When bands have the opportunity to create their first concert film, they usually have one of two options—create some sort of slick and energetic extended music video that gives the viewer a sense of being at the show, or find a way to reveal something more about their identity through the means of film and performance. I think the latter tend to be more interesting, as they try to unveil some of the mystery behind the always elusive creative process and understand the alchemy of sound that emerges from a group of musicians. Back in January 2012, on the heels of their most creative work yet, Ghost Upon The Earth, the worship collective Gungor started a Kickstarter campaign for a live album/DVD project. Being a huge fan of their work, I readily donated to the project and eagerly awaited the results. Later in the year, their fantastic live album A Creation Liturgy arrived. But no film. So I waited, and waited. The project went through numerous delays, much to the frustration of Gungor and their fans I’m sure. Finally, just a few months ago, the digital copy of Let There Be arrived in my inbox, and it was entirely worth the wait. I knew it was going to be much more than a typical live performance film when it opened up with Lisa Gungor singing “This Is My Father’s World” in a seaside cave in Northern Ireland, with the ocean swelling in and out to her lilting vocals. This is followed by a series of Terrence Malick-like nature shots over which Michael Gungor poetically meditates upon creation and creativity: “I used to think that creation was something that had happened. Now I see it as something that is happening. Creation is an ongoing process. . . . We’ve been handed brushes of our own. . . . What shall we make?” What’s beautiful about this opening is, despite being a film about a “worship” band, Michael taps into the inherent creative ability of every human being made in the image of God, and we are treated to a montage of dancers, carpenters, musicians, and parents exercising their gifts in small, everyday ways. It’s as if Gungor is trying to make clear at the beginning, “We are all worshipers, and all our attempts to add beauty to the world are an expression of worship to the Creator.” From here the film naturally and deftly slips into the first of its four movements. Given that so much of Gungor’s music is steeped in biblical narrative and liturgy, it makes total sense that the film progresses narratively through the themes of Creation, Fall, The Bride, and (Re)Creation. What’s wonderful about this film is that Gungor inhabits the role of artist seriously. It’s not just a collection of live songs. One of the early performances, “Crags and Clay,” deftly moves from the band performing in concert halls, to Colorado mountaintops and European coastlines. A few times I was distracted from the music by the thought, “Oh my gosh, how did they get there?” There are many other wonderful touches to the film throughout. Poet Amena Brown provides several stirring interludes of spoken word verse between songs. The performances during the Fall movement are shot in a noirish black and white that lends a somberness to the material. During The Bride, husband and wife Michael and Lisa stroll lovingly through the streets of Paris, and sing the love song “Vouse Etes Mon Coeur (You Are My Heart)” along the banks of the Seine with the Eiffel Tower twinkling in the evening background. Perhaps the coolest technical highlight of the film is an acoustic version of “Wake Up Sleeper” that the band performs at a New York City subway stop. We get multiple camera shots from various angles and levels that allow us to hear the band but not see them, even a shot from the street where the music eerily echoes up from the concrete depths. The performances themselves are fantastic. You can feel the wild, creative energy of the collective emanating from the screen. You also realize two things: these people love what they do, and they are crazy talented (just witness Michael Gungor’s blazing guitar solos). Ultimately though, this is more than just a visually stunning film of a super talented band. Through Let There Be, Gungor reminded me about why it all matters—why it’s important to be alive, to be human, to create, and to worship. I felt inspired, refreshed, and encouraged, having been once again given a glimpse of the big picture. As Michael puts it at the end: “There seems to be something living within these stories and creeds that has gripped my soul. It’s as though there are hands wrapped around my very heart, and as much as doubt or scientific analysis tries to wrench the hands free, there is no use. I have been marred by this story of a marred Messiah. So I keep coming back and listening to the story.” Let There Be is available at www.gungormusic.com

“My own eyes are not enough for me; I will see through those of others.”—C.S. Lewis “Lend me your eyes, I can change what you see . . .”—Mumford & Sons On one of those rare sunny days in the middle of a Michigan winter, light and warmth hinted at spring but failed to break through the deep chill that would persist for another few months. The road was covered in muddy slush, undoing my earlier efforts at the car wash. I came around a bend in the road and swerved to keep from hitting a slumped figure on the side of the road—a woman, bundled in layers of sweaters and t-shirts, hands clasped around a grocery bag. She held out her thumb, a silent plea for a ride. Our eyes met as my car swished past her and, without my conscious intent, my foot eased down on the breaks. I pulled onto the narrow shoulder of the road and waited for the woman to shuffle closer. My thoughts raced. What am I doing? A hitchhiker? Really? Not your greatest idea, Lane. The woman approached the passenger-side window and I motioned for her to open the door. I’ve always wondered how I’d die. Is this how it happens? She pulled the handle and ducked into the car, closed the door and fumbled for the seatbelt as she spoke through cold, chapped lips. “Think I could maybe get a ride to the dollar store?” “Sure thing.” I smiled and waited for the snap of the seat belt. I offered my name and she gave me hers in return: Deborah. “Jus’ call me Debbie, I guess.” The car filled with a stench I hadn’t experienced since I was about eight years old, the day a man stumbled into my family’s living room, drunk and mumbling incoherent demands: stale cigarette smoke, booze, and something else disturbingly human that only emerges after weeks without a bath or clean laundry. Not being well-practiced in the art of picking up hitchhikers, I wondered what amount of conversation would be considered appropriate. Since there wasn’t time to check wikiHow, I ventured a question. “How long have you been walking this morning?” “Only ‘bout fifteen minutes. My car broke down last month and I been walking pretty much everywhere.” So it began. The car pulled onto the highway and Debbie proceeded to share pieces of her story. She hardly took a breath in the fifteen minutes we were together. She lived in a lake house, she told me, that she had inherited from her deceased father. Her children had disowned her. She hadn’t seen her grandchildren in months. None of her family would speak to her. The reasons for her isolation were many and she offered a rambling explanation as we made our way north on MI-37, toward the Newaygo dollar store. The white lines in the parking lot were barely visible under the salt-punctured ice. When I put the car in park, Debbie cut her story short and restlessly shifted the plastic bag in her lap. “Well, I sure do thank you for the ride. It’s a heck’a lot better’n walkin’, I know that.” She turned and our eyes caught as they had when I’d nearly passed her on the road. Hers were green. “You can give me a ride anytime, Miz Barbara.” I assured her I’d be happy to give her a ride if I happened to see her again. She climbed out of the car and closed the door, offered a weary wave of her arm as she stood in the cold and met my eyes once again before she disappeared into the fluorescent-lit dollar store. Her smell lingered in the car as I pulled back onto the highway. I haven’t seen Debbie since that day, but I still see the color of her eyes in the wintered pine trees of New Mexico and in the painted stainless steel casing of the Hydroflask (gifted to me by my Rabbit Room Secret Santa) that holds my morning coffee. “The story of any one of us,” Buechner tells us, “is in some measure the story of us all.” Those brief moments when my gaze captured Debbie’s, or hers enveloped mine, there was the closing of a circle, a meeting of our two very different stories to discover the grace of sameness. The eyes are windows into the soul. We know this. Yet how often do we take the time to gaze into, or even notice, the eyes of another? There was something in Debbie’s eyes, or something behind them—a story, further reaching than I, or she, could ever articulate. Her eyes held a story that was, in all its mundane detail, eternally significant; a story that holds the power to transform my own vision.

My friend Hilton grew up poor in South Alabama. He and his older brother didn’t have a lot of toys, but they did have one tricycle to share between them. Only Hilton’s brother wasn’t much of a sharer. He rarely gave five-year-old Hilton a turn, and when Hilton did get on the tricycle, his brother was likely as not to knock him off and ride it himself. Which made it hard to relax and enjoy any tricycle time he got. One day the two boys were playing at a creek not too far from the house when the older brother stepped on a leg trap—picture a snap-jawed bear trap from the cartoons, but smaller and without the teeth. Still plenty painful, though, on a little boy’s bare foot. The older brother howled in agony while Hilton sweated and grunted, trying to open the jaws of the trap enough to free the foot. But he was only five. He couldn’t do it. The two boys together, in fact, couldn’t open the trap. “Go get mama!” the brother bawled. “Get her quick!” So Hilton lit out for the house, as fast as his little legs could carry him. He pushed through the palmetto of the creek bottom and onto the sandy road, his brother’s howls ringing in his ears. “Got to get Mama,” he said to himself as he ran. “Mama can fix it.” He turned up the long drive that led to the house and kept running. He could feel a little stitch in his side and he couldn’t hear his brother’s howls so clearly now but he kept running. “Got to get Mama,” he said. “She can fix it.” The house had just come into view when Hilton pulled up short. There, under the shade tree, sat the tricycle, unattended. There was no older brother. Nor was there any danger of anybody sneaking up from behind and knocking him off. For the first time in his life, the opportunity for a leisurely ride on the tricycle presented itself. So he hopped on. “I rode it three times around the house before I went in and got Mama,” he said. “Each time I came around the front, I could just hear my brother yelling down at the creek.”

