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Why am I writing about orphans? What’s with all the violence? Have I ever been attacked by pirates? Why did I kill your favorite character? How much of this history business is actually true? Here at the end of Part II 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. It’s a fun discussion. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. Click here to check out the whole podcast, or listen to this episode below (beware: spoilers!).

On a slow Saturday morning, my oldest daughter, who is eight, brings me a nature craft book, seeking hopeful permission to make something depicted in its pages. Before even taking a look, I roll my inner eyes. Children’s craft books come a dime a dozen, or a mere eighty cents at the local consignment store. Many are boring, or the crafts concepts are weird, or the designs look phenomenal but are so complex or confusingly-written that the books really aren’t much use at all. But then I look where she is pointing, at the craft titled, “Make Your Own Toy Garden,”and my heart leaps into immediate association. The words of C. S. Lewis, “That was the first beauty I ever knew,” flash through my mind, and instead of hemming and hawing over all the materials we’d have to gather together to make any given craft work—not least the energy and sustained parental attention to bring it to completion—I am nodding, Yes, yes! and grinning like the Cheshire cat. Yes, my girl. You may absolutely make a toy garden. In his memoir Surprised by Joy, the creator of Narnia describes how, as a young boy, his brother Warnie “brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden.” Lewis says of his brother’s garden craft, “That was the first beauty I ever knew,” and that isn’t a throw-away statement: Lewis’s biscuit-tin moment is not merely a pleasant story about a little boy learning to appreciate pretty things. No, the deep desire for beauty, catalyzed at such a young age by some creative impulse of his brother’s, drove Lewis through his boyhood, adolescence, early adult years, and headlong into his thirties on an urgent quest to quench the deep longing set in motion by that moss-covered cookie container lid. When I was about my oldest daughter’s age, I had recurring dreams at night. Some were tense or frightening, a handful were pleasant, and one was infused with a beauty so rich I can still sense it. In the dream, I walked through a golden wood, as haunting as autumn, as living as spring. There were elements other than the forest, too: a castle, the sense of mystery, a deep feeling of belonging and hope, and even sorrow—a pervasive sadness that I couldn’t keep staying here in this most perfect place. But above all, the dream was about the woods. I am what some people call middle-aged now. I haven’t dreamed of walking in that wood since I was very young, but sometimes I still lay on the edge of sleep longing for a glimpse of that forest again. One more moment standing among its living branches, its fair leaves. One more deep sensation of belonging, of finally having arrived home. I cannot say what significant or insignificant lights will illumine the way for my girls, each her own person, with her own path to tread. Rebecca D. Martin In my waking life, I don’t recall any such catalyzing moment as Lewis’s biscuit tin revelation, though my life was full of woods and imaginative play. One particular school friend and I would wander through her backyard and into woods, across a stream. We discovered turtles living there, and for a while, I’m a little embarrassed to say we decorated their backs with the puffy paint we also used to design our 1980s t-shirts. My eco-conscious husband shakes his head, but at the time, this friend and I were fully given over to the woods and its life, owning the branch-covered space and being owned by it. Later in adolescence, there were southern night skies, heavy with stars and close with heat. There were the glorious sunsets that strike all our eyes, and lead so many of us in young adulthood to wax poetic and worshipful. None of these experiences (save, perhaps, the puffy-painted turtles) are very unique, and I cannot pinpoint, like Lewis, what my first glimpse of beauty was that dug down like a seed into my heart, lighting my childhood dreams and later driving me to welcome each sunset, each night sky, with a longing for more. For Lewis, the beauty rooted in his big brother’s pretend garden was laid down early in life, an unexpected and long-lasting foundation. And then a series of suggestive moments, each also unplanned—reading a Longfellow Poem, hearing a Wagner opera, and the chance discovery of George MacDonald’s novel Phantastes foremost among them—grew out of that foundation, those roots, until they produced in his adult life a tree haunted by truth and longing that stretched its branches through myth and desire and the hope for a lasting beauty that could be touched and known. And finally, in the fullness of time, what had begun growing inside Lewis as a young boy leafed into life under the sun of God’s truth, which shines down with a great warmth and hope on this dark road between gardens: the hope that we will arrive forever at that truest and best garden someday; the hope that I may perhaps walk through that golden forest again, and never have to leave it. My two girls, ages four and eight, stand on the sidewalk at the bottom of our front porch stairs, each one bent in rapt concentration over her own miniature garden, soil topped with moss and stuck with fresh fir snips and flowers, on whatever plastic trays my husband could find. They are placing their pieces so carefully, laying out the elements at hand—green leaf, spiky twig, zinnia head, nasturtium bloom—in whatever manner comes to mind, beautiful compositions, because the elements are beautiful, because the minds behind the operations are beautiful, because the Mind behind their very beings is beautiful, and he images his beauty forth in who we are and what we do. “Come further up, come further in!” cries the unicorn Jewel as Lewis’s Pevensie children, newly arrived in glory in The Last Battle, race with joy and strength and glee towards that bright, first garden that is so much more now than it ever was before. Our home has been fractured and lost, and the journey to the new, even better one, promises to be long and dark. But in the end is that garden, and God himself the light by which all beauty will be finally seen. In the midst of today’s pain, of an oft-felt darkness, God gives these glimpses of glory that strengthen us on our way, that light for us the path that will lead us home. My girls spend the morning subcreating their own small gardens. As a child, I wandered the woods with a friend. “As long as I live,” Lewis writes, “my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.” I cannot say what significant or insignificant lights will illumine the way for my girls, each her own person, with her own path to tread. It may likely be something other than these childhood garden crafts on this particular weekend morning, something more unique to each of them. But my imagination is backlit with a stirred hope: our God is a sower who plants seeds of beauty and longing in the most unexpected places; he is the grand storyteller who knows just the right moment to pull the veil aside to a vista that strikes into our hearts that inconsolable longing that will not let go. And I watch with eager expectation for those moments of glory that will begin to guide my children home.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers interviews Harrison Scott Key. Memoirist and humorist Harrison Scott Key is the author of Congratulations, Who Are You Again? and The World’s Largest Man, which won the Thurber Prize for humor. In this episode, Jonathan and Harrison discuss the difference between anecdote and memoir, the value of not knowing everything about your own stories, and the link between memoir-writing and therapy. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 2 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

If you’re reading this, I think it’s safe to assume you love C. S. Lewis and are familiar with at least some of his work, if not his life. Perhaps you are also an artist of some kind, and you long for that Inkling-like fellowship with other artists that Lewis and Tolkien seemed to have enjoyed and that many of us find at Hutchmoot. But what we don’t often consider is that one of Lewis’s primary relationships was not with another artist but with his very practically-minded brother. I’d like to introduce you to a new picture book biography of C. S. Lewis—I hope you don’t mind if I call him Jack—and his brother Warnie. Like most picture book biographies, Finding Narnia: The Story of C. S. Lewis and his Brother by Caroline McAlister and illustrated by Jessica Lanan zeros in on one theme of its subject’s life: Jack’s relationship with his brother, Warnie, and its instrumental role in his own creation of fantastic worlds. From their childhood play world of Boxen to The Chronicles of Narnia, Warnie was at Jack’s side. And yet, while Warnie did become a member of the Inklings, he wrote history, never fiction. From childhood, as Finding Narnia brings out, Warnie was fascinated with real-world things like trains, timetables, ships, maps, and India. As they grew older, Warnie remained the practical one, working for the army and typing reports. Jack, on the other hand, was sensitive, loved to read, and had a vivid imagination. And even though he grew into a scholarly Oxford don, he never lost his ability to ask, “what if….” As you can see, the brothers were very different. And yet, Warnie’s role as resonator—a term coined by Inklings biographer Diana Glyer—seems to have been one of the essential ingredients in Jack’s creative life. The resonators we need may already be in our own community, part of our church, under our own roof. Carolyn Leiloglou Boxen, the play-world they created during their mother’s illness, was a combination of Jack’s Animal-Land and Warnie’s India. As adults, since Jack never learned to type, Warnie was the one who typed Jack’s handwritten manuscripts of the Chronicles of Narnia. And when Tolkien criticized Jack’s sloppy mythology in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Warnie offered encouragement. Warnie didn’t have to be an artist to be the resonator Jack needed. Which is why we creators don’t need to only surround ourselves with other artists, as Andrew Peterson has often pointed out. The resonators we need may already be in our own community, part of our church, under our own roof. After all, “art nourishes community and community nourishes art.” And when you read this book to your kids, don’t be dismayed if they identify more with practical Warnie than with Jack. Finding Narnia gives them a delightfully equal footing, even in the endpapers, the first of which displays a map of Great Britain and the second a map of Narnia. This short, picture book biography leaves off where The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe begins. If you’ve read the Chronicles with your children and want to introduce them to Jack and his brother Warnie, I can’t think of a better way. And for a picture book primer on J. R. R. Tolkien, don’t miss John Ronald’s Dragons by the same author. Click here to view Finding Narnia on Amazon.

