What are you looking for?

Featuring new illustrations and the first-ever Wingfeather comic, Wingfeather Tales is now available, as both a brand new hardcover edition and in audiobook form! Return to the world of the Wingfeather Saga with Andrew Peterson and his all-star author friends. Immerse yourself in a land of bomnubbles and quarreling cousins, sea dragons and book publishers, thieves and Fangs and secret maps. Here within these pages lie six stories of the distant past, lost adventures, forgotten songs, and heartbreaking histories. The Shining Isle is restored, but Aerwiar is vast—and these authors have tales yet to tell: • Explore the inner walls of Yorsha Doon, just West of the Woes of Shreve, on the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, from the eyes of young Safiki in “The Prince of Yorsha Doon” from the creator of Aewiar, Andrew Peterson. • Jennifer Trafton‘s warm and whimsical writing brings to life a publishing nightmare populated by the many beasts of Skree in “The Wooing of Sophelia Stupe.” • Learn the origins of Ollister Pebmrick’s mysterious entry in the Creaturepedia about his encounter with a raggant in “Willow Worlds” by N. D. Wilson. • Travel with young Podo Helmer on an epic hunt for sea dragons in “From the Deeps of the Dragon King” from A. S. Peterson. • Jonathan Rogers presents “The Ballard of Lanric and Rube,” sung by Armulyn the Bard, tale-spinner of the imaginary Shining Isle of Anniera, in On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. • Discover what life was like for Maraly and Gammon in post-war Skree in “Shadowblade and the Florid Sword”—the first-ever Wingfeather comic—by Andrew Peterson. • Douglas McKelvey‘s epic, heartbreakingly hopeful novella “The Places Beyond the Maps” recounts a father’s journey to redemption. You’ll also find delightful illustrations by Justin Gerard, Hein Zaayman, Cory Godbey, John Hendrix, Nicholas Kole, Aedan Peterson, Joe Sutphin, Jay Myers, and Doug TenNapel. Enter a rich, imaginative world that becomes more real, more mysterious, more dangerous, and more beautiful with each story’s telling. Click here to view the hardcover in the Rabbit Room Bookstore. And click here to view the audiobook on Audible.

The final post in a weekly Lenten series exploring themes of human frailty and suffering through music, story, and art. This week’s post features art by Brooke West and Trillia Newbell’s reading of “A Liturgy Before Mourning with Those Who Mourn,” from Doug McKelvey’s Every Moment Holy, Vol. II. An Image: Flower by Brooke West Brooke reflects on the inspiration for this piece: This piece was inspired by Gungor’s song “Beautiful Things.” I was experiencing a particularly lenten season in my life, feeling the dark heaviness of my circumstances. In creating this piece, I was able to grieve things that I couldn’t find words to express and lean into the hope that God makes beautiful things from my dust. “All this pain I wonder if I’ll ever find my way I wonder if my life could really change, at all All this earth Could all that is lost ever be found? Could a garden come out from this ground, at all? You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of the dust You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of us All around, Hope is springing up from this old ground Out of chaos life is being found, in you” —Brooke West A Liturgy Before Mourning with Those Who Mourn Leader: O Christ Acquainted with All Our Griefs, People: prepare our hearts to enter now this space of grieving. O God of All Comfort, Lead us humbly into this place of heartbreak. O Spirit Who Moves in the Midst of Our Sorrows, Fill us with a right compassion. Fill us with a right compassion that we would not cross this threshold armed with easy answers, but would enter instead bearing the balm of a divine tenderness best expressed in honest affirmations and small acts of service. Teach us even in this hour, O Lord, how better to mourn with those who mourn, that their burden might in some way be made more bearable by our sharing in it. O Lord, in this place of holy sorrows make us quick to listen, and slow to speak, reminding us how the only true comfort Job received from his friends came not from their many words but from a willingness to sit with him in a silent sympathy of weeping. So let any spoken comforts we offer be the fruits of a real and costly fellowship with those who grieve. The sharing of such sorrows is indeed a good and holy work, O Lord. For you also, Jesus, willingly entered the wounds of this world and wept with your creatures in their brokenness. And you have promised us that wherever your children gather in your name, you will be present as well. So be present with us now in this wounded space, O Spirit of God. Let our presence be sensed as a token of your presence. Let our concern bear unspoken witness to the redemption your love will one day work, even unto the utter and unimaginably glorious reversal of this loss. Now speak, act, and comfort, O Christ. Shepherd us into the sharing of this sorrow. May our hearts be as your heart here, our voices as your voice, our hands as your hands, our tears as your tears. Amen. Click here to download “A Liturgy Before Mourning with Those Who Mourn.”

