What are you looking for?

When I first learned about hospice, I focused on death and dying. That’s certainly one focus of hospice—but it’s not the only one. Although the modern hospice movement began with the work of Dr. Cicely Saunders in the 1960s, the concept of “hospice” is much older and wider. It derives from the Latin hospes, which refers to both “guest” and “host.” In medieval Christendom, hospices were hubs of hospitality for the sick and dying as well as for travelers and pilgrims. These early European hospices were common throughout the Middle Ages, phasing out only with the decline of religious orders. When I first became involved with a hospice in college, I didn’t expect to learn about hospitality. I began volunteering because I’d lost loved ones and wanted to learn about death, that cloaked thing that isn’t supposed to sting but usually does anyway. In my four years of involvement in the world of hospice, I’ve learned a little about death and a lot about hospitality. The former is mysterious and maybe inaccessible to my twenty-something brain; the latter is abundant in my life and, I’d argue, hard to avoid once you start looking. Hospitality in Hospice In my most meaningful hospice experiences, the patient-provider relationship has been marked by a distinct depth. The dying person is treated not as an unsolvable medical problem but rather as a guest in the home. To sit with a dying patient is to sit with a living person, to peer through the glass and into some of the strangeness of that last chapter. This perspective colors the relationship and can shift the dynamic from one of living-and-dying to one of host-and-guest. This host-and-guest relationship may be a marker of quality hospice care. While interning with a palliative care organization in New Delhi, I had the opportunity to shadow teams of Indian providers as they visited terminally-ill patients in their homes. In ideal cases, the family and team treated the dying person like a guest of honor; the person’s needs were prioritized, and extra efforts were made to ensure their comfort. Even in America, where most of the people I’ve visited have died in care centers, effective hospices have treated their patients as guests, not as medical consumers. Hospice creates space for comfort and rest. Similarly, my current vocation as a traveling hospice songwriter has not only invited hospitality but depended upon it. I wrote this post while on a month-long tour, a road trip that would be nonsensical if not for the generosity of my hosts. In many cases, these hosts are “strangers”—we’ve never met, several of them are unfamiliar with my work, and yet somehow they remain open to disruption in the form of a wandering musician. These tokens of freedom are hot coals on pessimism, and they're contagious. J Lind My recent encounters with hospitality could fill a book. Two nights ago, one “stranger” refused to let me sleep on their couch; instead, they gave me their bedroom and private bathroom, fresh towels and linens, and the key to their house. Last night, another “stranger,” who is not in any financial position to give, invited me over, let me raid their fridge, and then invited me over again. Others have sent me on my way with bags of food, gallons of antifreeze, and even money to fix my broken windshield. I’ve stayed with more than sixty such hospitable “strangers” coast-to-coast, and I’ve been consistently moved by the absurd grace in it all. Hospitality As Creation Henri Nouwen offers a refreshing take on hospitality: Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. —Nouwen, Reaching Out An open fridge; keys to the house; windshield money. These tokens of freedom are hot coals on pessimism, and they’re contagious; I want to spread the coals and burn the fields, but only to create more free space. I have received a gift, and now I want to pay it forward. The beauty of hospice, I would argue, lies at least in part in its coincidence with this virtue of hospitality, which involves the creation of free space for restoration. To be a caregiver is to be hospitable. To be hospitable is to be creative. And to be creative is to participate in a wider story. You can learn more about J and listen to his music at JLindMusic.com, and purchase his album, For What It’s Worth, here in the Rabbit Room Store.

“Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.”—St. Mark 10:15 One of the great mysteries of the Gospel is its accessibility—its exclusive accessibility—to children and those who would follow the way of childlike receptivity. But what is it about the way of children that so privileges them? Randall Goodgame has spent much of the last decade exploring this mystery. Through the early Slugs & Bugs albums to the Slugs & Bugs: Sing the Bible series, the tours, curricula, Slugs & Bugs books, and television series, Randall has plunged into a vocation that presupposes and speaks to the essential wisdom, honesty, and dignity of children. At each stage of his growth in this vocation, Randall has sacrificed none of the simple honesty of his projects, even as the Slugs & Bugs world has diversified and grown in subtlety and vividness. Whether he set out upon a project of Tolkien-ian world building I know not. But it’s pretty clear that’s where the project has gone, and is going. “You step onto the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” 1 Development, after all, is a childlike thing. Children develop, and they spare no cost to develop the projects of their joy. To heed the call to this childlike earnestness is repentance, and to re-learn this kind of wonder, laughter and love, the fruit of repentance. David Mitchel With the latest Slugs & Bugs album, Modern Kid, Randall brings the larger Slugs & Bugs project full circle, back to silly songs. But now he brings with him a cast of characters—Doug the Slug, Sparky the Lightning Bug, Carla the Delivery Lady—with formed personalities and recognizable voices (thanks to the delightful voice-over work of Ricky Boyd, James Kemp, and Amy Goodgame). There are witty meditations on animals (“The Pangolin Song”) and prophetic unveilings of the tech-obsessed life (“Modern Kid” and “Cell Phone Jones”) worthy of the child who said the Emperor wore no clothes. There are musical musings on domestic chores like walking the dog (“Poop in a Bag”) and making the bed (“The Bed-Making Song”) and new commercial sponsors (Foster’s Duck & Hedgehog Repellant). Randall has with him one brilliant producer, Ben Shive, who was with him at the beginning as a master workman; and he also has fresh contributions from another outstanding producer, Don Chaffer. The wheel rolls on, and coming full circle makes one circumference’s distance run. And maybe that’s part of what distinguishes the childlikeness Jesus commends from the childishness St. Paul puts away: it moves with the turning of the wheel, rather than curving in on itself by spinning in place. This idea finds beguilingly simple expression in the opening dialogue to “I’ve Got a Balloon”: MS. CARLA: Don’tcha know, I used to love balloons back when I was a little girl. MR. RANDALL: So you don’t like them any more? MS. CARLA: Well—you know, now that you mention it, I do still like balloons. They don’t stay around too long, but they sure can raise a smile while they last. “I’ve Got a Balloon” To love balloons well is to accept a key quality of their balloon-ness: transience. To smile at them while they last is childlike; to resent their going, childish. We see a similar idea, in yet subtler form, in Modern Kid’s title song. In Ben Goodgame’s spoken-word appearance in the song, he describes how he expects to “feel big” by the things he can make, play, and see on an iPad. But as quickly as we hear what he desires from his devices, we hear a response: But if it all went away, I guess I could be okay—if it all went away. But I gotta have just one friend, somebody that knows my name, Somebody that’ll give me five when I see ‘em at the football game. “Modern Kid” The childlike recognize that the common grace of one real friend out in the world surpasses all the triumphs and novelties the pixelated world affords. The friend calls us out of ourselves. That is, in fact, the common grace of all the Creator’s works: they call us out of ourselves, away from our sophisticated devices, to the earnest wonder, laughter, compassion, and affection of a child. To heed the call to this childlike earnestness is repentance, and to re-learn this kind of wonder, laughter and love, the fruit of repentance. If anyone wonders where the “gospel proclamation” is in Modern Kid, it’s in the pangolins, flying ping-pong balls, and dog-doo that feeds the country flies. These fit right in among the sparrows, lilies, pinches of leaven, and mustard seeds. “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight.”2

I’ve been wanting to have this conversation with Helena Sorensen ever since I had the pleasure of reading her last draft of The Door on Half-Bald Hill over the holidays. In this interview, we discuss the choice of partnering with life or with death, the apocalypse, thematic overlap between her story and the drama of Holy Week, the wonders of Celtic mythology, and much more. It was a long conversation, so I’ve broken it down into two parts. You’ll see the rest of our conversation on the blog on Maundy Thursday. Drew: To begin, I must acknowledge the timing of this book. It’s exceptional. This book is entering readers’ hands during a global pandemic. How are you feeling about that as the person who brought it into the world? Helena: Well, it’s very strange! I always thought of it as a book that no one would read. Even Pete and Andrew—they joke about all the books they publish that people will never read, and this one felt like an addition to that list since its inception. So we’ve laughed about it from the beginning. D: How many years ago did it begin? H: 2016 is when I sent it to Pete and I started writing it in 2015. The journey has been frustrating and long. My thinking was that it would finally come out, I’d be so excited, and then I’d move on to the next thing, and that would be it. And it may still be exactly like that. But the timing of the pandemic and the story is—I don’t know if I have words for it. Maybe it will make it more accessible, or make it feel like a more valuable story to people. But nothing has happened yet that would make me know how this story will impact people. D: So let’s bring Holy Week into this: every year, we walk through the story of Holy Week in our imaginations, letting it tell us about the reality we’re in. And now, we’re adding to the mix this story you’re bringing into the world—do you see any gut-level connections between the posture of Holy Week and The Door on Half-Bald Hill? What can we bring as readers and participants into the experience of both? H: One especially potent connection is the theme of waiting. When I think of the kind of waiting we do in the liturgical year, it feels like an extremely active waiting. Hope is an action verb. It’s something we see in the activity of the disciples in the story of the gospels—they’re so confused about who the Messiah is, what they need, and what the end of the story will look like. Just getting up in the morning becomes this statement of faith: there's more here than I can see, and it just might be good. Helena Sorensen That’s true in Half-Bald Hill, too. They run up against the end of a story and they have no idea what it could be, other than death and darkness. But they continue. Their waiting is beautiful because they partner with life instead of partnering with death: they harvest food, plant seeds, continue to see and care for each other, and generally operate as a community. Just getting up in the morning becomes this statement of faith: there’s more here than I can see, and it just might be good. D: You mentioned bumping up against the end of a story. That’s such a provocative phrase. It really rings true to me, even as a fitting descriptor of what we’re experiencing in our world today. How are characters in Half-Bald Hill bumping up against the end of their own story? H: For one thing, their land is sick. It’s giving out, not able to produce the kind of food that will nourish them. In the beginning of the story, a character who’s a kind of leader of the people comes and says, “I have a message from the ancestors! They say it’s time to embrace death. That’s the end of our story.” A lot of characters receive that and say, “Oh. Okay. We didn’t want that to be the end, but if it is, we’ll comply.” So they rush along towards it and call it courage. But the characters you love most in the story are the ones who refuse to receive that and say instead, “No, there’s the possibility of a different ending here and I’m not going to give up.” There are so many ways to partner with death. Cynicism partners with death; it says there’s no good that can surprise me. Unforgiveness partners with death; it says there’s no possibility of life in a relationship that’s broken. Despair partners with death; it says I can see the end and it’s all decided and settled. Free will, then, becomes very important. If you believe we’re operating in a world that is controlled, then this might be a moment when you say, “Well, all the signs are here. Looks like it’s time to give up.” But if you’re operating in a framework of free will, which is how love must operate, all our choices really do matter. Our choice to get up in the morning and plant seeds is a way of partnering with life, believing this isn’t the end. I talked a little bit in my recent Rabbit Room piece about the Celtic knot: where’s the end and where’s the beginning? It’s all wrapped up together and you can’t distinguish one from the other. It makes me think of that verse that says righteousness and peace have kissed each other. There’s this human demand that we must make things right. And there’s this peace of God that says, “I’ve already made it right.” Which is the beginning and which is the end? They’re woven together so beautifully. D: That’s gorgeous. One of the most spine-tingling, spooky parts of the book for me was the refrain—and Pete clarified for me that this is a Yeats reference—“Come away, come away, leave the weeping world behind.” That entered the story repeatedly through the puka. Are pukas real things in Celtic mythology? H: Yes, Irish and Celtic mythology. And the puka tended to be more of a trickster, like playing tricks on people at night. But one of the things pukas did was lure people away. D: I think it could be helpful to go further into all the many ways of partnering with death. Because as you were enumerating them, I had characters from your story flash through my head. And all of them were grandiose. Certainly Zinerva, and the druid who lights himself on fire. That seems to be the climax of this partnership with death. That scene is so potent in my memory. H: I was thinking a lot about how communities as a whole respond to harmful messages like that from leaders they revere, and who speak apparently with the authority of their entire history and folklore—people they ought to be able to trust. That particular Celtic ceremony happened in the autumn each year. At that point it’s starting to get cold, harvest has passed, and the year is moving into darkness. They would make a wheel and roll it down a hill to symbolize the year rolling on past them, onward and onward without ceasing. So in Half-Bald Hill, it’s in a moment like that when the druid takes that wheel away, out of the ceremony and all its attached significance, and uses it for destruction. It’s like he’s saying, “I don’t see where this reality is going and I can’t control where it’s going, so I have to make an end of it right now on my own terms.” Only fear, profound fear, can drive someone to do that. D: When you talk about hitting the end of a story, where it can’t explain what happens next or account for reality anymore, I think of Corann and his endless search. That is something that has huge overlap with Holy Week: that tension between the old and new. How does that theme play itself out in Half-Bald Hill? H: Corann was always a picture of the old ways, but I say that with love for Corann. He’s not just stubborn or stupid. He only knows one way, and he is quite faithful and dogged and relentless in his attempts to wring any ounce of life or hope out of that old way. Everything Idris has ever learned has come from Corann. He’s become who he is because of the work Corann has invested in him. But Corann just believes in the old ways, which have worked for many, many, many generations. I think that was true of the Jewish people when Jesus came. D: In their eyes, it worked! Their systems worked. H: Yes, they had a plan. So for someone to step into that and say, “No, this isn’t ultimate. There’s more here to discover” can be a bit insulting. It feels like, “Hey, you young whipper-snapper, how do you know? You can’t just change this thing willy-nilly!” One gift of the pause we’re in right now is the chance to stop and re-evaluate the old ways, and say, “We’ve been running 90 miles per hour in this direction. Is that the direction we want to be going in?” Likewise in Half-Bald Hill, the characters are forced to a stop. And at the end of the story, it’s the willingness of Idris to venture into something new that sets Corann free. He’s finally able to acknowledge that he was wrong and to laugh. In fact, one of the last things we see in the story is Corann’s laughter: a partnering with life. To listen and collaborate with the Spirit in spite of oneself—that is life, and our last picture of Corann is someone swept away in the beauty of that life. D: What would you say about the connection between openness to the new and the maddening silence that is often there to greet you? The work of hearing this new word is so arduous for Idris. What is the silence for? Why does it take so long? H: Well, I don’t know if you were raised in a tradition that said changing your mind was a moral failing. That was the message I got growing up: the faithful are the ones who get their theology figured out early and stand by it forever. And if that’s where you come from, and then you find yourself in life circumstances that don’t play out the way you were taught they would play out—if you do X, Y, or Z, then God will be obligated to bless you—a lot of us can find ourselves stuck in those times because we were never given the freedom to call those assumptions into question. And that’s the thing: you must feel freedom in order to ask those questions. Often that process begins with trying all the ways you’ve been taught, then encountering the failure of those old ways, then admitting that those ways have failed you, and then finally finding the freedom to share that frustration with yourself. Idris is slow in the beginning because he feels like he’s on his own, like he’s inadequate. He feels ill-equipped to take on this new role. People are looking to him for answers and he doesn’t even know what questions to ask yet. D: I think of the terminology of deconstruction and reconstruction. Perhaps the reason Idris has so much work before him is that he not only has to provide the right answers, but he has to dig himself out of the hole of misconceptions and wrong questions first. H: And as he nears the right question, the last question, the one that must be asked and answered, he becomes quieter and slower and far more grounded. He spends long periods of time doing ordinary things: waiting, watching, listening. You’d think that as the deadline nears, the opposite would happen. But instead, he’s settling down into the things that actually matter most. D: That mirrors the walk of Jesus towards the cross. There’s a resolve that sweeps over the story toward the end. That’s one reason that as a narrative it’s so brilliant: this huge, cosmic event is immanent, but there’s a peace and assurance that undergirds the entire thing. It ensures the reader of what to hope and look for. H: And with all the significance we find in the Last Supper—the body and blood, the Eucharist—the fact that Jesus even stopped at that moment to sit down and have a meal with his disciples is remarkable. How many other things could he have chosen to do? This concludes Part 1 of our conversation. Check back again on Thursday for the rest. In the meantime, check out The Door on Half-Bald Hill in the Rabbit Room Store.