As you may already know, the Rabbit Room began as a blog—a beloved ongoing conversation between a collection of writers and artists committed to encouraging each other and throwing ideas back and forth, just for the pleasure of it. It looked a little something like this: Isn’t it so nostalgic? These days, as you may also know, we make and share a myriad of content including but not limited to our blog posts. So here at the beginning of 2020, I figured it would be a good idea to provide a flyover view of the various ways you can follow our work on a daily and weekly basis. Podcasts Click to explore! For starters, let’s talk about the newest iron in the fire: our Podcast Network. Our network currently hosts nine podcasts. That sounds like a lot—and it sort of is—but our podcast schedule is seasonal, meaning that we actively release new episodes from just two or three series at a time throughout the year. Here’s what you can keep your eyes peeled for this year. The Habit Podcast (updated weekly). I have the sincere pleasure of engineering this podcast, and I can tell you that Jonathan Rogers is unstoppable. In just about five hours, we’ll record six stellar conversations with writers about writing. I don’t know how this guy does it, but for the foreseeable future, he’ll have a new interview ready for you to listen to every week. Fin’s Revolution (updated sporadically, dozens of episodes at a time). This is the podcast wherein Pete Peterson embarks on the adventure of reading through The Fiddler’s Gun and Fiddler’s Green audiobook-style, complete with funny voices. It’s endlessly engaging, and he’s halfway done, having just finished The Fiddler’s Gun. Be sure to check out his special bonus episodes, in which Shigé Clark (our head of Communications & Development) asks him piercing historical and narrative questions. The Second Muse (updated seasonally). This is my own personal contribution to our podcast network, in which I interview songwriters and producers about their own encounters with moments of resistance in the writing and record-making process. In each episode, we also break down a particular song of theirs in a Song Exploder-type fashion, analyzing how it grew into itself from the infancy of an idea to the completion of a shiny recording. Watch for Season Two to be released this spring. The Artist’s Creed (updated seasonally). One of our board members and our first-ever Scholar in Residence, Dr. Steve Guthrie is currently on sabbatical from his position as Religion & the Arts professor at Belmont University. The Artist’s Creed is one side project he will be undertaking during his time with us. The network’s most theological offering, Season One of The Artist’s Creed engaged topically in the Apostle’s Creed episode by episode, asking how it could inform the calling of the artist. But Season Two will look a little different—watch for it to be released in late summer. Fixed In Post (updated sporadically, one episode at a time). Our dear friend John Barber is a great lover of good films. Every so often, he and Pete get together to talk about their favorites. Watch for their Best of 2019 episode to come out soon. In podcast world, there are some other projects in the works this year that I can’t tell you about yet. But let’s just say we’ve never been more excited, and we’re breaking out of our comfort zone. Stay tuned. Streaming Playlists Click to listen to the Rabbit Room Playlist on Spotify! (Also available on Apple Music) One of our favorite new developments is streaming playlists. This is where we get to nerd out about all the new music from artists in our community and share it with as many listeners as we can. Chris Thiessen (Head of Sales and Donor Administration) curates our playlists to give you our latest take on great new music being made. Rabbit Room Playlist (updated monthly). This is our most general playlist, aiming to cover all the bases and keep up with new releases by artists in our community. Seasonal Playlists (updated quarterly). Our blog contributors band together with the coming of each new season to provide a soundtrack to the spring, summer, autumn, and winter. In addition to the earth’s seasons, we provide soundtracks for liturgical seasons, like Advent, Christmastide, Lent, and Easter. The Local Show Playlist (updated in the spring and fall, during Local Show seasons). Whenever we host Local Shows (our writers round concert in Nashville, TN), we keep track of the set list and reconstruct it on Apple Music and Spotify for your listening pleasure. It updates every two weeks with each new show. Weekly Digest Click the image above to subscribe! On a daily basis, the stream of new content can be a bit overwhelming. That’s why we’ve established our weekly digest, an email that includes highlights from that week’s blog and podcast content, news updates, upcoming tour dates from artists in our community, and our beloved “Stuff We Liked This Week” section, where staff members share books, music, movies, and podcast recommendations for the week. In addition to sharing stuff we liked, I greatly enjoy asking (via our Rabbit Room Chinwag page on Facebook) what you liked every Friday morning. It always gets a great discussion going, and I come away so encouraged by the great art being put into the world. Click here to check out last Friday’s discussion, and feel free to add your own comment as well! Blog Posts Where it all started. The heartbeat of all our content, the Rabbit Room blog sets the tone of our weekly discussion and anchors everything we do. Because chances are that if you regularly engage with the Rabbit Room, you like to read. And you probably even like to settle into your chair, light a candle, make some tea, and read with abandon. So if you want a place to go throughout your week for thought-provoking articles pertaining to art, music, story, and community, look no further. I update our blog four to five times every work week with a balance of reflective articles, important bits of news, and short delights. (Fun fact: I’ve been reading the blog since I was a freshman in high school. Pinch me.) If you’re looking for a place to start, here are a few of my favorite articles from the last few months: “Alleluia” by Amy Baik Lee, “The Garden Unguarded” by Matthew Cyr, and “Giants in the Land” by Helena Sorensen. Thanks for reading, listening, and participating. That’s about all the content we put out on a regular basis! I hope this guide has been helpful, whether you’re a new reader looking for a place to begin or a long-time listener who’s lost track of what all we’ve got going on. To wrap this up, here are some quick links to launch you into the media of your choice. Read our blog. Explore our podcasts. Subscribe to our weekly emails. Listen to our streaming playlists (Spotify, Apple Music). Follow us on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). Participate in our Chinwag. Become a member to support all of this work. In a world that is becoming more and more overrun with information by the day, we aim to provide a grounding and hospitable space where you can slow down and engage with worthwhile thoughts from a robustly Christian perspective. Because as far as we can see, art nourishes community and community nourishes art, and more than ever before, both of these gifts require and deserve every bit of nourishment they can get. Welcome. We’re so glad you’re here.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers interviews professional counselor and writer Meredith McDaniel. Meredith McDaniel is the author of In Want + Plenty: Waking Up to God’s Provision in a Land of Longing. She’s also a licensed professional counselor. Jonathan and Meredith discuss the deep connections between counseling and storytelling, the importance of bodily liturgies for a writer, and learning to give no more or less than what we have to give. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 3 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

