What are you looking for?

A few weeks ago, I finally sat down and listened to Breaking Benjamin’s latest album Ember, and it has since become one of my favorite albums. Something fundamental clicked into place for me with this piece, and I’ve been trying for the last few weeks to unravel exactly what that is. Bands that fall into the alternative metal, alternative rock, and post-grunge genres have been a staple of my musical tastes since I was old enough to choose for myself. Amidst all the shredding and screaming, I found the authentic expression of a deep-rooted ache—one I couldn’t quite put a finger on until I read Doug McKelvey’s “A Liturgy for Those Who Weep Without Knowing Why.” If you haven’t read it, you should absolutely go read the whole thing right now. Just in case your mouse is broken, or you’ve been assailed by a sudden onset of finger-paralysis, here’s an excerpt to show you what I’m getting at: “There is so much lost in this world, O Lord, so much that aches and groans and shivers for want of redemption, so much that seems dislocated, upended, desecrated, unhinged — Even in our own hearts we bear the mark of all that is broken. What is best in this world has been bashed and battered and trodden down. What was meant to be the substance has become the brittle shell, haunted by the ghosts of a glory so long crumbled that only its rubble is remembered now. Is it any wonder we should weep sometimes, without knowing why? It might be anything. And then again, it might be everything.” Ah, yes. There it is. I can’t tell you how much I resonate with the language of this liturgy. Dislocated. Upended. Desecrated. Unhinged. I once wrote in a poem, “The world is wrong / bent on its axle.” Yet, while many of us sense all that has not yet been redeemed and are filled with an understandable sorrow, that hasn’t been my reaction. I bear the mark of all that is broken. I see that what is best has been bashed, and battered, and trodden down. I sense the wrongness of the world, and it doesn’t make me sad. It makes me angry. Historically, the music I’ve found that manages to capture the tone and expression of that anger lacks the depth and discernment to make it meaningful. Christians are generally uncomfortable with anger; while sorrow and sehnsucht are largely recognized as signposts pointing toward the kingdom to come, rage receives no such consideration. At best it’s seen as an immaturity to grow out of and more often as a revelatory flaw in character. This produces a scenario where those of us who feel anger at the broken world are forced to choose between music that encapsulates the feeling and music that comes from a place of deeper truth. We as Christians have created a cultural divide where the only music left to express such an undercurrent of rage is made by those who don’t understand why they’re angry. Most metal bands—along with their sister and sub-genres—are the musical embodiment of the rebel without a cause, grasping at insufficient explanations for the fury that fuels them and assigning it to whatever seems to meet the mark at the time. They skim across the surface, hitting on symptoms without ever addressing the disease, and leaving their listeners feeling understood but ultimately unfulfilled. Into this gap stepped Breaking Benjamin. With its reformation in 2014 with Dark Before Dawn, one of my already-favorite bands underwent a significant thematic shift, while retaining its traditional style and tone. Ember followed in 2018 and turned out to be the realization of something I have always longed for without even knowing it: the candid expression of rage from a foundation of spiritual truth. I posit that sorrow and anger are merely two roads diverged in a wood, ultimately ending at the same destination. Some of us need to cry, but some of us need to scream. Shigé Clark This album is the most honest depiction of loss and grief I’ve ever encountered. Rather than the soft, pseudo-salving tones of most grief-related songs, the interplay of music and lyrics in Ember drags the listener through a war zone—a gut-wrenching journey of light and darkness, cold and warmth, burial and resurrection. It paints the picture of a man attempting to wrench himself up from a cavernous pit. The way is twisted and obscured in shadow. Ground is gained and lost. Faith is an oil-slicked rope constantly slipping in the climber’s grip. Hope is an act of defiance. Most Christian music is in such a hurry to get to hope that it ends up feeling like a lie to anyone tuned into the devastation of the world—a cheap curtain drawn over the smoking wreckage. Ember dares to plunge you to the very bottom of the pit, leave you there to shiver, and make you wrestle and claw to resurface. When you do, the redemption feels real. The hope rings true. Hints at the underlying source of the singer’s fury are woven through the album from the start. “Feed the Wolf” sets the story off with a rejection of the destructive, violent side of anger, which the griever is tempted to use as self-protection, drawing an immediate distinction between that and the anger that resounds through the remaining songs. Lines like “fight with folded hands” and “stay reformed, erase this perfect world” in “Red Cold River,” along with “I don’t want to live inside this hell / I was born to live inside this hell” in “Tourniquet” clue the listener in to the true nature of the battle being fought in the face of a broken world, even before the album directly addresses it. “Psycho” offers a roiling, visceral illustration of the fight for faith against all apparent logic, calling to mind the laments of Job. Here the listener finds the album’s first hints of the hope we see in Psalm 139, where even the furthest depths and darkness are not out of God’s reach. The album reaches its nadir at “Dark of You,” where the singer extrapolates from his personal grief and at last brings the listener directly to the true source of all the pain and rage: the fallen, broken state of mankind. Reminiscent of Ecclesiastes, he groans over the pointlessness of existence—yet the song ends in pleading repetition of a single line: “Save this selfish world.” From there, the album pivots—not into a sudden happy hopefulness, but as with a renewed strength and resolve, having focused the churning anger toward its rightful target. “Down” has become one of my all-time favorite songs. “Into your eyes I live Beautifully broken Fight! We’ll fight And bury our lives We’ll break these chains And wash it away Oh light Carry me over the ground Heavy won’t hold me down.” Oh man, what a turnaround! I could talk for pages about just these lines (I won’t though, don’t worry). I feel like it’s important to reiterate here that this song is still angry, it just understands where the anger belongs. The faith and the hope are not the end of the pain and doubt, but defiant in the face of it. There are still four songs left. The singer isn’t done struggling, but the struggle has changed, in a subtle but central way. The next song, “Torn in Two,” encapsulates it beautifully in one line, “Broken, I crawl back to life” (with the shredding and screaming to match). The rest of the album carries that theme through, ending on a hopeful note in the final song—like the first hints of sunrise breaking over the horizon: Hope will guide you to the end and there will be no last goodbye For all who live and die, leave it all behind Take away the dark inside, and lead me to the light I could go on. It has taken all of my restraint to hold myself back from diving into a full-scale analysis of the entire album line-by-line. I could geek out over the musical and lyrical layering used throughout to depict cognitive dissonance, the poetic compression of multiple concepts into single lines, or the individual themes within certain songs that I’ll continue to carry with me. Catch me in person sometime, and if you want to hear about it, I’ll talk your ear off. Better yet, listen to the album and experience it for yourself. For those who feel the brokenness of creation like the battering fall of an endless rain and need to weep along with the world, I understand. For those who feel it like the searing burn of a consuming inferno and need to rage along with the world, know that you are not alone. I posit that sorrow and anger are merely two roads diverged in a wood, ultimately ending at the same destination. Some of us need to cry, but some of us need to scream. This album was for me like someone finally giving me that permission. In a world of rebels without a cause, Ember understands the source of the nameless anger. If Doug McKelvey will permit me, I ask, “Is it any wonder we should rage sometimes, without knowing why? It might be anything. And then again, it might be everything.” Perhaps someday there will be liturgies for rage. Until then, there is Ember, and I’m grateful we have Breaking Benjamin to plant the signpost. Click here to listen to this record on Spotify.

The best of us move forward without hesitation. Dave Monks doesn’t operate that way—even though he should. As the front man for one of Toronto’s biggest bands, Tokyo Police Club, Monks has well over a decade of experience writing and recording and releasing music to the world, not to mention his own solo work. At this point, Monks should be moving forward without hesitation—musically speaking—coasting past any resistance that might surface in the form of fear or doubt. Instead, the idea that materializes again and again in our conversation with Monks is one of permission. Despite his experience, Monks says he’s still reticent to put out music that might defy expectations. He’s hesitant to bring something to his band that might be left of center. He’s uncertain whether it’s okay to, once again, carve out time and space to pursue other musical interests away from the band—even as he also knows they will be 100 percent supportive of him. If these sort of doubts sound familiar, it’s because they plague the majority of us who long to obey the fragile impulses that call to us in our most honest moments. Somewhere we feel the impulse to follow the business idea, the writing prompt, the musical influence and yet we’re frozen, looking to those around us for permission to actually follow through with it. This latest episode of The Resistance opens up a raw conversation about permission that’s so relatable. Instead of looking to others for approval, what if we could learn to obey those impulses without contemplation of what others might say or think? Sometimes our greatest fear might be pointing to the change we need to make the most. Click here to listen to Episode 8 of The Resistance.

Just a few blocks down the street is the Eagle and Child, home of the original Rabbit Room, and in every ancient nook and cranny of these old spires and streets and trees and pubs there’s a hint of old poetry or a remnant of a good story. Gerard Manley Hopkins said mass in the mornings and scratched out verse in these backrooms and garden walks. Dorothy Sayers plotted out her mysteries just around the corner. Professor Tolkien noted the prancing pony on the shingle of the White Horse over there. And Lewis walked ’round the water meadow one morning and dreamt of summer coming true. All these years and tales and songs later, here we are. Hutchmoot: Oxford The doors are open. Come on in. We’ve spent a lot of sweat and tears and prayer in putting the weekend together, and we can’t wait for you to join us. JJ is in the kitchen and supper smells fine. Let’s get busy. Convene the Hutchmoot.

During our 4th of July road trip, Kelsey and I listened to an interview with Nigella Lawson on The Splendid Table Podcast. She’s a little bothered by the privileging of the term “chef” over “home cook.” When people are just becoming interested in cooking for themselves, where do they turn but to the illustrious chefs on television with their fancy ways of chopping vegetables? And why should chefs get all the glory? What she’s bothered by is the glamour of specialization: this idea that the specialist, the professional who lives and breathes their craft, is the sole possessor of authority over it. Having been brought up a good Wendell Berry reader, I’m trained to see the faults with specialization, but let’s be clear about its merits: specialization brings efficiency, practicality, and a depth of accumulated craft otherwise impossible. Sometimes it’s good to devote your whole life to one thing. Yet all too easily and all too often, the specialized discipline gets cut off from the whole of life. We’re mistaken if we place final authority on the specialist rather than share that authority with folks who encounter the specialist’s work within the whole of their lives. To continue with our cooking example, specialization is the force that separated so many from their home kitchens to begin with. The assumption became that in order to prepare food, you have to know a bunch of stuff, and you’re better off handing over your money to the people who know all the stuff. They’ll do it better than you and they’ll do it for you. Anything less is considered “amateur”—a word synonymous with “inept.” But wait a second. How did that word get such a bad rap? The word amateur finds its root in the Latin word amator, which means “lover.” An amateur is motivated by affection. She loves the discipline to which she aspires. Culturally, that gets translated to, “It’s just a hobby—I don’t get paid for it.” The subtext reads: to do something because you love it is less valid than to do something because it pays. At the risk of this becoming a sermon, let’s compare this perspective to the Parable of the Good Shepherd. We don’t say, “Well, the Good Shepherd ‘loves’ his sheep, but he’s not a real shepherd because he never gets paid.” No! What makes him a Good (and real) Shepherd is that his love inwardly compels him to lay down his life for his sheep. And this motivation is much stronger than the external incentive of a paycheck, which leads the hired hand to merely clock in and clock out. But our culture lands squarely in favor of the hired hand, assuming that it’s always best for the skilled individual to exploit his skills for profit. Food is essential to life. It’s not a luxury. Nigella Lawson challenges us to give dignity back to the amateur—in this case, the home cook. And that movement is well underway, thanks to the efforts of people like Samin Nosrat and Michael Pollan. But what about other disciplines? What about art, story, and music? As participants in the entertainment industry, we are well aware that a different kind of sustenance has also been outsourced—the sustenance of story and song. And in the same spirit that Nigella Lawson seeks to restore legitimacy to the home cook, the Rabbit Room aims to reclaim the dignity of home-storytelling, home-painting, and any other form of amateur creativity. The mark of a good professional is not that they've successfully left behind the amateur spirit—it's that they have retained it even in the sobriety of their profession. Drew Miller This blog, these podcasts, this music, and these books are not just here to entertain you as an audience of consumers. These works are meant to spur you on to be creative yourself. We want to encourage discussions about how creativity takes place in our lives every day; how the impulse towards art, towards making the world around us beautiful, ought to be realized even if we don’t have a book deal or a fancy studio. (Full disclosure: I’m proud to live in Nashville. We’re home to lots of professionals who get paid for quality work. At the same time, this city is woefully prone to over-exalt production value, rendering all that is un-shiny invisible.) When anyone decides to make the leap from amateur to professional, they must endure the complication of their original love. Their craft will now require a greater degree of discipline, replacing their initial infatuation with a “challenging reality better than…fantasy.” But the mark of a good professional is not that they’ve successfully left behind the amateur spirit—it’s that they have retained it even in the sobriety of their profession. And that’s what we want to do at the Rabbit Room: support those professionals who remain amateurs at heart while encouraging an actively engaged readership of proud amateurs who partake in what they love, unafraid to contribute to this beloved body of work. In the Kingdom of God, the amateur is the one who gets all the glory, because the only thing that will get us where we’re going is love—the love of God’s creative, redemptive work and the unabashed desire to participate in it. This is the love at the heart of all creative expression—it’s the excitement of imitating your favorite guitarist when you’ve only learned a few chords, and it’s the fire that keeps us going into adulthood if we are wise and attentive enough to take care of it. Long live the amateur spirit, and may it thrive here. Artwork credit: “Bookshelf Watercolor” by Michaela Kinzel