The past year has been incredibly busy. There have been Hutchmoots (yes, plural), Kickstarter campaigns, Molehills, memberships, Anglican Ways, Wolf Kings, Slugs and Bugs, and a slew of other things to work on (many of which are still piled on my desk). Amid all that I’ve had people asking, “When is your next book coming out?”—in answer to which I have generally shrugged my shoulders and wondered the same thing. Since Fiddler’s Green was published at the end of 2010, I’ve been telling myself that as soon as I have time, I’ll get to work on the next project. But the last few years have taught me that such thinking is a sure road to nowhere. If I’m going to write, I’m going to have to make the time. You’d think I’d have learned that lesson by now, but I suppose I’m stubborn (my wife is nodding her head emphatically as you read this). So I began this project, which I call Tales of an Unremembered Country, last month and I’m releasing the first fruit of it today. This tale, “Timely Arrival of Barnabas Bead,” is about a hapless colonel and his long-suffering lieutenant, who are reassigned to a Confederate outpost in the Appalachian Mountains. The road they take to get to their new garrison, however, might just lead them somewhere else entirely. If you’ve read the Fiddler’s books, you may recognize some parts of the world in which this is set. I’ll leave it at that. The story is available as a PDF in the Rabbit Room store (you can read a sample here), and in the Amazon store via Kindle (Amazon reviews are much appreciated!). This month’s tale includes an illustration by Jonny Jimison, and I hope to involve a variety of illustrators in these stories throughout the year. I hope you enjoy it. I’ll have another for you next month.

On November 22 of last year, I lost my voice. I’m not talking laryngitis; I mean my words. They scattered from me like a covey of quail, and I knew, standing there amid the ragged stubble of a waning year, that there was nothing I could do to call them back, nothing but lean into the cold wind of sorrow and wait. Words, like all winged things, have a life of their own; believing in their return often feels like believing in the hope of spring when the whole world is laid barren and birdless by the ravages of winter. But on November 22, I was too tired and sad to care if they ever came back. That was the day that my dog Caspian died, and some fundamental innocence in me died with him. The past two years have just about broken my heart, not by the ruin of a single blow, but by the slow-growing burden of accumulated sorrow, of grief upon grief that has seemed relentless at times. But when Caspian was diagnosed with cancer last spring, the very day we were supposed to leave on a long-awaited jaunt to the sea in our ’62 Airstream, it was too much to bear. I couldn’t bear it, in fact: when I heard the diagnosis coming out of the specialist’s mouth and saw the tears gathering in my husband’s eyes, a great, black cavern seemed to open inside of me and I felt myself falling into a bottomless place haunted by all my worst fears. The vet droned on unintelligibly about how there was nothing that could be done and what to expect in the coming days, but my soul was crying out in silence: Jesus, catch me! (He did, by the way. Strong arms shot out of that darkness and held me so tightly I could almost feel them about my physical body. I am here, that grip told me, in words beyond words.) “How long?” Philip said in a voice that sounded nothing like Philip’s. The vet was cautious. “Weeks to months,” he said. “But it’s an advanced case, and moving fast.” We walked out into the sunshine of an April afternoon with Caspian tugging blissfully on the leash, ecstatic to be released after a night’s stay at the best veterinary hospital in the state. As soon as we were in the car, Philip and I stared at one another, frightened by the anguish in each other’s eyes. “Let’s take him,” I choked. “Let’s go home and pack that Airstream if it takes all night and let’s get on the road by dawn. Let’s run away from all this sadness and give Caspian the trip to the beach of his life.” And that is precisely what we did. If there’s ever been a heart on this earth that loved that Airstream or our island destination more than Philip and me, it was Caspian. In the ten years of tramping about in our Silver Girl, Caspian had only been left behind once—and he was so devastated we vowed never to do it again. Caspian wasn’t taking any chances, though. He always knew when we were even talking about packing up for another adventure, and would park himself by the door of the trailer, refusing to budge until the moment of departure, wherein, assured of a seat in the car with his nose on the console, he could finally relax. Sick as he was, this time was no exception. I actually had to feed him his breakfast in the Explorer the morning we left as he’d loaded himself up before I had hardly opened the kitchen door. Philip kept calling it our “Shadowlands” trip, and, indeed, there was a keenness to those sunlit days that only sorrow can lend, a sharp brilliance against which both pain and pleasure stood out in dazzling clarity. For Caspian, still feeling well enough to enjoy everything, it was a dream come true: he got to eat whatever he wanted and do whatever he pleased. He got to spend whole days at Philip’s side as he worked (the Airstream doubles as “remote office” by day) and long, late afternoons on the beach with us or strolling the fishing pier in the cool of the evening. He had half of whatever I was eating at any given time, and he even got a sip of ale at the oyster bar on the wharf. Indeed, if we were living in the shadowlands, Caspian was frisking the foothills of heaven. On the beach he was always off lead—for the first time in his life. Suddenly all the leashes and life-jackets and relentless safety of the past twelve years seemed silly. Worse than silly: in this light they looked like life-killers; joy-stealers. I had feared losing Caspian since the night we brought him home; I remember sitting on the kitchen floor clutching that squirming bundle of six week-old fluff to my heart and bursting into tears. It terrified me how much I loved him. And it terrified me that there was a world out there so suddenly swarming with Dangerous Things that could hurt him or take him from me. There were cars, and stagnant pools tainted with evil viruses, and ticks and vaccine reactions. And there was cancer, the thing I feared most of all. Now that it had come, I could not fail to see that my gentle Lord had softened this sentence of death with a radiant milieu of mercies. The very fact that we were all here together for a few fleeting weeks in a place that held some of the dearest memories of our lives was an unmistakable kindness. And Caspian’s illness did not mar the trip as much as it illumined it, revealing each moment for the fire-hearted gem that it was. I watched him trot free along the shore with the inquisitive abandon of a puppy and I wanted to run with him, throwing off the fears that fettered my joys to earth, free as the wind and the swooping gulls and the curls of foam tossed up on the murmuring tide—free as my dying dog, whose happiness anchored me in the moment even as my soul took wing with this glimpse of undying things. It reminded me of that scene at the end of The Last Battle when everyone was running together with such gathering gladness into Aslan’s Country, the real Narnia. We caught Caspian’s joy, Philip and I, racing with him along a deserted beach in the saffron radiance of a dying day, and the incandescence of it will be with us for life. I wrote in my journal: So here is what I want to remember and never forget: Anxiety is the devil. Fear is a taste of hell because it cuts us off from the ever-offered rest of God’s love. And fear cannot do one damn thing to avert the thing feared. Sorrow, on the other hand, is a kind friend, and when it comes, grace comes, too, and all the tender mercies of God. All fear is the fear of loss and death; all love comes with a price tag of pain; all true sorrow has its counterpoint of joy. And it’s real. We’re living it in the most vivid way. And if we’re running along the beach laughing at one moment and weeping over the grief that is coming the next, well then, this is life abundant, the full package. And the joy is more real than the grief because the joy is forever and the pain is for but the passing shadow of this life. Beyond all expectation, Caspian lived to travel with us once more to our island refuge in mid-September, though by that time he was completely blind. The dignity with which he accepted this sad new development was one of the most touching things I have ever seen. The vet explained to me that dogs don’t regard “suffering” as a concept the way we humans do; they are generally very philosophical about hardship, accepting what comes their way with deeply instinctual adaptability. I witnessed that first-hand when Caspian lost his sight: after a day or so of deep confusion, he shook off the gloom and started feeling his way around the house with his nose, reacquainting himself with thresholds and walls and furniture. He nosed his way up our steep staircase, gingerly at first, and then with astonishing confidence. He even wanted to go to the barn with us in the evenings as he’d always done, though it must have been frightening to have the goats and sheep and chickens all swarming about and not be able to see them. The island was no different: Caspian didn’t have to see to know exactly where he was and to be excited about it (or to run up to strangers, barking an ecstatic greeting, only to run right past them). And though the disease had certainly progressed, neither Philip nor I had the least doubt that our brave little dog was happy—glad just to be with us, salt-kissed and sun-warmed in a kindly breeze under a generous sky. Whenever we were on the beach, I would bury my face in that gorgeous spotted ruff of his (I always said it looked like the ermine collar on a princely robe) just because I could. Our days with him were dwindling, and we all knew it. On the last afternoon, I stayed behind on the beach while Philip took Caspian back to the Airstream, and as I watched their retreating figures, my eyes burned with tears. It was the end of an era. The loss of a particular innocence loomed: Philip and I both had lost dogs in our lives—but we had never lost our dog. Caspian was so much a part of us, we hardly knew “us” without him. We weren’t just “dog people,” ardently as we love the canine species as a whole. We were Caspian people. So, the day came in late November when Philip and I had to prove our love to this faithful companion of ours by making the decision that every lover of dogs prays they will never have to face. Yet even that black day was made tender by mercies: the sudden, unmistakable downturn that left us no doubts; the fact that we were both with him; the gentle expiration with his head on Philip’s lap. Our kind-hearted vet hugged me hard when it was all over. “I’ve rarely seen a dog loved as much as Caspian,” he told me gently. But that’s no credit to us. Caspian was the kind of dog that little children wrote letters to and perfect strangers were smitten by. He had a weakness for whole sticks of butter stolen from the countertop and a human-like cock of his head when he was trying to make out one of the several hundred words in his mental inventory. My best friends wept when they heard Caspian was sick, and when he died, one dear soul spent a couple of weeks trying to bring herself to break the news to her nine year-old daughter. When we came home that afternoon to a thunderously quiet house, we sat in the silence and counted off the things that Caspian had taught us in his living and dying: enthusiastic inhabitance of the present moment; unfettered enjoyment of life; courage in suffering. Philip said gently that maybe someday I would be able to write about it. But in the weeks after Caspian died, I could hardly speak in coherent sentences, much less write them. My journal from that time looks like psychological chicken scratch. The one clear, strong comfort was our shared conviction that Caspian is. If there’s a bone of theological contention that leaves me cold, it’s the argument of whether animals will be in heaven. No mere sentimental crutch, my doctrinal position on the matter is simple if not a little incredulous: Why the heck not? It’s one of those questions upon which Scripture is notoriously silent, but I see absolutely no reason to interpret silence in this case as “no.” All I know of the character of God speaks to the contrary: if there’s one thing in the infinite universe this quaking heart of mine doesn’t fear, it’s the possibility of imagining God better than He is. “I wonder if the spirits of all the pussy folk and doggy folk I’ve loved will meet me with purrs and yaps of pleasure at the pearly gates,” L. M. Montgomery’s whimsical heroine Pat Gardiner ponders. But dear “Grandpa George” MacDonald takes a firmer stance: “I know of no reason why I should not look for the animals to rise again…If the Father will raise his children, why should he not also raise those whom he has taught his little ones to love? Love is the one bond of the universe, the heart of God, the life of his children: if animals can be loved, they are loveable; if they can love, they are yet more plainly loveable: love is eternal; how then should its object perish?” We knew we’d been marked as dog lovers for life; Caspian had settled that question irrevocably. But in the first deadness of grief we declared we never wanted another dog. Then we said maybe, in a hundred years or so. Then we said it would have to be an Australian shepherd, just like Caspian. And then, before either of us dreamed we were ready, a five-pound ball of downy blue merle pranced into our sadness and lit it all the colors of the rainbow. Suddenly, our mourning for one dog was not mutually exclusive with the sweet anticipation of another. The woman we got her from (a saint among dog breeders!) was so gentle with my fears of circumventing the grief process: she told me that when one of her dogs goes to a home where a beloved companion has recently been lost she believes they have a special calling to care for wounded hearts. I can vouch for that: when Philip and I met our wee lass for the first time, we handed our hearts over without question. This pup had a vocation on her pretty little head—it was as obvious as that seagull-shaped “V” on the bridge of her perfect little nose. We named her Bonnie Blue (her mother’s name is Katie Scarlett, of course), and in the weeks since she’s come to live with us, a strong new joy has been swelling in my heart like the unblighted bulbs of early spring. Colors appear where once there was only the hard earth of sadness; hope flocks home, birdlike, one dove at a time. My words are coming back, as well, in this sudden thaw, and old ambition gleams out between patches of melting snow. All this from the advent of a puppy who’s not quite housebroken and nips holes in my favorite skirts and eats out of the litter box? Absolutely. That’s what love does—it kindles and warms and wakens. Love is a creative force: it always begets in some way or another. And this particular love is resurrecting gladness in my heart, reminding me that winter must give way at last to warmth and sunshine, in nature and in life. Who says dogs can’t be grace-bearers? We sat in the pasture the other day, Bonnie and I, and watched the sandhill cranes swirling overhead on a persistently northward course. “That means spring is coming, Bonnie-girl,” I told her, as she cocked her head at their far-off cries. “And you won’t believe how beautiful it’s going to be.” I’ll spare the details of how absurd Philip and I have made ourselves with puppy-love the past six weeks. But I will say that we’ve remembered Caspian more tenderly than ever since Bonnie has come into our lives. Though each dog’s personality is unquestionably unique, it’s been sweet to see the similarities in the breed that have made us such devoted “Aussie people.” With the remembering, however, comes the ghost of old fears, the temptation to snatch and grab and worry. Menaces rise on every side so that I want to clutch Bonnie in my arms and sit down on the kitchen floor and cry. How easily I fret my joy away over improbable things! And yet, it’s love itself that arrests my panicked heart, soothing me back down into the quiet of Caspian’s best and most unforgettable gift to us: Fearlessness. Love wildly! Love exuberantly! his doggie soul proclaimed in a thousand ways. But—for Heaven’s sake—love without fear.

