What are you looking for?

Today we begin the closing weekend of Frankenstein with five final performances. It’s been a ton of fun to watch this show get to its feet and learn to run. I’m at Lipscomb University this morning, about to walk in and talk to a group of students about theater, and as I do so, I’m overwhelmed by how lucky I am that I get to do this kind of work. The experience of writing a story and then seeing it incarnated in three dimensions on a stage is surreal. It’s scary, but it’s also exhilarating. There’s a community of dozens of people who have all brought their various crafts to bear on the story and the result is something we all own collectively. I’m thankful for that because it means the lights and the set and the costumes and the makeup and the performances all carry my work when the words alone aren’t enough. That’s the exhilarating part. We carry one another. We work on something so long and so hard that we can no longer be the best judge of it. At that point we have to trust those around us to tell us the truth. Pete Peterson Last week, Jennifer and I were on the way to one of the final dress rehearsals and I was wringing my hands because I was concerned the show wasn’t ready and would be a disaster. She didn’t believe me and I told her in complete seriousness: “Do you have any idea what it’s like to create something and expect to love it, and then feel absolute terror when you realize it’s turned into something horrible and you can’t stop it?” She immediately started laughing and asked me to think about what I’d just said. Then I was laughing too (and the ghost of Victor Frankenstein shook his head bemusedly). But all irony aside, that is the scary part, isn’t it? We work on something so long and so hard that we can no longer be the best judge of it. At that point we have to trust those around us to tell us the truth. So I’m grateful for all the folks who have connected with the story and understood it and been moved by it. Thank you. Thank you for telling me, and thank you for passing the word on to others. I’m humbled by every single person who has given it their time and attention. I don’t know if Frankenstein will have a life beyond this short run. But I’m deeply thankful for Matt Logan and Studio Tenn for trusting me with the story and incarnating it so beautifully. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ve still got time, but tickets are going fast. Get thee to the theater. Get your tickets here.

I can’t remember the first time I met Arthur Alligood, but early on in our relationship, I nailed a catfish to his dad’s back fence. In Southern parlance, that may mean we grew up together, even though we didn’t. I’ve surely given Arthur pause like that a few times over the years, from when I fried said catfish in his kitchen, with his skillet—while he looked on in quiet desperation—to when I slept on his couch and left behind nothing but a knife. In return for these disconcerting forays into friendship, he has given me music that carried me through darkness like a coal car heading into the light. If you’ll recall, Arthur started out with Formerly and Worship Circle Records and made his way through several independent projects. He released Under the Gray and One Silver Needle, featuring a filled-out sound and playing with folks like Leland Sklar and Jim Keltner. In and around these projects, he consistently returned to what seemed like the sonic home ground of a stripped-down acoustic sound. It fit rather perfectly. 2015’s The Shadow Can’t Have Me featured what felt like his most vulnerable tone yet. I knew he had been recording after that, but I hadn’t heard anything about it. Then I saw him when I was in town last year. “I’ve been messing around with synthesizers,” he told me. “It’s going to be totally different.” The record finally emerged in the middle of August, blossoming like a sudden flash of goldenrod on some country road. Different it is, indeed, yet it is completely and undeniably Arthur. Portage opens with a delightful paradox. The instrumentation is electronic, but the ambience of the song feels quite natural, reminiscent of a long, pensive hike up a lonely mountain trail. The lyrics themselves seem to look down onto life from a distance. It’s us versus them, the good guys against the bad. The bad ones are out of country or somewhere across town. Out of sight, out of heart, we’d rather judge than understand. We’re doctors plagued by blindness, the foolishness of man.Where went all the wisdom? “The Foolishness of Man” serves as a kind of preface. The curtain opens and we are walking together on this journey that we have chosen—or that chose us. The place we were before was full of turbulence that tortured the heart, but here is balm that says—at least, in one sense—that we don’t have to remain as we are. This is a record of pilgrimage. I stand here on the shoreline. I will take the portage path, ‘Cause only love will end this hatred, the foolishness of man. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the music is haunted by echoes of wide, crystalline views—there was the recent Alligood family trip out west. Such things tend to have a profound and unaccountable effect on artists and their art. The first song even ends with a full cathartic minute of slow, melodic chord swells, wrapping us in one final embrace as we walk the trail into the unknown, led by some definite but hidden truth. After bidding the world’s turmoil and nonsense farewell, much of Portage centers on the various joys and sorrows of walking the sojourner’s road. There are the moments of strength and steady headway near the beginning, such as in “Where the Sparks Fly Upward.” I know what flame burns in the distance; I know what fire calls in the night. Out in the clear, covered up in mystery I know the soul seeks till its finds. Of course, as anyone who has backpacked can tell you, there are also times of numbness, of despair and deep ache. Some break like twigs with a snap; Some run like thieves, never turning back. A coward is an easy find. The mirror always shows me mine.— “Since I Left to Go” In this, Portage follows a certain narrative arc. There are the ear-worm tracks, leaning into pop sensibilities even while maintaining Arthur’s characteristic conversational delivery, but there is also the centerpiece “Since I Left to Go,” a track that asks a little more of the listener. It’s a confession, and like some of the imprecatory psalms, it doesn’t let up. In the context of the project though, it’s exactly where it needs to be. The whole EP is deserving of a committed hearing. Personally, I suggest you put it on repeat. Certain refrains are likely to emerge in your soul at a later time—probably just when you need to hear them most. I can see myself driving to work, reeling from having to discipline one of my kids or angry at my own wandering eyes. Arthur’s voice will surface like a corked bottle with a note inside. “You are more than your old mistakes,” it will say. “Join me. I won’t live in fear. I refuse.” That the new project is based in an electronic sound does not exclude all things with strings. Well-placed electric guitars with just the right amount of distortion provide a great foil to the vocal on “Old Mistakes” and carry the progressions in “I Won’t Live in Fear.” “Since I Left to Go” makes smart use of the guitar-ukulele, giving the instrument a more orchestral voicing than ukuleles usually get. There are pianos and a bright hi-strung guitar. If anything, this setup makes me excited to hear this music live, given the possibility that there might exist two versions of each song—the album version and a single-acoustic rendition. So many lines on Portage are truths I need to hear on repeat. I’m also excited for the second installment, whenever that comes out, but Vol. 1 will be seeing multiple plays in my house. I didn’t know I could get all this for nailing a catfish to someone’s fence. I’ll make sure to do that more often in the future. You can pick up Portage Volume 1 here at the Rabbit Room Store.

Welcome to Week Five of The Rabbit Reads Book Group: Culture Making. We’re almost done! This week, we’re looking at Chapters 12 – 14, in which we’re reminded that actually, we can’t always change the world… but maybe that’s good news. Everybody wants to change the world. It’s the promise ingrained in campaign slogans and vision statements. We hear it from pastors, entrepreneurs, and politicians. Brands sell everything from clothes to coffee with the promise of doing good in the world. And for a lot of people in my generation, we haven’t found our dream job if it isn’t somehow meaningful. Everybody wants to change the world. Some would say it’s even our divine calling. But can we? Really? Here’s a quick recap of our reading so far in Culture Making. In Part 1, we defined some terms: culture is what we make of the world, and cultural goods are the things we make to shape the world. We also considered our roles as cultivators and creators and the postures we take toward the world. In Part 2, we took a tour through the Biblical narrative, from the very beginning, where God invites his creation to share in creative power, and through the story of Israel, Jesus, and the early church, all the way to the culmination of God’s redemption project in the New Jerusalem. Now it’s time to look at what all this means for us today. For the last two weeks of our book group, we’re going to explore our calling, and that begins with knowing our limitations. *** As we’ve seen in earlier chapters, the only way to effectively change culture is to make more of it. We can cultivate what we already have and we can create new ways to solve problems and promote human flourishing, contributing to God’s ongoing restoration project. But there’s a trick here: we can’t predict or control anything we make. It’s such a small example I almost feel embarrassed to use it, but I’m thinking about this in terms of my own work. My job is mostly creative. I write copy and social media content for a local non-profit. Part of learning to do my job better is studying what’s working, taking online courses, or asking industry peers for suggestions. I can research what works for others, learn strategies, and pay attention to what has and hasn’t worked in the past. But in the end, can I control which Facebook post will take off, or predict what will fall flat? No, not really. I can only make things, trust that I did my best, and keep trying. Perhaps, if you’re one of the many artists hanging around The Rabbit Room, you know this feeling all too well. You can pour your soul into a song or a poem or a blog, and nothing happens. You can make a wonderful meal for your family and realize they really just want takeout. And yet you keep on making…because maybe it can’t change the world, but it can contribute something good, and, if nothing else, change you, the maker. A statement like “Why We Can’t Change the World” might look discouraging, but I hope you read this chapter and realized that actually, it’s humbling, even freeing. Maybe you can’t change the world. Or maybe you can, but you can’t predict what needs to be done or control your creations once they’re set free. Once you let go of the idea of doing something epic—starting the company, writing the book, even voting for the right person or supporting the right cause—you are free to joyfully participate in God’s work. Once you notice who God uses to move the horizons of the possible, powerful and powerless people alike, you can live with humility and sobriety into the new creation. “God is at work precisely in the places where the impossible seems absolute. Our calling is to join him in what he is already doing…” (pg 216) It’s not all on you. And that is good, good news. *** Next week (our last week of the book club!), we will wrap up our reading with some practical diagnostic questions for discerning our calling in the world. But for this week, consider this: What does the idea of calling mean to you? What do you feel called to do or be? And do you have any stories about a time when you felt a distinct call on your life? Feel free to share your insights, favorite quotes, or thoughts on calling and changing the world in comments! And if you’re interested in further conversation, visit our book group thread at The Rabbit Room Forum.

I remember when I had no imagination for how ugly the process of redemption can look. It seems like that change in the landscape of my mind marks the point in life when I could say with certainty that I had grown up. In that moment, whatever or whenever it was, hope suddenly meant something different, something heavy and precious. It wasn’t pretty—not in the traditional sense of the word anyway. Learning to carry it hurt me, and I had to get used to the weight of something so worth holding, so demanding of a firm grip. I’m probably the eighteen-thousandth person on the Rabbit Room mailing list to declare that Flannery O’Connor’s short stories played a role in developing my language for this newfound perception of grace and the moments signifying its entry into our lives, the sanctifying it promises or in some cases threatens to do. When I finished “Good Country People” for the first time, I was lying on my back with the book opened flat, paper-down on my stomach while I pressed my fists against my eyes and tried to get a grip on how such a bizarre story, with sour-tasting characters and a seemingly bleak, sharp-edged ending, could make me feel I was actually breathing easier. A similar confusing comfort strikes me when I watch Martin McDonagh’s movies. A brief synopsis of his career in case his name is new to you: he achieved acclaim in the storytelling scene as a playwright first, and the scripts he published in the 90s and early 2000s earned distinguished shelf-space particularly in Ireland’s library of plays. He stepped away from theatre to write and direct his own films for a while and only recently returned to stage work again, having verbalized his preference for filmmaking. His feature length films—In Bruges (2008), Seven Psychopaths (2012) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)—are distinctly recognizable by their raucous, impertinent dark humor; characters often exploding with absurdity while maintaining disarming believability, who are humanized at surprising times whether or not you want them to be; and violence that’s so jarring it’s comical one moment and sobering the next. Inevitably, some moviegoers will find McDonagh’s filmography is not their cup of tea. In this case, their stance may be that he does nothing more than cram his screenplays with cartoonish gore and language unrestricted to the point of being almost unpalatable for the sake of style, that he does no caretaking for anything lovely or good with his writing. I can’t deny that he reveres American standards of profanity censorship very little if at all, and hyperreal violence is part of his signature. I am wearied knowing there is enough ugly talk and unneeded bloodshed in the world without media adding to it, but I also can’t pretend I don’t have a softly morbid sense of humor myself. What’s more, I can’t escape the suspicion that something powerful happens when Martin McDonagh tells a story, not despite but because of how he tells it: that this powerful something is good, and glorifies the things art should glorify in a Kingdom ruled by a loving God. The courses on which his characters find themselves reveal the spaces, in their lives and ours, where grace hangs indomitably overhead before collapsing over our skulls, altering forever the horizon before us and hardly being gentle about it. Janie Townsend Not unlike Flannery O’Connor, McDonagh bequeaths his protagonists and antagonists with dysfunctional moral compasses and ample negative or at least questionable qualities so that viewers can’t always be sure who the “good” and “bad” guys are. He sends his (anti)heroes into wayward explorations of themselves, others, the world, the possibility that this world is not where reality stops—he corners them against the hope for hope, although this tends to look more gruesome on screen than it sounds in a sentence. Their crooked stories of growth and decline, sin and forgiveness build with intensity and macabre hilarity, fracturing into sincerity and tenderness sometimes without warning, immediately spiraling into more quips and shootouts and impeccable soundtrack selections. The courses on which his characters find themselves reveal the spaces, in their lives and ours, where grace hangs indomitably overhead before collapsing over our skulls, altering forever the horizon before us and hardly being gentle about it. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson’s characters in McDonagh’s premier film, In Bruges, find themselves facing judgment and potential deliverance of sorts after a slipshod assassination assignment leaves them both more or less stranded in Belgium with their regrets, copious illegal substances used for self-medication, and each other. Seven Psychopaths focuses on three friends and a handful of nutcases (these circles overlap) who somehow manage to encourage each other existentially after becoming entangled in a wacky mob vendetta. Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell play gleefully flawed, at times reprehensible, at times lovable citizens of Ebbing, Missouri in McDonagh’s latest cinematic endeavor about a crusade for justice that careens out of control. Their characters endure trauma, loss, underserved sympathy, unsolicited and backhanded helpings of humility, and reassurances just substantial enough to carry them through life if only for one more day. In each film, you can’t quite hate any of the significant characters and you can’t say anyone is perfect or even ideal. But everyone, repellent or attractive for whatever reason, encounters surprising gusts of redeeming power amidst and often because of their hideous errors and unconventional brushes with fierce, persevering love. In some moments, this love shows itself when outlandish, hard mercy ambushes a character and strips away whatever framework they thought they had, disrupting their existence so a richer one might begin. The “hard mercy” to which I’m referring could be any painful, warped or initially sinful thing—a protagonist witnessing a grisly death, another enduring an agonizing injury that leaves them severely scarred, a mistake that jerks the story’s plot or at least one character’s arc in a different direction than the audience anticipates. In other moments, the vulnerability and compassion in one character affront and consequently nourish the vulnerability and compassion of another. Penetrating kindness then connects players in a plot—players who may even be enemies—if only for a second, and the unshakable humanness of people and our capacities for love are celebrated all the more resonantly because such instances of tenderness are shared within a context of dominating darkness. There is a fresh and fervent regard for humanity in McDonagh's films, and a love for life made somehow more tangible to me because of the carnage or cruelty the characters have to muddle through. Janie Townsend No one ever up and changes, suddenly a saint after all the wrong they’ve done or overlooked—but no one isn’t changed, and every character lands at the starting line of a narrative warping their murky past (and present) into a shape the script doesn’t run long enough to reveal. Not everyone necessarily receives the reshaping, which is partly why McDonagh’s stories remind me so much of O’Connor’s—in “Good Country People,” Hulga is inhospitably subjected to hope in renewal, but the reader never finds out whether she accepts her helplessness and the liberation that comes with it. I can’t be certain of McDonagh’s beliefs about God, Jesus or the afterlife—he was raised Catholic and, like his screenwriter protagonist from Seven Psychopaths explains regarding his own work, writes a descent amount of “heaven and hell stuff” in his movies. At any rate, his films aren’t being sold on DVD and Blu-Ray at any Lifeway stores. He’s said himself that he isn’t someone who avidly tries to broadcast a message with his art, but that he has wanted his movies to be life-affirming, ultimately. I have a feeling the impish delight with which he enlivens characters, dialogue and plot structures on screen and stage is the means and end of his work, which is the wonderfully simple call for anyone saddled with a need to be creative. But whether he means to or not, his upside-down, twisted truth-telling digs into the relentless, often leveling process of redemption as it barrels forth before us, hollowing out a way we have no choice but to follow—unless of course we decide to stop or go back the way we came, a way which never quite looks how it did when we travelled it the first time and rarely offers us life when revisited. The humor is jet black and the gore is garish at times, so I would suggest you do research and watch trailers before inviting your neighbors to a Martin McDonagh movie night. My affinity for his storytelling is in no way an insult to anyone with different taste buds just as anyone else’s differing opinion would not be an inherent insult to mine. Every person is a broken person, so every artist is a broken artist, and of course there are things about any bloody action flick or gritty drama that probably don’t teach us about the Kingdom of Heaven. But there is a fresh and fervent regard for humanity in McDonagh’s films, and a love for life somehow made more tangible to me because of the carnage or cruelty the characters have to muddle through. His lines make me laugh and his characters teach me a sort of grace and joy for myself that the Lord is ever encouraging me to hunger for. His stories help me hope. That is enough to make me sure that, in his own way, Martin McDonagh is a caretaker of something good indeed.