Caleb Chapman was stuck. It was time to make another Colony House record and he had no songs. That’s not quite true; he had a pile of songs, but none that were right for his band. Q: How do you write a pile of songs you don’t love? A: Focus on what the market wants. If you find yourself thus distracted, getting dropped by your label could be the best thing for you. Fewer voices in your head. And Colony House had just been dropped by RCA. Now Caleb was coming back to himself little by little. So yes, he was stuck and he had no songs, but it felt like they were on the train. Any moment now. Caleb sat at the piano, doing his best to embody the songwriter-as-fisherman metaphor, in which you cast your line out and wait. The phone rang. A welcome interruption. His grandfather wanted to know how songs were coming. They talked for a minute. And then a sudden tug on the line. The conversation had sparked a memory of Caleb’s great grandfather, an alcoholic and a drifter who had barely known his own daughter. Caleb felt a wave of empathy for this man, and a wave of empathy is as good a song-starter as any. The lyric took the form of a conversation between a man running away from his problems and the porter who takes his bag as he boards the train. Caleb reeled the big fish in and named it “Mr. Runaway.” At last, a keeper! I was also coming unstuck. A drastic change in my life had dislodged me from years of working around the clock as if my life depended on it. I was out with the Behold The Lamb tour, thinking what a different person I had been a year prior, when Caleb Chapman’s name appeared on my phone. Since I produced When I Was Younger with Joe Causey in 2013, I had not been holding my breath to ever work with the band again. I thought they had graduated from the likes of me. But somehow, when the phone rang, I knew. Caleb told me they didn’t need a genius, they needed a shepherd. He was right. They didn’t need a genius because they had Caleb, Will, Scott, and Parke. And they needed a shepherd for the very same reason!! I prepared to empty myself and take on the very nature of a servant. And then I heard “Mr. Runaway.” I was hoping Caleb wanted to make a record with a lot of heart—something rangy and cinematic that spoke to both the spirit of humanity and the spirit of the times. That song told me the answer was yes to all of the above. We started work in January of last year and proceeded to spend ten days on two songs, “Mr. Runaway” and “Looking For Some Light.” Neither song was finished after ten days and nobody was sure they liked either one and I was ready to get fired. Then the boys left for tour. I took my mentor Brown out for tacos and asked him what to do. He told me I was doing it upside down. I had put myself in the hot seat when it should have been them. We changed the whole plan. When we reconvened in the spring it was at their dad’s studio instead of mine. I barely played a note for the first two weeks. I was mostly a cheerleader, smiling through the studio glass with two arms raised. Some of my proudest contributions to the record are non-musical. It was my idea, for example, to leave Caleb alone and let him play guitar and sing with no one around, not even me. I wanted his wildest performances and this is how I got them. I eventually re-entered the fray. “Julia,” for example, took shape between Caleb, Will, and me. Will wasn’t so sure about it, but ultimately it was his feverish bongo playing that made it so joyous. I was hoping Caleb wanted to make a record with a lot of heart—something rangy and cinematic that spoke to both the spirit of humanity and the spirit of the times. The answer was yes to all of the above. Ben Shive After days of work, Will had the courage to say “Mr. Runaway” wasn’t right for the album. Caleb raised the knife to kill his beloved, but then we saw the ram in the thicket. Caleb and I sat together at the end of the day and reworked the song in a major key. We had to tweak the melody but we were able to preserve its contour. And then came the idea to split it into thirds and let the serial conversation between Mr. Porter and Mr. Runaway frame the whole album. The first part we recorded together in about an hour on doubled piano and guitar. The second I arranged for strings at the Beehive. The third is a Beck-ish thing featuring my two hands working independently at the piano for once and Caleb playing, to his delight, drums. Today, we release Leave What’s Lost Behind into the wild. I am grateful to have been there at the inception. I am proud of the guys for writing a beautiful record and supporting each other so well through the making of it. Nobody cared who played any given part. They just wanted it to be good. And nobody took offense when it was time to mute something they’d worked for hours on. This occurred often. I am proud of Caleb for doing what I want to see every artist do. Look without and speak to the times. Look within and speak to the heart of man. Look intently into the law that gives life and speak to the spirit. When I Was Younger is beloved by so many. I hope that Leave What’s Lost Behind has even greater emotional and spiritual impact. When Caleb played “Mr. Runaway” for me at that first meeting he told me he felt like he was at war with the hopelessness of the world and he wanted to shed light. Good. Everybody’s looking for some light. Click here to visit Colony House’s website. Listen to When I Was Younger on Spotify or Apple Music.

I wouldn’t exactly describe myself as a touchy-feely person. If you give me a 5 Love Languages test, physical affection just barely sneaks into the number three spot. I know I carry internalized messages for how to touch other people, from determining side hugs versus regular hugs to how many seats to leave between myself and strangers on public transportation. Marriage has done a lot to shrink my personal bubble, but if I’m honest, I haven’t always considered how meaningful touch can be when we avoid brushing against each other in a crowded world. In this world, there’s no shortage of messages about touch: when to give it, how to give it, how to avoid causing pain, how to be sensitive to the pain others have experienced. And that makes me especially grateful for the wise, thoughtful, and generous perspective Lore Ferguson Wilbert brings to her new book Handle with Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry. Just be warned though, you won’t find prescriptions or answers here. Instead, she takes the best possible approach: musing on the complexities of touch while pointing over and over again to Jesus’ life and ministry. God in flesh allowed himself to be made vulnerable so the broken might be healed. We cannot fully heal people by touching them, but we recognize their humanity, their story, their issue of blood, by allowing ourselves to be touched by them. Like Jesus, we should simply make ourselves within reach, available to however God might use us in his healing narrative. —Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Handle with Care Lore has been writing for years at her blog Sayable on topics of friendship, singleness, marriage, and embodied theology, and she’s developed a voice that’s wise, strong, gentle, and filled with grace. And it all comes together in her first book. One truly remarkable thing about Handle with Care is the sheer breadth of the material, how she explores a wide range of topics on touch without it ever feeling like too much information, handling each one with gentleness and nuance. To quote the great Mister Rogers, “Anything that is mentionable can be more manageable,” and everything is mentionable here. Handle with Care talks about the need for loving self-touch and care for our bodies, the longing for touch many of us experience in singleness, the need for self-control and mutual respect in marriage, finding a healthy balance for touch in between purity culture and #metoo stories, and understanding how trauma and abuse affect how we give and receive touch. If our bodies matter to God, they should matter to us. And they should matter to us as they are, not only how they will someday be. Lore Ferguson Wilbert If that sounds complicated, it is, but it doesn’t feel like too much. She explores each topic through the lens of Scripture and the reality of culture, challenging us to rethink how we offer and receive touch—in friendship, marriage, ministry, and parenting—while affirming the ways our experiences shape us. Every page holds the underlying reminder that we are embodied creatures, molded by “our stories and histories, vocations and stations,” and a hug, a hand on the shoulder, or a professional massage can be a holy gift that honors our beautiful, broken bodies. “If our bodies matter to God,” she writes, “they should matter to us. And they should matter to us as they are, not only how they will someday be.” Alongside these contemporary topics, a much older parallel story runs. Throughout the book, Wilbert returns to Jesus and how he loved people with his hands. He certainly could have been an untouchable, mysterious holy man. He could have accomplished every miracle with just a word or a thought. But the reality is that in so many stories—whether he opens a blind man’s eyes with mud and spit, honors a woman who grabbed the hem of his robe, holds and plays with small children, or washes the grime from his friends’ feet—Jesus uses his hands to heal, to comfort, and to bless. And may it be so with us all. I suppose the best way to describe this book is an approachable theology of touch, woven with stories, kindness, and respect. She isn’t going to outline a “who to touch” policy for you, but she might challenge you to at least give more hugs. And there is the root of healthy touch: giving with respect, not with the concern for what you receive. Honoring boundaries without making yourself untouchable. Learning to love and care for the one body you’ve been given. But always, always at your own pace, honoring the stories your cells hold, and the mystery of Christ in you. If you find yourself wanting to hear more from Lore, watch for next week’s episode of The Habit Podcast for a lovely discussion with Jonathan Rogers.

[Editor’s note: Next Thursday Jonathan is launching a new online class called Writing Through the Wardrobe. Participants will read through The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe with a writer’s eye, learning how to apply C. S. Lewis’s techniques to their own writing. Find out more at TheHabit.co/Wardrobe.] The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers interviews Heidi Johnston, author of Choosing Love. Heidi Johnston is the author of Choosing Love, a book that tries to tell teenage girls the truth about relationships. Jonathan and Heidi discuss the various roadblocks to writing—particularly procrastination and imposter syndrome—the task of writing to tell a truer story, and the wellsprings of originality. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 4 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

We are really excited to partner with Belmont University’s College of Theology & Christian Ministry to put on this free event one week from today—a writers round engaging in the topic of mental health & human wholeness. If you happen to be in the area and are interested in what it looks like to sing about these things, then we’d love for you to join us. There will even be free cookies afterwards. I mean, what more could you ask for?

