What are you looking for?

It’s getting close to Easter. I spent the day tweaking last year’s slideshow for the Resurrection Letters tour, removing adjectives here, clarifying ideas there, adding a new song for good measure. I turned on the stereo and listened to the songs while I collated the lyric sheets in a three-ring binder. I dusted off the bouzouki so I could relearn the part to a Jill Phillips song. Right now my living room looks nothing like it would look if Jamie and the kids were home. There’s an empty pizza box on the table; my luggage is in the middle of the floor where I plopped it when I got home three days ago; guitar cases lie open and the guitars that go with them are leaning against chairs and walls. The piano light is on, the bench is pulled back just enough to be welcoming. Today, my house is not a place for homeschooling and piano lessons. It’s a place for preparation. All this fuss, because Saturday night eight of us will have traveled hundreds of miles to stand on a stage before the saints and sing to them of glory. We’ll sing to them of the dark day when Jesus died, and the bright morning when he took up his life again, and that is not something we take lightly. Yes, we’ll laugh plenty, we’ll watch movies on the bus, we’ll debate the lasting relevance of Wilco versus Debussy (that actually happened on the last trip), and we’ll stress over soundcheck. But when it comes to the concert itself, we hope to do more than just play a set. We hope to create an opportunity for us all to encounter the Resurrection story. I hope you’ll shiver at Judas’s treachery and come out of your seat at Christ’s victory. I hope you’ll leave with a renewed awe for Jesus of Nazareth and what he did, and what he is doing. I missed the Song of the Day this week, so I wanted to post one of my favorites from the RL tour. This arrangement of an old hymn text was written by Andy Gullahorn, sung by Jill Phillips on her album Kingdom Come. The musical lift after the bridge, when Jill sings, “Praise the Lord,” gets me every time. It’s called “Man of Sorrows.”https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/ManofSorrows.mp3 MAN OF SORROWS Man of Sorrows! what a name For the Son of God, Who came Ruined sinners to reclaim. Hallelujah! What a Savior! Bearing shame and scoffing rude, In my place condemned He stood; Sealed my pardon with His blood. Hallelujah! What a Savior! Guilty, vile, and helpless we; Spotless Lamb of God was He; Full atonement can it be? Hallelujah! What a Savior! Lifted up was He to die; “It is finished!” was His cry; Now in heaven exalted high. Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! When He comes, our glorious King, All His ransomed home to bring, Then anew His song we’ll sing: Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Note: This is from his classic book Orthodoxy; the chapter, The Suicide of Thought taken from a larger paragraph discussing the Will. All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. (John) Davidson, are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else…Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses…It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense. Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold, creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffee with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called “The Loves of the Triangles”; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which in some ways is the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.

There are ways of seeing truth that you find and there are some that find you. An illustration found me, inevitably, one day as I prepared to teach my children about the unrivaled, creative power of God. I commend it to you. Get out some blocks such as children use to make houses and towers. Leave these alone on an otherwise bare table. Call up a clever child and say “Make something.” When the child makes something, a little house most likely, you thank him and ask him to stand aside. You tell him that it’s good, and you invite the compliments of other children. “Very creative.” “You’ve made something very nice here.” Then you knock all the blocks off the table and you point at the void where the blocks were. “Make something again,” you say.  The kid will be puzzled, or laugh. You repeat, “Make something.” You thank the child and ask him to sit down and the lesson teaches itself after that. Questions flow easily, like “Who can make something out of nothing?” Soon you have taught your way through the theology of the power of God and the principle of sub-creation. It is an effective illustration, and the children see more with their eyes than they can hear with their ears –and the truth is dazzling. There are many themes you can develop from there. Who is original? Well, God is. Who is derivative? Well, man is. We recently were blessed with our third child and we named him Micah because of the meaning of the name. Who is like Yahweh? The answer is a silence as empty as a bare and blockless table. Who is like our God? Who can stand against him? To whom can he be compared? He is absolutely holy –set apart. He is the elusive Other of all our regenerated longings, the earliest Enemy of our rebellion. This truth –properly considered– fills us with appreciation for the incarnation, helps us understand the mystery of the church as a mystery, and gives to our thankfulness an astonished aspect. It puts the lie to our man-centered worldviews, embarrasses us in our pride, and informs our art. Informs our art –how? Because we know that we are sub-creators. We are reflectors of a light we did not speak into being. So we are not original. However, we are unique –not as creators but as creatures. For we are becoming amazing art ourselves, the workmanship of the Father –so there is no room for boasting. There is, I think, room for appreciating our own art. As Lewis said, “If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself.” I think it is this attitude that informs the Rabbit Room’s spirit. That is, positive reviews of what is worth considering, appreciating, and receiving (as opposed to consuming). The exclusive glory of God, which teaches us to abandon idols, ought to work in us a delight in, and appreciation for, God’s holy work –his people. That can be extended, I believe, to the sub-creations humbly made for the glory of God and the joy and service of God’s creatures. I don’t think that this means we have to approve of every piece of utilitarian, pseudo-fiction drivel printed by zealous evangelists with little appreciation for beauty. But I do think that we are called to charity, something the Rabbit Room is notorious for, in my view. My own critical nature has been softened by my interaction here. But approving what is superior, while useful and helpful, also carries some significant risks in the area of pride. We have no status of our own that gives us standing with God. This is the heart of the Gospel. This applies to our own sub-creative art and to our view of what we may consider our refined taste (easy things to be proud about). So let’s point each other to excellent things worthy of our attention. Let’s add to the beauty by inventive and humble sub-creation. But mostly let’s remember our Creator, remember that we are dust, and that our life is a vapor. God is interested in his own glory, and we ought to be too. This is a happy thing. We may as well be pleased with it.

One of my favorite books is Charles Finney’s Faith. Finney was a fiery evangelist who had a very low backslider rate due to using the Law in its proper place – as a means of convicting those outside of Christ. Here’s an excerpt: The visible Christ embodied the true Godhead (Col 2:9). He is the way to God because He is the true God and the Eternal Life and Salvation of the soul. Many seem to understand Christ in this role as nothing more than a teacher of a system of morality, by the observance of which we may be saved. Others regard this role as only implying that He is the way in the sense of making an atonement and thus rendering it possible for us to be forgiven. Still others understand this language as implying not only that Christ made an atonement and opened up a way of access to God through His death and mediation, but also that He teaches us the great truths essential to our salvation. Now all this, in my understanding, falls infinitely short of the true spiritual meaning of Christ and the true spiritual significance of His role as the Way…He did not say, “I came to open the way,” “I came to teach the way,” or “I came to call you into the way,” but “I am the way” (John 14:6). Do you know Christ by the Holy Spirit as the Living Way? Do you know Christ as a personal acquaintance? Or do you know Him only by report, by hearsay, by preaching, by reading, and by study? Do you know Him as in the Father and the Father as in Him? Have you had this revelation? And when He has been revealed to you as the True and Living Way, have you by faith personally entered the Way? Do you abide steadfastly in it? Do you know by experience what it means to live and move and have your very being in God? Do not be deceived. He who does not spiritually discern and enter the Way, he who does not abide in it to the end, cannot be saved. See to it, then that you know the way to be saved, to be justified, to be sanctified. See to it that you do not mistake the way and take some other way… Christ in His own person is the Way. His own life living in and united to you is the Way and the only Way. You enter this Way by faith. Works of faith result from and are a condition of abiding in this Way, but the Way itself is the indwelling, living, personally embraced Christ, the “true God and eternal life” (1John 5:20).

A couple of weeks ago, I spent my Wednesday lunch hour listening to Irish theologian and philosopher Peter Rollins–described by my friend David Dark who put together the event as “redemptively provocative”–talk to the small group assembled around the tables in a private dining room at the Vanderbilt Divinity School about his three books, How (Not) to Speak of God, The Fidelity of Betrayal, and The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales. Later that afternoon, as Pete’s words were swirling around in my brain, challenging my assumptions and forcing me to think about what and why I believe, I was reading Walter Wangerin’s Ragman and Other Cries of Faith and came across his essay on preaching. Wangerin, whose writing I was first exposed to here in the Rabbit Room, had this to say: “It is not insignificant that my first apprehension of the love of God was granted in an experience with my father. Nor is it generally uncommon that God is apprehended in experience. Nor, in fact, can the divine and human meeting happen any other way. God is not a God of the pulpit, though the pulpit proclaim him. He is a God in and of the histories of humankind.” “Despite what we may think, and despite the freedoms we experience in so many areas of our culture, we remain, where religion is concerned, a people of the priest. By those singled out for the office we meet and perceive our God: the meeting is a conscious desire; the perception is an unconscious shaping; the consequence, except the priest be careful, is the contraction of God and then God’s abstraction from the whole of life… Therefore, the shape of preaching most shapes our God. And what is the shape of so much preaching today? Why, it is the shape of the classroom: teaching. And teaching is always (in our consideration) one step removed from experience and from the “real.” It is an activity of the mind. It prepares for what will be; or it interprets what has been; it is separated from both. The God who is met in doctrines, who is apprehended in the catechesis, who is true so long as our statements about him are truly stated, who is communicated in propositions, premise-premise-conclusion, who leaps not from the streets, nor even from scriptural texts, but from the interpretation of the scriptural texts – that God is an abstract, has been abstracted from the rest of the Christian experience.” “[W]hat, for heaven’s sake, is the incarnation, if it doesn’t announce God’s personal immersion in the events, the bloody events, the insignificant and humble common events, the physical and social and painful and peaceful and daily and epochal events of the lives of the people? In their experience? And isn’t the coming of the Holy Spirit the setting free of that immersion, so that it be not restricted to any sole place, time, or people, but breathes through all experience and temples in every faithful breast? Of course. Of course. It is not hard to argue the immanence of God. Why, it is one of our doctrines. One of our doctrines. There’s the sticking point. So long as it remains a doctrine alone, a truth to be taught, immanence itself continues an abstraction – and is not immanent. God abides not only in the church, but in the books in the church, and in the minds that explain the books, and in the intellect. What then, Priests? Preachers, what shall we do that the people’s perception of God not be so much less than God himself? Make something more of our preaching. Allow the preaching itself a human – and then a divine – wholeness: that the whole of the preacher be presently active in proclamation, the whole of the hearer invited to attend, and God will be seen as God of the Whole. Or, to rush the point: tell stories.” So, as Frederick Buechner cautions us under the entry “Stories” in Whistling in the Dark: “If the God you believe in as an idea doesn’t start showing up in what happens to you in your own life, you have as much cause for concern as if the God you don’t believe in as an idea does start showing up. It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to keep in constant touch with what is going on in your own life’s story and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others’ lives. If God is not present in those stories, then you might as well give up the whole business.” #FrederickBuechner #PeterRollins #Stories #WalterWangerin