It was all right, I knew, and so I drew lots of pictures of it. Grandma wasn’t sick anymore; Grandma was with Jesus, somewhere in the sweet by and by. I was going to wear a navy velvet dress and black leather shoes and sing “Amazing Grace” with my brother at her funeral. I was only five years old, but I was a pious little child and firmly believed someday I would go see Jesus and her together. The three of us would be very happy, and that was a moment worth drawing pictures of, so I drew lots of pictures of it. Of course it was all right. I drew pictures of it. Then came the time to put on the dress and go to the funeral home and sing “Amazing Grace.” Then came the time to sit down and be quiet and listen to my father tell stories about Grandma. They were good stories. Then, in the middle of my favorite one, he stopped. Although the story wasn’t over, he stopped, eyes red, said a few more words, quiet now, and his voice was thick now when he talked. He stopped again, and he began sobbing. He wasn’t just crying; he was shaking now, weeping, unable to carry on. This was not something I could have drawn a picture of, if I had tried. Still, even without a picture, I can see it all now: my little hands folded in the navy velvet of my lap, my black shoes not quite reaching the floor, my aunt beside me, holding me and a box of tissues at the same time, and my father up in front, beside the casket, weeping. For the first time in five years of living, it was not all right. How could it be? He was my father, and still is, and fathers by definition do not cry. They hold you when you cry. They hold your mother when she comes home late, crying and whispering into his shoulder, “It’s over. She’s home now.” But fathers do not cry. My childish vision of my dad, utterly strong and therefore unmovable, unshaken by any tragedy, died that afternoon in the funeral home. It seemed I had lost not one but two people that day. No, it does not seem all right—that story of a God they call the Morning Star who moved, who left heaven and the sweet by and by for earth, to be cut down by young braggarts, to fall on the beams of a fallen tree, to weep at the side of his friend's casket. Hannah Hubin I thought of that afternoon again a few years ago, when I was sixteen and finishing Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow for the first time. I hope you’ve read it, because it’s one of the books I can honestly say has changed my life forever; and from what I can tell, a lot of folks around here say the same. I also hope you’ve read it because I’m about to spoil the ending. Somewhere in the final few chapters, a young braggart named Troy cuts an ancient forest down to a stack of lumber. The grove is more than a timber stand; it is a symbol for the town of stability and strength—the unmovable, old vision of life—and it falls. When he discovers what Troy has done, the main character Jayber calls himself “a man whose knees were weakening against gravity, who needed to go somewhere and lie down.” Before my father wept at my grandmother’s funeral, I had never seen a forest fall. If I could go back, what would I say to that five year-old girl in the navy velvet dress, walking into the funeral home, holding her father’s hand? “Don’t fool yourself, kid. He’s not as strong as you think he is.” Would I? Is he? Or perhaps I would just sidle up next to her and whisper in her ear, “You’re going to need somewhere to lie down.” I learned last year that the north star—that steady point of navigation—changes ever so slowly. Earth rotates on an axis, and the poles drift through the star field, and we pass from one star to another. Polaris is our north star, but only for now. In the year 13,700 AD, Vega will be our new north star, or so I have been told by friends and foreigners who map the stars better than I. We will have other north stars between Polaris and Vega. Hentai Heroes or Harem Heroes. Here’s more about that, the game is the same, it was rebranded and Hentai Heroes became the main game. Can you see how our finest fixed points move? Can you hear the chainsaws cutting the forest? Do you need to go somewhere and lie down? It’s been fifteen years since my grandmother died—fifteen years since I first saw my dad weep. Since then, I’ve seen him cry again—not often, very rarely; but still, he does sob sometimes. Another forest is falling; can you see it? Would it help if I drew you a picture? I’m afraid I can’t; not of this. It is not all right. We will come to another north star soon. I live just outside city limits, down past West Main. You can imagine how it goes: how the road runs through the downtown square and then along the residential district and all those little wooden structures of history in our antebellum town, then how it all tumbles out into a tree-led drive that rolls less-than-straight home past lumber-slat fences and more wood-framed houses. Wood seems strong and unmovable, but I know better. I’ve read how stable stands of timber fall to lumber, how they crack, shake, and collide against the ground. All it takes is one young braggart to bring them down. Still, we construct our homes from beams already fallen and trust them not to fall again, to be stronger this time, to hold against the wind and the rain. We trust wood to not crack, weaken, and come down in the middle of the night, smothering us in our beds. We walk through forests unafraid. Are we fools for this? If so, we are no more foolish than the generations of mariners who have aligned their sextants with the north star to find their place on this sphere. They have determined their latitude and checked errors in their gyrocompasses and other navigational equipment against the so-called stability of Polaris. For centuries, they have acted in trust that the star does not move and that earth does not move from it. I am afraid to break the news to them. Will their knees weaken against gravity? Will they need to go somewhere to lie down? I hope they don’t go somewhere made of wood.  Wood falls easily, you know. When earth seems to be spinning too quickly through the star field, and I need something solid; when every tree seems to be coming down and I need something stable; when I am weak and I need someone strong, my father is still the first person I call. There have been times, and there still are times, when he cries with me. Why do we trust what we know can be moved, fallen, shaken? We trust our direction, we trust our lives, we trust our last ounce of strength to things and people who seem sometimes not very strong at all. What is strength? Some Wednesdays, every once and a while, when social isolation doesn’t prohibit it and my class schedule allows it, I go to the midweek service at the Anglican church that meets in one of those little wooden buildings on West Main, where there is never enough parking. There is barely enough space inside for the little congregation to stand between the altar and the chairs. I say the prayers, and dip the bread in the wine, and hear the Good Story one more time. Like so much of life, it is not something I can draw a picture of; it does not seem all right. No, it does not seem all right—that story of a God they call the Morning Star who moved, who left heaven and the sweet by and by for earth, to be cut down by young braggarts, to fall on the beams of a fallen tree, to weep at the side of his friend’s casket. Some call it foolish, I know, but I trust his strength to be sufficient for me. Thanks be to God.

What were you doing when you were 10-years-old? Despite the fact she’s lost count of the number of times she’s been asked to play the Grand Ole Opry, bluegrass icon Sierra Hull remembers her first appearance came to her at the age of 10. Those were the same years she signed to Rounder Records, played Carnegie Hall, and got a call from her hero Alison Krauss to join her on stage. Sierra has established more musical milestones than most career artists despite the fact that she’s still in her mid-twenties. She’s been named Mandolin Player of the Year multiple times by the IBMA and earned loads of acclaim and a Grammy nom for her previous album, the Bela Fleck-produced Weighted Mind. What role does Resistance play for an artist who has achieved so much so early? To hear Sierra tell her story, she’s experienced as much Resistance as ever as she’s released her latest album—the stunning masterwork known as 25 Trips. From industry hurdles to lessons learned about believing her own voice, Sierra’s proof that the Resistance hits all of us equally. There’s never a way around it, only through it. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Sierra Hull. Click here to listen to this episode of The Resistance. And here to visit Sierra Hull’s website. And here to learn more about The Resistance Podcast.

