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The maelstrom of the last few years has proven difficult for singer-songwriter Eric Peters, but the resulting growth has given way to a new set of songs that chronicle those experiences in a meaningful way. Longtime fans know this creative process well as it’s yielded resonant albums like Chrome, Birds of Relocation, and Far Side of the Sea. Via a new Kickstarter campaign, Eric has an EP on the way with his first new studio album in several years. Check out our interview with Eric to hear more about the tragedy of losing a home, the power of community to transform, and what it means to draw creatively from a deeper well. On your new Kickstarter, you mentioned the trials of the last few years and how these songs chronicle the ways they’ve made you a better man. Can you take us further into that story? Eric Peters: The day after the tornado, an army of people — some I knew but many of whom were total strangers — showed up to empty our house of all things salvageable for storage. It seemed like all of Nashville showed up to volunteer in our little hard-hit section of the neighborhood that week. Hundreds, probably thousands, helped clean, cleared debris, chainsawed tree limbs, delivered Moon Pies and drinks, offered condolences and hugs, cried with us, and let us cry on them. They were available in whatever way was needed. I remember being in my backyard Asylum—an office/art space I built—to gather my beloved library of books that had fallen from the shelves and were lying in piles on the floor. A stranger was out there already doing what I set out to do. I joined him, and he asked if this was my house, introduced himself, and said he was sorry this happened. His name was Nicholas, and I’ve only seen him once since that day. I dubbed him Saint Nicholas to his mustached face, and have considered him that ever since. He didn’t know me and he had no agenda. He just wanted to help by being present and available. The entire experience has made me realize that there is absolutely no gospel if we insist on being bad neighbors Eric Peters I don’t remember a lot about the night of the storm or the next day or even that week, but I will never forget the kindness of all the people who came to help those in distress and need, those who were dealing with loss. Being inside the tornado itself as it passed over was certainly an experience I won’t forget, but it was the people who made the deeper, more lasting impression on me. People are not deep down bad, as I’ve been taught for so many years. We are beautiful souls, broken at times, hurting, but capable of such glory. We are damn delights. I know, because I’ve seen it firsthand. What’s the application of that for you? Eric: The entire experience has made me realize that there is absolutely no gospel if we insist on being bad neighbors. By “neighbor,” I don’t mean the sanitized, generalization of the word. I don’t mean the people you feel safe around and with whom you go to church or have Bible study. I mean the very people who literally live next door to you or down the block. I can guarantee they are wildly different than you are with shockingly different beliefs—if any—different attitudes, different lifestyles, and different leanings. If you don’t know your neighbors, if you’ve never taken the risk of introducing yourself to them, or brought them a meal or cookies, then your gospel is empty and void of anything worth paying attention to. It sounds harsh, I know, but I’m so tired of our Christian culture’s ability to wax eloquently about all the things Christ promoted, yet we act like asses when no one is looking or the barista gets our coffee order wrong. Little moments matter. These past few years have made me want to be a kinder man, a better husband, a present dad, an affable neighbor, a mower of lawns, a writer of songs, and a painter of abstract things. Politicians aren’t going to save us from ourselves. Our government, no matter the party in power, will not save us from ourselves. No dollar amount will save us from ourselves. Stop thinking someone needs you to save them. What they need—what I need—is for you to be compassionate and to act like the delight that you are, the one the world deserves to see. How long after the tornado and resulting damage did it take you to pick up songwriting again? Eric: I didn’t write very much after Far Side of the Sea, mostly because I felt it was a worthless, pointless endeavor. But I did start writing again after the storm. “The Bread” was the first song I’d finished in over four years. I started pecking away at some song starts I’d begun months, even years, earlier, and found myself incorporating all of the stuff I’d been experiencing into these new songs. I wanted to make a pop/rock album that lacked pop/rock lyrics—sort of a musical marriage between happy-go-lucky and soberness. Photo Credits: Allison Gower You’ve certainly written a lot in the past about brokenness. Does this feel like a new well from which to draw when you’re saying, “Wait, we’re actually beautiful souls!”? Eric: Yes. I’ve been drinking from a well too shallow. There’s plenty of brokenness to still go around. I am judgmental, critical, cynical, negative, disappointed, self-absorbed, pious, arrogant, addicted to shadow brides, complacent, and self-serving. I may be all of these things, but I’m not just those things. I’m not rotten to the core, not incapable of making good choices, not sad enough, or too far gone to accept what is and find gratitude. I’m “Yes, and…” We’re all “Yes, and… Assuming that the creation story, as so many of us have been taught, is authoritative and the only true story, I find it increasingly difficult to reconcile that God would father a story of a world inherently bleak and hopelessly lost, would set a lost child down in that world, and tell them, “Good luck!” That doesn’t sound merciful at all. It sounds demented, cruel, and manipulative. No loving father sees their child as ugly. No loving parent gives up on their child without a fight. A loving parent sees only the inherent beauty of the living creature they’ve made. I’ve struggled these last few years to reconcile what I was taught in the past versus what I now know as a dad—as someone who has both lost and received significant things Have the songs come as a result of these discoveries or are the songs actually helping you discover these ideas? Eric: I started writing a few of these songs years ago, but for whatever reason, I would hit a wall or be blocked. I’d shelve one, come back to it, peck away at a lyric, chorus, or melody, get stuck in a new rut, and reshelve it all over again. This went on ad nauseum. I apparently needed that time to go through what I went through during those years, to gain a clearer perspective of myself, humanity, and the heart, and figure out what I really wanted to say and how best to say it. I’ve gained confidence in my “voice,” and, as author-theologian Frederick Buechner wrote, “[I’m] speaking what I feel, not what I ought to say.” I think I’ve always done that as a songwriter, but these songs seem to reflect a deeper experience and understanding of what makes me me, and you you. Does this provide a level of importance in sharing these songs that maybe hasn’t been as true in the past? Eric: No, I don’t necessarily think these songs are any more or less important. Art is the act of getting to the heart of the matter. I’ve always attempted to do that in my own way over the years. I’ve never tried to spoon-feed people, and I have always, always tried my best to say what I have to say, how I need to say it, so it sounds like Eric Peters, not like I’m trying to be somebody else. Basically, I think I’ve become more comfortable as Eric Peters the person and artist, and that I’ve given myself the freedom to have opinions and believe things that differ drastically from things I believed at 20, 25, 30, or even 40 years old. Make sure to check out the Kickstarter for Eric’s new campaign here. #EricPeters

I was driving my son to school when we almost ran over a beaver in the middle of what should have been a beaver-less place. It was a field filled with cows and one lone dump truck rusting into the ground. After narrowly dodging becoming beaver murderers, my son and I got to thinking about beaver-ish things. He had a lot of questions. “Why was the beaver crossing the road?” he asked (in a literal sense, not as an alternative to a chicken-based joke). “Did it live in that field?” I had no idea. What I did know was that beavers normally don’t live in fields with cows. I said as much, and then asked, “What if that beaver wasn’t actually a beaver but a shape-shifting dragon that thought being a beaver would trick us into believing it belonged there so it could eat one of the cows?” He talked about this for the next 15 minutes. He talked about it as we got out of the car, walked through the door, and tossed his backpack on the floor. At some point, we decided that the beaver was, in fact, a dragon, but it wasn’t going after a cow; it really wanted to drive the old dump truck sitting in the middle of the field. I’ve thought about this conversation a lot since we had it. In fact, I’ve thought a lot about the random beaver/dragon-style conversations I’ve had with my kids. It’s always been a goal of mine to foster their imaginations, curiosities, and general wonder of the world, but, for reasons I have never been able to pin down, these what if conversations always feel as though they are doing more than just letting us be ridiculous together. I’ve gotten a lot of advice about what ifs in my adult life, mostly to stay away from them and their distant cousin “if only” for the sake of my own joy. “What if I’d done X differently? What if I did X instead of Y?” To reframe the imagination as sacred connects me to the Creator in every creative moment. Dave Connis What ifs can sometimes turn into dangerous explorations of unfulfilled longings, deep sorrows, or regrets. These sorts of what ifs? can take us over. Swallow us whole. When they do, we get lost in the crypts and dungeons of Whatifland. Down there, in the dark, we forget about the world outside. We forget about Whatisland. Mystery and curiosity turn us into prisoners of everything unrealized if we are not careful. When that happens, imagination becomes something that we use against ourselves, and to protect our hearts, we put it in a cage. Alternatively, if we spend too much time in the cities of Whatisland then mystery becomes inefficient, curiosity turns transactional, and imagination is reduced to simply being a means to an end. I know my imagination isn’t an animal that has to be caged, but it also isn’t merely a means to an end. If I believe that I’m redeemed, I also must believe that my own imagination finds its source in the Creator—that it’s not just redeemed but can also help bring about redemption itself. The Creator’s imagination is clear in every God-breathed work, in the breath given to humanity in the beginning. We have been made in the image of a Creator. To create, you must imagine. To create the zebra, God imagined its stripes. To create the colors of a sunrise, God first imagined the canvas of the sky. He imagined the laughter of a child and the love humans can share. He also imagined beavers that might appear in beaver-less places. I’m a writer of children’s literature—most recently, The Stories of God (and Kiki). The bulk of my career has been built on exploring and writing about ridiculous what ifs. But the shape-shifting dragon conversation made me realize how often I force my own imagination to live in the dark, isolated places of Whatifland and Whatisland. It made me realize that, if imagination isn’t a part of my theology, I can lose it, or its purpose, entirely. I’m asked a lot by parents how to help inspire and foster their kids’ imagination and creativity. I’ve given advice like, “Slow down, truly look at the world and engage it with the wonder your child has for it.” While that’s true, I think the holy work of shape-shifting dragons has expanded my answer. To take the imaginations of my kids seriously, I have to slow down, yes, but I also need to take my own imagination seriously, or maybe less seriously if I want to dive down the rabbit hole of beavers turning into dragons, and reform it as a holy practice, a muscle that needs to be exercised. I need to challenge the notion that mundane actions—things like coming up with stories of beaver/dragons—are inconsequential. To reframe the imagination as sacred connects me to the Creator in every creative moment—not just when I pray, read the Bible, and perform other “official” spiritual practices. And as with all things redeemed, we have to practice using it outside of the darkness of our broken extremes. I need to work on my own theology of imagination and let the Spirit breathe redemption into my imagination. I need to remember to step out of the crypts and dungeons and into the wilds where magical beasts roar and intrepid explorers dare. Where mercy reigns. Where griffins fly. Where all are forgiven. Where dragons shape-shift. Where imagination is redeemed. And all of it points me to Jesus.

