What are you looking for?

Let me say right off the bat that this post is full of spoilers. It oozes spoilers. Spoilaphobic reader, beware. I want to talk about La La Land and that perplexing, polarizing, absolutely perfect ending. To set the scene: I went into the movie cold, soon after it came out. I had watched a trailer, and a friend had told me she’d seen it and wasn’t thrilled with the ending, but I knew nothing more than that. I had no idea how it was being received by the public or the critics, had seen nothing on social media about it. I was not particularly a fan of either Ryan Gosling or Emma Stone. I love classic musicals but thought this could go either way—fun or super cheesy. As soon as it ended, Pete and I looked at each other and both of us said, “I loved every second of that.” For the next 48 hours we did very little except listen to the soundtrack and obsess about seeing La La Land again, and then went back to the theatre for an encore and loved it even more the second time. Given the closeness of its themes to our vocations and our marriage, we decided to make it a new annual Christmas tradition. There are movies that are vegan burgers (I know I’m supposed to appreciate this intellectually but it’s just not tasty to my palate) and movies that are deep dishes of chocolate ice cream (ahem, Meg Ryan + Tom Hanks + cozy bookstores, anyone?). This was one of those rare occasions when I thought I’d found both in one movie: comfort food and an aesthetic A+. It was only after we’d seen it twice that I began hearing rumblings from the rest of the world about the movie—from friends, Facebook, reviews online, debates over award predictions—and realized that it wasn’t just a few people who didn’t like it or didn’t understand it. Hating on La La Land was a thing. The reactions (especially from people I expected to love it) completely blindsided me. And not because I expect everyone to agree with my opinion of a movie. I was almost alone in disliking the movie Hugo. I was in the minority disliking Fantastic Beasts and The Hobbit. I felt “meh” about Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella (another post for another day). Pete and I disagree about movies all the time, and when we do agree, we’re often in disagreement with everyone else we know. I’m well accustomed to disagreeing about movies. This was different, though. My instinctive response to many of the reactions I heard—especially those about the ending, which seems to have pitted friend against friend, husband against wife, almost as sharply as an American presidential election—was not a counter-argument but a double-take: “Wait—what? Are you sure we went to the same film? Maybe you accidentally walked into the wrong theatre and only thought you were seeing La La Land?” It was as if I had asked someone, “Did you like that piece of chocolate cake I gave you?” and he answered, “Fie, the monkey burns with mellow moonflake!” It was that disorienting. All I could do was stand with mouth agape and think, You saw a completely different movie than I did. Maybe we did see different movies. I have no illusion of being an objective critic—I know quite well that I walked into the theatre wearing a particular set of Jennifer-shaped spectacles. So let me tell you about the movie I saw. But first, let me set aside two common criticisms (ignoring the debate about jazz, which I’m not qualified to talk about): First, there are those who think that critics are only fawning over La La Land because it’s a movie about Hollywood. To which I want to reply (with gentle humility and deference, of course), “Um, did you watch this movie?” The movie that says L.A. is a place where everything is worshipped and nothing is valued? The movie that rejects the Hollywood idolization of romance in spite of the fact that doing so has alienated half its audience? The movie in which the actress’s big break only comes after she’s stopped trying to please the movie industry and decides to carve out her own vocational path by telling her homegrown story in live theater? Trust me, I have no loyalty to Hollywood whatsoever. I loved it because it was a movie about calling and joy, and it spoke to me deeply as an introverted writer in Tennessee who has never had the slightest shadow of an ambition to be a famous film star. We live the given life, and not the planned. Wendell Berry Second, I get the feeling a lot of people expected it be a reboot of a classic musical and then were disappointed that it didn’t live up to Singing in the Rain. It’s easy to poke fun at Ryan Gosling’s voice or nitpick over the choreography, but I think this is missing the point. La La Land is not so much a new musical as it is a kind of midrash on the old musicals. That’s one of my favorite things that art can do—stand on the backs of those who came before, comment upon them, and reach for something different. Director Damien Chazelle, was, I think, using the visual language, the tropes, the conventions of the old Hollywood musicals to do something new, to tell a very particular story. (And let’s face it, telling a rich and compelling story was not the top priority for many of those classic movie musicals we love; the plot was often just the thin glue for the song-and-dance numbers.) Case in point: In the middle of a Singing in the Rain-ish song-and-dance number near the beginning of La La Land, a cell phone rings and ruins the moment. That’s not just comic relief; that’s the thematic tension of the entire movie breaking humorously into the scene—fantasy, art, bumping up against reality. As much as they may want to be, as high as their aspirations might soar, Seb and Mia aren’t Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. They aren’t fabulous singers. They aren’t fabulous dancers. They’re ordinary people with cell phones. They’re me. And just like that, with the intrusion of that familiar ringtone, we’re presented with the movie’s central conceit. In the old Hollywood musicals, the musical numbers are just sort of there. There’s no explanation really for why all these people are suddenly singing and dancing. We just accept it. La La Land, however, makes a kind of sense out of that weird alternate reality. Throughout the movie there are two layers to the story: the fantasy/dream layer, and the earthy reality layer. It’s the story, after all, of people who have come to the city with enormous dreams for their lives. The opening ensemble dance on the freeway, “Another Day of Sun,” smacks us in the face with its starry-eyed optimism, followed quickly by the calculating ambition of “Someone in the Crowd.” Later come the more wistful “City of Stars” and the romantic ballet-in-the-air scene at the planetarium. Each of these scenes in the first half of the movie dramatize, outwardly, the inner dreams that swirl in and around and through the characters . . . dreams of glory, success, a place in the world where we fit, a person in the world we fit with. Haven’t you ever been so excited, or so in love, that your heart was tap dancing on the inside? But La La Land juxtaposes that layer of the story with a distinctly unglamorous realism. During the long middle part of the movie (where some people get bored), the songs mostly disappear—for a good reason. Seb and Mia have moved from the dreamy optimism of the opening scenes to the everyday struggle of pursuing those dreams. No one is dancing on the roof of their car or floating in the air or bursting into harmony. This is the real world, after all, where you get rejected so many times you want to give up, where bills have to be paid, where a relationship hurts. The argument they have is the way arguments between couples really work, full of escalating misinterpretations and perfectly-aimed, instantly-regretted arrows. The more I think about it, the more Ryan Gosling’s slightly off-key warble seems appropriate in this movie. It’s not ironic. It’s kind of endearing (in a way that’s completely opposite those “Hey, Girl” memes). Its flaws make him believable. So I’ve said this is a movie about calling and joy, and I’ve said it’s a movie about fantasy and reality. All those themes lead us directly to that controversial ending. When the credits roll, Mia has a successful acting career, an obviously kind and loving husband, and a daughter she adores. Seb, though not married, is sharing his fierce passion for jazz with a packed audience in his very own club. And yet people are saying this movie doesn’t have a happy ending—it’s melancholy and cynical and depressing. Come again? I read somewhere that La La Land depicts the triumph of selfish ambition and success over love, which is ludicrous. For one thing, it is abundantly clear from the start that the story of Seb and Mia is a story of vocation and passion, in contrast to the shallow ambition of those who are simply chasing fame in L.A., the roommates who only go to parties to be seen by the right career-launching person, the boorish writer bragging about how his books are getting talked about. Seb wants to open a jazz club because he loves jazz—with a passion that’s almost irritating and that can’t help but spill out of him onto everyone around him, whether they like it or not. Mia calls him away from the temptations of mere ambition and financial success, calls him back to the roots of his joy in spite of its lonelier and riskier path, because “people love what other people are passionate about.” And not one of those flashy wannabes in the opening musical numbers would have sung the “Audition” song Mia sings at the end, but that’s the Mia we’ve seen blossom in this story—the Mia whose love for acting is grounded in memories of her family, whose old bedroom window in Boulder served as the setting for her childhood dreams as well as her first original play. This part of the movie rang all of my bells, because I am Mia. Not in personality, not in career choice, certainly not in fashion (though I’m still drooling over her red handbag). I’ve been living her struggle for most of my adult life, caught between the strong pull towards artistic and cultural conformity and the terrifying prospect of carving out one’s own unique vocational path despite a strong possibility of failure, the misunderstanding of other people, the financial insecurity, and the ever-present monster of self-doubt. How many times have I stood there like Mia and cried, “I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s too hard. It hurts too much. What if I’m not good enough? . . . But what if I’m not?” So many of Mia’s conversations with Seb reminded me of my conversations with my husband—one side hopeful but hesitant, the other full of effusive reassurances and pointed challenges: “This story is awesome. You are awesome. Who cares what anyone else thinks?” The main difference being that Seb is a jerk for a lot of the movie, and Pete isn’t. Pete would have been sitting in the front row of my debut performance with tears pouring down his face. But Pete has said, in different words, and on countless occasions, “Stop being a baby and go to that audition.” Or, Look, I’m not going to coddle your self-pity, because to do so would be the opposite of loving you. Loving you, right now, means pouring cold water on your self-sabotaging angst and leading you to that desk where you can make the art only you can make and be the person you are meant to be, whether you feel like it or not. If it hadn’t been for that blunt love from Pete (and a few other people close to me) over the last five years, I honestly don’t know whether I would still be writing anything today. Real love is helping the other person become the person he or she is supposed to be, no matter the cost to yourself. When Seb and Mia part because their callings (the callings each of them challenged the other to follow) are taking them in different directions, that’s not romance, but it is love. (Note that I would not be saying this if they were married—because a third, shared calling would then take primacy). And we are richly blessed in life if people come along who love us in that way on our journey—not just the people destined to be our spouses. There have been those who have dropped into my life for a season, or a moment, who did that for me—challenged me to step out of my fear and farther on the path of my calling—and I will forever be grateful. In this sense the ending of La La Land is a whole lot like the ending of Once: the story of two strangers who love each for a brief period with that kind of love, who give each other the courage to take the next steps in the paths they are meant to take, which happen to lead away from each other. And it’s beautiful. Okay, then, why that weird mini-movie dream sequence that interrupts the ending? What’s going on with that, anyway? I’ve heard from many people—including people who were accosted by multiple perplexed husbands seeking explanations as they walked out of the theatre—that this was the sticking point for them. Which makes me sad, because when that sequence started, I felt like I had come home to something. That is exactly how my imagination works. If La La Land had ended with Seb and Mia together and both living their dreams, that would have been frothy wish-fulfillment, and wish-fulfillment is ultimately not emotionally satisfying; we all would have forgotten about the movie the next day. If the movie had ended with the two of them having drifted apart and seeing each other years later in the club, but without the dream sequence, that would have been depressing and cynical. It was the dream sequence, and only the dream sequence, that made this entire movie come together and work. For one thing, it is cinematically magnificent. We began the movie with musical exuberance; we trod through the darker realism of the movie’s second half; we’ve been drawn back into the glow of the dream gently with Mia’s audition. But now, the exuberance floods back onto the screen again as the earlier musical themes return and tangle themselves together like the final movement in a symphony. Visual allusions to old Hollywood musicals like Singing in the Rain and An American in Paris explode like fireworks. (When an author quotes something, do you sit up a listen? Yes, there’s a purpose…) We are swept through a whole range of human emotions in a single wordless sequence like that beautiful montage at the beginning of Pixar’s Up. Joy and melancholy intertwine and dance. Is it Seb’s dream? Is it Mia’s? It doesn’t matter. The question itself is too literal. This is no different from the moment when they take off flying around the planetarium before they kiss. Did that make sense? Not physically, no. But emotionally, it felt true. Reality pauses and there is a moment of communion when they get to play out, together, the fantasy of being in love and seeing your dreams come true. When an artist/writer/filmmaker does that, it’s a signal: hey, let go of your hold on the world a little bit, because I’ve got something to show you that doesn’t fit into literal boxes. There’s a truth beyond logic here. Pay attention. In this sideways reality, Seb and Mia get to live out their alternative “happy” ending. There is a sense in which they will always possess that fantasy; there will always be that parallel dream version of life in which Seb kisses her at the right time and follows her to Paris and there is no conflict and no hard choice. This is the classic Hollywood musical version of Mia and Seb’s story; the perfect movie those freeway dancers at the beginning would have wanted. And here’s the brilliance: it is both joy-giving and ultimately a fantasy, at the same moment. We need those dreams. We need those candy-colored love stories and song-and-dance numbers that happen in our imagination, because they fuel us. But we don’t live in them. And La La Land is a masterpiece because it interweaves the fantasy with the reality in a way that is the very opposite of modern cynicism. It affirms the value of dreaming while at the same time not romanticizing real life. We don’t live in the dream. But the dreaming is still good. There’s one more thing going on here, though. Their “happy ending” is still not quite happy, even in the perfect mini-movie version. Because as the dream sequence comes to a close, we see that in this version Mia has everything: except—notice—her daughter, who has been replaced by a son. (If you have a daughter and a son, ask yourself: are they interchangeable?). But Seb walks with her into someone else’s jazz club, and he is in the audience, not at the piano where he belongs. And because this is a movie about calling and joy, not romance, that would be a betrayal of the whole story. Mia’s love for Seb pushed him in the direction of becoming the person he was supposed to become, creating a space in the world for his own peculiar joy to pour itself out upon other people, just as he pushed her to do. The real tragic ending would have been if he had not been on the stage of that jazz club. Which is why the tension of the ending breaks only in a very quiet, easily overlooked, wordless moment as Mia lingers at the door and looks back at Seb sitting at the piano. And he smiles, just a little, and nods. And her face relaxes into a smile, and she turns away. Did you see the smile? It’s a perfectly nuanced, impeccably timed moment of visual storytelling. Everything is going to be fine. Life is not a movie (we’ve just seen the perfect movie; it failed), but in the end there is a nod and a smile, a quiet acceptance as we turn and walk back to the good life we’ve been given. If that’s not a true happy ending, I don’t know what is. For me, it was profoundly hopeful. I walked out of the theatre with a feeling of release from the angst of grasping my dreams too tightly, of fearing that the future will spin a story of disappointment and sacrifice. No, the joy of the fantasy and the smile of contentment with reality can coexist. It reminded me of one of my favorite lines from a poem of Wendell Berry’s: “We live the given life, and not the planned.” The backlash against La La Land sort of punched me in the gut because the movie so beautifully captured my vocational struggles, my relationship with my husband, and my narrative aesthetic that the criticism felt personal somehow. You don’t get it? Do you get me? Which is obviously very silly. It’s only a movie. But art is like that. It gets under our skin. It wiggles its way into the cracks in our hearts. It can also—if it’s good art (and “La La Land” is good art, whether or not you think it’s great)—be a cipher into which we pour our own experience, our own heartbreak, our own hopes, and it molds itself to the shape we fill it with. As a writer, I desperately need to untether story from literal reality, and I need to know there is audience out there that understands such stories. I’m not talking about pure fantasy, where we’re transported to Middle Earth or some other world and simply exchange one set of reality rules for another. I’m talking about stories that allow us to see our own world, our own rules of reality, stretched like taffy. Some would call this magical realism, and more and more I’m beginning to think that magical realism is the genre that best suits a worldview that takes seriously both the inherent goodness and beauty of the earth and the possibility of transcendence (another post for another day). Art helps us learn to see reality stretched; that is its unique power. That is, in fact, the point of Mia’s climactic audition song; art’s madness is its key to truth, and its messiness is the price we gladly pay for a brief glimpse. A bit of madness is key to give us new colors to see Who knows where it will lead us? And that’s why they need us So bring on the rebels, the ripples from pebbles The painters and poets and plays And here’s to the fools who dream Crazy as they may seem Here’s to the hearts that break Here’s to the mess we make I don’t know how anyone can hear that song and then walk out of the movie theatre saying, “Meh. Kinda cute, but that’s it”—unless you’ve honestly never felt totally out of sync with the world, a little mad, a little too in love with colors no one else seems to see, just a heartbroken mess with a foolish dream to create something lasting. But gosh, over here in crazyland, that’s my heart’s song. I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie that sung it back to me so perfectly. In the musical version of my own life, I’m going to sing and dance very badly. I’m going to make a mess. I’m going to have to sacrifice some good things for the sake of other good things. But I’m trusting that somewhere, someone in the audience will be saying, “That’s beautiful, because that is a real, flawed human life, graced by a dream.”