In Season 2, Episode 2, Drew Miller and Andy Gullahorn dig deep into his song, “The End of a World,” its backstory, and the windy path that land Andy to its final version. In this episode, Drew and Andy discuss Andy’s abiding love of math, the silent power of omission, the symbiotic relationship between convention and invention, and several iterations of “The End of a World” that preceded the final record. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 2 of The Second Muse. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with graphic designer, illustrator, author and printmaker Ned Bustard. In this episode, Jonathan and Ned discuss the fraught topic of success in art, the clarifying effect of working for one’s community, and how he and his wife, Leslie, have planted seeds in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 15 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’ve been wanting to have this conversation with Helena Sorensen ever since I had the pleasure of reading her last draft of The Door on Half-Bald Hill over the holidays. In this interview, we discuss the choice of partnering with life or with death, the apocalypse, thematic overlap between her story and the drama of Holy Week, the wonders of Celtic mythology, and much more. It was a long conversation, so I’ve broken it down into two parts. To take us into Maundy Thursday, here’s Part 2. Drew: I’m hearing you lean into this theme of the small tasks and chores of life taking on an eternal significance. I love how you chose a few different village tasks to recur and ground the story. Helena: The place where that began, having something each character was responsible for, began with what Idris would have to do at the end. The question was, “How can these characters go with Idris when he walks through the gate?” So these items became this crucial thing that the characters are always seen in light of. Engl is taking care of the sick baby, and she’s up all night with him, so she has this little candle pot that you always see flickering in the window. Calder, the old man, has this little blossom of flowers he always brings to his wife. What Idris gives at the end is simply his version of that one thing. He doesn’t necessarily see it as this huge, heroic sacrifice. He has the one thing he can give, and that’s what he gives. And I think that’s what all the other characters do as well: exactly what they’re uniquely qualified to do. The fishermen go out and fish because that’s what they can do. Even the little children try to fill up these hollowed-out rocks with rain to bring water to everyone, because that’s what they can do. The only place where that falls apart and doesn’t happen is when the healer, the Ovate, doesn’t do the job that she’s there to do. When she refuses, she partners with death. But all those small tasks are significant because they remind us of what is really true. I wash feet to remember that the body matters. Even when I see it decaying and growing old or getting sick, it matters. Institutions like to determine what the need is, then squeeze that out of people. But community sees the value of each person and asks how we can bring that value to light in a way that benefits all. D: The first book I compared Half-Bald Hill to was Till We Have Faces, because both are marked by a loving engagement with mythology. What especially reminded me of Lewis was that you’re working within this vast, mythological world, but you’re doing so in a way that is both faithful to that world—born out of study and research—and also points ultimately beyond it. There are passages towards the end of your book where Idris bumps up against the light underneath all creation that he doesn’t have a name for. By that point, the mythology has become more than just a narrative device. So what did you discover in bringing your own Christian paradigm to bear on this story? H: Let me start by saying that in the same way that individuals have something to bring to a community that makes it a whole, I think all the various communities of the world, all the people of history, have some aspect of who God is that we can learn from. Even the dark ones. I don’t think the revelation of God is limited to one group of people. Most of us have more knowledge and awareness of Greek mythology, where you have these stories of the gods fighting amongst themselves, acting violently and lustfully, and the humans are the real victims. There’s this huge metaphysical line between humanity and the gods, a real sense of helplessness in the presence of the divine. What if the thing being revealed in apocalypse is good news? Might the full revelation of the goodness and presence of God continually surprise us with joy upon joy? Helena Sorensen In Irish and Celtic mythology, it’s very different. One thing that was so fun about my research was that these people saw the gods as much more on their level. They felt like their gods needed to prosper in order for them to prosper. So that interconnectedness was not just on the human level, but between the human and divine. You even have this story of a king who lays his body down as a bridge for his people to cross over. That was their understanding of leadership. And the joy in their stories is amazing. There’s this overstatement to their stories, this merriment and exaggeration that is quite infectious. In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill talks about how the Latin Church fell into darkness during the collapse of the Roman Empire. During that period, there were these Irish monks who saved crucial manuscripts of scripture from the Roman Empire and then released them out into Europe as civilization rose back up to its knees. And one of the things the Irish did most was to infuse joy into Christianity. I don’t think you can encounter any version of their world, whether pagan or Christian, without finding this abiding joy. It’ll take your breath away. D: Does God delight in precariousness? In history, things so often unfold in such a way that so many landmark events almost don’t happen. It was up to this handful of Irish scribes to make sure that the gospel made it into the rest of the world. How crazy is that? H: The great joke. D: Yes! It’s laughter. H: I don’t know if it was MacDonald or Chesterton who said that the thing Jesus didn’t fully reveal to us was his mirth. He shows us his sorrow, his love, but his joy remains hidden. I want people to feel that at the end of Half-Bald Hill—it’s so precarious, there’s no way there can be a happy ending. But that laughter of God bubbles to the surface; he’s so not afraid and so joyful about the end of the story. Can we enter into that, just a little bit? D: I think a good place to end this conversation is with the idea of apocalypse. We’ve touched on it a bit—coming up against the end of a story. That’s an apocalyptic idea. And apocalypse is at the heart of both your story and Holy Week, as we all bring this anticipation of death. There’s even something very rich in the word “apocalypse:” it doesn’t necessarily mean destruction. It just means a revealing of what was always true. H: There you go! Preach it! D: So there’s still something ending, there’s still death, we’re coming to the limits of our story, but it doesn’t have to mean despair. What sort of closing thoughts might you have for us in this apocalyptic season of our world’s history, when things are being revealed about what was always true? H: The kids and I have been wallowing in Shakespeare passages for the first three months of this year, for homeschooling. And we’ve memorized and talked about that very, very famous passage of Hamlet, the “To Be or Not To Be” speech. He says, “To die would be to sleep. To sleep perchance to dream: there’s the rub. In that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause?” This speech is one of the most heartbreaking I have ever seen in literature: the speaker is in so much anguish that he would love the release of death, but death holds so much terror that he can’t take the risk. Who is the author of that kind of fear? I promise you it’s not God. Sometimes, we can become so trapped in fear that we can’t receive love and can’t receive God. When that amygdala reaction happens, all the relational parts of the brain are shut off— D: The things that make us human. H: Absolutely! And it’s reasonable to run from a bear. We don’t see a bear and try to be sophisticated instead— D: I will now resist acting upon my reptilian instincts! I will instead engage the bear— H: In conversation! We shall be friends! (laughter) Right? But most of us are stuck in that. And again, to partner with death is to say there’s a bear around every corner, that the truest thing about reality is always some new horror. But what if the thing being revealed in apocalypse is good news? Might the full revelation of the goodness and presence of God continually surprise us with joy upon joy? D: That sounds like eucatastrophe, which is a good word for right now, as we are surrounded by catastrophe. I will ask in response: there must be a continuity between the suffering we see as part of the revealing of what is true and that joy you speak of. That feels like the tallest order, the biggest task: to make sense out of that. How do you peel back the curtain and find a plague—find a consequence of partnering with death—but also see it leading beyond into good news? Do you have any advice on how we can take in so much bad news, so much catastrophe, and yet see hints of the eucatastrophe, the good apocalypse underneath? H: I can tell you where I’ve been personally with that question lately. As Christians, so often we’ve been taught that the best we can say is that God did not cause evil, but that he allowed it. But we say a lot of things about God that, if we were to say them about any other human being, we would call that person a monster. Oh, but “his ways are higher than our ways,” right? That’s what we say to convince ourselves that, since he doesn’t play by our rules, his version of love will be unrecognizable and maybe even disturbing to us. If someone is beating or murdering or raping another person, and you stand by and watch it happen—that’s a crime. You can go to jail for that. So there are these places in my heart where I’ve felt towards God, “You’re good, but I also secretly believe you’re a monster,” or “I love you, but I’m also scared to death of you”—and those are all places of suffering. They’re places where God is not fully revealed. I think what “allow” really means is that God says, “I love and value humans so much that I allow them total free will.” All human suffering is a result of human free will, whether individually or collectively. God doesn’t cause, but he does submit. If God stands by in a room and watches as I’m being abused, there’s nothing I can truly do but hate him. I can try to pretend I love him and follow all his rules out of fear, but I can’t love him. However, if God has given us all total freedom, yet has submitted himself inside that total freedom to perpetually work within our nightmare choices to bring about beauty, then I can release God from the expectation that he be a controlling monster. And instead of a master plan, I can lean hard into the love that never gives up, into the redemptive genius of a God who will suffer anything at our hands just to be with us. Click here to view The Door on Half-Bald Hill in the Rabbit Room Store.

Lily, our five-year-old, is standing in the narrow hallway outside her room in only her underwear. It’s bedtime. It’s past bedtime. She should be brushing her teeth. She leans back against the century-old, textured wallpaper. “Mama,” she says seriously as I approach. “I am thinking of Mowgli.” She grins because I grin, and begins to bop up and down, giving herself a back-scratch. I lean against the opposing wall and join in. Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, forget about your worry and your strife! we sing together, dance-scratching our backs against the walls until Lily announces, “Well, that feels much better,” and dashes into her room for a song and prayers. Usually I sing her one song: a nature-loving re-write of “Hush Little Baby.” Tonight she does not have to work hard to convince me to sing another song, and then two more. We made it through our first week of mandated “homeschool” and social distancing. We haven’t been off the property for over a week. California just issued “shelter in place”; Massachusetts will do so soon, too, we expect. Now that there are more tests available, the numbers will sky-rocket. I’ve been thinking about bare necessities more than ever. Settling into bed myself, I go through the liturgy of the pillows: flat one for beneath my knees; feather pillow for my head; the third propped behind me against the headboard, ready to grab if I turn from my back onto my left side. In this position I need something to hold. For the first time in fifteen hours, the house is quiet. Lily and her older brother, Jacob, are sleeping. My husband, Joshua, has gone through his own pillow liturgy and turned onto his right side away from me and is settling into a slower, rhythmic breath pattern that isn’t yet punctuated with snores. I am concentrating on my own breathing, scanning my body for signs of illness. My face feels hotter than usual (fever?). My throat has had a tickle in it for the last week and a lump of phlegm or anxiety (anxiety phlegm?) right in the spot where, on the outside, the neck pools between the collarbones. Right in the spot where I have welcomed kisses. Right in the spot where, on the inside, I imagine a malicious gathering of germs ready to plunge into my lungs. I really have no idea about the anatomy of my respiratory system. I am concentrating on my breathing. I am holding my breath to check my lung capacity. The tickle in my throat seizes and I cough, and cough again (a dry cough?). I reach for that third pillow and turn onto my left side. But now, because my left ear is pressed against a pillow, my head is an echo-chamber for my heartbeat. In poetry, the basic unit of rhythm is the iamb, one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable: bum-BUM. A heartbeat. Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter because it was the rhythm of heartbeat plus breath. Five iambs to a line; five heartbeats to one cycle of breath. To learn lines by heart, you have to get them into your body. You have to get them into your breath. I turn onto my back again and concentrate on lines I’ve learned by heart over the last year: “The Altar” by George Herbert, then “My own heart” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Finally, Psalm 23. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me. Surely goodness and mercy. Surely. I didn’t use to have—or didn’t think I had—a problem with anxiety. But there it is: fear. One of the basic human emotions with all its progeny alive and well in me, too. I look at the “Emotion and Feeling Wheel” a counselor gave me once and name the lump in my throat: dread. And there is worry, inadequacy, helplessness, insecurity, nervousness and panic. Yes, all of these. Yes, I am afraid. This time last year I had recovered from a bad bout with the flu I came down with on the night of my 39th birthday, only to find myself locking horns with fear. Who am I kidding? Locking horns? I was running for my life in the colosseum of my heart and mind. In hindsight, I realize I was hovering on the edge of a full-blown panic attack for about two weeks. Today I might die. Yesterday I did not. All of my tomorrows belong to you, Lord Jesus. Sarah Chestnut At the time, I chastised myself for “being dramatic.” (I recovered from the flu, after all). I could feel my imagination tunnel-visioning on all the possible tragedies, but I couldn’t pull my mind back from that cliff-edge. It was, I see now, a real confrontation with my mortality. A facing-off with one of the most basic truths about human existence—about my existence: contingency. I do not have to be. I am dust and breath. Apart from God’s life-giving breath we all sink back to the dust. I was working on a lecture on the heart at the time. Whatever attempting to pluck an articulate path through the vast terrain of the heart was doing to the blood-pumping muscle off-center in my chest, I don’t know exactly. I know it was stressing it. There were no unstressed beats: bum-BUM. It was BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM all the time. But what the Holy Spirit has been doing with that whole constellation of events—turning 39 (here comes 40 and mid-life); being in bed with the flu for nearly three weeks; acute anxiety—is the work that God has been committed to for every one of us ever since our first parents laid their hearts on the altar of self-sufficiency, ever since they rejected contingency as prerequisite to life. The Spirit has been chipping out my heart of stone, and giving me a heart of flesh. In the biblical imagination, the heart is the seat of the will, the organ of perception, that core part of us that is always worshipping something or someone. 17th century Welsh poet-priest, George Herbert, understood this. Looking at the altar in the little stone church where he pastored, he saw his own heart: A broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant rears, Made of a heart, and cemented with tears: Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workman’s tool hath touch’d the same… —George Herbert The weekly remembrance of Christ’s sacrificial death on our behalf happens on an altar. Here Herbert internalizes that altar and puts Christ’s body and blood, the bread and the wine, right on his own heart. Herbert did not live a long life by our standards, though he reached the average life expectancy for his time, dying at 40 of “consumption,” or tuberculosis. In his lifetime, London theatres were closed at least three times because of “plague.” A common devotional practice of the time was the momento mori, the remembrance of one’s mortality, a daily face-off with the fact that you will die. Even during a time when death was literally at the door, the human heart needed to be reminded of this truth: you are dust and to dust you will return. Last year as I recovered from the flu and was learning how to cope with anxiety, I started every day with a series of slow stretches (You are a body, Sarah! And you are alive!). I ended lying flat on my back on the floor. In this position, I prayed, “Today I might die. Yesterday I did not. All of my tomorrows belong to you, Lord Jesus.” Stating and facing these basic facts became a “bare necessity” of each day, a momento mori.

