Today is the official release day for The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, by a friend of the Rabbit Room, Jennifer Trafton. A few quick reasons you should buy this book: 1) For starters, that’s a great title. Go ahead. Say it aloud to yourself. There’s rhythm, alliteration, and it evokes a sense of strange, adventurous beauty. You may think I’m overstating my case, but that’s the best way I know to describe how I felt when I first laid eyes on this book. 3) Jennifer Trafton. She came to Hutchmoot 2010 and chopped celery with my wife and Evie Coates in the kitchen. That makes her awesome. 4) The story and the writing are superb. This is the biggest one for me. Lots of books have great covers, great titles, and are written by people who occasionally chop celery, but they aren’t well written or rich in beauty. But Mount Majestic is both of those things. Jennifer’s sentences are playful and deft, and it’s clear that she cares about words. She cares about the sound of them and the aesthetic of a sentence. I read somewhere that Annie Dillard said she wasn’t interested in writing good books, but good sentences, and I think there’s something to that. My favorite writers aren’t just the ones that are telling the truth, but the ones who are telling it beautifully. 5) She makes up names like “Guafnoggle” and dreams up walking mangroves and underground kingdoms, and, yes, poisonous turtles. The story is about Persimmony Smudge’s discovery of a giant asleep under the kingdom, and her desperate struggle to keep it asleep lest it wake and destroy everything. It reads like a modern day fairy tale, so it felt familiar. But right up to the last chapter I had no idea how the book would end. The book is thick with wonder, from the illustrations to the cover and dustjacket, to the moment when Persimmony first sees the sleeping giant. It’s a great story for read-aloud, for your 8-and-up kids, and even for the grownups. I loved it as much as my 12-year-old did. So thanks, Jennifer, for following your nose and writing a moving, memorable tale. Oh! And congratulations, from the Rabbit Room, on your book release. day. Pick up your copy here.

As Christians we are so often asking for what we’ve already received in Christ rather than thanking God and affirming what we’ve been given. This is one of my favorite Major Ian Thomas quotes on the subject. How did they (the children of Israel) get through Jordan? They put their feet in the waters of Jordan and stood still. Why? God told them to! What happened? God divided the waters and they went through on dry land. Why? God said they would! “As ye have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him” (Col 2:6). How are you to walk in Jesus Christ? As you received Him. How did you receive Him? By faith. Was that very difficult? How then are you to walk in Him? By faith! Will that be any more difficult? As you have learned to thank Him for His death, so you thank Him for His life, humbly assuming that He lives in you, as you have already humbly assumed that He died for you. Is that not simple? And how long has it taken you to find this out? Remember, He does not give you strength – He is your strength! He does not give you victory – He is your victory! He cannot be your life without being all you need, for “in him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and you are complete in him” (Col 2:9). Then count upon the fact – and stop asking for what you have!

Happy Thanksgiving, Rabbit Roomers. In honor of this fine holiday I give you my newest poem, which started out like John Berryman and became a total rip-off of Billy Collins. So don’t sue me. I wrote it while Pete, Jamie and I drove from Tennessee to Shiloh, my folks’ place in North Florida, where I write these words. I looked and looked for the perfect image to complement the poem, and this was the best I could come up with. Again, don’t sue me. Have a grand feast, and don’t do that thing where everybody has to say something they’re thankful for before you eat. I’ve found that everybody’s happier if you wait to do that after the trypto-whatever kicks in. THANKSGIVING (A CONFESSION AND A PLEA TO THE ALMIGHTY) Be near me, Savage Dreamer, Bright Igniter of Exploding Suns, But not too near. I’d like to live, By your grace, just long enough To taste another perfect steak. And to see my children marry, And, perhaps, to pen a memoir. Great redeemer of my lechery, Bright Dawn of Blessed Hope, Lay waste to every prideful thing, Each black infraction of your law. O Swirling Storm of Holy Anger, Be patient with me. I’m certain I will make a second gluttonous Trip to the festal spread of food. And I might as well admit, O King Omniscient, I plan to make a third. And that will lead to sloth, I know, If only for the afternoon. Awake, O sleeper! But not yet, not yet. I want to dream a dream of light In Heaven’s towering splendor. I long, my Lord, to walk its streets Or better yet, to drive them. I’ve always wanted a motorcycle, A cool one that blats and rumbles Like a herd of flaming zebras. I could totally impress the ladies With my holy rolling zebra steed, But only by your perfect pleasure, Ruler of the angel armies, blaster Of the horn of strength, would I ride The golden highways awesomely. O Wisdom of the Ages, speak! Sing to me of secret knowledge Open wide the gates of truth, And let me learn it, by your grace, Through the medium of television– Smartly written situational comedy, Perhaps, or an epic space opera. Let me taste the honey of your word, My beloved savior. Seriously. Save me From my wit, my words, my songs, My sin, my bad poems, my vanity, My every single human impulse, Except the ones I like and am able To justify using my corruptible Reason, my imperfect understanding, And my belief in your inexhaustible Forgiveness. When I awake, saintly, I will consume a dish of pumpkin pie. And, as I politely swallow a belch, I will lean my heart on yours, Almighty, To whom, alone, is due thanksgiving.

I came fully awake very early this morning, and opened my eyes to a window full of sheer crimson light. One of those rare, red mornings that come sometimes in autumn had visited the mountains. I wonder if beauty can be so great that it wakes you even from physical sleep, because I was exhausted. But there came that light, and up went my eyes. That dawn was a face pressed against my panes, staring at me until I woke to stare back. I sat up then, propped on pillows to watch the light draw back and laugh itself into pink, and then the gold of new day. And as I watched, the words from a story I had read just the night before spoke themselves over and over in my head: With his one good foot, the man nudges Josip, pushing him gently, making him turn to face the opposite wall. The bar of lig ht is climbing higher now. “Do you see?” Josip shakes his head. “Surely you see,” says the man. “I see the light, but the walls imprison it.” “The light has entered the prison. Nothing can keep it out.” “If there is no window, the light cannot enter.” “If there is no window, the light enters within you.” The novel in this case is Island of the World, by Michael O’Brien. I was familiar with O’Brien through his nonfiction book, A Landscape with Dragons. I sped through that one; a fascinating look at the spiritual and imaginative symbols that fill fairy tales and myth throughout the ages, and come to us in modern times through fantastical literature. (I highly recommend it, though disagree with O’Brien’s conclusions about A Wrinkle in Time.) So full of insight was that book into the workings of imagination, into the way we crave beauty and battle in story, I knew I would probably enjoy his fiction. When a bookish friend urgently pressed this 800-page novel into my hands last week, I dove right in. Imagine that a medieval mystic poet wrote a modern novel with communist Yugoslavia as his setting and a little boy as his hero.  That will get you the feel of this tale. The story opens in the boyhood of Josip Lasta, a Croatian boy oblivious to the turmoil enveloping his country at the end of WWII because he is so immersed in a joyous childhood in the remote mountain village of Rajska Polja, (translation; “the fields of heaven”). His life is simple; his home just three rooms, but he is rich in all the things that count. Taught literature and love by his schoolteacher father, adored by his warm-hearted, bread-baking “Mamica,” Josip is raised in the tight, friendly circle of his village and schooled in a living faith by the hearty Franciscan priest, Fra Anto. I’m not giving anything away when I say the first hundred pages of this book fool you with their joy. You know tragedy is coming, it’s hinted at in the first chapters. But the strong, homey beauty of family and field and tradition draws you into an innocence as sweet and blind as Josip’s. You dwell in that world with him as he discovers the great beauty of the earth, and senses the Love that beats behind it. You watch as light forms a land of its own at the center of Josip’s soul, founds a refuge right in his heart, and you, the reader, feel it to be the heartbeat of the story. Then the world breaks apart. Josip’s life is shattered and he is exiled, not just from his home, but from that place of joy in his deepest heart. And that’s where the journey begins. From the point of tragedy on, the novel moves quickly through Josip’s life as he becomes a mathematician, a professor, and then a “cultural rebel” under Tito’s reign. From a literary point of view, I found the pace of the novel swift and smooth; it was that rare book where I barely noticed the passing of a hundred pages. The history explained, and the evocation of the culture and mindset of that part of the world is superb. I have always maintained that stories are the best way to learn history, and if you are curious about the Balkans, you should read this for pure education. Yet the glory of this book is not in its excellent writing, or detailed research. The gift of this story lies in its unblinking portrayal of human brutality as it is juxtaposed with the light, the poetry, the Love that still bubbles up in the heart of a wounded boy and calls him relentlessly home. I warn you, this is a book that might cause embarrassment if read in public places. It has greatly funny moments; I sat in a coffee shop yesterday trying hard not to laugh straight out loud at the novel’s conversation between a Croatian Catholic and a Pentecostal from Harlem as they compare notes and merrily call each other heretics. But I have also cried at this book, teared up in ridiculously public places more often than with almost any other novel I have read. The tears aren’t surface either; whatever hurt or struggle you bear, this story will touch it. This book will not spare you as a reader (and if you are squeamish about violence, be warned that it is squirm-worthy. Not gratuitously graphic, but definitely matter of fact.) Josip’s life, the brutality that comes upon him unawares, his fight to escape not only evil men, but the “heart of Cain,” in himself, describes the battle in which I think we all are daily locked. But it also describes the journey and offers the affirmation that through pain and despair, we are all, truly, walking toward a world remade by Love. A world beyond this, and yet one growing up in the innermost regions of our souls. In this way, I find the story to be a mystic’s work, because it is a story that affirms the reality of the spiritual world as it shapes and transforms the events of the physical. Life and death, hope or pain, life may deal these things to us in circumstance, but it is the love working within us that changes what is marred and dark into grace. Josip’s story on the outside is an epic, Homeric journey across oceans and mountains, but the journey of his soul is no less the point and gift of the story. Josip must make his way back to the country within himself where Light enters in, even when there is no window. For me, to read this book, was to walk a little better in my own odyssey of the soul. In so many ways, this book is about the beauty that is always reaching out, always growing up within, beckoning us back, and sometimes that call comes in the form of a story. Island of the World was just such a gift to me. Josip turns and faces the wide open doors. “I do not know if I have the strength to enter.” “You do not need strength. You need the heart of a child. See, one comes to you now. He will show you the way.” Though the old man still has not opened his eyes, he points, and there at the end of his fingers, standing a few paces away, is a twelve-year-old-boy in white shirt and shorts, with sandals on his feet. When Josip meets his eyes, the boy smiles and extends his hand. Step by step, the child leads him upward toward the entrance, pulling gently . . .  Josip steps forward, but in that step he dies. Pitching headlong, he falls and falls and falls–into terror and despair. Then, the little hand pulls him up. Now he is standing again and going forward and at last he enters the house of God, the joy of his youth.

In the last decade or so, I’ve read several books on the subject of art. I can count on one hand the number that I would call essential. The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield is one such book. If you’re unfamiliar, you should immediately read Ron Block’s post on the book from two years ago here, and you can also purchase the book here. Now on to my point. I’ve hit the wall lately. Projects sit in digital folders, collecting cyber cobwebs if such things exist. Some ideas have come and gone. Excitement wanes over time for what made me feel so passionate just a few months ago. I’m not sure what it is exactly. Pressfield does, however. He calls it The Resistance. Anything and everything that works against you to keep you from creating what it is you’re called to do — be it apathy, Satan, last night’s lasagna — it’s all placed in the same greater category. The Resistance. One of Pressfield’s quick thoughts in the book hit me squarely on the vocational jaw recently and I believe it worth sharing. He writes: A pro views her work as craft, not art. Not because she believes art is devoid of a mystical dimension. On the contrary. She understands that all creative endeavor is holy, but she doesn’t dwell on it. She knows if she thinks about that too much, it will paralyze her. So she concentrates on technique. The professional masters how, and leaves what and why to the gods. Like Somerset Maugham she doesn’t wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition. The professional is acutely aware of the intangibles that go into inspiration. Out of repsect for them, she lets them work. She grants them their sphere while she concentrates on hers. The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn’t talk about it. She does her work.