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.

Every summer when I was a kid I was given the amazing freedom to walk down Elm Road to the neighborhood pool about a mile away. There I spent most of my summer days practicing my dives, playing 500 with Dave the ice cream man, and frolicking barefoot with my friends. There was an utterly beautiful simplicity to those summer days, when I could do almost anything I wanted. It was an amazing gift, except for one summer day when I was about ten, when I missed an important send-off celebration at my house. Periodically throughout my childhood, our family hosted high school-aged international students. The gathering I missed was for our Egyptian student, Hani, who had just graduated. I don’t remember when I figured out that I missed the party, but I was heartbroken that I would not be present to celebrate with family and friends. To this day, I believe I may have been forgotten in the haste of the party planning. Truthfully, as a young kid, I was probably too wrapped up in my own summer day agenda to notice what was going on around me. In my twenty plus years of playing music for a living, I have played every kind of venue from speakeasy club to living room to dive bar to theatre to church and last night, I gathered with about fifty folks in a small barn in the middle of a field in Canton, GA. They came not because they had any idea who I was, but because their friends who were hosting invited them into this beautiful story of a night. There was a distant sunset, hands being held, pockets of laughter, a small bonfire, crickets singing in the background, people in lawn chairs sharing tasty food and wine, and the end of a spring day whose oppressive heat finally shed its weight for a cool evening that required a jacket for many. It was a night probably much like the one I missed in my youth, except now I’m an adult with a guitar and a djembe and the privilege of taking two hours to journey through songs and stories, in hopes that at the end of the night this collection of strangers might end up as friends collectively leaning into a shared experience. It was a night of celebrating and coming together to be still. Although I never mentioned the name of Jesus once, I know that he was present, as my prayer was that he would speak to all who gathered in the midst of this beautiful evening. That is my hope and prayer on Sunday mornings as well as every time I have the opportunity to sing in front of people—that Jesus would speak through the words I sing and that He would meet us in the spaces we gather, both physically and spiritually. There is great power when we come together, and as my producer friend Roy Salmond writes, “We cannot gather alone…we need others to gather with.” It is not only biblical; it’s human nature. It’s how we are wired and why we are created the way we are: To be known, to feel safe To be honest and unafraid To leave the past, run into hope To find together we are not alone I need you, you need me This is why we gather To remember why we matter And yet much of the daily world that surrounds us pushes back on this elemental truth that we need one another. Our handheld technology boasts its unifying spirit and connectivity, but I often feel it driving us apart, pedaling fear and isolation, stirring anxiety and palpable restlessness. We have always been a forgetful people, especially when it comes to remembering who is in control and whose we are, and our devices are only fostering further belief of what we are not, what we don’t have, and stripping away the little room we leave open for God to work on our behalf. We are told we are the master of our own stories, posting the details we want people to see, the amazing life of the beloved we live, with calculated steps, knowing that whatever happens only happens because we brought it forth into happening. At a church I was guest leading this past winter, I was dumbstruck by stepping into a culture for 24 hours that might be more commonplace than I imagined; an entire worship team individually huddled like silos over their phones during every still moment in between making music together and leading the congregation in worship. There was little conversation, no diving into the depths of our stories, what the Lord was teaching us, nor even dialogue about the sermon that particular morning. And as I sat quietly amidst the strangers, unsure of how to engage and respond, it occurred to me that something might need to change. To share our story, silence the noise To hear the wisdom in the tremble of a voice To carry healing for all the scars To know we’re more than our broken hearts Sandra is one of the more senior members in the small neighborhood church I lead worship with and I will never forget her reading of scripture during Advent: she was so overcome by the power of the Word that she broke down in tears. After pausing for several moments, we collectively watched her wrestle with and embrace the unbelievable beauty of the Gospel story, taking in the tender reading of the truth of a living Savior coming into this world as a baby, seen through the eyes and wisdom of a woman in her late 60s, fully acknowledging his healing power in her life. At that moment the room was still, probably much like that night in the stable when Jesus was born. When we help each other fight the fear Be present with one another We’ll find that’s where the life of God is lived In Exodus 14, just before the Lord parts the Red Sea through Moses, he tells the Israelites, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today…I will fight for you, you need only to be still.” In that tense moment, God’s people had forgotten where they were. They had forgotten how they got there. And they had forgotten whose they were. Lost in their short-sighted desert existence, Moses called them back into the bigger story that God was writing for them, through a simple call—to be still. In those days, stillness definitely looked different than it does now, but much like those who have gone before us, silence is still silence and stillness, stillness. I wrote the song, “Gather,” as a rallying cry and a reminder that we are not alone, even though we may feel like we are in our modern world. It’s a song that celebrates this deep communion not only with one another but with our living Creator. He yearns for us to be at rest in him so we can have space to receive his love, grace, and mercy. I know he longs for me not to fill my still moments with busy useless knowledge in a silo void of connection, all while stories unfold around me. Be it a stoplight, waiting in line at a store, at the airport awaiting takeoff—so many empty moments where I know he is saying, “Pick up your head, my beloved, and see what is happening around you and what I have for you to witness. I will fight for you…you need only to be still.” When you mourn the death of your earthly father; when you celebrate the marriage of two people; when your only son learns how to ride a bike for the first time; when your community is splintering and you feel alone; when you pray musically on Sunday morning; when you sit around a fire with your bride and laugh together; when you watch the news and can’t process what you’re watching; he is present and he is calling out to you. To give courage, to hear it now We are beloved This is holy ground In Mark 6, Jesus walks out on the water to his disciples and states, “Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.” He offers a holy courage to them as he steps in the boat in the middle of the wind and waves. He is reminding them who he is at that moment and they are reminded whose they are. I firmly believe Jesus offers us the same courage in every moment of our days and that he also calls us as a body to offer that courage to those he places in our path. He’s got enough courage to go around and when we come together face to face and create those holy moments of stillness, we too will know whose we are and that we truly matter in the Kingdom of God. I need you, you need me This is why we gather To remember why we matter Click here to check out Christopher’s record, Gather, in the Rabbit Room Store. Click here to visit Christopher’s website. First published in WORSHIP LEADER MAGAZINE SUMMER 2018, copyright (c) 2018.

Welcome to Week Four of The Rabbit Reads Book Group: Culture Making. This week, we’re looking at Chapters 9 – 11 and focusing on the ways the Resurrection and the Spirit have empowered God’s people to make real, lasting change…maybe even eternal change. Read on for this week’s reflection, and share your insights, questions, or favorite quotes in the comments below! It’s hard to deny that something happened. What should have been a brief disruption quickly turned into outrageous claims of an executed man coming back to life. His small band of misfit followers went from scared out of their minds to claiming they’d seen him, eaten with him, and touched the wounds. Saul, an educated Jewish leader and Roman citizen, stopped persecuting Christians and instead traversed the empire to teach the gospel, planting churches along the way. From there, this weird little movement only grew. Jesus was the Messiah, they said. He told them to go and spread his story, love others, change the world. What began as a very specific religion among very specific people exploded into a multinational force. By AD 350 Christianity was not only legal, but claimed by half the Roman Empire. And today, we’re still talking about it. Something happened—something paradigm-shifting. World-shattering. Something true. *** Over the last couple weeks, we’ve been looking at Part 2 of Culture Making, in which Andy Crouch takes us on a tour of culture’s role in the Biblical narrative. We looked at how the creation account of Genesis presented a God unlike any other, a Creator who actually empowered his own creatures to create with him (if you missed it, Laure Hittle wrote a fantastic exploration of this topic last week). We explored the implications of the Fall and when human creativity goes awry in Babel. We looked at the call of Abram and how God’s restoration project began with a tiny imperfect nation. And we saw how Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection became the hinge of history, a culture-shaking event that still influences the world today. So here we are. In this week’s chapters, we see how the early church grew into a massive movement, and how God’s chosen family opened the way for the redemption of nations. This story is our inheritance. This is the story we live in still. *** Why Christianity? Why didn’t this whole thing fizzle out, leaving Jesus as a footnote in history? Crouch cites Rodney Stark’s book The Rise of Christianity for some insight. Perhaps part of the church’s growth came from their involvement with culture, serving their neighbors and facing challenges in loving, creative ways. In one example, Stark writes about the Christian response when disease swept through Roman cities. “In the face of terrible conditions, pagan elites and their priests simply fled the cities. The only functioning social network left behind was the church, which provided basic nursing care to Christians and non-Christians alike, along with a hope that transcended death.” (pg 156-157) So perhaps the spread of Christianity wasn’t from winning arguments, having the best theology, or providing concrete proof of the resurrection. The proof was in people who actually believed it, living like they had nothing to fear. When crises came, Christians were there, “innovating new ways of solving challenges that they shared with their neighbors.” (pg 157) The same Spirit that arrived at Pentecost and united a diverse crowd in Jerusalem empowered these earliest believers to make something new—the same Spirit behind some of history’s most beautiful movements of hope, restoration, and justice. The work of the Spirit isn’t merely internal self-improvement; it’s a transformation that spills out in powerful movements of grace. If you believe who Jesus is and what he said is true, enough to not fear death, then imagine the wonders that can be accomplished. “The belief of Christians that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead made them culture makers, and the culture they created was so attractive that by the fourth century A.D., an entire empire was on the verge of faith. (159) *** In Chapter 10, Crouch takes a look at the mysteries of Revelation with special attention to a surprising idea: in Isaiah’s vision of the future Holy City, the nations bring their wealth, from the ships of Tarshish to the glory of Lebanon. (Is 60:9, 11-13) There’s a suggestion that the best and most beautiful work of the nations has a place in eternity, a place to be purified and transformed, like gold beaten to translucence, ready to beautify the culmination of all Creation. Kind of makes you want to make something that lasts, doesn’t it? *** This week, can you think of any ways you’ve seen the world transformed by Christians facing outward? Take the time to consider with gratitude how the Spirit has worked in your life, and perhaps how this calls you to be a culture maker in God’s great restoration project. We’d love to hear your insights in the comments! If you want to dig deeper, we’ll have more questions for discussion at The Rabbit Room Forum. New here? Catch up on all the blog posts so far when you click here for the first post in this series. (Art in featured image: Golden Sea by Makoto Fujimura)