This morning I am making cinnamon rolls. How many “covid confessions” have already circulated over text from friends, announcing that in spite of Lent chocolate and wine are free-flowing in our homes again? “It’s just too much,” we all agree. Because suddenly we are submitting to a fast we did not chose: our mobility—perhaps the defining feature of our time—is utterly restricted. For centuries, Benedictine monks have taken a vow of “stability,” promising to remain in the community they enter for the remainder of their lives, and not move from monastery to monastery. Not only are we used to dashing from store to store, appointment to lesson to meeting to work-out and home again, we expect to move our household—perhaps several times in our lives—across country or even across oceans. I would never have thought to fast from mobility during Lent. Chocolate, wine, even (before having children) my morning cup of coffee, but not mobility. What can be learned about God and self that cannot be learned in any other way but by staying in one place for a long time? I have become accustomed to facing my inordinate dependence on sugar, caffeine and alcohol during Lent, but to face my inordinate dependence upon my mobility? I’m tempted to say, before the fast has even really begun, “It’s just too much.” On the last grocery run I made before school closures and cancellations of every sort started to fall like dominoes, I looked into my cart from the back of a long line and groped for some inner reassurance that I had chosen what I should, that I had what our family needed for now. (How long is now?) Beets and potatoes because they store well. Five boxes of three different kinds of tea—one my new favorite, “Tension Tamer.” I reached for words that could speak for me, this time from 19th century Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins: I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet. —G. M. Hopkins In his characteristically highly wrought style, Hopkins confronts his own propensity to look for comfort where true comfort cannot be found: in the darkness of his own depression and anxiety. I cast for comfort I can no more get / By groping round my comfortless…“comfortless,” being something of his own shorthand for “comfortlessness,” or resistance to comfort. I looked up from the contents of my cart and exchanged forced grimace-smiles with the person in line behind me. I glanced over the contents of his cart. Why didn’t I get seltzer, too? Maybe I’m groping for comfort with these cinnamon rolls. Slicing the rolled dough into spiraling rounds, I arrange them in the pan and leave them to rise briefly on the counter beside the red-and-yellow tulips. Back in December, I had filled several pots with bulbs and left them in the basement until green tips appeared. I had known I would be pining for spring by February. I just didn’t know how much I would need these unanxious blooms. Later in Hopkins’ poem he exhorts himself: …call off thoughts awhile Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room… —G. M. Hopkins Maybe these cinnamon rolls are helping me to “leave comfort root-room.” Hopkins’ poem ends: …let joy size At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile ‘s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile. —G. M. Hopkins I love the idea that God’s smile is not “wrung,” not twisted dry and drained of readiness to take pleasure. And I love that an “unforeseen time”—a surprising, joyful moment for Hopkins—was found in gazing on a “pied” or dappled sky blasting a colorful stretch of end-of-day light between silhouetted mountains. We gather at the kitchen table, pour freshly brewed coffee and lean over the Pyrex dish of lavishly glazed, gooey, yeasty rolls. Today and every day this is far more than a “bare necessity,” and in that way, these cinnamon rolls are essential. We lift bites too big for our mouths on our forks and whoop, “Praise God for sunshine! Praise God for Jacob! Praise God for Lily! Praise God for Sarah, for Joshua! Praise God for cinnamon rolls!” Walk the lovely, lit mile, I tell myself, and sink my teeth into the sweetness. I leave my phone on the kitchen counter, silenced. It is cold out, but sunny, and we take our sugar-crashing bodies out to the unfinished tree fort to clear last autumn’s fallen maple leaves, and to add some railings, and a rope ladder. For now the plan for what to do with this time is to start with “finishing the unfinished.” The tree fort. The primed, but not painted doors and windowsills. Books—so many books—with an old receipt or a pencil marking my place a third of the way through. So much gets stuck half-way there. To stay put is to face all the unfinishedness our busyness and procrastination help us ignore or deny. Right now there is a thread-bare flannel sheet lying on the floor outside my bedroom. It’s been there for two weeks, waiting for me to follow through with my plan to cut it up into dust rags. To face all this unfinishedness is also a confrontation with mortality. Death is the great interruption. Someday I will be snatched from my relationships, my work, my projects, perhaps mid-sentence. Perhaps with pen in hand. Perhaps the flannel sheet will still be lying in the hallway. We live and work at L’Abri, a Christian study center, where our first job is to welcome people. It was very strange to abruptly and prematurely send people away with so much left undone. It is good that finished work—in the ultimate sense—is not ours to do. Finished work—in the ultimate sense—is not ours to do. Sarah Chestnut The evening of the day we announced the decision to end our term early and told people to make immediate travel plans, Joshua still gave the scheduled lecture he’d been preparing. Chosen months ago, the topic suddenly seemed even weightier, and certainly timely: Between the Cross and Resurrection: Reflections on Jesus’ Death and Our Own. If Ash Wednesday a few weeks ago didn’t get people thinking about their mortality, words like “pandemic,” “quarantine,” and “uncertainty” definitely did. Joshua confessed his own “creedal befuddlement”: when Christians affirm, in the Apostle’s Creed, “He descended to the dead,” what does this mean? Where was Jesus on Saturday after he died and before he rose again? Where was Jesus when he was dead? Where do we go—if anywhere—when we die? Is where the right question? Now, submitting to a mobility fast and facing so much in my life that is unfinished, I am able to better imagine myself into the first disciples’ complete bewilderment over how much can change in one week’s time. Jesus’ final words, “It is finished,” reverberate meaninglessly. What could this possibly mean? Nothing is finished. Everything has been upended, left undone. But in the greatest act and statement of completion, Jesus wasn’t saying, “The End.” Projected on the screen behind Joshua throughout his lecture was an icon of the resurrection, also known as “The Harrowing of Hades,” or Christ’s descent. Clothed in white and gold, Jesus is standing on the cross, on the gates of death and Hades, is trampling down death by death, and he is heaving Adam and Eve, representative of all humanity, from their tombs. My friend Nickaela often says, as a reminder to us both, “Because of the resurrection, the worst thing will never be the final thing.”

Nickaela also says, “Sundays are hard because we are homesick for heaven.” We feel the rupture of what was always meant to be together: earth and heaven. Earth-and-heaven. We feel how unheavenly earth is. We feel how unearthly heaven seems. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Kingdom this earth, our Father. Sundays are hard because we feel so far from home. We feel the toll our mobility has taken. The gears have been grinding all week as we learn to move at a different pace in an oh-so-familiar place. We feel now the toll that running from ourselves and from God has been taking every minute of every day. Give us this day. This day, O Lord. Our church is live-streaming the service this morning. Our L’Abri co-workers and housemates are streaming the service for their church from the sunny, tiled floor room in our house because they are helping to lead their congregation through a pastoral transition. We “go” to their church this morning because it is here and I feel pangs of anxiety and guilt. I’m feeling lost right now in more ways than one. The fact is, even before COVID-19 social distancing measures, we were moving toward the periphery of our church, beginning an exit and a transition to a different church. The main reason is geographical: we live 23.4 miles (thank you, Google) from our church, which in metro Boston feels like traveling to a different world every Sunday. What does it mean to go to church right now? What does it mean to be the church right now? Herbert looked at the altar and saw his heart. He looked at the walls of St. Andrew’s and saw stones…perhaps he looked out at the gathering of parishioners and also saw stones: Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy name: That if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. —George Herbert On the first Palm Sunday, Jesus said of the exultant multitude, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:36-40). The apostle Peter—named “Rock”—clearly thought a lot about what it means to be a stone. He wrote to the church in exile under Nero’s violent persecutions: As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. —1 Peter 2:4-5 I imagine Jesus, standing on the threshold of my heart, taking a long, affectionate look around. I see him enter and lay his hands on the stony walls. I hear him say, we can work with this. I think of so many scattered stones praying quietly in their homes this morning, perhaps joining live-streamed church services and singing along with the hymns coming through computer speakers. We can work with this. We’ve always been working with this. What is God doing with this whole constellation of events? Pandemic and shortages of protective equipment. School closures, church “closures,” shifting timelines, uncertain projections, uncertainty projected. Our economy poised on a precipice. My heart, the broken altar. My life and so many lives, scattered stones for the building of a spiritual house. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. —Ezekiel 36:26 We can work with this. For years—decades even—I have breezed past Psalm 23. It’s everywhere, after all. On pillows, framed in cross-stitch, on kitschy posters—everybody knows it. And like every good adolescent (and we all know how prolonged adolescence is these days), I rejected the familiar and the popular because it was…familiar and popular. And, I wrongly thought, it just seems too nice. I cast for comfort I can no more getBy groping round my comfortless… The worst thing is not the last thing. Sarah Chestnut Throughout this past year, I have returned to Psalm 23 like…well, a hungry sheep to good pasture, a thirsty sheep to quiet waters. I have prayed it at night, as part of the liturgy of the pillows, prayed it when my heartbeat is too loud in my head, prayed it driving to and from my children’s schools, prayed it as a song, prayed it half-said, prayed it under my breath and when making bread. And this past week I have prayed it again and again walking the half-mile lane that runs through our neighborhood. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. I have prayed this Psalm standing in my children’s bedroom doorways, brushing my hand over the doorframes, imagining the Hebrew people in Egypt painting lamb’s blood on their doorposts. I have prayed for Jesus’ blood to mark our doorposts. Then I’ve second-guessed that prayer. If I pray this am I saying COVID-19 is a plague on the earth, a mighty act of judgement which is also a mighty act of deliverance? Who can say that? Who is being judged? Who is being delivered? I pray Christ’s blood on our doorposts, yes, as a plea that coronavirus will pass over our house and all who have sheltered here, but I pray it even more as a way to rehearse my ultimate hope whether or not illness finds its way to us. I pray and I plea Christ’s blood because, in Christ, judgement has already come. Death has been met and mastered. The worst thing is not the last thing. It is not Friday; it is not Saturday; it is Sunday, resurrection day. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; The last enemy to be destroyed is death. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Death is swallowed up in victory. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Today I might die. Yesterday I did not. All of my tomorrows belong to you, Lord Jesus.