There are a number of quarries in and around Knoxville where lanky, dusty men used to blast marble out of the hills before the Depression. In fact, if you read the odd town-centric indie publication here or there, you’ll eventually dig your way into a vein of prose in which some loafered, office-bound journalist will wax poetic about the geological intricacies of East Tennessee’s pink marble. We should all dream so big. In earnest, marble from Mead’s Quarry has made it all the way to New York and the District of Columbia. These old holes in the ground, however, have become the stuff of dreams nowadays. They tend to attract college students and hometown creatures alike to their emerald green waters, beckoning the sweltering and the summer-skinned to the coolness of placid depths. As for myself, though, I go in the deep dark of winter. Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t normally brave swimming when it’s frigid outside (though I have before, and you should try it at least once). I go for the echoes. One side of Mead’s Quarry sits low toward the southeastern shore of the lake, where burnt-out lime kilns lie dormant and families of day-hikers prod the trail map for plans. At the other side of the lake, the hulled rock face towers over the water and creates a natural amphitheater. If you swim all the way out there in the summer—which signage advises you against doing—you can glimpse below your feet the unnerving bone-frames of entire fallen trees, pitched whole off the eroded cliffs above. In the dead of winter, though, when the air is thin and not a cricket chirps amid the chill, it’s the perfect place to play the penny whistle. It has become a winter tradition for me: a single song in the deep of night. I usually play the same tune: “Caoineadh cú Chulainn.” It was composed by Bill Whelan for the Riverdance show, as far as I know. It means “Cú Chulainn’s Lament,” named for the mythic Irish folk hero Sétanta who, after killing the mighty hound of a smithy called Chulainn, offered himself as a replacement guard dog. Like many Irish folk heroes, Cú Chulainn—that is, “Chulainn’s dog”—lived a life marked by tragedy. In one tale, he mistakes his own son for an intruder and kills him. In another, he must go to war against his foster father and foster brother. The melody of Whelan’s tune captures the grief of its namesake better than most songs I know. It’s a slow air, marked by a languorous seventh pickup note that bends upward to the tonic before leaping a full fifth. My favorite parts, at least when playing at the quarry, are the pauses. I bend the final notes of the phrases down in the characteristic style before stopping them, and when the curved tones ring across the lake off the moonlit cliffs, their haunting sound more than makes up for the icy air and the late hour. Why would you do a thing like this? is the question begged by my friends or acquaintances. It’s late; it’s freezing. You could be watching Netflix. Honestly, I often would rather be watching Netflix. A movie, these days, represents a two-hour coma away from the unshakable loneliness and evil that poison the very air of this world. It’s the reason I occasionally endure director Michael Bay’s explosion-by-numbers kits with little more than a shrug and good bowl of cereal. Plus, I’ve been kicked out of the quarry by a police officer because somebody was shooting a movie across the street (no, this is true). This poor man was forced to walk off the set of a horror film into the dark woods to find the mysterious, creepy music sound and tell it to go away. The look on his face could’ve won awards. He asked nicely enough, though, for all that. So I took my leave. So, why indeed? Why should I stay up late and fling myself into the January dim for naught but a three minute song and some aural physics? Finding worth and value amid the frigid darkness of this world somehow makes it bearable for me. Even at the deep gashes in the earth, a song can reflect off the old rock bones of a Tennessee hill. Adam Whipple It’s because I have to. It takes no great amount of understanding to see that the world is a dark place. I need to do things that remind me of the coming light, the One that has come and is coming soon. In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the titular character, a framed gulag prisoner under Stalin, takes an almost unaccountable pride in his forced bricklaying work, even to the point of smarting off at his superiors when they don’t seem to care about the quality of the work itself. Out at the dangerously cold job site, where he is but an unjust slave of the soviet, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov laments, of all things, the shoddy workmanship of the prisoner who went before him. In his mind, he could see the wall under the ice, the outside wall of the power plant that was two bricks thick. He didn’t know the man who’d worked on it in his place before. But that guy sure didn’t know his job. He’d messed it up. Shukhov was now getting used to the wall like it was his own. Even though, according to multiple sources, this is the keystone piece of literature that undid the Soviet Union, what one reads in it is not strictly political. Over the course of the narrative, one develops a nagging sense of Shukhov’s desire to do good work for its own sake. The labor, you might even say, is a kind of play for Ivan. The prisoners talk trash and attempt to build faster and better than adjacent teams of workers. There is humanity in the game, in the playing. Of course, we know that play and work are never for their own sake. They are expressions of the Imago Dei, that thing in mankind which will not be squelched. It’s the same thing you find in the field hollers of American slaves and in Chance the Rapper’s gallows humor. It flows forth from the threadbare parquetries of poverty-numbed quilting bees in the South. It wafts upward from a skillet where an old hand stirs gravy out of salt and giblets for lack of something more substantial. I need it. I need to partake in the making and enjoyment of good things, even alone, even in the biting cold, because my very enjoyment of them bespeaks the name of the Uncreated One. Dorothy Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, postulated that it is human creativity itself that comes nearest to defining the Image of God in people. Like Ivan Denisovich, finding worth and value amid the frigid darkness of this world somehow makes it bearable for me. Even at the deep gashes in the earth, a song can reflect off the old rock bones of a Tennessee hill. Even in a place where men inflicted their fallen wills to sate the material lusts of a wide-mawed civilization, one can hear something beautiful echo back and recall that all shall be well. This piece originally appeared on Foundling House. Check it out for more excellent writing.

“Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind about us. Jesus came to change our minds about God.”— Richard Rohr Someone asked me recently why the Bible always presents God in masculine form. She wondered why God, who is spirit, didn’t appear to mankind as a mother. It’s a fair question, and a good one, though I had no good answer for her. Mainly, I ached for the suffering she’d endured and how it had damaged her understanding of God the Father. But if it is true that God is every moment being revealed in story and nature and Scripture and song and billions of faces crafted in God’s image, what is so important about God appearing to us as a Father? Why did Jesus say, instead of “My Mother and I are one,” “My Father and I are one”? Not long before that conversation, my kids and I were watching Peter Pan, and something about the movie surprised me. In this particular adaptation, the filmmakers took a story about the wonder of childhood and the bittersweet beauty of growing up and added a poignant detail. They cast one actor for two roles: Wendy, John, and Michael’s father and Captain Hook. One moment, the children are tumbling into their father’s workplace, thwarting his attempts to impress his boss, seeing their father’s fury and disapproval, and receiving a shouted command to “Grow up!” The next they’re in Neverland, and the sworn enemy of childhood wears the same face. Daddy and Captain Hook are the same. It broke my heart. Like all good fathers, the Good Father is not the enemy of childhood, but the custodian of it. Helena Sorensen To crowds of confused people, Jesus said, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” And they couldn’t make heads or tails of it. They’d drifted so far from the beautiful face of the Father, had lost so completely the love of the Father for the Son. They’d come to see the Father as bloodthirsty. He wore a look of permanent disgust. And his voice? His was the voice of thunder, wasn’t it? The voice of whirlwind and storm? He was the one with the lists of expectations, the one demanding that they grow up, do better, get it right this time. The loving Father had become, in their darkened minds, the sworn enemy of childhood. They needed a Jesus-shield to protect them from his wrath. By then the human race had come of age. They were desperate for a Good Father. They had suffered, they’d seen injustice, and with terrible determination they’d commanded themselves to grow up. They’d stifled all that was fragile and childlike within them. “Except you come as a little child,” Jesus said. But how? How can a little child find the courage to face that all-powerful being? How can Pan snuggle up to Hook? “And this is eternal life,” Jesus said in the gospel of John, “that they might know you.” We couldn’t come as children, couldn’t trust like children, without a Good Father. So Jesus came to give him back to us. On the cross, as he descends into the deepest darkness of humanity, as he takes on himself the lie that the Father cannot be trusted, that the Father has abandoned us, Jesus quotes Psalm 22. He utters Adam’s cry, and it is the cry of a child without a Father. But Jesus is no more abandoned than Adam was. With his very next words, he places himself into the Father’s hands. That impossible act of childlike trust unravels Adam’s failure. The veil that for thousands of years had hidden the beautiful face of God is torn apart, and at last we can see the Father. To our complete astonishment, he doesn’t look like Hook. Like all good fathers, the Good Father is not the enemy of childhood but the custodian of it. I’m praying that the Spirit of God would turn the hearts of children to their Father. That the people of the world, all children of God, would say, “Someone is in charge and he is good.” I’m praying that the Spirit of God would turn the hearts of the fathers to their children. That the fathers of the world would say, “It is good to be a child, for my children and for me, because someone is in charge and he is good.” May we recover the knowledge that it was God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness (II Cor. 4:6), that all good and perfect gifts come from the Father, that in the Father is no darkness, nor any shade of turning away from us (James 1:17). His is the unchanging gaze of love, and in that light we are free to be children again. Today if you hear him, Skipping rocks on the river, Laughing in the garden, Like when you were young Today if you hear him, Walking through the pine woods, Racing down the big hill, Calling you to come Don’t be too grown, oh, For your own sake. Let the children come, Let us become like children today. Today if you hear him, Let your feet take off running, Don’t worry who is watching, Let him kiss you on the face. Don’t be too grown, oh, For your own sake. Let the children come, Let us become like children today. Let the children come, Let us become like children today. —Taylor Leonhardt, “Today If You Hear Him” This article was originally published on The Story Warren. Artwork Credit: “Security” by Dana Jensen

