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Click through for this week’s edition of Jonny Jimison’s Rabbit Trails. Click here to check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

In our last episode, we heard Andrew Peterson talk about his love of ghost stories, and today one of my favorite people leads us a little further down that rabbit hole. Long-time Rabbit Room contributor Lanier Ivester is a deep wellspring of talent, insight, wisdom, and grace. She’s an author, a poet, an essayist, a bookbinder, a sailor, a keeper of bees and sheep, and, as you’ll hear, a lifelong chaser of the delightful shiver a great ghost story offers us. So, as a coda to the season of Halloween, we present to you “The Delightful Shiver: Part 2.” Listen at your own risk. Click here to listen to The Delightful Shiver: Part 2. Check out the Hutchmoot Podcast on Apple Podcasts by clicking here. And explore the Rabbit Room Podcast Network here.

Racial diversity is important to me, not only as a member of the body of Christ but also as a mother through adoption, for I have been given the incredible privilege of raising five beautiful children of color. All of them different. All of them fellow members of the Church. Yet, for my family, finding a church (or even a ministry) that represented us, all of us, has proven to be difficult for too many years. I longed for community as it will be in eternity. At Hutchmoot, the atmosphere was blessedly different than anything I have ever experienced. There, I experienced community in its richest form. I relished the conversations I had with fellow believers from all over the nation and world. I watched my thirteen year-old daughter, who had come along for the weekend, find a place where she truly fit in. I saw her become comfortable in her own skin and blossom as the hours passed and she was able to be, fully, who she was created to be in every way: artist, poet, musician, dancer, and daughter of the King. She belonged. We belonged. It was after a conversation with Andrew Peterson that my wheels really began turning. We discussed the diversity we saw in the sanctuary that day and the sincere desire of the Rabbit Room to be known as a place of welcome for God’s children of every race. They are actively seeking to learn and grow in this very important area, but we all know change like this is usually slow and often painful. A few months ago, my family made the difficult decision to leave our old church out of a deep need to give our children godly role models who looked like them, could understand the things we cannot (no matter how much we try), and teach them how to live their lives well as black and biracial children of God. As much as we loved that church family they simply could not provide that for our children. About two weeks after Hutchmoot, I joined a women’s Bible study at our new (and wonderfully diverse) church. The night of the first session I walked into a room of twelve women and I was the only white one. The last time I had experienced that was when I traveled to Ethiopia to adopt my youngest daughter. My heart leapt to my throat, partly in excitement but also in trepidation. What would these women think about me, the only white woman in the room? Would they question why I am here? Would I say something stupid? I was nervous but knew I needed to be right where I was and, most importantly, that I needed to be quiet and listen. Just listen. By the end of the hour I knew that I was indelibly drawn to each of these women. They looked at me with love and acceptance and, for the first time, I realized just how courageous the attendees of Hutchmoot, those who stood out in the room because they were “the diversity,” really are. I returned to the Bible study the next week, looking at the now familiar faces with affection and feeling so grateful for the privilege of sitting among these beautiful women of God. I went home that night and began to write, a poem flying from my fingertips and ideas swirling through my mind. A few days later I began to search the Rabbit Room blog to see what had been written about race within this community I have grown to love. I searched the word: “race.” My screen filled with articles about grace. Together, we are a coat of many colors gracing the broad shoulders of Jesus. Jeanine Joyner My spirit sang with joy because that is exactly what God was teaching me. When we step into a room filled with people from every nation, tribe, and tongue, we learn to live and experience grace in a way that we never could have in a homogeneous group. Because of my children, I have spent nearly two decades seeking and learning for them, to better understand and teach them. But now, more than ever, I see that God wants me to learn the grace of race not just for them, but also for me. In grace we find unity. In grace we find peace. In grace we belong and love well without offense or tension putting bricks in a wall. The Rabbit Room is becoming a more full picture of the community of God because of the brave, beautiful souls who stepped into that church on October 4th and contributed their gifts so freely and beautifully. I, for one, am grateful and thrilled to be part of a community that truly reflects the creative heart of God. We need one another. All of us are vital to the Kingdom work to which God has called each individual. Together, we are a coat of many colors gracing the broad shoulders of Jesus. This poem is the outpouring of my heart. It is with deep gratitude to my courageous brothers and sisters that I share it with you. From the White Woman in the Room You have no idea how much I needed you, how much I needed to be surrounded by the gaze of your dark brown eyes and to hear the rhythmic cadence of your voices as you read the Word of God with such care and grace. You savored each word, inhaling and letting the revelations drive deep into your soul and mine. Head back, eyes closed as your smile lit up the room with joy. The way you looked at me, this woman whose voice speaks of a different experience, a culture removed for too long from yours. The tightness of the hugs you gave me when I tried to express just how much I needed…this. This room full of aged wisdom and youthful dreams. This circle of determination and strength that refuses to bend under the weight of the world’s angry words and the brokenness that threatens us all. That threatens the Bride. Me, this sponge soaking in the faith you share. This mama who tried to find diversity in community but only scratched the surface. God gave me one friend like you, then three, then five but still not enough. Not enough for the pieces of my heart who needed to be immersed in the waters of a culture I cannot give them. You, beautiful ones, offer rich life. You, with your bright smiles and knowing nods, who love without judgment and embrace without walls, you take us in and love us hard and I sit in awe. Me, this sponge soaking in the wisdom you so freely give. You have no idea how much I needed you. Click here to read more of Jeanine’s writing at her website.

Click through for this week’s edition of Jonny Jimison’s Rabbit Trails. Click here to check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

In case Jonny Jimison’s last edition of Rabbit Trails didn’t quite get the point across, click through for its sequel. Click here to check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

Good news: Jess Ray is releasing a new album called Parallels & Meridians, and she began with its first single last week. I had the opportunity to talk with her about this record a couple months ago, and I was deeply compelled by the idea behind it—songs that represent lines of communication both horizontal and vertical, between fellow humans and between humanity and God. If you are familiar with her previous record, Sentimental Creatures, you know that Jess excels at writing songs of vertical communication with God. But the idea of bringing those two trajectories together and witnessing their points of intersection, just like on a globe—that’s something worth geeking out about. And that’s just what we did in the interview below. Read on to watch her perform her first single and learn about how she understands the intertwining of songwriting, community, faith, and the safe haven of the recording studio. Drew: How did you get into songwriting, music, and then pursuing it as a career? Jess: Well my dad plays guitar and sings, so in middle school I started learning guitar from him. When he first played “Blackbird” by the Beatles, I knew I had to learn how to play acoustic guitar. I would have him play different chords and I’d write down charts for myself to reference. I probably could have saved myself some trouble by reading a book or something, but I had my own system! So I was inspired by him to play guitar, and then I started writing a lot of bad songs. I played a lot of events and was given a lot of good opportunities as a beginner. That’s always what has gotten me to where I am: people pouring into me and supporting me. I continued on that path during college and discovered that I love recording—I feel like I’m addicted to it. So that became a big interest for me as well, just shaping songs into their final form in a studio. The funny thing is that I’ve always wanted to be a professional musician, but it’s only been the last three years or so that I could actually call myself that. It just took that much work on the front end—a good ten years or so—to get to a place where I could really start to see that happen. Drew: So tell me about this time before it became a profession, before the last three years or so. Jess: One of the biggest questions I’ve been asking myself over the years is what does it even look like to make music for a living these days? You have more control than ever. But in other ways, I can’t make a ton of money from CDs or from selling actual music. Yet at the same time, I can reach people who care about exactly the type of music I’m making without a label doing it for me. So there’s more accessibility than ever but it’s an entirely different game, as well. Drew: That’s been the story for several years now, but it feels like every year the content of that story changes so rapidly that the only constant is how much everything is changing. Like, do people even download music anymore? Jess: Yeah! That change was super recent, wasn’t it? It’s shifting all the time. At a certain point, you just have to decide what you’ll get on board with and stick to it. Drew: If you’re addicted to the process of recording, what do you love most about it? Jess: Seeing a song go from its rawest form to its full potential. When I hear someone play a song on acoustic guitar, I love imagining where it can go. And I’m an introverted person, so I’ve learned to make the most out of playing live, but at first I just hated it! I felt so uncomfortable on stage. I’d do okay singing, but speaking behind a microphone has always been weird to me. That’s still the hardest part. So studio time contrasted sharply with playing out, especially earlier on. The studio meant collaboration with others and working towards an end, but not in a live setting. I play a good amount of instruments in a very mediocre way, so I don’t want to perform live on drums or trumpet or something! But I know enough about these instruments that I can enjoy using them to shape songs in the studio. Drew: Is the studio more of a safe place to be curious about sounds? You’re not performing—you’re exploring what you can get out of various instruments. Jess: That’s exactly it. And on this new record I’ve allowed myself to collaborate even more—even if a song isn’t becoming what I thought it would be, I’m trying to let myself go down those unknown roads, trusting my friends and their ideas. Not taking my own ideas too seriously, being more open. Drew: That’s a huge, vulnerable thing to do. Jess: In some of my earlier projects, I didn’t know what I wanted my songs to sound like and I didn’t understand what the producer had in mind, either. I wouldn’t be able to define those things, and the result was that I was often unhappy with the outcome. But the more I know the sounds my friends make and the sounds I’m meant to make, I can loosen up and be less controlling of the music. For me it’s all about being in a safe place with people I can trust and daring to walk down paths I wouldn’t have dared walk down before. Drew: Was Sentimental Creatures your first full length experience of collaboration with others and molding songs into finished recordings? I have made what I feel to be the best music I've ever made, and the truest to who I am, in the past few years. And that has happened in conjunction with having the most community surrounding me. Jess Ray Jess: Yes. And when I showed up with the demos for that record, the guys producing it with me told me we just needed to replicate the demos. I had already added lots of percussion, trumpet, layers of synth, and such, so they sounded like lo-fi versions of finished recordings. So between our low budget and the work I had already put in, it ended up being me and my producer friend Jacob Early tag teaming to bring those demos to life. I would hop around instruments and lay down tracks, and he had faith in my ideas. I shared the role of producer with him and realized that I really loved it. That’s what Sentimental Creatures was. And I made it three years ago—there’s plenty I would go back and change if I could. But the most important thing is that it’s the first project I’ve ever done where I can go back and listen and say, “that sounds like me.” Drew: So you’re producing Parallels & Meridians as well, with Jacob Early? Jess: Yes. In these past three years I’ve become more and more capable of recording by myself, accumulated more recording gear and everything, but I’m so glad I didn’t decide to do that. The checks and balances of teamwork, even the friction of it, is so important. I’m super glad that I got Jacob in on this one. We met together in a studio in Nashville called the Art House. And this was the first time I ever tried to make an album in a set amount of days—we were there for ten days and got about three quarters of it finished in that time. Drew: So tell me about the idea of Parallels & Meridians. Jess: It dawned on me that a lot of the songs, even more than previous projects I’d done, were me talking to other people in my life. Like horizontal lines. But about half the songs were more like Sentimental Creatures, too—dialogues with God. So Parallels & Meridians is a succinct way of summing up those two directions of communication. We’re still digging into all the ways to explain that, but even as I’ve thought about it so far, I’ve been amazed at how much it comes down to the first and second commandments to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. When those two intersect, it forms a cross. The way Jesus is this perfect point between humanity and God, this intersection of horizontal and vertical—there’s so much there. Drew: That’s such a rich framework. It feels like the kind of thing that’s going to keep giving you more iterations of itself. So are there any instances of convergence on the record, where the horizontal and vertical lines come together in one song? Jess: There are a couple songs where people might think I’m singing to my husband, but I actually wrote them addressed to Jesus. I think that ambiguity can be valuable and I’d love for people to interpret the songs however they fit their story. With my writing, it’s often surprising that I’m talking about God—it usually sounds very intimate. At certain times I’ve been worried about how deeply intimate my music sounds, but you know, when it comes to relating to our Creator, is any language really to be reserved only for human relationships? I don’t think any language can be too strong to sing to God. Drew: It’s cool how Jesus being a person allows a conversation with him to be both horizontal and vertical. It’s tempting to categorize God and people cleanly apart—that’s all we’ve ever wanted to do as humans—and the name Parallels & Meridians in some ways sets you up to think those two avenues of connection can be completely distinct. But then— Jess: Psych! Drew: Yeah! They’re totally interwoven. No way to separate them. So one more question, and this is sort of the Rabbit Room question: the whole idea that art and community nourish one another, that they exist within the context of each other—I’d love to hear anything you have to say about how you’ve experienced that to be true. How have you seen those two relate? Jess: I have made what I feel to be the best music I’ve ever made, and the truest to who I am, in the past few years. And that has happened in conjunction with having the most community surrounding me. It doesn’t take dozens and dozens of people, either—five years ago I felt completely alone in Raleigh as an artist. But then I met Christa Wells, and she put me in touch with Taylor Leonhardt. Those two changed that whole story for me. I’ve gone from watching Taylor play open mic nights and thinking, “she’s got such a great voice and some great songs,” to hearing new songs she’s written and being completely blown away and overwhelmed at the depth of what she has to say. It’s not that there are that many of us in Raleigh doing this, but the key is that we’ve become friends who share with one another. And that has become a real focus for us in Raleigh. There wasn’t really anything like that, but now we are that thing! So we get the honor of asking, what can we do to welcome others into this? You can learn more about Jess Ray at her website by clicking here. And be sure to follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Spotify.