The morning of March 3, 2020, will be forever remembered by Middle Tennesseans as the day a tornado traversed nearly 60 miles and left utter devastation in its path. The day bears an added significance for me, as it was the first day of a bucket list trip to see the 48th Iditarod dog sled race in Alaska. For both of these things to happen on the same day caused a peculiar confluence of emotion—an uncomfortable concoction of regret, joy, pain, confusion, and elation. When the tornado first ripped through our neighborhood at one in the morning, I immediately and rightly prepared myself to give up this trip I had been wanting to take since fourth grade. It’s not right to be joyful right now; we don’t deserve this. We need to stay home and be with our community. But then, as I swept up glass in our kitchen at 2:00 in the morning, my sweet husband said, “I can’t go on this trip. But you’re going, and you’re going this morning.” Our driveway was covered by a 70-year-old poplar tree that was uprooted in the storm (one of about 30 trees we lost), so with the help of a neighbor I was whisked to the airport in the wee hours of the morning. It felt very much like an escape, and in several ways, it was. In the weeks leading up to the trip, I began to sense that I needed to disappear and be completely shaken from normalcy—which for me meant to be cold, makeup-less, tired, and smelling of dogs. If I’m honest, I’ve been restless in recent months. Maybe you’ve felt this way, too. I’ve felt like that eighteen year old girl again—on the brink of womanhood, itching to make new friends, ready to experience newness. When you’re eighteen, you can pick up and go to college. When you’re twenty-nine, picking up and leaving without cause looks an awful lot like abandoning community and running away from your problems. There are people I love here. There’s good work to be done here. But for eight days, Alaska would be my disappearing act, my great escape. There were a few final projects to complete for clients before I was able to turn off completely, so I had planned to use the airplane time to work, taking advantage of the on-flight wifi (a true wonder). Between completing tasks, I stared at social media, watching as the sun rose over Nashville to show the reality of the storm’s devastation. Pictures of our home began to arrive from my husband, who immediately readied his chainsaw at the first sign of light to begin cutting a way out of the driveway. My head echoed with what he’d said in the moments after the tornado passed over: “We need to pray right now and thank God we weren’t hit any worse.” In the darkness, we could tell there were large trees that had been uprooted and laid down on either side of the house, but the sunlight revealed how close we were to having lost our home. He sent photos and videos of our property, and our neighbor posted her own pictures of trees that fell on her cars and the havoc wreaked on our street. From six miles in the air, I felt the opposite of what I had expected to feel on this flight: I longed to be home. I longed to put on my bibs and gloves and get to work. My husband told me people were showing up to help without question—dozens of them on a Tuesday morning. I was missing the evidence of a community’s true beauty, all because I had left and abandoned them for my own enjoyment. At first it was hard to see that leaving was still the right decision, though several friends reminded me of this through text as I hurtled through the sky between Nashville and Seattle. I remember saying to Allan, my go-to conversationalist and wise sage during heavy times: “This doesn’t feel right, but somehow, I think it is.” “You’re right,” Allan assured me. Community looks like people asking me how my husband needed help when I couldn’t be there to care for him. Community looks like people bringing him food (as a powerlifting lumberjack, he needs a lot of it). Community looks like families with their wee children picking up branches and giving my husband coloring pages to brighten his mood. Community looks like others taking photos of the help we were receiving. Community looks like people saying, “Mike, what do we need to do so you can join Leslie in Alaska?” I went to Alaska to escape home. But Alaska became a reminder of what makes home so beautiful in the first place. Leslie E. Thompson Community also took the shape of comfort from strangers while in a distant land. I had gone to Alaska to become an observer, to melt away and blend into the tapestry of big coats and hats and gloves, but we cannot hide from kindness and grace, even in our parkas and massive fur hats. I was given a borrowed community in this new place. From the moment I set foot on Alaskan soil, I was welcomed. And when people asked where I was from (the Iditarod brings about many tourists, and, obviously, I was one of them), I was met with an immediate, “Are you okay? Is your family okay?” Everyone knew about the tornado that happened just hours before, even in a part of the world that’s so far north it’s basically Russia. I think more of the residents listen to NPR than most folks in the “lower 48,” and apparently, NPR’s coverage of the storms was extensive. Everyone knew about what happened, everyone had seen pictures, everyone wanted to help. I could almost see their hearts reaching out and grabbing for mine. The knee-jerk reaction to care for others in crisis is something we cannot help. Due to the extreme kindness of several of our friends, and the quick turnaround from insurance and contractors, my husband joined me in Alaska two days later. We spent our time with the crew of an Iditarod legend, four-time champion Lance Mackey. (The reasons he’s legendary are infinite, but I’ll start with this: he’s the only person to win the race four times in a row. I had him on my podcast a few years ago, so if you’d like to learn more about him, you can listen here). I wanted a backstage, all-access pass, roadie experience, and that’s what we got. We broke bread with Lance and his family, we listened as he told stories from the trail, we held his children and cared for them while their parents were tending to race events. We hung out with big, amazing, loud, high-energy dogs and led them to the starting line of the 1049 mile race. We stayed up late. We stared at mountains. We were dang cold. We got tattoos. And everywhere we went, people asked how we were. We left Nashville to escape and disappear, but instead we were seen and acknowledged by strangers. These people became our surrogate community. In the midst of their own crisis and high-stake events, they became the family we needed. I recall an evening at night’s end in the local haunt, Club Paris. It’s an Anchorage institution with the best steaks in town and a vibe that only fifty years of being on the “downtown strip” could produce. I sat across from my host, Kevin, as he told everyone at the table about my journey to Alaska. My eyes scanned the room and saw Lance across the bar recalling stories about his mother who passed last year, Lance’s children and partner giggling and running around the chairs and tables, and those who had put on the fundraising event cleaning up with beers in hand. I realized this was a membership, and I was being welcomed into it. Southern hospitality is great, but the welcome into Alaskan membership is even better. James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” played us out of the bar that evening as everyone left humming that familiar melody on their way home. That week, I discovered that there’s a little bit of home everywhere. I heard the whisper of home as I watched Hobo Jim, a Nashville songwriter and Alaskan superstar, playing to adoring fans. I heard the echoes of home as Johnny Cash played at a local bar. I felt the embrace of home when strangers wrapped me in southern-style hugs after learning what we had gone through. I am not a gifted enough writer to bend words in a way that will make you feel what we felt in Alaska. We are stereotypical in this way: just about everyone who lives there was, at one point, a visitor that couldn’t get the state out of their heart. For Christmas, my mom gifted me a copy of Peter Jenkins’ book Looking for Alaska. Peter (another Nashvillian!) has the best job of all time. He meets people and experiences their lives and then writes about it. I assume he even gets paid for it. What a dream. He’s most known for his book, A Walk Across America, in which he wrote about his experience walking across the country. In Looking for Alaska, Jenkins moves to Seward, Alaska, for eighteen months and submerges himself in the culture. He observes, he listens, he experiences. I began reading the book in the weeks leading up to our trip, and this passage struck me: Different seasons of the year, of life, demand different kinds of output. There is a time to sow and a time to reap. Sometimes it’s more mental, sometimes it’s almost purely physical. And at times your heart and spirit rule. —Peter Jenkins, Looking for Alaska I am reminded of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. There is a time for everything, we are told. I find it of note that at a time when I should have been physically in the act of helping the community, I was being called to a time of healing instead. I trace other times in life when I feel as though I should be in one season, but the one I’ve found myself in looks entirely different. Maybe this is something you resonate with as well. It will take years to return to normalcy on our homestead. Downed trees will have to stay where they lay, dented land will have to fill itself in, tree roots will have to remain exposed. But the pain of seeing the displacement of these things is tempered with the reminder that during the season of crisis, there was comfort. During the chaos, there was the order of love and care both near and far. They will serve as reminders that while our hearts yearn to see and experience new things, and yes, sometimes disappear, we cannot find ourselves without the oversight of a creator who loves us and cares for our needs. I went to Alaska to escape home. But Alaska became a reminder of what makes home so beautiful in the first place.

I’ve wanted to write for weeks, to speak something hopeful and life-giving into the world’s collective anxiety. But the words feel stuck, dried up. They come flickering in the middle of the night or while I wash dishes, only to evaporate in the cold light of my computer screen. For all of us makers, this is supposedly our time. You see the posts on Facebook and Twitter, doing their best to spin some hope. Finish that manuscript. Learn that instrument. Check in with everybody. The world has slowed, all our classes and meetings and events have been canceled, so there’s no excuse anymore, right? It’s the slowing of life, the removal of barriers to the good stuff, creativity and connection. There is no inspirational Instagram post telling you to sit on the floor for half an hour to pet your dog and cry. Some days, this isolated life is a well of beauty and kindness. I do my work, spend time reading, check in with friends and family, and make a beautiful, tasty dinner. And then there are the days when the to-do list stares back, but all I see are the constant news articles, the social media notifications, the monotony of homebound life where time loses meaning. In this strange, slow new world, where many of us are working from home, deleting canceled events from our calendars, suddenly homeschooling, or finding new stretches of unfilled time, it’s tempting to feel a need to do things. And as I try to find the shape of my life for now, I’ve had to give myself permission to go a little easier on myself. If you need to hear this too, may I extend the same grace to you. Permission Note #1: It’s okay if you can’t make art right now. It’s a strange time to be a maker right now. Sure, I’ve already worked from home for a while, so it’s not like there’s a full day job eating up my time. But suddenly, the calendar is empty, errands are compressed and minimized, and staying home is the expected norm for us all. What a great time to write poems, keep up my blog, and pitch to all the places I have on my “People I Want to Write For” list, right? We see the memes, the encouraging commentary: stay home and finish your novel, paint the canvases, learn the instrument, insert your medium of choice. Worse, some of us may feel pressure to look for more paid work, or finally start that crafty side hustle. I’ve been feeling a low-level struggle for days because I wanted to write this post, but couldn’t get my head around words. Recently, in The Rabbit Room Chinwag Facebook group, I saw this question raised: Are any of you finding it nearly impossible to create art right now? I’m not consciously anxious about COVID-19, but my adrenaline level is SO HIGH! I can’t get myself to focus on anything, much less working with my hands. If this is you, know that it’s okay to not feel creative. It may be frustrating and painful. Maybe you even feel like you have art you could be giving, if it weren’t so much work to get up and keep moving during the day. But it doesn’t mean the work isn’t happening. You don’t know the songs, stories, poems, and paintings that are sparking and swirling in the depths of your being. Give yourself a little room. If you must write, write in secret about the shape of these different days, about unnameable griefs and mundane joys. Maybe these are the days of listening to new music, rereading your favorite books, playing interesting podcasts while you wash the dishes. Author Kaitlin Curtice had this to say in a recent Twitter thread: It is OK if you aren’t producing or creating right now… Grief and trauma affect us all in different ways, but they do AFFECT US. Is it hard to create right now? That’s okay. We need YOU, because at some point, it will be time again, and we will be ready. I don’t know about you, but I call that good news. Permission Note #2: It’s okay to check in on yourself too. One day, after a Zoom meeting for work, a long phone call with my family, and preparation for an online gathering of church friends, I remarked to my husband, “I feel like I’ve done way more socializing since we started social distancing.” It was a joke, but like all jokes, there was a kernel of truth hiding inside. Staying connected takes a lot of work right now. It’s a vital thing to do right now, for our own sanity and for the good of our neighbors. We check in on older friends and relatives to make sure their needs are met. We check in on single friends who are far from home and feeling lonely. We check in on people we know who struggle with anxiety and depression, and on parents who suddenly have all their kids at home and are trying to juggle a new normal schedule. Be kind to yourself. This is how we heal. Jen Rose Yokel But sometimes, especially if you are a helper or empathetic type, the weight of all this checking in can be hard to bear. We live in a unique time where just about everyone we know is struggling against a common fear, even though it takes many forms. It could mean many conversations, all of them weighty with no solid end in sight. It could mean the vague feeling that somehow your own weight isn’t as heavy as others’, the compulsion to keep giving, giving, giving. That same grief and trauma that saps our creative energy? It can also mess with our capacity to give and care for others. Don’t be afraid to pause and check in with yourself now and then. Where are you feeling heavy or fearful? Those are places worth tending to. It may mean taking a day off from looking in on others to pray about those weights, to cry and talk it through with someone who gives you life, to schedule a remote appointment with a therapist or pastor or spiritual director, and, yes, maybe even create a little something if you can. I realize carving out that time may be hard for you, especially if you have children to care for or a demanding job. (Especially medical care providers. I see you.) So consider this permission. Consider it a gentle nudge to find a little space where you can, even just a couple minutes in the middle of a household chore, or a moment of stillness right before bed. Be kind to yourself. This is how we heal.