[Editor’s note: This one is a couple of weeks old, but the “everywhere but Nashville” line still holds true.] This week’s snow and ice (everywhere but Nashville) has made me think of a favorite poem by one of my favorite poets–“Boy at the Window,” by Richard Wilbur. “Boy at the Window” Seeing the snowman standing all alone In dusk and cold is more than he can bear. The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare A night of gnashings and enormous moan. His tearful sight can hardly reach to where The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes Returns him such a God-forsaken stare As outcast Adam gave to paradise. The man of snow is, nonetheless, content, Having no wish to go inside and die. Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry. Though frozen water is his element, He melts enough to drop from one soft eye A trickle of the purest rain, a tear For the child at the bright pane surrounded by Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear. Bonus media: My daughter, a devotee of the movie Frozen, introduced me to this different take on what it means to be a snowman:

In his poem, “A Footnote to All Prayers,” C. S. Lewis insisted whenever we speak to God we must acknowledge, He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou, … And all men are idolators, crying unheard To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word. Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in Thy great, Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate. Saint Augustine expressed it succinctly in his small book, On Christian Teaching, “God, although nothing worthy of His greatness can be said of Him, has condescended to accept our praise.” This is one of the most remarkable paradoxes of the Christian life. The more one realizes how no expression of praise could possibly be worthy of God, the more one feels compelled to shout Hallelujah! It is nothing short of audacious that for the past two thousand years believers have gathered every day to worship Him whom they know they could never adequately worship. Our inadequacy is hardly reason to abandon theological reflection. Nor is it reason to ignore the fellowship of the saints. Before God and among each other we Christians are not meant to reach perfection, rather we are wounded souls together “limping” to worship. Because we stumble along the way of life, what we know about God and how we react to our knowledge will always involve some discomfort. Picture not the pious woman with calloused knees; instead think of the same pious woman tripped up with skinned and bloody knees, but nonetheless shouting, “Praise God!” It is the kind of picture that might tempt some of us to try to strike out on our own, in a less theological and ecclesiastical but more comfortable direction. For the past two thousand years believers have chosen this individualist path, too. Yet, there is nothing audacious about lonely comfort. Fellowship in worship is the antidote to the discomfort of God’s ineffability. It would be nothing short of terrifying to proclaim with the Psalmist, “You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you! I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told,” if we never heard someone next to us exclaim, “That’s exactly how I feel, too!” #Augustine #CSLewis

As an illustrator, the most common question I’m asked is “what kind of utensil, paper, paint, ink, pen, etc., did you use to do this?” I’m always forthcoming in my response—at times in great detail. I have nothing to hide, there are no tricks up my sleeve when it comes to my art. I am aware that there is no magic pencil to be pulled from a stone, no special paper that arrives like a flying carpet and somehow transforms one into an amazing artist. There is however, a common misconception in the minds of artist-hopefuls that the artists they admire actually do possess those items and are simply hoarding them. “Let us make man in our image.” That’s what the Creator said, right? My humble mind has come to understand that “our image” was possibly referring to two major aspects of likeness: the possession of one’s own will, and the ability to create. Both of which I am grateful for, the latter more so than the first, as creating gets me in much less trouble than my will. Although one’s will, driven by faith, is the beginning of creation . . . but that’s for another day. Needless to say I’m thankful to be a creator, and it is that gift and talent in which I find the ability to produce artworks. So maybe there is some magic in the talent, but it’s up to me to determine the level of success I will find. The preparation, research, practice, planning and execution are based on what I am willing to put into exercising my raw goods. “Ok, so I’ve got some talent, then just how do I decide what medium and materials are right for me?” You try. You try over and over. You experience. You experiment. You fail. Failure is the most important thing you can do while you are finding yourself as an artist. And through this process you eventually shape yourself into . . . well, you. And no matter what that looks like, be proud of it. Whatever you find yourself to be as an artist, as a creator, be the very best at it. Do your art like nobody’s business and when someone comes up to you and asks “What kind of pencil and paper did you use to do this?” you can proudly respond as I do: “It’s a #2 pencil and Xerox paper.”