A few months back I posted a song by one of my new favorite artists, the Swedish band A Treehouse Wait. I’m telling you guys, this album is gorgeous. The production is lush and tasteful and super creative, and they do a great job of showcasing Jenny Wahlström’s crazy good voice. These lyrics! These melodies! I seriously can’t get enough of this music, and it’s not just because I’m Swedish, I promise. If anyone knows how to ache for the green fields of summer, it's the Swedes... Andrew Peterson One of the things I like most in a song is what Rich Mullins was so good at—grand, poetic themes that are grounded in story. The title of Rich’s album Winds of Heaven/Stuff of Earth sums it up. He was a master at writing these sweeping, epic lyrics, and then throwing in a friend’s name (“I remember what Susan said,” “maybe we could borrow Beaker’s bike”) or a city or place name (“Well, the moon moved past Nebraska,” “Once I went to Appalachia, for my father, he was born there”) to remind us that while he’s talking about big ideas, those ideas play themselves out right here on earth, among the people and places we know. It wakes me up to the beauty of our own stories, to the beauty of the world we live in—but it also just wakes me up. I pay closer attention when I remember he’s telling an intimate story about his life—about our lives—not just throwing out grandiose themes. The fact is, the streets where we live, the families we see every day, are the stage for the epic ballad of creation. The song “Waves” by A Treehouse Wait does the same thing. Check it out. Waves will move again and the fields be green When all of the flowers bloom And it will be summer again, I know I can see all the melting ice Can you feel the wind that blows? It’s changing its course now Will we see, and will we run fast with it, And dare to believe that winter is over? The middle verse takes a delightful turn that changes our experience of the song, so that when she circles back around to the first lyric we have the added ache of knowing that she’s actually, literally longing for the coming summer. Come home, John We saved a seat for you We put on some music, too I think you’re gonna like it And if you like I’d come pick you up somewhere Yes, I’ll go a million miles Just shout and I’ll come there I miss you here Please say that you missed me And when summer comes We’ll have light that warms us I’ve been in Sweden in the deep of winter. Once I stayed in a seaside castle in Varberg that was literally covered in drifts of snow. The rivers and lakes were frozen and waveless. The sun only shines for a few hours a day. If anyone knows how to ache for the green fields of summer, it’s the Swedes, and this song captures the wild hope that winter won’t hold sway forever, that those we love who are far away will one day feast with us again. There’s something about the dream of green in the dark of winter that wakes a longing in me like nothing else. This song, and this video, makes the waiting sweet and sad and, praise God, bearable. It will be summer again, I know. Buy the album here.

On May 8, 2012, it was announced that Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are and countless other books, had passed away. As I got on the train to work that morning, browsing through Twitter on my phone and reading news reports about Sendak, his life and his art, I stumbled upon a link in which National Public Radio re-posted their final interview with him at age eighty-three, done by Terry Gross just a few months prior. Nineteen minutes later, at the end of the interview, I stepped off the train fighting back tears and trying not to make a blubbering spectacle of myself. What I had heard was a story and testimony all at once extremely beautiful, extremely sad, full of mystery, and, quite unexpectedly, a testament to God’s faithfulness. I was hearing for the first time the longings of an artist who I only knew in a relatively small manner, but who I discovered meant more to me than I fully realized. I knew of him mostly through Where the Wild Things Are, one of my favorite books from childhood, plus some fond memories of seeing the films and books for Really Rosie and The Nutshell Library in elementary school. When I was young, I appreciated Wild Things in particular as a good story with fascinating pictures. Even in high school it stayed with me as I painted a famous scene from the book on the back of my denim jacket. When I started reading the book out loud to my own kids as an adult, I fell in love with it in a whole new way, marveling just as much at how it sounds as how it looks. I also look at this story as having similarities to the parable of the Prodigal Son: the boy Max lashes out at his mother and goes off on a wild rumpus adventure with the wild things, only to long for returning home, where he smells good things to eat and finds his supper still waiting for him. And it is still hot. I have since become a serious student of Sendak, collecting more of his books, sharing them with my kids, digging up interviews, and implementing his influence into my own unfolding work as a writer and illustrator of children’s stories. Observing the work of Maurice Sendak becomes all the more significant when learning more about his life and how it impacted his art. In previous NPR interviews over the years (collected here), he talks about how much of his life was spent looking out of a window while sick in bed, watching life in his Brooklyn neighborhood as it happened outside. (A great deal of this influence is evident in his first books Kenny’s Window and The Sign on Rosie’s Door.) Sendak even tells a riveting tale of his own childhood memory seeing an angel out his window, and describes it in full detail. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again. Maurice Sendak Another story, told by Wicked author Gregory Maguire (also on NPR here), tells us about him giving Maurice a gift in the hospital before he died: a photograph of Lewis Carroll sitting on the edge of his window, with his feet hanging outside. These repeated symbolic images of windows are interesting: the world that Sendak saw beyond his own window, and then finally, near his life’s end, a symbolic image of another author he had admired, sitting on the edge of a window as if ready to venture into another world—a world, to borrow from another one of Sendak’s book titles, Outside Over There. What is profound about Maurice Sendak’s final NPR interview in particular is how he wrestles, through real tears, with his adamant disbelief in God and the visions which call to him from “outside over there” anyway. The interview begins with Terry Gross talking to Maurice about his latest book, which would turn out to be his final one, called Bumble Ardy, about a rebellious orphaned pig who is not allowed to have fun. When he turns nine he throws a birthday party for himself with a bunch of grubby swine, only to be disciplined by his aunt when she gets home, so Bumble Ardy promises “I’ll never turn ten.” Maurice and Terry talk about the mystery of that line, “I’ll never turn ten,” and Sendak says, “I won’t pretend that I know exactly what it means. I only know it touches me deeply, and when I thought of it, I was so happy I thought of it. It came to me, which is what the creative act is all about. Things come to you without you necessarily knowing what they mean.” He relates this to his unhappy childhood; growing up in a Jewish family in the shadow of the Holocaust, the evil and pain that event caused his family played a big part in his giving up on God and not believing in His goodness. But he also talks about the people who are taking care of him later in life, his life-long friend and neighbor Lynn and her mother, who in his words, was “a saint in the best sense of that word, the best sense of what I imagine Christianity is all about.” He talks about his older brother Jack Sendak, whom he says “made my childhood bearable. More importantly to my life, he saved my life. He drew me away from the lack of comprehension that existed between me and my parents, and he took his time with me to draw pictures and read stories and live a kind of fantastical life.” His brother Jack would pass away in 1995. He talks a great deal about other people who have passed away, as he finds he is out-living many who he has loved so dearly. He talks about the death of his partner Eugene who he lived with for fifty years, and describes the central bond of their companionship, which was to travel together, read books together, and most importantly, to listen to music. He talks again about Bumble-Ardy and how he was writing it as Eugene was in the house dying of cancer, and how writing the book became an expression of his pain and loss. Part of the reason that Terry Gross is able to dig this deep into this many personal stories with Maurice is that they had a long history of interviews which went back several years. There is a level of trust, friendship and love that exists between these two people having this conversation, and it’s in this context of trust that Gross is able to explore the following questions with him, in this excerpt from the interview transcript: (Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=140435330) GROSS: We’ve talked before about how, you know, you’re Jewish but you’re very secular. You don’t believe in God. You don’t…SENDAK: No, I don’t.GROSS: Yeah. And I think having friends who die, getting older, getting closer toward the end of life tests people’s faith and it also tests people’s atheism. It sounds like your atheism is staying strong.(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)SENDAK: Is what?GROSS: Staying strong.SENDAK: Yes. I’m not unhappy about becoming old. I’m not unhappy about what must be. It makes me cry only when I see my friends go before me and life is emptied. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again. And it’s like a dream life. I am reading a biography of Samuel Palmer, which is written by a woman in England. I can’t remember her name. And it’s sort of how I feel now, when he was just beginning to gain his strength as a creative man and beginning to see nature. But he believed in God, you see, and in heaven, and he believed in hell. Goodness gracious, that must have made life much easier. It’s harder for us non-believers.But, you know, there’s something I’m finding out as I’m aging – that I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they’re beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music. You know, I don’t think I’m rationalizing anything. I really don’t. This is all inevitable and I have no control over it. “Bumble-ardy” was a combination of the deepest pain and the wondrous feeling of coming into my own and it took a long time. It took a very long time, but it’s genuine. Unless I’m crazy. I could be crazy and you could be talking to a crazy person.GROSS: I don’t think so.(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)SENDAK: I don’t know anymore and I don’t care. … GROSS: Well, I’m so glad you have a new book. I’m really glad we had a chance to talk.SENDAK: I am too.GROSS: And I wish you all good things.SENDAK: I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life. I won’t pretend I know exactly what was going on in Maurice’s head or his heart as he spoke, but what I heard that morning on the train was a reminder that no matter how adamant we are, how stubborn we are, how much we want to deny God or disbelieve in Him, or the idea of Him, God is faithful and he keeps moving. He doesn’t force Himself upon us, but He doesn’t give up either. He speaks to us by any means possible: through the kindness of others, through music, books, and art (even works of art which are not considered “religious”), through hundred-year-old maple trees, and through the beautiful world He has made. From any perspective, art and beauty can give us a glimpse past the windows of our lives, and in the worst of circumstances, can give us hope. Despite all of the sorrow and tragedy we create or receive, even if our hearts are willfully closed to God we may still surrender to beauty, and when the Holy Spirit takes us to the edge of ourselves, we may surrender to Him as well. Among the wild things in our lives that threaten to eat us up, stories from artists like Maurice Sendak can awaken us to a possibility: that we may see an angel through our window, or that we may smell good things to eat, and find our supper is still waiting for us. And it is still hot.

I was fourteen, walking into the gym for my first day of high school summer basketball camp. Switching from a small, Catholic middle school to a huge county high school was terrifying, so the night before I had stayed up late, weaving colored ribbons through two metal hair barrettes. Red, white, and blue—the team colors. I wore those to practice because I wanted to let the natives know that I was friendly.

 My hometown was the seat of the first diocese west of the Appalachian mountains, established in 1808 by Pope Pius VII. Our diocese ministered to Catholics between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River until 1841. In many areas of the South, Catholicism is shunned, but where I grew up, it was revered. Tourists would come from all over the world to visit our cathedral. I had grown up Southern Baptist, so I was accustomed to free-flowing emotions, pot luck dinners, and lots of hugs.  “The priesthood of the believer,” was more than just a doctrine–it was a way of life. We were congregational-led and democratic. Sunday School classes left room for debate, and because we felt personally responsible for guarding and giving the truth, we opened our Bibles and wrestled over nuance. None of that had prepared me for the first time I would attend Mass at St. Joseph’s basilica. The vaulted ceilings seemed to lift my soul up and out of my body like a balloon full of helium. Even before my classmates began to kneel and genuflect, I felt a compulsion to fall to my knees. I wondered if we entered in silent reverence to keep us all from shouting out in awe. So much was foreign to me there—the stations of the cross, the holy water that first dripped then clung to the fingertips of my friends, the statue of a kind-eyed saint I did not know, the recitations, “Lamb of God, take away the sins of the world. Lamb of God, take away the sins of the world. Lamb of God, take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us.” The artwork on the walls was holy, serious, and dark instead of bright and jovial like Baptist classroom posters. My heart pounded. I didn’t know that I was a poet then, but this sanctuary fit my instincts. I knew the purpose of liturgy without having to be taught. What they were doing here made sense to me. I held my breath when the ancient songs were sung. The Catholics were happy to have moved past Latin with Vatican II, but I drank up every bit of the good old stuff that they had kept. Mass felt like wandering into Lothlorien, or like reading George MacDonald’s Lilith, an enchanted world. Older Catholics spoke out of love for mystery instead of on fire with certainty. The part of my soul that responds to the transcendent quickened. During those years, I grew close to a nun and a priest. Father Bill would dress up like a clown, red-nose and all. He was different from a pastor, undivided by family demands so that his focus was singular. I loved his levity and his humility. Sister Theresa was maybe 4’9”, Italian, fierce. When the boys were terrible, she’d let out a string of foreign words that I was glad I couldn’t understand. Once I saw her throw a hardback grammar book at a kid named Doug. Honestly, he deserved it. With me, she was ever gentle. She asked me what I believed during catechism class, knowing good and well that I was Southern Baptist. When my classmates dared to giggle, she told them sternly that Baptists knew how to study their Bibles and that Catholics had a lot to learn from them. She told us stories of saints and miracles that delighted me, even if I didn’t fully believe all of them. She was probably close to 70, but her countenance lit up like a child’s when she spoke about the Eucharist. I had been taught the sufficiency of Christ for over a decade, so there were times when I thought Sister Theresa was too focused on working to please Jesus. Other times, however, I heard “faith without works is dead” ringing in her devotion. Her influence on my heart was like the book of James balancing out the book of Galatians. Every day at lunch, Sister Theresa would eat half a grapefruit with a spoon that had a jagged blade on one side. I would watch her work out the sections, worried that she would cut herself to pieces. But she was old, agile, and unafraid. She let me section out my doctrine with a blade, too. She relaxed around me, creating a barrier of protection around our dialogue, and I loved her for it. It was in this Catholic school that I learned to play basketball. I was a moderate little player, not squirrely enough to play point guard, and not tall enough to play center. But I made a solid forward, and I could play second guard in a pinch. My biggest strength was that I hustled. Every single game, I gave it all I had. The same love and support that filled our catechism classes ruled our court. Coaches were thorough and engaged. They corrected us and believed in us, insisting on good sportsmanship. We learned to cheer for one another and reach a hand to our enemies when they fell. I stumbled; I learned from my mistakes; I thrived. God, if you want me to be innocent, why did you leave me here where that’s impossible? Rebecca Reynolds But in ninth grade, I switched to the big county school, and county was a different planet.  Bloody fights in the hallways. A constant reek of body odor, and pot, and stale denim. A smoking area for teachers and students. Field parties on the weekends. Apathy. Metallica. Giant mullets and black eyeliner. A different cadence. A different vernacular. When I walked into the gymnasium that first summer, I knew in an instant that everything had changed. The first thing I noticed—high school girls moved like the boys I had always known, throwing themselves at hard angles between steps. Their jaws were clenched, and several of them kept a sort of permanent snarl on their faces. I had seen television shows with rough street gangs, but the saunter, the taunt, the threat, the dare—I had never seen any of this in a living female. Earlier that summer I had practiced walking up and down underneath the long tunnel of catalpa trees, my head up and my shoulders back, learning to plant my heels so that they came down softly and with dignity. Nearly every toddler learns to walk, of course, but as a child becomes a woman, her weight begins to collect in different places, so she has to learn to walk a second time. If she doesn’t, she won’t know how to hold her chest or her hips; she will let her breasts fold in, and bend over, and sort of clunk along. I wanted to float, so balancing a thick novel on my head, I had walked back and forth under those catalpa trees, squishing black and yellow caterpillars that fell en masse onto the asphalt below. Even though I was scared to death to walk into that high school gym, I remembered the grace I had practiced. Held my head up. Held my shoulders back. “Get them damned ribbons outta your hair, Princess,” one of the seniors barked. “I don’t know what kind of f***** world you come from,” said another, “But this is serious ball here at the County, and the next time I see you wearing s**t like that, I’m gonna up and rip them out myself.” Apparently the upperclassmen held some sort of authority. The other freshman laughed as I scrambled with the clips. “Damned rich private school kid,” I heard somebody whisper. The other seniors glowered, which silenced the freshmen. They looked around nervously to see what they should do instead, then took a hard jaw line. When the coach walked in, I saw something in his eyes I haven’t seen in many people since. It felt like a liquid hatred, the sort of hatred that feels like it’s doing you a favor by despising you. On bus trips,  if we hadn’t performed well in a game, he would stand at the front, arms on two seats, swaying back and forth with the motion of the bus,  and pointing out girls one at a time. 

He would say, “Thomas, I know your momma. I know your daddy. I know what kind of s**t they are. And you played like s**t tonight because you came from a s**t family, and unless you get your s**t together, you’re always going to be s**t just like your s***ty people.” I’d never heard anybody talk like that in my whole life. I looked down at my knees, hoping he wouldn’t notice me. One by one he would work through us, berating us, trying to figure out what would hurt us the most. I will never forget the first time he addressed me, “You, Kelley, you wish you were back at that prep school don’t you.” (It wasn’t a question.) “All those rich folks baby their kids like precious little treasures. Well you’re not precious here, Kelley. You’re nothing here.” My parents weren’t rich. We didn’t even go to restaurants. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t say anything but, “Yes, sir.” None of us ever said anything but, “Yes, sir. No, sir.” Some of my first exposures to sexual talk were among this crowd. In the locker rooms, the girls would laugh in smoky, harsh voices, telling stories about man bodies while they pulled up their knee socks and tightened their high tops. For them, sex was about conquest, about exposing men as fools. Sex was power—something that gave teenage girls the right to call grown men by their first names.

