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I wonder if this story is familiar to you. Their bodies are virile and ageless, and they are glad and bold in their nakedness. They go out to meet the morning, and a cool mist rises from the fertile soil. The clear cries of birds linger over the tops of the trees. Every leaf is pristine, every flower saturated with color. The day’s work is a delight to them, and Adam laughs as a gecko shimmies up a tree and blinks. He gives it its name and sends it on its way while Eve reclines at his side. They eat the fruit of the garden, and it is all the nourishment they need. They never tire of its bright sweetness, and the waters of the river quench their thirst entirely. In the evenings, they visit with the Creator. They stroll and chat as the sun sets, and then Adam, filled to bursting with joy, stays up all night to name the stars. They are given one—ONE—instruction. One rule to follow. And as the days or the years pass, they grow tired of paradise. Perfect bliss loses its luster. Adam is bored with the animals, and Eve can no longer endure the flavor of the fruit. Like the greedy ingrates they are, they begin to want more than perfection. More than all needs met, all delights enjoyed. Their desire brings everything crashing down. The earth groans and death slips through the door. The Creator, in horror and rage, curses them for their longing and their choice. He sheds blood and banishes them, hurling them out of Eden and barring the gates with a warrior and a fiery sword. This is how I learned the story of my beginning. The heading over Genesis chapters 2 and 3 in my Bible reads “Man’s Shameful Fall.” Shame on me. I had it all. The only thing left to be gained was deity, and I had to go grasping after that. I sent all creation reeling and stumbling until God reluctantly, angrily, developed a bloody Plan B. I have worn that shame like a veil over my eyes for as long as I can remember. I have felt, at every stir of longing or desire, a check. I already have so much. What sort of wicked ingratitude would spur me to ask for more? I feel like a child who got a tiny plastic bicycle for Christmas. I’d wanted a real one, of course, with a basket and a bell, but how could I dare to want more than what I’ve been given? A little toy bicycle is wonderful, really. I can push it around on the kitchen floor. I can make the sounds of the wheels and the bell with my voice. Who could want more than that? I’m ashamed to say that I do. Not long ago, a friend told me about her obsession with the story of Eden. She was fascinated by all things Eden, stories of Eden lost, and so on. Her fascination led her to my second book, but when she began to read, she didn’t see Eden anywhere. She was confused, disappointed. Why had I told her this was a story about Eden? It was a beautiful place, sure, the best the world of Shiloh had to offer, but it was certainly not paradise. Her questions unnerved me, sending me back to the Biblical narrative. What I found there confirmed my ideas about my book. I had written it right. But it gave me a new perspective on the world of Eden. (It is astonishing and humbling that an artist can tell the truth without knowing it in his bones. I told myself the truth in that book, and I didn’t even know it till now.) Let me try, then, to present the story differently. This time, I will lay aside my shame and my early ideas about the Fall. I will try to draw on the Scripture, but I’ll make a few leaps of the imagination, too. Stay with me. Adam is strong and good, and he is the apple of his Creator’s eye. He has a lovely home, but the management and upkeep of the land are a huge undertaking. Without root rot or spider mites or droughts or slugs, the plants grow vigorously. If Adam isn’t careful, his garden will become an impassable jungle. He enjoys the naming of the animals. By turns they are comical, majestic, and bizarre. To capture the essence of each in a single word, though, is a challenge. It stretches his creativity to the limit. He is lonely. God appears to have thought that the animals might entertain him, but in the flight of birds and the roaring of lions he finds no kinship. He marvels at the speed and cunning of a shark, but he cannot speak its language, nor learn its love of ocean currents, nor find peace in its restless journeying. When God forms woman and brings her to Adam, he is overcome. His desire for her is unlike anything he has ever experienced. And yet, while she is nearer to him in thought and form than any other creature he has encountered, he cannot know her fully. The mystery of her awakens the old loneliness. In the evening, he is comforted. He walks with the Creator as with a friend, and they talk of the curious things the Creator has designed and Adam’s intended uses for them. They speak of the progress of the garden, and Eve joins the conversation. But during the night he is troubled. The animals, for the most part, are sleeping, and the flowers have bowed their heads. Once the thrill of physical pleasure is past, Adam and Eve lie apart. His body cools, and Adam’s eyes drift to the stars. Sleep eludes him, and his thoughts turn to the immense and terrible darkness behind the stars. Something is gnawing at him, some shapeless hunger. He wonders if it has anything to do with the serpent he met in the garden all those days ago. The serpent speaks in riddles, its words leaving a residue of discontent. Still, Adam cannot stay away. That creature seems to see his secret desire. Something is missing, it hisses, and this is not a lie. But, oh, the one rule! The one thing the Creator implored him not to do! He has discussed it with Eve, and they are determined to obey. They reject the serpent’s suggestion—for a heartbeat, for a decade—but in the end, there seems no other answer. They want more, and the fruit is desirable, and they cannot bear their yearning any longer. They take the fruit and eat it, and the juice tingles on their tongues and slides like poison into their bellies. The Creator comes, and this is where we must take a monumental leap. Here we must pause and look a while at the Creator’s face, for his expression in this moment is the one he’ll wear forever. It’s the one we’ll shrink from, dread, worship, adore. It’s the one we’ll approach, or not. Through the veil of shame, I see his eyes burn, his jaw tighten. His is the anger of a parent whose spoiled child has received a hundred gifts and thrown a tantrum, demanding more. His is a righteous indignation. Perhaps Adam and Eve in their shame saw him so. But what if his eyes are pained and soft? What if his mouth trembles? What if, with a little nod of his head, he assures them that he knew this was coming, that he expected it, that he is ready? “Where have you been?” he asks. “I’ve been waiting to talk with you.” Adam refuses to meet his eyes. “I hid because I was naked.” “You look just as you did yesterday evening. Who told you that something had changed?” The Creator waits, studying his children. “Did you disobey me?” he asks. Adam, ashamed, cannot find the nerve to own his crime. “This woman gave me the fruit, and you’re the one who gave her to me.” The Creator looks at Eve. He doesn’t rage or cast blame. He only says, “What did you do?” Her response, twisted by shame, is like Adam’s. If there is anger in the account of the Fall, it is here, when the Creator turns to deal with the serpent. On that creature he pronounces a curse of lasting humiliation and final subjugation. Then, in contrast, and this is crucial, he lists for Adam and Eve the consequences of their choices. He knows about desire, knows that Eve will seek to fulfill hers in motherhood, in marriage, in positions of power. He warns her that none of these things will satisfy. Adam will seek elsewhere—in his work, in his land, in the quest for immortality. All these things God pronounces as futile. He foretells a future of enmity, sorrow, suffering. But he never once condemns them for wanting more. I think he knew what they wanted. I think he wanted the same. If Eden was a place of perfection, of completion, then it is true that Adam and Eve should have had no need unmet, no wish unfulfilled. That’s the way I learned the story. We had it perfect, and we screwed it up. Ours is the hugest, most catastrophic of failures. But if Eden was a place of challenge, of loneliness, if in Eden evil was present, then paradise had failings indeed. If God could come and go, an external and ephemeral presence, then perhaps Adam never felt quite certain of his standing with the Creator. Maybe Adam wanted more from God. We romanticize Adam and Eve in their innocence. Like babies, they were beautiful and simple and easy to love. But if you have ever loved an innocent, you know that that relationship is one-sided. It takes a long time for a baby to grow up, to know you, to love you back. Maybe God wanted more from Adam. In Genesis 3:22, God makes a strange announcement to the other persons of the Trinity. “Man has become like us now,” he says. “He’s not a baby anymore.” He drives Adam and Eve out of the garden, and I think that the driving was something like shooing a toddler away from a dangerous staircase. I think the angel with the flaming sword was something like a baby gate. Mankind had gotten just old enough to totter around and hurt himself and make mischief. But that was only the beginning. Eden was a beginning, a temporary best. It wasn’t heaven. It wasn’t “I in them and thou in me.” We needed time and growth and the failure of the law. We needed desire. And God sent us out into the world to grow up. The Lamb “slain before the foundation of the world” knew he would follow the same path, beginning in infancy, growing, learning his hunger. He would choose relationship, though, and his passion for more of us would carry him to the end, to the point of union, of ecstatic consummation. Could Adam have imagined such intimacy? Maybe not. Innocents understand very little of suffering and redemption. As the years of his life stretched on and on, did he punish himself, condemn himself, for wanting more? Did he grieve the Fall? Did he think that Eden might have been enough if only he’d waited longer, if only he’d asked for less? Did he ever guess that his longing might have been the echo of God’s insatiable desire for him? Did he ever imagine that his choice would “gain for us so great a Redeemer”? And when the world is new again and the children of the King are ancient in their youth again, maybe it’s a better thing, a better thing to be more than merely innocent, but to be broken, then redeemed by love. Maybe this old world is bent, But it’s waking up. I’m waking up. ‘Cause I can hear the voice of one crying in the wilderness Make ready for the kingdom come Don’t you want to thank someone for this? —from “Don’t You Want to Thank Someone For This” by Andrew Peterson

Writing The Battle of Franklin and watching it come to life on stage was one of the highlights of 2016. Director Matt Logan, songwriter Patrick Thomas, and an amazing cast of Nashville’s best talent breathed life into the story in ways that took my breath away and made it even better than I imagined. When I wrote the show, I wasn’t prepared for how relevant this story of familial and societal conflict would be (the 2016 presidential election fell during its opening run), and I think its themes have become even more relevant since. One of the characters in the play says “History is Franklin. History is now” and that gets truer every day it seems. I’m glad the show is coming back, and I hope the audiences that encounter it will go home moved and unsettled and perhaps ready to look at the people around them in new ways. I think there were ten performances last year and each of them sold out. Next month, Studio Tenn is remounting the show for a 16 more performances. If you missed the chance to see it last year, you’ve got another shot this September. I know a lot of you are already traveling to Nashville for the Rich Mullins tribute show at the Ryman on Sunday, September 25th. If you want to make a weekend of it, The Battle of Franklin’s closing performance is Friday, September 22nd. Tickets are available here. Here’s the just-released trailer for the show (and below that a behind-the-scenes short from last year.

On October 5th, you’re invited to join us for an evening of music, story, and celebration at our second annual fundraiser, Rabbit Room LIVE 2017, featuring Andrew Peterson & friends with special guests Fernando Ortega and Sho Baraka. If you’re coming to Hutchmoot, there’s no need to buy a ticket; your seat is included in your registration. For everyone else, this is a chance to taste a little slice of the Hutchmoot weekend. Rabbit Room LIVE is open to the public. Advance tickets are just $10 ($15 at the door). Not local? We’ve got you covered too! You’ll be able to join us on Facebook Live via the Rabbit Room Facebook page. But no matter how you choose to experience the show, we hope you’ll be there to celebrate with us and support the exciting work we have planned for year ahead. Click here to get your tickets. Seats are limited! To make a donation in support of the Rabbit Room, visit donate.RabbitRoom.com.