When I was eleven, I enrolled in a five-week kids program at the University of Louisville. One class featured a new role-playing game that was sweeping America: Dungeons and Dragons. I was both fascinated and overwhelmed by the scope of gameplay, but just as I was finally getting my bearings, word spread that D&D was demonic and led to violence. So, my light blue plastic dice disappeared for the rest of my childhood, and I returned to Parcheesi. I’m not one to splash haphazardly in supernatural puddles. I don’t like horror movies or spooky books, and I think unseen forces are more active than we sometimes realize. However, depending on how it is approached, D&D can highlight the struggles and victories of goodness instead of spreading enchantment with darkness. Like many other creative activities, gameplay can benefit or harm the soul. In the early 1980’s we were given simple guidelines about what was good and what was evil. Sometimes I miss that simplicity–feeling certain that I shared a team with humanity’s noble heroes and that we knew exactly who all the bad guys were. But reflecting now on that season of my life, I have to admit that the grave sins of certain political parties and denominations were often excused as rare outliers while stories of a few misguided role-playing teenagers flamed through evangelicalism like wildfire. In those days, we defended and censured others largely on the basis of team loyalty. The world was divided clearly into “we” and “they,” and our leaders constantly let us know how to draw those lines. I realized that avoiding evil involved more than obeying a handy-dandy team list of do-nots. Rebecca Reynolds But as the next decade or two unfolded, I watched families who lambasted Narnia because it contained a witch help facilitate injustice in religious communities. I watched stately religious leaders make excuses for men who used women and children badly. I saw people who advocated for love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control rally behind politicians who defied every single one of those traits—cheering for their venomous lies and lauding them as God’s help in times of need. I saw the demonic churning in real time, and those forces were not limited to the places I had been warned about. They were far more deceptive, far more invasive, and far more embedded in everyday life than I had been taught. I realized that avoiding evil involved more than obeying a handy-dandy team list of “do-nots.” For most of my adult life, I was too busy to revisit D&D; however, a few years ago, one of my older kids began talking about Critical Role, and my youngest started to play with a group online. My son’s character profile on D&D Beyond fascinated me—this new cyber tool made all the complexities we used to manage with paper and books so much easier! The beauty of the game hit me anew. A few folks from the Rabbit Room put together a campaign, and I joined up. Any lingering fears about gameplay taking a dark turn vanished in one session. You know how the Rabbit folk are—our general vibe is jovial magic. We sally forth in the spirit of Tolkien, Lewis, Lloyd Alexander. Good is good. Evil is evil. A measure of mischief is fun. Context matters, of course. Sex, photography, writing, dance, and mechanical design can be used in evil or good ways. So might this game. Discretion suits the making of sausage-and-egg casseroles as well as communal storymaking. I wouldn’t want to attempt creation of any sort with people enamored with darkness. But with the right people sitting at the right table, wonderful things can happen. My favorite character is Ophibwyn, an Owlin. She’s a bard with the power to inflict maniacal laughter upon her enemies. She can also terrify the wicked and encourage the noble—what more could a writer ever want in life? After about an hour of play, the constant clench of adulthood releases. I’m lost in belly laughs, the thrill of imagined danger, and the rush of cooperative creation. My teammates shock and delight me with their choices. We are reckless, astute, selfless, greedy, each flexing unique strengths and struggling with unique weaknesses. I’m having to relearn a great deal about gameplay, but my friends are patient, and they guide me along. They’ve helped me catch a solid vision for what a campaign can become, and I don’t want to turn back. I’m a bit in awe of the vulnerability a DM’s role requires. Rebecca Reynolds All of this joyful escape is hosted by the generosity of a Dungeon Master. Our beloved Rabbit Room has explored many different art forms, but in this post, I want to suggest that the creative labors of a talented DM deserve to sit among them. The DM orchestrates the campaign from its onset, establishing the general framework for each evening’s play. He (or she) develops a setting, envisions challenges, designs quests—and then as each session passes, he collects information about choices the players make, funneling the past and the present into the next branch of the team’s future adventure. As he guides, he responds minute-by-minute with a light-handed assistance. He remains responsive to the narrative physics of the entire machine, working to build a world, then opening his hands with his creation and letting it go, entrusting his story to others. As the evening progresses, the DM’s preconceived ideas of where a campaign might go must flex and shift as communal innovation occurs. For instance, we have a wild-eyed Harengon (a sort of rabbit creature) in our group. He’s absolutely nuts, good but chaotic. As long as that wild hare is around, anything might happen. Yet the DM remains unfazed, chuckling as we try to corral this crazy creature so he doesn’t get us all killed. In many ways, the DM is just as vulnerable as the players. In fact, I’m a bit in awe of the vulnerability a DM’s role requires. When it comes to artistic creation, I’m sort of a control freak. I don’t like working in groups. I want to pull all the levers and push all the buttons in private and on my schedule. Sure, I loved working with Kyra and Bailey on the Hutchmoot Pass the Piece art, but our collaboration didn’t happen instantaneously. We each had boundaries, separate roles completed in separate places. Yet, in the co-creation of a D&D campaign, a DM is always present, watching his original story spin into new dimensions without becoming a dictator over it. He has to stay supple, fluid, flexible, alert to help move the growing story forward. There’s a trust exchange at play. After establishing the loose rules of his universe, he allows players to develop or destroy themselves as well as the realm he has offered them. While there are some famous, public campaigns and well-known Dungeon Masters, I especially love the work DM’s do in small groups of friends. So much of artistic culture focuses on building a personal platform, getting signed with a publisher or a label, and attracting fans. But the grand creative work done by most DM’s is offered to only six or seven people. It will never bring fame or fortune, just escape, joy, adventure, and camaraderie. Playing D&D, I’m reminded of tales of the old days when groups of friends and family would gather around a fire to tell stories. Who knows how many thousands of brilliant grandmotherly raconteurs capable of captivating millions delighted six grandchildren instead? No platform. No publication. Their gifts spread out, tended human souls, and then faded, remaining only now in phrases, “They say your great-grandmother was a brilliant storyteller.” What the old grandfolk created is gone. But the closeness of the room, the sensation of journey, the delicious intimacy of the sound of a human voice offering another world strengthened and inspired. The care of a Dungeon Master falls into a similar category of generosity. He listens. He watches. He gives. He lifts a few hearts for a few hours, and all return home invigorated. He says, “Here you are. Here I am. The night is dark. The days are long. Let’s make something remarkable.”

I discovered the following note in my email inbox yesterday at 3:08 a.m. (Don’t ask me why I was up that late — the internet is a vortex.) The email subject line was: READ THIS TO AVOID BEING EATEN BY SHARKS. It was from one, Father Samuel Persla. It said: Dear Sir, This is not a scam. My name is Fr. Samuel Persla. I am an online scammer turned Franciscan priest who was sucked into the internet against my will. I write to you because your life is in danger. I must acknowledge that you are receiving this email involuntarily. But unlike most scammers — and spammers — I am not after your money, although I do want your trust. If you grant me this, there is a possibility that it will save your life. It is true that I once was an ordinary scammer. I tricked countless old ladies into giving me their bank account information, I confess — but those days are long past. I am reformed and repentant. When I converted, I made two resolutions: (1) that it should be my ambition to declare the Gospel of God to all my fellow scammers, and (2) that I should warn those online about the dangers lurking behind their electronic devices. I studied English grammar, got ordained by the Catholic Church, and immediately set out on my mission to evangelize online scammers. “How did you do this?” you ask. I scammed the scammers. I filled their inboxes with Scripture. I invited them to join the church. I even took it one step further: I showed up at their front doors with cookies. Now, as you might imagine, a few of my fellow scammers accepted the gospel gladly and were baptized at once. But there were others who became angry with me, for they were profiting off this immoral way of life. Foremost of these was one who calls himself Demetrius (watch out for him, he’s very sly). This former coworker conspired against me. Alas! But it was my own sin that turned out to be my downfall! Demetrius sent me an email that said: “Thought you enjoy read this article I found: THIS archaeological discovery PROOVES that Jesus Rose from the Dead.” I couldn’t resist! As soon as I clicked on the link, I was sucked into the internet! I didn’t just fall down a long and dangerous rabbit-hole of links and webpages like what you are probably accustomed to, but swallowed up — mind, body, soul, spirit, ALL OF ME! When I regained consciousness, I realized that I was trapped inside my computer. You can imagine the devastation this discovery caused me. I, who sought to warn the masses about the inherent dangers of the internet, was himself trapped inside of it! The only way I would ever be able to reach those I wanted to deliver from this evil was through the very same medium that brought me such grief! Oh, paradoxes of paradox! I thought I was ruined. But God is so gracious. At my lowest point he comforted me by reminding me about the nature of the cross. For there, as it is written, “God made him who had no sin to become sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God.” I, like Jonah, was trapped inside the belly of this beast — but not in vain! God desired it so that I would preach repentance here and bring salvation to many. It’s a fascinating phenomenon that both God and scammers are after the same thing: your attention. In fact, it’s not just the scammers; these days the whole world is fighting for it. It seems that people are beginning to reckon with the fact that attention is a powerful force — more powerful, even, than the internet. For where our attention goes, our spending habits, relationships, even our very souls follow — just look where it brought me! God sent me here to warn people about the grave dangers of getting sucked into this whirlpool. Of course, there’s nothing inherently evil about it. But when it serves as a distraction and prevents us from tending to things that are most important it puts us in grave danger. Be free because I am not free. All this to say, you need to get off your phone. The neighbors above you thought it would be a good idea to make their bathroom into an aquarium. They put a giant shark in it and now the floor is about to break. I know, because they are live-streaming the whole thing. Fr. Samuel He was right. As soon as I read the end of his email, I took off my headphones and heard the wall crack. I dove into the other room just as a massive torrent of water broke through my ceiling. Don’t ask me where they got the shark.

This past weekend my friend Heidi Johnston and I led a session at the Rabbit Room’s Hutchmoot UK in Oxford, England. Our topic was delight and the writer. The things you delight in are a clue to what you ought to be writing, we suggested, a clue to what you have to offer in your creative work. The world needs your delight more than it needs you skill or talent or cleverness—even more than it needs your “message.” But in the discussion time at the end of the session, a man named James asked what’s a writer to do if he is in a season of life when he feels he has no access to delight, only grief. I thought that was an excellent question. Also, I felt ill-prepared to give an answer. As it turned out, James and I sat other across from one another at supper that evening. Doug McKelvey was at our table too, so we posed James’s question to him: When a writer is in a season of grief, with no access to delight, how does he keep writing? I wish I could give you a verbatim account of Doug’s answer, which was beautiful. I can’t, but here are a few highlights: In a season of desolation, Doug said, it’s important to remember that you are given the present hour, the present minute to steward. You may be able to do only a very little. But maybe you can do that little, a minute at a time, an hour at a time? It may feel like you are trudging through waist-deep snow. But maybe you can keep trudging, just a short step at a time? When the winter ends and the thaw comes, hopefully you can look back at the little path you forged in the hardest season. But even if you can’t forge ahead, that time isn’t wasted. Even grief bears good fruit. And the winter always ends. [You can read more from Jonathan Rogers every Tuesday by subscribing to The Habit Weekly at TheHabit.co.]