Seeing my life as a story is one thing, seeing myself as the central hero another. I am helped by the thought of examining my life as if it were a story and that I ought to make of myself a good character. I know there are a few different books out with that as a central premise and (though I haven’t yet read any of them) I benefit from hearing people refer to them –especially to that central idea. I am a character in a story. I am on a journey. I may or may not have a guitar slung on my back as I walk down the railroad tracks smoking a cigarette while squinting. The problems often come in for me when I view myself, not as inconsequential in the big story, but as far too central. Sometimes it’s not even that I think I’m central in a good way, but that I think that my failings will derail the whole story –that I am the irredeemable Gollum, wrecking everything. It’s an arrogant presumption for me to think that I know either what will come of my little part in the bigger story, or that I can really know what it is. When post-moderns rail against certainty, I am often flummoxed by what they are saying and implying (especially about the alleged ineptitude of God). But in the case of a humble uncertainty about how our life fits into the grand, sovereign design of God throughout the ages, a certain uncertainty is demanded of us. The problem with pretending to be the director, or author, or a heroic central character, is that we are applying for a job which has already been filled. God is the author and the hero. Unsure of all the implications or not, we do know our place. If we are in Christ, there’s absolutely no doubt about our position, our relationship, our adoption, our justification, our standing before the Father. When the Accuser comes, throwing stones as his name demands, his accusations toward us hit the mark with great precision. The prosecution proceeds. Yes, yes, that is true about what I’ve done. He’s right. Things are looking bad. But when he is faced with the certain work of Christ on our behalf, and the resultant standing we have in Christ’s righteousness, he is unable to make a winning case. We are acquitted based on the work of Christ alone. In the great exchange, Christ receives our sin, bearing it on the cross, and we receive his righteousness, a free gift we receive by grace through faith. We receive this not for our stellar performance in the story of our life, but because he loved helpless rebels who couldn’t rise from the dead. Lazarus, you are officially dead. Can’t you do something about it? Um, no. We needed a miracle. We needed the deeper magic. “Be alive!” The Gospel is the central plot point, the hinge on which the whole tale turns. And what a turning! I recount the Gospel because it underscores the central roles in The Story. There’s no question of us being the Main Character, or Author. The worldwide casting calls for those jobs are a presumptive farce. But the calls go out all the time. We are offered regular remedies to our most basic problems which are so corrupt as to make snake oil seem like the fountain of youth. There isn’t salvation anywhere but in Jesus. No talk-show host with new age self-referential remedies on TV, or economic elixirs on radio, can cure what deeply ails us. Most often, the charmers are calling on us to look within, to view ourselves as the answer to our distress. They even speak out against the other people’s version of seeking salvation from within and argue that theirs is the true way to obtain your own salvation. Right and left-wing humanism serve the same god. Mirror, mirror on the wall. So what about my story? What about The Story? Same Author. Same Hero. It’s not me, or you. If we don’t see ourselves as derivative characters, as inventions of the Author, then we are on a collision course with needless confusions (not to mention rebellion). More presumptuous is the notion that we are Author-itative in any kind of grand sense. We write, but it’s a subcontracted job. It feels really important to me to make that distinction. It feels to me like it’s a subtle point, but a point of great importance. It’s a small hook from which hangs a heavy cloak. “God is sovereign, man is responsible.” Walter Staton said that and the order of the coupling is important. Have you ever been listening to “testimonies” and heard people talk about their salvation experience and God barely comes into it, except as kind of a side-character? I once heard (at a baptism!) a person tell her story of salvation by telling about all her struggles in life, but always returning to the refrain, “But God always knew I was a good person.” Her tale was one of personal goodness and near-sinlessness throughout life, which God knew all along, and, like an encouraging buddy, always saw her for what she really was. A hero. No need for a change of heart. No new birth. No work of Christ. No bad news (beyond “other people” causing her problems). Just God’s stamp of approval on her immaculate life. I wanted to barf. Mirror, mirror on the wall. If God is reduced to the role of midget league cheerleader in your life, it’s not Christianity you’re embracing. It’s a Christian-languaged horror story of self-actualized salvation. The truth is so much better! The Gospel frees us from our need to be needed. Lest I fall to the charge of over-simplifying (to which I’m admittedly open), let me add this. I do think that, in some sense at least, there are heroes among mankind. Jeffrey Overstreet says that art is not something that you make, but a conclusion reached by others. I get what he’s driving at. It’s the same thrust I want to make here. The title “hero” is not something we can really assign ourselves. It’s a conclusion that will or will not be reached by others. The audience will see and know. Of course the audience that matters most is also the author of the tale, who is not at all surprised by how your story turns out. He is, of course, the central hero as well. His work is what makes you a new kind of human. So we must get over ourselves, come to the end of ourselves, and repent of our self-inclined madness. We win by losing, triumph by surrender, become heroes –if we ever are– by being rescued. If we shatter the self-reflecting mirror on our walls, perhaps, in the fallen shards, we’ll see at last a thousand reflections of heaven.

I’m up to my neck in a Jeremiah study this fall. There’s a Bible study in Kentucky of which I am an honorary, if distant, member. When I lived in Nashville, I drove up once a week to pore over this or that book in the Old Testament with these people, and six years later, I’ve kept at least loosely up as they’ve plowed through the major prophets. The understanding these long-distance studies have opened in my heart cannot be measured. Take, for instance, the spring of Isaiah One blustery spring Saturday about three years ago, my dear friend (the teacher) came over during one of my Kentucky visits just so I could spill my hundred and three questions about our current Isaiah study. Rain light poured in a bay window over the table where we sat with coffee, Bibles open, notebooks spread, pens in hand. For three hours–three hours, mind you–we talked our way through Isaiah. At the end of it, I remember sitting back in my spindle-legged chair, that pure, grey light in my eyes and a light just as serene in my spirit. Finally, that day, I grasped that God’s judgment is part of his love I saw mercy in those epic books of judgment. I never thought I would. My walk with God has often been marred by my fear of him. Not a holy reverence, but a cringing, slave-like terror that I would never be enough to please the God I serve. For a while, this fear so shaped my eyes I could barely open the Bible without finding some new thing to worry about, some new evidence of my own perpetual inadequacy and God’s resulting frown. I came to my quiet time one day, Bible in hand, and told God I really didn’t want to open it. I was not strong enough, I felt, for the challenge of Scripture. Obviously, I failed to grasp whatever it was that set everyone else rejoicing. But I did pray. I begged to know God’s love and in the silence that followed, God spoke so clearly in my heart it startled me. I must open my Bible. He could, he said, hold me safe through this fear, teach me the truth about himself. But only if I would engage again. Only if I would open that Bible in my hands, plunge into the battle and let him fight for me. I sighed and resigned myself to my task. My study of Isaiah began in sheer obedience. I remember this now as I delve into Jeremiah, because each day I find myself awed. I keep on finding mercy, right there in the judgment. Mercy so epic in story and scope, my soul is wide with it, and my faith finally has air to breathe. The thing I ached to know and am finally touching as I study the prophets is simply God’s grace. But this is key, I have realized that grace has many faces. There is the tender, father-hearted face. I’ve seen this clear as water in Jeremiah. This is the face that weeps when his children go astray, crying out for the lost ones to return. There is the strong, kingly face of kindly rule. The benevolent Master offering rain and gladness and wine and feasts if his people will only acknowledge his name. There is the Lover who yearns over the wife of his youth, lamenting her beauty, her lost faith. But when those faces of goodness fail to move the hearts of a dark-spirited people, a new face appears. There is the face of the Maker, the keeper of all power who wields lightning and wind and forms the mountains. There is the frown of the holy-hearted Spirit who cannot bear to see his people turn from goodness to worship idols and destroy their children. And there is the final face of judgment, the stern, stone-set gaze that brings pain on the children he made. But every one of those faces is mercy. Every one of those faces is rooted in love, begun and ended in grace. What would happen if God didn’t judge his people? What if he left them to go about their merry, idolatrous way and said not a thing? What if God left me to the vagaries of my own sinful self? Judgment is what happens when tenderness and tears are not enough. If we will not have the personal God, the Lover, then we shall be left with the elemental God, the Maker of the the mighty heavens and the pathless earth. And every force of his holy, creative power will run through us as a purging fire. But the fire, the pain, is mercy. It is destruction with the goal of redemption. Over and over throughout the prophets, God states the goal of his judgment: a people who no longer need law or rod because goodness is etched on their very hearts, formed in their very souls. The goal of judgment is annihilation only of our sin. We, ourselves, come through cleansed. We may be broken apart, but it is only so that the dirt drops off and God can craft us beautiful again. The miracle is that God sticks around to see it through. Any other god would just zap the sinful lot of us and be done. To bring nations and peoples through the process of a judgment that leads to full redemption is a true, everlasting love. It is a faithful love that is not willing to leave us in sin, nor finish us in anger. Love is the only force I know that works throughout every change to bring about the goodness, restore the beauty of the beloved. I used to be afraid of the prophets in all their bluster. Now, I know, they are just expressing the storm of God’s grand and many-faced mercy.

“God spoke to me this morning.” I looked up at Philip with a little grin. I always save my best thoughts for those mellow moments towards the end of the meal, when there’s a little wine left in the glasses and the dishes in the sink have yet to be thought of and Caspian, having abandoned all hope of receiving anything from the table, has laid his head down on Philip’s foot with a sigh that is not so much resignation as the slackening of a campaign. “He did?” Philip’s face was all animated interest in the soft glow of candlelight and he laid down his fork. “In the Bible?” “No—it was in a poem.” I paused and lifted my eyebrows significantly. “Is that so?” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms with a satisfied smile. “And do I get to hear it?” That was all I was waiting for, and he knew it. I dashed into the kitchen where my journal sat waiting on the counter and dashed back again, as if afraid that the enchanted moment of communion would pass if the twilight deepened any more outside or the candles on the table burned a bit lower. I read it out loud to him there in the waning, flickering light and could feel the joy throbbing in my voice, unabated since that morning’s first perusal of Yeats’ The Two Trees. When I was done Philip silently reached for my journal which I had laid on the table between us and read it slowly to himself. When he finally looked up at me his face bore a reflection of my own joy, and a sympathy with what I had seen buried like a horde of fairie gold within the exquisite lines. THE TWO TREES by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee. There the Loves a circle go, The flaming circle of our days, Gyring, spiring to and fro In those great ignorant leafy ways; Remembering all that shaken hair And how the wingèd sandals dart, Thine eyes grow full of tender care: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass. While I make no pretense to literary criticism, or to the analysis of Yeats’ belief system, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that the two trees in the poem stand for the trees found in the original Eden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And the reality which they image is one that has been with us in all its sorrow and bliss since the Fall: that of man’s choice. We chose that latter tree under the delusion of a lie and a warped perception of what assures freedom and joy and life and peace. And with it we got all the bitter barrenness of hell itself. The glass, or mirror, the demons hold is not so much a falsehood as it is a mockery. “Look what you got for all your pains: an agony of death-in-life and a cheap imitation of life-in-death!” One fatal choice and the whole beauty of the created order was shaken, shattered. And might it not be so that every time a similar choice is made, every time the fatal image is taken for the real and the lie is plucked and swallowed that the Fall happens all over again, essentially if not actually? The affair in the Garden was not about keeping rules or breaking them so much as choosing the Desire of our souls or choosing His counterfeit. At the heart of this poem lies that ancient choice, as terrible today as it was when God first granted it in the Garden: heaven or hell? Life or death? Not only for all eternity but for this very moment snared in time. “Gaze on this,” the poet pleads, “not on that.” Love and long for—in other words, submit to and believe—the ecstasy of the Life offered you. Take faith to turn from the ruin of your own heart and fix your eyes on something that is truer than all the sorrow of the world put together. It has been said that for every look at self we must take ten looks at Christ. I find that truth expressed with such magnificent beauty in this poem. For while the accepted interpretation—and for all I know, the original intent—of these lines may uphold an inward search for goodness apart from Christ, as a Christian I take great delight in the freedom I have to celebrate the gleaming flashes of truth that glitter and sparkle with such inexorable joy in the world around me. We’re miners, really, we servants of the true King, plunging through a darkened world in enemy territory to retrieve the scattered bits of Eden that were made to flame in the light of the sun. For though far-flung and often couched amid the hard crust of error and inaccuracy, they are there all the same. As C. S. Lewis recounted in Surprised by Joy, longings that disclose eternal realities may be mediated to us by ‘the water-colour world of Morris, the leafy recesses of Malory, the twilight of Yeats…’ That is just the wonder of poetry—or of anything beautiful, for that matter. It bears the opportunity of communicating spiritual truth, these remnants of a lost paradise with which our tired earth is endowed like veins of living gold, and give us courage to hope in a Redemptive Plan that is steadily, patiently, unrelentingly working to restore all things to their original purpose. For what does the ‘holy tree’ represent if not Holy Desire: indeed, the Life from which all living springs? As a believer I have the blessed opportunity to gaze into my own heart and see Jesus Christ. To find the mad paradox of His beauty and light and goodness and truth breaking irresistibly through the many chinks and cracks of this very flawed human vessel. To call myself a saint, of all things, and to laugh at the gorgeous joke of it and to know that it’s the realest thing about me. That unspeakable realness jars me time and again from morbid introspection and self-centered cynicism. It reminds me that while ‘those who fain would serve Him best are conscious most of wrong within,’ the consciousness of our very weakness is what ultimately propels us towards Him with a force that all the ‘natural virtues’ in the world together could never muster. And it silences those ‘ravens of unresting thought,’ those ceaseless doubts and questions and inward deliberations, as if by some potent charm. When the home of our thoughts shifts from ‘who am I?’ to ‘Who is He?’ I believe we begin to fathom the miracle of ‘Christ in us, the hope of glory’. When my sister was in art school, one of her assignments was to paint a self portrait that would be subjected to a peer review. With characteristic unconventionality, and in one of the bravest moves she could make as an artist, she produced a work that was different than anyone else’s in the class. Dividing her face down the middle, she painted one half as her normal self: short red hair, a mouth curving in what could be mischief or pensiveness, a wide-eyed intentness to the gaze. The mirror image had many of the same distinguishing features, but the hair was long and soft like something you’d see in Rossetti, and the face was even more beautiful than my beautiful sister can’t help being. But the most striking thing about it was the nimbus of gold radiating from that half of the head, recalling the treatment of Orthodox iconography. “So, you think you’re a saint?” jeered her classmates. But my sister had made her quiet statement. And though she has gone on to produce works of stunning technical mastery and classical realism, that painting remains one of my favorites to this day. It’s the majestic sweep of the gospel, the essence of Romans 6, 7 and 8 encapsulated in one visual experience. The truth is that anyone in Christ is a brand new creation: ‘the old has gone; the new has come’. Throughout the Bible, God’s people are likened to thriving trees and fruitful gardens, springing with a Life that is bigger than they are. He calls us ‘trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord’; He promises that if we abide in Him we’ll bear fruit that remains. I just love that image of His life in me: an indefatigably green growing thing that even my obtuseness, my failures and sins, cannot destroy. Flowers and their fruit borne of no effort but that of yielding and birds of joy singing and darting among the branches. And the flaming circle of immortality resting like a nimbus over my head.

