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Batman’s origin story is full of darkness. Orphaned as a child, taking on a the mantle of a bat to fight crime in the dark of night – no wonder he only works in black (or sometimes, very very dark gray). Maybe this is just another instance of trying to compare myself to Batman, but I also have an origin story that set my approach to color. I am a cartoonist today because of Charles Schultz. I spent most of my childhood reading and re-reading books full of Charlie Brown and Snoopy. I loved the world that lived inside those panels—the distinctive characters in funny poses, the way the story was doled out frame by frame—I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was training my brain to speak comics. In time, Peanuts was joined by two other comic masterpieces: Calvin and Hobbes and Pogo. All three comics used their bright color Sunday pages beautifully, but it was those black-and-white daily pages that drew me in. I gobbled up one after another like… well, like peanuts. So that’s how I became a black-and-white cartoonist. I’ve grown to read, re-read, and love many styles and formats of comics, but those three comic strips are still my first love (I re-read the entire run of Calvin and Hobbes every year or two). That focus on minimalist, cartoony rendering, line and silhouette has informed all my drawing… until now. The story of why I’m rebooting my old webcomic Getting Ethan is one that I’ll discuss in a separate post, but it really fired me up. My drawing style has only really gelled in the past two years or so, so it has been a joy to recreate this world the way I see it in my head. And color! I’ve always been preoccupied by line art, but that extra step of adding color is giving the comics that extra pop I’ve always looked for, and I there’s a satisfaction in a finished, colored page that makes me feel more energized, not less. I’m excited to do the same for Martin and Marco. My first book, Martin and Marco, has been sold out for several months. And my readers are not happy about it. I’m not happy about it. I want to bring this book back in print—but I also like the idea of bringing it up to the level that digital illustration has helped me to achieve in more recent comics. Enter Patreon, which I’ll be using to help support my current comics and save up for a Martin and Marco reprint. I love this idea for three reasons: Patreon backers will get to see the book come to life in color, page-by-page. It’s a great way to share the process with the people who are helping to make it happen! Building a fundraising campaign helps me justify juggling three major projects (a Getting Ethan webcomic, a remastered reprint of Martin and Marco, and completing work on a third book) in addition to my day job and freelance work. While I stand by the story in Martin and Marco, at the time, I was still feeling my way through illustration and self-publishing. I’m thrilled to be breathing new life into the visuals that will make the book feel more cohesive and vibrant. Check out the Patreon campaign and share with your friends—there are lots of great rewards available at different levels (including an entire ebook every month) and we’ve already broken through our first goal (two pages per week)! I have many more rewards and goals planned as the Patreon—and subsequently, my comics output—level up! Me and color. It’s good to be friends at last!

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”  — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie I learned of the concept of the single story from a talk given by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In her now famous 2009 TED talk, the novelist explains that a single story of a culture or people is very common, but dangerous. At some point or another we have all assumed an understanding of what it must be like to live in, say, South America or China, but to have only a single story of those vast places in our minds is absurdly limited. When we have only seen or heard or read glimpses of other people groups and places, we tend to assign them a story based on these glimpses. Often the stories are so limited they are downright comical. I grew up primarily on the west coast: Oregon, mainly, for the first 16 years, with travel experiences to the north in Washington and to the south in California. This put me in contact with a certain west coast culture of relaxed, outdoorsy individualism that was pretty well matched by my experiences when I moved to Alaska to finish out high school. My peers in this culture dressed for comfort because on any given day they were guaranteed to — at a minimum — get their hands dirty. That was my single story of American life. When I graduated, I got a scholarship to a small university in Tennessee. I knew Tennessee was not going to match my experience growing up, but that was about all I knew for sure. My only glimpse of Tennessee (prior to arriving) was a single story of a “backwoods cabin Tennessee,” probably from books or movies. Upon arrival, I expected to meet at least a few cabin people. This is ridiculous to me now because, of course, even though I lived there for five years, I never once met a person who lived in a backwoods cabin. What I found instead were polished peers in crisp polos and khakis, accomplished musicians, brilliant playwrights, hilarious comedic writers, gifted financial minds, and some of the most disciplined athletes I’ve ever known. Thankfully, my two single stories very quickly grew to dozens of stories, and I was much better for it. I also provided another story to my college peers who had their own single stories. To them, the Alaska girl with too many flannel shirts to be wearing them ironically was the backwoods cabin person. As I shared my story, their horizons broadened as well. We probably all have some experience of this. I was lucky in that mine was not painful and actually made me a better person. The single story obstacle in my case wasn’t a big deal. But this is not always the case. Single stories are more dangerous on a larger scale, especially when accompanied by fear or judgement. These stories often focus on racial, religious, or economic traits. Sometimes our glimpses are from newscasts regularly highlighting the poverty of Africa or the extremists of Islam; other times our single stories come from actual stories — movies, plays, and books — with stereotypical roles for the characters. Our single stories can even come from what we have heard second-hand about a place or what we experienced first-hand on a short-term travel experience. It really doesn’t matter how we obtain our single stories. What matters is that, even though they are clearly limited, we tend to keep them. We tend to keep telling these single stories as we create and communicate because we simply only have the one to work with. This kind of limited understanding is fine for a starting place; after all, we have to start somewhere. But to stick with a single story for any people group or place simply defies logic. And yet, we have done it for a very long time. Why is that? One idea offered to explain this phenomenon is that we are more drawn to simplicity than we are to truth because we can control simplicity. Research shows that we are drawn to simple ideas more than we are to complex ones. We even buy according to what is simple over what is complex. If a website lacks clarity about what is being offered, we bounce more often than we explore further. The fact that our brains tend to prefer simplicity becomes problematic for more than just marketing execs when it comes to tackling more important things. Things like the truth. The truth is never simple. The truth can be complicated, paradoxical even. Often, it has the scent of mystery. This can make it uncomfortable to process and hard to accept. Because we are much more comfortable with what we can control, we prefer simple, often over-simplified, categories for our ideas. A single story fits this requirement. It is very simple and easily controlled. It’s easily obtained, explained, and replicated. It’s ridiculously repeatable. And this is the problem. Single stories are tenacious and infectious. They spread. And the more negative they are, the more so. They set up camp in our minds and imaginations and generate things like fear, condescension, and a lack of respect. They breed assumptions. Even when they generate pity, they prompt us to herd whole people groups into a corral of “them.” And it doesn’t end there. Besides the resulting words and behaviors wafting up from the stale air of our limited understanding, another challenge arises from the single story. A single story highlights how we are different, but neglects the balance of how, as humans, we are the same. This lopsided focus on differences stirs up division so quickly, the damage to relationships and cultures is hard to even calculate. Even when we never mean to do anything of the sort, we find ourselves caught up in it all. So what do we do? Back to me in Tennessee: I didn’t keep my single story of a backwoods cabin Tennessee for long once I got there. Why not? Because I was very quickly exposed to other stories. To my delight, my single story of Tennessee grew to be a collection of wonderfully diverse stories as I started to get to know my peers and build community with them. And it turns out that this is the best thing about single stories: they can be replaced with just a little effort to take in more varied ones. One of the places this happens organically is in community. Community is a positive transformation that happens to a group of people who come together with a shared intention of connecting and enough perseverance to get through the obstacles in the way of doing so. The reason for connecting doesn’t seem to matter much. What matters is that in almost any true community setting, be it a social or religious group, a 12-step meeting, or a group of parents at a regular playgroup, we take in more stories almost effortlessly. It’s just what we do in community. We show up and hear stories. And if we’re really intentional, we listen to each other’s stories. And we share ours, so others get to add to their collection as well. But what if we aren’t in community with anyone? How do we get community? We create it. At its core, community building is a creative act of the will. In her recent interview with Krista Tippett for On Being, Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat Pray Love and other best sellers, speaks of how we are all creators: “Creativity is innate. We are all makers, and we are descended from makers. Every human child does this naturally.” With our own ingenuity and creativity, we can create community and take in more varied stories from the people in the community. And there’s one more key: Community is created by makers who have chosen curiosity over fear. Gilbert says, “Curiosity give you clues, not a destination. Interesting people are interestED people.” With curiosity at the helm, each of us can become community creators, connecting with another, asking questions and simply being curious enough to take in more varied stories of our life together on this planet. And the more varied, the better. Where it happens or for what reason people are connecting matters less with community building than the fact that the participants are intentional and willing to persevere past the single stories to get a broader understanding of our life together. We can do this in reading groups, on sports teams, at project meetings, on the bus, or in the neighborhood. But it gets even better when we reach further — out of our regular routes — to find those who have grown from other gardens, come into town for other reasons. As we build community with those from more varied backgrounds, the new stories are like fresh water into our stagnant ponds. Everything gets greener, more oxygenated. The clouds clear when we get curious and start listening to the stories and joyfully gathering them in. So we have a starting place. We can overcome the single story with a resistance of curiosity, community building, and story gathering. We can refuse fear and choose curiosity. We can fight the heavy with the light. We can transform a “them” into an “us.”

Writers write because they have seen something in the world around them, and they want to show it to someone else. Why, then, do we writers spend so much of our writing time thinking about ourselves? You’re there at your desk, trying to work out the next sentence, and before you know it, you’re thinking about yourself instead: your failures, your ego, your word-count goal. You speculate on how you’re going to feel when you make your goal. You get a jump-start on the self-loathing you’ll feel if you fall short. You wonder what people are going to think when they read what you’ve written. You wonder if anybody will even read it. You question whether anything you’ve ever written was actually good. You buck yourself up, remembering that, yes, you’ve written plenty of good pieces–brilliant pieces, in fact. Which makes you suspect that you’ve already used up all your brilliance. You think about your friend whose blog gets twice as many comments as yours, in spite of the fact that he can’t write his way out of a paper bag. Then you ponder Edgar Allen Poe, who died penniless and alone in a Baltimore gutter. It occurs to you that you’ll never write as well as Edgar Allen Poe. In short, it takes about 45 seconds to decide that you’re the piece of crap that the universe revolves around. Just in the writing of this little post, I have experienced this self-absorption in many forms. I was going to knock it out and post it last Wednesday. Wednesday came, then Friday, and I still hadn’t sat down to write it. Monday rolled around–a fresh start. But since my post was overdue, I would need to make it extra-brilliant–more brilliant than I felt I was up for… Saint Augustine (among others) spoke of sin as incurvatus in se–a curving in on the self. This truth is nowhere more evident than in the neuroses and dysfunctions that so often accompany the act of writing. Self-absorption, self-consciousness, self-promotion, self-loathing, self-justification, self-doubt, self-aggrandizement–incurvatus in se. Writing demands a certain amount of introspection. But introspection doesn’t have to become self-absorption. In my own writing life, I have found that writing can be a means toward blessed self-forgetfulness. As I get absorbed in a subject I’m writing about, find that I am freed from self-absorption–and I am able to do good work. When I stop asking “What will my reader think of me?” I start asking, “What will my reader think about this person or event or idea I’m writing about?” And good things start to happen. I don’t live in that place all the time. I don’t even live there most of the time. But I don’t get much good writing done when I’m not in that place. In A Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis evoked the idea of incurvatus in se as he explained why Satan rebelled against God and lost his place in heaven: “in the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Satan] could think of nothing more interesting than his own prestige.” I write because I live in a world that is full of wonders and I count it a privilege to point out a few of those wonders to a few of the people I share this world with. I write because I live in a world that’s a whole lot more interesting than my own prestige. And yet I am forever stalling out because instead of looking outward at this astonishing world, I look inward. Instead of wondering at the world, I wonder what the world is going to think of me. So here’s my challenge to you, my writerly friend: be less introspective. Look outward at the world and at your reader, and leave yourself out of it. See what you see, and then write it down. [Editor’s note: Jonathan has an online class starting May 15 where I know he’ll have lots more writing advice to hand out. It’s called Writing with Flannery O’Connor, and you can register by clicking here. In June he’ll be offering an online class called Writing Close to the Earth.]