We spent the first evening after our return from Hutchmoot UK trying to revive our garden. In the busyness of life, with daughters going in one direction and Glenn and I going another, we forgot to arrange for someone to take care of our plants. The hot, dry weather had done its work and the results were obvious the second we looked out the kitchen window. The apple tree was brown, the flowers on the hydrangeas had lost their colour, the leaves on the cherry blossom were limp, the hanging basket was a tangled mass of ivy, and the sunflower we had nurtured as part of a youth group competition was slumped over in abject despair. We spent a few hours feeding, soaking and watering and went to bed frustrated and without a great deal of optimism. By the following afternoon the faded brown and yellow was already giving way to vibrant pinks and greens and our prize sunflower was quietly regaining its confidence. There was work still to do but I was glad of the reminder that life and beauty don’t give up as easily as I feared. As a writer, the last couple of years have been less than productive and I headed to Oxford this year with limited enthusiasm and a considerable dose of insecurity. We opened with Anne Porter’s poem “Music”, unapologetically stolen from Andrew Peterson’s welcome in Nashville several years ago. It talks about the power of music to open within us a homesickness for a half-forgotten country, drawing us ultimately to the one who “will always wait for us” and “wanders where we wander”. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that, for me, the rest of Hutchmoot was a progressive soaking in that sweet homesickness, gradually reviving things that had quietly wilted and begun to lose their colour. Hutchmoot was a progressive soaking in that sweet homesickness, gradually reviving things that had quietly wilted and begun to lose their colour. Heidi Johnston To be honest, it probably should have been a disaster. The last time we gathered in person was the summer before the pandemic and since then all our planning has been on zoom. The tension between preserving the beauty of Hutchmoot in Nashville and yet allowing this UK gathering to have its own accent can feel like walking a tightrope. Illness and travel problems meant we lost several volunteers at short notice. Then there was the moment on day one when unavoidable circumstances stripped us of our chef, only hours before the first meal. And yet. Almost as soon as I walked into St. Andrew’s Church the familiar sense of hopeful anticipation settled around me like a favourite blanket I had mislaid for a while. Logistically I couldn’t be at as many sessions as I had hoped but it didn’t matter, in fact it served as a reminder that Hutchmoot is often about the people. Despite all that came their way, Mark Meynell’s incessant optimism and Jo Tinker’s unflappable, calm determination were something to behold. The way the team from Nashville integrated immediately with everyone from the UK felt like an incarnation of the heart of the Rabbit Room. As I stood outside the church and watched people arrive, many of whom had heroically come on their own, I heard so many stories that resonated with my own. On the first night I spent half an hour with a new friend getting progressively more excited about the beauty of the book of Deuteronomy. At Hutchmoot you never know where the conversation is going to take you next. In the wake of the last couple of years it felt so good to repeatedly have those “what, you too?” moments. Sometimes the Rabbit Room shakes me out of my comfort zone and forces me to happily embrace something I may not naturally have been drawn to. That was true on Friday night. My background and personality type mean that, despite his obvious talent, Joshua Luke Smith’s music is not a genre I expected to gravitate towards. However, his authenticity and faith filled passion won me over. If there was anyone who wasn’t moved, I didn’t meet them. In a contrast that felt right at home at Hutchmoot, his gritty, honest storytelling was followed by British tenor, Joshua Ellicott, singing “When I survey the Wondrous Cross” in tones so rich and deep that they seemed to fill every crevice in the ornate roof and then seep back into the room like warm oil, soothing the very wounds Joshua Luke Smith had been gently prodding. This year, more than I ever remember, there has been an undercurrent of grief and loss running through the lives of so many people I love. It’s not surprising that these themes also kept emerging at Hutchmoot. From the honesty of Michael Tinker and others at In the Round, to the showcase on Friday morning, to Andrew Roycroft’s wonderful session on poetry, there was no attempt to pretend that our hope is not punctuated with struggle and loss. I appreciated that. Beauty is not really beauty if it is not also true. He gives us space and creativity to turn our own struggles into portals of light and hope for others. Heidi Johnston The God who “wanders where we wander” knows the reality of pain and, in his boundless grace, he gives us space and creativity to turn our own struggles into portals of light and hope for others. I witnessed that so many times over the course of the weekend. Through all of it – the music, the fellowship, the art, the food, the laughter, and the friendship – there was “shining at the heart of it” a palpable sense of the presence of the God who is both the giver of all these good gifts and the one who sustains us when we find ourselves walking in the shadows. It would be easy to expect a weekend at Hutchmoot to make you unsettled as you head back home. For me, that has never been the case. It is no secret that the people who are drawn to the work of the Rabbit Room are often those whose faith is both expressed and enriched by their interest in creativity and the arts, and that this can sometimes create a certain feeling of disconnectedness in our church communities. I have been part of my home church for over two decades. These are people who have walked with us as we raised our girls, sat with us in grief and laughed with us at our kitchen table. I love them deeply and yet, like so many I have spoken to at Hutchmoot, there is a part of me that I can’t express in my own church as fully as I would like. The beauty of the Rabbit Room is that it provides a place where that deep longing is shared and fed, freeing me to embrace my home community without resentment, even finding new ways to creatively enhance the life of a church that doesn’t always realise how much it needs the arts. In Andrew Peterson’s keynote on Saturday night, he said something that struck me deeply; “The waves of the new creation sometimes lap up on the shores of this one. When that happens, tell about it.” I commented later that Hutchmoot UK felt like a tsunami. In the wake of all this goodness, the challenge now is to use the unique voice God has given me, in the community where he has placed me, trusting that it will water the dry ground and awaken in someone else a longing for our true “half-forgotten country.”

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a conference room with a group of my coworkers, and for some reason, my stomach was killing me. Sharp pain was shooting up and down my abdomen and all I could do was sit still and try to hide the pain with a smile. As I looked around at my co-workers, I noticed that no one could tell—either they were all too wrapped up in their own thoughts and actions to notice, or else I am a much better actress than I thought I was. The situation was a strange and small thing, but I felt so alone, and in the middle of the meeting, my thoughts floated back to a movie I loved in high school—Star Trek: Into Darkness. My mom is a Trekkie, which means I grew up on Next Generation episodes, and while I enjoyed them, none of the Star Trek storylines ever made much of an impression on me—that is until I started watching the new movies. I remember sitting stunned on the couch, staring at the TV, garlic bread halfway to my mouth, as I watched a scene from Into Darkness. In it, Spock, one of the main characters, puts his hand on the side of his friend’s neck and is able to feel exactly what his friend is feeling—his pain, his fear, his grief—as though it was his own. That scene has followed me ever since. Every time I am in pain, either physical or psychological, I ache for someone to feel what I feel, for my pain to be known and understood exactly as I’m experiencing it—just as Spock experienced his friend’s suffering. A few weeks ago, I went to see Rabbit Room Theatre’s production of The Hiding Place. There are so many true and beautiful elements in the play, but there are two moments in particular that struck me. The first is a moment of total despair where Corrie ten Boom, the main character of the story, is in the infirmary of a Nazi death camp with her ailing sister, Betsie. Corrie stands and stares out the window into the hell they are living through and asks: “Where is God in all of this?” Over the past few years, I have heard a similar question in the voices of some of my friends. As many of the people in my life struggle and grieve, one after another they have asked: “Where is God in all of this?” When a friend sits down across from me, looks me in the eye, and asks why God is hurting them, why God is silent, or how God could exist when their lives are falling apart, all of my carefully-crafted answers fall away. As I sat watching The Hiding Place, I wanted an answer. I wanted Betsie to tell Corrie, once and for all, where God was, what he was doing, and why. Corrie’s sister answers her question by insisting, “He is here, Corrie. He is.” I sat back in my chair, a little disappointed. True and right as this assertion was, it wasn’t enough for me. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I couldn’t think of anything Betsie could have said in response that would make me feel less alone in my world, or that would convey to my suffering friends that they were loved and understood, despite all evidence to the contrary. The deepest truth I carried with me from The Hiding Place is that the one who turns the planets feels everything that I feel, and never once turns away. Carly Marlys As the play went on, I thought back to a few scenes before and realized that the answer I was looking for had already been revealed. Earlier in the second act, Betsie ten Boom had offered communion to the women in her prison barracks, using smuggled bread from a Red Cross package. The words she spoke over her fellow prisoners played again in my mind: “This is his body, broken for us. Even now he is here. He suffers in each of us. He bleeds as we bleed. He dies as we die and yet he is neither spent nor consumed.” That line spoke the truth that I wanted to hear when Corrie asked about the absence of God in her burning world. It is what I always want to hear when I feel alone in my pain and what I want others to hear when they feel alone in theirs. As I sat there, I recalled a story I heard from a pastor in my childhood church. He told the congregation about finding out that his daughter had been born with irreversible developmental damage. She would never live a normal life. She might never even learn to fully communicate. He told us how he sat in the hospital waiting room and wept all of his heartbreak into his hands. During that time, the only thing that actually got through to him was when one of his friends told him this: Jesus feels your pain, and he is crying with you. Pain and grief are isolating. I can sit in a room full of people who love me and still feel alone because no one can feel what I’m feeling. I could tell them, but it’s not enough. What I long for is that scene from Star Trek: someone to sit with me, hold me, and feel every modicum of physical pain, every anxiety, every moment of spiritual emptiness that I feel. This is what I want for my friends who call me to try and convey their feeling of abandonment, their pain that is too heavy for them to carry and too deep for me to know. I want them to know that someone is with them. I want them to understand that their God has the kind of radical compassion that doesn’t just understand their pain but feels it and bears it with them. That Star Trek scene is real. Betsie ten Boom is right. We do not have a Savior who is unable or unwilling to experience our suffering. The deepest truth I carried with me from The Hiding Place is that the one who turns the planets feels everything that I feel, and never once turns away. That is our comfort and the answer to the questions that have no easy answers yet. The great compassion of our God reminds us that we are not alone. In the days since seeing The Hiding Place, a line from a John Mark McMillan song has been turning over in my head: “I’ve got no answers for heartbreaks or cancers but the savior who suffers them with me.” He bleeds as we bleed. He dies as we die. We are not ever alone in our pain. Praise be to God.

The year was 2012, and I was at my third Hutchmoot, my first as photographer. In the three years the event had existed, a tradition had emerged called the “Lagniappe” — a mysterious, secret event that followed the keynote but was on the quirkier side (think Shakespearean Star Wars). That year at the Church of the Redeemer, the schedule gave a little clue: 8:30 pm – Reveille. The sanctuary had cleared quickly after Phil Vischer’s engaging keynote because everyone wanted to get him to sign their Veggie Tales VHS tapes. I took photos of the crowded vestibule, but my curiosity drew me back in through the double doors, where I beheld Redeemer’s handsome terracotta-colored chancel becoming festooned with the whitewashed plywood walls of a homemade spaceship named the HTV Reveille. I felt I was intruding on privileged preparations, and quickly stepped back out into the lobby’s chaos of animated tomatoes and cucumbers. Soon, with spaceship-building mission accomplished, the sanctuary doors were flung open, the curious Mooters took their pews, and Andrew Osenga emerged in the three-walled spaceship wearing a complete astronaut flight suit and an electric guitar. In that same spaceship (temporarily constructed behind the Baja Burrito in Nashville) Osenga had just recorded a concept album called Leonard the Lonely Astronaut. If you’re not familiar with the, um, concept, the concept album became popular in rock and prog music in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The songs are all tied together by a backstory that affects lyrics, characters, melodies, and even the artwork. The albums were often gimmicky but usually fun. The idea has become a bit lost in the modern era that favors singles over albums. In Leonard, we are completely immersed in the world of Leonard Belle, volunteer space explorer. There’s a detailed backstory, but you don’t really need it. I did not know the story when Astronaut Andrew fretted the guitar and sang, “Today would be the perfect day to tell you goodbye, but I’ve already said it.” It all clicked into place in one line. This was not going to be an album about lasers and space pirates (that’s a B-side, actually). It was going to be an album about being lonely. That same opening song, “Brushstroke,” closes with one of the finest lyrics I’ve ever heard: I keep thinking of that painting of the sisters at the piano That brought a tear to your eye Babe, today I was a brushstroke on a canvas Of a perfect blue sky In a single verse, Osenga gets us inside Leonard’s head and his heart. A specific memory reminds us of just how much time a solo astronaut on a long mission must have with his own thoughts. An extended metaphor shows us just how small one might feel in the expanse of space. No exposition is needed. And over the course of 14 songs, we know Leonard well, and we know ourselves even better. The songs are chronological, charting Leonard’s grief, nostalgia, lament, and healing over a span that could be a day or years in Einstein’s relativity. It doesn’t matter. What does is the way this extraordinary album rests on a universal lamentation, mines it for truth, and resonates with the hurting. “Oh, how I loved you. But I never told you. Always thought there was time.” For an interstellar album, Leonard is deeply grounded in the human experience. For an interstellar album, Leonard is deeply grounded in the human experience. Mark Geil Osenga is a versatile songwriter and musician, to the point that he created a series of four EPs spanning four unique musical genres. That versatility is so valuable in this album. Leonard’s angry tantrums lash out with power chords. His gazes through a porthole become ethereal instrumentals. And his smile at a memory is captured in what I believe is Osenga’s finest love song, “Ever and Always.” It’s a ballad about a girl who got a boy to finally lift up his head and look at the stars. It’s just that now he’s among them, and he’s alone. Back in the sanctuary, I was so captivated that I forgot I was supposed to be taking pictures. I got a few, and afterward managed to capture the moment when Andrew got to meet Kim Fisher, who created his space suit. Later that night, I found myself loading audio equipment and spaceship parts into my car and winding through the Tennessee darkness to unload them quietly in a stranger’s detached garage, which was so full of eclectic ephemera it was not unlike another planet. It was a fitting end to an otherworldly evening. I’m part of a couple of dozen Facebook Groups at present—mostly neighborhood and church stuff, the Chinwag, Bracket of Champions, that sort of thing. Only one of them is entirely dedicated to a single album: Leonard the Lonely Astronaut. In the decade since its release, legions of fans have fumbled through explaining it, either trying to describe the whole spaceship thing or telling Leonard’s story as if they know him. Because they do. The lonely astronaut has become a trusted companion for fellow travelers navigating the space of loss and isolation and finding their way to re-entry. The spaceship might be gone (or maybe it’s still in that garage?) but the album remains, a North Star for so many dark nights.