The Art of Family: Rituals, Imagination, and Everyday Spirituality Gina Bria (1998, Dell Books) Traditions, rites, memories, rituals:  These are overwhelming to parents desiring to foster a nurturing home environment for their children — one of joy, playfulness, freedom to be who they (and we) are, common courtesy, respect, and unconditional love. Such big shoes to fill, and we know it. Family-creating, as author and anthropologist Gina Bria points out in her wonderfully articulate, and refreshingly non-judgmental book, The Art of Family, is indeed an art, and oftentimes art must be trudged through in order to get the right colors on the canvas, the right words on the page, the flowers in the correct garden soil and light. A family is a “little society” from which play, ritual, imagination and story all are reinjected into the contemporary home. In Bria’s own words, The Art of Family is “not a guide or manual to ‘achieving’ family [but] a book about applied hope and intelligence, a short definition of imagination. I hope this book and its stories will be a new imaginative friend to you, sparking new ideas, offering solace, giving rest.” Fulfilling the author’s expressed hope, my wife and I continue to pull this book from the shelves from time to time as a sort of reference, an encouragement, and something like a steady friend.

[Note: What follows is the piece I wrote for my session at Hutchmoot 2010.] This past summer, throughout the course of a week, six adults shared their personal stories with several hundred high school students attending the camp where I played music. Their stories ranged from sexual abuse, addictions (including pornography, alcohol, drugs), abandonment, and seeking a father’s love through athletic performance, to a young woman who used to cut herself in order to feel alive. While listening to such painfully real histories, I was deeply moved by the honesty and vulnerability of those six people. I also was profoundly moved by the work of redemption each of them experienced over the course of their lives at the hands of God, at the hands of His image bearers, within the alphabet of their chronicles as it was laid bare for all to see and to read. I heard author Barbara Brown Taylor speak on this subject in referencing media, online social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and our desire for genuine community. She said: “We have so many choices of stories to pay attention to; the risk is to choose stories that are too small. We bear one word – one narrative – on our soul; is that one word enough to save another soul?” The question then becomes to which stories should we give heed, to which should we give credence to in our day-to-day lives? Which stories will edify and help us further construct or understand our own narrative? As for me, I must pay closest attention to stories of hope, for hope is what I need most since it is so often found lacking and withering within me. If I ignore hope, or if I pretend not to care, I know full well the cavernous darkness, its jowls wide open, awaiting me. It’s no small irony that the songs I have written over the years have spilled over with this hope, even though I myself have struggled to cling to it or, at times, to believe anything good about myself, about the world, or even that God himself should dare call any of the scarred earth “good.” Perhaps it is catharsis – self-serving, though it may be – and a verbal reminder to my stubborn, willful self since I am the one soul who will sing that very song over and over again, even out of darkness, even out of light. I cannot speak of hope without thinking of the 1994 movie The Shawshank Redemption, in which the main character writes to fellow former prison-mate, “Remember that hope is a good thing, and a good thing never dies.” It is very much worth recalling that Jesus himself spoke and interacted with friends and strangers alike in the form of parables and stories. In doing so he edified people by posing questions to them in what might easily have been their greatest moment of shame or guilt at the hands of anyone less gracious: “Do you want to get well?”, he asked the crippled man at the Bethesda pool; to Peter & co., “Who do you say I am?”; to the accusing crowd gathered in front of the naked woman caught in the act of adultery, “Are any of you without sin? If so, cast the first stone.” Why did Jesus interact this way? Why not just call down swift and immediate judgment? Why not deliver words on a silver platter? Was it because the posing of a question requires a response? It takes two to share a story: a bearer and a listener. To listen is to hear, is to “see”, is to be moved, is to interact, is to be changed. Words, in all their quiet, humble power, make the impossible brim with possibility. Words are resilient. They can redeem. Words can edify, they can encourage. They can also cripple and devastate. But words, in and of themselves, are rarely enough; action must follow. “He who hears my words but ignores them is like a clanging cymbal.” The art of storytelling and the art of listening beg us to engage in our own lives as well as others’, to not ignore the inner groanings of our speechless heart or our basic human desire and need to belong. I recognize my story in author Frederick Buechner’s, and his suggestion that we “listen to our lives and to see it for the fathomless mystery it is” because, as he says, “all moments are key moments.” Buechner recognizes grace and redemption in the hubbub, skulduggery and decay of our fallen humanity. I was and still am being changed by Frederick Buechner, even some ten years after my first introduction to his work. He gave my own inner groanings and hidden secrets an alphabet, a language, from which to breathe, to speak and to make myself known. He drapes flesh on otherwise arcane, ghosts of characters long since passed from the earth. Biblical characters who once seemed such perfect people to me on paper (even in some of their obvious imperfections), I now see as seemingly ordinary men and women who, just like us, ate, drank, bled, laughed, cried, toiled, gave birth, gave alms, and gave up hope. God used the foolish then the way he still uses the foolish today. I think of examples like Jacob in Buechner’s The Son of Laughter: limping, panting and hip-whipped, Jacob dared wrestle with God, to go to the mat with him, and he found himself, his family, and later the world, changed forever by the event. I also think of an aging Adam seated fireside in his La-Z-Boy, taking a drag on a Marlboro, now reminiscing about that long-ago afternoon in the green, ripe orchard with that forbidden apple, a smooth-talking serpent and his beloved wife, Eve, in Buechner’s Peculiar Treasures. Buechner’s uncanny gift for reading between the lines and for taking musty, archaic characters off the mantle and bringing them back down to earth, affords me a mercifully graceful gift: the chance to relate to those lofty characters myself amid my own humanity, my own failings and occasional successes, and to realize that their humanity is not so different from my own, even now from across a vast expanse of time, culture and religiosity. But perhaps Buechner’s greatest gift to me is not in what he actually says, but what he does not say. He never forces me to believe or to think a certain way; he simply observes and reflects, leaving me the time, space, freedom and dignity to observe, ponder and absorb the picture myself. Never forceful, never obtuse, never condemning, never narrow-minded or shortsighted, but always vivid, poetic, genuine and with a beauty born out of humility, and a humility born of Beauty itself, Buechner allows for what many in the Church see as dichotomy: faith and doubt, light and dark, knowledge and mystery. It allows for that most dangerous of existences: the opportunity to be yourself, the fool God made you to be, and in that originality to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are never alone. This has been key in informing my own writing over the years. I am not called to preach or to condemn, nor am I to present my “message” on a silver platter or to spoon-feed it. I am to venture alongside those who will go me on the journey in an attempt to paint a picture, to convey a scene, however abstract or esoteric it may be, that life is much too short – too long for some – and far too treacherous to go about pretending that we, especially the Church, are entitled to a singular righteousness that has anything at all to do with our own merit. It seems to me that in offering the listener/reader the space to interpret a song – or any artistic endeavor, for that matter – themselves, I grant them the freedom, grace and dignity to employ the brain and heart God himself wove together and placed within us. To “write something that seems beautiful, lasting, and true”, as Buechner states in The Sacred Journey, is to take people on that journey. I hope to remind people that though they may feel alone in life, in their struggles, in their despair, in their darkness, even in their light, they are most assuredly not alone. None of us are. To believe that we are utterly alone is perhaps Satan’s most subtle, and therefore, greatest lie heaped upon man. The sharing of story defuses the human capacity for judgment, enabling us to respond rather than react. Story breeds empathy, and therefore mercy reminds me of the power of redemption, and healing reminds me I am not alone, softens my heart, ignites hope. There is always a flipside to every coin so long as we give ears and eyes to its telling. At the heart of everyone’s story is the narrative of redemption being spoken and uttered into the world, whether we realize it or not, whether we purpose it or not, whether it is alive or moribund in us. We don’t always live out of such knowledge, we curse it at times, we regret the kinship, but if we ultimately believe that God is a redeemer, then all of it – all our poor choices, the mistakes, laziness, sadness, overzealousness, hypocrisy – is ultimately being reclaimed, redeemed, and blessed. And in a kingdom where no lily of the field is overlooked, every moment is a hallowed moment, and every story is sacred, hallowed ground.

We just discovered this piece (thanks to Katy Bowser) by renowned painter Makoto Fujimura, adapted from his introduction to our friend Michael Card’s book on creativity, Scribbling in the Sand. Dear Young Artist: Remember your first love—how much you enjoyed creating as a child. If you ever lose that sense of joy, you will need to reflect on why you lost that spark. Of course, the craft of expression takes much “dying to self” and much discipline. A discipline of any form takes perseverance. But when we are going through a period of training, we must remember the reason for our training. Our journey needs to have a specific direction. Our direction need not be toward being successful and being famous. We need to start from your first love; what we cherish, what we are, and what we value. As T.S. Eliot wrote, “our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” Read the rest at Makoto’s website, where you can also see some of his beautiful paintings.

The last installment of the Hutchmoot session given by Andy P. and me. The last post dug into the false self and its origins; this one continues the same thought and moves into a conclusion. A quote from a book by Dan Stone, The Rest of the Gospel (When the Partial Gospel Has Worn You Out): “The false self is a soul-based self. It is the soul operating independently of its Source. I don’t want to minimize the vital role of the soul in God’s economy. The life of God through us must be expressed through the soul. But His life is expressed through a soul dependent upon its Source, not acting independently of it.” “As an unbeliever our spirit was dead to God, so we became dominated by our soul (psuche in Greek). Our soul was turned toward the world, getting its direction and validation from the external environment. We were a natural man, as Paul called it, living a soul-based (psyche in English) life.” “Somewhere along the way we got saved and our sins were forgiven. And we wanted to live this thing called the Christian life, but we didn’t know how to live out of our new spirit. So we fell back upon our only other resource: the false self. It knew how to get along in the world. We just made a few adjustments to fit the Christian scene. We were sitting ducks for the how-to books, which told us how to manipulate the false self to make it more effective in getting along.” “Although having the Holy Spirit in our spirit, we didn’t know about the Holy Spirit living the life of Christ through us. So our mode of operation was the same as for the unbeliever: self-reliance. That’s what the false self is: our attempt to independently operate our own lives. As Christians, the false self even tries to do it for the glory of God.” George MacDonald expresses a similar thought this way: “It is only where a man is at one with God that he can do the right thing or take the right way. Whatever springs from any other source than the spirit that dwelt in Jesus, is of sin, and works to thwart the divine will.” Another one from GMac: “The law itself is infinite, reaching to such delicacies of action, that the man who tries most will be the man most aware of defeat. We are not made for law, but for love. Love is law, because it is infinitely more than law. It is of an altogether higher region than law – is, in fact, the creator of law.” And again: “In order to fulfill the commonest law…we must rise into a loftier region altogether, a region that is above law, because it is spirit and life and makes the law.” Jesus states in Matthew 5:20, “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” He then goes on to make the Law utterly impossible apart from the Spirit of God living in us, empowering us. C.S. Lewis wrote: “God made us; invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.” I have gone on to read many different writers, but Lewis and MacDonald remain two of my most cherished influences. Lewis took me by the hand as an emotionally troubled child and, through fantasy, showed me what God is like, what love is, what men are meant to be, and the ugliness of evil.  MacDonald continues to  mentor me into a better understanding who I really am in Christ – a dwelling place of God.