Rise and walk. He was saying this to a man who had lain there begging in dirt and filth for years. It was ridiculous to expect any action at all. To require such a man to rise, and even walk, was beyond any sense of decency. It was pointless and cruel. Stretch forth thine hand. The arm was withered, useless, and had been so for a long time. Any reasonable person could see the man was doomed to live with only one working hand. Why torture the poor man? Go your way; your son is made well. The man could have responded, “It’s an entire day’s walk back to my house. How do I know he’s made well? What if I go all that way and he isn’t? And how do you know he is well?” “But I’ve been unable to stand or walk for years. My legs are atrophied.” “Stretch forth my hand? Can’t you see it’s withered? I can’t stretch it forth. Let me go back and check with my doctor. I wouldn’t want to do any further damage.” But instead, each one made his gesture. The lame man rose up and walked. The man stretched forth his withered hand. The worried man stopped worrying and went home to his son. These were the gestures caused by faith, but what caused faith to rise, to stretch, to come home? It was one, single, actual look at the face of Jesus. They saw clarity, reality, sanity, grace, and the love of God in his eyes. They saw he was no charlatan, and definitely not a madman. They saw the living Truth, the Way, and the Life. This is what real contact with Jesus does to us—intimate, close, holy communion. We cannot help but believe, trust, rely—we cannot help but faithe. And the gesture that follows, whatever it may be, is the (super)natural outcome of the faith produced by that moment of truly knowing God. Faith isn’t something we drum up or fight for. We don’t pull up our faith-bootstraps and try to believe. Faith is more than intellectual assent to ideas about God; it is the outcome of any real moment of intimate contact with him. When we are fearful or unbelieving, when we look at the future with trepidation, or when our mind is spinning with past losses, what can we do? Well, what do we do when we are cold? We pull our chairs up to the hearth and get closer to the fire. We step into the warmth and light of the sun. The safest place for the unbelieving believer, that cringing child, is to recognize our access to the throne of grace through Jesus Christ, and to stand in communion with the living God. We see him for who he is: grace, love, compassion, mercy, strength, power. The unbelief melts away. God’s child, long-lame from cringing with fear, suddenly hears the words, “Rise and walk.” We are bought with a price. Nothing can undo that. We have been born into God’s family—we are sons and daughters of God. We have access to the throne and the face of God by grace, through Jesus Christ. We are indwelled by the Holy Spirit, who will guide, reveal, and teach us. Our job is simply to see, to look, to listen. In that moment, when we are knowing God for who he really is—the consuming Fire—our hearts catch fire. Faith is re-lit; it expels the cold darkness of fear and unbelief. Rise and walk. Stretch forth your hand. Go home. All is well. The living Word speaks. Faith-strength fills us, and we rise. The weight of unbelief falls off; the thick chains we believed bound us were really only cobwebs and dust, and we shake it from our coats and from our feet. The fruit of that reawakened reliance? Christ lives in you and is the power of God for your deliverance. Stretch forth your hand and write your story. Rise up and write your song. Love your enemies, and do good to them that persecute you. Forgive your husband. Love your wife. Grow your children well by encouraging them; don’t embitter them by being hyper-critical. The applications are endless, but the root begins in one single thing: contact with the heart of God.

Think of every barnyard animal you know. Cow. Pig. Chicken. Sheep. Horse. Duck. Goose. Every one of those words derives from Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon). If you were to kick around the farm with the poet who wrote Beowulf, the two of you would use the same words (or, in any case, very similar words) for all the animals you saw (except turkeys; turkeys didn’t come to England until five or eight centuries after the Beowulf poet died). And, by the way, you would even use all the same words for the male and female variations for each animal. Bull, boar, sow, rooster, hen, ram, ewe, mare, drake, and gander are all Old English words. The one exception is stallion, for reasons that will soon become apparent. But when the farmer calls you in for dinner, your easy communication with the Beowulf poet will quickly break down. When farm animals move from the barnyard to the dinner table, they drop their Old English names. The cow is now beef. The pig is pork. The sheep is mutton. The chicken, duck, and goose are now poultry. If you’ve ever taken a class in the history of the English language, you already know why all the names for barnyard animals derive from Anglo-Saxon and all the names for meat are of Latin origin. In 1066 AD the Norman French, led by William the Conqueror, defeated the English at the Battle of Hastings. King Harold II took an arrow through the eyeball, and that was the end of the Anglo-Saxons’ rule over the island that was named for them (England=Angle-Land). The Anglo-Saxons didn’t go anywhere. The population of Britain was still overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon; but the ruling families were all French. The guy out in the barnyard or pasture taking care of the chickens and sheep and pigs and cows and ducks and geese was Anglo-Saxon; there was no reason for him to change the names he called the animals. But when those same animals were slaughtered and cooked for the French landowner and his family, they thoroughly enjoyed their boeuf or porc or moton or poulterie. (That Anglo-Saxon farmhand, by the way, wasn’t getting a lot of meat. He was eating a lot of beans and peas—both Old English words.) Though the French ousted the Anglo-Saxon nobility in England, the French language never ousted the Anglo-Saxon language. Instead, Anglo-Saxon (Old English) absorbed thousands and thousands of French (that is to say, Latinate) words. For the most part, those new French words didn’t replace the English words. They were simply added to the English lexicon. So our language has countless word-pairs in which a word of Old English origin and a word of Latinate origin mean the same thing. Here are a few: Old English (Anglo-Saxon)Norman French (Latinate)     light     illumination     ask     inquire     answer     reply     hearty     cordial     snake     serpent     reckless     intrepid     belongings     property     follow     ensue     wild     savage Once you understand these dynamics, you understand a lot about English diction (or word choice, if you prefer the more Anglo-Saxon phrasing). Say you have a vocabulary that includes both Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words (which you do). And say the servants and farm hands use the Anglo-Saxon words, but the noble families in the village use the Latinate words. Also, the clergy speak Latin, the law and all other government business is conducted in French and Latin, and if there are any scientists or philosophers in your town, they do their work in Latin too. Which is going to feel more respectable and intelligent and highfalutin to you? The Old English diction, or the Latinate diction? It’s been 952 years since the Battle of Hastings, but we English speakers, when we want to sound smart and respectable, still trot out those Latinate words. And yet…and yet. It is true that the great majority of words in the English lexicon ultimately derive from Latin. Nevertheless, Anglo-Saxon is your native tongue. Here’s what I mean: depending on whom you ask or how your dictionary is arranged, anywhere from 2/3 to 3/4 of the words in an English dictionary derive from Latin or Greek. Scan a page or two of any dictionary with word origins, and you will see what I mean. But of the 100 most commonly used words in English, guess how many come from Latin or Greek. Whatever you just guessed, it was too high. Of the 100 most-used words in English, exactly ZERO derive from Latin or Greek. They’re all Old English words. Oh, and the next 100 most commonly used words, #101-200 on the English hit parade—how many of those do you think derive from Latin or Greek? I’ve read different answers, but the highest I’ve ever seen is five. So even though our lexicon as a whole is about 70% Latinate or Greek, no more that 2.5% of the 200 words you use most often are non-Anglo-Saxon words. You are a speaker of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) who also happens to know tons and tons of Latinate words. English speakers respond at a gut level to Old-English words. They feel like the stuff of the world. Before you started school, you navigated the world mostly with Old-English words: milk, mother, father, tree, dog, sun, moon, ball, dirt, house. You learned the Latinate words at school, from books. There are exceptions, and lots of them. flower, rock, and cat all have Latin origins. But the fact that it has never occurred to you, or to me, that rock and cat are Latinate proves my point: these words feel homey and natural because they don’t feel like they could have come from Latin. The Latinate words I’m talking about are the ones that you learned for your Friday vocabulary tests—words that are just fancier synonyms for Anglo-Saxon words you already know. Osculate for kiss. Illuminate for light up. Here’s an interesting exercise that demonstrates the different registers we associate with Old English words and Latinate words: Think of a cuss word. Any English cuss word will do. Do you have your cuss word? That word derives from Anglo-Saxon. The Beowulf poet would have known that word, or some closely related version of it. How do I know? I’m pretty sure I know all the cuss words, and I’ve looked up all their origins. Writing is an act of hospitality. It's an act of welcome. And one way to welcome your reader is to speak in her native tongue when you can. Jonathan Rogers The cuss words are among the oldest words in the language. And nobody has ever had any success in getting new ones to stick. One of my sons tried when he was three or four. He started using naked as a cuss word. We’d be trying to leave the house, everybody scrambling for shoes and socks, maybe pants, and my son would say, “Where’s my naked tennis shoes?” He had the syntax right, the inflection. Also, allow me to point out that naked is an Anglo-Saxon word. What I’m saying is that the kid had instincts. If ever a new cuss word had a chance, it was this one. But it never caught on, and my son abandoned the project before he even started kindergarten. But I digress. Let us return to your Anglo-Saxon cuss word. Now, imagine you had some reason to speak to your grandmother about the topic covered by that cuss word. How would you phrase your remarks? I’ll give you a minute to ponder that one… Ok. Whatever words you chose, I’d say there’s about a 95% chance that they were of Latin or Greek origin. Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Norman French (Latinate) constitute two registers of the English language. The Anglo-Saxon register tends to be earthier, and the Latinate register tends to be “higher,” more abstract. You use these registers naturally, whether you think about the origins of the words you use or not. We English speakers have had 952 years of practice at it. No wonder we can do it without thinking. The ability to move between these multiple registers is one of the great gifts of this language of ours. English always gives us many options for saying the same thing—options that carry many shades of meaning. And while it is true that I am suspicious of excessive Latinisms, there are plenty of ideas that you simply can’t communicate without that Latinate register. This essay, in which a writer tries to explain atomic theory using only words of Old-English origin, illustrates this truth in hilarious fashion. Let me return to a point I made earlier: Anglo-Saxon is your native tongue. It is your reader’s native tongue. Yes, there are plenty of good reasons to use Latinate words, but I suggest that you rely on Anglo-Saxon (Old English) words as much as you can unless you have a good reason to do otherwise. Writing is an act of hospitality. It’s an act of welcome. And one way to welcome your reader is to speak in her native tongue when you can. The writers of the King James Bible seemed to understand this truth. Check out these three verses, three of the most familiar in the whole Bible. I have underlined all the words of Latinate origin. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. That’s 62 words. Only three of them are of Latin origin. Sometimes writing requires that we go up and get big ideas. We have the language for that. Sometimes—more often, I would suggest—the writer’s gift to the reader is to bring big ideas down to earth. Here’s to earthy language. If you enjoyed this excellent advice and are interested in more, you can sign up for Jonathan’s weekly newsletter here.

I was standing in the parking lot of our little Valrico, Florida church when a man from the congregation came up to shake my hand. His expression was earnest, his voice impassioned, when he said, “I pray that one day millions of people will hear your voice.” It was an extravagant compliment, and kindly meant, but it was a dangerous thing for a teenager to hear. I had been on stage for as long as I could remember. When I was very young, no more than six years old, I sang a duet with my mother at a women’s event, and we were awarded the privilege of going through the buffet line first. This was heady stuff for a girl from Fort Lonesome. From there, I embarked on an illustrious musical career, including a starring role in the fifth-grade play, “Christmas from Scratch” and a gig singing backup for Sarah Brightman in three cities. I spent countless hours performing—on the piano, as a soloist, in every imaginable combination of singers, as a composer, as a conductor, even as a dancer. I met my husband because a choir tour overlapped with a family concert. And that was the beginning of the end, I suppose. Marriage, motherhood, homeschooling, and writing took center stage while dust settled on my piano and the memories of my singing days. The question of how to measure success is one I’d rather skip over. The lie that our work is more significant if more people know and love it is entrenched in our thinking. In all fairness, it is difficult to justify the sacrifices we make when only twenty-seven people like an article we wrote, or only a handful download our latest album. It’s challenging to argue in favor of three years’ work on a novel that will sell no more than a hundred copies. On the world stage, a bard was no more than a curiosity. Among his own, his value could scarcely be measured. Helena Sorensen But I came across a fascinating bit of history while researching for my last book. In Ancient Ireland, according to Brehon Law, each member of a tribe or clan was assigned an honor price. The practice is cold, rather inhuman, assigning a monetary value to each person based on his or her worth to the clan. But according to their way of thinking, it was something along the lines of a life insurance policy. If you were to murder a neighboring farmer in a hot rage, for example, you might be required to compensate the farmer’s family with a gift of ten sheep. If you killed the chief in the same way, your grandchildren might spend their lives making payments of food and livestock to pay your debt. But do you know which member of the clan was assigned the highest honor price? It was not the chief or the druid, not the healer or the blacksmith. It was not the most powerful warrior. It was the bard. The bard was the man (or woman) who knew the history of the village and the clan. In a culture with no written language, the bard was assigned the task of memorizing hundreds of stories and songs—all the history of his people, and all the tales they told. A bard was not educated in world cultures. He knew nothing of the goings on in Central America or China. But he knew his people. He knew the stories they favored for each occasion, knew the heroes they revered and the things they had lost. In times of celebration, of birth and harvest, it was the bard who delighted the little tribe with songs of rejoicing and tales of triumph. In times of grief, of battle and hunger, it was the bard who ennobled their suffering. On the world stage, a bard was no more than a curiosity. Among his own, his value could scarcely be measured. This wonderful piece of history came to life when I remembered Andy Dwyer, lead singer of Mouse Rat and resident of Pawnee, Indiana. Andy dreamed of becoming the biggest rock star on the planet. He wanted to crawl out of his little town and into the global spotlight. (What young artist doesn’t hope for that kind of recognition?) But Andy’s finest moment came when the people of Pawnee lost their beloved horse, Li’l Sebastian. Andy was asked to write a memorial song, and the stakes were high. Leslie wanted something “like Candle in the Wind, but five thousand times better,” and the stoic Ron Swanson was determined to “send that glorious beast into the great beyond with a display that rival(ed) the Superbowl half-time show.” The result was an original song of questionable artistry that was deeply satisfying to hundreds of mourners. As viewers of Parks and Recreation, we can watch the citizens of Pawnee waving candles and shedding copious tears and laugh ourselves silly. But Andy’s performance of “Bye, Bye, Li’l Sebastian” was a significant moment for his tribe. It was not the stuff of breaking news. (I doubt the biggest rock star on the planet could have found the time to write that song and sing it on the Pawnee stage.) Andy’s work was powerful and meaningful precisely because it honored his community’s loss in a way that only the local bard could. These days I sing for an audience of two, and they have no interest in the singing I did before I became their mother. I have sung them to sleep when they were weary or sick, drawing from my vast repertoire of lullabies, hymns, Disney ballads, and folk songs. My audience has joined me in rousing Slugs and Bugs sing-alongs. In times of celebration, we’ve turned up the volume on movie scores and danced around the house like lunatics. I suspect my singing will never mean more to anyone in the world. With all respect to the man in the parking lot, you can keep your millions.