Not too long ago, The Atlantic explored the phenomenon of people who do Goodreads reading challenges: Start with a set number of books you want to read in a year. Track how well you’re meeting your goal and see if you make it into the elite percentage of people who manage to read something like fifty books over the course of 365 days. Read to improve and prove yourself. Seeing this, I was reminded of a friend who always felt an unrelenting urgency to read more and faster. “How many books would you say you’ve read so far this month?” she’d anxiously ask, wanting to see how she compared. Whenever someone asks me how much I’ve read in a year, my answer is, “I honestly don’t know.” I’ve never kept a list of all the books I’ve read, even though my mother often urged me to do so in middle and high school. I couldn’t give you any sort of statistics on how many books I’ve finished or how many pages I go through in a day. Sometimes I can’t even recall the titles of all the books I’ve read in a calendar year. But I’m completely unashamed of this because I believe reading ought to be an adventure and a love affair rather than a test of willpower or a self-improvement regimen. It’s best experienced when it is gloriously unproductive, a way to simply awaken the imagination and intellect and forget oneself. Disengaging with the daily, anxious drive to always do more is truly challenging. We all want to feel good about ourselves, to have concrete proof that we’re “getting things done.” We have a unique tendency in our age to make everything about data, statistics, and self-optimization: how will this activity make me as smart, strong, interesting, knowledgeable as it is possible for me to be while fulfilling my productivity quota? It’s tempting to turn books into signposts pointing to how we’ve got everything together. But leisure reading provides an opportunity to forget about all that—to escape the demanding stranglehold of perpetual productivity and breathe for a while. Would you bring your children to an art museum and tell them to look at as many paintings as possible in the hour you’re there? Or would you ask them to sit and observe, letting their imaginations roam in front of whatever work happens to entrance them? In the same way, literature asks for a lingering, thoughtful look, the deep concentration of a person fully immersed in the type of treasures only it can offer. The whole book—from the words written within it to the cover art to the feel of the spine under our fingers—is meant to be savored. It’s a beauty to rest in and reflect on, not a mountain to be conquered. Revel in the glory of losing yourself rather than frantically trying to find yourself. Maria Bonvissuto Focusing on “productive” reading habits also discourages re-reading. Nobody who’s trying to meet a reading goal has time to indulge in that. Few things are more satisfying, though, than coming to know a story by heart, sinking comfortably into worn pages and lines that welcome you like an old, familiar friend. It’s a reunion that may be bitter or sweet, but one that always offers you something deeper, if you’re willing to spend time on it. Some of my old friends are Augustine’s Confessions, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. A roommate of mine is making a goal of re-reading all her old books from middle and high school, like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. “An unliterary man,” C. S. Lewis once wrote, “may be defined as one who reads books once only. . .We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.” Wonder can’t be rushed. The writing of centuries of human civilization transcends our own immediate, temporal goals. Truly fruitful reading brings us out of the temporal realm, towards truth and humility. Books shine a light on all we don’t know, awaken our ache for beauty, and quicken the creative impulse in each one of us. Books are a way for us, in some very small way, to participate in the gratuitous nature of God’s love. By reading for leisure, we can learn how to enjoy something for its own beauty, for the reality that it reveals to us. When the experience of reading is reduced to how much we can get through or how much information we can acquire, we lose this transcendent dimension. To anyone who makes their New Year’s resolution to “be better about reading,” I say bravo—but please, don’t lose the forest for the trees. Don’t make reading into a chore that needs to be plugged through as fast as possible because it’s “good for you” like eating your broccoli is good for you or doing more reps at the gym is good for you. Engage with the written word slowly, savor it, and let the beauty or sorrow or bewilderment of it whisk you away for a while. Revel in the glory of losing yourself rather than frantically trying to find yourself. We’re all painfully aware of the struggle these days to believe that simply being is enough and that we’re not defined by what we accomplish. Let’s preserve reading as a sacred realm for ourselves and our children, untouched by the frantic demands of merit and work. Forget the reading challenge and take your own sweet time. Artwork Credit: “Book Pile XXII” by Ephraim Rubenstein

A year ago my family and I played a concert in Sheffield, England. After it was over we stood in a circle with four British friends and prayed. They were fans and supporters of the Rabbit Room, and we talked about the crazy idea of trying to pull off a Hutchmoot in the U.K. someday. The gist of the prayer was, “Lord, we’d love to do this. If it’s your will, please help us make it happen.” It’s no secret that I love playing on this side of the pond, whether it’s Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia (hello, Sweden!), or Europe in general, so trying to put on a Rabbit Room gathering over here wasn’t a new idea. But it seemed like an impossible one—until a few key people sent me emails that said, “We’d love to see this happen over here, and we’re willing to help.” I came home last summer and excitedly told Pete, “I think it’s time. Let’s do it.” As Executive Director, Pete is in charge of a lot already, and he looked at me with a mixture of hope and dread. Planning and executing Hutchmoot right there in Nashville is hard enough, let alone trying to make it work from the other side of the ocean, but he agreed and we started the long process of planning Hutchmoot UK. I confess, we went into it with a lot of trepidation. Not only were there the logistical concerns (finding the right venue in Oxford, filling the roster with speakers and artists we didn’t yet know, travel and accommodation planning, etc.), but there were also translation questions. Just because something works in Nashville doesn’t mean it’ll work in Oxford. Would people resonate with these ideas, with this format, the way they seem to in America? Not only that, we were worried about disappointing people. When we started Hutchmoot in Nashville there were low expectations; we had nothing to live up to. Many of the people coming to Oxford had heard good things about the U.S. conference and we didn’t want to let anyone down. Pete and I had a lot of conversations about our shared anxiety over the logistics—but I kept coming back to one thing that brought me a lot of comfort: the people. After traveling over here quite a bit I had met so many of the wonderful people who I knew were coming. Tom and Rach Hart, who live on a farm in Suffolk. Jo and Michael Tinker, who have been involved in music ministry for years. Eilidh Patterson, a singer-songwriter from Northern Ireland. Joshua Luke Smith and his wife Kara, from Bath, who are both songwriters. Mark and Rachel Meynell, involved in church work in the U.K. (and beyond) for years. Heidi and Glenn Johnston (and their daughters!), from Northern Ireland, who have come to Nashville Hutchmoot several times. Ross Wilson, Northern Irish painter and sculptor. My British buddy JJ, who is both a concert promoter and a chef. Micah and Katie Coston, from Oxford by way of South Carolina. There were also the Americans flying over to help: Shigé Clark, Chris and Annaleigh Thiessen, Becca Jordan, Doug McKelvey, Rebecca Reynolds, Jonathan and Helena Aman, Phillip and Lanier Ivester. You get the picture. There were people, Christians, all of whom are bright lights in their home communities, all gathering in Oxford to share their spiritual gifts with this Rabbit Room community. Jamie and I were both a bit giddy at the thought of all these friends of ours—many of whom didn’t yet know each other—coming together for three days of feasting in the name of Jesus. What could possibly go wrong? Well, plenty could, I guess. But it didn’t. One of the greatest delights in life, for me, is seeing friendships born. When we gathered in Oxford on the first day to pray, to invite the Lord to work his will in us all weekend, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for the way he answered that prayer a year ago with a resounding “Yes.” People really do gather around the fire of the Gospel to warm themselves before journeying back home to tell the story to their neighbors and families again. Andrew Peterson What a joy it was to listen to the songwriters on the first night, one from Glasgow, one from Derry, one from Manchester, and two from Nashville, all sharing songs that came from such different places and yet all pointed to one King. What a joy to watch Pete try and break up the exuberant conversations happening in every corner of the building so people would go to the next session. What a joy to move through the dining hall and see old and new friends sharing a meal. And what a joy when, after three good days, we sang the doxology together in that fine old church building to end the weekend—and then watched those new connections spill out into the Oxford night with a new story to tell about God’s goodness and provision. Sessions and songs and meals are good, but the people are why this works. Everything else is icing on the cake. We cleaned up the church in a hurry so we could make it to the Lamb and Flag (yes, the same one where the Inklings sometimes hung out) before they closed. We crammed into the pub and raised a toast to the first ever Hutchmoot U.K. just before the bell rang and they turned us out into the Oxford night. These things happen, folks. People really do gather around the fire of the Gospel to warm themselves before journeying back home to tell the story to their neighbors and families again. Our prayer is that this little gathering was a nourishment, that it was an affirmation of the gifts we’ve all been given, and that it brought a fresh passion to love our neighbors in ways that surprise us and them. So, on behalf of the Rabbit Room, allow me to offer our deepest thanks to everyone who showed up and served, everyone who planned, everyone who cleaned, cooked, sang, spoke, laughed, and loved in the belief that these little things are great things in the Kingdom of God. Can we do it again next year? Please? We’d love to hear your thoughts. If you were there, what surprised you? What were the little moments of grace that will stick in your memory? What will you carry home?

There are a great many things to be said about Lilith. Stepping through this arduous, masterful story felt something like watching an artist make his first few meager brushstrokes on a gigantic blank canvas: the first quarter or so of my reading experience was an uncomfortable exercise in waiting for those inaugural brushstrokes to find themselves surrounded by enough context to finally make sense. That first portion felt like work—but then, once I reached the tipping point of comprehension, the meaning of the story compounded exponentially, and those first brushstrokes were revealed in hindsight to be inevitable and unchangeable. To step into this world of MacDonald’s is to become acquainted with a deep and confounding logic equally at work in our own world, and the only viable medium available for him to convey this underlying logic—as evidenced by his story itself—is the highly elusive and allusive genre of fantasy. And this is why talking (and writing) about a book like Lilith is so difficult. The meaning of the story defiantly refuses to be extracted or abstracted. If anything, it’s refracted—through the imaginative lens of the reader, only ever glimpsed from various angles, none of which can be replicated. For this reason, getting to know the meaning of Lilith feels kind of like how I imagine it would feel to learn sign language: picking up on unfamiliar patterns and discovering the way they relate to one another, all in hopes of becoming proficient in a whole new vocabulary of signs with their attached significance. Sometimes it takes the tales of another world to bring our own into focus. Drew Miller But once we have picked up on this new vocabulary, what a language we inherit! Words come attached to the stories they tell and the characters who animate them—anyone who has read Lord of the Rings, The Earthsea Cycle, or the Harry Potter series knows this great pleasure. The mere mention of the Elder Wand, for instance, evokes not just a fictional object, but the timeless human choice between power through violence and power through self-sacrificial love as epitomized by the actions of Voldemort on the one hand and Lily Potter on the other. The Shire is not just a fantastical location; it is an emblem of a fragile Creation whose fate depends unjustly on the whims of war, and whose scourging strikes grief deep into the hearts of our dearest hobbits. It’s my hunch that our attraction to such iconic places and objects as these speaks less of some ignoble impulse to escape into an imaginary world than of our delight in and defense of the precious things of this world. The thing is, with all the overlookable familiarity of this world (our eyes are weary of seeing), sometimes it takes the tales of another world to bring our own into focus. When Nathan had the awful, needful task of making King David aware of his sin (2 Samuel 12), he did not confront him with the bare facts of David’s actions. Instead, Nathan first had to bring alive the weight of evil in David’s imagination. And the medium required for this task? A parable: an other world whose tale of injustice would provoke an anger in David that, paired with conviction, could lead only to repentance. Time and again, we humans are most effectively awakened to the treasures of this world (and the imperative to uphold them) by tidings from another. And this currency of story is a treasure all its own: transferred from imaginary worlds to our lived world, it’s made tangible in the unmistakable virtues of joy, hope, kindness, and long-suffering—virtues which yield exponential return, increasing the value of life itself. The treasure—the inheritance—of MacDonald’s Lilith is marked by a strikingly resilient hope in the face of obstinate evil and the terrifying threshold of death. And this hope surfaces most readily throughout the novel in the open posture of children. We learn in such deceivingly simple sentences that “sleep is too fine a thing ever to be earned,” that “no one who will not sleep can ever wake,” and that “the darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also.” And what is the value of such an inheritance? As Rebecca Reynolds has reflected: Good and evil live on slender electric threads of neurons. Pluck one thread, and all worlds resound at once. Harmony here is harmony there. Dissonance here is dissonance there. . . A promise is a needle running through all dimensions at once. A bond is a bond is a bond. What I love about her word choice is that she speaks of morality without sucking it dry of its aesthetic implications. In short, it is not only right, but beautiful to love and do good. When we draw from the inheritance of a rich story like Lilith (or, you know, the Bible), our consciences are satisfied, yes, but so are our imaginations. I’d like to end with a question: What’s a story from another world that struck a chord with your own? What was the “harmony there” that caused sympathetic vibrations with the “harmony here”? I would love to hear your answer and invite you to write it here in a comment.