Admittedly, Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is a very odd film, especially for us Westerners. I always feel a bit disoriented as I begin to watch it, especially since it makes substantial use of Japanese tradition in its characters and symbols. Consequently, it has the unfamiliarity of a different cultural language. There are commonalities between our cultural language and the film’s, of course—that’s why Disney was able to release it successfully in the United States—just enough commonality, in fact, for the unfamiliarity to register more as intriguing than as off-putting. That being said, I feel the need to make a couple disclaimers before I go spouting off my speculations. I don’t have any education in Japanese cultural history. I have undertaken several fruitful Google and Wikipedia searches whose yieldings I have deemed trustworthy, but that is the extent of my research. There is a lot of intuition going on in my commentary, so take it with a grain of salt. And if you can correct me on any false claims, please do so. The logic of the film is based less in narrative than in symbolic layering. It unfolds not as a linear plot but as a series of parables, each with a somewhat wild yet incisive metaphorical meaning. In this post I will give some context for the film and then lend my thoughts to two of its parables. First, context. The world of Spirited Away is alluring and spooky. It deals with the treacherous interactions between two realms: the human realm of day-to-day commerce and the spirit realm of dislocation. These interactions unfold inside a bathhouse on the property of an abandoned theme park. The implication is that the land on which the theme park stands belongs in an eternal sense to the spirits that haunt it. Humans have desecrated these spirits by reducing their land and its long-standing culture to mere commercial pursuits, such as the theme park where the story is set. As a consequence of humanity’s industrial misbehavior, the spirits are now homeless. Where there was once a harmonious relationship of mutual exchange there is now a deep rift. The bathhouse and abandoned theme park embody this rift. Let’s zoom out for a piece of Japanese cultural context: I keep speaking of the “spirit realm.” From my minimal research, it seems that Miyazaki is invoking the Shinto religion here, which is the ethnic religion of Japan. In this religion, all the earth is permeated by and intertwined with a sacred divine essence. This essence and the earth’s physicality are not fundamentally separated as in our Western tradition, but are rather inextricable. The Japanese language does not distinguish singular from plural, so the word “kami” refers both to this one unifying essence and to all the individual gods or spirits embodied in every living thing. In light of this bit of history, the rift between the human and spirit realms in Spirited Away suddenly becomes much more dire. There is of course plenty to be said here of the destructive effects of industrialism on local enchanted places. The underlying logic of this backstory is not unlike Wendell Berry’s lament of the desecration of rural landscapes or J. R. R. Tolkien’s apocalyptic vision of Mordor. Keep that in mind as you read. Now, the spirits are not morally perfect or immutable. Far from it, they are easily tainted by the behavior of humans. They have taken up this bathhouse as their own capitalist exploit, charging money for traveling spirits to come in and receive a good bath. It’s a good business, too, because as a result of humans polluting the earth, the spirits are all very dirty. There have even been theories that the bathhouse acts as a euphemism for a brothel, as the majority of its employees are women and its operations have notably sinister undertones; perhaps more is being commodified here than meets the eye. This theory is complete speculation, however, and cannot be confirmed. The story begins as our protagonist, a ten year-old girl named Chihiro, rides in the backseat of her parents’ car on their way to vacation. They come across the abandoned theme park and begin to explore. Chihiro’s parents find a mysterious, unattended table set with steaming food and begin to eat. When they do not stop eating, they promptly turn into pigs. Understandably frightened, Chihiro runs away, and as night falls, happens upon the spirit realm and the bathhouse. The (arguably evil) keeper of the bathhouse, Yubaba, discovers Chihiro. Haku, a good spirit who has become enslaved at the bathhouse, tells Chihiro that the only way to escape and free her parents is to work for Yubaba. Chihiro complies and Yubaba gives her a new name: Sen. It is worth noting that the name Chihiro means “a thousand searchings,” evoking the curious and adventurous spirit of a child. The name Sen merely means “one thousand,” which represents the stripping away of Chihiro’s identity to a mere numerical value. Throughout the movie, Chihiro, now registering her name as Sen, struggles to remember her old name, lest she forget and never escape the spirit realm. Throughout her time working at the bathhouse, Chihiro encounters many spirits, fair and foul. Each of her encounters act as parables for the obscene ramifications of a commercialized spirituality. Here I will focus on her encounters with two spirits: the so-called Stink Spirit and No-Face. In each, keep in mind the theme of true versus false wealth. The entire staff recoil as the Stink Spirit enters the bathhouse. It is the picture of repulsive: a gigantic, viscous trail of green-brown sludge with a vague, sullen face. Despite the putrid smell, Yubaba commands all the staff to act natural in the face of this monstrosity. Determined for Sen to fail, Yubaba gives her the task of bathing the Stink Spirit. With characteristic innocence and goodwill, Sen leads the Stink Spirit to its enormous bathtub. The Stink Spirit splashes awkwardly into the tub. Sen attempts to get to work, but instead falls deep into the murky waters and becomes stuck inside the Spirit’s slime. Being a surprisingly kind Spirit, it scoops up Sen with its icky hand and shows her with great earnestness what appears to be a thorn stuck in its side. Still underwater, Sen tries to pull it out, but to no avail. She then swims to surface and tells the staff, which has become the audience of her performance, that she needs their help. Yubaba responds urgently, “This is no Stink Spirit,” gives Sen a long rope, and insists that this task will take the strength of the entire bathhouse. Sen dives underwater, ties the rope around the thorn in the Spirit’s side, and everyone lines up to pull the rope with all their might. To the dismay of all, the supposed thorn is revealed to be the handle of a bicycle as it is removed in its entirety from the Spirit. After the bicycle comes heaps and heaps of all sorts of trash, from soda cans to kitchen sinks, enough to fill the entire room. Once Sen removes the final piece of litter, a fishing pole, the entire screen becomes submerged in clear water and all sound fades away. We see Sen’s awestruck face as she beholds the true face of the Spirit. We see him, too: ancient and wise, with a wide, contented smile. In a low, reverberating voice, he speaks two words: “Well done.” Sen looks down to find a mysterious piece of bread in her cupped hands. The scene then returns to the room in which all the staff and Sen stand together, and it seems that the Spirit is gone. Among the heaps of trash, little pebbles of gold glimmer tantalizingly on the floor. Various staff members jump on the gold, but Yubaba knows the Spirit has not yet departed and commands them to stop. Suddenly and without warning, the Spirit, now transfigured as a hundred foot-long, cylindrical body of rushing water, bursts forcefully and jubilantly out of the bathhouse. Here we discover that he was a River Spirit who had been desecrated by human waste. Newly freed, he flies into the night sky accompanied only by the sound of his own laughter. This story speaks for itself. I hardly want to comment because I’m eager to hear what you find in this story. For now, I will make two comments: first, note the baptismal imagery. The Spirit is wounded and suffering. After he is submerged in the water and his wound is fully addressed—which involves the dirty work of pulling out every last piece of garbage he has endured in his long life—it appears that he is dead and gone. He has disappeared. Only then is he raised and transfigured with a new body in fullness of life. Second, why did the River Spirit give Sen a mysterious piece of bread? All I’ll say for now is to watch out for eucharistic undertones there. Spirited Away is constantly playing around with rival conceptions of consumption. Sen quietly and effortlessly receives the piece of bread moments before the bathhouse staff leaps on top of the glimmering gold left on the floor. This film suggests that you are what you eat. We will see more of this in our second parable. No-Face makes many appearances in the film before he causes trouble. He is himself a void, a shadowy figure whose only distinguishing feature is his mask, which looks neither happy nor sad. He hardly ever speaks, but only groans, and he seems to be in a constant state of need. Late one night, a spirit in the form of a frog (there are lots of those in this film—kind of weird, honestly) creeps into the room where the River Spirit was bathed to snag some of the gold left on the floor. No-Face pops out from behind a corner and holds out a pile of gold, ever increasing, in his cupped hands. He offers it to the frog, who naively leaps out to grab it. No-Face then promptly eats the frog and grows larger in size. Creepy, right? As the night goes on and into the morning of the next day, No-Face continues to repeat this behavior. He holds out mounds of gold to staff members, who greedily snatch it, only to be immediately devoured. With each repetition of this, No-Face grows bigger and his appetite stronger. He consumes insatiably and is never full. Now here is where this gets interesting: the entire bathhouse begins to operate according to No-Face’s hunger. From their perspective, No-Face is impossibly wealthy. He produces gold in his hands at will and gives it freely to all who will take it. He appears generous and quickly takes on god-like status as his size increases. I once heard an acquaintance say something to this effect: “The pace of money is faster than the pace of life. When life tries to mimic the pace of money, the inevitable consequence is frenzy and chaos.” This insight plays out stunningly in this scene of Spirited Away as the bathhouse struggles to serve No-Face, constantly striving to return his payments with due efficiency. From outside looking through the windows, it seems that the bathhouse is “booming”—wealth is being produced at an alarming rate as staff hustles around, serving banquets upon banquets of food. From inside, however, we see that the staff has taken to worshiping No-Face. They surround him on bended knee, fearfully singing his praise as he offers gold and eats them one by one. Everyone tries to consume some gold for themselves without being consumed. It’s a chilling scene with an impressive depth of metaphor. Sen is on another quest altogether, which takes her into this scene by mere happenstance. We get the idea throughout the film that No-Face wants Sen more than anyone else, so when she walks into the room, his attention shifts to her. He cups his hands and holds out a huge pile of gold, pleading Sen to take it. She simply says, “No thanks, I don’t need it,” and scurries away. No-Face looks dejected and chases her around the bathhouse. When he finally gets tired, they have a chance to talk. Sen asks him what he wants. He says he is lonely and that he wants her. She says, “If you’re going to eat me, eat this first,” and holds out to him the piece of bread the River Spirit gave her. Despairing, No-Face eats the bread and begins to feel sick. Unable to escape his fate, he runs frantically around the bathhouse, vomiting up every spirit he has eaten up to this point, getting smaller and smaller along the way. He miserably cries out to Sen, “Why did you make me eat that?” Finally, he vomits up the very first frog he ate in the middle of the night and is back to his original size. His appetite seems to have been subdued. He is shy now, embarrassed almost, but Sen invites him to accompany her on the rest of her journey. He found a friend. In this parable we see those rival conceptions of consumption juxtaposed directly. No-Face consumes out of unending lack—it’s all he knows—until he is given a different way to consume. He is cursed by his appetite, and yet he is ultimately healed and cleansed not by denying it, but by the very act of eating. In his encounter with Sen, his appearance of wealth is unmasked as poverty. Conversely, Sen’s seeming poverty in her unwillingness to accept No-Face’s gold is shown to be the true wealth of the parable. And what is the turning point? The piece of bread Sen received from the River Spirit. By eating it, No-Face undergoes an experience parallel to the River Spirit’s: a cleansing from poison, a form of death and rebirth, and redemption. After this breakthrough, No-Face becomes a restrained, good-natured companion to Sen on her journey to reclaim her own name and destiny. Friends, this is rich stuff. All in a very strange and sometimes uncomfortable film. I hope you have enjoyed walking through these stories as much as I have enjoyed sharing and interpreting them. They contain gems of wisdom presented in startling images and symbols. It is precisely the weirdness and apparent irrationality of this film’s symbolism that reminds me of my own imagination, comprised as it is of all the memories, hopes, stories, and hauntings I have ever encountered in my own life. Our imaginations resemble dream-worlds in this way: a bit wacky, screaming to be interpreted and cultivated like a garden into a place of order and growth. In my final post I will describe my own imagination as a place not unlike the bathhouse in Spirited Away, full of motifs and metaphors older than myself and wilder than I ever anticipate. I look forward to asking alongside you what Christ’s way is in these vast interior landscapes of ours: what does it mean to follow his path, to truly take every thought captive to him, to pursue a cruciform imagination? What encounters will we have, and with whom? Until then, go watch Spirited Away and tell me what you think.

If you’ve listened to the last few episodes The Rabbit Room podcast, you know how much we love watching and talking about good movies. But have you ever considered the parallels between a thought-provoking film and a heartfelt prayer? This week’s Rabbit Reads selection invites you to do just that. Film junkies, take note, and add this to your reading list… Movies Are Prayers by Josh Larsen (IVP Books, 2017) Culture / Art / Film Criticism Why We Love It: “Movies can be many things: escapist experiences, historical artifacts, business ventures, and artistic expressions, to name a few. I’d like to suggest that they can also be prayers.” The world is lousy with books on making peace between Jesus and Hollywood. I recall a time when it seemed like there was a “Gospel According to…” take on just about any slice of pop culture—not that this was an entirely bad thing for me. After all, I used to turn to websites with cuss word counters before deciding whether to watch anything above a PG rating. And rated R movies? Nope. What is and isn’t good for us is a constant discussion among film-loving Christians, and I’m so grateful for the work of thoughtful believers like Jeffrey Overstreet and Alissa Wilkinson, critics who aren’t afraid to dig deeper and teach us a better way to engage the stories we take in. After reading his new book Movies Are Prayers, I’d add Filmspotting podcast co-host Josh Larsen to the list. But this book truly gets interesting when you realize it isn’t exactly about “how to watch like a Christian” as much as it’s a meditation, using movies to illustrate the nature of prayer. After establishing his argument that films, like prayers, are expressions of our deepest longings, an artistic groaning beyond words, Larsen breaks the book down into 10 different types of prayers. Lament, praise, anger, confession, and reconciliation all make an appearance, and within each chapter, he guides a quick tour of films that reinforce the theme. Examples from all genres — indie, foreign, blockbuster, and classics — are equally considered, sometimes for just a scene or two. Then at the end, he ties it all together with a critical essay on the movement from fall to redemption in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. Movies are Prayers is a quick read and doesn’t linger for long on any one topic, so don’t come expecting deep analysis of specific movies or directors. But the potential for deeper discussion is rich, and a handy index of every film mentioned in the book is helpful if you’re looking to expand your watchlist. Taken as a whole, this book invites us to reconsider what films could be, and it has a lot to teach about our longings too.

"True, lasting healing comes when we step away from the old life and into a more spacious place. This is what the Rabbit Room has been for us..." -Elizabeth Maxon, Rabbit Room supporter & member. We at the Rabbit Room are no strangers to the power of stories and the role they play in shaping our lives. Today is Giving Tuesday and we are using the special day as a moment to invite you to enter the story of the Rabbit Room through giving. Your contribution helps us expand old projects and launch new ones—all in order to create and curate gospel-infused stories, music, and art, for the life of the world. With your help this Giving Tuesday, we are able to dream bigger in our pursuit of that worthwhile mission! Help us reach our Giving Tuesday goal of $10K raised in one day! We asked a few of our members to share their story as to why they felt called to give to the Rabbit Room. Here is Elizabeth Maxon's story. "Hi, my name is Elizabeth Maxon. I’m from the little college town of Clemson, South Carolina and I'm a Rabbit Room supporter. Several years ago, I was standing in my front yard with Jonathan Rogers, who had just led a writer’s workshop in my home, when he looked at me and said – 'Have you heard of the Rabbit Room?'A few months later I was registered for my first Hutchmoot and officially a member of the Rabbit Room. The Rabbit Room community regularly meets me in the trenches of motherhood and ministry. My husband and I work with couples in crisis and people imprisoned by addiction. We’ve found that it is not enough to help them find freedom FROM whatever has entangled them. They also need to embrace their freedom TO live a brand new life. It has been true in our own lives as well. True, lasting healing comes when we step away from the old life and into a more spacious place. This is what the Rabbit Room has been for us – like a doorway leading to a wide open space where the goodness, beauty, and truth of the gospel is not only experienced but engaged. It has transformed our lives and the lives of our children. Every story and song, every illustration and interaction, is a creative expression of God’s deep love for us and an invitation to participate in the continuous recreation of that love. For this reason, we are committed to supporting the Rabbit Room forever and interacting with this community as often as possible. Sometimes this simply looks like listening to podcasts or reading the member emails for recommendations of great films or books. Other times it is planning a family vacation to Nashville to attend The Local Show, a Rabbit Room theater production live, or just spending a morning visiting and dreaming with our friends at North Wind Manor (the kids particularly enjoy slipping into the Harry Potter hideout under the stairs and I particularly enjoy sitting by Tolkien’s fireplace in deep conversation with Elly or Rachel or a new friend I’ve met). We’ve even brought some of the Rabbit Room musicians (like Skye Peterson) to South Carolina for shows! If you’re looking for something to breathe new life into your work, your family, your very soul – I think you’ll find it here with us. It is the kindest, most welcoming bunch of imperfect, but committed, kingdom builders I’ve found. I hope you know you’re welcome too! Here is supporter Cathy McKeon: "We love and support the Rabbit Room for its dedication to Christ-centered community and its nurturing of creativity in the arts, but more than that... It has been such a gift to find this welcoming, generous, and hospitable creative community. We entered long ago through the doors of music and story, but I’ve become more involved through Hutchmoot and zoom calls (member, artists &, and the Poetry Pub groups) and the friendships formed there. I have been inspired by getting to know artists who are living out their callings excellently and unto the glory of God, and I have been challenged and deeply encouraged in my own creative work and faith in Christ by amazing friends who are walking with me on this road. We are so grateful to be able to participate in the life of this community and in the work of the Kingdom." Here is the Larson family: "We have been members and supporters of The Rabbit Room for many years, after first being introduced to this community through the music of Andy and Jill. Our girls read “The Hiding Place” and became obsessed with Corrie Ten Boom, so when The Rabbit Room Theatre put on the play, Eraina and Lucy travelled from Texas to Nashville for the show. It was a highlight of the year. These nights and books and prayers and music are all little conversations that together have a big impact on our family. The Rabbit Room has been a steady help as we encourage imagination and joy and whimsy in our children and pursue what is “good, true and beautiful” together as a family. We are delighted to be members of The Rabbit Room and cheer on this great work.' You can join these folks and support the Rabbit Room by giving today. Click here to donate!