Chances are, if you’ve been hanging around the blog, you’ve seen something about our new Podcast Network. Needless to say, we’re elated about this new avenue for sharing meaningful conversations—this network will be home to several promising podcasts, including The Artist’s Creed (bringing creativity into dialogue with the Apostles’ Creed), a best-of past Hutchmoot sessions compiled into Hutchmoot: The Podcast, and even The Membership, a podcast centering around the work of Wendell Berry (oh yes we did). Well, one of our new podcasts, led by Drew Miller, is called The Second Muse: How Songs Become Songs, and a new episode has released today. The title of this podcast is taken from a Wendell Berry quote in which he references two distinct muses: the Muse of Inspiration, “who gives us inarticulate visions and desires,” and the Muse of Realization, “who returns again and again to say, ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.'” It is this second Muse of Realization with which we concern ourselves in The Second Muse, specifically in the context of songwriting and record producing. In each episode, Drew interviews a different artist along with their producer about a song that gave them a great deal of trouble, whether in the writing or recording process. Episode One featured Andrew Peterson and Ben Shive discussing Andrew’s song “Maybe Next Year”—in this newest episode we get to know another formidable artist-producer duo: Jordy Searcy and Lucas Morton. Jordy Searcy has graced us with his presence at two Local Shows here in Nashville, and in no uncertain terms, he brought the house down both times. He is an artist who seems to have it all: an outstanding voice (both literally and as an artist and writer), sharp lyrical wit, silky smooth guitar riffs, and the sort of stage presence that compels all within earshot to listen. His EP Dark In The City, thanks to the gentle and seemingly infallible musical intuition of producer and friend Lucas Morton, embodies Jordy’s punchy style with an ease and joy that is evident from the recordings. This summer, Jordy and Lucas sat down with Drew to discuss the song that most quickly hushes any crowd: “Explaining Jesus.” Jordy reflected on the role spirituality has played in songwriting, Lucas described the way that their choice to record to tape influenced the final track, and all three discussed the instrumental components of the track, soloing various elements and commenting on them along the way. You can listen to Episode Two of The Second Muse here. Episode One with Andrew Peterson and Ben Shive is available here. Check out The Second Muse on Apple Podcasts here. And click here to visit the Rabbit Room Podcast Network.

[Editor’s note: This year at Hutchmoot, John Cal not only fed us with delicious food; he nourished us with beautiful stories, providing context for each meal and what it meant to him. What follows is the first of his speeches, given a week ago today—we will be posting the others, one by one, over the next couple weeks. Enjoy.] I had been to New York three whole times, but this was my father’s first time, and he was clearly out of place. He was afraid, from the first second he stepped off the plane, to ride the subway, to get in a cab. The streets were too crowded for him as we walked down 5th Avenue. He worried about pickpockets and street performers and people dressed as hot dogs handing out pamphlets. Meals were hardest. At restaurants, he tried to get me to order for him—a request for help which, in my snobbery, I refused. So he eventually just started saying, “I’d like a steak,” when the server would come to take his order. No glance at the menu, which posed its own sort of problem. “Well done,” he’d say, hoping there weren’t any follow up questions. “I want it gray and burnt,” he’d sometimes add. I was so annoyed with how uncool my father was. At the time, I was living in a cabin and working at a youth camp deep in the middle of the Deschutes National Forest. Besides a few others who also lived on campus, the nearest human beings were twenty or more miles away, so in my twenties I had gotten in the habit of going to New York once a year as a respite from the solitude and loneliness of the woods; a place to remember who I was, that I grew up in a high rise, that I thought myself a city kid, to feel sidewalk beneath my feet, to revel in the smell of metal, and gyros, the sound of high heels on pavement, the pulse of the S Train beneath my feet. But while New York was a comfort for me, a reminder of who I was (or who I wanted to be), for dad it was all new, and different enough that the peculiarities are what stuck out compared to his life in Hawaii. For my father it was an adventure—new, unbridled, and yes, sometimes scary. So he ordered steak, over and over, maybe half a dozen times over the week we were in Manhattan. On our second to last night in the city, I reserved a table at Les Halles, an easygoing French bistro on Park and 14th, which was, oddly enough, known for their steaks. But shortly after we were seated, in classic New York fashion, tiny tables and elbows just barely grazing the people sitting next to you, my father was confronted with a plate of food. His eyes perked and his head turned as it followed the scent across the dining room. “What is that?” he asked in wonder, the order going to a party a few tables down from us, but still in eyeshot. Somehow, so often, it begins with a meal—the Civil Rights Movement, a year at Hogwarts, Jesus's first miracle; a little sustenance to make us brave, something delicious to fuel us for the challenge ahead, something comforting to remind us that we are surrounded by friends. John Cal It was cassoulet, braised pork and chicken, stewed for hours with tarbais beans and tomatoes. Cassoulet in French refers to the deep earthenware vessel in which the dish is cooked. Cassoulet, a casserole, comfort food from across the sea, was for my father pure risk, pure adventure. It is a meal for the comforts of a languid Sunday afternoon, a cold January evening, a gathering, a coming home. But also adventure: chicken or goose or duck confited with bacon or mutton or sausages from Toulouse, lingot, haricot blanc, herb de Provence—flavors and ingredients that don’t often frequent our tables. We skirt this line at Hutchmoot: comfort and adventure. You each come to the table with something different, a different hope, a different expectation, but we all chose this: to come here, to be together. But in the end, my father didn’t choose to order it. In mid-September 1960, four college students, three black and one white, sat down at a segregated whites-only lunch counter in Louisiana. The week before, over bowls of gumbo, they planned their protest. “Gumbo makes people braver,” said chef Leah Chase of what came to be known as the CORE 4. “It satisfies the soul and gets you talking.” Their challenge to social convention was to enjoy a meal together at McCrory’s on Canal Street in New Orleans, but in their defiant act of friendship they were charged and convicted of criminal mischief in a case that would eventually go all the way to the Supreme Court. “All I wanted to do was have coffee with my friends,” said Sydney Goldfinch, one of the four arrested in what is noted as a key moment in the fight against segregation. Somehow, so often, it begins with a meal—the Civil Rights Movement, a year at Hogwarts, Jesus’s first miracle; a little sustenance to make us brave, something delicious to fuel us for the challenge ahead, something comforting to remind us that we are surrounded by friends. And how privileged we are, to be able to sit at this lunch counter together, to sup and be satisfied, to not only see that the Lord is good, but to, as the Psalmist writes, taste that He is good as well. But I was too busy being pretentious to enjoy the company, to revel in the togetherness with my father. I inadvertently chose segregation instead. “Cass- Cass- Cassoulet?” he said as the waiter took our order. “Excellent choice, sir,” the waiter replied, dressed in a pressed white shirt and pin-striped waist apron. “Cote du beouf, bernaise—on the side, frites, and frisee salad for me,” I said—my usual order at Les Halles when I was in my twenties and the annoyance of my pretension was at its peak. Then as the waiter began walking away, my father called out, “Does that come with rice?” Rice. Medium grain calrose rice, granularily speaking. We have it so often in Hawaii, with nearly every meal. With scrambled eggs, and spam, and teriyaki chicken, yes, of course, but I’ve also seen it just as easily come alongside pancakes, or spaghetti. “Uh, no sir. It doesn’t come with rice,” the waiter replied, confused at the request. “Would you like a side of rice pilaf?” It was a nice gesture, but it wasn’t the same, and in the confusion and panic, my father called out, “Steak. Never mind, I’ll just have a steak, well-done. Gray and burnt,” he added. Now, years later, I wish I had helped. Les Halles was Anthony Bourdain’s restaurant. In his book Kitchen Confidential he wrote: “For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we’ve all had to become disappears, when we’re confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.” So let us begin Hutchmoot with a meal, one to make us brave, one that connects us to the grand continuum of one another. Cassoulet, for my father: braised chicken and pork from the South of France—a taste of home from across the sea, comforting and adventurous, full of possibility and risk. Comfort or adventure; choose what you will. Either will do. I hope that this meal reminds you to help one another navigate all that’s ahead. I hope that as we sup together these next few days, as we are confronted with something as simple as plates of food, that you find yourself in awe of the many tastes of our great and mysterious Lord. I hope that however you came, whoever you are, whatever the reason you are here, even if, heaven forbid, you’re a bratty twenty-three year-old desperately pretending to be a New Yorker, you are able to, if only for a moment, or a second, remember that you are loved and welcomed; that as you drink from the well, your thirst will be satisfied.