If you attended Hutchmoot 2019, you’ll remember that our keynote speaker was Carolyn Arends: a down-to-earth, razor-sharp songwriter whose stories, songs, and insights wove the themes of the conference together. For Carolyn, 2020 gave rise to two new projects: a full-length album called Recognition and a hymns EP called In the Morning. I recently had the opportunity for an in-depth conversation with Carolyn about her childhood love of songwriting, the unfolding of her career, her work as Director of Education at Renovaré, and the wonder of parables. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Drew: I know a lot of our audience is already familiar with your work, but for those of us who aren’t, could you provide the broad brushstrokes of how songwriting and your love of the gospel and spirituality have come together in your life, and what that’s looked like for you throughout your career? Carolyn: Well, I was very shy growing up. And as a shy person, while I was very sensitive, I actually wasn’t very self-reflective. So songwriting allowed me to find a voice not only to share with other people, but also to find a window into myself. And very quickly I became hooked on songwriting. And then, God bless them, I was at this small Baptist church and from about twelve years old and on, the pastor would tell me: “Hey, here’s what I’m preaching about this Sunday—could you write a song for me?” Which was amazing that this little church would tolerate a twelve-year-old’s songs! And that really called something out of me. As a kid, I probably would have told you I wanted to be an author—I never conceived of a career in music, even though I was constantly writing. At university, I started in the sciences, and then about four years in, my boyfriend at the time (now my husband) sat me down and said, “You know, it’s kind of obvious to everyone—except you—that you should do something with your music.” And I was like, “Oh, really? Huh!” Truly didn’t see it coming. I graduated with a degree in psychology, but right after graduating and getting married, I met someone from Nashville at Benson Music who invited me to become a staff songwriter. And I thought at the time, This is perfect, because I can write songs for other artists without having to perform them! I was directing a crisis pregnancy center at the time, so I balanced that and songwriting, driving into Nashville periodically. In that journey, I eventually came across the work of Tom Jackson, a performance coach. About a year after I signed my publishing deal, I went to this music conference where Tom was doing a workshop about stage fright. So I snuck into the back of this workshop and heard him say, “You know, performers think that when people come to see them, they want to be impressed, but that’s not true. When someone attends your show, they’re coming for connection. They’re coming to feel loved. So if you find yourself on a stage somewhere, your actual job is to love people.” And so far, that sounded right to me. I remembered being at a U2 concert, feeling like Bono was singing to me. But then he said—and this is what really got me—”Your job is to love, and the enemy of love is self-consciousness.” I realized that my self-consciousness was keeping me from loving people well. Like, you know that thing when you’re walking down the street and someone else is walking towards you, and you have to decide at what point you’re going to acknowledge them? Because if you do it too soon, then what do you do the rest of the time? Self-consciousness! So after he said that, I went home and I played at this little writer’s night at a club in Vancouver. I was so nervous and self-conscious in the green room, and I just said a little prayer: “Help me not to be self-conscious, and help me to love the people in the audience well tonight.” And I went out on stage, and for the first time ever, I wasn’t worried that I would say something stupid or hit a bad note. I was just fascinated with the people in the room: Why are they here on a rainy Thursday night? And I just had a blast playing songs for them. It’s very rare in life that a switch gets flipped like that so quickly, but I’ve loved playing music for people ever since. And that’s how it turned into a recording career, which became very consuming for me. I did four albums for a label in Nashville, and then I started to have kids and realized I couldn’t maintain the touring that was necessary. So I went independent and found a rhythm where two weeks out of every month, I would rent a van and go play a few shows on weekends and come back home. God was gently, one step at a time, nudging me out into something more open and spacious and saturated with his grace. Carolyn Arends Alongside that, I was finding more and more opportunities for other kinds of writing. That started when my third album came out, and my label asked if I would write a piece of prose to go with it. That album was deeply influenced by both the death of Rich Mullins and the birth of my first child. And it turned out that almost as many people responded to my prose as responded to the album itself, which opened up doors to other kinds of writing as well. So I wrote a book called Living the Questions, Christianity Today asked me to become a columnist, and in that time—still doing music, also writing—God was doing this thing in me where I grew up in this kind of Christianity that, while beautiful, was rather walled in. So God was gently, one step at a time, nudging me out into something more open and spacious and saturated with his grace. So I started to sense an invitation to be a bit of a bridge for providing others with opportunities for that same kind of growth. I have artist friends who are iconoclasts and have this prophetic edge, and they want to burn it all down! That’s not who I am, but there has been this invitation in my life to help people take the next steps in their spiritual journey. So my vocational life has turned out to be this huge, complicated, knotted ball of yarn where I get to be that bridge in multiple ways: through music, writing, teaching at universities, and in the last five years, my work at Renovaré as well. Drew: Right. I’d love to hear about Renovaré and your work there. How did Renovaré come into the picture for you? Your role is Director of Education? Carolyn: Yes! I should probably give some quick backstory on Renovaré. So it was founded by this guy named Richard Foster, who wrote Celebration of Discipline. You know how you find your wells throughout your life—the resources of various sorts that seem to be part of the conversation God is having with you? Well I just had all these books on my bookshelf that had “Renovaré” on the spine, but I didn’t know they were even an organization. Richard Foster had been really helpful to me, as well as Dallas Willard. They have this collection called Devotional Classics, for example, and I remember being on a tour opening for Steven Curtis Chapman, and we were using that book as a band! So the threads of Renovaré go way back, even though I didn’t realize it. About five years ago, I had gone back to school for a Masters in Theology at Regent College. I was on an alumni Facebook page and saw that Renovaré was looking for a Director of Education. I’d been free-lance my whole life, but when I read that posting, I felt like someone hit a tuning fork and put it on my chest, and I just began to buzz! I walked out to my husband and said, “I think I know what I’m supposed to do when I grow up!” Recognition is an album about slowly getting better at recognizing the sound of God clearing his throat in everything going on around you. Carolyn Arends The job said it could be done from anywhere in America, so I sent them an email and said, “You know, Canada is just over the line—would you consider me?” So it turns out that after Richard wrote these books, there were so many church communities asking for help. His first book, Celebration of Discipline, was just saying, “Yeah, we’ve been saved by God’s grace, but there are so many ways we can cooperate with that grace in our lives, and people have been experimenting with just that—spiritual disciplines—for a couple thousand years.” So when he wrote that book, so many church communities asked if he could come help with these disciplines. And then he put this community together, Renovaré, and they’ve been inviting people into a more intentional, interactive, experiential life with God for a little over thirty years now. It’s crazy how God works—this job brings all the threads of my life together: music, my experience in higher education, other forms of writing, and even indie artist skills like making budgets, promoting projects, and so on. Drew: So cool. So about the new album, can we begin with the name, Recognition? I find it very intriguing. I have a couple theories: of course there’s the song “Almost Didn’t Recognize You,” which tips off the title a little bit, but I’m curious about other, subtler ways that you would explain how the title informs the whole record. Carolyn: For sure, that song tips my hand. But underlying the whole thing is an idea I’ve been working on since my first album, actually, I Can Hear You. It’s a sort of thesis—everybody says you have one sermon that you essentially preach your whole life. Drew: Fascinating! You know, he wouldn’t use the language of sermons, but I’ve heard Michael Pollan say a similar thing about writers. He believes every single writer in any medium only has one thesis, for their whole life, that they circle back around to over and over again. Carolyn: That’s so true. And for me, I think because I’ve always been a little bit spacey, a little bit of a daydreamer, my thesis has been learning to attend, to pay attention, all the way back to I Can Hear You. There’s a line from Frederick Buechner that says, “God speaks to us in and out of the thick of our days.” And there’s another place where he says that God leaves little hints, little calling cards, all throughout our days. So, just learning to recognize him has been a huge theme of my life. And since being at Renovaré, I’ve learned that that’s a really Jesuit idea. There’s a Jesuit strand of spirituality where you take a long, loving look at the real and you’re constantly listening for what God is saying to you through other people, through your response to art and nature, and through the stupid stuff that happens to you everyday. So Recognition is an album about slowly getting better at recognizing the sound of God clearing his throat in everything going on around you. Drew: I love that phrase, “God clearing his throat.” I don’t want to use this word for you, but I kept thinking as I listened to your album, These songs are parables! And not in a didactic, top-down, imposing sort of way, but in a gentle, nudging, “consider this” sort of way. Would you use the word “parable” yourself? Carolyn: I hadn’t thought of that word, but it delights me. I took a Eugene Peterson course called “Tell It Slant” about the parables of Jesus, and he argued that Jesus very intentionally left things open-ended, so that we would have to enter into the parables and work them out for ourselves. So if my songs could function that way, I’d be delighted. I do love narrative and I love trying to tell a story, much more than “making a point,” so if my songs tell it slant, that would make me very happy. Drew: As these little short-form stories, are the characters in these songs factual, made-up, or somewhere in between? I’d love to hear about a few songs, if you’d like to walk through the stories behind them. Carolyn: Some are definitely characters. “Becoming Human” talks about Pinocchio and King Lear, for example. Drew: So you haven’t met Pinocchio personally? Carolyn: Well, I do know some Pinocchios, but not the one of early legend! (laughter) Drew: Not the OG wooden puppet guy. Got it. Continue! Carolyn: So clearly some are fictional characters or composites, but “Memento Mori” for instance talks about a dream with a monk. And I’m not sure that was a full-on deep sleep dream, but I did have a dream like that, half-awake and half-asleep. Drew: And what a dream it was. Carolyn: Yes. So for some background, memento mori is a phrase that means “remember your death,” and monks of various kinds have long repeated it to each other as a way of putting their lives in perspective. The song itself was tied to this spiritual practice I was invited to do of writing your own obituary, and paying attention to what you hope people will say about you. The author David Brooks has written about the distinction between eulogy virtues and resumé virtues, for instance. Drew: Ouch. Carolyn: Yes! Most of us are working for resumé virtues, right? But at funerals, the questions at play are much different: Were you kind? Did you make time for people? And so on. So I had done this obituary exercise, and then I had this dream about a monk saying “memento mori” to me, so that’s pretty autobiographical! “Pool of Tears” comes from the story of my friend Trevor Hudson, a lifelong pastor from South Africa who teaches at the Renovaré Institute. He did an internship at a church in Washington, D.C. and really admired the pastor at this church. When he was leaving to go back to South Africa, he asked if the pastor had a word for him, which is something that he has done several times before with other people. Which honestly sounds kind of scary to me. And the pastor said, “Yeah, Trevor. Just never forget that every person sits next to their own pool of tears.” Now Trevor is one of the most deeply compassionate people I’ve ever met, and I think it’s because he understands that. A lot of folks have compared “Pool of Tears” to another song I wrote called “Seize the Day,” both of which are composed of a few vignettes. In both cases, these songs are composites: I’m telling true things about people I know, but they’re essentially mash-ups, in which identities have been changed to protect the innocent! When you grieve someone deeply, it's an embodiment of the fact that there was and is great, great love. Carolyn Arends And then there’s “To Cry for You.” I wrote that right before I came to Hutchmoot in 2019. That one is about how I lost my mom, in October of 2018. It was a seismic loss for me. Losing a parent is a huge thing, and my mom was my best friend. I told this story at Hutchmoot—that whole first year of grieving my mom, I just did a horrible job at grief. I don’t know if you can do a good job, but I didn’t understand that part of becoming human is learning to grieve well. And I just kept running from it and running from it, and thinking, Well, my mom was older, so while it’s sad that she’s gone, it’s not out of season. I mean, I’ve had friends who’ve lost children! But I had to learn that my grief is my grief, and I don’t get to sidestep or shortcut it. For me, part of that command to honor your mother and father includes after they’ve died. So when I was running from grief, I got asked to sing at someone else’s funeral, a drummer friend of mine who lost his wife very suddenly. And her son Jordy got up to speak and said, “If you’re wondering if Jordy’s gonna cry, of course I’ll cry: it is my honor to cry for her.” In that moment I realized that all the tears I’d been fighting, I didn’t have to fight them anymore. I could use them to honor her. I remember going to a grief counselor who told me that every day, I needed to set aside a half hour just to grieve. Which sounded awful at the time! But it really is part of becoming fully human. There’s a line in the song that goes, “grief is the work that love must do,” and there’s an author who says, “grief is the tax we pay on loving.” When you grieve someone deeply, it’s an embodiment of the fact that there was and is great, great love. Two and a half years into that grieving process now, it still knocks me off my feet, but I’m beginning to see it as a reminder of my relationship with my mom and a really special love. And as people listen to this album, that’s the song that I’m hearing the most about from people—I guess because everybody’s sitting next to their own pool of tears. Drew: Especially right now. As I was listening to “After This”—that song feels like it’s about 2020. Am I correct? Carolyn: 100%, you nailed it! “After This” is kind of the one that got the ball rolling on this album. In April of 2020, my duo partner Spencer Capier was just recording bits of music for friends’ podcasts, and he recorded this violin melody that he called “After This.” So there we were, two months into Covid, all like Have you ever seen anything like this?? Surely it will be over soon! We were all so traumatized by this new reality! Drew: And eleven months later…here we are. Carolyn: Here we are indeed. So anyway, he sent me this violin melody called “After This,” and I thought it was just beautiful. So I asked, “Would I just totally wreck this if I tried to put words to it?” And he said, “No, please give it a try!” And so we did that, and it was the first thing I’d written and released in ages. We put out a video made up of listeners’ videos and images about their experience with Covid. So that got me all inspired, and I started writing a bunch. I wasn’t even going to put “After This” on the album because it had already been released, but we ended up deciding that it worked great as a sort of afterward to all the other songs. Drew: Plus it’s just begging to be an album closer. It was born for this! Put me in, coach! Carolyn: Yes! That was its destiny. Drew: I did want to mention, too, just how gorgeous the strings are, throughout the whole record. And it wasn’t just the emotional parts like on “After This”—even in “All Flame” for example, there’s this wonderful bluegrassy line that’s initially played by something more picky, like a mandolin. And then when those strings come in and double it—so good. Carolyn: On most of the record, when you hear strings, it’s Spencer. But on “To Cry For You” and “All Flame,” it’s the Love Sponge Strings from Nashville. They’re these four Nashville Symphony strings players who can work with basic lead charts just as well as sheet music. What’s cool about “All Flame” is that Spencer played that main riff on an octave mandolin that he had just bought and was really excited about. Drew: I love that instrument. I want one. Carolyn: It’s really so great. So I sent that riff to the arranger for Love Sponge, and she just said, “Well, let’s play what Spencer’s playing!” They were doing the session in Nashville, and they let me join in via Zoom to watch and shout out ideas. So I’m watching, calling Spencer, and I remember telling him, “You’re not gonna believe the power you have! There’s this incredible string quartet, and they’re just playing whatever you play!” And he just loved it, of course. Drew: And they were so right about that decision! I feel like it’s a testament to the power of different musical voices doing the same thing—when that melody is voiced on an octave mandolin, you expect it. But then when a string quartet plays it, there’s this power infused into it that kicks it up to the next gear. Before we wrap up, I was thinking it would be a good idea to mention your hymns EP as well. We’ve been focusing more on Recognition, but the hymns EP is called In the Morning, and it’s also wonderful. So what do you want Rabbit Room readers to know about In the Morning, where it came from, and what your hopes are for this collection of hymns? Carolyn: Yeah! Thank you—poor In the Morning is getting neglected, only because it’s hard to promote two projects at once. But I’m quite excited about it. I’m not a traditional worship leader, but I’m often in situations where I’m called on to help people voice their worship in song, and over the years, I’ve found some go-to songs that I especially love. So there are seven songs on this album: some are well-loved hymns and others I’ve discovered along the way or have been written by friends of mine. The goal was originally for it to be just me and Spencer with our arrangements, but our Kickstarter went really well, so we added acoustic bass and drums. But it’s still super organic, really rootsy, songs that we feel are just gifts, that have unlocked a place of worship in my heart, and I hope they can do the same for people who listen. Drew: It’s interesting how the role of hymns and worship in our lives has shifted as a result of the pandemic, when we can’t gather together and sing. We’re having to ask, how do we enter the space of worship in new and creative ways? So I love that you’re putting new hymns out, throwing people a line, so that we can enter into a space that maybe we’ve been alienated from over this past year. Carolyn: I would love that so much. And I would also love if it kept the hunger alive to sing together after this, you know? There are two invitations here: one is to realize that there’s nothing insurmountable to God, and we don’t have to worship in a certain way for it to be worship, but I think there is also an invitation to cultivate a holy longing to worship together and not take it for granted when we do meet together again. Drew: It’s been a long year not to get to sing with other people. Carolyn: It sure has. And I love that for all our technology, we really can’t replicate this sense of being in the same room, pushing air together. May the day come soon. Click here to view Recognition in the Rabbit Room Store, and here to view In the Morning in the Rabbit Room Store. Click here to learn more about Carolyn Arends at her website, and here to learn more about Renovaré.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Winn Collier, Director of the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary and author of A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson. In this episode, Winn and Jonathan Rogers discuss friendship, “earthy spirituality,” and writing that goes beyond the informational and motivational. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 11 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.

Three Things Newsletter has curated a collection of poems composed by various poets in the L’Abri community. It is our pleasure to share two of these poems with you today: an interpretation of “Psalm 22” by Andy Patton and “Reservoir” by Anna A. Friedrich. Psalm 22 My God, My God, You are the sparrow’s fall And the flower’s garments. You are the hallowed hammer And the hanging tree. I am poured out like water. Why have you forsaken me, my father? Yet surely I was cast on you from birth. From the ordinary altar of my mother’s womb You have been my God. You are the light’s benediction And the silent sky, Both the chasm and the passage, My canticle and call. I am the veil, gripped and rended, In the darkness until the dying is ended. You have pierced my hands and feet, Yet as long as light has walked between stars You have been my God. You tell the sun your grief And darkness dances across the noon. You are unyielding. I am cross-hearted and heaving. All who cannot keep themselves alive Will kneel before you. You have been my God. You shake the shattered earth of its ancient dead. You are the breath in buried chests Who rise and walk and praise you again. I am the fountain found I am the holy wine swallowed down. I am trussed and scattered. As grapes are crushed, I stagger. Though the beasts surround me, And trouble is near, I will find your face For you have been my God. You dreamed of flesh in the ground, growing. For you are the God of scattered seed. But now I am kernel crushed Chaff blown, flayed and flying. I am the flesh you dreamed of dying. Why are you so far from saving me? I can count all my bones. My heart melts. I lay in the dust. As long as the afflicted have lifted prayers to you, You have been my God I am the holy bread, chewed and eaten. I am the Prince of Peace crowned and beaten. —Andy Patton Reservoir The swans have mated again despite the virus— seven cygnets, fuzzy, golden huddle in the reservoir between their cob and pen. Each in turn dives, apprenticed in the slow current. Crickets still chirp along the banks though it’s almost midday. Poison ivy sprouts across Beale’s path and pollen from white pines dusts the water’s surface and its debris, dusts my skin, dusts everything because this is the season of determination— when winter’s layers peel back like a mask and hope in every species flings wide as if irrevocable. I let their voices accompany the call of the mourning dove into my inner ear— the labyrinth where I’ve heard, equilibrium resides. —Anna A. Friedrich Click here to read more selected poems at Three Things Newsletter’s website.