 The Apostle Paul once said, “I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil,”  but I didn’t know how to be innocent there. To be naïve was to be slaughtered. I learned how to cuss, learned how to throw an elbow, learned how to deflect attack with a cold stare. I learned how to stop acting like I cared because caring was weakness, and predators smell blood in the water from miles off. “God, if you want me to be innocent, why did you leave me here where that’s impossible?” I prayed. When our teenagers are about to fly the nest, we fill them full of strategic training programs that promise to defend them from the wicked ways of the world. But no matter what information you’ve given a kid, it’s going to be overwhelming for him to walk into a cultural current so strong that he can’t keep his balance. A person can’t think her way out of a tsunami when she’s dodging broken trees, and floating cars, and metric tons of water force full of jagged edges of metal and wood. I was thrown around. Cut up. Knocked half silly. But floating in the top of the flood waters, God sent mystery once more to sustain me. He gave me an art teacher, and her room was my oasis. I fed myself from that garden, spattered my clothes with acrylic paint and clay, found refuge in that concrete prison with no windows. My teacher had formed a little posse of thinkers and dreamers, teachers who met in the early mornings and saw beyond the walls that held us in. They talked about literature, politics, philosophy, ideology, plays, exhibits. They were my foretaste of The Eagle and Child—my first introduction to The Rabbit Room. Sometimes on the weekends I would drive over to the basilica after Mass. I would pull the doors open and sneak in, genuflecting clumsy as a Protestant, then sliding in the pew to pour my heart out to God. The physical act of kneeling felt good after working so hard to be vulgar and violent. When I was finished praying, I’d sit and look up at all the saints staring down at me, wondering if I would want to talk to a beatified human if I thought I could. I decided no—even if I had the option, I’d rather talk to Jesus directly. I came to that conclusion without feeling judgment or pride. It’s just how I wanted things to be. Behind me were rows of candles folks would light, praying for their beloved deceased. I didn’t believe in praying for this either, but there was something about the intimate silence of that practice which stirred a fierce homesickness inside me. Homesickness that would become a homing device. “Peace of Christ be with you,” whispered an older woman, leaving the candles to give me her hand. I took it in mine, feeling her soft, thin skin rolling around on her bones. “And also with you,” I responded, though I wasn’t sure if that was right. Thirty years have passed since those days. My high school memories are now filtered through a heart that has been broken and humbled. I don’t remember which year it was when I stopped wanting to hide from those older girls who barked and bit and started wishing I could have just adopted them. And now when I think about my old angry coach or the Metallica-loving, pot-smoking crowd, all walking with their heads down and their hearts full of shame and fury, I want to lift up their chins and look them straight in the eyes. I see how the enemy of the imago Dei prowled around the poor and the abandoned, telling all of them from birth that they would never amount to anything. He provoked them with hot irons. He lied to them. He lied so persistently. He lied until we all believed him. Now I also see that I misunderstood the Apostle Paul’s expectations. When he wrote that he wanted Christ’s followers to be wise and innocent, he wasn’t calling them to be withdrawn from the world. He wasn’t holding a high, moral hoop for them to jump through. He was wanting us to work out our identity in Christ, smack in the middle of the darkness. He was showing us what was possible for lonely, scared kids stuck in a concrete country school. The Greek word for “wise” describes someone who is skilled, cultivated, learned. But this is not just cognitive knowledge, it’s a strategic, practical sort of wisdom. It’s about comprehending our surroundings with honesty and insight, then naming what we find without bias, projection, or exaggeration. Once we understand the facts of the matter, we’re to be discreet. You might even call it street smart. We don’t bulldoze with the truth—we are artisans. To be “innocent” means that we are unmixed. The innocent are pure like a pure metal or an undiluted wine. Innocent people do not live in denial or in hiding; they don’t giggle and flush with a maidenly ignorance. Like a bolt of cloth can be pure linen, the innocent are woven from one fiber. No matter where you place linen, it remains linen. The innocent are also authentic like that friend who tells you the whole truth without flinching. Regardless of their surroundings, they have learned to embrace the truth Christ has declared about them, and so they walk in it. Reflecting on all those years helps me see that something inside me was hungry for wisdom and innocence like this. While I walked through the catalpa trees longing to balance the newfound weight of a frightening world with grace, I was looking for the ability to hold steady and poised, no matter what names were thrown at me. When I found places to kneel amid a culture that sauntered and throat punched, I was eager to live a life of artisan focus. When I felt that sharp homesickness—even while the bus tires jolted and shuddered with the angry roar—I was looking for the discernment of one who walks eagerly toward her own telos. I was ashamed of those inclinations when they first came to me, ashamed to be a holy fool. But I shouldn’t have been ashamed because these were longings of mystery. These were leaps of a soul into the vaulted basilica of the heavenly places. Pilgrims had gone before me, extending their bare, bony hands to me, whispering, “The peace of Christ to you,”  and in offering this much, they had created a pregnant pause. A vacuum. “And also with you.” “Lift up your hearts to the Lord.” “It is right to give him thanks and praise.” Father, all-powerful and ever living God, we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks through Jesus Christ our Lord. Through his cross and resurrection he freed us from sin and death and called us to the glory that has made us a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people set apart. Everywhere we proclaim your mighty works for you have called us out of darkness into your own wonderful light. And so, with all the choirs of angels in heaven we proclaim your glory and join in their unending hymn of praise: Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. Father, You are holy indeed, and all creation rightly gives You praise. All life, all holiness comes from You, through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, by the working of the Holy Spirit. From age to age you gather a people to yourself, so that from east to west a perfect offering may be made to the glory of Your name. Part 1 Part 2

While I have long been an appreciator of the church calendar, Lent is the season that I have taken the longest to appreciate, mostly due to shallow evangelical understandings of Roman Catholic traditions (fish on Fridays?). Traditionally, Lent is a 40 day period (connected to Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness) before Easter that involves preparing to observe Christ’s sacrificial death, and the contemplation of sin and its mortal consequences. It begins with the imposition of ashes as a remembrance of mortality (“For dust you are, and to dust you shall return”), and ends with the remembrance of Jesus’ own embrace of death on our behalf. If you are observing the season, here are some film, book, album, and general listening recommendations to accompany you along the way to Easter: Last Days in the Desert Rodrigo Garcia’s film is a haunting portrayal of Jesus’ 40 days of fasting and temptation in the wilderness of Judea. While the film does involve him being tempted by Satan (also played by McGregor), none of the three temptations presented in the Gospel accounts are involved. Rather, Jesus encounters a family in conflict: a father too scared of the wider world to let his son go, a son struggling with his desire to see more of that world, and a dying mother. As Jesus struggles to understand his own identity and God’s apparent silence, he wrestles with how to help this family and what that means for his larger role in the world. Capturing the most unique individual in history has always been a tricky and dangerous affair, but in an industry often saturated with films where Jesus seems slightly ethereal, Last Days in the Desert offers a fascinating imaginative look into Jesus’ human struggles. P. S. The minimalist score is also great to listen to. Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana Anne Rice’s two-part series on the life of Jesus, Christ the Lord, has become one of my favorites pairs of books. The first book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, has become a new traditional Advent read for me, as it offers us a wonderfully constructed and respectful look into the mind of 7-year-old Jesus as he returns from Egypt to the Holy Land, and attempts to uncover the mystery of his birth. The second book, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, picks up the story several decades later, leading through the year before Jesus’ entry into public ministry. Of particular Lenten interest is the latter third of the book, which involves Jesus’ baptism and 40 days in the wilderness. David Crowder Band’s Give Us Rest DCB’s epic double album finale is a perennial favorite for me around this time. Based on the structure of a Catholic requiem mass, the album moves from the darkness of death, sin, and hopelessness to the glory of resurrection. The first disc is probably more appropriate to the Lent season, while the second disc focuses on the resurrection. Russ Ramsey Twofer Our own Russ Ramsey’s Behold the King of Glory is a fantastic devotional for the Lent season, journeying through the entirety of Jesus’ ministry up through Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter. Russ’ new book, Struck, coming out on March 14, details his struggle with facing sudden open-heart surgery, and the ensuing tornado of fear, anxiety, anger, depression, and renewed faith that came out of that experience. You can hear him talk about it a little more here. The Liturgists Lent Meditations The Liturgists Podcast is currently doing a series of daily lectio divina for Lent. Each daily meditation is about 8 minutes long, and walks you through a short passage of Scripture. If you’d like to listen to the meditations, you can become a $5 a month contributor to The Liturgists on Patreon. Plus, if you download the Patreon app to your phone, you’ll automatically get the new meditations everyday and can listen to them right on your phone.

I’m a writer, and that means I spent a lot of years feeling like a kid standing awkwardly at the edge of the playground with a third arm growing out of someplace an arm shouldn’t grow. I tried to hide it most of the time, that arm, but occasionally I’d wave it around and people would look at it and say things like “Wow, that’s really great and stuff,” and then they’d run off and play with the two-armed kids, and I’d go back to doing freakish five-pointed cartwheels because, dang it, the world needed my five-point cartwheels and those two-armed people didn’t know what they were missing. Analogies are fun. Eventually, I moved to another city and met a whole bunch of other three-armed kids, and boy was that great. We did tons of cartwheels. And we did them together. And for a while we’d point at each other and say things like “Hey, your cartwheel form is a little off,” and “Thanks, I never noticed that before,” and “Boy, my third arm is so much stronger these days.” But after a while, we got tired of cartwheel judging and just enjoyed the company. And I realized that what I needed a lot more than for people to checkout my cartwheels was just the opportunity to hang out with a bunch of other people with odd numbers of arms and feel like we were all okay and kind of normal. I’ve come a long way since those days, but I look around sometimes and see other three-armed kids in the area and they’re often asking around for someone to give them pointers on their cartwheel technique, which really just sounds like a chore a lot of the time and isn’t necessarily what they need anyway because I’m pretty sure what they’d really benefit from the most is a group of odd-armed people to get to know so they can feel like they are okay and then they’ll learn to do awesome cartwheels eventually because everyone else is doing them and cartwheels are fun and, wow, everyone’s third arms are getting stronger all the time. Good job, analogy. Take a knee. (That was ridiculous, I know.) The gift of being surrounded by friends who are writers is precious to me. It’s a powerful encouragement to live in community with people who know what it’s like to struggle with the craft, who understand the ups and downs, and who will tell you when to keep up the good work or when to put away the bad. But often when I hear of writers’ groups, the focus is on the sharing of writing and gathering of critique rather than the sharing of burdens or the simple enjoyment of laughter and community. It is my opinion that the better group to be a part of is the one that’s less about the writing and more about the writer. Writing is largely a solitary act, and writers need one another in ways broader and deeper than mere offerings of praise and critique. To that end, I’m founding the Rabbit Room Writers’ Fellowship—something that sounds really formal but will hopefully be pretty casual in practice. If you’re looking for a regimented critique group, you might want to look elsewhere, but if you’re a writer and you recognize your need for community, you’re welcome here. What will we do? Come and find out. It’s my hope that the Rabbit Room can provide a space and time for writers to find in one another what they need to grow as artists, as thinkers, as followers of Christ, and as friends. We three-armed kids need to stick together. I’ll host the fellowship here at North Wind Manor in Nashville on Saturday, March 18th @ 2pm. There’s no price, and no prerequisite, except that you aspire to write and you bring a copy of a favorite book. You’re welcome here. We hope you’ll come. If you’d like to join us, shoot me an RSVP at pete@rabbitroom.com, and if you know a writer who needs this kind of community, please let them know they are invited.

Five years ago, Russ Ramsey almost died. A bacterial infection found purchase in the mitral valve of his heart and chawed it to a fare-thee-well. Describing the sonogram in which he saw the inner workings of his own heart, Russ wrote that his mitral valve, in contrast to the tight little doors of the other three valves, “looked like two pieces of spaghetti flapping around with no apparent purpose or design.” Surgeons at Vanderbilt University Medical Center sawed open Russ’s chest and repaired the valve. After the surgery, Russ survived a minor stroke, an opioid fog, cardiac rehab, and depression. He slowly regained his strength. But he has never been the same. Russ tells the story of this perilous journey in Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death. It was all a shocking and most uncommon series of events for Russ and his family and the rest of us who love him. Nevertheless, Russ writes in the first chapter of Struck, It is not the uncommon part of our suffering I am drawn to write about. I want to explore the common experiences afflicted people share—the onset of a sense of frailty, the fear, the grief, the humor, the routines, the new ways of relating to people who love us and are afraid for us and for themselves. Indeed, suffering is one of the most common things in the world. Those of us who aren’t currently suffering have either recently come out of suffering or will soon be headed into it. That’s why Struck is such an important book. Even if suffering is common, Russ’s approach to suffering is not. He writes, When I first learned of the severity of my condition I felt afraid, of course. But the prevailing sensation wasn’t fear. It was wonder—curiosity, even exhilaration. I felt that I was at the beginning of a great adventure—one I instinctively did not want to miss. Struck awakens that same curiosity and wonder in the reader. This isn’t a book of advice, nor is it a book that draws simple and obvious lessons about a sick heart in need of repair by the Great Physician. (To the contrary, in this book Russ asks such questions as, “What if it was God who broke my heart?”). No, this is a book about paying attention. “Seeing through my suffering won’t show me a new world,” Russ writes. Rather, it will show me more of the world I think I know.” That’s what reading Struck is like. Like all great writing, Struck shows us more of the world we think we know. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment when I was lifted up and struck. Annie Dillard Russ wrestles honestly with his suffering—not just the physical pain and peril, but the doubts and fears, the relational difficulties, the depression, the death of a friend who declined even as he recovered—and he doesn’t let go until he gets a blessing. Then he bestows that blessing on the reader. The title Struck comes from Annie Dillard: “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment when I was lifted up and struck.” As Russ beautifully demonstrates, to be struck by suffering is not only to be stricken, but also to be struck like a bell, resonating at the frequencies of a world we cannot see. When we face affliction, we typically hope for a recovery so complete that in retrospect, after we have returned to normal, our suffering will seem no more than a bump in the road or a blip on the radar. Struck makes a convincing case that returning to normal is a pretty paltry hope. In our suffering, let us hope instead for transformation. Early in his ordeal, Russ wrote, “I cannot help but think that perhaps my life, up to this point, has taken place in a kind of womb from which I am about to be delivered.” Can it be that suffering births us to newness of life? Can it be that it is God who breaks our hearts? For those of us who love Russ Ramsey, it is obvious that his recovery from affliction has not been a return to normal. He has been transformed by his suffering and by his recovery. God is doing a new thing in Russ, and Struck is one of its first-fruits. [Struck is available in the Rabbit Room Store.]

Last week, the internet nearly caved in on itself when a happy toddler in white glasses and a yellow sweater danced her way into her father’s live interview on a BBC news program. If you have not seen the video I’m talking about, watch it here. Trying to describe it would be like trying to describe DaVinci’s Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David. It’s best just to see it for yourself. Once you’ve watched these glorious 47 seconds a dozen times or so, you might want to read this hilarious play-by-play from The Telegraph. Also, it seems mom’s pants might not have been on all the way. The BBC did a follow-up interview with the family in the video, and it will make you love them even more. They are just people—a humble, funny, intelligent couple raising little children who could not care less about the BBC, politics in South Korea, or how important dad’s job is. For the children in the video, those things might as well not even exist. All they see is dad, and all they want is a piece of his attention. And you can see it on the dad’s face that he wants to give it, even as he and his wife valiantly try to recover the moment so he can finish his thought on live television about the political climate of East Asia. A while back, Tim Keller wrote, “The only person who dares wake up a king at 3:00 AM for a glass of water is a child.” This video is a picture of that. For the dad, access to being on live TV required a lot—years of school, practice talking on camera, and immersion in culture and politics. For the children, on the other hand, access to their father is no trouble at all. They just dance right in. And we love it. We love it because we can relate to the parents and because we want to be the kids. Thanks to the technological age we’re in, within days of this interview someone created this gif of those children, and now it seems to be showing up everywhere as a universal expression of celebration and approval. In my opinion, this is a perfect example of creating art to the glory of God. Someone used their gifts to make a sharable gif which celebrates innocence and joy even as it pokes fun at the absurdity and futility of our attempts to keep things together. And here’s the most beautiful part. Those kids still have no idea the joy they’ve brought the watching world. Why? Because to them, we might as well not even exist. To them, only four people witnessed that moment. To them, it all happened at home, and it was all okay. Why wouldn’t it be?