When I started training to become a spiritual director, I was relieved to learn very quickly that our job isn’t about giving directions, fixing problems, or doling out wisdom like some sort of Jesus Yoda. Do you know what spiritual directors do? We ask questions. Lots of them. We listen, we reflect, we follow the connective threads, and we trust that the Holy Spirit is already doing a deep and secret work in a person’s soul. All we need is to bear witness and offer support. Reading Lore Ferguson Wilbert’s new book, A Curious Faith, reminds me of spending a few hours with a good spiritual director. It’s a thoughtful book from a compassionate writer, and in a cultural moment marked by black-and-white polarization in so many areas of life, it’s exactly the kind of book we need. “Try to love the questions themselves.” — Rainer Maria Rilke If the words of another author could sum up A Curious Faith, it would be this one from Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet: “Be patient with all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” In fact, Wilbert uses it to open the book, sharing how these words altered her whole perspective on life. “The Bible is a permission slip for those with questions,” she writes, and in thirty-two brief chapters, she explores the many questions woven throughout Scripture. Questions like God asking Adam and Eve, “Who told you that?” Or Habbakkuk lamenting, “Why do you make me look at injustice?” Or the many questions from Jesus himself: “Do you want to be well?” or “Who do you say I am?” or “Do you love me?” If you read A Curious Faith from cover to cover, you’ll see a chosen Biblical trajectory to Wilbert’s questions addressing subjects from the Garden of Eden to the resurrected Christ. At the same time, each short chapter can be read as a meditation on its own. You can easily savor each question, prayerfully turning it over, examining it against your own life, and exploring it through reflection and journaling. And while she occasionally draws stories from her own life, Wilbert’s writerly gift is how she keeps her attention on the reader and always kindly directs them back to Jesus. Wilbert’s writerly gift is how she keeps her attention on the reader and always kindly directs them back to Jesus. Jen Rose Yokel Maybe you aren’t in a shaky place. Maybe you feel a little bit of resistance to a book full of questions, wondering if this is another “deconstructionist” who is sure to send readers on a slippery slope toward relativism. If that’s in the back of your mind, rest assured that every word is deeply rooted in faithfulness and hard-fought wisdom. Throughout the book, Wilbert reflects on an upbringing that was more about “behavior modification” than spiritual formation, and she recalls a twisting path of doubting, moving, longing, and changing over the years. And looking back, she sees how the questions didn’t drive her from God. On the contrary, “Living the questions led me not to an unstable expanse, as I’d been afraid it would. Instead, it led me to more surety and stability than I’d ever had before.” “Before your face questions die away.” — C. S. Lewis This is another area where this book feels like the work of spiritual direction. Wilbert doesn’t set out to answer all of these questions. She doesn’t offer a lot of self-revealing stories with neat morals, and freely admits when she’s in the middle of uncertainty. One thing Wilbert knows for sure, however, is the source of answers — and over and over, she points her readers right back to the God who holds them. One of Wilbert’s greatest strengths as a writer is that she trusts the reader enough to give them room to listen to the Holy Spirit’s work. She guides readers toward discerning the voice of God. She points back to God’s character, over and over, and highlights not just what Jesus does, but how he does it. She allows the stories in Scripture to enter into conversation with her own life and makes room for us to imagine the inner lives of people like Moses and Peter and Mary Magdalene when she looks at how God answers (or doesn’t answer) their questions. Toward the end of the book, in a beautiful chapter called “The Unasked Questions,” Wilbert acknowledges that a curious faith is a risky one. “Christians want to be resurrection people, but we can’t have resurrection without death first. And for some of us, this book of questions will lead us to a kind of death first. A kind of waiting period during which no one else is sure we’ll come through, including ourselves… [but] Shadows exist because something real exists to cast them. Darkness exists because light exists. And questions exist because answers do too.” Or to borrow a line from Lewis’ Til We Have Faces: “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away.” Whether you are in a place of rock-solid certainty or feel the foundations of your faith crumbling beneath you, this book can be a gentle guide toward a deeper, more beautiful curiosity. Perhaps it can even be one more step toward living your way into the answers you seek.

During this past summer season I had the joy of taking an aimless stroll through St Albans, in Hertfordshire, England. History was everywhere on display. From the remaining Roman walls of Verulamium to the riches of a tightly woven Christian past, it is a town that provides a fair field full of folklore, a storehouse of what has gone before. One particular feature caught my eye, however—a plaque mounted on the gateway of a monastery wall marking the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The surprise of this find chiefly lay in my past life as a medievalist, and the intensive postgraduate work I had undertaken on the theme of how the revolt played out in the literature of its day. Quite unawares, I found myself standing where Wat Tyler and his fellow insurgents had stood centuries before, demanding their rights in a feudal system. That simple chance encounter launched a pilgrimage for me back into the catalogue of texts that dominated my earlier life, and that continue to shape the ways in which I think and see the world. Dominant among the poems and fragments that I have re-explored is Piers Plowman, a remarkable vision poem written by William Langland in the midst of the tumult and disruption of the later medieval period. Piers Plowman was written in a pocket of air in English history between the Plague and the Peasants’ Revolt, between the devastation visited by a deadly pandemic, and the political unrest bubbling beneath the surface of society. Langland, with alliterative flair, poetic prowess, and a light touch interrogation of the Medieval estates, produced a towering piece of literature—deeply imaginative, socially disruptive, inherently honest. Not only is the poem a pleasure to read (in original Middle English or in modern translation), but it continues to carry resonances for our period in Western history, as well as possibilities about how to understand and articulate the cultural and moral impasse that Christianity currently faces. Piers Plowman is a poem of protest, of occasional despair, but also a thoroughgoing affirmation of the primacy of love as a true law for living. Speaking poetry to the power-hungry A key to understanding William Langland’s work is to be constantly conscious of just how subversive his poetic endeavours were in the later Medieval period. Even the medium of English carried connotations of popular appeal and popular piety, a language charged with the emergence of a confident vernacular which gave voice to such social revolutionaries as Wycliffe and the Lollards. Langland adopts and adapts the language as a means of critiquing the overarching structures assumed in medieval society, insisting on saying hard things in creative ways for maximum impact. Langland’s position is not on the side of the powerful or the politically ascendent, but with the poor, the marginalised, and the disenfranchised. Scandalously the richest preaching in the poem comes not from prelates but a plowman, a man of the soil, unsullied by the simony and avarice so typical of those who wanted to hold sway in society. Langland lays bare the hypocrisy and duplicity of a religious elite who have so wedded themselves to wealth and political position that the fundamental love principle of the gospel has been lost. Scandalously the richest preaching in the poem comes not from prelates but a plowman, a man of the soil. Andrew Roycroft Piers Plowman documents the devastation that follows Christianity making itself a parasite of the political estate and insists that charity be the chief expression of the faith in wider society—caring for the poor, ministering at the margins, and challenging a clerical system that could assume its position without embodying its own values. The fact that poetry is the channel through which this challenge comes is fascinating. Langland was clearly an educated man, possibly a priest himself, but the hazy, disorientating, and at times almost postmodern poetic he adopts delivers his challenge in a disarming way. He tells the truth but tells it slant (to borrow from Emily Dickinson via Eugene Peterson), eloquently and imaginatively undermining the Christian status quo while tenderly pleading for love to be the governing principle of religious belief and practice. The possibilities that this opens up for poetry in our contexts are multiple and will be governed by our specific cultural circumstances. Whatever our current challenges, Piers Plowman stands as a model of a message mediated with genuine imagination and breathtaking moral courage. Speaking complexity to a superficial culture Piers Plowman is largely allegorical in format, probing medieval virtues, vices, and values in a way that will be familiar to those who have been brought up on a diet of John Bunyan. What Bunyan lacks, Langland abounds in: namely comedy and complexity. Piers Plowman is laugh-out-loud funny in places, with characterisation not confined to the allegorical labels individuals bear (Greed, Conscience, etc.). Dialogue is charged with misunderstanding, farce, and drama, drawing the reader into a world rich in humour and dimension. Gluttony decides to repent, but gets waylaid in the pub on the way to the church; later slumbering and giving way to a flatulence whose aroma disgusts the array of other characters. Behind the laughs, Langland articulates the big questions a medieval Christian wanted to ask. He critiques the structure of the church, he queries whether people can be saved outside of the sacraments. He wrestles with theological conundrums about why God would create a world that would experience the Fall, how unreached people can be condemned, and how he himself can know spiritual peace of mind and heart. What is striking here is the poet's willingness to visit these borderlands of belief (and doubt), and return without the souvenirs of easy answers. Andrew Roycroft What is striking here is the poet’s willingness to visit these borderlands of belief (and doubt), and return without the souvenirs of easy answers. Over and over again the questions raised by characters are left in the air, another episode opening without the previous one being resolved. This is part of Langland’s great skill, an ability to reflect without immediately pronouncing, a willingness to say the unsayable but to leave the unanswerable unanswered. Such strengths are arguably always the stuff of poetry. A walk in St Albans and a revisitation of my medieval past have reawakened in me the old joy of what vintage texts can say and do. Time and again while reading Piers Plowman I felt deep conviction about how easy it is to let true charity be a low priority, about the importance of poetry in times of public peril, about the danger of privileging over-simplification, and how the enduring message of Christian love outlasts plague, revolt, and the ravages of time. Langland has encouraged me to read again with joy and repentance and has challenged me to pursue the task of writing in that vein also. Some suggestions for reading Piers Plowman As a former medievalist I will always urge people to at least dabble with original Middle English, but realistically reading the poem in translation will be a more accessible experience. A.V.C. Schmidt has produced a wonderful new prose translation of the B-text, unforced but still carrying resonances of how alliterative poetry worked. Readers may also find this episode of the perennially wonderful BBC podcast In Our Time to be a good introductory guide to the riches of Piers Plowman.