Since the inception of the Rabbit Room community, we’ve believed that real relationship requires more than merely an online exchange of ideas. The last decade of creative work has taught us that an exchange of ideas needs to be accompanied by shared laughter, by the satisfaction of a shared meal, by the joy of friendship. We’ve realized the power of bringing big ideas into three-dimensional space inhabited by flesh and blood people. In other words, we believe in the importance of place. To that end, we’ve dreamed of the day when the Rabbit Room would be embodied in a physical space of its own, moving these hopes from theory into practice. And now we have that opportunity. Imagine, just south of Nashville—a city brimming with authors and artists and musicians—a beautiful farmhouse on four acres. There’s a group of writers meeting every Tuesday. On Thursday nights there’s an intimate concert. On Wednesday evenings there’s a Bible study with a potluck dinner. When theologians or authors pass through town there are symposiums and lectures, open to the community. Some days people drop in to browse the library and sit on the porch. It’s close enough to Nashville to be part of the community, but just far enough away to provide a real sense of peace. From an operational standpoint, the Rabbit Room is bursting at the seams. With more than thirty books published by Rabbit Room Press, we need storage and a shipping office. With the Local Show and Hutchmoot and the Podcast Network and all the other spokes on the wheel, we need office space for staff and room for growth. After researching the area, the board determined that renovating North Wind Manor, a 130-year-old farmhouse, was the best and most financially responsible way to accomplish all these goals. The house has been our base of operations for three years now, but after dealing with plumbing disasters, leaks in the roof, an utter lack of insulation (you can actually see your breath in the winter), and an insurmountable list of repairs, the board determined that the only way to make it work was a deep renovation. When we’re finished, the house will not only be a tremendous help from an operational standpoint (saving money on storage and leasing office space); it will help us fulfill our mission to foster spiritual formation and Christ-centered community by hosting an array of events and providing hospitality. We interviewed several contractors and landed on Israel Holladay, a Christian with a passion for the Rabbit Room’s ministry. Because the Rabbit Room is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit ministry, your contribution to the renovation of North Wind Manor is tax deductible—and not only that, a very generous anonymous donor has offered a matching grant of $160,000! That means every dollar is doubled until we reach $320,000. The Lord has led us to this place. We’re ready to get to work. We’re ready to open the doors and be a blessing to the community. We hope you’ll consider helping us build something that will last, something that will serve the Kingdom for years and years to come. Click here to contribute to the renovation of North Wind Manor.

Let us now collectively exhale. If you’ve taken three or four spontaneous naps since this weekend, please know you’re not alone. I write from North Wind Manor after our weekly staff meeting—I believe all our eyelids are a little heavier than they were a week ago, but our hearts are full to overflowing. The Gray Havens shared some delightful brand new songs with us, one of which involved us finding out that Dave Radford can shred the trumpet. We joined in celebration of our beloved Ben Shive, who was awarded the first ever Resonator Award. Andrew Peterson led us in singing of Christ’s resurrection. The Tokens Show taught us about the sacraments and their role in daily life. John Cal blew our minds repeatedly, both with his delicious food and his profound stories. Andy Crouch delivered a stirring call for artists to forgive and love the church. Dave Trout introduced us to amazing new music (he’s very good at that!). Stephen Trafton truly brought Paul’s letter to the Ephesians to life, reciting it not only from memory, but from the deepest resonances of his heart. I love to pay attention to themes that arise of their own accord, from sessions and songs and stories. This year I picked up a lot of discussion around “immortality projects” and the ways that we humans try to outlive ourselves and make our marks on the world—bringing these coping mechanisms to light in dialogue with the gospel and what it has to say about death. Did you pick up on that as well? What else did you pick up on? Now is the time to share your stories. There are already several blog posts about this year’s Hutchmoot going around Facebook—please link to them here in the comments! We would love to hear from you about your experience of this weekend, what made an impact, and where you sensed renewal of life throughout our time together. So comment away, and thank you to everyone who came and who prayed for those who came. It was such a gift to be with you. Photo by Mark Geil

The food is cooking. The sessions are set. The soundcheck is underway. Folders are printed. Art and books and other fine wares are on display. Surprises are in store. There’s a Hutchmoot at hand. Travel safely. Arrive in good cheer. We’re going to have a fine weekend. In the words of Robert Farrar Capon: I wish you well. May your table be graced with lovely women and good men. May you drink well enough to drown the envy of youth in the satisfactions of maturity… May there be singing at our table before the night is done, and old, broad jokes to fling at the stars and tell them we are men. We are great, my friend; we shall not be saved for trampling that greatness under foot… Come then; leap upon these mountains, skip upon these hills and heights of earth. The road to Heaven does not run from the world but through it. The longest Session of all is no discontinuation of these sessions here, but a lifting of them all by priestly love. It is a place for men, not ghosts—for the risen gorgeousness of the New Earth and for the glorious earthiness of the True Jerusalem. Eat well then. Between our love and His Priesthood, He makes all things new. Our Last Home will be home indeed. Until then? We Hutchmoot. (Verbed.)

At Hutchmoot, there are so many ways that we offer ourselves to one another: through stories, songs, conversations in the hallway, listening intently, and sharing meals, to name only a few. The etymological roots of the word liturgy suggest that it is a “work of and for the people”—in this sense, every Hutchmoot is one big liturgy composed of countless small ones. Every logistical detail and fleeting decision weave together to form one shared work of celebration, communion, and hopefully worship. That’s the goal, anyway. And as lofty as that sounds, it is a goal achieved not by impressive feats of artistic prowess or piercing insights, but by the smallest, most mundane kindnesses we can give to each other. Hospitality, vulnerability, community—all these words at risk of trendiness—the ideals they represent come to life in the nooks and crannies of our days. As in any vast, coordinated effort like this, every one of us brings our hopes and fears, our griefs and gifts to the table. It’s a beautiful and fragile thing to gather—in being loved, we risk being known. So whether you will be joining us in person this year or not, we ask that you would join us in prayer for the many souls being brought together. Below you’ll find a liturgy from Every Moment Holy that may assist in your prayer. A Liturgy to Begin a Purposeful Gathering Leader: And so are we gathered here, uniquely in all of history, we particular people in this singular time and place. People: Accomplish your purposes among us, O God. Tune our hearts to the voice of your Spirit. Wake us to be present to you and to one another in these shared hours we are given. For it is you, O Lord, who have so gathered us from our various places, and you alone who know our hearts and our needs. Among us are some who arrive anxious, some who are lonely, some who suffer pain or sorrow. May we in our joys find grace to enter the sorrows of others. Among us are some who arrive rejoicing, hearts made light by good news, good health, glad anticipation. May we in our sorrows find grace to embrace the joys of others. Let us prize these moments and care for one another deeply—for each of us, and our relationships to one another, are precious and fleeting. Amen. This poster was made by Stephen Crotts. You can view more of his work here.

Click through for this week’s edition of Jonny Jimison’s Rabbit Trails. Click here to check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

The most important thing in your life is not what you do; it’s who you become. That’s what you will take into eternity. – Dallas Willard Greetings, Rabbitarians! It brings me great joy to once more invite you to hop on over to the Renovaré Book Club, where we are about to begin a new season. This year we’ll be reading together: Book One: Becoming Dallas Willard: The Formation of a Philosopher, Teacher, and Christ Follower, written by Dallas’s close friend Gary Moon. The story of how Dallas grew into the philosophy professor who made a huge Kingdom dent with books like The Divine Conspiracy and Renovation of the Heart is fascinating and hope-sparking. Gary Moon himself will be facilitating our journey through this book. Book Two: Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies, by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung. Everyone I know who has read this book has said it was a game changer in terms of how they detected and dealt with vice in their own lives. We’re pleased to have the author herself guiding us through this transformative work. Book Three: The Cloud of Unknowing. Sometimes it seems like this enigmatic classic is a bit like Woodstock—everyone claims to have had a point of contact with it, but few can remember the details. One of our favo(u)rite Brits, James Catford, will be helping us give this book a real go. (For those of you who have no idea what Woodstock was, think Coachella, but muddier.) Book Four: Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion, by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. Many of you may know Jonathan through his social justice work with Shane Claiborne (and others), and especially through his contributions to Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. We’re very glad Jonathan agreed to lead us through this important new offering…a book for such a time as this. Are you feeling drawn to this opportunity? The first week of reading begins October 1st. Membership in the Club includes weekly guides through the books, exclusive resources from the authors/facilitators, online community, and, in about 74 (and growing) locations, the option to join or start an in-person discussion group. Good things happen when Rabbitarians and Renovarians meet. We hope you will join us in the Club.

I wrote this three summers ago, a few months after I had graduated college. I was in the middle of a real sea-change, a marked shift in the way I began to approach my own emotions and my own story. It was as though God had been asking me to wake up and finally, I was able to fight through the sleepiness and open up my eyes. This piece was born out of those moments of gracious eye-opening. Sometimes people ingest something that they shouldn’t, like something poisonous, and the only solution is to vomit. Ipecac syrup comes in handy for this. I’ve (thankfully) never had to endure that process, but I hear that’s the way it goes. The bad thing in you has to come out somehow and there are times that vomiting is the only way. It isn’t pretty, but it’s effective. Afterwards, though the process was painful and gross and altogether unpleasant, you are better for it. It is vaguely more complicated when it comes to ingesting something that isn’t quite physical. Lies, maybe. Untruths about the world and my place in it. There is no ipecac syrup for unwanted internalized lies. “We are what we eat” applies to more than just food. It applies to words, both spoken and unspoken. It applies to actions. It applies to lack of action. I take in those things, internalize them, and sometimes that’s the end of it. There is no intake form and no data collection about whether that was the best thing to ingest. I just take it in and it becomes a part of me. On my worst days, I take those thoughts at face value. Someone said that about me? Someone treated me in such a way that reflects they think this about who I am? It must be true. On my best days, I take thoughts captive and hold them up to the person of Christ. Does this thing that was given to me (this thought, this word, this feeling) reflect the character of the God I know? Is it true, noble, right, pure, lovely? Is it patient? Is it kind? If not, I don’t want it. I show it the door. I have suspected for a while that there are some ways in which I operate that are not God’s best for me. There are behaviors that I have learned, truths that I have exchanged for lies, and general understandings of my existence in this world that do not line up with what God tells me about what He is like and what He is all about. Some of this stems from my own sin. Some of this stems from the sin of others of which I have been on the receiving end. Most of this stems from the reality that the world is just not as it should be. We are so far from Eden. There are ways in which I think my body has learned to cope with the poison, whether this poison manifests in the form of my own destructive self-talk, or works itself out in my sometimes less-than-healthy behaviors towards other people. I have manipulated myself into being able to either hide these realities away, so that I am the only one privy to their existence, or brush them off as just some sort of manufacturing error, merely a glitch in my personality, merely an inconvenient reality, but one that is here to stay. And now, in the thick of the heat and of the humidity and of the dog-days-of-a-Tennessee-summer, God has shown me my poison for what it is. I know this poison, these lies, quite well. I know the taste and I've become comfortable with the sting as I choke it down. I might even call it an addiction. It is not uncommon to become attached to the very thing that causes us harm because at least therein lies some consistency. Kelsey Miller It turns out that not all of the words, thoughts, and actions I have ingested were for my good. Some of them, even from people I loved, served to harm me. Not every word that has been spoken over me has been good, true, or beautiful. Some, in fact, were the exact opposite. Some of those words and actions were twisted to appear as such from a distance, drawing me in with the hope that they would be as life-giving as they promised, but the closer I got, the more evident it became that they were merely counterfeit in light of the real thing. Some words I have ingested are poisonous. Lacking that knowledge, I had taken them in, considered them as facts, and allowed them to shape me accordingly. They have bred in me behaviors and instilled in me patterns of thinking that I no longer even question. But in reality, they are wrong, unhealthy, and leading me further away from the fullness of life that Christ has given to us. They have to go. To be honest, I am not sure I would have made them leave myself. I know this poison, these lies, quite well. I know the taste and I’ve become comfortable with the sting as I choke it down. I might even call it an addiction. It is not uncommon to become attached to the very thing that causes us harm because at least therein lies some consistency. But though reliable, the poison is destroying me, numbing me to joy, love, and grace. And yet I turn my back on these things, preferring the intoxication of my own self-hatred. But God in His infinite mercy, having already waged and won the war for my soul, has led me forth in a battle against this poison. And though I imagine He too hoped there would be another way, He knows, like I do, that sometimes ipecac is the best answer and the only choice left is to hold on tight and vomit up the bad stuff. It feels especially brutal because it is a slow exile. It doesn’t happen all at once. There is no quick or practical ipecac solution to this problem. This makes sense because it didn’t happen all at once. It took years for this poison to become a part of me. I took more than one swig. In practice, the obedience of this expulsion has looked like a whole lot of truth telling and a whole lot of crying, often simultaneous. I have spent the better part of the last month crying about one thing or another, as God continues to give me the boldness and courage to say out loud what I have kept locked away for months or even years. It turns out there is some deep emotion surrounding telling your secrets. But especially for me, as a human who is so connected and in tune with my body as it is, there is grace in crying these tears in particular. As I voice the worst stuff, as I give names to the poisons that I have ingested, the physicality of crying stands in place of vomiting. It isn’t pretty. But I can feel the poison being expelled from my body. I don’t have to guess. It is gone. It is indeed finished. I can only hope it stays away for good. It feels fitting that all of this would happen in the thick of Ordinary Time, the glorious majority of the liturgical calendar. Here, we merely rest in the ordinariness of our lives, trusting that this too can be an incubator for God to do His best work. Embracing this, I hope to act in direct contrast to the thought that I must be doing something impressive for God to take notice. So, for now, I’ll do the ordinary things. I’ll keep going to counseling. I’ll keep communing with my people. I’ll keep telling my secrets. And though I had hoped this was the case all along, I am now able to see it in practice: He stays with me in sickness and in health. For better or for worse. He’s in it for the long haul, the whole haul, vomiting and all, and even when I grow weary of me, He is patient and faithful. There is no ipecac for the emotional poison we ingest. But there is Jesus, and He knows our insides and our outsides and the sides we have been told to hide away. He is privy to our pain, mindful of our suffering, and He knows what we need if only we would have the courage to ask. Artwork credit: Energy Field & Water by Nancy Reyner Acrylic on canvas