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers interviews Lore Ferguson Wilbert, author of Handle with Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry. Lore Ferguson Wilbert is the author of Handle With Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry. She has been blogging since 2000 at Sayable.net. In this episode, Jonathan and Lore talk about the idea of touch as the mother of all senses, the exceeding vulnerability of Jesus, and the surprisingly symbiotic relationship between tenderness and resilience. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 5 of The Habit Podcast. And click here to visit Sayable, Lore’s blog. Jen Yokel recently wrote a review of Lore’s book—you can read that here. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

I was giving a lecture in Oxford the other day, and took the opportunity, as I often do, to drop into the Eagle and Child. It’s a fine old 17th-century pub, unspoiled by “improvement;” it still has a couple of those lovely wood-panelled “snugs” which encourage camaraderie and close conversation—and, most famously, “the Rabbit Room,” where C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their friends met on Tuesday lunchtimes, for the kind of sparring, cajoling, but ultimately encouraging conversation that was at the heart of their informal club, “The Inklings.” As Lewis said of these pub sessions in a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves: “The fun is often so fast and furious that the company probably thinks we’re talking bawdy when in fact we’re very likely talking theology.” It’s a pleasure to raise a pint to their memory in that room, and to imagine the free flow of their talk, to think of how the solid goodness, the conviviality and welcome that Tolkien evoked in the Prancing Pony, might owe something to this place. Indeed, life sometimes imitates art, and, on one occasion, Tolkien recalled, “I noticed a strange tall gaunt man, half in khaki, half in mufti, with a large wide awake hat and a hooked nose sitting in a corner. The others had their backs to him but I could see in his eye that he was taking an interest in the conversation.” Moments later, the stranger leaned forward and took up the thread of what was being said, and was discovered to be the poet Roy Campbell, who had come from South Africa to Oxford specifically to seek out Lewis and Tolkien. Tolkien reflected that it was just like the moment when Strider is revealed at the Prancing Pony, an episode from the unfinished New Hobbit, which he had only recently read to his fellow Inklings. So, as I sat in that dark little snug, nursing my pint, in the same corner (if not the same chair) as that wayfaring poet, I savoured the way in which literary inns enhance one’s appreciation of real inns, and vice versa. It's a pleasure to raise a pint to their memory in that room, and to imagine the free flow of their talk, to think of how the solid goodness, the conviviality and welcome that Tolkien evoked in the Prancing Pony, might owe something to this place. Malcolm Guite The other good thing about “The Bird and Baby,” as the Inklings called it, is that it is just a few doors down from the Oxfam bookshop, which, as one would expect in Oxford, is always well-stocked, and sometimes I pop in there on my way to the pub. On this occasion, I picked up a nice hardback edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, a choice of which both Tolkien and Lewis would have approved. Enjoying the happy combination of beer and Beowulf, I recalled that “Beer and Beowulf” was the name Lewis gave to his Anglo-Saxon tutorials at Magdalen. How much more attractive a title than “Linguistics 101: The Vowel Shift!” Before I drained my pint, I recited (under my breath) a little tributary sonnet to Lewis: From “Beer and Beowulf” to the seven heavens, Whose music you conduct from sphere to sphere, You are our portal to those hidden havens Whence we return to bless our being here. Scribe of the Kingdom, keeper of the door Which opens on to all we might have lost, Ward of a word-hoard in the deep heart’s core, Telling the tale of Love from first to last. Generous, capacious, open, free, Your wardrobe-mind has furnished us with worlds Through which to travel, whence we learn to see Along the beam, and hear at last the heralds Sounding their summons, through the stars that sing, Whose call at sunrise brings us to our King. This piece was originally posted here at Church Times.

There’s nothing like viewing the world through the lens of another language to show you how limited your own can be. We can’t ever fully merge two lexical frameworks into one, and our translations often fall short of the original concept. Some vocabularies don’t concisely reach into others. All this is to say that the Welsh word Hiraeth is one I’m still learning how to wrap my English arms around. I’ve mentioned it here before, as have others. It’s most often described as a nostalgia or, better yet, homesickness—but not one that can be easily cured by a plane ticket. It’s a homesickness for a home you’ve never been to, one you’ve never seen or can no longer return to, sometimes even one that never existed at all. It is simultaneously grief and desire—a restless dissatisfaction with what is that comes from a weary confidence that something else used to be. Can you feel the shortcomings of the English language here? Can you grasp the depth of the Welsh—how seven letters could scrawl out so much of what it means to be human? It’s going to take something more creative than a line from Webster to define. There’s one more definition I’ve recently added to my collection of possible translations, and it may just be my favorite one yet: I’m homesick most For a place I don’t know But I knew before, I knew before —Joel Ansett So Denver-based singer-songwriter Joel Ansett writes in the opening track of his sophomore album, aptly-titled A Place I Knew Before.  I have no idea if Ansett has any Welsh running through his blood, but I can honestly say that keeping his album in my car disk player (because I still have one of those) over the last six months has changed the way I understand hiraeth in my own life. It’s little wonder that this first song, “Homesick,” describes the gardens of Manito Park in Spokane through Edenic imagery like “the cool of the day” and “angels and flames,” as Ansett wrestles with his own sense of loss and desire. Then the lament turns to a question: Try to remember your voice Deep in my mind. I have a choice: If I could picture the place I am from Would it change who I become? —Joel Ansett From this question, an entire album of pictures unfolds: lyrical sketches of life lived between grief and desire, the same loss and longing for home we all know so well. With each song comes different images of people, relationships, and places. He writes of marriage, illness, and the breakneck speed of modern life. He plays through movies that run in our minds and resists our tendencies to view other peoples’ stories in the cinematic simplicity of black and white. We see in a geranium what Ansett describes as “beautiful to me but dying underneath,” and we know the truth of the flower rings true for the world. He describes in vivid detail those joys that distract like Cadillacs driving past and those joys that offer “a glimpse of glory, something I knew before”—and the homesick heart feels the pierce of hiraeth everywhere. The love of the Father is dwelling here, now, in the bent world, in the gardens that typify Eden yet still fall short, in a voice that speaks beyond the limitations of language, in a love that not only moves towards the pain but takes on our pain. Hannah Hubin For their broad scope, all these songs have one thing in common: in some way or another, they’re all marked by the restless dissatisfaction of hiraeth—a desire for the sick to be healed, the broken to be restored, the wound tight to slow down. Like Ansett, we desire whole human relationships we don’t now know, but somehow, written down in the beginnings of our history, we knew before. We rage against our limitations, our distracted hearts, and our distant friendships like languages narrower than we were meant to speak. Like Ansett, we find ourselves both wounded and wounding, and “we wait for someone to move toward the pain.” We desire to love more deeply than this fallen flesh lets us, and we grieve our inability to comfort those also grieving. My heart is aching but I finally found a cure If you’re a breaking wave, maybe I could be the shore I’d give up all my dreams if you would tell me yours Oh it hurts me; it hurts me not to know you more. —Joel Ansett The hiraeth soul knows that this place is not home, that these relationships do not perfectly satisfy, that our communities are ever breaking and healing and breaking all over again. We celebrate what is beautiful and we grieve that the beauty is never whole. And then comes one last song—the final picture. The album that opened in the gardens of Manito Park ends “running through the gardens to the east of Cheesman Park”—and the listener knows this is more than just a transition from Seattle to Denver. Chasing rabbits with my son ‘til it’s too dark And he can’t understand the fullness of my love Tell me it’s the same with my father up above.I feel broken Weary of the wars I can’t escape Tired of hoping For the promised morning light to break And then I heard you, calling out my name Singing “Do not be afraid. I will be your dwelling place.“ —Joel Ansett Ansett doesn’t leave us without a second garden. This final picture is one both of the place we are from and the place we are making our way home to again—though we see it now only through the fading dusk. But, in answer to Ansett’s earlier question, does it change who we become? The truth is that it is already changing who we are now. The things of heaven cast their shadows on earth, and though Cheesman Park is no Eden, in this moment we catch these Edenic patches of evening light. The homesick heart isn’t home yet, but this final song reveals more than the hope that we’ll make it someday. It reveals the holy presence here as well, manifested in the voice Ansett tried to remember back at the beginning of the album. The love of the Father is dwelling here, now, in the bent world, in the gardens that typify Eden yet still fall short, in a voice that speaks beyond the limitations of language, in a love that not only moves towards the pain but takes on our pain. And this, I believe, is why Ansett has offered a better description of hiraeth than I’ll ever find in a Welsh dictionary: he’s added a missing piece to the truth of our own nostalgic hearts. Between the grief and the longing of homesickness can also lie a third thing—a contentment—and the listener, left there in the love of the Father falling like shadows over Cheesman park, with the ferocity of hiraeth burning in his heart, still east of Eden, is not without a dwelling place even now.