I recently discovered this creepy old George MacDonald poem and the painting that inspired it. It may take reading it a few times aloud to get what he’s saying (it did for me, anyway), which I recommend doing with all poetry. So you don’t think it’s all gloom, here’s a snippet from stanza eleven: “God is in heaven–yes, everywhere; And Love, the all-shining, will kill Despair.” Enjoy the poem (if you dare). from The Threefold Cord: Poems by Three Friends: edited by George MacDonald (1883) Suggested by a drawing of Thomas Moran, the American painter. I. THIS must be the very night! The moon knows it!–and the trees– They stand straight upright, Each a sentinel drawn up, As if they dared not know Which way the wind might blow! The very pool, with dead gray eye, Dully expectant, feels it nigh, And begins to curdle and freeze! And the dark night, With its fringe of light, Holds the secret in its cup! II. What can it be, to make The poplars cease to shiver and shake, And up in the dismal air Stand straight and stiff as the human hair When the human soul is dizzy with dread– All but those two that strain Aside in a frenzy of speechless pain, Though never a wind sends out a breath To tunnel the foggy rheum of death? What can it be has power to scare The full-grown moon to the idiot stare Of a blasted eye in the midnight air? Something has gone wrong; A scream will come tearing out ere long! III. Still as death, Although I listen with bated breath! Yet something is coming, I know–is coming; With an inward soundless humming, Somewhere in me or in the air– I cannot tell–but its foot is there! Marching on to an unheard drumming, Something is coming–coming– Growing and coming; And the moon is aware– Aghast in the air At the thing that is only coming With an inward soundless humming, And an unheard spectral drumming! IV. Nothing to see and nothing to hear! Only across the inner sky The wing of a shadowy thought flits by, Vague and featureless, faceless, drear– Only a thinness to catch the eye: Is it a dim foreboding unborn, Or a buried memory, wasted and worn As the fading frost of a wintry sigh? Anon I shall have it!–anon!–it draws nigh! A night when–a something it was took place That drove the blood from that scared moon-face! Hark! was that the cry of a goat, Or the gurgle of water in a throat? Hush! there is nothing to see or hear, Only a silent something is near; No knock, no footsteps three or four, Only a presence outside the door! See! the moon is remembering–what? The wail of a mother-left, lie-alone brat? Or a raven sharpening its beak to peck? Or a cold blue knife and a warm white neck? Or only a heart that burst and ceased For a man that went away released? I know not–know not, but something is coming Somehow back with an inward humming. V. Ha! Look there! Look at that house– Forsaken of all things–beetle and mouse! Mark how it looks! It must have a soul! It looks, it looks, though it cannot stir; See the ribs of it–how they stare! Its blind eyes yet have a seeing air! It knows it has a soul! Haggard it hangs o’er the slimy pool, And gapes wide open as corpses gape: It is the very murderer! The ghost has modelled himself to the shape Of this drear house all sodden with woe, Where the deed was done, long, long ago, And filled with himself his new body full– To haunt for ever his ghastly crime, And see it come and go– Brooding around it like motionless time, With a mouth that gapes, and eyes that yawn Blear and blintering and full of the moon, Like one aghast at a hellish dawn. –It is coming, coming soon! VI. For, ever and always, when round the tune Grinds on the barrel of organ-Time, The deed is done;–and it comes anon– True to the roll of the clock-faced moon, True to the ring of the spheric chime, True to the cosmic rhythm and rime; Every point, as it first went on, Will come and go till all is gone; And palsied with horror from garret to core, The house cannot shut its gaping door; Its burst eye stares as if trying to see, And it leans as if settling heavily, Settling heavy with sickness dull: It also is hearing the soundless humming Of the wheel that is turning–the thing that is coming. On the naked rafters of its brain, Gaunt and wintred, see the train Of gossiping, scandal-mongering crows, That watch, all silent, with necks a-strain, Wickedly knowing, with heads awry, And the sharpened gleam of a cunning eye– Watch, through the cracks of the ruined skull, How the evil business goes! –Beyond the eyes of the cherubim, Beyond the ears of the seraphim, Outside, forsaken, in the dim Phantom-haunted chaos grim, He stands with the deed going on in him! VII. O winds, winds! that lurk and peep Under the edge of the moony fringe! O winds, winds! up and sweep; Up, and blow and billow the air, Billow the air with blow and swinge; Rend me this ghastly house of groans; Rend and scatter the skeleton’s bones Over the deserts and mountains bare; Blast and hurl and shiver aside Nailed sticks and mortared stones; Clear the phantom, with torrent and tide, Out of the moon and out of my brain, That the light may fall shadowless in again! VIII. But alas! then the ghost O’er mountain and coast Would go roaming, roaming; and never was swine, That, grubbing and talking with snork and whine On Gadarene mountains, had taken him in, But would rush to the lake to unhouse the sin For any charnel This ghost is too carnal; There is no volcano, burnt out and cold, Whose very ashes are gray and old, But would cast him forth in reviving flame, To blister the sky with a smudge of shame. IX. Is there no help–none anywhere, Under the earth, or above the air? –Come, come, sad woman, whose tender throat Has a red-lipped mouth that can sing no note! Child, whose midwife, the third grim Fate, Shears in hand, thy coming did wait! Father, with blood-bedabbled hair! Mother, all withered with love’s despair! Come, broken heart, whatever thou be, Hasten to help this misery! Thou wast only murdered, or left forlorn; He is a horror, a hate, a scorn! Come, if out of the holiest blue That the sapphire throne shines through; For pity come, though thy fair feet stand Next to the elder-band; Fling thy harp on the hyaline, Hurry thee down the spheres divine; Come, and drive those ravens away; Cover his eyes from the pitiless moon; Shadow his brain from her stinging spray; Droop around him, a tent of love, An odour of grace, a fanning dove; Walk through the house with the healing tune Of gentle footsteps; banish the shape Remorse calls up, thyself to ape; Comfort him, dear, with pardon sweet; Cool his heart from its burning heat With the water of life that lakes the feet Of the throne of God, and the holy street. X. O God, he is but a living blot, Yet he lives by thee–for if thou wast not, They would vanish together, self-forgot, He and his crime:–one breathing blown From thy spirit on his would all atone, Scatter the horror, and bring relief In an amber dawn of holy grief: God, give him sorrow; arise from within: Art thou not in him, silence in din, Stronger than anguish, deeper than sin? XI. Why do I tremble, a creature at bay! ‘Tis but a dream–I drive it away. Back comes my breath, and my heart again Pumps the red blood to my fainting brain Released from the nightmare’s nine-fold train; God is in heaven–yes, everywhere; And Love, the all-shining, will kill Despair. To the wall’s blank eyeless space I turn the picture’s face. XII. But why is the moon so bare, up there? And why is she so white? And why does the moon so stare, up there– Strangely stare, out of the night? Why stand up the poplars That still way? And why do those two of them Start astray? And out of the black why hangs the gray? Why does it hang down so, I say, Over that house, like a fringed pall Where the dead goes by in a funeral? –Soul of mine, Thou the reason canst divine:– Into thee the moon doth stare With pallid, terror-smitten air: Thou, and the Horror lonely-stark, Outcast of eternal dark, Are in nature same and one, And thy story is not done! So let the picture face thee from the wall, And let its white moon stare. (End.) ———————– What do you guys make of the last several stanzas? I know what I think, but I’d love to hear your take on it.

Randall Goodgame and a whole passel of other folks have been in the studio this past month putting the finishing touches on A Slugs and Bugs Christmas. I know Randall is excited about how the whole thing has come together, and today we’re giving you a first listen to one of the finished songs. If you’d like to be a patron of the record, act fast–tomorrow is officially the last day to sign up. “Gingerbread House” from A Slugs and Bugs Christmas

[Note from the editor: This post constitutes the Rabbit Room’s 1000th post! Celebration is in order. Dance, cheer, toast your friends, and then come back and read this most excellent post by Jonathan Rogers.] “It’s around here somewhere, boys,” I said, kicking at the pine straw. The lot was still vacant, but it was hardly identifiable, overtaken as it was by brush and vine and scrubby pine saplings. It had been a full twenty-five years since I had been there; but still, how does a concrete house slab just disappear? I imagined eager souvenir hounds chipping it apart and carrying it away piece by piece. But that seemed unlikely. Could we be in the wrong spot? I sighted with a surveyor’s eye across the playing fields to the back exit of the school. No, this was the place. It was past lunchtime, and I could see that my boys were losing interest. “Keep an eye out for broken teeth,” I said, “hanks of hair—that sort of thing.” They gave skeptical looks. This wasn’t working out the way I had pictured it. How many times had I told the boys about the Slab? How many times had I gone over the speech I would give when I finally took them to see the place for themselves. I should have sussed things out before bringing them cold like this. There we were, and the Slab was nowhere to be found. It seemed a shame, however, not to give my speech. “Boys,” I said, “this ground was once stained with the blood of my enemies.” Was that an eye-roll I saw? Perhaps I was overstating the case. I started again: “Such deeds have been performed on the ground where we stand,” I said. “How many wrongs have been avenged on the Slab? How many boys have stepped onto the Slab and walked away—or were carried away—as men?” I looked into the faces of my sons—eleven, twelve, thirteen—and it dawned on me that I was not much bigger than they when I had last been in this place. *** Separated from campus by a gravel lane and a red clay ditch, the Slab was the venue for big after-school fistfights betweenWarner Robins Junior High students. There were spontaneous fights, of course, that popped up and played out as suddenly as summer storms, but the big, premeditated fights took place at the Slab, supposedly beyond the jurisdiction of Mr. Beck, the Assistant Principal. No matter now many times Mr. Beck crossed the ditch and the gravel lane to drag combatants back by the ear, we persisted in our belief that Slab fighters enjoyed an off-shore immunity that hallway fighters didn’t. A hallway fight was simply a matter of action and reaction; the psychology was straightforward, centered around the fight-or-flight response. But a code duello obtained in a Slab fight, beginning with a challenge issued and accepted: “Meet me at the Slab.” In a Slab fight, that lapse between challenge and fisticuff—usually hours or a day or two—brought a whole new dynamic to bear. No utterance spread through the student population faster than “Meet me at the Slab.” A Slab fight almost always had an audience, and often a large one. The fights were usually scheduled to start as soon after the 3:15 bell as possible. Spectators who rode later buses were often able to see the whole thing and still get to the bus line on time. Many bus-riders, however, made arrangements on Slab-fight days to walk home with friends who lived nearby. As often as not, potential combatants had time to think better of a decision made in hot-headed haste, and the fight never happened. Would-be onlookers were left to derive such entertainment as they could from the opponents’ face-saving convolutions, which were a kind of sport themselves. (“Oh, you thought I was talking about your mother…well it was obviously just a big misunderstanding…”) Of those Slab-fights that actually did survive the preliminaries and resulted in two boys squared off in the vacant lot, a high proportion resulted in more talking, some cautious circling, and a foot-shuffling headlock, if that. But one Slab-fight during my tenure at Warner Robins Junior High was legendary. I forget the details of how it started, but one way or another my friend Mike felt it was his duty to defend the honor of a girl who had been insulted by a boy named Rusty. Mike issued the challenge. Rusty accepted it. And they agreed to meet at the Slab the next Wednesday, five days thence. The fight quickly took on great symbolic significance. Rusty was one of the “hoods” who terrorized us from the day we entered seventh grade. Even in junior high they drank and smoked and put boys like me in trash cans. Rusty, to be fair, was one of the more agreeable of the hoods but there was a wildness in his close-set eyes that made me think he was capable of anything. Mike, on the other hand—ah, Mike. One couldn’t imagine a finer champion for the “nice” kids. He was big and good-looking, an honors student, a star football player, the beloved son of married parents. Michelangelo’s David statue has always put me in mind of Mike. If he couldn’t whip Rusty, none of us nice kids could. Which was exactly what I feared. I feared that Mike would step onto the Slab and get beaten to a pulp. The hoods’ oppression would go unchecked—and for how long? Through the rest of junior high, for sure. I understood that Rusty and his cronies weren’t going to be running the world when we grew up. But they certainly seemed to be running Warner Robins Junior High, and I feared what would happen if Mike failed in his one-man rebellion against the status quo. Would the hoods clamp down all the harder? For five days, every lunchroom and recess conversation was devoted to odds-making for the upcoming fight. “Mike’s going to win. Of course he’s going to win. Look how much bigger he is.” “Okay, so he’s bigger. But how many fights has he been in? Rusty’s cagey. He’ll mop up the Slab with Mike.” “But Mike has The Right on his side. That has to count for something. Doesn’t that count for something?” By the time Wednesday finally rolled around, Warner Robins Junior High was whipped into a frenzy. Who could focus on school when such a momentous event loomed on the other side of the 3:15 bell? I, for my part, was so distracted that I was late for Math and was assigned fifteen minutes’ detention after school. It was a worst-case scenario. Mike had agreed to let me be his second second. Our friend Ben was the real second; his chief duty was to carry Mike’s bookbag to and from the Slab–and, I think, to inform Mike’s family should the worst happen. In the event that Ben couldn’t perform his duties, I was supposed to stand in. But how could I stand in if I was in detention? I spoke with Ben. “Is there any way you could slow things down this afternoon?” I asked. “I’ve got detention until 3:30. I don’t want to miss the fight.” Ben shook his head slowly, gravely. “I’ll do what I can,” he said, “but I can’t promise anything.” When 3:30 arrived, I leapt from my desk and sprinted down the hallway. I burst through the back exit, the one nearest the Slab, hoping I could still catch the fight. But as my eyes adjusted to the brightness, I saw a whole horde of junior high schoolers tearing across the playing fields back in my direction. And at the front of the crowd loped Ben, swinging a book bag in either hand, his head thrown back for joy. I caught him by the arm and swung him around. “What happened?” I asked. “We won! We won!” Ben whooped, as if he or I had done something. Boys and girls blurred past in their haste to get back to where they were supposed to be all along. “Mike threw one punch and Rusty went down and stayed down. One punch!” I mostly felt relief. I was genuinely afraid that Rusty would hurt Mike. I felt exhilaration too, as if Mike’s triumph over Rusty were a triumph over oppressors everywhere. And I felt let down. One punch? Really? And I was in detention? I looked back toward the Slab. Mr. Beck clutched Mike’s collar in one hand and Rusty’s collar in the other and was marching them across the gravel lane, down into the red clay ditch, and up the near side. Mike was grinning and rubbing the knuckles of his right hand. Rusty, red-faced and surly, kept his eyes on the ground. Ben and I buzzed with unspent energy. We rode the bus to my house, where we beat the tar out of one another with boxing gloves. But after Ben went home, the excitement of the afternoon gave way to a sadness that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. But the gist of it was this: I knew already that somewhere between boyhood and manhood, the Rustys of the world would give way to the Mikes. I just didn’t expect it to come so soon. Eighth grade wasn’t over yet, and there was a good chance that Rusty was on the wrong side of his high-water mark. In Houston County, the punishment for fighting was three to five days at Pearl Stevens Alternative School—Pearl, as we called it. Pearl’s permanent population was a mix of career delinquents and students who were too deeply disabled to make it in a regular school. It was an especially cruel and insensitive arrangement, lumping the system’s most vulnerable students with its meanest. I think it has been abandoned by now. Into that mix was thrown the short-termers like Mike and Rusty, for whom Pearl was a terror. It was customary for boys who went Pearl for fighting to come back buddies, their new friendship forged and hardened in the fires of adversity, like combat veterans from the same unit. Pearl is the kind of place where you can use a friend, and if the only person you know is the person you were fighting on the Slab last week–well, he’ll have to do. By the time they returned to the junior high, any animosity between Mike and Rusty was entirely spent. As I remember it, they even ate lunch together from time to time. *** “What’s this?” my son asked. “Is this part of the Slab?” He was poking a stick at a piece of broken asphalt protruding from a tuft of grass. “That’s asphalt,” I said. “We’re looking for concrete. Keep looking.” The more we looked, however, the more asphalt we found, split and broken by twenty-five years’ growth of vegetation. We never found the first piece of concrete. Then it occurred to me. The spot we called the Slab wasn’t a slab at all. It was a patch of blacktop, maybe a bit of driveway. Another realization dawned: for all I had talked and heard about the Slab, I had never actually been there. I had seen the vacant lot from across the way, but I had never been to see the Slab itself. I was a nice kid, after all, and never wanted any trouble with Mr. Beck. The showdown between Mike and Rusty marked the first time my interest in a Slab fight had overmatched my desire to keep my nose clean. And even that had been thwarted by my math teacher…though, if you want to know the truth, it’s entirely possible that I drew detention on purpose so as to have a face-saving excuse for not crossing the ditch and the gravel lane to the wildness and danger of the Slab. I already knew that the Slab’s significance in my imagination and memory had been exaggerated. I now realized that it was more than exaggerated: it was more or less fabricated. I picked up a piece of asphalt and held it in my hand—a little chunk of my own personal mythology. And I made a new speech for my boys, a shorter one: “Sic transit gloria mundi.”