Randall Goodgame, he of the Slugs and Bugs, has lately taken to hanging out at the monkey bars to talk theology with the big kids. He also comes armed with the best ’80s TV theme song since The Facts of Life. Check out the first two episodes featuring Russ Ramsey (the Presbyterian), Russell Moore (the Baptist), and Thomas McKenzie (the Anglican): Russ Ramsey is an author and associate pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee. He just released Struck – a wonderful book about marriage, friendship, a heart surgery, parenting, and living a life of faith during trying times. Highly recommended. Russell Moore is the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. His book  Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel is a must-read for Christians in the United States of America. Thomas McKenzie is the pastor of Church of the Redeemer in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of The Anglican Way, a guidebook for the Anglican tradition. Also check out the Kickstarter campaign for TWO new Slugs & Bugs albums! Source: A Baptist, an Anglican, and a Presbyterian Walk Into a Monkey Bar – Episode 1 | Slugs and Bugs

I just realized that today’s the birthday of one of my favorite living poets, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. I’ve often called him the gateway drug for poetry, because his work manages to be just as accessible as it is profound, convincing even the skeptical (like I was) that modern poetry could be amazing. His poems do so well what I think C.S. Lewis’s books do with theology: they take big, beautiful ideas and tether them to earth so the rest of us down here actually stand a chance to grasp them and thereby broaden our minds and hearts. His poems are kind, and, I would argue, even loving to the reader, deftly mixing humor and human nature and transcendent themes in a way that I’ve never encountered before. He’s a master. If you want a primer, here’s a video of Billy reading some of his great ones. One of the high points in my career was getting to do a writer’s round with him one night at an event in Nashville, and I was talked into the very risky prospect of not merely reading one of my meager poems in front of him, but one I wrote about him after spotting him at the airport on a layover. After my reading (which embarrassed him somewhat) he very graciously leaned over to me and said, “I like that you wrote about my buttocks.” True story. I thought I’d share my poem here. It was published in The Molehill, Volume I. Cheers, Billy. I’m glad you do what you do. BILLY COLLINS AT THE AIRPORT By Andrew Peterson You looked as much like Mr. Collins As you ought to have: bright eyed, With a minuscule smile, as if you knew Something the rest of us could only know If you put it down in a ten-line poem. You were putting on your suit coat After having been undressed And x-rayed by the security offcers, Who I’m sure had no idea what You were really smuggling, Unaware that they were patting down The thighs and buttocks of a poet laureate Searching all the wrong sensitive areas With their bright blue latex gloves. They couldn’t imagine that they were, In that moment, merely metaphors For some wry, lovely, dangerous thought– Something about windows, or fruit, Or maybe something even worse.

For the last few years, The Trinity Forum has been enriching Nashville through “evening conversations” with some of the most engaging thinkers and speakers I’ve ever heard, including painter Mako Fujimura, poet Dana Gioia, Lincoln biographer Ron White, and mathematician John Lennox (who attended C. S. Lewis’s last lectures at Cambridge!). On Thursday, March 30, The Trinity Forum will host another evening conversation with John Inazu, a Professor of Law and Religion and Professor of Political Science at Washington University in Saint Louis. He will speak on “Confident Pluralism in a Turbulent Age.” To quote from the Trinity Forum’s website, “During this Evening Conversation, Dr. Inazu will examine the state of religious freedom and challenges to pluralism in our polarized age. He will offer ways of learning to live with our deep differences over politics, race, religion, sexuality, and other important matters, by strengthening constitutional commitments that protect difference and dissent, and by embodying civic practices in our speech, action, and relationships.” Registration is $10 and includes excellent hors d’oeuvres at a pre-event reception. These evenings are a lot of fun. If you’re in Middle Tennessee, I commend this event to you. For more information and to register, click here.

My wife Gina and I don’t watch television, so we rarely hear about any film that is not your typical blockbuster. So, when we decided on an impromptu movie at a local dollar theater last night, it was to our surprise that the theater was packed to the gills for a movie called Lion. The film was inspired by the life of Saroo (Brierley), a 5-year-old boy from a small village in India, who finds himself separated from his older brother Guddu and trapped on a train headed thousands of miles from home. Stranded in Kolkata, he fights to survive starvation, language barriers, and even child trafficking, eventually being adopted by a wonderful husband and wife in far-away Australia. Years later, Saroo, in his late ’20s, is desperate to find his birth mother and brother and put closure to the wounds of separation, and with the aid of Google Earth, that becomes a real possibility. I was instantly sucked into this story. Some directors might have catered to English-speaking audiences by choosing to narrate the scenes from Saroo’s childhood, or to even show all of those events in flashback, narrated by an adult Saroo in a film focused on the grown man as the main character. About 30 minutes into the story of this young boy, I found myself guessing that we would be cutting away to present day soon. But I finally realized that the director cared more about what we were watching than to reduce it to segmented memories. The story is patient, patient in ways that films like The Black Stallion are. I can remember, during my only viewing of The Passion, the feeling of being thrust into a story and forcibly prodded along behind Jesus through his trials. I had no choice but to follow behind him and take part in the events that ensued. This film also thrusts you into the story. The lands and cultures are unfamiliar to most of us, but they are breathtakingly beautiful. The cinematography is direct and intimate and revealing, yet full of mystery. As Saroo finds himself lost in Kolkata, even he cannot understand the languages being spoken to him, and we too feel lost and vulnerable. It doesn’t hurt the film at all that the young boy playing Saroo is one of the most adorable and believable child actors I’ve ever seen. He makes you want to reach into his world and scoop him up and save him. There are beautiful messages of family bonds, both by blood and by adoption, and wonderful scenes depicting love and kindness where vocabulary is absent. It’s woven together like good fiction, but made even more powerful by the knowledge that it is not. And though I now know the theater was packed with moviegoers come to see an Oscar-nominated hit, for Gina and I, unaware as we were, this was the refreshing and deeply moving sleeper we had hoped for.

This is but one of the legends of which the people speak… It had been four years since the last real Zelda game (A Link Between Worlds) and six years since the last full console Zelda game (Skyward Sword). I was eager to return to Hyrule. My body was ready. And Nintendo knew what they were doing—they whetted my appetite for four years, releasing preview images and extensive gameplay videos. Sprawling and open-world, this was going to be something new, unlike any Zelda game before. I devoured it all, preparing for something exciting and different—and finally, Breath of the Wild arrived! And then I cooked virtual food. There are a thousand things to do in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but this one is so simple that it doesn’t even qualify as a mini-game. Here’s how it works: when Link is near a campfire, open your inventory and pick your ingredients. The peppers you picked from that bush, for example, or the poultry you purchased from that trader. Or maybe the Hyrule Bass from when you grabbed that fish right out of the water like a boss. Cook them over the fire and see what new dish or elixir is now in your inventory, and what health and abilities it supplies when you eat it. I don’t know why such a simple game mechanic is so satisfying to me, but collecting ingredients and preparing these culinary power-ups takes up a good bit of my gameplay. I’m going somewhere with this. Hutchmoot 2016 included a great session about originality and “stealing like an artist.” Chris Yokel summed up his part of the session here. Here’s my brief, paraphrased recap: instead of trying to develop a unique artistic voice, immerse yourself in the art that you love. Over time, your voice will develop as a fresh but familiar creation informed by, expanding on, and remixing those influences. But Link’s adventure is helping me see how that idea holds true not only for creators but for individual stories as well. Because as different as this game is, there’s something astonishingly… familiar about it. The Legend of Zelda has always embraced the remix concept. Every Zelda game includes a version of the classic “hero’s journey” (itself a remix concept), with the young but determined Link and the noble Princess Zelda in a battle against evil (often in the form of Gannon). Along the way, Link rides his steed, Epona, to Kakariko Village and the Great Fairy Fountain. He trades with Beedle and discovers the Triforce. All of these elements would be familiar enough, but they are mixed with gameplay and storytelling that explores the earliest Nintendo games and the most recent console and PC games. This is a series getting back to its roots, and the original Legend of Zelda game (1986) was a wilder, less structured animal. Trying to emulate that early format in a new generation brings Zelda into the territory of recent open-world games like Skyrim and The Witcher 3, and I’ve heard comparisons to Minecraft as well. Plus, this is by far the Zelda game that feels most influenced by Japanese culture… and is this just me, or do the shrines feel a little like lightweight Portal levels? This is a game with a lot of texture. Storytelling experts often instruct me to hone in on the heart of what my stories are about. Marketing experts have taught me to find concise pitch-lines to describe my stories. They’re not wrong, but I have sometimes limited myself by being shortsighted in my pursuit of those things. Breath of the Wild is not about one thing. It’s a dish. You can call a dish by it’s name—Spicy Meat and Seafood Fry—but to get there, you need all the ingredients, like meat and peppers. And the great thing about a dish—or a video game—is that the combination makes it more than the sum of its parts. In my own storytelling, I’m taking the time to collect a lot of ingredients and test some recipes, because I want my next story to be as textured and complex and delicious as Breath of the Wild. I also want to hear what you think. Are there dangers to complexity? How do your favorite stories combine their ingredients in unique ways? And what are your favorite parts of Breath of the Wild, or of the Zelda series in general? Let’s discuss in the comments below!

For years, I’ve struggled with spiritual disciplines. Growing up evangelical, of course I’ve always known about the need for “quiet time,” but other than that, I don’t recall a whole lot of direction for how to actually accomplish this mysterious and vital thing. I’ve tried devotionals, apps, picking a random book of the Bible to read through, and dipping in and out of the Book of Common Prayer or the Psalter. I’ve felt guilty for not being enough of a morning person, and guilty for falling asleep at evening prayer. But this year, finally, I found something that works for me. Maybe I’d dare say it’s changed my life? If you haven’t heard of Sacred Ordinary Days, well then, let me introduce you to a tool that has helped change my daily rhythms for the better. It may sound like an exaggeration, but after four months using their weekly planner, I finally get how to prioritize spiritual practice in the middle of everyday life. It has an elegant, open-ended design and incorporates the liturgical calendar, weekly Sabbath and examen pages, limited priority lists, Lectionary readings, and a good bit of unlabeled space to write. A few ways this planner has helped me… Reading through the Lectionary gives guidance to my Bible reading. I didn’t grow up with the Lectionary in my spiritual vocabulary, but I’ve found that small passages from the Old Testament, Psalms, New Testament, and Gospels, in sync with the Christian calendar and churches all over the world, has opened me up to a whole new way of reading.  Now I see surprising connections between passages and the cohesion of story, poetry, and doctrine, making the familiar feel brand new. Short, repeated readings encourage lectio divina. The ancient practice of sitting with and praying through Scripture feels much more natural when you’re only reading a few short sections over and over for a week. Sometimes I find myself lingering on a story, a verse, a word, and it’s beautiful. (Bonus for busy people: you don’t need an hour every morning to do this. Even a short read-through can be enough.) Limited writing space helps me see what matters. You can’t make a huge to-do list when you only have three priority slots. And you can’t journal for pages and run down a rabbit trail when there are only a few lines of space per day. I use the journal space to write insights from the readings or note important moments of the day. You might use it for something else. The Sabbath page is one big blank space! Again, highlighting what matters. A visual reminder to rest. It makes an excellent space for sermon notes too. I’m keeping a record of my spiritual life. All the struggles, the goodness, the changes, the beauties of ordinary days. I’m looking forward to revisiting the story of this year when Advent comes around again. And yes, you can bet I’ll have a fresh, blank planner ready for the new year. If this sounds helpful but you aren’t sure yet, take a little time to explore their website, download a free preview, and check out the current sale. Now that the year is well underway, you can get a great deal on all current planners, maybe even pick up an Academic edition and try it out for these last few months of the school year. And if you’re already a fan, I’d love to hear how you use yours!

Besides being a student at La Muncha Elementary School, Henry Penwhistle is an artist and a knight-errant. Henry and the Chalk Dragon, Jennifer Trafton’s brilliant new novel for young readers (and anyone who has ever been a young reader), demonstrates just how much the artist shares in common with the knight-errant. Both artists and knights-errant have to face their fears every day. They have to buckle on the armor and sally forth into the world to pursue a calling. Henry’s armor is a raincoat he has covered with tinfoil; in the inner lining he has scrawled various rules of chivalry, lest he forget: Be brave. Fight for the right. Don’t feed girls to dragons. That last rule proves to be especially important when a jungle-green dragon enters Henry’s life and begins to wreak havoc. The dragon starts out life as a piece of art work—a large chalk drawing that Henry has drawn on his bedroom door. But as great art tends to do, the dragon takes on a life of its own, beyond the control of the artist. When Henry’s Chalk Dragon comes off the door and into the three-dimensional world where Henry lives and moves and has his being, all hell breaks loose at La Muncha Elementary, heretofore the Safest Elementary School in the County. The power of Henry’s artistic gift terrifies him. He tries to get his dragon under control, but there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle—or, in Jennifer’s much fresher image, “it was like squishing the white fluffy explosion of popcorn back into the kernel again. The Art was out, and it would not go back in.” That kind of inventiveness and verbal energy, by the way, is everywhere in this book. Jennifer’s exuberance is child-like without being childish or talking down to children. The Chalk Dragon has chosen an inconvenient time to hitchhike to school in Henry’s lunchbox (it is a shape-shifting dragon, so it can do that). It’s National Vegetable Week—a celebration that is duller than it sounds—and Miss Pimpernel’s class is working hard to finish their group project to commemorate the week: a cardboard box covered with identical bunnies munching identical lettuces, all cut from the same pattern and colored with the same crayons. Quite apart from the dragon trouble, Henry struggles with what you might call artistic differences. When he tries to trace his bunny’s ears, his crayon turns the bunny ears into a space helmet. When he tries to draw the fluffy bunny tail, all he can see is jet flames shooting out from behind. The Chalk Dragon, in other words, is but one expression of Henry’s inconvenient inability to conform. Henry is surrounded by adults who try to make him conform—adults who value safety and stability (and all of whom, it turns out, have their own history of youthful exuberance). When Henry is hauled into Prinicipal Bunk’s office, he gets a speech on the importance of taming his imagination: Do you know what tame means, Henry? It means under control. Think of it as the opposite of a lion—something safe enough to keep in your house and pet between the ears, like a kitten—or a bunny! Imagination is a wild animal, like an alligator, or a shark, or a polar bear. And do you know what the problem with wild animals is, Henry? They make messes! So untidy. So unpredictable. You must keep that imagination of yours on a leash at all times. But Principal Bunk doesn’t know the half of it: by the end of the day, Henry’s imagination, embodied in the jungle-green dragon lurking the halls of La Muncha, will utterly wreck the Safest Elementary School in the County. In a good way. Perhaps more interesting than the outside pressures faced by Henry the schoolboy-artist-knight are the inward pressures. He lives in a constant battle between his imaginative exuberance and his fear. On the inside he is a dragon-master, but on the outside he is still a little boy who finds it hard to navigate a world that doesn’t understand him. Dragons aren’t scary—well, they are, but they’re a good kind of scary. They’re the kind of scary you want to be scared of. People are the bad kind of scary, he thought. Dragons can only eat you, but people can laugh at you, and that is like being chewed to death by a smile. “Be brave,” the inner lining of Henry’s armor tells him, and as his tumultuous day progresses, he gets braver and braver. He has the help of his best friend Oscar (“If life were a drinking straw, Oscar would be the paper wrapper soaring off the end”) and his new friend Jade, a bard who chronicles his quest in clever spontaneous verse. He also has the help of a bus driver-philosopher who names him (“Henry, you are a talented artist”) and protects him from the philistines who torment him on the bus. By the end of the day, our artist discovers that great art requires not only bravery, but also kindness and community. As we say at the Rabbit Room, community nourishes art and art nourishes community. Henry’s bus driver-mentor puts it best: All you can do is make the best thing you can, and love it as hard as you can, and let it go loose in the world, and watch what happens…Henry, let your imagination be as wild as the spinning universe. Let it be beautiful and adventurous and even terrifying. Let it go free. Don’t be afraid. But remember that art does things you don’t expect. Remember that it can hurt people, but remember that it can make them happy as well. Remember that it can break things and stomp on things sometimes, and that’s where chivalry comes in—the good knight in your heart. What kind of art is that good knight brave enough to make? Yes and amen. One of the most remarkable things about Henry and the Chalk Dragon is that it is addressing the very same, very difficult questions as books like Bayles and Orlund’s Art and Fear or Stephen Pressman’s The War of Art, but in ways that are accessible to a child. This book, like those other books, gives me courage and makes me want to sit down and make something. Henry and the Chalk Dragon is an act of bravery and kindness on Jennifer Trafton’s part. May it go forth and wreak havoc.