One of the realities of writing a book is that you almost never understand your first chapter until you’ve written your last one. And invariably your first chapter ends up being the one you work on the most and the one that changes the most. That was certainly the case with The Fiddler’s Gun. In this bonus episode, I’ve pulled out one of the earlier versions of chapter one that contains considerably more background information about the setting and characters. While it has some content I regret having to cut, I’m also confident that cutting it was the right decision. The published version of the book gets the reader right into the story without having to stroll through quite so much exposition. Exposition can be fun, but it can also be a quick turn-off if the reader isn’t yet invested. I’m glad to give this version a bit of new life here in the podcast, though, because I do think it contains some important information that isn’t found elsewhere, and I think there’s a bit of good writing in there as well. I’ll be back next week with another bonus episode in which I go “behind the scenes” as it were and talk with Shigé Clark about the writing of chapters 1-12. And after that, look for Part 2, to follow closely on its heels. Click here to listen to Bonus Episode: Apocrypha and subscribe, and if you’re enjoying the podcast, I’d love it if you left a review on your favorite podcast app.

The song that drew me to The National at first was “I Need My Girl,” and I heard it during a very discouraging season of my life. It’s a worn irony, this aching comfort of sad songs for sad people, but when I first encountered Matt Berninger’s grainy, plaintive lyric “I keep feeling smaller and smaller,” I listened to the song on repeat for two hours. Since then I’ve been a foul-weather follower, if you will. Every time that certain loneliness or melancholy hits harder than normal, I know I’ve got someone who will sit still with me in that place for a while until it’s time to move forward. The National’s new album I Am Easy to Find is like an entire lifetime of those places, slipped into the space of sixteen songs. It is their eighth and longest studio album, and it’s my personal opinion that it cannot be fully appreciated without experiencing the accompanying short film of the same name. The director Mike Mills collaborated with The National to create what amounts to a portrayal of an entire life in less than half an hour. The score tells the story hand-in-hand with micro-moments of one woman’s existence, and the story is thematically linked to the push and pull inherent in that imagery. Throughout, Alicia Vikander’s character remains ageless in appearance in every stage, from newborn to elderly—she is the same person, even as the world and her experience of it shifts around her. We see her losses and gains, her leavings and arrivals, her repetition of experiences over time, her failures and joys. These songs live in the space between deep brokenness and longing for transcendence, always tethered to something more bright and beautiful than their flaws. Chris Wheeler The National surrounds these visuals with a textural soundscape dominated by a series of female vocalists and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, representing a range of identities. And through all of this weaves an unrelenting admission of brokenness, fear, and pride warring against loyalty, faith, and love. The tension is relational, as our love for ourselves pulls us away and our love for others pulls us back. The song “Oblivions” portrays a long-term relationship where both parties don’t really know what they’re getting into: It’s the way you say yes when I ask you to marry me You don’t know what you are doing Do you think you can carry me over this threshold Over and over again into oblivion? Even though the people entering this covenant are different in essence due to their promise, they still carry with them remnants of their old, unattached. They are easy to find, but they are still shifting and growing. The singer admits, “I’ve still got my fear,” but in the midst of the flaws, the other won’t walk away. Similarly, Berninger and vocalist Kate Stables sing together in the title track: There’s a million little battles that I’m never going to win anyway I’m still waiting for you every night with ticker tape, ticker tape. The National’s songs traditionally uphold this tension of attractions as an essential force of existence. These songs live in the space between deep brokenness and longing for transcendence. They are a kind of soundtrack for our current pilgrimage. They aren’t comfortable, and they’re weird and incoherent sometimes, and they wander. But they are always tethered to something more bright and beautiful than their flaws. They uphold high ideals and recognize that humans are consistently unable to reach them unaided. In this way the characters in their songs inhabit familiar space and a familiar tension—especially for those of us who struggle with ourselves in the light of God’s holiness and perfection. And isn’t that all of us? Aren’t we all prodigals, returning home caked with the mud of our wanderings, with fear in our pocket and shame on our backs? I’ve only recently been able to articulate, and that rather poorly, a way of living faithfully in that space between. It has to do with the affections (with help from Jonathan Edwards and James K. A. Smith) and the practice of writing poetry. The best way that I’ve come to understand affection is, admittedly, by contrasting it with my modern conception of emotion. Emotion is something that happens to you. We experience and exhibit various strong feelings as responses to various stimuli—a person, a place, a picture, and so on. Often emotions are fleeting, superficial, and not necessarily related to action. Affections, on the other hand, are connected to both mind and body in a more holistic way. Jonathan Edwards contrasts them with “passions” (or emotions) this way in The Religious Affections: “The affections and passions are frequently spoken of as the same; and yet, in the more common use of speech, there is in some respect a difference; and affection is a word, that in its ordinary signification, seems to be something more extensive than passion; being used for all vigorous lively actings of the will or inclination; but passion for those that are more sudden, and whose effects on the animal spirits are more violent, and the mind more overpowered, and less in its own command.” Ultimately, affections are vitally connected to faith by the inclinations of the will. When we accept Christ, our deepest desires experience a fundamental shift. While we still struggle with wanting those things we wanted in our natural human state, we begin to desire those things that are of God. We are awakened, in a sense, to the loveliness of our Father and alerted to the ugliness of our sin and everything that opposes our Father. In a regenerated person, our godly affections war against our ungodly affections, seeking to submit them to this new paradigm of glorifying and enjoying our God. As we encounter attractions to things that are evil still existent in ourselves, we must fight against them for the sake of a higher attraction. Edwards says it this way: As all the exercises of the inclination and will are either in approving and liking, or disapproving and rejecting; so the affections are of two sorts; they are those by which the soul is carried out to what is in view, cleaving to it, or seeking it; or those by which it is averse from it, and opposes it. Of the former sort are love, desire, hope, joy, gratitude, complacence. Of the latter kind are hatred, fear, anger, grief, and such like; which it is needless now to stand particularly to define. James K. A. Smith, in You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, gets at the same fundamental tension. Jesus didn’t just come into the world to renew our intellect, but to redirect our loves. Jesus’s command to follow him is a command to align our loves and longings with his—to want what God wants, to desire what God desires, to hunger and thirst after God and crave a world where he is all in all—a vision encapsulated by the shorthand “the kingdom of God.” This is why repetition, which we pursue in artistry, liturgy, worship, and prayer, is essential to living life in Christ. As we turn again and again in total need to the face of Christ and receive grace in our brokenness, our desires themselves are shaped. An intellectual understanding of God’s grace cannot change me, but a habitual receiving of his grace does. Like my poet friends in The Poetry Pub (join us there!) I’ve been trying to understand all this through writing poetry. I want to develop a deeper understanding of how to let thrive those affections that make me love God more and more each day. I want to get into the habit of hating my sin and all that stands in opposition to him. So I’m attempting to live in the tension of an attracted life in a similar way to The National, by creating art. Writing poetry becomes a continual wandering and return, a practice in prodigality. Through it I come again and again to the throne of grace to receive what I cannot earn. Through it I repeat God’s promise to me, his name for me, when I have trouble believing both of those things. In some sense, I’m learning to repeat this verse from “So Far So Fast:” Don’t you know someday somebody will come and find you? If you don’t know who you are anymore, they will remind you We don’t see you around here anymore, it’s okay I will say your name out loud and you will be home There are so many things that drive me crazy What you think I am, it’s never been me Hearing you talk always saves me Can you get away and talk to me? And slowly and imperceptibly, with each line and each return, I continue my gradual collapse into Christ.

For the past year, I’ve become deeply compelled by the words desolation and consolation. Neither are words we use a whole lot. But they each carry layers of subtle meaning, and I get the sense that they’ve got a lot to teach us. Desolation is linked with sheer absence. I see this word used most often in reference to a landscape—a desolate ghost town, for instance. And this makes sense, because its verb form, “to desolate,” is nearly synonymous with “to abandon.” A ghost town that has suffered desolation used to be full, but is now empty. The lives that once filled its streets have fled. The body remains, but the spirit is gone. While many negative emotions accompany a word like desolation, the most haunting part to me is that the word itself is indifferent to them. It doesn’t mean “sad,” “lonely” or “despairing”—it simply means empty. Nothing. Absence. Just as desolation implies a past presence that has now fled, consolation implies a prior absence, now filled with palpable presence. And like desolation, it also stems from a verb: “to console.” Those who have never known loss or grief have no need to be consoled. It’s only from a previous emptiness that we hunger and thirst to be filled. Suffice it to say that desolation and consolation are far from opposites. They have much in common: both are always unsolicited. Both leave us different than they found us. And extraordinarily, both provoke song. Psalms 22 and 23 stand side by side for a reason. I realized somewhere along the way that all the songs I’d been writing were either desolation or consolation songs. And once I realized it, I wrote a couple more of each on purpose, and it felt like giving the right name to something that was already happening. And that is how it came to be that I made my first solo record, comprised of two parts: Desolation & Consolation. With my friends Evan Redwine and Lucas Morton, I recorded it at the Art House in three days last January. Art by Mindy Cook I learned a lot over the course of writing, wrestling with, and recording these songs, and it’s my hope that some of what I’ve learned will travel through them and into your ears. Because in today’s world, there are innumerable, devastating iterations of desolation that daily bear us down. If we’re paying attention, the experience of utter emptiness will not fail to find us. We must honor both, because in each we receive the liberating truth of our need. Drew Miller Equally true, if we are lucky to escape cynicism, consolation finds us as well, with a quieter and fiercer relentlessness. “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.” There’s always some measure of defiance in our hope—defiance towards the lie that our end destination is desolation. We must honor both, because in each we receive the liberating truth of our need. We’re taught to hunger so that we may feast. Grief and joy alike stem from an encounter with the gift of being alive and the possibility—the promise—of resurrection. And while the hope of resurrection compels me to affirm that in the end, every tear will be wiped from every eye, it also bids me honor these present tears with the understanding that “those who sow with tears reap songs of joy.” I’ll begin sharing this album on September 6th with the first song from Desolation, and we will step into the darkness. By December, we’ll be entering into Consolation just in time to celebrate Advent. I invite you to walk through these songs with me, paying attention to the questions they stir in you. If you’d like to hear “Into the Darkness” now, click here to sign up for my email list and you’ll receive it in your inbox. You can also click here to pre-save “Into the Darkness” on Spotify.

