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Whether you know his name yet or not, chances are that Stephen Crotts is responsible for at least one piece of art—whether it’s an album cover, book cover, poster, or stand-alone work—that has stopped you in your tracks and filled you with wonder. The latest piece of magic Stephen has contributed to Rabbit Room Press is the cover and inside illustrations of The Door on Half-Bald Hill. The reader’s imagination is an unruly, vivid, and intimate element in the experience of any novel. Consequently, the act of illustrating a novel—providing one’s own visual interpretation as a filter for that of the reader’s—is a fearful task. And yet, when it’s done well, it adds an indispensable aura to a beloved story. In the case of The Door on Half-Bald Hill, it’s safe to say that Stephen Crotts has done exceedingly well, providing illustrations that both clarify the content of the story and unobtrusively encourage the reader in their own work of visualization. As someone who bonded deeply with The Door on Half-Bald Hill, I was grateful and enthralled to hear from Stephen about an artistic process I have zero knowledge of myself. Drew Miller: Can you share about the process of reading The Door on Half-Bald Hill, imagining the story unfold in your mind, and then translating your mental images into illustrations? How does an image from the story progress from your imagination to a fleshed-out work? Stephen Crotts: Before I’d even met Helena, Pete told me about a project that had a tone of Cormac McCarthy-meets-Tolkien. He said, “There isn’t enough illustration in books for grownups, and I’m going to do something about it.” So I was all in. As I read through the manuscript, I made notes of visuals that stood out. With a few, though, I underlined and boxed in sections that I thought were key visual moments. One was the comparison of carrying a question like a snail carries its shell. On the same day, I came across a snail on my daily walk in the woods. A snapshot of that became the basis for the engraving that appears in the book. Drew Miller: What sorts of aesthetic decisions did you make throughout this process, to make the story “feel” a certain way to the reader, as they flip the page and find an illustration? Stephen Crotts: I did some study and watched several documentaries about the ancient world of Celtic peoples to get a sense of some of what Helena drew inspiration from in traveling overseas. I made a huge folder of images to get in the right headspace. The emotion of Helena’s story lives well in the misty landscapes of the British Isles, Iceland, and the North Sea. The Isle of Skye became my primary reference for imagining Idris traveling in the mountains. For the feel of village life, I looked to Butser Ancient Farm in the South Downs. It is an experimental archaeological museum that interprets Iron Age communities. Drew Miller: Am I right that there’s only one color really featured, other than black and white—red, for the Bloodmoon? Stephen Crotts: We wanted the sense of stillness and longing that the people of Blackthorn are experiencing to sit within the drawings. In my mind, much of the story is in a monochromatic world. A land that ought to be deep green is decaying. Red is associated with moments of reckoning in the story, so it felt right to include it in the cover. And from a design perspective, the red spine and flaps just felt really pleasing. Drew Miller: Could you choose an illustration from the book—it could be the cover, too, if you like—and use it as an example, walking us through how you crafted it? We wanted the sense of stillness and longing that the people of Blackthorn are experiencing to sit within the drawings. In my mind, much of the story is in a monochromatic world. A land that ought to be deep green is decaying. Stephen Crotts Stephen Crotts: I used a variety of media to make these drawings, including wood engraving, scratchboard, and digital. For the cover, I made sketches, and then several comps. At one point, I composited several landscape photos to put together an idea of what I wanted to see. Pete and I went back and forth on overall design, color, and feel as we narrowed in. I drew that one digitally, on an iPad. I love the ability to draw subtractively with a digital format, much like I do when carving substrate out of a wood or linoleum block. Taking the white out of the black lends a more carved feel to the final piece. But the flexibility is a blessing and a curse, as I would find myself zooming way in and fussing over tiny details for a long time. Helena pulls no punches in this story. While set in an imagined land, it has a rawness and honesty that is recognizable. The acknowledgement of brokenness and the frustration of not being able to fix it is something we all feel in our collective moment. I first read this book during the season of Advent, which seemed right after finishing it. Idris and his people, like us, mourn in lonely exile. Learning to carry the right questions in humility is crucial on our journey toward intervening light. Click here to view The Door on Half-Bald Hill in the Rabbit Room Store, and here to visit Stephen Crotts’ website.

We’re grateful to share this new song from Andrew Peterson today, and grateful he wrote it. Link to the video and full lyrics are included in this post. I was walking down on Broadway In a multitude of marchers on parade There was anger, there was passion, There was mercy, there was peace yet to be made And the masks that we were wearing Kept the virus in control, or so they say And there was sickness in the air, and to be fair, It was the grief and all the grievances that plague The many years, and cause the tears on every face There are things I’ve done that need to be forgiven But I’m still learning how to ask Because the virus in my veins has been contained By this inherited mask And I’d rather be exposed to what is killing Than to hide from what’s to blame So let me lift my voice on Broadway, Let me lift my brother’s cross, Let me mourn for what it cost, And feel the magnitude of loss In every name George, Breonna, Ahmaud All beloved of God And there’s more, so many more, But there’s just no way to say every single name And there’s anguish, so much anguish to be sure Inside the killers of the slain ‘Cause if you’ve done somebody wrong It’s like a song you can’t just banish from your head It’ll eat you when you’re sleeping, like a wolf that you’ve been keeping by your bed And those names are gonna haunt you Till you lie down in the grave and say goodbye And on the resurrection morn you’ll see the form Of Jesus blazing in the sky And then you’ll know how much he loved The ones who suffered Whose blood was crying from the ground And you’ll reckon with the truth That even they and even you Were so much dearer than you knew, So tell me what then will you do When the ones you never knew come back around: George, Breonna, Ahmaud All beloved of God And I shouldn’t be surprised that when the lies Come out of hiding there’s a fire ‘Cause when every hope was dashed Into the ashes of that funeral pyre There was a spark of truth unsmothered Till the mighty wind uncovered and relit So let us lay down on the altar every sin That we pretend we don’t commit Till this world has been refined, Oh, let us share the bread and wine And pass the peace Till every soul has been remembered Every stony heart is tendered Every all has been surrendered Every noble cause is rendered obsolete And I believe that there’s a reckoning in store And all the poor and the oppressed Will be the first who were the last And all the lost and all the cursed will be the blessed So let this kingdom of the least Spread the table for the feast and light the flame Let us send the invitation, Every tribe and every nation, There’s no corner of creation That is safe from this salvation It is rolling down the mountain Like the water from a fountain It is breaking on the beaches From the deep and distant reaches Of the seas, and all the gleaners Are the proclamation bringers And the dancers are the answers To the questions of the singers And we’ll shout that we were wrong We had it coming all along And then the mercies of the Lord Will be the chords to every song And all the glories of the king Will be the melodies we sing And all these marchers on parade Are making ready for that day And it begins as I repent And bow my head as I lament this broken world ‘Cause every victim, every villain Was a precious little boy or little girl This is me and this is you This is the truth, if you believe it or not You have always been beloved They have always been beloved George, Breonna, Ahmaud All beloved of God Words and music by Andrew Peterson. Audio by Asher Peterson. Video by Dawson Freeman.

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 2: The Breath Between Us.] We believe in the Holy Spirit, The Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father (and the Son) —Nicene Creed Toward the beginning of the current pandemic, an article appeared in Wired magazine, its title articulating a subtle but meaningful distinction. It read: “They Say Coronavirus Isn’t Airborne—but It’s Definitely Borne By Air.”1 What on earth does that mean? Let me try to translate that title into a slightly less gnomic form: To the best of our knowledge, it seems coronavirus cannot live on for an extended period of time, freely floating about in the air around us. However, the virus can be and is transmitted when microscopic droplets from the lungs are carried on the air, through, for instance, a cough or a sneeze. I’ll spare you an extended quotation from the same article, describing the actual journey of these contagions from the lungs of one person to those of another. The upshot however could be summarized in a slightly altered form of the article’s title: “The Coronavirus isn’t Airborne, but it is borne by Breath.” The work of breath, that is to say, is to take what is living in one, and to cause it to reside and grow in another. Let me repeat that: the work of breath is to take what is living in one, and to cause it to reside and grow in another. Some of you—perhaps particularly those who have suffered under many years of children’s sermons—may already have detected a metaphor gestating in these words. And you would be correct. But while this is metaphor, it isn’t “mere metaphor.” Instead, we’re riffing on the very image that scripture gives us. Spirit means breath, or wind. (For more on this, see the first or second articles in this series.) The Nicene Creed says that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son.” And as the article from Wired reminds us, this “procession” is one more way that the Holy Spirit is breath-like. When you and I are sitting together talking, my breath moves from my inner being, out toward you. More broadly, breath takes what originates inside one person (sounds, ideas, words . . . or viruses), and carries it to the inside of another person. This is precisely the work of the Holy Spirit as well. The Spirit takes the good things that live in God and causes them to live in me—whether that is life, or holiness, or knowledge, or power. So, Jesus tells his disciples: “All that belongs to the Father is mine,” and what is more, “the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.” (John 16:14-15) So the Spirit receives what the Son has received from the Father, and makes it available to us. We see this happen just a little later in John’s gospel, after the resurrection. Jesus, like God in the Garden of Eden, breathes on his disciples, and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). The very life of God in the person of Jesus Christ is now carried, by the Breath of God, to live in Jesus’ disciples. The Spirit proceeds. He is (in the words of British theologian John Taylor) “the Go-Between” God;” The Holy Spirit is God in motion. The work of breath is to take what is living in one, and to cause it to reside and grow in another. Steve Guthrie We could even say that the Holy Spirit is the divine person whose very being is to “proceed”—this is the very nature of breath. And if the Holy Spirit is fully God (as Christians confess), then this giving, flowing outward, and moving beyond God’s own self that we’re describing is not something extra or “external” to God. It is not just something that God “does.” Rather this outward movement is who God is. And remarkably, this is also one way that God has created us in his image. We also are beings who exhale—whose very being includes “procession.” It didn’t have to be that way. We could hypothetically imagine a different kind of world, in which only God breathes out, and human beings only breathe in. But God has made us like himself with respect to procession. We can only continue living if we both inhale, and also, exhale. If we were to refuse to “proceed” in this way—if we were to try to live wholly enclosed within ourselves, resisting any outward movement—we would die. Interestingly enough, these same ideas about breath, procession—and infection!—are echoed in one of the most famous modern theories of art. The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy defined art in this way: Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them. —Tolstoy, What is Art? (1897) Like the Spirit who gives us life, we have our being by exhaling, and allowing what is deep within us to move out beyond ourselves. Steve Guthrie The image Tolstoy uses is so striking that his theory of art is sometimes called “Art as Infection!” Tolstoy uses the metaphor of infection over and over again throughout his treatise. Art comes about (he argues) when that which is “deepest inside” the artist is transferred to some external media (a canvas, a melody, an arrangement of syllables). Another person then comes into direct contact with that media, like a person placing her hand on a germ-laden doorknob. (Apologies for the “ick” factor in all of this.) And finally, as a result of her contact with that “contagion,” the same feeling that once resided deep inside the artist comes to live deep inside the viewer, listener, or reader. There are all sorts of problems with Tolstoy’s theory of art. (When I listen to Vladimir Ashkenazy perform a Mozart piano concerto, am I really feeling the same thing Mozart felt when he composed it? Or am I feeling the same thing that Ashkenazy is feeling when he performs it? Or am I feeling the same thing that the conductor of the orchestra is feeling? And, more to the point, how would I ever be able to determine whether any one of those and I were feeling the exact same thing anyway?) But there is something in Tolstoy’s theory of art. In the human impulse to create, we see some echo of God’s own being. God has created us to proceed. Like the Spirit who gives us life, we have our being by exhaling, and allowing what is deep within us to move out beyond ourselves. There is something more that the word “procession” highlights for us: the Holy Spirit is the Giver of Life, but not in the way that a doctor is the giver of medicine. (Can you tell that I’m kind of stuck on the whole infection thing?) The doctor provides access to some healing power that is other than herself; but the Holy Spirit is himself the life he gives. We do not live from some power that God gives and that we then have apart from God. Indeed—“If it were his intention and he withdrew his spirit and breath, all humanity would perish together and mankind would return to the dust.” (Job 34:14) We live from God himself. God is the life that is in us, because there is no source of life but God. God doesn’t send us life the way a shipping clerk sends us a package. No; God himself, in the person of his Holy Spirit, proceeds. The fourth-century theologian Didymus the Blind writes: the Holy Spirit is the fullness of the gifts of God, and . . . the goods bestowed by God are nothing other than the subsistent Holy Spirit. For it is this fountain that pours forth all benefits received by the grace of God’s gifts. —Didymus the Blind, “On the Holy Spirit,” II God’s Breath is in fact God’s presence with us. And again, it is the sounding world—the world of movement initiated by breath or borne by wind—that helps us to understand the very distinctive way that breath manifests another’s presence. First of all, sound comes to meet us. I can, to a certain extent, control what is visually present to me. I can actively direct my gaze, looking here and not there. But I am addressed by sound, whether I choose to be or not. I can turn my head away from an unwelcome sight, but I cannot turn my ears away from an unwelcome sound. We have eyelids, but (as someone has observed), no earlids. Likewise, I can see something whether it is alive or dead, whether it is moving or not. But sound necessarily speaks of life, activity, and motion. Think of being in the woods on a dark evening. You hear a sound and you’re suddenly on high alert, because something (or someone!) is moving out there. Because sound is evanescent (it doesn’t just hang around “on its own”) anytime we hear a sound we also infer the presence of someone or something making the sound. Walter Ong writes that “[s]ound signals the present use of power, since sound must be in active production in order to exist at all. . . . [Sound] tells us that something is going on.”2 This in itself, it seems to me, is one point at which reflecting on the breath-like character of the Spirit is helpful. When we are met by breath we are addressed, approached, by the activity of another, that proceeds toward us. Spirit-uality then is not simply adopting a different perspective on things, nor is it simply getting in touch with my own inwardness. Rather, breath meets me from outside, in its liveliness and livingness. It is not under my control. “You do not know where [the Spirit] comes from or where it is going,” Jesus tells Nicodemus. (John 3:8) We do not become spiritual by (as it were) proceeding to a place of Spirit. Rather, it is God’s Spirit who proceeds to us. Sound necessarily speaks of life, activity, and motion. Steve Guthrie Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in this same verse remind us of one other thing that is distinctive to the kind of presence manifested by sound. “You hear [the wind’s] sound,” Jesus says, “but you cannot tell where it comes from.” Sound, in other words, makes that which is unseen available to our senses. “An inquiry into the auditory is also an inquiry into the invisible,” writes the philosopher Don Ihde.3 In John 3, Jesus appeals to the sounding of the wind, in part to remind Nicodemus that there are powerful forces at work in the world; some of which are seen, but some of which are not. The sounding world has the power to remind us of that still. And of course, this is equally true in our relationships with one another. There are deep things “inside” of me that are unseen and unknown to you, just as there are deep things inside of you that remain invisible to me. (“For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit [Gk. pneuma] within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit [Gk. pneuma] of God.” [1 Cor. 2:11]) My thoughts, like my breath, are within me and not available to anyone else, unless by that same breath they proceed toward another, making known what would have otherwise remained hidden. This, it seems to me, helps account for why “sounding arts”—spoken word and poetry, theater, and especially music—move us as deeply as they do, and why they feature so prominently in Christian worship. They speak of presence. Moreover, they make available to our senses something that is unseen. For it is not only God who is mysterious and invisible. There are ways in which we remain unseen and unknown to one another as well—this is Paul’s point in the passage just quoted—unless we make ourselves known to one another. And indeed, God has so made us that we may do just that, proceeding, from one toward another by the breath given us by God’s own proceeding Breath. As I look back over this article, it feels as if my own (figurative) breath has traveled some considerable distance, and along a somewhat winding path! And I would like it very much if “the thoughts that are in me” might be known—not just to my own spirit, as Paul says, but to all of you as well! So I’ll conclude, not with a rhetorical flourish, but with a few bullet points summarizing the main points I hoped to make. The Holy Spirit, the Breath of God, is breath-like, not only in giving life and sound, but also in that the Spirit proceeds. This is the work of the Spirit: to take what is in God and carry it out into creation; to bring what is “inside” of God to the “inside” of me. This is also one of the ways in which we are made in God’s image. We too can only live (or live fully) by “proceeding” out beyond ourselves. One particularly powerful and effective way that this sort of “proceeding” happens—one way that the things in me can come to live in another—is through the arts. This was Tolstoy’s conviction, and it is almost certainly correct. When we say that the Spirit proceeds, we are saying that God himself comes to us. God does not send us supply shipments, but his own self. This is again, another way that the Spirit is breath-like. Breath communicates presence. Music, theater, and spoken word, the arts of sound, are especially good at helping us to understand what is distinctive about the kind of presence that is manifested by breath. First of all, sound comes to us; addresses us. It is not under our control in the way that the visible world is. Secondly, sound makes sensible what is unseen. These two features of sounding presence can help us understand why music is such a powerful means of engaging with God and with one another. God and human beings are both personal realities, and persons—whether human or divine—cannot be known through examination. A person must come to us. A person must give him or herself in order to be known. Through breath, we give ourselves to one another. [Editor’s note: click here to read Part 4: Sounding, Re-sounding, and the Antiphonal Shape of the World.]