[Editor’s note: This piece was written by our friend Mary McCampbell, who we are excited to have at Hutchmoot this year. Enjoy, and be sure to check out her session if you plan to attend.] A few years ago, when preparing notes for a class discussion on Terence Malick’s 2011 film, The Tree of Life, I began to feel very uncomfortable about typing notes and viewing the film simultaneously. I realized that Malick’s film, which pushes the viewer into a disorienting space where he or she must explore what the film’s opening voiceover calls the “two ways to live”—the way of nature and the way of grace—demanded my complete attention. Watching the film felt like participation in a sacred act, and my rather clinical academic analysis seemed like a violation of sorts. Our attentiveness, or lack thereof, to the 'glory' of the film tells us something about our own sojourning, about the particular kind of attentiveness, amidst both pain and beauty, that is formative in the development of our own spirituality. Mary McCampbell The film is both abstract and concrete as it invites us to consider the relationship between its macro-narrative—God, the creation of the world, and the moral structure of the universe—and its micro-narrative of the O’Brien family as they grapple with questions of suffering, justice, and the knowledge of God. Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) follows the self-serving, purely pragmatic “way of nature” until he finally realizes that “I dishonored it all and did not notice the glory.” O’Brien learns that, in order to love his family, God, and creation, he must notice its complexity and allow himself to be ushered into a space of awe and wonder. The Tree of Life, a highly conceptual, impressionistic coming of age film focused particularly on the internal landscape and spiritual journey of Jack O’Brien, causes its viewers to think about their own relationship with beauty and its ultimate source. Our attentiveness, or lack thereof, to the “glory”of the film tells us something about our own sojourning, about the particular kind of attentiveness, amidst both pain and beauty, that is formative in the development of our own spirituality. By forcing his viewers into a sometimes uncomfortable state of confusion, Malick often leads us into a state of wonder. The film demands patience, contemplation, attentiveness; and these are things that many moviegoers, nurtured on quick and easy Hollywood feel-good formulas, are not ready to give to it. Sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno claimed that popular art has been “standardized;” by this, he means that what he called “the culture industry” provides simple, formulaic “art” forms that are created in order to tell us what we want and then sell it back to us. In this sense, we are formed in the image of our culture as we find comfort and false sustenance in these things that we have been trained to think we need and love. Perhaps this is one reason we (the American public) find ourselves so uncomfortable in front of abstraction that cannot be understood immediately. In a sense, we are culturally trained to become Mr. O’Brien; we learn that the most important things are instant and formulaic, giving us a false sense of fulfillment because they meet one of two goals: increasing our power or entertaining us. These are the standardized norms of mass American culture, and anything that challenges these norms is often simplistically labeled “boring” or “weird.” How fascinating it is that Mr. O’Brien is played by Brad Pitt, the twinkling star of so many mass produced Hollywood flicks. Interestingly, many moviegoers felt led astray, cheated, and angry when seeing this film; they wanted their money back. But Pitt’s Mr. O’Brien teaches us to be humble in front of the mystery of both beauty and suffering; he teaches us to become like children and re-enter a state of wonder: “I wanted to be loved because I was great; a big man. I’m nothing. Look at the glory around us; trees, birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all, and didn’t notice the glory. I’m a foolish man.” This article was originally published at Relief Journal and can be viewed by clicking here.

If you’re like me, you have some childhood and early adolescent memories of listening to certain songs that gave you a magical impression of seamlessness, as if they had always existed in all their wholeness, just the way they met your ears. You may remember exactly where you were and what day it was when you first had an experience like this with music—it may very well be that these memories act as threshold moments marking your awakening to the sheer scope of music. I was in the backseat of my parents’ Pacifica during an excursion to Nashville, my big sister riding shotgun and my dad driving, when he turned on the radio to Lightning 100. They were playing “Smoothie Song” by Nickel Creek. It was love at first listen; it is no overstatement to say I’ve never been the same. That moment shaped my taste for thoughtful, vibrant, harmonically inventive acoustic music. On vacation in Florida, my sister picked up a weird-looking CD, immediately recognizable to my eager, thirteen year-old eyes as a token of college coolness that I was surely on the cusp of “getting” if it weren’t for my premature ears. It was called Come On Feel the Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens. She put it in the CD player and I recall feeling overstimulated by a bright density of kaleidoscopic melodies bursting from the speakers. When I was in eighth grade, I was in my bedroom one evening reading Mat Kearney’s blog (because that’s obviously what you do when you’re in eighth grade) and I stumbled on his recommendation of a new Nashville artist named Brooke Waggoner. I clicked the link to her MySpace page and listened to “Hush If You Must” through my headphones. An elaborate, gorgeous strings section followed her piano through a non sequitur change in time signature immediately after the first chorus; I encountered for the first time a melding of through-composed classical music with pop sensibilities. I’m certain that this sort of experience can be had with other forms of art, too, but there’s something distinctly timeless, inalterable, and enduring about a pristine recording—every sound occupies just the space it must as if by some cosmic moral obligation, and to think of a recording like that in the process of being made feels almost scandalizing. To consider that there was a moment in time when Jeff Buckley sang the final take of his song “Grace”—or his legendary version of “Hallelujah,” for that matter—feels like an irreverent insult against the completeness of those recordings in their final form. And perhaps it’s just that characteristic of completion that I’m trying to articulate. Music, as a uniquely time-bound art, has the astounding ability to lift us out of the sequential time of which it consists and into an eternal sort of time for which it reaches. And in an age proliferated by studio recordings, the chiseled changelessness of the music we consume only augments this feature. Sadly, as we grow up, we learn to spot the seams, even in what first appeared to be exhaustively seamless to our younger, more impressionable selves. Alas, I’ll never forget when I heard a moment in Buckley’s “Lilac Wine” when two vocal takes were clearly cut and spliced together. Or even, maybe more subtly, the moment when I first thought, “I’m not sure I love every little thing about Sufjan Stevens’ songwriting anymore.” As we grow and mature, the scales fall off our eyes, we peer behind the curtain, and we see the toil of our favorite art: the hidden struggle of incompletion. Our standards rise higher. More and more easily, fresh new music stales. Which makes it that much more impressive when we encounter exceptions—when a song so captures our imagination that once again, we do not see through the magic to the artifice beneath, but are, against our better judgment, transported to another time and place, one that seems always to have been there waiting for us. It was December of my first year out of college and I was an intern with little work to do and much time to fill when I pulled my headphones out of my backpack and listened to Remember Us To Life by Regina Spektor. And I might as well have been eleven years old again in the backseat of my parents’ car. The entire album successfully evaded each of my watchful dragons, who, I might add, are very watchful. Much joy has been stolen from me by the watchfulness of my personal dragons, but, like judges with insufficient evidence, they shrugged their shoulders and pronounced Spektor’s record spotless. Every lyric, every melody, even every instrumentation and production choice shimmered with the completion of a piece of art fully, but not overly, wrought. I felt like Mary Berry confronted with the possibility of a perfect pastry. This was a good, good bake. A previous album by Regina Spektor called Far had enamored me when I was in tenth grade, but in the years following, I began to discover elements of her craft that left me craving more. Certain songs survived my criticism, but others seemed, to return to my Mary Berry analogy, a bit under-baked. Spektor has described her style as “surreal”—her lyrics fit together not with the logic of wakefulness, but of dreams, where abrupt and fantastical images demand not intellectual explanation, but affective response. Consequently, Spektor’s music has always struck me as gimmicky at worst (she makes playful seal noises in her song “Folding Chair” and overdoes this weird, abrasive breathing thing in her otherwise gorgeous song “Open”) and strikingly perceptive at best (as in classics like “Samson” or her breathtaking song “Laughing With”). However, in Remember Us To Life, Spektor’s penchant for giving voice to the pre-conscious stirrings of our imaginations has developed to full maturity—and for the first time, her voice as an artist has been expertly supported by an intricate web of instruments, produced to completion. The album’s cohesion is established by this thread of her dreamlike imagination woven inseparably with a production style that brings it to life. The result is an experience, both sonic and lyrical, of purposeful fragments, seemingly unrelated, swimming hazily around like the day’s fleeting memories flashing in your mind as you drift off to sleep. “Bleeding Heart” tells the tale of adolescent angst with poignant accuracy: Someday you’ll grow up and then you’ll forget All of the pain you endured Until you walk by a sad pair of eyes And up will come back all the hurt And you’ll see their pain as they look away And you want to help, but there’s just no way ‘Cause you won the war, so it’s not your turn But everything inside still burns “The Trapper and the Furrier” is a cultural critique whose music embodies the primal sins that its lyrics condemn: The lawyer and the pharmacist went walking in paradise And all the sick were around them with fevers unbreaking Crying and bleeding and coughing and shaking And arms outstretched, prescription collecting “Obsolete” describes with arresting clarity deep fears of emptiness: This is how I feel right now: Obsolete manuscript No one needs, no one reads Pages lost, incomplete No one knows what it means The climax of the album, “Sellers of Flowers,” unfolds like a cryptic riddle pleading our human need for life beyond death, for meaning beyond banal evil: The sellers of flowers buy up old roses They pull off dead petals like old heads of lettuce And sell them as new ones for cheaper and fairer But they die by the morning, so who is the winner? Not the roses, not the buyers, not the sellers Maybe winter In moments when my ears are tired, when the familiarity of the most common musical tropes obfuscates my ability to hear and resonate with even the truest of songs, it is helpful to remember that what I need is not—contrary to popular belief and the spirit of our age—more novelty. I don’t need a word or a melody that I’ve never heard. Tolkien himself famously and unfashionably argued not for freshly-paved roads of originality, but for the well-trod paths of convention. It is not the tree’s fault that we have forgotten the wonder of trees; it is rather our eyes that have grown weary of the seeing. In Remember Us To Life, Regina Spektor has awoken me to the sweet desire for a world I have never visited, but which is a truer, realer version of the world as I know it. The magic of this record is not in newness, but in a gracing of tried and true conventions with unwearied ears. The normal realities of daily life—the images and memories, the desires, the fears—are all there in recognizable form, but portrayed by a narrator searching for meaning, for answers, for the slightest trace of a world more lasting than our own. It is this commitment to the integrity of her dream-like songs that gives Spektor’s album a lasting beauty—the kind of beauty that reminds us to hope for our very own world made seamless and whole.