I have a truly distinguished acoustic guitar, decades old. The depth of its face reminds me of the late afternoon sun on an autumn field of round bales, scraped and scarred here and there, like exclamations, the quality of look and tone deepened by scores of years of living life in God-knows-what sorts of places. Dingy, drunken bars. Backseats of ancient cars. Dim lights, thick smoke, and ashes of love at bluegrass festival campsites. Several years ago a guitar-collecting friend rang my phone. He said, “I have the guitar with your tone.” He was right. He brought this wood-gold chalice to my house and I checked it against my best. The old warhorse won hands-down, no contest. All my best guitars sounded two-dimensional and this one was running over with transcendent tone. I finally held in my hands an instrument that gave me sublime timbre, every time, for the price of a pick-stroke. It was a grand piano, especially dropping the sixth string down to D. It could play at a whisper, or thunder out bluegrass rhythm, and all the varied shades and nuances of tone were definitively within reach. Six years have gone by and I still love the thing. I don’t mean “I like it.” I love the tone. I’ve stopped looking for guitars – acoustic guitars, anyway. This is the one for me in every way, and its marks, scratches, and finish cracks are part of its mystery and magnificence. The signs of its long life give it character, uniqueness, individuality. In a word, personality. Some guitars are sluggish; they don’t obey immediately, and they can be frustrating to play. Others are responsive; the note pops out and feels right, with depth, clarity, meaning – immediately. Instant response is what I’ve looked for in a guitar all these years. This piece of wood is just so responsive and…willing. It trusts me – and obeys. And because of that instantaneous, singing tone it gives me, I delight in using it for nearly everything. This guitar’s reward for being so sensitive to my touch is simply that it gets played all the time. The instrument is joyful in that honor, knowing that all the rough-and-tumble of spinning through fire, smoke, and songs, being bounced around on dirt roads in long-decayed cars, and even sitting uselessly under someone’s bed for years, was just preparation to become what it is now – a loved, cherished instrument, royally adorned with jeweled scars, perfectly fulfilling the purpose for which it was created.

I’ve known Katy Bowser for several years, and am always struck by her brightness of disposition. She’s got this classy, Golden Age kind of quality to her, and the music she makes with her husband Kenny Hutson is the same.  At a retreat with Charlie Peacock several years ago Katy told me she had written a book of poetry. I immediately had a long list of questions for her: How did she find a publisher? How long had she been writing? What kind of poetry? Does she have copies of her book with her? Will she sell me one? When she gave me her book, I was humbled to discover that she wasn’t one of those writers who writes just for the dream of publication, or for notoriety, or for money. Her little book, you see, was handmade. The pages were lovingly bound in a strip of patterned fabric. This was a collection of poems written by someone compelled to decorate the world with beautiful things. And that’s just what Katy does. I’m glad she agreed to write a piece for the Rabbit Room, and I hope it’s not her last. –The Proprietor I ran into Andrew Peterson at Vanderbilt Divinity School the other day.  We were there to hear a panel discussion on Flannery O’Connor by a group of artists who had performed a benefit the evening before for Andalusia, Flannery’s homeplace in Milledgeville, GA. It’s always pleasant to run into Andrew, particularly as it often feels that he’s a couple of steps ahead of where I’d like to be on a few projects.  Any time a person I know personally finishes writing an entire book, let alone a series, they develop a certain mythical quality to me. I’m forty-odd pages and a rough outline into one, and am just amazed at the notion of somebody finishing that particular race.  When I went to my first marathon (at twenty five years old) I couldn’t help but yell “YOU’RE AMAZING” at the runners until I was hoarse.  If I were to do that while Andrew was writing, it might break his concentration.  I did tell him that I was enjoying the Rabbit Room, and he offered me the immediate assignment of writing about the panel discussion–it seems there’s a perceived shortage of female contributors in the bunch? Some of my favorites were present at the panel.  I knew half of them, which made for a fun time, as they chatted and consider some favorite things.  Minton Sparks, storyteller extraordinaire.  Julie Lee, songwriter and visual artist- my husband Kenny and I were in her band for a couple of years.   Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler from Over the Rhine, with whom my husband Kenny currently plays.  Mary Gauthier rounded out the group.  She’s one of my new favorites to listen to, whether singing or talking.  The show at Mercy Lounge the night before meant that all of the artists had been palling around and having a good time, there was potential for a well-oiled existing conversation. The difficulty in writing about the discussion is that it didn’t much develop as a discussion. Had these artists been left alone in the corner of Rumours Wine Bar for a couple of hours, the discussion would have been more natural–especially with such a thoughtful group of artists.  The medium of conversation served to stunt the flow of thought.  Of course a moderator has to have a prepared set of questions–what if the panelists aren’t talking?  The difficulty is that there were no such difficulties, and little direction was really needed–these panelists interacted so naturally.  Things felt stilted at times, and we made ninety degree turns away from roads we were happily meandering down. The talk began with a comment about Flannery’s dark themes and use of violence.   There was some wondering on the moderator’s part about why dark things can make people laugh in Flannery’s stories. Minton Sparks (a storyteller with a dark streak) answered.  The night before she had performed stories about adultery, gossip, suicide and murder in such a way that we were all howling.  Who can listen to a story about the local gossiping “hens” as Minton struts and cackles and pecks and scratches without seeing the humor in it? Minton pointed out that if you tell a dark story over and over, it develops a mythic quality and allows people to laugh. Karin added an observation that joy and suffering occupy the same part of the brain.  I thought, what a mercy.  If they were farther from each other…  My own experience confirms the thought–it’s so kind that sweet joy lingers near the edges of hard sorrow. Along these lines, Mary Gauthier brought out one of my favorite thoughts of the afternoon. (She did that a few times.) Mary likes to go dark–as she said, she “goes for the spook.  Swamp air and poisonous snakes”.  She warned, though, that we don’t go to the dark places gratuitously.  We go there because the dark places make us see the light shine brighter.   Adding wonderful to wonderful, Mary quoted Woody Guthrie.  Our job, she said, is to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.  Silly Katy, thinking that her pastor made that up himself when he prayed that. The discussion moved to the importance of a writer’s region.  I think most all of the panelists were reluctant to talk on the subject.  Clearly region plays into all of the artists’s work–the South and Appalachia in Julie’s work, the South in Minton and Mary’s, Ohio in Over the Rhine’s. I was mulling over Eudora Welty’s idea in my head, that she could write about either a place she knew intimately or a place she’d never been, nothing in between.   Yet I gathered they all understood there’s more than one answer to that question. As an example of writing outside of one’s own region, Jewly Height (the moderator) asked Karin to quote a line from their song “Jesus in New Orleans”:  “The last time I saw Jesus I was drinking bloody marys in the south”.   Linford jumped in, pointing out that they were not trying to make a literary point with the line.  The song did in fact start with a good bloody mary in the south, and “the literary stuff came later”.   Good encouragement as writer to live, and see what comes of it.  Jewly asked Over the Rhine about their southern ties, and Linford graciously conceded a bit of south-jealousy.   Karin pointed out with a grin that Cincinnati is southern Ohio.  Gracious guest that she is, she pointed out that the south has a lovely, nurtured tradition of storytelling for working out their issues and “Northerners go to therapy for it”. Along the lines of “writing regionally,” Julie Lee, a transplant from Maryland with roots in Pennsylvania who lives in Nashville, mentioned that she’s tried on different hats in this respect.  Julie sounded halfway apologetic about this “trying on,” as though perhaps it was inauthentic.  I was in Julie’s band for a couple of years, and know her and her songs pretty well.  I would like to vouch for her in this department.  The reason that Julie can pull this off is that she has such great empathy. She gets inside a character’s head and considers life from their point of view.  Good friends out fishing, a community in Pennsylvania losing two little boys, Maybelle Carter home raising babies while A.P. is on the road. This empathy of Julie’s strikes me as a case for why a writer who is a Christian ought to have a leg up on writing well, all other things being equal.  (I suddenly feel as though I’ve painted a target on my back.  But I mean it.)  A writer with a basic understanding of the glory and brokenness of the human situation and heart has an awful lot to glean from when considering their subject. Which leads me to the lack in the conversation.  The massive elephant in Vanderbilt Divinity School’s panel discussion was any direct address of O’Connor’s spirituality.  Her overt Christianity, her Catholicism.  Don’t get me wrong, the conversation was steeped in themes of mercy, mystery, darkness, justice.  Flannery seemed to have little place for abstract discussion of themes, though.  Her notions are thoroughly embodied.   My friend Tish Warren brought up a story she’d heard about Flannery going to a chic party at Mary McCarthy’s house in New York City, where in discussion, Mary said that the Eucharist was a symbol of the Holy Ghost, and a beautiful one.  Flannery famously replied “Well if it’s a symbol, to hell with it”.  Flannery’s respect for incarnation, body, ideas in flesh and blood are the stuff of a great storyteller.  Christianity in person, and distorted Christianity in the person of distorted and ugly people and their actions are the stuffs in which she trades. How do you have a discussion of Flannery O’Connor and her writing without bringing up her Catholicism, her prophetic eye for the South’s Christ-hauntedness?  The writers nudged it in, happened to be folks whose understanding of life is infused with an understanding of where grace, mystery, justice, brokenness intersect with life. No one’s fault, necessarily, and hindsight’s 20/20.   But to have this discussion at Vanderbilt Divinity School without bringing up Christ in her writings made the whole thing feel off-kilter. Short of directly confronting the reality of Jesus, Flannery’s work doesn’t have a lot of direction or legs.  She startled and shocked, drew her large figures and freaks so that sightless folks could see.  Like Minton, she mocked what needed mocking, called out fools and evils and gave religious people a mirror.  Like all of the great storytellers on the panel, called a spade a spade and told her stories like they needed telling. I just think she might have had a tantrum at what was missing.  Kind of a Flannery story right there: a discussion of Flannery O’Connor at Vanderbilt Divinity that skirted (or just kinda missed?) the divine.

