roots is a treasure for families with small children. It lives up to its name, and I’m so thankful for this simple yet deep addition to the canon of music written for, and worthy of, children. [Rain for Roots is available in the Rabbit Room store.]

By the time I was a freshman in college, my Dad had been dismissed from the position of Senior Pastor at four separate churches. This is a hard fact for me to admit. It was even harder living through it. But I did, and miraculously, so did my faith. A few years ago, I started trying to write a book about how it all happened but it’s turned out to be much harder writing than I ever expected. And yet I believe I’m called to do it. Saying it that way sounds so pious to me, but I know no other way to say it. I don’t always believe it either, but there have been a few holy awakenings scattered along the path which help remind me of the truth. The most recent began on a weekend last September, during Hutchmoot. John and I were sharing a vacation house with three other couples and ended up sleeping in the kids’ room on separate twin beds. There was a skylight directly above my head, and just before the sun rose that morning, it began raining. I’m a light sleeper, so the steady drizzle woke me up. I lay on the bed watching raindrops splash, scurry, and drag down the glass, and I thought about an assignment we’d been given the day before, during a planning meeting with the rest of the Hutchmoot staff. We were discussing an upcoming storytelling session. The idea was to open up the floor and let people share their stories, but in case everyone shied away from the microphone, a few of us were to have a tale in our back-pockets ready to go. To stay casual, the stories were supposed to be lighthearted and funny. Well, that certainly limits my participation, I thought to myself, and in my head the voice of Anne Shirley concurred, “I prefer to make people cry.” Though I knew I wouldn’t be participating in the storytelling session, it was early morning and I was in a house full of sleeping friends with nothing else to do, so I silently readied a familiar sad story knowing that for the time being it would go no further than the walls of our room. An hour passed while I thought of two more stories and a way to connect all three pieces together. Hmm, I thought, maybe that’ll be an essay someday. Then, right before I got out of bed and started the day, a possible title, originating from a familiar Bible passage, popped into my head. A few weeks after Hutchmoot, I was working on my memoir in a burst of inspiration. I’d finished a couple of chapters when that germ of a title, no longer content to stay in its essay jar, popped up its head again. It gradually floated to the top of the page where my book outline lived, and I decided it might work as the title for my book, but I never shared it with a soul. Later on, I typed out the Bible verses containing the title, which I envisioned as the epigraph, onto a fresh, blank page. Months passed and my initial writing fervor began to wane. The stories I’ve shared in the book can be emotionally taxing to revisit, so there are times when I’ve had to step back from it for a while. Then there are other times when the writing seems to be going well, but my family needs my attention, so I have to climb down from the mountains of my memory, and it can take a few days to gather the time and energy required for a return trek. When I back away for too long, I begin questioning the value of the writing. I sometimes see myself as an archaeologist and wonder what I it is I’m hoping to find underneath all the dirt from my past. What if there’s really nothing down there, I ask myself. What if you dig and dig and dig and still come up empty-handed? Isn’t it best to leave some things buried? Part of me wants to say yes, and lay this shovel down, but on Memorial Day, God reminded me that my life is his story and he wants me to understand it as much as possible. Even if no one else ever reads it, even if I dig up the same old bones as every other writer, he’s put the shovel in my hand, so the best thing I can do is keep digging. It was Memorial Day weekend when God woke me up again, quite literally this time, and called me back to the writing of my book. I was staying with my parents while my husband and eldest child had gone to Beach Camp. It was Sunday. No one had to rush off to work, and the kids were sleeping in. Though my awakening was startled and sudden, the house was completely quiet. I awoke with a vivid memory that I felt compelled to write down. The timing of this particular memory didn’t make sense to me, but the compulsion to write about it was familiar enough that I obeyed and pulled out my laptop. The scene in my head was a sad one: I was barely fourteen and we were moving to a new church in a new town. I didn’t want to relive it, but I knew it was a scene that belonged in my book, so I took it down as best I could. I mourned as I wrote; twenty-year-old tears rose to the surface, anxious for release. It was cathartic, but it also left me feeling raw. I got ready for church, hoping the feeling would fade, but as I put on my sundress, I began to feel self-conscious about the tattoos it made visible, which would be seen by everyone in Mom and Dad’s small Baptist church. An old, familiar need—impressing church people so they would like Daddy—resurfaced. To make matters worse, it was the Sunday before Memorial Day; Dad was sure to pull out his patriotic script, and I was sure to feel twelve years old again. Then there were my kids, who aren’t exactly used to traditional Sunday mornings and were acting whiney. Honestly, I can’t believe we even made it to the church without having a major fight on the way. We sang hymns I didn’t remember, and for the most part the kids sat quietly. No one stared at my tattoos, at least not that I could see. Then the kids were dismissed and Dad took the stage. His liturgy continued in its usual manner for about fifteen minutes, and then it happened. It was an aside, not part of the main message at all, perhaps even thrown in on the fly, but Dad alluded to my passage, the one I’d written down months before as my epigraph, and then he actually spoke aloud the three words I’d chosen for the title of my book. I’m not ready to share that title yet, but what Dad said next was just as wonderful. “It’s good to remember things,” he told the small crowd, and my eyes filled with tears. It was one of those rare moments when none of the tears spilled over and onto my cheeks, but their very presence served as witness, to me, of a holy encounter. “We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence…” says Annie Dillard in the first essay of her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and I’m struck by the possibility that I spend most days wakened only in the physical aspect of my being, while my spirit slumbers on inside me. What does it take for these Lazarus ears to hear? How many times must Jesus call out my name, and why can’t I make it through the rest of my days, without doubting the reality of his voice? Behold my microscopic faith. Yet, God mercifully continues to call. May the eyes of my heart flutter open just in time; may the full weight of his gaze falling directly onto me be itself the sun that wakes my spirit for eternity.