The great thing about Google is that it takes you straight to the information you want to find (or, in any case, straight to the information that the Keeper of the Algorithm wants you to find). The great thing about every other method of organizing and/or delivering information is that it doesn’t take you straight to the information you want to find. Back when I was walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways, if you wanted to know something you had to go to the library and get a book. And in order to get that book, you had to walk past a lot of other books. This quaint fact accounts for a good 20% of my education. Fetching a book about, say, Shakespeare required me to scan whole shelves of other books about Shakespeare—books I didn’t even know I wanted or needed to read. In graduate school it wasn’t unusual for me to emerge from the stacks with six or seven books, but not the one I originally went looking for. You don’t know what you don’t know, and sometimes the only way to find out is through that highly inefficient, often inconvenient process known as wandering around. But as G. K. Chesterton observed, “an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.” I thought of those old pre-Internet wanderings yesterday when my children were discussing the French and Spanish words for ham. Back before Merriam-Webster.com was a thing, I used to noodle around in the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED. The OED is a miracle. (The Professor and the Madman, by the way, is a fascinating little book about how the OED came to be.) The OED, according to its own website, is “the most complete record of the English language ever assembled.” At twenty volumes, I should think so. I have the “compact” edition, which crams all the entries from twenty reasonable-sized volumes into two huge folio volumes, each three inches thick and weighing fifteen pounds together. Either of the two would be the biggest book in my house. They come with a magnifying glass. The dictionary websites are incredibly efficient. You want to know what a word means or where it came from? You’re only a couple of seconds away. Not so with the OED. The OED is a place to ramble (especially if your eyes are still young). One of my favorite rambles came when I was curious about the words gamble and gambol. I figured they both came from whatever root gave us the word game, since to gamble is to play games of chance, and to gambol about is to run and jump and play games, probably in a meadow. I was curious as to how and when the meaning diverged between playing dangerous games on the one hand and playing innocent games on the other. That is exactly the kind of information that is on offer in the OED. But the OED surprised me. The two words, though homophones, are unrelated. Gamble does ultimately derive from the Anglo-Saxon root that gave us game. But gambol has a more interesting history that leads down quite a rabbit trail. But why, you may ask, is it necessary to know these things about ham and gamboling? That one is easy to answer: It is not necessary. But the unnecessary is the most important thing about us. Jonathan Rogers Gambol is more closely related to the word ham than to the word gamble. The late Latin camba or gamba means leg. Hence the French jambon, the Spanish jamon, and the English ham—the cut of meat that comes from the leg of a hog. This root is also the source of the now-obsolete gam, meaning the leg of a human being, and especially an adult female human being, as in “The palooka elbowed the wise guy and said, ‘Get a load of the gams on that dame.’” To gambol is to kick up one’s legs. A form of the word originally came into the language from the French gambade, which describes the curveting of a horse. The same root, gamba, also gives us jamb, the leg that holds up a doorway, and iamb, a metrical foot of poetry (as in iambic pentameter). A gambrel roof is that barn-style roof that has an extra bend between the roofline and the eave, like the bend of a horse’s back leg. I’ll conclude this discourse with the word gambit (not to be confused with gamut, which has its own fascinating story). A gambit is a stratagem or a calculated move. The word is often associated with chess, in which a player will put a pawn at risk in order to gain an advantage against an opponent. So where do you suppose the word gambit comes from? Is it more closely related to gamble and game, or to gambol and ham? You would think gamble, wouldn’t you? A stratagem is always a gamble, a risk. And chess, of course, is a game. But before gambit referred to a chess strategy, it referred a wrestling strategy—the strategy of gaining an advantage over one’s opponent by tripping up his legs. The Italians called it a gambetto. Thanks for indulging me (if, indeed, you are still indulging me). You had more efficient ways to use your time than to meander along the various paths that derive from the late Latin word gamba. But this letter is a celebration of inefficiency. When we don’t know what we don’t know, an efficient search often turns out to be a case of making better time to a place you don’t need to be. I am highly grateful for the efficiency of Google and Merriam-Webster.com. I used both to check my facts about gamble, gambol, ham, and gambit. But without that old inefficient, inconvenient (and time-honored) tradition of flipping through a dusty book, I don’t suppose I would have ever known about the connections between those words. I take that back: one could definitely discover those connections via the Internet, but only if one were using the Internet inefficiently. But why, you may ask, is it necessary to know these things about ham and gamboling? That one is easy to answer: It is not necessary. But the unnecessary is the most important thing about us. The ever-delightful Jonathan Rogers now has a brand new platform for his online courses! Check it out by clicking here, and see if there’s a course you’d like to enroll in. It’s fancy and impressive.

When I tell people I’ve written a book about death, hands down, the most common response I receive is laughter. I take no offense, though. It’s not a cruel, mocking sort of laughter. We joke about death by instinct, the way an eight year old laughs when someone passes gas. It’s socially unacceptable, therefore hilarious. Maybe it’s wishful thinking on my part, but I take this response as confirmation of a major reason I wrote the book in the first place. Our society has placed a taboo over honest, straightforward talk about death. Perhaps without realizing it, many of us have accepted an unspoken agreement not to go there. One of the first writers to describe this taboo was a British sociologist named Geoffrey Gorer, writing back in the 1950s. In an essay called “The Pornography of Death,” Gorer suggested that death had become to the twentieth century what sex was to the nineteenth century. Even as the prominence of sex broadened—in conversation, in mainstream television, in what kids are allowed to see and know—death was pushed further out of sight and out of mind. (“The Pornography of Death,” Encounter, October, 1955, 49–52). This taboo on death is something we impose on our culture, wittingly or not. But the taboo also imposes something on us that we ought to recognize and take seriously. It distorts our view of reality and allows us to live as if death is someone else’s problem. What the taboo does to us is the deeper insight of Gorer’s essay, and the reason for its provocative title. When you suppress honest talk about basic human experiences, interest in them doesn’t disappear. The interest itself is irrepressible. But that interest bubbles up in perverted forms. With sex you get pornography. With death you get zombie movies. What porn is to monogamous married sexuality death-on-screen has become to death-in-reality. Think about it: the deaths shown in our most popular shows and movies are violent deaths. They come to relatively young people who usually aren’t expecting to die. Characters aren’t dying of old age and natural decay. They’re dying because a psychopath, a mafia hit man, or a zombie killed them. You don’t watch these shows for insight into genuine human experience. You watch them to escape from genuine human experience. Too often where death shows up in popular culture, it belongs to a fantasy world. It’s newsworthy. It’s tragic. It’s psychopathic or maybe apocalyptic. But one way or another, death is exotic. It’s something that happens to someone else. But death, of course, is not exotic. It’s as basic to human experience as birth, eating and sleeping. The great danger of our taboo on honest talk about death is that it enables self-deception. It feeds a distorted detachment from my own personal mortality. In our time and place, where death is often banished from polite company, we will struggle to experience the beauty and power of Jesus because we've numbed ourselves to the problem he came to solve. Matt McCullough Contrast this detachment from death to the prayer of the psalmist in Psalm 90: “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Behind this prayer is the consistent conviction of the Bible: to live well in the world as it is, we have to account for death with honesty. If we’re willing to push through the taboo on death we’ll find wisdom on the other side. But honesty about death can lead us to something far more precious even than wisdom. This honesty can lead us to Jesus, to a clearer view of his beauty and power, to a deeper awareness of his life-giving relevance to everything we face. We need to overcome our detachment from death so that we can enjoy a deeper attachment to Jesus. There is a direct correlation between our sensitivity to death’s sting and our ability to savor Jesus’s promises to us. The gap between the promises of the gospel we affirm and our experience of those promises in life—between what we know and what we know—is a timeless struggle. But what aggravates that gap can vary from culture to culture. In our time and place, where death is often banished from polite company, we will struggle to experience the beauty and power of Jesus because we’ve numbed ourselves to the problem he came to solve. In John 11, Jesus made resurrection a bedrock promise of the gospel. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (Jn 11:25-26). But what good is resurrection to those who are living like immortals? “If death is not a daily reality,” Walter Wangerin has written, “then Christ’s triumph over death is neither daily nor real. Worship and proclamation and even faith itself take on a dream-like, unreal air, and Jesus is reduced to something like a long-term insurance policy, filed and forgotten—whereas he can be our necessary ally, an immediate, continuing friend, the holy destroyer of death and the devil, my own beautiful savior” (Mourning into Dancing, 29-30). There is a beautiful irony here, with the power to change your life: If we want to enjoy the precious relevance of Jesus in our day-to-day, we need to bring the truth about death into our day-to-day. Death-awareness is our path into the liberating, life-giving truth about Jesus. When we’re honest about what death means for who we are, for what we hope to accomplish, for everything we love about life—when we’re driven to cry out with Paul, “who will deliver me from this body of death?”—we’re made ready to join with Paul in joyful relief, and to mean it deep down: “thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom 7:24-25). Click here to check out Matt’s excellent book, Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope in the Rabbit Room Store. This post originally appeared on Desiring God. You can view it by clicking here. Artwork credit: Dawn Waters Baker www.dawnwatersbaker.com “To the Lowest Place” 60×48 (inches) on Canvas Available through Waterfall Mansion www.waterfallmansion.com