Little faces crowd around the table, counting together as drops fall into the Mason jar. “62, 63, 64…” The water balloons over the rim. Sixty-five drops ago, Flo asked the kids if the jar was full. “Yes!” they answered. But drop after drop lands on the surface, and still the water doesn’t overflow. One boy leans closer, eyes wide. “102, 103, 104…” Finally, one drop too many hits the surface, and water spills down the side. “Now you get a turn,” Flo says as she hands each kid a penny and a medicine dropper of their own. They count aloud, giggling as the water bubbles up and then spills over, often staying together even as it falls off the penny. “How many drops fit on your penny?” Flo asks when they’ve finished. “I got 35 drops,” someone says. “Did you think a penny could hold that much water?” The kids shake their heads. “Do you remember what special power water has to make it stick together?” An arm shoots up. “It’s cohesive!” “I wonder what would happen to the water in the world if God hadn’t designed it to stick together?” Flo then reminds the kids of the Creation Care Camp verse: What a wildly wonderful world, God! You made it all, with Wisdom at your side, made earth overflow with your wonderful creations. -Ps. 104:24 (The Message) From the cohesiveness of water to the dance honeybees use to communicate to the birdcalls in our backyard trees, we are surrounded by a world that is wildly wonderful. Psalm 104 invites us to slow down long enough to see God at work in the world. It invites us to wonder. At A Rocha, we see care for creation as a worshipful response to the God who created and loves all things. Our hope is to help Christians to take practical action to love and care for their places, and we believe that in order to love a place, you need to know it. Wonder is part of that knowing. It’s what I experience when I recognize Tennessee’s native river oats on a horseback ride through the woods or first identify a Carolina wren calling, “Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle.” The more we learn about and pay attention to our places, the more deeply we care for them, and the more we stand in awe of and are grateful to the God who made them. Through Creation Care Camp, kids are invited into this kind of wonder. Science experiments, Nature Breaks, craft projects, and games help them see, hear, touch, taste, and smell the wonder of the world God has made. As they extract DNA from a strawberry, dissect owl pellets, and close their eyes and listen to the birds around them, kids learn to see God as the maker, sustainer, and lover of all that he made—from soil and water to plants to bugs to animals to people. And, of course, Creation Care Camp includes plenty of opportunities to get dirty. After a few more words about surface tension, Flo collects the pennies and droppers, puts them under the table, and pulls out a bowl of garden dirt. “Do you like to play outside?” she asks. “I wonder if your clothes or hands ever get dirty?” A few kids giggle as they nod. “Sometimes, scientists say that soil is alive.” She holds up a teaspoon of soil. “There can be up to one billion bacteria in a teaspoon of soil. Isn’t that amazing?” The kids will mix soil with water and use it to paint a picture, but not before marveling at its intricacies and the ways it supports life. “We can thank God for holding the earth together and keeping it healthy,” Flo says as she closes the activity. “We can praise him for the beauty we see in the soil and even in the sand and the diatoms all the way at the bottom of the sea. What a wonderful world God made, and what a gift that he shares it with us!” Year One of Wild Wonder, the new Creation Care Camp curriculum from A Rocha USA, is now available. Learn more here (http://arocha.us/creation-care-camp).

I am an artist. I am a singer. I am a songwriter. I am a musician. I am a poet. I am an author. I am, however, also married to Joe Sutphin. The end. For many years, that would have been the end of this article. I’m sure some of you are in a similar position and I hope to encourage you by shedding some light on the dynamics of our situation. As a child, I would hide away for hours acting, singing, reading, and writing. Then, as the years passed, adult life began to squeeze those things into smaller and smaller increments of time. Adding to the pressure was the fact that I was a young, single mother of two small children. Being all things to these two little lives demanded all my energy and emotional resources. And then, I married Joe. Joe was young and I’m sure got much more than he bargained for. He entered into the role of father, husband, and provider all in one gigantic step. His talents were some of the very things that drew me to him. However, jumping into the middle of a full-swing family began to press and limit his time for those things as well. During the early years of our marriage, we played in a Christian rock band together. That served as a great outlet for artistic expression. He had basically stopped doing art all together, even though I was encouraging him to pursue it. But the pursuit of anything takes time. Eventually he began working on a novel. Juggling jobs, our family, the band, and his writing began to be too demanding to keep up with. The constant challenges of practicing, hunting for shows, and keeping band members finally pushed us to make a hard choice. We made the decision to eliminate the band from our lives, at least for a time. I continued supporting his efforts in art and writing. On rare occasion I would draw a small sketch. Perhaps I’d spend a few hours on my belly in the grass drawing a wild strawberry flower or a daisy along the stream. But for the most part, my creative outlets were few and far between. After several years the book was finished. The only response we received from publishers was one polite “Thanks but no thanks.” We self-published to have some copies, sold a few, gave a few away, and then shelved the project. Joe was still pursuing art and eventually we joined the worship team at our church. We took on the role of being leaders on the team. We either led worship or played on another leader’s team almost every Sunday. I also took on running the church café. In my world coffee qualifies as art. So for a time I had several creative outlets again. This continued for years and I honestly could have gone on doing it forever. But it was not to be. There came a time when we needed to step back, to sit and rest for a while. Church work can be very hard and we were dealing with extenuating circumstances in our own lives. Suddenly we became people who just showed up on Sunday mornings and sat in our seats. No more leading people in worship for three services every week. No practices or picking songs to match the message. No working with team members and helping them grow in their understanding of worship. No more shopping at multiple stores every week to find deals on café snacks. No training new volunteers on coffee equipment. No standing behind the counter talking with church goers week after week hearing their stories and trials. I fell into a void, a listless void. I was aimlessly drifting. At the time, we still had our day jobs. Joe was pursuing art and I was supporting his efforts. He was beginning to get more work in that area. Even with more time on my hands, I just couldn’t find the old me. I didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror anymore. She felt foreign. Joe attended Hutchmoot alone and the following year I joined him. It was such a strange and overwhelming experience. As the weekend progressed, I began to have the feeling that I was remembering myself. It was like a distant voice calling to me from the past. I recognized that voice as my own. In the year that followed, I made attempts to reconnect with that girl I used to be. There had been so many years of surviving the demands of life while supporting Joe’s dreams and talents. It was a hard habit to break. I may fancy myself an artist in many ways, but it’s difficult to describe the inner conflict you experience when partnered with someone who is better at everything you ever thought you were good at. In the middle of the demands of life, desires to do anything creative can quickly be crushed by thoughts that say “Why bother?” There’s also the struggle of handling the supporting roles that make life function while constantly watching your partner receive praise for the fun things you’d rather be doing. Further complicating our situation is my personality. It’s a bit of a quandary. I’m very logical and practical, yet also very artistic. These aren’t typically characteristics that go together. The logical, practical side of my mind puts the most energy where the greatest benefit will be reaped. In our world, artistically, that equates to putting my support behind Joe. But after Hutchmoot I began to rethink some of this way of life that I had become numbly accustomed to. I felt that maybe I had been too quick to chalk Joe’s talents up to being better than mine. The truth is that our talents are just different. Since not everyone likes the same thing, differences are important in satisfying the diversity of artistic tastes and preferences. The following year I attended my second Hutchmoot. I found myself in a session by Jeffrey Overstreet.  He began by saying “I have a friend who has a tattoo. It reads “Comparison is the thief of joy.” That is exactly what I had allowed. I have to work at things that are seemingly effortless for Joe, so I had stopped seeing my talents as valuable in comparison to his. I had let my own attitude defeat myself. This was a reality check I needed. I’m sure there are others out there that need it as well, so I’m opening up our world for a little glimpse inside to show you that you are not alone. Over the past couple years I have begun to reconnect and find value in my own artistic expressions. I’m relearning how to enjoy the things I’ve always enjoyed. In that process, I’m gaining new skills and more creative knowledge. I’ve taken on learning woodturning. I’ve also received my Master Gardener Certification through my local Department of Agriculture. I’m writing again and have contributed to the Master Gardener newsletter. I’m become more disciplined about spending time at the piano. But most importantly, I’ve been relearning how to appreciate me and who God made me to be. That same year at Hutchmoot, I sat in a session where Chris Slaten quoted Sara Groves. She said “For some people, I will be their songwriter.” Joe will likely be an illustrator to the masses, but for some people I will be their writer, their wood turner, their gardener. The best part is that now I am completely okay with that. I’m even content when “some people” is only an audience of one: me. P.S. (Literally an hour after I wrote this article, Joe was looking through a book illustrated by Bill Peet.  Joe said, and I quote “When I look at his stuff I feel like I don’t have any idea what I’m doing. I feel like I don’t even know how to draw.” The feelings are normal. We all have them. Don’t allow them to become a lifestyle.)