Christian art is the expression of the whole life of the whole person who is a Christian. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be solely a vehicle for some sort of  self-conscious evangelism. ~ Francis A Schaeffer Francis A. Schaeffer was a great thinker. Having been dead for nearly 25 years now, it’s telling that his books and essays still resonate vigorously with so many. Schaeffer was well known for his writings and his establishment of the L’Abri community in Switzerland, a place that was established in the mid 50s to discuss philosophical and religious beliefs, and to pursue interests in art, music and literature. Honest questions have always been welcome there. The organization has expanded through the years and now has locations world wide. Mark Heard, a recording artist sometimes discussed in the Rabbit Room, spent significant time studying under Schaeffer at L’Abri. Heard, Michael Card, and others in The Jesus Movement were influenced by Schaeffer’s ability to lend context and understanding to the cultural transformation occurring in the late 60s and early to mid 70s. Schaeffer used a biblical foundation to help Christians wrap their arms around an understanding of how to think critically. And in learning how to think, he was also teaching them how to live. Art and the Bible, a foundational work for Christians in the arts, is a tiny book of distilled information. The book is concentrated and potent. Hardly a sentence is wasted. It’s under 100 pages and can easily be read in a couple of hours. I’m a slow reader and I finished it in one night. The first essay discusses what the Bible has to say about art. As it turns out, it’s quite a lot. We are treated to a cornucopia of biblical references of art. Poetry, architecture, music, drama, dance, and sculpture are all found in scripture. I found it surprising and quietly joyful to find so many biblical references of art collected in one place. Not so surprisingly, Jesus referred to art. And thankfully, art is not prohibited in heaven: And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire; and them that come off victorious from the beast, and from his image, and from the number of his name, standing by the sea of glass, having harps of God. And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, “Great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God, the Almighty; righteous and true are thy ways, thou King of the ages.” Revelation 15:2-3 The second essay offers up a variety of useful perspectives on art, all of which lend context and understanding, and is particularly helpful to believers. As a prelude, Schaeffer notes that meaningful discussions of art should not be relegated to only “high art,” that is painting, sculpture, poetry, and classical music. He advances that more popular expressions of art—novels, theatre, movies, and popular music—should also be included in the discussion. Further, says Schaeffer, Christian living should be the believer’s greatest work of art. How should creators and enjoyers of beauty comprehend and evaluate it? CCM artist Steve Camp created quite a ruckus several years ago with his call for reformation in the CCM industry with his 107 Theses. In the tradition of Luther, who nailed his 95 theses onto the door at Wittenberg in 1517, so Camp nailed his 107 theses on the door of CCM. While Camp’s paper is largely an austere laundry list, Schaeffer’s approach is thoughtfully specific. He leads us through eleven distinct perspectives from which a believer might consider and evaluate art. Somehow, Schaeffer manages to provide us with a structure for artistic interpretation which is  both authoritative and thoughtful. While I read, I sensed Schaeffer’s passion and command of his topic. While I can’t say that I encountered any significant new epiphanies, I can say that I rounded up a lot of exclamation points for that which I already hold to be true. Consider the first of the perspectives: “The Art Work as An Art Work.” Schaeffer suggests that “a work of art has value in itself.” It doesn’t need to be dissected intellectually or analyzed exhaustively to be appreciated (That’s not to say art should not be analyzed. For some of us, that’s more than half the fun). Says Schaeffer, art is something to be enjoyed. The Bible notes that art work in the tabernacle and the temple was for beauty. Schaeffer weaves a wonderful web of logic for the value of art as art, which includes God as the Original Creator and man created in the image of God. I felt as if I were being mentored by an expert over the kitchen table, one who inherently understood my neophyte status, and modified his brilliance so I might easily grasp his words. I highly recommend Art and the Bible. I felt as if I were privy to the life long thoughts of a soul brother who was patient, wise, and willing to share. I forced myself to read even slower than usual, so I might better retain its insight. This mini-primer isn’t as poetic as Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, another exceptionally insightful book  on Christian art, written by Madeleine L’Engle. While Schaeffer had the aptitude to pursue more flowery phraseology, in this book, we catch a glimpse of his theological underpinnings. If you are allergic to the word theology, please don’t let those negative connotations keep you away from this book. Far from dreary sermonettes, Schaeffer simply uses  theology as a framework by which we can more effectively understand the way in which God would have us to think about art. Writes Schaeffer, “A Christian should use the arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God.” #Addnewtag

Here we are again in the season of Lent – what has become one of my favorite liturgical observances. Since I didn’t grow up in a Christian home, I was always mystified by my catholic friend’s religious practice of ordering fishwiches from McDonald’s on Fridays.  “I can’t eat meat on Fridays for Lent,” they would explain, whatever that meant. I didn’t get it. But as I grew older and learned more about this sacred season leading up to Easter, I fell in love with it.  If you happen to be uninitiated as I was, one of the basic ideas of Lent as I understand it is to give something up during the 40 days leading up to Easter in order to help you identify with the sacrifice and sufferings of Christ.  As goofy as it may have sounded to me at the time to give up cheeseburgers in favor of fishwiches on Fridays for Lent, if that kind of thing brings the sacrifice of Christ to the forefront of our conscience, then I suppose that it  served its purpose. However, for me personally as I discovered the beauty of the Lenten fast, I felt like I wanted to sacrifice something more personal than a cheeseburger, something that cost me more on a deeper level, and so I committed myself to praying about what my sacrifice could be.  I believe the Spirit led me down a slightly  less conventional path and my Lenten fasts have taken on a different shape than the traditional model that I’d seen growing up.  At the time I don’t believe I’d ever heard or read of anybody observing it the way we now do in the Gray household, and I don’t think I’m clever enough to have conjured it up on my own.  It felt like it came by grace, like some songs do, or a rainy afternoon, or good dreams. I’ve since learned that who our observance of Lent is not unique – there are many others who share our mode of observance – but the point is that I’d never heard of this before and so I have reason to believe that it was inspired, in the truest sense of what that word means, by the Holy Spirit. What we did that first Lent and have been doing since is pray that the Lord would reveal to us anything that has some kind of lordship or mastery over us, anything that is competing with the supremacy of Christ for our attention and affection.  As the Spirit convicts and reveals what that particular thing is, then that is what we give up for lent. It is usually some sin, addiction, or lesser appetite that I can’t seem to beat or that occupies too much space in my life.  The idea is that it’s difficult – for me at least – to quit a stubborn sin cold turkey once and for all and expect that I’ll never stumble in that area again.  Ever.  It’s quite daunting and in most cases unrealistic.  I think of Bill Murray in “What About Bob” and his mantra of “baby steps…”  I believe the season of Lent can provide baby steps to freedom, an attainable goal of 40 days to give up that sin or habit you can’t seem to beat, to see what freedom feels like, to “taste and see that the Lord is good.” Over the years I’ve given up things such as fear, anxiety, certain eating habits, or other more private sins that stick to the walls of my heart.  I’ve also done things like commit to rekindling my affection for God’s word.  My wife gave up speeding one year, and it changed her life.  In the process she realized how much of life she lives constantly on the run, driven.  I introduced a friend of mine to this idea and he found much needed hope as he gave up a pornography addiction for the Lenten season.  Again, giving it up forever seemed an unattainable feat, but 40 days seemed  manageable and it was like entering his heart into a detox program.  In that time he started to get hooked on something else: the glorious freedom of the children of God. With the traditional Lenten fast, at the end of the 40 days you would get to enjoy whatever it is you gave up on Easter morning as a way of entering into the celebration of the resurrection, meaning you could swing by McDonald’s for that cheeseburger on your way to church. Of course my proposed observance of Lent breaks down here, as it would be a bit of a buzzkill (to put it mildly) to go binge on porn or push the speed limit or give yourself over to anxiety, or (insert your sin here_______________) on Easter morning.  Some of my friends have repeatedly pointed this flawed aspect of our Lenten fast out to me, as well as their disapproval of the idea of giving up a sin for Lent to identify with the sufferings of Christ.  Some of them wonder if the Gray Lenten observance might even be mildly blasphemous. Who can say? I get what they’re saying, I really do, and yet I can’t help but feel that ours is a fast that pleases the Lord.  Especially when it is a favorite sin that we fast.  I am, in fact, giving up something precious to me – a desire of my flesh, and usually a potent one that is trying to usurp my heart’s affections.  In this way, it is not only a very real, focused, and significant sacrifice but also one that acknowledges what Christ suffered for in the first place: my sin.  In giving this up I identify not only with Christ’s sufferings, but the bondage of my own misery as well – a misery that Christ came to deliver me from. And when Easter rolls around, though I’m not at McDonald’s scarfing down cheeseburgers, whispering Hallelujah between bites, My celebration comes in a newfound sense of the reality of the freedom that the resurrected life of Christ offers. Not to mention that on Easter morning I‘ve never rushed back to my old bondage.  40 days of freedom is enough to whet your appetite for more of the same.