When you write a book it becomes somehow precious to you. Precious in the way that a child is precious. Kind of. Okay, not quite that precious. Still, your story is a creation you’ve lovingly incubated for months (or years), a thing you’ve painfully labored to bring into the world. It represents a huge investment of time, care, prayer, thought, emotion, hope, and fear. You’ve battled hard against doubts and gravities both internal and external, suffering as many defeats as victories before taking this final hill at last, before triumphantly clutching this finished manuscript to your chest in a rush of wonder and disbelief. And then comes that trembling moment when you hand it off to an illustrator. It feels as if you are voluntarily giving your new baby into foster care. Kind of. Okay, not quite that heartrending. But still, there’s the lingering fear that this thing you love might get dropped on it’s head. So when one deposits one’s story in the ink-stained arms of an illustrator whose own distinct vision will now be brought to bear—ultimately leaving an indelible imprint on every reader’s experience of the book—one makes such an exchange with a very sober and a very real trepidation, aware that this situation could easily go very wrong. When it came to my first book, The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog, I had decided several years ago that if I were ever in a position to put it back in print, I wanted to change a few things. Mainly, I wanted it to include several interior illustrations this time around, and also for the cover painting to have an entirely new feel and approach. Some two decades ago, for the book’s inaugural printing, illustrator Ian Schoenherr took a straightforward, realistic approach. It was a well-rendered painting and many readers remain quite fond of that image for its old-school, adventure-tale rusticism (Russ Ramsey and Sara Masarik, you know who you are). I’ll likewise always have a sentimental attachment to that original cover, but this time around I wanted a quite different image that hinted at other nuances of the tale. The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog is a frontier fantasy story of a journey through flood and miracle. It is a story of the coexistence of love and loss, of sorrow and hope. I had always imagined a cover illustration that suggested the spiritual struggle at the heart of the book, with maybe a visual nod to iconic images of the saints of old, and oh, by the way, I wanted it to somehow feel slightly fantastic and aesthetically current as well. That shouldn’t be a problem, should it? I mulled the work of several artists for more than a year, before settling on Zach Franzen. I didn’t pick him because of his Green Ember notoriety—though what he’s done with S. D. Smith’s book series certainly gave me confidence that he was an accomplished illustrator. Rather, when I enlisted Zach’s talents it was almost exclusively based on his nordic-inspired painting Freya. I saw something in the style, in the slightly elongated lines he used to create the human subject, in the colors and the landscape and sky as well, that hinted at a blending of something iconic with something fantasy-rimmed. Even so, it took me the better part of a year to bring myself to the point of actually posting the downpayment and setting the collaboration in motion. In these matters, I tend to move slowly. I did not think I could afford, either financially or emotionally, to have this particular story baby dropped on its head at this stage of the game. The stakes were too high. If the illustrations came back as a somehow uninspired or misinterpreted visual translation of the story, I would be stuck, without funds to hire another artist in the forseeable future, and probably without the stomach for it anyway. At that point I would likely have just relicensed the original cover image, and sadly reprinted with no interior illustrations. So I was nervous. And fearful. But somehow, I mustered the courage to deposit my book baby on Zach Franzen’s doorstep. Ah, Zach. Mighty brush-wielding benefactor and lord protector of innocent stories. My timid trust, as it turns out, was well placed. Zach proved himself mercifully adept at nurturing a tender tale. He swaddled my little story in cloths of brilliant colors and returned it to me beautifully enhanced and utterly unharmed. I could breathe again. So why did this collaboration work? And more broadly, what makes the difference in any successful artistic collaboration versus those that fail? Undoubtedly there are many nuanced factors that might come into play, but I’m convinced it’s mostly about the ability, and the simple willingness, of the collaborator to enter into a creation that is not their own, and to find a way to translate it into a new language that is their own. Which is maybe the same as to say that you actually have to bring your full self to the project. And to do that, you actually have to care about the original piece. You have to foster a deep connection to it. You have to crawl inside it emotionally. You have to go to that daunting and dangerous place where you are actually risking something creatively, rather than just coasting on the rote mechanics of your craft, phoning in something that’s passable (but that doesn’t add any new layer of richness to the original vision). At the end of the day, it can’t just be about collecting your paycheck. The task of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. George Orwell In this case, Zach clearly absorbed the soul of The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog and sensitively and masterfully translated it into visual language. There was an initial level of trepidation on my part as Zach gently steered me away from the scene I envisioned for the cover, and towards a simpler, more elegant, and more poetic approach. But his instincts were correct. And after a couple of rounds of back and forth sketches and comments, I was convinced that his approach was actually truer to my vision for the book than my own notions had been. I signed off on the concept and Zach went to work, rendering the cover painting more brilliantly than I could have imagined it, capturing the girl’s vulnerability and fierce courage in a composition that suggests hagiography but that also feels somehow retro-modern and contemporary. But the interior drawings, which Franzen only recently completed, turned out to be objects of beauty in their own rights.
 As an author, one always secretly hopes in these situations that the artist will not settle for merely illustrating the text, but will instead set out to make the project their own, moving beyond mere competence and into the realm of deep creation, yielding that visual poetry that has its own interior substrata of symbolic meaning. And in the common parlance, Zach nailed it. By way of example, take a look at the final interior illustration Zach created for The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog. In this singular—and at first glance somewhat simple—image, Franzen inexplicably captures for us the movement and feel of the entire book; he suggests it in the contrasting postures and expressions of father and daughter, of the grief and the hope, in the insinuation of farewells and in the sense of the rush of movement forward into the days yet to come. In these things he lays before us the soul of what was written. But he doesn’t stop there. He expands on the theme, bringing his own symbolic language to the work. Pay special attention to the design of the train window casing. Pay special attention to the birds on wing. Those are his own creations, never mentioned in the text. And yet, what Zach is getting at by placing them there—father, daughter and birds within the frame of a train window that looks like it might also be a stained glass church window—what he is getting at there is a rendering of the whole beating heart of the story. It is the mysterious presence of the divine and of grace somehow manifest in our hard journeys. It is the baptism of our suffering, made more powerful by a sublimated symbolism. Franzen’s art is, in his own words, a way of seeking to practice “hospitality.” It is about laboring to create something that will be of benefit to the recipient. It is about “displaying the beauty of truth.” It is about creating a good space to welcome others in to, where they might be nourished and cared for. This is the reason I love collaboration and return to it even though there are times when it doesn’t turn out. It is because other people can see things I cannot. They can translate into languages I can read but cannot write. They can add new layers of their own mysterious making so that a thing I’ve conceived becomes more than what it was when it was in my hands alone; more beautiful, more wonderful, more truthful, more hospitable. The task of the artist, George Orwell stated, is always to deepen the mystery. Amen and amen. In all of our collaborations, let us always be reaching for that. Let us always be bringing our full selves into our shared works. This is, after all, a collaborative venture from beginning to end; this life, this building of the kingdom, this attempt to establish a colony of heaven on the remote outpost of earth. We are all collaborators in the truest, largest sense, laboring collectively in the service of the same eternal vision, in the service of the redemption of all things. Each of us shepherds our own distinct vision of how to pursue that goal, and each of us are forever dependent on our co-laborers if we are ever to bring such visions to fruition. And that larger collaboration, I think, is the context in which we should always be working through our smaller creative collaborations. [The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog is available for pre-order in the Rabbit Room Store.] #collaboration #creativity #DougMcKelvey #TheAngel #ZachFranzen #McKelvey #Franzen

When I was a kid, I was repeatedly told I could do anything I set my mind to accomplish. This led me to try things bigger than I would have attempted if I hadn’t believed it. In some things I succeeded, in others…I heard the other message, the one that hurt to hear, the one that swept aside the defense of “I tried my best.” I was told my best wasn’t good enough. That stuck with me. It started small, as I still tried to accomplish big things in my 20s. I made a movie, I wrote novels, I pursued my dream of filmmaking. I found a new group of friends and we made things together. I pushed my limits and learned a lot. But the dream I had of being a successful filmmaker hit a brick wall. Repeatedly. I spent years fearful that in an effort of trying to perfect my movie, I had missed the bus and nobody would care by the time I actually finished it. Turns out some fears are based in reality. I shouldn’t say “nobody” was interested in it because I don’t want to belittle the support I have been shown. But, I’m pretty certain we spent more on bottled water for the set than we netted for the first year of release. Not being able to justify the financial decision to produce another feature film, I turned to novel writing. Turns out I can move about as many copies per book as it costs to produce the following book. So, at least that pays for itself and isn’t a financial burden on my family. Really, it’s a hobby that I fancy as a lifestyle. Let’s put that aside and I’ll come back to it in a minute. Honesty in portraiture. Recently I had my portrait taken by Jeremy Cowart. I had been feeling a bit down about the state of creative affairs, and I wanted to make a statement that I was back in and ready to return to fictionsmithing (a word I made up because I found fictionsmith.com hadn’t been taken and I felt pretty clever). I brought props. I wore goggles. I wore my typewriter bracelet that had the letters spelling “Don’t give up.” I postured. I saluted. The front that I put up was captured in most of the photos. But there was one photo I don’t remember being taken. It felt real. Photo by Jeremy Cowart I look tired. I look like I’m questioning whether or not I should keep up with this identity. I look like I put too much faith in my fountain pen, or maybe myself. If I posted this on social media, I feel like it could easily come off as “Aren’t I a moody creative-type?” sort of posturing. But it was an honest moment. Of the thousands of hours I’ve spent pursuing something I felt called to do, I find difficulty in justifying the time spent continuing to pursue it. This morning my 3-year-old, unprompted, said, “Daddy, you’re my hero.” It about broke me. No, it did break me. She didn’t say that because I wrote books or made movies. I’ve just spent time with her. My wife offers a similar vantage point. She doesn’t love me because of what I create, which is a mercy and would create a need for me to continue to make things. Thankfully, that’s not what love is. Frankly, I’m a bit crushed from what happened after spending nine years of my life on a project. It’s hard to be motivated to keep telling stories. I plan to finish The Elsewhere Knight since I can’t leave 2/3rds of a trilogy published, but after that I may need to take some pressure off of myself to be a clever person with a self-appointed witty title and see how that feels. A silver (grey?) lining. Don’t get me wrong, many good things came from making greyscale. The friendships built and the jobs that came from having a proof of concept for what I had learned from spending years in the trenches have benefitted me and my family. It’s just hard to justify that to everyone who joined up with me with the hope that the film would be successful. Part of the reason I spent so long on it was to make sure the end product had the best shot of succeeding, to honor (and pay) people for all of their hard work. I think that’s a major source of the frustration with the end result of the film itself. While there were many struggles and setbacks once the movie wrapped, I can at least take some solace in knowing that I had to learn things like crowdfunding and how to write/format a novel, all of which has allowed me to help others with pursuing their dreams with things I wish I had known before I set out to accomplish mine. If I return to telling stories, wonderful. If not, hopefully it’s because I’ve found a fuller existence in being me than in presenting myself in a way I want others to see me. So, now I guess I get to figure out what it means to be me again. [This post originally appeared at Medium.com.]