“One. Two. Three.” Confession: I’m a wannabe monastic. I even mowed a makeshift prayer maze into my backyard when the grass got high enough. I like to slow my days and wander through weeds; I bet my neighbor Ryman thinks I’m crazy. “Greg must be hopped up on Mountain Dew. He’s shirtless and crying in the field. Who’s he talking to anyway? Should I check on him?” Counting my steps settles me. “Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.” If I pace it right, 150 small strides complete the path. The number is an accident, but it conjures the Psalms and invites me to walk in the honesty and hope that they have paved for me. The Psalms serve as the original template for the range of emotion: welcoming us to embrace our desire to be fully known and fully accepted (Ps. 139), giving us permission to speak completely and truthfully about our disappointments and desperate needs (Ps. 88), and inspiring and imploring us to hold fast to hope for a Savior (Ps. 126). “Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.” The Book of Common Prayer, written and compiled by Thomas Cranmer in the 16th century, is a helpful tool for some of the same reasons. It was a centerpiece in the Protestant revolution in England and is still used by many denominations around the world. It sets a standard for liturgical worship and, like my well-worn trail through the grass, creates boundaries within which to explore. “Fourteen. Fifteen.” My new record accepts Cranmer’s invitation to the journey, walking his words in music. Songs of Common Prayer pairs simple, singable melodies with the Book of Common Prayer’s time-honored poetry (which is often taken from the lavish language of the Psalms). This album is a gift to the Church, whether you belong to a congregation looking to include more traditional elements into your service; a liturgical community looking for fresh, accessible song settings; or you just crave a devotional accompaniment for everyday life. I’ve introduced these songs to my church over the last year and incorporating them into our daily liturgies has been a formative adventure. “Sixteen. Seventeen.” Recording the record often felt like a sacramental party with mugs of cinnamon tea and plates of brownies next to candles and incense–prayers, poetry, toasts, and laughter. We sought, through shared vulnerability and contemplation, to create something comforting and helpful. In the end, when I hear the album, it moves me toward the sacred, communal, and celebratory spirit in which it was created. “Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.” The first single from the record is called “Mystery of Faith.” I knew when I wrote it that I wanted Sarah Masen to sing it with me. Her presence is palpable, offering healing like a mother’s cool hand on a feverish head. The song emphasizes the liturgical words, “We have died together. We will rise together. We will live together.” It declares that life is severely painful and that there is reason to hope. Died together. “Twenty-two.” Rise together. “Twenty-three.” Live together. “Twenty-four.” The song goes on. “We are brothers and sisters through our Savior’s blood.” When we sing this song at church, I see real people singing with me—seven-year-old Samuel and retired Ron, Nyk cradling Cosette facedown like a football, Caroline quietly serving in the back, Morgan, Emily, Andrew, Tommy. I’m reminded that it is not only Christ who who has been crucified, resurrected, and who joins me, but a roomful of friends, a city of believers, and a cloud of witnesses from across the ages. Together. “Twenty-five.” Together. “Twenty-six.” Together. “Twenty-seven.” As we walk the winding roads of life—perilous and full of wonder—may we slow down and open our hands to receive and accept reality, open our hearts to trust and worship God, and open our eyes to our brothers and sisters beside, behind, and before us. Hand in hand and with a single voice, let us put one foot in front of the other and sing ourselves onward as we march through mystery. I’m not even close to the end of my journey and I have no idea where I am going, but I do know that I’m not alone. So, for those traveling this same road, I hope that Songs of Common Prayer will feel like an invitation into the tall grass: a place where you can go at your own pace and ask your own questions. I pray that you will find truth and comfort and discover hope when it’s all that keeps you moving. “Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three…” Greg LaFollette is a musician and producer in Nashville, TN. He is the resident artist at a local church plant, Grace Story Church, and serves as their director of arts and liturgy. You can follow Greg at his website to hear the new single “Mystery of Faith” and get the full-length album Songs of Common Prayer on October 26th.

Welcome to Week 3 of The Rabbit Reads Book Group: Culture Making. This week, we’re looking at Chapters 6-8, which call us to consider God’s good gifts of culture and the ways in which He continues to invite us into His creative work. What does the creation story in Genesis tell us about the nature of creation? What does all this mean for us as creators and cultivators? Join us in the comments section or in the forum with your thoughts. In the beginning, before there were names for anything, there was chaos. Apsu (freshwater) and Tiamat (salt sea) mingled and begat children, gods. The gods begat other gods. These gods rebelled; Marduk, chief among them, clove Tiamat in two and her corpse became the sky and the earth. When the younger gods tired of menial service, they begged for a race of slaves to wait upon them. In answer, humans were made to do the gods’ bidding and build their temples. The gods warred, humans served. Chaos. But this is not the God we know. This is not the God in whose image we are created, in whose likeness we also create. No, our God hovered over the waters—salt and fresh. Our God tamed the chaos, ordered it and filled it with life. Our God created the dry land not by tearing asunder but by drawing together. He planted a garden. He made our first parents not to serve Him, but to serve the ground, to work alongside Him to tend the garden, to make of the whole world a garden. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It was formless and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Holy Spirit of God hovered over the waters to bring order out of chaos. Who are Apsu and Tiamat of Babylonian legend? They are nothing, unnamed in the Hebrew narrative. Not gods. At most they are sea monsters, created by the one true God. Nowhere in all of ancient mythology has any other deity given away authority like this. No god but ours has ever given us His own nature. No god but ours has ever invited us to create. Laure Hittle Who is our God? The one who made heaven and earth, who ordered it and filled it, who made us in His likeness and called us good, who exalted us to a place of co-laboring with Him, who submitted to Adam the authority to name the creatures. And in ancient cosmology, nothing exists without a name and a function. In one sense, Adam created the zebra, the howler monkey, the toucan, the moth. God was their origin; He invented their being from formless emptiness, by a word. And then with a word He gave authority to humankind, who, with a word, told these creatures who they were. “Whatever the man called the creature, that was its name.” Nowhere in all of ancient mythology has any other deity given away authority like this. No god but ours has ever given us His own nature. No god but ours has ever invited us to create. *** Who are we? Where did we come from? How did the world get this way? These are questions that all humans wrestle with. Archaeology, as Crouch says, cannot tell us what makes humans distinctive, or when and how that happened (119). But we need to make meaning of the world. We need to make sense of our place in it, and of the powerful forces which we cannot control. Like us, ancient Israel dwelled amidst a wider culture with widely varying beliefs. They had been powerless cogs in the great machine of Egypt and now sat at the crossroads of the known world. They were familiar with Egyptian wisdom literature, with the mythologies of the surrounding nations, with the household gods inherited from Ur and Canaan. They had learned to condemn and critique—and to copy and consume. The writer of Genesis wrote with this backdrop, and in a deeply literary and slyly subversive manner he took those old tropes, those motifs of darkness and chaos and humankind’s place in the cosmos, and made them to serve the One God. By both word and silence, the writer of Genesis deftly unmakes Babylonian cosmology, dethroning Marduk and exalting the One God, Maker of Heaven and Earth. Laure Hittle The writer describes God dividing the spheres of the world into inhabitable planes, and then filling them with life. Light from darkness: Days. Water above from water below: Sky. Waters from waters below: Sea and land. And then, the explosion of life: Luminaries, creeping creepers, animals, humans. Luminaries? Yes, luminaries. For this writer, the sun, the moon, and all the stars are no deities, dictating men’s and women’s fates. They serve us and mark the seasons. They govern the day and the night, but not us. And again, they are not even named. There can be no mistaking what lights the author means, but he will not give them names which to the surrounding culture indicate personhood and power. He means to ascribe all glory to God. And he does this with a subtlety that is so easy to miss if we lack the cultural language to hear it, and so hard to miss if we grew up hearing stories of Apsu, Tiamat, Marduk, and the sun and moon in their glory. By both word and silence, the writer of Genesis deftly unmakes Babylonian cosmology, dethroning Marduk and exalting the One God, Maker of Heaven and Earth. Perhaps what I love the most about this writer’s work is that unlike Babylon’s creation myth, the Enuma Elish, Genesis was not written in poetry. And yet, the Biblical creation account is not written in prose either. It is a challenging and exhilarating melding of prose and poetry that exists nowhere else in scripture. It may be that the writer of Genesis, seeking both to tell a true account and a beautiful one, started with prose in mind and took flights along the way. But in my mind, he saw that the old art forms could not contain the grandeur of God’s creative work any more than the highest heavens could contain Him, and he set out to mimic his creator—to not only set down the facts in an orderly fashion, but to extravagantly create a new art form along the way. *** Did something stand out to you in this week’s reading? Share it in the comments. You’ll find more discussion questions and opportunity for reflection in the Rabbit Room forum. And if you’re new to this reading group, click here for the first post in this series.

