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“Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” –G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Because it is so very personal. My Anglican pastor tells me that for him, consecrating the elements for communion was a huge step the first time it was his responsibility to perform the ceremony. The act of consecration is a conscious drawing forth, a lifting up, a marking out, a recognition of these particular things as holy—not because this bread and this wine are any more holy than all other bread and all other wine, but because by this conscious act we are reminding ourselves of the truth that everything in the world will one day be this; all parts of creation will one day be seen for what they truly are, viewed again through the knowledge of their consecration, both in their parts and in the whole. And so, this bread and this cup of wine, so consecrated, are a first fruits, are a reminder, are a means of refocusing our vision with a greater clarity that sees all things, even if only for this flickering moment, as they more truly and eternally are, each imbued with a holy light. Chesterton’s point about the work of fairy tales is, I think, exactly that same point. Fairy tales… make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. Fairy tales employ the tool of the fantastic to jar us back to a truer vision that sees that all things are fantastic. Wonder is an appropriate response to all things because all things are wonderfully made. Though few of us can remember that earliest season of awakened wonder, there yet was a time when everything was new to our hearts and minds and senses, when everything was an unfolding delight. There was a first time we first saw the ripe redness of a strawberry. There was a first time we encountered a rushing stream and dipped our bare feet in the giddy laughter of it. There was a first time we met the sort of rollicking, affable beast we call a dog, and reveled in the uproarious, comic beauty of its romp. There was a time when all things were new and so were seen and encountered as the wonders they actually are. And the work of fairy tales, according to Chesterton, is to rescue that wonder from the grey sediments it has long been silted over with. Songs penned by Mark Heard in the ’80s and early ’90s had a profound influence on my own development as a lyricist. One of the devastating lines that early etched itself in my consciousness came from the song “Worry Too Much:” It’s these sandpaper eyes It’s the way they rub the lustre from what is seen It’s the way we tell ourselves that all these things are normal Till we can’t remember what we mean. Fairy tales, apparently, are about helping us remember what we mean. They’re about helping us see things with the lustre recovered. Because that’s the true nature of nature and of all creation. It shines from within with a bright, luminous glow, with a deep “magic.” When we are children, we see it. We see it with aching clarity. And then our vision goes flat, fuzzy, out-of-focus. We grow bored, tired, wounded, cynical. We lose the ability to see the wonder for what it is. We gravitate instead to the novel, the flashy, the garish, consuming all that we can, addict-like, in a long, misguided attempt to reclaim those lost wonders by sheer excess and volume. By the age of 12 most of us have forgotten that an earlier sense of Eden ever existed in our lives. It takes something like a fairy tale, or a consecration, to pull our vision back into true focus. To lift an element out of the commonality of our banal slog, and to show us again that this singular thing is fraught with wonder. And if this thing is so fraught, then is not everything? Have you forgotten? we are asked. Look again! I’m now in the middle of a collaborative book project with painter/illustrator Jamin Still. The Wishes of the Fish King is a manuscript I wrote when my oldest daughter was two. We lived in a house on a hill in a forest. The hill swept down and out into magnificent views of fields and pond and forest and faraway hills and even a forest island set in the midst of the billowing field grasses. At dusk we would join hands and walk together, exploring our own little corner of the world. For my daughter Anastina Mansi, it was a season of perpetual wonder, of the unfolding of creation, of all things shiny and new and resplendent with their native glories. For me, it was a time of shedding my old cynicism, of negating my sandpaper vision, and of seeing the world anew as my daughter saw it, bright and joyful! Of course, there was simultaneously the sense that I carried of the fleetingness of things. I knew this was but a small window in the span of my daughter’s life. With it came an attendant and consequent grieving for the passing of that small season even as we were still walking and breathing in the midst of it. For a mother or father watching their small child delight in the newly-discovered creation, there is that bittersweetness that comes from the knowledge of the loss and the longing they will one day encounter. Andrew Peterson sings in “Don’t You Want To Thank Someone:” 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 To be more than merely innocent But to be broken, then redeemed by love This is the wellspring of the bittersweetness. It flows from the knowing that our children cannot remain in the bright place they are. They will have to walk their own wild journey through pain, woundedness, heartache, suffering, brokenness and loss. They will lose this true and delightful vision of creation somewhere along the way, just as each of us has in our own journeys. But as their parents we have lived long enough that we can also see further ahead to the even greater joy that will await them beyond those sorrows. We can look ahead to the time when vision will be eternally renewed and that first innocent delight and the brokenness and sorrow that followed it will all be wrapped up in the same glorious redemption that restores our delight but that does ever so much more than simply restore. We hold this promise and anticipate the coming advent that will see the redemption of our vision of all things and of our place in them, making it right and true and new and as unbreakable and as beautiful as diamonds shot with a fairy light. And though we cannot see it all that way yet, we have caught enough glimpses in stories and songs and paintings and starfields and moonrises and sunsets and romping dogs and glad streams and giddy romances to know that it is real and that it is already breaking into our brittle-edged world. We will see one day with such an unbroken, sacramental vision. All things. All things for the inexhaustible wonders that they hold, for the inexhaustible glories they reveal of the mind of the artist and storyteller who created them. But fairy tales, and luminous paintings, and the voices of cellos and the taste of a wild, sun-warmed blackberry or the sparkling of a chalice held aloft or the visual force and scale of a wide, windswept ocean can sometimes jar us back to that sacramental vision, even if only for a brief, precious moment. That is the particular notion that resides at the heart of what I’m attempting to do with The Wishes of the Fish King. I want adults to read it and lose themselves in the rhythm of the words and in the glow of the paintings and to remember what it was to see the world anew. And I want the words and images to nest in the hearts and memories of young children so that their vision might be more sacramentally shaped as they grow. I want them to one day return to the story as adults with young children of their own that they might be reminded again of the delightful garden they once knew and of the shining city that awaits. I know it is a lofty goal. And I know that I am unequipped to pull it off adequately. But my prayer with such endeavors is always that the whole will somehow be more than the sum of the parts and that there will be spaces between my words that winds of another world might blow through. I think that my hope is to create sacramental spaces where more important things can happen that don’t even involve me. If in twenty years I have mastered one aspect of being a writer, it is the ability to step back and let a thing go, knowing that its journey from here will scarcely involve me, and that the rest is dependent upon the Spirit whispering as He pleases through such imperfect offerings. As such, I take a strange, third-person encouragement in observing that the words of the story, paired for the first time with Jamin’s latest illustration, are already having a noticeable effect on me. This painting is called The Sea of Fields. Even as a chalk sketch over a base coat it was already stunning. I haven’t been able to look at it without some emotion, as it’s a fantastical rendering of a place and time I once inhabited. The tone is magical and perilous and fairytale-esque. And yet I see the real place clearly pictured here. In fact, the blend of fantasy and memory creates a layered vision that holds the essence of that time more vividly than any photograph ever could. This fairy tale visual re-interpretation of that physical location and era, offers a keener sight of the deeper reality of the wonder and the beauty of it than a camera ever could capture. Jamin’s painting holds an iconic familiarity in its placement of the house atop the great hill, sweeping down to the wind-rippled fields and the forest island. I see it clearly as my old home. This was once my land. I walked it. I fished it. I tended it. My second daughter was born here. I see the terrain and the history. But in this painting, I see also, as if in hindsight, the eternal glory that filled it as well. I see the light. I see all at once what was and what is and what is to come. And something in me rises and says Yes, that was always how it was, even when I couldn’t see it. The Sea of Fields is a sacramental painting of a real place and a real time in the lives of real people. And I was one of them. And I hope that though this story began as a personal reflection to capture for my daughter the memories of that bright season, that it will still function for others as a window flung open to the bright, sacramental nature of their own corner of creation and of their own lives and relationships and of their own histories of glory and brokenness, and especially of that brief season with their young children when all the world is seen as new. I hope that in some small way our book will help children to grow wise and will help adults to grow childlike. And with that, now I finally will just step out of the way and let Chesterton bring the point home, because in his continuing words resides the point of it all… “…[G]rown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” [Chesterton drops the mic, walks off stage.] #GKChesterton #Chesterton #WishesoftheFishKing #delight #DougMcKelvey #Story #sacrament #Stories #JaminStill

I’m feeling a little lost these days, as though I’ve awakened from a troubling dream to find that nothing is where it was or as it was. I’ve entered my forties during a nationwide cultural and religious shift, during a global pandemic, and a future that once presented a hazy but recognizable profile has become a blank. The energy that carried me through other seasons of difficulty has run out. I am groping for the familiar on an alien planet. Without meaning to, I’d slipped into the assumption that the world would go on pretty much as it always had. I picked up the phone and made a call with the certainty that the person I loved would be waiting on the other end of the line. I was sure of what I’d find behind the doors of the homes, businesses, and churches with which I was well acquainted. My interior world was recognizable, if not always comfortable. I knew what I believed. At the very least, I could identify which people, which institutions were sturdy enough to lean on. That’s the trouble with illusions, isn’t it? You don’t know you have them until they’re taken away. Some weeks ago, I stumbled on an old recording of A Horse and His Boy’s “And the World Was an Ocean.” It’s a song I found compelling from my first introduction to it. Its heartbreaking simplicity begs the listener to sing along. Hearing it again surprised me out of a profound silence, and I joined Seth Harper without thought, as if by muscle memory. One day I woke up and the world was an ocean The sun ran in circles to keep me confused My bed was my lifeboat as I was its captain My wits not about me, my spirit diffused. —”And the World Was an Ocean,” A Horse and His Boy Harper’s image of desolation perfectly reflected my reality. I woke one morning to find myself scanning the surface of a vast oceanic void, searching for shorelines. “I am lost in the current,” I sang, “I’m lost in the blue / I am lost without a compass / I am lost without you.” I didn’t know how lost until the singing stirred my grief, didn’t recognize the truth until my tears told me so. Suddenly, the water was everywhere. I found it in my Instagram feed, when a sample of Scott Erickson’s iconography caught my attention. In the image, a hermit crab struggles in a tiny, cramped shell. Erickson is talking about the challenges and gifts of transformation, urging the viewer to recognize that the shell provides only an illusion of safety. His words brought me back to the lifeboat, a small thing in the frame of my mind, a fragile wooden shell pitted against the fury, the mystery, the sheer breathless expanse of the ocean. And then in the course of an ordinary day, as I washed dishes or folded laundry (you know how it is with these things), I remembered a sermon I heard more than a decade ago in which the preacher referred to the fall of mankind as “The Great Gasp.” We were made to live inside the love of God, he said; that love, that water, was the air we were meant to breathe. In turning away from the true face of God, we cast ourselves on dry land, into an environment for which we were entirely unsuited, to gasp and struggle. To die. I pulled up Audrey Assad and Fernando Ortega’s “O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” and set it to play on repeat. “O the deep, deep love of Jesus / Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free / Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me / Underneath me, all around me / Is the current of his love.” I want that love to flow around me and through me. I want to abandon myself to it. But apart from the principle of the thing—the abstract theological imperative—I don’t know how. I have dipped my toe in the water and come away changed, but if I fell in, all the way, I would die. That’s my feeling on the subject. The love of God is infinite and fathomless and it will kill me. It’s the kind of fear you don’t acknowledge on a Sunday morning. I am not so much lost as I am exploring a Welcome more expansive than I ever dreamed possible. It is calling me out of my flimsy boat into the staggering embrace of home. Helena Sorensen Over the last eighteen months, I’ve led several groups in a study of Robin McKinley’s Beauty. The novel is deceivingly simple, with a rich story buried beneath the familiar elements of plot and character, and it’s the only retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” in which the Beast’s love transforms Beauty, and not the other way around. I’m moved by their early encounters, the ones defined by Beauty’s fear. Faced with a gigantic, hairy creature whose motives are unclear, and imagining herself in danger of imminent death, Beauty reacts as anyone would. She tries to protect herself. Her amygdala kicks into gear. She vacillates between freezing and fleeing, with an occasional fight. This in spite of the fact that McKinley’s Beast does nothing to cause her fear. Unlike his Disney counterpart, his faults are a matter of the past; during all Beauty’s sojourn in the castle, he is gentle and undemanding. He defers to her, makes himself vulnerable to her, offering a genuine love that Beauty cannot receive. Why? McKinley doesn’t make the reason explicit, but I learned not long before I began the study that when the amygdala is activated, the pre-frontal cortex is offline. In other words, when a person is in the midst of a fear reaction, the parts of the brain that allow for relational connection are shut down. You cannot be afraid and receive love at the same time. You might say that fear casts out love (as love casts out fear). It’s one or the other. How, then, do we overcome fear and receive love? How do we fall into the ocean when our fingers are biting into the wood of the lifeboat? Those deeply buried fear responses were formed before we understood what was happening to us; they’re intrinsic. Often we are not even aware they exist. As a child, I did not have words to say that the God I was introduced to was a beast. I did not know I was afraid. Someone painted a picture of the Eye of Sauron and called it Holiness. Someone told stories of violence and retribution and called it Love. Someone used “his ways are higher than our ways” as a panacea to justify all manner of horrors and then pointed my young heart toward the monster and said, “This way lies hope.” That these conflicting messages were wrapped in earnestness, in fine clothing and stained glass, in lofty language and lovely music, only complicated the matter. My exterior confidence belied the fundamental reality that, when presented with the Person(s) of God, I was no more than a frightened little girl. Was? Am? I don’t know how to define the overlap of was and is, the layers of truth in my one subjective experience, the past selves I carry with me and those I am and will be. I only know that Beauty eventually uncurled her fingers from the banister where she cowered and stepped up to the Beast and saw him and knew him. In the same way, I am uncurling my fingers from the side of the boat, maybe because it is leaking and doomed, but maybe also because the ocean is beginning to look a little less terrifying. I found the water again in a passage near the end of one of my favorite fantasy novels. Could there be candle flames burning under the water? There could. I knew that, when I was in the ocean, and I even knew how. I understood it just as I understood Dark Matter, the material of the universe that makes up everything that must be there but we cannot find. I found myself thinking of an ocean running beneath the whole universe, like the dark seawater that laps beneath the wooden boards of an old pier: an ocean that stretches from forever to forever and is still small enough to fit inside a bucket, if you have Old Mrs. Hempstock to help you get it in there, and you ask nicely. —Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane Gaiman, it seems, has a sense of the ocean that surrounds and undergirds us; he knows how terrible it looks from the outside, how peaceful from within. Like the old preacher, he grasps the unnerving truth that the ocean is more our home than dry land, that we were made, so to speak, to breathe water. I would like to close, Reader, by tossing you an anchor, but I cannot. I am drifting. The nature of my journey is as mysterious as these strange new surroundings. Don’t fear for me, though. I am not so much lost as I am exploring a Welcome more expansive than I ever dreamed possible. It is calling me out of my flimsy boat into the staggering embrace of home.