As we enter into Holy Week, we offer you this liturgy from Every Moment Holy, Volume II to be read and relished on Easter Sunday. The text is provided here in this blog post, as well as a link to download a PDF if you’d like to print it out or save it offline. We strongly encourage reading it together with a small group of friends and/or family. Four readers should be designated in advance for the scripture readings. The prelude prayer may be read aloud by the leader or silently contemplated by the participants before the first scripture reading. Prelude Prayer: Sing through me, O Spirit of God. Call forth songs of praise. Let my lips, my tongue, my life proclaim the glories of the Living One who died and conquered death; the Risen One who leads me into life. Leader: You have made all things well, O Christ! People: You have made all things well! What once was lost, you have reclaimed. What had been harmed, you will remake. What was unwell, you now restore. You make all things well! First reader: Hear the word of the Lord: Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. —Hebrews 2:14-15 (NIV) Leader: We, your creatures, O Christ, once endured the cringing lives of slaves, in a long bondage bereft of hope, bowed by the weight of grief, subjected to futility, fettered to our fear of death. But you did not abandon us. You were not content to cede one speck of ground to the enemy of souls, or to the cruel kingdom of death. You were ever mindful of our plight. All praise to you, Lord Christ! For it was your intention from creation’s dawn, not only to make all things, but to make all things right. When your works were despoiled and wrecked by sin and death, you undertook to save and to reclaim what you had first made good. You entered into this—our space and time—to act on our behalf. You took on body, blood, and breath, that you, clothed in our condition, might move in sympathy to save and shelter us. For in the living temple of your flesh, perfect justice and perfect mercy were met and there—in the shedding of your blood— they were forever reconciled in love. So you subdued the sting of sin. By death, you conquered death. You rescued us from the fear of death, and from its power. You have made all things well, O Christ! You have made all things well. Silence is kept. Second reader: Hear the word of the Lord: This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. —2 Timothy 1:9b-10 (NIV) Leader: The powers of darkness sought to swallow you, in death’s black waters, O Christ. But going under that flood, you drank death down like a river. You drank death’s reservoir dry. All praise to you, Lord Christ! You swallowed death for us, and by that act of willing sacrifice, you pushed death back upon itself, like the last lapping wave at the turning of the tide; that high water mark now fading, as death’s dominion ebbs out for all time, its power to terrorize God’s people forever destroyed by God’s own passage through it. Through death, O Lord, you gave us life! You have made all things well, Eternal King! You have made all things well, O Christ! Death’s dark shroud has been rent ragged and pierced through by the first dawning of your resurrection light. And after your return, after the final splintering of that dark night, death will possess no lasting fame; the works of death will win no glory for its name. Hear this promise, O children of God, hear and know: Death will surely die forever, his shoddy works undone, his usurped crown torn from his palsied grasp, his impotence unmasked, his power to harm shattered for all eternity like shards of thinnest glass. Receive the glory due your name, Lord Christ! The grip of death already slips. It cannot slow the steady progress of the resurrection, now advancing, one day to be made visible in the full outworking of its infinite glad implications. The door that led to death has been remade by Christ into the door that opens into everlasting life. You have made all things well. You have made all things well, O Christ! Silence is kept. Third reader: Hear the word of the Lord: For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. —Colossians 1:13-14 (NIV) Leader: Now, O King of All of Space and Time, raise your scepter, declare the advent of the age of the healing and remaking of the world, of the great rejoining of these realms of earth and heaven, of the eternal dwelling of God with his people in this reconstructed temple of Creation. We who live in this shadowland of death’s last stand, await your appearance and command, O Lord! Every longing of our souls, every molecule of our physical bodies, is crying out for, yearning for, reaching for, tilted toward, the irresistible gravity of your being and your glory. Come quickly, Lord Jesus! We await your speaking of the word that will roll up death like an old, disintegrating scroll, bind it with iron bands, and cast it into flames. Christ alone will wear the crown! Christ alone is worthy of the name above all names. Every knee will bow and every tongue proclaim the rightness of his coronation. All sorrows we endure for now are but the rattling gasp that signals death’s defeat. Christ’s heel is planted on death’s neck. Death cannot breathe. And this space in which we grieve is but the long exhale of death’s last expiring breath. This age of passing sorrows is but the long death rattle of death itself. The outcome bears no hint of doubt. The work is done. The victory is won. So death will be undone. All works of death will be undone. And we, whose lives are hid with Christ, in God, will rise to live, eternal, every one. You have made all things well, O Christ! You have made all things well! Silence is kept. Fourth reader: Hear the word of the Lord: We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. —Romans 6:9 (NIV) Leader: The victory is yours, O King! Now claim what is your own! Every inch of earth, all the span of heaven, fields and skies and stars and seas, all continents and forests, all nebulae and galaxies, all creatures and peoples, all principalities and governments, all of time and history, all wonders and mysteries, all loves, all hearts, all lives— All this is yours! The crown, the throne, the prize! The name above all names! The kingdom and the joy! The glory and the praise! The victory over death! The conquering of the grave! O King of Kings, we offer our eternal adoration! Now let your resurrection at last be worked through all the fabric of creation, till every fiber, every atom, every particle in play, is bathed in holy light, consecrated forever as your own. Till every sorrow we’ve sustained is redeemed, restored, renamed; till ones we’ve loved and lost and grieved are joined to us again; till all the brokenness that breaks our world is by your word made whole. You have made all things well, O Lord of Life! O King of Creation! O Christ Who Conquered Death! You have made all things well! You are the radiant end toward which all creation tends. In you dwells the fullness of God, and through you all things are reconciled to God. You are the beginning, and the firstborn from among the dead. You are the firstborn over all creation. You are the church’s living head. In all things you are supreme. All glory is your own eternal glory. You are faithful and true. You have kept your promises. You have done what you said. You have rescued your children and your creation from the futility, from the fear, and from the lingering kingdom of death. You have done what you said. You have made all things well, O King of Earth and Heaven! You have made all things well! O Christ who gives us life, we give you praise! First reader: Hear the word of the Lord: I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. —John 11:25 Second reader: Hear the word of the Lord: On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces. . . In that day they will say, “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the Lord, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.” —Isaiah 25:7-8a, 9 (NIV) Third reader: Hear the word of the Lord: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. —1 Peter 1:3 (NIV) Fourth reader: Hear the word of the Lord: I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades. —Revelation 1:18 (NIV) Silence is kept. The closing section might also be memorized and prayed as often as one is confronted with any works of death yet briefly evident in this world. Crush this age-old darkness, O Christ, in the winepress of your everlasting light. Trample this old darkness and from it draw the wine of everlasting life. Upend all works of death. Make all things new. Make all things right. You have made all things well. You have made all things well. All: You have made all things well, O Christ! Amen! Hope is kept. Click here to download a PDF of this liturgy at the Every Moment Holy website. And click here to view Every Moment Holy, Volume II in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

I park the van at the top of Section C, and my daughter and I get out into the rain. The spongy ground slopes away from us to the road below, speckled with headstones that are, in turn, speckled with lichen. Already my daughter bends over one, wipes the drizzling rain off its surface, and reads a name aloud. About this cemetery hangs a pleasant sense of disorder. Stones shaped like benches, pillars, or pensive children kneel in the grass, half-sunken where the ground beneath them has settled; moss laps at their edges. Certain monuments here are notorious, like the massive stone angel who has, with her attendant urban legends, nearly eclipsed the family she was meant to memorialize. Broken stones lean in pieces against cottonwood trees whose burly roots slowly shoulder the soil away. Unlike another local cemetery, which styles itself as a “memorial park” and offers natural burial as well as farewell tributes, death is still a presence here, not an unpleasant thought to be sponged away with rebranding. I feel comfortable saying “tombstone” here, or “grave.” As in, “Look at this grave!”—which I call to my daughter when I find one carved to resemble a scroll draped over a log and slicked with real moisture, real moss. She is at my side in a moment and together we puzzle out the inscription. It is beautiful, but it is not his. We have come looking for the grave of a man we never knew and are not related to. He enlisted in the military in June of 1917 and drowned a month later while swimming in the bay. He and his wife lived in our house that year, and we discovered his story while my daughter researched the history of our house for a school project. We thought finding his headstone might help us learn more about him or his family, but coming here was more of a pilgrimage, I think. Finding some physical mark that he was here, that he was more than a newspaper clipping on a screen, more than a typewritten name in a city directory—I think that is what we are really after. We want to see his name in stone, but when we reach Section C, Lot 50, Grave 8-A, where the cemetery’s website assures us he was buried, there is no stone. But there is an old tree, arcing an arthritic branch over the lot with startling grace, and a single rose-colored headstone for a woman who shared his last name and who, if she was his mother (the dates and the nearness of her grave suggest she may have been), would have outlived her son by forty years. We kneel and read her inscription, and I cannot help but place my hand on the stone as though in consolation. So, we find her stone. But not his. My daughter snaps a picture of the spot, that one branch slick and dark with rain, the ground beneath it nearly empty—for other stones are missing, not just his. My daughter photographs the rose-colored stone, too. Then we begin the climb uphill. We came prepared to get wet; we are wet; my feet, in their rubber boots, are leaden with cold. I think maybe my daughter will be disappointed, and she is, but only a little, for somehow finding even that plot was enough. She chatters on about finding his possible-mom, how great that was, and wonders what happened to his stone. I don’t know, I say. We should look up what happens to headstones, where they go. And I think, we know where to find him now, and we are perhaps the only living people in town now who do. That’s something. Finding some physical mark that he was here, that he was more than a newspaper clipping on a screen, more than a typewritten name in a city directory—I think that is what we are really after. Théa Rosenburg Despite the cold, we are not ready to leave. We linger over the graves on the way back up the hill, reading epitaphs. Bits of poems or hymns, or the simply eloquent “Mother” or “Father”—which is to say, “I mattered to someone, I was loved.” Every so often, we see a carved lamb resting atop a small white stone, and the lamb says the same thing but in a heavier, more heartbroken key. We pause by a monument for fallen miners, inscribed with the work of a local poet, which my daughter reads aloud. At one headstone we pause: I am the Resurrection and the Life, it reads, golden moss embossing the letters, and I smile at my daughter. “Maybe we’ll meet him one day,” I say. If we are only bones and breath, nothing more than a mind tuned for survival, then death means nothing. For a time, those who loved us will mourn—they will miss us, perhaps with a ferocity that wakes them weeping. But they too will die and generations will seep away. Moss will fur our headstone and the ground above us will buckle and shift as we dissolve. Saplings will blossom into great old trees whose roots will nudge our headstones aside. Our names may remain for a time—letters on an old bill of sale or a marriage license—but eventually even those will fade. We will return to the dust. And if all we are is flesh, then when that flesh is gone we will be nothing. If that is true, this man is nothing. An unmarked grave, over a hundred years old—a story snapped shut before it finished. But I don’t think that’s true. We may wither and fade like the flowers; our days may be fleeting as the grass. But the Lord never forgets a story—not a soldier falls without him knowing. By some small series of events, my daughter and I get to tell this man’s story, incomplete as our knowledge of it is: a young man enlisted in the army during the Great War. One month later he drowned swimming in the sea. He lived in our house and left behind a wife, who packed her things and moved out by the end of the year. His name was Reuben.