Eighteenth century philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke wrote about the need for a “moral imagination.”  Russell Kirk explained what he meant by that phrase: By this “moral imagination,” Burke signifies that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events “especially,” as the dictionary has it, “the higher form of this power exercised in poetry and art.” The moral imagination aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth. In other words, the true purpose of art is not a light escapism or mindless entertainment, but to reflect and to produce an understanding of what it means to be truly human, and for humans to live together rightly.  The “highest form” or this moral imagination, Kirk and Burke argue, is not found in propositional statements of truth (though those are necessary), but in “poetry and art.” Madeleine L’Engle expressed a similar sentiment.  Noting, in Walking on Water, that when she observes injustice, neither theology nor philosophy help her much, she writes the following: The painters and the writers who see the abuse and misuse of freedom and cry out for justice for the helpless poor, the defenseless old, give me more hope; as long as anybody cares, all is not lost. As long as anybody cares, it may be possible for something to be done about it; there are still choices open to us; all doors are not closed. As long as anybody cares it is an icon of God’s caring, and we know that the light is stronger than the dark (117). It’s not that the theology and the philosophy are not needed and helpful explanations. It’s that we need the “icons of God’s caring” as well, because the icons – the symbols – reach us at the level that rational explanation cannot.  Propositional theology is always attained at the surface, moral, and allegorical levels of meaning – which is not a bad thing in the least; it’s just not all there is. This is why imaginative fiction, and the Bible itself, have a transformative effect on us – they take us through journeys not just of words and explanations, but of actions, metaphors, and symbols which powerfully move us.  C.S. Lewis, for example, framed his entire Narnia series on the imagery of medieval cosmology – the seven heavens.  He framed his Ransom Trilogy on the symbolism literary alchemy – a practice as old as Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet) and as new as J.K. Rowling. This is why fairy tales are more than just kids’ stories. This is why fantasy fiction isn’t just a fringe genre for geeks. Any story that helps us escape not “from the real world,” but “to more permanent things,” as Tolkien said, is worth the journey through its pages. As Tolkien wrote: Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

Unbelief is really just faith going in the wrong direction; as in Eden, we make an unconscious or conscious choice to go with Satan’s word rather than God’s Facts. Unbelief leads to bondage. The cycle of unbelief has become apparent in my own life many times as God has replaced old thinking patterns with new. I’ve finally encapsulated it in this brief summary. 1. Unbelief is the swallowing of a lie. 2. The lie generates fear. 3. Fear births the desire to control. 4. The desire to control prompts self-effort. 5. Self-effort produces tension in the body and mind. 6. Tension puts a lid or a cap on our abilities. I’ve seen this truth lately regarding the music I play. Lies I swallowed 25 years ago generated fear (“maybe I won’t succeed”). The fear birthed a desire to control (“I must do something to insure I succeed”); this desire produced self-effort (practicing feverishly). The self-effort ended up producing certain amounts of tension in my mind and in my hands, arms, and shoulders. That tension kept me from achieving the speed I’d had in the early few years before I swallowed the lies, before “grown up” thinking infected the childlike wonder with which I was learning to play banjo and guitar. Think about this paradigm in your own life. Marriage relationships. Parenting. Jobs. And especially our relationship with God. The lighting of the bomb fuse that blows up this false self is to replace wrongly directed faith with true faith. The lies in me have been replaced with truth – faith in the God who has given me a certain set of abilities for certain good reasons. This leads to a whole new set of inner and outer actions. The new paradigm looks like this: 1. Faith is the swallowing of the truth. 2. This truth generates a sense of sufficiency. 3. A sense of sufficiency births a God-confident attitude about playing music. 4. The God-confident attitude causes me to play music with more of a sense of joy and purpose. 5. The sense of joy and purpose creates ease and spontaneity in playing as I look to reprogram the tension in my body with this new restful, confident sufficiency. 6. The clearing of tension takes the cap off my abilities. 7. I more fully enter into my God-given purpose in life. So we ask ourselves, “Where else is the unbelief paradigm affecting my life?” The answer is that wherever there is fear, strain, and tension in the life of a believer, there is an inner lie causing it. It all starts with our identity in Christ, which is the subject of the last installment of Two.

I love when Jason Gray and his family stop in at the Warren for a visit. My kids love it too, even when the Gray kids aren’t with them, partly because they love to hear Jason tell stories. Usually when someone’s telling me a story that I’ve already heard I stop them mid-sentence, but with Jason we lean in like we’re hearing it for the first time. Jason’s newest album is a collection of live performances and stories from the road called Acoustic Storytime, and you can get it on iTunes and at his website. I picked two tracks for your listening pleasure. The first is an excellent song he co-wrote with Andy Gullahorn called “The Reason That You Brought Me Here”, and the second is one of the stories we’ve heard in our living room about seven times. THE REASON WHY YOU BROUGHT ME HERE I know I’d get an answer That I can’t understand If I ask that Your intentions be made clear I know Your plans are greater And in that greater plan Lie the reasons why You brought me here This story would be different If it were only mine to write There are secrets I would never volunteer But secrets lose their power When they have no place to hide Maybe that is why You brought me here Ooooh, all I see are the ruins Yeah, as the smoke starts to clear Ooooh, I hope You know what You’re doin’ ‘Cause You brought me here It’s a mess of my own making This I won’t deny And though the consequences shake my heart with fear If I was happy with the way things were I’d give more of a fight I guess I’m grateful that you brought me here Ooooh, all I see are the ruins Yeah, as the smoke starts to clear Ooooh, I hope You know what You’re doin’ ‘Cause You brought me here And if it’s hard to raise the white flag it’s even harder to believe That surrendering is worth the sacrifice And the very thing I always feared would be the end of me Was a way to come alive Now it hurts to be this broken But it’s bearable somehow As the chance to prove I’m worthy disappears I always heard You loved me But I think I know it now Is that the reason why You brought me here I’m grateful that You brought me herehttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/TheReasonWhyYouBroughtMeHere.mp3

Justin Gerard is one of my all-time favorite illustrators. He’s responsible for the cover of my album The Far Country, as well as the cover and illustrations for On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. For the last few months he’s undertaken the task of preserving his imagination before it is usurped by Peter Jackson and his well-meaning cronies. While the film version of The Hobbit will no doubt be a huge success, and will probably be a delight to watch, it will inevitably imprint itself on the minds of every future reader of this great story. This is one of the sad results of books-turned-films. Illustrations are less less intrusive than film in all its sound and fury, and seem more likely to merely inform and augment an imagination than to supplant it. So Justin set out to illustrate The Hobbit the way he remembers it–not the way Guillermo Del Toro sees it, and thanks to Justin’s blog we get to see the illustrations take shape. It’s a fascinating look at the fruit of one strong imagination’s influence on another strong imagination. Whether you’re a Tolkien nerd, an art nerd, or not a nerd at all, I’m sure you’ll enjoy watching this process unfold on Justin’s website. Justin told me he didn’t mind if I posted a few images from his blog here. But seriously, subscribe to the feed as I have, and watch these excellent works as they unfold. I’ll let Justin tell you about it in his own words: I remember having very clear notions of Shelob as a trap-door spider, that Isengard was more geometric and turned into a diamond at its top, that Sauron was seen as smoke and eyes and the illusion of oil-slick armor, that the orcs were meatier and more ape-like, with much longer arms, and knuckles that dragged the ground. The Balrog was only ever seen by the cracks in his flesh and his eyes and jaws. His skin would never really be seen for the smoke coming off it. The cracks in his skin would be like those in a lava flows seen at night, where some of it has cooled at the surface, but underneath it is still burning. And a few hundred other odd, now-forgotten notions of Middle Earth. I had not seen, at this point, any of Alan Lee, Ted Nasmith’s or John Howe’s fantastic paintings, on which the film’s art direction was to be largely based. I had a lot of very crystallized ideas in my head about how everything looked. And when the films were released I was jarred my first time seeing them. Things didn’t look like they had in my head. At first it bothered me. They got it all wrong I thought. But as the Fellowship of the Ring began to make its way towards Rivendell I was surprised that I found that I really enjoyed it anyway. It was a different take than I had, but it was spectacular and I went back and watched them several times each in the theater. Then something terrible happened. I found that I had lost my ideas. At first, they were only tainted by the films, but after a while I found that I had lost them altogether. And no matter how much I tried to see things differently, I still saw it the way Peter Jackson showed it. The Boromir I had imaged was gone and Sean Bean’s character remained. The goblins were hunched and crooked green men without noses. This has bothered me ever since, and now that The Hobbit films are on the schedule to be released next year I find that my ideas on The Hobbit are to be put in jeopardy as well. Click here to visit Justin’s blog.