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Emily P. Freeman, author of The Next Right Thing, creator of the Next Right Thing Podcast, and co-founder of the online writing community Hope Writers. In this episode, Jonathan and Emily discuss writer’s block as a form of decision fatigue, the demand on our attention created by unmade decisions, the problematic desire “to be great,” how her training as a sign language interpreter has made her a better listener, and what a difference can be made by merely investing in our aspirations to write. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 27 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

Rosi Golan isn’t afraid to admit her fears. Despite Rosi’s 12 years in the music industry, beginning with 2008’s The Drifter and the Gypsy, the Israeli-born singer-songwriter says some fears loom larger than ever before. From the vulnerability of releasing personal material, to the fear of getting lost in the shuffle, to the worries of living up to expectations, Rosi swims in the Resistance in several forms. Even with her experience, her internal script still reads, “People are going to figure out I don’t know what I’m doing.” Fortunately, Rosi is mentally wired to push back against such doubts, a songstress always keen to try new things. It’s why she waited four hours to play an open mic night after learning to play just three chords on her first acoustic guitar. The fears are present, yes, but her curiosity and sense of adventure embolden her all the same. Click here to listen to this newest episode of The Resistance. And here to learn more about The Resistance Podcast.

For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. —Habakkuk 2:14 A while back I finished reading The Worst Journey in the World, the account of the British expedition to Antarctica made by Robert Falcon Scott and his men more than a century ago. We had a mild winter where I live, so I felt I could handle a stretch of living vicariously in bleakness and frigidity. (You must realize this was shortly before COVID-19 upended our lives, so l never suspected that soon we’d need not look to Antarctica to find isolation, privation, endurance, and danger.) During the polar exploration craze of the early twentieth century, to challenge adversity was one way to “win renown.” Men who braved the ice were cultural heroes, maybe the equivalent to the early astronauts of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The Worst Journey in the World was written by one of the youngest members of Scott’s expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard (known simply as Cherry to his companions). Published about ten years after the events described, his book relies heavily on his own journals and those of Scott and other key expedition members, and often gives long passages from them. Though primarily a scientific research operation, Robert Scott’s expedition is best remembered for his attempt to reach the South Pole, which no one had managed so far. He did succeed in reaching the Pole in January of 1912, though he was beaten to it by a Norwegian explorer who made it thirty-four days earlier. Worse, Scott and his four companions didn’t survive the return trip, succumbing to starvation and cold. We know the details because their friends later found their final camp and recovered their journals before giving the fallen a snowy burial. Though only five men trekked all the way to the Pole, there were twenty-five in all that lived at the main camp near the icy shore of the Ross Sea, and dozens more who stayed on the ship exploring the coast and collecting samples of marine life. From the main camp, various parties went out in different directions across the continent over the two-year lifespan of the expedition. In fact the title The Worst Journey in the World refers not to Scott’s later and much longer trip to the Pole, but to the so-called “Winter Journey” that Cherry and two companions made in hopes of collecting the first emperor penguin eggs ever seen by humanity. Among other things, this book showed me conclusively that I am not the sort of person needed for polar exploration. Emperor penguins lay their eggs in the winter, and previous explorers had always reached them too late in the year to see any. Winter travelling in the Antarctic had never been attempted, and Cherry’s account shows why. I don’t have time to tell you nearly all the details of even that one journey of the two-year expedition, undertaken in the months-long night of a sunless polar winter, when temps plunged as low as the negative 70s and frostbite reached even limbs well hidden in layers. Cherry says his teeth “split to pieces” either from their violent chattering or the sheer frigidity. But somehow the men, against all odds, managed to find their penguins and procure three eggs (plus two more that got smashed when Cherry fell into a crevasse). At one point their tent is blown away from over their heads during a three-day blizzard, leaving them cocooned in their reindeer-fur sleeping bags under the open sky and the drifting, burying snow. They outlast the blizzard and, impossibly, find the tent intact a half-mile away amid a chaos of canyons and tumbled ice. With the tent recovered there is once again a minuscule possibility of making it home, and they start the return slog. Navigating treacherous, broken terrain in the still-unbroken darkness, the only suffering they are spared is the snow-blindness that afflicts and even debilitates members of the summer journeys that would come later. After five weeks of enduring the most unimaginable conditions, the three men stumble back into base camp with their three priceless eggs, and are welcomed by Scott and the others as heroes. Creation can't be dis-enchanted; it's only we that can be. Matthew Cyr I said earlier that Scott’s expedition was primarily scientific. In his book Cherry claims that the attempt to reach the South Pole was a fundraising ploy more than anything, because Scott could appeal to the national pride of those whose money he needed but who didn’t care much about scientific research. Scott was a former Navy officer and not a scientist himself, but he always gave priority to the research—even when this hurt his chances at getting to the pole first. To him, coming in second to the Norwegians was almost irrelevant; the object of coming to Antarctica was in the samples collected, the measurements taken, the observations recorded, and in pinning down the geography of this mystery continent. The men, both scientists and otherwise, kept daily meteorological records even under the worst conditions, and these turned out to be the longest unbroken weather record that had yet been captured. In addition to the weather and magnetic observations, they brought back to England a couple thousand plants, animals, and fossils, many of which were previously unknown. Up to his death Scott maintained that they had succeeded at something worth dying for: adding to the world’s store of knowledge. Knowledge for its own sake. In contrast to the book’s veneration of scientific knowledge and discovery, I don’t recall anything being said about spiritual discovery. Of the many things that Cherry-Garrard’s book gave me to be astonished at, one of the more surprising was how his detailed account includes almost everything but God. We might think that conditions of abject misery and the risk of death would be enough to turn most anyone’s thoughts toward their Maker. But if he was much on their minds, Cherry does not discuss it, and his excerpts of the other men’s journals omit it also, except as linguistic artifacts such as the occasional “God help us!” whenever things are looking really bad. Another such artifact of bygone spirituality is the big cross the men erected in memory of the five who died on the way back from the Pole. There was some debate about the inscription to put on it, and someone suggested it ought to be a quote from the Bible because “the women think a lot of these things,”the women presumably being the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of the deceased. But Cherry approvingly records that instead of scripture, the men settle on the last line of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” to honor their dead: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Since reading those words, I’ve tried to imagine the news being carried to the wives that they were now widows and their children now fatherless, or to mothers that not even their sons’ remains were coming home, because they were locked in ice at the far end of the world. I’ve wondered if they felt the hard-won scientific knowledge was a satisfactory return for the loved ones they spent, or if they took any consolation that their men had given the world excellent weather data, or really remarkable Glossopteris tree fossils. I’ve tried to put myself both in their place and in the explorers’ place, while wrestling with the question of just what sort of knowledge is worth dying for. At the opening of the 20th century, it seems to have been widely accepted throughout the Western world that scientific progress was making the world safer, and easier, and would soon usher in a new era of happiness for humanity. Man was finally coming into his strength, the ability to conquer the world he lived in, the inevitable result being peace and enlightenment for all. From what I can tell, a vision of a sort of global Manifest Destiny was permeating Western culture, and such people would have been attracted to a poem like Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” a humanistic celebration of unbowed souls, “heroic hearts,” and bold adventure. The frontiers of knowledge were being rolled back just like the geographic frontiers, and spirits ran high. A mere 57 years after mankind set foot on the South Pole for the first time, the first human planted his boot on the dust of the moon. I doubt Captain Scott would have wagered that we’d get so far in so little time. But so much had changed between those two sets of footprints—not just our bank of knowledge, but the way we thought of it. By 1969 our stories had largely changed to dystopias. The unfettered optimism of Jules Verne’s “futurism” had given way to Brave New World and 1984. We knew more things than ever, but the more insightful of us saw that knowing more facts and having more technology doesn’t translate to peace and prosperity, or even a sense of purpose. As a people, we’d seen too much to keep that faith afloat. Today we’re even farther along; we live in an “Information Age,” which means we stumble daily through a blizzard of information that threatens to drift over and bury us. Even before COVID-19 blew in, we were bombarded by more facts, statistics, headlines, and sound bites than we could ever hope to make sense of. It can begin to feel meaningless, to degrade into mere noise. When I try to map out the path we took from the Heroic Age of Exploration to where we are now, it reminds me of the song “Small World” by The Orchardist. The opening lyrics run: I used to live in a world of mystery A world that I could see But could not explain I used to live in a world of unanswered questions But unquestioned answers  Are all that remain —”Small World,” The Orchardist Later the chorus laments: It’s a small world after all When you know it all It’s a small world whose mysteries Finally are solved —”Small World,” The Orchardist I think we Westerners are a people who have been running out of frontiers. The places beyond our maps get fewer and farther between, and it seems to mean less and less to fill them in. We harnessed the atom, sequenced our DNA, and we’re rolling right along on building artificial intelligence. And the utopia we anticipated a hundred years ago looks farther off than ever.  Our discoveries have tended to make things more convenient and more comfortable, to give us longer lives. . . and leave us emptier. We come out the other side and the universe has shrunk somehow. We’ve more or less completed the taming and subduing of the world, and what it looks like is all our needs being met with the push of a button, while we look at screens to keep from looking at each other, or at ourselves. The beating heart of the universe is an endless and beautiful mystery, and it’s a mystery that isn’t solved so much as opened, more and more fully with every wonder. Matthew Cyr As for geographic frontiers, with Google Earth I can sit eating Cheez-Its and visit any place in the world; I can zoom right down to Captain Scott’s 1912 expedition hut still standing at Cape Evans and even “walk” inside, scoping out their old-timey lanterns and supply crates and a preserved emperor penguin skin on a table. I’m doing it right now. If I want to, I can mouse-wheel back out past the stratosphere, then plunge down in another hemisphere and onto my street, till I can read the numbers off my mailbox. I can see branches in my yard that need to be picked up, and a box waiting on the porch to be brought in. I can see what looks like an oil stain where my wife parks on the street. I can see cracks in the pavement, individual leaves and pebbles. I can do the same thing with an alley in Bangkok and what appears to be a strip mall in Reykjavik (Taco Bell, KFC, and Domino’s Pizza). If I want, it’ll tell me the distance between the two down to the hundredth of a mile (6,271.97). Everything has been pinned down and quantified. There seems nothing left out there to be discovered. Hilariously, when I opened the website, it warned me: You are running an experimental version of Earth. It feels that way, doesn’t it? In the absence of geographic frontiers and the (seeming) scarcity of scientific ones, I think the idea of a spiritual frontier could be an antidote to the dis-enchantment of the universe. But I also think that we can have a hard time thinking of God as a still-mostly-undiscovered country, beckoning us to virgin landscapes and never-before-seen phenomena. Sometimes it can feel like the Christian faith too has been pinned down and quantified over the centuries. Charted and catalogued to the least minutiae by theologians, dried and put under glass by church bylaws. Yet as Michael Card told us last Hutchmoot, only .09% of Jesus’s earthly life is described in the gospels. We’re shown only a well-selected sliver of even that 33-year span. And if our Creator is indeed infinite, then the whole of what he’s revealed of himself so far can only be the tip of the iceberg. What remains hidden and waiting to be revealed is vast beyond comprehension. There is Love and Beauty, Wisdom and Mirth in such abundance that we can spend the rest of forever pressing into him and come no closer to exhausting his marvels. God grant that I might be an explorer who will shrug off my fear to encounter wonders. Reading Cherry-Garrard’s experiences in the Antarctic, I was fascinated by the idea of snow blindness. The sun’s glare off the snow and ice can debilitate men, especially during a polar summer’s months of daylight uninterrupted by night. One man came back to England with blue-gray eyes in a weathered face, and even his mother didn’t readily recognize her son, who’d been brown-eyed when he left her. I’ve since read other accounts of the color being burned out of people’s irises during polar travel. Our eyes are made to receive light, to see, but there is more light in the world than we can take in; too much and we are overwhelmed. I begin to wonder how often I’ve trudged over a field of innumerable cold hard facts, each one like a tiny crystal reflecting the light of a single Source to which I was insensible. How often have I been snow-blind? As the outer borders of our world keep getting annexed into “the known,” I’m deeply thankful for pockets of artist-priests like the Rabbit Room. The body of Christ needs members who will keep reminding us that the seemingly barren expanse of data we’re subjected to is actually outlining the contours of Glory, scattering more light around than we know how to see. The beating heart of the universe is an endless and beautiful mystery, and it’s a mystery that isn’t solved so much as opened, more and more fully with every wonder. Every snowflake and aurora and penguin egg becomes an arrow pointing to that One that gives them meaning. Creation can’t be dis-enchanted; it’s only we that can be. May we instead pursue Jesus into the horizon with the tenacity of Jacob wrestling his God—To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with singer-songwriter Claire Holley. In this episode, Jonathan and Claire discuss the role of fear in writing, object writing prompts, how to discern what music is “saying,” and what Claire has learned over time about her songwriting process. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 28 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. 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 3: God in Motion.] I believe in the Holy Spirit . . . Together with the Father and the Son He is worshipped and glorified. —The Nicene Creed On a recent Saturday morning, a text message popped up on the Rabbit Room Staff thread. Leslie Thompson, one of our staff members, was in Kentucky with her husband, hiking. She texted to tell us that as they drove to the trailhead that morning, they had passed a handmade sign fixed to a tree. It read: “Is He Worthy?” A hundred yards or so further along there was another tree, and another sign: “He is.” I’m pretty confident that most Rabbit Room readers will recognize this reference to our own Andrew Peterson’s song, “Is He Worthy?” Part of the power of that song—and part of the fun of the signs that Leslie saw (like a series of liturgical Burma-Shave placards)—is the way the call propels us toward a response. Like an unresolved chord; like the story setting up a familiar joke until we are left dangling on the edge of the well-loved punchline; the initial statement generates its own gravitational field, drawing us on to the answering countersign. “Is He Worthy” is an example of a very ancient musical form called antiphonal song, in which a leader and congregation (or a congregation divided into two groups, or perhaps two different choirs) engage in call and response. You can find examples in the Old Testament. Psalm 136, with its answering refrain of “His love endures forever” almost certainly would have been performed antiphonally. In Nehemiah 12, Nehemiah describes an antiphonal arrangement for the choral celebrations that marked the dedication of Jerusalem’s rebuilt wall. “I . . . assigned two large choirs to give thanks,” Nehemiah writes. (Neh. 12:31) One lucky group was assigned “to proceed on top of the wall to the right, toward the Dung Gate. Hoshaiah and half the leaders of Judah followed them.” (Neh. 12:31-32) “The second choir” Nehemiah records, “proceeded in the opposite direction. I followed them on top of the wall, together with half the people.” (12:38) (It’s notable, though unsurprising, that Nehemiah decided he would be singing in the “not-by-the-Dung-Gate” group.) The point is that this musical celebration was going to be not just a sounding of praises, but a re-sounding. The celebrants would be both performers and listeners. Each would call, and this call would elicit a response, which would draw forth its own response in return. This to-and-fro wasn’t just arranged for the sake of interesting acoustics. Rather, it reflects something of the architecture of worship itself. In the last article in this series, we considered the part of the Nicene Creed which says that the Holy Spirit proceeds. The Spirit, as the Breath of God, is God in motion; carrying the life of God from God into creation. The next phrase in the creed however, tells us something of what that Breath is meant to do once it reaches creation: together with the Father and the Son [the Holy Spirit] is worshipped and glorified. The Breath of God proceeds into creation, and then, in a great antiphonal response, the worship of creation proceeds back toward God, carried on the same breath God has leant His creatures. But even though the call generates the response, this is not a mechanical reflex; this isn’t God tossing a tennis ball against the wall in order to play catch with Himself. Rather, it is precisely in this re-sounding that we find our own voice. We can explore this idea a little more fully through one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ best known poems—“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame.” (If you’ve never read it, you have my permission to go do so now. Really. Go ahead. I’ll wait here.) Hopkins writes: As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; —Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” In Hopkins’ poem the sound each thing makes in the course of its ordinary being in the world is in fact an announcement of its name. It is the means by which each stone, well, or bell bow gives voice to its deepest and truest self. In this way it “deals out that being indoors each one dwells.” Think for a moment about what Hopkins is describing. A stone rolls over the lip of a well and tumbles toward the bottom, clattering and bouncing off the sides along the way until with a final echoing sound it announces its arrival at the bottom. What do we hear? In all the percussions of the stone’s descent it “flings out broad its name.” So, we learn something of what the stone is made of: a heavy rock thuds its way down the shaft differently than a light one. We learn something of its shape: the roundness of the stone (or its flatness, or its edged serrations) makes itself heard along each point of its descent. We discover what the rock is made of—the clear ping of polished granite, or the whispering rattle of shale. We learn all of this even if we don’t know enough about geology or physics to articulate it in the proper terminology, which in a way just underlines the point. We don’t learn the stone’s scientific classification; we learn its voice. This is the sound of this rock along this trajectory through this space. Sound only exists by re-sounding . . . Sound is not only a movement, but a movement that sets other things in motion. Steve Guthrie But more than one name sounds out as the stone is “tumbled over rim.” Sure, we learn the shape and character of the tumbling stone, but no one ever just hears “a stone,” all on its own. As it falls we also learn the name of the “roundy well” into which it has tumbled; namely, at the very least, that it is a well, and that it’s a “roundy” one! (Because a round well of course sounds different than a square one; and the same stone falling into a puddle, or a creek, or a sewer drain, sounds different still.) So the stone’s declaration of its own name carries with it the name of all the stones that line the walls of the well (or the mud, or the concrete, or . . . ). It announces not only its own voice but that of the water that stands (or doesn’t stand) at its base. It articulates the particular shape and dimensions and density and humidity of the resonant air contained within the well. The sound of the stone is necessarily the sound of the stone in its environment. We hear not just the “voice of the stone” but the antiphony of the stone and all that surrounds it. If the stone in our poem were a particularly proud and individualistic rock—if it were to insist that we hear its voice only; if it were to refuse absolutely that the walls, the floor, and the surrounding atmosphere of the well should add their own voices to its descent—then we would hear nothing at all. And conversely, if the walls of the well, and the water at its base turned out to be insufferable divas, forbidding any tumbling rock to sound in their space, then we would not hear their voices either. Lest we think this is a particular quirk of stones and wells, it’s worth saying explicitly: this is always and everywhere the case. Sound only exists by re-sounding. There is no sound in a vacuum, because sound is not only a movement, but a movement that sets other things in motion. As the promotional posters for the movie Alien famously announced: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Sounds are events in an environment, and nothing sounds apart from an environment. This also means that each voice, by its sounding, awakens (at least to some extent) all the voices within the horizon of its sounding. That’s a startling thought. Consider: in one sense, nothing is more intimately or closely related to you than your own voice. And yet, you have never heard your voice “only.” Your voice always carries with it the voice of the space around you. And this is true, not only physiologically, but culturally. “Your” voice is manifested through the accents and inflections of the time and place in which you were raised. (Even before they can say words, babies of Russian speakers (for instance) make different kinds of sounds than the babies of Spanish speakers!) Likewise, if you are speaking words, those words announce the distinctive elements of the language which you received from those who raised you. I belabor the point just because of how often (as a college professor) I hear young people being encouraged to “find their own voice.” And of course, that’s an important thing to do—as long as we remember that, even at the most literal level, “our own voice” is never just “our own voice”! The sharing of others’ voices is not a limitation of my ability to express myself; it is its condition. Steve Guthrie Individualist that I am, I might be tempted to think—like our imaginary egotistical stone—that my voice only truly sounds when all the other “re-sounding” voices around me have been silenced. But the acoustical reality of such an eventuality would not be a stunning solo, but silence. My voice can only sound through the resounding of the spaces and voices around me. And conversely (we could say), like the walls of Hopkins’ well that we “hear” as the stone tumbles along them, my voice is likewise when others re-sound through me. As I type these words, I pause, and clear my throat (mm-mm-mm-MMM). I do it at least a dozen times a day, but as I listen to it now, I realize, it is my mother’s throat-clearing-sound that I hear. I would know it anywhere. And this happens a lot. My son says something funny; I laugh, and shockingly—really, shockingly!—I hear my father’s laugh emerging from my throat. Where did that come from? I think. That was a “Dad Noise!” I speak, it turns out, in my parents’ voices; and my parents’ voices speak in me. This sharing of others’ voices is not a limitation of my ability to express myself; it is its condition. In the same way, when I express myself, I do not silence my parents, but voice them. Even now, some years after both of my parents have passed away, our antiphonal song continues, calling and responding to one another. My conviction is that all of these instances of antiphony (ringing stones, re-sounding voices) are not just “illustrations” of a general truth. They are ways in which our world bears the stamp of the God who has made it. And in particular, they testify to the delightfully antiphonal character of the spiritual life. The Spirit does not only to cause God’s life to live in me, but also enables my answering response to God. The first gift brings about a second. Physiologically, the intake of breath—by necessity—gives also the answering exhalation. So God gives not only breath, we might say, but breathing. What is more, this answering response is not any less “my own,” not any less original, by virtue of being an answer. In fact, when I return the breath I have been given in praise and worship, then who I am in my distinctive individuality sounds out most clearly. If our responding breath is like God’s (or we could say, if we really have learned the lesson of the tumbling stone in Hopkins’ poem), then our voices will not only sound, but will set off other resonances all around us. It’s a question worth asking ourselves: What sorts of re-sounding does my sounding make possible? Or: Can I exercise my voice in ways that very intentionally give rise to antiphonal responses from those around me? This is a different sort of vision of creativity, but one, I think, modeled on the activity of the “Creator Spirit.” The Holy Spirit not only creates, but creates the conditions for further creativity. The Breath of God both sounds and gives rise to countless answering echoes. The Holy Spirit, writes Etienne Vetö, “acts through others and makes them act.” The Father breathes the Breath into the Son to make it his and allow him to breathe back; in the same way, it is breathed into us to become ours, so that we may “breathe back out” to others. Our way of “breathing out” is to love God and to love others, especially the poor and the needy. We “breathe out” by employing the gifts [of the Spirit] for others. —Etienne Vetö, The Breath of God: An Essay on the Holy Spirit in the Trinity God gives life and breath in order to make us givers. “Those who want to save their life will lose it,” Jesus says, “and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Mtt. 16:25) In the same way, the life-giving breath we have received remains a life-giving breath when we offer it to God and others. In the same way, my voice is most truly mine when it both answers and calls to other voices—the voice of God first of all, and then that of my neighbor. Our sounding forth, whether metaphorical or literal—whether in our activity generally, or in our art- and music-making particularly—is most deeply “Spirit-ual” when the sounding of our breath doesn’t drown out these other voices, but causes them to sound. [Editor’s note: click here to read Part 5: The Preposition of Love.]