How do you change a person’s mind? We live in a polarized age. Even when tectonic events happen in our society, like the Ferguson Uprising or the Sandy Hook massacre, it seems inevitable that we will all hold the line in our ideological trenches, most if not all of us failing to cross the No Man’s Land to have even a conversation with those on the opposing side. So how do you change a person’s mind? The film Just Mercy leads us towards an answer. May our revolutions be embodied before they are ever televised. Kale Uzzle The film investigates this question via the relationship between Bryan Stevenson (protagonist and author of Just Mercy) and Tommy Chapman, the loathsome District Attorney played convincingly by Rafe Spall. Chapman, a white Southerner perhaps ten years older than Stevenson, is smarmy and condescending, surpassing even the open vitriol of Sheriff Tate. His suggestion for Stevenson to check out the “Mockingbird Museum” on his way out of Monroeville, the county where Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, is dripping with contempt, particularly as it comes after Chapman’s flat rejection to give Stevenson any help in re-opening and reconsidering McMillian’s murder case. This rejection contains within it every ounce of Chapman’s greater refusal to even entertain the thoughts of a black, Harvard-educated attorney from the North in what he believes to be a settled matter in his Alabama county. As the movie progresses, this relationship becomes the crucial turning point of the story. Stevenson fails to convince Chapman of the need to reconsider the evidence in their first meeting. At one point, he shows up at Chapman’s house to plead with him to consider being on the side of justice, even if it costs him his reputation. You can sense the weight on Chapman’s mind but, once again, he refuses to engage the conversation and boots Stevenson off his property. At the film’s zenith, a final courtroom showdown between Chapman and Stevenson, the weight finally becomes too much to bear. As Stevenson asks for the Circuit Court to dismiss all charges against McMillian, the judge asks for Chapman as the District Attorney to represent the opposing arguments. After a long, painful silence, he finally changes his mind, opting to join Stevenson and the defense in asking for the charges to be dropped. Even having read Just Mercy when it came out a few years ago, this scene moved me, certainly because of the actors’ performances, but perhaps more so because of the nature of the victory. Stevenson certainly gives an Atticus-Finch-level speech to set up the scene but, in the end, he doesn’t beat Chapman by the force of compelling courtroom rhetoric. He doesn’t exactly “win” at all; he convinces his opponent to forfeit, to pay the price of losing a very public case in order to remove the moral weight from his shoulders. Why does this work? Why does Tommy Chapman—who, by the way, was re-elected three additional times after McMillian’s exoneration in 1993, finally retiring in 2012—change his mind about his need to hang the murder of a teenage white girl in rural Alabama on the head of Walter McMillian, a black man sitting on Death Row awaiting execution? How do you change a person’s mind? Bryan Stevenson, like Martin Luther King, Jr. before him, managed to do so through the practice of prophetic persuasion, the public embodiment of a value so completely that it compels enough cognitive dissonance in the observer to allow them to consider that they might actually be wrong in how they are viewing or behaving in a given situation. This practice includes speaking boldly, but words are a mere accompaniment to and interpretation of clear and effective action. Walter McMillian Contrary to much of how we think about ourselves as rational creatures, our minds actually tend to follow our bodies and hearts. As James K. A. Smith writes, “We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love.” Our worldview may be reinforced by the intake of information but it is changed by practice, by the embodiment of previously unseen realities. In some sense, it is the body that changes the mind—both my own mind and that of the other. Prophetic persuasion practices that which it preaches even before it begins to preach. It incarnates into the world, letting the mouth bear witness to what the body has already practiced. We love in action and let our words offer the interpretation of that action. St. Francis instructed us to “Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.” This is not an excuse not to speak. Rather, it is a call to put a thumb on the precise scale our age is most tempted to neglect—that of quiet, sacrificial action not intended for Insta stories or Twitter likes. It is a call to allow our words to come only when our bodies and our bank accounts are already on the line. It is to preach a lived word instead of a theoretical one. It is to exit the clean offices and kitchen tables of our minds and enter the messy world on our hands and knees, praying and working for the world yet to come. This is the power of Bryan Stevenson and others like him today—his talk shines through with the light of his walk. He speaks as one with authority. I want the same to be true in my life and in my generation as a whole. May the words we speak, tweet, and share come from the deeper well of a heart transformed by experiences lived and sacrifices made. May our revolutions be embodied before they are ever televised. May our persuasiveness be the fruit borne by seeds planted in struggle and watered by our own tears, sweat, and blood. May the first mind we change, even if it is the only mind we change, be our own.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers interviews Elyse Fitzpatrick and Eric Schumacher, co-authors of the book Worthy: Celebrating the Value of Women. Elyse Fitzpatrick and Eric Schumacher are co-authors of Worthy: Celebrating the Value of Women. In this episode, Jonathan, Elyse, and Eric discuss writing as an antidote to reducing other people to categories, the church’s responsibility to defend victims of sexual abuse, the cowriting process for Elyse and Eric, and how they have chosen to navigate a politically fraught topic. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 6 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