RR Note: It feels like every corner of the Rabbit Room is shaped in some way by the meaningful work of Frederick Buechner. As we grieve his bittersweet passing at the age of 96, we wanted to repost an address given by Andrew Peterson to the Buechner Institute from 2016 that pays tribute to his eternal impact. (This was the address I delivered to the Buechner Institute at King College last year. Frederick Buechner’s 90th birthday was just over a month ago, so I post it here and invite you all to respond with your own reminiscences of the ways his work has affected you. For me, it was the comfort of discovering that I wasn’t alone in the most private and painful corners of my life in Christ. Happy birthday, Fred.) All I know to do is to tell you a story. Once upon a time I lived in a world of dirt roads and diamondbacks. Alligators haunted the lakes, four wheelers and hunters haunted the woods, and as Flannery O’Connor famously said, Christ haunted the South. He was everywhere. He was in the Bible verse printed on the front page of the church bulletin, he was in the oddly hyphenated words in the hymnbook, he showed up on the church marquee, he was prayed to before the football games and before meals, he was on bumper stickers next to confederate flags, his name lifted jubilantly from the tongues of worshipers during four hour Sunday meetings on one side of the tracks, and on the other the name of Jesus launched like a rocket from my father’s mouth as he paced behind the podium where the white folks sat dutifully and muttered an occasional “Amen.” Picture, if you will, a skinny kid with a mullet, slouching on the back pew and struggling to stay awake. Picture him scribbling dragons in the margins of the bulletin or writing notes to his brother, constantly aware of his preacher father’s roving eye. Picture the kid’s Levi’s, his Converse high tops, his Michael Keaton-era Batman shirt. That kid is interested in three things: girls, rock and roll, and girls. He is looking for love in all the wrong places. He stays up way too late listening to Pink Floyd records or driving around the dirt roads of the Wildlife Management Area or reading Stephen King novels with a flashlight. That kid, I can tell you, is rotten with longing to be anywhere other than where he is, anyone other than who he is, and he’s willing to do almost anything to feel anything at all. He reads creepy stories not just because he likes to feel afraid, but because he’s up for feeling anything as long as it’s something other than the dull boredom of his adolescence. He listens to an array of music because sometimes music seems to clean the mud from the windshield of his heart, and so he learns to play piano and guitar in an attempt not just to impress the girls and friends and parents, to prove to them and to himself that he exists and is capable of more than being a knuckleheaded fool, but he learns to play because music makes him feel something. He’s discontent with merely listening to songs. No, alone in his bedroom at night he begins to suspect that the chords and rhythms and lyrics and melodies are a secret code, the key to the combination lock that keeps the door shut on what’s really real and holy and true. So he learns the songs, breaks the code, flings open the door, and—as crazy as it sounds—sometimes it works. Sometimes he actually feels something like a flash of warm light on his face and in his heart and for a few minutes he’s a little less lost. That same kid, of course, has to go to church every single Sunday, or else. He goes to Sunday School, followed by “big church,” followed by a potluck dinner, followed by youth meeting, followed by the evening service. That kid remembers being baptized when he was ten, confessed before his little congregation that he believed a homeless Jewish rabbi from Nazareth was the same God who made the galaxies, though of course that baptism happened before the kid discovered Bon Jovi and Lynyrd Skynyrd. But it still happened. It’s an undeniable, unalterable part of the story. And in the story—my story—I’m stuck in a church parsonage in the Deep South, besieged by that holy haunt named Jesus, and no matter how hard I try to ignore him by sniffing like a hound from novels to guitar riffs to girlfriends, I cannot escape the fact that this Jesus cannot be escaped. Frederick Buechner encourages us to listen to our lives, to pay attention to them as the fathomless mysteries that they are, if I remember the quote right. (Side note: I didn’t have to look that up. If I wanted to I could rattle off from memory four or five sentences our friend Frederick composed, each of which I memorized just like I memorized those Zeppelin songs, hoping that if I internalized the thing it might unlock something in my heart. I’ve lost count of the ways Buechner’s writing—his sentences, even—have done that very thing.) Anyway, Buechner says that if I pay attention to the story I hear myself telling about myself again and again, I might just learn something about my family or the truth or about the way the great love of God has been working itself out in my life. So when I pay attention, what do I notice? What keeps coming up? Upon reflection I realize that in nearly every conversation I show all my cards. I blurt out that I’m a preacher’s kid, and not just that, but a preacher’s kid from the South. I’m doing it right now, in fact. I’m proud of it, in the way someone is proud to have survived a hurricane—a beautiful hurricane. The story of my life is as much a part of me as my fingerprint or my DNA. Your story is yours and no one else’s. No one before you can lay claim to the million-million changes and choices and perspectives and revelations you own. For example, I was speaking to my counselor about a particularly dark season in my childhood, and I made a comment about how neither my brother nor my sisters seem to have this same baggage about those dark years. He said that if he spoke to my siblings about our common childhoods every one of us would describe a completely different family. Again, like your DNA, your story is yours, and no other’s. But your story is an even greater mystery because it’s still being shaped, just as my understanding of it is constantly being shaped. It’s a portrait that’s always in flux—not altering, necessarily, but being drawn into continually sharper focus. With each step forward into time, each sentence deeper into the book, we’re able to see the past from a different angle, however slight. And so, as Buechner has shown us, it doesn’t hurt to keep looking. Actually, that’s not true. Sometimes it does hurt to keep looking. But maybe that’s just so something can heal. I wrote a whole album about it, so please visit the merch table after the show. Right now I want to tell you what I’m learning today. As in, what have I learned by listening to my life today, today as I write this—right now, as I read you what I’ve written? I have three confessions to make. The first is this: I have never seriously doubted that God was real. Not really. I doubted that I would go to heaven. I doubted that I had a brain in my head. I doubted that I’d ever amount to anything, or that I’d graduate high school, or that I’d see the Rocky Mountains, but I never really doubted that someone had made this crazy world, and I always thought of that someone as God. The Bible, many verses of which I had memorized since I was little, was too wonderfully strange, too authoritative and ancient and seemingly alive to be dismissed, and so I never really doubted that it meant something, whatever that thing might be. I offer this next part bashfully. I was a nerdy, starry-eyed romantic and I still am. Late at night when I knew my dad was asleep by the sound of his window-rattling snore, I used to sneak out of the parsonage and into the hollow darkness of the church fellowship hall, then up the creepy back stairs behind the baptistery, past the dark second-story Sunday School classrooms, then out the back fire escape where I could shimmy up a drain pipe, edge across a high window ledge, and jump over to the roof of the building. I’d lay on the north slope of the roof with my Sony Walkman and gaze at the stars. There I talked unabashedly to God while I listened to George Winston solo piano pieces. Understand, this was no pious act—I was a sinner through and through. I didn’t want to obey him, or my parents, or my teachers, but neither did I want to be abandoned by him—or any of them. One night at a youth group event at someone’s house in the country, my girlfriend and I were laying on a trampoline and holding hands while we watched the stars. (I told you I was a starry-eyed romantic.) I was consumed with the same passions every high school kid is consumed with when it comes to girlfriends, completely selfish and unconcerned with what Jesus might want me to do or to be. She went inside for pretzels or to watch the end of The Goonies or whatever, and I stayed behind for a little while. I lay there on the trampoline in the humid Florida night, looking up at the spray of stars just like I did from the church roof. Realizing even then how cliché and silly it was, I said aloud, “God, if you’re really there, will you give me a sign?” I know, right? Well, God is no cynic. He’s untroubled by tropes and clichés—they had to come from somewhere, right?—because right after I prayed that prayer, a dazzling meteor hissed across the dome of stars. The only thing more amazing than the fact of what had happened was how quickly my goosebumps faded and I explained it away as mere coincidence. But, just as Christ haunts the South, moments like that have always haunted me. I’m not ashamed to tell you that, whatever the truth of it is, I sincerely want it to be that the rock that God sent hurtling through the dark of space however many thousands or millions of years ago had my name on it just as surely as God has graven my name on his hand. It certainly makes for a good story. So that’s confession one: I have always suspected that there’s someone behind the curtain of this stage. I was a young man losing arguments, and it was Scripture that was defeating me. Andrew Peterson Now, confession two. Somehow that smart-alecky preacher’s kid made his way at last out of Florida to Nashville with a wife, a handful of songs, and a mountain of audacity. And that’s when the real doubts slithered in. Those doubts, however, weren’t about whether God was real, or even whether Jesus was. I have had too many luminous moments of what C. S. Lewis called Joy. Sehnsucht, to use the German word for “inconsolable longing,” was what Lewis felt, and as he listened to his life he saw those moments as almost painful stabs of joy, and they were breadcrumbs on the road to his faith. I’ve had a number of breadcrumbs myself, as I’m sure you do too, whatever you may believe. These new doubts were about doctrine and orthodoxy and what my parents had taught me about God. You see, I found myself on tour buses with lots of other Christians who believed things that would have curled my mother’s toes. I won’t get into the doctrinal issues here, but it more or less boiled down to the fact that I had grown up thinking that our church was right and your church was wrong and yes you might end up in heaven but you can’t be too careful so why don’t you come to church with me sometime and we’ll get you all straightened out? But now I was a young man losing arguments, and it was Scripture that was defeating me. (As it turns out, every denomination just underlines different verses.) My idea of who God was was shifting in deeply uncomfortable ways. Doubt—real doubt—crept in. I lost sleep. I emailed Bible college professors and asked them how to win arguments. It wasn’t that I was after the truth, you see—I was after victory. I wanted to win, and I didn’t. I was learning how little I really knew, and I was learning it the hard way. One particularly bad night on tour, I crawled into my bunk and cried in the dark. It wasn’t, “Are you there, God?” it was “Who are you, anyway?” Now there was no comet zooming across the sky like E. T.’s spaceship. There was no goosebumpy thrill at the sight of a nice sunset. It was as if I had asked the question “Who are you?” and God said, “I could tell you, but let’s face it. It’ll be easier just to show you.” And then he ruined my life as I knew it. Picture that kid again. Picture him touring around the country, trying to raise a family, trying (and failing) to be a good husband, trying to make a bunch of label executives happy, not to mention trying to make listeners happy, trying to make his parents proud—and all of these things are just another case of the same disease that kid had in high school, the one where he was trying to prove to himself and to everyone else that he existed, only now he was playing with the big guns of marriage and children and career. Something happened which caused a massive, bleeding rift in a close friendship, and that kid was heartbroken and angry and confused. “Who are you?” I had asked. The answer, I decided, was, “I am the Great Destroyer.” That was how it felt. I did my share of weeping in closets, sitting listlessly in church, sometimes quite literally shaking my fist at the heavens as I continued to not doubt God’s existence but to doubt his goodness. Every day I woke up doubting God’s goodness. Every night I lay awake doubting God’s goodness, doubting his intentions for me. So let me finish by telling a quick story about God the Great Destroyer, as I thought of him during this dark season. Part one involves a monk. Part two involves a guy named Frederick Buechner. Part one. In 2002 a friend saw that I was in dire need of help and offered me his weekend slot at the Abbey of Gethsemani. You may remember it as the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where Thomas Merton lived and wrote and is buried. I had never been to an actual monastery before, and I spent my three days fasting and praying, reading my Bible and journaling. I barely left my cell except for vespers. My main goal was to prove to God that I deserved an answer for my suffering. I demanded audience with the king. Again and again I asked him why my heart felt abused, betrayed, angry, bitter, hopeless, lost, numb—again and again the heavens were silent. Finally, on the last morning there, I visited the statues. I wandered through the frozen hills of Kentucky for what felt like miles, following trail signs to the statues, whatever they were. My breath fogged the air. The woods waited in the deep silence of winter. The trail led up a hill to a sculpture of three men huddled together in sleep. They were covered with leaves and it took me a moment to realize that it was Peter, James, and John, asleep in the garden on the night the Lord was taken. “Ah,” I thought. “Of course. This is the Abbey of Gethsemani. If I follow this trail around the bend I’m going to see Jesus praying.” I climbed the hill without expecting much. What I encountered was an icon of the Lord’s suffering like I had never seen before. The artist depicted not a pious, romanticized Jesus, but a Jesus whose soul was deeply troubled to the point of death. His back was arched. He looked like he had staggered and fallen to his knees. His hands covered his upturned face and his elbows were splayed out like wings. The way I remember it is this: the statue looked exactly the way my heart felt. Alone. Confused. Hammered with grief. Face turned towards the heavens not in a posture of doubt but of desperation. The statue was not just a mirror of my suffering—it was a window into God’s. I understood in a way that I never had before the profound comfort of the Incarnation. Jesus, the man of sorrows, hurts with us. I was comforted. I wasn’t healed. The pain wasn’t taken away, nor could I have explained what had happened, but as a wise friend once told me, “His presence is to be esteemed more than his provision.” God is with us, and his name is Jesus. At the time I happened to be reading what I think is C. S. Lewis’s finest work of literature, Till We Have Faces. In it, the main character has suffered greatly and has also demanded an answer from the Gods. Towards the end of the book she finally has her audience with them and lodges her complaint. She rants. She stomps her foot. She rages against those she holds responsible for her suffering. When she’s finished throwing her fit she waits for some reply. But the Gods are silent. In the end she understands that the Gods give no answer because they themselves are the answer. God’s answer to me that day at the Abbey of Gethsemani was Jesus himself—his suffering, his sorrow, and his compassion—literally his “suffering with.” Part two. Not long after this epiphany I read my first book by Frederick Buechner. It was called The Eyes of the Heart. I had never experienced this kind of writing before. He could string a sentence together in a way that was poetic and dizzying and profoundly comforting. Then I read The Sacred Journey. Then it was Son of Laughter, then Telling Secrets, The Hungering Dark, The Magnificent Defeat and so on. I haven’t binged like that before or since, with the possible exception of Breaking Bad. Buechner’s way of writing was attractive to me because he so freely admitted what he didn’t know, even as he beautifully proclaimed the love of Jesus. It was, he assured me, all right to aim those questions at the Lord. I once heard Michael Card say that that in all of Scripture God never tells us, “How dare you speak to me that way.” It’s a conversation he welcomes. Jacob wrestled the Lord. Jeremiah turns his sorrow toward God in lament after lament. David and the psalmists accuse God of abandonment. It is within the afterstorm of that sort of painful bold-faced honesty that we sometimes discover what we really think, who we really are, but were never able to admit to ourselves. Just like gratitude tends to aim itself at God, anger and weeping and doubt all follow suit. In the final analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. Frederick Buechner But in his book The Sacred Sorrow, a wonderful study of lament, Card describes what he calls “the vav imperative.” Vav is a Hebrew word that means “and yet.” Card says that all but one of the laments in scripture have a vav moment, when after all the anger is spewed, all the accusations are launched, all the sorrow is wailed, the writer says, “vav.” “And yet.” And yet, I will praise you. And yet, your love endures forever. And yet. And yet. Oh, God, we say with all the saints, “I don’t believe in you. And yet, I do.” Before Buechner I had no context in which to admit to myself, let alone to anyone else, that this God, this basket in whom I have deposited every last one of my eggs, was a mystery as much as he was a revelation. Because of Buechner’s frank and persistent admission that he isn’t quite sure about this whole Jesus thing 100% of the time—and lest you get defensive on his behalf, why don’t we all just admit here that it’s just as true of us?—I found myself opening up to a new and deeper consolation than that of surety—the consolation of doubt. The consolation that comes when one traveler says to the other, “I’ve been here before, and I still don’t know where I’m going. It’s a mystery, but at least we’re in this thing together.” And wherever two or more are gathered in his name, even if they’re lost and angry and doubtful and confused, Jesus is in their midst. Maybe especially so. So I confess, I still don’t really doubt that there’s some bright and holy life that made us all and makes the lilies burst out of the snow. I confess that I still get lost along the way, and when I do I still wonder if he loves me. My last confession is this: there is no story I would rather be true than the Christian story. I may be a whiskery forty-year-old with a burgeoning gut, but that skinny little Florida kid is still in here, still watching the sky, still arguing with himself about who God really is and what he’s up to, and still seized, as they used to say, by the power of a great affection—the affection of a God who surrounds you from birth with whispers of another world, who flings meteors across the northern hemisphere, whose light ambushes us in songs and stories, who consoles us with the doubts of the saints just as much as their faith, who guides us gently into the frozen Kentucky woods to remind us that he clothed himself in our sorrow, laid down his life, and then shattered the chains of death. That’s the story he’s telling, with his life, with your life, and with mine. I can’t overstate what a profound shift occurred in me because of the convergence of three things: my dark night of the soul, my encounter with the suffering Christ at the monastery, and the writings of Frederick Buechner, who tells us again and again to pay attention to the fathomless mystery of our lives. Pay attention. “In the final analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” (I didn’t have to look that one up, either.) Someone smart once said, “If you want someone to know the truth, tell them. If you want them to love the truth, tell them a story.” Maybe God wants you to love the truth, and so he’s telling a story with your life. You’re sitting in the middle of a scene this very second, in a story God is telling. “Are you there?” we ask. “Who are you, anyway? Do you care about me?” He gives no answer because he himself is the answer. He could explain it all, but maybe it would be better just to show us. “Behold,” he says in Revelation, “I am making everything new.” #semifeature