If you saw The Orchardist play at The Local Show last month or read “Chris Thile, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Eucatastrophe in Music” at The Rabbit Room, then Drew Miller needs no introduction. But here’s a proper one anyway! I had a chance to talk to Drew about his band The Orchardist’s forthcoming EP series, creative community, and, yep, The Lord of the Rings. Thanks for talking with me today Drew! Yeah, I appreciate this. I’ve been a Rabbit Room fan for a long time! Well, I hear you guys were awesome at The Local Show, so it’s about time The Rabbit Room community officially meet you. So, what’s one thing you want everyone to know about you? One thing? That’s a hard question. I guess that we’re inspired by a lot of literature, like the Inklings, Lewis, Tolkien… I actually just finished Lord of the Rings for the first time, which is really fun. Oh, congratulations! Haha thanks. I think a lot of times when people ask me about the influences for our music, my mind starts going to authors instead of musicians, just because conceptually and thematically there’s a lot of rich influence in countless books. We draw a lot from writers as well as singers, and that kind of sets the tone for how we write and what subjects we’re pursuing. I noticed while listening to your album some familiar turns of phrase and imagery from books I’ve read. I see how the authors influence not just the subject matter, but the poetry and phrasing. That’s a good well to draw from. Sometimes when people ask about our name, I like to say that’s what happens when a lot of Wendell Berry fans decide they want to play music instead of having a farm. Drew Miller Yeah, that’s really helpful to hear. Let’s me know it’s working! Sometimes when people ask about our name, I like to say that’s what happens when a lot of Wendell Berry fans decide they want to play music instead of having a farm. We aren’t called to farm, so we might as well hearken to the language of the orchard to breathe life into the vocation we are pursuing. Planting seeds and nurturing them… Yeah, totally! That goes a long way. There’s so much rich language in that. Who else is in The Orchardist, and how did you come together? Our other members are Janie who sings with us and occasionally whips out her harmonica. Tyler plays mandolin, and Camille plays violin. Janie, Tyler, and I met at Belmont. Tyler was down the hall from me in our first dorm, and we started playing music together. And then we met Janie that semester and became best friends. We’ve gone through several iterations of people in the group… at the beginning it looked very different. Camille came into the fold a couple years ago. She goes to the church that I went to in high school, so we crossed paths through that. She wanted to join, we welcomed her in… so yeah! It’s the result of collecting people, relationships weaving in and out over the years, and it’s been refined to us four now. I hope it’s okay to say the first time I listened to your music I was reminded of The Oh Hellos. I got that same sense from both of your bands that you’re just a bunch of people having fun together. I can hear the joy and community in it. That’s so encouraging! We love talking about artists in community here, so I’m wondering, how does the creative process go for you four? How do you create music as a collective? I think Tyler has a really good language for this, because his background is actually composing and film scoring. He has this great mind for arrangements and orchestration. He describes it as all the songs we ever play are an unfolding conversation. And so he wants whatever arrangements we find to serve the song musically, and for there to be fidelity between the theme of what’s being sung about and how the music is expressing that. In a way, that sounds like we’re loving each other with the notes that we’re playing. Sometimes we’ll pray before the show, and often when he prays he’ll ask, “may we play like we love each other. With every note we play, let it be like we’re sending a gift across the stage to each other.” We try to make that pretty central to everything, because that’s where we find the magic happens. I really would love to hear the stories about so many of these songs, but I probably need to just pick one. Well, go for it! Anything you want! Well, this morning I was listening to the record, and “Quiet, Now” got my attention: “Songs are priceless / Some are just cliche / We sing them anyway / To cope.” Would you say that’s your songwriting philosophy? Do you have any deep thoughts you want to share, because I was like “that’s so good!” Awww, I don’t know. It’s like a portion of my perspective. Because no song can totally encompass everything, like “this is my manifesto!” But it’s definitely… a sheepish song? It’s a little bit nervous to say what it has to say. I do own that for sure — there’s the question of the ultimate value of music in a commercialistic culture that wants to sell you something all the time. But then at the same time, we’re so saturated with content and songs that I wonder, what is their value? We have so many. Do we really need more? It’s the double-edged sword of wanting to ascend the value of each song that’s put into the world while admitting it’s kind of presumptuous to think I could add anything to the songs we already have. Does that help? That makes sense. As a writer and poet, I wrestle with that question too. Does it matter? I’m writing, and it feels good that I’m writing, but it takes so much to psych myself up to share it. Maybe that’s why it resonated with me? I’m glad it did! I think even the resonance is the proof or legitimizing factor in songs. We wonder all these things, but ultimately when a song, a part of ourselves, is shared in vulnerability, and its received and celebrated, that’s the justification of the sharing. Once we realize we’re all asking these questions and we all feel equally paranoid and self-conscious, the walls come down and we realize the pricelessness of everything we have to offer. Do you have a personal favorite on the new record? Oh man, it’s ever-shifting. I think it comes down to two songs right now: “Bleeding Heart” and “People, People.” “Bleeding Heart” is definitely the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done as a band, and it draws a lot of influence from The Punch Brothers. There’s an essay I wrote about Chris Thile and his perspective on music, and we draw a lot from him, musically speaking. It’s something we’re really amazed we put together. On the flip side, “People, People” is more humble, and when I first wrote it I wasn’t sure it measured up to the rest of the songs. And now it’s the title track because we realized its value over time. Because it’s the little guy! And you know, it’s such a good little guy. I think a lot of what we’re talking about in “Quiet, Now” applies to that song too. So the new album is People, People, and it’s coming out soon, right? Yes, it’s actually releasing in three parts, and each one is going to be four songs. Act 1 is coming out May 5th. Awesome! Any particular reason for dividing it up like that? Originally it was purely just because that’s how people listen to music now, in smaller chunks. We can have more fun marketing, making content, and getting more creative with it if we have three opportunities to tell the story and walk through it slowly. At first we were thinking we couldn’t do a whole album because nobody likes albums anymore, and we were sort of bummed out. But then we realized doing it this way could be fun. Finally, because this is The Rabbit Room… what was the last great book you read? Hahaha… well, since I literally just finished The Lord of the Rings a few days ago, that has to be my answer. That’s true. If you said anything else that would be wrong. Any other great books? Um… I’d have to think pretty hard about it. The Lord of the Rings took up all of my time for half a year now, so it’s been a long journey. I don’t remember anything before that. That’s totally fine… it’s so long! Have you gotten into any deep Tolkien yet, like The Silmarillion? Kind of? I was really excited about the creation narrative in the very beginning, and my friend let me borrow it. So I read the beginning eighteen times in a row, and I didn’t get much further than that. In theory I just want to sit down and slog through it, but man… there’s just so much. I read it last year… it wasn’t as much of a slog as I expected. It can be done! Yeah, you just have to get in the right mindset. It almost feels like there’s a Biblical tone cataloging great swaths of history, and it’s supposed to be more informative than immersive. But I want to read it. Someday it’ll happen! https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/01-Inside-Your-Head.mp3 People, People: Act I is now available for pre-order in the Rabbit Room Store, and it comes with an immediate download of “Inside Your Head.” Full release on May 12th.

I forget how much I love songs all the time. I’m not one of those people who just loves to write. I don’t know if that makes me less of a songwriter, but there it is. Whenever someone says, “I write because I have to,” I always feel envious and a little ashamed of myself, because I just don’t have to write. Life is full of interesting things, most of which don’t come with as much difficulty and self-doubt as songwriting, so it’s easy to avoid the grind of trying (and usually failing) to make something beautiful out of thin air. For whatever reason, after twenty-some-odd years of putting out records and books, I’m feeling exhausted and oddly content to not make music. It’s frightening, to be honest. Does it mean God has dried up the well? Does it mean I’m called to something else for a season? Last night I was talking to Jamie about all this, and she said, “It’s okay. You go through this every single time you make an album.” It’s one of the advantages to being married to your best friend for twenty-two years. She sees the pattern better than I do. And part of the pattern is that, when I’m lost in the wasteland of the blank page and wondering why I’m even there, there’s a moment when I remember why I got into this in the first place, when there’s some flash of inspiration upon hearing someone else’s music and I get the flutter in the belly that tells me that there’s more to be written, more to be sung, more story to be told. This morning, that flash came from Tom Douglas, a legendary songwriter here in Nashville. I did a songwriter’s round with him last year and I almost fell out of my chair when I heard him sing “Little Rock,” which was recorded by Colin Raye many years ago. An amazing song. Tom (along with Allen Shamblin) also wrote Miranda Lambert’s “The House that Built Me,” and about a zillion other great ones. I saw Tom a few days ago and was reminded of this video, which I urge you to watch, whether you’re a songwriter or not. It’s his acceptance speech from his induction into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame a few years ago. “This,” I thought again today, “is why I love art. It’s why I love songwriting. It’s why it’s worth it to put yourself out there, to suffer the heart-wounds that come with the touring and promoting, the warring between hope and futility, pride and humiliation, gratitude and guilt.” Thank you, Tom, for these words. I’m a (relatively) young songwriter who needed to hear them today.

This year I started a project called The Adventures of Fenigus March. It will be a series of paintings with accompanying one-page short stories that will eventually be put into a book. The stories take the form of journal entries made by the intrepid collector Fenigus March as he explores the Islands and finds and doesn’t find what he’s looking for. My goal is to use the adventures to slowly reveal the true (and unexpected) nature of this fictional world both to the reader and to March himself. So it’s kind of a mystery/adventure/picture book. The closest thing I can compare it to is Griffin and Sabine, but even that isn’t a great comparison. Anyway, here’s the shot-by-shot process of the first painting. It’s called “The Tree of Life.” First, I used white chalk to sketch the crow and the tree and the fruit and the leaves on a canvas painted black. Then I got to work on the tree. I love painting bark. This takes place in early morning, so there’s low blue light raking in from the left. Here are some bark details. And the faint beginning of leaves. At this point I realized the perspective on the crow isn’t what I wanted. So I redrew him. Then I painted in the leaves and sky. I didn’t change the bark color – that’s just different lighting. Then I did the fruit. It’s supposed to glow, so you see its reflection on the branches and leaves. Finally I started working on the crow itself, adding different colors as I shaped his body. Next I realized the sky was pushing forward too much, so I darkened the sky and made it earlier in the morning. I continued working on the crow’s plumage. To finish the painting I added some fruit peels and a half-eaten piece of fruit. And stars. And then I photographed it with a real camera. Look for more posts on this evolving project!

A couple of years ago a friend introduced me to the resources available at the Bible Project. It may be that I am late to the party, however I have found myself turning to them increasingly often in recent months. If you are not familiar with the work of Timothy Mackie and Jonathan Collins, they describe themselves like this: “The Bible Project is a Portland based non-profit that utilizes short-form, fully animated videos to make the biblical story accessible to everyone, everywhere. We create videos, podcasts, and study guides that explore the Bible’s unified story by focusing on its overarching themes and each book’s literary design. We are committed to understanding the Bible in its historical context and communicating its wisdom for the modern world.” Initially, it was the Read Scripture video series that impressed me. Each short video uses animation to summarise a biblical book or theme, engaging with complex ideas in a way that is not only creative but also logical and thoughtfully structured. More recently, I have been enjoying the podcasts that form the basis of the new animated video series. If you have listened to Rabbit Room podcasts or attended Hutchmoot, the conversational style will feel familiar. There is an immediate sense that you have stumbled into a conversation between two guys with a genuine friendship and an infectious passion for the Bible. The more I study the Old Testament, the more captivated I am by the layers of story within it, not only painting a stunning picture of the heart of God and pointing to Christ, but laying the groundwork for a proper understanding of the New Testament. As an adjunct professor of Hebrew and Old Testament, Tim’s knowledge of the Hebrew language and culture bring a fresh perspective to the Biblical story, peeling away the centuries of Greek thought that often cause us to miss ideas central to both the Old Testament and the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament writers. With such a rich focus, it would be easy to become purely academic, producing something that is inaccessible to the general public. The beauty of the podcasts is that Tim and Jon manage to present strong, scholarly work in a way that leaves room for humility and natural humour. The video below is an introduction to the work of the Bible Project and the rest of their resources are available at their website www.thebibleproject.com.

I’m pleased to be able to offer here, in full, the first chapter of Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death. When my doctor told me I was dying, I came alive. Three days before my fortieth birthday I was admitted to the emergency room. A bacterial infection had destroyed my mitral valve and I was in the early stages of heart failure. That day and the two years that followed are the setting for this book. They are the setting, but they are not the subject. This is a book about what happens when affliction and faith collide. I am a husband, father of four, pastor, and author living in the greatest “big small town” in America—Nashville, Tennessee. I lead a simple life. I get up early for work. I am rarely awake past 11:00 p.m. My wife and I go to bed tired. I have never dug a well in Africa or jumped out of an airplane. I am suspicious of people who use the word “epic” to describe their desired life. I am a simple man, and I do not presume that my story of affliction is all that unusual. But it is not the uncommon parts 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. I have committed myself to the work of paying as much attention as I can to the medical, spiritual, relational, emotional, pharmaceutical, and physical experiences of this journey my failing heart has set me on. I have asked a lot of questions and taken a lot of notes and used them to write the chapters that make up this book. Affliction awakens us to things we might not have seen otherwise. 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. I have discovered that many in my position have felt the same way. I want to interrogate my affliction. What happens when a person stands at the edge of their mortality and looks out into the eternal? What happens when a doctor tells a man he is dying? If that person believes in God (which I do), what will become of his faith? Will the spiritual premises he trusted as dependable foundations all those years earlier suddenly fail? Will he require certain personal outcomes in order for his faith to hold? And if so, is that even faith? Or is that nothing more than a house of cards too easily toppled by the winds of suffering? I do not want simply to endure my affliction. I want to experience it—to receive it as an adventure and follow it to its end. I find the whole business fascinating. Knowing that I come to this season having seen the world only through the eyes of the well, I ask God to help me see whatever this struggle might reveal. There is nothing automatic about learning to see with new eyes. In the early 1700s, doctors in the West discovered how to remove cataracts from the eyes of blind patients, giving them the ability to see. Annie Dillard, in her Pulitzer Prize–winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, wrote about what the experience of seeing for the first time was like for these people, many of whom had been blind since birth. One might presume the sensation would have been like someone turning on a light in a dark room—bringing clarity and information to an otherwise bewildering existence. But for many of these newly sighted people, who had already learned how to navigate the world through their other senses, the sudden ability to see was what confused them. For the majority of patients, concepts like depth, size, shape, and space were nearly impossible to grasp. Dillard wrote, “For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning.” These patients had no categories for what they were seeing, and this was more than many of them could bear. Many became depressed because when they gained the ability to see, they lost the world as they knew it. Vision became a new form of blindness. In response to their frustration, some simply refused to use their eyes. One doctor said of his patient, “Her unfortunate father, who had hoped for so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and she is never happier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness.” For those who did not refuse their new sight, they had to learn how to use it. One man “practiced his vision in a strange fashion; thus he takes off one of his boots, throws it some way off in front of him, and then attempts to gauge the distance at which it lies; he takes a few steps toward the boot and tries to grasp it; on failing to reach it, he moves on a step or two and gropes for the boot until he finally gets hold of it.” For those who practiced using their new eyes, the world they learned to see was filled with wonder. One twenty-two-year-old was so overwhelmed by the world’s brightness that she kept her eyes shut tight for two weeks following her surgery. When at last she gathered the courage to open them “she did not recognize any objects, but the more she directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful!’” I want to know those moments when confusion gives way to beauty and wonder. I believe moments like these are bound to come for me in this season of affliction, if I look for them. When one such moment happened for Annie Dillard herself, she said, “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” For my whole life I have seen the world through the eyes of the well. This is all I have ever known. But now, I have been lifted and struck, and I want to hear what resounds in me. Though I may stumble for a time like a man reaching for his boot, I want to learn to see the world through the eyes of affliction. This will be a challenge because I see this world and my place in it through the lens of what I already know. I can’t help it. A dog is a dog and a pear is a pear. I can’t see “Eden before Adam gave names.” But affliction has the power, I believe, to quiet the voices in my head that think they already know everything. Seeing through my suffering won’t show me a new world. Rather, it will show me more of the world I think I already know. Affliction is bound to find us, and when it does whatever faith we profess, along with all its convictions regarding the meaning of this life and the next, is tested. Some affliction comes suddenly and lasts only a moment. Other affliction comes and takes us out of this world. Often though, affliction grabs us like an unsuspected wave and tosses us around in its currents for a season before washing us back up onto our familiar shores. What then? Do we thank our lucky stars that we survived and try to return to the life we knew before any of this happened? Is that even an option? And if so, at what cost? Affliction shapes our lives. It comes for us all—in our own personal distress or in the sufferings of those we love. It has come for me, and I know it will come again. The least I can do is pay attention. I do not wish to waste my pain. (Pick up a copy of Struck here.) [Copyright © 2017 by Russ Ramsey. Published by InterVarsity Press. Used with permission.]