I once heard a wise woman talk about enjoying things during times of want that had been stocked up in times of plenty. Like myself, she was a gardener. She told a tale of a lovely patch of strawberries. I could tell she was incredibly proud of this patch and I understood why. There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction that comes from hard work flourishing and growing into a great bounty. Most people who take on the toil of seeing this process through to a harvest also find ways to preserve some of this seasonal glory. At least that is the case for me. I, like many gardeners, have taken to learning the art of canning. It wasn’t until moving to our current home that I had room for enough plants to have extra produce left over for storage. I had only tried small preservation tasks at our old location. We rented a home for many years that had one lone mulberry tree growing in the corner of the yard. Once I discovered it, everyone knew not to bother mom during mulberry season. I would get up early to pick berries before taking the kids to school and then heading to work. And when I got home, I would check to see what new berries had readied themselves during the day. Aside from my busied schedule every spring, my stained fingertips were also a good indicator of what time of year it was. My children likely thought I was a little obsessed. But that opinion would always change with the expectation and joy of mulberry pie come Thanksgiving and Christmas! So I was overjoyed to find mulberry trees when we moved to our current home. Even though our children were grown and leaving for lives of their own, mulberries were a memory of their childhood for all of us. When our daughter moved across country, I baked her a mulberry pie to take with her on the long road trip. That, in turn, helped create one of my favorite pictures. It’s a picture of her on a late-night travel stop, having a few moments of rest before the next leg of the journey. She was tired and road worn, but very happily eating mulberry pie. When an infusion is turned into jelly, and that jelly is warmed by toast on a frigid winter morning, it becomes the taste of the sweetness that lingers in the airs of May. Gina Sutphin When we moved to our current home on a large plot of land, discovering the number of things that could be stored away to anticipate for later became a personal mission. I captured the scent of a spring breeze by making an infusion with flowers from the honeysuckle bush. When an infusion is turned into jelly, and that jelly is warmed by toast on a frigid winter morning, it becomes the taste of the sweetness that lingers in the airs of May. I captured the emerald green color of summer’s leaves and grass through the blanching of green beans processed in my pressure canner. I captured the amber hues of fall through the process of caramelizing pears into a rich butter, warmed and spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg. And these colorful jars progressively filled our shelves throughout the growing season. But then came the winter, and the earth had nothing left to give. This morning I was thinking about that wise woman I heard tell of her strawberry patch. Her tale also told of a joyful morning spent eating strawberry jam on biscuits with her children. It was an overflowing bounty from two seasons before. And even though there had been strawberries in the current season, she had been unavailable to pick them. Events of great sorrow had set things into motion that caused her to be away during the harvest. But like the wise woman of Proverbs 31, she had food that she had brought with her from afar. And now, while it was yet still night in her life, she was rising and providing joy on biscuits for herself and her children. I may have become good at the craft of preserving when it applies to fruits and vegetables, but I’m not so good at doing it in the area of personal joy and happiness. Joy can be experienced in the moment, but it seems to slip away like sand through my fingers. I can be prone to letting discontentment be a more normal state in the day to day living of life. I long for that to change, so I’m trying to take lessons from people like this wise woman. I’m trying to learn how to preserve joy in the same way I have preserved these jars of mulberries and pears. It’s winter here in Ohio. The earth is cold and waiting for its next season of plenty. But here on this chilly morning, with thoughts of those strawberry jam-laden biscuits swirling in my head, I pulled some mulberries from the freezer. A cobbler was made, and without any current signs of life from the mulberry tree out back, its fruits were enjoyed and brought happiness even though the tree currently has nothing it can offer. I want my heart to be more like the preserved fruits of the mulberry tree. My prayer is that I can have a greater trust in the Gardener and his methods of helping me have a greater harvest. With a greater and deeper harvest of joy and happiness, there will be extra lingering on beyond the moment. Then, in times when I am currently depleted and have nothing new to give, it will be there waiting for me. It will be tucked away in those pretty jars on the shelf of my heart, and there will bounty ready to open and enjoy and share with those around me.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about paths, by which I mean the ways that we follow to get from one place to another. The more I reflect on what a path really is, the more I see them everywhere, both in their presence and in their disappearance. At this point, I’m wondering what isn’t a path. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s not that I have some abiding interest in maps, roads, and geography. I can hardly navigate Nashville’s interstate system. My interest lies less in the quick engineering of roads and cities than in the paths that spring up slowly as passages of memory, more entrenched with every footfall. And now I’m sounding like Robert Macfarlane, whose book The Old Ways has gotten me down this road in the first place (pun earnestly intended). In this book, Macfarlane adventures down the many ancient paths that crisscross the British landscape and beyond, recording his travels and observations about how these paths came to be and what they mean. Let’s set the tone with some of his philosophizing. Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It’s hard to create a footpath on your own. . . They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people. Macfarlane, p. 17 The literature of wayfaring is long, existing as poems, songs, stories, treatises and route guides, maps, novels and essays. . . A walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells. Macfarlane, p. 18 As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth, and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream. Macfarlane, p. 105 Now, consider this simple definition of path that I offered earlier: “The ways that we follow to get from one place to another.” Following Macfarlane’s footsteps, allow yourself to imagine the meaning of place less concretely. With this expanded definition, can you think of some examples of paths that exist in realms untraversable by feet? Here are some observations I’ve made while thinking on this question: Aren’t stories like paths, made and remade in their telling and retelling? When I pick up an old favorite novel and reread, aren’t I retracing my steps and the steps of many others before me? How about songs? Or even melodies, for that matter? Take “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and imagine every note as another step. What is that beautiful melody but a beloved, well-trod path? How can we remember it but by singing it again? If the Lord's Prayer is a footpath, then there must be a massive tree at its entrance with names upon names etched on it—the names of saints and sinners, rulers and martyrs, priests and confessors throughout the ages. Drew Miller And maybe most compelling of all, prayers and liturgies. If the Lord’s Prayer is a footpath, then there must be a massive tree at its entrance with names upon names etched on it—the names of saints and sinners, rulers and martyrs, priests and confessors throughout the ages. And if each word is a foothold, then these words are nearly inextricable from the earth itself, fixtures that have become one with the landscape. How can we walk this path—thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven—without sensing, palpable in the air, the great company that has gone before us? We could go the scientific route, too. Our bodies follow familiar paths every day, like the path from waking to sleeping, from hunger to satiation, as well as the more sophisticated paths that we call “habits”—I write this at the conclusion of my morning coffee, for instance, which can claim no small amount of responsibility for this post. More subtle still are “neural pathways,” traveled by nerve impulses from neuron to neuron. Those can claim full responsibility! So maybe you can begin to see why I can’t stop seeing the world in terms of paths. Hopefully, I’ve passed this problem on to you, as well. And as long as I’m at it, I’ll pass along another problem: the disappearance of these paths. Ready for a massive overgeneralization? Every new piece of technology outsources our pathmaking. History’s trend is to pave our paths, reducing the cultural memory required of us to navigate the world. Here’s what I mean. Long, long, long ago, stories only existed in people’s memories. They were transmitted through the spoken word. With each retelling, the story both solidified in the memory of the teller and made its imprint on the memory of the listener. Then, long, long ago, we invented writing, and gone was the need to remember our stories in the same way. They were written down and preserved, word for word. And then, long ago, there came the printing press, allowing stories to be shared and circulated with even less expense of memory. You could replay a similar story in music, with the introduction of notation, then our ability to record and reproduce sound, and then, well, Spotify. Let me be clear: I am a huge fan of the written word. And the printing press, and recording studios, and (with some reservations) streaming services. Not all outsourcing of pathmaking is bad. My concern surfaces when we privilege sheer accessibility over sustained, shared knowledge. And I get the sense that our relentless quest for this accessibility has taken a toll on us, in the form of a sort of willful forgetfulness. If we want to replace the many winding paths from point A to point B with one straight, paved road, we will have to be willing to forget the accumulated memory of those paths. If we want to replace encyclopedias with quick Google searches, we will have to be willing to forget the slow, painstaking work of human knowledge. If we want to replace communities with consumer markets, we will have to be willing to forget that we belong to one another. I find it all too fitting that in describing such a leveled-out world, Wendell Berry uses the metaphor of severed paths in the search for home: . . . Nobody who wanted to go home would ever get there now, for every remembered place had been displaced; every love unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant to make way for the passage of the crowd of the individuated. . . Having never known where they were going, having never known where they came from. Berry, “The Objective” A dire picture indeed. The implicit question in such a dire picture is, “What is the way forward?” Two popular answers to that question are aggressively advertised to us on a daily basis. The first is to forge our own path. Forget the old ones—they were riddled with the many evils of injustice—and let’s start from scratch with our newly enlightened perspective. This answer isn’t entirely wrong. Any way forward must reckon with the failures of what lies behind. But we can’t do that reckoning by just obliterating the old. The second popular answer is to entirely forsake the new in order to reinstitute the treasures of the old. This option would have us believe that innovation is never to be trusted, it’s only ever safe to go where we have already gone, and the way forward is in fact backward. And the instinct behind this perspective isn’t entirely wrong, either. But it goes very wrong when it succumbs to untempered nostalgia, replaying the “halcyon days” at the expense of the present. In fact, in a strange twist of irony, all its zeal for remembering the past lands it in another kind of forgetfulness altogether—forgetfulness of the future, and consequently, forgetfulness of hope. The best answer I’ve found is at once under-publicized, mundane, and miraculous. You’re probably already doing it, but it always helps to remember what it is you’re doing and why. Tell stories. Sing songs. Cook and share meals with your friends. Remember and proclaim. The beautiful thing about these treasured paths is that they are made and re-made in the very act of walking, and Sara Groves is absolutely right that “the path is worn, but to us it’s new.” The miracle that happens in these mundane creative acts is that our lives are stitched back together even as we turn around to glimpse the potentiality of healing. Grace works that way, and it imbues our memories and imaginations just as much as our hearts and souls. With the very first faithful step down the path of a treasured story, we are making that story realer to ourselves and to one another. Is this not what we’re doing when we worship, partake of the sacraments, and practice communion itself? So go out and listen in the old for intimations of the new, and in the new for intimations of the old. Be open to surprise from any direction. Join your own voice in the resounding, inextricably woven, vast memory and anticipation of creation. Etch your name on the tree that marks the path.

Eric Peters has a talent for calling to lost and discarded things—as anyone who loves his music can attest. Turns out that gift extends beyond his skill as a songwriter. His photo collection in the recent re-publication of Far Side of the Sea: A Photographic Memory reflects twenty-five years’ worth of wandering and watching for fragments of civilization that the rest of the world has forgotten. Here, he gathers them like cast-off scraps and builds them into something new. Each photo is paired with a thoughtful vignette, often told from the viewpoint of the picture’s subject. Those who are familiar with Eric’s album Far Side of the Sea will find its songs woven through the words and photos, connecting them to a larger narrative. The book in turn expands the album, illuminating points of inspiration and adding to the contemplation behind the songs. In that way, it serves as a lovely companion piece—like world-building for a record. A personal favorite is the photo-essay pairing titled Gravity that calls to the song of the same name (alternately titled “Vincent In Reverse“). The picture looks over a pair of tombstones set against a wheat field, as the passage beside it muses on the life and legacy of Vincent van Gogh: Did he own any hope that his impasto heart, the thick swabs of Cobalt blue and confessional ochres, the gilt moons, the birds—my God, those crows!—and the many slants of light would one day shine into countless souls who would be just as much in need of that gravity and radiance? Eric Peters Eric Peters gathers lost and discarded things and builds them into something new. Shigé Clark Just as Eric does through song, this work draws attention to the unnoticed and seeks to give them story. It heralds the neglected and strives to imbue them with dignity and hope. The passage for Gravity begins, “I thought of him alone with his oils”—a beautiful encapsulation of the unique way in which the author approaches the world. Of course he did. Of course he walked by these nondescript headstones with their unexceptional backdrop and thought of Vincent van Gogh. Of course he stopped to take a picture and reflect on the intersection of despair, and legacy, and beauty, and hope. In one of my favorite fantasy series, there’s an order of knights who live by the ideals, “I will remember those who have been forgotten. I will listen to those who have been ignored.” I can’t help but think that Eric could be a proud member of this order—because these are exactly the ideals that this book inspires. It encourages the reader to stop and interact with the world in a deeper way. Take note of the seemingly unremarkable. See beauty in what others would call ugly. Find meaning in what would otherwise be ignored. And that’s a shift in perspective most of us could use—I know I could. Click here to check out Far Side of the Sea: A Photographic Memory in the Rabbit Room Store.