My first poetry book was about light in dark seasons, and was in part the result of wrestling with a fascination with darkness that I’ve carried most of my life. Ironically, but not unexpectedly, my life has never been soaked in darkness. There have been dark seasons, but most of them I have experienced from the outside, or they have turned out to be not so dark as expected. I have had my bouts with depression here and there, but nothing like those of people I know and love. Much of my interest in darkness is probably due to some alchemy of growing up in a homeschooled evangelical Christian subculture and my undying curiosity; I’m not enough of a psychoanalyst to come up with anything deeper than that. I grew up thinking a Christian’s life was all about victory and light and “pressing on the upward way / new heights I’m gaining everyday,” so yay! For the first several years of my young life this made sense and felt right and was borne out in my own personal experiences. But then more real life started to seep in to that experience. I began to hear other people’s stories and truly listen to them. I began to allow myself to feel their hurt. I began to come to terms with my own pain, with the lies I had told myself about what it meant to follow Christ. Perhaps because I came from a culture that looked away from darkness or sought to relegate it to unbelievers and Christians-in-name-only, I leaned pretty hard in the other direction for a number of years. I read and watched increasingly dark and disturbing stories. I grew to prefer them. The honesty I saw in them was intoxicating, but it wasn’t just the honesty that appealed to me. It was the drama of depravity, disease, and despair. This is something Leslie Jamison’s book on addiction narratives, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, wrestles with. She explores her own alcoholism and the addictions of poets and writers throughout history in terms of the stories they were telling and trying to tell. At one point she contrasts two profiles of alcoholic writers: a Life profile on John Berryman entitled “Whisky and Ink” and Charles Jackson’s partially-autobiographical The Lost Weekend: For his part, Berryman loved the Life profile. It showed him a side of himself he wanted to believe in—a prophet surveying his kingdom of empty shot glasses—and fed the delusions that were feeding his drinking. The why-less drinking that Charles Jackson had proposed in The Lost Weekend would have been harder to absorb. That type of buffoonish drinking—with its vaguely comic desperation—didn’t strike the same appealing pose as the poet with his quivering psychic antennae pointed toward death. —Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath The illusion of the tormented artist is partially one of control: I could overcome my addiction, but I don’t because it gives me a private window into the secret realities of the soul. Jamison knows the deception of that illusion, enough to reveal addiction as it is: “a seepage toward death.” I still sense the allure of darkness in my own writing. In my pursuit of honestly engaging the dead and dying world around me, I often feel the pull to step over the thin line demarking empathy and truth-telling into the realm of dramatizing and affirming darkness as desirable, inevitable, and alluring. I often step over that line. I can even locate my identity in stepping over that line. In contrast, a life without darkness tends to sound boring. Jamison reckons with this as well: If addiction stories run on the fuel of darkness—the hypnotic spiral of an ongoing, deepening crisis—then recovery is often seen as the narrative slack, the dull terrain of wellness, a tedious addendum to the riveting blaze. I wasn’t immune; I’d always been enthralled by stories of wreckage. But I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could. —Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath In many of these stories, addiction is not so much a disease as it is a symptom of hidden hurts—of loneliness, of the unquenched desire to be wanted and loved, of the ambition to be significant and known. The sins of the flesh are those actions that bubble up to the surface of broken people, and the hurt will not be healed by the bottle, by porn, by political fervor, by social media likes, by being upheld as a tortured genius poet, or by “making it” as an author. These things will only ever reveal our brokenness unless we turn to the Healer of that brokenness. Recovery happens slowly, in unseen places, without fanfare or originality. We make it inspirational, quotable, and shareable to our peril. Chris Wheeler It’s no surprise that the first step of the Twelve Steps used in recovery is both communal and confessional: “We admitted we were powerless over [insert focus of addiction here]…” Confession of need in a loving community initiates the process of healing. The more I daily confront the darkness within and outside of me with the light of Christ in the community of his saints, the more I understand it as a channel directing my desires beyond itself to an overwhelming light. I look at my darkness not to love it more, but to recognize that I need help to escape it. In confession, I relinquish my darkness into the hands of my Savior who already knows its contours. I share the burden of it with the people around me, and they share their burdens with me. This is the purpose of the Lenten season: to face our need and look to Christ to fill it. In the upside-down kingdom of God, when we turn to him and look him in the face, when we see the severe and gentle mercy of our Savior, our darkness begins to reveal Jesus instead of our own brokenness. We see the failure as it is, and we remember that no depth of failure was too deep for him to reach us. We know the pride in us and we see him humbling himself unto death, even death on the cross, that we might be his. We know our crippling addiction to approval and our desperate desire to be loved, and we know that through spilling his own blood on the cross he has approved and accepted us as his beloved bride. In this light, the work of recovery is not about skyrocketing to victory out of pits of despair. Healing is not about inspirational moments, mountain summits, or applaudable epiphanies. In recovery, I found a community that resisted what I’d always been told about stories—that they had to be unique—suggesting instead that a story was most useful when it wasn’t unique at all, when it understood itself as something that had been lived before and would be lived again. Our stories were valuable because of this redundancy, not despite it. Originality wasn’t the ideal, and beauty wasn’t the point. —Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath Like our creative work and our spiritual lives, recovery happens slowly. It happens in a close, honest community. It happens in unseen places, without fanfare or originality. It is not always beautiful or noteworthy. It doesn’t fit into the algorithms. Its similarity to other stories is unnerving and comforting at once. We make it inspirational, quotable, and shareable to our peril. In the light of Christ, every story bent toward night is a signpost to a happy ending. Every illness is pointing to the cure. Every dark night of the soul is pointing to the rising of the sun. In Lent, we may recognize our need, but we encounter our healing in Easter. As we retell this story during Holy Week, may we look beyond the darkness to the approaching dawn.

A treasured album is like an old friend. Any longtime music listener has them: those well-worn albums you come back to, not every day but every so often, when you need them. They become more than just a collection of songs. They’re a tangible set of memories. They might evoke a particular place and time when they first connected with you in such a personal way. You turn back to them to revisit those memories, or to seek the wisdom in the songs, just like calling a friend. And each time you say, “We should do this more often.” These are the hopes a good artist imbues into each song—that a unique and sometimes very personal story or feeling will somehow connect to people, transcending the firsthand experiences that built the song. That connection is unpredictable, but when it happens, it can forge a special bond. That’s when a song or album becomes not just a means for entertainment or a tool for ministry, but a very real part of someone’s story. In this new series, we’ll be honoring some of these treasured albums. We’ll invite artists and writers to share the music that occupies a special place in their story, and hopefully introduce you to some gems you might have missed along the way. So, for starters, allow me to introduce you to my dear friend, Clear to Venus by Andrew Peterson. It was his second major-label studio album, and this year it will celebrate its twentieth birthday. (Just look at that baby face on the cover!) Venus is a “road album,” not uncommon when new artists must tour relentlessly while satisfying label obligations and momentum. Many of its songs were written in exotic places like the Super 8 Motel in Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The bulk of the band at that time was Andrew, his wife Jamie on background vocals, and Gabe Scott on BGVs, guitars, accordion, hammered dulcimer, etc. “No More Faith” opens the album with a cheeky declaration: “This is not another song about the mountains.” It was a gutsy call for a sophomore album to call out its predecessor’s biggest single, “Nothing to Say,” about a drive through the American west where “the mountains sing your glory, hallelujah.” But the rest of the opening line takes the cheek away and couches the album in a new reality. This is not another song about the mountains, “except about how hard they are to move.” Oh. The lyrical mastery that sees Peterson give such care and attention to every single word was already abundant, and while this early album is never naïve, there is a youthful ebullience that makes me smile. Mark Geil “So now faith, hope, and love abide these three,” says First Corinthians, “but the greatest of these is love.” I had always thought that a pleasant sentiment, especially for a chapter about love, but then Andrew—like he would so many times in the decades hence—revealed a deeper truth from an ancient story. “I say faith is a burden. It’s a weight to bear,” he sang. That was a brave bit of honesty for early-2000s CCM, and I’m sure it gave his label pause, but that was the line that made me an Andrew Peterson fan for life. “Nothing to Say” was a wonderful praise song. Its follow-up single “The Chasing Song” was clever and confessional. But “No More Faith” was revelatory. That’s why the greatest of these is love! I finally realized, longing for the day when we won’t need faith and hope any more. Clear to Venus has the unfortunate distinction of being released on 9/11/2001, but “No More Faith” somehow spoke into the events of that day with deep empathy. (This is also the song that established AP as a brilliant bridge writer—see also “The Reckoning” and “Don’t You Want to Thank Someone.”) Second track “Mary Picked the Roses” has a unique history. Rich Mullins left the lyrics to this song behind when he died tragically in 1997. Andrew, who has borne the “heir apparent to Mullins” mantle his entire career, was given the lyrics to set to music. I’ve often imagined the weight of that task: to do the song justice, but not be imitative, and to add to so great a legacy. Andrew and Gabe wrote a folksy delight livened by Dan Tyminski’s mandolin. “Isn’t it Love” follows and carries the same bounce over another deep truth. I’ll admit that I missed the gravity of the third verse until I heard the slow version (you can find it on After All These Years), and felt the guilt and thanksgiving in Andrew’s voice as he sang, “And still you died for me.” Clear to Venus makes the personal “old friend” connection for me on two particular songs. “Let Me Sing” is a quiet marvel, a beautifully structured song set to piano and cello. It is remarkable that Andrew wrote this masterpiece in 1996, when he was just 21 years old. When I lapse into a routine of life that leaves layers of mundane crust on my heart, this is the prayer I sing to be made new. It’s my favorite song from the entire AP catalog. And the title track that’s not exactly a title track, “Venus,” is my favorite road song. I’m a sucker for road songs—think “Load Out” or “Turn the Page”—because they often find the artist at their most human state. I’ve never been on tour, but it’s clear that it can wear you down. These are songs that speak to the sacrifice of a calling, and the mix of joy and fulfillment against a longing to just sleep in your own bed for once. I think of this song every time I pass a Hampton Inn, and I can hear the emotions of every artist who has ever given up their time to play their songs for me when Andrew sings, “Still, it isn’t home.” Every song on this album is worthy of mention. Track down the story of Andrew and Eric Peters’ competing coin songs. Delight in the AP-Randall Goodgame story-song “Alaska or Bust.” Don’t miss the Mary Chapin Carpenter cover “Why Walk When You Can Fly.” And there’s even a hidden CD bonus track, because in 2001, hidden CD bonus tracks were the equivalent to Marvel’s post-credits scenes. “Land of the Free” has a clunky line or two, but its heart is in the right place. Clear to Venus is a remarkable work. The lyrical mastery that sees Peterson give such care and attention to every single word was already abundant, and while this early album is never naïve, there is a youthful ebullience that makes me smile. I pull it off the shelf more than any other AP album, and I let it come alongside me for the memories, the comfort, and the truth it always brings. Click here to view Clear to Venus (in physical CD form!) in the Rabbit Room Store.