I deleted Instagram from my phone earlier this summer. A few months before that I did the same with the Facebook app. Our family went on a pretty big adventure for a few weeks, and more than once my instinct was to share a photo of it on social media, but when I realized the app wasn’t on my phone I felt a flash of frustration followed by a sigh of relief—then I moved on, happy to be fully present where I was, when I was, how I was with those I love most. Part of the reason I dropped the apps from my phone was that the previous year had been so packed with stuff I needed to tell people about: the Wingfeather film and Kickstarter campaign, the Rich Mullins show at the Ryman, the Christmas tour, the Resurrection Letters release and tour. It would have been irresponsible of me to refuse to share that stuff online because other people (the label, management, concert promoters, etc.) were counting on it. If nobody knows about these things, nobody shows up; if nobody shows up, the people investing time and money in them don’t get paid; if that happens, the next time we try and put something into the world, I won’t have much help. Like it or not, we look to social media for news about what matters to us. It would be silly not to take advantage of it. In fact, twenty five years ago when I started doing this music thing, I remember feeling frustrated that there wasn’t an easier way to let people know what I was up to—or on the other side of the coin, I was frustrated when I only found out after the fact that an artist I loved had been in town. Not long after that, when our community of songwriters banded together as the Square Peg Alliance, we talked about how sad it was that we couldn’t afford to make records without a label or a benefactor. “If only there was a platform that would allow our small but wonderful fanbase to help us pay for the project,” we lamented. Enter Kickstarter, which changed the game for many of us. These are good things. But here’s the problem: now social media asks more from me than I’m able to give. And if I play by its rules, it becomes a spiritual issue. Here’s what I mean. Our family adventure this summer was a time of reconnection and retreat for Team Peterson. We were tired, worn down by school and work, by more-intense-than-usual creative demands (which always brings with it an increase in travel, which always brings an increase in weariness and stress). Don’t get me wrong—I love my job. Truly. I couldn’t be more grateful that the Lord has allowed me to serve him in this way. But in my old age I’ve gotten more and more private with personal stuff, and have felt more conviction about what’s appropriate to share on social media. Not only does it snap me out of the moment I’m in, as if it’s not enough to be in a beautiful place with my family unless I show everyone else where we are, it also leads to envy. Some people actually write “envious” or “jealous” in the comments. I know, because I’ve done it myself. We all know about the tendency on social media to make our lives look like they’re better than they really are. I’ve considered seeing what would happen if I posted a picture of myself with bloodshot eyes after a tearful argument, or a quick video clip of me grumbling about something that didn’t go right, or (the horror!) me with my shirt off to show why I’m trying to get more exercise. That’s not to mention the hellish tendency to put too much stake in how many likes or follows we got today. Comparison is the thief of joy, said Teddy Roosevelt, and social media is foundationally comparative. It’s comparison on steroids. Social media asks more of me than I'm able to give. Andrew Peterson Here’s the rub: I’m a touring songwriter and author. The way I pay my bills is, in a very real sense, tied to social media. It’s not a stretch to imagine that in the board meeting where a publisher or label is discussing whether or not to offer someone a deal, the amount of followers one has on Facebook or Instagram actually matters. More followers equals more influence and advertising, equals more sales, equals more profit, equals a contract and the possibility of putting something good and helpful into the world. As a member of the Rabbit Room board I can attest to the fact that an organization needs income in order to survive. If we didn’t have help from our Rabbit Room members (thank you for joining by clicking here, seriously), and if this amazing community didn’t actually support our artists and authors by purchasing products, the Rabbit Room would fizzle and go away. Social media is often how you guys find out about this stuff. Even if the Rabbit Room were just a website, we’d need to pay someone for hosting, design, and maintenance, not to mention content. Commerce isn’t an evil, however evil commerce can become if it isn’t done with righteousness. Okay, so social media is, in this day and age, a necessary component of an artist’s career. Why not just post tour dates and album releases? Because, the social media gods tells us, people will stop listening to you if there’s no personal connection, no ongoing interaction, or if there’s only sporadic activity. People will start to think you’re greedy or self-serving if the only time you post on Instagram is when you want them to buy your books or albums. And, sadly, there’s some truth to that. We already get enough advertisements from everything else in the world—why would we bother to follow an artist just to get more ads? But isn’t there something icky about sharing intimate moments of my family’s summer vacation when even a fraction of my motive is to build up enough trust to tell you about my new record when the time comes? The answer is YES. It’s more than icky. And that’s when social media demands more than I’m willing to give. My heart is at stake. Yours is, too. You, friends, are not commodities. You are not merely means to an end. You are not mere vehicles for commerce. You are vast souls, invaluable and intricate. The murmur of the Holy Spirit in my heart has grown over the years into a clear voice: don’t thoughtlessly share pictures of yourself or your loved ones with people you don’t really know. Don’t play a game that inevitably leads to envy or dissatisfaction, for you or anyone else. Don’t manipulate children of God for your own purposes. Don’t compare your own gifts to what God has given to others. Be content with what you have. Pay attention to where you are. Be present. What I’m describing, of course, is a worst-case scenario. I’m not at all implying that everyone on social media has the same conflict I do. Indeed, most of the time I’ve posted stuff online that wasn’t directly career-related was done so for fun, or because it really can be helpful, even joyful, to share our lives with each other. But we’re all flawed. Our hearts aren’t impervious to this temptation. Mine isn’t, at least. The murmur of the Holy Spirit in my heart has grown over the years into a clear voice: don't thoughtlessly share pictures of yourself or your loved ones with people you don't really know. Don't play a game that inevitably leads to envy or dissatisfaction, for you or anyone else. Andrew Peterson That leads me to where I am now, which feels like an impasse. How do I reconcile all this with the fact that I’ve come to know some of you well because of interactions on social media? How can I discount the massive encouragement I’ve received from some of you via Facebook or Instagram? How do I deny the fact that I have been blessed and shaped by albums and books and films and concerts and articles I wouldn’t have discovered any other way? How do I maintain a healthy relationship with people who actually do care about me and mine, who actually want to know what’s going on in my life, though I’ve never once had dinner or coffee with them? This culture is so weird, right? It’s weird in ways no one could have predicted when the first computer was constructed. I don’t know the answers to these questions. It would be arrogant for me to assume you’ve noticed that I’ve been more absent than usual from social media, but if you have, it’s not your imagination. I’m fighting my way through this just like you are. But while I’ve been “gone,” I’ve actually been more “here” than I have in a long time. I’ve harvested this year’s honey, laughed with my family, watched some great movies, and read several great books. I’ve seen beautiful things and thanked God for them with a lessening impulse to grab my phone to tell everyone else about it. I’ve become more aware than ever of my broken need for approval and my habit to envy. Life was rich long before social media showed up, and it’s been nice to remember that. And yet, I really do want to share things with my friends and acquaintances and even those I don’t yet know. How can you see a beautiful tree and not want to say, “Isn’t that something?” I guess I’m saying I don’t yet know how to navigate these waters. For now, at least, here are a couple of principles I’m trying to abide by: 1. Don’t post about myself unless I have to. Use social media to draw attention to other people’s work more than my own. If we all agreed to this, we could avoid the icky stuff and just as many people would know what we’re making. 2. Keep it off my phone. I don’t miss the Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook apps. Nowadays I post stuff from my computer. That way it’s a bit more trouble to share things, and I’m not tempted to do it in the moment. We all know there are better ways to spend our time at traffic lights and airport terminals than thumbing our way through a zillion pictures and memes. 3. Don’t post anything that might cause my brothers and sisters to stumble. If I’m posting something that is meant, even a little bit, to make my life look awesome, then I shouldn’t. Yes, our lives are full of beauty and goodness and delightful moments. No, I’m not meant to construct a false world for others to see or, worse, to boast. This one is really tricky, because it’s actually wonderful to be able to share good news and gratitude. Pray for discernment. Listen to the Spirit. 4. Be present. After our vacation I found some fun pictures and posted them, then I moved on. No offense, but when I was with my family, I didn’t want to be with the rest of Facebook. It reminds me of something Wendell Berry said about poetry: “You can’t think about the fact that you’re writing a poem. As soon as that thought shows up, you’ve stopped writing a poem. You’re doing something else.” In that spirit, I’d say this: “When you’re experiencing something beautiful, you can’t stop and take a picture of it to share with everybody else. As soon as that happens, you’re not experiencing something beautiful. You’re doing something else.” I’d love to hear how you’re wrestling with these things. I don’t pretend to have the answers, and I’m sure I’ll post stuff online that’ll make you roll your eyes and say, “Oh, Mr. I-Hate-Instagram doesn’t have a hard time now, does he?” All I know is, it’s been nice not fussing with it for the last few months. On the other hand, maybe it’s just part of the culture now and the answer is to find a way to redeem it. In the meantime I want to keep wrestling the giant. I’ll let you know how it goes. Probably on Facebook.

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.

When I was a boy, I read a comic book about which I remember only one scene: the protagonists are being menaced by a bad guy with a gun. They get backed into a corner (literally, if memory serves, not figuratively), and just when it is obvious that there is no way they could possibly escape, the bad guy bursts into flames right before their eyes. One protagonist turns to the other and says, “Spontaneous human combustion: what a stroke of luck!” This is an extreme case of a storytelling offense known as deus ex machina—literally, the god out of the machinery. The term derives from the Roman theater; as Roman theatergoers’ appetite grew for novelty and plot twists (not to mention mistaken identities and twins separated at birth), the plots of Roman plays grew increasingly complex. In fact, they sometimes grew so convoluted that the playwrights gave up on actually resolving the complications in a narratively believable way. Instead, they would write a scene in which a god would appear and resolve all the characters’ problems with the wave of a wand. That way, everybody could get home at a reasonable hour. The actor playing the god would often be lowered on a rope from machinery installed in the rafters for this purpose. Hence the phrase, the god out of the machinery, deus ex machina. While many of us believe that there actually is a God who is fully able to reach out of the machinery of the universe to resolve problems of human making—a God who often does just that (and, indeed, who made the machinery)—few of us are interested in stories in which a human writer invents problems which he then resolves by inventing a divine intervention, or a happy coincidence or a timely case of spontaneous human combustion. The deus ex machina highlights a tension that exists in almost all storytelling, both fiction and non-fiction. When we tell stories, we are balancing goals that are often at odds with one another. On the one hand, the storyteller is always trying to depict events that feel true to the way things actually happen in the world God made. On the other hand, the writer has other goals as well: he wants to communicate information that the reader needs to know in order to make sense of the story—information about characters and their relations to one another, information about setting, perhaps information about events that have led up to the events of the story at hand. He wants to create tension, then resolve that tension. It isn’t always easy to harmonize these goals with the goal of writing stories that feel true to real life. The deus ex machina is one of the more spectacular failures to harmonize these goals. But there are lots of ways to get this wrong. No doubt you’ve read dialogue in which the characters seem to be talking to the audience rather than to one another. Cindy, I’ve been your stepmother for ten years now, and I love you almost as much as I love my natural-born children—Paul, age 20, and Baby Brittany, your half-sister and the apple of your father’s eye. But I don’t think you have ever made me this angry before…except possibly the time you refused to be the flower girl at my wedding to your father. It is always a problem when the writer’s motives are easier to understand than the characters’ motives. A few weeks ago, one of my online students submitted a (non-fiction) story in which two co-workers have a conversation that gives the reader everything she needs to know about the two characters’ relationship, teeing up the surprising gesture that is the climax of the story. The only problem was that the characters’ dialogue was just a little too informative. I told the writer that the dialogue seemed packaged. (I might have said that the dialogue seemed like something written rather than something two people would say to one another in the world God made.) The writer wrote back, You’re right that the story is ‘packaged’ in the sense that I chose to combine elements of different conversations and events that happened at different times into a single narrative; I was attempting to use those to establish the nature of the characters’ relationships with each other, to give some context in which to understand the gesture at the end. But the events and conversations described really happened: they really said (more or less) those words. Let me say two things in this writer’s defense. First, it is the writer’s prerogative to compress events and combine bits of different conversations into a single conversation, as long as he is not making any claims to reportorial accuracy (which this writer wasn’t). And second, “to establish the nature of the characters’ relationships with each other” and “to give some context in which to understand the gesture at the end” are both perfectly legitimate goals. Having said that, I think it is dangerous for a writer to prioritize any goal over the goal of depicting a scene that feels like something that could happen in the world in which we live and move and have our being. Compressing events and combining conversations are fine as long as as the end result is a scene that feels like real life. Establishing characters’ relationships and providing context are legitimate goals, but if you don’t achieve the goal of writing scenes that could have happened in the world God made, you can’t achieve any other goals in your storytelling. As Flannery O’Connor said, do whatever you can get away with…but nobody ever got away with much. If you enjoyed Jonathan’s excellent advice and are interested in more, you can sign up for Jonathan’s weekly newsletter here.

I’m a slow reader, and it’s rare that a writer comes along with a voice so captivating that I can’t stop reading. I finished this one in less than 24 hours (a real feat for me), and I’m just about to slip it onto my shelf of favorites right in between what I consider its spiritual forebears: Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb. Courage, Dear Heart is presented as a series of nine letters written to those in the midst of abuse, disillusionment, doubt, and pain. And this format gives Reynolds leeway to engage her substantial powers of empathy. Such intimate powers coupled with her gift of language come together to create a work of incredible insight, beauty, thought, and grace. And those qualities are dearly needed because on every page she grapples with monumental powers of darkness. She’s forging for the wounded of the world a shield against the problem of evil, the spiral of loneliness, the cataract of suffering, and the temptation of doubt. The book is nothing less than a battlement erected against the enemy’s advance into our homes and hearts. Yet it’s not an apologetic. It’s an act of love. I’ve always known Rebecca Reynolds had a book in her. She’s one of the best writers I know, and also one of the best thinkers, and one of the most caring people. I know these things because over the years I’ve butted heads with her from time to time and I’ve always ended up wiser for the bruises, no matter who came out on top. And I also know this book cost her a lot to write. Maybe that’s part of what makes it so good. After all, a book or a painting or a poem that doesn’t cost the artist much, doesn’t ask much of its audience. But Courage, Dear Heart, asks a great deal. It asks us to pay attention, not to the writer, but to her Source. It asks us to let ourselves open up and be loved by a writer and her gifts in a way that may make us uncomfortable at times, but will not leave us alone in the dark. It asks us to follow its pages through darkness and pain in search of the bright dawn of hope. As the book wound down to its final page, I found myself enjoying the kind of breathless wonder that only a few other books have given me—books like Godric, or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or The Supper of the Lamb, or A Severe Mercy. And this is how a great writer best loves her reader: the wonder she stirs in us is less about the written work, and more about the right and true things toward which her gifts leave us oriented. Until I cracked it open, I didn’t know I needed this book. But I did. Read it and then give a copy to someone you know. They need it, too. We all do. [Courage, Dear Heart: Letters to a Weary World is available in the Rabbit Room Store.]