The year was 2005. I was a junior in college, and it felt like the world was both beckoning me to a wide open future and coming apart at the seams. We millennials may joke about the “dumpster fire” of the past few years, but I humbly submit that the fire sparked long ago, and I didn’t notice the smoke until the turn of the millennium. In 2004, I was finally old enough to vote in a Presidential election. Twitter and iPhones didn’t exist yet, but the ugly divisiveness of partisan politics was already sneaking into my life. The wounds of 9/11 were fresh and raw, the War on Terror was just beginning, anyone with cable TV could pick their 24 hour news cycle poison, and I was spending my days running between my small town comfort and the diverse world of a city university. Oh, also the certainty I used to feel in my faith was beginning to crack. Just a little. If anything, I needed music to capture the vague despair and fear and anger in the air and spin it into hope. I needed Switchfoot, a band I’d casually enjoyed since high school, and a record called Nothing is Sound. Of all the bands I loved in my younger years (the time of life that supposedly shapes your musical tastes forever), there’s something about Switchfoot that continues to stick with me. If you listen to their early work — especially 1998’s fabulous New Way to Be Human — you find smart, philosophical songwriting tucked into a surf-punk vibe. Skip ahead twenty years to 2019’s Native Tongue and you find relentless hope in a world that seems to be perpetually on fire. But I would humbly suggest Nothing is Sound might be their greatest achievement. It came just two short years after they broke big in the mainstream, but to some it was considered a commercial flop. Instead of peppy melodies and self-aware anthems, the sound took a darker tone and the lyrics dwelled on empty consumerism, disconnect, loneliness, and war. It’s Psalms and Ecclesiastes and Lamentations all at once. And somehow, in all that, it lands on hope in the end. Permission to be angry. Permission to lament. Permission to, in spite of it all, not lose hope. Just what a quiet, uncertain, and confused young woman in a lonely world needed. “I want more than my lonely nation“ The album opens with dirty guitars and an introduction to an unnamed character: “she turns like the ocean / she tells no emotion… she’s been breaking up inside.” I’m only now realizing how 21 year old me, growing up and discovering the complicated ache of the world, might have recognized herself in this nameless “she.” The aggressive, dark-tinged rock hints toward a rage under the surface, while the lyrics address a weary loneliness, frustration, and longing to see the world set right. Two years before, this band declared “We want more than this world’s got to offer,” and it felt like a fist-pumping empowerment anthem. But here, the desire takes on a whole new urgency: “I want more than my desperation / I want more than my lonely nation.” But how can the world be set right when the people tasked to care for it appear to tune out, chasing after empty pleasure? After all: We’re just numb and amused and We’re just used to bad news and We are slaves of what we want… Or consider this line from from the most notable single “Stars” Stars looking at a planet Watching entropy and pain And maybe start to wonder how the chaos in our lives can pass as sane. Then there’s the Bob Dylan-inspired rumination “Happy is a Yuppie Word.” As the specter of war loomed large and the economic prosperity of previous decades came to an end, Foreman meditates on the failure of empires and empty consumerism, tapping into the well of full-on Ecclesiastical lament: Everything fails Everything runs its course A time and a place For all of this love and war Everyone buys Everyone’s got a price But nothing is new When will all the failures rise? And so the story goes. “Nothing is new,” says the author of Ecclesiastes, and “Nothing is sound!” screams a singer into the pain. Nothing is steady, “nothing is right-side right,” and when I hear these words, I’m once again sitting on the university quad, wondering about the future and the pain of war and the violence of words and talking heads on TV news. And in 2019… nothing is new, is it? The second-by-second social media news cycle, the pundits escaping the boundaries of cable news and pontificating from my phone, even Instagram squeezing pristine influencers and finely targeted ads between pictures of friends and their kids and their vacation photos. I can’t help but think “Easier Than Love,” a song about commercializing sex to distract from loneliness, is an apt lament for the disconnection and perfectionism of the Instagram age: “It’s easier to fake and smile and brag… it’s harder to face our souls at night.” I can’t help but realize I’ve never related more to the unbridled roar of a line like “I pledge allegiance to a country without borders, without politicians.” Nothing is new indeed. “But these scars will heal” If there’s one thing that has marked Switchfoot all these years though, it’s this: joy is inescapable. Somehow, even as they rail against the empty promises of a materialistic American Dream, there’s a hope that can’t be suppressed. You hear it in the album’s most joyful track, “We Are One Tonight,” an anthem of solidarity that would almost feel out of place if it wasn’t such a necessary counterpoint. “And the world is flawed / but these scars will heal,” the song declares against all odds. Somehow, in the midst of fear and fighting and loneliness, healing waits. There’s still beauty, still sunshine on the edges of the shadows, still friendship and love and waves to catch and songs to sing. When I listened in my early-twenties angst, I might have overlooked the more joyful songs. When I listen today though, I cling to them. And I can’t help but notice how the closer “Daisy” brings it all full circle. The album opens with the image of a woman who is “breaking up inside,” and ends with a gentle invitation and an affirmation. I’d like to think these two characters are the same person: Open up your fist This fallen world doesn’t hold your interest it doesn’t own your soul Daisy, let it go… We can’t escape the fallen world. We can rage against injustice, interrogate our desires, sit in our loneliness, and keep our gluttony in check. We can choose: will we be just another consumer, or will we live fully alive in the world as it is? If I had any quibble with these lines today, it would be that this fallen world does have interest, as I imagine all it can be. It’s a promise and a shadow of the world to come… and well… “the shadow proves the sunshine,” doesn’t it? But no, it doesn’t own my soul either. Sometimes I need songs to remind me. Click here to listen to Nothing is Sound on Spotify

Here at the end of Part I of The Fiddler’s Gun, I sat down with poet, writer, Rabbit Room staff member, and reader of fine books Shigé Clark to discuss some “behind the scenes”-type stuff. Shigé only recently read the book for the first time and came to the studio full of great questions. We’ve limited the discussion to the content of Part I, so don’t worry, no spoilers for Part II, but we do get to talk about a lot of fun stuff. What it’s like to read the book for the first time in ten years? How historically accurate (or inaccurate) is the book? What was the research process like? What would I do differently today? It’s a fun discussion. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. Look for Part II (chapters 13-25) of the book to go live in the coming weeks. In the meantime, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave a review.

“Golowara. I think I know where this word comes from, but. . .what would that word mean to the people who are in the village churches?” It was a typical overcast Bangui morning. That meant that the second-story office was relatively cool. The translation office windows were open and shaded by a mango tree. One could gaze through the dust haze of the dry season harmattan and see school kids playing soccer across the street. The Mandja Bible translation team—Edmond, Magloire and Samuel—immediately looked upwards, stroking their chins, contemplating a response to my question. I was working with them on an accuracy check of their translation of 1 Thessalonians. Pastor Edmond broke the brief silence and met my eyes. As an experienced translator, he smiled a smile that silently communicated, Ha! I understand, and know what we must do next. He then responded out loud as the team coordinator—and thus the final decision maker of the translation team—saying, “It’s just a church word that people say, but don’t really know what it means. It means nothing, really.” I smiled back at Edmond and the rest of the team and said, “Okay. Communicating wrong meaning in the translation is bad and communicating no meaning is almost as bad. What can we do to make it better?” Now, as the Apostle Paul did with his Hebrew heritage, I myself could go on about my Hillbilly pedigree: A veritable son of the holler—Burrell Holler to be exact. A winding narrow valley of bubbling fountains and hardwoods crowned with a shining, yet hidden, lake at the end. The taller mountain of the holler is nameless on the maps except what my grandfather and his eleven siblings called it: “Piney Spur.” All while the single road that runs through it bears my family’s name. I’m the seventh generation that has lived on the land. We even have a ghost story, generations old, that features my relatives and is set on the same road and in the same holler. My notions of home are tightly bound up in this little familial kingdom nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But to zoom out only slightly further (a twenty-minute drive through the country, to be exact), the crowning jewel of the Blue Ridge and of the larger region is the Biltmore Estate. A 250-room Loire-Valley-esque mansion surrounded by miles of woods and gardens and filled with the wonders of its builder, railroad tycoon heir, art collector, and epic bibliophile, George Vanderbilt. By thinking about the power, beauty, and goodness of him who made all power, beauty, and goodness, our hearts saw the glory of God and together we, like Paul says elsewhere, 'were being changed from one degree of glory to the next.' Adam Huntley Now, since I was a kid, I’ve had this theory that the great draw and wonder of visiting the Biltmore is not only its beauty, but the pleasant imagination of the guest. When you wander through the ornate leather-lined and Renoir-covered walls of the breakfast room, the room with Napoleon’s chess set (I mean, of course Napoleon would play chess, right?), the library with its painted ceiling imported from a Venetian home filled with tens of thousands of leather-bound volumes, the underground swimming pool, countless servants’ quarters, the rotisserie room, the stables, and especially the large separate bedrooms of Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt with their gorgeous mountain views, deep seats, and large fireplaces. . . You then, in your mind, become transformed. Your faded T-shirt and sweat-pant shorts crisp into formal dinner attire. Your five o’clock shadow smooths clean and a large gilded-age gentlemen handlebar moustache grows in its place. Your sockless crocs and comfy leggings bloom into a lacey gown undergirded with a whalebone corset and your ponytail forms up into a tight and tasteful bun and your neck is suddenly spangled with tasteful pearls. You no longer are a visitor who has paid for his ticket. You’ve become a Vanderbilt. You’re not getting in your car to dutifully leave at the end of visitor hours. You are home. And in those imaginative moments, you participate in the greatness, the grandeur, the glory of a great lord of a glorious estate. Back in Bangui, the passage we’re looking at is 1 Thessalonians, chapter two, verse twelve, where Paul says to one of the first churches he planted, “We exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.” You see, Paul was worried. The church at Thessaloniki had only existed for a matter of weeks before he and his fellow teachers were run out of town by a murderous mob. How was the church doing now? Did the mob turn on the fledgling congregation soon after? In a time when communication only went as fast as a person could carry papyrus, a million what ifs? must have darkened Paul’s mind. His anxiety and love couldn’t wait any longer, so he decided to send his protégé Timothy to make quick tracks to Thessaloniki and see how things were. Thankfully, Timothy returned saying that the church still existed and, in general, was thriving. Because of this good report, Paul wrote a letter to the church that in the Bible is called “1 Thessalonians.” So in the verse we were looking at, Paul wants them to continue to follow the word of God by first looking at the worth of their salvation and then acting accordingly. You see, our behavior is always determined by what we think will give us the most pleasure—or said in another way, by what we most value. We humans are ceaseless appraisers. And our actions are inexorably drawn to that which we most value. For there to be lasting change in us, we should never just try to mitigate behavior—rather, we must change what we value. While it is only God who can do this in us, God’s means does not equal our passivity: we are to consider and develop our deep-down value of knowing God himself. And this is what Paul is telling the Christians in Thessaloniki to do in this verse (restated in my own words): “Live your lives before God in proper response to having been given such a tremendously valuable status: a member of God’s kingdom, promised to enter into the very glory of God.” Now, most of us can understand those words fair enough until we get to the word glory. What does it really mean? That’s the same question that the Mandja team was considering. In our verse, the translation for the word “glory” was the Mandja word golowara. Golowara is the Mandja adaptation of the French word gloire (meaning glory). Since the word was, by the translators’ estimation, “just a church-y word” that meant nothing, it was my job to start an informed conversation about how to find a different translation solution for our word glory. I needed to help them move from a word with zero meaning to a translation that is accurate, clear, and natural in Mandja. I started going through every use of glory in the Scriptures that I could think of: “Glory is simply the greatness of something. People can have glory. Valuable things can have glory. ‘Glory’ is even used of women’s hair-dos in 1 Corinthians! Don’t you think ‘wow!’ when you first see your wife just after she gets her hair done? That’s glory.“ This caused a great deal of laughter, and subsequent jokes, as women in the Central African Republic put a premium on having their hair done. “But in our verse here, ‘glory’ doesn’t mean the greatness of any created thing, but rather of the Creator himself. The one whose resume includes making all things that were, are, and ever will be. The one who sustains all things moment by moment. If he for one moment decided that we wouldn’t continue to be, we wouldn’t become a puff of smoke—we would become nothing. That sort of greatness or glory is something that we we’ll never completely understand but should rightly stand in awe of. And in this verse his glory is something that we ourselves enter into. We enter into it partially now, but will enter into it completely in the next age.” Suddenly Magloire (whose name means “my glory” in French) suddenly shot up his head with his eyes all aglitter in a eureka moment and said,“Gbahuru hini!” Samuel smiled, nodded, and pointed at Magloire indicating strong agreement. Then they both looked at the final decision maker, Edmond. He quickly said, “Gbahuru hini is good.” “Okay, what does it mean?” Edmond responded, “Gbahuru hini is basically greatness or glory. Imagine a wealthy and powerful man with a great home and kingdom; that greatness is gbahuru hini. But this word also means that it’s a kind of glory that others can participate in and enter into. For example, if you’re associated with this person of gbahuru hini, then you enter into it. You share the greatness and benefits and become great like the person of gbahuru hini himself. In this verse, believers enter into the gbahuru hini of God and they themselves share his glory.” Following that was a brief silence, one of those special times that make me especially love the process of doing Bible translation with my fellow Christian brothers in the Central African Republic. A process that, if done right, will involve serious contemplation of God’s word. By thinking about the power, beauty, and goodness of him who made all power, beauty, and goodness, our hearts saw the glory of God and together we, like Paul says elsewhere, “were being changed from one degree of glory to the next.” In those imaginative moments we, in a little way, are transformed: no longer am I just a backwards white boy far from his beloved holler home. Instead, together we are brothers who imagine our future home that none of us have yet seen. We saw ourselves at home in the grandeur of our Lord’s glorious estate. It was a gbahuru hini moment for sure. A kind that even George Vanderbilt himself couldn’t conjure. Adam Huntley is a translator with Wycliffe Bible Translators in the Central African Republic. He and Ruth and their family live in Bangui. Artwork Credit: “Biltmore Afternoon” by Gary Cooley