In his beautiful collection of short stories The Wild Birds, in a moving tale of generosity and adopted family, Wendell Berry writes, “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.” Berry’s concept of membership is one familiar to his readers: an ideal of interwoven, interpersonal community, a giving and receiving that is the opposite of American culture’s rugged individualism and our current state of isolation. Normally a voracious reader, in this pandemic season I have read very few new books. A chronic re-reader anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to invest any emotional energy into a story I couldn’t trust; I desperately needed daily reminders of truth and beauty. Bringing my weary soul to Narnia, Middle-Earth, and Port William reminded me again and again that all shall be well and all shall be well . There are, thankfully, many such stories, but the one I couldn’t keep myself from reading over and over this past year was Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay For Now. Called a “skinny thug” and suspected by all around him of following in the footsteps of his abusive father and delinquent older brothers, Doug Swieteck is a lonely boy with nowhere to be and nowhere to go. Nowhere to go except the library, where he finds himself after moving to a new town his eighth grade year. And there, in the Marysville Free Public Library, Doug is offered grace: an invitation to a membership. Upon seeing the abrasive boy’s fascination with the Arctic Tern in a displayed book of Audubon’s Birds of America, an older librarian gently coaxes Doug into learning to draw, basing each lesson on Audubon’s works. “Red Phalarope” from Audubon’s Birds of America Each bird, each Saturday art lesson with Mr. Powell, gives Doug a place of retreat, a place to fail safely and then succeed, a way to understand the chaotic world around him: “Maybe this happens to you every day, but I think it was the first time I could hardly wait to show something I’d done to someone who would care besides my mother,” he says. “Do you know how that feels?” Through Mr. Powell’s quiet dignity and respect for Doug, he gives a greater gift than even that of art: he gives Doug an invitation into a community. Grace, when freely poured out, cannot be contained. Millie Sweeny True membership does this for each of us, when we are enveloped into a broader body. This gift, we know because of the work of Jesus Christ, is grace. Unasked, unsought, unpayable. And grace, when freely poured out, cannot be contained. In the disciples and apostles of Jesus, this joyful grace changed their ways of seeing, of being human. As it should do for each of us. As it does with Doug. He sees what it means to be human through Audubon’s interpretations of the birds, through his own understanding of being an artist, through the compassion and grace extended to him, and this humanity reaches out from his life to touch those around him, to invite them into membership as well, or to accept their invitations. As his older brothers struggle against the lot set before them, Doug acknowledges their battles with respect: “It’s like the screech of the Black-Backed Gull, crying out into the empty white space around him. You can’t hear it when you look at the picture. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.” When he discovers the traumatic cause of a hated teacher’s anger, Doug stubbornly probes him into accepting help, just as he himself received from Mr. Powell in the library. He understands pain, and grows to understand grace. A genuine grace, a grace that changes. As it must. Doug deserved none of the grace he was given, could not have grown into maturity and kindness without the guidance of wise and persistent mentors. This is not a story of one boy’s struggle against the world, but the story of a boy pulled along into life by those who saw him drowning. Like us. Dragged along into membership by the Holy Spirit, by the godly friends and mentors placed around us by grace, in grace, for grace. It fills up, and it flows out. So we are given, so we give. Doug’s experience shapes him into a young man of courage for those he loves, of respect and empathy for others; he is emboldened to speak out, deciding that “whatever is in the dark is waiting for the Yellow Shank, he’s going to do it anyway.” He is given much, and he gives much. In a season of isolation, where membership and church community and long-time friends feel like a bygone dream, I needed this story. More than once. And now, as we continue in a season of unrest that more closely resembles the anguished Black-Backed Gull than the daring Yellow Shank, I need it still: reminders of how empty are our lives without one another, how poor we are without the gifts of art and literature and friendship. Go read Berry’s The Wild Birds, of course, but alongside it, read Schmidt’s Okay For Now. Recipients of a vast and unasked for grace, all of us. In need of, and given, truth and beauty and belonging in the holy brotherhood of Christ. So we, too, may become what the Brown Pelican is. And even more. Click here to read more of Millie’s writing on the Rabbit Room blog, and here to view Okay for Now in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

In the past couple of years, we’ve enjoyed working with Oasis Audio to bring a number of Rabbit Room Press titles to the audiobook format. Just this year we’ve seen the releases of Henry & the Chalk Dragon (read by Rebecca Reynolds), Every Moment Holy, Vol. 1 (read by Fernando Ortega & Rebecca Reynolds), The Door on Half-Bald Hill (read by Robert Hook, Janet Devlin and Nigel Patterson), and my own stage adaptation of Frankenstein, which was nominated for an Audie Award for Best Audio Drama thanks to the great work of the Oasis team and the incredible cast of actors. Today we’re excited to announce that Oasis Audio and Rabbit Room Press have entered an exclusive partnership in order to continue bringing you audiobook versions of Rabbit Room Press titles, both new and old. Yes, we’ll be digging into our backlist to breathe new life into some old favorites! We look forward to the wealth of high-quality work this relationship will enable us to bring to our readers, and we’re incredibly grateful for the good people at Oasis Audio and their belief in our work. All our audiobooks are available on Audible, in the Rabbit Room Store, and anywhere else audiobooks are sold. Click here for our current list of available audiobooks.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Stephen Roach, host of the Makers and Mystics podcast, founder of The Breath & the Clay creative arts movement, and co-author (with Ned Bustard) of Naming the Animals: An Invitation to Creativity. Stephen Roach is a poet, musician, speaker, and creative coach. He hosts the Makers and Mystics podcast and is the founder of The Breath and the Clay, a creative arts movement. His latest book, a collaboration with Ned Bustard, is Naming the Animals: An Invitation to Creativity. In it, Stephen and Ned make the case that creativity isn’t just a talent given to the chosen few, but an invitation extended to all, an essential part of God’s design for partnership for humanity. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 16 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.

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 a session led by Jonathan Rogers and Helena Sorensen called “Recovery, Escape, & Consolation: The Gifts of Fantasy” from 2020’s Hutchmoot: Homebound, in both video and audio form. J. R. R. Tolkien and G. K. Chesterton both make cases for the necessity of fantasy literature. Here, Jonathan & Helena discuss three of Tolkien’s primary arguments. Click here to listen to this episode of The Hutchmoot Podcast.

For close to a decade now, I’ve been working on a project that is close to my heart—a series of all-ages graphic novels called the Dragon Lord Saga. It’s a story about adventure and imagination and redemption and community, and it has slapstick humor and talking animals and dragons. I believe in the story that I’m telling and in the work that I’m doing, but in the day-to-day grind of drawing each panel, promoting my comics, and scraping and searching for paying work, it’s disconcertingly easy to forget that what I do has any value. It takes years of slow progress to draw a graphic novel, and in a world competing for attention, it’s exhausting to get even a single pair of eyes to rest on my work long enough to care about it. Some days I begin to wonder if anyone is listening. And I begin to wonder if it even matters. But every now and then, I get a letter from a kid who has read my books. Sometimes they thank me for creating the Dragon Lord Saga, but more often the letter is a plea to finish the next book so that they can read it. And often the letter includes their drawing of my characters. Letters like that stop me in my tracks, and brighten my eyes. The work is still hard, but those letters remind me why it matters. Last month, in the middle of a pandemic, in a busy work day, in my most despairing mood, I received a message that stopped me in my tracks. This one wasn’t from a reader, and it wasn’t anything surprising. It was just an automated reminder email from Patreon’s web service: “Your Patreon anniversary is coming up next month on April 13!” So many comic pages have been inked in the years since I launched my Patreon page. Back then, I didn’t know if Patreon was even worth wasting time on. All I knew was that I was working overtime creating comics, and for all that work, I was (at best) breaking even on costs. I needed a way to generate income from these comics, or I would have to stop making them. But asking fans to create an account, to pledge support—that’s a big ask. Would anyone show up? If you’ve never encountered it, Patreon is a service that allows creators to build member-supported content based on a monthly pledge. My Patreon backers choose an amount to pledge financially each month, and I keep the Patreon feed updated each week with new comic pages, along with other goodies like behind-the-scenes features, ebooks, and exclusive webcomics. Thank you for every Patreon you pledge to, and every Kickstarter you back. Thank you for buying books from your favorite authors, albums and t-shirts from your favorite bands. You stop us in our tracks and tell us that we matter. You matter, too. Jonny Jimison People showed up. It started slow, and it grew slower. Some people showed up for a few months and then discontinued, kindly stepping in to give me a few months of support. Others have honored me by staying since the very beginning. Patreon support doesn’t pay the bills, but it allows me to continue to pour my hours into making comics and pursue new opportunities. And the vote of confidence and interest indicated by the presence of so many Patreon backers is like a letter from a young fan, reminding me that what I do matters. We’ve created two books—and started work on a third! We’ve released 382 pages of comics—and that’s just the Dragon Lord Saga. That doesn’t include all the webcomics we’ve been able to create, including Getting Ethan comics for social media and the Patreon-exclusive Martin and Marco Mini comics. And last year, we began getting serious about merchandise. In addition to free quarterly gifts for top-tier backers, Patreon has allowed me to create limited-run books and postcard prints—and we have something special coming next week: a Patreon-exclusive pin featuring a certain penguin! Best of all: with the completion of volume two, The River Fox, I’m doing a final pass on the book, redrawing a few pages, addressing editor’s notes, and adding print necessities like the title page and covers. As I finish this work on the book, we’re posting two entire scenes each week, instead of our normal two pages! And to celebrate, for the next few weeks, those scenes will be open to read for free, even if you don’t have a Patreon account. If you haven’t visited the Patreon yet, now is the best time to check it out. And, friends: Thank you for every Patreon you pledge to, and every Kickstarter you back. Thank you for buying books from your favorite authors, albums and t-shirts from your favorite bands. You make a difference with every pledge, every purchase, every penny that you use to support us. You stop us in our tracks and tell us that we matter. You matter, too. Click here to visit Jonny’s Patreon page.