In Season 2, Episode 3, Drew Miller talks with J Lind and Lucas Morton about the album they made together, For What It’s Worth, specifically its title track. In this episode, Drew, J, and Lucas discuss the necessity of listening to negative emotions while writing songs, the deceivingly difficult work of self-honesty, and the mutual contingency of beauty and suffering. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 3 of The Second Muse. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with author Nancy Guthrie. In this episode, Jonathan and Nancy discuss the invaluable resource of deep focus, research as practicing the posture of learning, and the clarifying power of talking before writing. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 16 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.

The world is different now. We’re hunkering down. Thus far, for us Whipples, the price of that is small. I know it’s not small for everyone. The Psalms make a lot more sense these days. Our prayer is for doctors and scientists, now more than ever. In the meantime, the Spirit has been teaching me things I had forgotten. In times of war—wars on people or wars on germs—folks squeezed by dearth of one kind or another tend to gain perspective by the bucketful. You see them start to appreciate small things. Soldiers limited to MREs come up with little recipes crafted of freeze-dried parts. Prisoners on a chain gang invent and reinvent heart-wrenching work songs out of the pieces of their former lives. Aid organization annals are full of stories of children ecstatic over eight crayons that many over-entertained kids would ignore out of hand. I’m not saying that a time of illness and death is a good time. Pandemics are products of the Fall and—as any reader of the Book of Job knows—they are not necessarily devoid of diabolical influence. Yet part of the good the Lord wrings from such difficulties is a reminder of the sweetness of our pleasures. Hardship strips away our pretension and pettiness. Most of us have enough pettiness to spare anyway. When I was twenty, for example, I knew everything. And of the everything I knew, I knew Jimmy Buffett music was not serious art. I remember listening to the man as a child, sitting in the back of my grandparents’ car. To me, it felt like a phase my family went through, like workout videos or weekly hibachi food. I enjoyed the Ricky Skaggs phase and the Ray Stevens phase. Then came “Fruitcakes” and “Everybody’s Got a Cousin in Miami” and “Quietly Making Noise.” I was eleven when this record came out, and my grandparents still lived off Freewill Road in Cleveland. Across the street was a cow pasture in which I don’t remember ever seeing any cows. It was somewhere I longed to roam. I always had the vague desire to vault the barbed wire and see what lay on the far side of that field. It was a Rubicon. Jimmy Buffett did not cross Rubicons. The man made two 70s-country style records. Then he began a reefer journey of burrowing into a beach bum character he either crafted or unearthed, like an id from the depths of his banana boat soul. I sang along as a young kid, but beginning in high school, I built an ideological Babel of what was worth listening to. I labeled it Good Art. It did not include Jimmy Buffett. Nor did it include any of the top forty hits puttering out of my community’s staticky transistors. They liked Aerosmith; I liked Counting Crows. They liked Faith Hill and Limp Bizkit; I went in for Michal Hromek and Crux and Caedmon’s Call. I liked challenging lyricism and an amount of unpredictable structure. If the music was going to give me everything it thought I wanted, I didn’t care. I'm convinced that, of all the good things we enjoy, God enjoys them more than any of us. It is not pedantic for us to remind each other of all that is good. Adam Whipple Twenty years and four kids stripped away much of those old, arbitrary ideologies. Then last summer, in the mysterious calculus of God’s irony, my friend Ethan asked me to come play gigs with him—at Margaritaville. If you don’t know, Margaritaville isn’t just a song anymore; it’s a high-quality themed hotel. The staff wear Hawaiian shirts. They pipe a coconut sunscreen smell into the lobby even in the rain-sodden dead of February. There are real parrots in cages near the bar. I succumbed to the gig for financial reasons, and because I love hanging out with Ethan. He’s a dedicated student of whatever he puts his mind to. He had already done vast amounts of research about the son of a son of a sailor and become an armchair expert—and unlikely evangelist—for Jimmy Buffett’s songwriting. This is a guy who held staunch, informed opinions on large swaths of nineties alternative, and here he was touting the brilliance of “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” He’s my good friend, and I know better than to argue with him when he believes something that strongly. So I didn’t say anything. It took playing the shows for me to understand the appeal, though. We’d load up our gear and drive to Gatlinburg. Seven o’clock would roll around, and we’d play our way through one cover after another: The Beach Boys, Chris Stapleton, Jack Johnson, Johnny Cash, Smashing Pumpkins, Journey, and, of course, Jimmy Buffett, to whom Ethan referred as “Uncle Jimmy.” The intimate little bar crowds ate it up. We’d get them used to the motion of the show and pull out “Sweet Caroline” or “The Weight,” highly singable group participation numbers. Peppering the set were songs by the Fruitcake-man himself: “Pencil Thin Mustache” or “Come Monday” or “Fins.” We’d even throw in sad, drink-by-yourself bits like “A Pirate Looks at 40.” Looking at the faces of vacationers from all over the country, I started to get it. These folks came to the bar to listen to us because, for that slight moment of a major chord or a perfect rhyme, everything was alright. We got the privilege of being part of these people’s respite from bills and jobs and news cycles and neighborhood association meetings. One of the ingrained pretensions swept away by dearth—even a forcible dearth of social contact—is that of the lofty pleasure. It is the self-involved pleasure of eating, drinking, or doing things one doesn’t necessarily like on the grounds that they are somehow higher than the simple joys of the proletariat. I’m guilty of it, of course. Kids and mortgages tend to tear down these ivory towers for me, but playing Jimmy Buffett covers helps too. The consummate ‘Gulf and Western’ singer-songwriter makes the music he wants to make, after all. He’s only been in danger of winning a Grammy twice. Both times, it was over crowd-pleaser collaborations with powerhouse country artists; it was never for his beachier tunes. Most of Jimmy Buffett’s songs revolve around simple pleasures. Like conch fritters and étouffée, these songs are comfort food. At times like these, we could all use a little comfort food. And it’s okay. Sure, sometimes you’re watching Dada plays Off Broadway and drinking keto coffee. Other days, you’re the people of Walmart. I’ve got news for you: the Psalms were written for the people of Walmart. They’re sweatpants psalms. They’re Oh-God-Y2K-is-coming psalms. The writers ask God to do cringeworthy things to their enemies. They’re suicidal and angry and beset by fears. And these songs are also congregational music, meant to bring us relief. And it’s okay. In my head, I hear Tom Hanks’ Fred Rogers from A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, looking at a tacky Christmas photo and saying, “That’s a nice picture. It gives me a good feeling to see them all together like that.” It’s not a great work of art, but it does give us a good feeling. Maybe it’s not Wolfgang Puck, but it is Spaghettios, and it gives us a good feeling. Maybe it’s Jimmy Buffett, and it’s musical comfort food. I’m convinced that, of all the good things we enjoy, God enjoys them more than any of us. The unassailable mirth hidden within sharing simple pleasures and offering them to our neighbors, be they cups of cold water or Jimmy Buffett songs, is one of the gifts most generously given to us on this mortal plane. There are many reasons to weep. There is nothing new under the sun. Even still, it is not pedantic for us to remind each other of all that is good. Enjoy, and be ye comforted.

The Brave Artists Club is a free family art experience featuring a variety of artistic activities and mediums taught by illustrators, cartoonists, painters, potters, leatherworkers, and writers who are part of the Rabbit Room community. We hope this fun, eclectic journey will spark imagination, camaraderie, and creative courage. Artists leading this class include Eddy Efaw, Growley Leather Co., John Hendrix, Kyra Hinton, Jonny Jimison, Aedan Peterson, Benjamin Schipper, Karen Schipper, Jamin Still, Phaedra Taylor, and myself! Designed especially for families to do together, it is appropriate for all ages (though some activities are more geared towards younger kids, some older). Use your own parental discretion about which activities are suitable and safe for your kids. Those under 10 may need extra assistance. Almost all the activities in this class are adaptable to whatever art supplies you already have around your house (pencils, pens, crayons, markers, white paper, scissors, glue, etc). One exception is the watercolor activity, for which you’ll need a set of watercolor paints (a kid’s pan set is fine) and brushes. Since this is a self-paced course, it does not necessarily include individual feedback from the teachers. There is, however, a community forum which allows families to post their art for others to see, and to encourage each others’ art.