This past year has been, what you might call on LinkedIn, a “season of transition,” which is French for “I’m figuring it out all over again.” My label gig ended about a year ago and the road life, besides the occasional show or short tour with good friends, is not something worth putting my family through again. So now what? I’ve spent quite a bit of time praying, hiking, and talking with trusted friends and it has confirmed what I have known all along. What I love to do is walk with artists and songwriters, helping them write great music, make wise business decisions, and lead a healthy artistic life. I’ve been quietly doing this quite a bit for the past year and it’s been life-giving and exciting. But I can’t keep meeting people for coffee without some sort of financial structure to provide for my family, so I’m taking my own advice and believing that my time and work are valuable. That’s why I’m now offering Artist Consultations and Artist Development for hire. Nothing gives me greater joy than the time I get to spend pouring into people in this way. I hope that my years of experience across the music industry can prove beneficial to people, and we can help folks make plans to finally be able to do the good things they’ve always wanted to do. If you’re interested you can read more about this at Andrewosenga.com. If I can be of service to you as you’re trying to navigate the next steps in your music career, feel free to reach out.

I saw a quote-photo posted on Twitter the other day: “I dread writing poetry, for, I suppose, the following reasons: a poem is a terrible journey, a painful effort of concentrating the imagination; words are an extremely difficult medium to use, and sometimes when one has spent days trying to say a thing clearly one finds that one has only said it dully; above all, the writing of a poem brings one face to face with one’s own personality with all its familiar and clumsy limitations.” — Stephen Spender, “The Making of a Poem” This quote has a context, and the author may have meant something entirely different. But taken by itself, as posted, it annoyed me. Writing, or playing music, or any form of art certainly has its hard moments, times of frustration, disappointment, a sense of lack. But there is no faith or motivation in staying there. So I rewrote it for my own amusement. “I love playing music, for, I suppose, the following reasons: a song is a beautiful journey, an expressive flow of focusing the imagination; music is a wonderful medium to use, and sometimes when one has spent days working on a tune one finds that there are always more and better ways to play it, because music is infinite; above all, the playing of music can be sometimes daunting because it brings one face to face with one’s own God-given, wondrous, complicated personality with all of its endless, eternal potential.” — Ron Block, “The Making of Music.” In my life I have seen some of the creative process of varied people: T. Bone Burnett working on the O Brother soundtrack and Down From The Mountain shows, Kate Rusby and Damien O’Kane arranging songs for Kate’s record, writing songs with Rebecca Reynolds. I’ve worked with Alison Krauss for nearly 26 years. And I’ve worked on my own material, my own songs, my own practice of music for nearly 40 years. The best music I have made, and the best I’ve seen others make, has not been from a continual over-focus on “How hard this is!” I have been through hard bits in the studio, where I’m basically thinking, “What’s the name of that truck-driving school?” I’ve been stuck before. “This is hard” solidifies into “I don’t know if I can” which then brings, “I’ll muscle my way through it.” This never ends well. If I’m stuck, it is not because I’m being lazy. It’s because of thinking, “This is so terribly, extremely difficult, and painful, and I am so clumsy and limited.” This brings stress and tension to my body, which makes it impossible to play music freely. It can bring procrastination, avoidance, and the use of various anesthetics—food, drink, television. I went through a phase performing with Alison Krauss & Union Station where I was feeling stress and tension before the shows. The solution wasn’t to try harder, to practice more, to be even more prepared (Make no mistake. I am a preparer. That is my bottom line.). The answer to the stress was to sit in a chair in the dressing room before the show, with the lights shut off, breathe in deeply for a few minutes until my entire body was relaxed (sitting up so as not to fall asleep), and then thank God: “Thank you that I get to play music. Thank you for this band, for this show, for these people. Thank you for putting me here, for filling my life with yourself, with filling me with sufficiency and power to do this work well.” After about 20 minutes of this meditation on reasons to be grateful, I’d get up and get dressed for the show. This attitude of gratefulness, fullness, and sufficiency changed my entire attitude. I walked out on stage every night thinking, “This is going to be  awesome.” “Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder,” said G. K. Chesterton. I felt better, played better, was more relaxed, spontaneous, and present. I see this attitude in the people I mentioned, and other high-level artists I’ve worked with. There’s an acknowledgement of the hard parts, but undergirding it all is the love of the activity and a sense of sufficiency and gratitude in doing it. We can acknowledge the hard bits. Of course it can be hard. Anything we want to excel in is going to be tough at times. But down beneath the toughness is desire, love, pleasure, fullness, and a sense of sufficiency, even if we have to water the ground on top and till the  topsoil to find it. Chesterton also said, “Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.” The lynchpin of these two views is faith—a sense of gratefulness, fullness, and sufficiency. These things are cultivated; it is the easy thing to stay on the top of the hard ground and live in the terrible, the painful, the difficult, the dull, the clumsy, the limited. To live in gratitude, fullness, and a sense of sufficiency takes cultivation. We thank, we trust, we sit our posterior in the chair and write, or practice, or study, and by that cultivation we become “artists of a large and wholesome vitality.”

Since the conception of the Every Moment Holy project, we’ve always known it would be illustrated. We wanted to find a way to capture the style and look of sacred images but infuse them with “ordinary” scenes and subjects. Author Doug McKelvey and I both had clear ideas of what direction the illustration should take, and so finding the right artist for the book was a source of a lot of discussion and hand-wringing. Enter Ned Bustard. When we saw the work he’d done in Revealed: A Storybook Bible for Grown-Ups, we knew we’d found our man. Ned caught the vision for the book right away and I’m anxious to show you how he’s bringing Doug’s liturgies to life visually. Though his name might not be familiar to the Rabbit Room audience (yet), he’s cut from familiar cloth. He’s an author of children’s fiction and historical fiction, and he’s the editor behind two books that get at the root of what the Rabbit Room is all about: It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God, and It Was Good: Making Music to the Glory of God. He’s the creative director at Square Halo Books, a board member at ASCHA (The Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art), and on staff with CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts). And beyond all that, he’s just a downright nice guy. I’m so glad I have the chance to introduce him to all of you through this interview in which we discuss Barry Moser, printmaking, Christian symbolism, the creative process, and plenty of other stuff. Say hello to Ned Bustard. PP: So Ned, Let me first say how happy I am that you’re gracing Every Moment Holy with your work. The book is going to be great, and your illustrations are a big part of the recipe. It was important for us to find an illustrator who would catch the vision of the book and I feel like you’re doing just that. NB: I’m extremely excited about this project. Earlier this year when Andrew and I were talking about upcoming book projects that our companies were developing, he described EMH and I nearly fell on the floor. I’ve been a huge fan of Doug’s writing since he collaborated with Charlie Peacock years ago. And I grew up with a love of prayerbooks because my grandfather’s church used them. I have a large collection of them and often pillage them when writing the liturgy for my church’s worship services. And on top of all that, the inspiration for my printmaking is medieval woodcuts. Combine all those influences together and it’s no surprise that I shamelessly asked Andrew to be considered. PP: But let’s start at the beginning. I’m a huge fan of Barry Moser, and when I first saw some of your stuff, I thought to myself, this is a man who loves Barry Moser. Was I right? NB: I must say it’s quite an honor that you would connect me with Barry Moser in your mind. He’s an amazing artist whose work has kept me spellbound for years. I have his illustrated Bible sitting on the book shelf right next to me as we’re talking. His work is magnificent. His craftsmanship is superb, and his work has such deep passion in it. Years ago I had the good fortune to design a book of Gregory Wolfe’s writing that was accompanied by Moser’s engravings. In the process I got to hold the works in my hands to scan them, and I felt like I was holding mithral. Ah, forgive me… I’m geeking out. The short answer is: yes, I love Barry Moser’s work. PP: Can you explain how you create your work? This stuff is all a mystery to me, and it’s fascinating. Are you carving linoleum or wood or what? Take me through the process from conception to print. NB: Relief printmaking is a very simple method of making art. And its simplicity is what I love about it. The connection this technique has with early Bibles and prayerbooks makes it a perfect visual medium for Every Moment Holy. My day job is offering people illustration and graphic design services. When I started in the field it was all work done by hand, but the industry changed, and now nearly all I do is computerized (not that this is a bad thing, generally). One aspect I like about printmaking is that it is so gritty, earthy, and non-computerized. There is no copy/paste or save-as. And there is something that feels more “real” to me than what I do with my computer. The basic process is that I draw on a block of linoleum, cut away everything that I want to be white, roll ink on the block, lay a piece of paper on it, rub it hard to get a clean impression, and pull off the paper and hang it up to dry. Then I ink it and apply paper again and again until I have as many reproductions as I desire. I usually use a printing press to make the impression, and I almost always use the computer to work out my compositions before transferring them to the linoleum. For example, the first print I completed for this book began as a doodle I scanned into my computer over which I laid in a photo I had my daughter take of me with a laptop and cell phone (to get spacial relationships correct). Many decisions were made on the fly as I was cutting the block, but the basic image had most of the kinks worked out on the computer, allowing me more freedom as I cut the block. PP: Can you talk a little about that image in particular? I know you love Christian symbology. How does that find its way into your work? “New Creation” from Revealed: A Storybook Bible for Grown-Ups NB: I love designing logos. I’m passionate about communicating meaning and giving the viewer as much symbolism as I can. This love of telling a story through icons is apparent in my printmaking as well. An extreme example of this is the piece I made called “New Creation,” in Revealed: A Storybook Bible for Grown-Ups. In that piece symbols for the 12 Apostles and 12 Tribes swirl around a new Earth full of things representing Christ, the Church, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the Trinity, martyrs, New Jerusalem, and more. One of my favorite books is Signs and Symbols in Christian Art by George Ferguson (it sits on a shelf next to opposite Moser’s Bible). In that reference book there are oodles of animals, plants, colors, and more that I regularly draw from for my artwork. Certainly I load my pieces with more symbols than most folks have the education or inclination to decipher, but I enjoy knowing that they are in there for the person who cares enough to spend the time decoding it. Print block for “A Liturgy for Those Who Consume Media” This first piece for Every Moment Holy isn’t overloaded with symbolism, but there is plenty there to tell the story. In that print a man in the boat sits, preoccupied with with his various electronic devices atop the crest of a wave while the wind blows and a raven looks out intently towards the horizon. As a good pilgrim he should be rowing his boat to shore, but instead he is “surfing” the dark seas of the internet without any care for where he is going. The raven/blackbird is a symbol for sin, and he is at his post looking to guide the oblivious traveler. The wind is blowing the opposite direction, and possessing three parts is a symbol for the Trinity. PP: I love that. Our vision for the book is that the illustrations capture the holy inherent in the ordinary, and that image is a perfect example. How long does it take you to to carve a block once the artwork is up to snuff? NB: I’d guess an hour for something like that. Maybe more. I try not to keep track of how long it takes me to cut a block because it would depress me too much if I factored that time into what I’m able to charge for a print. Even if you only include paper, ink, and the time it takes to pull the prints, my hourly rate ends up well below minimum wage. I know the “New Creation” print took over 40 hours to cut, because I was curious, and made it a point to keep track. Obviously, it would be much easier and quicker to create these images on the computer, but like I said, the prints feel more real than a computer illustration, and the cutting and printing process always gives me happy mistakes and irregularities that add to the charm and grittiness of the final pieces. My friend Matthew Clark (an amazing printmaker who everyone should know about) once said that those unplanned anomalies in the process had been described to him as “gifts from the printing gods.” Of course, as a good elder in my church, I would have to describe them as good and delightful markings predestined to be in the artwork “according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.” PP: I wish someone would come up with something wise to say that would make me feel better about typos in published books. Authors, I guess, are doomed by perfection. A collaboration between Ned Bustard and Matthew Clark I love that you work in such a tactile medium. The physicality of the final piece is what makes block cutting and printing such a compelling form of illustration. The inherent flaws in the process are part of what make the work beautiful. Which makes it so fitting for this book. Do we need to add a liturgy “For Those Who Create Block Cuts On Small Publishing Budgets?” I’m joking, but now that I think of it, a liturgy for “Those Who Create Images” might be something to consider. NB: I’m often reluctant to open the books I design when they arrive from the printer because I know as soon as I do I will find a mistake. Never fails. PP: Are there any liturgies you’re particularly looking forward to illustrating? NB: The liturgy for a Husband and Wife at the End of the Day was very moving to me when I first read it. I’m eager to work on that one. I also am eager to work on the liturgy about home repair. I had my little brother pose for my reference for that piece and I think it will be fun to cut a block depicting him. More than a specific liturgy, I am looking forward to making a bunch of them so I can see the visual themes that emerge and listen in on the conversations between various pieces in the series. I dont have plans for them as a whole, but I am sure motifs will emerge and symbols will tie diverse prints together across the book. PP: I’m so glad you brought this up. I have a similar experience each year when I edit together The Molehill, the Rabbit Room’s literary journal. I get submissions from writers all over the country and it’s always fascinating to watch for the themes and images that emerge to form a cohesive whole. Having read what Doug has written for this book so far, I’m already seeing how it’s coming together and it’s beautiful. I can’t wait to see how his work informs yours. NB: One of the great blessings for me, personally, about having the privilege to be part of this Rabbit Room book project is that it affirms what God has been doing in my life for many years. Early on in my career as an illustrator I found my work developing in a style i dubbed “faux gothic.”  I worked and worked at it out of my passion for celtic and medieval art. I really saw no place for it, but it seemed to spring naturally from who God had wired me to be. Then I added to that aesthetic a passion for printmaking. Still not knowing why I was doing it or having any idea of where it might find a home. And now Every Moment Holy has been laid in my lap! I’m not saying folks should keep following their creative passions and one day the Rabbit Room will affirm all of their efforts with a cool project like this, but what I DO believe is that we should work hard to grow in our disciplines (writing, music, art, bee keeping, etc) as a way to give glory to God—and then not be surprised when we see the Lord bless us. There is no way to say what “success” will look like—soli deo gloria—but we need to be faithful, work hard, and see what fruit comes from it all. And we may not see the fruit. For example, I have heard that many people have been positively affected by my book It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God, but I’ve met only a few here and there. I just need to trust God that he is raising the harvest he wants to see grow from the seeds we have planted in faith. PP: Amen. I think that’s the perspective all of us have with this book. And I think that’s the way we approach so much of the work we do at the Rabbit Room. We plant seeds. And then we trust God to make it grow. Thanks for the conversation, Ned. I look forward to seeing the rest of your work on this book. To learn more about Every Moment Holy, visit the campaign page (and share it with your friends!).