The wind was bright and sharp, the blue sky cold, our skin reddened with the icy air, but we didn’t mind. The day of the C. S. Lewis symposium at Westminster, we Lewis lovers got to the doors of St. Margaret’s almost an hour before they opened. As I tightened my scarf, I watched the line grow, hundreds of us queued in the chilly air, ready to honor an author whose words had formed us, heart, mind, and soul. But a question grew in my mind as I waited, clapping my hands against the cold, watching my breath etch the frosty air. Why, I wondered, is the draw of C. S. Lewis so strong? What power in his self or stories summoned us from around the world, from all walks of life, to honor his tales and study his thoughts? His books are famous, yes. But so are countless others. Novelists, we have aplenty. Apologists too. And though his status as an Oxford don intrigues us, it’s really not enough to kindle the kind of love that lasts for decades and links the hearts of countless different kinds of souls. I pondered this the rest of the day. Even as I heard the excellent symposium talks, I wondered. I glimpsed the fact that part of it was the extraordinary way that Lewis reconciled reason and imagination. But I felt there was another element still to identify. I mulled it as I walked home that night and as I rode the Tube back to Westminster for the memorial dedication next morning. Only at the end of the service, after two hours crammed with the truths that Lewis strove to tell spoken into the air of that storied, sacred place, echoing down the decades to us, did I finally begin to guess. Two weeks later, I think I understand. We came because Lewis lived a great story. The best tale that Jack Lewis ever told was the tale of his own life and that story lends a power to his words that time cannot dispel. In his essay On Stories, Lewis wrote of the “atmosphere” imbuing his favorite books of “romance.” Some tales were steeped in a certain air beyond the cycle of mere events, an air that struck the reader with a sense of the other or beyond. Whether the long, awful dark of outer space, or the chill, pure sky of Northern myths, some stories let us enter, for a moment, a “sheer state of being” that stirs our souls to life with hunger, awe, or wonder. Human lives have atmospheres as well. Some are a mere series of events. But some lives, like the tales that Lewis loved, are marked by a vibrancy of mind, body, and soul so potent that we taste the numinous in their history and presence. The life of C. S. Lewis is a romance in and of itself. His story bears the atmosphere of pipe smoke and good pints drunk amidst a world of word craft and learning. His tale has the air of hearth-sides and shabby college rooms in which fast friendships and strong opinions played out in brusque good humor and jolly tones. In his tale, the fresh air of long walks and even longer thoughts blows free. His elements are tea and common sense and books and the call of the distant hills. But into this rich air flows a fresher one from the vast beyond; the heady wind of imagination. Who would have thought that an Oxford don skilled in logic, the “best read man” of a generation whose intellect cowed countless students (and peers) could countenance a fairy tale? The atmosphere of Lewis’s story grows wondrous as we marvel that the mind at work in Miracles wove also the tale of a little girl named Lucy and the love she had for a wild, but very good, lion. Talking trees and tea-drinking fauns peer round the corners of Lewis’s life. Lions roar through his dreams and give his story an atmosphere in which any number of wonders might take place. We love his tale because it gives us hope that our own stories could quicken with the wind of imagination. But I think our love of Lewis and his story runs far deeper. In his pithy little book An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis identifies six qualities belonging to the kind of story that he calls a “myth.” He describes myth as a story that is “a permanent object of contemplation—more like a thing than a narration—which works upon us by its peculiar flavour or quality…” Myth, he contends, is a story not dependent on literary finesse or narrative twist. A tale of absolutes, it deals with “impossibles and preternaturals.” “Myth, “ says Lewis “may be sad or joyful but it is always grave.” Last, and most important of all, Lewis believed that in reading myth we encounter some facet of Reality itself. We come up against something, clothed in story, that “will move us as as long as we live.” In tales of dying gods or kings returned or great sea-faring heroes, we apprehend some aspect of eternal Reality. Myth, at its best, gestures to Christ. The life of Lewis was the best kind of myth. Not because he was sinless or brilliant, not because he was a legend, but because he turned every facet of himself to the love of God and that turns a person mythic in the end. Lewis did nothing by halves. From the point of his conversion he followed every logical conclusion demanded by faith. He shirked nothing. His books are certainly marked by reason, by beauty, by vivid imagination. But they are also shaped by an eminently practical faith. His frank, good-humored obedience to worship and pray, confess his sins and love his neighbor, succor the poor and bear the difficult made his very life “a permanent object of contemplation.” His was a heroic virtue, the “impossible or preternatural” virtue that comes through Christ, lived on the scale of the every day. The longer he lived, the more his own story was subsumed into the life of God. His life became a form, as he described, a fixed and lovely object, that gestured fully toward Reality. Perhaps any man who spends a lifetime loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength will begin to grow mythic in the end. The lines grow starker the longer you follow Christ. Sin gets sloughed away. The soul grows crystalline with love and the light of Christ shines through, “lovely to the Father in the features of men’s faces” (Hopkins). Lewis believed his own words in The Weight of Glory and “conducted all his dealings” in such a way that his life was the slow becoming of “everlasting splendor.” His way was not without pain and doubt. His books fully picture the inner dilemmas of temptation. He knew the struggle that comes with truly learning to love. And when death took his beloved wife, Joy, the book that he wrote voiced the anguished abandonment we know in loss. He knew the way that God himself seems to change when suffering obscures our sight. But I remember how Bishop Simon Barrington-Ward described him in the months after Joy’s death: as if he had fought a battle that cost him everything. And yet, “there was almost a light upon his face.” I don’t believe that the stories Lewis told or the truths he argued could wield such power today without the bedrock story of his faithful life. His writing and work were rooted in the primary story of his life. I think that perhaps even his remarkable ability to reconcile reason and imagination grew out of a life in which the concepts of Love were embodied by faith. He chose God and lived Love at every turn, and his life became a living story gesturing toward that Love. When the life of C.S. Lewis is considered, I often hear people wonder who the next Lewis will be. Young Christians are encouraged to pursue rigorous training in reason and apologetics, or aim for the best kind of literary education at a prestigious university. These are fine pursuits for believers who hope to emulate Lewis’s genius at cultural engagement and imaginative apologetics. But if we really want to raise up another Lewis or two, I think we have to start with our own hearts and follow the advice of Lewis himself: Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Look for Christ and you will get Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. Look for yourself and you will get only hatred, loneliness, despair, and ruin. Those words pounded down the corridors and echoed in the air at Westminster Abbey on the day of the memorial service. They came to us in Lewis’s own recorded voice, and they opened the service with a challenge. Everything that followed—the tributes and songs, the prayers and stories honoring Lewis’ life—was framed by his own ringing description of what he thought it meant to live, and live to the full. The story of Lewis confronted each of us present at the service with an invitation: to join the best story that has ever been told. To live the one true myth in Christ. Lewis once said that “you could never find a book long enough” to suit his taste. Like Lucy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, who found the best tale ever told within the house of a great magician and wished she could read it forever, Lewis himself hungered from childhood to get inside of the great myths he loved. The great, joyous fact of his life was that he actually did. In his love of Christ, Lewis entered the one true myth of the world. He got right inside the best story ever told and his life became a living image of its beauty. And he calls to us, through the stories he left behind, to join him. “Further up and further in!” said Aslan… and Lewis. Shall we follow?

This post is part of the "Behind the Curtain"series in which creators share about the process of making their work and deeper themes behind it. Jonny Jimison is a cartoonist, illustrator, and the creator of the all-ages comic series The Dragon Lord Saga, published by Rabbit Room Press. In addition to drawing playful comics, he loves Thai food, fantasy stories, and playing tabletop games and video games with his wife Elise in their little home in Tennessee. He thinks that you're cool and would love to meet you - come say hello at www.jonnyjimison.com! Art begets art. When I started working on The Dragon Lord Saga, over a decade ago, I had no idea how far this idea would grow or how many people it would touch. But I knew whence it came: I love the epic fantasy world-building of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, rich in lore, backstory, and adventure. I love the classic comic strip humor of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and Walt Kelly’s Pogo — two classic comics are fun and exuberant and so joyfully visual. I’ve spent a lifetime absorbing the stories and art that delighted me, and the result was a unique new concoction I called The Dragon Lord Saga - part fantasy adventure, part cartoon comedy. If you’re new to the series, The Dragon Lord Saga is an epic fantasy in comic book form, told with playful character humor. It’s about two brothers, an impulsive knight named Martin and a cautious stableboy named Marco. Their journeys take them far from home, where they meet a bandit princess and a talking horse, encounter dragons and desperados, and discover a wild fantasy world far beyond their kingdom in the North. But there’s a new spin-off series, called Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga. It’s a series of short comics — a spin-off from the main series that you can read in any order. But more than that, it’s a comic book anthology! Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Tales was my template. After writing four Wingfeather Saga novels, Andrew enlisted a group of writers and illustrators to create their own stories in the world he had created. In the forward to Wingfeather Tales, Andrew writes that the anthology was necessary because “there were castle ruins and cities and jungles full of trolls that I hadn’t yet explored.” I had the same predicament: I’ve come to realize that there are areas of this fantasy world I’ve created that Martin and Marco will never see on their journey through The Dragon Lord Saga. In Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga, I’ve invited some of my favorite cartoonists to tell comic book stories set in my world… but with their own storytelling sensibilities and their own visual style. They went above and beyond, and created some truly incredible tales! It was ambitious to try to create an anthology comic in just six months. But it happened, it expanded to two issues, and we sprung the project on unsuspecting attendees as a surprise release at Hutchmoot! This was only possible because Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga was a collaboration from start to finish. Meet the Contributing Artists John Haney created a comic about a cat named Reginald and a hermit named Batholomew - a playful fable exploring the idea of “losing life by clinging to it and finding life by losing it.” His colorful, exuberant style brought something new to the world I had created, and together, he and I came up with the idea to have the storyteller interrupted mid-story, which set the overall tone for both books. Ben Humeniuk enlisted the help of the two biggest Dragon Lord Saga fans he knows - his kids, Ellie and Peter. Together, the three of them collaborated on a creepy, funny folktale with sly references to the main Dragon Lord Saga series. Their tale features two kids named Grace and Rocky, and the monsters they encounter in the dark woods. Ben, Ellie, and Peter had loads of fun planning the story and designing the characters… and you can feel it on the finished page! Jeshua Koilpillai introduced two new characters — short-tempered Tom Foolery and distinguished Robert Moneysworth — and took them to Snark Island, a location that I had placed on the map but had said nothing about in the books. You can tell in the ensuing adventure that Jeshua relished the opportunity to fill that blank slate with clever character designs, wild environmental world-building, and a comic adventure that escalates into pure comedic chaos before resolving into a happy ending! My wife, Elise Jimison, told a nautical tall tale of sea monsters, prophecy, and a ragtag group of sailors, rendering the whole story in stunning watercolor! I absolutely love watercolor comics, and I don’t see them often enough. Elise used her evocative painting to take us on a journey above the sea, below the sea, onto shore and back again… and she did it all in rhyme, with all the narration and dialogue told as a ballad of the high seas! Stephen Hesselman created Professor Hesselman’s Varmintpedia — creature profiles pairing a creature illustration with “academic notes.” Stephen wrote his notes in character as Professor Hesselman, a creature enthusiast in the world of The Dragon Lord Saga. His illustrations are a delight, and his creature descriptions make me giggle uncontrollably every time. Then there’s Will Kelly, who did the impossible: he took all these wildly different stories and came up with amazing cover illustrations that brought every tale together and beckoned us from the cover into the wild cacophony of delightful stories inside! He really helped tie together the themes of each book — stories from the forest in issue #1, and stories from the sea in issue #2. Even I got in on the act. In addition to overseeing the project, I ended up creating some framing narratives to wrap around the individual stories. My cue here was David Peterson’s Legends of the Guard, an anthology spin-off of his Mouse Guard graphic novels. In Legends of the Guard, Peterson created comics about his mouse characters sitting around the June Alley Inn, swapping stories. When a mouse begins a story, you flip the page and you’re suddenly inside that story, via a comic contributor to the anthology. I followed that pattern to create an eight-page story for each issue, showing the folks in The Dragon Lord Saga who are telling these tales … and just for fun, I made those storytellers my own in-story caricatures of the real-life contributors! My favorite thing about anthologies is the diverse spectrum of story styles and techniques, and I love how that plays out in Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga. Just as I drew from Tolkien’s fantasy and classic comic strips to create The Dragon Lord Saga, each of my contributors drew from their own influences, inspirations, and resources — as well as drawing from The Dragon Lord Saga itself. The results are art and story that never would have happened if we hadn’t all collided into art and story on these pages! Elise used her skill with watercolors, her sailing experience, and her love of monster stories to tell a nautical ballad about a giant sea monster. Ben collaborated with his kids, whose adventure-loving personalities shine through their folktale about monsters in the dark forest. John combined my fantasy world with story ideas he was already exploring, creating a tale larger than either of us could have created on our own. Stephen and Will took what everyone else was creating and remixed it in their own inimitable style. And while my fictional world impacted Jeshua’s story, he also put his mark on my comic — he came in at the eleventh hour to help color one of my framing narratives when the deadline was looming a little too heavy! Art begets art. Inspiration meets inspiration, and something new happens. It’s true of every story, but I love the way that Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga puts that in the front window and lets it shine! But I’ve saved my favorite story for last: We always knew that Elise’s story would take place on the high seas, but as an experienced sailor, creating that story prompted some questions. What elevations can be seen from sea level? Which nations in this fictional world are sea traders, and which have military navies? Would the tides behave as though there is one moon, like our world? Or is there more than one moon? Or NO moons? I had NEVER considered these questions before, and discussing them was so much fun that I asked Elise to create a sea chart for the seas of The Dragon Lord Saga, which she did with a pizzazz and authenticity that befits this wild world we’re creating. The chart is included in issue #2 of Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga. We put it in the center of the book, in case anyone wants to carefully pry up the staples and remove the chart for their own imaginary voyages. Elise brought her curiosity and scientific knowledge, and I brought the world I’ve been creating all these years. Together we created a sea chart that not only inspired her story, but is already inspiring spin-off stories of my own. Art begets art. I hope that the ideas, techniques and art styles in Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga inspire you to new ideas and stories as well! Click here for issue #1 of Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga. Click here for issue #2 of Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga. [For the record, Elise and I decided that the world of The Dragon Lord Saga has two moons. Because that sounds cool and I really wanted to draw that.]