It’s mid-July and unusually hot for Oxford. Sweat rolls down your spine, and your feet are on fire. Half a block down, you see an indie bookshop. No air conditioning, but they have a basement. Eighteen slapdash shelves—children’s books and clearance—this is going to be a hunt. Still, there’s that library smell. Oh, glory. It makes your arms tingle. A rattly dehumidifier gurgles in the next room. You can hear the owner and his son upstairs, arguing about the book of Exodus. Puccini is playing on Radio 4. Time is slow here. It could be 1936, or 1952, or whatever it is now. You’ve forgotten. Doesn’t matter. You thumb through the shelves, daydreaming about finding a long-lost epic. Imagine—a story forgotten by all but a few dusty old folks who name their cats “Winfred” and smell faintly of breakfast sausages, rose powder, and menthol. Then, you see it—two volumes, leather-bound book, nearly a thousand pages total. On the spine, faded letters you can barely make out…The Faerie Queene. A Lost Epic That’s not how I discovered The Faerie Queene, but it’s how I want you to feel when you discover it. For the most part, this story has been forgotten for over 400 years, just waiting for us to find it. Perhaps that’s been for the best. Perhaps a story this dangerous and powerful needed to sleep for a few centuries before waking up again. Perhaps The Faerie Queene is our generation’s Excalibur, holding still until the perfect generation of souls arrived. After all, most treasures are worth more after being underground for a while. My favorite writer, C. S. Lewis, loved The Faerie Queene dearly. He once said that it should be enjoyed on a rainy day by young men and women “between the ages of twelve and sixteen.” I agree with him completely, though I’m still smitten at forty-seven. (The best fairy tales get better as we age.) Still, there’s a reason most twelve to sixteen year-olds haven’t read this epic. Though The Faerie Queene was written about the same time as Shakespeare, for most readers, Spenser’s original language is much more difficult than the Bard’s. (I’ll explain more about why this text is particularly difficult in my next post.) When the rare lit teacher assigns an excerpt of The Faerie Queene, it’s often used as a brief exercise in old language. Two or three bookish girls get excited. Everyone else is miserable. I tried teaching original Spenser once, but very quickly, I realized most of my students were missing the joy and awe of the tale. They could not drink it down in delight like Lewis had hoped they would. His language is different from mine, but his story still resounds. Rebecca Reynolds Genre differences come into play here. While etymological labor almost always pays off for young folks reading Shakespeare, meticulous, line-by-line research can kill the natural and healthy, young delight of a fairy tale. When you are twelve years old, you usually can’t hold your breath (and your reader’s trance) while a monster attacks—as you search the OED for the nuance of a forgotten adjective. That’s not how stories should work at that age. At twelve, you need a comfy chair, a steaming mug of tea, your imagination, and permission to be a child on a dangerous journey. Engaging with original Spenser, my students learned that Elizabethan language was tough, but they never fell in love with the story. This broke my heart. So after school was over, I spent most of a long night transposing several pages of the text. Could I catch every textual nuance? No. But when I read these pages to my students the next day, they loved it. And they wanted more. From that moment on, I knew this had to be done large scale. Why “Transposition”? Why am I using the word “transposition?” Somehow it just seems to fit better for this project. It’s a smaller, gentler term. We use the word “translation” to refer to a story interpreted from an entirely different language—something like Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, or Dorothy Sayers’s Dante, or Julie Rose’s Les Mis. In this case, I’m doing more of a “key shift.” I’m taking English from the late 1500s to 2020. In this transposition, I’m trying to keep the heart and heft of the text. Some loss of meaning is inevitable of course, and I grieve when I can’t catch the full weight of an idiom or pun. But I can walk as close to the original language as possible while whetting appetites. I can show older readers why they should go back and hack through Spenser’s original text. And I can give them a tool that will help you on that journey. Consider my work an introduction to a party you can attend for the rest of your life. What will this entail? Over the next two years, I will be creating a text-faithful transposition of Spenser’s entire epic. I’ll be keeping you updated here on the Rabbit Room so you can follow the process and be a part of some decisions I’m making along the way. I’ll also be asking a few twelve to sixteen year-olds to participate in the Order of the Red Cross—a special group of young readers commissioned to give wise and honest feedback as we go. (You Rabbits are good folk. I can’t think of companions I’d rather have on this journey.) Thanks to the brilliant artistry of renowned illustrator Michael Kaluta, this story is also gaining gorgeous new illustrations. I’ve had so much fun brainstorming with Kaluta and my publisher, deciding which scenes should be incorporated visually. By Michael Kaluta I’m including one of those illustrations here, along with a chance for you to sign up for a free version of this print (signed by Kaluta and by me) if you register here before August 20th. (Enter your email in the “Send me Updates” box. Warning: Dangerous Fairy Tale Ahead I should give you one warning before you continue, though. Don’t let the delicate title lull you into a false sense of security. The Faerie Queene is not a safe story. It’s bloody, and it’s scandalous, and it’s complicated. You will meet seducers, spirits, monsters, and beautiful, deadly women. You’ll need the stomach for dismemberment, and exploding bodies, and ghastly battles. Heads will be split in half and chopped off. Hellish creatures will tear the flesh of good men, and brave souls will make terrible mistakes. Yet, through all of this, you’ll learn about courage, and humility, and discernment. You’ll learn that it’s possible to grow through your mistakes. You’ll find out who you can trust and who you shouldn’t. You’ll walk away wiser and hopefully a little braver—understanding more about yourself and the world you’re about to face. While working on The Faerie Queene, I’ve often found myself sitting at a library table, surrounded by books written by Spenserian experts—covered in goosebumps—because a particular story element had caught my own fears, failures, and hopes so accurately. His language is different from mine, but his story still resounds. I have needed his images during the chaos of the last few years as a call to keep fighting, keep getting back up when I fall, keep confessing, keep growing. For as Chesterton once said, monsters can still be defeated—even when we feel small and stupid—and even when the world feels so very dark. Click here to learn more about this project at its website.

“How do you know when you are finished with a piece of writing?”—Evie, age 10 Evie, you’ve asked a stumper. I wish I had a clear, concrete answer for you. Turn around three times, shout “Brahahahallooalloo!” and throw the paper against the wall. If it sticks there and darkens to a slightly bluish-purple shade, it’s finished. That would be handy, wouldn’t it? But alas, it’s not so simple. There’s a famous old saying—“Art is never finished, only abandoned”—which has been attributed to various painters and poets, but it doesn’t really matter who said it first because every artist knows it’s true. For something to be really truly finished, it would have to be complete, perfect, nothing lacking anywhere, nothing more to be improved. And we’re never going to make anything that’s perfect, no matter how brilliant and talented we might be, because we’re human. When an artist says, “Okay, I’m done,” what he or she really means is, “This is the best I can do right now, and it’s time to move on”—or even, “This is a mess, but tomorrow is the deadline and and so it’s going to be done whether I like it or not!” We write something, we set it aside and come back with fresh eyes, we revise it, we correct the mistakes, we give it to other people to read and let us know how they think we can make it better, and then we revise again, sometimes many times. I know a poet who fiddles with a single poem for a year before she’s ready to call it done. I took several years to revise both The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic and Henry and the Chalk Dragon. If I took another ten years to revise them, I’m sure they would turn out even better. But if I waited that long, why not take another 10 years after that, and then another 20 . . .? Would I ever finish anything? Would anyone ever get to read what I wrote? Usually if I start changing the same things over and over again, or if I have looked at this piece of writing so much and so long that I loathe the very sight of it, I know it’s time to stop and let it be whatever it is. Everything I write helps me write something better next time. It’s a little like blowing soap bubbles with a bubble wand. Sure, I can blow quickly and carelessly and send hundreds of tiny spheres cascading from my wand in all directions. But sometimes I want to go slow and steady, measuring my breath so the bubble is as big and beautiful as possible before it suddenly breaks free. And yes, inevitably it’s going to go splat on the pavement or pop on a blade of grass. But before it does, it will shimmer in the air awhile, all wobbly and misshapen and imperfect and fragile. And maybe someone else will see a glint of light in its surface and be delighted by it. And maybe a breeze will catch it and it will soar higher and farther than I ever imagined it would. Who knows? There are many things about that bubble and its path through the sky that I am not skillful enough to control. Yet each bubble is a little surprise, a little miracle. I get to blow a floating, silvery mirror-ball out of soap. Who cares if it wobbles a bit as it flies? It’s the same with writing, or any art. You do your best, and you let it go. And then you blow another bubble. Jennifer answers kids’ and parents’ questions in her e-newsletter, which also includes creative prompts, news about upcoming writing classes and events, recommended reading and family resources, free coloring pages, and more. You can subscribe at her website here: www.jennifertrafton.com

The moment he said it, I could feel its hooks sink deep. During my conversation with Drew Holcomb, the subject turned to the reason why he made music in the first place, why he chose a life of artistic pursuits. “…I was bearing witness to something good I had seen in music and the world around me and wanting to offer that to the world.” There it is, I thought when he first said it. I replayed it several times thereafter for the sake of memorization. The reason? I’ve felt that same impulse, too. In that succinct, splendid statement, Holcomb described exactly why I’m even interested in putting in the work (and it’s a lot of work) for this podcast. I’ve been changed by these conversations. I’ve been inspired by this music. I’ve witnessed and wanted to share. These days, Drew is offering much more to the world than just his music, although there’s plenty of that, too. His brand new album, Dragons, releases August 16 and is everything you’ve come to love from him (and his band, The Neighbors). He’s also curating festivals (Moon River Music Festival) and record selections (Magnolia Record Club) while making music with his wife, Ellie. In this episode of The Resistance, Drew talks to us about the posture needed to consistently create and how he’s learned to protect that initial spark that prompted any/all of this in the first place. Click here to listen to this week’s episode.