[Editor’s note: In case you didn’t know, Malcolm Guite has an excellent collection of poetry for the seasons of Lent and Easter—one poem for each day, including classics like Dante, contemporaries like Rowan Williams, and the work of Guite himself. The collection is called The Word in the Wilderness, and it makes an excellent companion to the Lenten season. To give you a taste, here’s a poem of Guite’s called “Dancing Through the Fire.”] Then stir my love in idleness to flame To find at last the free refining fire That guards the hidden garden whence I came. O do not kill, but quicken my desire, Better to spur me on that leave me cold. Not maimed I come to you, I come entire, Lit by the loves that warm, the lusts that scald, That you may prove the one, reprove the other, Though both have been the strength by which I scaled The steps so far to come where poets gather And sing such songs as love gives them to sing. I thank God for the ones who brought me hither And taught me by example how to bring The slow growth of a poem to fruition And let it be itself, a living thing, Taught me to trust the gifts of intuition And still to try the tautness of each line, Taught me to taste the grace of transformation And trace in dust the face of the divine, Taught me the truth, as poet and as Christian, That drawing water turns it into wine. Now I am drawn through their imagination To dare to dance with them into the fire, Harder than any grand renunciation, To bring to Christ the heart of my desire Just as it is in every imperfection, Surrendered to his bright refiner’s fire That love might have its death and resurrection. For more excellent poetry and observations throughout the season of Lent, check out The Word in the Wilderness in the Rabbit Room Store. Artwork Credit: Sky Fire by Georgiana Romanovna

It’s no secret that we at the Rabbit Room are huge fans of the BibleProject. Their work, in all its forms—immersive videos, fascinating podcast conversations, the Read Scripture book and app, and so much more—testifies to a remarkable integration of beauty, truth-telling, and infectiously playful wisdom. They just released a new video that knocks it out of the park. Every color, motif, and word is chosen with the utmost care, resulting in five minutes of densely-packed teaching that will clarify the way you see the symbolism of trees all throughout the Bible. One primary purpose of the Rabbit Room is to uphold and shamelessly geek out about deeply good, gospel-inspired creative work being done wherever we find it. So if you’re new to the BibleProject, consider this your introduction. And if this isn’t your first rodeo, consider supporting their work by donating or sharing with your friends—they are a completely crowdfunded animation studio. Visit the BibleProject website to learn more.

Every now and then, a book comes along that rings all your bells, shivers all your timbers, winds your clock, melts your face, shakes your foundations, and smacks you upside the head to remind you that stories are altogether a form of magic—and if that’s true, if stories are magic, Helena Sorensen might as well be Gandalf. The Door on Half-Bald Hill is just that kind of book. It’s mythic. It’s personal. It’s tender. It’s terrifying. It’s fantastical. It’s historical. It’s pagan. It’s prophetic. It’s meticulously grounded, and yet gloriously transcendent. What is this book, you ask. Rightly so. Steeped in the landscape and lore of an ancient Celtic people, the book imagines a world on the brink of an abyss as its people struggle to find hope in the face of destruction. They look to their leaders for answers, but the answers they hear are hopeless. They look to the past for guidance, but the salvations of the past are powerless in the shadow of the Crone. They are a people desperate for hope, and desperate for answers. Like the psalmist they lift up their eyes to the hills and ask “Where does my help come from?” Enter Idris, the young Bard of Blackthorn. The book is a portal into his odyssey of awakening and discovery. In the same way that luminous works like C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Mark Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale nearly defy description yet leave readers with the indelible impression that the author has moved Heaven and Earth to impart a glimpse at the mystery in the heart of the world, The Door on Half-Bald Hill charts a course all its own as it stretches boldly toward the universal and numinous. This tale is defined and mapped by the author’s crystalline voice and confidence as she beckons us on a quest, not for an answer, but for a question—a question that can alter the course of history and change the world forever. Helena first approached me with this story nearly four years ago, and it’s been a delight to watch the book grow and develop as she’s refined it. She’s an incredible writer and her powers are on full display here. She’s crafty, patient, and deliberate, and I’m in awe of the way she’s so carefully put this story together. Her encyclopedic knowledge of her source material and the elegance with which she unspools her endgame are wonders to behold, as are the tender, human touches with which she chisels out her characters and their struggles. The starkness and strangeness of the world of Tír Ársa and the mythological texture of the story convinced me that it was crying out for illustration, and that led me to Stephen Crotts. He’s done the wonderful cover work and interior drawings, and I’m delighted with the atmosphere they evoke. There’s something in his work that hearkens back to Doré’s etchings from Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy, calling to mind tales ancient and primeval and signifying of eternal mysteries on the cusp of revelation. I’m so excited to get this book into the hands of readers so they can experience characters like Idris and Corann and Muriel and come to love them like I have. Helena has worked long and hard to give us something special, and it’s my great delight that Rabbit Room Press is able to present her gift to the world. Years in the making, it’s finally ready. May it wreck you and remake you in all the best ways. Click here to order and experience the story for yourself. The Door on Half-Bald Hill Paperback by Helena Sorensen coming Spring 2020 from Rabbit Room Press When the Bloodmoon rose, death came with it. Now the water is bitter, blight consumes everything, and the Crone haunts the hills. The Druid of Blackthorn searches desperately for hope, the Ovate of Blackthorn returns from the underworld bringing omens of despair, and Idris, the young Bard of Blackthorn, Keeper of the Sacred Word, will walk through fire and iron to uncover questions no one has ever dared to ask. But time is short. And the Bloodmoon is rising again.

Our March 3rd Local Show lineup is going to be a party. One big reason for that is the zanily skillful presence of Zach & Maggie, who will be making their Local Show debut. Allow us to introduce them to you. The music of Zach & Maggie is at once playful, captivating, and stealthily intelligent, drawing on the sounds of dusty accordions, fiddles, and mandolins in equal measure to traditional drums and bass in order to achieve endearing narrative songs. Once you start listening, you’ll find it hard to stop. Click here to purchase tickets to the next Local Show and here to peruse Zach & Maggie’s website.

The poet Christian Wiman writes, “Lord, suffer me to sing these wounds by which I am made and marred.” Only a few days remain in the year, and I stand singing on a Sunday morning. This world is a weary place, brokenness marks every face. Dear ones are lost and bodies languish, divisions drive our souls to anguish. Injustice mingles with the soil, we eat the bread of anxious toil. Hear our cries, show us favor, we need hope, we need a Savior. —”Lord Have Mercy,” Laura Frost My voice trembles, and I feel my jaw tighten. The notes ring in my ear, but not as loudly as the words. Weary. Brokenness. Injustice. Anxious. I hear those words scrape at my soul, tearing away at the armor I clothed it in when I stepped into the church. We need hope. I fumble through that last line and try to blink back the emotion flooding my face. The voices around me carry the lyrics I can’t seem to say. It seems a fitting way to end a hard year—a song of desperation sung with a shaking voice, a few tears, and a community who cries out with me. Show me the scars as you sing of his goodness. Then I might believe. Sarah J. Hauser I wonder if Israel experienced this as they sang psalms of lament together. As they traveled the long and wearying road to worship in the temple in Jerusalem, they sang, “In my distress I called to the Lord” and “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!” I can’t imagine what it’s like to carry their history as an enslaved and oppressed people. I sing in the comfort of a heated building with cushioned chairs, and my journey to worship involves a ten-minute drive, not a days-long trek. But I have cried out to God in sorrow, and the chorus around me offers a reminder that I’m not the only one. **** Other refuge have I none, Hangs my helpless soul on Thee; Leave, oh, leave me not alone, Still support and comfort me. All my trust on Thee is stayed, All my help from Thee I bring; Cover my defenseless head With the shadow of Thy wing. —”Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” Charles Wesley The Duke of Edinburgh clenches his jaw, his eyes locked in place in a futile effort to dam up the tears as he listens to the people of Aberfan sing. They’re standing over a mass grave lined with scores of small caskets. **** “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” the psalmist writes. Just five verses later, he says, “I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me” (Psalm 13:1, 6). The movement from pleading to rejoicing in such a short space seems too paradoxical to make sense. How do you sing to God when he feels so far away? How do you recount the goodness and generosity of God while mourning what’s been lost? **** Every week I walk to the front of our church and take a small cup of wine and a piece of cracker. I sit in my seat alongside my husband and kids and rehearse the story with my family again. “What does this represent?” my husband asks our kids. “Jesus’s body,” they reply. “And this?” He holds up the cup. “His blood.” They know the routine, their responses often rote. But we tell the story of his death and resurrection again and again, praying each week it sinks in a little deeper. It does for me, at least. There’s no resurrection without a death and no healing without his wounds. They need to know about the wounds. As we talk through the meaning of the elements with our kids, my four-year-old son starts singing, “Nothing but the blood of Jesus!” His high-pitched preschool voice rings more loudly than I’d like. I shift in my seat and ask him to whisper. But I don’t want to quiet his song too much. **** The Gospel of John tells us the story of Thomas’s initial disbelief in Jesus’ resurrection. Even though Thomas was one of Jesus’ closest companions, part of the inner group of twelve, he still doubted. When the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord,” Thomas says, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe” (John 20:25). I’m like that too, I think. I need to see the marks to believe in the healing. Thomas’s story speaks to all of us cynics. Tell me what God has done for your soul, yes. But show me the wounds he’s healed, the sea he’s turned to dry land, the fire used to purify, the death he’s brought to life. Show me the scars as you sing of his goodness. Then I might believe. **** On October 21, 1966 in the coal-mining town of Aberfan, South Wales, a huge pile of debris from a spoil tip broke loose and flowed downhill. It buried everything in its path—including a school. 144 people were killed; 116 of them were children. Netflix recounted the story in their series, The Crown. I paused the episode several times as I watched, and at one point I had to leave the room. I couldn’t help but weep as parents dug through the sludge in search of their children. I have three kids of my own. I cannot imagine. The show goes on to portray the different responses the Royal Family had to the tragedy. In the episode, Prince Philip—the Duke of Edinburgh and husband to Queen Elizabeth—visited the town and attended a mass funeral. After his return, as he pours a drink and unpacks a few belongings on his desk, the Queen asks him how it went. He shakes his head. “Extraordinary,” he replies. “The grief. The anger—at the government, at the coal board, but at God, too. Eighty-one children were buried today. The rage—on all the faces, behind all the eyes…They didn’t smash things up. They didn’t fight in the streets.” “What did they do?” the Queen asks, her eyebrows furrowed and her face looking almost confused. “They sang—the whole community. It’s the most astonishing thing I’ve ever heard.” **** Song in the midst of grief seems as impossible as resurrection after death. But in fact a man dead four days walked out of a tomb, raised to life by one who himself would soon do the same. So let us sing the whole story, for the doubters among us need to touch the scars to see the healing. Let us sing of the wounds of a Savior raised and sing of our own wounds pleading—and believing—he’ll bring life once again. Sing the wounds, the ones that mar us and the ones he will make whole. This post originally appeared on Sarah’s personal blog.

