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by the Rabbit Room The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Doug McKelvey, author of Volumes I and II of Every Moment Holy . Every Moment Holy, Volume II is a book of liturgies and prayers for seasons of dying and grieving. Doug McKelvey spent two years in dialogue with bereaved and dying readers as he wrote this book. In this conversation, Doug speaks with Jonathan Rogers about loving the reader, stewarding gifts and opportunities, and listening to the people you wish to serve in your work. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 14 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

by Jen Rose Yokel I’m writing this from a sunlit cafe in Providence, where the daffodils and forsythia are finally blooming and everything feels right in the world. Sure, I’ve got a mask on my face to remind me that we aren’t entirely done with this pandemic yet, but somehow this particular spring almost feels like waking up after a long, exhausting year. And yet, for so many, the losses big and small remain. The ruins of the past year are still being sorted, named, grieved. Music can be a good friend in grief, and perhaps that’s why Rachel Wilhelm’s new album Requiem feels especially necessary right now. As a music minister in the Anglican Church, Rachel has made it her artistic mission to write the songs the church needs, specifically when it comes to lament. Her hope is that this album, created remotely in 2020 with the help of her community, will be that friend for many. Recently, I had a conversation with Rachel about the making of Requiem and the compelling power of lament. I hope these songs can be a good friend to you too when you need to grieve, and I’m grateful to introduce you to Rachel’s good work. Before we get into talking about your new album, I realize many people in our audience might not be familiar with your music. So first of all, tell me a little bit about yourself and your art. What have you been up to? I am primarily a minister of music and worship arts and have been pursuing my calling in that capacity for about fourteen years. I’m currently based at an Anglican parish in Knoxville, TN, and minister there. I love to see people thrive in their calling, so I love to encourage artistic gifts in others. I also lead songwriting retreats for the church as a whole through a ministry called United Adoration . I love songwriting and filling in gaps in the church’s repertoire, which led me to release my first full-length record, Songs of Lament , in 2017, and now Requiem . Speaking of Songs of Lament , you also produced Cardiphonia’s compilation Daughter Zion’s Woe last year. So, is it safe to say lament songs are in your wheelhouse? What is it about lament that compels you as an artist? It’s totally safe to say that lament is in my wheelhouse! Lament and minor keys are something the church is allergic to, but I have always found comfort in lament since I was very young. I spent a long time thinking that something was wrong with me, not realizing or knowing that God puts different flavors into different people for the building up of the Body of Christ. It wasn’t until I started serving in the Anglican church, where the church calendar is practiced, that I understood that there was room for me during Advent and Lent to express my art in that way. I have always written from the minor prophets, believe it or not, and found those passages the most beautiful in Scripture. God laments in the Old Testament. Jesus is the Man of Sorrows. The church forgets this and prefers to treat Sunday morning as a vacation, not a place where we can carry each other’s burdens in community and see God for who he is. So I guess the church compels me to write laments. What is the story behind your new album Requiem ? My poet friend Kate Bluett and I were on the phone talking about the Daughter Zion’s Woe project back in March 2020 right at the start of the lockdown, and she was telling me that she was listening to requiems at night to calm herself. I think the reality of death during the pandemic was especially sobering for both of us. She asked me if I had ever thought of writing a requiem. Death is not right. And it’s okay to say so. Rachel Wilhelm At the time, I had only known of Rutter’s Requiem, and actually spent some time with it in high school one year when my choir and I performed it under Rutter himself at Carnegie Hall. Because of that experience, I was introduced to requiems enough to entertain the thought. I told Kate that if she wrote lyrics, I’d write the music. Directly after getting off the phone we started exchanging emails with links of requiem movements and what we needed. We brought in another friend, Amber Salladin, a seasoned choral arranger and director, to write choral arrangements for the project and guide us through what would work well. We were three women who wanted to bring healing and hope to families that lost or were about to lose loved ones to COVID-19. And as I was writing and recording Requiem , I lost a couple friends to cancer as well. 2020 was a hard year, wasn’t it? It sure was. I think a lot about how it was one hard thing after another on a global or national scale, but then we all still have our individual challenges