Summer of 2012 found me flying over to Europe for three weeks of touring with Alison Krauss and Union Station. One of the best parts of playing in a band is that it funds my bent for wandering and taking in beauty. In the past 20 years, Europe, England, Ireland, and Scotland have skinned me of more shoe leather and per diem than I care to count. St. Patrick’s and Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, the British Museum and Library in London, and Heidecksburg Castle in Rudolstadt, Germany, have all been food for the eyes and soul of this wandering boy. Four days into the 2012 tour we flew to Oslo, Norway. It was a day off, but much of it was burned up traveling, so I walked around the town for a bit, bought some food, and went to my room. I got online to research Oslo, and a thrill ran through my stomach when I saw The Viking Ship Museum—three ships used for burials—was three miles away. Sound check at the venue wasn’t until later in the afternoon the next day. In the morning I armed myself with camera and coin and set out. There is something deliciously lonely about walking solo for miles in a strange country thousands of miles from home. I took time for a perfect cappuccino in a narrow cafe on a quiet street, looking in shop windows, listening to unintelligible conversations, and watching birds. I wandered in town: I wandered in parks: As I came closer to the museum I smelled the salty edges of the sea, wanderers moored until the next wind drove them out again. Three miles from the hotel, I entered the museum slightly footsore (I’d been in Europe four days already, remember). I went in, paid up, and saw how the Vikings crossed the North Sea. Basically, they used large, ornate rowboats. Also, I saw some boots. The boots of a wanderer. And combs to make things beautiful. Museums always get me thinking about bigger things. I remember seeing the Persian Kings exhibit at the British Museum in 2005. There were floor tiles the prophet Daniel may have walked on, utensils, cups, dishes he may have used. My old pastor used to say, “Most people don’t put flesh and blood on the Bible.” I’ve pled guilty to that more than once. But as I looked upon the everyday household goods of Darius and Nebuchadnezzar, I felt a palpable closeness with Daniel, a sense of his utter reality. I stirred myself and moved on to the Viking cart, which was in amazing condition partly due to how well it was built. Practicality and beauty mingle. I especially loved the reddish textures in the wood. After two hours of slack-jawed gawking, I noticed I was really stretching it on time. The band bus would leave from the hotel for sound check at 3pm. I went outside, my mind and heart spinning with all the impressions and thoughts I’d gathered. Art, craft, beauty, courage, sailing by the seat of your pants, life, and death, we-never-really-own-anything-we-just-use-it-for-awhile. I walked to the trolley stop outside the museum. It would ride into Oslo and be at the hotel in fifteen minutes. After all, time was short, I was tired, my feet hurt a little, and I had a show to play that night. Then the thought came, “If the Vikings could sail the North Sea in ships like that, you sure as heck can walk three more miles.” I didn’t have time to walk all the way back. So I ran.

Twelve years ago at a Wesleyan college in Indiana, I played my first show as Andrew Peterson’s full-time right-hand man. Tonight in Greeley, Colorado, I played my last. At least for now. In January of 2002 I was 22 years old and newly married. I had come to Nashville two years prior to pursue my goal of playing sessions. I also hoped to be a sideman to a great songwriter. I just didn’t know who that might be. Rich Mullins had died in 1997, my freshman year of college. I figured eventually somebody had to pick up that torch and run with it. I wanted to run alongside. I met Andrew through my friend Mark, who was AP’s college roommate. Mark told me I was meeting the next Rich Mullins. The magic words! I wrote a string arrangement of Andrew’s song “Faith To Be Strong” for a class project and sent the recording to AP. It worked. He hired me to write strings for Behold The Lamb Of God, which was then in its second year of touring. After the show, AP asked me to come on the road in the spring. Little did I know . . . Now it’s March 2nd, 2014. Beth and I have been married almost thirteen years. We have four kids. Our oldest is 10 and our youngest is 5. The goal of being a session player never quite came to full fruition for the best reason possible: production got in the way. I spend nearly every day in the studio helping one artist or another shape her best songs into a cohesive, inspiring, truthful recording that will help her say what she needs to say and take the next step on the path marked out for her. I always said I’d travel with Andrew until he made me stop. But anyone who’s been around record-making can tell you that production is a more-than-full-time job. Sometimes I work average hours, but when the river’s in flood you can find me in the studio 15 hours a day for days on end. In those seasons I am keenly aware that I am just one man. It took me a while to admit—because I didn’t want it to be true—that I can’t be the husband, dad, and producer I’m called to be AND be the drop-everything, fully-present sideman I want AP to have. Here’s a sidebar about sidemen. The artist’s ministry is to the audience; the sideman’s ministry is to the artist. The artist carries a heavy burden, and when that gets too heavy the sideman carries the artist. It’s Sam Gamgee work. Sometimes I was good at it. Most of the time I flat-out sucked. Sidemen have our own signature blend of psychoses. The sideman feels like he’s always about ten feet away from someone really interesting. I think there’s a movie with a similar title now, and that only corroborates my story. The sideman finishes second every night. As AP has said, if he does his job right, he becomes invisible. People have come up to me five minutes after I played my heart out and said, “Weren’t you the drummer?” Yes. Yes I was. Boo hoo, Ben! Woe is you! That’s not my point. My point is that everything I’ve just said about sideman work turns out to be what’s lovely and sanctifying about it. So John the Baptist has this great ministry going. He’s baptizing in the desert and people are coming out in droves. Then Jesus comes along and takes the limelight. What does John say? “He must increase, I must decrease.” And there was never one greater than John the Baptist! Then Jesus starts his ministry and what does he say? “I do nothing on my own but only what I see my father doing.” I love the way the Message translates Colossians 3:3. “Be content with obscurity, like Christ.” Obscurity is appropriate attire for human beings. It looks really good on us. The sad fact is, I have a fame idol. Not a front-page fame idol. More like an “everybody whose opinion matters knows who Ben is and thinks he’s the best at everything” fame idol. And now that I’ve made my most humbling admission, you have to send me yours. What could kill a fame idol deader than a nightly spoonful of second-place? I used to think it tasted bitter. Now I like to keep it in a hip flask and sip it. Production, for example, tastes so much better spiked with obscurity. My best days in the studio are preceded by the following prayer: “Lord, I am going to the studio today not to be served but to serve and to give my life.” So I recommend sideman work, with all its glorious difficulties. Especially if you can find an Andrew Peterson. Andrew knows his calling and because of this he has incredible spine. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him make a move that wasn’t in keeping with his calling. And it’s a worthy one. It’s all about mining the depths of his own wounded-ness and coming up with the kind of rare jewels in which the poor in spirit see their own reflection. His songs are like Harry Potter’s thestrals; you can only see the winged horses if you’ve experienced death. The people who appreciate Andrew’s music the most are the ones who’ve known real sorrow. AP himself has been Job-tested as of late, kind of punched in the gut over and over by the accuser. I’m proud of him for hanging in there, staying in community, seeking out counsel and encouragement. Go and do likewise. As for our relationship, Andrew and I have spent enough time together to know every last one of each other’s stories and most of each other’s flaws. And yet I’ve never questioned whether our friendship mattered to him. Andrew takes community very seriously. He meets conflict head-on because he sees the kingdom coming and he wants to enter it alongside his brothers. He’s prone to point out the elephant in the room with disarming bluntness. Some of the words I most needed to hear, whether I welcomed them or not, were spoken by AP. Finally, it goes without saying that Andrew possesses a hard-to-match creative intelligence. It manifests itself in story, wit, and insight. He wrote Light For The Lost Boy (the whole record) in about two weeks. He’s always adding irons to the fire, new projects that will keep him fresh and engaged. Or wear him out! When you engage in a critical discussion with Andrew, you know you’ve met your match. To say working with Andrew has sharpened me as a writer doesn’t do the last 12 years justice. I learned the writing life from Andrew. Tonight we closed the show with “Don’t You Want To Thank Someone.” It’s my favorite AP song. Yes, I do want to thank someone. Thank you, Lord, for giving me the gift of these years. As I walked off stage tonight I glanced back at my keyboard world. I thought, “Goodbye, little domain; it’s time for me to go.” Thank you, Lord for the time I spent on that piano bench, ten feet from someone really interesting. Thank you for the whole trip. From the car to the shuttle to the ticket counter, through security, to Starbucks, to the gate, to the jetway, to the plane, to the jetway, to baggage, to the rental car, to Chipotle, to the used book store, to the venue, to soundcheck, to dinner, to the green room, to the stage, to the green room, to the rental car, to the hotel, and eventually to bed. Goodnight AP. I’ll see you one of these mornings and we’ll do it again.

I’m so grateful for the invitation to contribute to this community. When I learned what many of you write and listen to, what some of you sing about, I often think, “Yes! That’s what I paint! We mine the same material, plumb the same waters.” The themes of rebellion and redemption, brokenness and restoration resonate with me as they seem to with many of you. And so it’s a privilege to offer you a glimpse into my world. I’m currently preparing for an art fair in April and so every few weeks I’ll update you on what I’m working on. I look forward to getting to know you all better. #art #illustration #painting

Following is the piece I wrote as an essay for the special edition of my new record, Love Will Have The Final Word. The suffering of others can make us talkative, loosening the tongues of even the most timid among us. We mean well, we want to help, but more often than not we end up being like Job’s comforters: doing more harm than good by offering half-baked answers, which are no comfort at all and leave the hearer feeling even more alone. When we do this we are asking the suffering person to be okay, to cheer up, and in doing so we are rejecting their pain. The loneliness of our own suffering can make us introspective. It can lead us into the shame and regret buried deep in our hearts, warranted or not (a friend of mine who had a miscarriage told me that all she wanted to say over and over again was, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” though she had done nothing for which she needed to apologize). In this we see how pain has the power to unearth our deepest wounds, driving them to the surface where perhaps God can begin to heal them. Several years ago, I experienced one of the most healing moments of my life. It happened in the back lounge of a tour bus. I had just poured out my broken heart to my friend, Andy Gullahorn, when I recognized in the silence that fell between us that I was bracing myself for what he would say next. Would he try to fix me? Correct me? Would he reject my pain by offering answers? After a moment Andy said, “Jason, I want you to stand up with me. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to hug you, and you need to let me hold you for at least two minutes. And I’m going to time it,” he said as he took off his watch, “so you’re not going anywhere.” I’m not afraid of male bonding, but two minutes is a long time to hug anyone, let alone in the back lounge of a tour bus. I laughed nervously at first because I felt awkward. But then I found myself crying, and not long after that I started ugly crying. And then, as the last bit of strength I had been clinging to gave itself up, I felt like I sort of went limp and mostly just hung there, held up in the arms of my friend. He didn’t ask me to be okay. He didn’t offer answers. He just offered himself. Pain is holy, and in the presence of holiness it’s often best to keep quiet. No words passed between us, but what Andy was saying, and what God was saying through him, was clear: “You are loved. You are not alone.”