I heard it said once in an interview with Michael Pollan that, when it comes down to it, every writer only really asks one question with their entire career. I can’t decide whether I agree with that assessment. As with all aphorisms, part of me straightens up in my chair with that feeling of eureka! It really is that simple! while another part of me sits back, scratches my chin, and bitterly mutters, That is entirely reductive and unfair to all writers. But, for the purposes of this review, I’ve managed to persuade my skeptical half that this observation is valid, because as I listen to J Lind’s songs, I find that they all ask one existentially rattling question: Where and how are we to find meaning given our inescapable condition of contingency? By contingency, I’m referring to the idea that everything depends upon everything else. For example, think about how you feel when you watch a nature documentary, and all of a sudden that cute little baby tiger is ravenously tearing apart a freshly dead antelope alongside its mother-huntress. Your discomfort arises from realizing that the health of this vulnerable, furry creature you’ve spent the last few minutes coming to know—this miraculous instance of life—is contingent upon the death of another miraculous instance of life. How can this be? How can life be contingent upon death, and vice versa? Is this how creation was intended or not? If you sit with these questions with anything approaching the earnestness of a child, you’ll find yourself very rattled indeed. J Lind’s album For What It’s Worth broadcasts this message from the moment you glance at its cover art. Taking cues from its title track, the cover depicts a tiger posing alongside a deer, accompanied by a vulture—a portrait of contingency. For more on that album, see my review. At its heart, The Land of Canaan is kindred to its predecessor, ultimately dealing with that same fundamental question of contingency. As for how it phrases that question, however, it’s worlds apart. You’ll find no neat and tidy parables here, no cleanly-stated morals, and no dramatic scenes of nature. Instead, before anything else, you’ll find in both the cover art and the first track the familiar and baffling story of Abraham in anguish on Mount Moriah after God has commanded him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. This story—one of the most foundational religious stories in all of history—is a fitting choice to set the tone for an album that explores the human impulse towards religion, how that impulse can be spoiled, and how it finds its culmination in radical faith-amidst-contingency. Before I go any further, I think it would be helpful to zoom out for a quick aside about engaging with both art and scripture. My wise friend, Shigé Clark, mentioned her gratitude for the BibleProject’s How to Read the Bible podcast series, as it introduced her (and me) to the genre of “meditation literature:” stories which are meant to be entered into, pondered rather than analyzed, and soaked in like a hot bath. Meditation literature contains symbols, turns of phrase, and thematic head-nods that both aid the reader in interpretation and bind them together with the whole constellation of other stories that comprise the Bible. And, as Shigé pointed out to me, The Land of Canaan is itself something like a meditation on the meditation literature in which it is grounded. To help you get started engaging with this meditation of an album, I’ll introduce you to two threads I believe J has woven through it. These two threads begin to intertwine in the moments following any spiritual encounter, and together they form the frayed fabric of religious devotion. The first thread I’ll refer to as the moment of epiphany, and the second thread I’ll call the impulse towards religion. My hope is that these two threads will give you a head start in hearing what this album has to say and forming your own interpretation. We'll never begin the journey if we refuse to begin it precisely where our feet are currently planted. Drew Miller An unadulterated spiritual encounter—whether brought about by a near-death experience, a walk in the woods, a moment of prayer, or anything in between—is by definition an encounter with our own contingency. For example, when I stand on a ledge with a sheer drop-off underneath, it’s thrilling precisely because I can’t go any further. I’ve come up against my ultimate limitation, and it is that limitation which instructs me of my contingency upon the limitless. From such a space of profound human vulnerability, one small existential step can take us across the threshold from a mere “thrill” or “adrenaline rush” into what I’m calling a “moment of epiphany.” This step shifts our awareness from our nervous systems to our very souls with the felt knowledge that there is a Life that was here before we were and will be here long after we’re gone. This epiphany of grace comes naturally and frequently to children, who live their lives with a greater natural capacity for wonder than adults. It’s a form of pure spiritual experience, unburdened by doctrine or law or religion—for now. I say “for now” because none of us can live our entire lives in that state of childlike epiphany. It’s just not practical! We’d be constantly confronted with the fact of our mortality and the vastness of the universe, unable to get anything done. And so, as we grow up, we crystallize that moment of epiphany into a tale that forms the backdrop of our lives. We tell the tale over and over again, increasing our distance from the encounter itself with each re-telling. We codify our encounter with Life into a dependable set of instructions that assure us we are living our own small lives correctly. This movement is our impulse towards religion. It would be a mistake to stop here and privilege the moment of epiphany over religious instinct, or vice versa. The epiphany is as fleetingly miraculous and impossible to reproduce as a solar eclipse. And while it’s all too easy to demonize the religious instinct as nothing more than “putting God in a box,” it’s the only way we can make coherent sense of what has happened to us. We simply must tell some story about our encounter with Life. And so a spiritually rich life is woven in equal parts from these two threads, which are together constantly creating the conditions for us to choose radical faith-amidst-contingency. J does a marvelous job of spotlighting these two threads throughout The Land of Canaan. “Funny” begins with the presence of contingency in the songs of birds fighting for their lives (“Making music as a lifeline / that’s a funny way to sing”), then longs for the simplicity of the religious tale to take the edge off (“So here we go, back to the good times / Writing stories in the stars… That’s just who we are”). “Tangerine Skins” reminisces on the narrator’s childhood car rides with his dad, establishing an analogy with Abraham and Isaac’s journey to Mount Moriah in the process: “Where can I run? Your only son… I cannot say what it means to know you love me / You love me, Dad, I know.” It’s a song heavy with the epiphany of belovedness that makes life livable. But nowhere in The Land of Canaan do these two threads work together with such synchrony and nuance as in “City on a Hill.” In this single song, J simultaneously shows tenderness towards the moment of epiphany without sentimentalizing it and faithfully critiques the impulse towards religion without a trace of cynicism. The chorus of the song conveys both in stride: And were our hearts not burning within us? Did not the rocks cry, “this is why you’re here”? Let us defend this most holy mountain Let none disturb our city on a hill —J Lind, “City on a Hill” Notice how subtly the heart-burning, childlike awe of the first two lines turns to the ownership and line-drawing of the second two lines. Is it wrong to have a most holy mountain? I don’t think so. But who is the narrator seeking to defend it from? Where is the implied threat? In a variation on the chorus at the end of the song, the words shift: And were our hearts not burning within us? Did not the Lord say, “there’s no other way”? Let us protect this most precious garden Because we need it, the apple and the snake —J Lind, “City on a Hill” This is one of J’s playful moments of allusivity, where it’s impossible to totally grasp what he’s saying—but that very looseness, when grounded skillfully in a source text, makes for an excellent entry point into this meditative posture I mentioned before. I can practically hear the voice of Tim Mackie in my head saying, “Okay, now we’re working with the words garden, apple, and snake, which the author clearly intends to hyperlink us back to the story of the Fall.” Within my interpretive framework of the two threads—the moment of epiphany and the impulse towards religion—I would say that this line is citing the Fall as the origin point of Christianity’s religious story, the moment that establishes protagonist and antagonist, the boundaries of in and out. “We need it” in order to locate our own spiritual encounters, our own epiphanies, within a larger context of moral and narrative value judgments—preferably value judgments that will land us inside the “most precious garden.” What makes “City on a Hill” a truly great song is that it values that need for religious context as legitimate, even as it critiques the petrification and weaponization of it. Alexander Schmemann puts it very well in For the Life of the World: “Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man. But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.” And in many ways, that quote gets straight to the heart of The Land of Canaan: it explores the language of religion as a means of grappling with contingency in a world where this wall between God and humanity remains, yet has been promised to be removed once and for all. In an effort to give the listener plenty of space to enter into its meditative posture, The Land of Canaan politely refrains from didactic moralizing. However, if there’s any “moral of the story,” however implicit, it no doubt comes straight from J’s personal hero, Søren Kierkegaard. There are a smattering of moments throughout J’s album that instruct the listener make the leap from the comfort of the religious impulse to the existential tightrope of Kierkegaard’s faith-amidst-contingency. In the final verse of “So It Goes,” J joins Jesus in the moments before his arrest and crucifixion: While sweating in Gethsemane, I prayed one final prayer To find the crack in everything, the truth within the dare So now I’ll take up this old cross to see just how much I can bear There might not be a ‘why’ but I don’t know, I don’t care And so it goes, and so it goes… And in some way, I’m not alone And so it goes —J Lind, “So It Goes” The uniquely transformative gift of the Christian story is that it offers us just this portrait: God in Jesus holding the oh-so-human cup of contingency—praying, just as any of us would, that this cup would pass from him. But in the ultimate moment of self-surrender, Jesus drinks the cup in solidarity with humanity. And so it goes, and so faith becomes possible. Full disclaimer: I don’t know much about Kierkegaard. If you have questions, I bet J would be glad to engage with you in them. But I do know that in his work Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard enters into the story of Abraham and Isaac to investigate the nature of this faith-amidst-contingency. After giving Abraham a peek into the story of Israel, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac, whose very life is Abraham’s miraculous epiphany. In following God’s command, Abraham is brought to his own moment of self-surrender in the face of terrible contingency. In order to carry out God’s request, he must abandon every promise God has made to him—from the promise of his descendants outnumbering the stars to the promised Land of Canaan—and choose naked faith instead. It’s not until Abraham has raised the knife that God stops him, provides a ram in place of Isaac (J ends his album with the words “Agnus Dei,” by the way, which means “lamb of God”), and keeps all his promises. And so it goes, and so Abraham’s radical faith becomes the narrow passage into the entire story of the Bible. By situating his songs within this baffling story, J explores the interwoven threads of epiphany and religious impulse as a drama that takes place against the backdrop of Abraham’s faith. And that faith is the only honest place to go in this life—a surrender of certainty, of our “most holy mountains,” and even of our precious childhood epiphanies, in the hope (with a healthy dose of human doubt) that God will keep his promises. And yet this surrender, this faith-amidst-contingency, must not be treated as an end destination or a reward for “being good.” Cliff’s-edge moments have a way of finding us at various points in our lives without any of our help, and romanticizing them does nothing to help us make the leap of faith. I suppose that’s why J chose the title The Land of Canaan: it may be the promised land, but in a way, it’s not the point. So often, our own narratives of arrival somewhere else keep us from the terrifying gift of the present moment, which is the only way into faith to begin with. This is not to say that there will be no arrival or that there is no fabled “Land of Canaan” where all wrongs will be righted—it’s the promise of redemption that lends meaning to our human struggle to begin with—rather, it is merely to acknowledge that we’ll never begin the journey if we refuse to begin it precisely where our feet are currently planted. As J sings in some of his album’s final lyrics: When you reach the end and drop the pen and reach again, you’ll find That it’s the day that you’ve been waiting for ‘Cause it’s today that you’ve been waiting for —J Lind, “The Day That You’ve Been Waiting For” Listen to The Land of Canaan on Spotify and Apple Music. Visit J’s website and learn more about his music.

I think my paintings may be a subconscious protest. For me, they decry cheap imitations of Christ I have unknowingly been “gifted” along with my Christian upbringing. A plastic collection of bait-and-switch Jesuses. Messiah impersonators that tell me the Maker of the Universe is too disinterested in and disgusted by my earthly experience to provide me with needs intrinsic to my humanity. These Christs are too “spiritual” to care for the myriad and simple ways that brokenness has affected our very being in the world. A global pandemic, economic instability, rampant systematic injustices, the genocide of people in a remote land I’ll likely never be welcomed into, an ocean drowning in the irresponsible refuse of an endlessly consuming population, the declining mental health of a loved one who has been oppressed by years of unhealed festering trauma, and the scrounging survival of the homeless person who shelters in the alley behind my work building—these sufferings culminate like a hundred thousand little splinters too deeply buried for any easy remedy, just like the anxiety that constricts my chest by simply living on this spinning rock floating in the black void of space. These needs, big and small, are what weave the fabric of our humanity. The Gardener 20×24 Oil On Textured Canvas (Commissioned By Private Collector) To get my hopes up, to believe that Christ might care, seems irrationally vulnerable. Mary, the Magdalene, surprisingly mistakes Jesus for the very identity he embodies: a tender and attentive laborer caring for the wellbeing of his garden. A new Adam. The “Cosmic Gardener,” as theologian N. T. Wright calls him. He is slowly and steadily rearranging the universe according to his new order. She thinks this Gardener is too alive, too human to be the one for whom she is searching. Christ is not erasing the human story. His coup de grâce against the curse upon humanity is not the removal of my humanity. His final triumph is undying humanity. Joel Briggs In my daily sufferings with anxiety at the fragility of existence, a Christ who redeems me to an ambiguous half-existence of a floaty nirvana is destructive. No, I need a Christ who cares for my humanness—the joys, struggles, needs, wounds, and delights. I need a Lord and Savior who is redeeming me in my humanness. I need a Christ with dirt under his fingernails and oxygen in his lungs, who is bringing new order to the old chaos, new life to the old, worn-out wastelands. This Christ is not erasing the human story. His coup de grâce against the curse upon humanity is not the removal of my humanity. His final triumph is undying humanity— his physical resurrection, in which human thriving is defined. Perhaps our visions of hope realized were too informed by those cheap mimicries of Christ and their anemic visions of glory. The seemingly fragile promise of the inheritance of all creation is being held in the firm grasp of him who is both gardener and “first of the fruit” of his own garden. Hope seems irrational to our human sensibilities, which are profoundly accustomed to death. The very same Gardener tending these promises has ultimately and finally put death to death. Click here to follow Joel Briggs on Instagram.