My friend Kirby and I were going to play a show in an upscale planned community, and I felt the need to prepare him. “Just be forewarned,” I said. “I’ve been here before. It’s a little weird.” We pulled into the drive, puttering past a capacious barn that looked a more like a Colonial Inn than any working barn I knew. A dainty roadside sign proudly offered to direct us to “Goat Yoga.” “I see what you mean,” said Kirby. Now, don’t get me wrong. If you want to do yoga around goats, I guess that’s fine. It’ll probably teach you that goats don’t care about yoga—a universal truth I lament isn’t more widely known. Goats do not look good in stretchy pants; they are eating, bleating poop-machines. Many people who don’t farm have a mental image of farming that’s best described as cute. Cute little critters running around making cute noises, cutely not excreting on every available surface. Cute little seedlings growing up into a newsworthy bumper crop. Never mind that the very term bumper crop implies a kind of surprise, as if we hold it to be self-evident that our curse from the Fall includes stumbling blocks in plant husbandry. Yet there is still magic in the smallest aspects of gardening. I recently discovered the magic of the hoe. It’s awesome. I wanted to try sorghum this year. It’s a crop grown round the world, both highly drought tolerant and highly useful. You can roast and eat the grains or simply toss the prolific grain heads to your chickens—assuming that, like me, you’re fool enough to raise chickens. Depending on the variety, you can cut the cane and juice sorghum, firing the liquid until it boils down into a delightful syrup with a nice cereal overtone. After that, the cane mash makes great silage. Geeks are people entranced by material that leaves others bored. . . Each of us is geeky about one or several things, and I’m convinced that—if we may say so—God is the biggest geek of us all. Adam Whipple This is where the hoe comes in. Unlike those beautiful squashes leaching your nitrogen supply, sorghum is happy to be left alone. You plant in good rows at appropriate distances and commence regular hoeing. In your hand is an ergonomic ninja staff, armed with a flat, perpendicular metal plate at the end. With all the enthusiasm you can muster…you scrape it across the ground. Then, you do it again. There is no Sigur Rós backing track. No one is Instagramming you. You are scraping dirt with a bladed stick, trying to maintain your rows and keep the weeds at bay. This is called trusting the process, and no one watching you would be able to tell at a glance that you might be doing work dedicated to Christ, serving people by your labor—because good work is boring. Process, most of the time, lacks marketable charisma. When my kids summon the audacity to tell me they’re bored, I tell them I’m glad. Boredom is the blank space where attention is cultivated, the marathon track upon which our minds learn to breathe properly and endure strain. If we don’t appreciate the quietude and lack of stimulus, we’ll never acquire the ability to work through it. Furthermore, if we assume that good work, whatever the unique discipline may be, is only the surprise egg-laying of a finished product, we’ll tire and quit when our own labor hits a wall of drudgery. You see this in everything from music to teaching to demolition—perhaps especially demolition. Years ago, a bridge over I-40 had to be brought down. Weeks, probably months, were spent in planning. Then came a few seconds of crack and boom in the early morning dark. Then there was cleanup. Nobody stays to watch cleanup. This is hoeing: it’s cleanup and maintenance. It’s management of a million tiny scoops of surface-dry soil. You must have the imagination to see plants slowly gobbling up minerals, for they do it quietly. I am learning the grace to be more interested in the minutiae of my own endeavors. Adam Whipple We have a term for people who possess the imagination to find interest in boring things. We call them geeks, or nerds. These days, geek is thankfully more chic than it used to be. Those of us who suffered the daily derision of our schoolmates—except when that pop quiz came around—are glad for a reprieve, glad to reclaim a pejorative epithet as a term of endearment, almost praise. So, what does it mean nowadays? Well, it means the same thing it used to mean: someone who can outtalk your attention span on a given subject. We have baseball geeks, Tolkien geeks, culinary or psychology geeks. Of a time, geek referred to young people interested in chemistry, music, grammar, and the like. I’m still there. My friends know I’m willing to die on a hill of well-placed commas. I feel physical anger at John Dryden over his seemingly arbitrary decision that we ought not end sentences with prepositions. Sometimes, that’s what prepositions are for. Jerk. Geeks are people entranced by material that leaves others bored. That is to say, geeks possess the imagination and wonderment to engage subjects more deeply than other people, to dig into good work. Each of us is geeky about one or several things, and I’m convinced that—if we may say so—God is the biggest geek of us all. Think about it: the idea of atoms has been around since before Epicurus, and since then we have learned about quarks and bosons and leptons. While the universe seems to be of incomprehensible size, it also encompasses humanly inestimable complexity, a fact God knew before Epicurus or anyone else. Our Lord could discourse with perfect joy on electron orbitals for ten hours straight and more. He loves them and knows everything about them. Me? I’m Biff Tannen, my hippocampus balking at wave-particle duality. I am learning the grace to be more interested in the minutiae of my own endeavors. Besides gardening, there are all the uninteresting parts of recording music. Standing as formidable obstacles to my laziness are the unrolling of cables, the plugging in of cables, the setting of levels, and the waiting for a time of day when no cars are passing. It’s good medicine to be able to connect such things to the moments when songs, by the mysteries of the Holy Ghost, come to bear on the souls of actual people. If plugging in cables brings people encouragement in this warmongering world, it’s totally worth it. Besides, it keeps my work from becoming goat yoga. The sorghum is knee-high now. I wish I were an expert at this—I can certainly outtalk my own knowledge on the matter—but I am learning. Most days, I spend a little time with my hands in the dirt, or I let the chickens out while I wander the Tennessee-red rows, plucking spears of fescue or pulling out fibrous tentacles of crabgrass. I wield a hoe, and I am a bit bored, and it is good. Click here to read the first post in this series: “Gardening 101: Fighting Racism in Practice.”

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 4: Sounding, Re-sounding, and the Antiphonal Shape of the World.] How accurate one has to be with one’s prepositions! Perhaps it was a preposition wrong that set the whole world awry. —Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion The truth is, I’m not much of a stickler for grammar. But I do love this passage from Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion. I love the prospect of all of history teetering precariously, balanced on the back of a couple innocuous looking letters. And I love thinking about whether Williams could actually be right. Could a mere “without” where there should have been a “within”—or perhaps an “above” that should have been “below”—really set the whole world out of joint? The prepositions under discussion in this part of Williams’ novel are “of” and “in,” but the preposition I have in mind right now is “through.” In particular, I’m interested in the last little bit of the Nicene Creed devoted to the Holy Spirit. “I believe in the Holy Spirit” it reads, “who has spoken through the prophets.” “Through the prophets” is not only a creedal expression, but a biblical one as well: “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets.” (Hebrews 1:1) So from one source or the other we may have heard the phrase often enough that it no longer strikes us as unusual. But it is. We speak of people, to people, and about people. If we aren’t careful we sometimes speak over them or past them. We speak for those we want to assist and against those we want to resist. We may speak down to someone we don’t care for or into a situation we care about very much. But—apart from a president dispatching an ambassador, or a foreign visitor employing a translator—we are unlikely to speak through someone. Nevertheless this is how scripture describes the work of God’s Spirit in the prophets: “The Spirit of the Lord spoke through me,” King David declares on his deathbed. (2 Samuel 23:2) What sort of significance, if any, attaches to this particular preposition? One way of reading “through the prophets” might be to construe the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the prophet as more or less the same as one of the examples I just cited. Perhaps the Holy Spirit speaks through the prophet the way a foreign speaker speaks through her translator. But this isn’t very satisfying. A translator is, more or less, a necessary evil. In almost every instance we would prefer that the speaker be able to address her audience directly, but the barrier of differing languages means she cannot. And so she employs a translator, whose job is essentially that of a courier, shuttling words from the speaker to listener by the most direct route possible (and preferably, not touching or tampering with the package along the way!). In a situation like high level government negotiations for instance, the perfect translator (we might imagine) would be the one who adds nothing at all of his own voice. We don’t want the translator hammering out delicate international policy. That’s the job of the government official. The translator needs to keep his own voice out of things. Is this how it works when God’s Spirit “speaks through the prophets,” then? Again this isn’t very satisfying. First of all, if God is able and willing to speak (and speaking is pretty much what we see God doing throughout scripture, from the “Let there be!” of Genesis 1 to the concluding invitation: “Come!” of Revelation 22); if God is able and willing to speak, then why would God have to employ the “necessary evil” of a courier service? I remember standing with my parents outside the sanctuary of our church while an adult friend asked Mom and Dad some question about me. I was a boy of eight or nine. “So what does Steven think about . . . ?” Dad smiled and looked at me. “I think he’s probably big enough to speak for himself. What do you think Steven?” Isn’t God “big enough to speak for himself”? So why the prophets? Plainly, God is able to speak directly, without an intermediary; there are plenty of instances in scripture where we see just this happening. And yet, God delights, God chooses, to speak through others. God is pleased that we should hear the word of God through a human voice. Which brings us back to the matter of prepositions. God, in his freedom, has not only determined to speak to us, but through us. We are not just projects, but partners in God’s work of creation and redemption. So, no: the through of “through the prophets,” is not the “through” of an interpreter; a paid courier. It is the “through” of breath. As we’ve been considering over the last few posts, Spirit (in both Greek and Hebrew) also means breath (or wind), and certainly, speaking through the prophets is one of the obvious ways the activity of the Holy Spirit is breath-like. How then do wind and breath create sound? Not independently, certainly. We do not hear either wind or breath “by itself,” so much as we hear the objects over which and through which (there it is again) they pass. This is the case whether we are talking about the wind moving through the trees in my yard or the breath passing through vocal folds in my larynx. The wind does not “have” sound, but “makes” sound, collaboratively, as it were; in conversation with its environment. In the same way, theologian Etienne Vetö writes that the Holy Spirit “rarely speaks directly but rather . . . inspires others to speak.” So for instance, “Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: ‘Rulers and elders of the people!’” (Acts 4:8) The early opponents of Christianity found they were unable to stand up against Stephen and “the Spirit with which he was speaking.” (Acts 6:10) Paul’s “message and . . . preaching were . . . a demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” (1 Corinthians 2:4) Jesus refers to “David . . . speaking by the Holy Spirit” (Mark 12:36) And he begins his own public ministry by declaring: “The Spirit of the Lord . . . [has] anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. . . to proclaim release to the captives . . . . To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.” (Luke 4:18-19) There is a deferential quality to the Spirit’s work, whereby the Spirit empowers others to speak. There is a deferential quality to the Spirit’s work, whereby the Spirit empowers others to speak. Steve Guthrie This observation helps us think through another concern that has been raised about the Spirit speaking “through the prophets.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge was uncomfortable with the traditional doctrine of biblical inspiration (as he understood it), because it seemed to him that it obliterated the voices and the personalities of the human authors of scripture. In the Bible, he writes, we find writings of extraordinary beauty; “heart-awakening utterances of human hearts—of men of like faculties and passions with myself, mourning, rejoicing, suffering, triumphing.” But if we say that these writers were directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, he complains, then we make of God “O bear with me, if I say— [a] Ventriloquist.” We turn authors like King David, “the sweet Psalmist of Israel [into] . . . a mere instrument . . . an automaton poet.” If we say that it is God’s Spirit “speaking through” the authors of scripture, then the Bible becomes not a living breathing chorus of human voices, but simply “a hollow passage for a voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their names, and yet is but one voice, and the same; and no man uttered it, and never in a human heart was it conceived.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit) But it seems to me that this objection doesn’t take the biblical language of breath—or the Holy Spirit’s role as the Breath of God—nearly seriously enough. If we really take our bearings from the statement that “all scripture is God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16), then we will be pointed toward a very different sort of understanding of scripture than the one Coleridge warns against. For breath (as we’ve already said) does not “have” a sound, so much as it sounds in collaboration with all that it passes through. We might ask then: when someone speaks, do we hear the sound of their breath? Or of their vocal folds? Or of the resonating cavity of their mouth, lips, tongue, and nose? The answer, of course, (just as it was when you were back in school) is: “D. All of the above.” Coleridge worries that talk of “inspiration” (being en-spirited, or “breathed into”) turns someone like King David into “a mere instrument.” The metaphor of “instrument” belongs to Coleridge, not the Bible, but it’s still worth considering for a moment. Over the last couple of years my daughter Lucy has been learning to play the bassoon, but recently she discovered an old trumpet we had brought back from my parents’ house, and decided she wanted to try to learn to play that as well. Whether playing bassoon or trumpet, the same breath—Lucy-Breath—is at work. Neverthless (you will be unsurprised to learn) the sound of our newly acquired trumpet remains entirely different from that of the bassoon. There is no danger of mistaking one for the other. Indeed, when we took the trumpet to a local band store to be serviced, the technician spent several minutes telling us the reasons why this particular trumpet would have this distinctive sort of sound. (It turns out the trumpet is from the 1920s! Not worth much money, but still!) Again, as I said, the “player and instrument” metaphor isn’t one that scripture uses to describe how the Spirit speaks through the prophets. The point is simply that Coleridge tosses out the phrase “mere instrument” altogether too easily. Try talking with a professional violinist or guitarist about their “mere instrument.” There is no such thing. So we return to a different version of the same question I posed earlier: when I hear Lucy practicing in her room, do I hear Lucy, or do I hear her bassoon? And again, the answer is: Yes. And in just the same way, we might ask: When we read Isaiah, or Galatians, or a Psalm, do we hear the voice of the Holy Spirit or the voice of Isaiah, Paul, and David? Yes. Of course, scripture, and God’s work in inspiring scripture, is unique. And likewise, it would be wildly presumptuous for any of us to put ourselves on a level with Isaiah or Paul. And yet, there is a sense in which this “through the prophets” reveals something of how God works among his people generally. In the Old Testament, Moses tells Joshua: “I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29) On the morning of the first Pentecost, Peter declares that Moses’s wish has been fulfilled: “this [the events of Pentecost] is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.’” (Acts 2:16-19) Now, we who follow Jesus also have God’s Spirit. Now we who follow Jesus are also those whom God speaks through. A preposition, as Charles Williams’ character suggests, can change the very character of the world. The preposition matters, because prepositions tell us about the nature of the relationship between one thing and another: “Prepositions, so called because they are commonly put before the words to which they are applied, serve to connect words with one another, and to shew the relation between them.” (Robert Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar) This little syllable tells us something about the kind of relationship God desires to have with the world he has made. Living in the Spirit, Etienne Vetö writes, means a way of being in which “each of our acts has two actors.” And so Paul can say “I labor, striving according to His power, which mightily works within me.” Is it Paul who labors, or God? Does Paul strive with all his might, or is it God mightily at work? Yes, indeed. The Spirit draws us into a world of more than one voice sounding at once—out of the realm of opposing alternatives and into the world of through. [Editor’s note: click here to read Part 6: The Man Who Read with his Mouth Closed (And the Spirit Who Didn’t).]