[Editor’s note: A full year ago, Doug McKelvey debuted his (probably fictional?) advice column “(Whatever You Do, Don’t) Ask Doug!”. In it, he began to trace the curious and entirely improbable tale of Paul Harvey, complete with extensive and dubious footnotes. Well, fret not, for the tale continues. Read on for the next installment in this far-flung adventure, and stay tuned to see what happens next.] Dear Ask Doug Or Not!1, I’m a little embarrassed to ask this, but I actually need some romantic advice. There’s a girl I’ve known for a long time. Well, technically I’ve only known of her—but I’ve done that for a really long time. And by that, I mean that I’ve been aware of girls—generally speaking—as a genre, though not necessarily of this particular girl. But now I am. Aware of her in particular, I mean. Kind of. What I’m trying to say is that I’m going to be a contestant on a reality show this Fall, and 23 other guys will be vying for my woman’s hand. Technically, we haven’t met. But I already know she’s the one for me. How? My palms feel tingly when I think about her. So I’ve got physical science on my side. And also possibly magic. And if our connection is already this amazing when we haven’t even met yet, think how heartbroken I’ll be if she accidentally chooses one of the wrong guys just because he’s smarter, richer, wittier, more fun and handsome and romantic, and a better listener than me! Is there anything you can do to help me win this? I guess what I’m really Ask-Doug-ing2 is “Do you know any of the producers on the show, and if so, do you have any dirt on them that I could use for leverage?” Signed, A Lot to Chew On in Chattanooga. Dear Chattanooga Chew-Chew3, I’m sorry, but do I frequently interrupt you when you’re talking? No? Then pray tell why are you interrupting me? If you read my most recent4 Ask Doug! column, you would know that I’m still in the middle of telling a story about the golden age of radio—and not about reality dating shows. And if you didn’t read my previous column, how did you even know to write to me with such an off-topic query? Stand down, sir. You are out of order. No, you are out of order! When last I checked, this column was still devoted to the exploration of sundry things Paul Harvey-ish—namely his popularity as a ruby-throated5 radio star, and the trouble brewing as his research staff grew increasingly lazy and began to feed poor Mr. Harvey less-than-entirely-factual facts for his most successful syndicated show “The Rest of the Story.” I had only just mentioned, in fact, Mr. Harvey’s small Spanish goat6, and how I was probably not going to write any more about it. So we will begin there, taking special care never to mention the goat again.7 If you really want a sensationalist advice column about torrid reality dating shows, I suggest you either contact Chuck Woolery or pen it yourself. Now please, dear readers, I sincerely beg you to cease these relentless interruptions and allow me to move forward with our story… Who Was This Paul Harvey & Why Should You Care About Part 2 of Who Was This Paul Harvey and Why Should You Care? Emboldened by the success of their initial subterfuge, and probably high on cheap adrenaline8, Harvey’s staff grew ever lazier and sloppier in their labors. Having introduced a few story compounds that were a scant 2% false and a walloping 98% true, they now began to experiment with broadcast stories that were 10%, 20%, or even 40% fabrications.9 This steady decline in “reality congruence”10 went on for six years—a time referred to now as “The Half-Score Affront To Honesty In Human Relationships, Specifically In the Area of Broadcasting and as Pertaining to the Question of Trust Between a Broadcaster and His Listeners, More Specifically When that Broadcaster Happens to be Paul Harvey, Good Day!™”11. Such a gross web of prevarication could not last though. In the spring of 1977 Paul Harvey signed on to the airwaves from his kobold-proof, diamond-studded booth,12 and delivered the following address, having no foreknowledge that his well-enunciated words—uttered in utter innocence and without sibilance—were destined not only to shock an already flabbergasted nation, but to threaten Harvey’s own seemingly impenetrable popularity, shaking both the one, and then the other, to their very foundations. The episode told a simple story about an obscure chapter in the life of one of America’s most popular presidents. But the ratio of truth-to-falsehood had been increased to a volatile mix. The story that aired that day was simultaneously 48% TRUE, and 73% FALSE, an unstable super-capacity formula that every mathematician worth his or her salt can tell you will “in igneous fervor combust most roundly and robustly”13 with even the slightest spark. And Paul Harvey was a chain smoker.14 ORIGINAL Script for PAUL HARVEY’S September 27, 1977 “The Rest of the Story” RADIO BROADCAST PAUL, CLEAR YOUR THROAT BEFORE TURNING THE MIC ON. NO, DON’T READ THIS PART OUT LOUD! THIS IS JUST SUPPOSED TO BE A NOTE OF INSTRUCTION BEFORE YOU BEGIN. PAUL! STOP READING THIS PART ON AIR! OH, NEVER MIND. JUST GO ON TO THE NEXT PART— Hello listeners, I’m Paul Harvey, and this… [COUNT SLOWLY TO 46 BEFORE COMPLETING THIS SENTENCE]15 …is the rest of the story! BOOM! The first blow lands on the man’s nose, like a hurtling meteor intent on extincting16 all dinosaur life on earth, if earth were represented by the man’s nose on which the blow had just landed. A second uppercut follows with lightning speed, catching the base of the jaw and turning the hapless fellow’s knees to jelly, as if part of his legs were jars, or maybe all of his legs were jars, and it just so happened that the jars that just so happened to be where his knees ought to have been just so happened to be jars that contained a fruity jelly, some of which just so happened to have spilled out because the jars just so happened to have cracked and shattered, so that they no longer retained any rigid structure with which to support the man’s imbalanced weight.17 The assailant steps back, hopping lightly on the balls of his feet. He is unusually agile for such a tall, wiry fellow. His fists are split and bloodied, but he continues to dance around, hoping for more. “Come on, Mr. Davis, you rascal!” he cries, exhilarated by the rapture of the battle, “Come at me like a man and I’ll drive those Dixie Scouts of yours through the back of your head!” “Wha..? Dixie scouts?” The man is clearly confused. “I thought they changed their name to ‘The Chicks.18’” “Obviously I’m talking about your front teeth, buddy. Come on, get up!” But the man addressed as Mr. Davis has been hopelessly felled by the blows that came so suddenly, raining down on him in the cold darkness of the alley, as if those blows were a hail storm, only instead of ice clods, the hail just so happened to be made of iron daggers, daggers that just so happened to hit a man much like a fist. I don’t mean that it was the man who was much like a fist, but that the fists that hit the man were like a raining hail, a hail which just so happened to be like sharp, metal daggers, and what’s more, those daggers just so happened to be of the sort that tend to hit a man much like a fist. Which, again, isn’t to say that it was the man who was much like a fist… (NOTE TO EXALTED GRAMMARIAN & C.B.: Can you fix this? When Harvey reads this script on air it’s going to sound really confusing if you don’t. Thanks. P.S. I am also filling out the appropriate paperwork requesting that you brew a new pot of “Jolly Joe.” I know this will sound weird, but I think this six-day-old thick, silty stuff in my Harvey Flask™ tastes of wrath and resentment and also possibly of a dark desire to destroy this and perhaps also many other worlds. Thanks much! —Jimmy.19) The forlorn and dagger-like-hail-fist-pummeled man whispers wearily to himself “Can’t an underemployed minor philosopher find gentle solitude and peace of mind anywhere?” His head is swimming with “donkey whiz” swilled earlier at one of D.C.’s public gin tanks20, and now throbbing from the beating. His lip is swollen, and his nose thrown out of alignment21. He hears one of Schopenhauer’s chants reverberating in his head as he feels about existentially22 on the cobblestones for his glasses, but cannot find them. “What kind of a person would accost and harry a minor philosopher” he wonders, “seeing as how we do so much good for humankind?”23 Warily he raises his eyes and squints at his assailant. The apparition flitting before him in the lamplight would rival Ichabod Crane for general lankiness. Yet there is something so familiar about the fellow… if only he would hold still. That beard… that stovepipe hat… The victim’s numbed mind struggles to pull the picture together. “On your feet, General Lee! Or have you had enough of my ‘fists o’ thunder’?” The ominous scarecrow bellows at him a second time. Suddenly it all comes clear. This man is… is… no, it can’t be! But it is!24 “Oh Captain!” the tipsy philosopher cries mournfully, “My captain!” PAUSE HERE FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT, PAUL, BEFORE LAUNCHING INTO THE MAIN NARRATIVE. NO, PAUL, DON’T READ THIS PART ALOUD! THIS IS JUST A NOTE FOR YOU. STOP READING IT OUT LOUD! JUST MOVE ON TO THE NEXT PART! SHEESH! The summer of 1885 struck hard and fast, like a golfball slammed home down the windpipe, in a scenario where the golfball represents momentous events and the windpipe represents pretty much everything else. Rumors of war were in the air (and soil), and the Swedish Tobacco Crisis was causing shockwaves on Wall Street that threatened to shutter every last two-dollar mom-and-pop dime store in the country. The country had been too preoccupied to remember to vote, so President Lincoln was enjoying the onset of an unprecedented fifth term in office, when the news reached him over the Pinkerton Telegraph: The South had agreed to unconditional surrender on the basis of one condition—that they be allowed to permanently secede from the Union, and that they receive double compensation for the seventeen potato cruisers torpedoed by the North in the Battle of the Pleiades25, four months prior. Nevermind that the potato boats belonged to the North26 and were destroyed as part of Lincoln’s premature ‘scorched earth’ policy. Lincoln, whose temper was never a secret, ripped the telegraph wire out of the wall, mildly electrocuting himself in the process.27 Feeling “a great desire to exact some serious vengeance, no bones about it, people,” he then ordered that the entire telegraph line the message had traveled over be felled and burned pole-by-pole, from Washington to Chicago. Then he sent for Pinkerton and had him pilloried and publicly ridiculed, placing upon “his moist and squalid brow” a one-hundred-twenty-pound butternut squash, cultivated specifically for that purpose of “most incogitable and loathsome obloquy28.” These actions, though carried out in a fit of anger, were actually calculated to strike terror in the hearts of Southerners, for, as Lincoln himself said, “If we will not hesitate to so humiliate our truest friends, how much more terrible must be the ponderous and vengeful gourds we shall deposit upon the noggins of our enemies!”29 The South, however, responded with a bizarre string of proactive, preemptive attacks upon their own people, punitively perching ponderous prize pumpkins30 atop the heads of more than two hundred local mayors and mayoral hopefuls31. The state of South Carolina was so devastated by this cannibalistic infighting that she actually surrendered in confusion to the Southern government “like a whipped puppy with its tailward parts tucked neatly ‘neath,” to quote then Georgia Senator Ombudsman “Baconwrap” Montgomery.32 Lincoln, sensing a window of opportunity in this odd turn of events, disguised himself, first as Jefferson Davis, then as Davis’ wife Begonia Cleopatra Happenstance Elizabeth33, and set out by rail for a clandestine tour of South Carolina, hoping to win the beleaguered populace back to the fold of the Union. This may have given rise to the historical myth that Davis’ wife was a tall, gangly, bearded woman.34 Though easily explained in light of Lincoln’s charades, this curious myth still persists, finding its way into numerous history books, movies, and epic poems about Jefferson Davis. In reality, President Davis was an advanced polygamist (LVL 17) who had fifty-five wives, twelve of whom were numbered amongst the “Virginia sharpshooters” that fell in the assault on Sherman’s forces at Appomatox.35 Though enemies never succeeded in identifying and unmasking the well-disguised Lincoln, he was able to effect little in the way of swaying public sentiment. After a two-week bout with the “Carolina Malaria36,” he returned to Washington, D.C., broken, humbled, and deeply frustrated, “like a man with his hindermost parts where his head should have been,” remarked acting Secretary of State John “Cookie-Heart” Admantle. White House aids silently adopted the “fifty foot” rule, refusing to approach any nearer the chief executive out of fear for their own safety. Those who accidentally violated this dictum more often than not found themselves immobilized in a vicious bear hug, headlock, or full nelson, grappling with the president, who would not release his victims till other staffers came and pried his arms and legs loose from the hapless target, at which point Abe would immediately ensare one of the would-be rescuers. “A president never lets go!” he would shout.37 This exhausting cycle sometimes repeated for up to six hours before the president tired of the game and fell asleep in a crumpled heap on the floor. Within a matter of days, Lincoln’s mood had turned even more morose, sullen and angry. He was often overheard muttering his dark thoughts aloud. Even his wife, Mary Toad38 found herself powerless to “pull the tall man” from the icy depths of self. Abey is scarce himself, she wrote in her diary dated March 17, 1885. He takes his breakfast in the tub, submerging his scrambled eggs for several minutes before consuming them, as he has known the raccoons to do, and he does not sing when his back is scrubbed with the bristle brush, as he used. Even the light tickling of his feet brings scarcely a smile, and once he even rebuked me for my pains. I fear for the Union, and most of all for the minor philosophers. Mary always feared for the minor philosophers.39 The next evening, Mary Toad, along with Colonel “High-Steppin’” Wilhelm and Vice President Eliazer “Immortal-Biscuit-Mix” York40, cornered Lincoln in his study and bolted the doors behind them. There is no record of what was said in that fateful meeting that lasted less than five minutes, but eyewitnesses report that when the doors were unlocked, Lincoln burst out “like a man stuffed full of angry ants all half-drunk on rancid linseed oil,” ripping off his shirt so that “fiyve buttons did flye moste erratically and did stryke a gentle page upon hyne41 orb of eye.” The president then rushed from the White House and into the street, where he bellowed an ululating, open-throated cry, hailing one of D.C.’s storied and infamous moose-drawn cabs. Prickly knees! Sticky knees! Dry, scaley, scabby knees! Say, friends, are your knees too often unsightly and imperfect? Do you dread summer, when your friends and co-workers pressure you to wear shorts, and then you have to walk bent over double with your hands covering your knees, just so random strangers won’t heap deep shame upon you? Well fear no more! There’s a product that can make those unsightly knees glow like yine orb of eye: Uncle Dorsey’s Premium Knee Shine & Polish. Just three applications is all it takes. Wipe it on. Lie motionless in bed for a debtor’s week42, and wipe it off. Repeat, and repeat again. It’s as easy as that! Uncle Dorsey’s Premium Knee Shine & Polish—available wherever Uncle Dorsey’s Premium Knee Shine & Polish is sold! And at that commercial break, dear reader, we shall also momentarily leave off lest this, our second installment of “Don’t Ask Doug!” expand to an unwieldy length. Here we shall resume and complete our narrative when next we convene. Till then, may you each remain undisputed champions of whatever spheres and realms you inhabit. Cordially, and with utmost haste, I remain, Ask Doug. #DKM #humor #PaulHarvey #TheRestoftheStory