For years, Glen Phillips says, it felt personal. It makes sense when you listen to Phillips explain his career arc, a creative trajectory within which he says, “I peaked at probably 23 … and, in a commercial sense that anyone would notice, I was over by 26 or 27.” That’s a perplexing stage to have in the rearview mirror, especially for someone who’s continued to make music for another 20-plus years. It’s taken some time for Phillips to realize the ebb and flow of popularity and the shifting sands of the music industry have nothing to do with his value as a person or his worth as a cultural voice. These days, he’s “over” the idea of a career, he says. It’s simply about obedience to the creative impulses that he feels. These days, Phillips is still writing, recording, and releasing music as both a solo artist and with his longtime band. However, he’s also taking time to find his spiritual center via drum circles and helping his neighbors channel their own creativity. While Phillips sounds more at home than ever, it’s come at the cost of several battles with resistance—some of which are ongoing. Here’s our interview with Phillips about his early years, his latest work and the roles that resistance has played at each intersection. Click here to visit Glen Phillips‘ website.

When I asked Xavier Dphrepaulezz how I should refer to him in our pre-interview banter, he told me he’s always Fantastic Negrito unless he’s in his pajamas. “And Matt, I am most definitely not in my pajamas!” Even before the tape is rolling, when the conversations are informal with the two-time Grammy-winning musician (whose last two albums have won Blues Album of the Year), Negrito, as he is most often called, is filled with an activist’s ardor and clergyman’s cadence. It was immediately clear to me that Negrito would close our first season of The Resistance once we began our conversation. Here was a man speaking—nay, preaching—from a lifetime of hard-fought battles with resistance. Record label woes. A car accident and ensuing coma. The inability to use his hand—to literally make music. Relearning it all after his supposed prime had passed him by. Negrito has learned to sift through the silly for the serious, to put aside the concerns that don’t matter to stand militantly for the few things that do. He’s a transformed artist and the Grammy wins are simply the bits of hardware that tell him that we’re listening. What began with a Tiny Desk contest win in 2015 has blossomed into one of the most dynamic and diverse catalogs of the last few years. It’s rock and gospel, hip-hop and soul laid atop Negrito’s foundation of funk while the statesman diagnoses societal ills and packs political punches. We’re thrilled to close our first season of The Resistance with this revealing conversation with Fantastic Negrito—the lessons learned along the way and how the resistance looks to him at his most successful. Click here to listen to this episode of The Resistance. And here to visit Fantastic Negrito‘s website.

When Jake Speck called me about this time last year and asked if I’d be interested in adapting Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place for the stage, my response was “Heck yes! But hang on. Before I agree, let me go read the book and see if I like it.” The truth was I had only the faintest idea of who Corrie was and honestly didn’t know if hers was the kind of story that would suit my abilities as a writer. I ordered the book and ate it up in a couple of days. World War II. Nazis. The Resistance. Smuggling of Jews. The Holocaust. Faith in the face of nigh-unquenchable darkness. I called Jake back and told him I was in, but I had little idea what I was getting into. Things have come a long way since that phone call, both literally and figuratively. In October, Jennifer and I flew to the Netherlands to visit Corrie’s home, the “Beje,” in the city of Haarlem. We stayed an hour outside of Amsterdam at Dutch L’Abri, a cozy little commune in the countryside where we picked apples, foraged walnuts, installed solar panels, washed dishes, ate amazing home-cooked meals (including legit Dutch Apple Pie), and participated in a lot of rich convesation with people from all over the world. My thanks to Robb Ludwick and his family for their hospitality. After getting over our jet lag, we drove into Haarlem where we walked through the Grote Markt flush with flowers and fruit (though I’m sad we missed tulip season), we visited the gothic cathedral of St. Bavo where the Ten Booms went to church, we strolled alongside canals under the eaves of pastel colored houses, we ate stroopwafel by the yard and edam by the pound, and we found ourselves at last in an alley of the Barteljorristraat knocking at back door of the Ten Boom watch shop where Corrie and Betsie spent most of their lives. I’ve never been good at tourism. I dislike the fakery of it. I don’t usually care for the well-marked historical route or the guided tour. I want to be left alone to know a place in an intuitive rather than an instructive way. I want to get lost and find my own path and therefore come to the long-sought place in a way that can be said to be in some way authentic, even if only in my bumbling 21st-century American way. But my distaste for the tourist trap goes only so far. Its limits stop abruptly at my personal interest in a particular subject. For instance, the English countryside might be merely pretty (no small beauty, mind you!), until I cross into a hidden glade and discover that Samuel Coleridge walked here and wrote here, or Lewis and Tolkien ate there, drank here, read stories over that way. Then suddenly I’m all ears. I want the guide. I want the tour. I want the legend to the map that unlocks the stories of all the ghosts lingering nearby. So when I stepped into the backdoor of the Ten Boom’s Beje, I stepped into a world where the air hung thick with age-old laughter and tears and fears and time-tried faith and stories. So many stories. In this house, the Ten Booms led a prayer group for the Jewish people for a 100 years before that love of one’s neighbor culminated in the series of events told in The Hiding Place. I felt suddenly conscious of and humbled by the strange fact that I, of all people, had been invited to help tell the story of this place. Incredibly, I would get to join my small story to the mythic edifice of this old Beje and its giants of the Faith. The Beje’s ghosts took my hand, pulled me further in, and began to whisper. The tour guides led us through the home. Little of it was original, but it was furnished to look as it might have in the 1940s. The atmosphere felt oddly familiar, like the home of an elderly relative from some distant branch of the family tree. The carpets, the wallpaper, the wooden desk, the brittle chair, the winding stair: everything was burdened with history, pregnant with lost stories. Up and up we climbed until we entered Corrie’s bedroom, and there, through a hole in the false wall, the “Hiding Place” itself was, ironically, on public display. We crawled inside and felt its closeness. We listened as its silence told its tale. This then is the calling of the writer, the novelist—the playwright. To strive against the forgetfulness of the world. To proclaim a whisper in defiance of cacophony. . . . Only by story does the world remember. Pete Peterson After about an hour, the tour wound down and spit us back out into the alleyway where it began, but the ghostly whispers in my ears didn’t fade. They would follow me for the rest of the trip through the Netherlands and across Germany to our final destination and the darkness crouching there in the east. Eventually, those voices would grow, keen, wail, and thunder as we followed the Ten Boom path into the past, but for now, here in Haarlem, they whisper in quiet desperation, because in that alleyway surrounded by the cafes and restaurants and hotels and flowers and commerce and vacationing tourists, they are being drowned out. They fade. They wither. They are slowly forgotten. These insistent phantoms cry out for fear their stories will dwindle and vanish into the post-Christian din of a present rushing past. This then is the calling of the writer, the novelist—the playwright. To strive against the forgetfulness of the world. To proclaim a whisper in defiance of cacophony. To find the hidden nook, the lonely vale, the cobbled alley whose story is slipping toward mundanity and visit it with re-enchantment. For what is a writer if not an explorer who reminds the world of its own marvels? In the telling of our tales we give back to ghosts their voices, so they can speak to generations upon generations and remind them of the cloud of witnesses that have come before. We give back to the dead their testimonies, and they, in turn, they give them back to the ages. Only by story does the world remember. A few days later we left Haarlem and drove into Germany, my mind full of whispers. I have a story to tell. If I’m to tell it well, I must listen.

I’ve been a fan of Jonny Jimison’s work for a long time. In fact, a few weeks ago when I sat down with the original Kickstarter version of Martin and Marco, I got a little teary-eyed when I got to the end and read through the list of backers, because it seemed like I knew every one of them, and most were part of the Rabbit Room community. Sadly, though, that book has been out of print for what seems like ages, and people ask for it all the time. We’ve been setting up Rabbit Room booths at homeschool conventions for three years and every time I go I wish I had copies of Jonny’s book to give to kids (and adults for that matter). So it seems like destiny (or more properly the Holy Spirit) when all these years later we find ourselves finally able to welcome Jonny to Rabbit Room Press in order to first re-issue Martin and Marco in full-color (it looks AWESOME, let me tell you), and then to ensure that the rest of the Dragon Lord Saga has a publisher and a home and will find its way into the world over the course of the new few years. If you’re new to Jonny’s work, you might recall that he’s the cartoonist behind the Rabbit Trails cartoon here on the site. He’s also done several other webcomics over the years like Getting Ethan and Noma. But no matter what it is he’s working on, it’s always something fun and always a joy to read. The Dragon Lord Saga is Jonny’s epic and we like to say it traces its lineage from forebears like the Lord of the Rings and Calvin and Hobbes. Yes, the story is full of dragons, and swords, and armies, but it’s also full of playful sibling rivalry, a talking horse, and more comic hijinks than you can shake a satchel at. What I enjoy most about the books, though, is the heart that Jonny puts into them. Sure, it’s colorful, and funny, and easy to read, but it’s also about two brothers who are growing in their relationships with one another and with everyone around them—and they’re also learning some hard truths about their own hearts along the way. These are good books. They are the kind of good books that are a pleasure to put into the hands of a child. The kind of good books that disappear into the bedroom and aren’t seen again until they are fully read and tattered at the edges. The kind of good books that a kid will read again and again and again. I’m so happy that Rabbit Room Press gets to be a part of the ongoing story of the Dragon Lord Saga. The wait is nearly over. The adventure begins with Volume One: Martin and Marco which is set for release on October 11th. You can pre-order today in the Rabbit Room store.* *Coming to Hutchmoot? You can pre-order now and pick up your book at the merch table. We’ll refund your shipping charge once you’ve picked up the book. Click here to pre-order Martin and Marco in the Rabbit Room Store.

I remember the first time I read The Princess Bride. I was a senior in high school and my sister was home from college for Christmas break, brandishing a thick paperback with the familiar title. Of course, I had seen the movie a handful of times, and I always assumed there was a book to go along, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. “I’m going to read it to you,” Connie insisted, but the tables quickly turned. She came down with a case of pneumonia and I ended up reading the whole book to her instead. Fifteen years have passed since then and I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve read it together. It is, hands down, our favorite novel. Besides the witty narration and fun characters, what draws us most to this epic tale is its impossible challenges. As Connie and I deal with our own struggles in life, we are encouraged time and time again to see Buttercup survive the snow sand, Fezzik strangle the Arabian Garstini (snake), and Westley come back from the dead. Sure, it’s fiction, but it reminds us that “impossible” is a silly word, and you only say you’ll not survive the Fire Swamp because no one ever has (but that doesn’t mean you won’t). My sister and I share a love for reading, but we also share a disease called Spinal Muscular Atrophy. This essentially jumbles the message that runs from our brains to our spinal cords, causing our muscles to not work well and atrophy over time. We have used power wheelchairs for most of our lives, learned our way around a few hospitals over the years, and depended on others to take care of our personal needs for as long as we can remember. So it may come as no surprise that we like stories in which impossible challenges are overcome. It may also come as no surprise that we always have a good laugh at the absurd-yet-relatable antics of the gang as a rag doll Westley slowly comes back to life. “My brains, your strength, and his steel against a hundred troops? And you think a little head-jiggle is supposed to make me happy?” There is something silly and yet profound about watching Westley, Fezzik, and Inigo storm the castle gates by working together and getting creative with their unique skills. But it didn’t start here. This wasn’t the first disabled man Inigo had encountered, nor the first time he’d had to think outside the box in such a scenario. Impossible is a silly word, isn't it? Kevan Chandler There’s a minor character, tucked deep into a page that touches briefly on Inigo’s past. As he prepares to battle a hoard of king bats, the Spaniard recalls his time spent one summer with the crippled MacPherson, “the only Scot who ever understood swords.” MacPherson openly mocked Inigo’s formal training, showing how it was fine for a fancy sport but useless on a mountainside, or if your opponent threw acid in your eyes. Goldman explains, simply, “his legs stopped at the knee, and so he had a special feel for adversity.” He forced Inigo to break the mold of what was deemed proper strategy, and this affected the way Inigo lived his life, how he saw challenges and took on the world, all the way to the gates of Florin. So when even the problem-solving Westley, who days earlier wrestled an R.O.U.S., looks at their situation on the wall and announces, “It’s impossible,” Inigo steps in to say otherwise. He admits that he doesn’t know how it’s possible, but he knows it is and assures Westley they’ll figure it out—and they do! There’s a lot to be said here about disabilities, but I think the takeaway of MacPherson, Inigo, and the gang runs deeper. It’s a message we can all relate to because, at the end of the day, everyone faces impossible challenges, and the question is, what will we do with them? MacPherson had nothing below the knees, but his life didn’t stop there. He took on whatever obstacles stood in his way, from dressing himself in the morning to mastering swordplay on the side of a mountain. And because of his will to persist, his path crossed with Inigo’s for the learning Spaniard to grow in his skills. Inigo was always a caring and resolute achiever, but their time together honed this in tandem with innovation, so that by the time he sat on a castle wall with Westley’s limp-necked head flopped against his shoulder, there was nothing weird or impossible to him about the situation. I look at my own life and have to remember two reasons why I push through my own impossible challenges. First, God has given me life, to live to the fullest as best I can. It’s a gift to unwrap and enjoy, so I’m going to do just that! And it may not always be easy, but it is always worth it. Secondly, as a Christian, I am called to love others and pour into their lives. As I overcome (or even simply deal with) my own struggles, I invite others to learn and grow with me—and who knows what castle wall that will land them on in the future? My hope is that, as folks’ paths cross mine, they are enriched because of the impossible challenges I’ve faced and handled well. After all, “impossible” is a silly word, isn’t it?