The season of Lent is a forty-day period mirroring Jesus’ forty days of temptation in the wilderness. During this time, participants devote special attention to the ache of incompletion, suffering, and trial in their lives, both collectively and individually. Hemmed in by Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday, Lent begins with the dust of mortality and ends with the broken bread of the Last Supper. As Lent is traditionally considered a season of “prayer and fasting,” it’s often associated with gloom, giving up chocolate or coffee, and other forms of funlessness. But it’s important to remember that self-denial is not the ultimate goal—in fact, and rather counterintuitively, the hope of Lent is that by acknowledging the depth of our ache, we would be led to greater depths of joy. N. T. Wright said it beautifully: “Following Jesus means denying yourself, saying ‘no’ to the things that you imagine make up your ‘self,’ and finding to your astonishment that the ‘self’ you get back is more glorious, more joyful than you could have imagined.” So with this Lent playlist, we offer you some songs that have stirred in us both a greater recognition of our own need and a deeper hope for the restoration that is to come. Illustration by Ned Bustard, from Doug McKelvey’s liturgy for “Those Who Weep Without Knowing Why” Click here to listen to our Lent playlist on Spotify. And here on Apple Music. “Dust We Are and Shall Return” by The Brilliance A beautiful arrangement of a traditional Ash Wednesday liturgy. —Chris Yokel “Fell Like A Feather” by Amy Stroup The line “the light stings as it tears through unbelief” feels about as Lenten as it gets to me. —Kelsey Miller “Carbon Ribs” by John Mark McMillan His album The Medicine is still a staple in my Lent to Good Friday listening, mostly because it doesn’t shy away from the grit and reality of life on earth while reaching for the mystery of indwelling spirit and resurrection. This song in particular captures that tension and longing beautifully. —Jen Yokel “The Trapper and the Furrier” by Regina Spektor This visceral song exposes the falseness of worldly power with a grief and weariness that whets my appetite for justice. —Drew Miller “Let It Fall” by Over The Rhine ‘Cause rain and leaves And snow and tears and stars And that’s not all my friend They all fall with confidence and grace So let it fall, let it fall While I know that this song is from a Christmas album (Blood Oranges in the Snow), it’s articulated the concept of loss for me over the past few years in a way that no other song has done. It’s kind of sat with me in my grief and let me ugly-cry. But it’s also reminded me, over and over again, that, in Gospel-economy, falling into the ground is a death unto life. —Lanier Ivester “High Noon” by Andrew Peterson The Lenten season is an annual invitation for us to respond to the events that ushered in a new reality. I’ve always loved Andrew’s song for the way it beckons us, “Let the people rejoice / Let the heavens resound / Let the name of Jesus, who sought us / And freed us forever ring out.” —Matt Conner “Hard To Get” by Rich Mullins This is my favorite song Rich ever wrote, and he died before he could record it, but I think the rough demo version he taped as he played his guitar in an old church perfectly captures the raw ache of the song. At one point he invokes Jesus’ sleepless night in the Garden of Gethsemane, the sweat mingled with blood, the anguish, the utter loneliness of a God who understands the depths of our loneliness. But to me this song feels most like Holy Saturday—the dark space of waiting and confusion and hard, hard trust between the crucifixion and the resurrection, between despair and joy, when we know there are answers to our questions but we can’t quite feel them yet. “I know that it would not hurt any less even if it could be explained.” “I can’t see how you’re leading me, unless you’ve led me here to where I’m lost enough to let myself be led.” The most honest Christian lyrics I’ve ever heard. —Jennifer Trafton “Learning How To Die” by Jon Foreman Jon Foreman meditates on the fact that life is really about coming to grips with our mortality. —Chris Yokel “The Ghost of Tom Joad” by Bruce Springsteen The Grapes of Wrath is one of the great American novels (go read it NOW if you haven’t), and this Springsteen song, which is inspired by Tom Joad’s speech to his Ma near the end of the book, is a great illustration of our longing for justice and equity in the world. —Pete Peterson “Weeping Mary” by Loud Harp This short, meditative hymn reminds us that the season of Lent is meant to simplify and focus our over-complicated lives. It doesn’t offer long, theological statements within its lines, but instead brings us back to this elementary truth: Jesus offered rest and a light burden when the world offered sinking anxieties and mournful weeping. —Chris Thiessen “Parrot in Portugal” by Sandra McCracken Originally released during Lent last year, this song is a gorgeous example of hope born through suffering. The sense of liberation these melodies carry is the kind we can only find by reckoning fully with our sorrow—the result is a freedom with that distinct taste of having recovered one’s true name. —Drew Miller “Anytime” by Neil Finn This is a perfect Ash Wednesday song about the unpredictability of death and the longing to be part of a bigger story. I once sang it at our church’s Tenebrae service. “Although you’re still a mystery, I’m so glad I’m not alone.” —Jill Phillips “Enough” by Jill DeZwaan A lovely prayer that reminds me of truths that I constantly seem to lose track of. This song confesses a need to depend on the sufficiency of Christ—even for the very act of depending on the sufficiency of Christ. —Jonny Jimison “Jesus, Remember Me” (Taizé) In Luke 23, one of the criminals hanging beside Jesus says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” This is the humble plea of a sinner and a prayer of faith. Taizé is an ecumenical communi­ty in France. Their community and many other Christian communities and churches use this song as a medita­tive chant. These simple words and tune come from the hand of Jacques Berthier, one of the primary composers associated with the community. —Rob Wheeler “God Rested” by Andrew Peterson I would choose “God Rested” from the Resurrection Letters Prologue. The music builds behind the steady lyrics, like something grand is approaching and the singer doesn’t know. The whole song ends like a bated breath and makes you lean forward, waiting. —Shigé Clark Click here to listen to our Lent playlist on Spotify. And here on Apple Music. What are some songs that express the season of Lent for you? Please share in the comments section!

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers interviews Jen Pollock Michel, author of Surprised by Paradox: The Promise of “And” in an Either-Or World. Jen Pollock Michel is the author of three books, most recently Surprised By Paradox: The Promise of And in an Either-Or World. In this episode, Jonathan and Jen discuss the role of paradox in writing, the difference between either-or and both-and, and the difference between mystery and paradox. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 8 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.