A few weeks ago, my seventeen-year-old daughter Skye told me she wanted to take a walk and listen to a complete album, top-to-bottom. She said she was tired of listening to singles, and, though she spins full records all the time, wanted to experience an artist’s work in an intentional way. To my great pleasure, she asked what she should listen to. I stood up in the garden where I was weeding and told her the first album that popped into my head: Josh Ritter’s So Runs the World Away. (I wrote about what a revelation that record was to me here in the Rabbit Room a few years back.) She came back about an hour later and we talked about the songs—most of which she had heard, though they had most likely been cherry-picked in a playlist or played in the background at our house. It’s a different thing altogether to sit and listen to a full record, each song a part of a larger opus. Now, if a member of Generation Z is telling me she’s growing weary of singles, something must be up. I’ve been thinking that for years, but I can be sort of a curmudgeon when it comes to music. Granted, Skye is a singer/songwriter, a musician, and has grown up in a musical home—but the fact that she arrived at that conclusion on her own makes me wonder if she’s not alone. Spotify has not only changed the way we listen to music, it’s changed our relationship to it. My feelings toward Spotify are complicated, because I railed against it when it first arrived. (For our purposes, I’m referring to Spotify, Apple Music, and any other similar streaming platform.) Friends in Sweden, where it started, told me in so many words, “You can fight it all you want, but this is the future of music.” Well, I fought it all I wanted, and it was still the future of music. My record label also saw it before I did, and pushed me to release my albums there for years before I finally conceded defeat. I’ve made my peace with it, honest. (And now for a small rant: I still maintain that if there were two tiny tweaks to the platform, things would be so much better. First, there should be a paywall after, say, the third listen of a song. If you’ve listened to a song thrice, I’d say it’s time you paid a dollar to the people who made it. The best argument for Spotify is that it’s a great way to discover music. I totally agree. But after three listens, I think it’s safe to say that you’ve discovered it, right? Easy. Now support the folks who made it. Second, why not treat new music like new movies? Nobody expects brand-new movies to be free on Netflix on the opening weekend (quarantine anomalies notwithstanding). If you want to see the new Star Wars, then you go pay the ten bucks and watch it in the theater. If you don’t want to do that, you can wait a few months and watch it at home. This is how movies are funded. If you want the new Coldplay record when it comes out, just buy it—or wait a few months and then listen on Spotify. I realize it’s too late for this tweak, because the philosophy of the model is entrenched. The bird has flown. But my first point is doable. And I also realize it’ll never happen. As a side note, a third grievance is the death of liner notes. Why on earth don’t Spotify and iTunes have a “credits” link on every album so people can see who played what, who produced it, where it was recorded, who got thanked, etc.? It would be so easy, and it would draw attention to the many, many people who help make the music we love. Here ends the rant.) Ubiquity makes us giants, and puts the world at our fingertips; scarcity makes us small enough to see that the little things are vast. Andrew Peterson My hunch is that the combination of 1) the quick and easy thrill of being able to listen to anything you want whenever you want and 2) the glut of new music at our fingertips, has sucked some of the enjoyment out of the listening experience. This is really about scarcity versus ubiquity. False dichotomies are a pet peeve of mine, so I’m not saying that old is always better or that new is always better (though I’ll admit I tend to err on the side of the former). But I am suggesting that the above combination of on-demand music coupled with millions of options is causing us to drift away from something really wonderful and enriching, and to drift toward something that’s wearing us out (evidenced in Skye’s desire to sink into an album for a change). When I was a kid, we didn’t have much money. That meant it was a big deal if I saved the ten bucks to buy a tape at Turtle’s Music in Gainesville. When I got home I would smell the cassette, unfold the booklet, and read the tiny liner notes while I listened. I would treat the tape like it was a rare jewel. I had to think twice before I lent it to someone, and I always made sure I got it back when they were finished. The cassette was a treasure. When I rode in my buddy Joe’s 280 ZX I would drool all over the tapes in his Case Logic case and beg him to lend me the newest Tom Petty album. He had to think about it hard, because if he did, it meant he couldn’t listen to it in the meantime. He would miss it, pine for it, until I gave it back. Not only was the artifact itself a treasure, it wasn’t easy to skip songs—which meant you discovered buried treasures within the treasure. You had to suffer through songs you didn’t like in order to get to the ones you did, giving the B-sides time to grow on you, with the happy result that they became favorites. Nowadays, if I don’t like a song it’s really easy to remove it from a playlist and never give it another shot, and I’m certain that by doing so I’m missing out on some great music. This came up recently in a Rabbit Room meeting. I was talking to Chris Thiessen, who reviews a lot of albums, and asked him how he knows an album well enough to review it if it just came out. To my great relief, he said he tries to listen to a record from front to back at least five times before he writes about it. That’s a good discipline, especially if it’s a bad record. I honestly don’t know how reviewers do it. But I’d argue that even five academic listens in one weekend is nothing to what it’s like to live with a record for a few months because it’s the only thing in your car. A few examples are in order. 1. Counting Crows. Their first record is a masterpiece. A game-changer. One of the great albums of all time, in my not-so-humble opinion. The second album, Recovering the Satellites is grittier, rockier, and takes some time. I honestly didn’t like it at first. But I kept listening, because I was a fan. After a few months it grew on me more and more, and now I’d argue that it was the perfect follow up to that perfect first record. 2. Rich Mullins. A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band. Honestly wasn’t sure about it at first. I liked a few songs, but didn’t get it. Then one day, after a few months, I realized it was magnificent. His last album, Brother’s Keeper is another example. A lot of people don’t like it, but I think it’s wonderful, and it’s because I let it steep. 3. Bob Dylan. Blood on the Tracks. A classic, recommended to me by Randall Goodgame. It was my first real listen to Dylan, and it took about eleven listens. 4. Alison Krauss and Union Station. So Long, So Wrong. Truly a masterpiece of an album. But in the late-nineties I didn’t think I liked country or bluegrass. Boy, was I wrong. And it took driving around America with Gabe Scott for a few years to realize it. My point is this: if I made a list of my very favorite albums of all time, I’m pretty sure most of them cost me some time and effort before they really clicked. The key was the scarcity. The fact that the CD or tape lived in my car and I didn’t have the world at my fingertips meant that I gave the songs time to unfold themselves to me, to surprise me, to shift the tectonic plates of my taste and understanding enough that the next time I looked out the window I could tell the landscape had subtly broadened. The time spent with the music was the key that unlocked it—and the music, in turn, was the key that unlocked something in me. None of that would have happened if I had bumped up against a difficult song and merely skipped it or removed it from the playlist. Back then, the interface made it a little more difficult to banish a song into outer darkness. But now, the path of least resistance is to make a knee-jerk decision about a song and never revisit it, or to mean to go back and listen again but forget because eighty-five new albums came out today. So rather than peddling a false dichotomy, I suggest meeting somewhere in the middle. If you’re a fogey like me, it’s good to remember that old is not necessarily better. I absolutely love the fact that my kids love music. They’re always discovering new stuff. Folks, I’m here to tell you that there’s some wonderful music being made today, by people half your age. Some of the stuff my kids like is tough for me at first, but by paying attention and giving it time I not only honor my progeny and get to know them better, I get to put my money where my mouth is and do the work of learning to like something new. (PSA: if your kids are playing an album loud enough for you to hear, chances are they want you to like it. They might be telling you something about their hearts.) On the other hand, it’s good to submit to some self-imposed limits. Rather than Pandora, or a playlist, try what Skye did and commit to one record, front to back. Put it on repeat. Don’t let yourself skip anything. Sink in. Take my word for it: the artist worked hard deciding what order the songs should be in, and dreams of listeners experiencing it as a whole. My best argument for scarcity is this: for years our family vacations have been marked by one or two albums on repeat. When we went out west, it was Riders in the Sky. A few summers ago it was the second Colony House album. Another it was Coldplay’s Viva la Vida. By choosing our “vacation album,” we’re imprinting those songs with that memory of that place. A record can be a cloud storage drive for a memory. It’s just floating out there, and when the right music plays it downloads like a bolt of lightning. To this day, when Riders in the Sky’s Silver Jubilee record comes on I’m in Yellowstone National Park and a herd of memories stampedes through my mind. There’s a lot to be said for ubiquity. I sure am glad I can find a song I want to hear in a few clicks. Indeed, Paul Simon, these are the days of miracle and wonder. But scarcity can be like fertilizer for your soul. Slowing down enough to savor one thing for a long time can teach you to enjoy everything a little more. Ubiquity makes us giants, and puts the world at our fingertips; scarcity makes us small enough to see that the little things are vast. Click here to read Part 2: Miracles & Wonders by Chris Thiessen.

I’ve been asked to write a brief pronunciation guide for anyone who might need help with character and place names in The Door on Half-Bald Hill. Pronunciation guides are tricky! It’s always easier to hear a new word than to decode it by means of the kind of weird, inconsistent descriptors I’m about to give. Two quick rules of thumb. First, when you come across a strange name in a piece of fiction, make your peace with it right away. Keep it simple and logical. You don’t want to trip over it every time the word appears. Second, assume that the writer was going for something beautiful. Nobody wants to work with ugly, ungainly words for years on end. It should sound nice when you say it aloud and when you think it in your head. Here goes. Idris: sounds like you think it does. Idris Elba. Corann: COR – un, rhymes with “foreign.” Deirdre, Muriel, Calder, Shannan, Sloane, Etain, Murdoch, Pixie, Vaughn, and Brennan: all sound just like you’d imagine. Hard “c” at the end of “Murdoch.” Barra: I can’t think of a rhyming word! Wait. Okay. Think of an excessively wealthy Southern woman who’s very proud of her family lineage. One of the older characters in Gone with the Wind, for example. Imagine her saying “horror,” and you should have it. Llyr: rhymes with “steer” and “clear.” Llyr steers the coracle through the clear water. Clodagh: CLO-dah. Ignore the “g.” Rhymes with “Yoda.” Saoirse: Think Saoirse Ronan. This insane combination of vowels makes a sound somewhere between a long “e” and a short “e.” Say “Seershah,” but flatten your tongue a bit. Cogath Tornech: CO-goth TORE-neck. This is the War of Thunder. Necks get torn. Tír Ársa: TEER AHR-suh. Oh, the fair land of Tír Ársa! The sound of these words should fill you with longing and bittersweet memories! If it doesn’t, say them differently. Tullagh Sé: TOO-luh SAY. This first syllable rhymes with words like “took” and “look,” so you can remember it like this—“We took a look at the Tullagh Sé.” Baileléan: Trickiest word in the book. Think “balalaika” without the “aika.” Slap an “ane” on there instead. Laure Hittle divides that last syllable ever-so-subtly in two, and it’s gorgeous. Fir Bolg: feer BOLG. First syllable rhymes with “fear.” Because you should fear them. They’re the Lightning Men. They will eat up your land. That syllable also rhymes with the “Tír” of “Tír Ársa,” but I didn’t add the accent because the Fir Bolg are part of Irish/Celtic Mythology. Like so many elements of The Door on Half-Bald Hill, I didn’t make them up. But maybe I should have added the accent. Hmmmm. Well. You can’t win ‘em all.

In Season 2, Episode 4, Drew Miller talks with Ben Shive about his album, The Cymbal Crashing Clouds, and together they break down his song “The Fire Pit.” Drew and Ben discuss the scandal of parables, the indispensability of collaboration, and the implications of sabbath for the creative process. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 4 of The Second Muse. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Laura Fabrycky, author of Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus: Exploring the World and Wisdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In this episode, Jonathan and Laura discuss the multiple competing narratives of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the centrality of place in the stories of our lives, and connections between writing and civic housekeeping. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 17 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.