Jennifer Trafton’s much-anticipated Henry and the Chalk Dragon is a romp through the “what ifs” of an imagination run wild. It’s a companion for children feeling self-conscious about their creativity; a loving nudge to the adult who has neglected the things that once made them feel alive; a celebration of the courage it takes to make art and the friends we need along the way. Which means it’s for everyone. Jennifer and I have been friends since the very first Hutchmoot, way back in 2010. We connected immediately over favorite authors and a shared love for the British Isles, and she’s since become a trusted confidante and partner in writerly accountability. It’s been a privilege to walk with her through the creation, revision, and fulfillment of Sir Henry’s quest. I love this book so much, and I’m delighted to see it coming into the world. But don’t be deceived by its playful nature—I assure you, this story is one of those stories that has the power to shape peoples’ stories. If you’re not ready have your heart quickened, your dreams ennobled, and your friendships explode with collaborative creativity, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. I had the joy of chatting with Jennifer about some of the themes in Henry, as well as art in general, friendship, ritual, fear, and pygmy goats. (Incidentally, seeing as the interview took place via Facebook, a quick look at our message history managed to illustrate an awful lot of the very things we were talking about.) L: So, Jennifer, I just glanced back at our chat history, and it seems to involve an inordinate amount of me whining about how hard it is to write, banging my head on my desk, and you promising to pray for me. And my desk. J: That was you? I thought it was me. L: Well I think it’s safe to say that both of our desks have seen significant abuse. And all head-banging notwithstanding, you’ve written an absolutely beautiful book. The best children’s books, in my opinion, are the ones that can be enjoyed equally by the kids who read them and by the adults who might have the opportunity to read them aloud to the kids in their lives. Apart from the delightful humor in your book, there are several poignant moments adults can relate to, wherein a grownup confronts the abandonment of their own creativity and the limitations it has imposed on them—limitations which are depicted quite literally: Principal Bunk is glued to his chair, Miss Pimpernel is imprisoned on a raft made from her own bulletin board, and the Lunch Lady is held captive in a fortress of cafeteria tables and chairs. I didn't want this to be a book about how kids are pure imaginative beings and adults are unimaginative doofuses; some of the grown-ups in Henry's world may have squelched or forgotten their creativity, but there's still hope for them. Jennifer Trafton But you don’t leave any of them there. Without giving too much away, you grant each of these characters a chance to embrace their creativity in an unprecedented or forgotten way. I think my favorite part of the whole book is when Principal Bunk recognizes his own drawing rendered by Henry on the belly of the dragon, and sits down on the pavement and cries. This is such an unexpected and thoroughly satisfying response. You seem to be issuing a gentle challenge here: It’s never too late to honor the things that made you come alive as a child. It’s never too late to be YOU. The thread of grownups reawaking to their own potential is a redemptive current running through your book. Is this something you set out to explore, or was it a theme that grew naturally out of Henry’s challenges? J: One of the wonderful (and astonishing) things about writing a book is that you don’t fully realize what the book is about until after you’ve written it—or sometimes after other people read it and tell you. I didn’t even realize that I had dramatized the limitations of the adults that way—literally held captive by glue, bulletin boards, and tables—until you just asked the question. But that’s a great observation, and of course that must have be there in my subconscious as I wrote those scenes. Now I’m looking forward to you explaining the rest of the story to me! L: Ha! Love it J: I set out to write about one boy’s imagination and the hilarious chaos it caused; my stories always begin that way, not with a theme but with a situation or a character that begs for my attention. But this particular story, as it grew, began to mirror many of my own struggles without my even realizing it until later. And that struggle to hold fast to some core of childlike creativity even as you are rocked by the currents of the grown-up world is a struggle I know very, very well. I’ve been held captive by many cages (often of my own making). For so many adults, it is hard to recapture the freedom we had as children to let our imaginations out to play, to shake off the voices that tell us we’re “not creative,” that it’s too late for us, that making money is more important, etc. Sometimes we need to let the children remind us what it was like to be eight years old and full of visions of dragons—and to stir that up in us again. But I didn’t want this to be a book about how kids are pure imaginative beings and adults are unimaginative doofuses; some of the grown-ups in Henry’s world may have squelched or forgotten their creativity, but there’s still hope for them. “It’s never too late to honor the things that made you come alive as a child. It’s never too late to be YOU.” YES! I couldn’t have said it better. L: Maybe my subconscious passed that one to the surface since we were talking about Ray Bradbury yesterday. That’s really the essence of what he urges in his writing advice, isn’t it? Tapping into sources of your childhood delight? I think Bradbury would love “Henry,” by the way. J: Yes! In fact I have a Bradbury quote right here: “I was in love, then, with monsters and skeletons and circuses and carnivals and dinosaurs and, at last, the red planet, Mars. From these primitive bricks I have built a life and a career. By my staying in love with all of these amazing things, all of the good things in my existence have come about.” In Zen and the Art of Writing, he talks about how what we love as a child we love freely—we are taught to un-love things as we grow older because of the mockery or criticism of other people. And Henry himself is in the danger zone already—hiding his passion from the eyes and the laughter of others. But what Bradbury did (and what he encourages others to do) is to STAY IN LOVE, because those childhood loves are the mulch from which creativity grows. L: Speaking of delight, there are an awful lot of smiles in your book. I love the way that you acknowledge a child’s innate intuitiveness by the names Henry gives to each one of them, from Miss Pimpernel’s Be-Nice-to-Me-I-Haven’t-Had-My-Coffee smile “which wasn’t her happiest”, to the dragon’s triumphant Look-How-Fabulous-I-Am smile. In short, there are a thousand things a smile can say, sincere or otherwise. Could you talk a bit about the role of smiles in Henry’s Quest? Do you think that children are more sensitive to/influenced by facial expressions than adults might like to admit? J: The thread of smiles throughout the book was another example of how a story often leads the writer instead of the other way around. They just kept popping up everywhere. So many different smiles. Smiles that flew. Smiles that melted. Smiles that fell out of purses and came unglued. Again, not a theme I was consciously trying to add to the story but simply an outgrowth of the kind of character Henry was and the unique way he saw the world. That’s an interesting question about children being sensitive to facial expressions—I don’t know, but I certainly was as a child. I was constantly watching grown-ups, reading their faces like books, detecting nuances of emotions that I didn’t fully understand yet. L: I love Mrs. Penwhistle’s smile, the one that flutters around on wings. That’s just gorgeous. And the way it comes to rest on her face at last as she’s finally allowing herself to enjoy and enter into Henry’s imagination. J: I wish I had a brilliant answer about where that idea came from, but I don’t. It’s just the way my imagination works. L: Your imagination is a vast and colorful country, and it needs no explanation. But it seems like Henry’s mom might have some abandoned creativity of her own—am I right? She is, after all, the one who painted his door with chalkboard paint. J: I agree! His parents may not entirely understand his wild imagination, but they’ve obviously encouraged and nurtured it. L: I think your next book needs to be about Henry’s parents. Or Jade. I love Jade. I see a lot of you in her. J: I’ve had ideas about subsequent stories, but also like a book that ends with just the hint of things beyond. Jade is a lot cooler than I am. L: I completely disagree with that statement. The only person I know who has a stronger handle than Jade on the redemptive properties of words in general and poetry in particular, is you. J: But I would be pretty useless in a real adventure, I’m afraid. Unless I truly could fight a dragon with poetry. L: You ARE fighting dragons with poetry—who says metaphorical dragons are any less scary and dangerous than real ones? Besides, letting a book out into the world is about the coolest adventure I can think of. But, seeing as this is no venue for a Big Fight, I’ll move on to the next question. J: Point taken. This journey of writing has certainly been an adventure, and I have battled many a metaphorical dragon in my heart. L: Atta girl. So, the friendships in Henry are really quite nuanced. In a general sense, Henry chooses kindness over his own ideas of “perfect” art, and the collaboration that results between him and his classmates transcends what he would have been able to accomplish on his own. What’s more, Henry’s close friends are the ones speaking the truths into his life—about himself and about his art—that he desperately needs to hear. How have friendships influenced your creative journey? J: Oh goodness. Hold on while I write another book about that. L: That was a beaut, I know. J: There’s a moment in the Henry and the Chalk Dragon that’s significant for me, when Henry has to overcome the hurtful lie, “The world doesn’t care about your art. The world will laugh at you.” And the answer to that lie is the quiet reminder of those specific people who love him and understand him: “This person cares, and this person cares, and this person cares, and this person cares . . .” And that’s enough. I set out to write a book about a child’s imagination gone wild. but the story ended up being one that I, more than anyone else, needed to hear. Because you’re right: I have fought dragons, and the worst of my dragons are Fear and Self-doubt. During the many revisions of this book I was going through some of the hardest battles I’ve ever fought against those dragons. I’ve had to learn to be brave, like Henry, when making art and letting it out there into the world felt like an impossibly scary thing to do. But during this same period I’ve also been surrounded by an incredibly supportive community of friends—friends (like you) who have refused to let me wallow in fear and have spoken truth to me time and time again, friends who have been like Jade making my journey feel like an epic quest rather than a loser’s march. I would not still be writing today if it weren’t for those specific people who cared about me and my imagination so tenderly. At the last Hutchmoot conference, our speaker Diana Glyer talked about resonators—people who not only praise and encourage but echo back to us the goodness of what we create even we can’t ourselves see or hear it clearly. I immediately thought of Henry and his resonators, Oscar and Jade. And I thought of the Rabbit Room community itself, and how it has been a roomful of faithful resonators for me over the past six years. There is a moment in the book when Henry must face his classmates with all of his imagination hanging out there for everyone to see, and in a reversal of all his fears, they don’t laugh. In fact, they pitch in and become part of his quest. My moment came when, at Hutchmoot, I got up in front of my community and read a chapter of this book and everyone laughed, which for me (unlike Henry) felt like the best gift I could possibly have been given: a roomful of resonators telling me, “We care.” People thanked me afterwards and I thought, “No, you’ve got it all wrong. I should be thanking YOU.” Writers are solitary artists, but this is the closest thing to collaboration I’ve ever experienced. That’s why I’m so happy Rabbit Room Press is publishing this story. This is, in a very beautiful and personal way to me, a Rabbit Room book. L: That is so powerful, Jennifer. I loved what Diana had to say about resonators. And this all leads into what I wanted to talk about next, which is the age-old connection between art and fear. If I had to point to the heart of your book, I would turn to Mr. Bruce’s wonderful words to Henry: “You have to be brave to be an artist.” I love the way you acknowledge the dangers, as well as the joys, of letting your art out into the world. Once we’ve made something and let it go, we have little to no control over how it will be received or interpreted in the wide world. Can you speak to the tension between the temptation to shield one’s work from the public eye, and the fears that come when a work takes on a life of its own? How has the fear of being misunderstood impacted your own journey as an artist? J: You’re not throwing me any softballs, are you? L: No, I haven’t yet, that’s for sure. J: Well, I could write a whole post on this topic (and probably will), but let me just say a few things. Henry is an artist, of course, but he’s also (at least in his imagination) a knight, and the connection between those two roles is, first and foremost, the need for courage. I want to emphasize again that this isn’t where I started, back when the story was first coming to life for me. Henry began as an eight-year-old Don Quixote character in my brain, and as I explored the vast and wild terrain of his imagination I gradually realized that my young knight had the eye of an artist, and would naturally love to draw. So much safer for the artist, perhaps, but so much sadder for the world. It is an act of great courage and great intimacy to show the world your art—courage usually reserved for the fiercest knights, and intimacy usually reserved for the closest friends. I think some people think that, because they’re afraid of making art (it can be hard!) or showing people their art, they must not be very good artists. Sometimes we need to remember that everyone feels this way at some point, and that it’s okay to be afraid. It’s okay that we need someone to remind us, as the bus driver reminds Henry, “Be brave.” I am afraid ALL THE TIME. And I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I can’t just wait until the fear goes away before I write anything. Bravery means picking up my sword (or my pencil) and diving into the fray no matter how I feel. I’ve also had to slowly push away my anxiety over what will happen to a work of art (or a work of fiction!) once it’s free in the world and has a life of its own. As Mr. Bruce tells Henry, all you can do is make the best thing you can, love it as hard as you can, and let it go. Then: make something new. Well, I loved Henry and the Chalk Dragon the best I could, and now I’m letting it go and trying to make something new. L: Jennifer, you are an interview-question rockstar. Thank you for such a vulnerable answer! J: Thank you for asking such thoughtful questions! L: You have a rather Dickensian gift for naming characters. I know you’ve got a beautiful story about the naming of Persimmony in The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic. But in this case, did you think of your characters first, and then the names? Or was it the other way around? J: That is a high compliment indeed, because Dickens is my HERO when it comes to character names. Uriah Heep, Ebenezer Scrooge, Mr. Fezziwig, Mr. M’Choakumchild, Poll Sweedlepipe…. I mean, come on! He was a master! And the characters are as quirky and memorable as their names. Every time I do a school visit, the kids basically run through the names of all my characters and ask, “Why did you name her_____? Why did you name him ______?” And I don’t always have an interesting answer, because the fact is that I just love to play around with sounds until I come up with something that makes me laugh and that feels like the character I’m naming. Henry popped into my brain as a character with a name already attached—he was never anything but Henry to me. Oscar similarly dropped into the story already named. Jade was a bit more difficult—I tried so many different names on her for size, but the one I kept coming back to was “Jade” because it fit her personality—solid, no nonsense, yet with a hint of something mysterious and mystical. I didn’t know any Jades when I named her—now I do! For all the other first and last names in the story, I just had a lot of fun smooshing together bits of words, existing names, and sounds. “Penwhistle,” for example, is a play on Pendragon (because Henry wants to be one of King Arthur’s knights). Oh! Here’s a funny story: in the early drafts, Henry’s teacher was a bit of a shrew, and she didn’t really have her own arc. I named her “Mrs. Garrunchy,” which made me giggle because it sounded like both “grouch” and “crunchy,” and she was in danger of being eaten by a dragon. But I completely rewrote her character, and when I did that name no longer fit her personality. The new teacher, whom Henry had a crush on, needed a flowery name, yet something that also hinted at heroism and adventure. “Miss Pimpernel” was born! I still love the name “Garrunchy” though, and I’m claiming it for a future book. L: That’s fantastic. We’ll definitely look out for a Miss (or Mr.) Garrunchy down the line! And Miss Pimpernel is perfect, by the way. The minute I met her in your book, I pictured swordplay and romance, à la Baroness Orczy. Okay, I haven’t asked you an easy question yet. But here’s one more doozy, and then I’ll ease up on you. So, Henry’s chivalry. I love it. But it’s not just a cute little attribute. It’s a genuine regulator of his actions, a governor in the engine of his art. It helps prescribe his treatment of people, and it nudges him back to kindness when he goes astray. We all know there’s as much need to acknowledge the dark, sad things of life as there is to point to the great “eucatastrophe” of the ultimate happy ending. But how would you say that the “chivalrous” worldview ought to direct the kind of art we bring into the world? J: I’m going to neatly sidestep your doozy by saying that I deliberately left this an open question in the book. As Henry wonders, is there a chivalry for drawing things? That’s exactly what I want a reader to go away pondering, and debating with other people. And therefore, your question is an excellent question. And therefore, I refuse to answer it. Ha! p.s. I did, however, just write a list of slightly tongue-in-cheek chivalrous rules for writers, which will be published on a blog soon. L: How perfect! Do let us know when it’s published! (That was an exceedingly graceful sidestep, by the way. Perhaps people will take up the debate in the comments…) J: Would you like to see my super-sneaky sideways sword swipe? L: I’ve been wanting to ask. Can you give us a demonstration? J: Next question! L: Lawful heart, that was close! All right, a couple of easy ones to wrap up. What are some of the things you do to nourish your own creativity? Do you work on a fixed routine, or does a more flexible schedule suit your writerly temperament? Twyla Tharp talks about ritual in the lives of artists, certain practices or physical activities that tell your subconscious mind, “Okay, it’s time to work.” (Mine is a fresh pot of PG Tips, for what it’s worth.) Do you have any rituals that help ease you into your creative space? J: Rituals? Oh, I have rituals galore. First, I drink a cup of tea and daydream about how wonderful it would be to have written something. Then I sit down and try to write something. I suddenly realize three things: (1) it’s been at least 36 hours since I last scoured the Internet for pygmy goat pictures, (2) I absolutely definitely positively have at least six undiagnosed illnesses, (3) I will never ever have another good idea again, ever, (4) my paper is blank, and (5) I’m such I complete failure that I’ve forgotten how to count. At this point I begin my rituals of wailing, banging my head against the nearest available hard surface, raising my fist against the unfriendly sky, and sobbing on my long-suffering husband’s shoulder, “Mmmm mcan’tmmmm mmdooooo mthissmmmmmmm I’mmmmmma failuremmmmmm” (muffled by his now-soggy shirt sleeve). Rinse and repeat (the shirt and the rituals) several times . . . L: Wow! That sounds fun! (And all too familiar . . . ) J: Then I open up to a new page in my journal and make a list, in the prettiest handwriting possible, of all the things that inspire me. I misspell a word, tear out the page, and start over, because you can’t possibly do anything on a list until the list is perfect and beautiful. [Editor’s note: This is not precisely true. She would never “tear” out a page. She’d cut it out neatly so no one would ever notice a mistake had been made.] L: Of course you can’t. J: Then I sit back and admire all the wonderful, inspiring things I could do—like go for a walk, reread a favorite book, make another cup of tea, or spend an hour drawing to clear my mind. It is such a beautiful list, after all, that it must work. And then I color in the letters. L: Absolutely. J: Usually in sunset colors, because it is not possible to write anything without at least the close proximity of something vermilion. L: Truth. The thing that amazes me is that none of the writing books have picked up on this yet. J: I know! L: You know, I’ve always said that you and Sarah Clarkson and I should write a writing book. Or, more accurately, I think we should write a “care and feeding of writers” book for the people around us. J: I think it should probably come with a paid counselor visit for our loved ones. L: Yes, agreed. Or at the very least we could make it a top-tier Kickstarter reward. I know who could do the lettering for the pages. It would be the most beautiful book in the world. J: I can letter anything as long as I don’t have to do what the letters say. I’ve lost track of my rituals. Was I supposed to ever get to the writing part? I think somewhere in there is a big bowl of ice cream and a “You’ve Got Mail” / “Miss Potter” marathon viewing. L: That sounds about perfect. So, let’s wrap it up with some of the most burning questions of all. Chocolate or vanilla? J: Do you even have to ask? L: Ha! No! Okay, Anne Shirley or Emily Starr? J: Anne. Sorry, Emily. L: That was sneaky. Okay, this may be the toughest of all: Bantams, Orpingtons, or Silver Cuckoo Marans? J: Which breed of Bantams? L: Your choice. J: Cochins. I like my chickens in pants. L: Ah, yes, they are the dandiest, to be sure. Well, Jennifer, you’ve been a champ. Thanks for the generosity of your answers. J: You are an epic interviewer. L: I think it might have more than a little to do with the fact that you and I never run out of things to talk about. J: Now that’s the truth. L: But this has been so much fun. Thank you, again, and Godspeed, Sir Henry!! J: Sally forth! L: Jennifer forth! J: Lanier forth! *sound of hoof beats galloping off into the distance* Henry and the Chalk Dragon is available in the Rabbit Room Store (and wherever great books are sold).

How many of you wait and watch for spring all winter long like I do? For me, the longing for spring sets in the moment I see the first leaf change color in the fall. It’s a heart aching that grows ever deeper with each new leaf giving way to the lack of chlorophyll. With their life blood no longer being produced by exposure to the sun, they slowly close off their veins until finally separating themselves entirely from the tree and falling to the earth to decompose. When the last few stragglers make their way to the ground, the ominous pressing of winter seems that it’s everywhere, even though it has usually not yet arrived. You can feel it coming. Its foreboding whispers fill the wind and you can’t escape. And so the counting begins. The first time table is the countdown to the dreaded end of Daylight Savings. In my opinion, it is the worst day of the year. We are plunged into a deep darkness. The earth itself takes on a funereal silence. In this absence of sound the heightened pitch of the wind-whispers sting the tips of your ears. Then the longest countdown begins. With singular focus I watch the date on the calendar marking the start of Daylight Savings. For me, this is the best day of the year. It’s a hope against the darkness, each day being one step closer to the light. With the addition of an extra hour of daylight, the new time table then becomes how many days are left until the First Day of Spring. Each passing calendar date bringing sunshine and green one step closer to being a part of daily life. I can feel the weight lifting. In Ohio, the start of Daylight Savings and the First Day of Spring are both more likely to be marked with snow versus an actual sign that the wait is almost over. But in my heart they are markers telling me to hold on, the end is almost here. The heavy whispers that curled my shoulders will soon become a sweet uplifting breeze. Soon I’ll walk a little taller with my face uplifted towards the sun. I find a deeper satisfaction in “playing in the dirt” than what is implied by this tagline frequently used by gardeners. Yes it is fun and the rewards of a bountiful harvest are immense. But for me, the dirt under my fingernails reaches me on a spiritual level that few other things can. I feel closer and more in tune with God. My inner noise is silenced and I am there with Him in the very act of creation. We live on a spec of the land. It’s a meager 7 acres. Yes I know 7 acres is nothing to disregard but of the billions of acres making up our world, this truly is a speck of dust, nothing in the grand scheme. My garden is an even smaller fleck but it belongs to us, at least in the sense of auditor records with the county. On occasion I have given way to an inner turmoil, a feeling that taking care of this speck is a waste of time. The argument in my mind always consists of something about how my time could be better spent reaching souls and helping others, doing something of eternal value. But a greater voice always seems to wash away my doubts and I feel a sense of God’s pleasure. I feel His joy in seeing His daughter love His creation so much and want to take care of it. Gardening was one of man’s first God given tasks. Genesis 2:15 says “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and keep it”. As we continue through scripture Jeremiah 29:5 says “Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce”. There is a certain reliance on God that comes from placing a seed in the ground and hoping for a harvest. There are things we can do to help it be successful. But the very act of a seed germinating and growing into anything in the first place is purely a miracle of God. And so we take what we have and place it in the ground and trust in God’s process. We start with surrender and then we work and tend, we hope and we wait. Tending the earth does require a great amount of work. But I always find each step of this process bringing me closer to God, more aligned with Him and understanding Him better. In the spring we break open the soil to cultivate it, making it ready to receive what we will surrender. We place our hopes in the cultivated soil and cover them up. At that moment, from all appearances, the seed is no longer even there. And yet at this point we increase our efforts. We keep the ground watered. We pull weeds to protect our fragile little dreams as they start to sprout. And as they grow we fertilize them to encourage that growth so it will be even more productive. We employ fences and scarecrows to chase away predators who would steal what we’ve worked for and take it as their own. Indeed it is all very hard work. But for me it is also an act of worship and service. We see this dance played out in Scripture with the Hebrew word Abad. There are verses where Abad clearly refers to the act of manual labor. Exodus 34:21 says “Six days you shall work (abad). Proverbs 28:19 says “He that tilleth (abad) his land shall have plenty of bread:” However we also see it used in the act of worshiping God through service. Exodus 8:1 says “This is what the Lord says: Let my people go, so they may serve (abad) me.” And then in Joshua 24:15 we read “But as for me and my household, we will serve (abad) the Lord. Our actions of taking what we think is ours, recognizing it as God’s through surrender, worshiping God though working towards our desired outcome, while we wait for what only God can do, this is the dance of work and worship. Again nature mimics life. I love our little spec and my tiny garden. In the grand scheme of land of earth it truly is a fleck, a nothing. But to me, the time that it takes to tend it is the open door to the grandest scheme of all. God, my Father, the Maker of the Universe who holds my surrendered hopes and dreams. In His presence and with dirt beneath my fingernails, I can feel Him smiling at me.  And that is truly the deepest reason I always long for spring.