[Editor’s note: This is the second of Amy Stimson’s posts engaging with Jack by Marilynne Robinson. Click here to read the first.] I have been thinking a lot about grace lately. It occurred to me today that we have seasons in the church calendar dedicated to the attributes of God. If you, like me, grew up in a church in which “church calendar” meant either Easter or Christmas, let me paint you a picture: at Easter, we meditate on God’s great love in terms of sacrifice, atonement, and eternity and at Christmas we rejoice in hope, peace, giving—though of course there is overlap. The grace of God doesn’t seem to have its own period. Recently, I asked a friend for an unchurched definition of grace, and his response was, “Oh I don’t know, like elegance?” It strikes me now as funny that for many people like him, women named Grace are assumed to be named for a quality of person rather than a quality of God. What prompted this discussion in the first place was this passage from Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel, Jack (2020). A pastor is talking with the titular character, a man who is broken, lonely, and despairing. Jack is not a Christ character, at least not deliberately, and yet he is (as many of us might believe ourselves to be) “a man of sorrows, acquainted with suffering” (Isaiah 53:3). He and Reverend Hutchins have been talking about forgiveness, and the pastor muses: “If the Lord thinks you need punishing, you can trust Him to see to it. He knows where to find you. If He’s showing you a little grace in the meantime, He probably won’t mind if you enjoy it” (167). What struck me though was Jack’s response: “It’s not always clear to me how to tell grace from, you know, punishment.” Grace as punishment. Grace as punishment. Rachmaninoff’s piano music always used to unsettle me because it sounded frenetic and on the brink of utter chaos. This idea was like that, jangling discordantly within me, mostly because it didn’t feel like chaos. It felt true. I suppose it’s a lot like feeling the power of a large wave. Its full force, its threat, its life-taking power only bears down upon the one who is determined to remain unmoved. Amy Stimson I have often found that Robinson’s writing makes unseen things seen. She writes about loneliness in a way that is profound and all-seeing, but somehow private and human and unobtrusive. The tragedy of Jack is that he appears to be irredeemable. The prodigal son of a forgiving minister, the beneficiary of an understanding brother, the love of a wonderful woman, and yet he finds himself at odds with the world in so many seemingly insubstantial ways that you cannot but despair with him. His greatest hope for his life is to be harmless, to avoid inflicting harm upon his fellow man, but even this seems too much to hope for. Ever since I first met Jack in Gilead (2005), the first of this collection, questions about what grace is for Jack have been on my mind. We talk so often about grace as amazing, in the words of the great hymn. And indeed it is. It is grace that reaches far, that reaches where no one else would, that does the unthinkable, and redeems the irredeemable. G. K. Chesterton once wrote that the message of the story of Beauty and the Beast was that “a thing needs to be loved before it is lovable.” The redeeming grace of the story is not in it being a tale of unlikely romance, but of something irredeemable being redeemed, humanised, made new. But what about grace as punishment? Grace as burdensome? Grace as a heavy weight, obligation, requiring response? To come back to the conversation with my friend, we began to talk about whether grace could exist if you didn’t believe in God. Well, yes, I said. Grace is as water to a fish; in it we live and move and have our being. We are complexly and inextricably wound up in it, so that everything is a grace in our lives. Granting those terms, even what feels like a punishment might even be considered a grace. I’m reminded of a story Corrie ten Boom tells of her days in Ravensbruck, a Nazi concentration camp. On top of everything else, their barracks were infested with fleas. In her prayers, attempting to be thankful in all circumstances, Corrie’s sister Betsie even thanked God for the fleas. Corrie felt this had taken it too far. It became apparent, however, that the guards who may have separated them, confiscated the smuggled Bible, and punished them, were avoiding that room—because of the fleas. Can one distinguish grace from punishment? I suppose it’s a lot like feeling the power of a large wave. If you swim with it, if you’re carried along by it, you are aware of its power only in a small way. It’s only felt when you resist; its full force, its threat, its life-taking power only bears down upon the one who is determined to remain unmoved. Timothy Keller has written that “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.” To have someone know the worst and be loyal all the same—this is what grace is. It stares baldly into the fathomless depths, and it doesn’t baulk at what it sees; “illusionless compassion” is one way of looking at it. It is unbearable. Most of us come from cultures that have privatised vulnerability: it is revealed only to the select few. If it escapes us accidentally, if we show weakness where we wanted to be perceived strong, we feel insecure and exposed. Robinson uses the imagery of an unbearable light, exposing, “light indeed, rid of the dilutions that sometimes made them into warmth and illumination, those blandishments.” Something similar happens when you read Psalm 139 as if you were a fugitive evading capture: all that light imagery suddenly becomes terrifying, and the promises that you will be seen, you will be revealed wherever you are, whatever you are, make the light fearsome and terrible. In the same way, amazing as it is, grace can also be terrible. That devastating awareness of how far grace had to descend in order to find you. It is knowledge you can’t un-know once you do. It is heavy and huge. The thing that Jack eventually comes to verbalise is the question of whether you could enjoy a moment of grace and refuse it at the same time. I have sat with these ideas a long time, and as I have prayed over them, I am reminded of how pervasive grace is as well. Pervasive is not really a hymn-like word, but it describes the kind of complexity I have been pondering. God pursues relentlessly, and his grace manifests and envelops in ways we cannot even understand. His grace is both terrible and great, but also small and moment-sized. Jack is a book all about grace. The grace of moments—small mercies, as some would say. And the grace of eternity, bearing down like Francis Thompson’s hound of heaven upon a fleeing man. To conclude all these barely-tethered ponderings, what is grace? The meeting of guilt, perhaps, with the knowledge of good—and all the weight of glory that brings. Click here to read Amy’s first post about Jack—“Loneliness in Marilynne Robinson’s Jack.“

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with blogger, poet, and memoirist Janna Barber about her new book Hidden in Shadow: Tales of Grief, Lamentation, and Faith. Janna Barber is a blogger, poet, and memoirist. Her most recent book is Hidden in Shadow: Tales of Grief, Lamentation, and Faith. This memoir is one woman’s honest reckoning with the truth that even as our faith waxes and wanes, God is constant, and he loves his children even when they don’t know what he’s up to. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 17 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.

What if it’s terribly awkward? That was my first question when a filmmaker named The Arctic told me he wanted to conduct a video experiment with my song “To Cry for You.” His proposal was simple: “I’ll just ask people to let me film them while they listen to the song.” I’m shy. I’m Canadian. I’m deeply uncomfortable with displays of intense feeling. So, you might ask yourself, why did I record a song about crying in the first place? It couldn’t be helped. In a season of deep loss, I wrote “To Cry for You” out of the discovery that constantly fighting my tears was beating up my soul. Though I’ve tended to view grief as something to be avoided at all costs, the song documents my journey towards understanding that grieving is a necessary and even beautiful form of loving. So, I understood why The Arctic wanted to see how the song affected other people. But when he pitched his idea, my shy Canadian-ness kicked in, and I felt apprehensive about the possibility of two opposite but equally horrifying outcomes: What if the participants don’t have an emotional reaction to the song? What if they do? Still, The Arctic convinced me to let him try his experiment. Now, looking at the footage of the brave, beautiful souls who came into his studio and allowed themselves to be vulnerable, I’m so glad. Some participants are visibly moved. Others just listen intently, offering the holy gifts of their presence and focus. Together they teach me that there is no right or wrong way to process loss or emotion, and that Simone Weil is right: Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. There will always be a level of risk and embarrassment inherent in the courageous choice to be fully present to sorrow within ourselves and each other. Carolyn Arends Watching the video, I realize that my impulse to avoid anything too awkward is connected to my delayed capacity to grieve. There will always be a level of risk and embarrassment inherent in the courageous choice to be fully present to sorrow within ourselves and each other. We’ll stammer. We’ll blunder. Tears will evade us when we need them, only to suddenly arrive at the most inopportune times. But here’s what I’m learning. If we refuse to bail—if we just show up and hang in there with each other and with our lives—there is a level of connection on the far side of awkwardness that is rare and holy. What if it’s terribly awkward? Well, then, it’s human, and real. On my best and bravest days, I’m in. Click here to read our in-depth interview with Carolyn about her new album, Recognition. And click here to visit her website.

The world is filled with so much music. As a music and arts enthusiast, it’s hard to make sense of the constant noise. Where do you start? How do you keep up? In the streaming and digital era, it’s hard enough to keep up with your favorite artists, let alone try to discover new favorites. It’s for this reason we’ve created the Rabbit Room Discovery playlist. While you’ll always see familiar names like Andrew Peterson or Taylor Leonhardt or the Gray Havens on the Discovery playlist whenever they release new music, we also have our ears to the ground for something new. Something hopeful, soulful, graceful—something that leads us deeper in our love of God and neighbor. And so our hope with the Rabbit Room Discovery playlist is that you’ll be encouraged by the wonderful music your favorite artists have to share with the world, and too, that your new favorite artist might be discovered right around the corner. For weekly updates every Friday, make sure you Follow the Rabbit Room Discovery playlist on Spotify or Apple Music. And to learn about the other streaming playlists we curate on a regular basis, visit RabbitRoom.com/playlists.

It’s not enough to say Taylor Swift sings about romance as if it were just a topic of interest to her (though it is). Romantic relationships are the entire genre, language, and viewpoint through which she interprets the world around her. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that few in recent years have mined the myriad angles and experiences of romantic relationships better, or at least more thoroughly, than Taylor Swift. In her catalog, we find every sort of human emotion fathomable expressed as a reaction to or result of romance, from infatuation (“Enchanted”) to vengeful rage (“Better Than Revenge”), wistful longing (“Teardrops on My Guitar”) to sorrowful regret (“Back to December”), and so on and so on. Sure, these songs are explicitly about relationships. But through each romantic encounter, Swift is exploring something in herself, her story, and in the human story. Through romance, she wrestles like Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction with whether our story is a tragedy or a comedy. Is the world headed for a Happy Ever After or a “Sad Beautiful Tragic” ending? And here in this tension is where I realized Taylor Swift meets J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of eucatastrophe and decides that, in the end, love conquers. In his essay “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien coins the term “eucatastrophe” as the “highest function” of the fairy tale, “the sudden joyous turn [that]…denies universal final defeat” and gives “a glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” It’s the moment Gandalf appears gleaming like the sun at the break of dawn to lead the Rohirrim’s charge against the forces of evil at Helm’s Deep. It’s the moment in Avengers: Endgame where all hope is lost, and Thanos has won. But then suddenly, resurrected reinforcements arrive; death is overcome; evil is undone. In Taylor Swift’s music, we see the same eucatastrophe at play, not in fantastically epic battles, but in the intimate relationships we share with each other. We see an early glimpse of this in the smash hit “Love Story,” a song we’ve heard so many times, it’s easy to miss the significance of what Swift accomplishes. In this 2008 country-pop hit, Swift inserts herself into Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but dares to reimagine one of literature’s most famous tragedies as an act of eucatastrophe. She sings in the bridge: I got tired of waiting Wonderin’ if you were ever comin’ around My faith in you was fading When I met you on the outskirts of town —Taylor Swift, “Love Story” She then sings the chorus, replacing her infatuation earlier in the song with quiet lines of doubt and feeling like the relationship is over: “Romeo, save me, I’ve been feeling so alone / I keep waiting for you, but you never come / Is this in my head? I don’t know what to think.” When Swift is feeling her lowest, when the tragedy should strike, Romeo kneels on the ground, pulls out a ring, and the song modulates—a joyous turn in the darkest night. This scene plays out almost exactly the same way on Speak Now opener, “Mine.” Again, Swift uses the bridge to present the dark night before turn: And I remember that fight, two-thirty AM ‘Cause everything was slipping right out of our hands I ran out, crying, and you followed me out into the street Braced myself for the goodbye, ‘Cause that’s all I’ve ever known Then, you took me by surprise You said, “I’ll never leave you alone” —Taylor Swift, “Mine” The great strength of the eucatastrophe is its surprise, something Swift expresses in both these songs. In “Mine,” it’s explicit; in “Love Story,” the surprise comes through rewriting Shakespeare. Both effect joy and keep us coming back to these songs over and over. Our story does indeed end in joy, and our current pain won’t be for evermore. Chris Thiessen Swift has been criticized, especially around the release of these songs a decade ago, of offering unrealistic expectations for young girls, of writing a Happy Ever After story that only exists in Disney movies. And to be fair, in his discussion of eucatastrophe, Tolkien writes, “It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance.” However, any critics that have made this argument must have missed songs like “White Horse” where Swift admits “this ain’t a fairy tale” or “Fifteen” where her childhood friend “gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind.” Good news is only good because we are simultaneously surrounded by bad news, bad endings. The power of eucatastrophe, however, lies in its argument that the bad endings are only temporary. It may take a while, but joy eternal is still around the corner. I’ll admit, while I love the eucatastrophic stories of “Love Story” and “Mine,” they have room for improvement. That improvement finally came on “Evermore,” the title track from Swift’s second 2020 album, the greatest example of eucatastrophe in her entire catalog. The song begins with a simple, yearning piano line played by William Bowery as Swift recounts months of gray, a sense of intangible something’s-wrong-ness: “And I was catching my breath / Staring out an open window / Catching my death.” The scene is cold, merciless, unrelenting as Swift concedes, “I had a feeling so peculiar / That this pain would be for evermore.” In the second verse, Swift can’t remember what she used to fight for. The stories of joy and hope she used to sing no longer light the fog, no longer anchor her spirit. Her thoughts are consumed with only heartbreak, and she sings, “I rewind the tape but all it does is pause / On the very moment all was lost.” Then the fast-forward button hits, the quiet dread turns to billowing storm, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon enters like a narrator of Swift’s swimming inner thoughts. Their lyrics swirl around each other—images of shipwreck, waves being tossed, violence—but Swift tries to hold on to the cracks of light through the wreckage. The swelling voices and spiraling piano rise unfettered. But suddenly, Swift remembers hope. She remembers that an unnamed “You” was there with her, and the waves are told, “Peace, be still.” The storm settles. Swift catches her breath and exhales, “this pain wouldn’t be for evermore.” “There’s no way this doesn’t end in tragedy,” you can hear in Swift’s voice at the beginning of the song. But it doesn’t. It ends in beautiful hope of an eternity without grief, without death, without endless winters and the violence of the dog days. I can’t argue that Swift is trying to make grand theological statements. I don’t know enough of what she believes to do that (though she has explicitly identified as a Christian). However, it’s undeniable that she argues again and again that life is a love story, an idea Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) would agree with: “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event.” And thus, every exploration of human love stories holds within it the potential for divine metaphor, for revealing something of Christ to us in a way that intellect simply can’t comprehend. It’s too fantastical and mysterious a story to be boiled down to doctrine. The Christian life is a fairytale, something Swift and Tolkien would agree on, as he writes in his discussion of eucatastrophe: The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable Eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the Eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the Eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. —J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories” Not every chapter ends in beauty. Not every relationship is a happily ever after. But like Tolkien, Swift argues that love is victorious at the last. When it’s snuffed out momentarily, we watch it “Begin Again.” When currents sweep it out to sea, love returns “alive, back from the dead.” Our story does indeed end in joy, and our current pain won’t be for evermore. Click here to read more of Chris’s writing at Quarter Notes.