Almost twenty years ago, while I was at university, my parents decided to move back to the seaside village in Northern Ireland where I had spent the first twelve years of my life. We relocated several times during my teens and, for me, this latest move felt like a step backwards. I visited for their first Christmas “back home” with no intention of joining them on any permanent basis. On Christmas day a guy with ginger hair and a smile that was contagious gave the children’s talk in their new church. The response to his self-deprecating humor was evidence that he was not only well known but also well loved. Long story short, I ended up staying. Two years later we were married. I went into marriage believing that there were some things I could fix about Glenn. One was what I considered to be a slightly infantile obsession with the town that would now be my home. I shared my plans with him regularly. I wanted to move somewhere that was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. I wanted to find a place where we could have a ministry together, fully exercising our gifts in a way that suited us exactly. Again and again he agreed that it all sounded great, assured me that we would think about it and then carried on doing exactly what he always did: working in the same schools, being part of the same church, spending time with the same people. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year. This Christmas it will be twenty years since I first sat in the congregation and watched Glenn captivate the children in the front rows. Lots of those kids are married now and I’ve lost count of the number who asked him to perform their wedding ceremonies. I’ve begun to notice something over the last couple of years. When my husband is asked to speak at weddings or funerals, he rarely has to ask the families for stories to tell. He already knows them. Like the characters in Wendell Berry’s Port William stories, their lives have intersected and merged with his so many times over the past four decades that it’s hard to tell where his story ends and theirs begin. To be untethered by roots or commitment is seen as a great achievement in our upside down world. Undoubtedly, there are particular callings and seasons in life that require us to set out, even temporarily, in search of new things. The world is full of rich stories and unexpected wonder and there is something irreplaceable about the adventure of meeting new people and discovering new places. I suspect that part of me will always be straining to see what is just beyond the next horizon. Having said that, I wonder how often my longing for something new has simply been an attempt to validate a pattern of dissatisfaction that no new church or town or community will fix. What if, sometimes, cutting your lines and setting sail just means you are adrift? When Cain murdered Abel, his punishment was that he would forever be a vagrant and a wanderer. From that time on he would have no home and no permanent community. Genesis 4:13 tells us that Cain considered the punishment too much to bear. I'm learning that deep community may be so slow to grow that we only get to do it once or twice in a lifetime. I'm learning that it's a choice to be present in a certain space and time with a certain group of people, whatever that costs. Heidi Johnston When God called the nation of Israel to live as his people, he placed them in a specific piece of land. Its location was genius, making it a through route for much of the world’s trade traffic but one of the main weapons in the Israelite arsenal was their community life. By witnessing the way God’s people continued to live in relationship with each other, living intentionally according to the pattern God had given them, those looking on would see the heart of God. My natural instinct is still to run away when things get hard or monotonous or overly ordinary but I’m learning that community at its best is a long-term plan. I’m learning that deep community may be so slow to grow that we only get to do it once or twice in a lifetime. I’m learning that it’s a choice to be present in a certain space and time with a certain group of people, whatever that costs. It means continuing to bring yourself and your gifts to the table and offering them up for the sake of people who may not always understand what you are doing or why you are there. When others say or do the painful things, committing to community means choosing to stay and forgive when the voices in your head are screaming, “Pack up and move on.” If, like me, you have a tendency to say and do stupid things, sooner or later you are going to have to walk back into the room, look people in the eye and take responsibility for your own brokenness. A friend of mine came to see me a few months ago, after a difficult season in her personal life caused her to withdraw for a while from many of the people she knew. Truthfully, I was surprised to see her. Many of my memories of our conversations end with me kicking myself on the way home for the stupid things I said or the wise things I didn’t say. When I asked, she told me she came to me because I had been there for her for twenty years. The reality is that I had done very little to shape her life in any intentional or significant way. When she said I had been there, she meant that I had literally, physically been present in her life for twenty years. It may be an obvious point but it struck me for the first time that to be in someone’s life for twenty years takes twenty years. It turned out that while Glenn had been intentionally building community, I had been doing it almost by accident. While I was trying to fix Glenn’s devotion to the people he has spent his life with, that same community had been slowly teaching me how rare and beautiful it can be to commit your life to one particular patch of earth and the people who share it with you. With the passing of two decades I have found myself living within the rhythms Glenn chose for us, unaware of the way the framework of my life has been shifting. In my own introverted, bumbling way I have become part of something richer than I have ever experienced before. I have no doubt that greater intentionality on my part could have made the experience richer still. I don’t have Glenn’s openness with people and my impact on our town doesn’t compare to his. Our church faces the same struggles with personality, politics, misunderstanding and brokenness that are common wherever you go. Left to my own devices, there have been many times when I would have given up in frustration. Honestly, it’s not uncommon for me to look around the place where my story has taken root and be overwhelmed in the same moment by a deep sense of belonging and a desire to be somewhere else. However, with the passage of time and to my great surprise, I have found myself in a place where I know and am known. Where I least expected to find it, because love would not let me leave, I have fallen clumsily into a place I’m learning to call home.

I know better than to say that I’m a Springsteen fan. It’s not because I don’t listen to Springsteen. I do. I have most of his catalog in my iTunes folder. Nebraska is one of my favorite albums, and thank goodness for The Rising and Devils and Dust, albums that did some justice to the experience of 9/11 and the second Gulf War. So, I’m plenty familiar with Springsteen and enjoy his music immensely. I hesitate to call myself a fan, however, because I know a few, and I have nothing in comparison to their life-altering devotion. Springsteen is not an item on their bucket list. Springsteen is in the oxygen they breathe. So, for instance, they might drop all the details of their life and get on a plane and fly across the country to attend a concert, maybe even for the third or fourth time on a particular tour. A dear friend of mine has been to countless Springsteen concerts. His boys are now old enough that they’ve been through the Springsteen catechism and attend concerts with their father. Recently, the boys went to a U2 concert and were disappointed at the weak effort of the lads from Dublin who could only manage to play for two hours, far below the Springsteen standard, who on his most recent tour played one night for four hours. For my friend and others—you know who you are—Springsteen doesn’t just talk about life. He delivers it. It’s a through-your ears-to-your-heart, throughout-your-body kind of life. Springsteen has a way of making me ache when I listen to him...the ache for escape, to run, the desperate need for there to be more. To follow the indeterminate destination of the road, or to be carried someplace by the river which makes us clean. Mark Love Don’t get me wrong: there’s some church in his music. It’s not hard to scratch on a Springsteen lyric and find some sort of faith allusion. I don’t know if you saw Springsteen’s interview with Stephen Colbert on the Late Show upon the release of his memoir a few years ago,  but they talked about the way their Catholicism shaped them. It can’t help but be present in his music. I saw an earlier interview with Springsteen in which he talked about how the themes of faith, of resurrection and hope, show up in his music. He didn’t write directly about these things. In other words, he wasn’t intentionally writing songs of faith or about faith. It was more that the rhythms and smells and dispositions of his early religious training got deep inside of him so that no expression was devoid of them. In his memoir, a brilliant read, he writes: In Catholicism, there existed the poetry, danger and darkness that reflected my imagination and my inner self. I found a land of great and harsh beauty, of fantastic stories, of unimaginable punishment and infinite reward. It was a glorious and pathetic place I was either shaped for or fit right into. It has walked alongside me as a waking dream my whole life. So as a young adult I tried to make sense of it. I tried to meet its challenge for the very reasons that there are souls to lose and a kingdom of love to be gained. I laid what I’d absorbed across the hardscrabble lives of my family, friends and neighbors. I turned it into something I could grapple with, understand, something I could even find faith in. As funny as it sounds, I have a “personal” relationship with Jesus. He remains one of my fathers, though as with my own father, I no longer believe in his godly power. I believe deeply in his love, his ability to save . . . but not to damn . . . enough of that. In his interview with Stephen Colbert, he actually talked about his songs in gospel terms. “The verses,” he said, “are the blues. The chorus is the gospel. It’s how I think of a song when I write.” The chorus, he says, is where he tries to bring some “transcendence.” Maybe the themes are getting more explicit the deeper Springsteen goes into his career. The allusions seem more obvious in Devils and Dust and Radio Nowhere. The friend I spoke of earlier says he’s reconnecting with his Catholicism. Maybe. But this is not, I think, Springsteen’s primary appeal to my more spiritually sensitive friends. His appeal comes more, I think, from his ability to name our common experience poetically, and in doing so, to make it transcendent. Our everyday experience is shot through with meaning, with a beat, with a turn of a phrase, and in performance with an embodied passion. It’s this sensibility, I think, that you hear in his memoir when he writes about the neighborhood he grew up in: There is a place here— you can hear it, smell it— where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures, play baseball, die, make love, have kids, drink themselves drunk on spring nights and do their best to hold off the demons that seek to destroy us, our homes, our families, our town. Here we live in the shadow of the steeple, where the holy rubber meets the road, all crookedly blessed in God’s mercy, in the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, race-riot-creating, oddball-hating, soul-shaking, love-and-fear-making, heartbreaking town of Freehold, New Jersey. Let the service begin. Life as worship. Where the holy rubber meets the road. Blues and gospel. Laying it across the hardscrabble lives of friends and families. The truth. Springsteen has a way of making me ache when I listen to him. He touches places I’ve been and feelings I’ve had. Some of it in sepia tones, home, glory days, regret and longing for home. But some of it is the ache for escape, to run, the desperate need for there to be more. To follow the indeterminate destination of the road, or to be carried someplace by the river which makes us clean. He captures something of the beautiful and horrible ambiguity of life.  Oh that our worship on Sundays could hold this beautiful and horrible ambiguity! Too often our worship “papers over” our reality. It’s too glib, too easily moves to happy or joyous. It’s all gospel and no blues. It scarcely notices injustice or hardscrabble lives, and in so doing, reduces the gospel. One final thought about Springsteen. It’s rock and roll that carries all of this, that both holds the lyrics and creates the space for them. But it’s more than that. The words are embodied in the performance—in the sweat and the movement and the beat and the way the sound moves through your chest. At a Springsteen concert, we’re not “brains on sticks,” to use Jamie Smith’s memorable phrase. We’re bodies connected to light and sound and others and the world. It’s not escape. It’s just the opposite. It’s connection. One that we long for. One that we desire. Bruuuce. This post originally appeared on the Tokens Show website. In November, the Tokens Show will be visiting the Ryman Auditorium for a special Thanksgiving show! Grab your tickets here.