The next installment of the Hutchmoot talk by Andy P. and me. The last post introduced the idea of the true self as found in the works of Lewis and MacDonald. In this post we come to the dark side. In my two favorite works of George MacDonald, Lilith and Phantastes, I found the flip side of the coin of identity: the false self, an illusory self pumped up by the great Shadow. In Lilith, the character Odu speaks of this great Shadow and says, “‘He was a shadow….He came down the hill, very black…He was nothing but blackness…He came on as if he would walk over us. But before he reached us, he began to spread and spread, and grew bigger and bigger, till at last he was so big that he went out of our sight, and we saw him no more, and then he was upon us!…He was all black through between us, and we could not see one another, and then he was inside us… I felt…bad. I was not Odu any more – not the Odu I knew. I wanted to tear Sozo to pieces – not really, but like!’ He turned and hugged Sozo. ‘It wasn’t me, Sozo,’ he sobbed. “Really, deep down, it was Odu, loving you always! And Odu came up, and knocked Naughty away. I grew sick, and thought I must kill myself to get out of the black. Then came a horrible laugh that had heard my think, and it set the air trembling about me. And then I suppose I ran away, but I did not know I had run away until I found myself running, fast as I could…I would have stopped but never thought of it…Then I knew that I had run away from a shadow that wanted to be me and wasn’t, and that I was the Odu that loved Sozo. It was the shadow that got into me, and hated him from inside me; it was not my own self me!'” Odu recognizes and differentiates his real self from this false self; “It was not my own self me,” echoing Paul’s statement in Romans 7, “When I sin it is no longer I that sins, but sin which is dwelling in me.” In Phantastes the same idea is similarly expressed. “Shadow of me!”  I said, “which art not me, but which represents thyself to me as me, here I may find a shadow of light which will devour thee, the shadow of darkness! Here I may find a blessing which will fall on thee as a curse, and damn thee to the blackness whence thou hast emerged unbidden!” Going back to Narnia for a moment, we can see this same conception of the self in Eustace, who has turned into a dragon through sleeping on a dragon’s hoard and thinking greedy, dragonish thoughts.  Through seeing the horror he has become, and hating it, he truly repents, and begins to make himself as useful as he can as a dragon. Finally Aslan comes to him one night and leads him to a pool. The dragon Eustace goes to get in, but Aslan says, “First you must undress.” Eustace goes to undress himself by scratching off his old skin like a snake. But he scratches off and steps out of his skin three times only to find he is still a dragon each time. Aslan says, “You will have to let me undress you.” Eustace says, “The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off…Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off…and there it was lying there on the grass…And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me…and threw me into the water.” Lewis echoes this again in Mere Christianity: “The point is, He wants you to know Him: wants to give you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble – delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having got rid of all the silly nonsense about your dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life. He is trying to make you humble in order ot make this moment possible: trying to take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which we have all got ourselves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we are. I wish I had got a bit further with humility myself: if I had, I could probably tell you more about the relief, the comfort, of taking the fancy-dress off – getting rid of the false self, with all its ‘Look at me’ and ‘Aren’t I a good boy?’ and all its posing and posturing. To get even near it, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.” I have found this same idea in other writers, as well as biblically in the idea of the old man and new man.

A lot has happened with JJ Heller in the two years since we reviewed her last album, Painted Red. JJ and Dave’s daughter, Lucy, was born a couple months after the album released, and then around this time last year, a contestant on the hit TV show So You Think You Can Dance decided to use her song “Your Hands” as her audition music. Turns out having your song played on a show that has millions of viewers – 6.8 million that night – is a good way for more people to discover your music. Because of the subsequent radio success of “Your Hands” – it spent 24 weeks on Billboard Magazine’s Christian Radio chart – they decided to delay the release of a new acoustic record they were planning on releasing and head back into the studio to flesh out some of those songs with more production, as well as adding a couple more songs. As with their last four albums, When I’m With You was engineered and produced here in Nashville by Mitch Dane, but this time around they asked Ben Shive to co-produce besides playing keys, bringing his great ear for melody and memorable hooks to the production, resulting in their best sounding album to date. Andy Osenga is back, joining Dave on acoustic and electric guitars, and Paul Eckberg returns to play drums, with Tony Lucido on bass. JJ’s music has always been notable for her great melodies and the way her vocals seem to float effortlessly above the instrumentation, and this album is no exception. The title song, with a melody that is stuck in your head for days after you hear it, was written for their daughter and is a touching account of how the world looks different when you’re holding a child in your arms, someone looking to you for love and attention, completely dependent upon you: When I hold you in my arms, Love, / something changes / It’s the strangest feeling / The things that used to matter, / they don’t matter to me // When I see you, / and you’re smiling, / how my heart aches / So full it is about to break / You make me believe in love // This album, more than JJ’s other releases, puts love songs front and center, with at least four of the songs on the topic, including Tell It Again, Boat Song, Love Can Make You New, and Until You Came Along. A couple of these, the ones I’m guessing are autobiographical, provide a nice contrast to the kind of love songs that one normally hears, songs that talk more about puppy love or first attraction – a good topic to write about, to be sure, but we need love songs that go deeper than that. These songs are the kind of love songs that could only be written after almost eight years of marriage, containing a maturity to them that is both a tribute to Dave and JJ’s marriage and a noteworthy example for younger couples. Dave and JJ are good storytellers, and this time around, they spend some time sharing the stories of others. Olivianna tells the story of a little girl they heard about who died eleven minutes after being born, and Control describes the struggle of someone who turned to cutting themselves to deal with their pain (The cut is deep, but never deep enough for me / It doesn’t hurt enough to make me forget / One moment of relief is never long enough / to keep the voices in my head / from stealing my peace). No Fight Left continues on the same theme as Control with a realization that maybe admitting that you can’t make it on your own is the best place to be: There is no fight left on the inside / But maybe that’s where I should be / I’ve given up trying / I’m giving it all to you. // Their new radio single, What Love Really Means, is an updated version of a song they wrote and first recorded five years ago. I think it is one of the best songs they’ve written, and it’s certainly one that has generated a lot of feedback from listeners who find much needed hope in the lyrics. Each verse tells the story of someone desperate for love, desperate for someone who will look past mistakes they have made and truly care about them: He cries in the corner where nobody sees / He’s the kid with the story / no one would believe / He prays every night, / “Dear God won’t you please, / could you send someone here / who will love me?” // Who will love me for me / Not for what I have done / or what I will become / Who will love me for me / ‘Cause nobody has shown me what love / What love really means // The song both points to the source of love and offers a reminder that we, you and me, are the hands and feet of Christ in the world, that the way Love is made tangible is in the way we care for the hurting. Besides releasing What Love Really Means to radio, they also turned it into their first music video, shot here in Nashville recently. And after just three weeks on youtube, it has already been viewed more than 130,000 times. When I’m With You releases this week, and you can buy it, and JJ’s other albums, at her website, www.jjheller.com, or on iTunes.

Jason Gray might be “new” but his music video career is even newer. Check out the video of his new single co-starring Evie Coates and her workshop, “The Hatch.” (If you like the song, don’t be shy about letting your local radio station know.) Check out Jason’s music in the Rabbit Room store.

This continues the series of posts on the Hutchmoot talk by Andy P. and me. The last post, beginning my part, spoke of the inconsolable longing which Lewis awakened in my heart with Narnia. By my mid twenties I had read nearly all of the works of Lewis. I read and reread The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Mere Christianity, Till We Have Faces, God in the Dock, and most of the others. In The Great Divorce I saw people I knew, and myself, in the ghosts from the Grey Town. Complainers, self-justifiers,  self-pitiers, hanging on to offenses and illusions from their past; since they lived by illusions, they had become illusions themselves. They refused to be their real selves God made them to be, became caught up in world, flesh, and devil, and eventually lost their ability to be real at all.  This idea of the false self and the true self runs as a common thread through the works of Lewis and George MacDonald. In Perelandra, as the demon-possessed scientist Weston does his best to tempt the pure Queen to disobey by filling her mind with inflated and melodramatic views of herself, Lewis writes, “The external, and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy’s true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.” In my mid twenties I began to seek out the works of George MacDonald because Lewis said, “He was my master.” Lewis wrote that Phantastes “baptised my imagination. But MacDonald disturbed me at first. I had carried a legalistic concept of God in my early years which culminated in a nine month stint in a very legalistic church at around the age of seventeen. I longed for God to be more like Aslan. Nearly a decade later when I encountered MacDonald, I had traded the legalistic God for a more biblical God I could trust. By then I was trusting God to take care of me financially  via Malachi 3 and Matthew 6, and I trusted Him to get me to Heaven through Christ. In short, I was believing in a  God of grace and love but not one who required holiness. At the time I didn’t believe it was possible to be holy; I believed Jesus died merely to pay my sin debt so I could go to Heaven when I die. By the time I was beginning to read MacDonald, I had long since learned that I couldn’t ever be good enough to pass muster. MacDonald’s constant talk of obedience, of doing what Jesus said to do, tore at the depths of me. He stirred up what seemed an ancient sense of inadequacy. I would read him for awhile and set the book down, feeling agitated inside. He writes of Jesus in Unspoken Sermons Series II, “It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in him, if you do not do anything he tells you.”  He struck at the heart of some of the  things I had been taught – the lie that mental assent to a set of facts about God, about Christ, was the same as relying on God Himself. I began to find through MacDonald that true faith and action were inseparable, that obedience was just another word for Faith, that real faith will always bear fruit in our action. He wrote, “It is the one terrible heresy of the church, that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ.” Although at the time I struggled with MacDonald’s unrelenting emphasis on obedience, paradoxically it was through MacDonald I began to find that the  righteousness of Christ is at the heart of a redeemed man; that Christ in the man is the root and the source of fruit in a true man. In study I began to find the Word of God supports this. I had long believed the opposite, that even as the redeemed, we were at the root depraved and sinful, and that only through physical death would we be holy, so I had given up. But MacDonald says, “Of what use then is the law? To lead us to Christ, the Truth – to waken in our minds a sense of what our deepest nature, the presence…of God in us, requires of us – to let us know, in part by failure, that the purest effort of will of which we are capable cannot lift us up even to the abstaining of wrong to our neighbor.” Unspoken Sermons, Series One MacDonald writes in Unspoken Sermons Series Three, “The Christ in us is our own true nature made blossom in us by the Lord, whose life is the light of men that it may become the life of men.” This “Christ in the man,” for MacDonald, is the source and ground of our real  identity. MacDonald’s constant prompts to obey God, to do what Jesus Christ said to do, are the starting point to finding that real identity. For MacDonald, “Everyone who desires to follow the Master has the spirit of the Master, and will receive more, that he may follow closer, nearer, in his very footsteps.” This echoes Ephesians 5:8-10,  “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), finding out what is acceptable to the Lord.” This new self, or true self, that we really are and are meant to live by is a consistent theme in MacDonald’s work. For MacDonald, salvation means Christ has given himself to us as our inner wellspring of righteousness, and to be true is to live by that trueness – our humanity indwelt by and in willing cooperation with his Deity.