Slow-moving cultural forces have combined to make the holidays more difficult than they used to be. As Bill Wright writes in The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, we have become geographically and demographically stratified in recent decades. We are surrounded by people who live like us, think like us, vote like us, and see the world as we do. All the while, we are more isolated than ever. We are reaping the seeds the modern self has sown and the modern self is a lonely self. As cultural alienation and stratification set in, we lose those trace infinitesimal opportunities to be influenced by those with whom we differ. Robust communities have always offered humans opportunities to be changed by a variety of sources, but now we are brainwashing ourselves by likeness. And then the holidays come around. We pack up the car and go back to the places we came from to celebrate the holidays with the people who raised us and we find that we’ve become even more different than we were last year. We discover that there are things we can’t talk about anymore, places we can’t go, views we can’t express. Or, even worse, we do step on one of those conversational landmines and, sure enough, it blows. Suddenly a gathering that started as a celebration of the day God dawned in flesh amid his darkened world becomes a clash of inflamed opinions and old wounds. If you find yourself in that position this holiday season, take a step back. Take a breath and remember that this isn’t only something you’re doing. It is also something our culture has done to you. We are both the victims and the perpetrators of our broken discourses. But what has been done can also be undone. How Can Christianity Help? It is no small thing to have a conversation with someone whose ideas you disagree with (or possibly find repugnant). It can be painful, confusing, and frustrating. We can enter difficult conversations with the most careful intentions, only to be dragged into a tit-for-tat, zero-sum battle of words that leaves everyone wounded and no one closer to the kind of insight that changes people. It is not a foregone conclusion that just because you are a Christian, you will interact with people as Jesus did. Modern people are not short on conversational role models that are at odds with the teacher from Nazareth who gave his time to talking, teaching, listening, challenging, forgiving, and loving people out of their misbegotten thinking. Yet, if we are to pursue the pattern of a God who was incarnated into our broken world to put it to rights, we are going to have to get better at talking to people we disagree with (even when those people are seated around the family table). Yet, in our polarized, digitized, and politicized cultural moment, that is exactly the skill we are in danger of losing. The ability to have unhurried, nuanced, generous conversations is not an optional add-on for the people of God. Too often, we pattern our speech after culture warriors: we use sound bites, slogans, and straw men to “win” our conversations, but these won’t do if we want to understand (and be understood by) those who are not already members of our particular tribe. If we are to overcome the world’s ways of making ideological war, we are going to need more mental, emotional, and spiritual firepower — but not of the kind the world recognizes. If we are to master the taxing task of conversing with those with whom we disagree, we are going to need more patience, kindness, love, laughter, time, wisdom, grace, curiosity, and, above all, humility. The good news is that transforming humans into the kind of people who are characterized by those qualities is exactly what Christianity does to those who would follow the way of Jesus. The question is: What hope and help can Christianity offer to our culture when the kinds of conversations we need have never seemed less likely? Quite a bit of help, as it turns out. Everyone alive bears the image of God All Christian relationships and communication should be built on the bedrock of the image of God. If we raise our conversational houses on that foundation, we will avoid all kinds of errors. The image of God reminds us that all persons have been imbued with dignity by God himself, so we will not subject them to indignity in our minds or words. The image of God reminds us that God is committed to the well-being of our conversation partner, so we must be likewise committed. The image of God reminds us that the person in front of us is a whole person, not just the sum of their ideas and opinions. The image of God is able to both humble and inspire us. It humbles us because God’s image is also both present and marred in ourselves. It inspires us because everyone — even that difficult person we are talking to — bears God’s likeness, is the object of his affection, and benefits at every moment from his care even if they give him no thanks. No one has said this better than John Calvin. To paraphrase his wonderful thought from The Institutes: “The Lord wants us to do good to all people without exception, though most people, if judged by their own merits, are unworthy of it. But Scripture tells us that we are not to look to what people themselves deserve, but to attend to the image of God in them, to which we owe all honor and love… Whenever anyone comes to you in need of help, you have no grounds for denying it to him. Say he is a stranger — the Lord has given him a mark that ought to be familiar to you. Say he is lowly and of no consequence — the Lord points him out as one on whom rests the glory of his own image. Say that you owe him nothing — the Lord has substituted that person in his own place, that you might give to him the great obligations that you owe to Christ. Say that he is unworthy of your smallest effort on his account, but the image of God he bears is worthy of your life and all your effort. If he merits no good and has provoked you by injury and mischief, still there is no reason why you should not embrace him in all possible love… In this way only we attain to what is not only difficult but altogether against human nature: to love those who hate us, to render good for evil, blessing for cursing. We are not to reflect on the wickedness of men, but to look to the image of God in them, which covers and removes their faults and by its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them.” The ability to have unhurried, nuanced, generous conversations is not an optional add-on for the people of God. Ask Questions With Humility Don’t forget that you are also a fool. You also have treasured distortions of the good in your own life. You have blind spots and strongholds of falsehood that you guard and protect. All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, not only in our behavior but also in our thinking. All of us will be subjected to the lifelong process of refining our ideas and removing the dross from our convictions. Are you certain that process isn’t continuing right now with the person you are talking to? Do not forget Jesus’ sobering words for those who would be judges: “With the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” I take this to mean that even when we see our brother’s or sister’s sin clearly, we should be more grieved by, more focused on, and more repentant over our own. The missionary and minister Francis Schaeffer spent his days talking with people from all walks of life who came to his home in Switzerland. He used to say that if he had an hour to speak with someone, he would spend 55 minutes listening and asking questions so that he could say something of actual value in the last five. So when you find yourself in a conversation with someone you disagree with: Why not spend more time listening and less time correcting and accusing? Why not make curiosity your watchword and channel it into genuine questions? When you feel an answer or rebuttal burning inside you, why not prohibit yourself from interrupting in order to gainsay the person you are talking to? Why not listen carefully, repeat their argument, and then ask if you have understood it correctly? If you haven’t, ask them to say it again until you can say their own point back to them better than they said it. If you could accomplish that monumental task, I wonder what would happen to the part of their brain that is gearing up for another battle of misunderstandings? If this became your pattern of listening, what would happen the next time you had something to say? Challenge With Patience Christian conversation is not all about listening and questions, however, because having an opinion is not the same thing as knowing the truth. Therefore, our conversation must involve challenge. That said, we should take off our shoes before we go tromping around in the minds, lives, and attitudes of our fellow image-bearers. We are walking on holy ground. But we must not forget that God’s reality, though it surpasses us, is not infinitely malleable. It is not a ball of clay that will take any shape we mold it into. At times, if we want to be people of the truth, we will have to stand for the truth in our lives and in our conversations, come what may. God’s truth is rich, complex, and full of mystery, so we should always challenge with humility and as much strength and gentleness as we have the maturity to muster. When you have something important to say, don’t just blast your conversation partner with a cannon full of “truth” and see what happens. Jesus told his people to be “harmless as doves and wise as serpents.” What does it mean to challenge with wisdom and strength but without fear and violence? What would it mean to forswear harshness for firm strength (which can accomplish everything harshness can but without the damage)? What if you built bridges from truths people already loved to truths they do not love yet? What would it take for you to discern which hills to die on and which crazy comments to completely let slide? What if you saw your role as sowing conversational seeds without harvesting them all at once? Could it be enough for you to simply drop questions into the minds of your conversation partners without launching a follow-up barrage of answers? Remember That God Changes People, Not You We should remember — especially in our most difficult and trying conversations — that the Holy Spirit is the one who is the Great Counselor who leads people into all truth. God works in people’s lives both in brief, intense moments of insight (perhaps as a result of some impactful conversation) and in long, slow revelations that take decades to come to fruition. Any single conversation might be just one part of God’s ongoing work of redemption in a person’s life. Or it might not. After all, we know that any conversation takes place in the context of God’s larger care for people. God, who made and loves our conversation partner, is ultimately responsible for clearing away the error from their thinking and the sin from their lives, not us. We are invited to play a role in speaking and demonstrating the truth in our words and actions — no small part of that being to simply do no harm to our fellow humans for whom Christ died. C.S. Lewis’s words of comfort in Perelandra are a balm to anyone who feels they have erred in a conversation: “Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world. Look! it is beneath your head and carries you." Christians should be able to trust God enough to believe — even if your words don’t produce the results you hoped for — that God was at work before the conversation started and abides with the person long after it is over. The fate of the person with whom you are speaking doesn’t rest on your shoulders, but the God who took the burden of the whole broken world on his scarred back carries you both. Receive and be glad. Andy is a staff member of the Rabbit Room and a former staff member of L'Abri Fellowship. Read more from Andy on The Darking Psalter (commentary, translations, and poetry about the Psalms), Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God), and Pattern Bible (reflection on biblical images in the Bible). Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

A few years ago, Leif Enger came to speak at Hutchmoot, the annual Rabbit Room conference. That year, he and I had both gone through sudden medical crises. We bonded then over recovery stories and continued that friendship in the form of a fairly regular correspondence. When I was preparing to release Struck, a memoir about my experience, I asked Leif if he might be willing to read it and write an endorsement. He graciously obliged, providing one of the true high points in my career as an author—support from a literary hero. Recently, as he was in the home stretch of finishing up his wonderful new novel, Virgil Wander, I asked for an early copy so I could write about it for the Rabbit Room. Once again, he obliged, and sent it with the following note: “Proofing the final edit it seemed that Virgil might be my most Christian book, and least evangelical.” After I read Virgil Wander, Leif and I talked about it a bit, and about that note in particular. Russ: Leif, I loved this novel. Absolutely loved it. One of the key characters in Virgil Wander, I would say, is the town in which the story takes place. Greenstone does more than serve as the setting for the story. It contains its characters. It facilitates certain necessary interactions. It frames back-stories in ways that really help the reader understand your characters. What role do you think place plays in the work of telling a story, and how do you approach constructing your settings? Leif: The simplest answer is that I only set stories in landscapes I love. When you love a place you look more closely at it, and then it is a matter of describing it in your cleanest words and allowing it to inform your characters, action, weather, and so on. Russ: How did this work itself out in Virgil Wander? Leif: This mostly happens subconsciously. I didn’t foresee that setting Greenstone on the edge of Lake Superior would translate to most of its characters existing on various other edges, but sure enough they do—Virgil lives on the borders of faith and doubt, speech and silence, lucidity and confusion, civilization and wilderness (bears walk the streets), order and chaos. The inland sea is also a constant reminder that life is unpredictable and fog-shrouded and that tragedy is tethered to beauty and in fact joy. Everything is raw in a place like this. Damage is right out in the open. I’d wanted to write about a character like Virgil–the owner of a failing movie house–since the early 90s, but it wasn’t until I spent some time on the North Shore that I knew where he’d be at home. Russ: You recently moved to Duluth, right? What was that like? Leif: Robin and I had a lovely, strange summer. We sold the farm where we raised the boys, bought a house in Duluth a few blocks off the water and, since we couldn’t close until August, we lived for weeks on our heavy old creaking sailboat at the edge of the Apostle Islands. Mail was unreliable and internet sporadic, so there was an insular feel both sweet and temporary. Russ: In Virgil Wander, I noticed that there are no true “bad guys.” What we have instead are people who have difficult things between them, and must find a way to live in community with each other. I was challenged to see so many of these characters not simply move past their relational struggles to mere civility; instead, your characters seem to be drawn closer to one another by way of what’s broken between them. Leif: That’s a good observation and one I hadn’t thought of—that our flaws can be a point of contact or friendship, a bridge instead of a wall. One of the things Virgil finds himself doing more easily after his injury is listening, to his unexpected houseguest Rune, to Bjorn, to the unlucky handyman Jerry, and ambitious Ann Fandeen. Virgil is simply more accessible than his earlier self knew how to be. Maybe his diminished language gives him forbearance. In any case he hears those around him in a more unguarded way, and because of this they seem to share more of themselves than they might have before. Interesting that it takes actual brain damage for Virgil to act on this capacity! Of course what happens when you listen to people is you are beset by empathy, by a wish to suspend judgment. You don’t see this in the media because argument sells commercials, but in real life it’s common. We’ve all had the experience of meeting someone we expect to dislike, only to be disarmed when they start talking about their kids. It’s a cliché but a true one that more joins us than divides us. Russ: Perhaps this is a good place to ask you to elaborate on what you meant when you described this novel as your “most Christian book, and least evangelical.” Leif: Now, especially, there’s a chasm between that freighted label (Christian) and its origins. I was lucky enough to grow up when “Christian” referred (logically) to a reliance on Jesus, who forgave tax guys and prostitutes, appreciated little kids, pointed out the futility of wealth, and saved his hottest anger for religious leaders who thirsted for power and had no doubt of their own rightness. Now the word Christian (and its cousin Evangelical) is used to describe a dependable Republican voting bloc. What a hijacking. This book doesn’t concern itself with either orthodoxy or politics but with decency, which is faith’s unsung expression. Decency allows a person to say: What if I’m wrong here? I’ve come to suspect that faith needs doubt in order to be real, as there’s no courage without fear. I’m drawn to pilgrims and skeptical of zealots. Years ago I felt differently, but as the song says, I was so much older then–I’m younger than that now. Virgil Wander is available in the Rabbit Room Store.

In the afterglow of Hutchmoot 2018’s dizzying cascade of several dozens of wonderful and meaningful conversations, I can no longer remember who requested copies of the poem I read during Rebecca Reynolds’ and my tag team session on “the holy, hidden potential of human weakness.” Hence the posting of it here. Beyond that fulfillment of forgotten verbal obligations, though—because we as a community tend to skew heavily on the introvert scale and also because I suspect that even the beloved extroverts among us struggle with the same foundational insecurities—I would like to offer the piece to the wider Rabbit Room community. It’s a poem I wrote some sixty hours before my Hutchmoot session. At the time I was harried and discouraged in my attempts to pare a 12,000 word outline down to a manageable 4,000 words. (Spoiler Alert: I failed.) Scanning my eighteen pages of ten-point font notes, I felt a vague and growing unease. Trying to divine my own disquiet I realized, “Okay, these notes do contain some interesting and valuable observations, but I’m mostly only offering abstract ideas about weakness. Is there some way to move this presentation beyond the abstract such that it might actually give someone something to hang onto?” Yes, I could have just rested in the knowledge that when Rebecca Reynolds began her portion of the session everyone in the room would immediately feel connected and welcomed into that warm, encouraging aura she magically projects in a roughly forty-foot radius around her person. But it seemed irresponsible on my part to ask attendees to suffer through the first half of the session without any rungs yet affixed to the ladder we were asking them to climb. I couldn’t see that I was offering—in my notes as they then were—any point of connection that might “incarnate” these important ideas and make them more immediate than abstract. As I was stewing on the matter I did what any of us do when faced with frustration. I checked Facebook. And there I happened to read Helena Sorensen’s post asking the Rabbit Room community whether they were more discouraged or inspired by personal tales of struggles and failures. I skimmed the response thread and I was like: Oh. Yeah. That. Hmm. So I just sat for a few minutes, long enough for all the fears and insecurities swirling chaotically just outside the edges of my vision to catch up to me and begin to announce themselves. And then I started typing, trying to document that sideshow parade of insecurities as they marched up the main street of my imagination. Because the truth is, being asked to speak in front of a group of well-read, thoughtful, sensitive people—who have gathered because they think I might have something to say that’s worth their time to hear—pushes the buttons for almost every one of the fifty-eight floors accessed by my elevator of paralyzing insecurities. Writing this mostly stream-of-consciousness poem was beneficial though, as the process of driving those insecurities into the open and naming them had a settling effect that allowed me afterward to move forward with more focus in the preparation process. (I didn’t shave the notes down to 4,000 words, but I did cut them to about 6,500. The rest of the editing had to happen at the podium. Apologies to those present, for any rather abrupt transitions.) Based on feedback from several of the gracious attendees, I think the poem did also do some valuable work to bridge that gap between the abstract idea and the personal experience. If there’s a practical takeaway here for content creators, it might be that the sense of pressure and stress we feel in such moments of preparation and editing might actually be a friendly voice, warning us that we’re trying to position ourselves as an expert on a particular topic, when what might best serve community is not so much a “voice of authority” speaking from above, but the voice of a fellow pilgrim speaking to us just from the bottom of the next gulley, or from the far bank of the ravine we’re only just now descending into. —Doug ... Shadows circle like crows over my shoulder, and as I get older I feel those wingbeats colder and I can give them names; names that escaped me in my younger days: Fear of failure. Fear of loss. Fear for my children. Fear that the cost of ever finishing another book, or story or poem is more than I can pay. Fear that life from here will fray, growing harder and more confusing. Fear that what’s to come is mostly losing what I’ve had and learning what it means to hurt and how to come to terms with everything I cannot save. Fear that the sometimes tremor in my hand which began about a year ago as I wrote the close- ing pieces for a book of liturgies means that something really might be wrong with me. Fear of finding out that something might be wrong with me. Fear of letting people see what might be wrong with me. Fear that somehow God is done with me; fear that in the years to come my lot will be that of a sailor lost in aimless seas. Fear that all my old regrets might finally catch up to me. Fear that I stand here in front of you presumptively with nothing to say; that my meagre offerings will not be met by anything greater than the voices in my own head and I will be left to dangle disconnected from anything but the cringe-inducing echoes of things I’ll wish I’d never said… So add to my growing, crowing, list of dread: fear of exposure, fear of shame. Fear of being named and criticized. Fear of how I look in anybody’s eyes, including yours, including mine. Fear of endlessly learning the same lessons I already learned as a kid when I was burned so many times by wanting so much to fit in that it hurt. It hurt, and then overextending my hopes again and feeling those rope burns on the skin of my palms as the thing I so yearned for was yanked out of my grasping hands. Fear of what I do not understand: I do not understand what to say, or how to stand, or what in creation I’m ever supposed to do in public with my hands, or how to not come off as too absurd, so add fear of being seen as awkward, which is to say fear of being seen as I am because I am awkward. (I am as awkward in my attempts to fit in or be loved as the wobble of a wooden-legged duck pursued through a mile of mud by a redneck kid in a pickup truck.) Fear of inadequacy. Fear of trying to just relate because the basic mechanics of human interaction was a language I came to too late and somehow failed to learn to imitate believably. And I never wanted to be the fool. I never wanted to be uncool, but I was always uncool. On my death certificate the coroner will doubtless rule: Cause of death: He was so, so very terminally uncool. And when my daughters come to identify my body, they will shake their heads and say, “We thought he would eventually outgrow this awkward stage. How could we know he would only wax more uncool with age? His sucking need for affirmations he could not let himself receive was so pathetic. Let us hope, oh, let us hope, it’s not genetic.” So diagnose my clumsy self protection as a symptom of this constant fear of rejection, paralyzed by possibilities and presuppositions of pending hostilities that might at any time be unmasked and directed at me. And in that crown of utter instability set these stones of other fears and ring them round: Fear that anytime I speak or do not speak or cross the street or wait too long to cross the street or sit across from someone else and lift my fork to eat, I’m being judged, and run the risk of being seen as I am which is to say— of being seen as weak. —©2018 Douglas Kaine McKelvey