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be working through two Greek tragedies with my students. The first is Oedipus Rex, a devastating story about a man who unknowingly murders his own father before accidentally marrying his mother. The second tragedy is Antigone, which describes the pathetic death of a daughter conceived in the incestuous marriage of Oedipus. The historical context of these tragedies is interesting to me. In modern times most of us attempt to avoid “spoilers.” We don’t want the outcome of a plot to be known until the story unfolds. However, when these plays were first observed, the audience already knew how the lives of Oedipus and his daughter would end. Imagine experiencing this dynamic as a script writer. From the first words of the prologue, the average audience member knows more about the fate of poor old Oedipus than his character does. The punch line is told before the joke. How would a playwright keep an audience engaged if the end of his plot is already exposed? Instead of running from this challenge, Sophocles maximized it. He incorporated the empathy of his audience as a key function of the narrative, almost like a painted scenic backdrop against which the action takes place. In fact, Oedipus is driven by a dramatic irony that depends upon the audience’s sense of foreboding. Catharsis is achieved because Sophocles evokes fear and pity for a doomed hero. Unpacking this has been relevant to me, because recently I have been thinking about how I carry my own past and how I tell its stories. I’ll be forty-two this year, old enough to have seen certain micro-plots of life worked to micro-conclusions. Yet, passing days tend to move so quickly, and in the rush I have assigned meanings to certain micro-plots haphazardly. When I realized this, I began to work intentionally back through the story of my life, and particularly through my twenty-year marriage, to reexamine acts and scenes that were lived in the raw and rapidly named as comedies or tragedies. The first scene I unpacked was a miscarriage. I was young and horrified when it happened, and the sorrow of losing a child was too much to process. I couldn’t find thoughts or words to capture it all, so I simply let images collect into a deep, vague ache that throbbed for two decades. Going back into this memory last week, I knew how the story ended. Like the audience watching Oedipus, I knew what profound sadness was waiting for me. Yet in retrospect, that certainty allowed me to examine the particulars of the narrative and find valuable messages hidden in a tragic story. One of my favorite lines from The Lord of the Rings Trilogy was spoken by Samwise Gamgee. He looks at Gandalf the wizard and asks, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” I love that sentence, because it is the silent ache of so many hearts. We long to know that spring will come after a brutal cold. If you are a spiritual person, perhaps your eschatology provides a vision of paradise that will kiss away every tear lost. Skeptics argue that promises of eternal comfort were borne of desperation and fairy dust, but I see that differently. I think it is telling that there is a widespread, inherent ache in the human heart for happily ever after. An infant who has never nursed will still scream out of need for milk. His hunger indicates that something exists to quell the want. Is it not then possible that the human soul hungers for bliss because a heaven exists? That is my ultimate hope. I cling to it. Yet it is also good for me to see that even in this closer, sadder world, there are tragedies that can be re-explored after time and seen with more clarity. They are going to bite and sear to the last line, and yet, by exploration tiny strands of truth (and even beauty) will emerge, hidden among the train wrecks. This is not the ultimate redemption, of course. It is not what I long for most. Still, to see how grace sometimes rises in horror is an unexpected benefit of growing older. Our sad stories are important, too. And knowing how terribly they end can invite us to rewind through them, looking not for the great reveal, but for bits of sea glass hidden on broken shores.

At the most recent Hutchmoot, Andrew Peterson and I gave a talk called “Writing Close to the Earth.” Andrew got on the subject of sehnsucht, that unexplained and unsatisfied longing that was for C.S. Lewis such an important clue to the meaning of the universe. Lewis’s autobiography Surprised by Joy is punctuated by moments in which some earthly experience awakens him to the truth that there is more to the world than mere earthly experience. A little model garden in a biscuit tin, Arthur Rackham’s illustrations of the Ring Cycle, a flowering currant bush—seemingly commonplace things—each gave Lewis “the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing” for a world beyond this world. In Andrew’s words, these episodes are “moments that are lodged in our memories as significant, though we don’t always understand why—moments where the veil is lifted for a moment, and we’re left with longing, or with a new revelation of the wild beauty of the world.” Andrew asked the audience to describe such moments in their own lives. There were a lot of mountain vistas, sunsets and sunrises, encounters with music and with art. For me, the question brought back a memory that sheds light on all the fiction I’ve ever written. Once when I was eighteen or nineteen years old, my father and I were puttering up a familiar stretch of Georgia’s Ocmulgee River in a small aluminum boat. As we passed a sandbar that I had seen a hundred times, I was startled to see it move. Only it wasn’t the sandbar that moved; it was a great, thick alligator, ten feet long at least, with a tail as big around as a saw log. Though I had been coming to the Ocmulgee River all my life, I had never seen an alligator in its waters or on its banks. But there he was, as big as life and twice as natural. The alligator was terrible to behold. But he was thrilling to behold too. Awful and awesome, after all, used to be synonyms. If he had wanted to, the alligator could have swept us out of our little boat and eaten us up. I understand that alligators don’t ever behave that way. But it wasn’t the understanding part of my brain that first reacted first to the sight of this monster. Nor do I even think it was my “lizard brain”—the seat of the fight-or-flight reflex—that awoke at the sight of the great lizard. No, I think this alligator awakened the part of my brain (or, more appropriately, my soul) that responds to mythology—to old stories of dragons and monsters that lurk at the edges of the worlds that we humans try to keep civilized and comfortable. I had seen alligators before, at the zoo and in the Okefenokee Swamp. But this one lived only ten miles away from my house. He was in “my” river, where I had been coming all my life. A week earlier, I had swum across its muddy waters, not a mile from the very sandbar where this great reptile lay like Smaug on his pile of treasure. The rivers in the southern half of Georgia once teemed with alligators. I had heard rumors that a few still survived in the Ocmulgee. I dearly hoped it was true, that the world where I lived was still as wild as that. But it didn’t seem likely. I lived in a world where the roads were paved and hot water came out of the faucet. We had a television, a VCR, a microwave oven. There were McDonald’s restaurants in my world and Top-40 radio stations and convenience stores that sold Coca-Cola and potato chips. But also, as it turns out, there were dragons. For me, the alligator on his sandbar was a stab of Lewis’s Joy. I couldn’t get over it. I haven’t gotten over it yet. My friends think it’s funny that every novel and short story I have ever written involves at least one alligator. I suppose it is kind of funny. But it’s more than funny. Alligators for me carry a lot of metaphorical freight. They remind us that just beyond the civilization and comfort that we carve out for ourselves, there is a wild beauty that is neither civilized nor comfortable nor even safe. They remind us that this world, the one where we live and move and have our being, is still a place of myth and marvel. Here be dragons.

“With Every Act of Love” was the last song to be written for my new record. Knowing I didn’t really have a song that felt like the lead single, I turned to N. T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope for inspiration in a writing session with my friend Jason Ingram. I enjoy the idea of taking a compelling theologian’s idea and shaping it into a pop song that might extend the idea’s reach. What follows is the essay I wrote that is included in the Special Edition of my new record. With Every Act Of Love A doorway placed on a set or in a scene is often a sign of new possibilities. A wall divides worlds, and the door is a portal between them, a passageway through which change can enter from one world into another. In his book, Surprised By Hope, N. T. Wright reminds us that though we live in the world of men, the Kingdom of God is always at hand. Statements such as “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through” are meant to affirm a deeper reality beyond reality, but they may tempt us to imagine Christianity as an ideology of evacuation and abandonment. However, the hope of the Gospel is as earthy as it is eternal, marked by a Love that pursues, engages, renews, and is fulfilled in the marriage of Heaven and Earth—when the Kingdom that was launched through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ comes to fruition in the new Jerusalem, “coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev 21:2 NIV). The hope laid out for us in Scripture is that this world will not be abandoned! It is being redeemed as part of God’s new creation. The Kingdom of God is not for “someday when” but is an eternal reality that we are invited to participate in here and now. “Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness;” says Wright, “Every act of care and nurture, comfort and support . . . every deed that embraces holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world—all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. . . . What we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God’s new world.” This means that all that we do with love—whether mission work in a foreign land or doing laundry in our own home, feeding the poor or feeding our kids—advances the Kingdom of God and will last forever. Or in the words of one of my favorite songs by David Wilcox, “You will always have what you gave to love.” The outlandish beauty of all this is that God doesn’t need us to build his Kingdom—he is God after all—but for reasons of his own, he’s decided he wants us. And in the wildness of his wisdom, and as unlikely as it seems, he has put us where we are and asked us to be a portal between worlds, a doorway through which he arrives to redeem and renew. “Amen! Come Lord Jesus!” Watch the “With Every Act Of Love” lyric video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4bB7BUxBbY The new album, Love Will Have The Final Word, releases next Tuesday.