If you’re a Rabbit Room regular, then Jill Phillips and Andy Gullahorn should be common names that display on your iPod or iTunes. Both songwriters continue to release albums year after year that become important for the spiritual journey for many of us — an old friend reminding us of what is true amidst a culture that lies to us daily. Now, the duo turn their attention to the holiday season to bring an unexpected Christmas release that should avoid the holiday cliches and cheese that Andy hates so much. It’s just easier to let Jill explain. The Rabbit Room: The new release is going to be a Christmas album. Obviously the holiday music category is already quite stocked, so did you hesitate to do a project like this in the past? And what makes this the right time? Jill Phillips: I think we felt that way for so long and that’s why it’s taken us so long to do it. We’ve had people telling us since I started 12 years ago, ‘Oh, you should do a Christmas record.’ It was always, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ Then when Andrew’s [Peterson] tour became a big part of our Advent season, people would still say, ‘Oh, you should do a Christmas record?’ And we’re thinking, ‘No way.’ [Laughs] It just always felt opportunistic, or not like the kind of thing that would be our first priority. But I do love Christmas music. I really, really love it. During Advent season, I just really enjoy listening to it. I love being on a tour that’s been a part of my own worship during that month of December. That’s become such a tradition for us. But the flooding and the damage in May sucked up the money that we’d been saving for my record. We felt we needed to postpone that for a while, but I also felt like I was creatively dying. [Laughs] I’d been in mom-land for a really long time. It’s great and I’m grateful for it, but I felt I had to do something that was creative outside of the bounds of parenting. So Andy and I began to brainstorm together on what we could both work on in our own studio that would appeal to us and that we could get done in the time crunch we were under. And we kept coming back to the holiday project. It’s what we did with Kingdom Come a few years ago, to work on something in our house together. He is not a Christmas music or holiday music kind of guy, so I knew that it would take a different slant and be a very interesting project. I knew it wouldn’t be your typical Christmas record. It would be more centered on the church year with some traditional things thrown in. It would be acoustic and organic and produced a bit more like the Kingdom Come record. The Rabbit Room: How many songs did you come up with? Jill: Maybe 30 or 35 that we thought might potentially work. We didn’t want to do something just to keep it interesting. I think that’s so annoying. We weren’t going to take every Christmas song that’s been around for ages and put it in a minor key or do something weird. We didn’t want to do that. But we also didn’t want to do something that has been done. What we tried to do is choose songs that wouldn’t be the expected person to sing that song. What would it sound like for Andy to sing his version of “O Holy Night?” What would it sound like to hear an acoustic-only version of “Christmastime is Here,” since it’s only been done on piano? It’s not anything too crazy and it’s true to us and what we find interesting. The Rabbit Room: Is there a most pleasant surprise? Jill: Yeah, the thing we were both least excited about was doing a song that was more recognizable and traditional. We had three original songs and some that were reworked hymns. So we chose “O Come All Ye Faithful,” and I thought, ‘This might be the snoozer of the record, the one that’s most boring.’ But the arrangement that Andy pulled off is one of my favorites. It really is one of the best on the record, and I wasn’t expecting that. The Rabbit Room: Can you talk about the originals? Where do they come from and what do they speak to? Jill: The first one was for City on a Hill, the compilation put together by Steve Hindalong. He’s a friend of ours and he asked us to try to write a Christmas song to pitch for that record. We did and they liked it, but for whatever reason, it didn’t end up on the record. So we had this Christmas song that we both really loved that had been sitting around for years. We’ve never had an opportunity to do anything with it. Then Andy had written a song with Jason Gray that you might have heard at Hutchmoot that he wrote about a short story by Walt Wangerin, Jr. I love that song. I absolutely love that song, so he put a version of it on the record. Finally, we worked with this old hymn, “Nations That Long In Darkness Walked,” that not a lot had been done with and we put that to music. So there were a couple of different ways those original songs came about. We also did a more obscure Advent hymn–it’s not an original–called “Once In Royal David’s City” that’s really beautiful, but nobody else really does it. So we did that one. We tried to pull originals from things that were not done very often as well as things more recognizable. The Rabbit Room: That has to be fun to uncover a gem like that. Jill: Yes, I’ve only heard one person do that one and it was Sufjan Stevens and he did an amazing version of it. But he also did a Christmas record that had 40 songs on it or something. [Laughs] The Rabbit Room: Yeah, the five-song EP project. Jill: Yeah, I think he did every song that is out there, and it’s kind of fun to listen to that. But this whole journey has been surprisingly fun. I think Andy is having fun as well. He did this bluegrassy version of “In The Bleak Midwinter” and I just loved the way it’s been turning out. It’s been really fun to be creative, yet at the same time, we can do it quickly. We don’t have to come up with 12 new songs. It’s been fun to interpret the songs and see what we want to do with them. The Rabbit Room: You mentioned the time crunch a few times, so what does that mean? Can you explain that more? Jill: Sure. We were hoping to start my record sometime in early summer and have it done before we left on Andrew’s Christmas tour this year. We’ve learned that that’s a good time for us to release records. It’s what works for us. The kids are back in school in the fall and for whatever reason, that’s the cycle that tends to work. But with the flooding, we were overwhelmed, not only with the things that needed to be done, but we were overwhelmed financially. It was just thousands and thousands and thousands in home repairs we weren’t expecting. We lost everything in our basement from the HVAC to the hot water heater to the washer and dryer–everything that was in the basement. Even though we had insurance and a lot of it was covered, there was still a plenty that wasn’t covered. It pushed everything back and making a record just takes time. You don’t think that it does. You think you can go in there and just knock it out, but the scheduling, the logistics, the finding the studio, child care–it all becomes a challenge to turn out a record quickly. I think that’s why Andrew and the guys just left for two weeks. They left their families for two weeks and that wasn’t super-exciting, but they knew that what they could do in two weeks of isolated time up there would equal what they could do in two months at home. So Andy and I didn’t have that luxury this fall. It was nice to have something where we didn’t have to put finishing touches on all of our songs or wonder which ones we were going to keep. We were working with three or four originals and then just finding the other songs. That was really fun in a different way. The Rabbit Room: If you guys continue to be a part of Behold the Lamb of God, I assume this means your own Christmas music and release won’t get a lot of support? Jill: Yeah, we thought about that. It would be hard to fit it in unless we did it around Thanksgiving. [Laughs] Most churches don’t want to do that, so I think it will probably have to be–at least for this year–just Behold the Lamb. And that’s okay with me. It really is. It probably won’t last forever. There will come a day when it won’t happen and I’m sure we’ll miss it. So we just take it year by year. We get an email in September that asks, ‘Is everybody in?’ Then you respond and you’re in for another year. But I don’t think beyond that. The Rabbit Room: How many years have you been involved there with the projects and tour? Jill: Let me think. I first sang the song when Andrew did his first concert in Nashville at First Christian. They weren’t touring it yet. They were still doing the stripped down version with Silers Bald and Gabe [Scott]. I did one Nashville show and they had me come sing the song and I was pregnant with Drew, and he’s now almost nine, so it was a while ago. [Laughs] It was at least eight-and-a-half years ago. I’ve been pregnant three times singing that song. It really has become part of our Advent season or our tradition that we do as a family. It’s been great. I think the tour has been going on for six years, maybe? I think that’s right. We never had a clue when he asked us to do it. It’s like anything that’s successful in that you usually don’t know what it’s going to be in the beginning. We just thought it would be a fun adventure for a year. We would have 10 or 12 shows and it was so wonderful and fun that the shows were well received. Well, every year it just kept expanding with the amount of shows. We were thinking we could get up to 19 or 20 shows and it’s at that point that I realized, ‘Oh, this is going to be something they’ll want to do every year.’ It became the defining thing of Andrew’s career in a way. It became the thing that eclipsed his other albums of work and I think it will be the thing he’s remembered for. So we’re just glad to be a part of it as long as we can and as long as it works for our family. If it comes to a point when it doesn’t, that will be a sad day. For now, though, it’s okay. I do have to miss every Christmas thing known to man. We miss all of December. We miss all of our kids’ Christmas everything–all of the pageants and whatever. We just know, though, that this is what we’re doing every December for as long as it’s feasible. The Rabbit Room: After you reset yourself in 2011, where does the attention turn? Jill: I think if we can get this record completed the way we would like, I will feel very, very pleased. Then my attention will turn to my own solo project with Cason Cooley. He did the last one and he will be on the tour as well, so we will do some pre-production on the road in December since we will have that time without kids. He has two little kids as well, so I just look forward to that. When I feel that I have the 11 or 12 songs that I feel really great about, then we’ll head into the studio. That will be the next thing. The Rabbit Room: And what of Andy? Jill: He’ll start his in the summer most likely, whenever I’m done. We just leapfrog records. It’s just too hard for us to do it at the same time, so my guess is that he’ll keep writing and get his songs ready. Like right now, I’m getting my songs ready and then when I’m done with mine, he’ll start on his projects. It’s the only way we could do it, I guess. When our kids are all in school, it might be different, but this is what works for now. [Laughs] The Rabbit Room: So what are the details for the release? Jill: The goal is to have it out by the beginning of November and it’s going to be sold at the Rabbit Room. We’re starting to move our store from my own site to the Rabbit Room just to take one more thing that we have to worry about out of the equation. For years, we’ve shipped all of our own orders and it’s finally gotten to the place where Andy and I looked at each other and decided we could use some help. So the Rabbit Room is there and iTunes is still a big thing. So I think Pete [Peterson, Andrew’s brother] and all of those guys now are making a page specifically for our music so we can specifically sell it there and then Pete will ship it out. So we will all be sending things out when the project is ready. That should be beginning of November. We just had our photo shoot last weekend and the designer is working on the artwork right now. The Rabbit Room: What’s the title? Jill: We don’t know. [Laughs] Right now, it’s just Christmas. If it doesn’t work, you might as well just call it Christmas. Everything else just sounded pompous or ridiculous or not at all Christmas-y. We would pick random lines from the hymns and it would sound like a hymns record or something. So we just say Christmas until we can come up with something better. #AndyGullahorn #Christmas #JillPhillips

As I sat there at the Hutchmoot listening for the first time to Andrew’s talk, I was thrilled to see how our two parts fit together. I’ve broken this into several parts for the good of the blog. I saw the moral failure and subsequent humility of Edmund; I saw Aslan eat death for Edmund and all Narnia, and rise from the dead to wipe out the White Witch, and forgiveness, cleansing, restoration, and renewal were given as unmerited gifts to Edmund by the great Lion. In A Horse and His Boy, I could see the difference between Shasta and his twin brother, Corin. There was Shasta, raised in an ill-tempered home, learning to lie and sneak and steal when necessary, and Corin, raised in a royal family, never even considering it an option to lie or do wrong. In Shasta I saw how someone could come from the most humble, hard beginnings, born a king and not knowing it, not living from his kingship, instead living like the poor fisherman’s son he thought he was; I could see a good heart with bad habits, a true heart sometimes acting falsely. I saw how, even still, he had the makings of a king, and how he became one in the end – a humble, kind sovereign because of his hard background. I was struck by Aslan’s kindness to even Digory’s Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, his twinkling humor with Trumpkin the unbelieving dwarf at the end of Prince Caspian, and his love to Emeth the Calormene soldier in The Last Battle. I saw King Tirian fighting to the death for love of Aslan and Narnia, and Prince Caspian overturn an oppressive regime into love and justice for all, and I saw throughout all the stories the depth and importance of Aslan’s “Well done” to all who stood firm to the end. The White Witch and the Queen of Underland  displayed the deceptive and seductive power of Satan. Both witches were liars who smoothly exploited others for their own ends, making lavish promises, distorting reality; “There is no Narnia; there is no Aslan.”  I saw Prince Rilian, Eustace, and Jill come under the witch-Queen’s spell, repeating her words, “There is no sun,” as they began to believe in a false reality, a distorted conception of themselves, of Aslan, of Narnia. I saw Puddleglum gather his courage and stamp out the seducing incense of the witch to break the enchantment with the smell of burnt Marshwiggle. Puddleglum said, “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that…the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.” The spell was then broken, and the witch took her true form – a green serpent. With great trepidation I saw Prince Rilian attacked and entwined by the monster, and with greater  satisfaction to my sense of justice I watched as they hacked off its head. I think most if not all of you can understand the inconsolable longing these books awakened in the heart of the eight year old me. I wanted to be inside Narnia. Lewis captured my imagination, immersed it in God’s goodness, and opened the doorway for more. As a child I could not have put these things into words; nevertheless they were present in me as subconscious ideals. My Bible study has often been a discovery of truths and types already placed in my mind and heart by the fiction of Lewis, and later, George MacDonald, Tolkien, and others.