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers interviews Philip Yancey, author of more than 25 books including What’s so Amazing about Grace, Disappointment with God, Where is God When It Hurts, and The Jesus I Never Knew. His most recent book, from 2021, is his memoir Where the Light Fell. In this episode, Philip and Jonathan discuss the complex interactions between identity, memory, and memoir, and the journey from fear to gratitude. Click here to listen to Season 4, Episode 5 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to our Head of Development, Sarah Katherine, at sarahkatherine@rabbitroom.com if you are interested in becoming a sponsor of our Podcast Network. Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

In the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, there is a scene where Rory Neary cries into his mashed potatoes. He, along with several other people, have had an encounter with an extra terrestrial that has implanted a shared vision in their consciousness. The thing is, he’s not sure what the image from the vision is. He’s been trying to replicate it with anything he can find. He sees the shadow of it in pillow cases and shaving cream, but when he tries to form it, it’s just not right. As he shovels mashed potatoes onto his plate and begins to try to sculpt them into the image, his family looks on in horror. He starts crying, and then his son starts crying. Throughout the film he defends his odd behavior, saying “this means something”—even though he doesn’t know what. I know that feeling all too well, and I suspect you do too. We write songs and make videos and tell stories that seem to say, “I’ve seen this thing, and I’m trying to show you. So I wrote this song, I made this video…and it’s not quite right, but it means something.” It’s almost the thing, but not quite. And sometimes it’s so far off that I want to crumble it up and trash it. In fact I hate it—I hate the thing I made because it’s not even close to the thing I’m trying to show you. But we can’t stop trying. So over and over, we take our brutish hands and try to carve a river rock into a diamond, spin cotton into silk. But it’s never right, never perfect. It can feel disheartening, pointless even. And there is a certain truth to its pointlessness. We are never going to fashion a perfect replication of the vision. The great artists come close: Beethoven, Shakespeare, Van Gogh. But I have a suspicion that they were frustrated too, for compared to the thing itself, they were closer to our feeble works of art than the goal. What is the point then? Why even try? The ultimate goal is not to find the perfect image, but to let them all go in the face of an actual encounter with the one true God. Hetty White In the practice of Centering Prayer, there are many ways to enter, but one is through images. The monks at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit instructed me to picture getting in an elevator with the Trinity and riding down, down, down, to where my heart is and where encounter happens. Although starting with an image is helpful if like me you are visual, the ultimate goal is not to find the perfect image, but to let them all go in the face of an actual encounter with the one true God. What if all our art, songs, stories, and poems were perfectly imperfect image-elevators down to the heart of the one hearing them, to encounter the one true Artist themself? In a tense scene near the climax of the film, Rory Neary has thrown plants, dirt, chicken wire, and trash cans through the window into his house (much to the horror of his wife and kids) and is working on his biggest recreation of the image yet, when on the television he happens to see the very thing he’s been trying to sculpt: a monument in Wyoming called Devil’s Tower. He knows immediately that’s what he’s been trying to replicate and that’s where he has to go. The vision was a call to a meeting place with the mysterious creatures that implanted the vision in the first place. Isn’t that our hope? That all our brave attempts would be recognized in the end: “oh, that’s what you were trying to draw!” We would see the shadow of the Father’s face and recognize it from each other’s art and lives. And that we would all see and know the invitation to a meeting place, where everyone is invited.

“Home, is it just a word? Or is it something you carry within you?” In the opening minutes of Chloe Zhao’s film Nomadland, we see these words inked on the arm of an Amazon employee named Angela, who is showing off tattoos to her new friend, Fern. It’s a quick scene that may not seem particularly noteworthy, however, nothing in this movie is extraneous or insignificant. The words of this tattoo present us with both a portent of what’s to come and the central tension of the entire film. Fern (played by Frances McDormand) has recently endured back-to-back tragedies: the death of her husband and the closing of her longtime job at a gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada. Very soon, she will swap her belongings for a van and adopt the life of a nomad, crisscrossing the western United States in search of work and roadside community. As she meets other nomads, she will face questions that are at once timely and timeless: Where in this rapidly-changing world do I belong? How do I put down roots when all that was familiar has washed away? Can home be found on the edges of the maps? If you haven’t seen Nomadland yet, I heartily recommend it. The movie was named Best Picture at the 2021 Oscars, where McDormand and Zhao also won awards for acting and directing, respectively. I saw the film months ago, but I’m still thinking about it. Primarily, this is because it reminds me of someone who, on the surface, has little in common with the oddball wanderers of modern America: C. S. Lewis. Shortly after seeing Nomadland, I started reading Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy. In that book, Lewis recounts his decades-long journey to faith in Christ, tracing the impact of a mysterious sensation that he calls “Joy.” Lewis compares Joy to the German word sehnsucht, defining it as an “inconsolable longing” in the human heart for “we know not what.” What do the nomads of Zhao’s film have to do with Lewis’s Joy? I believe that Nomadland is packed with echoes of that bewildering, bittersweet desire. If we listen closely to those echoes, we can learn some profound things about both the nature of Joy and humanity’s search for that elusive destination: home. Shaken Loose According to C. S. Lewis, Joy is dynamic. It’s an elusive desire which appears unexpectedly and vanishes far more quickly than we want it to. While it may be sparked by familiar things—an illustration in a book, the smell of morning mist, or a glimpse of distant hills—it always surprises and unsettles us, compelling us to find it again. This is because of its fleeting nature and its unique intensity. Joy carries with it a sense of what Lewis calls “incalculable importance,” a transcendent spark that feels otherworldly and makes all other pursuits seem “insignificant in comparison.” Unlike other desires, we can’t manufacture or control it. As Lewis says, Joy “is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’” Joy is on the move, and it gets us moving, too. Once we’ve encountered it, we are never quite the same. The characters in Nomadland (many of them played by real-life nomads) have varied reasons for leaving society behind. Like Fern, some are bereaved and unemployed. Others are battling depression, chronic illness, or symptoms of PTSD. Still others are pursuing adventure and a deeper, richer way of life. Despite their differences, all of them have been shaken loose from what was familiar, launched into uncharted territory by experiences that changed them, rendering them unable or unwilling to thrive in traditional settings. Chloe Zhao highlights their uniqueness with close-up camera shots that dwell on weathered skin, lines etched in faces, and the glow of restless eyes. She invites us to empathize with these characters by lingering on numerous scenes of everyday life, work, and play. These mundane moments are punctuated here and there with scenes of astonishing beauty: buffalo rustling through a sea of tall grass, hundreds of birds wheeling in the air beside a cave wall, a sunset blazing over the Badlands, and a desert sky splashed with starlight. Like our own stories, the lives of Zhao’s characters are multifaceted—slow and meandering and chock-full of ordinariness, yet also riven with glory. Like Fern and her companions, those of us who have experienced what Lewis calls “the stab of Joy” and committed ourselves to pursuing its source are square pegs in round holes—what the Bible calls “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11). Having tasted a desire that no earthly comfort can assuage, we are compelled into motion. Our starting points may vary, but our quest is the same. We are drawn inexorably onward, lured by a high and holy wind that fills us with longing for something else, something more, and something beyond. We have no hope of controlling that wind, but if we allow it to carry us, we may find ourselves swept to places and people we never expected to encounter. Like Fern, we may find ourselves shedding old goals, old entanglements, and old coping mechanisms in our efforts to track down that peculiar spark, yet also discovering new joys along the way. We may traverse the highways and byways of the world, but we are no longer “of the world” (John 17:6). We have been displaced. On the Outside Looking In In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis describes Joy as an ache—a desire that, while pleasurable, is tinged with bitterness. This melancholy strain is not only a consequence of Joy’s absence, but is also an intrinsic part of Joy itself. Reflecting on his own experience of sehnsucht, Lewis identifies the feeling as something “almost like heartbreak.” Elsewhere, he calls it “a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss.” Joy as Lewis defines it is interwoven with grief. While Chloe Zhao’s film explores the appeals of life on the road, it refuses to romanticize the experiences of its subjects. Fern and her friends are vulnerable to many hardships, from difficulties finding stable work to the vicissitudes of the natural environment. Cinematographer Joshua James Richards underscores these struggles with camera shots that expose the vast, silent barrenness of the Badlands and the Arizona Desert. In such places, a broken van becomes a terrifying prospect. Fern’s relationships are laced with the sorrow of inevitable goodbyes. During one raw scene, her sister tells her, “I would have loved having you around all these years. You left a big hole by leaving.” Throughout the film, we see Fern repeatedly gravitating toward the firm beams and warm embers of family. Yet again and again, that old itch that Joni Mitchell dubbed “the urge for going” sends her retreating back into the wilderness. Frances McDormand’s performance here is masterful, betraying the depths of Fern’s yearning and grief in quiet, subtle expressions and the fires of a relentlessly searching gaze. The bitter aftertaste of Joy reminds us that despite its glories, our road is a hard one, and we are further away from the source of our longing than we had imagined. Jeshua Hayden In the pages of Scripture, we learn that suffering is part and parcel of our journey toward Joy. 1 Chronicles 29:15 connects life as a sojourner with the ache of continual transience: “Our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no abiding.” In his letter to the Jewish exiles, the Apostle Peter describes the Christian sojourn as a battleground, which is fraught with temptation and peril: “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11). Like the characters of Zhao’s film, those of us who chase Joy into the wild must eventually confront the fact that our best efforts to achieve happiness are imperfect. Beauty crumbles away, the fires of longing fade with time, and our thirst for lasting fulfillment collides with the reality that this world isn’t as it should be. The bitter aftertaste of Joy reminds us that despite its glories, our road is a hard one, and we are further away from the source of our longing than we had imagined. Like Fern, who thumps against the glowing windows of home with the persistence of a determined moth, we find ourselves on the outside looking in. Called Home Musing on the strange character of Joy, C. S. Lewis describes the desire as something akin to memory: “All Joy reminds.” On the final page of his autobiography, he elaborates this idea by comparing Joy to a signpost. Unlike other desires, Joy doesn’t merely lead us to the physical object or experience that inspired it. Instead, it points beyond itself to something that is farther off and more difficult to name. What does Joy remind us of, and where is it pointing us? Lewis answers these questions in his book Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” There is a reason why our encounters with sehnsucht feel otherworldly. That ache is a memory of another time and place—an echo of an Eden that was lost when humanity disavowed its creator and a seismic evil sundered the cosmos, fracturing everything in its wake. It is also a signpost pointing us to a time and place yet to come—to an Eden regained, healed of all the sin and sickness and sorrow that ravaged it. The Joy that Lewis writes about is a both a remnant of paradise lost and an invitation from the God who is making all things new again. In the last analysis, it’s a call to come home. Near the beginning of Nomadland, a girl asks Fern if she is homeless. “No, I’m not homeless,” Fern replies. “I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?” Throughout the film, as we watch Fern roam from place to place, we’re invited to ask ourselves that very question. Is home a physical place, or is it something that we take with us? Can those without roots ever truly be at home in this world? Zhao’s film challenges us to linger in spaces of tension, inviting us into the physical and existential wilderness that Fern and her friends must navigate. We’re encouraged to walk a mile in their shoes—to see ourselves as fellow sojourners, set adrift between the past we’ve left behind and the future we’re longing to participate in. As we read in Hebrews 13:14, those of us who await God’s new creation “do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” Like Fern, we’re still on the road. Yet for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, there is profound consolation to be glimpsed in Nomadland, tattooed on an Amazon worker’s arm. In the Apostle John’s depiction of the New Jerusalem, we witness the ultimate balm for our homesickness: our savior, Jesus, dwelling among the people he has redeemed by his blood. He, more than any physical space, is our truest home—the source of our Joy and the satisfaction of our longings. What comfort does this vision offer us in our wilderness wanderings today? Elsewhere in the New Testament, Christians are told that the same savior who will one day welcome us home now lives within each of us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Faced with the questions posed by Angela’s tattoo, we can honestly answer, “Yes and amen.” Yes, home is just a word; more specifically, it is a name. And yes, it is also something we carry within us—a fellow traveler, who has promised to be with us “to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). Reflecting on Nomadland and its resonances with Lewis’s Joy, we might find ourselves agreeing with the words of George MacDonald: “Yea, no home at last will do, but the home of God’s heart.”

The Local Show is returning next month to North Wind Manor! As we prepare to get the new season underway, I want to talk a little bit about why I love being a part of it. In order to do that, however, I need to share some reflections I’ve had this week. Despite what social media might have us believe, culture—the perspectives, practices, and priorities of a particular people—doesn’t change rapidly. Rather, culture change happens slowly and locally. Most often, you can’t even recognize it has happened until you’re looking in the rearview mirror. I was reminded of these truths last week while watching a new Showtime documentary titled You’re Watching Video Music Box. The film, directed by hip-hop legend Nasir “Nas” Jones, explores the history of hip-hop from its largely underground status in 1983 to the present through the lens of one of its most faithful documentarians, Ralph McDaniels. In 1983, McDaniels recognized something important was happening in parties across New York City and set out to make a TV program on public access television. Despite its humble, local placement (compared to the national reach of later show Yo! MTV Raps), Video Music Box became an integral part of New York City in the ’80s and ’90s, offering virtually unknown artists a platform to refine their craft and promote their music to their city. Some of those underground artists included Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige, and Wu-Tang Clan. You may have heard of them. While those artists went on to become global superstars, McDaniels remained rooted in his NYC community, filming local shows and building community one TV interview or shout-out at a time. Side note: apparently the idea of doing a “shout-out” to someone literally came from Video Music Box. Mind blown. Anyways… McDaniels’ commitment to the roots of his community—allowing art to nourish community and community to nourish art at a neighborly level—reminds me why I love organizing our Local Show at the Rabbit Room. Our songwriters’ round is nothing flashy. It’s not pretentious. It’s not about being the next viral thing. It’s just four artists and their instruments, a few dozen community members, some forgotten lyrics, plenty of jokes, probably tears. It’s a picture that in some ways looks so different from the one McDaniels painted in NYC. But underneath, I think there’s a lot of shared understanding. Our goal at The Local Show is to create a space for connecting, where musicians and storytellers in our local community have a chance to share their gifts with their neighbors, and then have a scone (or three) together. Chris Thiessen Sure, we like to talk about changing culture. We long to see the world redeemed. We hope that what we do—the music we make, the conversations we have—makes a difference. And we want it ASAP. But changing culture, especially on a large scale, can’t be our aim. Rather, it’s a result of good, faithful work. And so our goal at The Local Show—like that of Ralph McDaniels at Video Music Box—is to create a space for connecting, where musicians and storytellers in our local community have a chance to share their gifts with their neighbors, and then have a scone (or three) together. Here, roots are watered. Music is made. God is glorified. I’m thrilled to be a part of it and to hear those whispers breathing life into the world. As we look ahead to the rest of 2022, we’ve decided to make The Local Show a monthly endeavor at North Wind Manor, rather than two biweekly seasons as it has been in the past. So beginning on March 1st, the Local Show will be hosted at North Wind Manor every first Tuesday of the month going forward (with probable exceptions in December and January). Tickets for the March 1st show are going on sale today, and you can buy those here. More shows will be announced soon via social media and at www.rabbitroom.com/events. Additionally, in an effort to better foster the local-ness of The Local Show, we are going to scale back the livestreamed nature of the show. We will, therefore, be livestreaming one show per quarter moving forward. This allows us to still connect our neighbors across the globe with the show every so often, while also allowing us to remove the cameras and focus on being more present in the room for the other two shows. We will announce with plenty of heads up which shows will be livestreamed, and they will remain free to everyone as always! So get your tickets now and watch your email for more updates on The Local Show. We’ll see you there! P.S. I’d like to do a shout-out to all the donors and sponsors that have made this community-building, art-creating work possible over the years. If you’re interested in partnering with us and learning more about what it means to be a sponsor, we’d love to talk with you! Please reach out to Sarah Katherine at sarahkatherine@rabbitroom.com