Welcome to Week 2 of The Rabbit Reads Book Group – Culture Making. This week, we’re looking at Chapters 3-5. A couple weeks ago while preparing for this read-through of Culture Making, I posed two questions on the RR Forum: “What do you think of when you hear the word ‘culture’? And what was your relationship to culture when you were growing up?” The answers weren’t surprising… “Growing up, I think I associated ‘culture’ with the idea of culture wars. The ‘culture’ was a worldly, ungodly place that I needed to stay away from. Then I think I moved to a different kind of aggressive stance, where I thought Christian culture needed to overcome secular culture…” – Chris (@chrisyokel) “In a church context – it’s almost always put forward as an ‘us vs. them’ scenario, such as ‘….our culture is telling us [option A], but God/the Bible [option B].’ I think it’s often used as a stand-in word for behaviors that are socially accepted in the US but miiight not be biblically orthodox.” – @Laura “Growing up in the church and heavy into the early phases of ‘Christian rock,’ I saw culture as something to be imitated but with a Christian twist, not unlike what we are now seeing in the film industry… ‘culture’ has what people want, so let’s make it wholesome or biblical or Gospel oriented. The idea that believers are to be culture makers was completely foreign.” – Beth (@bethelrising) If you’re a regular at the Rabbit Room and willing to pick up a Christian book on Culture Making, I’d guess a few things are true about you. For one thing, you are probably a Christian with some solid ideas about theology and culture. However you got here—growing up in church, becoming a Christian later in life, or in the middle of a faith shift, questioning and finding your way—here you are. I suppose it’s even safe to guess the majority of us are smack in the middle of white American evangelicalism. (And if you aren’t part of that tradition, please comment away… we need your perspective!) For better or worse, my guess is at least one part of those stories above rings true for you. I know it did for me. What Chris, Laura, and Beth describe in their comments are certainly definitions of culture, but they also suggest something about the postures we take in how we respond to culture. In Chapter 5, Crouch gives us a history of Christians and culture, characterizing different times and groups with different postures: Condemning: Fundamentalism (withdrawing and ignoring, all fear and no delight) Critiquing: The Neo-Evanglicals (think Francis Schaeffer and L’Abri… asking question about worldview, “somewhere between beating the world and joining it”) Copying: The CCM / Jesus Movement (welcoming and appropriating cultural forms, but becoming puritanical about content and splitting sacred and secular) Consuming: Just taking it all in Like the way our bodies’ postures communicate confidence or shame, energy or withdrawal, our posture toward culture says something about what we believe is possible. And, as Crouch points out, good posture gives you freedom to move. Our posture makes some movements more possible than others. If our attitude toward movies is “that’s all a bunch of immoral liberal trash,” then it’s impossible to experience the redemptive power of great films. But if we read books with a critiquing posture, it’s possible to find God between the lines of both great classics and a contemporary sci-fi paperback. If our posture is copying, then it becomes possible to enjoy music that sounds reasonably close to whatever is popular without feeling gross about it (this was me in high school with my WOW CDs). And if our posture is consuming, then well… it’s possible to binge-watch anything on Netflix that strikes our fancy because who cares? It’s just entertainment, right? This week, let’s talk about the postures we’ve been taught to hold and the ones we carry today. Maybe over the years, you’ve built up a posture that’s constantly squinting at the world, looking for the glow of the holy, or maybe your arms are open wide, free from fear but not really questioning what you take in. Take some time to honestly consider how you approach the world, and ask yourself what you might learn if you saw through a different lens. A final word on these four postures: all of them have their place. Some cultural artifacts are worth condemning because they are damaging, dehumanizing—pornography for sure comes to mind. Many deserve our critique, because there’s more to them than just the surface. Sometimes it’s good to copy, as a way of learning from and paying respect to those who have gone before. And you know what? Sometimes a sandwich is a sandwich and we should just consume it. These postures, rightly ordered, can give us the freedom of movement to take on a new, more generative posture toward the culture we find ourselves in: “If there is a constructive way forward for Christians in the midst of our broken but also beautiful cultures, it will require us to recover these two biblical postures of cultivation and creation. And that recovery will involve revisiting the biblical story itself, where we discover that God is more intimately and eternally concerned with culture than we have yet come to believe.” (pg. 98) Did something stand out to you in this weeks’ reading? Feel free to share your favorite quotes, insights, and questions in the comments! You’ll find more questions for discussion at The Rabbit Room Forum. And if you’re new to this reading group, click here for the first post in this series.

In case you haven’t heard, A. S. Peterson (aka Pete Peterson) has written an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein for the stage. In Pete’s own words, “this is not your mama’s Frankenstein.” Show up to the play and you’ll find an eloquent Monster, theological questions of creation and death just as abounding as questions of scientific progress, and a Victor Frankenstein indelibly shaped by the drama of his family. I recently had the great pleasure of visiting Studio Tenn’s second read-through of Pete’s play adaptation—his own tenth draft—and I was blindsided by the depth and beauty of the story, the characters, and the symbolism woven gently into every moment of the play. What follows is the second and final part of an interview with A. S. Peterson—in it, we talk about the transition from novel-writing to playwriting, the hidden treasures within the covers of Frankenstein, the endangered art of theater, and much more. Enjoy! Click here to read Part I of our interview. Show dates begin August 31st and run through September 9th. You can buy tickets here. Drew: I noticed the Monster has a cadence reserved only for himself—when he opens his mouth, it feels more poetic than other characters. And of course that’s unexpected when we’re used to thinking of the Monster as this groaning beast of a creature. Pete: In the book, Victor warns people about the Monster: “Be careful; it is eloquent and it lies.” So while we imagine the Monster to be this course, vulgar brute, nothing could be further from the truth—I mean, the Monster learns how to speak by reading Paradise Lost! So he immediately possesses both a fluency of the English language and a rich theological framework through which to reflect on his existence. It was a lot of fun to inhabit that voice as the writer. A lot of his lines are iambic; I purposefully kept that cadence in there. Drew: Tell me a little bit about the process of making a play, from start to finish. Pete: The theater company, Studio Tenn, commissioned the play. And when I wrote my first play, I thought it would basically be like writing a novel, except that people would speak it out loud. I was sorely mistaken! Not only is it spoken out loud, but it takes place in three dimensions, it’s not performed the way you hear it in your head, it involves a whole community of people, it has to be between 90 and 120 minutes long in the form of a two-act structure—it’s a very different art form. That’s scary and exhilarating to me, because I believe art functions best from within limitations. So for someone to come up to me and say, “hey, I want you to tell this story. Here are your limitations,” I get excited about how to make that happen. I go to work and write a couple drafts. My long-suffering wife Jennifer is the first audience; we’ll sit at the kitchen table and read the whole thing out loud, doing the voices the best we can. The reality of a play is that you don’t know what’s wrong with it and what’s right with it until you hear it read aloud. So I’m deeply grateful she’s been willing to endure that with me. After a few drafts, I’ll arrive at something I’m comfortable enough with to send to the director. At that point, what I’ve sent feels like a mostly final draft to me. The director will then schedule a reading with a handful of actors where we’ll all sit down and give it our first pass, and that’s when we inevitably discover the play is nowhere near done! The first reading we did a couple months ago was entirely different from what it is now. Every time we read it out loud, I go back to the drawing board and start rewriting. We’re on draft eleven or twelve now, and we’re about to go into a workshop for the show, which means we’ll read it together, then edit it, then read it again until it settles into its final form. I appreciate the constant collaboration of playwriting—novel writing is a solitary act, but with playwriting, you’re in dialogue with all kinds of different perspectives. And I’ve been blessed to work with an amazing team of people at Studio Tenn. I trust them, I admire their sense of storytelling, and when they disagree with me I know it’s for good reason. Drew: Do you ever feel like a play is truly finished? Pete: No—like with anything, you get to a point where you have to abandon it. Books are the same way. With The Battle of Franklin, we were making tweaks to it right up until the day it opened. And even during the performances we made slight changes. The second year we did that play, we gave it another edit, cut some scenes, and so on. If we do it a third time, we’ll probably do all that over again. And that’s the unique thing with theater—it’s never the same way twice. That’s part of its gift. It’s a very living art form. Drew: What does theater have to tell us about art and spirituality? What can we learn from theater as an art form about the way God made the world? Pete: Oh man. This is one of my favorite topics. The transience of theater does not bode well in a culture of instant gratification. A. S. Peterson Drew: Here in Nashville, we give music a lot of attention, but I rarely hear conversations of this nature about theater. Pete: Yeah, it’s frustrating to me that theater is so removed from many people’s radars. There are reasons for that. Not only is it expensive, but it’s impermanent. The Avengers has been in movie theaters now for a few weeks; there’s no pressing need for me to go see it. And even when it’s gone, it will show up on Netflix, whose entire business model is to render movies ubiquitous. On the other hand, live plays will only be performed for two weeks. And if you’re busy those two weeks, or if you only just heard of the play by the time it’s closing, you’re out of luck. It’s a difficult art form to stay engaged with unless you’re very intentional about it. The transience of theater does not bode well in a culture of instant gratification. But man, I love theater. I love that there’s a parallel between theater and the Incarnation of Christ. In the Old Testament we were given the law by God; it was written and we were told to follow it. Then when we get to the New Testament and God is incarnated in the person of Jesus, it’s as if the law stood up and said, “Here’s what I look like in three dimensions.” That’s how theater is. As a writer, when I write something, I think I know all there is to know about it. But when I give it to the theater company and it stands up and becomes three-dimensional, it does things I didn’t expect. It looks different than I thought it would look. It takes on a whole new layer of meaning. I’m fascinated to think about that in context of the actual Incarnation. What was it like for the apostles to see the actual Word of God walk around in the flesh? They knew God in a way no one has ever known him, before or after. And we have their testament now in written form, but we still can’t understand it in the same way they did. We will one day—that’s our great hope. Drew: It’s as if in a certain sense, by virtue of having been born after Jesus, the play is closed to us. We missed it in live action. Pete: All you can do is read the reviews. Drew: Right! Exactly. Pete: There are some great reviews out there. Drew: Lots of them. Pete: But the revival is coming. Drew: Here’s a thought: the idea of art imitating life is a generally helpful notion, but would you say that theater has an especially privileged role in imitating life? It is the most direct imitation there is, isn’t it? When you see an actor start weeping, or being beaten on stage, it has a much more immediate effect on you than if you were to see the same things taking place on a movie screen. It's inescapable—you feel complicit in whatever is happening on stage because you're in the room with these people. A. S. Peterson Pete: It is and it isn’t. Lots of people think about theater as essentially a live movie, but there’s very little real comparison between cinema and theater. Cinema is not just filmed theater, and theater is not merely acted out cinema. What I mean is that when you go to a movie, you can sit in front of the sixty-foot movie screen, watch the story unfold, and remain distanced from it. When you go to the theater, you have an easy time knowing it’s fake—set pieces generally serve the purpose not of replicating real life objects, but of referencing them loosely— Drew: Wow. So in some ways theater is more abstract and distinct from actual life than cinema. Pete: It’s very abstract in one sense. But then when you see an actor start weeping, or being beaten on stage, it has a much more immediate effect on you than if you were to see the same things taking place on a movie screen. It’s inescapable—you feel complicit in whatever is happening on stage because you’re in the room with these people. Drew: I know there’s a lot of discussion around the issue of becoming desensitized to violence in movies—do you think there’s a chance for us as a culture to be resensitized to life through theater? Pete: The Battle of Franklin is about the bloodiest battle in the Civil War. We depicted no violence in the show, but people had visceral reactions to it. What makes it hard to watch at certain points is the sense of violence you’re experiencing. You hear fists beating on wooden doors, people screaming, gunshot sounds, none of which are coming from the safety of speakers. It’s right in front of you in a way entirely unique to theater. If you’re interested in reading Part I of our interview, you can do that by clicking here. Frankenstein will be performed at Jamison Theater in The Factory at Franklin, August 31st—September 9th and tickets are now on sale. Click here to purchase tickets.

Two scenes stand out in memory: one a place of beginning, the other a place of understanding. In the first, a nineteen-year-old girl sits alone in her car on a summer afternoon, while the boy she loved walks away. She is hurting, and the feeling of rejection is intolerable. She is disgusted with herself, so she uses her pain as a catalyst for change—she will finally take control of her health. In the fall, she begins her junior year of college, returning to the dorm with tennis shoes, supplements, and a juicer, which she props on the corner of the bathroom counter. In the mornings, before class, she gets up silently, doing Tae Bo videos while her roommate sleeps, or slipping out for a brisk walk around Lake Hollingsworth. She feeds carrots and apples and peppers and lemons and parsley into the juicer, and cleans up the mess, and she uses every spare minute to research ways to reclaim her health, to look like all those taut education majors lounging at the pool by 11 a.m. She never does look like those girls, by the way, but she turns a pitying eye on others who lack the willpower or the information to radically change their lives. She is all in. She is fully invested. She seeks out new practitioners and reads up on theories of health and healing. She does not try a supplement or a cleanse or a new methodology for a week or two and give up. Oh, no. She grits her teeth and gives it six months, a year. She is troubled, though, and increasingly so as time passes. There are people who eat what they want, drink what they want, whose bodies look as if the Greeks have carved them from marble. She can’t make sense of it. Meanwhile, she faces serious health challenges (both internal and cosmetic) that show no sign of improvement. Doctor after doctor shakes his head in dismissal. They have no answers. In the midst of all this, she meets a guy and falls in love. Loving him and being loved by him, seeing her life laid out before her like a fairy tale, makes her feel like a goddess. She is invulnerable, immortal, undeniably beautiful. She has the power to lose so much weight in the days leading up to her wedding, that the seamstress does an emergency fitting to keep the dress from falling off. Then she returns from her honeymoon to a new city, a new church, a new house, a new job, and the reality of married life, conflict, and financial struggle. Depression sets in. Her superpowers vanish. There follow seasons of struggle, of failing to live up to the standards she sets for herself, and seasons of searching for answers. There are brief periods of triumph, when the strength of her resolve sets her back above the masses. People come to her for advice, and she begins to shy away from their questions. She is learning that she cannot heal them. Then comes pregnancy, and the host of both sensible and irrational fears that accompany the arrival of a new human child. She labors over pre-natal vitamin choices, and decisions about the baby’s environment, diet, schedule, sleep, and safety. Yet her child gets sick. He catches colds and cries and develops rashes, and another baby comes along to prove that no amount of information or willpower can guarantee the perfect health of her children. Daily, we feel the infinite tiny losses that will culminate in one great loss. And we pray for healing and we search for answers, but even if we find them, they are fleeting. The Law of Sin and Death is too much like the second law of thermodynamics. Helena Sorensen This is where the second scene opens. The woman stands in the chiropractor’s office, watching a documentary on a mounted television screen. Around her, the walls are plastered with motivational quotes and flyers about upcoming seminars: ways to improve heart health, strengthen the immune system, drop twenty pounds. On the screen, the experts are weighing in, declaring that animal products cause inflammation and all manner of evil. The woman flinches, startled by the sudden break in the soundtrack of the last eighteen years. “Wait,” she says. “Haven’t they been saying for ages that grains were the problem? I thought it was bread that caused inflammation and weight gain and all manner of evil.” And it hits her with stunning clarity: they don’t have the answers. They’re trying to beat an unbeatable law. They’re trying to beat the Law of Sin and Death. All of them—the doctors, the naturopaths, the herbalists, the personal trainers—all the experts, and all of us who listen, all of us living in a world where your eczema medication can give you leukemia—we’re all trying to beat the law of sin and death. It was a revelation two decades in the making. When Adam sinned, he set himself under a new system of power and authority. Separation from God, from Life, placed him automatically under the jurisdiction of death. We who are his children have inherited that judgment. The cells of our bodies die and are renewed, and as time passes, the dying outpaces the renewing. Our strength goes, our clarity of mind goes, our vitality fades. Daily, we feel the infinite tiny losses that will culminate in one great loss. And we pray for healing and we search for answers, but even if we find them, they are fleeting. The Law of Sin and Death is too much like the second law of thermodynamics. This body is wearing out. Though I push it to its limits, eventually it will fail me, and I am more vulnerable, more fallible than a nineteen-year-old girl could have thought possible. I cannot overcome the law that governs the galaxies. One hope remains. I can submit myself to a higher law. That’s it. It’s so simple, but I had to exhaust myself completely before I could see it. All along, I’ve had access to a different way of living and thinking, because “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” (Rom. 8:2) My only hope is to place myself in the hands of the One who conquered sin and death. I cast myself at the feet of a man who entered a culture of rigid adherence to dietary restrictions and yet told his disciples, “Eat whatever is offered to you and heal the sick.” (Luke 10:8,9) I still don’t understand it. I can’t explain why some people abuse their bodies and live long, robust lives while others act with wisdom and caution and die young. I don’t know why medications help some and essential oils help others. I don’t know why some of us live on vegetables and suffer while others skate comfortably into old age on whiskey and bitterness. But I can look with tenderness on the nineteen-year-old girl sitting lonely and wounded in her little green Pontiac. She was determined to search within the problem for a solution when the Answer was there in the car, sitting with her in her heartache.