On one of the golden swan song days of last October, my husband and I took our two small daughters to see the Claude Monet: Truth of Nature exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. Afterward, the road home was illuminated by a parting shot from the ripe autumn sun. The signs and curbs and fences stood fully exposed to it, as if they were having their faces washed by light. All too soon, dusk descended. But as we drove, my thoughts lingered on one word whose mention and reiteration throughout the exhibit had caught me by surprise. Truth. A time-lapse video of the water lilies in Monet’s garden had ended with the artist’s own words: “You have to know how to seize just the right moment in a landscape instantaneously, because that particular moment will never come again, and you’re always wondering if the impression you got was truthful.” Monet was known for working on several canvases at a time in this effort to “seize just the right moment,” going from one to the next as the light and colors shifted. He was so intent on accurately conveying the scene before him that he had to stop painting if he could no longer capture what he had glimpsed: I’m chasing the merest sliver of color. . . I want to grasp the intangible . . . Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes three or four minutes at most. What to do, what to paint in three or four minutes? They’re gone, you have to stop. Ah, how painting makes me suffer! —Wall text, Coming into Giverny in Winter, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO He became a master at working quickly to capture these colors, usually outdoors. Small strokes, dabs, and unintelligible dashes of paint melded together to create fresh portrayals of the evanescent beauty and texture around him. I had known about these hallmarks of Impressionism, but I’d never realized how intently Monet and his colleagues tied their art to the notion of truth-telling. These “mere impressions,” at first derided by contemporary critics, were meant to be more than a fanciful, personal take on the world; they were meant to provide a window to the reality of light, color, and movement in a particular location at a specific time. Monet’s pursuit of truth has been shared by artists through the ages. John Ruskin believed “the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see” (Modern Painters III, Part IV, Chapter XVI ‘Of Modern Landscape’). According to this view, the onus is on the artist to “tell what [s/he] saw” as simply and as clearly as possible—not crudely, as with a litany of facts or a slew of haphazard images—but so that the viewer, the reader, or the listener can plainly perceive the subject at hand and perhaps comprehend some true aspect of it anew. Of course this isn’t the only consideration that artists must keep in mind, but it is a crucial one. When they forget or neglect this charge, they run the risk of dwindling into the fate of C. S. Lewis’s painter ghost in The Great Divorce: “No. You’re forgetting,” said the Spirit. “That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about the light.” “Oh, that’s ages ago,” said the Ghost. “One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.” “One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.” —C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9 Monet’s emphasis on accurately relaying the impression of a moment, I think, spared him from being consumed by this form of self-love. It helped him not to become so caught up in the art of the telling that the given object—the truth he wished to represent—was obscured. Impressionism and Writing I strive with words, not paint, but Monet’s methods have helped me reconsider some of my own. I am, for example, frequently too wordy for my own taste. At the outset of any draft I’m tempted to put forward an intertwined mass of ideas all at once, keeping in all the connections I can think of rather than unsnarling the skein and plaiting it into order for the reader. This desire sometimes makes it desperately hard to “murder my darlings,” and, unchecked, would probably render the reader desperate to see the point I’m trying to make. But the short brushstrokes in The Parc Monceau (1878) call my attention to the cool sun-dappled beauty of the scene simply by being brushstrokes. The oil paint is thick; the bristle-marks are visible. Monet did not attempt to conceal or blend or make individual masterpieces out of them. These dots and dashes remind me of Chaim Potok’s novels, in which simple words and straightforward sentences—even the unremarkable but recurring appearance of two gendarmes in The Gift of Asher Lev—make up an utterly absorbing world. “Suddenly he was weeping, silently,” Potok’s narrator says at an unexpected place in The Gift: “He sat there, silently and unashamedly weeping, the drawing in his hands. Devorah looked down at her plate. The children were very quiet. ‘This kind of art I appreciate,’ my father said through his tears. ‘Please excuse me for a moment.'” There is perhaps nothing momentous about these words in a bald excerpt, but when I read them for the first time with the charged history of the characters fresh in my mind—suddenly I was the one weeping. Kenneth Grahame recently caught my attention in a similar way with a description of a winter scene: “[Mole] nosed his way over a field open and trackless and bare in the faint starlight.” “Open” and “bare” I skimmed without much thought, treating them as the sturdy lexical bookends they were, but “trackless”! “Trackless” brought to life the lonely, wintry, silent expanse that lay between the heroes and home, all in the span of a single word. Finally, in the same vein, I’ve found that some of my favorite passages by Tolkien weave their enchantment through unembellished color. White shores. Green country. Grey rain-curtain. A rising red sun amid gold and red autumn trees. The author who had an endless supply of actual and invented words available to him chose a basic palette to make Middle-earth real for us, and I am both intrigued and grateful. These writers, in verbal complement to Monet, remind me that vivid writing calls for more than piecing together interesting turns of phrase. Not every paragraph can be a showpiece, and not every paragraph should be one. Like canvases scattered around a garden, the amount of truth that comes through in my work will depend on how much Light has passed through my life. Amy Baik Lee The masters who transport us work with the exact same materials as beginners. They have learned, however, that sometimes fewer paint strokes, words, or musical notes are more effective than layer upon layer of the same. They have honed their pacing, refusing to overwhelm the senses continually, so that we are drawn to the places of emphasis in their works. As Linda Sue Park notes, “The challenge is to make it whole, seamless, so that story and language aren’t separate concerns, but work together to enhance each other.” The smallest building blocks are thereby arranged into a luminous whole. And there is a certain humility I’ve glimpsed in this restraint and rhythm that I am trying to learn: the humility of an artist hieing herself out of the way so that another can see. Impressionism and Kingdom Living When an artist does this well, a thread of consistency forms. This particular mark of creative skill is not an ability to mention the same pet subject in every piece, but the ability to relate any subject in the same distinct way. Authors thus become recognizable by voice, photographers by style. I find it fascinating to trace the steps by which certain juvenilia developed into beloved literature or to consider how world events and movements shaped specific artists and musicians. Passing on what you see, after all, means that you must first figure out how you will take in the view before you, as well as the world at large. Monet established both a way of noticing his surroundings and a means of communicating them, so that even the paintings he created when cataracts affected his vision were unmistakably his. But for those who believe there is a deeper truth and gladness undergirding the world—a story that runs through the whole of history and creation—the thread of consistency goes even further, beyond the bounds of the artistic sphere. The truth we tell as believers asks also for a constancy of soul. This is the kind of thing the church says all the time but which I am always in danger of forgetting, and so warrants repeating to myself again, and again, and again: the simple acts and the hidden dashes of our lives comprise the greatest part of our work here. The tone of our words, the responses we give to small children and strangers, the voluntary acts of love that seem so much less pressing than the next deadline, the prayers we offer in the dark: all of these matter, and I gloss over them at my peril. The smallest moments will prove or disprove the integrity of our art—whatever our main creative channels may be—and ultimately shape the whole of our lives. If I wish to be a better writer in the service of my King, then, I have to pay heed to the above principles not merely at my desk but throughout the rest of my life. Restraint over thoughtlessness. Sensibility spent in hospitality. A refusal to become enamored with my tools and my reputation, and a willingness to get out of the way so that Christ might be seen. Like canvases scattered around a garden, the amount of truth that comes through in my work will depend on how much Light has passed through my life. The artists who have succeeded in truthfully conveying visual forms to me have permanently changed the way I see. I’ve walked beside garden ponds and down many country lanes, but Monet has gifted me with the wondrous possibility that I might see rain-ripples on my street that are as blue and brilliant as the puddles in The Geese. Through his perspective I’ve discovered that the everyday splendor of straw-colored light falls on both the grainstacks in Giverny and the avenues of Denver. And I am left with the quiet resolve to tell the truths I know as clearly and as well as I can, so that they may add up to one honest impression of the Great Creator’s glory. To live them, so that these brief numbered days might gleam with the evidence of His work: the deep color of renewal seeping into every corner of this life. Click here to read more of Amy’s writing at her blog.

Somehow Sarah Siskind has saved her best work for her own albums. That’s a difficult feat for a songwriter who has written for the likes of Alison Krauss, Wynonna, and Randy Travis. She’s toured with Bonnie and Bon Iver. With over 20 songs placed on the hit TV drama Nashville alone, she is a master craftswoman who has learned to navigate the commercial side without sacrificing substance. Who you are isn’t where you’re from But where you’re from is always close And when you go digging in that dirt Get ready for what you fear the most —Sarah Siskind, “Carolina” Despite her experience and success, Sarah’s latest album, Modern Appalachia, reveals an insecure artist opening herself—her wounds, her fears, her doubts—at very personal levels. From the opening track, “Me and Now,” she digs deep and admits the uncertainty that comes with solitude. Only God completes me and he says to be still Why’s it so hard to try and see how that feels It’s just me and now, it’s just me and now —Sarah Siskind, “Me and Now” Sarah’s openness as an artist is also what makes for such meaningful conversation. As a parent, she struggles to manage family and career. As an artist, she’s hungry for the time and space to create. On this side of divorce, she wrestles with being alone for the first time in her life. Sarah’s willingness to share from these wells allow her to connect and offer hope in ways that few artists can. Click here to listen to this newest episode of The Resistance. And here to learn more about The Resistance Podcast.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with music industry veteran and host of The Pivot podcast Andrew Osenga. In this episode, Jonathan and Andrew talk about what Andrew’s podcast has taught him about listening, the multilayered complexities of career, and how his own pivots have changed the way he approaches songwriting. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 29 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

While reading Wendell Berry’s story collection, That Distant Land, I was struck by this description of a character named Martha Elizabeth Coulter: She was a woman always near to smiling, sometimes to laughter. Her face, it seems, had been made to smile. It was a face that assented wholly to the being of whatever or whomever she looked at. —Wendell Berry, That Distant Land I don’t know whether Wendell Berry is a student of Thomas Aquinas, but that description of Martha Elizabeth as a person who “assented wholly to the being” of the people and things around her sounds like the kind of thing Aquinas would say. That idea of assent is key to Aquinas’s understanding of love. And, as I will argue, it’s a major reason to write; in fact, assent may be the writer’s most important reason of all. I’ll be paraphrasing and quoting from Josef Pieper, who was himself paraphrasing Aquinas. (The page numbers below refer to Faith, Hope, and Love, which collects three of Pieper’s long essays.) We can mean a lot of different things when we use the word “love.” I love my wife and family. I love Jesus. I love watermelon. I love good books. I’m not misusing the word “love” in any of those sentences, but neither does the word mean quite the same thing in any of those sentences. What all of those usages share is the idea of approval. And, as Pieper writes: This [approval] is first of all to be taken in the literal sense of the word’s root: loving someone or something is to find him or it probus, the Latin word for “good.” It is a way of turning to him or it and saying, “It’s good that you exist; it’s good that you’re in the world!” —p. 163-4 Martha Elizabeth Coulter was always on the verge of smiling because she loved her world so much. She assented to its being. She would make a good writer, it seems to me. When you read a book like Brian Doyle’s One Long River of Song or Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations, it is clear that those writers approve of the world around them. You get the strong sense that it is good that the world exists—that everything is worth our attention. I should mention assenting to a fellow creature’s being is not the same thing as assenting to that creature’s behavior. Often, loving our neighbors means wanting more for them than they want for themselves. To write out of love does not mean to write or think uncritically. But love doesn’t leave room for us to say to (or about) another creature, “It would be better if you didn’t exist.” It doesn’t even leave room for us to say “You are beneath my attention.” This world exists because God thinks it is a good idea. To love the world and our fellow creatures is simply to say that God's not wrong. Jonathan Rogers Pieper points out that assent or approval is an expression of the will. To love someone or something is to say, “I want you to exist.” I know we usually think of the will as that inner force that makes us go out and get something or accomplish something or make some change in the world, but consider what Aquinas has to say on the subject: “The will knows not only the act of striving for what it does not yet have but also the other act: of loving what it already possesses and rejoicing in that” (p.165). If you’ve seen Hamilton, you’ll know that Alexander Hamilton had incredible force of will when it came to striving for what he didn’t yet have, but his downfall derived from the fact that he lacked the will to love and rejoice in the good things that were right in front of him. Writing, like all creative work, starts with seeing—paying attention to what is in front of you and loving the world and your reader enough to give an account of what you have seen. And, as you already know, love is generative: it always gives birth to something new. (I can send my kids screaming from the room just by saying, “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…”) Josef Pieper again: “The most extreme form of affirmation that can possibly be conceived of is creatio, making to be, in the strict sense of the word” (p.170). God created the world for the simple reason that he wanted to. And then he spoke those words of approval: “It is good. It is good. It is very good.” Creative work—in any case, the creative work I want to do—starts with agreeing with that assessment. It is good that this world exists. It is good that each of God’s creatures exists. Sometimes we write to celebrate. Sometimes we write to lament or to reprove. But let us not lose sight of this most fundamental fact: This world exists because God thinks it is a good idea. To love the world and our fellow creatures is simply to say that God’s not wrong. This piece was originally shared in Jonathan’s weekly Habit Newsletter. If you’d like your own inbox to be graced with such insight—and with staggering frequency, at that—you can sign up for it by clicking here.