Fairy rings, for all their mystique, are common at Berry College. In comparison to other universities, Berry isn’t abnormally eco-friendly, but its long-leaf pines, sweeping lawns, and petite, half-tamed deer attract an array of nature-loving students, as well as skunks, cats, tree frogs, herons, black grasshoppers, and fungi. In the mornings at Berry, when the sun gushes like a crushed blood-orange over the pines, a circle or two of white caps will often bloom on our lawns, while the fawns bend and graze around them. The mushroom caps are lush, as though sponging in the surrounding dew, but they are bordered by a necrotic zone, a shadow-ring of dead grass. When I was a freshman at Berry, I dated a girl named Emily, who sometimes carried a mushroom field guide with her, so now and then, I’d see her sitting on her heels in the grass, her field guide open in her palms, and squinting to identify a fresh umbrella of pearl, sulfur, or coral. I began to spot mushrooms around campus more often, ranging from scab-like buttons to angelic halos, and I tried to mimic my girlfriend’s reverence by squatting to examine them. Sometimes, I’d cross a dewy lawn to visit a fairy ring. This circle of caps, chipped and nibbled, marks the living ripple of mycelium below. The mycelium is the true body of the fungus—a tangle of fibers hidden underground, yet signaling its presence with rising caps. At the fairy ring’s center, where there are no mushrooms, the fibers beneath have withered, having used up all the surrounding nutrients. The fairy ring itself, however, rises from the living border of the mycelium, spreading away from the dead core. In this way, mushroom rings become a liminal space—a border between life and death, flesh and spirit. Celtic legends describe these spots as a dancing ground for sprites. Some fairies would sit on the mushroom caps, carousing and clapping, while others would stomp and leap and whirl in an ethereal bacchanalia. Spirits of miracle and mischief, the pixies weaved back and forth across the fungal border, in and out of the realm of decay. Mushrooms are a bridge between worlds. You feed a stump, a mangle of bruised leaves, or perhaps a corpse to the mycelium, and out come bubbles of living color, a splatter-paint of cobalt and mauve and ochre. The fungus works like a mad chemist—deconstructing the dead into their basic elements, then rearranging them into newborn flesh. Peoples of ancient Asia seemed to have glimpsed something sacred in this transformative power. The Ganoderma fungi—called lingzhi in Chinese, reishi in Japanese—grow in kidney-capped stalks and fanning shelves, and their Chinese name stems from the words for divine spirit (ling) and woody mushroom (zhi). This “divine fungus” is also known as the “ten-thousand-year mushroom,” or the “mushroom of immortality.” In the Shennong Ben Cao Jing, a Chinese medicinal document compiled somewhere between 25 and 220 AD, the authors identify six basic colors of Ganoderma: white (baizhi), yellow (huangzhi), green (qingzhi), black (heizhi), purple (zizhi), and red (chizhi). Each color, according to this text, has a different medicinal property. So, if you’re ever browsing through the forest, and you pluck a lingzhi from a stump for a snack, it may benefit your lungs, your spleen, your heart, or your kidneys, or it may give you eternal life, all depending on the color. (If you want immortality, the red chizhi is the best choice.) Of course, if you’re the sort of person who samples unidentified mushrooms in the woods, then it’s also quite likely that you didn’t eat a lingzhi at all, and that your intestines will promptly cave in. The risks of foraging notwithstanding, the lore surrounding the lingzhi suggests a portal between death and life. This revered, wrinkled cap eats up dead flesh and transmutes it into a fount of medicine and immortality. If the mushroom's way of sculpting life from rot yields us any comfort in our grief, it might be because it dimly echoes an entirely different world order, one ruled by the law of re-composition. Noah Guthrie Though I’ve never seen a lingzhi, I’ve had glimpses of a similar transformative power through the fungi in my own life. Back when I was twelve, I switched schools, and for over two years, I grieved for the friends that I’d left behind. As though to emphasize my division from those relationships, my family moved houses in 2014, transitioning from a largely flat suburb in the town of Pegram to a hilly, forested neighborhood twenty minutes from downtown Nashville. Our new home had a long driveway with a thirty-five degree slant, and to one side of that driveway, some shrubs, gravel, and a decaying stump clung to the hillside. The stump was the important part to me. Back then, my favorite videogame was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which portrays the protagonist’s best friend as a wood elf of sorts, named Saria. With the blessings of eternal youth and good hair (the latter being styled in a moss-green bob), Saria passes the time in a sacred grove, playing her ocarina on a tree stump. By the time my family moved, I’d already begun to associate Saria with the old friends I’d left at Harpeth Middle School, so when I saw that my new home had a tree stump, I viewed it as a symbol of my loss. I’d sit on that wooden seat, maybe whistle a bar of Saria’s song, and wrap myself in a fresh layer of worn, aging melancholy. Then the mushrooms arrived. Thick brown saucers began to foam across the tree stump. Over the following months and years, the fungi tore at the wood, prying away splinters and wedges like rotten teeth. At the stump’s receding base, new soil opened up. Grass sprouted. As the shelf fungi gnawed at the stump, the years wore away at my grief for my old friends. The tendrils of new classes, dance recitals, fantasy novels, and relationships began to creep in. So, by the time my “Saria’s stump” had decayed, giving way to fresh herbage, I’d been transformed as well. My grief had taken me apart, then built me into something new. Such images of decay and new growth have brought me hope in the past, but I admit that in some ways, they are a misrepresentation of what fungi actually do. In my own case, I underwent an inner transformation from melancholy to renewed joy, but at each phase, my essence was preserved. The body and self that I called “Noah” was still intact. Say I died, however. The mushrooms would deconstruct my flesh, then rearrange it into something unrecognizable. My body’s proteins, aminos, and carbohydrates, my marrow and lymph and neurons, my soil-brown eyes, they’d become humus, grass blades, and maybe a spray of blackberries to feed a passing bear. Yes, pieces of “Noah” (my proteins and all that) would technically be preserved in the flesh of berries and bears, but they’d no longer be myself, any more than Notre Dame would remain itself if I tore it down and raked out the rubble to form a parking lot. Notre Dame would be destroyed, just as I would be destroyed if my body went to the mushrooms. Maybe the lingzhi can yield medicine for the living, but the dead remain dead. This is why I’m not always comforted when good things arise from death. I see this when I consider the passing of my paternal grandmother, who died during a family vacation in 2011. The week leading up to her death, she’d been as lively as ever, serving our family lasagna over a game of Texas Canasta, so when she was hospitalized, and her organs failed, it was an evil shock. There was no decline, no preparation. It felt like I’d watched her go straight from the kitchen to the coffin. However, as is often the case with seasons of grief, the following years yielded many up-shoots of new life for my family, color mushrooming from ash. Grief brought me resilience, emotional maturity, and inspiration for my fairy novel, and as my family and friends comforted one another, love blossomed. These are the blessings of the lingzhi: decay and transformation. If those blessings were all I had, however, it would be a hollow consolation. Even if my grandmother’s grave yields grass, dandelions, and mushroom caps, medicine and new life, the magic trick isn’t enough for me. My grandmother is still dead, and no amount of personal growth or familial affection will change that. In the end, mushrooms are just another proof of the law of decomposition. Everything lives by ripping other lives apart, by devouring them, by transforming their flesh into their own. We join the fungi in a parody of Eucharist: we offer them our bodies to tear apart, and we are destroyed, becoming food for the next generation. We accept the law of decay for the time being, though. While we’re still alive, it’s helpful for us. In the case of the lingzhi, we harvest, powder, and brew it, concentrate it into pills, and sell it to ailing souls across the world. In 2004, the global average turnover for lingzhi products was about $2.16 billion. There would be no mushrooms without death, but we accept them, whether eagerly or grudgingly, because they bring us life. Even when we don’t invest in myco-medicine, our lives all depend on decomposers. Every food chain leads back to the soil, no matter how many links of meat-eaters, plant-eaters, and all-eaters you work through to get there, and our decomposers (the dead-eaters) give the soil its structure and fertility. The mushrooms feed the earth, and as a result, they feed everything. We eat the fruits of decay at every meal, whether in a bowl of kale, a hatchet of chicken breast, a curried pot of rice, a froth of blue cheese, or a savory, frilled wheel of portobello. People across the world consume the lingzhi in tea and supplements, but mycologists have observed ever since the third century, all the way back to the Shennong Ben Cao Jing (if not earlier), that the mushroom of immortality is bitter. It’s what you’d expect from death’s medicine. If the mushroom’s way of sculpting life from rot yields us any comfort in our grief, it might be because it dimly echoes an entirely different world order, one ruled by the law of re-composition. The Hebrew prophet Ezekiel offers a bizarre, almost hallucinogenic image of this alternate law. In his book of visions, Ezekiel describes God overlooking a wasteland of desiccated bones. The worms and fungi, no doubt, had cleaned these corpses long ago, leaving the skeletons for the wind and beasts to scatter. By now, even the most dedicated osteologist would struggle to piece the bones together. Nonetheless, God speaks to them: “O dry bones, I will lay sinews upon you, and I will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live.” As Ezekiel looks on, the bones shudder. They jerk and shift, turning the wasteland into a field of rippling limbs, white and ripe. Then, like a time-lapse run backward, the lost bodies are reconstructed bone by bone, muscle by muscle. Everything that had been scattered to the soil—the collagen, the tendons, the veins, the ballooning flesh of the lungs—they weave themselves together, and they are human again. The lingzhi may transform flesh, feeding old life to new generations, but it always leaves the bones to dry. It picks apart, but it can’t rebuild what was lost. In the end, it’s only the promise of re-composition that comforts me about my grandmother, or about anyone else who’s died. One family of mushrooms, however, bears a hint of that hope for restoration. The fairy ring mushroom, so common among the grazing deer on my college campus, is also known as Marasmius oreades. Its name comes from the Greek marasmos, which means “withering.” If, upon catching sight of a fairy ring on my college’s lawn, I waited for the sun to come out, and the dew to dry, I might see those caps, caramelly and lush as pancakes, shrivel into husks. For most types of mushrooms, this is the end. You can’t revive a punctured heart, and you can’t revive a dried mushroom cap. However, if I waited longer still (perhaps with an umbrella), and watched a shower spill over the withered ring, I would witness a phenomenon that has long fascinated mycologists. The mushrooms would blossom anew, frills spreading, their wrinkled heads turning smooth as the cheeks of a newborn child. Here, we see another vision of this unnatural, yet good, law, the law that refreshes dry caps and enfleshes cracked bones. It’s no wonder that we relegate this to the world of sprites, and that anyone who sees a fairy ring is meant to step inside and make a wish. The ring invites us to enter, crossing to stand over the mycelium’s withered core. It invites us to pray for rebirth. —In memory of Eden Muina, who passed away on September 12, 2021, at the age of twenty. A memorial garden has been established on Berry Campus in Eden’s memory. Click here to contribute to ‘Eden’s Garden.‘ To read more of Noah’s writing, visit his online journal, The Green Phoenix.

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers interviews activist and author Lisa Sharon Harper. Lisa Sharon Harper spent three decades researching ten generations of her family’s story through DNA research, oral histories, interviews, and genealogical records. That research is the basis of her new book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It. In this episode, Lisa Sharon Harper and Jonathan  Rogers discuss truth-seeking, truth-telling, forgiveness, and repair. Click here to listen to Season 4, Episode 6 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to our Head of Development, Sarah Katherine, at sarahkatherine@rabbitroom.com if you are interested in becoming a sponsor of our Podcast Network. Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

I once went a year without eating bread. It wasn’t a fast or a health kick or anything noble like that. I’m allergic to gluten and moved overseas to work in a country without gluten-free anything. It also happened to be a country without unlimited internet. Each month I would save up my data to Skype family back home or stream a movie. One month I used all my data spending seven hours downloading Rogue One, which never made it to the theater in the town where I lived. I’d been in my new country for four months when my mom sent over some DVDs. Mixed in amongst some new releases I’d been excited to see was a random movie my mom saw and thought I would like called Kubo and the Two Strings. It looked interesting, but I set it to the side because it also looked dangerous. I was three months into the deep grief of the death of a cherished friend, and Kubo and the Two Strings looked like it could be just honest enough to send me back into the darkness I thought I had crawled my way out of. So, I stuck the DVD on my desk and forgot it existed until months later, as monsoon rains pounded outside. Slipping the DVD into my laptop, surrounded by the cool, rainy air, I was only hoping for something entertaining to pass the time. Instead, what I discovered was a work of art my imagination would use to change my life. Kubo: If you must blink, do it now. Pay careful attention to everything you see and hear, no matter how unusual it may seem. And please be warned: If you fidget, if you look away, if you forget any part of what I tell you—even for an instant—then our hero will surely perish. —Kubo and the Two Strings The above lines are spoken by a young boy named Kubo, the protagonist of Kubo and the Two Strings, as the movie opens. From the moment I heard these words, my heart slowed in my chest. Something about them rang true, but what they meant I was yet unsure. As the movie progressed, I learned that Kubo is a storyteller full of joy and imagination, but one who is familiar with suffering and grief in his young life. Throughout the movie, he is hunted by one who seeks to steal his joy, imagination, suffering, and grief—one who seeks to steal his humanity. As Kubo flees his pursuer, he is forced to reckon both with the anguish of loss and what it means to be the one still living. I walked away from this movie with a tiny part of myself healed, but I was back home in America before I was able to give voice as to why. My imagination latched onto an exchange between Kubo and his pursuer that made everything fall into place. Moon King: Everything you loved is GONE! Everything you knew has been TAKEN from you! Kubo: No… it’s in my memories. The most powerful kind of magic there is. It makes us stronger than you’ll ever be. These are the memories of those we have loved and lost. And if we hold their stories deep in our hearts…then you will never take them away from us. —Kubo and the Two Strings I had been angry since my friend died. Not so much that she had died, but that so many people only seemed to want me to feel better about it. They wanted me to be glad she was no longer suffering. They wanted me to only remember the good times with her and forget the bad. Forget the ache of knowing she was dying for over a year. Forget the utter wrongness of her death. For months I had been raging over it and could not figure out why…until my imagination showed me. God does not forget, even for an instant, the stories of every single person who is gone. Hannah Mitchell The memories of my friend are carved deep into my heart, and the stories held there are the only thing not even death can take away from me. But if I blink or look away, if I choose to forget any part of those stories, then my hero will surely perish. To choose to only remember the good like so many wanted would mean forgetting the fullness of my friend’s story. All of her life was precious, not just the parts that hurt less than others. I won’t let my desire for a little less pain loosen my hold on the memories of my friend nestled safely in my heart. Because these memories, they’re a magic stronger than death. And as I live on, they do nothing but make me strong. Even as my anger soothed and my soul’s wounds began to heal, I still had a problem: God. For months after my friend died, people had been telling me all the peace God wanted to offer me or what great things God would do through this part of my story—how great my testimony would be. Somewhere deep inside me, I felt like maybe God wanted me to forget the pain too. And that was something I just couldn’t do. But as my imagination continued to do its work with Kubo’s story, it helped me understand something about God. Unlike people who tried to soothe my pain, part of the comfort God offered me was to never flinch or look away. God saw my pain and knew not to try to make me feel better, but to sit with me in the endless ache. God knows the only thing that can slightly lessen the pain of death is for it to be seen and known. So Jesus wept. And God does not forget, even for an instant, the stories of every single person who is gone. What I experienced in Kubo and the Two Strings may not be life altering to anyone but me. That’s the magic of the imagination: it’s as unique as the person in whom it exists. Every single one of you may watch Kubo’s story and find a different moment that shapes you most, or you may even take a different meaning from the same moments I shared about here, but none of that makes any of us wrong. Your imagination is yours, not mine or anyone else’s. It will find meaning and beauty and the truth of God in art that no one else may ever know. The mystery of it is precisely what makes it so beautiful. So, I invite you now to share in the comments below your own moments of imagination working. Share your favorite lines from a book, movie, song, TV show, or comic, and why they mean so much to you. Share a painting or a photograph that touched you and how it made its impact known. Share the blustery winter day that taught you about God. No, we may not find the moments you share as wondrous as you. But we will know that for you, they are something of unspeakable beauty. And for that reason alone, they should be seen, known, and loved. Click here to read “Imagination as an Agent of Healing (Part 1 of 3)” and here to read “Imagination as a Spiritual Practice” (Part 2 of 3).”