Click through for this week’s edition of Jonny Jimison’s Rabbit Trails. Click here to check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

Back in November of 2017, I had the pleasure of interviewing Andy Gullahorn about his new record, Everything As It Should Be, the craft of songwriting, the balance between boldness and humility, and what he has learned from the arc of his career. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Andy is currently in the middle of a Kickstarter project to fund the finishing of his new record, and he’s got twelve days to go. Click here to learn more about the project and choose how to support him. Andy Gullahorn: In 2016 I didn’t write any songs. It was just a slump. I don’t know if you know this, but there was a political campaign going on that year— Drew Miller: Oh really? AG: Yeah, for president or something. Anyway, for me, it’s hard when people don’t get along. So if I write a song, it has to be the one that brings everybody together. And that song didn’t come. I was kinda waiting on that one to show up all year. Drew: Did you have an ideal for what a song like that would be? AG: Yeah, and it was paralyzing. I was thinking, “Okay, if I write this song, it’s got to be something that will get people on both sides of the issue to really see each other.” But that’s such a huge task. Drew: Well, it’s hard to do that without it becoming kitschy. AG: It was stupid for other reasons, too. Drew: Do you have a list? AG: It was stupid of me to think that I could do that—not that songs can’t do that, but it was stupid to think that I particularly have some power to do that. Drew: To elect yourself to that task? AG: Yeah. So I had to back off and start thinking and writing small and close to home. There ended up being a couple songs about wider culture on this record, but for the most part, the songs ended up becoming an exercise in living on my side of the street, tending to what is before me rather than trying to think so big. So I had the songs, but it was a really busy year with working on other people’s records, which always come before mine in my pecking order. So rather than rushing the whole process, I made a completely acoustic version of the record. The full version will come out later in 2018. Drew: So if you were thinking too big at first, wanting to bring the whole world together, and then you decided to stick more to your own story, how did the writing go when you started to think smaller? Did you ever feel like you hit a moment where you found where the songs were? AG: The truth is, I hadn’t even picked up the guitar and tried to write in a while. There were seasons when I was really busy, so that would make it hard, but even when those seasons were over, I would realize I hadn’t written a song in a couple months and then get scared. Like, what if it just won’t happen, or what if I fail? And then if I try and fail, that’s worse than not trying at all. So sometime during 2017 I began to take my own advice: I put my guitar in my bedroom and committed to playing five minutes a day, just picking it up, and then within a few days a song came right out. It’s what I call my middle aged love song—the title track, “Everything’s As It Should Be.” It’s about life being imperfect and messy. I came to a point with writing songs where I thought, “If I don’t write another song, I’m okay.” It’s not even that I didn’t write any songs because I was depressed or there was something wrong. It was that good things were happening, I was happy with where I was, so maybe the fact that I wasn’t writing anymore meant I had finally figured out who I was. Drew: Is that a major component of songwriting for you, to figure out who you are? AG: It’s certainly part of it. I mean, I’ve been writing songs since I was fifteen. And there was definitely a time when I asked, “If I’m not a songwriter, what am I?” It’s the reason I got into music. So I just forced myself to write out of sheer exercise, and the song that came out ended up being about marriage and family. That’s what it needed to be. Drew: That’s helpful for me to hear—the role of songwriting in your life shifting over time. Being able to ask yourself the question, “How else can I make myself useful in the world?” is its own tough but liberating process. AG: I don’t even feel like songwriting is the best thing I have to offer my community—I may be better equipped at other things and enjoy other things—but it all stems from that sense of identity I receive from songwriting. I also have never had another job, so I don’t know what else I would actually do. Drew: I’d love to hear your take on the arc of your career in general, to put everything in context. How do you interpret that story for yourself? AG: There have been plenty of iterations of what life and music have looked like, and they have all been ultimately anchored to songwriting. I began as a student at Belmont University. I wanted to live in Nashville. I got married right out of college to Jill, and she got a Christian record deal. I started writing for a Christian publishing company. I played guitar for my wife and stopped playing my own music. I was happy to do that; I loved being a guitar player and writing with her. We did that pretty much from 1998 till a little bit after my daughter was born in 2004. So about six years of that. Then, when Jill wanted to be home more with the kids and not travel as much, that’s when I realized I had only really been a guitar player for the last six years. So what should I do? That’s when I did another record, and Andrew asked if I could open for him on tour and play guitar for him. That was the beginning of about ten years of traveling with him and Ben Shive whenever I wasn’t traveling with Jill. There were some shows with Andrew, lots of shows with Jill, and a few of my own, and in time, my own shows began to outnumber the other ones. Drew: And that sounds like growth. AG: I guess—it wasn’t my game plan, though. I would have been fine playing guitar for other people the rest of my life. I love traveling and playing music. And playing with others helps me know what I want to write and say. To me, songwriting has been the boat I got into that has taken me to a bunch of different places. If I wasn’t writing songs, how would I have been on the road with Andrew for ten years, for instance? So I trusted it enough to wait and see which doors open and which doors close, to just follow it. In that way, my role has been almost a passive one. And recently, I’ve found myself in many therapeutic settings—playing at counseling retreats, for instance. Drew: One of the first impressions I receive in listening to your songs is that they are emotionally intelligent. Whatever the song may be, it is holding the complexities of multiple feelings at the same time and navigating through it. AG: It’s a common thing for counselors to use my songs in their practice, then have me come out and play for some retreat, and then by the end of that, I’ve been inspired to write more songs. It’s definitely become a cyclical, self-reinforcing thing. And one reason for it is that I’ve needed a lot of therapy myself. I love the recovery community. I can write songs in that language because I’m lucky to be around it and immersed in it. When you talk about the songs sounding emotionally intelligent—I always feel like they’re way ahead of me. They’re paving the road before me. I want to be that emotionally intelligent, so I write myself into it. Drew: You know, you mentioned off-handedly that you feel as if you’re a passive participant, just riding this boat of songwriting to see where it takes you. I know that especially in Nashville, there can be a sort of opportunistic, self-promotional culture around music. Is there any correlation between that culture and your inclination to wait and see rather than seize and grab? AG: Maybe. I think part of it is just my personality. Part of it can also be fear. It’s not all a good thing. It could be that it feels better to have somebody ask you to do something than to make it happen on your own. That could be pride. But there is something good about it, too—personality-wise, Jill is the same way: first day of school at Belmont, people are out on the yards showing off with their guitars, and they’re good at it. But when we were students, Jill and I were both reluctant to mention that we were songwriters. Over the years, there have been a number of times when I could have cashed in all my chips. There’s part of me that wants to take advantage of situations, but there have been enough times of not forcing it that I’ve built up trust: maybe this waiting will come back around someday and pay off, and maybe it won’t, but I’m happy with what I do. In a world that’s pretty ambitious with self-promotion, I find that it is a liberating posture to cultivate contentedness. I mean, I have other things I enjoy besides music—badminton, you know. Music is everything to me, but it’s not that important. Jill and I see plenty of young artists come around who make their first record, do a big marketing blitz, have a bunch of publicity, you see their name everywhere, and we think, “Man, they just left us in the dust,” and then three years later they’re burned out because they’ve played too many shows. We’ve watched that happen, and that’s one way to do it. It may even be the right way to do it for some people, but I would be happy if I was eighty years old traveling around and doing what I’m doing right now. It’s more of a long game for me. So if we’re in it for the long haul, it’s important to be kind to people. Drew: I get that reservation and the value of that reservation. There is something valuable about waiting to be noticed and asked to do something. If you just insert yourself into every opportunity you have, you’ll never know if you would have been appointed, rather than appointing yourself. AG: I remember I was at this retreat sometime where the speaker was talking about a meeting at Mars Candy Company, and their question was, “How much money should we make this year?” Not how much could we make, but how much should we make. Drew: What an admirable question for a candy bar company! AG: Yeah, like what would it mean for us to do this? What are the other costs? Having a balanced, healthy life is priceless. Could I be on the road 200 dates a year? Maybe. Could I make a lot more money than I make now? Maybe. But I’ve seen the cost of that in other people’s lives and I’ve seen the cost in my own life, so how much money should I make? Drew: Well that’s coming from an entirely different ethic of life, right? One thing I’ve heard Danny Bryant say in a lot of his sermons is “Be your strand.” If the Kingdom can be described as this intricately woven tapestry, you are no more than one strand in it. So be that strand, wait patiently, do what is before you, and be faithful to where and when and who you are. Do you have any thoughts on that, making those spiritual dimensions more explicit? I think that’s an urgent issue for Christians who are artists. AG: Part of that process of figuring out whatever it is I’m supposed to be and do is figuring out what I’m not supposed to do. So I could lead worship. And I have nothing against that, but I know that’s not what I’m called to do. I can do it well, but I don’t think I should. Am I called to write the biggest hit on pop Christian radio? I’ve tried, and it doesn’t work out very well. That’s not to say God can’t work in mysterious ways, but at a certain point I had to realize I needed to stop trying to write this generic pop Christian song. And especially in artistic circles, people will say stuff like, “I didn’t write that song—God wrote that song. I’m just a vessel.” And I honestly think that’s ridiculous. God would write a much better song if he was writing it himself! So the key is being small, but it’s also realizing that in that small strand, there’s responsibility and there’s power. I can be humble and believe my songs have the power to save lives at the same time. Because if songs have that power—and I don’t think that power is from me—I can hone my skills, take what I’ve learned, and let it become more than what it is with the help of God’s grace. Drew: That’s the mark of a truly good song, too. I would go so far as to say that any truly good song is more than what the writer brought to it. AG: Yeah. And for me, it’s about being small and humble, but also recognizing that being small doesn’t mean shrugging off your job. To pretend that there’s not power in my music is to disrespect the one who gave me this music. Drew: And that’s such a problem in Christian culture: being overly minimizing of human effort and ability out of “humility.” If we are to believe the gospel, we have to believe that God has invested in our flourishing, in our dignity and freedom and responsibility. So sure, we’re vessels, but we’re also active participants. Our call is to both actively participate in redemptive work and do so in such a way that we’re treating everything as a gift that ultimately has a greater source. AG: One of my songwriting heroes, David Wilcox—I could see him walking up to someone and saying, “I have a really important song for you that you need to hear.” And years ago I could imagine myself thinking, “Gosh David, calm down. Don’t be so self-important.” But to him, he’s not attached to the song as if it’s his. Anyone who’s written a good song knows it’s not really theirs. So when you show up with your gifts, but aren’t totally attached to them, you can say stuff like that. You can be bold. You don’t have to apologize for what you have to offer. If you’re a doctor and a patient is telling you about their symptoms, it would be crazy for you to say, “Well, I mean I don’t want to play the hero here or anything, but if you’re interested—I mean, I know there are so many drugs out there on the market that you’re inundated with every day, but—I have this medicine that could help you. If I may be so bold.” No! You say, “Here, this medicine will help.” Because you’re not overly attached to it. You’re doing your job. Drew: You’re being faithful to what’s before you. AG: And David has been a huge part of that growth for me. He does that so well. He shows up to write the songs, then holds them lightly and can let go of them, too. That’s what I hope to be able to do myself as well. Click here to visit Andy’s Kickstarter page and support his new album.