Near the end of his life, Pope John Paul II was seated on his chair at the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. He was in his eighties and suffering from Parkinson’s. He had trouble sitting up straight, and even holding up his head was a chore. Yet there he was, in front of hundreds of parishioners and visitors who filled the cathedral to capacity. Thousands, indeed millions more watched him on television outside in the square and around the world. He looked tired and rather glum—not an office-holder of stature, but an old man hunched by the many failings of his body. During the mass, children of multiple nations paraded across the front in their native garb to greet the ailing pontiff. Until that point, you could see the hardships of his health writ large over his countenance. Yet, when the first child mounted the steps of the altar, a subtle but certain joy broke upon John Paul’s face like a ray of winter sun. In that moment, he did not have to be a pope, but a mere man of great age taking thankful pleasure in seeing the young in all their guileless vibrance. I have never forgotten this. Like many local bodies, the church where I attend has alternative activities for small children during the service. Up to a certain age—fourth grade, I believe—the kids are invited out after a few songs to participate in what is ostensibly a more age-appropriate gathering. Very young children, below grade school age, can spend the entire service in the care of kind, dedicated volunteers. This is the situation in many churches, and I think there’s a definitive place for it all. There is nothing wrong with age-appropriate practice. We don’t lade our children with the fullness of the predestination debate, for example. We don’t expect them to understand the depth of iconography behind marriage and sexuality—for goodness’ sake, we hardly scratch its surface as adults. However, my wife and I make our oldest two—seven and nine years of age—sit through the whole service, sermon and all. We do this for a very specific set of reasons. If we have read the book of Hebrews, we know that we ought not to give up meeting together. Concerning why we ought not give it up, we tend to come up short. Corporate worship is, for lack of a better term, special. It may seem vaguely animistic, or at least far too easy, to subscribe to mysticism here, but there is something particular and ineffable about congregational worship. It is there that the embodiment of the Body of Christ is most often expressed. Furthermore, among the ways we perceive the reality of the Church, corporate worship is one of the more tangible and even visceral. I certainly want my children to see this. I’m sure part of our family decision, or at least my half of it, stems from a crotchety, mawkish pride in my own age—a modest thirty-five years among all the epochs of the world. When I was a wee young lad, after all, we had no “children’s church.” We had to sit and listen to the preacher. And we walked fifteen miles to school. And we ate boiled shoes and pine bark in the lean winter months. I want my own children to suffer the same deprivations, in order to build character. The other part of me—the less narcissistic bit—is happy for them to be exposed not only to the stories of the Bible, but to words and doctrines that escape them. I can’t tell you how many times I heard “Calvary” as a child and envisioned Union Army horsemen, charging in with swords drawn. Of course! Why should there not be army men charging anywhere and everywhere in the church service? This is what little boys dream of. I was probably in middle school before I gathered exactly what Calvary meant. As with so many things—names, phone numbers, recipes—it’s the repetition that finally gets through our thick skulls. Secondly, and in a way more importantly, I want my kids present in church so that we can be the Church. Not only are they supposed to learn from all those grown-ups hopefully hanging on every word of the Scriptures or lining up for communion, but we as grown-ups ought to learn from them. They receive everything with a sense of novelty. They’re quick to ask hard questions, and they do so without the guile so often hidden in adult debates. When we bring our weaknesses and faults to the Body of Christ, we offer the opportunity for people to see the way in which we must approach the Lord—pitiful, blind, and naked. Whosoever does not come like a little child cannot enter. Adam Whipple Furthermore, they stubbornly refuse to give in to our self-importance. They write little jokes and draw things that have nothing to do with the sermon. They openly sleep. The pastor mentions the Water of Life, and they have to go to the bathroom. People take some degree of offense over these things, mostly because adults chafe at assaults upon their quietude. I know, for I personally fail often here. For example, I find it difficult to concentrate on the finer points of, say, soteriology, while some dear old lady unwraps a single butterscotch candy for eight excruciating minutes. The plastic crinkles in the quiet. My hands close and unclose involuntarily; my teeth grind. I quote verses to myself such as, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!” Deliver us, O God, from Werther’s Original. In regards to noise, kids in church show us something we rarely have the gumption to show each other: weakness. A hungry baby cares not a whit for “Now let us pray” or “Thanks be to God for his Word.” The child mews and squalls, flinging raw sound over our decorum like Jackson Pollock before a canvas. And for God’s sake, we ought to let her. You may recall a scene from the movie Children of Men, in which Clare-Hope Ashitey and Clive Owen carry a newborn through a bombed-out building in the midst of a guerrilla war. Cowering civilians and rifle-wielding soldiers alike stop cold in their tracks at the sound of the baby’s crying. With wonder in their eyes, they make way, in the midst of a firefight, to let the child through. There’s so much in that scene about the mighty power of innocence, but imagine if we held to that same wonderment about children in church. I recently attended my first church business meeting. Thankfully, it was a sheer delight, a poetic scene of a hundred unsung volunteers managing a gigantic sum of money (gigantic to me, anyway) out of plain servanthood and willingness. I’ve heard the horror stories of other church meetings, though. Backbiting, subversion, and sabotage make regular appearances. Imagine if, into all that posturing and sebaceous bravado, there was placed a single clean drop of innocent weakness. What self-entitled pillar of the community would not rise from his laurels to help if, say, a little boy suddenly broke an arm falling off a chair? Now, I know kids can be irritating. Don’t hear me saying that I’m against things like good discipline or those helpful crying rooms in churches. I know it’s embarrassing to have your kid make a ruckus, but for the rest of us listening, I think grace one-ups decorum every time. If these be silent, the stones will cry out. When we bring our weaknesses and faults to the Body of Christ, we offer the opportunity for people to see the way in which we must approach the Lord—pitiful, blind, and naked. Whosoever does not come like a little child cannot enter. It’s true, we’ve given each other plenty of reason to fear showing our weaknesses. It isn’t for nothing the Church is often seen as a pack of wolves. We all bite now and again. Faith in the Lord gives us hope, though, and hope keeps us returning, even to each other. And when at last, old and broken, we see each other as the Children of the King that we are, we can pause amid the ceremonies and the pageantry to take joy at the guileless, helpless young. Like John Paul in that moment upon Christmastide, we can forget our thrones, and our offices, and our fine robes and remember that those young ones are us, and that we all come to God as little children.

[Editor’s note: This year at Hutchmoot, John Cal not only fed us with delicious food; he nourished us with beautiful stories, providing context for each meal and what it meant to him. What follows is the second of his three speeches, given two weeks ago today—we posted his first one last week and will be posting the last one next week. Enjoy.] You are my sunshine, my only sunshine You make me happy when skies are grey You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you Please don’t take my sunshine away You are my son John, daddy’s only son John You make me happy when skies are grey You’ll never know, John, how much dad loves you Please don’t take my son John away Please don’t take my sunshine away _______________ I’ve always been afraid of ghosts, axe murderers, and monsters under the bed. For years, as a child, a simple night light wasn’t enough assurance that the boogie man wasn’t lurking in the shadowy corners of my bedroom. I’d go to bed with the full brightness of the room lights on. I’d fall asleep in the living room with the TV blaring, or on the floor in my grandparents room—anything to avoid facing the darkness alone. I know what that sounds like. I hear the internal monologue of some of the more judge-y parents in the room: set up a routine, practice boundaries, slowly introduce change. I know that it’s simply not okay to let a small child watch The Little Mermaid every night to help him fall asleep, but you, dear parent, did not know five year-old me, who, when forced to sleep in my bed alone in the dark, would lie awake, waiting till my parents were sleeping, before exiting my bedroom and finding safer, more well lit accommodations. Yes, every night. Yes, even with the risk of a spanking in the morning, because a spanking is one thing, but the fear of a tender bottom is nothing compared to the sight of vampires when you close your eyes or knowing there are witches and hags hiding in the hall closet just waiting for you to let your guard down. One thing that would work, sometimes, is that my father would sing to me: old Campbell Soup jingles, classic Beach Boys, and more often than not, “You Are My Sunshine.” He was one of sixteen siblings and always wanted a large family like the one he grew up in, but then my parents divorced, and it was just me: his only son, John. But of course we get older, time passes and relationships get more complicated. We learn from someone, somehow, that it’s not so simple. One time I was driving, which is the start of so many arguments between my dad and me. We were having a disagreement we’ve had so many times before, and we were screaming at each other, actually screaming, the “I told you so”s and the resurfacing of past transgressions flying about the Miata like shrapnel, all over where to go eat lunch. “I decided yesterday,” I said, exasperated. “I decided the day before and you didn’t like it,” dad replied. “I’m fine with wherever,” I volleyed back, a sliver of saccharine covered kindness attempting to make my venom more palatable. “I don’t want to pick a place you hate,” he returned. My father doesn’t cook, and whenever I’m back in Hawaii for a visit, doesn’t see the point in buying groceries, so besides the sweet reprieve of possible leftovers from the night before, we eat out every meal, literally every meal, so this argument is ongoing and constant. Each of us simply refuses to make a decision. Once, my father offered to go to California Pizza Kitchen, a restaurant he hates but I love, a fact which I pointed out by saying, “Why do you want to go there? You hate their food,” to which he replied, “See, I knew you were going to complain about what I picked.” I know what that sounds like. I hear the internal monologue of some of the more judge-y people in the room—set up a schedule, practice emotional boundaries, it’s just lunch. But it’s never just about lunch, is it? Relationships seem simple enough: an experience shared, a need met, a fear of the dark, a father singing over his son, like when Zephaniah writes, “With his love he will calm all your fears. He will rejoice over you with singing.” But what happens when we find we can’t even agree on the music? And what happens when the metaphors of lunch and music give way to the realities of why we’re really in disagreement? How are you faring after one day? Is it getting harder? I hope it is, because so often it is in this hard work that relationships are not only built, but strengthened and fortified. It is one kind of friendship to be able to say, “Olives on my pizza! I love olives on my pizza, too!” It is a quite another to be able to share a meal with someone who likes anchovies, or worse, pineapple. It was silent in the car for a long time, and even without the exchange of words, the message of how we each were feeling was palpable. We all can be such awful people when we’re hungry. But then the discomfort is broken by something unexpectedly sweet and sincere. “You know I love you, right?” my father said, angrily, yes, but it was the first kink in the wall we were both building between us. “I know,” I said. “I love you too,” with slightly less venom than before. Then, like magic, the argument was just about lunch again, not about who would win or who would default to whom, and it did seem silly after all that we were screaming at each other about lunch. And don’t mistake me, we were both still angry, but it was the sort of anger and argument you can only have with someone you care about. Eventually we went to Zippy’s. It’s a diner of sorts in Hawaii which first opened in 1966 by brothers Charles and Frances Higa—burgers, macaroni salad, pie, but what they’re really known for is chili, of which they sell over a hundred tons every month. It’s one of the meals I’m sure to get whenever I’m in Hawaii. As a kid, I would dip my grilled cheese in the stuff. When I went to college in Nebraska, my father would overnight me frozen packages of chili, a reminder of home. So we’re having chili for supper. And while it’s delicious, I admit it’s not very revolutionary. It’s just chili, and pretty simple chili at that. But sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that it’s enough to go back, to not have to work so hard, to remember that in our differences, of course there are things we agree on, that there are things we share, things we all love. For Lent last spring, Trinity Church in Wenatchee, Washington gave up donuts. Normally the congregants gather on the lawn in front of the sanctuary and finish a Sunday’s service with a fellowship of donuts, but Lent is a time to tackle difficult things, to meditate on the desert. I was there at Trinity, Matt Canlis’s church, the Sunday after Easter. All that ruminating on death is bound to make one tired; even the idea of resurrection and life can labor one’s mind. We had gotten to the part in the liturgy where together we’d recite the Apostles’ Creed, when, of course, the over head projector stopped working. The words on the screen were gone, as if someone had taken away all the hymnals and expected us to sing the second stanza of “The Old Rugged Cross.” The fear began to sink in. Without a guide or a crutch, who are we really? Then Matt calmly continued, “Let’s see how much of it we know.” And we did know it. Yes, we fumbled a little as he led us, but it was a delightful surprise to be reminded of what we already knew, of that work that was started in us oh so long ago, to go back and remember what we believe. And then after all that laboring, there were donuts waiting just outside to add to our rejoicing. As I said, I hope it’s getting complicated. I hope, in these new friendships you’re forming, you’re beginning to tackle the really hard questions: Lewis or Tolkein, Star Wars or Star Trek, which Doctor Who is the best Doctor Who, and whether or not Harry Potter is appropriate reading; and when it seems like the disagreements are becoming too hard to bear, as they will at times in any relationship that is filled with love, just go back a little, when you weren’t so afraid to be afraid, when all it took to quell our fears was to rejoice over one another with songs. Click here to read John Cal’s Thursday night speech. Photo by Mark Geil