In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis writes of the distant Castlereagh Hills outside his nursery windows. “They were not very far off but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing-Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.” The Gray Havens have always had a tinge of mystery (and more than a tinge of the Inklings) in their music. They’re a great example of the ways that music, when written well, can mine deep stores of wisdom and theology without becoming stuffy or off-putting. And my goodness, the Gray Havens’ music is written well! Lewis’s quote, which provides the name of the band’s latest album, gives words to the great paradox that there is in us a singular desire that no experience in the world can satisfy. The word “supernatural” is so overused we forget the meaning. Think of the visible spectrum—all the light we can see—with red on one end and violet on the other. Just past the ends, invisible, there is infrared and ultraviolet. Maybe “ultranatural” is a better word than supernatural to describe this liminal space where we step outside what we know and see and realize there is something else, something beautiful and mysterious. Blue Flower, the band’s fifth studio release, dances in that space and (like another of Lewis’s works) ushers the listener from a long, drab winter to a bright and tantalizing summer. Lewis’s autobiography is filled with obscure references, and he often does not explain them. Indeed, his flower means more than we might first think, as it was an important symbol in Romanticism. Early German Romantic poet Novalis introduced the symbol in a fragmentary novel in which the protagonist, upon hearing a stranger’s stories, shares, “The Blue Flower is what I long to behold. It lies incessantly in my heart… In the world I used to live in, who troubled himself about flowers?” In 1839, Thomas Carlyle wrote an essay on Novalis, and gave this interpretation: “The ‘Blue Flower’ there spoken of being Poetry.” H. H. Boyesen expanded the thought and wrote that the flower “is meant to symbolize the deep and sacred longings of a poet’s soul. Romantic poetry invariably deals with longing; not a definite, formulated desire for some obtainable object, but a dim, mysterious aspiration, a trembling unrest, a vague sense of kinship with the infinite.” All of these meanings suggest a transcendent beauty: the feelings a poem or a song can stir that ordinary prose cannot. And long before he had knowledge of Romantic symbols, Lewis felt it. We all do. But what a challenge to capture such a mysterious and wonderful thing! That’s where the Gray Havens have triumphed. Blue Flower gives voice to sehnsucht in ways that discourses on literature just can’t. In these songs, we don’t just understand the longing, we feel it too, and we’re given space to name it, and to lament its distance even while we joy in its very existence. Just over a minute into the opening title track, the somber, atmospheric music changes to a vibrant, lively instrumental line that swells in layer upon layer. It makes me smile every time I hear it. The music steps us out of our everyday existence into some other alluring realm, and like six-year-old Lewis, the listener knows there is something more. Ben Shive’s production employs a broad range of instrumentation to set a cinematic place for each song. The album’s themes are as strong in the music as in the lyrics. Shive is a master at strings, and his touch here is perfect. Havens’ founder Dave Radford was more involved in the production for this album, and the collaboration is wonderful. The toolbox was wide open—percussion, horns, loops—but the tools are used with expert precision, and always in service of the theme. In these songs, we don’t just understand the longing, we feel it too, and we’re given space to name it, and to lament its distance even while we joy in its very existence. Mark Geil I’ve listened to this album for a while now, but only recently have I done so through a critic’s lens, and I’ve realized something: pulling this off was so difficult! Think about the task: write about this soul-deep, inconsolable longing we all feel but can’t always describe. Go ahead and describe it. Then, actually stir that thing in our souls. Consider how adeptly these songs accomplish all of this. “Rhythm of the East” hints at something otherworldly, in staccato lyrics and music, acknowledges how difficult it is to share, and points to the source in the rising sun and its Creator. “I remember now in December how, like a split-second dream, I heard a summer song; if I get it wrong, you can find it in the east.” How clever for a song to describe an attempt to remember a song. “Wide Awake” is somehow musically sparse and full at the same time, capturing two planes of existence and inviting us to tune our senses to the one we can’t always see. The lyric acknowledges how we as adults might try to talk ourselves out of the possibility of this land we imagined as a child where the blue flowers grow. Albums like this could steer off a ledge into ethereal or academic pitfalls, but choruses like this one make Blue Flower into something honest and accessible. The Gray Havens grow with each new album, and it’s a delight to enjoy. Radford’s songwriting has always been impressive, but here he’s accomplished something remarkable: an album about transcendence that is, itself, transcendent. Click here to listen to Blue Flower on Spotify and here to listen on Apple Music.

On 14-16 July, 2022, the Rabbit Room will convene the second Hutchmoot UK at St. Andrew’s Church in North Oxford. You’re invited to come and enjoy a weekend of live music, delicious food and conversation, and a series of discussions centred on art, faith, and the telling of great stories across a range of mediums. Keynote: Andrew Peterson As a singer-songwriter and recording artist, Andrew Peterson has released eleven records over the past fifteen years including his latest album, Resurrection Letters, Vol. 1. His music has earned him a reputation for writing songs that connect with his listeners in ways equally powerful, poetic, and intimate. A natural-born storyteller, Andrew has also followed his gifts into the realm of publishing. His books include The Wingfeather Saga, Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making, and The God of the Garden: Thoughts on Creation, Culture, and the Kingdom. Andrew, his wife, Jamie, and their three children live just outside of Nashville, Tennessee, on a wooded hill in a little house they call The Warren. Andrew is the founder of the Rabbit Room community and the bearer of the honorable title of “The Proprietor.” Live in Concert: Joshua Luke Smith Hutchmoot UK is proud to host Joshua Luke Smith live on Friday night, 15 July. Admission to the show is free for all Hutchmoot ticket holders. Joshua Luke Smith is a poet, producer and natural storyteller. Smith has been praised in Complex, featured on BBC Radio 1Xtra and gave a TED X talk titled “The World Within” in 2017. As Smith himself says, his music is made to “speak into the chaos” of the modern world, distilling his own experiences into something anyone can relate to. Among Smith’s best known works is “Becoming Human,” a poem inspired by the story of an attempted suicide. The poem’s success paved the way for Smith’s work with suicide prevention charity Samaritans, the first of many charitable initiatives that Smith has been involved in. Rather than adding to the chaos of modern society, Smith’s music is about bringing solace and tranquility by addressing elements of the human condition that other artists might shy away from. In 2021 he released his debut album The Void and will see his first book published in the summer of 2022. He’s also the host of The Pilgrimage Podcast. Other featured speakers and performers include Sarah Clarkson, Ruth Naomi Floyd, Alastair Gordon, Heidi Johnston, Mary McCampbell, Mark Meynell, Jonathan Rogers, and Michael J. Tinker. Click here to register for Hutchmoot UK 2022. Sponsoring Hutchmoot If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of Hutchmoot, whether in the UK or the States, we’d love to hear from you! Contact Sarah Katherine Woodhull, the Rabbit Room’s Head of Development, at sarahkatherine@rabbitroom.com and she’ll be glad to answer any questions you have.

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers talks with author Dorena Williamson. Dorena is a bridge-builder, a speaker, and a co-planter of a multi-racial church that has been doing beautiful work in Nashville for 25 years. Her most recent picture book, Crowned with Glory, is an ode to Black hair and Black girl joy. In this episode, Dorena and Jonathan Rogers talk about representation, writing the books you want to read, and the perils of “color-blindness.” Click here to listen to Season 4, Episode 7 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to our Head of Development, Sarah Katherine Woodhull, at sarahkatherine@rabbitroom.com if you are interested in becoming a sponsor of our Podcast Network. Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

Here’s the thing: I never planned to write a book. At least, I never thought anyone would publish a book I had written. Despite being a self-professed book nerd, I’ve always considered myself a filmmaker first and foremost. Books were something I read, collected, discussed. I didn’t have the time (or the confidence) to write one myself. But, over the span of six months beginning in the fall of 2020, two unexpected things happened. First, a booklet of Psalm-inspired prayers I had written with my friend Dan Wilt found its way to the fine folks at Brazos Press, which resulted in a two-book offer. I wasn’t prepared for that, nor was I prepared for my film adaptation of Carolyn Weber’s memoir Surprised by Oxford to at last take flight in the spring of 2021, after four years of development and a number of failed attempts to get the production off the ground. What this all amounted to was a very busy, but highly rewarding year. While I’m still in post-production on the film, the first prayer book, titled Sheltering Mercy, was released on February 8th and is now available for purchase at all the usual places. On release day, I posted this on Instagram. I think it’s worth repeating here for context: Ryan Whitaker makes movies. Ryan Whitaker Smith writes books. My bi-furcated self is the product of C. S. Lewis, Alfred Hitchcock, G. K. Chesterton, Steven Spielberg, 1940s Technicolor, Christian theology, Film Noir, liturgy, poetry, Ernst Lubitsch comedies, John Ford westerns, an endless fascination with Orson Welles, a borderline obsession with Scottish novelist John Buschan, and everything in between. While Ryan Whitaker is still hard at work on @surprisedbyoxford (which combines several of the influences above), Ryan Whitaker Smith has a book releasing TODAY from @brazospress, written with co-author @danwiltarist. Sheltering Mercy is a book of prayers inspired by the Psalms and is available wherever books are sold. Get it today! The truth is, Sheltering Mercy and Surprised by Oxford are more connected than they might initially appear to be. Both owe a debt of gratitude to Carolyn Weber (more on that in the introduction below). Both are inspired by art, poetry, literature, scripture, and themes of grace and transcendent truth. Both are the products of the unique blend of influences that have made me who I am. So, without any further rambling on my part, here is the introduction to Sheltering Mercy, along with the first prayer, “River Tree.” For more information about the book, visit praywiththepsalms.com. Introduction In his book Reflections on the Psalms, C. S. Lewis makes a simple but profound observation about praise. He notes that “the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious minds” praise most, “while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praise least.” In other words, the humble (or, to use the common parlance of the Psalms, righteous) find occasion for praise even in the worst of circumstances, while the cranks (or wicked) are notoriously silent when it comes to thanks—even as their riches increase and their victories abound. To be sure, the Psalms are chiefly concerned with the subject of praise. The ornamentation of many churches today attests to this fact, and rightly so. But praise, according to the psalmists, is a more complicated matter than our modern Christian use of the term might suggest. For every comforting turn of phrase fit for a hand-painted wood plank or colorful banner, there are dozens more one would do best not to mention in the company of children. Artwork by Nathan Swann Yes, the praise we find in the Psalms is often joyful. Exuberant. A tune fit for dancing. But there is praise of another sort—the praise of the forgotten. The destitute. The fearful. The guilty. For these, praise often looks like utter desperation. Immobilizing panic. Fury. Trembling lips and a stuttering heart. The Psalms pull no punches. They remind us that worship is not only celebratory, but often mournful—the cry of those so overcome with grief, so lost in darkness, that the world of light and laughter and sun and sky seems like a half-forgotten memory. The God we serve—the One who is relentlessly present with us, even when He seems as distant as the peace we long for—is with us both in triumphant victory and in crushing defeat. In consolation and in desolation. In darkness and in light. In weeping and in rejoicing. In death and in life. The Psalms cover the wide gamut of human experience and human emotion. They are refreshingly honest. Tactlessly blunt. They move us. Shock us. Invite us to join them in their joy and in their lament. For God is present in it all. The Psalms have been used as prayers by the faithful for a few thousand years. Excellent translations are available, as well as paraphrases, commentaries, and additional resources for those wishing to study the Psalms. So what exactly are we attempting to add here? The first prayers written for this book emerged organically from times of private devotion as an attempt to engage thoughtfully and creatively with the text—prayerful responses, mirroring each psalm in its tone and content. The idea was birthed from friendship—years of walking together as fellow disciples of Jesus through the ebbs and flows of life and bearing one another’s burdens in prayer. We are vocational writers in different fields—Ryan Whitaker Smith in the sphere of filmmaking and storytelling, and Dan Wilt in the world of teaching, worship, and spiritual formation. We share in common not just an abiding belief in the power of prayer, but a love for language and the cadence and musicality of lyrical poetry. In December of 2019, we shared a small booklet with friends and family that contained twenty psalm-inspired prayers. The enthusiastic responses we received confirmed that we might, in fact, be on to something. So we continued writing. The prayers contained in this book (covering the first seventy-five psalms) are the fruit of our labors. They are not translations or paraphrases. Neither of us pretend to be qualified for such a task. Rather, they are responses—prayerful, poetic sketches—written in harmony with Scripture. We’ve taken to calling them free-verse renderings, which is just another way of saying they are impressionistic poetry without the limitations of meter or rhyme. The prayers contained in this book are responses—prayerful, poetic sketches—written in harmony with Scripture. Ryan Whitaker Smith Imagine a painter roaming the countryside who, stumbling upon a hidden valley, scrambles for her canvas and paints in an attempt to capture the vista before her: the rocky hillsides spilling down into a meadow of green and violet, the sun straining through the clouds to scatter its golden light across the scene. The painting that results is not the valley itself, but an impression of it—an attempt (however feebly) to harmonize with its beauty. We have attempted to do something like that here. The psalms are holy ground, and these prayers are lyrical paintings of what we have seen, heard, and felt while sojourning there. Each prayer adheres to the general movement of the psalm it references, while not being constrained by it. As a result, one phrase in the original text might inspire several lines of prayerful response. We allowed ourselves the freedom to follow where the text was leading us on a personal level as we prayed along with it, and to rejoice (and frequently wrestle with) what we found there. We have included Scripture references wherever possible. One of the unexpected joys of this endeavor was finding that the whole body of Scripture was providing content for these prayers. Which brings us to another important point: as followers of Jesus, we felt the freedom to approach these prayers through the lens of the New Testament. Christ is the central figure of the Bible and the One the Hebrew Scriptures anticipate, hint at, and long for. As a result, these prayers are unapologetically Christocentric. At the time of this writing, the Psalms are enjoying a historic revisitation in the broadest streams of the twenty-first-century Church. We hope the prayers offered in this book will contribute in some small way to a rediscovery of not only the Psalms, but the entire canon of Scripture. Ultimately, our hope is that these prayers would lead you into the presence of the God who inspired the psalmists—the God who sanctifies the praise we bring and the ground on which we tread. —Ryan Whitaker Smith and Dan Wilt River Tree Psalm 1 Lord, Your presence is life to me: joy of my heart; strength of my soul. Grant me the grace to walk in Your ways; to cherish Your friendship over the fellowship of the fallen, soul-shaped as I am by the company I keep— pressed and formed, for good or for ill. I refuse to march with those who mock Your mercy; who revel in the unraveling of sacred things. They stumble down trackless wastes, training others in the ways of their wandering. But You will be my delight, Lord; Your Word my mirth and meal— and I like an oak, drawing strength from fertile soil, growing in grace, safe in the circumference of Your mercy. So I will flourish, a river tree drinking from the deep— fruit heavy on my branches; leaves thrumming with life. Though seasons shift around me, I will stand. The godless are lifeless: withered stalks, bent by the wind; such are those who shun Your mercy. They forfeit seats at Your table, refusing Your wedding garments; choosing nakedness over grace. I won’t be counted among them— not while Your River rushes for my good. Lead me, Lord, strength upon strength, that at the end of my days I may look back and wonder at the manifold mercy of God. Click here to learn more about Sheltering Mercy: Prayers Inspired by the Psalms.