One of the topics I’m asked to speak about most often at churches and conferences and in workshops is how God is helping churches see their neighborhoods with fresh eyes. But lately I’ve also been drawn to another aspect of this relationship. In particular, what if it is within the context of the Neighborhood that the Church itself is best seen? The metaphor I keep coming back to is one of bioluminescence, the chemical process by which organisms—fireflies, some deep-sea fish, and other creatures—emit light. (The word derives from the prefix bio-, meaning “life,” and lumen, or “light.”) I’m especially interested in bioluminescent algae and plankton, which can make waves glow, illuminate footprints in the wet sand, or appear as miles-long light trails behind ocean ships. As followers of Jesus, we have the light of Christ inside us. We are 'theoluminescent.' John Pattison In his autobiography, Jim Lovell, the commander of the Apollo 13 mission and a former Navy pilot, recalled the time in 1950 when he had to perform his first night landing on an aircraft carrier. Through a series of unfortunate events, he had gone off course. His instrument panel had shorted out (as had the cockpit light), there was no moon, and thick clouds blocked out the stars. He was plunged into darkness, with no sense of where to find his ship, the USS Shangri-La. But when his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw a faint greenish trail in the water below him. He recognized it immediately as the phosphorescent algae being churned up by the propeller of the aircraft carrier, a road leading him back home. Robert Macfarlane, the British author of The Wild Places, describes wading into the sea of an island cove near Scotland, and “flinging long streaks of fire” from his fingertips like Merlin. “When it was undisturbed, the water was still and black. But where it was stirred, it burned with light.” Macfarlane also told this amazing story: In 2004, a father and son were sailing in the Gulf of Mexico when their yacht was capsized by a gust of wind, sixty miles offshore. They clung to the hull, as it was carried on the powerful currents of the Gulf. After night fell, the water became rich with phosphorescence, and the air was filled with a high discordant music, made of many different notes: the siren song of dolphins. The drifting pair also saw that they were are at the centre of two rough circles of phosphorescence, one turning within the other. The inner circle of light, they realised, was a ring of dolphins, swimming around the upturned boat, and the outer circle was a ring of sharks, swimming around the dolphins. The dolphins were protecting the father and his son, keeping the sharks from them. Bioluminescent marine organisms live at least just below the surface of the water. They all have the capacity to make light, but they’re so small that they can only be seen in community with each other. “By processes not entirely understood,” says Macfarlane, “these simple creatures ignite into light when jostled. They convert the energy of movement into the energy of radiance.” Maybe you’re starting to see why I’m so drawn to this image, and why I think it’s relevant to my work with Slow Church. As followers of Jesus, we have the light of Christ inside us. We are “theoluminescent.” St. Paul told Christians in the city of Ephesus to “walk in the way of love”: For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord…[Everything] exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. (Ephesians 5:8-10, 13) In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:14-16) Theoluminescent, we are “children of the light” (John 12:36). For too long, many displaced and disembodied churches have lived above or apart from their neighborhoods. (My coauthor and I talk about this in Chapter 3 of the Slow Church book.) But what if the Church got below the surface? What if we moved more of our lives into the ongoing life of our neighborhoods? What if we let ourselves be jostled and churned up in our particular places? And what if we did all this within the context of communities of other believers? I think what would happen is that the Church, like those bioluminescent organisms, would turn the energy of movement into the energy of radiance. We would be a trail of light pointing the way home. By God’s grace, we would shine. Image Credit: The image above is from a beautiful scene in the 2012 film Life of Pi. Here’s the full scene: Go Deeper: I’d love to connect and hear about the work you’re doing in your own neighborhood. You can find me on Facebook and on Twitter. If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to the Slow Church blog. As a way of saying thank you, you’ll also get a free copy of the ebook, Growing Deeper in Our Church Communities. #Bioluminescence #Church #LifeofPi #RobertMacFarlane #Place

An artist friend and I had a long talk a while back about the types of people that make up the human race. According to him, most people fall into one of two camps: the leaders and the followers. “Then there’s this fringe element,” he said. “You know, the gonzos, the folks that never really feel like they fit in anywhere. They wouldn’t consider themselves leaders in a million years, but they’re way too individualistic to consent to anything that looked like following, either.” These, he says, are the artists—the thinkers, the writers, the painters, storytellers, musicians, scientists, what-have-you; the ones who observe and articulate the human condition from what often feels like the outside. These are the ones whose notes and colors and theories and words seep into the busy lives of the leaders and the followers, influencing them in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. They pour courage and insight into the human race; they affirm what matters most; they expose the lunacies of the particular generation they happen to inhabit, and they expend superhuman energy interpreting things—important things, true things, culture-shaping things—which the leaders and followers then experience and are eventually affected by. “It’s the fringe element that changes the world,” he told me. “If they’re brave enough.” I mentioned the excruciating sensitivity required of these interpreters, the curse of such harrowing insight into what it means to be alive—which comes coupled with the wonder and joy and sublimity of…being alive. “It must hurt them terribly,” I said. “All that knowing and making known. It must feel like pouring out their hearts’ blood, over and over and over again. And the fringe element rarely sees the real fruit of their labors.” “Maybe,” my friend posed thoughtfully, “maybe they,” and the look he gave me said we, “are meant to take that fall for the rest of humanity. Almost like a martyrdom for the greater good.” His words have haunted me ever since. What do y’all think?

A couple of days ago, we introduced you to Ned Bustard, the illustrator for Every Moment Holy. We gave you an early look at his work, and here’s a peek at the liturgy that goes along with that image. We’re also happy to announce that we’ve decided to include in the book a list of everyone who has helped bring this project to life (we’ll give those who wish to be anonymous a chance to opt out). If you’d like your name to be printed in Every Moment Holy‘s list of patrons, please join us by making a donation on the campaign page. And one more big announcement: We’ve decided that our 3rd quarter thank-you gift to our members will be a hot-off-the-press copy of Every Moment Holy. So if you’d like to be one of the first people to hold a copy of the book, consider becoming a member today. (Note that quarterly thank-you gifts are given out each quarter to those who have been recurring members for a minimum of 2 months of the given quarter. So don’t wait until it’s too late to start your membership.) A Liturgy Before Consuming Media from Every Moment Holy (copyright 2017 by Douglas McKelvey) O Discerning Spirit who alone judges all things rightly, now be present in my mind and active in my imagination as I prepare to engage with the claims and questions of my culture, incarnated in the stories that people tell. Let me experience mediums of art and expression, neither as a passive consumer nor as an entertainment glutton, but rather as one who through such works would more fully and compassionately enter this ongoing human conversation of mystery and meaning, wonder and beauty, good and evil, sorrow and joy, fear and love. All truth is your truth, O Lord, and all beauty is your beauty. Therefore use human expressions of celebration and longing as catalysts to draw my mind towards ever deeper insight, my imagination into new and wondering awe, and my heartbeat into closer rhythm with your own. Shape my vision by your fixed precepts, and tutor me, Holy Spirit, that I might learn to discern the difference between those stories that are whole, echoing the greater narrative of your redemption, and those that are bent or broken, failing to trace accurately the patterns of your eternal thoughts and so failing to name rightly the true condition of humanity and of all creation. Grant me wisdom to divide rightly; to separate form from content, craft from narrative, and meaning from emotion. Bless me with the great discernment to be able to celebrate the stamp of your divine image revealed in an excellence of craft and artistry even while grieving a paucity of meaning and hope in the same work. Guard my mind against the old enticement to believe a lie simply because it is beautifully told. Let me not be careless. Give me right conviction to judge my own motives in that which I approve, teaching me to be always mindful of that which I consume, and thoughtful of the ways in which I consume it. Impart to me keener knowledge of the limits of my own heart in light of my own particular brokenness, that I might choose what would be for my flourishing and not for my harm. And give me the grace to understand that what causes me to stumble might bear no ill consequence for another of your children, so that while I am to care for my brothers and sisters, I must also allow them, in matters of conscience, the freedom to sometimes choose a thing your Spirit convicts me to refrain from. Even so, let my own freedoms in Christ never be flaunted or exercised in such a way as to give cause for confusion, temptation, or stumbling in others. May the stories I partake of, and the ways in which I engage with them make me in the end a more empathetic Christ-bearer, more compassionate, more aware of my own brokenness and need for grace, better able to understand the hopes and fears and failings of my fellow humans so that I might more authentically live and learn and love among them unto the end that all of our many stories might somehow be more beautifully woven into your own greater story. Amen. So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who does not condemn himself by what he approves. —Romans 14:22