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 1: Ubiquity & Scarcity by Andrew Peterson.] Friends, I believe I am falling victim to one of the classic blunders—the most famous of which is never get involved in a land war in Asia—but only slightly less known is this: never go against a Peterson when your job is on the line! I kid. And yet… Last week, Andrew Peterson made an argument for the recovery of the “lost art of listening” and scarcity in music. In it, he shared about his experience growing up with cassettes and CDs, poring over liner notes, and the process of learning to love an album’s deeper cuts. He argues that the ubiquity offered by Spotify and the digital age has made it easy to speed past these experiences and engage with more music on a surface level, rather than dive deep. Today, I’m tasked with offering a rebuttal—an alternate view of our musical landscape and its implications on our capability to intentionally engage with art. But I’d first like to establish some common ground. I absolutely agree and affirm the need to sit, slow down, and pay attention to what we’re listening to with the same respect we offer films at the theater. After all, the artist spent months—perhaps years—crafting this collection of music for our enjoyment and enrichment. Can’t we offer them at least an hour’s attention? Andrew covered this subject well, and I don’t want to spend too much time doubling down on it. What I’d like to do instead is push back against the idea that streaming-era ubiquity undercuts the process of truly living with an album. The choice between intentional listening and playing background music is not new to Generation Z or Millennials or Gen Xers. Before the algorithms of Spotify and Pandora came along to compete for our musical attention, there were mixtapes—collections of songs cherry picked so we could ignore the album cuts we didn’t like. Furthermore, radio programmers have been curating America’s musical taste and pushing singles for just about 100 years. Deconstructing the album is not a novel idea. The choice has always been there: do we allow ourselves and others to control a piece of art and conform it to our needs, or do we allow an artist to speak to us in the way they intended? Surprisingly, a look at recent Billboard charts suggests that America is actually taking a slowed-down approach to music. While social commentators like to highlight Gen Z’s shortening attention span, last year, 21-year-old Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” became the longest-running number single in history, holding the spot for 19 weeks. That’s nearly five months dominated by a single song. Additionally, it’s now commonplace for entire albums to appear on the Hot 100 chart at the same time, instead of just a single or two. In 2018, Drake claimed seven of the top ten spots when his album Scorpion dropped. This year, The Weeknd’s album After Hours also appeared on the chart in its entirety. What this all suggests is that people are listening. They’re listening to albums from cover to cover. They’re taking their time. But I’m not here to talk about how ubiquity has served the world’s biggest pop stars. They were doing fine before the streaming era, and they’ll be doing fine in whatever era comes next (may the vinyl revolution come soon!). The true “miracles and wonders” of the streaming era begin with the opening of the gates to independent artists. Never in music’s history has it been as possible for an independent artist to gather an audience. Now, please don’t mishear me. It will never be easy for independent artists, but the tools available—from platforms like Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Audiomack, and Spotify, to digital distributors like TuneCore and CD Baby, to recording software like GarageBand, Pro Tools, and FL Studio—are simply unprecedented. Music creation, distribution, and promotion is at every artist’s fingertips. It’s truly amazing. However, it also adds to music’s ubiquitous, saturated market, making it difficult for artists to vie for an audience’s attention. We should never shy away from allowing our curiosity to wander to the world’s very edges in search of truth and hope, especially in times like right now when it’s easy to be cooped up with our own thoughts and emotions. Chris Thiessen This is the world I find myself in every day as a music writer, a world with enough music—old and new, popular and underground, traditional and experimental—to fill the Library of Alexandria hundreds of times over, all for $9.99 a month. Yes, it’s easy to devalue music in this current landscape. Yes, it’s easy to get lost in the unnavigable waves of sound pouring out of speakers incessantly. However, music’s ubiquity is not our enemy. If we as music listeners are not finding art to engage with on the level Andrew shared about with Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Counting Crows’ Recovering the Satellites, we can’t blame Spotify. We can’t blame this new fad or that. We can only blame ourselves. Instead, we should be harnessing this immense wealth of art to: 1) Explore music’s vastness and discover what truly speaks to us, 2) Give attention to a diverse collection of artists whose stories are different from ours and drive us deeper toward truth, and 3) Discover music’s deep interconnectedness and weave together a beautiful picture of the world through art. Let me share a bit about my relationship with music to demonstrate what I mean. I wasn’t much of an “album listener” until about five years ago. I simply didn’t have the tools to critically analyze art and find deeper meaning in its melodies until college. Before then, I listened to albums on occasion (Switchfoot’s The Beautiful Letdown will forever be an important part of my story), but mostly I cherry picked songs to fit my mood and my needs. Most of the time, that meant songs that sounded impressive on my guitar with a lot of distortion (read: Stryper). In 2016, I decided I needed to broaden my horizons and discover more music if I were to truly understand it as an art form and, through it, understand the world I live in. A passage from C. S. Lewis’s Surprised By Joy had been gnawing at me: “It had, heaven help me, never occurred to me that what I called my thoughts needed to be [based] on anything. Kirk once more drew a conclusion…‘Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?’” You see, I had opinions about music, but what they were based on, I couldn’t say. And this is where my undying gratitude for music’s ubiquity enters. In 2017, I set a goal to listen to 500 unique albums in a year—a goal I thought was well-intended, but one I wouldn’t actually reach. I wanted to know the depth and vastness of music, instead of sequester myself off in the niche of Christian hard rock and metal. That year, I listened to 732 unique albums (yes, I’m a nerd and have the list). I listened to new releases which changed my life from Kendrick Lamar’s multi-layered masterpiece DAMN. to Mount Eerie’s devastating exploration of death on A Crow Looked At Me. I dove deep into older artists who have become essential to my musical taste and spiritual formation like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Bob Dylan. That year, to be honest, I didn’t listen to a lot of records on repeat. I was simply trying to listen to as much variety as I could (still with intentionality). Yet, it’s amazing that when I look back on the list, I can remember exactly where I was for so many listens. I remember walking in an East Nashville park soundtracked by Tyler, The Creator’s Flower Boy or doing dishes in our tiny on-campus apartment to 2Pac’s All Eyez On Me. I remember blasting Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band on the Run with Annaleigh on our way to see my musical hero in concert. I’m so thankful for these memories, which I carry with me even as I plow forward in daily music discovery. In the three years since, I’ve tried to slow down my approach somewhat. A balance must be struck between constantly discovering and sitting with a piece over time. I still listen to plenty of albums (217 so far this year), but I’m learning to give them enough time to sit, to glean from them what the artist is communicating and what I can learn from it, to earn “the right to have an opinion” by living with the music. Still, the accessibility of diverse music has been instrumental in my growth. The amount of life lessons and perspectives I’ve experienced as a result of easier access simply couldn’t be matched by any other era of music. For example, through rapper Saba’s Care For Me, I was thrust into the bleak outlook of a young African-American man growing up in Chicago. Through Nigerian-British funk group Ibibio Sound Machine’s Doko Mien, I heard stories in a unique language about coming to the water for rest from labor and stress. Through Brandi Carlile’s By the Way, I Forgive You, I was prepared to practice the compassion and selflessness of being a parent. I wasn’t listening to any of these artists five years ago. I can’t imagine my life without them now. The world of music is infinite. It’s okay to be overwhelmed and not know where to start. As a music writer, I still feel that way all the time. But we should never shy away from allowing our curiosity to wander to the world’s very edges in search of truth and hope, especially in times like right now when it’s easy to be cooped up with our own thoughts and emotions. To that end, I want to provide some resources which will help you recapture the lost art of listening and make sense of this immense world of art. 1. Liner notes & Lyrics: Andrew mentioned his grief over the loss of liner notes, and I feel his pain. However, there are wonderful digital resources to fill this void, at least in part. Genius is a hub with lyrics to basically every song in existence. What makes it even better though is it often offers the song’s credits as well as commentary from the Genius community (Note: this is open source like Wikipedia, but oftentimes, the artists themselves chime in with their own commentaries). Additional resources for credits and album information include Discogs, WhoSampled, and AllMusic. 2. Critical Publications: It should be noted that the ratings and opinions of music critics are exactly that: opinions. They should never dictate your own opinion about music, but there are some publications devoted to true storytelling and editorial writing which I find insightful and help me consider music from different points of view. Among my favorites are Pitchfork, DJBooth, Bandcamp Daily, and of course, our own reviews at The Rabbit Room. But there are so many others that might fit your tastes! Aggregate sites: If you’re looking for new music releases, my favorite resource is Album of the Year, which provides new release lists as well as an aggregation of critical writing on the albums. If you’re looking for past releases, Wikipedia is a wealth of information and has music pages for each year. Though not always accurate or complete, it’s pretty dang helpful. Of course, this doesn’t even include the insane amount of interviews, concert videos, documentaries, video essays, and so much more you can find on YouTube and elsewhere. The resources are endless, and the potential for deeper connection with music today is unparalleled. So, of course, play Paul Simon’s Graceland for the millionth time, and you’re sure to still glean new revelations in these days of miracles and wonders. But please don’t stop there; the world is too big! Let that record lead you to Shaka Zulu by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose South African isicathamiya was highlighted on Graceland. Then let that lead you north to Nigerian activist Fela Kuti whose 1977 album Fear Not For Man was released amidst 200 different arrests by a corrupt government. Then listen to Mos Def’s Black On Both Sides, which sampled Kuti 20 years later to highlight the ongoing reality of oppression. Then listen to Rich Mullins’ A Liturgy, A Legacy, & A Ragamuffin Band to realize that the battle of hope and fear connects entirely different styles of music. Then listen to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and The War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream to hear how the midwest landscape has served as muse for generations of American songwriters. Then listen to… I could go on, but I’ll let you continue that listening journey yourself. Click here to read Part 3: Precious Impermanence by Jennifer Trafton.

The story goes that in March of 2015, my roommates and I headed out on spring break to Texas. We left the icy remnants of an early-spring storm in Nashville and headed south. Our first full day there was a Sunday and we attended Ecclesia Church in Houston. That morning, Thad Cockrell was there as a guest leading worship and he introduced a song to the congregation that I’d never heard before called, “We Will Feast in the House of Zion.” I sang along with tears in my eyes. Like many 21-year-olds, I was entering somewhat of a deconstruction phase of my faith, beginning to set aside some practices and thoughts that no longer fit as I’d grown and changed. I suppose that’s a nice way to put it. Privately, I wondered if the entire Jesus thing was a sham. Words I’d used for years began to leave a sour taste in my mouth. I now felt uncertain about the lines I had drawn in the sand. But this song was something on which I could stand. I may have felt unsure of just about everything, but I felt sure enough that there would be a feast. I have always hoped that God liked to eat as much as I do. Had I been listening more closely that Sunday at Ecclesia, perhaps I would have heard Thad say that the song was soon to be released on Sandra McCracken’s Psalms record. But I wasn’t. So instead I scoured the internet for weeks, trying to call to mind as many lyrics as I could to find a recording of it. Of course, I did find it eventually, along with a treasure trove of other songs on the Psalms album. I devoured it, and then noticed a small notation in the liner notes: “With gratitude, this album is dedicated to St. Mary of Bethany Parish (Nashville) and Ecclesia Church (Houston).” Curious, I researched. St. Mary of Bethany Parish was a new Anglican church in South Nashville. Drew and I were newly dating and searching for a church to call home together, since part of my deconstruction process was allowing myself to leave the church where I’d spent most of my college years. Mary of Bethany sounded nice enough and so we visited the following Sunday afternoon. Drew and I sat in the car right before the service and breathed shallow breaths, looking for a way to get out of going in. Something about it felt important, so we hyped ourselves up and in we went. I remember that there was a Wendell Berry poem on the front of the bulletin that Sunday—a sign from God if there ever was one—and I remember lots of standing up and sitting down. It was the quietest church service I had ever attended. We were right at home. It has been five years since then. I have prayed and played with the folks at St. Mary’s. I have belly-laughed and lamented with them. Perhaps most joyously of all, I have eaten with them. We’ve practiced for the feast that is coming. I’ve sat at the kitchen counter, taking bites of leftover mac and cheese after Sandra’s kids finished dinner. Drew and I have eaten Friday night pizza with the Braggs. We’ve made soups and salads for potlucks after church and hoped there’d be enough to go around. I’ve laugh-cried with Melinda over our meals at Dozen Bakery. It matters what we ate. But also, it kind of doesn’t. It matters that we ate. And that we ate together. It matters what we ate. But also, it kind of doesn't. It matters that we ate. And that we ate together. Kelsey Miller I became a Christian eleven years ago, a few months after my 16th birthday. The most formative decisions of my life have stemmed from my allegiance to Jesus Christ. But I’m not the Christian I was a decade ago. Sometimes there is no better choice than to let what stands fall and crumble, even if it’s the very foundation beneath your feet. And indeed, I’ve begun to learn how to be a Christian with my feet on the ground and my eyes wide open. I see that there isn’t one square inch of this world that won’t be touched by God’s healing: every person, every blade of grass, every system that now stands broken. But the healing doesn’t come (and never came) through flying away to glory. It comes through incarnation, which stands as the utter denial that redemption can involve anything except flesh-and-blood people, in flesh-and-blood reality. There are resources and language for the deconstruction process, especially now as we all get more honest about the ugly truths embedded in the history of Christianity. But what I haven’t uncovered is helpful language for the reconstruction process. And yet I’ve lived it. I’ve felt it in my body. And what I’ve found so far to be the balm to the vital, painful work of deconstruction is quite simple: friendship. What has kept me from kicking the whole thing to the curb, what has kept me somewhat in touch with this reality of belovedness… it’s friendship. With flesh-and-blood humans who have as many questions as I do. Who love to eat Indian food as much as I do. Who love to laugh and play and wonder and feast as much as I do. God’s love is not as abstract as it used to be because I most often experience it through people whom I know by name. I know God’s love because I know Helena. Because I know Melinda. Because I know Danny, Jon, Mindy, Mary Beth, Nina, Hunter, Beth, Sarah, Hetty, Becca. The list goes ever onward. I know God’s love because I know God’s people. What gets me every time is that we were led to St. Mary’s through a song. I heard a song one time in Texas and it so captured my imagination that I couldn’t rest until I heard it again. And the tumble of gifts that came from that still overflows my cup. I was so used to rules, equating sanctification with self-flagellation. I was so burnt out on trying to protect God’s image. And then came a message that offered me hope, as though God nestled this song into my heart, gently nudged me outside the cage I’d been living in, and asked me to sing. Loud and free. Head thrown back. And to my surprise, I wasn’t the only one singing. God gave me people to sing with. According to the powers that be, friendship isn’t officially a sacrament. But having been on the receiving end of loving friendship that washes me clean of cynicism, I’d like to propose an amendment. Perhaps more than anything else, I’ve felt the grace of God in having a literal seat and voice at the table among men, women, and children who’ve joyfully given up being correct and instead have decided to feast. Photo by Nina Coyle

In Season 2, Episode 5, Drew Miller talks with Asher and Aedan Peterson about the making of “Thunder in a Blue Sky” from Asher’s recent NAMO record. Drew, Asher, and Aedan discuss the gift of a blank page, the importance of beginning somewhere for the simple sake of beginning, and the indispensability of other people’s perspectives. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 5 of The Second Muse. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Scott James, pediatric physician and author of Where Is Wisdom? A Treasure Hunt Through God’s Wondrous World, Inspired by Job 28. In this episode, Jonathan and Scott discuss the practical complexity of applying wisdom, the role of empathy in good reading, the instructive power of story for life’s moral questions, and grace as God’s surprise ending. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 18 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.