Art cannot be divorced from context, so it is the year of our Lord 2021 into which Charlie Peacock’s wonderful new album, Skin and Wind, enters and resides with its lovely melodies and poetic wisdom. It’s an important arrival, to be sure, given the artist’s posture and position in the world. The context around Skin and Wind is as important as the work. This album is a mature musical release, a gift brimming with inspired observations gleaned from a life well-lived. That’s good news, since these are juvenile days. Peacock is an elder statesman, one who nurtures yet nudges us along with this 10-song set. This might all sound a bit flowery, but Peacock’s fourteenth studio album is a remarkable achievement for a number of reasons. It’s rare for any artist to build a catalog so broad that it crests the youthful hills of love lost/gained. Most albums wrestle with the opponents we all face in our earlier periods of life—pushing back against inherited boundaries, exploring interests on our own terms, questioning long-held beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. Those albums are needed. Those releases are necessary. We’ve all been there. The problem is that context changes—or at least it should—but the art often does not. We’re intended to move beyond youthful concerns of what is black and white, in or out. We’re supposed to find our identity and settle into it. We’re meant to move from reactive to proactive. If we’re lucky, we find art to accompany us—or at times even lead us—down that path. This album is a mature musical release, a gift brimming with inspired observations gleaned from a life well-lived. Matt Conner It’s a chicken-or-egg conundrum, but suffice it to say, the context for Skin and Wind‘s arrival shows that we’re stuck. Our juvenile culture is filled with juvenile art and pointing fingers to shift blame is a juvenile exercise. Then along comes Skin and Wind with meditations and musings that summon us toward our better selves—both individual and collective. Peacock’s ruminations from farther down the path invite us to consider such things ourselves. The album title itself, Skin and Wind, points us to the sustenance of the life-giving work of moving forward—the Holy Spirit at work in our flesh. “Skin and Wind is a Mind-Bend” opens the album, the thesis given up front: a body animated by the spirit, a fusion of the titular subjects, is beautiful and mysterious, frightening and majestic. There is a wind, an untitled wind A friend to every color of skin A life-giving hurricane A just and holy rain It’s impossible to listen to these songs and not be struck by the rare space from which they’re sung. What other musician introduces himself like Peacock does on “Call It Destiny” when he sings, “Here I am a man of quiet demeanor / No more lust for spinning plates”? Youthful pursuits are behind him. His storied career, one filled with accolades and achievements from Grammy wins to smash songwriting hits, is well established. He’s now concerned with our own movements, as listeners, through those same portals. He’s an artist on the other side, hoping his own reflections and reminders will help keep the head up and heart strong. On tracks like the acoustic “Sing It Blue,” the advice is heartening. After reminding the listener that “it’s all been decided, the history of love,” Peacock then beckons us all: Lift your voices like sirens Like echoes in the black night of the universe Do your part to be a heart That beats in time with the truth And I will too, sing it blue In other places, the guidance offered is harder to stomach, musically difficult truths spoken from a well of experience. On “Waiting is the Plan,” Peacock’s familiar analogies are deeply felt: “Boat adrift on the water / Wind at the stern, broken sail / Nowhere to go, leave or follow / Stay the course of nowhere now.” The adage that nobody prays for patience is true, yet avoidance is foolish. It takes an enlightened artist to remind us to lean into the unkown. Later on in “The Captain,” Peacock admits “I’ve got the least amount of time that I’ve ever had” and vulnerably describes the tension of being “the captain” of a failing body—the honest side of skin and wind. I’ve got the least amount of time that I’ve ever had My heart is full, my mind is quick My body wants to lay it down I’m a riddle, I’m a puzzle, I’m a quandary all around I’m the captain of a ship that’s going down To be clear, Skin and Wind is not overly serious or downtrodden. Its arrangements range from jazz to pop and back again (with some wonderful Paul Simon-esque touchdowns thrown in periodicaly). Peacock celebrates love and life on several tracks such as the golden “Even When You’re Not” and “Never Be Another One,” while “24 Hour Parade” nods to Sly Stone and salutes the beauty of humanity (“We’re all drinkin’ the same wine / Need the same touch, same love”). Yet it’s also this latter track that reveals the album’s rudder. After listening to Skin and Wind, we can only hope to shed our childish skin and labor in the same direction: I seek to live the righteous dream So deep and wide and beautiful All faith, this hope Love first, let’s go Click here to listen to Skin and Wind on Spotify and here to listen on Apple Music. And click here to learn more about Charlie Peacock and Skin and Wind at Charlie Peacock’s website.

In honor of this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we’d like to share with you an interactive, animated rendering of his “I Have A Dream” speech, created and shared originally by Stanford University. On this webpage, you can listen to the audio of his speech while scrolling to read its text, augmented by helpful images. We recommend reading and listening on a computer rather than a phone, to do the animations full justice. Click here to read and listen to the “I Have A Dream” speech.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with speaker, singer, educator, and activist Ruth Naomi Floyd. Jonathan Rogers and Ruth Naomi Floyd discuss the intimate relationship between truth and beauty, the liberating power of art, and the immense legacy of the African American spiritual. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 2 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

As we approach the release of Every Moment Holy, Vol. II, we thought it would be helpful to give you a peek into the extensive territory covered by its liturgies. The book is broken up into three main sections—liturgies “For Seasons of Dying,” “For Seasons of Grieving,” and “Liturgies of the Moment”—and ends with the benediction “A Liturgy of Praise to Christ Who Conquered Death.” Click through for the full list. Order here Liturgies for Seasons of Dying For When the News is Bad For Hours of Uncertainty For the Feeling of Infirmities Before a Medical Treatment For the Morning of a Medical Procedure For Dying Well For a Time of Widespread Suffering For Those Who Tend a Loved One in Decline Interceding for One Slowly Losing Function For Those Facing the Slow Loss of Memory For Long-Term Care Givers For Caregivers in Need of Rest For the Living of Last Things Praise for This Day of Life Releasing Ambitions & Embracing Christ For Preparing the Heart to Return to God What Is His Seeking Amendment & Reconciliation Stir Courage in a Child Facing Death For a Child Contemplating Heaven For Those Who Will Gather to Grieve For Me For the Dying and Their Friends For Those Who Tend the Sick or Dying A Lesson We May Learn from Death Giving Voice to the Costly Confession For Moments When Dying Feels Unfair For those Enduring Lasting Pain For One Who Lingers in a Long Dying For the Speaking of Meaningful Things One Might Record for Their Own Funeral For Letting Go of the Hope of Recovery For the Weighing of Last-Stage Medical Options 12 Meditations to Anchor the Heart in Eternal Hopes To Begin a Beside Vigil Before Ending Life Support For the Final Hours Momentary Liturgies Intercession Against the Kingdom of Death Liturgies for Seasons of Grieving Lamenting the Passing of a Public Figure For the Wake of a National Tragedy For Grieving a Death Due to Natural Disaster For the Loss of a Close Sibling For the Loss of a Loving Parent For the Loss of a Spouse For Grieving a Death Due to Violence For Those Who Have Suffered a Stillbirth or Miscarriage For One Who Suffers Shame or Guilt after a Miscarriage For the Loss of a Child Grieving the Loss of One Whose Relationship to Their Creator Was Unknown Before Mourning with Those Who Mourn For the Morning of a Funeral I For the Morning of a Funeral II Lament for a Loss Forgiving Unintended Wounds For One Responsible for an Accidental Death For Those Who Feel Abandoned By One Who Chose Suicide For Grieving Well Amidst the Confusion of a Suicide For One Who Suffers Grief & Guilt Over a Past Abortion For Caregivers after the Loss of a Loved One For the Scattering of Ashes For Missing Someone To Welcome Another Into My Grief For a Friend of One Who Grieves Upon Waking from a Disturbing Dream of One Lost Upon Waking from a Comforting Dream of One Lost For the Litany of Regrets For When Someone Thinks You Should Be Over It By Now For Those Who Share a Common Loss To Begin a Family Gathering After Loss For Removing One’s Wedding Ring For Sorting Through A Loved One’s Things For Returning to Daily Life after Loss For a Loss Experienced Anew Daily For the Hardship of Holidays For the Anniversary of a Loss For Remembering the Life of One We Loved For Embracing Both Joy & Sorrow Liturgies of the Journey: I. A Liturgy for Those Shocked By Loss II. A Liturgy for the Pain of Loss III. A Liturgy for Seasons of Frustration & Anger IV. A Liturgy for When the Long Sadness has Settled In V. A Liturgy for the First Glimpse of New Hope VI. A Liturgy for Beginning to Rebuild VII. A Liturgy of Thanksgiving at the Return of Joy Liturgies of the Moment Upon Feeling a Stab of Grief For the Grieving Who Have Lost Direction For Loving Well in Times of Sorrow For the Navigation of Shared Grief Upon Feeling the Urge to Lash Out at Another Upon Feeling Frustration at Others For the Cultivation of Compassion For Anchoring the Heart Upon Feeling a Surge of Sadness For Trusting in Christ’s Abiding Presence For Extending Kindness to One Who Grieves For Charity in Sorrow Upon Learning of a Friend’s Miscarriage For Centering the Heart in the Faithfulness of God For Those Who See No Quick End to Their Grief For Times of Turbulent Emotion For Calm in Times of Storm Upon Learning of an Indigent Death For Navigating Difficult Moments For Difficult Days For a Troubling Hour For the Shaping of My Heart For Comfort in Sadness For Hope Amidst Sorrows I For Hope Amidst Sorrows II For When There are No Words For Caregivers When Hope Seems Far Off For When it Feels Like the World is Falling Apart In the Wake of Tragedy Benediction A Liturgy of Praise to Christ Who Conquered Death