In this year’s Best Films of 2016 Rabbit Room podcast, one of the chosen films was… a TV show. Cheating? Sure. But it makes sense to me—over the past ten years or so, the lines have blurred between TV and film. TV production, at its best, is on the level of studio filmmaking, and film franchises are more episodic. We binge-watch movies and shows at home. As far as I’m concerned: —Sherlock is a BBC film series, while Doctor Who is a BBC show —Stranger Things is Netflix show, while The Crown is a Netflix film series —DC Comics movies comprise a film series, while Marvel movies are MCU show episodes —The Force Awakens was a new Star Wars film, while Rogue One was the first part of a Star Wars anthology show That’s where I stand on the film/show dichotomy. I can’t seem to hammer down any specific criteria, but I know what feels like a show to me and what feels like a movie. How do you distinguish a film from a show? Does this dichotomy need definition, or do we need to coin hybrid terms for a in-between production?

Andrew Osenga is spinning some new creative plates these days, from a new career focus on helping young, developing artists find their footing to a new online songwriting course to his instrumental project After Lake (iTunes). From the outside, it’s easy to assume Osenga is enjoying a fruitful, inspired season filled with joy and creativity. Instead, to hear him explain it, the new ventures have organically grown from a tough season of fear and insecurity, confusion and a search for identity. When I first heard you mention an instrumental project, my mind jumped to your four-EP series where you indulged a bit more there than ever. Does this have any roots there? Does it go farther back than even that? A bit, yeah. I really love listening to instrumental music when I’m doing the administrative parts of my work—email, scheduling, bills, etc.—and usually there’s just a lot more melodies going on in my head than I have worthwhile thoughts to share. [Laughs] I did a couple instrumental pieces on Leonard, which was the first time I’d really done anything like that, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This past year has been a pretty tough season of transition for me, and transition into what I still don’t quite know. There have been some days where I just didn’t know where I should be putting my name. I realized I had two options: 1.) Spiral into depression and emotional Facebook suicide, which is where you scroll forever and decide everyone’s life is amazing and yours is the worst, or 2.) I could go do something productive. For the past few months I’ve been choosing option 2, most of the time, and so I go down to my studio in the mornings and write until lunch, either new songs, of which I have a ton and hope to share later this year, or these instrumental pieces. This first collection is the fruit of that first initial bout of productive energy, all done this March. Where does the name “After Lake” come from, besides just sounding cool? I googled “Hipster Band Name Generator” clicked on the first link and “After Lake” was there when it loaded. “That’s pretty cool,” I thought. You’ve got licensing information in the middle of the new website. Is that a primary goal for this, to have the music available to appear in movies, television, etc.? Yeah, the real financial hope for this stuff is that it gets picked up and used in film or TV placements. The long term hope is that building a catalog of music that could fit there would eventually help fund the time it will take to invest in the next phase of my career. When you take away the lyrical expectations of songwriting, how does that change the creative experience for you? Oh man, it is so freeing. Like most writers, I ran out of my “feelings” about halfway through my second record. Then I had to go looking for things to write about. I write a lot of songs and so I can get to feeling like I’m constantly just telling the same three stories. Without worrying about the lyrics or the time it takes to get a great vocal I’m able to move really quickly from idea to completed work. It’s a nice palate cleanser, and interestingly enough, though I’m not using words, I feel I have a lot to say right now, and I can often say it best with tones and melodies. I’m working on a second collection now which I hope to release in June. I give advice to artists all the time where I tell them to set aside regular time to write, but of course, that’s something I’ve never actually done myself until this year. Once I started taking my own advice and writing every day I have just had a flood of new songs come through. I’m back on a lyrical wave right now, so I’m going to ride it until it crests and then get back to After Lake and the next volume of those pieces. You mentioned the last few months you’ve been channeling that energy into something productive. Has that given way to the thing you’ve needed? Or are you still searching in a way, emotionally? In a tangible way, not yet. I’m still very much on that journey with a blindfold. Emotionally, though, it has been a precious gift. I started writing songs as a way to process my thoughts and feelings, and as the hobby became a career it became less about that and more about writing things that, while true, and real, and important to me, could also bring income to provide for my family. In this season it’s been more about writing to reclaim a sense of my own identity, who I am apart from my career and who I am in relationship to God. A lot of it may never end up for public consumption but it’s been important work to do as a person. I think a lot of readers will read your statement about not following your own advice and nod along in agreement. What is it that you think kept you from taking your own advice until now? You know, there were seasons when I was a full-time artist that I would write very regularly. Usually before a record, I would put the time on my calendar and be diligent. Over the last few years, I’ve had other things going on 9 to 5 and have done the traditional “hobby-style” writing, which means you only write late at night when you’re really really sad. [Laughs] I guess I told myself I was too busy: the same thing we all tell ourselves when we’re avoiding something we know is better for us than Netflix and Instagram. It is crazy how productive but it has been to just put time on my calendar to write and then follow through on that commitment. It makes sense. If you actually make the time to write three times a week, 40 weeks a year, there’s just no way you won’t have some good songs by the end of that year. What other creative plates are you spinning these days? This past year I’ve done a lot, and I mean a lot, of soul searching, trying to figure out what I really want to spend the second half of my career doing. The conclusion is that I love walking with songwriters and artists. It’s a strange calling and not an easy one, and so my heart is to help guide people to avoid the mistakes I made and to have a healthy artistic life, whatever that needs to look like for them. That may eventually lead me back into a record label or publishing company, we’ll see, but right now I have the freedom to serve whoever knocks on the door, and that’s kind of beautiful. So what I’ve been doing this season so far has been writing in the morning and then consulting in the afternoons. I help out with A&R duties for a few smaller record companies or management firms and then do a lot of Artist Development consulting, where I sit with artists and help them figure out their goals, their resources, and make plans to do the things they want to do. it’s life-giving work that I really enjoy, and I’m hoping I can serve people enough there that it can grow into a sustainable business. I’ve been putting together an online songwriting course, as well, which I hope to beta-test for Rabbit Room folks sometime this Summer. #AfterLake #AndrewOsenga

One of the great things about writings songs (or books, or painting portraits, or recording podcasts) is that you don’t need permission. You need time, a couple tools (often way less than you think you need) and the will to Make Something. The news will always be stressful, Instagram will always make you feel like your life isn’t as great as somebody else’s, TV will always promise rest but leave you more tired. We justify our distractions and give them so much of our lives. They will never pay you back. It’s pretty darn rare that you spend four hours staring at screens and get up thinking, “Wow, that was really worth it! I’m better for that experience.” So look up from the news, hold the instagram app until it does its little “delete me” dance, throw a blanket over the TV and put the remote on a high shelf in a different room. Get out that notebook. Set up your easel. Take a walk and hum a new tune. No one can stop you but yourself. Make Something. You will never regret that you did. Source: Make Something — ANDREW OSENGA

A lot of you may be familiar with Sara Masarik’s Plumfield and Paideia blog and the Potato Peel Pie Book Community on Facebook. If not, keep reading. This month they are beginning a series of reading quests from Doug McKelvey and Jamin Still’s Stories We Shared book journal, and it’s definitely something you should get in on. Here’s Sara’s intro to the adventure from her blog: At Plumfield and Paideia, we believe that every child is a reader (even if they don’t know it yet) and that every family should have a read-aloud culture. In our Facebook group, Potato Peel Pie Book Community, we have had the privilege of journeying with many families who are trying to navigate the waters of reading and the seas of books – good and bad. Along the way, we have realized the importance of pointing people in the direction of really good and great books in a wide variety of genres. In May of 2016, Doug McKelvey and Jamin Still created a gorgeous family read-aloud book journal, a beautiful place for families to track the books they share together. We believe that this journal will be a legacy item that reveals the “ropes that we could feel but could not see” which allows families to scoop up stars and wishes together. In that journal, they added an absolutely inspired piece: Reading Quests. These reading challenges focus a reader in a particular direction and give them a kind of scavenger hunt list that they can use to go on a reading adventure! We loved this idea so much that we asked Doug and the Rabbit Room if we could partner with them and build a community-wide challenge. So, find your coat… your shoes and your hat… it is time to go on an adventure together! Here is how this going to work: Each month, on this site, we will feature one of the reading quests from The Stories We Shared family reading journal. During that month, we will post an article with details of that quest and links to reviews of books we recommend that would qualify for the quest. On our Facebook page, we will post a link to a submission form where families can suggest books that fit the quest criteria. At the end of the month we will publish a list of our favorite suggestions! Also on our Facebook page, we will post a thread asking families to post a picture from their family questing adventure. The photo could be a picture of their child reading, a photo of their completed quest page in the journal, or anything else that fits in with the spirit of the adventure. We welcome your creativity! At the end of the month, we will randomly select one submission to win a fantastic prize: a copy of The Stories We Shared journal plus one Rabbit Room book we love. We are starting in June with the Literary Zookeeper Quest. Click here to visit Plumfield and Paideia and get the full scoop. Source: Quest Adventure – Plumfield and Paideia

I can’t remember for sure how it started. I think I was just driving around in my car when a phrase suddenly came to mind: “Here’s to the weak ones…” And those words must have reminded me of the first line of Apple’s iconic “Think Different” advertising campaign (“Here’s to the crazy ones…”) because all of a sudden I was imagining what it would have sounded like if Steve Jobs had translated the Beatitudes. The “Think Different” campaign debuted in 1997. Print ads featured black-and-white photos of rebels and misfits like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali, Jim Henson, Albert Einstein, and many others. The TV spots, narrated by Richard Dreyffus, began with the memorable line, “Here’s to the crazy ones…” Here is that one-minute commercial: If we imagine the Sermon on the Mount as the constitution for the Kingdom of God, the Beatitudes are its world-inverting preamble. Instead of trying to win favor with the religious, political, and moneyed elites, Jesus blesses the poor in spirit, the pure in heart, the grieving, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran priest who was assassinated in 1980 for his outspoken advocacy for the poor and his criticism of the brutal military regime in El Salvador, said this of the Beatitudes: “Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down.” Even Kurt Vonnegut, the self-described “Christ-loving atheist,” was “enchanted” by the Sermon on the Mount. “If Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being,” he said in a 1999 commencement address at Agnes Scott College. “I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.” In his 2005 book, A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut wrote: For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. “Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!” If Steve Jobs had a created a campaign for the Beatitudes, I imagine it would feature images of people like Romero, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. Mother Teresa, and other heroes of the faith who were “crazy” enough to follow hard after Jesus. I don’t know, maybe it should even include Kurt Vonnegut, who, even though he could never fully accept Jesus’s divinity, still let Jesus change his heart in ways that challenge me as a Christian. I think of this as the “Live Different” campaign. The image below has my preferred formatting. Below that you’ll find the plain text version. The plain text version… If Steve Jobs Translated the Beatitudes Here’s to the weak ones. The outcasts. The broken. The peacemakers. The ragamuffin royalty who will inherit a new world. The ones who see God through open eyes and open hearts. They don’t long for power. And they have no respect for status. You can insult them, spread lies about them, disbelieve, vilify or persecute them. About the only thing you can’t do is dishearten them. Because God is changing them, they change things. They comfort. They show mercy. They heal. They mourn with those who mourn. They love. They are filled to overflowing with goodness. And while some may see them as the weak ones, I say they are blessed. Because the people who give up everything to follow me in this life, will get it all back and more in the next. Go Deeper: I’d love to connect and hear about the work you’re doing in your own neighborhood. You can find me on Facebook and on Twitter. If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to the Slow Church blog. As a way of saying thank you, you’ll also get a free copy of the ebook, Growing Deeper in Our Church Communities. #Beatitudes #Mashups #SermonontheMount #SteveJobs