[Editor’s note: On the first night of Hutchmoot 2018, Andrew Peterson suddenly took a break from his Resurrection Letters set to deliver a speech. As he made his way through the first few paragraphs, it became clear to everyone that some cherished soul in the room was about to win a very special award. Then, as the context clues came together, it was undoubtable that the recipient would be Ben Shive, seated modestly behind the piano on the far side of the stage. By the end, many in the audience had shed tears, and we all realized we had witnessed a profound moment of love between friends. As a token of thanksgiving to Ben, the Rabbit Room will be pressing a limited edition vinyl of one of his records, yet to be determined. After you’ve read Andrew’s speech, click here to pre-order this vinyl in the store.] Awards are funny. It’s easy to roll your eyes at the whole notion of something like the Grammys or the Doves—as long as you’ve never won one. “They mean nothing,” we say. “It’s never about true art,” we say. But then your friend, or someone you’re a fan of, wins one and you can’t help but feel satisfied, as if justice has been done. You’ll almost certainly congratulate the person—and mean it—when they’ve won. I don’t know about you, but that exposes some dishonesty in my own heart. I can’t say that awards only matter if my favorite person wins. The whole thing may be rigged, to a point, I can admit that. But there’s also something that feels right about recognizing someone for a job well done, or a life well-lived. If you’ll allow me get theological on you, I have a hunch that we resonate with it because the idea of crossing a finish line, or receiving an honor, is a foretaste of what is to come. When we see someone accept a well-deserved honor, our hearts quicken, I believe, because we’re glimpsing through a glass darkly something that the Lord has written into the fabric of time. In 2 Timothy 4:7–8, Paul wrote, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.” Perseverance matters. Faithful work matters. And since this is Hutchmoot, I can’t not mention Tolkien. In the Lord of the Rings movies, when the throng at Minas Tirith kneels before the four hobbits, our hearts swell. Heck, even Princess Leia threw together a whole ceremony for the end of Star Wars. There’s a rightness that we feel when it happens. This year we in the Rabbit Room decided to give an award of our own. The Rabbit Room, and Hutchmoot by extension, exists in part to draw attention to good and beautiful work that bears well the truth of the Gospel, work that sheds light, work that gives us that sweet foretaste of what is to come—whether by piquing our longing or outright declaring the truth in a lovely way. In the spirit of Philippians 4, we want to lift up whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, excellent, or worthy of praise. We want to think about these things, and to encourage others to think about them, too. We also believe that art grows best in community. Part of the role of community is to encourage, and one way to encourage is to acknowledge, before others, a job well done. Two years ago at Hutchmoot, Dr. Diana Glyer taught us about the community of the Inklings. She identified certain qualities that members of that group exhibited, qualities that led to the lovely, commendable, excellent works of art produced by Tolkien, Lewis, Willams, and others. She said that one crucial component of a good artistic community is resonators: people who resonate with your work, who see what you’re doing and tell you to keep doing it. People who feel a quickening when they read your story or hear your song, who give you the courage to keep going. People who see you and celebrate your gifting. If you hold down the damper pedal on a piano and strike a single note, you can hear all the other strings with resonant frequencies quietly singing along. We need Resonators. We want to be Resonators. We want to honor someone whose work has struck a chord in us. Someone who has demonstrated a quiet and faithful devotion to their calling. Someone who has not only worked hard to compose their own songs year after year after year, but someone who has encouraged the work of countless artists. I want to tell you a bit about the recipient of this year’s Resonator award. He moved to Nashville about twenty years ago as a student at Belmont University. He distinguished himself as a piano player and an arranger. I first began to work with him when he arranged the strings for the 2001 Behold the Lamb of God concert. He and I toured together for about twelve years, and the first song I ever co-wrote with him featured harmony by none other than Alison Krauss. The opening line of that song, along with the timeless piano part, would demonstrate a musical sensibility and knowledge of Scripture that would mark the rest of his work. Writing about Abraham about to say “Yes” to the Lord’s call to go on a great journey of faith, he threw out these lines: Sarah, take me by my arm. Tomorrow we are Canaan Bound, where westward sails the golden sun and Hebron’s hills are amber crowned. After that album he co-produced Behold the Lamb of God with Andrew Osenga, and then my album The Far Country. Even though you know your heart is breaking, for a little longer still you must be whole; to love the life that’s given for the taking, and to give the love the living’s given for. He produced, along with Andy Gullahorn, my album Resurrection Letters, Vol. II, which included yet another of his beautiful and scriptural lyrics: The blood of Jesus, it is like the widow’s oil; it’s enough to pay the price to set you free. It’ll fill up every jar and every heart that ever beat. When it’s all you have it’s all you’ll ever need. Meanwhile, he was producing album after album for artist after artist. His resume is bursting with names like: Randall Goodgame Christa Wells Sanctus Real Marc Martel The Gray Havens John Thurlow Melanie Penn John Tibbs JJ Heller Ellie Holcomb Jenny and Tyler Hannah Godsey Mercy Me Rend Collective Dave Barnes Colony House Brandon Heath Son of Laughter Molly Lockwood Jeremy Camp Bebo Norman Matt Wertz Eric Peters Barbara Haynes Point of Grace Megan Isaacson Carousel Rogues Sara Groves And writing and arranging for artists like: Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors Ben Rector Sixpence None the Richer And playing on albums by artists like: Amy Grant Steven Curtis Chapman Bethany Dillon Jonny Diaz Big Daddy Weave The Lost Dogs Matt Maher Sidewalk Prophets Laura Story Andy Gullahorn Jill Phillips Andrew Osenga …to name a few. Somehow, with all the extra time on his hands, he and his wife Beth are raising four children, he’s an elder at his church, he teaches Sunday School, he mentors younger artists and producers (like my son Asher), and he released two solo albums, along with many songs written for his family and church. I speak for thousands of people when I say that my faith has been edified, my life enriched, and my love for Christ and his church strengthened by this man. Andrew Peterson Those solo albums are sources of astonishment to every songwriter I know. The songs on his solo projects contain some of the most creative and musically gob-smacking sounds as well as some of the finest lyric writing you’ll ever experience. I’m not exaggerating. If I were, we wouldn’t be giving this award. The songs on his albums are exquisitely written, full of brilliant turns of phrase, perfectly employed metaphors, clever rhymes that are so natural you forget they rhyme, and—perhaps most wonderful of all—they’re brimming with scriptural allusions that could only have been written by someone who doesn’t just know God’s word, but who loves it and has written it on his heart. A few examples: In the song “A Name, A Name, A Name,” he describes a woman going to work in the morning, a woman who’s tired of life but suspects that there’s some great beauty calling to her through the mundanity: She steps off of the train and then out in the rain, Carried away on a sea of strangers. Men gaping up from their papers At ladies weightless as vapors Make her tired. So tired. The telephone calls and the windowless walls Siphon the life from the halls where all these Half-human beings sit staring at screens Repeating routines without meaning Leaving her tired. So tired. She closes the door to her office and sits in her chair And there in the quiet, she hears it, A name she knows from somewhere. That name, of course, is Jesus. He writes of his love for old and out-of-tune pianos, comparing himself to that brokenness that still, against all hope, longs to sing and to be beautiful: In the corner of the room, Down and out of tune, A lonely old upright With a jagged set of keys That unlock old memories– Sentimental melodies, Voices echoing, Beautiful funeral flowers. I remember when I used to be Part of the family When I was younger. But now the glory days are gone I’m no use to anyone. Out of shape and out of key, they’ve all forgotten me. But then the lonely old upright begs to be touched by God, to be played and listened to, to be given some hope: But if you’ve got the mind to take a swing, I’ve got the hammer and the string. And when the player plays I was made to resonate. So come and sit beside me Come and touch me again. Come and press a message into my hand If you can take a good dissonance Like a man. Your love is a hand in the dark And hope is the sound of the song That it plays in my heart. In the song “4th of July,” he sings of the transience of great civilizations like America, compared to the eternal Kingdom of God: The first star of the evening Was singing in the sky, High above our blanket in the park, And by the twilight’s gleaming On the fourth day of July The city band played on into the dark. And then a cannon blast. A golden flame unfolding Exploded in a momentary bloom. The petals fell and scattered Like ashes on the ocean As another volley burst into the blue. But the first star of the evening never moved. There’s a sweet melancholy that runs through much of his music and lyrics, a gut-level ache for healing that gives wings to his fierce hope in the love of God. As it was for Tolkien, the power of the beauty was partly the sadness. In “Nothing for the Ache,” he bears his soul: There’s nothing for the ache, The groaning of a heart about to break You’ll notice when you lie in bed awake, Feeling like you’re falling. And there’s nothing for you here. Your life is like a mist that disappears, Fading like a ringing in the ears– You strain to hear the sound and then it’s gone. How my heart is bleeding. I cry with every beating. Tell me why are we born with these souls inside That burst and break us open? Why, If there’s nothing for the ache? The question begs an answer. An answer which he offers up in song after song, though not always in an obvious way. In the song, “Listen!” he tells us to pay attention to the God whose presence moves through the world like a train passing in the night: Shrouded in steam and smoke On a dark cloud he approaches And the tails of his coal-black coat Are a train of lumbering coaches He passes unseen like a ghost But he thunders like a herd of horses And he calls to the heavenly host To join with their airy voices Listen! And in a song no other person on earth could have written, “EGBDF,” he compares his own journey from law to grace, from the Old Testament to the New, to, of all things, his journey from piano lessons with Beethoven to his love of rock and roll by way of the Beatles: There were venerated volumes of rhythm and melody The grave embalmings of a language dead for a century To read, to recite, to repeat Without even thinking to learn to speak ‘Cause good boys do fine Always hearing, We never understand We see without perceiving And speak of what we can’t comprehend Old Testament. Then… Sir Paul McCartney appeared to me in Day-Glo With an english horn Speaking words I thought were dead Now strangely reborn And I heard unearthly voices That sang in distant doorways and rooms He was conducting kite strings Winds that filled me and I flew Now the harmony is written on my heart Yeah, the language is on my tongue And I barely understand it But I’ve only just begun New Testament, now written on his heart, in a language he’s just beginning to learn. I could go on and on. More, though, than his tireless work, more than his stellar playing and writing, more than his willingness to pour his own gifting into that of others, is his kindness. His willingness to listen. His willingness to humble himself before scripture. His willingness to serve his wife and children and church. I speak for thousands of people when I say that my faith has been edified, my life enriched, and my love for Christ and his church strengthened by this man. I truly believe that he’s an exemplar of what it means to serve the Kingdom of God with his gifting and to do so joyfully, with integrity, with excellence, and with love. On behalf of the Rabbit Room community it brings me great pleasure to present the Resonator Award to Ben Shive. Click here to pre-order a limited edition vinyl copy of one of Ben’s records (yet to be determined).

I grew up next door to a family with a willow tree with a swing in their backyard, a family who allowed me to be as one of their own for summer days on end. For years and years, I was as much an O’Connor as their own daughters and son. The two girls, Erin and Cara, were younger than me by a few grades and so I sometimes took a surprising role as leader in our tiny tribe, a space I didn’t often fill as a little girl with a quiet voice and a tender spirit. I grew up romping around the yard with my neighbors, huge to our small selves. I’m sure that we spent a fair amount of time together in the other seasons, as we lived as neighbors for almost a decade, but it is summer that remains the most vivid. I can smell the tomato and lavender plants in the muggy Virginia air. I remember grass stains galore and sticky lips from those popsicles you squeeze from a tube. I remember taking refuge in their cool basement when it was hottest and watching Annie for the first glorious time. I remember Mrs. O’Connor taking lunch orders as she called out the back door: PB&J, turkey, or ham? she’d ask. I remember also being scolded more than once for being mean to one of the girls. I did not have immunity— I was a member of this household, not a diplomat.  On those long summer days, we’d pretend-play the days away. We’d play school and house in the basement. We’d make forts in their conifer trees that lined the back fence. I’d tell them I knew how to make perfume from fresh flowers. And they believed me. My childhood house has a window that looks right to the corner of their backyard fence, the corner where the willow tree was planted. Many summer days, I’d wait by that window in the mornings until the girls would come to the corner of the fence. We had our own code symbols and hand gestures. “Can I come over?” I’d ask through our symbols from behind my window. They’d run in to ask their mother, who always had room for me. I’d return home hours later, closing the back fence gate behind me and galloping past our other neighbors’s deck, after spending the day emerged in other worlds, ones where I was a nurse, a mother, a teacher, a firefighter (and apparently a budding perfumer) all in the same day. It wouldn’t be until much later that I realized that one of the best gifts I was given by my neighbors was an extension of innocence in the form of friends who still wanted to play pretend. The O’Connors moved away when I was eleven and I was devastated. The friends I had at school weren’t interested in pretending anymore. On the cusp of the pre-teen years, it wouldn’t be long until Taylor Swift and make-up and seventh grade boyfriends would edge out imaginative play. But in Sycamore Lakes in Herndon, Virginia, I grew up with a rich inner life, a mind bursting with story, and with neighbors who let a little girl with straight across bangs join their ranks as an eater of apple slices, a player of games, and above all, a chief pretender. In the mini-civilization of our neighborly tribe, she was the mender of wounds, the dispeller of little-girl disagreements, and the one who tweezed the stinger out of my toe when I got my first bee sting. Kelsey Miller It was not long after they moved away that Mrs. O’Connor died in a car accident. Erin, who was only ten at the time, tried to call me to share the news, but I hung up on her because I thought she was being a jerk with a cruel joke. My dad sat me down an hour or so later after my parents got home from work and I remember so vividly his face as he told me Erin’s joke was true, holding my small hands, my mom standing in the kitchen crying. I can see now just how much my parents tried to quell their own grief in that moment for my sake. But it was undeniable, for that day they lost a friend, a neighbor, a sharer of snow days and summer days and those inevitable longer-than-intended talks in the driveway as we walked past their house on an evening stroll. If there was any shred of hope for that pure innocence of childhood to live on, it was buried then. I thought I was devastated when they moved away, but living in a world where Mrs. O’Connor didn’t anymore moved beyond devastation into an unrelenting grief that stings thirteen years later. In the mini-civilization of our neighborly tribe, she was the mender of wounds, the dispeller of little-girl disagreements, and the one who tweezed the stinger out of my toe when I got my first bee sting. I believe still that she loved me as a child and I loved her as a second mother, and her mark on my life will always be the complete welcome she offered to anyone who found their way into her home. I have wondered many times what it would have been like if Mrs. O’Connor were still here. I wonder what it would have been like to bear witness to her growing older alongside her children and what a loss it is that such a woman never got to become a grandmother. I wonder what our relationship would be like today, me now having matured into an adult. I wonder why God took away so brutally one of the best people I knew. I can’t know the answer to those wonderings and so I am left to stick to hope. I hope that one day Drew and I will have children and we will be friends with our neighbors and our children will be friends with their kids. I hope we will have a spot for a willow tree in the backyard and a sandbox underneath it and some fragrant flowers with which a little girl will pretend to make perfume. I hope that I will tweeze the bee stinger out of the toe of a neighbor friend who wasn’t wearing his shoes in the grass and offer some shelter from the unpredictable storm that is childhood, darker and scarier than we let ourselves believe. And most of all, I hope that I will feast with Mrs. O’Connor again, perhaps on peanut butter and jelly, and that we will share in the goodness of the world and laugh about the times I was a brat to her kids and how she still let me come back through her doors day after day, year after year.

[Editor’s note: This year at Hutchmoot, John Cal not only fed us with delicious food; he nourished us with beautiful stories, providing context for each meal and what it meant to him. What follows is the last of his speeches, given on Saturday, October 6th—you can read his first one by clicking here and his second one by clicking here. Enjoy.] Edelweiss, Edelweiss Every morning you greet me Small and white Clean and bright You look happy to meet me Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow Bloom and grow forever Edelweiss, Edelweiss Bless my homeland forever _____________ I am not one to make promises, but I promise the story is true. I understand it’s hard to believe, in part, because it begins with me arriving early to class: Public Speaking 101 with Professor Blake. One morning, a brief silence fell amidst a normally raucous room. There was humming from somewhere behind me on the left. Later I’d learn it was Michael Paradise. I knew the tune, somehow, and so did Yara Gomez apparently, who sat next to me, because when I turned to my left and we made eye contact, the words came in unison: “Edelweiss, edelweiss.” As if on cue, Stephanie Burks joined in, then Michelle Corson and Ryan McCullough; before long we were all singing at the top of our lungs and Mr. Blake was waving his hands about like a conductor, beckoning the Von Trapp family to sing, filling the Felsenreitschule in Salzburg with music. I think about that day often, like magic, an unexpected gift, and I get it: it’s hard to believe, but I promise the story is true. Now that we’ve become better acquainted, built spaces of trust, and dare I say, become friends, I would like to admit something to you, deeper and darker perhaps than my previous admission that I, much to the chagrin of Pete Peterson, have still not seen Star Wars. I don’t celebrate Christmas, don’t like it, try to avoid it if I can, and am annoyed by the music, decorations, and lights. I find it the most aggressive of all the holidays. To be clear, I do love Jesus and am a big fan of his birthday. I am deeply grateful of his being begotten as the only Son of God, and annually, usually, around the 25th of December, I try to hold that truth in my mind, that I am loved and treasured. It’s just Christmas I can’t stand. Sure, there was a time when I liked Christmas—what four year-old can resist the temptation of all those shiny boxes? But the pomp of it all lost its circumstance for me early on. “Why don’t we make cookies for Santa?” my father would say to six year-old me. “Because Santa isn’t real,” I would reply shortly. “He left a note last year, thanking you…” “The note was in your handwriting,” I would say, with a well-placed eye roll. At ten years old, I decided that cutting down thousands of Christmas trees every year and shipping them all the way from the Pacific Northwest to Hawaii was ecologically unsound and financially irresponsible; and so I declared that I would boycott Christmas unless my parents invested in an artificial tree. Even after my parents divorced, my father tried desperately to hold on to some sort of celebration, wrapping presents in bright paper and inviting friends over for dinner, though he was the only one in his household of two who was keen to do so. I tried, at least I think I tried, to allow him his festiveness by staying out of the way, but I’m also sure it isn’t easy to celebrate and revel in any sort of holiday alone. But there was one strange Christmas, my favorite ever Christmas, a day that paradoxically restored my love for the holiday and further solidified my detest of it. To my surprise, out of nowhere on the night of the 24th, my father asked, “What do you want to do tomorrow? I don’t have anything planned.” I thought it was a trick, but with trepidatious hope queried, “Could we go to the movies?” James Cameron’s Titanic had been released five days earlier and all my friends had already seen it. “Okay,” he said without belaboring the point, and as to not jinx it, I stayed relatively silent for the next twenty-four hours. We went, just he and I in a preposterously crowded theater. Titanic was supposed to be the movie of the decade, and Leo and Kate were the “it-onscreen couple” that was going to deliver us the entertainment spectacular of the season. As the movie started, Dad tapped my knee twice and gave it a squeeze, something he still does to this day. “Hey there buddy,” and “proud of you” are what I imagine he’s silently trying to communicate. Then there it was, the ship of dreams. Rose in that purple hat bedecked with striped grosgrain ribbon. Jack wins tickets aboard the ship at a hand of poker, but wait…the horn is blowing. Are he and Fabrizio going to make it? Rose is unhappy. Jack saves her with his cleverness, but she’s in a loveless engagement to Cal. Rose’s mom is insufferable. New money, Molly Brown is feisty and makes inappropriate jokes at dinner, all the while Bill Paxton, the treasure hunter, is just trying to get out of the old lady where the necklace is. But then we watch the ship sink, and there isn’t enough room on the floating door…allegedly. And everyone, even Bill Paxton is heart broken. Then, that night in the middle of the Atlantic, we find old lady Rose has had the necklace all along. She dangles it over the edge, giggles a girlish laugh, and tosses it into the sea. “She wouldn’t have done that!” my dad yells from his seat. Someone nearby shushes him. A few people laugh. “She should sell the necklace and give the money to her granddaughter!” he continues, still not whispering. I was mortified. Afterward we ate in the food court, and I told him how embarrassed I was about what he did in the theater. He laughed and said, “Well, she wouldn’t have thrown it over. Would you have thrown it over?” “I guess not,” I said, starting to laugh myself. I know it sounds silly, but it was everything I ever wanted out of Christmas: the togetherness, the laughing, the just being, my dad being completely and truthfully who he was, and me getting to be completely and truthfully who I was, even the parts that were embarrassing. When school started again after break, my friends didn’t get it. They didn’t believe me. “It was just you and your dad?” James asked. “Yeah, but we hung out and it was fun,” I said. “And there wasn’t any pie or presents?” asked Anna. “No, we had Chinese food and watched Titanic, and my dad was so embarrassing in the theater,” I said, laughing. “But it just doesn’t feel like Christmas without pie,” came the retort. You go home tomorrow, and some of them won’t believe you because what we do here is so utterly preposterous, so out of sorts and strange compared to what the rest of our lives looks like. And maybe even you don’t believe it yet, that this happened, that for a moment we shared something special that was just between us, that we sang “Edelweiss” together, that we celebrated and were merry. And it’s okay that they don’t get it. It’s okay if you don’t quite get it yet. We’re bombarded with so many stories. Some are just lies: like horoscopes or fortune cookies. “If you just eat this fruit…” the beautiful serpent said. (That’s how lies work. They’re always bathed in a veneer of beauty.) There are good untrue stories, like the one of Samwise and Frodo or Hermione and Dumbledore. There are stories that, while they didn’t really happen, point to the truth, like that of Kalmar and Podo, or Edmund and Lucy and Aslan. But I promise these things happened. I promise these stories are true. So tonight we feast on take-out Chinese food, the meal from my favorite Christmas ever, the celebration in which I felt most loved and connected to my father. “Who sends a baby to save the world, anyway?” my friend Tyler asked a few months ago when we were riffing on how absurd Christianity sounds. “An illegitimate baby,” I added. “Adopted,” Tyler said. And then, if you believe the prophecy in Isaiah, he wasn’t even a cute baby: “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.”—Isaiah 53:2 It seems unbelievable that the all-knowing great God of the universe would choose to connect with us, would call us into community, into his presence by sending a baby…an illegitimate, adopted, not cute, brown skinned, middle eastern baby to a poor family from a repressed, occupied minority group. But I promise the story is true. I promise it was magic when we sang “Edelweiss” that day. I promise we watched Titanic together and were embarrassed and laughed real laughter. I promise that we few unlikely pilgrims who gathered here have done our best to be present in moments and spaces of truth and respite through story and song, with tobacco filled pipes, and ink smudged drawings, with kind and difficult words, and plates of food. I promise that a baby was sent to save you. So until we meet again, whether here or on that farther shore, keep sharing these ludicrously unbelievable stories of our blessed homeland and its Great Emperor across the sea, and come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord. Click here to read John Cal’s Thursday night speech, and here to read his Friday night speech.