While attending Hutchmoot: Homebound in 2021, I was struck by a particular interweaving of artists and influences that were cited. The closer I looked at these inklings of connection between them, the more I discovered. The focal point of my observation starts with the author/illustrator Maurice Sendak, well known for his picture books Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and dozens of other books, operas, and illustrations. In a previous article for The Rabbit Room, I wrote about my reflections after learning of Sendak’s passing in 2012, his final NPR interview with Terry Gross, and his spiritual yearnings that came from that interview in the final pages of his earthly life. Despite claiming to be an atheist, his conversation with Gross comes to life with a sincere spiritual longing, expressed through mysterious paradoxical sayings like “I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again.” Being a scholar of Sendak’s life and collector of his books, my ears perk up whenever I see a piece of his work, or hear his name mentioned. Because of this, his presence came alive for me during Hutchmoot through a series of curious connections uncovered throughout that weekend. First of all, I was delighted to hear Sendak mentioned by name in the video interview with the late Walt Wangerin Jr., and even more delighted to find out they were friends and colleagues. Wangerin’s book The Bedtime Rhyme features an endorsement by Sendak as “the most beautiful thing Walt has done,” and his book of essays Swallowing the Golden Stone is dedicated to Sendak. In Part One of his blog series The Writing of Branta and Other Affections, Wangerin muses on his conversations with Sendak about the publication of Where the Wild Things Are, and the fervor it created from those who deemed it too scary for children. He says, “Far from inaugurating fears in children, such books as his gave a habitation and a name to fears the children already experienced, but amorphously, perplexedly.” Does that phrase “a habitation and a name” sound familiar? If it does, you’ve either read Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or heard it read and dissected by none other than Malcolm Guite, both in his keynote speech at Hutchmoot: Homebound 2021 and companion book Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. —Malcolm Guite, Lifting the Veil In his book, Guite proceeds to use this quote as a launching point for his insightful observations on poetry, imagination, and the holy scriptures, coalescing in how artists might be inspired to “body forth” their own responses to these mysteries of heaven and earth. One of many artists whose work is cited in Lifting the Veil is Samuel Palmer, whose etching Opening the Fold is included on page 110. In Maurice Sendak’s final NPR interview, right after his comment on seeing his brother again (in an afterlife he doesn’t believe in), he mentions: I am reading a biography of Samuel Palmer, which is written by a woman in England. I can’t remember her name. And it’s sort of how I feel now, when he was just beginning to gain his strength as a creative man and beginning to see nature. But he believed in God, you see, and in heaven, and he believed in hell. Goodness gracious, that must have made life much easier. It’s harder for us non-believers, but you know, there’s something I’m finding out as I’m aging—that I am in love with the world. —Maurice Sendak, final NPR interview Even as he clung to his atheism, Sendak could not shake his unquenchable thirst for beauty in the natural world around him, and in the beauty created by other artists. This beauty drove his own work, his own stories, and his own passions. More significant than the one-page inclusion of a work by Samuel Palmer in Guite’s book is the focus on William Blake. In the section of his book titled “Christ and the Prophetic Imagination,” Guite uses Blake’s poetry and art to defend him as a prophet for our modern times. As part of all this connective tissue, not only does Walt Wangerin, Jr. write about Blake in Part 2 of his blog series, but William Blake was one of Maurice Sendak’s most vital inspirations for his life’s work. Sendak openly admitted on many occasions that he didn’t understand much about Blake, but that he was captivated by him; his life, his poetry, and his illustrations. Whether it was the religious or the aesthetic elements of his work that provided such a light for Sendak is a mystery, but the influence is profound nonetheless. Sendak often stole and paid homage to his muses with mischievous glee, and parallels can be drawn from Blake to Sendak in numerous works of his, including the layout of text and imagery in Night Songs and Lullabies. But his influence is felt most deeply in his final posthumous piece My Brother’s Book. Through poetry and image, Sendak pens a love letter to his late partner Eugene Glynn and his late brother Jack Sendak, expressing his longing for reunion in his own “dream life.” The imagery is a blend of heavenly otherness and earthly habitation, and funnily enough, based in part on Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. Once again, like the work of Blake, My Brother’s Book encompasses in its aesthetic form that same Shakespeare quote cited by Guite: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. —William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream In this short video, an aging Sendak talks briefly about his love for William Blake and what his work means to him: As I clicked my way through the secret tunnels and video feeds on Hutchmoot: Homebound weekend, I was elated to discover that the connections from Guite to Wangerin to Blake to Sendak did not stop there. In 1824, William Blake had illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy, which Diana Glyer so expertly lectured on, and in the late 1960s Maurice Sendak had illustrated stories by George MacDonald, including The Golden Key. MacDonald’s work likely had a strong influence on Sendak as well. Funnily enough, in the Rabbit Room Chinwag shortly after Hutchmoot, an insightful observation made by Devorah Allen drew a parallel between drawings from Where the Wild Things Are and the following quote from Phantases: Hearing next a slight motion above me, I looked up, and saw that the branches and leaves designed upon the curtains of my bed were slightly in motion. Not knowing what change might follow next, I thought it high time to get up; and, springing from the bed, my bare feet alighted upon a cool green sward; and although I dressed in all haste, I found myself completing my toilet under the boughs of a great tree, whose top waved in the golden stream of the sunrise with many interchanging lights, and with shadows of leaf and branch gliding over leaf and branch, as the cool morning wind swung it to and fro, like a sinking sea-wave. —George MacDonald, Phantastes This barrage of connections and influences that I felt throughout the weekend led me to respond with my own habitation and name as I decorated Jonny Jimison’s poster: What other connections do you see? How are we intertwined as fellow artists, and how are we influencing each other? Feel free to share in the comments section below.

We understand something, we humans: woods are never just woods. Sensing the breaths and rustlings inside, we have learned to marvel at and to mind—at times, to fear—the exhale of otherness that meets us when we stand on the sparser side of a wall of trees. In storytelling and specifically old Anglo-Saxon fairytales, woods are a place of transformation, a world apart where loss is faced and pain shifts its shape. Always a thin place, woods guard a realm in which the spiritual mingles confoundingly with the temporal. We feel our humanness differently there; no one who goes in comes out the same. Writers have used different words and images to describe this transformative theater over the years. Katherine May uses “wintering” in her book of the same name, and Kierkegaard used the three stages of existence. Scripture speaks of Jesus being drawn into the desert, Jonah into the guts of a sea creature, and Mary into what we must assume were nine full months of unplanned pregnancy as well as literal, physical transformation. And for Stephen Sondheim, it was still the woods. I often think of Sondheim’s Into the Woods as a sort of musical theatre translation of the Christian bible. It must sound blasphemous at worst and silly at best, but I suppose it has something to do with the fact that not one lyricist or composer in the world of 20th century musical theatre captured over and over again the nuances, hilarity, and downright mess of what it is to be a human being the way that Stephen Sondheim did. And I guess I think pretty much the same thing about the bible and its sprawling cast of I-couldn’t-have-made-these-people-up-if-I-tried characters, as far as books and characters go. In how he manicured a turn of phrase or composed a polyphonic harmony, this man touched on the staggering subfloor of our reality: that some undeniable, ineffable truth connects the experiences of every person, that it indeed informs the experiences of every person, and so perhaps we are not very different after all. JANIE TOWNSEND While I am just as much an enthusiast of Sondheim’s other masterpieces—Company (1970) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) specifically—Into the Woods (1986) may be the epitome of his ability to behold and critique and praise and confess to what living in our humanity really is up close, doing so with cerebral precision and the visceral understanding of heartbreak that people can only feel when they’ve had to grow up. Subjective realities and objective Truth alike are given voices in the stories of these characters, just as they have while they sing around and inside of us every day. Somehow—through spiritual gifting and responsibility, I am convinced—Stephen Sondheim was able to harness the most universal and yet personal experiences we humans can have and write them into a single piece of art. In how he manicured a turn of phrase or composed a polyphonic harmony, this man touched on the staggering subfloor of our reality: that some undeniable, ineffable truth connects the experiences of every person, that it indeed informs the experiences of every person, and so perhaps we are not very different after all. Sondheim died late last year, as you might have heard. He was old and unwell, and left behind people who love him and a treasure trove of sublime dramatic and musical work. Trying to describe the gift of his portfolio and how he was the only person equipped to say things just the way he said them, I could write about Into the Woods in its entirety. I could write about what he contributed to the arts, or I could dissect his truly superior talent as a writer and composer in as formulaic a fashion as possible, all the while knowing I am not nearly qualified to do so. I could skip down endless rabbit trails here, so I’ll narrow down my description of what we have because we had Stephen Sondheim putting pen to page to stage. Go listen to “No One Is Alone.” (Click here to view this song in Apple Music.) Pull up whatever streaming service or internet browser you choose. Search “no one is alone into the woods” and make sure to choose the recording by the original cast—none of that condensed-for-theatrical-release, film score stuff (it’s not that I’m not a fan of the movie or Meryl Streep, whom I basically worship in fact—but I’m a snob, too). Just listen to it. And then keep reading. This song is perhaps the tenderest encouragement, the most loving rebuke, and—if any such thing exists—the wisest of any American proverb I have ever heard. You see, we forget to think this way, you and I. We try so hard to remember that everyone else is a loved person, a significant person. We try so hard to have empathy for all the humans in our space—our kids, wailing over something that seems a trifle to us, or that one guy who decided to turn left at the last second and is now straddling two lanes and blocking traffic with his truck—and sometimes we just can’t. No cure or antidote for our creeping self-centeredness exists, other than humility and the presence of one another. Without these, we do our best and so often don’t have the radical vulnerability to simply say it isn’t enough. We lose our tempers. We miss out on ideas and nuances and growth. We take sides even when there really ought not to be sides for the taking. We judge others. For the more righteous of us, we judge others for judging others and still blindly perpetuate the buzz of masses playing judge, jury, and executioner. We forget to spare such judgment even for ourselves. In summary, we forget that every person who lives and breathes, or almost does or once did, is sacred. Because life is sacred. Because, as best we can guess, God crafted us and breathed life into us out of his want for nearness and creativity and work and dwelling with us. And so we are not only sacred, but loved. And no one truly loved by such a constant companion as their Creator can ever be truly alone, so no one is alone, nor is anyone ever meant to believe such an exceptionally brilliant, crushing lie. And we do forget. And Sondheim probably did, too. But he was one of us who wrote it down. Because it is crucial that we do not forget. That, above all else, is what we have to thank him for. Into the Woods, and more broadly, what Stephen Sondheim saw in the world and how he shared it through his art, has such a unique anchor in my heart. It taught me young—certainly before I would understand it for myself—that we’re only ever journeying, constantly reentering whatever transformation, whichever wilderness God beckons us into where he might meet us afresh. It reminds me on every listen that I am probably overwhelmingly normal, whatever my feelings, thought spirals, or flaws, and that adults have been terrified of being adults and parents and leaders for much, much longer than I have been afraid of such things. Through this story of growing up and wishing and losing, of giving up and chasing after and swallowing what you have to swallow in order to do what’s right, I remember what it felt like to fail and find redemption the first time, and I submit myself to having to do it all again. I remember that no one who ever loved me can possibly be lost to me. I remember my friend Ethan, who was in that musical with me in high school, and who ended his life years later despite having been immersed in all these good and beautiful lessons which could not save him. But maybe they can save something in you. Listen to “No One Is Alone” and hear what’s true about you—because God loves you, because someone else loves and sees you, too, I am confident. Because you exist. And then give the gift of knowing people are not alone to someone else. By how you see them, regard them, judge them. This is the greatest gift and legacy any artist can leave us, I believe: to have taught us to see better and love more freely. This, above all else, is what we have to strive for. Equal parts children's fiction writer, musical theatre expert, and emo pop-punk music aficionado, Janie Townsend can always be found among good stories. Along with her unmistakable voice, she contributes a haunting yet playful narrative tone to The Orchardist's music in the form of meticulous vocal arrangements.