Welcome to Week 6 of The Rabbit Reads Book Group: Culture Making. We’ve reached the end of the book together! As we consider the final chapters this week, we’ll take a deeper look at discerning our unique call to be culture makers. We’d love to hear your thoughts and insights in the comments. In the early chapters of Culture Making, Andy Crouch makes a big statement: “the only way to change culture is to make more of it.” And so, for the past six weeks, we’ve been slowly unraveling exactly what that means. But the more we talk about the massive project of shifting our deeply ingrained cultures, the more clearly we see that on our own, changing the world is harder than we think. Perhaps, for all of us, it’s even an impossible task, where the best we can do is trust that God is doing the work and accept his invitation to join the adventure. In other words, once we release the need to be world-changers, to quit our ordinary lives and do something big and radical for Jesus, we find ourselves free to change culture the only way we can: through little things, great love, and the help of a few friends along the way. I think we’re all, at some point or another, trying to figure out our calling. We’ve been told that we can change the world if we figure out our unique vocation, the place where (to paraphrase Frederick Buechner) the world’s need and our gladness meet. But what about those of us who are doing work that doesn’t feel all that necessary to the flourishing of the world? Or those who don’t exactly find deep gladness in washing another load of laundry or filing another insurance claim? Who are your people? Who could you count on to work with you? Who do you know that calls out the beautiful in you? Jen Rose Yokel If you’re in one of those places, were you hoping this book would give you a little more direction on calling? I’m raising my hand here. I’ve spent the past year or two drifting between total confidence in the goodness of my work and wondering if maybe God has something different for me… if I could just figure out what that is. In the end, this book still doesn’t answer all the questions about my Big Important Calling, but at least now I have a few hopeful ideas to nudge me in the right direction. Finding your calling isn’t something you settle once you pick your college major, start a career, get married, and buy a house. It’s an ongoing, lifelong process of discernment, and the good news is you don’t have to go it alone. Here are three areas to consider as you discern your call. Power We don’t really like to talk about power, but if we’re honest, we all want at least a little bit. In this world where anyone with a smartphone and an Instagram account can become an influencer, power and platform seem more attainable than ever. And yet at the same time, it feels even harder to grasp. A connected world reveals our blind spots, our privilege, and our lack. Power, as defined in Culture Making, is “the ability to propose a new cultural good,” with a chance it will actually succeed. As you discern what you can make of the world, take an honest look at the power you already have. Where are you privileged in connections and influence? And who are you sharing your power with? Keep in mind that, while none of us are immune to the temptations of power, all of us can practice stewardship (using it well) and service (sharing it with others) to do beautiful work for the Kingdom. Community So you have a little bit of power and influence. We all do (even if it’s only in our families, workplace, church, or friendships.) But still, that’s not everything we need. To make and change culture, you need a community. Crouch proposes that the best collaborative relationships start with three people; surely we all can name at least two friends to join us in God’s work. Who are your people? Who could you count on to work with you? And if you still aren’t sure what you’re supposed to be working on, who do you know that calls out the beautiful in you and can see your gifts and strengths? When you gather your three around a table, you never know what could happen. Grace Finally, consider everything you have—your power, your community, your influence—as a gift of grace. It’s tempting to think changing the world happens with the perfect genius idea, determination, or hard work. But just as change begins in tiny groups and power starts small, everything ultimately begins in gratitude and delight. What has graced your life? What goodness do you have that you didn’t earn? In the end, we can’t grasp for power or force our communities any more than we can change the family or town we were born into. Every place we end up is a grace-touched place. And though you still have to discipline yourself, though you can and will fail, and though you can bet grace will lead you to places of pain, just the grace to wake up every morning is a gift. Maybe that’s enough. Look for the powerless around you, and consider how you can serve them. Look for problems you can work toward solving. Look for the people who align with your hopeful vision, and invite them into the process of discerning and living out your true calling. The world needs you (yes, you!) to be a culture maker. Thanks for joining us in our reading of Culture Making! Though the book club is done, the conversation doesn’t have to be! Our discussion at The Rabbit Room Forum is still open, and you can catch up on all our blog posts right here.

Hello, old friends. I feel a little shy jumping straight back into the jollity of the Rabbit Room after such a long absence, but I’ve missed this place too much to delay any longer. I think my posts here dwindled about the same time I moved to Oxford. I’d fully intended to be the Rabbit Room’s UK correspondent, but I ended up holding on for dear life as I found myself falling in love with theology, turning a one-year certificate into a three-year degree, then also falling in love with and marrying my husband (an adorable Dutchman named Thomas whom I’m scheming and dreaming of bringing to Hutchmoot someday), and while I was at it, having a baby (her name is Lilian–she’s elfin-sized and blue-eyed and already very opinionated and the joy of my heart). Yes, I’m still mostly sane, thank you. But also very glad to have the margin to jump back into the conversation here now and then. And I think I’ll begin by telling you about the subject that has gripped my imagination and set me to wrestling and researching for years to come. Theodicy. Before I came to Oxford, I had never heard the word “theodicy,” which is basically the theological attempt to vindicate the goodness of God in view of the existence of evil. But the moment I heard and understood that word, I knew it was my topic. It has been my topic ever since I was nine years old and fascinated by butterflies; it’s the reason I fell in love with the work of J. R. R. Tolkien when I was seventeen years old. It’s also one of the great reasons I take such joy in the Rabbit Room and find it to be such a home for the soul and why I hope you’ll weigh in with your thoughts if I write about what I’m studying now and then in the future. Let me explain, and let me start with butterflies because that’s where I first began to understand what theodicy was. The summer I turned nine, my family moved to the sun-baked wilds of Texas hill country. The space of our rural life was an abrupt wonder to me; the stretch of those western skies with storms rolling through them like ocean surf, the unfettered blackness of the night with the thick, spattered stars. And the butterflies. Early one hot, crackly morning I went for a ramble in my grandmother’s garden and discovered a dewy-winged marvel of a creature, all midnight black and iridescent blue with orbs of white that glimmered up at me like eyes. I ran to get my grandmother and show her this wonder. “Oh, it’s a swallowtail,” she said, nonchalantly, as if this creature, this glimmering wonder looking like something from the realm of myth was a matter of the everyday. She marched inside and pulled an old Audubon guide off the shelf. “There, look,” she said, “it’s a spicebush swallowtail.” From that moment, butterflies became my obsessive study as I immersed myself in the world of tiger and spicebush swallowtails, fritillaries and buckeyes, painted ladies, and that rare blue ghost, the “Diana.” I haunted the fields round our old ranch house, my eyes trained to catch the slightest flicker of wings. One day, I chased a buckeye through a field of yellow grass; it tantalized me, landing every few seconds in the dirt and closing its wings so that the camouflage brown of its underside blended into the dirt. I would crouch in wait until suddenly the earth somewhere near my hands seemed to slip apart into flashed glimpse of some otherworld reflected in the burst of orange and azure that were the butterfly’s magical wings. I remember sitting back and laughing after my fifth attempt to catch the little thing, delighted in the hunt after that beauty, the way it flashed out, an unexpected grace in the brown landscape, the way it made me hungry and happy all at once. Even at that age, I recognized that the darkness I saw presented a powerful narrative about existence: it closed the horizons of hope by caging me in with fear; it cut me off from relationship as I drew away in shame from others; it told me that the bleak, shattered reality I experienced was the ultimate reality of the world itself. Sarah Clarkson I sat back on my heels, alert and still. And suddenly, my sense of time was suspended as I lifted my face to the great blue dome of the Texas sky, brimmed with the honey-tinged light of late afternoon. The sounds of the earth grew distant and a quiet came into my mind and body. For one mesmerizing moment I became aware of the personal, present goodness thrumming in every atom of the world around me. I knew I was encountering God. And I knew I was loved. And the next instant the buzz of the cicadas and the far off cough of a pickup roared back into my ears and time stomped forward and I was a sunburned little girl with grass-stains on her jeans, chasing butterflies. But it was as if, for a moment, the brown wings of the cosmos itself had fluttered open, and what I glimpsed was the mesmerizing beauty of Love, a beauty stronger and more real than anything else I knew. And that was saying something because the summer of the butterflies was also the summer that my imagination went haywire with the first tremors of the earthquake that would later be diagnosed as OCD. For several months, I knew a powerful, daily darkness that I didn’t know how to tell anyone. It would take another almost ten years before anyone gave a name to my interior malady, one marked not by a fear of germs or the need for symmetry that is the common notion of OCD, but by its lesser-known manifestation in vivid, intrusive images of violent things happening to me and to those I loved, images that shattered my sense of safety and left me feeling broken and guilty. At nine years old, I was confronted with evil (because that’s the only name I can give to what I saw in my mind), with the inescapable sadness of a broken mind and the story told in the world by sorrow. Even at that age, I recognized that the darkness I saw presented a powerful narrative about existence: it closed the horizons of hope by caging me in with fear; it cut me off from relationship as I drew away in shame from others; it told me that the bleak, shattered reality I experienced was the ultimate reality of the world itself. Against that knowledge then, was set the moment of luminous sight I found in the goodness of the butterfly, in the flickered glimpse of a Beauty untouchable by shadow, outside of time and yet present to me in it, affirming me as its own and drawing me out of time and suffering to itself. I knew that Beauty told the truer story and so it was, in that instant, my theodicy, my way of clinging to the goodness of God in the midst of pain. I'm pretty darn convinced that what our skeptical, despairing world needs isn't more arguments trying to rationalize evil and defend an abstract redemption, but rather narratives that immerse us in stories where beauty invades suffering, where characters can act in hope, where the horizons of possibility are open to redemption, to Tolkien's eucatastrophe, the 'unexpected grace of a happy ending.' Sarah Clarkson Eight years later I encountered that Beauty again in a saving way in an actual story, Tolkien’s good old epic to be exact. I was in my late teens and to my continuing and ever evolving grapple with OCD was added profound disillusionment with my faith. I didn’t trust Christians. I didn’t like the God they worshiped, who, I had been told simplistically, willed all the bad things that happened to me. If everything was determined, and God caused harm, I saw no point in acting courageously or creatively and the horizons of my life seemed suddenly to shrink in discouragement and lethargy. I began to read The Lord of the Rings in sheer boredom but into the shadowland of my mind crashed the epic of Middle Earth, with a story that set me back on my feet and told me I had a choice to make, a quest to follow, that livened me to beauty and made me hungry, with an aching, healthful yearning for a goodness I could barely name. I looked up from The Lord of the Rings upon my own existence with healed eyes that could imagine God as the king who arrived in my own world with “healing in his hands.” And in that moment, Tolkien’s work operated upon me as a theodicy, an argument for God’s goodness despite the existence of evil. When I arrived at Oxford and began to pore over tomes of doctrine outlining all the different arguments for God’s goodness, all the schemes to explain the presence of evil in the world, I realized that the best theodicies I could find were outlined and rather dry arguments for something I had already encountered much more viscerally in the hope that came to me like a rope to a drowning woman in the form of beauty and story, image and song. That realization sent me into six months of work on a mini-dissertation on how beauty teaches us to hope, how stories narrate us out of despair and into action. At the end of it all, I’m pretty darn convinced that what our skeptical, despairing world needs isn’t more arguments trying to rationalize evil and defend an abstract redemption, but rather narratives that immerse us in stories where beauty invades suffering, where characters can act in hope, where the horizons of possibility are open to redemption, to Tolkien’s eucatastrophe, the “unexpected grace of the happy ending.” So, I want to write those stories of course (someday I’ll finish that novel), but I’m also going to spend the next year doing a longer dissertation on why the works of imagination—stories and songs, art and drama—may be one of the best ways we have of offering a profoundly Christian theodicy to a broken and skeptical world doubtful of God’s existence because life is just so sad sometimes. The reason I want to tell you about this is because, well, I’ll be wrestling with these themes for years to come I think, and they might just show up here. But also, and much more importantly for me, the Rabbit Room is a space in which I have encountered, countless times, that “light and high beauty” (Sam Gamgee, in Mordor), that vision of goodness that is, I think, what a robust theodicy must offer. In these crazy years of study and change, I’ve thought often of you here, keeping alive the flame of hope with story and song, laughter and the hobbit-like fellowship that I have come to love in Rabbit Room gatherings. This is, I think, a deeply theodical community because it is a fellowship of storytellers and lovers, of those who acknowledge the profound brokenness of the world even while kindling the holy fires of creativity, imagination, and community in which we glimpse the redemption that is drawing our own stories forward to wholeness. I love what is being created here; I love the Beauty you all speak and sing and give in all that happens here. You keep me rooted in hope and for that I’m continually grateful (and determined to make it to Hutchmoot again). Bless you all if you made it this far. It’s good to be back. Sarah Clarkson’s brand new book, Book Girl, is now available at the Rabbit Room Store. Click here to learn more.