Last week one of the dearest saints of our era stepped into the Long Hello. Eugene Peterson, a pastor, teacher, theologian, and writer died after a long illness. Here’s the story from Christianity Today. It draws on a beautiful account by the Peterson family, which reads, in part: Among his final words were, “Let’s go.” And his joy: my, oh my; the man remained joyful right up to his blessed end, smiling frequently. In such moments it’s best for all mortal flesh to keep silence. But if you have to say something say this: “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Yes. Holy, Holy, Holy. But also, I want to say a few words about what Eugene Peterson’s work has meant to me. In 2002 I only knew Eugene Peterson as the author of The Message, an “idiomatic translation” of the Bible that I felt pretty ambivalent about (I’ve since warmed up to it, mostly because I have come to trust Eugene Peterson’s wisdom, good sense, and good heart). I had quit my job and was a little vague on what I was going to do next when my friend Tim Filston gave me a set of cassette tapes containing a series of sermons Eugene Peterson had preached on the life of David. (These sermons became the basis of his book, Leap Over a Wall.) I don’t have any idea why Tim gave me those sermons or what he expected me to get out of them. I was visiting Orlando at the time; for a few days, I spent my mornings listening to Eugene Peterson and my afternoons canoeing in various swamps and rivers in Central Florida. Between the alligators and the swamp birds and the turtles and the way Eugene Peterson opened up those old stories to me, something big shook loose in my imagination. After years of mostly just talking about writing, I felt like I was going to bust if I didn’t actually write something down. I went to an Einstein Brothers’ bagel shop and outlined the whole Wilderking Trilogy in one sitting. I spent the rest of 2002 writing The Bark of the Bog Owl, and the next two years writing the other two books of the trilogy. These are truths I have internalized so fully, that have shaped my thinking and writing and teaching so thoroughly, that I had mostly forgotten who taught them to me. I have nothing to add to the reputation of a man who, after all, has gone from glory unto glory. But it's always a good thing to register one's gratitude. Jonathan Rogers When I heard that Eugene Peterson had died, I pulled down Leap Over a Wall, the book that was based on those sermons. I don’t know how many times I read through that book as I wrote the Wilderking stories, but it was a lot. I have also loved Peterson’s more well-known books, especially A Long Obedience in the Same Direction and Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, but Leap Over a Wall was my gateway into his work, so it has always had a special place in my imagination. Still, in looking back through the book, I was astonished to see how much I owed—as a writer, as a Christian, as a human being—to Eugene Peterson’s way of talking about story, and the larger story we all live in. “The reason that story is so basic to us,” he wrote, “is that life itself has a narrative shape—a beginning and end, plot and characters, conflict and resolution.” He continues, Life isn’t an accumulation of abstractions such as love and truth, sin and salvation, atonement and holiness; life is the realization of details that all connect organically, personally, specifically: names and fingerprints, street numbers and local weather, lamb for supper and a flat tire in the rain. God reveals himself to us not in a metaphysical formulation or a cosmic fireworks display, but in the kind of stories that we use to tell our children who they are and how to grow up as human beings, tell our friends who we are and what it’s like to be human. Story is the most adequate way we have of accounting for our lives… Forgive the long quotations, but I can’t seem to stop: Somewhere along the way, most of us pick up bad habits of extracting from the Bible what we pretentiously call “spiritual principles,” or “moral guidelines,” or “theological truths,” and then corseting ourselves in them in order to force a godly shape on our lives. That’s a mighty uncomfortable way to go about improving our condition. And it’s not the gospel way. Story is the gospel way. And finally, Story isn’t imposed on our lives; it invites us into its life. As we enter and imaginatively participate, we find ourselves in a more spacious, freer, and more coherent world….Story is the primary means we have for learning what the world is, and what it means to be a human being in it. No wonder that from the time we acquire the mere rudiments of language, we demand stories. ... Yes and amen. These are truths that I have internalized so fully, that have shaped my thinking and writing and teaching so thoroughly, that I had mostly forgotten who taught them to me. I have nothing to add to the reputation of a man who, after all, has gone from glory unto glory. But it’s always a good thing to register one’s gratitude.

Greg LaFollette wants his music not only to be beautiful and true, but to be helpful and useful. Over the past year, he has been writing church music with his own specific congregation in mind; in this endeavor, practicality has become a virtue of his craft right alongside aesthetic nuance. And the result is an album that is truly useful and beautiful, all at once. In fact, he just released it into the world on Friday the 26th. Read on to listen to one of the songs and learn about Greg’s journey towards the unification of utility and art. Drew: The process of making your new record, Songs of Common Prayer, seems to have been very interwoven with your church family (Grace Story Church, Nashville, TN). How has your desire to be helpful within the context of that community informed your craft and creativity? Greg: Well, I’ve worked in the music industry for almost fifteen years and contributed to probably a hundred records. In that span, I’ve made a few of my own singer/songwriter records, and while I believed in my art, I would always get to the point of releasing the music and find I didn’t have it in me. Something about that final step wouldn’t feel true or natural to me. Realizing my lack of “the x-factor” that I so readily identified in the artists I worked with, I began to categorize myself differently. As a producer, I knew I could come beside artists to realize their creative visions; and as a touring musician, I was confident in my ability to fill in whatever gaps existed in a band—but that felt markedly different from being an artist. I started working at this church a year ago and quickly realized that sharing songs that inspire honesty, vulnerability, self-awareness, and God-awareness is something that feels really true and natural to me. I discovered that I could make art and help people. It shifted my whole definition of what an artist can be. I’ve thrived since then, although I’m still coming to terms with being a two on the Enneagram (helper) while I really admire fours (artist). Drew: Would you describe this as a shift from self-promotion to promoting others, then? Had you previously assumed that art by nature was always only used for self-promotion? I started working at this church a year ago and discovered that I could make art and help people. It shifted my whole definition of what an artist can be. Greg LaFollette Greg: I grew up with the idea that if you want to be virtuous and truly serve others, then the highest calling was to be the unheralded guy who shows up to church early to turn on the lights and set up the chairs. I mean, of course the pastor and worship leader are serving and helping, but they also get thanked after the service. The head trustee rarely receives a hand shake and nod of gratitude as the congregants leave. I’ve always aspired to be the guy who does the quiet, unnoticed, unappreciated work. So, in my reaction to the disproportionate attention they received, I often underestimated the virtue of the people who were up on stage leading the church. Sorry, everyone. Drew: I do think there’s a cultural assumption there, though, that art isn’t primarily useful. Practicality and creativity have been divorced so irreparably in our imaginations that we assume the “useful” thing to do is get to church early to turn the lights on and the “indulgent” thing to do is to write a song and think people will be helped by it. Greg: Yeah, and I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve been able to reconcile those two actions and motivations. I can now be supportive and serve in ways that involve my creativity and not feel uncomfortable. It helps that at a church plant, none of your work is liable to be over-glorified. The lack of pretentiousness helps ground everyone’s efforts in the community, whether it’s perceived as “creative” or not. Drew: What has the learning process been like in the nooks and crannies of a community learning how to be together? You’re in this new pastoral role, especially new in the way you’re imagining and interpreting it. How have you grown into it among everything else in the church? Greg: My story is a common one: I never thought I wanted to work at a church. I wanted to make music for the church and be associated with the church; but to actually work at a church somehow felt like a demotion. I don’t know where that untrue idea comes from, but it’s prevalent—I’ve listened to lots of worship leaders tell me that they didn’t embrace their role in the church until later in life, after pushing it away for a long time. But then they explain how liberating it can be to have a legitimate career and directly serve the Church. It’s important to accept who we are and where we are in life. Today, I find myself being equipped for this and being placed in front of people who are willing to let me lead them. And I am so grateful for it. In terms of my responsibilities, I have a lot of freedom to create for my church. If I feel like it would be helpful, I can write a song during the week and introduce it the next Sunday. I feel a great charge to be in tune with my people. As I’m choosing songs, I often ask myself two questions: What do we need? Where does it hurt? That’s where all the songs for Songs of Common Prayer came from. It should be stated that not every song “works” the first time. Sometimes, after introducing a song to the church, I go home and shift the melody around to better fit our congregation, to encourage their participation. I love that because at that point, there’s a co-writing element introduced—I feel like the Church then owns the song as much as I do. All these expressions embody the life of our church—they’ve been written for particular people experiencing particular joy and suffering with a particular vocal range. Drew: Similar to the misunderstanding that art can’t be useful, it seems to me that we are also prone to imagine songs as detached pieces of content floating around the atmosphere, rather than gifts to specific people in specific settings. What is it like writing directly to your church community, for these friends you know by name? Greg: I want the kids to be able to sing these songs, but I also want the songs to have staying power. So I often land on meditative refrains that can get stuck in your head, but aren’t annoying like lots of “children’s music” can be. My writing process is really shaped by wanting to meet standards of usefulness. Nothing feels better to me than helping people gather together. Drew: What are your hopes for Songs of Common Prayer as a recording that both transcends your own community and remains faithful to the particularity of other communities? Greg: I’m actually in the midst of answering that question for myself, and I’m excited to share. In releasing the record, I’ve received offers to play concerts and lead services at various churches around the country. In a lot of ways, that’s of course what I want. But as I began to plan, I realized that there might be a way for me to use my gifts more effectively and, in turn, spend my time in a more life-giving, rewarding way. So rather than doing a traditional tour, where I’m only in one place for a few hours of one night every year or so, I want to create a model where I can be something like an artist not-in-residence. I want to use the platforms that have been given to me to serve the Church by evaluating needs and trying to help. Drew: So, something like a consultant for the disciplines of worship? It reminds me of how Andy Crouch came to speak at Hutchmoot this year: he observed us over the course of the weekend, and I could tell by his words that he had really gotten to know the Rabbit Room. His advice was unique to us and our calling. He was so passionate about it, and it seemed to mean a lot to everyone there. Greg: Yeah, something like that. I want to spend time getting to know communities personally. I want to help identify needs and then join in addressing them. I want to be able to give that kind of gift, which I don’t think I can give if I tour traditionally. Drew: And it’s so much more sustainable in the long-term, for everyone. Greg: It definitely is for me. This sort of helping feels truer to who I am than simply scheduling a tour. In partnership, mutual inspiration, commonality, and friendship we can have meaningful interactions that lead to meaningful and lasting change. This is the way that I know I can have passion and integrity with how I move forward. I’m excited to see how God uses this vision. Click here to listen to and buy Songs of Common Prayer. Click here to learn more about Greg LaFollette and Songs of Common Prayer at his website. Click here to read Greg’s own blog post about this new project.

What is it that makes ghost stories so much fun? Is it just that they’re scary and suspenseful and make us jump? Or is something deeper going on? What if these eerie tales of things that go bump in the night are actually lifting the veil and shining light on something real and good and true about the world? For Halloween this year, we present to you “The Delightful Shiver: Part 1,” in which Andrew Peterson (singer/songwriter, author, and poet) investigates these questions and tries to get at the heart of why these stories fill us with such a delightful shiver. Listen—if you dare. Click here to listen to The Delightful Shiver. Check out the Hutchmoot Podcast on Apple Podcasts by clicking here. And explore the Rabbit Room Podcast Network here.