In October 1949, a brassy New Yorker named Helene Hanff wrote a letter to a staid London bookseller named Frank Doel. “I am a poor writer,” she told him, “with an antiquarian taste in books.” She knew exactly what she was looking for: essays by Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Robert Lewis Stevenson. And a Latin Vulgate Bible. “If you have clean secondhand copies,” she wrote, “for no more than $5.00 each, will you consider this a purchase order and send them to me?” A month later, and in admirable good faith, a package arrived from London. “The Stevenson is so fine it embarrasses my orange-crate bookshelves,” Helene wrote back. “I never knew a book could be such a joy to the touch.” Enclosing a five dollar bill and a single for change, she dispatched her response with an added plea for “translated” prices in future: “I don’t add too well in plain American, I haven’t a prayer of ever mastering bilingual arithmetic.” Thus commenced a twenty-year correspondence that filled Helene’s shelves and sealed a firm friendship, not only with Frank Doel, but with his wife and daughters, and with the entire staff of the little bookshop at 84, Charing Cross Road. When Frank died unexpectedly in 1968, Helene was a failed playwright, and an out-of-work screenwriter. She didn’t know where the next paycheck was going to come from; she didn’t know how she was going to pay the rent. The news of Frank’s death came like one blow too many in an already brutal year. “I began to cry and I couldn’t stop,” she wrote later.  “I don’t know at what point in my crying I began to mutter over and over: “I have to write it. I have to write it.” Over the next few months, Helene shaped her correspondence with Frank into a story she knew no one would ever publish. But that wasn’t what mattered. Frank’s friendship deserved a memorial; the treasures that crowded her “orange-crate bookshelves” called forth a response. No one was more surprised than Helene Hanff when 84, Charing Cross Road became a cult classic overnight. Lanier Ivester It was too long for a short story; too short for a book. But—amazingly—a publisher named Dick Grossman wanted it. No one was more surprised than Helene Hanff when 84, Charing Cross Road became a cult classic overnight. Fan mail and phone calls poured in from all over the world. A respected English publisher snatched it up; it was made into a BBC television series, a London West End production, a Broadway play, and a major motion picture starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. Helene’s financial worries were over. She had attained a success of fairytale proportions. But even that was secondary to the connections she’d made—first in books, then in relationship—to the men and women who shaped her story, who helped articulate who she was in context of noble ideals and generous friendship. Helene’s debt of love was immeasurable. But the story didn’t end there. As a matter of fact, it didn’t even begin there. Back in the 1930s Helene was an aspiring writer with no hope of a college education. The Great Depression was raging, and scholarships were scarce. Helene knew that if she wanted to be a good writer she would have to be taught to be a great reader. And if she wanted teachers, she was going to have to find them herself. So she went to the most logical place: her local public library. “What I wanted was the Best,” she wrote. “Written in language I could understand.” Most of the textbooks were lofty and academic, completely over her head. She sampled the entire alphabet, pulling one book after another, and replacing them in turn with a sinking heart. When she reached the ‘Qs’ there was only one selection: a thin series of essays by a Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. A quick glance at his bio told her, among other things, that he was a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, and that to his students at Cambridge (where he still taught), he was known affectionately as ‘Q.’ “If you wanted instruction on how to read and write English, Oxford-and-Cambridge was definitely the Best,” she reasoned. So she took him home. For the rest of that summer—and for the next several years—she devoted herself to Q’s teachings, taking every scrap of advice to heart, and reading every book he so much as alluded to in his lectures. Q became her mentor, the Virgil to her Dante, the George MacDonald to her C. S. Lewis, guiding her skillfully and faithfully through the landscape of English literature until it felt like native turf. And it was Q—and the scarcity of his recommendations in American versions—who eventually led her back across the Pond, to a bookseller named Frank Doel, and a little shop at 84, Charing Cross Road. “I owed [Q] whatever literary education I had,” she wrote, “and enough training in the craft of writing to have kept myself alive by it… I owed him my shelves full of books—Wherefore I owed him 84, Charing Cross Road—and the hundreds, if not thousands of friends [that book] had brought me. It was an awesome legacy for a Cambridge don to have conferred on a lowly pupil he never knew existed three thousand miles away.” I think that the story of Frank and Helene and Q is a beautiful image of the connections that happen here at the Rabbit Room. At Hutchmoot last year, my friend Chris Slaten and I presented a session wherein we talked about some of the literary responses to the disenchantments of our age, and I went into how C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and their ilk looked back to the robust sacramentalism of the Medieval period to inform their fantasy novels. At this moment in time, I’m midway through an undergraduate course in English at Oxford University, and much of the inspiration for my talk came from a Middle English literature class that set my mind on fire in ways I never expected. The greatest joy of my studies has been the connections I’m making between periods of literature and the story of humanity—it’s like I keep bumping into Jesus amid the radiance of medieval manuscripts and the clear heights of antiquity. And every time I do, I find that one of my heroes has already been there. I mean, I knew that Lewis and Tolkien were medievalists, and that Dorothy Sayers’ translation of Dante was almost as stupendous a feat as the Comedy itself. I knew that Charles Williams pulled heavily from medieval thought in his incarnational theology. But when you go back and find them there, warming their hands, as it were, around the Christ-light that lives at the heart of every good and true and noble thing—well, it’s like showing up at a huge party and realizing that all of your best friends are already there. 'I want to know how you see all these things in books,' she said. Lanier Ivester The connections between me and my literary heroes—between my literary heroes and each other—happen because we love, and we’re looking for, the Same Thing. After that Hutchmoot session, a young woman came up to me and looked me right in the eye. “I want to know how you see all these things in books,” she said. She was a senior in high school, with dreams of becoming an English major, and she wanted to know, point blank, How do we make these connections between human stories and God’s story? How do you find Jesus in the books you love? It was one of the best questions anyone has ever asked me. We chatted briefly about resources and academic examples. But I told her: “Sweetheart—You’re doing it. The fact that you’re asking means you’re already looking. And I promise you—if you’re looking for Him, in art, literature, the beauty of the world—you will find Him. He’s everywhere.” As G. M. Hopkins put it, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in eyes and limbs not His…” Literature—like all of the arts—is either redemptive or it’s destructive. It’s either marked by God’s presence, or it’s haunted by His absence. But you can’t miss Him—even if you have no idea what you’re looking at. After Jesus fed the 5000, he had His disciples go around and pick up all the leftover pieces of bread “that nothing may be lost.” And, as we all know, those fragments, garnered from five barley loaves that had just fed over 5000 people filled up twelve whole baskets. I like to think that’s a picture of how the truth-bearing fragments we pick up along the way, the stories and songs by which our own souls are nourished and over which we connect with other people, are exponentially redemptive, generative of a life larger than the poets, songwriters, storytellers and artists could ever had imagined. And it reminds me what an important work this is—to keep gathering up these fragments—these splinters of a shattered Eden—and sharing them with other people, reminding them, as we do that the Story’s not over. I was in Oxford last May, and in between lectures and meetings, I basically followed my heroes all over that golden city, keeping trysts I hadn’t had time for on previous visits. I visited Charles Williams’ grave at Holywell. I had tea with friends at The Kilns, and I had tea by myself at the Eastgate Hotel where Jack and Tollers kept their sacrosanct Monday date. I holed up for hours in one of the oak reading bays of Duke Humfrey’s library, and I stumbled into the Oxford Oratory where G. M. Hopkins, of all dear souls, was curate. On my last day, I skipped a lecture to wander Addison’s Walk, the loved haunt of C. S. Lewis at Magdalen College. There was this muddy little byway branching off of the main walk leading to a stone bench in front of the gate to the Water Meadow, and I sat there in the sunshine for a solid hour contemplating the view of flower-sprinkled mead and golden spires beyond, thinking of all I owed Jack and his friends. It was so poignant to think that I was in Oxford, that I’d been flashing that university card in and out of colleges and libraries all week, not on my own inspiration or merit, but because my heroes had been here before me. I was here because they were here—and because they had left something behind for me to trace, to pick up and to carry forward. Lewis, Tolkien and the others entrusted us with these overflowing baskets of fragments, leftover splendors of a world that was and will be again, truths and beauties upon which they had been fed, and which they, in turn, broke open to feed the world. This kind of holy generosity calls forth a response, to not only enjoy such deeply incarnational creative acts, but to interact with them, to carry their riches forward in our own lives, to interpret their truths in our own unique voice. In like manner, from my very first encounter with the Rabbit Room I was goaded with this overwhelming longing to respond. To add an emphatic, “Yes! Me, too!” to the truths and beauties I found here. To roll up my sleeves in the good, hard work of articulating the Kingdom to a broken world. And to generate that kind of life in another human being—isn’t that the most creative work of all? But the legacy of the Rabbit Room won’t end with these folks, or even with their works, any more than it started with them. I firmly believe that because they’ve responded to the longings kindled by what they found among the pages of Lewis and Tolkien, Chesterton and George MacDonald, and so many others, that they’re paving the way for other Lewises and Tolkiens and Chestertons to take up the golden thread long after they’re gone. I can’t help but imagine, someday, ages and ages hence, people coming to Andrew’s Chapter House, or North Wind Manor, or The Well Coffeehouse, making pilgrimage in much the same way as I’d followed Lewis and Hopkins all over Oxford— Like I’d walked up and down Charing Cross Road in London five years ago, looking for number 84— I picture these people, people yet-unborn, seeking somehow to connect with a larger story, to respond to the good things this community fostered in some kind of tangible way. But it won’t be Andrew or Eric or Rebecca or Jonathan or Jennifer they’re looking for—it will be the unique glimpse of Jesus which they gave them. Can’t you just see it? They’ll stoop, pick up a fragment of bread so alive it feels like a hot coal in their hands. In faithfulness they’ll give thanks, break it— And that fragment will feed hundreds, if not thousands. If not more… This is a transcript  from the Rabbit Room Live event in November 2016.