I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. –Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet Several months later, while visiting the home of Lou and Friedrich, he began working on a cycle of poems he called “the prayers,” which would later make up the first part of The Book of Hours, the first of his mature poetic works. In 2013, these initial poems were translated and republished in their early draft form by Mark S. Burrows as Prayers of a Young Poet (a nod to Rilke’s famous Letters to a Young Poet). I first stumbled across Prayers of a Young Poet several years ago, and was captivated by the lines of prayer #2: I live my life in widening rings which spread out to cover everything I may not complete the last one, but I’ll surely try:I’m circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I’ve been circling for thousands of years— and I don’t yet know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a vast song…. That was about as far as I got. Last fall, I picked up Prayers of a Young Poet again. Early 2017 had brought on a bout of unexpected and severe depression, unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and along with it, a sense of spiritual darkness. There were many days when I wondered where God’s voice was in the midst of dark thoughts, or I cursed God for the silence. As I gradually emerged out of the depression itself, what then began was a time of spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction. It was in this space that I re-encountered Rilke’s prayers. Prayers of a Young Poet are a perfect example of what Dorothy Sayers called the poetry of search versus the poetry of statement. For Sayers, search poetry is about exploration and groping, whereas statement poetry is didactic, teaching a lesson that has been learned. Rilke is supremely a poet of search, as I found in Prayers of a Young Poet. This can be seen in the poem above, which describes him as “circling around God, around the ancient tower.” I also see this in another dominant metaphor throughout the prayers, one that fascinated me deeply, and that is God as ineffable darkness. Take for example prayer #3: My God is dark and like a clump of a hundred roots drinking silently. I lift myself from His warmth; more than this I don’t know, for all my branches rest in the depths and only sway in the winds. This sense of God as darkness and silence is also accompanied by a sense of yearning. From prayer #6: You, neighbor God, when I sometimes wake You with loud knocks in the long nights, I do so because I rarely hear You breathing and know You’re alone in the vast hall. And when You need something, no one’s there to offer a drink to Your outstretched hand. I’m always listening. Give me a sign; I’m very near.Only a thin wall lies between us— by chance; for it could be that a cry from Your mouth or from mine— and down it falls without any noise or sound at all.The wall is built up from Your paintings.And they stand before You like names. And when the light flames in me and claims You in my deep, it squanders itself as radiance upon their frames.And my senses, which darken so soon, are without a home and parted from You. In saying, “The wall is built up from Your paintings” I believe Rilke is referencing the religious iconography he experienced while in Russia. Rilke seems to be suggesting that our very attempts to capture the divine can often be a stumbling block or a barrier to experiencing God. Translator Mark S. Burroghs suggests that the “prayers” reveal “[Rilke’s] desire to loose God from the conscious realm of the intellect, to seek the divine not through concepts or doctrines but rather in the experiences communicated in ‘the deep,’ by means of images and metaphors….We encounter this God in the ongoing experience of creation, and above all in the primal darkness that represents each new experience of beginning. ‘The dark of God’ is not sheer absence but is rather a gesture toward a presence we can ‘sense’ but cannot know: ‘Don’t let go of me with Your hands,’ he cries, ‘for I am night from Your night.’….Darkness allows for the emergence of this ‘second life’ in our experience; it is the place of every new beginning, according to Rilke.” Looking back, I can see that this has been true in my life. Darkness led to the beginning of a renewal in my spiritual life that I now see was desperately needed. Old, bad ideas of God and myself had to be plunged into a dark abyss, in order for the Spirit to hover once again over chaos and wait for the quickening word. I love the dark hours of my being, for they deepen my senses; in them as in old letters I find my daily life already lived in pious words, so soft and subdued.From them I’ve come to know that I have room for a second life, timeless and wide.

The season of school is now upon us! To celebrate, we offer you a few of our favorite Rabbit Room books at reduced prices. Click through to learn more. We have three bundles available. The first is Jonathan Rogers’ entire Wilderking Trilogy, plus the accompanying curriculum guide, at $16 less than its value. Click here to view this bundle in the store. The second bundle is Jennifer Trafton’s Henry & the Chalk Dragon with a curriculum guide for only $10. Click here to view this bundle. And finally, we’re offering McKelvey’s The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog for a reduced price of $12. Click here to view this in the store. You can click here to view all three bundle options in the Rabbit Room Store. We wish you a wonderful school year!

Welcome to Week One of The Rabbit Reads Book Group: Culture Making. This week, we’re looking at the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2. If you haven’t read all of that yet, no worries! Feel free to jump into the conversation whenever you can. Imagine for a moment that you’re an Earth human walking on Mars. What would you think on this alien world? You’re wandering around (not too far from whatever hypothetical spaceship you took there), encased in a suit of Earth materials, breathing Earth air. You might drag your boot through the red dust to leave a mark, test out the gravity, examine rocks. Maybe you thought you understood what you were getting into, but the foreign sky and landscape show all your studying from worlds away barely scratch the surface of what Mars is. I kind of imagine this is what some of us Christians sound like when we talk about “The Culture:” standing in the middle of it, trying to make sense of what we see. Some say our relationship to culture is like a fish swimming in water, surrounded and influenced, but not consciously aware. James K. A. Smith, in his book Desiring the Kingdom, talks about cultural liturgies, the habits and practices that shape our lives, and I think that might be a little closer to the truth. I suspect if you’re a regular at The Rabbit Room, you share the impulse to think deeply about the things that shape us. We love to look at the world we wander through. We love to talk about culture from a Christ-centered perspective. We want to examine it, redeem it, influence it. All of this is good and has its place, and that’s why we’re the people who would pick up a book with a title like Culture Making. But before we get too far in this conversation, a common language is helpful. So here we are at the beginning, where Crouch starts his argument by defining some terms. It's beautiful, isn't it? We are the creations of a God that made something out of nothing—a universe stuffed with all manner of glory, from galaxies to electrons to the mysterious spaces between them. And our great impulse is to make something of this world. Jen Rose Yokel “Culture is what we make of the world” becomes a defining refrain in this book. He goes on to say it’s “our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else.” (pg. 23) It’s beautiful, isn’t it? We are the creations of a God that made something out of nothing — a universe stuffed with all manner of glory, from galaxies to electrons to the mysterious spaces between them. And our great impulse is to make something of this world. Culture points to our impulse to take raw materials and make. Some of the things we create will remake the world: cities, interstates, the printing press, the Internet. Some will have a less grand impact—the quick dinners we throw together—but they are no small thing. As you read this week, it might help to make notes on the terms Crouch lays out, like culture, cultural good (or artifact), and some broader concepts like multiculturalism and cultural spheres. We’re going to carry these terms with us as we explore Culture Making together in the next few weeks. For now, here’s a question to consider: If it’s true that you don’t have to be a massive influencer or great artist to be a “culture maker,” consider this: how do you make something of the world? (Think about your relationships, family, work, play, etc.) Please share your thoughts in the comments! And for more discussion questions, visit the Culture Making Book Group thread at The Rabbit Room Forum. And click here for the first post and introduction to this series.