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 5: The Preposition of Love.] “We believe in the Holy Spirit. . . Who has spoken through the prophets.” —The Nicene Creed I am sitting in the upstairs office space of the Barn, by North Wind Manor. (The reconstruction of North Wind Manor that has been going on over the past several months is almost finished, and the place looks amazing!) Three staff members are in the room with me: Shigé, Pete, and Chris; each seated at a desk, each reading. What are they reading? I don’t know. I could find out, but I would have to ask. And this is one way in which reading in the contemporary world is different than it was (at least most of the time) in the ancient world. A famous story from St. Augustine’s (354-430) Confessions illustrates this point. A key figure in Augustine’s conversion to Christianity was the great preacher and theologian, Ambrose of Milan (340-397). Even before he became a Christian, Augustine admired Ambrose and looked for opportunities to speak with him privately. That wasn’t easy, because most of the time Ambrose was surrounded by people, and busy with the demands of his work as a bishop. Augustine recalls that when he had time to himself, Ambrose “restored. . . his mind with reading,” and then, in a fascinating passage, he describes the way in which Ambrose read: “When he was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” Augustine wonders “if he read silently perhaps to protect himself in case he had a hearer interested.” If someone happened to overhear Ambrose reading, Augustine reasons, they might ask him to explain some difficult passage, or they might even want to debate some point in the text. Or maybe, Augustine suggests, “the need to preserve his voice, which used easily to become hoarse, could have been a very fair reason for silent reading. Whatever motive he had for his habit,” he concludes, “the man had a good reason for what he did.” (Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 3) What is remarkable about this passage is what it finds remarkable. Ambrose’s habit of silent reading was unusual enough that Augustine pauses to take note of it. More than that, Augustine suggests a few possible explanations of why, even though this man clearly was engaged in reading words, nevertheless (surprisingly!) “his voice and tongue were silent.” The story reminds us that for much of history, even the reading of texts was an oral and aural happening. In fact, ancient texts not only sounded; very often they sounded tunefully. Certainly this was the case for much of scripture. Imagine you are present in the synagogue at Nazareth on the sabbath morning described in chapter 4 of Luke. Jesus stands up to read the passage given to him from the book of Isaiah. What do you hear? In all likelihood you hear Jesus singing (or technically “cantillating”) the words of Isaiah. (You can hear a modern recording of Hebrew scripture being cantillated here.) The Hebrew scriptures still are chanted in this fashion today. “Come to a synagogue on a Sabbath,” writes the Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner, “and you will hear the Torah not read but sung loud and clear, in ancient chant, melody matching natural sounds of the very words God says.” Many rabbis believe that this practice of singing the scriptures extends all the way back to the reading of the law described in Nehemiah 8. Some even suggest it was instituted by Moses himself. In a passage that should warm the hearts of musicians everywhere, we meet Moses just before his death—in his final appearance before the Israelites—not in the role of Warrior, or Miracle-Worker, but Singer-Songwriter. God tells Moses: “Write down this song and teach it to the Israelites and have them sing it.” So Moses wrote “the words of this law from beginning to end. . . and recited the words of this song from beginning to end in the hearing of the whole assembly of Israel.” (Deuteronomy 31:19, 24, 30) Singing wasn’t just a way of “dressing up” scriptural texts for public worship services, either. This also was how Jews of Jesus’ day studied scripture. Rabbi Akiva (who lived from 50 to 130 AD; just a generation or so after Jesus) urges students of the Torah to study diligently, telling them: “Sing every day, sing every day. . . [R]eview your studies like a song that one sings over and over.” (Sanhedrin 99b) Another ancient Jewish text advises: “One who studies Torah through song demonstrates that he is fond of his learning,” but: “concerning anyone who reads from the Torah without a melody, or studies the Mishna without a song, the verse states: ‘So too I gave them statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live.’ (Ezekiel 20:25)” (Megillah 32a) Breath carries voice, not text. Steve Guthrie This tuneful method of presenting the scriptures then passes very naturally from the synagogue and the yeshiva into the life of the Christian church. The first Christian monks organized their days around the regular chanting and singing of the psalms, a practice that eventually would be adopted by the entire monastic tradition. The Rule of St. Benedict, one of the earliest and most influential guides to the monastic life, sets out a daily pattern of services—seven each day, and one each night—that would allow monks to sing through all one-hundred and fifty psalms in the course of a week. This regular, methodical singing of the psalms was the chief business the monks were to pursue, a work so important it was sometimes called the “Opus Dei”—“the work of God.” Outside of these eight daily services, Benedict urged the monks to learn silence: “So important is silence,” he said, “that permission to speak should seldom be granted even to mature disciples, no matter how good or holy or constructive their talk.” (Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 6). You could say then, that in a way, the life of a monk had a kind of sonic organization: periods of silence, surrounded by the regular singing of the psalms. The spiritual life meant learning to steward sound well; cultivating attentiveness on the one hand, and training one’s voice on the other. All of this sounding and singing of scripture casts a fresh light on (or perhaps we should say, adds greater resonance to!) the words of the Nicene Creed: “We believe in the Holy Spirit. . . who has spoken through the prophets.” The Holy Spirit (as we’ve repeated each week throughout this series) is the Breath of God. And at least in the most straightforward and immediate sense, breath carries voice, not text. The creed does not identify the Spirit as the one who “produces the message communicated by the prophets,” or who “shares the information written down by the prophets,” but the one who “spoke by the prophets.” What our short survey indicates is that for much of the church’s history, the prophetic word inspired by the Spirit has been spoken indeed. This isn’t to deny the Holy Spirit’s role in inspiring written scriptures, or to suggest the Spirit is unable to work through text on a page. As Augustine’s anecdote indicates, people read silently in the ancient world too; and even in biblical times people engaged with scripture as readers as well as speakers, singers, or listeners. But immersed as we are in the world of silent text (you’re reading text now; are your lips moving?), we might need to be reminded of something that would have been obvious to earlier generations: when the Nicene Creed says that the Holy Spirit has spoken through the prophets, the phrase “has spoken” is not only a metaphor. The Holy Spirit brought about the sounding of human voices; real sounds that encounter us in the world of sense. What is more, for most of history, a vital dimension of Christian discipleship has been ordering and engaging with sound—listening, speaking, and singing. Ambrose may have read with his mouth closed, but he was an exception, and in the centuries since he has remained so. What difference does this make? Why emphasize all of this “out-loudness”? The materiality of song, the concrete sounding of scriptures, reminds us that the fruits of the Spirit are not just pleasant feelings, but are virtues and practices worked out in the routines of our lives, and manifested in ways that can be seen and heard. Steve Guthrie Let’s return to the monastery. It’s easy (at least it’s easy for me) to associate “spirituality” with a sort of vague, inward attitude; a general outlook that recognizes something beyond day-to-day realities, or an openness to mystery. What I don’t think of when I hear the word “spirituality” is getting out of bed at midnight, 3:00am, 6:00am, 9:00am, and noon to chant the psalms, and then dragging myself back to the chapel three more times over the remaining twelve hours to do the same thing again. Whatever associations the word may have for me, for the great Christian spiritual tradition of monasticism, “spirituality” had everything to do with day-to-day realities. In fact, it was what the monks set their watches by. (Or would have been, if medieval monks had worn watches.) The life of the Spirit was not only an inward attitude, but an outward set of practices. It was something you could see and hear. It included mystery, yes. But it also had the specific shape of this particular melody, sung by these voices, gathered in this space. The materiality of song, the concrete sounding of scriptures, reminds us that the fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, and so on) are not just pleasant feelings, but are virtues and practices worked out in the routines of our lives, and manifested in ways that can be seen and (again) heard. A Jewish text we quoted earlier highlights another reason for emphasizing the sounding dimension of the prophetic word. The one who studies Torah through song, it says, shows “that he is fond of his learning.” The word the Spirit speaks has a delightful character to it, that appeals to our senses in all their bodiliness. In Ezekiel 3, the Lord tells the prophet to eat the scroll he is giving him. “So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.” (Ezekiel 3:3; see also Revelation 10:9-10 and Psalm 119:103) When we recall its “out-loudness,” we are reminded that the word the Spirit delivers through the prophets is not a sterile inventory of abstractions. It is beautiful; and those who repeat it in word and melody beautify it. The 4th-century theologian Athanasius wrote a letter explaining why we should not just speak but sing the psalms. “The Lord,” he says, “wishing the melody of the words to be a symbol of the spiritual harmony in a soul, has ordered that the odes be chanted tunefully, and the Psalms recited with song. The desire of the soul is this—to be beautifully disposed.” Life in the Spirit embraces the true, and the good, and also the beautiful. Life in the Spirit has an aesthetic dimension. The sounding word inhabits—more than that, creates—a shared space. Steve Guthrie That’s one reason I enjoy imagining Jesus singing in the synagogue—forming not just concepts, but sounds. (Matthew 26:30 and Mark 14:26 also mention Jesus singing.) We may speak (legitimately) of the “still, small voice” of the Spirit, and the mysterious leading we sometimes experience through an inner sense. All of this is just fine, but it might cause us to think of the Spirit’s voice as something that arises within us only, rather than something that also meets us from outside. Jesus the Messiah (that is, the one anointed with the Spirit) meets us as a material reality in the world of mass and extension and acoustical vibrations. His voice comes to us incarnated in the sound of a historical language, with its own regional accent; in a tune that employs the musical conventions of a given time and place. The eternal Word of God takes to himself a body which then engages our bodies. The Word clothes himself not only in human flesh but in human culture, working in and through both flesh and culture, that both might be healed and made whole. Yesterday afternoon, I was sitting in the upstairs office space of the Barn, by North Wind Manor. Three staff members were in the room with me: Shigé, Pete, and Chris; each seated at a desk, each reading. What were they reading? I don’t know about Shigé or Pete. But Chris was reading an article about a controversial issue that has been widely discussed over the last few weeks. I know this because as the other three of us sat, each absorbed in our own texts, a voice sounded. Chris said: “Oh my goodness. Listen to this!” And we did. I tried at first to shut it out, to stay focused on the page in front of me. But every voice is a call, and I couldn’t resist. Three conversation-filled hours later I finally pushed back my chair and said: “I need to go home.” “How was your day?” My wife Julie asked a little later. “It was good. I didn’t get much of my work done. But we had a great conversation.” The phrases continued resonating in my head as Julie went about other business. What does make for “a good day”? Do I want to do “my work”? Or be part of a conversation? Here is one more reason why all this soundingness matters. The sounding word inhabits—more than that, creates—a shared space. The work space in the Barn is not that large, and yet here were four people, each “in their own world.” Yes, of course, there are times when we need to retreat into a private space. At this very moment my earbuds are firmly embedded, the white noise generator on my phone piping a wash of sound directly to my brain, precisely so I won’t be distracted by the music playing in the room and the things my colleagues are talking about. But the negative example is instructive. I employ one sound to suppress another. Their sound creates a shared world, one I really can’t afford to visit right now. (I promised I’d have the essay finished today!) So I create a separate aural space as a way of remaining outside a shared world and a shared conversation. One of the primary works of the Holy Spirit is to create community. “We were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body,” Paul writes, “whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.” (1 Corinthians 12:13). And this is yet another reason for emphasizing the soundingness of the Spirit. The Spirit’s work of creating community is not unrelated to the Spirit’s work of speaking through the prophets. A spoken voice creates a resonant field, one large enough for others to enter. And when I hear this voice—particularly if it is winsome and tuneful—I may be drawn out from “my work” into a shared work. Perhaps, even into the opus dei—the work of God.