WARNING: Spoilers of certain films and stories follow. So tonight is Halloween, or maybe for some of you, time for a church “Harvest Festival.” It’s essentially the same thing. Your kids will eat a year’s worth of candy in one night (unless, of course, you’re one of those boring parents who hands out apples and juice boxes), and everyone will dress up, just as long as there are no bloody Scream masks or witch costumes. Whatever your tradition is on the night of October 31st, the dark, spooky themes of horror films are inescapable this time of year. Many Christians shrug and play along, knowing it’s just part of the season. Others are deeply offended. In either case, the unfortunate fact is that the church has often downplayed, sanitized, or completely ignored the horror genre instead of questioning why it exists, and furthermore, how Christ may be active in it. 2 Corinthians 6:14 rhetorically asks, “What fellowship has light with darkness?” Absolutely. Yet it is false to assume a horrific piece of art contains nothing but darkness. More on that in a bit. I watched the new Halloween film last week in the theater. For those unfamiliar with the saga, Michael Myers plays the villain, a serial killer who attempted to kill Laurie Nelson (Jamie Lee Curtis) in the original 1978 film. Forty years later, Michael Myers escapes and Laurie is preparing for their imminent encounter. However, Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer) thinks her mom is psychotic, so instead of preparing herself for the danger, she retorts, “The world is not a dark and evil place. It is full of love and understanding.” As soon as I heard that line, I thought, Wow, that is so often how we as the Church approach art. We want it to be “safe for the whole family,” devoid of evil. Though if there must be evil for the good guys to conquer, it mustn’t be scary, or too dark, and definitely not relatable. Because if a villain were too relatable, or if their ethics were almost logical, it might reveal something true and terrible about us. For this reason, combined with arguments of horror’s glorification of violence and depravity, we dismiss art that reveals the horrors of our world; instead we misinterpret Philippians 4:8 to mean that we should always imagine the world as full of love and sun-shiny days. But there is a deep fulfillment to be discovered in pondering the darker things of the world. Indeed, the light of Christ shines brightest because of the darkness in our world. It would be a travesty to downplay the brilliance of the light of Jesus by sanitizing the dark. It’s for this reason that the horror genre exists: it’s not to keep you looking over your shoulder for ghosts, goblins, and zombies—I don’t personally know anyone who has to deal with such villainy on a daily basis—but within the horror genre, ghosts, goblins, and zombies exist to remind us of other evils, both societal and personal, which are much more sinister, often going unnoticed until pointed out. To use the Halloween example again, director John Carpenter set the film in a small town, the kind where nothing goes wrong and everyone lives in a bubble. For Carpenter, this type of easy, cruise-control lifestyle (which reminds me too much of Williamson County, Tennessee where I live) is a perfect breeding ground for undetected evil. And indeed in the film, the teens who find themselves in the deepest trouble are those shirking responsibility, lying, drinking under age, and having casual sex. Though Carpenter denies trying to send a moral message, it’s clear that these small-town vices, harmless as they seem to the film’s characters, are disastrously distracting when the battle of good and evil is at stake. It’s a reminder to keep awake and alert, never allowing yourself to fall prey to a life of going through the motions. In fact, it’s reminiscent of what Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5:5-6: “For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.” Speaking of keeping awake, the 2017 horror film Get Out opens with Childish Gambino’s song “Redbone,” asking us to “stay woke.” In the case of this film, the evil being brought to light is racism. But it’s not pre-Civil Rights Movement racism that director Jordan Peele tackles here. Most of us can agree that racial inequality has plagued our past, but if you ask if America is still racist today, the answers are sure to be more varied. Get Out answers with an unequivocal “yes.” It would be a travesty to downplay the brilliance of the light of Jesus by sanitizing the dark. Chris Thiessen First, the film makes you squirm as it portrays awkward interracial conversations we’ve all heard before. These awkward conversations often key in on questions about Chris’s (Daniel Kaluuya) African-American body—how strong it is, how talented he is. But things go from awkward to deeply sinister as you realize that the family of Chris’s girlfriend is going to sell Chris to the highest bidder for the purpose of a brain transplant into Chris’s body. It’s a dark commentary on the societal horror that white people have long admired the bodies of black people as a mere object of their own control, from the time of slavery to the present—the horror that white people would often rather be entertained by African-Americans playing football or singing than actually listen to their stories. While we’re on the subject, even George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, a 1968 classic largely responsible for the zombie sub-genre, has been cited as a critique of racism. Writer Renée Graham wrote about the film in the Boston Globe, “Everyone in the posse is white. Ben is African-American. I was a child, but the message I received was depressingly clear: They killed Ben because they believed a black man had to be a threat. A black hero equaled a dead hero.” Other “creature features” have served as metaphors for real-life issues as well: Godzilla is a giant dinosaur-like monster that emerges from the sea and terrorizes Japan, empowered by nuclear radiation. His first appearance was only nine years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And, of course, Frankenstein isn’t about a mumbling green giant, as portrayed by Boris Karloff. As Mr. A.S. Peterson has recently reminded us, Mary Shelley’s multi-layered original tale serves the verdict that humanity is guilty of monstrous acts ranging from hating the “other” to feeding human ambition at the expense of charity and community. As these films and stories bear witness, the horror genre has a deep capacity for great sorrow, for mourning the evils we have committed and see in the world around us. That being said, like any genre, it can be hollowed out when mere entertainment becomes the prime goal. Not all horror stories are created equal, and viewers should be wise in discerning whether something redemptive is to be gleaned from the story. But as I said before, I don’t believe a horrific piece of art can contain only darkness. Director Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Deliver Us From Evil) once said in an interview, “For me, [horror] is the perfect genre for a person of faith to work in. You can think about good and evil pretty openly. I always talk about it being the genre of non-denial. I like the fact that it’s a genre about confronting evil, confronting what’s frightening in the world.” As Derrickson says, the darkness is already there. The films just bring it to our consciousness. So this Halloween, let us not be afraid to consider the horrors which serve as a daily reminder that we were once slaves of sin, and indeed, that many still live in darkness. For in doing so, we are also reminded of the hope we have in Christ, the light who shines into the darkness and cannot be overcome.

As I am writing about Joy Ike’s newest album, Bigger Than Your Box, my daughter is literally making a home out of a cardboard box on the carpet beside my chair. It is a house for our cat, Berdie.  Before Sally Ann finishes spelling out “Welcome” in marker on the front, Berdie is already inside, purring. We never outgrow the urge to build or inhabit such small spaces for security and comfort, and the older we get the more elaborate and invisible these constructions become. In Bigger Than Your Box Ike reminds us that these safe havens can be coffins for creativity, barriers to the very air we need to thrive, and we are at our best when we are able to break free of them. In “You Betta’” Ike confronts her listener’s security box like the best kind of life coach. She’s not having it. Her challenge is backed by a whole choir of confronters, clapping their hands as if to wake us up, chanting together, “You betta’ step out that box. / You betta’ stand up and walk.” All together the songs on this album sound just like that, a long awaited burst of just anger and firey optimism grounded in the confidence that “your hope is coming.” If you are facing the iron grip of your own limitations, if change feels impossible, this is album is for you. Yes, she is calling her audience to break through their boundaries, and she is perfectly willing to perform the example. Chris Slaten One way she approaches this task is by playfully calling out some of her subjects on the habits that keep them in hiding. She almost seems amused by them. In “Give a Little” she wistfully pleads for a lover to reach out from living “lives so isolated,” joking “maybe we can trade anxieties.” Later in “Full” she calls out a more obnoxious subject for being so un-empathetic that they have “no room for anyone else.” Towards the end of the song the studio is invaded by a crowd crashing the one-band show inside. It ends with the laughter of a host of new friends. Instead of being spiteful, the message is an invitation: Being so self-focused is a lonely prison; instead, come join the party. That’s not to say that every box is of our own making. Her latest video for “Hold On” focuses on facing the constraints beyond our control. You can even see her sister, Peace, for whom she wrote the song, pounding against the walls of her own body as she presses through physical therapy. Ike’s passion pervades the record and in some ways seems to have freed her from her own musical boxes. Anyone who has seen Ike perform live knows she’s typically the most versatile and lively performer in the room, but this is the first of her recordings that comes close to taking the risks needed to capture what it is like to listen to her sit behind the piano, fully leaning into her stunning range of vocal textures. She moves deftly between sonorous growls, Nigerian whoops and howls, and more vulnerable moans and whispers; she manipulates notes like threads that can be strained and stretched; she punctuates her rhythmic piano style with percussive breathing and mimics her drummer’s cymbals by striking words like “else, else, else.” Yes, she is calling her audience to break through their boundaries, and she is fully willing to perform the example. What is most compelling about her message is how she finds greater security in the One leading her out of her box and the saints that have gone ahead. She begins and ends the record with “Ever Stay” and “Assurance,” which both assume the only real way to step out is to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” The best kind of assurance comes not from our homemade safety measures, but out of adventurous obedience in step with the One who is near, who not only frees us from our boxes, but like an “unassuming fire” has a knack for lovingly burning them down. Given more time, I’d go into just how beautifully the band fully realizes the energy and joy of these songs, but you’ll just have to hear for yourself. Joy Ike’s music can be purchased from her website, iTunes, or Amazon.

For weeks now, my laziness has gotten the better of me and I’ve been filling my body with what would be considered less wholesome choices—Cheetos, Dr. Pepper, and more McFlurries than I’d care to admit. I heat cans of soup, packet ramen, and a litany of “just add water” meals. I open paper and plastic and pressed foil to find the amalgamated products inside. It’s true that in the midst of all this pseudo-food there have been a few real bowls of cereal, errant fried eggs, and even the stray banana covered in peanut butter, but on the whole, I haven’t been taking care of myself. It all just seems too hard. I think that because I cooked professionally for much of my life, people assume that my meals at home consist of Tarragon-Scented Chicken Paillard, Miso-Glazed Salmon, and Roasted Chiogga Beets. “What’s your favorite thing to cook for yourself?” someone will ask, and while I imagine they think I’m going to answer with “homemade brioche” or “bouillabaisse” or maybe even “a perfectly executed meat loaf,” if I’m being honest, more often than not, the reality comes much closer to something like a frozen cheese pizza. Blueberry Pop Tarts, Ruffles and onion dip, plastic tubs of tapioca pudding—when I am struggling to be that better version of myself that I want to be, that version I tell other people I am, these are the foods that I so often default to. I may try to cut up a cucumber or sit a handful of grapes next to my Ham & Cheese Hot Pocket, but often, even then, the consumption of said cucumbers and grapes turns into a Hail Mary intercepted at the last minute by a bag of BBQ Lays. It’s so hard when we’re in despair to remember what goodness tastes like, to remember that we’ve had fruit from the vine and water from the well. And in our despair we think it’s just us, that we are the only people in the world who can polish off an entire can of Pringles while standing at our kitchen counters, or speed through half a box of thin mints without noticing—but then, even the Israelites, who were given manna, the very bread from heaven, longed to glutton themselves on quail. We ate like this when I was a kid: Mt. Dew, frozen fish sticks with bottled tartar sauce, Totino’s Pizza Rolls. Sleepovers at friends’ houses revealed that their parents made spaghetti, egg salad sandwiches, and baked potatoes with steamed broccoli. So, so often in my childhood, when all I wanted—when what we all wanted, really—was to fit in, to not feel so different, I was left feeling lacking. There are, of course, the tastes we tell ourselves we’re supposed to want: grilled chicken breast, greek yogurt, kale smoothies. I circulate the idea of eating carrot sticks and hummus through my guilt-laden mind. It’s so easy to wish I was someone else, to want someone else’s shiny life, instead of sitting in the reality of my own: this life, my life, the one that I was given. I justify the coveting by conjuring the words of Paul to my lips, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of God?” For a moment, I let myself revel in another lie, that “if I just ignore it, it will go away,” but when I sit in this grief of eating too many slices of pizza, the weariness of yet another fast food bean burrito, the pain is too acute to ignore and I don’t know if I can swallow another helping of shame. And yet, I do not know how to get from here to there, from trapped in my puddle of grief and diet Coke to the supposed high fiber celebration of the vitamin-dense super fruit waiting for me on the tree of life. In Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon, there are recipes for saffron-infused bread, lobster soup, chicken paprikash, and, of course, many ways to cook lamb, but early on, before he gets into any of the fuss about how to make a saffron paste, sauté a lobster, or braise a lamb shank, Capon begins with, “I must first teach you how to deal with onions.” They are the first step to so much cooking— boeuf bourguignon, arroz con pollo, a pot of potato soup. “It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions,” Julia Child once said. “First, onions,” I think to myself. It's so hard when we're in despair to remember what goodness tastes like, to remember that we've had fruit from the vine and water from the well. And in our despair we think it's just us—but then, even the Israelites, who were given manna, the very bread from heaven, longed to glutton themselves on quail. John Cal I get up off the couch, go to the kitchen, open a drawer, and find my favorite chef knife. I grab its hilt and settle my grip gently on the bolster. The motion comes automatically. I can recall so many onions in my life, so many beginnings—the onion that went into the first dinner I ever cooked for my family when I was five, an over-salted stir fry made edible by tempering it with larger heaps of steamed calrose rice. There were the onions that held up my first roast chicken at age ten. I misread the recipe and confused twenty minutes at 350℉ with twenty minutes per pound at 350℉. It’s still amazing to me how most things will work out with just a little more time. Sliced thin and raw with capers on chilled plates of gravlax, roasted alongside roma tomatoes for a summer soup, caramelized for my favorite dish of capellini and mushrooms, pickled with red cabbage for my friend Jackie’s wedding—I have faced so many onions before, and yet this one seems so very insurmountable. “No one ever told me grief felt so like fear,” wrote C.S. Lewis. How hard it is each time we attempt to step out of that fog into brighter spaces, to try, even for a moment, to be slightly less afraid. And yet, so many of those first scary steps have led me to this one, and as I slice halfway through the root end of this onion, the one in front of me, and begin to unfurl the layers of papery skin, the next step becomes a little clearer: dice two stalks of celery. When thirty seconds ago I found myself in such despair and the lesser voices in my mind were so loud in their rattlings, as my ideas became incarnated as actions, and as I not only knew I could peel and slice an onion, but did it—as I took the next step out of this pit I had dug for myself (and filled with fun-sized Snickers wrappers), the next step became evident, and then the next and then the next. Soon the celery was diced, along with two cloves of garlic. I sliced a basket of button mushrooms, grated a few ounces of cheddar cheese, and buttered a cup of fresh bread crumbs. Enough light was getting through the cracks now to show me where I was going—Tuna Noodle Casserole. My father doesn’t cook much—oatmeal, banana sandwiches, fried eggs—but he can make Tuna Noodle Casserole, and was happy to do it whenever I asked. While dinner simmered on the stove, he’d toast slices of white bread for sopping up the dregs of sauce and slather them with a thick layer of margarine. I am reminded that I am only here because I allowed myself to be taken care of, because in my weakness, others entered my life and took care of me. If my father was cooking, he’d open a can of peas. He likes them mushy. I take some of the English variety from out of the freezer. I stir the pieces together: vegetables, noodles, sauce, and two cans of tuna. I top the lot with the breadcrumbs, and in the ensuing thirty minutes in the oven, I heat two bread rolls that I will later slather with generous helpings of butter for sopping up the sauce and go through the liturgy of setting the table for one. Yes, just for me. When the breadcrumbs have browned and the sauce is gently bubbling around the edges, I take the casserole out and set it on the counter. It is still too hot to eat, but while waiting for my supper to cool, I call a friend—the next step. “John! How’s it been going in Tennessee?” comes a bright voice on the other end. “Hey Arthur, really rough actually. Been in a funk for a couple weeks now,” I say. “Yeah?” Arthur replies. “Tell me more about that.”

Last week the students in my Writing Close to the Earth online class read George Orwell’s classic essay, “Politics and the English Language.” In it, Orwell makes the case that vague, abstract, usually Latinate language is an important tool in the dishonest politician’s tool-belt. The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. If you’ve read more than two or three of my letters, you are probably aware of my ongoing campaign against vague, abstract language. I agree with Orwell that fuzzy, imprecise language fosters the kind of fuzzy, imprecise thought that allows the worst kind of politician to flourish. But lately it has occurred to me that my exhortations to clear, concrete storytelling are incomplete. If storytelling is the most effective vehicle of truth (and I believe it is), it is also, and for the same reasons, the most effective vehicle of falsehood. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” Orwell wrote. True enough. But that doesn’t mean that all clear, concrete, specific language is sincere. Storytelling, whether fiction or non-fiction, has a unique power to reframe a reader’s or listener’s sense of reality. It says, in effect, “I know you have a lot of ideas about the story you’re living in, but consider the possibility that you are living in a different story altogether.” I am a Christian person, so I think of the Gospel in precisely these terms. The world gives us a million false and contradictory stories about the nature of reality, and each of us (for our own reasons) believes a few of them. (Nobody could believe all of them). The Gospel comes along and says, “Forget about all those other stories. Here’s the story you’re actually living in.” And in the truest story, you don’t have to be afraid, or proud, or self-indulgent, or self-protective. You don’t have to be right. You can say “Oh, what a fool I’ve been.” Then, for the first time, you can stop being such a fool. You don’t have to be the boss. You don’t have to be a victim. You don’t have to jealously guard whatever power you have managed to consolidate. You don’t have to find your sense of self in your race or your gender or your social class or your political leanings. You don’t have to be the hero of the story. You don’t even have to be the main character. You live in a better story than the ones the world is telling you. Jonathan Rogers But if the best stories awaken you to the larger, truer story in which you find yourself, there are other stories that shrink your world. These stories convince you that you need to be afraid, that you are a victim, that if you don’t hold tightly to your power or your rights (or, alternatively, if you don’t scrap for more power and more rights), you are doomed, along with everybody you love, and the “other” will triumph over you. These stories try to convince you that you are surrounded by enemies. The villains in these stories are so one-dimensional, the us-and-them dynamics so oversimplified and stereotypical that you would never tolerate them in a work of fiction; you’d throw the book across the room. And yet somehow we let these melodramas shape our sense of what kind of world we live in. When I look around our political landscape, I feel a little nostalgic for an era when Orwell’s “long words and exhausted idioms” could have seemed like a major threat to democracy (if, indeed, such an era ever existed). Much more serious are the threats posed by very specific, very concrete stories that lie about who we are and how we fit into the world—stories that lie about our fellow human beings, most of whom are just doing the best they can to get along in a world that can be pretty hard to get along in. Today is election day in the United States. I don’t know what your options are where you live. Some districts have better options than others. But whatever you choose, I hope you don’t choose it because some politician has stirred up your fear and outrage, then offered himself up as the solution to your fear and outrage. We’ve got to start telling better stories—not for the sake of wishful thinking, but because the better stories are true. You live in a better story than the ones the world is telling you. Take courage.