In an early chapter of Henry and the Chalk Dragon, La Muncha Elementary School receives a visit from two mysterious people whom Henry hears referred to as “Bored Members” and who walk around in dark suits and glasses a la The Matrix, write things in their notebooks, and terrify the creatively repressed and desperately sycophantic principal. As Principal Bunk (with a cheerful smile that seems permanently glued to his face) boasts about the school’s stellar safety record and perfectly polished doorknobs, the Bored Members interrupt him: “But Principal Bunk—” said the Bored Man. “We’re sorry to say—” said the Bored Woman. “The Bored has decided that there will no longer be a need for doorknobs.” “Yes, doorknobs have been cut out of the budget.” Principal Bunk stopped walking and swallowed so hard that Henry could see the swallow slide all the way down his necktie. “Doorknobs?” “Studies have shown that doorknobs will not help students do any better on tests. Therefore, all doorknobs must be turned in to the Bored by next week.” I thought I was writing a gentle satire. That’s what I love to do in a story, after all: pounce on the little idiosyncrasies of people and situations and blow them up to ridiculous proportions, in order to make myself (and hopefully the reader) smile. Henry Penwhistle’s imagination is larger-than-life; so must the forces of antagonism in his world be. His otherwise glorious teacher has forgotten her own childhood fantasies and doubted her own creativity so much that she leads the class in an exercise of vapid artistic conformity. The class bully refuses to believe in anything that is not on a test. The principal gives Henry a stern lecture on the dangers of an untamed imagination in an effort to prepare him for the “real world”—a world that only cares about facts and numbers and budgets, not art. The Lunch Lady is forced to suppress her wild culinary creativity in favor of cafeteria pizza. And Henry’s mischievous Chalk Dragon is not allowed in the National Vegetable Week Art Show because it is neither a vegetable nor a vegetarian. I was always afraid of going too far; afraid that someone wouldn’t get the light-hearted jab in the ribs and instead would take the book as an attack on the school system, and that I would be getting angry letters from board members and principals and real-life-superhero teachers everywhere. But this past school year I spoke to a group of public school teachers who had read Henry, and thankfully they did not pelt me with erasers. In fact, their response to my over-the-top caricature of La Muncha Elementary School was, “How did you know?” The scene about the Bored cutting doorknobs out of the budget was one of their favorite parts of the whole book. Apparently they found it hilariously close to the mark. Exactly what we expect might happen next, they said. One teacher told me about a school that had actually outlawed crayons, even in the youngest grades, because crayons weren’t helping the students perform any better academically. Coloring was a waste of time. If an administrator entered a classroom, woe to the teacher if there were any crayons in view anywhere. Good grief. I thought I was writing satire. La Muncha Elementary School was meant, as I said, to be an exaggerated caricature for comic effect; but like all caricatures, it relies for its humor on a fondly or grimly recognized hint of reality. I am not qualified to pronounce judgments on our educational system. But as a writer of books for children, a teacher of children, and a creatively repressed person who has spent much of her life struggling to get out of boxes, I have plenty of reasons for concern. I've learned (despite being a grammar nerd and a former editor) that I have to begin most of my creative writing classes by assuring the students that I won't be correcting their spelling or punctuation—that I only care about how they're using imagination—because so many kids are so uptight about being correct and pleasing the teacher that they can't simply let loose and write. Jennifer Trafton For years, I’ve heard stories from teachers, school librarians, and parents—about the arts being cut out of the curriculum, about second grade students becoming physically ill with anxiety during standardized testing week, about school days that leave no time for creative play and curriculum requirements that do not recognize any instructional value in studying (or making) art for its own sake, about students who don’t even know what to do with a brief period of unstructured creative time, when given the rare chance. I’ve learned (despite being a grammar nerd and a former editor) that I have to begin most of my creative writing classes by assuring the students that I won’t be correcting their spelling or punctuation—that I only care about how they’re using imagination—because so many kids are so uptight about being correct and pleasing the teacher that they can’t simply let loose and write. I’ve taught kids who hated writing because the only writing they got to do in school was “boring”—meaning they were told exactly what to do and how to do it, with little freedom to be creative or write about something they were passionate about. This is by no means just a public school issue. I once came across a homeschool writing curriculum that insisted children should not be allowed to write stories until the older grades, after they’d learned to distinguish between “real” and “not real.” Literalism first. Imagination can wait. I teach lots of homeschooled kids, and I’ve had parents say, “I’ve tried and tried to get my kids interested in writing, but they always see it as a chore, as just more homework. But when they come out of your class they are bursting with enthusiasm to write a story. What have I been doing wrong?” And when I press deeper, it turns out that they inevitably have been turning every writing activity into a lesson about spelling and grammar, correcting mistakes as they go, and the kids’ enthusiasm and creativity were getting squelched by mechanics and structure. But that’s backwards. A good writer has to be a master of grammar and sentence structure, but that’s the second step, not the first. The first is falling in love with an idea and with the process of bringing that idea to life. Whatever form a child’s education takes—public school, private school, homeschool—and no matter what official requirements are in place (I will leave others better qualified to debate this), I hope that certain conditions will prevail in the end, because the root of my concern about education lies in my understanding of the importance and especially the process of creativity. Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized expert on creativity and gave an enormously popular 2006 TED talk called “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” He tells the story of a 6-year-old girl who was drawing a picture in the back of the classroom. Her teacher asked her what she was drawing, and she answered, “God.” The teacher said, “But no one knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will in a minute.” (By the way, his whole talk is hilarious and well worth twenty minutes of your time.) Robinson’s point is this: “If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.” To be creative you have to be willing to risk making lots of mistakes—but as we get older we learn that we’re not supposed to make mistakes, there are right answers and wrong answers and we don’t want to be wrong, and so we conform, we stop taking risks. But everybody knows you can’t be original by sitting down and trying to be original. You have to let ideas pour out of you, right or wrong—only afterward do you (or others) go back and evaluate those ideas and decide what has value and what doesn’t. We writers have a special name for this outpouring: it’s called THE FIRST DRAFT. The first draft is playing on paper, letting your imagination go wherever it wants to go. And only in that playful freedom will you be able to find any nuggets of true originality. As the late Steve Jobs preached and demonstrated, unconventional (and world-changing) ideas come from an unconventional life, from coloring outside the lines and from drawing new lines between the dots no one else has connected. Give the children crayons, and watch them innovate. I hope there will be space in a child's education to allow for such blowing-the-roof-open, crazy brainstorming without it being turned into a 'teaching moment,' because that is the teaching moment: the free exercise of the imagination, the outlawing of 'wrong' or 'right' for a few brief minutes when the only test that matters is the test of creative fearlessness. Audacious play. Jennifer Trafton Last summer I led a workshop for 7-12-year-olds that consisted entirely of coming up with the most fantastical MacGyver-esque inventions we could. I gave the kids random pictures of ordinary objects—bicycles, duct tape, cotton balls, clocks, trampolines, rubber bands, trash cans—and asked them to draw and describe imagined inventions, somehow incorporating those objects, that would improve the world. Much hilarity and ingenuity ensued. All I can say is that we can look forward to a future age of dramatic teleporting, space travel, lock picking, and brilliant new ways of waking up in the morning. There was no hint of “well, that’s impossible . . . how can you climb a ladder beyond the earth’s atmosphere without at least an oxygen mask?” I redirected the “but hows” of the more literal-minded classmates. I reminded them that once upon a time someone said, “I wish I could put a little box up to my ear and talk to someone on the other side of the world,” and everyone around that person said he was CRAZY. And he was. Until he wasn’t. I hope there will be space in a child’s education to allow for such blowing-the-roof-open, crazy brainstorming without it being turned into a “teaching moment,” because that is the teaching moment: the free exercise of the imagination, the outlawing of “wrong” or “right” for a few brief minutes when the only test that matters is the test of creative fearlessness. Audacious play. I preach tirelessly about the importance of playing because I don’t do it very well. I desperately need to relearn and relearn how to play. No one knows more than I do how difficult it is to retain this ability as an adult. The only thing that helps me keep that faint spirit of playfulness alive in my soul is my memory of having had free rein to do so as a child. If we ever take that away from children—if we suppress the instinct toward creative play even before it meets the inevitable challenge of growing up . . . God help us all. Who will be our next Einstein or Edison or Shakespeare—or Steve Jobs, for that matter? Who will disturb our complacent hearts with beautiful stories and with art that startles and shakes the status quo? Who will help us imagine a new kind of world? “Be brave, Sir Henry,” he whispered as Miss Pimpernel’s hand closed on the doorknob. Years later, when Henry Penwhistle remembered this day and told the story again and again to himself, it seemed to him that this was the moment—the hand on the doorknob moment—when everything changed. Before, the adventure with the dragon was like a balloon bobbing at the end of a string in Henry’s hand, trying to break out of his grasp. After this moment, the string came loose, and Henry realized he had never known—indeed, no one at La Muncha Elementary School had ever known—just how wildly an imagination can fly when it has broken free. Perhaps the Bored Members were wise to take away doorknobs. For it is a dangerous thing to open a door. Dangerous, yes. As dangerous and as necessary as hope. We have a special back-to-school deal in the Rabbit Room Store for the month of August! Check it out by clicking here.

“…And that’s why I never read parenting books anymore.” – Recently spoken by a dear friend and mother of four. We had been discussing the particular challenges we were facing raising teenagers. My friend is a diligent mom who takes seriously the calling of raising children. Why had she sworn off reading books that promise healthier, well-adjusted and happy children? I knew the answer without further probing. I felt similarly. After two decades of parenting, I know I should be more ______ (you fill in the blank with your “should be;” patient or demanding, laid-back or scheduled, creative and fun or thoughtful and serious), but at the end of the day, regardless of the books I’ve read and the podcasts I’ve listened to, I’m still stuck with me. Which often feels defeating. Which is why my friend doesn’t read parenting books anymore. She’s tired of feeling defeated. For those of us who face similar challenges in parenting, how do we seek parenting advice that is timeless and life-giving, not trendy and guilt-inducing? Our generation of parents, unlike any who’ve come before us, gorges on endless information, yet we’re starving for wisdom. Artist Makoto Fujimura, when discussing the difference between works of art that last for centuries versus those that are popular for a brief period of time, poses the five-hundred-year question: “What is the five-hundred-year question? Well, it’s a historical look at the reality of our cultures, and asking what ideas, what art, what vision affects humanity for over five hundred years. It’s the opposite of the Warholian 15 seconds of fame.” Perhaps the same question should be asked of raising children. A multitude of blogs and books and parenting podcasts are reminiscent of Warhol’s 15 seconds of fame. The messaging is bright and shiny and “all the cool (adult) kids” are quoting them. But what is the parental wisdom parallel to those works of art which impact the far-reaching future? Is it possible to sit under the teaching of someone who speaks words which are hopeful and eternal? Teaching that inspires rather than leaves us feeling defeated? I’m grateful to say that Clay and Sally Clarkson’s latest book, The Lifegiving Parent, is an affirmative answer to the five-hundred-year question. The wisdom and principles examined are rooted in eternal truths. How do we seek parenting advice that is timeless and life-giving, not trendy and guilt-inducing? Julie Silander The Lifegiving Parent is the third book in the Clarksons’ “Lifegiving” trilogy. The common thread woven throughout all three books is a winsome, hopeful, scripture-based invitation to create a home that offers life to all who enter. The first two books address the heart of the home and the ministry of gathering around the family table. Both books inspire. Both books give practical advice. This third book is no exception. However, The Lifegiving Parent is more devotional than conversational. I’d recommend reading with a journal and a pen in hand to take notes for further reflection. It’s a book seasoned with deep theological truths that are best savored in small bites. Perhaps this statement in the introduction of The Lifegiving Parent best sums up the heart of the book: “At the core, lifegiving parenting is less about what you do and more about who you are—a child of the living God who is connected with Him and is ready to share that life with your children so that they may know Him too.” Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of parenting, including Numbering Your Child’s Days, Nurturing Your Child’s Spirit, Guarding Your Child’s Heart, Renewing Your Child’s Mind, Strengthening Your Child’s Faith, Shaping Your Child’s Will, Cultivating Your Child’s Character, and Forming Your Child’s Imagination. Clay explores the theological basis and practical application for each topic, then Sally shares a personal reflection of how that particular element played out in their family. I was fortunate enough to encounter the Clarksons’ writing when my children were very young. It’s not hyperbole to say that they’ve had an indelible impact on the shaping of our family. Although our older two children are grown and our youngest three are teenagers, the wisdom that Clay and Sally share is no less significant when relating to our adult children than it was when we were parenting toddlers. I’m confident that the truth, grace, and practical advice offered will be just as relevant when our children—and our grandchildren—become parents. To answer Mako’s “five-hundred-year question,” The Lifegiving Parent has the potential to impact families, and in turn the cultures in which they live, far into the future. Parenting is a joy and a privilege. It can also be depleting and disheartening—particularly when I’ve exhausted all my resources and still feel inadequate. However, The Lifegiving Parent reminds us that coming to the end of ourselves is where true life begins. As we rediscover the one source of joy, wisdom and life, we are renewed and able to offer that life to our children. The Clarksons remind us that the essence of parenting is, indeed, “One beggar showing another beggar where to find bread.” You can purchase The Lifegiving Parent here at The Rabbit Room Store.

Over the past few years, I’ve begun to read through the Psalms as a daily practice. Once I reach the end, I return to the beginning all over again. It’s become a circular rhythm in my life, like the ticking hands of the clock or the slow circle of seasons throughout the year. Each psalm feels fresh as I approach it from a different vantage point on the calendar and from the ever-evolving perspective of one who is in constant conversation with its poetry and prayers. As a lover of words, a lover of deep emotions felt and expressed, I’ve always had an affinity for the Psalms. It is a step away from the practical practices of faith in the Old Testament and a step closer to Christ in the New Testament. When I find it difficult to relate to Levitical law or challenging to walk with one as sure and passionate as Paul, I feel the Psalms like a reverberating song in my spirit—a gap bridged by a melody. The writers of this book have set a precedent of truth-telling—I have learned from them to take my every thought and feeling before God without shame. David’s struggle with longing, frustration, and pain teaches me to call my own struggles by name. Ethan the Ezrahite teaches me how to craft words of abandon in worship. I learn from Moses to number my days and seek wisdom in the numbering. The Sons of Korah sing with me in lament and in praise. As I’ve spent time with these rich writings, I’ve discovered that the absence of shame sets desire free. The Psalms are a book of desire—for revenge, for forgiveness, for safety, for shelter, for love, for truth, for rescue, for guidance, for spiritual awakening. They teach me how to desire wholly, without becoming suffocated by shame, with passion and purpose for every secret longing. Here in poetry and prayers, these longings find their place. As a long-time follower of Christ, I have found a deep resistance in many Christian circles to allowing longing to have its place. Desire is either muted or over-spiritualized. I rarely hear desire discussed in a church or small group setting as a healthy expression of our humanity. Most often, the small flicker of desire has been doused with heavy-handed use of scripture about denying one’s flesh, or reminders of Jesus as a man of sorrows and suffering. The Psalms teach me how to desire wholly, without becoming suffocated by shame, with passion and purpose for every secret longing. Here in poetry and prayers, these longings find their place. Kimberly Coyle I often see this suppression of desire among Christian artists when discussing their work. Countless times, I’ve heard artists state that their work is purely for “an audience of one,” and their only desire is to glorify God with their gift. I understand the impetus behind this—it’s right and holy and good to create for the glory of God. But, surely the desire to share one’s art with others, to communicate truth, and create beauty for the sake of beauty are right and holy and good desires too. Walter Wangerin, Jr. writes in his book Beate Not the Poore Desk, “Art is an act, a process. In order to be complete, writing requires a reader.” Music requires a listener, fine art an audience. Wangerin goes on to say, “Only by the viewer’s responding act does the artist move outside himself into a community.” We create for God, but also for the joy of sharing, for the pleasure of reaching across a divide and discovering a community of people who interact with our offering. I see similar expressions in other areas of life and community within the Christian church. While out to dinner, a friend from church once told our table of fellow churchgoers that she denies herself nothing—she eats what she fancies, loves what she loves, and spends time on pursuits she enjoys. She said it without the accompanying shame I often feel when desire rises in me. Heads swiveled in her direction and jaws dropped, mine included. It was an unexpected admission, and I felt an equal sense of awe for her honesty and judgement for such an unabashed claim. I confess to jealousy as well because I long to walk with such freedom. I don’t know how to be honest about my deepest longings in community—it requires a vulnerability I don’t possess. My ultimate desires are fulfilled in relationship with God through Jesus, yet what of these longings for connection with others? For self-expression? For work? Wisdom? Justice? Many of these desires are meant to be fulfilled through relationship, spiritual community, and through the work of my hands here on Earth. While I have agency to act on these desires in God-honoring ways, God is ultimately sovereign over them. David writes in Psalm 145:16, “You open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.” There is a givenness I must acknowledge, a givenness that can’t be manufactured by my own striving or hard work. In part, I am to do the work and seek the good. But, like so many of the psalmists, I’m also meant to sit with open hands and a heart cupped, willing to receive. I’m learning to hold questions of desire openly before God without shame, trusting he will satisfy my mouth (my soul, my body, my mind) with good things. As I continue my circle through the Psalms, I find myself in excellent company.