I grew up in a home with scientists, so when a parent would ask me to run and get a container of Cool Whip out of the chest freezer, finding the right tub would usually take three or four tries. I might find owl pellets, a garter snake, a cow eyeball, or a paper wasp’s nest before I found the whipped topping. When I was in first grade, my parents agreed to raise Madagascar hissing cockroaches for the Columbus Zoo. Yeah. These are those cockroaches from Indiana Jones—those wicked-looking three or four inchers. If you’d walk down in the basement and flip on the lights, a communal metallic hiss would rise up like steam from Dante’s hell. Nothing scientific was ever so gross, so scary, so dangerous that my mom didn’t say, “Let’s explore that.” When huge, black snakes would hang off the trees in our back yard at dusk, Mom thought they were “interesting.” When they stopped twitching, we ate them. Rebecca Reynolds She caught a snapping turtle once while fishing, and her first response was, “Let’s eat it!” After we figured out how to get the meat out of that thing (which wasn’t easy), we stood around a five gallon bucket of iced salt water and marveled that the chunks of turtle were still twitching three days later. They twitched again when Mom put them in the skillet. When they stopped twitching, we ate them. My dad once bought Mom a mushroom farm for her birthday. This was essentially a huge, cardboard box full of horse poop with spores in it. She squealed with delight. When Dad was traveling and Mom decided that we needed to cut the heads off some chickens, she nailed two drivers into a log to make a “V,” then she made me hold the hen bodies while she got the axe.  When she raised bees, she taught me how to use the smoker. When we neutered the sheep, I held the blue plastic gun. What I’m telling you is that I grew up in a house in which there was no “Option Disengage Because of Factor Gross.” We were taught that the world was fascinating, and that we were here to master it. Girls and boys alike were encouraged to live with gusto. The magazines in our bathroom were National Geographic or Popular Science. Maybe some seed catalogues. My only exception to this was Victoria Magazine, a beautiful women’s journal that will remind you of everything Lanier Ivester, if you can ever get your hands on one. I read that publication religiously, cover to cover, but I never received any sort of teen pop culture magazine, and my mother never received any women’s gossip or beauty publications. These were days before the internet, before Google, before cell phones—so there were certain bits of information that you could only find in certain magazines. And fashion magazines were the Rossetta Stone for nerds like me—nerd girls who owned fluorescent green “Bugs are Beautiful” t-shirts and knew how to write in Japanese. Nerd girls had no other means of translating cool girl language—cool girls who used Love’s Baby Soft in the locker room, girls who lived in sub divisions and hung band posters on their walls. I listened to NPR. I had one opportunity to learn all of this secret female information. One chance and once chance alone. The beauty shop. When I would go to get my hair cut, I would try to show up early, then pile up three or four of those women’s magazines next to the most isolated chair I could find. Then I’d blitz them all like somebody cramming for a chemistry final. Styles? Check. Makeup? Check. How to get a boyfriend? Check. Narcissistic advice? Check. Pages and pages of pointless information. And in one of those pages, I found the holy grail. I found an advice column explaining how to condition my hair naturally. “Two raw eggs” it said. Let them sit for ten minutes, then rinse. Easy. I felt a sharp little guilty thrill run through my belly. We had eggs. Nobody would even know. Looking back, my parents wouldn’t have cared if I had tried this. They probably would have thought it was interesting. They probably would have bought me eggs from ostrich, ducks, Canadian geese, and hummingbirds. They probably would have helped me create a comparative study determining the quality of hair follicle conditioning according to avian egg species. But the fact that I had read this in a Teen Magazine made it feel forbidden somehow. Somewhere out in the world, cool girls put eggs in their hair while listening to to pop songs. Heck, yes. I was all in. The next night, I sneaked two eggs out of the fridge and ran the hottest bathwater I could stand. I’ve always loved super hot baths– hot enough that my skin is lobster red when I get out of the water. I got my hair wet and cracked those eggs into a plastic cup, squished them up, and dripped glops of them way down into my scalp. They were cold, slimy, and drippy, and they smelled a little like sulfur.  I told myself it was an “egg masque,” which felt either French or granola; I couldn’t decide which. Mostly, it felt super girly. Of course, I was in the middle of a good book that night, so I read while the eggs did their work. Then I got lost reading. When my water turned frigid, I drained it and ran an entire new tub, hot as I could stand it. I guess I was in there for an hour and a half before I remembered that I hadn’t rinsed my hair. By this point, my hair had fallen from the loose egg twist I had tried to stabilize on top of my head. In fact, it was floating in the water beside me. But this wasn’t a normal float. Something was strange about it. When I reached back, I realized that the eggs had started to cook into the fibers of my hair. To this day, I don’t understand how this happened. Supposedly egg white coagulates at 144 degrees, and human skin begins to burn at 131 degrees. Most hot water heaters are set on 120 degrees. None of this adds up. But when I tried to run my fingers through my hair, little white beads of egg were stuck all over the place. Hundreds of them. I panicked. I tried to wash the eggs out, but they held fast. Two shampoos. Three. Nothing. I got a comb and tried to comb the blobs out, but they split and made thousands of gremlin egg blob children. I remembered eating powdered eggs at 4-H camp, so I decided to try a hair dryer. Maybe the blobs would turn to dust? Nope. The more I dried, the more I brushed, the more my hair grew larger and larger. Fifteen minutes later, I was wearing a massive egg-fro that smelled like burnt omelette and stood out in all directions from my scalp. By this point, my parents were banging on the door.  “You’ve been in there a long time!” “What’s going on? What’s that smell?” I don’t remember the looks on their faces when I opened the door. I must have blacked out the memory. I do remember going to school the next day because a kid with long hair who smoked weed and listened to Metallica leaned forward in one of my classes and said, “What have you been taking?” That was thirty years ago. Last month I was on a flight to Atlanta, and I sat beside a twenty-something who was flipping through a copy of Cosmo. She had her headphones on, and while she popped her gum, she turned pages as casually as if she were reading the back of a cereal box. Turbulence was making it tough for me to engage with the nerd book I’d brought along—some sort of cultural analysis written by an academic priest with no girlfriend. Girl-next-seat over was humming her pop songs. Her nails were bright pink, she was wearing a preppy striped popover, and her hair looked like it knew what it was supposed to do. She also smelled faintly like pears, which was intimidating. I was wearing saggy Land’s End sweatpants—sweatpants with a comfort waist— sweatpants that screamed—“A-forty-year-old-mom-found-these-on-clearance,” which is exactly what had happened. I was a little bit bloated from travel, and I was wearing one of those cheap yoga headbands that come in a pack of 9 for $12. I smelled like dryer sheets and macaroni and cheese. There she sat, turning pages. Turning pages. You’re going to judge me for what I’m about to say next because I would judge you if you said it to me. Folks, I hate it when people read over my shoulder. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves in the world. I never read over other people’s shoulders. I never, ever do it. It’s rude. I can’t stand it. But this was urgent. I needed to know what secrets were hidden in that Cosmo. I was frumpy mom, cheesy-mac mom, saggy-sweatpants mom, lost mom, starving to know the secrets of the pear-smelling, pink-nailed, female universe mom. So, I put on my sunglasses and plugged in my ear buds, hoping it might look like I was sleeping (which makes this entire story waaaaay creepier, I know). And 40,000 feet above the earth, I was flat out scanning that magazine. Here’s what I learned: Fashion 2017. Skinny jeans are going out. (Free at last, free at last…) The mascara of the moment. (I’m pretty sure I’ve had mine since 2006.) Short shorts for your body type. (Oh, this is definitely information every woman halfway to ninety needs. For sure.) How to kiss a guy so he won’t forget it. (Snort. Let it be known that I’m the proud owner of a spatula that says, “I’m a good cook, but I kiss even better.” That’s basically like a Nobel Prize in kissing.) Advertisement for perfume. (Featuring a photo of a woman painted silver. She has shaved eyebrows and is holding a whisk. She also looks angry.) Advertisement for jeans. These are unzipped, and the model (who seems to have lost control of her lips in some sort of nerve damage) is drooling down the right side of her face. I’m empathetic. I realize that this poor woman probably needs the “How to kiss a guy so he won’t forget it” article, but I can’t figure out how to contact her. A purse with a giant “see u later” printed on the side. (This feels delightfully ominous to me. I wonder if my portable bluetooth keyboard would fit inside. I toy with the idea of buying this thing and walking down the street with a tormented expression on my face, holding it at arms length like a “The end is nigh!” sign.) Speed read. Flip. Speed read. Flip. Inside the home of hottie hot hot so-and-so actor. (Is he even old enough to drive? I can’t even be remotely attracted to this person. I might pay him to cut my grass, if I had a permission slip from his parents.) And there it was. Page 47. “How to condition your hair naturally. Get two raw eggs…” it said. Deja vu. 1987. 2017. Oh no you don’t. Not this time. NOT. THIS. TIME! I yanked out my ear buds, ripped off my sunglasses, and opened my nerd book. Safety at last. But I will admit this much, if you won’t tell anybody. The last time I went shopping at T.J. Maxx, I almost bought a body spray that smelled faintly like pears. And if I ever find the “See U Later” bag on clearance, it’s mine, Baby. It’s mine.

This year for Lent I committed to writing a sonnet each day. I won’t burden you with all forty, but at the risk of being presumptuous, I thought I’d post the seven sonnets for Holy Week in the hope that they might be helpful somehow. The stories are true, folks. He is risen, indeed. PALM SUNDAY “Hosanna!” We cried, and we waved our palms, Standing outside the church on Palm Sunday. We sang songs of praise, read lessons and Psalms, And then came the Gospel reading. The way It usually happens, the celebrant Follows the cross and Bible down the aisle, And we all turn to face them. The moment Reminds us of the Incarnation while The scripture is read. God did become flesh. He dwelt among us. But it’s Holy Week, And things change so that we feel it all fresh, The arrest, trial, crucifixion: we shriek, “Crucify him! Crucify him! Release Barabbas!” How quickly hosannas cease. MONDAY Passover was at hand. It was a time Of remembering. Once, they were enslaved To Egypt, but God freed them. Who will climb The mountain now? The holy law engraved On stone, written by the finger of God, Was delivered, and it said, “Remember.” Did they? Did they remember the lamb’s blood While they sold pigeons in the temple for Caesar’s coins? Jesus, upturn my table. Cleanse your temple. Be zealous for my heart, Because it belongs to you. Unable but willing, I beg you to take apart Each stone and rebuild in me a new home. Make a temple out of this catacomb. TUESDAY I’ve never seen a better place for spring Than here in Tennessee. The dogwoods spread And blossom in the shadows by the stream, Like cotton balls above the riverbed. And never have I seen a richer blend Of greens! So many hues illuminate Both underfoot and and overhead, suspend The verdant canopy with heaven’s weight, And anchor earth with heaven’s airy hue, That I can scarce discern if this is dream Or merely God’s abundance breaking through With pure delight in what he made, agleam With grace in this, the cursed and crooked earth. You resurrect the world with every birth. WEDNESDAY Tenebrae. A darkening. Poems read, Stories told, candles extinguished, songs sung. I sat all night in the dark with my head Full of conflicting thoughts. Some of them stung, Some were just mild distractions, enough that I considered slipping out to go home. But of all the places I could have sat, In that room as dark as stone-sealed tomb, I gleaned beside me a good friend’s shadow. His eyes were shut the whole time. I even Changed positions once and bumped his elbow, But he didn’t flinch. How could I know then What I know now, how his heart was broken? The dark silence was the solace spoken. MAUNDY THURSDAY “Love as I have loved,” you said, washing feet. A foot is a humble thing, the lowest Part of the body, where earth and flesh meet. We put them up when we just want to rest, And our odd little toes, smelly digits, Callused and caked with dirt, don’t make the best First impression, even if one sees fit To put his best foot forward. But you blessed Your friends from head to foot, washing away The day’s accumulation of travel, Speaking into existence a new way To love: love by exalting the humble By serving the servant, by kneeling down Before your subjects, giving us your crown. GOOD FRIDAY After this, Jesus, knowing all was done, Said, “I thirst.” They raised a sponge of sour wine On a hyssop branch, gave it to the Son, Holding it to the mouth of the True Vine. He drank. “It is finished,” he said at last, Then he bowed his head and gave up the ghost. John, as an old man, looked into the past And wrote his gospel. I wonder what cost Came with remembering that stormcloud day? Did he shudder as he wrote out each word? What would it be like to kneel down and pray To the God whose grand stories you have heard Since boyhood, and carry the memory Of him hanging there, bleeding on the tree? HOLY SATURDAY Joseph came and took him down from the hill. Nicodemus also came, with aloe And myrrh—seventy-five pounds, just to kill The death smell—and they wrapped him head to toe In linen, which is how it was done then. They needed to bury him somewhere soon. Not far from Golgotha was a garden, And in that garden was an open tomb Where no body had yet been laid to rest. The Jewish Day of Preparation meant There were laws these righteous men did their best To keep, so they, of all the people, went To Pilate, made it happen. Who can tell If they loved God? They loved their neighbor well. RESURRECTION SUNDAY Be praised, Lord Jesus, humble conqueror! Thy battered body’s wounds were joyful streams, Thy furrowed flesh the soil of the gardener, Thy bones unbroken, strong as temple beams. But none could know when laid they in the ground The sin-wrecked Son of God whose heart was dead, Whose stiffened corpse was cold and linen bound, As day-death turned the firmament to red And decay began its work on each cell, As decay has done since hard fell the curse, What glory was to gleam in that dark hell When death’s decay at once was in reverse. Be praised, Lord Jesus! Morning then revealed Thy beating heart! Today, my heart is healed.

Update: Tonight is the final week of our “How Did We Get the Bible” class. Dr. Trafton will discuss how Scripture has been translated and passed down to us over the centuries. Previous attendance isn’t necessary. Email pete@rabbitroom.com if you’d like to come and I’ll send you the address. For the past few weeks, Jennifer and I have attended a class on the history of the Bible. It’s been a fascinating exploration into the historicity of what we believe, and how the Christian faith has come down to us across the centuries. But this wasn’t a class taught by a well-meaning deacon who’d read a few books and remembered a few things from Bible college. This class was taught by a professor who recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching New Testament at Western Kentucky University, by someone who has himself worked with the Dead Sea Scrolls (and can read them to you). This was a class taught by a man who has invested a lifetime of research and scholarship into Scripture and speaks on it knowledgeably and passionately—and with a contagious curiosity that’s fun and engaging. Of our teacher, Michael Card (whose classes many of you have enjoyed) says: What you want is a scholar with a pastor’s heart. You want someone who has done their homework and has thereby done some of your homework for you. You want someone who understands that teaching is really just one way to wash feet. All of this describes Dr. Joe Trafton. He has encouraged me with his scholarship and his life for 30 years. Oh, and I should mention that he’s my father-in-law. Jennifer had always told me what a great teacher her dad was, and I’m so glad we had the chance to attend this class so I could experience his mind myself and marvel at his way with students and his passion for Scripture. Upon completion of the course, I immediately asked him if he’d be willing to come out to North Wind Manor and teach for the Rabbit Room community, and I’m thrilled that he’s agreed. If you’ve ever wondered if the Bible is trustworthy. If you’ve ever wondered where exactly it came from, how it came together, how it arrived in English, or whether it’s authentic, I encourage you to come out and join us. Some of the answers may surprise you, and I guarantee you’ll be captivated and edified Dr. Trafton’s teaching. We’re going to start on Monday, March 13th @ 7:00pm. There’s no cost, but we do encourage folks to bring a snack to share. We’ll run for five consecutive weeks as Dr. Trafton leads us from the collection of the Torah to the gospels and all the way up through the translations we read today. This is a great opportunity to look closely at one of the foundations of our faith and we hope you’ll join us. Week 1: The Contents of the Bible Week 2: The Canonization of the Old Testament Week 3: The Canonization of the New Testament Week 4: The Transmission of the Hebrew and Greek Texts Week 5: The Translation of the Bible If you’d like to come, please RSVP to pete@rabbitroom.com. Space is limited to about 25 seats.