On January 29th we are partnering with The Trinity Forum to host artist and author Mako Fujimura for a conversation around his brand new book, Art + Faith: A Theology of Making. Mako believes that in the act of making we are able to know and experience the depth of God’s being and grace. Mako says, “I now consider what I do in the studio to be theological work as much as aesthetic work. I experience God, my Maker, in the studio. I am immersed in the art of creating, and I have come to understand this dimension of life as the most profound way of grasping human experience and the nature of our existence in the world. I call it the ‘Theology of Making.'” We hope you will join us as we explore the theological work of creating. Click here to sign up for this online event. Those who register for this Online Conversation will be invited to participate in post-event discussion groups to continue the conversation! The discussion groups will be moderated by Trinity Forum representatives and aim to allow participants to more deeply engage with the ideas in the Online Conversation with other viewers. Once registered, be on the lookout for an email from The Trinity Forum with the sign-up for a break-out group. About Makoto Fujimura Makoto Fujimura is a leading contemporary artist whose process-driven, refractive “slow art” has been described by David Brooks of The New York Times as “a small rebellion against the quickening of time.” He is an arts advocate, writer, and speaker who is recognized worldwide as a cultural influencer. A Presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts from 2003-2009, Fujimura served as an international advocate for the arts, speaking with decision makers and advising governmental policies on the arts. His books, Refractions (NavPress) and Culture Care (IVPress), reflect many of his ideas on arts advocacy written during that time. His books have won numerous awards including the Aldersgate Prize for Silence and Beauty (IVPress). Fujimura founded the International Arts Movement in 1992, now IAMCultureCare, which oversees Fujimura Institute.

When I was 21, I signed a Nashville publishing deal. As a shy teenager I had discovered songwriting as a form of prayer, therapy, and self-expression. Now, given the opportunity to turn my introspective hobby into a career writing material for other recording artists, I figured I’d better make my songs less intensely personal. I began writing lyrics on more generic topics, hoping any vocalist could relate to them. I soon got a call from my publisher. ​“Why,” she asked, ​“are you suddenly writing terrible songs?” That was the day I learned, as a general rule, the more personal something is, the more power it possesses. Any contribution we wish to make holds much greater potential if it’s an authentic expression of who we are. “Authenticity” has become, rightly, a buzzword. We crave it in culture, relationships, churches, and lives. Something is authentic when whatever claims it makes for itself are consistent with its own interior reality. Songs are authentic when they express something their writer actually feels. Mexican food is authentic when the ingredients and recipes used to make it really do come from Mexico. People are authentic when their hidden motivations match the things they actually say and do. What if in becoming authentically good, we actually become ourselves? Carolyn Arends It’s the inner condition of a person that determines whether his or her authenticity is a good thing. The man who leaves his family to be true to himself is being authentic, but not good. Conversely, most of us know someone who is genuinely himself—unmasked and transparent—in ways that are very good indeed. When a person’s inner and outer realities are both healthy and aligned, she becomes a profoundly powerful presence. I’ve noticed a trend regarding authenticity in some of our circles. We’ve rightly rejected an emphasis on an outer appearance of holiness if it doesn’t match the real state of a person’s heart. Instead, we honestly acknowledge our brokenness. A lot. It’s good—it’s essential—to get real about the truth of our condition. But what would happen if we focused less on downgrading our exterior emphasis on holiness, and more on upgrading the interior possibility of it? It scared me to type that last sentence. God forbid I should ever wield the self-wounding sword of legalism. I’m not arguing we harangue ourselves into moral rectitude. I’m just asking what would happen if we let ourselves imagine it is possible to grow—slowly, gently, and with God’s help—into people who are both authentically ourselves and authentically good. To put it the other way around, what if in becoming authentically good, we actually become ourselves? What if we discover that, in the words of C. S. Lewis, ​“The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become”? I’ve been in dozens of prayer meetings where we’ve used John the Baptist’s cry: ​He must increase, but I must decrease! (John 3:30, KJV). Every time I’ve uttered that prayer, I’ve imagined my own personality receding into a generic state of Christlikeness. But it has started to dawn on me that John only became more completely his confrontational, unshaven, locust-eating self in Jesus’ presence. John actually became Johnier and Johnier—but now all of him was pointing to Jesus. He was authentically holy, but in an authentically John the Baptist sort of way. And this Jesus John was pointing to? He is fully divine, yes. He shows us what the Father looks like. But He is also authentically human. He shows us what it looks like when a human being is flourishing and whole—and He shows us that, with His help, such a thing is possible. The first single from my new album is called “Becoming Human.” Taking Pinocchio and King Lear as its subjects, the lyric is as odd as I am, and nothing like those generic songs I offered my publisher long ago. The song argues the case I hope the album makes—the fact that we are “only human” is not a cause for resignation, but a high and holy calling… and an invitation to become authentically good. Click here to listen to “Becoming Human” on Spotify and here to listen on Apple Music. Click here to buy the full album, Recognition, in the Rabbit Room Store. Parts of this article were adapted from an earlier piece entitled “Authentically Holy,” first published in Faith Today.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a talk given by author and theologian Russell Moore at 2020’s Hutchmoot—the Rabbit Room’s annual conference. The talk was titled “Why We Need Fiction For Moral Formation,” and in it, Moore makes the case (and I’m paraphrasing since it’s been three months since I heard the talk) that so many of us are Biblically illiterate and desperately need a better understanding of storytelling to direct our lives. Moore doesn’t mean that we can’t literally read the words of scripture, rather that we haven’t been sufficiently taught how to see those words as part of a grand picture, a storyline that stretches from the creation of Eden in Genesis 1 to Eden’s ultimate restoration in Revelation 22. We prefer cherry-picked abstractions over overarching plot lines. We treat the Bible like that classic acronym: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. As I’ve reflected on it over the past months, I’ve realized we suffer not just from Biblical illiteracy, but illiteracy (as Moore defines it) across the world of art, story, and music—illiteracy that keeps us focused on abstractions and surface-level observations rather than what’s at the heart of a given work. These thoughts came to the fore of my mind again last week as I observed a Facebook thread beginning with the question: “Is there any Christian music that has a country feel? My daughter loves country, but I don’t love the lyrics or worldview so much.” Let’s park here for just a moment. And so as to not call out this specific poster, let me just say: the assumptions, feelings, and desires of this particular poster are shared with so many within the Church, and especially with parents wanting to guard their children’s hearts. Any critique I offer of this specific question is not to call out a specific person. This question simply serves as a perfect example of what I’ve observed over and over again. With that said, there are a few things at play in this question—some helpful and good, some that are actually quite harmful to our spiritual life and theology. First, I absolutely affirm the desire to provide good, meaningful art for our children. We should always be interested and involved in what our children are interested and involved in, not in a helicopter parent way, but in an encouraging and conversational way. When presented with a song that makes us uncomfortable, we must ask ourselves why. Chris Thiessen What strikes me about this request for country-tinged Christian music, however, are the generalizations. Notice, “Country” has a singular “worldview” that imbues its lyrics, while “Christian music” also has a singular “worldview” that is supposed to be better and safer. As I scroll through the suggestions people offer—Rhett Walker Band, Johnny Cash, Carman, Needtobreathe, Randy Travis—I can tell you with certainty that a plethora of worldviews, theologies, and attitudes are at play within their lyrics. This, like most issues, is not a dualistic issue. And sometimes a song that mentions Jesus or has a guise of wise spirituality but contains poor theology can be far more detrimental to our souls than the exploitation of beers, cigarettes, and women that permeate the vapidest bro-country. Additionally, some topics and themes that may seem vapid, sinful, un-Christ-like—or insert your objectional adjective of choice—require a deeper understanding of story and music to interpret correctly. This is where Dr. Moore’s warning against illiteracy comes into play. “Carrie Underwood has a song about a woman and her husband’s lover who collude to run him over with their two cars,” this same poster later asserts, sharing her concerns about what’s wrong with country music. The song referenced, 2012’s “Two Black Cadillacs,” is indeed a macabre story about marital unfaithfulness, violence, and revenge. However, context should always be a requirement when interpreting music and story. In this case, we must look into the long history of murder ballads within folk and country music to see what’s really at play in Underwood’s revenge tale. The murder ballad is a lyrical folk tradition that stretches back to the 19th century American South (and even further in the British Isles). Often, these songs relayed the events of real murders as reported in the newspapers, and often, these murders were carried out toward women. As C. Kirk Hutson writes in his essay, “Whackety Whack, Dont Talk Back”: Sometimes folksongs portrayed such men in a sympathetic light. Similar to the mass media of the late twentieth century, some folksongs turned them into tragic heroes—brave but misguided characters—not brutal villains. On the scaffold, for example, they typically accepted their fate “like a man.” Often they gave heart-wrenching confessions in which they blamed whiskey or the victims themselves for their downfall. By allowing southern males to shift responsibility for their abusive behavior, the culture trivialized femicide, because the murders were slighted or glossed over. —C. Kirk Hutson, “Whackety Whack, Don’t Talk Back” Traditional songs “Down in the Willow Garden,” “Omie Wise,” “Pretty Polly,” and countless others pervaded Southern culture for over a century, and have led to more recent murder ballads. Jimi Hendrix popularized the rock standard “Hey Joe” in 1966, singing, “I’m going down to shoot my old lady / You know, I caught her messing around with another man.” In 1994, Johnny Cash repopularized the murder story of Delia Green with his rendition of “Delia’s Gone”: First time I shot her I shot her in the side Hard to watch her suffer But with the second shot she died Delia’s gone, one more round Delia’s gone However, in the last half-century, some women in country music have pushed back against the rampant abuse, violence, and exploitation they endure in the lyrics of country music. Wanda Jackson, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and others trailblazed the way in the 1960s. And more recently, we’ve seen a surge of women in country music who’ve flipped the murder ballad script as an act of defiance toward the genre’s violent history. The Chicks took out an abusive husband with a sly smile on their 1999 hit “Goodbye Earl”; Miranda Lambert did the same in response to a toxic relationship on 2008’s “Gunpowder & Lead”; and on her new record, evermore, Taylor Swift (joined by rock group HAIM) exacts justice on a man who cheated on and murdered his wife with “no body, no crime.” It's important to recognize that presenting a topic or theme is not the same as condoning that topic or theme. Chris Thiessen It’s in this mode that we must interpret Underwood’s “Two Black Cadillacs.” Sure, violence is violence. But it’s important to recognize that presenting a topic or theme is not the same as condoning that topic or theme. “Two Black Cadillacs,” like the other songs mentioned above, are less about revenge and more about the long history of violence, mistreatment, and toxicity that have ravaged country music and the southern culture it reflects. It’s also worth noting that the business side of the country music industry has a long history of misconduct toward and exploitation of women, and that narrative can’t be separated from the angst fueling songs like these. These are not themes to shrug off and turn a blind eye toward. (For further reading on that, please read Marissa Moss’s thorough exploration of sexual harassment in country music for Rolling Stone). Context matters. Learning how to interpret art matters. And believe me, I get it. When we’re presented with something that makes us uncomfortable, when we’re presented with darkness or violence or evil, our instinct is often to shudder and move away from that thing and blame the messenger. However, we must confront the darkness. When presented with a song that makes us uncomfortable, we must ask ourselves why. Often (not always), the artist is trying to show us something broken about our world that we are perhaps a bit too comfortable with. An effect is always preceded by a cause. But if we only spend our time critiquing or avoiding the effect, we’ll miss the whole story and never fully embrace truth. We live in a world full of characters, themes, and plot lines. Not abstractions. So the next time you encounter a woman sing about “colluding to murder a man with cars,” listen to her story. Truly hear her. If you do, you’ll probably find it was never about murder to begin with. Click here to watch and/or listen to Dr. Russell Moore’s session “Why We Need Fiction for Moral Formation” referenced in this post. This post originally appeared on Chris Thiessen’s weekly newsletter, Quarter Notes. Click here to learn more and subscribe.