The Levitical laws are suffocating in their all-encompassing completeness. Sin, sin, sin. The requirement for sin was that you publicly confessed it, had to bring your own property to sacrifice, and your animals had their throats cut or necks wrung because of what you did. The New Testament has a commentary on this: Hebrews 10. “For the law, having a shadow of the good things to come.. can never with these same sacrifices…make those who approach perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? For the worshipers, once purified, would have had no more consciousness of sins. But in those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins.” So when that bull’s throat was cut and the blood pumped out in its death-struggle, when the innocent she-goat lay there with her legs twitching in a crimson pool, all it did was remind the worshiper of his imperfection, his sinfulness, his sin, his wrong. It reminded him that he was a bad person. And it reminded him that someday a Redeemer would come, the Seed of the Woman, the Anointed One, the Messiah. This is God hammering home the consequences of the wrong Tree, a performance-based acceptance with God. Strive to not sin. Pay up when you do. It is a sin-consciousness whereby we “try to not sin” rather than loving God and loving others. It’s the old covenant, the Old Testament. What is offered us in the New Covenant, the New Testament? A one-time, once-for-all sacrifice of the only One whose blood can take away sins. But wait, there’s more. Hebrews 10 goes on to say, “But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God…For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being made holy. But the Holy Spirit also witnesses to us; for after He had said before, ‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds I will write them,’ then He adds, ‘Their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.'” Now, let’s get this straight. The New Covenant is not only where the Messiah offers one sacrifice for sins forever and sits down, finished. The New Covenant is also where Jesus gives us an inner perfection by that one sacrifice, and that salvation in our inner being is being outworked into our daily lives because He has put His laws into our hearts and written them in our minds. This “Christ-in-you” was not revealed in the Old Covenant. So – sins paid for, once for all time. An inner perfection, given to us in Christ, once for all time. That inner perfection, Christ Himself, is being worked out into our daily lives because He is the inner, living Law put into our hearts, as the unbroken tablets of the Law were put into the Ark of the Covenant. We’re not only dead to sin in fact; we are also dead to the Law – to that sin-conscious, sin-generating system of performance-based acceptance. We have a choice. We can live according to the old way, sin-consciously building up a system of fence laws, rules and regulations based on fear of sinning. Or this: “Not only did Christ die for me, and pay for all my sins, but He lives in me and is even now my inner, living Law – both the desire to fulfill the Law and the power to do so.” This God-awareness (in an Old Covenant frame) is what caused God to call David, “A man after My own heart.” That’s what God is looking for – a vast army of Aragorns, “…who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Women received their dead raised to life again. Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection…” The choice is to live the old covenant, or to labor by faith to enter His rest – the righteousness which is of God by faith, ceasing from its own works. It is a giant-subduing faith, leading the alcoholic to get drunk on the Spirit, the porn addict to turn to the real Man within him, the financially fearful to trust upon the God who “owns the cattle on a thousand hills.” This is the God who draws us deeper and deeper into His inexhaustible Well. That’s the Good News; anything less isn’t. In the mid-nineties I found “Jesus-died-to-pay-your-sin-debt” was only half of the Gospel. I prayed at that time, “Lord, if you don’t change my life, don’t bother forgiving me anymore.” After growing up with a legalistic concept of God, and then after years of “greasy grace” I was sick of who thought I was. When God started to shake what can be shaken, a real self began to emerge and is still emerging – a humanity that is more and more being owned and operated by the indwelling Savior that is “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” the living Law that is in my heart and written on my mind. I’ve found Biblically and experientially that reliance on God brings His life through me; reliance on “my self,” brings me under sin’s power, because that “self” is a false self generated by unbelief. That’s life under the written Law, and the subject of Romans 7. But as we learn to walk in the Spirit – a faith-choice in every situation whereby we rely on Christ-in-me to live through us – He lives. Temptation and even sin become God’s calling card telling us what the next area of Spirit appropriation and victory will be. So ask yourself: “Do I live in a sin-consciousness? Do I feel I have to ‘pay up’ when I sin? Am I aware daily that Christ paid a one-time eternal fee for me? Am I aware that He has put Himself in my heart and written His laws on my mind? Do I live from that awareness – or do I live from sin-awareness, fear, and my own fleshly striving to do good and avoid evil? Am I walking in my true identity?” The one consciousness brings about the seeming reappearance of “the old man” as we lock into a false struggle with ourselves to in an attempt to do good and avoid evil by our human will power. The other consciousness – faith in God’s Word –  causes Christ to live through us more and more as He progressively appropriates more and more of our psyche and body. Faith takes the things of the Unseen and brings them down into manifestation; through faith our inner and outer Land is taken for the Kingdom.

“Pontius Pilate sought to release Jesus.” —John 19:12 Think about that for a second.It has been years since I observed a proper Lenten Season.  But the activities in New Orleans on the news are telling me Lent has begun.  Lent, this year, converges with a sermon series I’m working on dealing with the final week of Jesus’ life.  So as parts of my study for those messages present themselves as well suited for blog posts, I’ll bring them to the Rabbit Room in this span of time leading up to Easter. Today I can’t seem to shake the implications of John’s little statement above about Pontius Pilate.  Doesn’t it sound loaded with implication?  It sure does to me. Though Pontius Pilate ultimately became the man who ordered Jesus’ crucifixion, there were several points along the way where his actions were intended to prevent Jesus’ death. Consider the following instances: —Pilate vocally objected to the credibility of the charges against Jesus many times over: “I find no basis for the charges against this man.” (Mk 15:14, Lk 23:4 14-16, 22, Jn 18:38, 19:4) —Pilate questioned Jesus privately, away from the Chief Priests, giving Jesus a chance to defend Himself against the charges. (Jn 18:33, 19:9-11) —Pilate sent Jesus to Herod after finding no basis for the charges against him.  Pilate wouldn’t have done this had he thought Herod would disagree.  That would have been politically embarrasing.  Also, it might have made him appear like a poor judge in the eyes of his superiors.  Pilate was certain Herod would agree with him, resulting in a concensus that Jesus didn’t deserve to die.  And he was right.  Herod agreed. (Lk 23:6-15)  This, Pilate hoped, would end the momentum of Jesus’ accusers. —Pilate invoked his tradition of releasing a Jewish prisoner during Passover—giving the people a choice between Jesus and Barabbas, a known murderer, thief and insurrectionist.  Pilate thought the contrast between these two would leave the decision to release Jesus ironically in the hands of the mob who brought him there.  Surely given this choice, the people would free the non-murderer.  He was wrong. (Mt 27:15-22, Jn 18:39-40) —Pilate had Jesus publicly flogged.  This may not sound like an attempt to release Jesus, but the thinking was that maybe Pilate could satisfy the mob by taking Jesus to a point close to death without having to actually kill him.  Then, Jesus could live out the remainder of His days bearing on His body the marks of the Roman flogging and in His mind, the memory of the crowd as they cheered for this.  Maybe that would suffice. (Lk 23:16, Jn  19:1)  Wrong again. You might say Pontius Pilate was Jesus’ most ardent defender during these few short hours they had together.But with friends like this, who needs enemies, right? I don’t mean to foster sympathy for Pilate here.  And I certainly don’t wish to defend his cowardly, wicked acts.  Ultimately it was Pilate who held the civil authority to order a death by crucifixion—and this is what he did. I do want to say this though.  Pontius Pilate was no hero, but neither was he the consummate bad guy with the thin mustache sneering through the wispy trails of smoke rising from the “Cruella De Vil” cigarette in his hand. (Sorry Buechner.) Pontius Pilate was a middle-management Governor—basically a mayor with soldiers. He hoped, as any mid-level politician would, that his stock was rising. Judea was a stop along the way to the power, stature and respect he hoped to one day possess. He was a godless man motivated by a desire for the outcome of this unrest to be one that played to his favor. And for all of us, when it comes to this part of the Easter story, we have not understood the Cross until we have understood that, left alone, we are vastly more like Pilate than we are like Jesus.Pontius Pilate didn’t want to release Jesus for Jesus’ sake, but for his own.  He’d rather not have to explain to his superiors why a religious dispute required him to have a man under his authority executed. He’d rather not have to feel like a puppet at the hands of powerful and influential religious leaders.  He’d prefer for this matter to end with everyone alive and happy. But not really for the sake of anyone’s life or happiness except his own. This intrigues me because it raises questions: How many of my actions which appear noble and for the good of others are really more for the sake of making my own life easier?  And what does that say about what really drives me to act nobly? Appropriate questions to consider leading up to Easter?  What about you?  What in your own motivations of the heart testify to your need for the Cross and the Empty Tomb.