Yesterday, the heaviness of a world under a global pandemic became an almost unbearable weight on my soul. Social media led me down hallways of suffering, of fear, of self-righteousness. Someone tried to pull me down a YouTube rabbit hole and another pulled me toward a debate in a comment section. I’m embarrassed by the amount of time I spent yesterday being yanked around from one talking head to the next; and also by the amount of time I spent forming rebuttals in my head and arguments I would counter with, should I ever have the courage to voice what I think Christians ought to be saying right now—or, maybe more importantly, not saying. I was in a sad state of affairs. The virus was wreaking havoc on bodies, the fear was eating away at both our souls and our economy, and the desire to be right about things was destroying our ability to see our neighbors as people. I left our new (virtual) public square weary of the world God created. I thought He must be weary, too. After getting the kids in bed, I put my phone on the nightstand and gladly traded it out for Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb. It’s my second read-through, even more savory than the first. I slid my thumb into the gap between pages and let my pen roll out, which was marking my place at Chapter Two: The First Session. Ah, the onion chapter. If you haven’t read The Supper of the Lamb, you have a real gem waiting for you. It is part cookbook, part memoir, part theology, part philosophy… It’s actually quite hard to describe what it is, but what it’s like is like having the most colorful and enjoyable guest at your dinner table. The entire book is a recipe for one meal: Lamb for Eight Persons Four Times, but it is dealt with leisurely and unhurried, like any good dinner party. Take for example Chapter Two: The First Session, in which Capon asks the reader to sit with the first ingredient, an onion, for 60 minutes. I closed the book for a minute and thought about the audacity of the request. Yesterday, I had a lot of people telling me how I should be spending an hour: Watch this video; Read this article; Google this name; Do your own research. But Capon was the first person to ask me to have a session with an inanimate object. Admittedly, I didn’t leave the comfort of my bed to retrieve an onion, but I did spend an hour considering an imaginary one with the help of Capon’s words. “You are convinced, of course,” he begins, “that you know what an onion is.” It is because God made the world out of joy that He will bring it back Home in love. Elizabeth Harwell A novel virus, no. I can humbly admit my gaps in knowledge there. But surely, I knew an onion. As it turns out, Capon’s assumptions about my arrogance proved true. Do you know what an onion is? Have you considered the “elegant dryness” and “understated display of wealth” of its outer skin? Have you thought about the colors or the nestling structure of its insides? Have you compared it to cathedrals or delighted in its watery make-up? I considered the onion and it changed my narrative. Sitting with a real thing—a thought of God that I could hold in my hands— reminded me that He is not weary of the world that He made, but He delights in it. He likes the world, and therefore we exist. Capon concludes the onion session with these words: Perhaps now you have seen at least dimly that the uniquenesses of creation are the result of continuous creative support, of effective regard by no mean lover. He likes onions, therefore they are. The fit, the colors, the smell, the tensions, the tastes, the textures, the lines, the shapes are a response, not to some forgotten decree that there may as well be onions as turnips, but to His present delight—His intimate and immediate joy in all you have seen, and in the thousand other wonders you do not even suspect. —Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb His present delight. I drifted to sleep in the comfort of those words—the God who holds the world together also delights in that world. He has good reason to preserve it. When I woke up this morning, I decided it was necessary to have my own session with an onion. And yet, unfortunately, our pantry was bare. Then I remembered that I had already done this exercise in a writing class I took with Jonathan Rogers. In this particular exercise, Dr. Rogers had asked us to sit with an inanimate object, like Capon’s onion, and to consider it for what it was—not for what we thought we knew it to be. I had chosen a mussel shell, and this morning I pulled that essay and that shell back out to have another practice in focused consideration. The blue mussel shell is displayed, piled amongst other shells from a trip to Maine, in an heirloom silver dish in our dining room. I picked it up for study, wiggling it out from under and scraping it against the rest of its transplanted neighborhood. It was cold in my hands, like the glassy waters that bit my toes when I first bent over to take it from its cobblestone carpet on Maine’s shore. Separated from its mirrored partner, the half-shell spooned the curve of my palm and my thumb moved to bed where the mussel once lay. The inside is pearly smooth—without blemish smooth, as if it must be the ruling line by which all smooth things are measured. I moved the shell under a lamp, because the little pearl valley deserved illuminated consideration. The inside shone milk white with a puddle of blueberry blue bleeding out from the center and inking towards the north and south of this long and hollow cave. The iridescence summoned my eyes to follow the jumps of light, giving gifts of color with each tiny twist to the right or left. Here is secret beauty—only for the delight of the humble mussel and his Maker! What an entire world to the mussel who called this shell home. I like knowing that no other mussel will move in, plastering over nail holes and hanging his own pictures. No one else would have seen his inner sanctuary, but he and His Maker, had I not collected it on the shore. A secret joy. God’s present delight. We are not some forgotten decree that there may as well be Earth as Jupiter. We are His very good idea and His present delight. Elizabeth Harwell There are no YouTube videos, or forum discussions, or peer-reviewed articles that could have given my feet such sure landing in the way the mussel shell did this morning. That shell represented one of thousands (millions?) of pearly homes that will never lay bare in front of human eyes—miles of ocean floor, covered in secret delights, that began as thoughts in my Father’s mind. We humans can be so self-important that we’ve never considered that God is enjoying parts of creation that none of us will ever see. Could the proverbial tree actually fall without someone there to hear it? Yes, it can, and it does. Sitting with that shell allowed me to stick my head through the door of a secret room, where I could enjoy God’s quiet mirth. His delight in the world does not depend on any audience, and there is such comfort in that sort of steadfastness. Imagine the security of being able to see your dad smiling over you, when he thought you were sleeping. Being reaffirmed in God’s love for His world stirred up hope in my soul: It is because God made the world out of joy that He will bring it back Home in love. When we delight in the world with its Maker, we can also grieve it properly. Do we feel the world is broken? We certainly do. Should we speak against the brokenness? We absolutely must. We love it too much to let it suffer. We love our neighbor too much to look away. But before we allow ourselves to believe that God has given up on us or has grown weary with us, we need not look further than our backyards to see the ways in which He is tethered to this world in delight. Genesis tells us that He crowned His work “good.” The Psalms tell us that the earth echoes this joy back to Him in song. Revelation tells us that He cares so much about our world that He’s not going to scrap it in the end but make it new. As Capon puts it, He will “bring the city Home.” God so loved the world. I’m asking you, with Capon, won’t you leave the public square for an hour to sit with an onion? A mussel shell? A pinecone? Your child’s eyelashes? Your neighbor’s smile? We are not some forgotten decree that there may as well be Earth as Jupiter. We are His very good idea and His present delight. Take hope, friends. Run back into the public square carrying a renewed delight in this world that God made, and let your speech be seasoned with the hope that He will not—cannot—forsake it. He loves it too much.

Early in C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, when Aslan gives Jill Pole the quest of rescuing Prince Rilian of Narnia, he also gives Jill four signs by which she might fulfill the quest. Before sending her to Narnia, though, Aslan warns Jill. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. —C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair Like Jill in Narnia, members of Christ’s Church must carry out our vocations in a world whose air is thick and often confuses the mind. In this we have forerunners—the prophets and apostles—who left us God-inspired written testimony about carrying out the mission of God in the world. Holy Scripture is sufficiently capacious to contain “signs” not only for one quest as discrete as Jill’s, but for the full range of vocations given to all “good stewards of God’s varied grace.” But like the signs Jill received from Aslan, the signs of Scripture may not look as we expect when we meet them in the world. Thus the importance of knowing them by heart. One way the task of learning Scripture by heart can be made easier is by setting its God-breathed words to music: rhythm and melody aid memorization and turn drudgery to delight. The delight is doubled and trebled when we sing the words of Scripture with others—either in a congregation or the “little church” of a household. Remember and Proclaim takes ten brief and well-chosen passages of Scripture and makes them singable, danceable (for my sixteen-month-old daughter), and memorable. David Mitchel This is where the work of the Corner Room is invaluable. For several years, this fine group of musicians, based at Cahaba Park Church and led by its minister of music Adam Wright, has set Scripture to song. Their latest project, Remember and Proclaim, was written particularly for children. But these Scripture-songs are excellent for family worship. If the musical styles represented on the album are eclectic—ranging from bluegrass to early–1960s pop—the beauty of the melodies and tastefulness of the accompaniment make the tracks go together. Remember and Proclaim takes ten brief and well-chosen passages of Scripture and makes them singable, danceable (for my sixteen-month-old daughter), and memorable. After opening with an invigorating jolt of praise (Psalm 106), Remember and Proclaim touches a handful of key Scriptural “signs,” the remembrance of which is essential to the vocation of any saint—young or old—in the world. The first sign is Story: the faithful promises of Christ’s first Advent (Isaiah 9:6–7, Zechariah 9) and his second (Revelation 22). The second sign is Identity: that we are crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20) and being made new in him (2 Corinthians 5:17). The third sign is Faithfulness: that we embody faithfulness by fortitude and resolution in facing trials (1 John 3:5, James 1:2–5). And the fourth sign is Assurance: that God faithfully holds and steadies us even in trying times (Isaiah 41:10, Romans 8:38–39). The Corner Room has served Christ’s Church well by setting these Scripture-signs in memorable Scripture-songs. Remember and Proclaim should nourish the homes where God’s people grow, and prepare them for their parts in the great vocation of Christ in the world. Remember and Proclaim releases tomorrow. Click here to learn more about it at The Corner Room’s website.

Now open for enrollment, Belmont University Professor Steve Guthrie leads a reading group for John M. Perkins’ powerful book Let Justice Roll Down. Students will join one another in reading and discussion. The book group, which includes Zoom chats every Thursday night at 7:30pm, begins this coming Monday, August 3 and continues through August 28. You are welcome to join at any time. The discussions will be archived, and the forums will be open indefinitely for new registrants to continue reading and discussing the book. Steve Guthrie’s Introduction to the Course Let Justice Roll Down is available in the Rabbit Room Store. No purchase necessary to join the reading group. About the Book His brother died in his arms, shot by a deputy marshall. He was beaten and tortured by the sheriff and state police. But through it all he returned good for evil, love for hate, progress for prejudice, and brought hope to black and white alike. The story of John Perkins is no ordinary story. Rather, it is a gripping portrayal of what happens when faith thrusts a person into the midst of a struggle against racism, oppression, and injustice. It is about the costs of discipleship—the jailings, the floggings, the despair, the sacrifice. And it is about the transforming work of faith that allowed John to respond to such overwhelming indignities with miraculous compassion, vision, and hope. Click here to enroll in this course.