I am a Christian at a loss for words. In fact, speaking from a Christian perspective feels something like tiptoeing through a minefield of words: I can barely write without worrying that the words I’m using will either implode with cultural baggage or lie dormant underground, meaning nothing. Allow me to demonstrate. I mock Chick-fil-A as I stuff waffle fries into my mouth. I’ve been reluctantly cuffing my jeans for several months now. “Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord” is my guilty pleasure. When searching for a C. S. Lewis quote, I mistakenly open my Bible to the New Testament. I still get a little too excited that communion at my church involves real wine. I liked banjos before they were cool. I believe the word “creative” was never meant to be used as a noun to describe a type of person. I know just enough Hebrew to decipher the majority of forearm tattoos. I cringe at phrases like “facilitating community” and “intentional vulnerability,” yet crave these things at my core. I have been searching for a new word, when what I need is a true word. Drew Miller So here I am, flailing in a sea of failing words, and my first instinct is to throw them away and look for new ones. I go shopping on Wikipedia for a new spirituality as nonchalantly as if I were shopping for new clothes. I borrow from various traditions and languages, attempting to escape the suffocation of my own, only to find that I get tired of those too. I have been searching for a new word, when what I need is a true word. Every word is a promise we keep by speaking, a promise made to protect the hope that humans are still capable of telling the truth. True words, then, are promises as-yet unbroken, little pictures of fidelity reminding us that we can still trust each other. But what happens when we break these promises? We kill words. There are about as many ways to kill words as there are to kill people, but here I’ll list the three most common as I see them. First and least harmful, we kill words through sheer repetition. When this happens, the deceased word is then referred to as a “cliche.” Cliches are like the poor songs that get overplayed on the radio: they aren’t necessarily bad or untrue–in fact they are often overused because they have something good to say–it’s just that I never want to hear “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz ever again. Second and more serious, we kill words through dishonesty. These dead words are called lies. This is pretty straightforward: a breakdown occurs between what I’m saying and reality, causing people to lose trust in me. My word is no longer true. We are speaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in the presence of what we have said. Wendell Berry Last and most dangerous, we kill words by using them violently. Words that have been used violently are referred to as “bad words:” vulgarity, prejudice, and hate speech, for example. Wendell Berry has written, “We are speaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in the presence of what we have said.” We have all stood in the presence of truth, deception, joy, and exhaustion, whether from our own words or the words of others. We know from experience, then, that the health of a language indicates the health of those dealing in that language. Our world is filled to the brim with words, and the turnover rate for these words is ever-increasing. The chattering of news networks, emails, and advertisements hardly gives us a chance to stand “in the presence of what we have said.” This constant frenzy does considerable damage to our words, rendering some useless and others dangerous until we struggle to speak meaningfully at all. And yet there is one ancient word that manages to rise from the ashes no matter how many ways we kill it. This is no ordinary word; it also happens to be a person: the word that was “made flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14) This person I speak of was marred and mangled, bloodied and beaten. His name has been deceitfully bought and sold, invoked for acts of mass violence, and domesticated into empty cliches. This person suffered the deepest alienation humanity has ever known: the cavern between Creator and creature. His name has been used as a weapon to further this alienation, to sprinkle salt into his own wounds. But this word has proven true, not in spite of these atrocities, but because he can be found binding up wounds in the thick of them. He is to be trusted because “by his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5) When the truth of this gospel sinks into my heart, I react in one of two ways. Sometimes, I am even more at a loss for words than before. I gag at all the ways I have spoken of Jesus, whether harmful, presumptuous, or just plain silly. I struggle to form one complete sentence about him. I may try to write a song, because songs seem more durable than plain speech, but I fail in the attempt. Finally, I resolve myself to silence. Other times, the truth of this one eternal word suddenly enlivens all the other words. In my joy, all my abuse of language doesn’t matter to me anymore. I want to say all the words because they are all so beautiful. I begin to love speaking of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, my Father in heaven, and his kingdom coming to earth. I resolve myself to speech, saying, “I will never hesitate to speak the gospel again.” But have you ever said a word over and over again so many times that it sounded like gibberish? Have you ever looked at someone you love, and then all of a sudden, they look completely unfamiliar to you? No matter the resonance of my silence or my words, I usually end up feeling like I’m speaking gibberish and praying to a stranger. I recently told one of my past professors about this. He said, “I think it’s a good thing that you’ve realized you don’t actually know Jesus.” I asked him why, and he reminded me that just when we think we know everything there is to know about someone we love, we discover that we don’t know them at all. As odd as it sounds, I take a strange comfort in the humiliation of knowing I don’t know Jesus. At least from here, I can begin to know him with greater sincerity.

[Cracking the Cover interviewed Jennifer Trafton recently, and they talk about writing, the creative process, Henry and the Chalk Dragon, and many other good things.] Why do you write? Why specifically for young people? The author Susan Cooper once said we’re all at the mercy of the imagination we were born with—I’ve got an imagination that needs to spill out of me in stories, and they happen to be the kind of stories that have buried giants, walking trees, poison-tongued jumping tortoises, runaway dragons, and children with wild imaginations at their center, because those are the kind of stories I most enjoy reading. I also just find children endlessly fascinating as human beings. I love their fresh perspective on the world, their lack of cynicism, the fantastic ideas they dream up, and their embrace of silliness as well as mystery. I love the questions they ask. For many years, I tried desperately to be a grown-up and to pursue some sort of normal grown-up career with a paycheck and a retirement fund and all of that, but alas! The pull of giants and dragons and ten-year-old heroines in eccentric hats was far too strong, and I walked one day into the children’s section of the bookstore, spread my arms wide, and bellowed (at least in my heart), “These are my people!” After that, my fate was sealed. So I write “for children” because I feel like, at the level of the imagination, and in the stories I love to read and love to write, I’m one of them. [Read the entire interview.]

Back in 2010, my husband and I attended our first (and the first!) Hutchmoot. It was exciting, and a little surreal, to contemplate a face-to-face gathering of a fellowship that had formerly been confined to my computer screen. (It was also slightly terrifying—I broke out in hives on our way to Nashville.) We were accompanied by some of our best friends, a couple whom Philip and I not only love to travel with, but regard among our most trusted companions. Early in our marriage, we identified a cluster of people with whom, God-willing, we wanted to walk through life; we called them our “always yes” friends, deciding ahead of time our default response to their needs, requests or invitations. In short, if they asked, the answer was “yes,” if it were at all humanly possible. And Luke and Laura were at the top of that list. It’s no exaggeration to say that the weekend was life-altering. For three days we enjoyed excellent music, gourmet food, and penetrating conversation. We attended lectures on George MacDonald, Annie Dillard, and Flannery O’Connor. We met some of our heroes, and we heard Walt Wangerin deliver a breathtaking address on the real work of an artist in a heartbroken and homesick world: “We are shapers”, he told us, taken literally from the Old English word for artist. “We come upon the mess and apart from our own wisdom we make order of it.” That concept was so luminous it lit a fire in my heart. I longed to make that kind of art, to create a world out of the raw materials I had at hand and invite others in to help make sense of their own worlds. “Artists weave the world around those who have no world or personhood or name”, Walt told us, and, in a way, that’s what this weekend had done for me. In discovering this community, I’d found my people at last; putting solid faces and personalities and friendships behind words on a screen had altered not only my inner landscape, but my outer one, as well. My ambitions had received a thoroughly good scrubbing and my reading list had increased ten-fold. I was brimming with a desire to create, not merely words on paper, but a physical context within which all the holy ideals we’d been talking about could flourish, bloom, bear fruit. In short, a great conversation had begun, and I didn’t want it end. We actually didn’t see much of Luke and Laura over the weekend, each of us making a point to reach out to people we wouldn’t have met otherwise. However, as soon as we were back home Monday morning, Laura fired off one of her characteristically to-the-point emails. “What do we do now?” she wanted to know. It was the question I had been asking myself all morning, in the doldrums of post-trip laundry and letdown. I was already wistful over the lively fellowship we had left behind in Nashville, and the multitude of “what, you, too?” moments the weekend had entailed. I wish we had something like that in Atlanta, I thought, for the hundredth time, as I sorted and folded, making order of a house that had not seen my touch in four days. But Laura would not be satisfied with wistfulness. As far as she was concerned, this experience demanded a response. And she wasn’t going to let me get off with a mere blog post or journal entry. “Let’s have lunch,” she went on. “This week.” Which was interpreted to mean she had an Idea. My instincts proved accurate, for scarcely had we been seated at one of our favorite little French places a few days later, than she leaned forward and smiled a smile of the inspired. “I think that we should start a couples’ book club,” she said. “To start discussing all of these things we talked about at Hutchmoot.” It was a brilliant idea, almost a done deal the moment it was out of her mouth. Of course—what better way to carry forward the encouragement and inspiration we had received than to nourish it in our own sphere? What better way to enflesh the ideals we had been celebrating and the authors who articulated them, than to develop these ideals within the varying perspectives of trusted friends? We spent the remainder of our lunch discussing logistics and outlining a basic infrastructure, but on the whole, our plan was quite simple. It needed to be regular (survival depended on this, first and foremost), and it had to be intimate enough for honest conversation. We wanted men and women with whom we agreed on the essentials of our faith, but whom we trusted enough to enter the fray over non-essentials. In short, we wanted to be challenged, sharpened. Refined. Membership was capped at twelve, not out of exclusivity but pure necessity. There are plenty of opportunities in life for a come-one-come-all approach; this, however, was not one of them. In theory, each member could select a book for each month; in reality we’ve yet to read twelve books in a year. But there was an even greater incentive for limitation: Laura and I agreed unequivocally that we all had to fit around one table. Sharing a meal was requisite for the kind of community we were seeking to nurture, and if we got too big for one conversation, we were too big. (Few people, we realized, actually have a dining table large enough for twelve, but anyone can tack on a card table and a piano bench. And when a room is ringed with loved, candlelit faces, no one notices the furniture.) Invitations were extended and warmly accepted, and the following month we held our inaugural meeting. It was a playfully uproarious meal to which each couple contributed; my house smelled so good and was so full of laughter and candlelight that one friend said it felt like Christmas. And when the club name was submitted for approval it was met with a general shout of enthusiasm: “The Notions” we called ourselves, as a nod to the Oxford Inklings, and its unfinished fictional counterpart by J.R.R. Tolkien. (It was also at that meeting, I think, that I received my club sobriquet, “Chuck”, for my very Charles Williams-ish tendencies towards the refilling of wine glasses and the steady supply of ale.) When we retired to the den for coffee and formal discussion, I opened with some thoughts about the vision for this club and the motivation behind Laura’s idea. I told about Nashville and how inspired we were by all these artists and their works (as well as our own charge to create in the image of a Creator) but how the biggest takeaway was that we were not meant to do this alone. We were designed to take this artistic journey of life and faith and discovery in company of others. From its very inception, The Notions put me in mind of the book of Nehemiah, wherein the builders labored among the rubble of Jerusalem, rebuilding a wall with tools in one hand and weapons in the other. It was hard work, isolating work, and a good metaphor for the task of keeping and shaping culture in a world of decaying standards and crumbling absolutes. “The work is extensive and spread out,” Nehemiah told his companions, “and we are widely separated from each other along the wall.” So what did he do? He instituted a trumpet call that would summon everyone together, for refreshment, instructions, encouragement. “That’s kind of what this is,” I told the others. “A monthly “sounding of the trumpet,” where we can gather to remind each other who we are and what kinds of lives we want to lead.” Appropriately enough, we had chosen T. S. Eliot’s “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” for our first reading, and the discussion went better than Laura or I could have hoped. Everyone contributed stimulating thoughts, and there was even enough healthy disagreement to make things truly lively and real. Philip got up quietly and made more coffee and people stole in and out serving themselves, unwilling to disturb the conversation or to miss any of it themselves. We talked about what it really means to ‘build the Church’: what impedes and what spurs us along. What our ‘small lights’ look like and why our art matters. There was never a lull, never a comment or a question that fell flat, but many a reading from the text, citings of cross-references, and scrutiny against the standard of Scripture. The ultimate success of the evening can be summed up in the fact that it was well-past midnight before anyone realized. In the years since we’ve read dozens of books, poems, essays. We’ve gone en masse to local shows of artists we admire, and we’ve plotted weekend getaways for twelve. At Christmas our meeting is a black tie affair, but all the rest of the year it’s easy and casual. Hospitality (as opposed to “entertaining”) is a guiding principle, and while table settings are created with the utmost care (and often subtly themed) dinner is potluck to make things light on the hostess. From the beginning soup has been our mainstay: with diets ranging from vegetarian to gluten-free to hardcore Paleo, soup is the most accommodating dish, lending itself to endless variety. But with a couple of pots of something savory, a big salad, bread, dessert, a few bottles of wine, and a regular date on the calendar, we’ve developed a no-fail recipe for intentional community. Throw in a little Dorothy Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, Gerard Manly Hopkins or C. S. Lewis, and you’ve got yourself a feast. Not to mention a Fellowship. Originally published on Humane Pursuits.