Now available in The Rabbit Room Bookstore is Jamin Still’s latest work, a collection of deeply immersive stories and paintings called Tales of Hibaria: The Awakening. Click through to learn more about this beautiful project. The twelve stories contained in this volume introduce the reader to the world of Hibaria and the Islands. It is a world of magic and mystery, of dragons and sea serpents, a world where the Sky Lords—the Constellations—can take physical form and walk the land. It is a world in which an ancient evil, long imprisoned, threatens to break free. The central characters in these stories are children and young adults who grapple with fear and sorrow, loss and longing, and who are given the opportunity to choose courage and hope. Their individual stories weave together to begin to tell a larger narrative. This full-color volume is as much a book of stories as it is an art book: it is brimming with richly painted illustrations, numerous supplemental sketches, and finely detailed maps. Here is a sampling of page spreads and images included in the book: Want to hear a sample of one of the stories? Click below to play an excerpt from The Snow Beast. Click here to view Tales of Hibaria: The Awakening in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

This week, we are grateful to share a liturgy from Douglas McKelvey’s upcoming Every Moment Holy, Vol. II: “A Liturgy for Embracing Both Joy & Sorrow.” And not only is the text of the liturgy now available—Annie F. Downs has shared a special video reading of the liturgy as well. Do not be distant, O Lord, lest I find this burden of loss too heavy, and shrink from the necessary experience of my grief. Do not be distant, O Lord, lest I become so mired in yesterday’s hurts, that I miss entirely the living gifts this day might hold. Let me neither ignore my pain, pretending all is okay when it isn’t, nor coddle and magnify my pain, so that I dull my capacity to experience all that remains good in this life. For joy that denies sorrow is neither hard-won, nor true, nor eternal. It is not real joy at all. And sorrow that refuses to make space for the return of joy and hope, in the end becomes nothing more than a temple for the worship of my own woundedness. So give me strength, O God, to feel this grief deeply, never to hide my heart from it. And give me also hope enough to remain open to surprising encounters with joy, as one on a woodland path might stumble suddenly into dapplings of golden light. Amidst the pain that lades these days, give me courage, O Lord; courage to live them fully, to love and to allow myself to be loved, to remember, grieve, and honor what was, to live with thanksgiving in what is, and to invest in the hope of what will be. Be at work gilding these long heartbreaks with the advent of new joys, good friendships, true fellowships, unexpected delights. Remind me again and again of your goodness, your presence, your promises. For this is who we are: a people of The Promise—a people shaped in the image of the God whose very being generates all joy in the universe, yet who also weeps and grieves its brokenness. So we, your children, are also at liberty to lament our losses, even as we simultaneously rejoice in the hope of their coming restoration. Let me learn now, O Lord, to do this as naturally as the inhale and exhale of a single breath: To breathe out sorrow, to breathe in joy. To breathe out lament, to breathe in hope. To breathe out pain, to breathe in comfort. To breathe out sorrow, to breathe in joy. In one hand I grasp the burden of my grief, while with the other I reach for the hope of grief’s redemption. And here, between the tension of the two, between what was and what will be, in the very is of now, let my heart be surprised by, shaped by, warmed by, remade by, the same joy that forever wells within and radiates from your heart, O God. Amen. Click here to download the full liturgy at the Every Moment Holy website. Click here to watch Kristyn Getty’s reading of “A Liturgy for Seasons of Uncertainty.”

Friend of the Rabbit Room, beloved poet, and honorary hobbit, Malcolm Guite, has just released a new book of poetry called David’s Crown , composed of 150 poems written in response to all 150 Psalms. We are huge fans of Malcolm and want to give you a few ways to connect with him and his work, including an upcoming webinar and a collection of “Spells in the Library” episodes on his YouTube channel. On February 11th at 1pm CST, Malcolm will be joined by David Taylor, Paula Gooder, and Roger Wagner for a special webinar hosted by Canterbury Press in which they will discuss poetry, the Psalms, and much more. Click here to register for free. Meanwhile, Malcolm will be exploring his new book on his delightfully interactive YouTube channel in the coming days. Click here to subscribe. And of course, we’d love for you to order a copy of his book. Click here to buy in the Rabbit Room Store.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with songwriter and storyteller Matthew Clark. Jonathan Rogers and Matthew Clark discuss the many facets of Matthew’s mission to “make things that make room for people to meet Jesus,” his tour van that he calls “Vandalf the White,” and human creativity as a posture of synthesis rather than analysis. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 3 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

[Editor’s note: This post first appeared in Jonathan’s weekly Habit newsletter. To learn more and sign up, click the link at the end.] I call this letter (and my podcast, and my membership site) The Habit because, to quote Flannery O’Connor, “I’m a full-time believer in writing habits.” To continue quoting Milledgeville’s favorite daughter… You may be able to do without [habits] if you have genius, but most of us have talent, and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. Another word for this kind of habit is liturgy. Liturgy works on the principle that our outward actions shape our inward states. Last week the online edition of The Atlantic ran an interview with a couple of friends of mine that illustrates the incredible power of liturgy/habit. Andy Gullahorn and Gabe Scott have been friends for a long time. Both musicians, they’ve been playing Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb Christmas tour together for as long as there has been a tour, since 2000. But they didn’t do a good job of keeping up with one another the rest of the year, in spite of the fact that they both lived in Nashville, a couple of miles apart. We aren't just brains on a stick. We are embodied creatures, and the things we do with our bodies shape our inward realities. Jonathan Rogers So in 2014 they cooked up a plan: once a week they would give each other a high-five. At a mutual signal (delivered by text), Andy would leave walking from his house, Gabe would leave walking from his house, and they would meet at a park equidistant from the two houses and give each other a high-five. Sometimes they play basketball. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes they just turn around and go home. There are different protocols and procedures for the high-five depending on the situation. Gabe and Andy introduced a clap and a snap into the high-five to distinguish it from other high-fives. Andy keeps a high-five journal, which is one of the most Andy Gullahorn things I’ve ever heard of. They’ve been doing the high-five every week, with very few exceptions, for more than six years. But 2020 threw a major curve ball at the high-five. (Was it a curve ball? A monkey wrench? The correct mixed metaphor is escaping me.) Gabe fell ill with a kind of encephalitis that wreaked havoc on his memory. Huge swaths of his memory were just gone. He forgot, for instance, that he was the owner of the highly successful and much-beloved Ladybird Taco, my new favorite breakfast place. When Gabe was recovering in the hospital, Andy stayed with him one night to give Gabe’s wife a break. Here’s what they told the Atlantic interviewer about that visit. Andy: I asked him if he knew anything about the high five, and he said, “No; what are you talking about?” So I told him the basic story. The next morning he got up to use the restroom. At that point, his short-term memory was really, really bad, so he wouldn’t have remembered the conversation the night before. I said, “Okay, Gabe, this probably isn’t going to make any sense, but on your way back from the bathroom, I’m going to walk toward you. I need you to give me a high five.” He was like, “Okay.” … I started walking toward him, and then right before the high five, he did the clap, and the snap, and I just started crying. I said, “I can’t believe you just did that.” He was like, “Can’t believe I just did what?” It just blew my mind. I didn’t expect him to remember anything about it. Gabe: That’s one of the things I love about the routine of it. Not just the mechanics of it, but the friendship part of it is so burned into my body memory that that’s what came out. Gabe’s body remembered what his brain couldn’t remember. That’s the power of habit, of liturgy. Gabe went on to tell the interviewer, Typically, when I think about routine, it means something that comes automatically. And the high five is routine in that we do it every week; we know it’s coming. But the joy and the reward that comes out of it—that’s not routine. Even after six years of doing this, every time I see my wonderful buddy walking down the side of the road toward me, that’s special. We’re dedicated to each other, and we’re showing each other in a way other than just calling and saying, “Hey, I love you.” We’re actually doing something, and that hasn’t gotten old. Isn’t that great? We aren’t just brains on a stick. We are embodied creatures, and the things we do with our bodies shape our inward realities. You really need to read that whole Atlantic.com article for yourself. It’s fantastic. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll think about your own habits and liturgies of friendship. This piece was originally shared in Jonathan’s weekly Habit Newsletter. If you’d like your own inbox to be graced with such insight—and with staggering frequency, at that—you can sign up for it by clicking here.

The Hutchmoot Podcast features some of our favorite sessions recorded at our annual conference which celebrates art, music, story, and faith in all their many intersections. Today, it is our pleasure to share Dr. Russell Moore’s session “Why We Need Fiction for Moral Formation” from 2020’s Hutchmoot: Homebound, in both video and audio form. You can watch Dr. Moore’s session below, in which he explores the ways that fiction and story are fundamental and indispensable building blocks in our our understanding of the world, ourselves, and God. In addition to Dr. Moore’s session, today’s podcast episode features Andrew Peterson’s welcoming address as well as his performance of “Many Roads” (complete with a pandemic-themed bridge). Click here to listen to this episode of The Hutchmoot Podcast. For further reading, check out Chris Thiessen’s thoughtful application of Dr. Moore’s ideas in his post, “Black Cadillacs and Murder Ballads.”

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Lisa Deam, art historian and author of 3,000 Miles to Jesus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life for Spiritual Seekers. Jonathan Rogers and Lisa Deam discuss the process of writing as a pilgrimage, the human desire to leave signposts for those who come after us, the infamous “long middle” of the writing journey, and the instructive power of inefficiency. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 4 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.