A few weeks ago, Jakob Lewis (a friend from church) sent me the first episode of his new podcast, Neighbors, wondering if it might be of interest to the Rabbit Room community. He said it featured a story about Thomas McKenzie, and, knowing that there are no dull stories about Thomas McKenzie, I was intrigued. I listened to the episode and was immediately impressed. Not with Thomas’s story (though I would be), but with the quality of the podcast. I’ve been a Radiolab fan for years and I could tell right off the bat that Jakob was too. I loved the sound, style, and pace of Neighbors, and any favorable comparison to Radiolab is a positive thing. But Jakob’s ear for a good story was just as in tune as his technical ability. He let Thomas’s experience with the death of his father play out just like it should, with grace, insight, and a bit of revelation. When I told Jakob how much I enjoyed the podcast, I learned that he’s just been accepted to a residential radio storytelling program on Cape Cod. The course is led by Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich and This American Life’s Nancy Updike. They only accept nine applicants and Jakob was lucky enough (and talented enough) to be one of them. The two-month course means that Jakob will have to take leave from his job and be away from his wife for two months, though, and he’s currently in the middle of an IndieGoGo campaign to try to raise money to defray his expenses. He’s not asking for much, but if you appreciate the kind of storytelling that Jakob demonstrates in this episode, consider helping him out. I did. When Jakob completes the residential course he and his wife are hoping to drive across the country and collect stories along the way. Based on his work in this first episode, I can’t wait to hear them. You can stream the episode below. Check it out for yourself and visit the Neighbors homepage. Neighbors, Episode 1 “Our Father: Two Fathers Trying to Out-Father One Another” by Jakob Lewishttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/OurFather.mp3 Click here to visit the campaign page.

I’ll never forget the call. I was being asked to join Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God tour as their special guest. Did they have the right number? I had seen the show for the first time the year before and was so encouraged and inspired by the evening that I told my husband I’d found our family Christmas tradition, so the invitation to actually be a part of the show seemed surreal and too good to be true. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never intentionally read through anything for Advent, but as I listened through the Behold the Lamb of God record to prepare for the tour, I was swept up into the “old, old story.” I have Andrew to thank for introducing me to the joy of remembering well the story of our savior. I was totally that girl on the bus who fell asleep listening to the Behold the Lamb record every night and who was reading Russ Ramsey’s Behold the Lamb book in the mornings. I was captured again by the story of our Rescuer. I also found myself caught up into a beautiful community of story-tellers. These people love well. They seek each other out. They listen. They pray. They laugh—a lot. They play spike ball and catch phrase. They say, “I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?” They gather each night to eat a meal together. They bear with each other. They craft songs that carry the ache and joy and hope and wandering our souls experience, and they welcomed me as one of their own. Night after night, I would cry standing side stage, hands raised in the air, as Andrew sang the truth to every crowd. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away our sin Behold the Lamb of God, the life and light of men Behold the Lamb of God who died and rose again Behold the Lamb of God who comes to take away our sin Oh to get to sing the gladdest of tidings to a different city each night. To get to sing the story of Emmanuel, God With Us, to our own souls. Remember! “The power of death undone.” Remember! “Son of God. Son of Man.” And then we would walk off the stage every night as our own voices mingled with the voices of brothers and sisters who came to the show to remember with us. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” Praise Him indeed. #BeholdTheLambofGod #EllieHolcomb

Saint Augustine wrote a small book in 393 that I like to use as a reminder. The book, Faith and the Creed, was an address he gave to a plenary council of the African Church. In it, he exposits a combination of the Nicene and Romano-Milanese creeds. As you would expect from Augustine, the entire short book is good. Yet, I especially like the introduction, where Augustine explains the use of the creed and the importance of its defense. He begins with its use. But the Catholic Faith is made known to the faithful in the Creed, and is committed to memory, in as short a form as so great a matter permits. In this way for beginners and sucklings, who have been reborn in Christ but have not yet been strengthened by diligent and spiritual study and understanding of the divine Scriptures, there has been drawn up in few words a formula they must accept in faith, setting forth what would have to be expounded in many words to those who are making progress and are raising themselves up to attain the divine doctrine in the assured strength of humility and charity. The Bible is a big book and theology is an expansive discipline; there is much to learn. The creed serves as an orientation to the Christian faith for those who are new to it. But also, the creed is a reminder for those Christians who have dug deeper into the Scriptures and have lived in the faith long enough to have experienced the conundrums of discipleship, which often engender doubts. Be sure, doubts will arise. Not just because faith includes disheartening mysteries, but also because there exist people who do not believe the Christian faith and who are not content that others should. This is why Augustine makes a case for exposition. But the exposition of the Faith serves to fortify the Creed, not that it is given to be committed to memory or repeated instead of the Creed by those who obtain the grace of God. But it guards the things contained in the Creed against the wiles of heretics with full Catholic authority and with a stronger defense. In a word, all Christians need to remember the basics of faith and also we need individuals who will expound the complexities of faith. Few of us would feel comfortable categorizing ourselves alongside the likes of Augustine, one of the great expositors and defenders of Christianity. But, neither with false humility should many of us claim only to be sucklings. The majority of us are in between. It helps for me to remember this: I am not new to Christianity, though others are and they need the example of my continued affirmation of the faith that they are just beginning to learn. Neither am I a great defender of the faith, though others are and they need the example of my continued affirmation of the faith that they labor so hard to defend. Those expositors of the Christian faith have been on my mind and heart recently. They are the Christians who get beat up by antagonists, and even by their own hearts and minds. Too often, they also get thrashed about by in-between Christians like me. They choose to wrestle with mysteries and doubts in an effort to give me comfort and assurance. I would not understand the smallest imprint of the depths they explore. And, if I followed them all the way down to those depths, my faith would be rattled to its core. Why am I so quick to accuse these expositors? They begin to dig in search of diamonds deep, but as soon as they hit clay, I chide, “Ah ha! I knew you were going to smear the faith.” In reality, defending the faith requires getting messy. Often confidence comes only after washing off the caked-on grime accumulated from burrowing for jewels of truth. Are there ways, I wonder, for in-between Christians like me to help expositors clean up after a particularly hard dig? I cannot say I know the best way to help, though I suspect it might involve getting a little dirty, too. #Augustine

First of all, let me apologize to Andy Gullahorn for the awful Beyond the Frame joke you see in the picture above; I stole it from Sally Zaengle so you can blame her. That’s Kathleen Norris being a good sport with the guitar. We left for Texas on Thursday morning with quite a bit of anxiety. The opportunity to hold a “Hutchmoot” event at Laity Lodge was a dream come true, but none of us knew how well it would work. Would people recognize it as a uniquely Rabbit-Room-ish event? Would the community aspect translate in the same way it has at past Hutchmoots? Would the more spacious program still leave people fulfilled? Would Kathleen Norris feel at home and enjoy her time with us? All these and many other questions were on my mind when I got off the plane. And now, after three and a half days in the beauty of the Texas hill country, after lots of Psalms and poetry, after tables spread with great food including some legendary scalloped potatoes, and after lots of great conversation, I’ll say that the answer to all those questions is a resounding “Yes!” Thank you to all who came and participated so richly. Thanks to all the speakers and musicians (Andrew Peterson, Jennifer Trafton, Jill Phillips, Eric Peters, Andy Gullahorn, Paul Soupiset), you guys were fantastic; Saturday night’s concert was one of the highlights of the weekend. And I’d especially like to thank Kathleen Norris, who had no real idea what she was getting into, but who came with curiosity and a beautiful, earthy humility. Her humor and wisdom were an absolute delight and it was a privilege to be able to sit at her feet and learn for a few days. Now that we’re home, I’m anxious again—but not with questions. I went to the desert drained, but now I’ve soaked up the poetry of the weekend and I’m full. I’m anxious to write—and that’s a good thing. I’m also anxious to get to work finalizing plans for Hutchmoot 2014. The dates are October 9-12. We expect registration to begin sometime in mid-March. We’ll see you in October.