Today we are excited to share with you the third episode of our new podcast, The Second Muse. In this episode, Drew Miller is joined by Chris Slaten (aka Son of Laughter) and Ben Shive to discuss Slaten’s song, “The Fiddler.” If you’re familiar with this song already, you know that it is complex, yet succinct; dense, yet lightweight. It feels like a three-minute peek into a vast landscape worthy of endless exploration. If you’re new to The Second Muse, here’s the podcast in a nutshell: the title is taken from a Wendell Berry quote in which he references two distinct muses: the Muse of Inspiration, “who gives us inarticulate visions and desires,” and the Muse of Realization, “who returns again and again to say, ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’” It is this second Muse of Realization with which we concern ourselves in The Second Muse, specifically in the context of songwriting and record producing. In each episode, Drew interviews a different artist along with their producer about a song that gave them a great deal of trouble, whether in the writing or recording process or both. The song is then explored from the inside out, breaking down the components of the mix and how each element works towards making the song effective as a whole.

Every November, it seems that the boundary between Thanksgiving and Black Friday becomes thinner and thinner—sales begin sooner and obligatory family meals hasten to their end. Black Friday offers an over-abundance of new products, but this surplus is predicated on our shared assumption of scarcity: limited supply, time, and money. How does a cultural phenomenon such as this shape how we see the world? Are we still able to remember that we are creatures dependent on the earth to sustain us? And what do creation’s seasonal cycles of life and death—this time of year, decaying leaves strewn across a frost-bitten ground—tell us about abundance and scarcity? What does it mean to work, play, and rest as participants in these rhythms? Next week, St. Mary of Bethany Parish will host its first ever Commonplace Conversation: an event comprised of a panel discussion and carefully chosen art aimed to engage thoughtfully and beautifully with issues pertinent to our shared human life. The theme of this first event is “The Myth of Scarcity” and it is freely open to the public. This event will feature a discussion with Jason Adkins (Director of Trevecca’s Urban Farm), Mary Brown (deacon at St. Mary’s), and Kelsey Miller (Program Coordinator for Society of St. Andrew and writer on the Rabbit Room blog), original photography by Joey Bradshaw, and specially selected poetry and music, all interweaving to ask these questions. When: Thursday, November 15th at 6:30 pm Where: Wallace Chapel at Christ Church YMCA 15354 Old Hickory Blvd Nashville, TN 37211 Come join us to reflect on how the rhythms in which we find ourselves shape our minds, hearts, and relationships. We hope to see you there!

When we met Walt Wangerin at the first Hutchmoot, we didn’t dream that nearly ten years later, Rabbit Room Press would be issuing a brand new edition of one of his most beloved books. And yet here we are. Over and over again, I hear people list Miz Lil & the Chronicles of Grace as their favorite of Wangerin’s works. It’s a small book of short stories that recount Walt’s youth and the renewal of his faith while pastoring (and being pastored by) a small inner-city church. It’s a book of carefully chosen moments that build a powerful mosaic of sin and grace, loss and renewal. Tragically, the book has been out of print for some years and has become scarce, so it’s with humble pleasure that we offer it back to readers in this new edition. When Walt first asked us if we were interested in putting it back into print, he said he even had a couple of stories to add. In the end he found four. The new stories act as a coda to the main narrative arc and flesh out the community of characters in the book with quick yet bold strokes and, as always, Walt’s inimitable style. acclaimed artist Steve Prince to join the project and bring his unique gifts to bear on Walt’s stories. He graciously agreed. Steve’s passion and art springs from and nourishes inner cities and we couldn’t have dreamed of a more perfect match for Miz Lil. His images are earthy, chock full of symbolism, and unmistakably African American. In the end, we’re humbled and amazed that Rabbit Room Press has had the opportunity to work with Walt and Steve, giants in their fields, to bring this book back into publication. It will be released on November 23rd, and is available for preorder today in the Rabbit Room Store. New from Rabbit Room Press One of Wangerin’s most beloved works, Miz Lil & the Chronicles of Grace leads readers on two parallel journeys: one a series of tales from Wangerin’s youth as he reveals his descent into human sinfulness, the other a chronicle of his awakening to the great grace of God through relationship with his congregation while pastor of an inner city church. In this series of alternating stories, Wangerin’s staggering facility with language is at its most vibrant. Witty, sharp, rollicking, and unexpected, his prose crackles with life and hard-won insight. Characters like Miz Lil, Grandpa Storck, and Jolanda Jones are rendered unforgettable by his vivid writing and their unmistakable humanity. Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace is a book shot through with emotional weight, and Wangerin’s steady hand carries us through the wasteland of the human heart and lands us squarely in the grace and mercy of God.

Do you ever find yourself thinking, “I really want to dig into scripture, but I just don’t know where to start”? Did that one poem from Isaiah give you goosebumps, but then when you tried to read more of the whole book, you got lost and unmotivated? If you answered “no,” well then good for you! But if you answered “yes,” you are in good company, and Russ Ramsey might be able to help you. Russ has done a very good thing in the world: he has condensed the narrative arc of scripture into three elegant and helpful books called The Advent of the Lamb of God, The Passion of the King of Glory, and The Mission of the Body of Christ. These books provide accessible, inviting entry points for those among us who would like to become more scripturally literate. In fact, scriptural literacy has become very important to Russ, both as a pastor and as a writer. Every once in a while, I have an interview with someone that is so good that I can’t bear the thought of editing it down too much, so I break it into two parts instead. This interview was one of those; it was a conversation I have taken with me, and it is my hope that you can find some gold in it for yourself. Stay tuned for Part 2 soon. Drew: I don’t consider myself scripturally literate. How would you define scriptural literacy? What does that mean culturally right now? Russ: Biblical literacy is the reason I wrote these books. There was a time not too long ago when people generally had a higher level of familiarity with what’s in the Bible. When you look at art—people like Michelangelo and Rembrandt—a lot of the subject matter is depicting stories from scripture. And that’s because scripture was pretty ubiquitous; it was source material most people were able to access. So they knew the stories. It was part of the cultural fabric growing up, even if you weren’t religious. These days, as a pastor, I find that fewer and fewer people have read the Bible. That becomes troubling when it is the source material of the faith a person claims to embrace, yet they have not read it. It leaves a person in a position where they might invent a faith and call it “Biblical Christianity.” We see that happen all the time and it’s a problem. But we also live in a time when people read constantly—I’d say this generation is reading more words a day than any other generation that’s ever lived, thanks to the screens in our pockets. Information comes to us in a way that is immediate, global, and free. One of the struggles, then, is that when you’re overwhelmed with content, you don’t read very deeply. You know a little bit about a lot. It’s like music—once downloading mp3s became popular, everybody’s iTunes library became full of records they got for free that they never listened to. The idea of having a free album is great, but the amount of time it takes to really get to know an album hasn’t changed. Generally speaking, I think people talk about scripture a lot more than they actually read it. So I wanted to create a resource that would help Christians know the story of the Bible. I don’t deal a lot with poetry, the epistles, or the teaching portions; they’re there, but I fold them into the narrative. A great percentage of the Bible is narrative, Jesus taught with narrative, and stories are foundational to the human experience. We’ve been using stories to understand each other and ourselves since the beginning of time. It’s a Trojan horse for the truth. You can sneak truth by the gate if you share it in the form of stories. And Jesus says, “I tell parables that some will hear and some won’t.” Scripture assumes that if you draw breath as a human being, the story is about you, whether you believe it or not. Russ Ramsey Drew: Yeah, what do you make of that? Russ: Well, there’s a place in one of the gospels where Jesus is praying, thanking the Father that the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven have been hidden from the educated and revealed to spiritual children, referring to his own disciples. He’s thanking God that this is the case: that the ability to comprehend what God is doing in the Kingdom is not something that only belongs to the upper echelon of society. So when Jesus tells stories and uses parables, one of the reasons he does that is to confound the teachers of the law who think they already understand everything. There’s more of a human element to stories. You’re not just learning a lesson; you have to enter into something. That’s humanity’s relationship to God—it’s a story. We were made for relationship with him, that relationship was broken, and ever since, humanity has been crying out for redemption. We’ve known grief, the desire to hide, that gut-level feeling when someone dies, that death is an intruder—all of that plays out because we live our lives in need of being relationally connected to our Maker. That’s a story. Drew: One thing that strikes me about the contrast between doctrine and story is that while there are plenty of psalms about cherishing God’s law, turning it over in your heart and meditating on it, I don’t think you can cherish God’s law the same way you can cherish his stories. There’s a certain overabundance to stories—my wife and I are currently reading through the Harry Potter series out loud to each other, and we both know the story very well, but there’s almost a greater pleasure in returning to it again and again than even in reading it for the first time. Russ: The beauty of stories is that the reader changes over time. There are stories I loved in my twenties that I read with different eyes now, after having lived a whole bunch of life, experienced greater joys and greater sorrows. I see things I didn’t see before. The beauty of scripture is that you’ll never exhaust it. You’ll never understand all that is there to know. The hope is that we would be life-long students of God’s Word. Drew: It strikes me that, funnily enough, the word “story” is kind of a buzzword right now. That’s definitely cause for celebration in some ways, but I’m also curious how you would navigate the advantages and disadvantages of story becoming such a cultural obsession. Big companies have started saying, “We need to tell a story with our product!” And of course, we’re being told stories all the time through advertising in ways that no one could have ever predicted. Russ: The word itself is a big umbrella. It can mean a lot of different things. You don’t need to look much further than modern-day cinema. You could say that a movie like A River Runs Through It or Shawshank Redemption tells a story. You can say the same thing about a Transformer movie. It tells a story, too. But in each case we mean something totally different. Some stories exist to entertain; other stories are designed to lead to transactions. When a company says, “We need to tell a story,” everyone understands that the story is contrived, not inspired. But scripture belongs to the category of story that is about the reader as much as it’s about anything else. Scripture assumes that if you draw breath as a human being, the story is about you, whether you believe it or not. The stories have so much heart, too—one of the things I love about the stories of scripture is how emotionally dense they can be in a time when writing was done in thrift. If something was written down and preserved, there weren’t a lot of stray words. It was a rare thing. So scripture is written in this kind of thrift, where emotional resonance is played out less in long description and more in little turns of phrases. I think of a moment like when Sarah and Abraham are finding it difficult to have a kid, and Sarah says, “Go sleep with my maidservant, Hagar, and maybe we can have a son that way.” Sure enough, Hagar has Ishmael, and then Sarah hates Hagar and Ishmael for their very existence. Her words become flesh and live among her, and she hates it. So she sends Hagar and Ishmael away. The passage says that once they were in the desert on their own, Hagar sat Ishmael down “a bowshot away” from her. That phrase, “a bowshot away,” carries astounding resonance. It could have said anything; it could have said “a stone’s throw” away. But what “a bowshot” means is that Hagar is setting Ishmael down to die and wrestling with the sense that she’s the one killing him. It’s a tragic moment, contained in one phrase. We’re supposed to hear that, stop, and imagine this distance between mother and child, the isolation and pain—it’s so rich. And those little details are all over the place. Drew: One thing you mentioned earlier is this idea that so many stories are told to us for the purpose of leading us to a transaction. That’s a turn of phrase right there! I could sit with that all day and think of all the things it could mean. At least personally, and I think I speak for many people, part of my own distance from scripture is a result of feeling like it has itself been treated as a story meant only to lead me to a transaction: the transaction of salvation in whatever way that gets distorted. And I’m not saying salvation can’t be a transaction; I think there is very powerful transactional language to be had there, but maybe it’s difficult to hear it in our culture since we’re constantly surrounded on all sides by insincere transaction. Russ: The apostle John, at the end of his gospel, acknowledges that what he has written is transactional. He says, “These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and by believing have life in his name.” That’s the transaction of the Bible. I think we go wrong when we say, “I want people to listen to my sermons, read my books, and attend my events.” Scripture is given for the purpose of us understanding who God is and having a relationship with him. That’s the transaction that matters. What John is saying through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is that this transaction is for you to know your Creator eternally. Here in the West, in the Christianity of products and selling things, we can mistake what the transaction is about. If it’s about building an individual person’s brand, we’ve moved away from the ultimate reason why scripture matters in the first place. And it’s hard, because we live in a culture where it’s an important thing for Christians to make art and for that art to make its way into the hands of people. We’re contributing to the cultural conversation of our day and it’s vital that Christians are in that mix. But when that’s all it’s about—the number of units you move—we’ve gotten confused about why we’re doing it. You see it when you start to care about numbers: how many copies you sold, how many people came to your concert, how many likes you got on social media— Drew: One word that keeps coming to my mind is the word “compel.” That word can carry two different meanings: you can be compelled to do something externally, and that’s more like coercion or manipulation, or you can be compelled inwardly as a partaker in art. There’s a compelling happening in every advertisement, maybe of the former kind, that’s loaded and trying to lead you somewhere for its own gain. In that case, there’s something at stake for the storyteller. There’s fear involved in having profit and influence at stake. While the stories of scripture also compel us towards a transaction, it’s a compelling that has nothing to prove—there’s of course quite a lot at stake in the gospel, but not in a way that stems from insecurity or lack. The story itself is compelling because I am a human who draws breath. Russ: You know, Mary Chapin Carpenter has a song on one of her older records called “John Doe No. 24.” It’s a true story about an old man who was found wandering around the banks of the Mississippi, I think in St. Louis. He had no memory of who he was, no identifying paperwork, and he couldn’t talk. So in the song, people find him and try to figure out who he is. The story is told from his perspective and what he would say about his story if only he could. The song is compelling because of what’s at stake: he knows his name, but he can’t spell it, he can’t say it, and he can’t write it down. He doesn’t know much of his own story, but he knows his name, and yet he can’t even share that. So they’ve named him “John Doe No. 24” and he lives in a house with a bunch of other people who need tending to. And the ache of the song is that his very identity is at stake. That’s what’s at stake in scripture, too. We are wanderers in the cosmos asking, “Who am I? What’s the point of me being alive in this world?” And God’s saying, “Here’s the answer. The answer to who you are, what you were made for, your dignity, your worth, your desire to be in relationship with other people, that feeling in your gut when you see something beautiful that takes you by surprise.” It’s not a system to sign up for and join—it’s more like you’re wandering on the banks of this river and you don’t know who you are, but Jesus can tell you who you are. Drew: The transaction of scripture grants freedom rather than takes it away. Russ: That’s right. And it’s not for you to buy into another person’s gain. It’s for you to come home. Check out The Advent of the Lamb of God, The Passion of the King of Glory, and The Mission of the Body of Christ in the Rabbit Room Store, and visit Russ Ramsey’s website by clicking here.