During my time at seminary I became enamored with the lives of the saints. Perhaps “enamored” comes across the wrong way—my Protestant roots run deep enough that I’m wary of turning anyone or anything into an idol (I’ve seen my fair share of hero worship in every denomination—but that’s a different story). What I mean is that I’ve come to realize our need to drink deeply of the stories, songs, and words written by and about fellow Christians—be they members of our local congregation, faithful followers of Jesus across the globe, or those separated from us by time and death. The best of the saints’ stories (whether Catholic or otherwise) are those who nudge our gaze upward at the exact moment our eyes attempt to fixate on the saints themselves. These people are undeniably human and most assuredly sinners, and yet they are also creatures that have been touched by God’s grace and who are unable shake the glow of that encounter. One such story is that of Charles Jennens. I found myself at Fellowship Bible Church in Arkansas where I had worked for several years as a videographer before attending graduate school. Charles Jennens The congregation was gearing up for an arts festival. It was scheduled to take place in the Christmas season and with the theme of “Messiah”—taking inspiration from the great musical work by George Frideric Handel. Of course, I had heard the infamous “Hallelujah Chorus” used (and abused) by dozens of films, television shows, and commercials, but I soon learned that I knew little about the rest of this famous work. The leader of the worship team had purchased several books on the subject and I checked out a few from his office. I found that although the work is primarily referred to as Handel’s Messiah, there was another man who was instrumental to the work’s creation. This lesser-known individual was the impetus for the work and convinced Handel to join him in it. His name was Charles Jennens. Jennens had worked with Handel before on an oratorio about the relationship between King Saul and his eventual successor, the shepherd boy David. Jennens was not a professional musician—in fact, he was not a professional anything based on our modern definition. He was a wealthy landowner well versed in music, literature, and the Christian scriptures. His primary area of expertise was William Shakespeare but he lacked credentials and approval of other scholars in the field. It would be closest to the mark to call him a benefactor or a patron of the arts but only if it’s made clear that Jennens was not simply a man with a lot of money looking for a way to spend it. He doesn’t fit the stereotype of an aloof millionaire who cuts checks for artists for the sole purpose of sharing in the accolades while maintaining distance from the work itself. On the contrary, Jennens was passionately involved in the artistic process. Yet he was also wise enough to know when to hand the work over to those whose gifts he admired and whose character he trusted. He would do this with Messiah. Charles Jennens had experienced a personal tragedy when his brother, Robert, committed suicide. One of the reasons behind Robert’s decision, Jennens believed, was his association with the burgeoning philosophy of deism, which he encountered while studying at Oxford. This was during the height of the Enlightenment and deism was on the rise. Deism may affirm the existence of God (or at least of a sort of “unmoved mover” or “first cause”) but it denies God’s personal presence and committed activity within the present-day cosmos. The purveyors of this doctrine may agree with Christian thinkers on several points but one finds that the claims of deism and classic Christian orthodoxy are ultimately at odds. One cannot affirm a hands-off vision of God while continuing to look to the accounts of Moses, Isaiah, or, above all, Jesus as the ultimate source of truth. I would argue that the fixed chasm that stands between Christian teaching and deism is ultimately wider than the gap between deism and atheism. Charles Jennens perceived a deep emptiness embedded at the heart of this philosophy and he sought to refute its claims. Yet he did so in a surprising way. Christian history is full of brilliant men and women who, armed with the tools of reason and rhetoric, have defended the faith from heresy. Jennens knew this; in fact his library was full of names like Chrysostom, Augustine, and Cranmer. Yet, faced with the mounting challenge of deism, Jennens did not produce a new commentary or attempt to publish a theological tome. Instead, he began to skillfully arrange passages from the Bible. Yet just as astounding is the impetus behind the work—Jennen’s hope that the goodness and truth of the Christian scriptures would be more powerfully transmitted through beauty than through mere rhetoric. Matthew Aughtry Jennens pulled from various authors and books of the Bible to place the focus on the overarching narrative of scripture and its culmination in the person of Jesus Christ. His work was that of juxtaposition—not adding his own interpretations or elaborating upon the text but editing together the biblical text in a certain order for dramatic effect and narrative flow. The restraint he showed in doing so speaks volumes about his faith in the power and integrity of the Bible. “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation,” reads Article VI of the 39 Articles. As a communicant in the Church of England it’s very likely that Jennens knew these words well. Jennens put this particular idea into practice, trusting in Scripture to save his own age from falling into the trap laid out for it in deist doctrines. Upon the completion of his arrangement, Jennens sent the manuscript to his friend and collaborator George Frideric Handel in hopes that it would be the composer’s next oratorio. Moreover, since this particular work was, according to Jennens, about the subject who “excels every other Subject,” his hope was that Handel would “lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excel all his former Compositions.”[1] In a world of back and forth arguments about the existence and eminence of God, Charles Jennens did not publish an essay or craft a three-point sermon—he asked the most talented musical mind of his day to create melodies for the words of scripture. He lifted verses out of the Old and New Testaments and trusted the power of art to give them new life in a world that had gotten used to ignoring them, a society which very much believed that it had moved on from such things. Of course, Handel’s composition of Jennen’s selected scriptures would outlive the master composer and continues to be the most popular piece of music he ever wrote. Every Christmas and Easter you can almost guarantee that someone in your town will be performing the work and you can rely on the fact that filmmakers and marketers will continue to utilize the infamous “Hallelujah Chorus” anytime they want to convey an intangible sense of elation, wonder, and ecstasy. Messiah is an astoundingly beautiful work, one that resounds across generations and illuminates the scriptures in a remarkable way. It’s almost as if, at times, one hears the ancient words in a new language—as if the music combined with the choir and soloists are producing a translation of the text itself. Yet just as astounding is the impetus behind the work—Jennen’s hope that the goodness and truth of the Christian scriptures would be more powerfully transmitted through beauty than through mere rhetoric. In place of arguments, Jennens produced an artful apologetic that stands the test of time and continues to touch the lives of those who experience it. Christians in an increasingly pluralistic society could learn much from Charles Jennens. Like him, it would be wise for us to trust so firmly in the Bible. The scriptures contain a world of majesty—their words have transformed lives for millennia and will continue to do so. Perhaps we, like Jennens before us, might begin to explore the power of art and beauty to guide our hearts and minds into goodness and truth. In a world full of rash arguments and rapid retorts, the wiser course of action may be to focus our energy and attention on the long and often quiet works of sowing justice, planting peace, sharing good meals, and creating good art. One of the ways I feel called to make the case for the goodness, beauty, and truth of the Christian faith is simply by telling the stories of the saints—men and women who, like Charles Jennens, invite us further up and further into the fullness of God’s kingdom. I was part of crafting a short film about Jennens during my time at Fellowship Bible Church in Arkansas and it played before the performance of Handel’s Messiah during the opening night of Fellowship’s arts festival. I hope you take the time to watch it and that it brings you as much joy as it brought my collaborators and I to make. Most of all, I hope that as you watch it you feel that Charles Jennens would not have you rest your gaze upon him but would instead invite you to raise your eyes heavenward in wonder at this beautiful world and the One who made it thus—the One who works even now to bring it to perfection. [1] Calvin R. Stapert. Handel’s Messiah: Comfort for God’s People (Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies) (Kindle Locations 443-444). Kindle Edition.

[Editor’s note: Say hello to Drew Miller. Some of you will remember his band, The Orchardist, from the Local Show last month. I love the way he thinks about music. Read this post and you’ll see why.] Starting at about 47:06 in the video below, Chris Thile reflects on his style of composing music and says: “You can’t just pull the rug out from someone. That’s easy to do—finding high contrast is super easy. What’s difficult is making that high contrast seem inevitable in retrospect, that a need has been met that you didn’t know you had until afterwards. Essentially subversively creating an expectation and meeting that expectation, which amounts to, hopefully, expectations being exceeded.” When I first watched this moment unfold, much to my own surprise, tears were shed. What follows is me exploring the question: Why the tears? Because obviously, this is about more than merely composing music. My first guess is that I have always lived in search of shivers down my spine and mind-blowing moments. I believe that behind this search has been a love for the humbling thrill of having my imagination exceeded. In these moments, I realize that the world is more connected, cohesive, and true in its integration than I had thought. We all have a perspective of the world, and our perspectives allow for a certain degree of variety and a certain degree of cohesion within that variety. Yet our perspectives are woefully limited. So when we encounter another perspective represented through a piece of art, writing, or even lived experience that is more deeply cohesive than our own, we are brought down to size. We are humbled. There is a thrill in it, too, because these moments allow our own perspectives to enlarge and expand. We make more room in our imaginations for reality than there was before. Here are three examples of these humbling thrills in the realm of music: https://youtube.com/watch?v=W47kHPq9ngg%3F “My Legionnaire” by Brooke Waggoner: This song establishes its form, then departs from it in a way that ultimately coheres with and strengthens the entirety of the song. I first heard it in eighth grade and couldn’t believe my ears. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ppn7eQSBdJQ%3F “Julep” by The Punch Brothers: When this song goes into the bridge section, it feels like it couldn’t possibly return to the first section of the song, yet it does flawlessly. https://youtube.com/watch?v=YYUDOEZ6BbU%3F “Sellers of Flowers” by Regina Spektor: This one has to do with the uncertainty of where the key center is. When we listen to songs, we interpret the whole song around the tonic note, which determines the home-base key: the one chord from which the whole song ripples out. So when a song bends away from that and modulates to another key, the center shifts and we feel like we’re going somewhere. The thing about this particular song is that the melody and chord progression work together to constantly evoke a sense of rapid motion in which every new chord feels like a new key center. I find music to be the epitome of the humbling thrill. I think this is because one purpose of music is to bring seemingly disparate pieces together. Wendell Berry writes, “In healing the scattered members come together.” He writes of grace, healing, and wholeness as near synonyms. You can’t have health without bringing fragments together into a whole, and grace is what it means to bring those fragments together. Music reveals the hidden cohesion behind seeming disparity. The key of G feels totally dissociated from the key of C sharp. In fact, those are tritones, as far apart from each other as they can conceivably be, and yet they are related. The circle of fifths reminds us that we can get from G to C sharp and vice versa, and to me that feels like hope. Music refuses to believe that the world is a fractured place. Notes resound within the grace of time. Strictly speaking, without time, there is no music. The relationships between tones give us ratios and harmony, but these relationships need time in order to unfold into melodies that tell stories, that “go somewhere.” Without time, the story aspect of music is lost. There is the old adage that there’s no healing medicine like time; music is a great microcosm of it. My dear friend Cameron Welke once paraphrased the words of music theorist Jean-Phillipe Ramaeu for me: “harmonic motion is motivated by the resolution of dissonance into consonance.” That doesn’t happen without time. Time allows us to go to unstable places where we’re suspended from the rhythm, the pattern, and the melody for just long enough that we doubt in our bones whether the rug that has been pulled out from under us will be replaced with another rug—and yet it always is. If it’s a well-written song, these moments of resolution will be satisfying in ways we couldn’t have imagined. If it’s a poorly-written song, then we’ll have the rug pulled out from under us only to fall flat on the floor. What are the sorts of things you think after hearing a bad song? Probably something like, “That did not feel complete. It did not feel whole. The parts didn’t fit together.” A half-baked idea does not do justice to the wholeness that all songs seek to achieve. Time is the key to that wholeness, the condition for music to reveal the fullness of itself. The problem is that we have inherited in this age a fundamentally fractured view of the world. No matter how we may depart from this view as we grow up, it is yet the ubiquitous backdrop behind our lives from which any departure is a tenuous journey upstream. We breathe like air the predominant assumption that the world is a place of competition, that all things are at odds, that my good must exclude someone else’s good. Life is a zero-sum game until proven otherwise. This is what many people mean by “individualism.” It’s not a very musical perspective. We’re intensely aware of how contestable our little beliefs are. When we confront the vast uniqueness of each and every person on the earth and all their perspectives, it becomes more and more exhausting to believe that we all fit together, that we can cohere as a human race. And yet we don’t just resign ourselves to this fragmentation; that’s not a very human thing to do. Our current state of desperation has only made us more thirsty for revelations of hidden cohesion. The stronger the narrative of disintegration becomes, the more we will know in our bones that it can’t be true. We will go on believing in a deeper wholeness to the world in spite of extensive contrary evidence. In a recent interview with John Dickerson, Stephen Colbert was asked how he felt about “post-truth” being Oxford Dictionary’s word of 2016. He responded, “That’s before God said ‘let there be light.’ That’s absolute chaos. That scares me.” There’s something catastrophic about this. Can we no longer agree that anything can be agreeable? Is the foundation of our very words and sentences now a thing of the past? Once upon a time, J.R.R. Tolkien played around with the word “catastrophe” and put the prefix “eu-” at the beginning of it. Speaking of “eucatastrophe,” he writes in his essay “On Fairy Stories“: “…it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence…of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” He goes on to say that good fairy stories more often than not contain a moment of such eucatastrophe: “It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it…a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears…It is not an easy thing to do; it depends on the whole story which is the setting of the turn, and yet it reflects a glory backwards.” Is it just me, or is Tolkien speaking of something very similar to the “high-contrast moment” Thile got so excited about regarding music? Although fairy stories are not entirely comparable to music, there is yet a strong analogy between Tolkien’s and Thile’s insights. We come into one of Thile’s “high-contrast moments” with a certain extent of imagination. The moment then exceeds our imagination by showing us a greater coherence than we had known to hope for. According to Thile, as the moment passes, we realize in hindsight that it was inevitable. At other times he has even spoken of these moments as “genetically encoded” into the DNA of the music from the very beginning, like a recessive gene. Tolkien’s eucatastrophe “reflects a glory backwards,” he says. So the whole story is working up to this “turn,” and once the turn comes, it’s so miraculous that it sheds light on everything that came before it. Think of your favorite mind-bending TV show drama—mine is LOST—and recall the moment when you learned something about a character that changed everything. You had to pause it, catch your breath, and frantically reinterpret the entire series in light of this new revelation. Tolkien goes on to write: “The Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story—and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.” Jesus’ embodied life is the original eucatastrophe, the modulation of key on which the song depends, and the brilliant punchline. It is the central moment which, within the grace of time, shines a glory backwards and forwards in history. History was never merely linear with Christ’s time on earth as one more little point on the line among other points. Instead, all of history hinges upon him. He is where the stone hits the water in the pond and the ripples come out to every inch of space and time. Jesus stands up, reads a passage of Isaiah, and says, “This scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” And even now Jesus says to us, “I have come that you may reinterpret the Story, that your perspective would be exceeded by my grace.” This is why Chris Thile’s words put tears in my eyes. He’s not just talking about art; whether he realizes it or not, he’s speaking of the gospel. When we’re thrilled by a break in a pattern, a moment in a movie, or a song that does something we didn’t think it would do, these are little reminders of the true nature of the world as always more than we thought it to be. The gospel itself is the more towards which these trinkets point. It is the abundance, the grace, the healing we desire. So if the gospel is a thrill, it’s not a thrill of mere candy. It’s not a thrill of indulgence—rather, it’s a thrill of hope in which the weary world rejoices. It’s the thrill of an enduring hope, a deep, quiet hope that our insufficient imaginations may be subverted and exceeded by God’s own again and again. I will leave you with a poem I recently wrote called “Songs We Couldn’t Write:” Where Imagination fails Beyond the edge of light There live the tallest, truest Tales And Songs we couldn’t write Like the patient peace of trees We think to be asleep They yet resound the silent Speech Of roots hidden and deep Far away from fantasy And further still from fear They bear their ancient history For quiet hearts to hear Every child listens first In their own native tongue A heavy gift to tend the Thirst Inside of them begun All our works of good and ill Have from this Thirst been wrought Each desire to heal, to kill And every passing thought Some grow up to bitterly Deny their Thirst unquenched They’re wrong when they think themselves strong; Their fists are merely clenched Others crave a prize to earn, A treasure to attain They ever burn, their world upturned, Imagining in vain But in Hope the meek receive The failure of their sight And like the child none can deceive They wonder with Delight That where Imagination fails Beyond the edge of light There live the tallest, truest Tales And Songs we couldn’t write

There’s a little white church building in Connecticut that for many years has hosted concerts by me, Jason Gray, Andy Gullahorn, Eric Peters, The Gray Havens, Jill Phillips, and many more. It’s called Community Coffeehouse, and it’s run by some of the kindest New Englanders in the world. One of those New Englanders is a bonafide sculptor named Scott Lee Johnson. I visited his studio a few years back and marveled at the pieces he had made, many of them intricate, artful religious scenes like you’d see in Italy (the header image above is one of his pieces titled, “Jesus and the Homeless Woman”). A few years ago, Scott gave me one of the best birthday gifts I’ve ever received. He called and said that he wanted to drive it down—all the way from Connecticut!—and was a little vague about what it was. I knew he was a sculptor, and so of course I was deeply intrigued. Well, when he showed up and unveiled the gift, I literally gasped. Then I got goosebumps. Then (of course) I got a lump in my throat. This is what he gave me: I don’t want to spoil anything if you haven’t read the Wingfeather Saga, but this is Janner and a certain Gray Fang, from a scene in The Warden and the Wolf King. A priceless gift, and I’ll forever be grateful. But that’s not all. Scott went on to create four more pieces—two bookends, the first of Peet the Sockman walking on his hands (from book one), juxtaposed with the other of Artham Wingfeather cradling that same Gray Fang in his arms (from book two). It’s a picture of Peet’s transformation into the protector he was always meant to be. And here’s the awesome thing. These pieces are small enough that he can cast them and make a set JUST FOR YOU. But that’s not all. Scott also made a bust of the intrepid bibliophile Oskar N. Reteep, which makes an excellent addition to anyone’s library wall—and this one is also for sale, along with a small “sketch” version of the Warden and the Wolf King sculpture I mentioned earlier. Check out Scott’s website here, and support him by placing an order for these ultra-rare and lovingly made tributes to the Wingfeather Saga. I know Scott poured a lot of heart and time and skill into the crafting of these pieces, and it shows. Thank you, Scott, from the bottom of my heart, for making these pieces. It’s an honor.