Songs from the Silent Passage is a new collection of essays by various members of the Chrysostom Society (Eugene Peterson, Matthew Dickerson, Luci Shaw, and more) which explores the breadth and depth of Walt Wangerin Jr, a writer who has wandered through a passage and returned with news of a far country. In celebration of the book’s release, Matthew Dickerson sat down with David McFadzean to talk about Wangerin and his influence. Matthew: Tell me about when you first met Walt. David: The first time I met Walt he was a professor at my college. The local PBS station invited a student (me) and a professor (Walt) to read our poetry on air. I fancied myself a poet (I’m not) and Walt was very gracious to share the stage with me. Later our paths crossed again when we were both founding board members of an arts organization, The New Harmony Project, which is a two-week conference for playwrights to test their works with a cast of professional actors. It was during this time that our relationship began to grow. Among the board members Walt immediately became the spokesperson for the mission of the conference and an inspiring critic for the playwrights.  He showed them the same grace he’d shown me on our first meeting. Matthew: How did your impression of him change over the years as you got to know him better? David: When I first met Walt, he was a successful writer, and I was a struggling playwright. So of course I was delighted. I never expected we would form a friendship lasting these many years. But I soon found out that Walt was an enthusiastic mentor. In later years I was doing a lot of speaking at colleges and screenwriting workshops, mostly on the structure of story. Each time I was slated to talk, I’d call Walt, pick his brain and furiously take down notes. I stole from the best. He was, to say the least, very generous with his insights. Matthew: What stories of interactions with Walt stand out as particularly memorable? Or funny? Or insightful? David: This example comes from the many hours of conversation we’ve had over the years: One time when Walt and I were talking, he asked me if I knew what it meant to understand an idea. Of course I knew. It meant you “get it.” You “get” what the idea means. Who doesn’t know that? Apparently me. Walt said, far from understanding meaning you “get it,” it means you stand under the idea, as you would stand under a tree. You spend time with it. Perhaps you meditate, perhaps you never really “get it.” But it is a beautiful thing to live under the idea as it grows and bears fruit. Matthew: Moving from Walt as a person to his books, tell me about his writings. What have his works meant to you personally? Which have been the most meaningful? David: St. Julian had a powerful effect on me. The sharp prose immersed me in the world of Julian and the orphic poetry compelled me to experience his pain. And as dark and degrading as the story is, I felt relief and hope in its picture of redemption. And I was reminded that the brutality of Julian’s world can be found in our world, as can the blessed humiliation of his redemption. Matthew: Have you thought, as I have, that Walt’s books have a lot to say of great importance to our modern church? David: Many of his books are aimed at the church. And they inform, but not in a text book way. Anyone who has read him knows that story and imagination are the foundations of his message. Story puts flesh on dogma and imagination brings it to life. I think for Walt, story is a living thing, as is the Church. When either becomes simply an offering of pleasant, unimaginative information, it dies. Matthew: What about the broader cultural response to his writings? I went to a secular New England college in the early 1980s. It wasn’t the sort of institution where I would have expected to find any of Wangerin’s pastoral (non-fiction) titles to be sitting on a faculty member’s desk or even buried on some bookshelf. And yet one day I was in a conversation with one of the better-known literature professors about speculative fiction (fantasy and sci-fi) and he recommended to me The Book of the Dun Cow (not knowing I had already read the book.) That title seemed to have spoken powerfully to a lot of readers. David: Good writing is good writing. You may not want to live in France, but you still drink their wine. Matthew: Did knowing Walt personally give you any insights into any of his writings? David: Once you know a writer it’s difficult to separate the person from the work. So, yes, knowing him did give me insights. But the insights were incidental compared to the depth of enjoyment I get from reading him. And even before I knew Walt well, I’d read several of his books. The Book of the Dun Cow, The Book of Sorrows and Potter come to mind. And they were and are among my favorites. To paraphrase Aristotle, reading Walt’s books before I knew him, I couldn’t conceive of who wrote them, but after knowing Walt, I realized only he could. Matthew: If you had a budget to pick any of his writings and make a film of them, what would it be? David: Several years ago I brought Horton Foote and Walt together to adapt his memoir, Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, into a film. They talked for days. Horton ended up writing a lovely screenplay that told the story of Walt’s life from birth into his early twenties. It was an engaging and poignant piece, as you would expect from the screenwriter of To Kill a Mockingbird. Several studios were interested. But it turns out that it was one of those projects (of which there are many) that was on everybody’s list to read, but nobody’s list to make. Another movie-worthy work of Walt’s is The Book of the Dun Cow. A friend of mine wrote an Off-Broadway musical version that is wonderful. And I’ve always thought The Book of the Dun Cow would make a terrific animated feature. And who knows? In Hollywood, great projects can sit on the shelf for years until suddenly they’re rediscovered. Click here to view Songs from the Silent Passage in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

Season Two of The Artist’s Creed begins today! Over the course of six episodes, Steve Guthrie and Drew Miller will explore the relationship between the sounding world and the Holy Spirit. They’ll ask what we can learn about God through music, speech, breath, and voice, starting next week with “Episode 1: The Sound Breath Makes.” Tune in every Wednesday wherever you listen to podcasts. In Episode 1, Steve and Drew discuss sound as incarnational in an excarnational world, the dual American problems of loneliness and polarization, the vulnerability of speech, the voice as a glimpse into the soul, wind and breath as more than mere symbols of the Spirit of God, the human being as a musical instrument, and much more. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 1: “The Sound Breath Makes.” And click here to read “Spirit & Sound, Part 1: The Sound Breath Makes,” which serves as the baseline for this conversation. Transcripts are available for The Artist’s Creed. Click here to access them.

Artists & is a project created to meet the need for community among visual artists. Throughout this project, we will learn the stories of artists we know and respect, looking inside their studios and hearing about their work, process, and rhythms. In this third installment, we hear from Stephen Crotts and Breezy Brookshire. Stephen Crotts and Breezy Brookshire share their journeys as illustrators, their creative practices, struggles, aspirations, and the role of community in their work. Click here to join the artists & group on Facebook. And click here to watch the first installment of artists & their stories, and here to watch the second.

In celebration of summertime, here’s a liturgy from Every Moment Holy, Vol. 1 about planting flowers and glimpsing the beauty of creation in both its birth and its completion. To download the liturgy as a PDF, visit EveryMomentHoly.com/liturgies. Prepare the bed for planting. Once the soil is prepared, each participant cradles in their palm one of the unplanted flowers, bulbs, or flower seeds. Leader: In a world shadowed by cruelty, violence and loss, is there good reason for the planting of flowers? People: Ah, yes! For these bursts of color and beautiful blooms are bright dabs of grace, and witnesses to a promise, reminders of a spreading beauty more eternal, and therefore stronger, than any evil, than any grief, than any injustice or violence. What is the source of their beauty? From whence does it spring? The forms of these flowers are the intentional designs of a Creator who has not abandoned his broken and rebellious creation, but has instead wholly given himself to the work of redeeming it. He has scattered the evidences of creation’s former glories across the entire scape of heaven and earth, and these evidences are also foretastes of the coming redemption of all things, that those who live in this hard time between glories might see and remember, might see and take heart, might see and take delight in the extravagant beauty of bud and bloom, knowing that these living witnesses are rumors and reminders of a joy that will soon swallow all sorrow. In the planting of these flowers, do we join the Creator in his work of heralding this impending joy? Yes. In this and in all labors of beauty and harmony, praise and conciliation, we become God’s co-workers and faithful citizens of his kingdom, by acts both small and great, bearing witness to the perfect beauty that was, to the ragged splendor that yet is, and to the hope of the greater glory that is to come, which is the immeasurable glory of God revealed to us, in the redeemed natures of all things. Participants here kneel and plant the seed, bulb, or flower they have been holding. What then is the eternal weight of these flowers? Though our eyes yet strain to see it so, these tiny seeds, bulbs, or velvet buds we have planted are more substantial than all the collected evils of this groaning world. Their color and beauty speak a truer word than all greed and cruelty and suffering and harm. What is the truer word spoken by these flowers? Though our eyes yet strain to see it so, these tiny seeds, bulbs, or velvet buds we have planted are more substantial than all the collected evils of this groaning world. Doug McKelvey They are like a banner planted on a hilltop, proclaiming God’s right ownership of these lands long unjustly claimed by tyrants and usurpers. They are a warrant and a witness, each blossom shouting from the earth that death is a lie, that beauty and immortality are what we were made for. They are heralds of a restoration that will forever mend all sorrow and comfort all grief. They declare a kingdom of peace, of righteousness, of joy, of love, and of the great joining of justice and mercy into a splendored perfection in the person of a king whose amaranthine wonders eternally upwell, beautiful beyond the grasp of human imagination. How will these brief blooms accomplish such mighty labors? What grace will sustain them? Because their work is so great, we pray, O Father, your blessing on these small flowers. May their roots work deep, finding rich soil. May their leaves and buds be wakened by gentle sun and watered by ample rain. May the strength of their fragile beauty in bloom give pause to passers-by, who will meet in their sweet scent and radiant forms whisperings of grace, stirrings of the spirit, and the awakenings of eternal hungers, that can be met and satisfied only in you. Let these flowers, O Lord, bear witness in their deepest natures to eternal things. Let our lives also, O Lord, do the same. Amen. Click here to view Every Moment Holy in the Rabbit Room Bookstore. And click here to view all liturgies available for free download at the Every Moment Holy website.

In Season Two of The Artist’s Creed, Steve Guthrie and Drew Miller explore the relationship between the sounding world and the Holy Spirit, asking what we can learn about God through music, speech, breath, and voice. This second discussion, “The Breath Between Us,” touches on the significance of breath in the murder of George Floyd, the phenomenon of Zoom fatigue and the exhaustion of words without breath, the shifting ways in which we experience music, and much more. Tune in every Wednesday wherever you listen to podcasts. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 2: “The Breath Between Us.” And click here to read “Spirit & Sound, Part 2: The Breath Between Us,” which serves as the baseline for this conversation. Transcripts are available for The Artist’s Creed. Click here to access them.