I believe the highest praise one could receive of their art is, “it made me want to make my own.” You hear a song and it inspires you to pick up your guitar again. You see a painting and you dig out all your brushes and wipe off a dusty canvas. For me, as I finished chapter three of Andrew Peterson’s The God of the Garden, I closed the book with a lump in my throat and began to write the story of my own favorite tree. The Zacchaeus Tree was aptly named, because it was the tree where every summer at VBS, we would find Zacchaeus all robed up and ready to tell his story once again. This tree was full of low branches running horizontal to the ground, made even lower because the church parking lot had been graded right up to this cluster of trees. It meant the trees all sat in a ditch, so you could have a friend standing on the parking lot, eye level, while your feet dangled from one of the lower branches. Its branches were big and broad, and it was easy, even for little kids, to walk around from limb to limb, the brave ones going higher, the timid ones still feeling brave on the branches below. So much of our time on Wednesday nights was spent congregating at the Zacchaeus Tree. We’d wait for our parents to pick us up, or we’d bring our dinner to the tree between confirmation and youth choir. As an adult, now I can see how it served the same community-affirming function as the coffee pot for the grown ups. My dad was the pastor of this very fast-growing suburban Lutheran church in Minnesota. And it was one night at dinner, when I was in 7th grade, that Dad described the plans for the third sanctuary that was to be built. He was describing the new layout for the church offices, a much bigger narthex (our fancy word for lobby) and a sanctuary to seat a thousand. It was a very exciting time. Every service was overflowing, and Dad was leading five services every Sunday morning, one every Saturday night. But at some point it became clear to me that the Zacchaeus Tree was right where everyone was pointing when talking about the new sanctuary. I brought it up in a panic with my dad: “Dad, it can’t go there!” And I cried. What is sweet about my memory of this horrible reality is that my Dad was fully understanding and very sorry himself. His hands were tied, though. There was a building committee and a hired architect. The train was in motion. I must have been persistent enough because at some point my dad said to me, “Well, you are welcome to come to our next building committee meeting and let your concern be known there. That’s probably the best thing you could do.” The next scene I remember is my brother, home from college, driving me to church at 7:00 for the building committee meeting. Dad had put my name on the agenda. My brother, a debate champion in high school, was coaching me all the while, “This is good, Becca. More people should be doing this sort of thing.” I remember feeling shaky. My heart was pounding and I felt sick. But I walked through the narthex, the smaller one, and with bravery that inspires me to this day, opened the door where the meeting was held and stood just inside. Before me was the building committee of twelve members all sitting in a U-shape, familiar faces from church, parents of my good friends. I felt faint. But I remember Mary Casey smiling at me, and Cris Ireland, my favorite church secretary, was nodding at me as if to say, “I know why you’re here and you’ll do fine.” I think I looked at those two because they were the moms in the group. Then my dad announced, “Becca is on the agenda tonight because she has a concern about our current building plans.” And I began my case. I imagine my voice must have trembled all the while. (I feel shaky even now.) I told of how this tree meant a lot for the community of kids at our church. How even in that room everyone knew it by name. And that I thought they should consider moving the plans so the tree could stay. My dad smiled affirmingly at me. I remember that. I didn’t feel patronized. He was glad I was there and I now suspect, as we share the same sentimental and tender heart, he was relieved that someone was standing up for that tree. I stood there and everyone agreed that the Zacchaeus Tree was definitely a great part of our church’s history, that it had always been a special tree. And then the chairs of the committee rolled out the blueprints and invited me over as they figured out exactly where the tree stood with the new plans. A little X was drawn right where the new curb was to go, leading to the new entrance. I felt sudden relief and exclaimed, “You could just build around it! It could just be a part of the entry!” I imagined a little green island with the tree at the center. It felt perfect. But they explained that already, the tree stood down three or four feet from the current parking lot and that with the grading to be done, it would likely be in a five-foot hole with low branches shooting out in all directions, blocking the entry and the loading zone. They noted that its exact location was where the handicap ramp would be, blocking the sidewalk, the drop-off zone, and the front doors themselves. Then it was just sort of over. The adults in the room knew there really was nothing to be done. There was more on the agenda that night. I was commended for coming in and thanked for voicing my concern, and as I closed the door behind me, my dad resumed the meeting. I got in the car with my brother and told him the play-by-play, crying all the way home. He assured me that it was still the right thing to do. Even if it didn’t change anything, it was still the right thing to do. It was months later that my dad told me, “They took down the Zacchaeus Tree today.” There was nothing else to say. As I think about the location of this tree now, I can understand how impractical it would have been to build a curb all around a lone tree down in a five foot pit. If the tree could even survive all the earth movers, it certainly would be a hazardous entry. We would have had to put up a sign that said “Watch your step so you don’t fall down that hole.” And in truth, the tree was not stunning. In fact, I have no idea what kind of tree the Zacchaeus Tree even was, but if we’re totally honest, it was scrappy. So a very reasonable part of me can rationalize the sad outcome. But the storyteller in me still feels the swell of love for its branches and grieves the most amazing missed opportunity. Because can you imagine this entryway?! With a huge hole that you’d have to walk around, a scrappy tree in the center? There would be kids in every branch and you’d have to explain to each new visitor, “Well you see, this tree is the Zacchaeus Tree, a beloved tree, so we decided to save it.  And you know what Jesus said to Zacchaeus? ‘I have come to seek and save the lost.’ Have you felt lost? Because you’re not anymore. The Way, the Truth and the Life is calling us to gather once again just inside these doors.”

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers talks with Christie Purifoy, author of Garden Maker: Growing a Life of Beauty and Wonder with Flowers. Christie is a writer and gardener committed to growing flowers and growing community and cultivating beauty. She’s also the host of the Black Barn Garden Club, an online community for aspiring gardeners. Click here to listen to Season 4, Episode 8 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to our Head of Development, Sarah Katherine Woodhull, at sarahkatherine@rabbitroom.com if you are interested in becoming a sponsor of our Podcast Network. Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

I was on tour with some folks for most of December. One of the last shows was in Greenville, NC, and I remember seeing the pouring rain from the green room window. The mountains pressed against the stormy skyline, the cedars were swaying precariously against the hills, the clouds were a charcoal gray—it was beautiful (Cedar of Lebanon). But while I was playing ping-pong in a youth group gym, I found myself thinking about this place I had called “home” for the last nineteen years. I knew that in a few days I would walk through those doors after a long run of shows and there my mother would be, excited and joyful, just as curious and kind as when I’d left. The room would be bright and beautiful and full of life, just like the woman who made it so. The tour ended three days before Christmas and I had no gift for her—just a melody that I sort-of liked and a few scribbled lyrics I jotted down in a Taco Bell drive-thru. So I shut myself in my room and I told myself I wouldn’t leave until I had written something I liked. I had no idea this appreciation for my mother’s hospitality would be the theme of the whole record I was about to make. The verse was simple (with a few nerdy internal rhymes): Greenville brought the grey skies and it rained like it was springtime. The world, it bore a beauty on its back. I love the Carolinas, the Blue Ridge, and the pines but Tennessee is all I’ll ever have. And then the chorus: Somewhere in the suburbs there’s a little gravel drive,  And a home with the heart of a mother just waiting there inside. She waits, she waits for us. Home is a funny thing; sometimes I think we have to leave it for a while before we can really appreciate how wonderful it is. I was the stereotypical teen that was itching to graduate so I could go and live “real life”—whatever that even means (Real Love). As if this real life the Lord has so graciously given is not enough to make me want to stay. To sit. To love where I am and the people around me. The older I get, the more I think that maybe it’s a braver thing to know the name of your neighbor than to climb El Capitan (Map). The second verse talks about homesickness. Or, as Doug McKelvey puts it, “a deeper longing for what will one day be.” I think we can admit that we are creatures of hope; people who yearn for something more, something real, something lasting. We’re all the same in the end if the Old Testament has taught us anything (Just Like Them). Each day we worked till midnight; I can picture the home on the hillside I can see her open door and open arms. Yearning is a holy thing, it’s the imprint of eternity, The sense that there is somewhere we belong. And then the second chorus: Somewhere in the suburbs, she’s beckoning us home. I can’t help but love her, I’m a child she calls her own. She waits, she waits for us. There are about fifteen psalms that Hebrew pilgrims traditionally sang on their way to Jerusalem. They’re from the period of the Babylonian Captivity (586), written by captives longing for their home, for future peace and prosperity after severe oppression. They’re called Songs of Ascent because the road to get there was an uphill climb. I’ve never been to Jerusalem, but I imagine that the trek to get there is tiring. That's what this record is about—how to be pilgrims heading toward a better place, but also seeing that the kingdom is here, too, if we look close enough. Skye Peterson We’re not the only ones who are in the “in between,” as Eugene Peterson describes it. We’re between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. But as I look ahead to that future reality, I forget that there’s beauty here beside me now. I can look to my left and know that the resurrection is real by seeing daffodils rise again after the winter (Resurrection in You). I can get lost in the wonder of this place called “now” and breathe deep the air that tells me that despite the sin and brokenness here, God loves the world that he made (Wonder of it All). We get little pictures of the Kingdom right here in the suburbs. That’s what this record is about—how to be lost in the wonder of this place called “here.” It’s about learning to love where we are, to see the truth of God in the kindness of friends, the beauty of spring, the turning of a page. It’s about how to be pilgrims heading toward a better place, but also seeing that the kingdom is here, too, if we look close enough. This record is about how to love home. I heard about the pilgrims when they journeyed to Jerusalem, They sang about that city far away. Deep inside this soul of mine, I ache to see those city lights And feel that holy rest beyond the gates.Somewhere there’s a Kingdom with a door that’s open wide And a Father who’s been waiting for his child to come inside. And the kingdom’s come in the suburbs, In the home with the heart of a mother She lives out the love of the Father who waits for us. He waits, he waits for us. Click here to visit Skye’s Kickstarter page and be part of making this album.

We’re so excited to introduce you to the newest show on the Rabbit Room Podcast Network. The Artists & Podcast, hosted by Kyra Hinton and Jamin Still, is a series of conversations about the visual arts in the context of everyday, ordinary life. In this introductory episode, Kyra and Jamin introduce us to the podcast, share about their own journeys as visual artists, and clue us into the kinds of conversations they’ll be hosting in the coming months. Click here to listen to The Artists & Podcast on Omny, here to listen on Apple Podcasts, and here to listen on Spotify. Transcripts are now available for The Artists & Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to our Head of Development, Sarah Katherine Woodhull, at sarahkatherine@rabbitroom.com if you are interested in becoming a sponsor of our Podcast Network. Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

I n the season of Lent, we devote special attention to the ache of incompletion, suffering, and trial. Lent begins with the dust of mortality on Ash Wednesday and ends with the broken bread of the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday before leading into the great hope of Easter. This Ash Wednesday, we invite you to join us in praying this liturgy as we begin our Lenten journey. An Exhortation Making Space to Speak of Dying Children of the Living God, Let us now speak of dying, and let us speak without fear, for we have already died with Christ, and our lives are not our own. Our dying is part of the story that God is telling to us, and part of the story that God is telling through us. It is not a dark and hopeless word we must take pains to skirt or mention only in hushed whispers lest our conversations grow awkward and uncomfortable. Rather, death is a present and unavoidable reality, and one through which we—the people of God—must learn to openly walk with one another. Yes, it is cause for lament. Death is a horrible and inevitable sorrow. It is grief. It is numb shock and raw pain and long seasons of weeping and ache. And we will experience it as such. But it is more than all of that. For it is also a baptism, a prelude to a celebration. Our true belief that Christ died and was raised again promises this great hope: That there will be a newness of life, a magnificent resurrection that follows death and swallows it entirely. Death will not have the final word, so we need not fear to speak of it. Death is not a period that ends a sentence. It is but a comma, a brief pause before the fuller thought unfolds into eternal life. Beloved of Christ, do not hide from this truth: Each of us in time must wrestle death. In our youth we might have run in fear from such lament, but only those who soberly consider their mortal end can then work backward from their certain death, and so begin to build a life invested in eternal things. We should remember death throughout our lives, that we might drive at last well-prepared to follow our Lord into that valley, and through it, further still, to our resurrection. Death is not the end of life. It is an intersection—a milestone we pass in our eternal pursuit of Christ. Yes, death is an inhuman, hungering thing. But it is also the pompous antagonist in a divine comedy. Even as it seeks to destroy all that is good, death is proved a near-sighted buffoon whose overreaching plans will fail, whose ephemeral kingdom will crumble. For all along, death has been blindly serving the deeper purposes of God within us— giving us the knowledge that all we gather in this short life will soon be scattered, that all we covet will soon be lost to us, that all we accomplish by our ambition will soon be rendered as meaningless as vapor. Death reveals the utter vanity of all our misplaced worship and all our feebly-invested hopes. And once we’ve seen, in light of death, how meaningless all our human strivings have been, then we can finally apprehend what the radical hope of a bodily resurrection means for mortals like us—and how the labors of Christ now reshape and reinterpret every facet of our lives, rebuilding the structures of our hopes till we know that nothing of eternal worth will ever be lost. Yes, we are crucified with our Lord, but all who are baptized into his death are also resurrected into his life, so that we live now in the overlap of the kingdoms of temporal death and eternal life— and when it is our time to die, we die in that overlap as well, and there we will find that our dying has already been subverted, rewritten, folded in, and made a part of our resurrection. Have we not all along been rehearsing Christ’s death and his life in the sacrament of his communion? We have been both remembering and rehearsing our union and reunion with him. O children of God, do you now see? Your pursuit of Christ has always demanded a daily dying to your own self, and to your own dreams. That final, brief sleep of death is but the last laying down of all those lesser things, that you might awake remade, set free, rejoicing in the glorious freedom that will be yours. Yes, hate death! It is an enemy— but an enemy whose end approaches, and whose assault can inflict no lasting wound. Yes, weep and grieve! But more than that, believe! The veil is thinner than we know. And death is thinner still. It cannot hold any whose names are dearly known to God. Rejoice in this! Death is neither a grey void, nor a dungeon cell—but a door. And when Christ bids us pass through at last, we pass from life to Life. Amen. Click here to download this liturgy at EveryMomentHoly.com/liturgies. And click here to view Every Moment Holy, Vol. 2: Death, Grief, and Hope in the Rabbit Room Store.

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers talks with psychiatrist and author Curt Thompson. Curt Thompson is the founder of Being Known, an organization that develops resources for hope and healing at the intersection of neuroscience and Christian spiritual formation. His books include The Soul of Shame and The Soul of Desire. In this episode, Jonathan and Curt discuss the left brain and the right brain, the power of beauty to awaken us to goodness and truth, and Andy Gullahorn. Click here to listen to Season 4, Episode 9 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to our Head of Development, Sarah Katherine Woodhull, at sarahkatherine@rabbitroom.com if you are interested in becoming a sponsor of our Podcast Network. Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.