While I was reflecting recently on Quentin Tarantino’s latest film Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, I was reminded of something T. S. Eliot wrote (unlikely pair, I know): “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” Eliot stated in his essay on Philip Massinger. “Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” For those unfamiliar with Tarantino’s filmography, the self-taught director’s entire career is steeped in this philosophy—stealing images, aesthetics, and even whole scenes from cinematic history in order to create something wholly innovative. In his most recent film (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt), Tarantino reimagines the Hollywood of 1969 in a fictitious tale about a has-been TV western star, his stunt man, and the real-life events surrounding the Manson Family murders. But instead of merely imitating Hollywood history and the classic cowboy genre, Tarantino transcends his source material. He offers a mesmerizing pastiche, filled with snapshots from classics like Gunsmoke or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly all sewn together into a cohesive patchwork quilt. This film (and much of Tarantino’s work) proves Eliot’s thesis: that art can never exist in a vacuum. Instead, artists combine, repurpose, and breathe life into an endless supply of “stolen” artistic ingredients in an attempt to make sense of our present world, situations, and stories. When I first discovered that artists were allowed (nay, encouraged) to heavily borrow from the past instead of attempting to imagine wholly novel ideas, it felt as though I was lifted from under the weight of every artist, musician, and author I ever admired. Now, I was able to stand firmly on their shoulders, hoisted by the strength of their collective creativity, knowledge, and wisdom. So although Tarantino’s films are often objectionable (and not recommended for those sensitive to crass language and gratuitous violence), I’m beyond thankful for his incomparable grasp on his art form and for his ability to transform borrowed and stolen experiences into something, well, Tarantinoesque. Yes, that’s a word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Now, the term “stealing” in this case may appear self-serving, but the thievery employed by Tarantino and described by Eliot is not a zero-sum game. Instead, it’s a powerful form of collaboration where the thief introduces his unique voice and the thieved artist is immortalized. While we do celebrate this collaborative connection to the past, it must be remembered that collaboration isn’t constrained to one-way conversations with dead poets. We live in community with other passion-filled artists—artists who help shape our worldview and whose collective voices are often louder, bolder, and more inspiring than a single voice. The most original parts of an artist's work may be those in which other artists, both dead and still living, assert their immortality most vigorously. Chris Thiessen The power of collaboration is displayed time and again in the music community. Most recently, I was blown away by its presence on Bon Iver’s album i,i. Just three years ago, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon delivered a computery, inward-looking record titled 22, A Million. His experimental extremes throughout the album convey a feeling of isolation and wintry lonesomeness which remain haunting and beautiful today. However, on i,i, Bon Iver’s tone has shifted remarkably as Vernon steers the band into meaningful collaboration with a broader musical community to create something uplifting and transformative. The piano-driven, gospel-inspired song “U (Man Like)” is a perfect example of what I mean. The second verse reads, “Well, I know that we set off for a common place / And the lines have run too deep / How much caring is there of some American love / When there’s lovers sleeping in our streets?” The message is one of unity, of striving together toward a better “common place.” However, instead of just delivering this message himself, Vernon invited singer-songwriter Bruce Hornsby to sing the first lyric, art-pop artist Moses Sumney the second, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus the third before Vernon is finally heard again. While it would be easy to think more collaborative voices would distort the distinct identity Bon Iver has crafted over their career, Vernon and company are more assured and confident here than they’ve ever been as they embrace the life-giving energy of community. Indeed, their identity is made all the more vivid because of the artists they’ve gathered around them—artists which have included Kanye West, James Blake, The National, and so many more in recent years. Often, individuality and originality are the most prized qualities to the critical eye, not collaboration. But if I may again paraphrase Eliot, the most original parts of an artist’s work may be those in which other artists, both dead and still living, assert their immortality most vigorously. I know that my arguments here for collaboration are just “stealing” and rehashing Eliot’s ideas as well as the Rabbit Room mantra that art nourishes community and community nourishes art. But I’m so encouraged that it’s not just something we say. It’s something I see in the work of Tarantino and Bon Iver. It’s something I see in hip-hop, a genre where you’ll be hard-pressed to find a project that doesn’t promote a deep sense of collaboration. Lastly, it’s something I see in my own work, even this essay which is the fruit of conversations, shared thoughts, and lots of encouragement from the community around me. So I apologize if you were hoping for some original, individualistic wisdom about art; I have none to share. Instead, I offer an invitation to create collaboratively and to steal confidently. Image by Tom Killion

Our first stop in Germany was to visit my brother- and sister-in-law in the small, industrial town of Hagen. We drove, we got lost, we got found, we ate, we visited, and then the next day we went to Cologne to see the famous cathedral there. The black facade of the church is the largest in the world, and the building took a staggering eight hundred years to complete. This means that for nearly a millennium, architects and engineers and masons and laborers spent their lives in service of a final work they knew they would not live to see. But when the building was finished in the late 19th century (still working off the original plans!), the king swung a ceremonial golden hammer and struck a ceremonial golden spike to mark the church’s completion. In his speech he proclaimed that after generations of back-breaking (and bank-breaking) labor, the work was finally done and the church would stand for millenia as a sign of the greatness of, wait for it, “our great city.” Do you hear that dissonant note? After climbing hundreds of tower steps and walking the cavernous nave and marveling at the craftsmanship and dedication involved in raising up something so beautiful, that speech landed on me like the final episode of Lost. Eight hundred years invested in a church building—and in the end it’s all for the glory of your city? That golden hammer went wide of the mark. How tragic to fumble the final act after such a storied history. I’d think about this a lot during our trip through Germany—the way that people and cultures so often stray over time, winding up at destinations far afield. We visited Wittenburg and stood at the door of the church and walked through Wartburg Castle where Luther fled in the aftermath of his defiance. We stood in the room where he translated the Bible into the language of the people. Eventually we’d even stand in Charlemagne’s throne room, the very seat of Christendom. Everywhere we went, the land was marked by history. The Church itself had marched through these ancient woods, through time, through space, always setting out with the grandest of intentions—often ending up elsewhere. Germany is a land built in the shadows of giants. And yet, those weren’t the shadows we’d come to see. We’d sometimes find ourselves talking to our AirBnB hosts, or to a local waiter or waitress, and they’d ask what brought us all the way from Tennessee. They’d inquire with a friendly smile and piqued curiosity, but upon hearing my answer, they’d change. “I’m doing research for a play. I’m here to visit a concentration camp.” Then followed the faded smile. And then the solemn nod, as if to say “Ah, that old spectre. Two thousand years of theology, and philosophy, and civilization, and music, and architecture, and art—but the swastika has blotted it out. We really messed things up. How long will it haunt us?” It was only ever an instant that I saw the disappointment, then they’d put on a good face and cover it up. But it was there, and I felt the pain of it, something like embarrassment. I wonder if the king ever felt that way after he swung his golden hammer. I suppose not. But the spectre of the swastika is what brought us here. A short drive north of Berlin, out in the wooded countryside, we entered Ravensbrück, the camp where Corrie and Betsie ten Boom were imprisoned in 1944. The SS command center sat like a crude industrial blight on the shores of a small lake, and the ruin behind the building spread across the ground like a salted field that would have to lay fallow for a generation before it could bear fruit again. I didn’t know what to expect. A few plaques? A memorial? A list of names? I had no idea. But I’ve come to think of the experience as a mirror image of the experience of visiting the Grand Canyon. The ground and stones themselves cried out, adding name after name to the same lament they sang for Abel. Pete Peterson When you go to the Grand Canyon the first time, you think you know what to expect. You’ve seen a million pictures of it. You’ve seen it in movies. You’ve heard people talk about it, oooh and aaaah over it. Maybe you’re just going to do your time and see it for yourself. But when you walk up to the rim and see the vast chasm of glories sprawling out below you, your jaw drops, you’re speechless, you can’t believe how big it is and all you can do is keep on looking at it as you try to comprehend its size. It’s hard to turn away. It’s so much grander than you ever thought it would be. The opposite is true at a concentration camp. You think you know. You think you’ve comprehended it. But the reality is so much darker. The chasm of horror so much deeper and wider and more incomprehensible than you imagined. You just keep looking at it in disbelief. You can’t fathom its size or its depth and it threatens to swallow you. Tragende (Ravensbrück Memorial) I stood in the crematorium where Betsie ten Boom was committed to smoke and ash, and I trembled under the din of the ghostly silence screaming from the oven’s mouth. Later I would stand with my back against a wall in Dachau where untold numbers of men were executed by firing squad. The ground and the stones themselves cried out, adding name after name to the same lament they sang for Abel. We spent about four hours at Ravensbrück, the same at Dachau, and we only scratched the surface. It was overwhelming—the artifacts, the photos, the documents, the testimonies, the terrible quiet, the evidence of a gradual and years-long build from a relatively pleasant place of political confinement to a swirling horror of death and suffering and hate. It’s hard to even know how to react. When we got back into the car, all we could do was cry. This is the creeping shadow under which modern Germany lives and breathes and goes about its life. Fifteen-hundred years of history is nearly obscured by it. It’s tragic on an epic cultural scale. As we retreated back into the relative safety of the world at hand, I grew more and more anxious. I’d agreed to tell the story of the Hiding Place, but the story of the Ten Boom family is so much more than their own. It’s the story of a darkness more vast than I can imagine—and of the light that pierces it. It’s a tale of ponderous weight, and tremendous hope. And I worry that it’s more than I can tell. I worry that I’ve been handed a golden hammer. Yet, thankfully, the insistent ghosts that found me at the Beje and drove me to Ravensbrück beckon me forward still. If it’s by story that the world remembers, then it’s by silence the world forgets. If I’ve learned anything of Corrie ten Boom, it’s this: she did not keep silent. She saw into the darkness of human suffering and evil. She saw what lay beyond it. And she spent the rest of her life testifying to what she she’d seen. The ghosts won’t let me keep silent either. Act 1. Scene 1. Time to write. I whisper a prayer for the Holy Spirit’s help. I close my eyes. And I swing my hammer.