[We were so delighted to publish this at Story Warren because it zeros in on so much of what we are aiming for. But this doesn’t only apply to children and families. Thank you so much for this, Alyssa. —Sam] “Can we go to school the long way today?” My daughter’s brown eyes watched my reflection in the mirror as I stood behind her, brushing her hair. “The view is better when we go that way,” she said. “Do you mean when we pass the big field?” I asked, returning her reflected gaze. She nodded. “What do you like to see in the field?” I asked her. “Everything.” This was a first. My six-year-old is much like me: practical-minded, task-driven, and above all, punctual. She is the first of us to be ready each morning. She will stand in the kitchen—backpack on—and watch the clock, announcing each minute that passes until go time. Even when we’re running ahead of schedule, she hurries her little brother along and asks repeatedly, “Are we going to be late?” So I was surprised that today she wanted to go the long way. And that is why, even though her little brother had seen to it that we were running late, the long way is how we went. In truth, plenty of other fields are lovelier than the one on Woehrle Road. Just a few miles north on 62, you pass sights much more pleasing to the eye: sprawling farms, ribbons of water bending between wooded banks, meadows wrapped around maple-crowned hills. By comparison, our little field hardly qualifies as a field at all. It’s really just a wide place between suburban gridlines — a few dozen acres the city hasn’t yet been able to wrest from the (no doubt wonderful) family who owns them. But perhaps it is made lovelier for its incongruity with the edifices of industry and commerce huddled around it. It certainly is a welcome respite for eyes that are accustomed to the visual bam-bam-bam of development. For maybe thirty seconds, the landscape smooths. You can look at it without having to blink away information overload. You want to keep looking. Driving down the arrow-straight lane along the eastern side of our field, I risked letting my wheels wander off into the icy shoulder to look a little harder at the field than usual. I wanted to appreciate it with my daughter, to have it in common with her. I think I know what draws her to that field. It isn’t the modest beauties perceivable to the eye: the subtle rise and fall of the land, like a topography of slow breathing. The ice-glazed skeletons of last autumn’s gleanings. The pond, frozen who-knows-how-solid, issuing a silent dare. The southern sun slipping upward, glancing across the expanse with shy eyes. I think she is drawn not to the things she sees, but to what they awaken: longing. I know because I have felt it and hoped to feel it again. I have gone the long way in order to find it. C.S. Lewis called it the inconsolable secret. It’s the deep desire to be able to slow, to enter, to quench an ineffable thirst. It’s an ache in my chest, a wild need to hold on to the invisible source of the beauty before my eyes. It is my soul trying to swallow. The Germans call it sehnsucht. Maybe they can explain it better. This longing has become familiar to me as I’ve learned to recognize and welcome it. But it is just beginning to awaken in my daughter. She’s never asked to go the long way before. I glanced back at her. She was turned toward the window in her high-back booster seat. I wanted to say something, to mark the moment with a poignant phrase. But her head rested against the seat belt. Her eyes were distant. I knew that my girl had gone where I couldn’t follow. Gazing silently out her window, deaf to her brother’s nonsensical chatter, she was listening to a language only knowable to her. I didn’t ask her what she felt. She couldn’t have explained it any better than I can. It is enough to know that she was willing to risk punctuality for the sake of something lovely. She is learning to differentiate between what is expedient and what is meaningful. I am overjoyed that she is beginning to listen to the call of a place whose rewards are worth the price of practicality. It was a beautiful, sad, holy thing to watch my daughter slip into that place and beyond my reach. But it is a place she must go. I pray she will learn to seek it often, and to take delight there. I pray she will hear in it whispers of a Name. I will gladly go the long way to get her there. —–   —–   —– Featured image by Shauna Raymer

An Explanation for the Uninitiated: Subjects With Objects is an ongoing, collaborative art project forever ordered according to the following rules: A shadowy public spaces painter sets up in pubs and executes spontaneous portraits at the rate of one painting per pint. He then hands off those enigmatic little ocular disturbances to a semi-anonymous poet & novelist who lives with them long enough to solicit their otherworldly mumblings and ephemeral whispers, distilling each of their essences into a line or two of poetic prose. The painter is Jonathan Richter. The poet is UNKNOWN & UNKNOWABLE, so it is best NOT TO EVEN ASK! However, for the sake of convenience we may refer to him as DKM. Subjects With Objects Unplugged Untitled 17 (2008) The One That Almost Got Away… Okay, so this little pink fellow gave me fits. First off, unless he’s been picking his nose (and be warned, dear reader, that I did explore that possibility), there’s no readily apparent “object” in the painting. So what is his object? Is it the tank-turreted Rorschach of his shirt? Is it the golden chaos of his unkempt, Nordic hair-sweep? His nose reddened from gobleted grog or Northern cold? Or is it . . . Ah, yes . . . Is it perhaps an object in that other sense of the word: An intent, a desired end or outcome? An objective, as it were. As in: His one object was to negotiate world peace. He was the ever the most disappointed of men. As I considered it, I saw that the ruddy fellow’s posture could clearly suggest that other sort of object. I noted the rigid but slightly leaned angle of his torso, as if he’s been waiting for someone else to finish speaking before he interjects his own words. The hand raised, finger up, to suggest that he’s a student or a new intern, waiting to be called on before he speaks. He’s almost certainly not the authority in whatever situation he finds himself in. In fact, he’s probably the sort of fellow who’s mostly at the mercy of others, if only because he cannot see past the rules to ascertain the spirit of any law and make his own broader judgments. And then there’s his expression. Not hopeful. A tiny insinuation of panic behind his small eyes. A sense that perhaps he has already, like Elvis, left the building and has entrenched himself in what he perceives to be the most defensible depths of the soul, walls erected and steeled against some great disappointment. The doorman left standing guard behind his eyes is now but a coin-operated automaton. Those were some of my early thoughts anyway, but back to the question of “rules.” That’s the territory I lit out for as I first began to formulate the earlier possible lines of text. This little gentleman seemed to have retained his Germanic forebears’ love of order, though any martial aspect of the Teutonic warriors had long since seeped from his family line. So he sits there now as one who finds order in life by following the rules—if only he could understand what’s expected. And right now, he’s having a bit of trouble understanding. Untitled 17 was originally created as part of a gallery show titled “First Day In Purgatory.” The overarching (though unspoken) context for that show was that each of its subjects were experiencing their first day of the afterlife. Some were reflecting on the temporal existence that had so recently drawn to a close. Others were seeking to get a handle on their new surroundings. It wasn’t too rigid a pretext and some of the pieces in that collection surely outside of it, but that was at least the loose context I had in mind as I approached this one. The rules have changed, I thought. This poor fellow is sitting in a desk, in a room with a bunch of other newbies, and he’s trying to find order, to make sense of this new plane of existence. He wants to get it right. He wants to play by the rules. He’s like a first grader on the first day of school. And he wants so badly for the others to play by the rules as well. So what are the rules? Would someone please tell me the rules here? Or would they at least rigidly enforce what I assume the basic rules to be? Excuse me, sir, I’d like to make just one point. People keep getting the paper towel stacks in the bathroom wet. Excuse me, sir, I’d like to make just one point. People don’t seem to be wiping up their messes in the break room. If he calls on me, I’m going to ask why the girls got a longer bathroom break. If he calls on me, I’m going to ask to be assigned a new partner. If he calls on me, I’m going to ask what they’ve done with my knees. Is there anything I can wipe this on? And the other thing is, my room is right beside the door and people keep coming in late and slamming it. And the other thing is, my room is right beside the door and people were coming in late last night and slamming it. If I could just interject one point. My room is right beside the door, so when people keep coming in late and slam it, it wakes me up. Whaddayou mean ‘dispose of it myself’? It’s a booger! Does someone have a tissue? It’s a booger. Why? It’s a booger! What do we do with boogers here? What are we supposed to do here with the boogers? Is there someone here to dispose of this for me? And one last question. What do we do with our boogers? And one last question. Where do we put boogers? I don’t know where to put this… booger. I might not have been blessed with their talent or money, but at least I knew my place. And then, BAM!, just like that, I was able to retrieve it from my nose. If this isn’t hell, why am I so uncomfortable? If this isn’t hell, why is it so uncomfortable? I would just like to point out several safety violations I’ve noticed. I’m just wondering if there will still be a daily quota. Will we be graded on spelling? Will we be graded on spelling? Because I’m actually pretty good at spelling. When Untitled 17 hung in the “1st Day in Purgatory” gallery show, Richter and I opted for the slightly surreal text choice: If he calls on me, I’m going to ask what they’ve done with my knees. I honestly don’t know why. If he calls on me, I’m going to ask what they’ve done with my knees. I think the idea probably just amused us enough that, in a moment of sophomoric giddiness, we actually did choose it. Part of the humor is that the statement presupposes that the ambiguous “they” did indeed do something with his knees, and what that could be, and why, is as absurdly perplexing to us as it is to him, but by golly, he’s gonna get to the bottom of it, if only they’ll call on him. Who knows what goes on in a place like purgatory, anyway? We even printed 20 paperback copies of a book version of that art show to sell in the gallery, so this version was forever memorialized, though in a limited fashion. Still, this one nagged at me, and I found that even a couple years later I was still uneasy with the choice. It made me chuckle, but it just wasn’t the correct text. It wasn’t until we had secured funding and were preparing for the printing of the hardback run of Subjects With Objects, Volume I last year, that I sat down to wrestle with this one again, throwing out all the previous brainstorming choices. And finally, at last, the answer lit like a butterfly on the tip of my nose and I said Oh, yes. All along, I had been trying to force this guy into the wrong venue and the wrong posture. He wasn’t the student trying to figure out the rules. No, he was the defendant whose flimsy defense had already crumbled, and who was now making his last ditch appeal, grasping at the only straw left him: That’s true, your honor, but if you find me “Not Guilty” I will afterwards remember you with a greater fondness. Now the piece was both comic and tragic (as many of the SubWOb pieces aspire to be), as it became a reflection of our ill-conceived human attempts to somehow find enough personal leverage to justify ourselves, or failing that, to “bribe the judge” as it were. Postscript: I’d like to think that after this fellow made his statement, there were several seconds of complete silence in the courtroom, and then the sound of the judge’s booming, bellowing, mirth-filled laughter, rising up in waves and bursting forth like a flood that overtook all within it’s hearing, sweeping them up in a rising tide that was at once, joyful and terrible. And if our friend in Untitled 17 was at last able in that moment to suddenly see himself for who he was, and rather than becoming angrier and more defensive, was able to embrace his own absurdity and unselfconsciously join in the laughter, then I think it all might have turned out right for him in the end. _________________________ Untitled 17, 2008 is currently on display and offered for sale in the Subjects With Objects gallery show Pretty Girls Like It When You Take Their Things at O’ More College in downtown Franklin, TN. The show is open to the public and will run through March 3rd, 2014.