I just got home from watching The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole with my family. I’m eager to share just “owl” much I loved this movie. And with that bad joke I demonstrate explicitly how far I am from being qualified to review a movie. I have none of the skill of the learned chaps who frequent this fine establishment. This will be a review from a person who has never seen most of the movies that get reviewed by people who know a lot about cinema. Most of my male relatives chew tobacco. Owls movie, regular idiot review, with commentary on raising kids in a toxic world…go. Firstly, Legend… is breathtaking to watch. It’s a visually stunning, captivating movie, with wonderful detail and Movies with good “special effects” are in great supply. (Do they still call them special effects?) But there are fewer movies that have a great story and fewer still which don’t undermine the truth about the world God made either in slight, or flagrant ways. This movie, to unholster a tired cliche, has it all. I loved the story. I bought in like a rich investor, took the bait hook, line, and sinker. Was it a basic good vs. evil story?  Yes. I love that. The story was so fundamentally good in that I just sat there grinning throughout. My review can be summarized in one word: fantastic. But this has a lot to do with where I am in life and who I was sitting with. I sat between our 5 and 7 year old kids, my wife held our sleeping baby throughout. Our 5 year old boy has only been so for a few days. Yesterday we celebrated his birthday with a “St. George” party. My older brother dressed as a dragon and our son, distinguished from his comrade knights by the St. George’s cross on his chest, led the attack on the castle to save the princess (well-acted by his brilliant and beautiful sister). It was a great time, though I’m sure if there were any dour, P.C. scolds watching they would have been horrified. (This is unlikely in rural West Virginia farming country.) What we emphasized in that party and what countless tales told to these children over and over emphasize is this: If you have strength, it is not to dominate and control, but to love and serve. If you are a leader, then you are not to rule by lording it over others, but to lay down your life. To serve. To die. I must say (though I know it is hard for some modern ears to hear) that I especially emphasize this point with my oldest son (and will with his brother in time). My old-fashioned understanding? Boys need to know that strength is not for lording, intimidating, tyrannizing, and it is for dang sure not about serving yourself. We. Look. To. Jesus. Jesus is our example. The Son of God who, though being rich, became poor; though being strong, became weak; though being Majestic in Glory and Deserving of All Power and Praise, put on a servant’s nature. He came to serve. Husbands are therefore commanded to be like that as they lead. My heart is for that in my own life (though I fail regularly) and my training and instruction for these boys must be “in the Lord.” So, back to this movie about owls. Inside the story there is a story (I love that kind of thing.) The story within the story is one that our main character, Soren, loves and retells over and over. He believes this story (of the legendary Guardians) with all his heart, though others deride him for his faith. A beautiful element of this movie is how the story that he believes to be true, though he can’t see with his eyes, impacts his entire being. He is different because of how this story works on him, in stark contrast to his unbelieving brother. This is pretty much the situation for Christians. Of course Soren is right, his faith eventually becomes sight and he meets his heroes. In a lovely touch, his number one hero is not as physically impressive as he expects. This clever turn points to the underlying theme of the story and the oath of the Guardians. They are charged with, “mending the broken, making the weak strong.” In contrast with the evil “Pure Ones,” (wondrous, ironic nomenclature) who wish to manipulate, dominate, and enslave the weak and vulnerable. The Guardians protect the vulnerable, they serve the weak. They do not use their power and authority to serve themselves, but fight for those who cannot fight for themselves. The Guardians also have a hierarchical structure, they have a king and queen. But the use of this power and authority, as in Tolkien and Lewis (and Scripture), is operated by the “good side” not for self, but for love and service. It is, frankly, a beautiful thing to see. It is a rare joy to go to the movies and so explicitly see the values that we emphasize in our home be, not undermined, but underlined. I was ecstatic. Sure, it’s fine to talk over all the core toxicity of films with our kids, to learn something from the bent expressions of the fallen imagination. These can sometimes be very fruitful –especially, I suppose, with older kids. But man, it’s great to just see something good. Real good. This is why I love Andrew Peterson’s books. Fantastic stories brilliantly told, but without the core deceptions of a man-centered worldview. A modern author…and we can trust him! Don’t wonder why Christian parents rejoice at such things. It’s a rare treasure found. There are others of course (my kids have read hundreds of good books), but the “total package” thing is pretty rare in my experience. I feel like that’s what you get with AP’s books. This movie feels pretty close to that as well. I haven’t read the books (The Owls of Ga’hoole), but this movie was a deep delight for me to see with my kids. I enthusiastically stick all the thumbs I have and can borrow from my neighbors in an upward direction. Note: Some of the action/peril might frighten young kids, but my 5 year old (prepped) was not bothered –and he is not exposed to a lot of scary images/movies.

My new single, “I Am New”, was released to radio last week, and I find myself thinking about our sense of identity and it’s consequences… Today I sat by an angry man. I was in seat 7C on a small commuter flight to Chicago, and I could feel his anger the moment he came to my row to take his place in seat 7D. Though I got up, smiled as I made room for him to take his seat, this man only glowered as he took his place and, leaving his sunglasses on, turned to the side to apparently go to sleep. No problem, I thought, all the better for me to get some work done. He was an older man – maybe early 60’s – dressed in casual business style with black pants, nice though non-descript black shoes, and a powder blue button up shirt. He was tan and fit with well-groomed, spikey white hair. He looked like a confident and powerful man in the world of business, and yet he was wound pretty tight. Once we were airborne, I got out my computer and went to work on some writing I needed to get done, quickly getting lost in it – so lost, in fact, that an hour later I didn’t hear the lone flight attendant of our small plane ask us to put away our electronic devices. Not only that, but I didn’t even hear the man in 7D talking to me at first, until his words reached some distant region in my brain, and, shaking off a focus induced kind of stupor, I looked at him and said, “oh… uh, I’m sorry… are you talking to me?” The first thing I noticed was that he had finally taken his sunglasses off and that he was glaring at me with cold, blue, and watery eyes. His face was flushed, his blood was obviously up, and he was actually cursing me with a string of profanities – both adjectives and nouns. I quickly tried to get my bearings and figure out what I had done wrong and realized that he was unhappy that I was on my computer. It was then that I discovered how close we were to landing and that I must have missed the announcement to turn off and stow all electronic devices! Had she really asked and I didn’t hear it? My first reaction was subconsciously defensive: I quickly looked around me to see if other people were still on their computers or listening to their iPods, etc. Shoot! She must have announced it – no electronics in sight. “Oh man, I’m so sorry…” I started to say and immediately closed my laptop to stow it under my seat, though I doubt he heard me because he was clearly on a roll. He was taking my oversight personally and he intended to shame me with a verbal whipping. Having closed my laptop and stowed it under my seat, I was surprised to find that this infuriated the man even more as he kicked the intensity of his tirade up a notch. People started looking at us – including the flight attendant – and once again I felt like I was at a loss, looking around trying to take stock of the situation, desperately wanting to figure out what I was doing wrong. I genuinely wanted to make things right. “That (insert colorful adjective followed by colorful noun here) isn’t cool. They said to power it off! Power that (colorful… adjective maybe?) thing off! I don’t appreciate (colorful pronoun, plural) like you endangering my life.” Oh… okay… it’s coming to me now. He’s upset that I only closed my laptop, putting it in sleep mode. Which puts me in a complicated position. What should I do? Take it out again? He must not realize how long it will take to power my computer down… We’d be on the ground by the time I did all that. Besides, I can’t really power it down, because… “I’m sorry sir, I have information I need for my layover that I won’t be able to retrieve if I power down,” I tried to explain to him. You see, my itinerary was on a webpage that I had to leave open on my desktop. Without wi-fi at the airport, I wouldn’t have any of the info I needed for the rest of my trip. But as I tried to explain myself, it was clear that he was not interested in my story. He was angry and seemed invigorated to have found a place to spend his wrath. Technically he was right – I guess I could have tried earlier that day to save the web page as a document so I could power down as would be requested of me, but doing all that at 5:30 that morning was low on my priority list, partly for this reason: A couple of years ago I asked the flight attendant why we’re always asked to turn everything off at take off and landing – “does it really interfere with the cockpit instruments?” I asked, trying to reconcile the logic of their request with the fact that my iPod doesn’t have transmission capabilities. “No, not at all. It’s more because If anything is going to go wrong on a flight, it is most likely to happen during take off or landing and it’s just a precaution we take in order to have everyone’s attention, so they aren’t tuned out with their iPods during the critical moments of our flight.” Ah, the truth at last! God bless you, Mrs. Flight Attendant, for your truth telling! How many times had I heard the company line that my iPod might interfere with the cockpit instruments?! Oh the little lies we are told to invoke fear and force our compliance! It was obviously an illogical assertion and I was grateful for her honesty. From then on out, I have interpreted “please turn off all electronic devices” as them saying, “please give me your attention during this part of your flight, we want you to be alert and ready if anything should happen.” And ever since, I’ve been happy to give them my attention. Now skip ahead a couple years to my current predicament. My first thought is that I’m surprised that a man of his age and education is still buying this old lie about cockpit interference. I feel my adrenaline start to rise as my fight or flight instinct is triggered and I have to decide how I should respond. Part of me feels genuine regret. Lost in my own thoughts, I simply didn’t hear the flight attendant’s direction. And in this man’s defense, I can imagine how it might have looked like I was brazenly ignoring the rules. Maybe he assumed I’m one of those people who feels entitled to do whatever they please, or that I’m a disrespectful punk who cavalierly ignores safety procedures. I genuinely wished to apologize – if he would’ve let me – for my ignorant disrespect that was offensive to him. He was right after all, I should have stowed my computer. And technically, yes – they do ask us to power down our electronic devices. But for the reasons I mentioned above, I just hadn’t prepared for this, nor could I get it done before landing even if I had. And since I know that the real objective is our undivided attention, I knew that strict compliance to the rule, at this point, defeated the purpose of the rule. But then another part of me was aware of the fact that this man obviously had anger issues. Is he a father I wondered? Does he shame his children like he’s shaming me? Do I fight back? I’m good with words, they are my specialty – I think I could have outgunned him… My anger was welling up in me, eager to come to my rescue. Ah… and yet I know that’s not the right thing to do. But what should I do? As I weighed what the proper Christ like response would be, I began to suspect that the inner drama within me mattered more than the outer drama, and so I turned my attention there. Last week I was at a retreat where author John Sheasby told us of our Heavenly Father’s love for us, his children, and how so much of our heartache and trouble comes from our misunderstanding of our identity in Christ. The story of the prodigal son is the story of us all, John said. There is the son who ran away because of his self-hatred and the one who stayed because of his self-righteousness and neither of them knew their father’s heart nor their place in it. The thoughts and insights John shared are worthy of their own post, and I hope to share his beautiful insights here soon. But suffice it to say that their effect on my heart was profound. He proposed that most if not all of us only know how to come to God as a servant, and so lurking in our minds and hearts is the servant identity – the identity of one who desperately and dutifully wants to please their Master, our value tied up in what we do rather than who we are. Think of the scene of the prodigal son returning home. In Luke 15 it says that, “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father…” Even in the moment of repentance this son reveals his servant mindset: he thinks of returning as a hired man! He thinks to repent for what he’s done when in fact the real sin is that he forgot who he was!And so he prepares his speech – the repentant speech of a servant – but barely gets a word out when his father runs to him and says, “Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate!” The father will not hear of the speech – it’s irrelevant because of course the boy is not a servant, he is a son. John Sheasby would propose that it was a case of mistaken identity all along and that it was the son’s perception of who he was that drove him to run away in the first place. I’m a people pleaser, full of shame and self-loathing, with an identity firmly rooted in the servant’s mindset. If I am living victoriously over my various vices then I’m at peace, confident of God’s love for me. But if I’ve sinned in any way, then I’m plagued with shame and doubt. I feel God’s pleasure to the degree that I feel like I’ve gotten passing grades on my righteousness report card (a grade, by the way, that I give myself). And so I’m often tempted to feel like I can never do enough to please my heavenly Father, afraid that I fail him too often. Because of this, I rarely feel like I can do or be enough for others either! You see, this is how it works for all of us: our relationship with Father God colors our every other relationship.In my case, my servant mindset sets me up to succumb to shame pretty easily.I don’t know who I am, and therefore I don’t know where I stand, and that’s why I desperately want the approval of others. And when I don’t get it, I get defensive, and defensiveness, of course, is the posture of a servant who has to constantly prove himself. But sons and daughters don’t have to prove themselves – because there’s nothing to prove! Their identity rests in who their Father is! I’m trying to learn what this means and I find myself as defenseless as the prodigal son, my servant speech silenced as my Father embraces me. These were my thoughts as I sat next to this angry man in seat 7D, fighting my desire to fight fire with fire and trying to restrain my usual instincts of shame and defensiveness (wanting to prove to him that it was an honest mistake, and that really, I’m a pretty great guy if he could get to know me. Please like me! Pretty please?). And then I finally remembered who I was. I am a son of the Most High God, an heir according to His promise. I am chosen, holy, without blemish and free from accusation. I am no longer a servant, and my Father celebrates me. He knows my name and has carved it in the palm of His hand. I made a mistake, I did – I should have been paying more attention to the flight attendant and stowed my computer.Heck, maybe I should have even powered it down.But my Father knows my heart, he knows I never meant disrespect or harm.He knows I desire to do the right thing, even when I miss opportunities to do so.He loves me as a son and is daily setting me free from the shame and fear of a servant. A remarkable thing happened: all of a sudden, the angry man’s words didn’t mean anything anymore – they could find no purchase in my soul. He didn’t know me like my Father does (nor did he even wish to know me, if the truth be told). Chances are he’s angry because he’s bound to a kind of servant mindset of his own – a slave to his work, his ego, his ambitions and ideals, perhaps – and he is crushed under the burden of constantly trying to be enough, to prove his worth.  No wonder he’s so angry. I relaxed in my seat, answering his accusations with a humble “I’m sorry” repeatedly until I answered no more and stopped cowering (which seemed to make him even more angry). The adrenaline receded, the blood that had rushed to my face in embarrassed humiliation began to find its way back to my other extremities, and my heart settled. He continued to rage at me for several minutes even after we landed, but I sat untouched in my identity as a son. Not gloating, mind you. Just at rest. In a way, I became grateful for the episode and how it so dramatically forced me to see the difference I experience between living as a servant and as a son – not just in my relationship to God, but in my every encounter. It was a swift and certain confirmation of what the Lord had ministered to my heart just that week about my sonship. This man would not accept my apology, but my Father does. I am writing this from some thousands of feet in the air during the second leg of my flight home, and wouldn’t you know it? They’ve just announced that it’s time to turn off and stow all personal electronic devices. I think I’ll do just that.