What about the old man? What about sin? Does Christ indwelling us mean that now we can trust Him in us every morning and then just go about our day walking in the Spirit, never being tempted or sinning? It is just in this tight spot that we find the story of the Exodus useful. The Hebrews were saved from Egypt’s dominion over them. But then they had to make a journey. They were not only saved from something; they were saved to something. They were saved to the Promised Land – from bondage to freedom. But nearly the entire first generation didn’t make it there. Their un-faith in God’s promises produced fear, which brought  the desire to control their own lives. “Let’s go back to Egypt.” “Not Thy will, but mine be done.” After years of this, God had had His fill, and after the carcasses of that generation fell in the Wilderness, Joshua and Caleb went in and took possession of the Land by a process – a continual process of faith. Whenever they resorted to their own human effort rather than relying God’s power and their identity as His chosen people they lost that particular battle. But eventually through faith they subdued the Land – more or less. The Land was theirs already by divine decree, in the Unseen. All they had to do was seek God’s face, trust Him, and walk in that trust, and that Land would progressively become theirs in the Seen. God would go before them, sending hornets, being their strength, confusing the enemy. Likewise, in Christ we are saved from something – the bondage and power of Sin. Mr. Sin, in fact. We are cut off from his dark domain. But there is a Wilderness – the no-man’s land between bondage and freedom. This is the believer’s Wilderness. Christ has redeemed you from sin, from bondage. He has loved you, called you His chosen. He has put His Spirit in you, made you one Spirit with Him. The old you in Satan (Eph 2:2) died, and the new you in Christ is risen to walk in newness of life. You are called to enter the Land and subdue the giants, the fierce inhabitants. All this happens by faith, not by exertion of human power. We seek the Lord’s face, trust Him, and go forward in that trust. The problem is that most of us won’t enter the Land. We spend years in no-man’s land – the Wilderness. Mix one part salvation and one part longing to return to bondage. “I’m such a sinner. An awful sinner, and I can’t change. Thank God for grace.” Or, “I’m doing better than Joe down the street. At least I go to church and read my Bible.” Or worse, “I’m involved in this church program and I host a Bible study and I’m doing this and that and these other things for God (and what an excellent fellow I must be! I’m so much better than all those other people!).” We give up and refuse to trust God; we trust our own effort, our own programs, our own ways, our own thoughts. We believe in sin’s power over us. And we trust God to “get us to Heaven.” One foot in Canaan and one foot in Egypt. Doing the splits makes it a little hard to walk. The question for us is this: Do I really believe the Word? Am I dead to sin? Am I dead to the Law, to using my own effort to become good? Am I a new creation? Am I holy? That’s what God says is Fact. Immutable. Eternal. These things are true right now. And we must deal with Fact, face it – believe it, or choose to believe our eyes, because this subduing of Canaan starts and continues and ends by faith. We can look at the giants. We can look at the fierce inhabitants. We can cower in fear. I can look all day at things in my psyche and think, “Oh man. This is never going to change.” Or we can look at God’s Word. His promises. His reliability. His love. His power to accomplish what He says He will do. What He wants is those who will go forward – not those who look back. He wants us reaching for the prize – a Holy Spirit empowered, gigantic butt-kicking of all the junk we were saddled with in our psyches, junk that we have followed our whole lives. It’s all got to go. And it does – as we faithe. That new man in us wants to push through the accretions of years of wrong thinking, falsely independent attitudes, and self-reliance, to break through into the Land and take it over. This of course is a process, like the land of Canaan. We are “being made holy” in our thoughts, attitudes, and actions, because in Christ we are filled with the Godhead by the Spirit. We don’t have just an outer, transcendent God, but an inner, immanent one. That’s the real you, the real me. The new man – a union between the human vessel and Deity, just as the old man was a union between the human vessel and the false deity. God wants to turn this new union into a unity of thought and being, where His will is our will at all times and in all situations. But we’ve been fooled into thinking that the old man is still alive. We’re to put off his deeds because he is dead; although Satan still shoves his thoughts into our minds he has been circumcised right off of us and is no longer a part of our identity. God wants faith-warriors. When we hook into that Power by faith, we become unstoppable. One by one, the inhabitants fall. The question is do we want to subdue the Land “more or less,” or totally?

Probably most of you have heard of Malcolm Gladwell, the author behind such best-selling titles as Blink or The Tipping Point. If not, then just know that it’s stimulating, easy to read non-fiction that Wikipedia calls “pop sociology.” (Although I realize that someone could easily edit it if you wanted to fact-check me and change it to Andrew Peterson impersonator). Anyway, Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, holds interesting truths within and specifically for the church. And it’s something I’m particularly drawn to since I believe the consequences could be huge. Pause. Let me back up a bit by saying that I’m in the middle of 1 Timothy in our teaching series at church. One verse within mentions doing everything without favoritism and remaining impartial in selecting leaders. All of our teaching weeks have focused on the development of a new community – that our world around defines us by our job, our status, our race, our class, our gender. But the radical reality of the Kingdom of God wrecks all those identities and erases all those lines. Unpause. Gladwell’s basic premise (Spoiler Alert!): we are all the same in our ability to succeed. To argue his point, Gladwell enters the realm of athletics, law, politics, corporate millionaires (et al.) to realize that from Bill Gates to Wayne Gretzky, they were simply a product of luck or chance and hard work. And anyone else in their same shoes could succeed on the same level if they were also willing to work hard. The idea might sound far-fetched because we’re taught from the beginning that some are “gifted and talented” – as my school called it – and the rest were, well, not. Thus those who are deemed as “special” are given the extra chances to be even more special, thus continuing to separate the lines between the haves and the have-nots. In the end, you’re left convinced that Gladwell is onto something and that our society has ruined countless opportunities to embrace the down and out because we’ve bought into this sociological lie. This is beautiful news to someone like me, trying to get a community of people to realize that all are equal, that all are called children of God, and that the body of Christ shouldn’t play favorites. What if we didn’t choose our favorites from class, but instead worked with all kids equally and made sure they all had that same chance? What if we created systems of learning or tutoring that believed that every child who entered that room could – given the chance – become something “special?” I’ve always been privileged. Sure, I have my downer stories (growing up in a trailer park, etc.) but my reality was that I had very active parents (mom mostly) who worked with me incessantly. I knew the alphabet forward at one and a half, backward at 2, books of the Bible memorized at 3 and reading small books at 4. Someone chose me early and made sure I would be something. Gladwell’s book goes beyond “cool cultural insight.” What it does is give us some proof, some solid reasoning, behind the Christian calling to make things level – that we would follow Jesus into his interactions with the poor and oppressed and marginalized. And that along with our feet and Good News, that we might bring some opportunity with us to help call someone “special” who has never heard those words before.

My evening reading for the last couple weeks has consisted of a book of essays by British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, alongside G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. In chapter six of Orthodoxy, The Paradoxes of Christianity, I found a passage where Chesterton helped me explain my interest in reading Russell’s book. Describing how he came to faith as a teenager, Chesterton writes, “I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now.” He said it was the reading of the prominent atheists and agnostics of the day that brought him back to Orthodox theology. “They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt.” With that in mind, there was one paragraph that stuck out to me while reading the essay Russell’s book takes its title from, written in 1927, where he gives his thoughts on the roots of religion. “Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.” The reason Russell’s list struck me was because, if asked, those are three of the reasons I would give for why I believe. Or rather, the antithesis of that list. I believe because I embrace mystery, because I am persuaded that there is more than I can see, because I hear echoes of eternity around me that I can not explain. I believe because, in a final and eternal sense, I do not fear defeat. I have hope that things will be made right, that every sad thing will become untrue. And I don’t fear death, trusting in the words of the One who sits on the throne that all things will be made new, that the end is not the end. My friends know that I love quotations. I probably bore everyone around me by repeating lines from sermons, books, and songs that I’ve heard or read whenever I can slip one in. The one I’ve been repeating the last couple of weeks, my favorite quote at the moment, is one I’ve heard N.T. Wright give in a couple different sermons I’ve listened to recently. Wright mentions a friend of his, Leslie Newbigin, who was asked if he was optimistic or pessimistic about some issue. Newbigin’s answer, for me, is the answer to Job’s question, the question of theodicy. It’s the answer to the genocide in Rwanda. It’s the answer–but not necessarily the explanation–to my questions about wealth and poverty, sickness and health, indescribable happiness and unbearable tragedy. It’s an acknowledgment that there is something that transcends my questions, that “His ways are higher than my ways.” Newbigin’s answer? “I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.” Andy Gullahorn’s song Resurrection, recorded by his wife Jill Phillips on her new CD The Good Things, wrestles with this paradox of believing in Resurrection in spite of sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s one I find myself listening to on repeat late at night when I need to know others find the strength to somehow believe.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/Resurrection.mp3

While we were in college, my then-girlfriend, now wife, Danielle, introduced me to the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye. Though I was not reared on poetry or the merits of prose, most of it soaring far above my head (sorry, Bill Shakespeare), I was readily drawn into the world and words of Mrs. Nye. I know next to nothing about iambic pentameter, free verse, or the various types of rhyme patterns, but hers was unlike any poetry I had ever experienced, tender, graceful, plain-spoken, humorous and utterly human. The first poem of hers I read – rather Danielle read to me from a class assignment – was titled “The Traveling Onion”. She then read “Famous”. I was hooked. Finding a copy recently of one of her newer collections, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, I have found great pleasure in reading a few excerpts at bedtime, sometimes aloud to Danielle, before nodding off for the night. Nye, a resident of San Antonio, TX and of Palestinian descent, so richly communicates the richness of her ancestry that it is hard to conceive of any world culture failing to make peace with one another all these millenia, explosions, and deaths later. Our planet would be a safer, more sane, more peaceful place were it not for the stubborn, thick-headed, childish governments of the world. Nye never sinks to pointing fingers, but with the humility of a painter, she instead uses language to draw pictures describing the everyday beauty of the individual. Governments and so-called leaders will not spare this world its peace; only the individual choosing to love and honor his neighbor offers that sort of hope. Nye shows that, though we are made to believe we are all so vastly different, in actuality the cultures of the world have more beauty in a common humanity than any newscast would ever bother to convey. An elderly Palestinian man in worn coat and tie reaches up to pluck a fig from his backyard tree with such joy that one must smile from half a world away at the very thought of the sky and the soil and Yahweh finding pleasant agreement in the scene. An onion lies peeling on the drainboard, limp, translucent and divided, providing an object lesson in the humility of the small, forgotten things of earth. These are the types of moments Nye is profoundly adept at depicting, and I am grateful to be reminded of my own simple place in the turning of the earth, my own richness in the world, my own silk in the woven tapestry. A few years ago Danielle went to visit her sister in Florida. I elected to stay home. She left me with a writing assignment for the week: to write a song based on Nye’s poem, “The Traveling Onion”. I wrote, then, what amounted to the comparison of a career in music to that of the translucence of an onion, tears, flavor, subtle texture and all. The song, of the same title, will be included on my newest and forthcoming album, due out this spring. “Answer if you hear the words under the words — otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.” (from “Words Under The Words”)