When my aunt passed away, I inherited a little black journal of my grandfather’s that she had kept. It’s just big enough to hold in one hand, the paper so soft and thin, and his light, somewhat cramped penciled handwriting is fading with the years. He died just months before I was born, and all my life I’d been told how much alike we were, so this little piece of him, traveling to me from across the decades, was a treasure indeed. One day, I started to read it. Though I hoped for insight, outpourings of the depths of his soul, I got entries like this. Fri February 7, 1947 Worked 8 hrs today, which went by very well. Pay day. Fair all day. These were the makings of life. There was the birth of dad’s eldest sister, years before he was a thought. There were fair and warm days working in a shipyard. There were days work went well and days it went slow. There were days of cultivating gardens and visiting family and, occasionally, missing the bus. My grandfather was a simple man. He went to a Bible college in New York, wanted to be a preacher, somehow made his way from New England to Florida, and supported his growing family by working on ships and in orange groves. He never drove. His kids played marbles in the dirt road. And my parents have made a similar way, though perhaps with a little less education and little more money in the end. My dad joined the Navy, spent a few years in Puerto Rico, married my mom, worked a couple jobs before persistence landed him at a local phone company. Forty years, five company name changes, and a slew of new technologies later, he still loves it. My mom worked in retail and grocery stores until I was born. She stayed home to raise my sister and I. She homeschooled us and drove us around and made sure her little family ate three meals a day. Sometimes she talks about things she wanted to be when she grew up, but she sees the blessing and the hard work of being a mom. It seems they didn’t make as much of calling as my generation does. We’ve been told we could be anything we want to be if we get a degree and dream big, live life like an adventure, center ourselves in an epic story. They told us we deserved more than a mundane 9-to-5, that we could do more, dream more, that it’s somehow noble to quit your day job to travel and write and play songs and dig wells. That your story could be more. More epic. More lasting. Like your own personal Odyssey. Like immortality can be earned. Well. Let me tell you. We are none of us entitled to our own epic story. We are in one, but we are not one. We are the walk-on extras in the grand tale of the universe. We are living in our microcosms, but floating in and out of the scene. Of course, we do live them. Some of us do enjoy the call to go do grand things. But some of us write our smaller, no less important stories in eight hours of work a day.

“I was terribly shy as a boy,” the man said. “Excruciatingly shy. But in third grade there was a girl I liked, and somehow I mustered up the courage to tell her so on the school bus. And she said she liked me too.” He smiled a wistful little smile as he told it. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She liked me too. So I thought I’d strike while the iron was hot. I asked her if she’d like to be my girlfriend. She said ‘Sure.’ It was like I had been transformed in a moment, from a loser to somebody’s boyfriend. Even my big brother noticed something different about me when I got off the bus.” He paused as if to savor that memory before going on. “The next day,” he said, “I picked some flowers and gave them to the little girl on the playground. Everybody stared at me, but I didn’t care at all. Except that the little girl stared too, just like the others. ‘What are these for?’ she said. ‘They’re for you,’ I said. ‘Because you’re my girlfriend.’ The girl’s mouth dropped open in horror and she shrugged her shoulders and gave the other kids one of those looks that said, ‘This boy’s crazy.’ “‘What are you talking about?’ she said. ‘On the bus,’ I said, ‘I said I liked you and you said you liked me too.’ She came at me so fast I didn’t know what was happening. She gave me a shove that landed me flat on my back. When I raised up on my elbows, the girl made it clear that she would hit me again if I tried to get up. The other kids were laughing and pointing, and lying there on the playground I promised myself that I would never again get close enough to a girl to get hurt by her. “I kept that promise,” he said. “That was thirty years ago. That little girl was my last girlfriend. I’ve never been hurt by anyone since.” I ran into that fellow the other day. He’s still as guarded as ever. And as lonesome. C. S. Lewis wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, unredeemable.” That little girl shouldn’t have betrayed that little boy’s confidence or pushed him down or humiliated him in public. But the things she did to him weren’t nearly so harmful as the thing he did to himself when he promised never to be hurt again. Valentine’s Day is a day for sentimentalizing the most pleasant aspects of romantic love. I’m fine with that. But it’s also worth noting that love, when it comes to it, involves a willingness to risk being hurt. To love a person is to be willing to struggle—to struggle for her, and often to struggle with her. My wife’s love is a harbor from life’s storms, and I’m thankful for that. But sometimes it’s the storm. I’m thankful for that too.

When the purport of the images—what they say to our fear and hope and will and affections — seems to conflict with the theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. —C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer 52 (1963) A man wakes up on a misty morning. He looks out his window and likes what he sees. So he dresses and walks out his door to enjoy what has been given him. The mist doesn’t last long.  But while it lasts it softens the edges of the world, brings out its colors, and dances with the shafts of light from the rising sun. And then it vanishes. The man emits a satisfied sigh. God makes everything beautiful in its time.(1) I can imagine another man—say, a photographer—waking up the same morning, somewhere in the same vale, seeing the same mist, the same light, the same landscape. Recognizing the aesthetic value of what he sees, he runs to find his camera. He rushes out his door, and looks for just the right place to best capture the dance of mist and light and landscape, the viewpoint from which mist and light and landscape appear to greatest advantage. He experiments with a few different lenses, and snaps a few pictures to preserve the morning’s beauty for posterity—to preserve the past for the future. It isn’t preserved, though. A window on it is preserved. If the photographer has done his work well, it may be a clear window. But still it is a window only; the misty morning itself isn’t preserved. And the sigh the photographer emits when the greedy fingers of the rising sun have stolen the last mists likely will be of a much different kind than our first man’s sigh of satisfaction. God has set eternity in the man’s heart, but in such a way that he cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end.(2) We cannot capture vapor. We can enjoy its flirting and flitting through our fingers, but fixity is not one of its virtues. Likewise we cannot shepherd the wind. For starters, we do not know where it comes from or where it goes. Even if we did, we still couldn’t pick up stray wind, lay it across our shoulders, and carry it back to the fold. Welcome to life under the sun. For many years I could not begin to understand what Koholeth, the author of Ecclesiastes, was teaching. His book seemed to oscillate between pounding home the vanity of life, and then exhorting us to enjoy life—food, drink, company, and toil. Enjoy your vain life. I can take instruction from paradox, but not schizophrenia. But Koholeth was not schizophrenic. Many of his translators unjustly make him seem so. They make him seem so by doing precisely the opposite of what C. S. Lewis told Malcolm to do: they trusted abstractions like “vanity” and “meaningless,” rather than trusting images, like “vapor.” The translators doubtless could heap up lots of scholarly reasons for translating hebel as “vanity” rather than “vapor.” I’d say it’s a literary misjudgment, though. Hebel loses much of its affective power when rendered as a negative abstraction, rather than as a positive picture-word—the kind of word that lodges in our imagination and works its way through our will out into our hands and feet. The vaporousness of life under the sun may very often vex us. It may turn much of our toil to vanity—especially if we labor under the delusion that our lives are going to turn a profit under the sun. Yet if God gives us the ability to do so (3), we will recognize life under the sun, in all its vaporousness, for what it is—and we will enjoy it. (1) Ecclesiastes 3:11. (2) Ecclesiastes 3:12. (3) Ecclesiastes 2:24-25. #CSLewis #Koholeth #LetterstoMalcolm #Ecclesiastes #vapor #images

When I was a graduate student at Vanderbilt, I went back to my hometown in Georgia to work on a remodeling crew. One of my crewmates was a boy named Jake. He was seventeen and skinny but tough as beef jerky. He was so country that the dash and bustle of Warner Robins, Georgia made him gape the way you might gape at Times Square, and any time we went to a restaurant for lunch, he had the unsettling habit of telling the town girls how pretty they were. Most mornings Jake came to work bleary-eyed, as if he had stayed up all night. I asked him what that was about, certain there was a good story behind those red-rimmed eyes. “I hunt wild hogs,” he said. “Me and my buddies spend most nights in the swamps, either at the Ocmulgee or the Flint.” “Boar hunting!” I said. This was interesting. I didn’t figure it would be hard to get him going on that subject. A question or two, and he would be off. “So, what kind of gun do you use?” I asked. “Gun?” he scoffed. “We don’t take no guns!” “Then what do you take?” “Dogs. Rope. A flashlight.” “Wait a minute,” I said, not sure we were talking about the same thing. “What did you say?” “We got these dogs,” Jake said. “Mostly bulldog. We slog through the swamp until they bay up a hog. Then a catch dog grabs holt of his ear.” He paused, basking in my fascinated attention. “And then I whirl in with the rope to tie him up.” “Tie him up?” I asked. “Tie who up?” “The hog! Who else?” “You mean like calf-roping at a rodeo?” “About like that. Except that a calf aint slinging five-inch tusks around and kicking like a roto-tiller and squealing to deafen a feller. It’s some excitement, I don’t mind telling you.” I gaped. “So you tie him up,” I said. “What do you do then?” “We carry him out on a pole, kicking and squirming.” I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but the next day he brought me pictures of the dogs, the hogs, and the hunters, both in the swamp and in the pen where they fattened up their captured hogs. Jake came to work one morning more red-eyed than usual. Obviously he had been crying. I put a hand on his ropy shoulder. “What’s wrong, Jake?” I asked. He gave me a doleful look, then busted out crying again. “We were hunting last night,” he sobbed. “And an alligator ate my dog.” I thought, What a world is this? I was living this suburban, academic life, and yet there was this alternate world swirling just around the corner where men wrestled wild boars in the swamp and alligators ate their dogs. I decided that if I ever wrote a book, Jake would have to be in it. And he is. He is the original feechie.