This is the final part of a series about George MacDonald, adapted from my lecture with Ron Block at Hutchmoot 2010. In part one I discussed the inner chamber (about MacDonald’s peculiar insight into scripture and God’s nature). Part two was about his inner vision, MacDonald’s childlike ability to imagine. I said before that his imagination was unbridled. That isn’t quite what I mean to say. It was, in fact, bridled– It kicks off with: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. In him was life, and that life was the light of all men. So John was, I think, a poet. But when you read his letters, you get the sense that he might have been a bit senile. I mean no disrespect. But he was so repetitive, and his habit of calling his flock his little children implies his old age. And then you get to Revelation! How could a normal person have written a book like that? It’s a fascinating bit of writing, as confusing as it is epic. I’m working through Revelation right now, and it struck me recently that I get the same feeling of unsettledness when I read it as when I read MacDonald. There are elders and hosts of angels and cherubim and dragons and pits and millennia. It paints a picture that may confuse you, but you always get the feeling that it means something, like it’s there for a reason. And it is, of course. The only way for John to have written Revelation is to have been led by the Spirit. In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus says: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” John 3:7-9 I’ve heard people describe Rich Mullins the same way. He was a free spirit. He seemed to be swept up in something and was helpless but to go along for the ride. He listened to a voice and sometimes obeyed it, and to the rest of us it looked like craziness, or weirdness, or eccentricity. And it was, in its way. The Spirit, once it lives in you, may have you on some hobbit-like journey you never in a million years thought you’d take. So when a writer, especially a writer of fiction, sits down to write, and the Spirit is in him, and he’s willing to abandon whatever inhibitions he may have, you never know what you’re going to get. You can’t tell where it’s coming from or where it’s going. It goes where it pleases. And I don’t think the writer knows any more than the reader where the story is going. I’m not saying this is the best way to write, or that you’ll ever get published, or that you’ll ever come up with something anyone will read—but I guarantee you will be surprised. And you may have something to learn from it. For that matter, you may end up with something that is better than you can do. Buechner said, “Where [my stories] tend to be repetitious, simplistic, superficial, merely rhetorical, I blush for them. Where, if at all, they have any power in them to touch for good the human heart, I can say only that in that instance I have said more than I know and done better than I am.” Which brings us back to L’Engle’s principle of serving the work. George MacDonald, in his way, knew this better than anyone. At times he was on a galloping horse of a story, holding on for dear life, trusting that the destination was good. In the closing of Phantastes I discovered one of my favorite MacDonald lines, about the hope that the author of our story has good intentions for us: “A great good is coming—is coming—is coming…I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it.” That sense of ultimate goodness beyond the veil is what Lewis encountered in MacDonald’s books. MacDonald is helping us to see greater truths about hope, and sorrow, and our false selves, and about sacrificial love. But he’s doing it in a way that just might set your imagination crackling. He might wake up your sleeping inner child. He might even disarm you enough to admit that maybe there’s more to the world than you thought. And if you were a whip-smart young man from Belfast, on his way to Oxford and a life of high study, a young man who had decided long ago that there was no God, you might have the sinking feeling that you may not know as much as you think you do. C.S. Lewis’s imagination, he said, was baptized. Immersed. It was redeemed by the Holy Spirit to do a great Kingdom work someday, all because he picked up a book at a train station. Life, it turns out, isn’t all that much different from one of MacDonald’s meandering, surprising, frightening, and luminous stories, where at any moment you may find yourself walking through a portal into another world. “Picking up a copy of Phantastes one day at a train-station bookstall, I began to read. A few hours later,” said C.S. Lewis, “I knew that I had crossed a great frontier.”

Fiddler’s Green is the end of a story that began a long time ago with a map and a buried treasure. You may recall that I buried my family’s Christmas presents in the woods one year, giving out maps so they could find them, and how that was the genesis of The Fiddler’s Gun. But that’s not the map I’m talking about. The real map was nothing more than a faint outline in the mind’s eye. It was a fleeting vision of a young woman—an American revolutionary named Fin Button. Over the last ten years, I’ve trusted Fin’s lead and followed her into some strange and wonderful places. I tried my best to keep up and she always kept a few steps ahead, always confident that she knew just where she was going. And like any good map should, she beckoned me toward a fair and hidden place and bade me dig. I spent most of this year digging, not with a spade but with words. And now that the treasure chest, Fin’s story, has been unearthed, and dusted off, and carried out of the wilderness, I’m honored to announce that it’s time to start handing out keys so you can all see what’s inside. The Fiddler’s Gun was a success because so many of you believed in the project and generously offered your patronage. I’m deeply grateful for each of you. Patrons were a pivotal part of the book’s creation. It’s now my hope that if you enjoyed the first part of Fin’s story, you’ll stick with her to the end. The book is written. The editing is complete. I’m probably typesetting as you read this, and how about that gorgeous artwork by Evie Coates? But the final hurdle is the tallest and the costliest: printing. I’ve been saving all year to pay for the print run, but right now I’m only able to cover about half of the cost on my own. If you’re interested in becoming a patron of Fin and her story, you can be a very real part of the publication of a book that may not exist without your support. Read on to see what some who have read it have to say. If you judge it to be worthy of your patronage, I hope your face will light up with the shimmer of gold when, come December, you open and partake of the treasure I’ve labored so long to give. Early Praise for Fiddler’s Green: “Mercy, honor, trust, dignity, reclamation: these words are not typically associated with pirate folklore. But in the astounding sequel to The Fiddler’s Gun, Peterson has managed to save the best for last. Fiddler’s Green is just as replete with action and adventure as it is with love and reclamation.” —Eric Peters, singer-songwriter, Chrome “The colorful character of Fin Button comes resplendently alive in the pages of Fiddler’s Green. Peterson has done his research well and found the human heartbeat at the center of both history and legend.” —Douglas Kaine McKelvey, author of The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog “Peterson has written an exciting adventure, but it is so much more than that. The characters will get inside you, and you will live, ache, die, and find freedom with them as you enter their stories. Fiddler’s Green is raw and real, a very human tale, and nothing short of transformational.” —Travis Prinzi, author of Harry Potter & Imagination “The best of Peterson’s work in The Fiddler’s Gun is matched and tripled in his action-packed sequel, Fiddler’s Green. He proved himself an able writer of a worthy tale in Gun, but as I read Green, I felt like I was witness to the magical moment of a certifiable author being born. There were passages that took my breath away and brought tears to my eyes. Stunning prose, unforgettable characters, a rip-roaring page-turner of an adventure that I couldn’t put down. I thoroughly enjoyed this book! Now, tell us another story Mr. Peterson.” —Jason Gray, singer-songwriter, Everything Sad is Coming Untrue “There’s more to Fin’s story than meets the eye. Sure, there’s peril, piracy, heartache, and humor, yet enveloped within the expected is the unexpected. Fin is not always who I want her to be—rather, she is who she is. Still an orphan deep in her bruised heart, she wrestles with goodness and redemption, but they wrestle back. I love a book when its characters reach out, grab my arm, and pull me into their lives, forcing me to look them in the eye, to bear their burdens and joys. With Peterson’s pen at the helm of such beautiful, poetic, and precise writing, I felt tears rolling down my cheeks during a chapter or two. And is Fin’s homecoming joyful? You’ll have to read this classic-to-be to find out, but I will say that joy is a strange and complex reality. Peterson is right up there with my favorite authors who write truthfully, taking the hurt and ‘turning it to beauty.'” —Jenni Simmons, Editor, Art House America Blog; Contributing Editor, The Curator Fiddler’s Green A Secret Mission. A Faraway Sea. A Long-awaited Homecoming. From the backwaters of Georgia to the taverns of Philadelphia, Fin Button is the talk of the colonies. The British say she’s a pirate. The Americans call her a mutineer. The crew of the Rattlesnake call her the most unlikely thing of all: Captain. But with the Revolution on the verge of defeat, the Congress offers Fin a deal. If she can free a noblewoman held captive by pirates, the French may be persuaded to join the war. Fin’s reward? A full pardon. Along with Jack, Topper, and the mysterious Armand Defain, Fin sails the Rattlesnake to the Mediterranean Sea, half a world away. Their destination is Tripoli—home of the savage corsairs and slavers of the Barbary Coast. To win the prize, Fin will need the help of an ancient seafaring order, the Knights of Malta—and the resolve of one faithful knight could alter more than just the outcome of the Revolution. It could mend the heart of a lonely girl and give rise to an American legend. Official Release: December 7th, 2010 Patron packages ship as soon as books arrive from the printer (estimated 11/19). ——————————————————————————- Fiddler’s Green Patron $25 – (2) signed copies of Fiddler’s Green, priority shipping, *your name listed as a patron on the acknowledgments page Fin’s Revolution Bundle $25 – (1) signed copy of Fiddler’s Green, (1) signed copy of The Fiddler’s Gun, download of the digital book The Fiddler’s Gun: Letters, *your name listed as a patron on the acknowledgements page Fiddler’s Green Gift Bundle $50 – (5) signed copies of Fiddler’s Green, *your name listed on the acknowledgements page Fiddler’s Green Book Club Bundle $100 – (10) signed copies of Fiddler’s Green, custom bookmarks printed with the name of your club, downloadable discussion guide, *your book club listed as a patron on the acknowledgements page Fin’s Revolution Club Bundle $150 – (10) signed copies of Fiddler’s Green, (10) Signed copies of The Fiddler’s Gun, custom bookmarks printed with the name of your club, downloadable discussion guide, downloadable digital version of The Fiddler’s Gun: Letters, *your book club listed as a patron on the acknowledgements page *For inclusion on the acknowledgements page, order must be received by 10/21