Fifth grade wasn’t kind to Susan O’Farrell. No longer an undifferentiated mass of squirming humanity, our class at Miller Elementary began to sift itself into the social haves and have-nots, the in-crowd and everybody else. Susan O’Farrell, a plain and unremarkable girl, suddenly found herself on the outside of friendships she had never had reason to doubt. And even I, oblivious as I was, became aware of the growing sadness that seemed to be the central fact of her life. The angles of her face got sharper, and the dark circles under her eyes got darker, giving the impression that she was sinking more deeply into herself. I was a nice boy, and I tried to be nice to Susan. I imagined myself one of the few rays of sunshine in this girl’s darkening existence. Why, then, did I wrong her so unaccountably? One day during recess I returned to the classroom to fetch my coat. Emptied of fifth graders, the room seemed a completely different place. It was a strange and exhilarating feeling to have the room to myself. I savored the experience, walking up one row and down the other, seeing my friends’ familiar desks and possessions as if for the first time. Looking at Susan O’Farrell’s notebook I was struck by something so obvious I couldn’t believe I had never noticed it before: that second ‘r’ in her last name could easily be made into a ‘t’ so as to read O’Fartell. Get it? Fart—right there in the middle of her name! I pulled the pen out of her spiral binding and scratched the ‘t’ in its place, a little larger than it needed to be, just to be sure my efforts wouldn’t go unnoticed. The spell of the quiet room was broken; I went back to the playground. When the bell rang for the end of recess, I hurried to my desk. I wanted to be watching when Susan saw what I had done to her notebook. I looked as nonchalant as I could as she came to her seat, catty-corner from mine. This was going to be good. I didn’t have to wait long. Susan’s eyes widened when they fell on her notebook. Then they filled with tears. Then she hunched over, covering her name with her forearm. She looked furtively to her left, then to her right to see who had noticed her humiliation. And also, I believe, to see if she could tell who hated her enough to humiliate her so. Up to this point in the story, I’m willing to chalk my actions up to youthful indiscretion. My motive was wordplay (albeit juvenile and coarse wordplay), not malice. Until the moment I saw Susan’s face collapse, it hadn’t occurred to me that she might not appreciate my wit. In other words, my failures to this point were the failures of the immature. But as Susan scanned the room, I made a very mature calculation. I realized that I was literally the last person in the room Susan would suspect of such a meanness. If I played it cool, she would never know I was the person who had hurt her. So there I sat, looking off into the middle distance, pretending I hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Susan scribble out her name. Think on that a minute: in her sadness and hurt, the poor girl scribbled out her own name. It would have been so easy to fix my mistake. Two or three sentences: “Susan, will you forgive me? I don’t know what made me write that on your notebook, but I promise it wasn’t because I dislike you or think there’s anything wrong with you.” Which would have been true. But saying that that would have cost me something. Susan would have thought less of me. She might tell our classmates what I had done. I told myself that Susan would be crushed if she knew that I, the nice boy, had done such a thing to her. If she couldn’t trust me to be kind to her, whom could she trust? Best to let her keep some shred of hope in—well, in me, I guess. Besides, it wasn’t like me to persecute the downtrodden or to deface other people’s property. I had never done that sort of thing in my life. Surely I could be allowed one mistake, as long as I promised myself not to do it again. And I never didn’t mean to hurt Susan. Wouldn’t the judge count that in my favor? So I never told Susan what I had done. I let that suffering girl believe that, on top of the rejection she felt every day, she had an unknown enemy actively seeking to hurt her. I felt the cowardice of it, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it. The next day Susan had a new notebook. As far as I know, nobody but she and I ever saw what I did to her old one. Every day until the end of the school year, I felt a pang of conscience when I saw Susan and her clean notebook. Any one of those days, I could have made things right. But I never did. I never paid the small price of confessing my wrong. Instead I let Susan pay a heavier price. Oh, but I paid a heavy price myself: it’s a hard thing when you realize you’re not as righteous as you thought you were. The next year, Susan was in the other sixth grade class, and she mostly faded from my consciousness. The year after that, we went off to different schools. If I ever saw her again, I don’t remember it. I don’t suppose I even heard her name mentioned until one day in high school an old classmate from Miller Elementary asked, “You heard about Susan O’Farrell, I guess? Dead. She had some disease. Had it for years.” I wish the story had a happier ending. But when fear and self-protection and self-righteousness carry the day, we can’t expect happy endings. Instead, we’re left longing for the day when love and truth and justice win out and sweep everything before them like a flood—the day when, to paraphrase Sam Gamgee, every sad thing will come untrue. Lord, haste the day.

Every believer deep down wants to hear Jesus Christ say “Well done, good and faithful servant” on the Day. All we have to do is ask ourselves and listen within; if we listen deep enough we’ll find the Holy Spirit way down there resounding with a great “Yes!” But the question many of us have is “How do I get there? How do I change? How do I become ‘Christ-like’?” The usual answer I’ve heard is to read more, pray more, go to church more, start a Bible study, work in the soup kitchen, and any of a number of “do this and don’t do that” kinds of thinking. While all those things can be good actions, they can spring from the wrong source – the wrong Tree. Pretty soon we are doing this and doing that to try to become more sanctified.But that isn’t God’s way. He says in Isaiah 55, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways…For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” More twos: His thoughts vs our thoughts. His ways vs our ways. God’s way is that fruit comes from His implanted Word, the rain of His Holy Spirit watering it. It will not return to Him void. Yet He bases the amount of fruit on a believer’s level of trust. Thus, “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him: Rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Col 2:6-8). Here we have another pair of things: the faith-in-Christ way, or being spoiled through “our ways”: deceptive thinking and traditions modeled after the satanic principles of the world and not after Christ. Once again, we see the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Growth in Christ – or “growth” according to satanic principles. We can be built up – or robbed of fruitfulness. This echoes 1Cor 3, where Paul says he laid the foundation of Christ in the Corinthians, and other teachers build upon that foundation. Paul warns that every man take heed how he builds on the foundation; teachers are to build Christ upon Christ, faith in Him upon faith in Him; that’s building with gold, silver, precious stones. The teachers are responsible for what they teach; we are responsible for accepting or rejecting true or false teaching. So here I ask a question, to which I think I have in part the answer: What does God’s optimal believer look like? Here’s at least a partial answer that goes a long way; bear in mind that this is not some sort of method, but a picture: God is looking for faith in His Son. I don’t mean merely trusting Jesus “up there” to save us from our sin-debt and take us to Heaven. I mean a present-tense, here-and-now faith in Jesus who lives by the Holy Spirit inside you, inside me. We have to renew our minds to the new-creation reality: I am not an independent self trying to be good and make life work by my own effort. I am a human container, a cup, a vessel, who has an indwelling Lord. I am a slave with a inner Master, a wife with an inner Husband, a subject with an inner King, a son with an inner Father – a need with an inner Supply. “Well, then,” some will say, “Why, if I am all those things, do I still sin? I’m trying to be this new inner man, trying to do what God wants me to do, trying to follow the Master, and I keep on failing. Where is this abundant life of faith and victory?” That’s the unrenewed mind, the wrong Tree; that’s the trap of Romans 7. The Christian does not have to become holy; he already is holy. He is a man set apart. The believer does not have to become a good person by his human effort; he is a good person because the only Source of goodness in the universe lives inside him. ”Well!” some will say, “We’ve still got to act like it! Faith without works is dead!” To this I wholeheartedly agree. What I disagree with is the common, satanic, legalistic method of “getting there.” Any Way which does not begin and end in a wholehearted reliance on the One who said, “I am the Way,” is doomed to failure. Whether legalism or license is of no consequence; they both fall off this narrow Way, the width of a single Man. Works that spring from anything but God’s life through the channel of faith will burn in the end. God is looking for faith-people. Faith-ers. A peculiar people, the uncommon folks who will rely on Him every step of the way. Like Aragorn, through faith and endurance they slash through demonic hordes, deception, and lies to find their real identity, their true kinship and kingship.This kind of faith, the faith that recognizes God’s truth as Reality even though circumstance says otherwise, is what brings us to the expression of our real identity; we say in faith that we are loved when we feel unloved; we say in faith that Christ in us is our strength when we feel weak. We don’t deny our feelings, but we put them in their proper place. Trinity says to Neo, “…the Matrix cannot tell you who you are.” God is the Teller of our identity. If we hearken to Him, and put that new-creation identity in our mind-mirror daily, it will begin to show in our thoughts, attitudes, and actions. God only. That’s the Tree of Life. Christ alone has redeemed us; Christ alone has cleansed us, justified us; Christ alone has perfected us forever by His one sacrifice, and now is transforming our daily expression of life into His image. All we do is rely on Him, believe what He has told us in His Word, and step out on that Word as if it were true (because of course, it is). That Word, when mixed with faith, washes away the grit and grime of the wrong Tree, and so we learn to stand. We’ll discuss “the old man” in Two, Part IV.