Outside, coursing in from the west, the amber and violet gloaming has begun. Dinner is over, and I sit at the piano. Behind me a stream of girlish laughter twirls and dashes through the living room in response to the film music I’m playing, but my own shoulders are weighted, as if a hollow has been carved between them, and lead poured in. Somehow I’m always startled by the physical heaviness of grief. In the past two weeks, I have watched Christians say things I did not think it was possible for Christ-followers to say. I’ve written and second-guessed emails regarding the upcoming school year, closed my laptop, and wept: for the gracious administrators, for our conflicted friends, for the generation of children growing up in such a time, for hearts so hardened that callousness and cruelty are the default response in conversation—and for my own heart, which is often no better in its retaliatory thoughts. And I’ve barred myself from thinking about paperwork that should have been processed months ago, now delayed by a year and quite possibly more, that would have enabled our family to finally move closer. The delights I’ve had in times of well-being and plenty have lasted me a season and no more, but the truths, beauties, and hopes that have held my attention through hard struggle I keep with me still—joys kindled upon the very taper of grief. Amy Baik Lee I try not to think about what certain widespread sentiments mean for the future of this community, this city, this country. I’ve squashed my own speculation on what ripples my current decisions may cause six months, a year, five years from now. Things might change in any number of directions, of course, and it’s no good inviting imagined troubles in. But tonight, no matter what pragmatic reason and shrewder souls might have to say about it all, my heart feels crushed. The soundtrack pieces are finished, and my fingers have begun an old, quiet, steadfast hymn. The windows are open, and I suspect that the evening air is carrying the notes outside, but for once I don’t get up to close the sash and click the lock shut. “Be Thou My Vision” soon carries into “Amazing Grace,” and then “For the Beauty of the Earth.” I think of Hardy’s darkling thrush choosing to “fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom,” and I find myself playing the songs as one who is listening to their poignancy from another home. I play them as beautifully as I know how. Afterward I close the windows and come into my room, where the daylight is almost gone. I light a candle for the first time in ages, but make no move towards the lamp; the dim illumination from the pale blue twilight and the small, flickering flame is all I would like for now. Tonight, prayer is a fathoms-deep space of listening: a cry that my voice is insufficient to utter. Even the attempt is too great. The sky fades to silver, pewter rainclouds smudging downward like a child’s thumbprint in the far distance. In the garden the chain of small lanterns begins its nightly glow. And Psalm 57 comes, unbidden. No—more accurately, I ask for a psalm, and this is the one that comes to the foreground of my thought, and this is what I take up and pray. Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by… . My soul is in the midst of lions; I lie down amid fiery beasts— the children of man, whose teeth are spears and arrows, whose tongues are sharp swords. Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let your glory be over all the earth! —Psalm 57:1, 4-5 (ESV) As I set the Bible down again, the memory of another candle in the dark comes back. About fifteen years ago, I struck a match, touched it to a candle wick, and knelt to pray in my college apartment. I was worried that I was somehow not as elated as I should be—as I had once imagined I would be—in the dating relationship that had recently begun. It makes me smile to think of it now, but at the time I was truly perplexed. Shouldn’t I be happier? Did the lack of blissfulness bode ill for this relationship? Meanwhile, the candle refused to burn. I had trimmed the wick too close to the wax, and the resulting tiny blue glow had to be coaxed with care into a proper tongue of fire. But something happened in the process that I scribbled down later with an amateur (and undeniably dramatic) poet’s pen: Blue ball of flame, precariously curled A fetus of fire as yet unfurled— One breath enough to secure a cold fate, Leave weary wick crumbling in its wake— Alone now lights a dim prayer-filled room Tenaciously spurning its likely doom. In troubled air the timid question hangs: Can true love begin sans ecstatic pangs? Two eyes, cast downward, glance slowly about, Belying a heart long perplexed with doubt When, fixed on flame, alerted gaze beholds The fearless breaking of blue into gold A Father’s voice speaks to glad heart made bold: “That Joy is stronger which slowly unfolds.” Whatever the merits of the rest of the sonnet, the last line has proven true. The delicately rolled beeswax curls inward as it melts; I watch small spires form along the crown of the candle. Perhaps this is also a time for a leaner joy—a stronger joy—one that can go through the stifling hours from dusk until dawn because it burns from denser fuel. The delights I’ve had in times of well-being and plenty have lasted me a season and no more, but the truths, beauties, and hopes that have held my attention through hard struggle I keep with me still—joys kindled upon the very taper of grief. Tonight, then, I remember that the evidence of sacrificial love is abroad, even in these times. That it is good to have a heart alive enough to be stung by thoughtless words born of disordered affections. Thanks be to God for a lasting hope that’s steady enough to help me get up in the morning, and for sorrow that dims my surroundings enough to goad my feet towards the throne of grace. I have taken refuge in a Lord who lends language for my tears, and whose goodness to me through the years has prevented me, though pressed, from being utterly crushed. Because of Him, I’ve known what it is to be struck down but not destroyed. Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; let Your glory be over all the earth. The candle trails an ephemeral flourish of smoke. It will stand here through the coming watches of the day, this small dormant pillar of fire, marking the site of inextinguishable joy given by degrees amid gathering shadows. Of One who comes to give the oil of gladness instead of mourning.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Cindy Bunch, author of Be Kind to Yourself and associate publisher and director of editorial at InterVarsity Press. In this episode, Jonathan and Cindy talk about how to maintain a healthy relationship with the inner critic, the many misplaced wishes that writers often throw onto their writing, and the mystery of which readers resonate and which readers don’t. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 30 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. 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 renovation of North Wind Manor is nearly complete! The fireplace from Tolkien’s Oxford house is up and ready, just waiting for a fire to bring it to life and books to surround it with good company. Construction is estimated for completion next month, and then it’s on to furnishing! We’re crafting an intentional space to cultivate hospitality, creativity, and rest. A place of community, where creators can gather to cultivate and share their craft. Where theologians and authors passing through can hold symposiums and lectures. A place of beauty, where guests can rest and revive for the callings God has placed on them. J. R. R. Tolkien’s fireplace As we move into the next phase of modeling and furnishing to shape that atmosphere, we’re grateful for any continued support. Because we anticipate that this space is going to host a lot of people through the years, we want to fill the space with well-made and beautiful furnishings that will last a long time. If you’d like to cover any specific needs, here are some of the things we’re working toward as we turn this space from mere construction into a comfortable and rejuvenating space: Indoor 1. Bar stools for the island – $2000 2. Large dining room table – $2500 3. Chairs for the dining table – $2000 4. Pillows and throws – $1500 5. Lighting and accessories – $1500 6. Kitchen Ware – $3000 7. Bathrooms – $500 Outdoor 1. Table – $1800 2. Chairs for Table – $2000 3. Fireplace seating – $3000 4. Additional seating area – $1500 5. Rocking chairs – $2500 6. Porch swings – $2000 7. Rugs – $600 8. Plants/planters – $500 9. End tables – $400 Thank you for all the support and generosity you’ve invested to bring the work this far! We’re thrilled to be so close to completion, and looking forward to the day when we can gather safely with community in this space God has given us to steward.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with singer/songwriter and hymn writer Sandra McCracken. In this episode, Jonathan and Sandra talk about the formative power of hymns, the ancient balance established by the psalms between lament and a vision for what lies ahead, Sandra’s first book, and the role of true confidence in human flourishing. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 31 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

Eric Hilton’s approach would be difficult to mimic even if the world didn’t feel as if it was presently falling apart. As one half of renowned electronic duo Thievery Corporation, Eric (along with his musical partner Rob Garza) is responsible for a massive catalog spanning the last quarter century. He’s influenced an entire generation of producers and DJs, and with three solo releases slated for 2020, he remains as busy as ever as an artist. Through it all, it’s Eric’s positive disposition that stands out so meaningfully—especially in the midst of a global pandemic. Infinite Everywhere is his new (and first) solo release, and it’s filled with uplifting and inspiring instrumental tracks. The end result is a heartening listen—the natural overflow from his chosen posture. It’s hard to maintain an optimistic outlook these days, but Eric Hilton has learned that it’s part of the artistic discipline. To choose otherwise would only serve to shut down the flow for an artist who has so much more to offer than what he already has. It’s how he fights Resistance and it’s just one part of our conversation on this episode. Click here to listen to this newest episode of The Resistance. And here to learn more about The Resistance Podcast.

I’ve never ridden a tandem bicycle. I imagine it takes a measure of coordination and balance I simply don’t possess. More than that, however, I imagine it requires an intimate understanding of your pedaling partner—an understanding of their tendencies, knee-jerk reactions, rhythms, strengths, weaknesses, and on and on. I can only name a handful of people with whom I share this understanding; I imagine you’d say the same. And yet, we’re called in this life to much more daunting, collaborative endeavors than a bike ride. On Tandem, the most recent release from Waterdeep, husband and wife duo Don and Lori Chaffer explore these endeavors—both through personal and societal relationships—with tender care and grace. And they do it without any of the cheesy bike metaphors I employed in the first paragraph. Now 25 years into their career, the Chaffers sound perfectly in sync. Lori’s voice soars like the Söderberg sisters (First Aid Kit) or Florence Welch (Florence & the Machine); Don remains steadily grounded, like a livelier Sam Beam (Iron & Wine); and their beautiful harmony is bolstered by a marriage of acoustic guitar propulsions and angelic string and vocal layers. Everything about this album lyrically and musically calls out for unity, for things to be on earth as they are in heaven. But don’t expect any “We Are the World” or “Kumbaya” moments here. Throughout Tandem’s tracklist, the Chaffers see unity as a battle to be won through one-on-one relationships, not grand, utopian statements. Their lyrics are both personal and ambiguous, often written to a “you” which could be someone very specific to them, or it could be me, the listener. This songwriting approach allows us to experience the music in two ways—both from the point of view of the addresser and the addressee. Take, for example, mid-album song “We Made It Out.” Here, Lori reminisces on a childhood friendship set adrift. “I went holy roller and you went wild,” she recalls, and yet, she recognizes that despite any differences, “we made it out.” I’ll admit, my tendency is to identify with either the holy roller or the wild child, not both, but the grace with which each of the song’s characters is treated requires us to see ourselves in both walks of life, to find the commonalities with our neighbor rather than dividing lines. On the album’s opening song, “Know Your Name,” we’re again encouraged to dig deeper than surface-level social titles and fight for intimate relationships. The opening verse calls these ostracizing categorizations by name: “You’re a cardboard sign / You’re the back of the line / You’re a bratty little kid / You’re ‘everybody knows what your mama did.’” However, when the hopeful chorus comes in, the lines “They don’t even know your name / You know you’re a burning flame” remind us that social labels are irrelevant. We are, each of us, called to be neighbors, united in mind and thought and sowing God’s kingdom rather than human competition. Yet, especially in our Western context, competition is the name of the game. The idea of scarcity turns our interests inward, even when we have everything we need to find contentment. On “Over the Snow,” Waterdeep reminds us of our fallen nature, confessing, “There is nothing we don’t want / We may want for nothing / But there’s always something / Always something we will hunt.” In this context, Christ asks us to rebel against our self-preserving desires and open our tables and storerooms to one another. “Yet with more or with less / We make everyone our guest,” the Chaffers sing on the gorgeous “Blessing.” Everything about this album lyrically and musically calls out for unity, for things to be on earth as they are in heaven. Chris Thiessen This, it seems, is the Chaffers’ key encouragement for living in tandem with our neighbor and for loving one another as Christ loves us and offers his invitation freely. I admit, in recent months I’ve bought into “Us vs. Thems” and have failed to extend grace in divisive moments (we’ve experienced a lot of those lately, haven’t we?). Waterdeep has offered me an important reminder in Tandem that a hospitable heart opens closed doors, and a “gentle answer turns away wrath.” Sure, there are things in this world that are scarce. But the most central thing which unites us—the freedom of Christ’s hope and salvation—knows no bounds. There is room for every person at the table, and this gift casts a blinding beam across every shadow line seeking to set us apart. Even so, embracing this unifying reality (like riding a tandem bicycle) may not be as easy as a walk in the park. It requires patience, care, and communication to overcome the falls and skinned knees both riders will inevitably endure (especially with someone as clumsy as me). I want to believe, however, that the struggle will only deepen our devotion to each other and collapse every barrier seeking to separate us. Click here to view Tandem on Waterdeep’s website.

At long last, an album we have eagerly anticipated for more than a year now has been officially released: Ella Mine’s Dream War. If you were at Hutchmoot 2019, you may remember being overtaken by Ella’s powerful performance of her debut album as part of the show “Well: Exploring the Healing Power of Art.” With Dream War, she has managed to name depths of the human experience that often go unnamed, creating a hospitable space where the listener might untangle the mystery of their own emotions. \Ella’s distinctive voice is far-reaching and impartial to genre, incorporating a mastery of classical piano with a sonic palette characteristic of progressive rock. She’s unafraid to traverse great artistic distances in small spaces. Even within a single song, seas of meticulously layered electric guitars will be followed by shimmers of sunlight on water cast by picks against acoustic strings, harmony quickly overtaken by fierce chromaticism, rushing walls of sound cut short by vulnerable moments of intimacy between her solo vocal and piano, and even momentary appearances of bagpipe and cello, which lend an air of epic fantasy to a far-reaching tale. The cumulative effect is an organic confluence of the personal and the archetypal. I wanted to write with a musical language that could name and illuminate painful and ambiguous feelings like lostness, the desire to give up, and even dread. Ella Mine Ella’s musical instincts were honed under the formal discipline of Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music for six years, where she studied classical piano performance, followed by a university degree in music. These years of training would see Ella’s sharp intuition augmented with an expansive musical vocabulary, allowing her own idiosyncratic voice to emerge and flourish. A talented visual artist as well, Ella Mine’s musical aspirations were always more holistic and expansive than writing and recording collections of songs. Her passion was to create an immersive, transformative experience for her audience; something that she and they could get lost in. She knew from the outset that she wanted Dream War to land as a fully-formed, seamlessly cohesive, movie-score-like, symphonic experience. “As a teenager with chronic amplified pain,” Ella says, “I was prescribed a medication and had a severe adverse reaction that affected the functioning of my brain. I was suddenly overwhelmed by fear, confusion, intrusive and violent thoughts and dreams, akathisia, and a host of other psychoactive effects. Whether I was asleep or awake, everything around me was like a nightmare.” After many years of recovery, Ella started writing the songs she most needed to hear. But more than that, she wrote what she knew other people would need to hear. The “fuel to her fire” in creating Dream War was the knowledge that other people were experiencing the same kinds of oppressive darkness that she herself had come to know too well. “Since I had come out (mostly intact) on the other side,” Ella explains, “I set out to pave a sonic space in which we can connect with painful emotions we often push away. When our language is limited, our understanding is also limited. So I wanted to write with a musical language that could name and illuminate painful and ambiguous feelings like lostness, the desire to give up, and even dread.” Together, the songs of Dream War ask, “How are we to dream, hope, and love again after our first dreams have been crushed, our first hopes dashed, and our first loves ravaged?” All throughout, Ella Mine asks these questions with dexterity, poise, and an ambition born of courage. It is impossible to hear any one of these songs without feeling compelled to listen intently, and that is the magic of Ella’s songwriting: the sense that you’re listening not only to one songwriter’s story, but to the untold depths of your own. Click here to view Dream War in the Rabbit Room Store and here to learn more at Ella Mine’s website. Further Reading & Listening In this Rabbit Room interview, Ella goes further in depth about the story that led to Dream War. She also makes an appearance in Season 2 of The Second Muse, where her song “Sound + Fury” is explored in depth.