Please enjoy my favorite song from Andrew Osenga’s Letters to the Editor, Volume II, available here in the Rabbit Room.  I remember listening to this song on tour–headphones on, curled up in my bunk on the bus, missing my family, missing my God, pricked by that terrible feeling of incompleteness that only comes when everything is going really well, and everything is not.  I put my iPod on repeat and went to sleep with the phrase “YOU ARE WHO YOU ARE, AND YOU ARE, AND YOU WERE AND WILL BE” ringing in my ears. And there was rest. Let Us Know You My friends have sent me letters I’ve read them all and then I tried to make sense of the stories But I was overwhelmed So much anger, so much pain We’ve had to go numb to survive So I am closing my eyes And I’m praying for those in my life Let us feel, let us love, let us be alive Let us know You My friends have shared their secrets I have given mine The anarchy of what we think No one will ever find But in the daylight, to our surprise Our secrets are shades of the same So I am closing my eyes And I’m praying for those in my life Let us feel, let us love, let us be alive Let us know You In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with You You parted the seas, You hung up the flame in the night to guide us through You drew in the sand, dropped the stones from violent hands You heard the cry of the crow and set Your eyes on a faithless friend You are who You are, and You are, and You were and will be I am opening my eyes And I’m praying for those in my life Let us feel, let us love, let us be alive Let us know You ————— Now playing: Andrew Osenga – Let Us Know You via FoxyTunes

It was an unexpected interview. Not that fact that I was interviewing Roger O’Donnell, longtime keyboardist for The Cure and Thompson Twins, since I had it scheduled for a few weeks in advance already, but rather that I actually enjoyed it so much. I’ve interviewed nearly 1,000 musicians in my time as a writer so the process has become rather dull for the most part and rare is the interview where the conversation is as stimulating as it was with this one. Of course, as a music industry veteran for the last 30 years, O’Donnell’s perspectives are quite interesting to say the least. However, it was one thing he said in the middle that stays with me long after we both hung up our phones. When I asked him about the demise of the Cure into what he earlier called “the best Cure tribute band ever,” O’Donnell said the reason was that an artist only has so much to say and after that, they just repeat themselves. I’ve heard this mentioned before in a couple places from a few artists in my time and I wonder about its truth. I’m also a pastor nearly five years into a church plant and I can easily see from time to time how much a fresh voice would help in this place. As a sports fan, I’ve definitely seen how the firing of an old coach simply helped for the sake of bringing in a fresh perspective. And I wonder, does this holds true for the artist? Perhaps an even better question to ask is what does this mean for the Christian artist? Is it true that there’s only so much that we can say and then we need to move on? Of course, it’s impossible to create a formula that everyone should only make 10 albums or 20 years of playing shows or whatever. But rather than shrug and say “we can’t figure this out,” I think it’s worth asking a simple question of “is there a time to stop, at least for some people?” I don’t play an instrument (at least to the level that anyone at all, even my mother, would pay to hear me), so, as I said, my venue is the church. And I definitely see this in play there. Here in the Bible Belt, there are many more churches alive than there should be – several in each surrounding city seem to be holding on only because somebody left some money in a trust fund or will, died, and then the church lives on its holdings. A friend of mine runs an inner city church and non-profit and most people reside right next to an old Methodist church. They’ve asked to rent from them, partner with them, meet at all separate times, etc. but to no avail. The same 10 to 12 people continue to drive in from “safer” areas (read: white) and refuse to allow anyone else to use the building. And I suppose it’s their right to do so since they own the building and are able to pay their utilities. But is there life there? It’s a natural life cycle to die and live. We’re so scared of one that we can’t embrace the other. But it’s death that gives nourishment to life. In fact, it’s even the promise of death that brings life to some things. We almost closed as a church plant three years into it. I grew up in a Pentecostal, money-manipulating atmosphere, so I promised if I ever led my own church that I would never do the same thing. But I went in the extreme other direction – never, ever mentioning the fact that it takes money to run things, like it or not. And because of that, we were going to shut down. I stood in front of our church that Sunday morning and explained it out. I said that I wasn’t afraid for us to die, that we had a great three year run and that I wasn’t going to manipulate for money, but that the reality was that this was our last week if things didn’t change. Since then, we’ve never looked back. There was something in that moment – knowing that everything has a limited run and that we can be okay with that – which has propelled us in a way we’ve never experienced. I wonder about this within our lives, wherever we are. What does it mean for the artist to know there’s only so many records to make and to make them well? And what does it mean to know when the life is gone and we’re stuck in our routine and comfort zone?

It’s not so much that I’m afraid of heights. It’s the involuntary anticipation of falling that bothers me. The prospect of losing balance from a high perch brings on the heebie-jeebies, a physical manifestation of falling. My palms sweat. An army of goose bumps slide from the top of my head, poised to meet waves of prickly nerve endings rising from below. Like draftees inducted into a war they do not want to fight, these inner nerve soldiers meet somewhere in my core, swirling in time and prepared for battle. When I visited Chicago and the Sears Tower Skydeck observation deck on the 103rd floor, I was inflicted with a ghastly case of these infamous heebie-jeebies. When the wind blows, the tower sways, a tangible, terrible reminder, that falling is always possible. What goes up, must come down. Contrast my perspective with that of Frenchman Philippe Petit, the star of Man on Wire. Replace my fearful dread with Petit’s unabashed joy and we begin to understand something about why this man will achieve his goal. Notwithstanding the hurdles and setbacks, on the morning of August 7, 1974, Petit did it. With the focused concentration of an eagle stalking its prey, Petit walked, lay down, knelt, juggled, and ran confidently between the two towers of the World Trade Center. As a growing boy, Petit loved to climb. The higher, the better. Trees were his domain. In the waiting room of a dentist’s office, Petit browsed a magazine article about the construction of The World Trade Center in New York City. An artist’s finished rendition of the barely started project provided a flash of inspiration. Surreptitiously, Petit swiped the picture and carried it home. This would not be the first time that Petit broke rules to further his fanciful vision. Man on Wire is about a dream. It’s about a man so ardent about following his dream that nothing will sway him. His passion is so scaldingly fierce, that he easily recruits a group of disciples to assist him in preparing and implementing his vision. He so effectively communicates his dream, that they do not hesitate to follow, though all of the team will not stay to share in achievement of the goal. Despite its documentary format, director James Marsh uses considerable creativity in wiring this picture for tension, intrigue, and beauty. It plays like a thriller, though we don’t witness wild car crashes or shaky hand-held cameras filming bad guys on the run. The cinematic pressure rises out of skillful editing and masterful story telling. We witness painstakingly calculated plans which sometimes go awry. Just when we anticipate that we are close to witnessing the fulfillment of Petit’s dream, something happens to prevent the plan from going forward, at least in the way in which it was conceived. So close, and yet so far; what goes up, must come down. Petit fancies himself as a sort of low-grade criminal. He’s supremely confident, but not quite brash. When he and his team move to New York City, they spend their leisure time watching cop and robber TV shows. His girl friend—the encourager—explains that Petit was raised by strict parents, insisting on fastidious, no nonsense behavior from young Philippe. As we get to know this man, witnessing the joy with which he practices his craft and the naughty twinkle in his eye, we begin to sense that bending the rules—taking certain liberties—is part of his character and motivation. Interviews with the present day versions of those that participated are edited next to well constructed reenactments, striking stills, and snippets of video preserved from the 70s, resulting in a compellingly realistic collage of this wonderful story. Attempting to articulate why such a preposterously bizarre act—walking a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center—captures my heart is as fruitless as Petit trying to explain why he did it in the first place. If Petit were a wacko, that would be an easy explanation; but he’s not. He’s remarkably lucid; a man that spins a tale with the same level of skill that he employs in walking tightropes. No. The whys and wherefores slip away, like the residue of a once vivid dream. This artful event transcends words. Why described it as art? Well first, it was beautiful. Video doesn’t exist of the New York episode, but there is video of some earlier practice rounds, one of which was between the towers of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. And it’s strikingly stunning. The still photographs used in the film frame this man, dressed in black from shoulder to toe, as a silhouette contrasting with the slate blue sky. Further, it’s a representation of possibility. What could each one of us do—the world might say—if only we could lasso the focused intensity required, like Philippe Petit? Switchfoot sang, “We were meant to live for so much more, have we lost ourselves?” Counter intuitively, believers learn that to become new men (and women), we must lose ourselves. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.   Ephesians 4:22-24 Philippe Petit’s singular act is poetically beautiful because of what it tells us about ourselves and our lives: who we are, and for what we were created. We hear it, not with the spoken word, but with language of the heart. It’s like a microcosm of a life well lived. “If I die, what a beautiful death, to die in the exercise of your passion.” “The fact that wire walking is framed by death is great because you have to take it very seriously.” “To me, it’s really so simple, that life should be lived on the edge. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to tape yourself to the rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge. Then you will live your life on the tightrope.” The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10 (New International Version)

I’m sure everyone has heard some reference to the eerie coupling of music and film evidenced by joining Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz.  If you haven’t, let me give you a brief introduction: get Dark Side of the Moon ready on your music player of choice and at the same time spin up The Wizard of Oz on the DVD player.  Start playing the album at the third MGM lion’s roar and then sit back and watch how strangely the music seems to line up with the film. I don’t think for a second that any of it is intentional, but you can’t deny that it is really very interesting.  Well, I’ve got another one for you. A while back I was at a church helping to install their new audio-visual system and something fascinating happened.  As we were working on the video system, Wall-E was our test video, projected large over the stage.  The sound was muted because the audio guys were busy testing their systems and they happened to have Coldplay’s Rush of Blood to the Head playing.  It wasn’t long before a friend stopped me and told me to look at what was happening.  The music and the film lined up in such a way that they seemed made for each other.  It was amazing. So that night I bought Wall-E for myself and tried it again…and it’s really pretty cool.  For instance, start the music just when the lights go down on the Pixar logo, the camera zooms from somewhere deep in space to focus on the earth and just as the earth comes into view the lyrics begin: “Look at the earth from outer space Everyone must find a place” Cool right? That song ends as Wall-E comes home and just as he opens the door to his house, the lyrics for In My Place come in: “In my place, in my place, Were lines that I couldn’t change, I was lost, oh yeah” And so that song about waiting for someone plays as we learn about Wall-E’s loneliness.  Anyone else feeling me here? Sadly, it does break down somewhat after that but it’s kind of creepy how well the song The Scientist fits the imagery just as Eve appears for the first time and its even cooler if you play that song over the final sequence of the film (try starting it at 1:24:30). Clearly no one planned any of this but it’s a lot of fun to watch and it reinforces my case that Wall-E is a brilliant piece of film art.  It’s visual storytelling at its best.  None of the meaning of the film is lost by replacing the soundtrack.  Try it for yourself.   If nothing else it’s an excuse to watch a great movie and listen to some fantastic music.