and losses to face. We all have something to grieve this year. I’m very interested in the idea of working in such an old format to make something new! What was writing in the traditional requiem structure like for you? I’m used to working within structures because of the Anglican liturgical service, so I found a lot of freedom when writing Requiem . Kate, Amber, and I researched what movements we really needed (like Lux Aeterna, Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, In Paradisum, etc). Kate is a prolific writer, so she was sending me lyrics left and right. It was a whirlwind of writing and finding joy during a time of isolation. I think with the production (by Jered McKenna), it was interesting to figure out what would sound transcendent, or not dated in a few years, so that no matter what, people could have the album recommended to them when they incurred loss, or pull it out if they knew about it when the time came and they needed to process their grief. I didn’t want to be tied to completely following the requiem rules, so I left out the Dies Irae because the song “Deliver Me” covers a lot of the wrath aspect of a requiem. The opening track, “Man That Is Born of a Woman,” is untraditional, but I wanted to pull something from the Book of Common Prayer (the Anglican missal). The Job scripture passage that the song is based from is one that jumped out from the BCP burial service. Sadly, there is no funeral mass. Because I am Anglican, I wanted to start with the Anglican song. Ha! For our readers who aren’t familiar with a traditional requiem, could you give us some background and walk us through the liturgy a little bit? Since this was Kate’s suggestion and more from her Catholic tradition, I emailed her and asked her to answer that question! Here’s what she had to say: The Requiem comes out of the medieval practice of praying for the dead. This was considered an act of mercy, praying for the salvation of the soul of the person who had died. In the old form of this liturgy, the emphasis was on judgment, and on the fear of damnation. “Deliver Me (Libera Me)” reflects this focus. But in the modern form of the funeral service, the emphasis is on asking for mercy for the departed. In the end, that’s what all of us are counting on, and the songs based on the Pie Jesu and Lux Aeterna show this. Those prayers are interspersed with the ordinary parts of a service: the Lamb of God, the Kyrie, and the Holy, Holy, Holy. Because death and our need to process it aren’t separate from the rest of our lives, but bound up in them. In a way, this is music for a regular Sunday, but it looks forward to the end of all our Sundays. —Kate Bluett That’s beautiful… thanks Kate! Something about the way you and Kate bring your Anglican and Catholic traditions to this project really delights me. Could you say more about how your respective faith traditions supported the creation of these songs? It delights me too! Anglicans and Catholics have a rough history for sure, and I love that the two of us can work together as sisters in Christ and create something beautiful for the Church universal. We frequently write together anyway since my hard leaning is melody. Collaborating is such a gift because the songs, especially if they have very well-crafted lyrics, beg to have a great melody, and it’s a good challenge. For a good number of the songs, I wrote three to four different melodies to each of them to be sure to give it my best effort. Something I really love about Kate is that she writes poems or lyrics each week based on the readings for each Sunday at her parish and posts them on her blog. She has hundreds. That girl knows her Scripture, too. She has to! I can tell her what Scriptures I want, the idea I want to be conveyed, and she says, “Got it!” and comes back to me with a jewel of a lyric. Since we wanted to be both Catholic and Protestant in this requiem, we were especially sensitive to each other’s traditions and were careful to find that middle ground where not one or the other would raise an eyebrow. It occurs to me that grieving and music-making can be both solitary and communal. Like grief is something you navigate on your own, but a community can come together to care for you. And you can write a song by yourself (or maybe with another person) but to make a record you need a community of musicians and producers. Could you speak to the role of community, especially when it comes to making a record in the middle of a pandemic? I could say so much about this. And that observation is thrilling and brilliant. Community is everything. I found that if I talked about Requiem even during its infancy, it helped me to keep going. Sort of an accountability. I love people. I just delight in watching them, being with them, and collaborating with them. I love seeing people flourish, I love promoting other people’s projects, I love understanding that people are experts at only a few things, and we should honor that. In making music, or a project like Requiem , I had to remember those people that I knew well enough who could pour their gifts into it to give it the best chance. What is interesting about your question is that every person who was involved in this project is from a Facebook group that I help lead called Liturgy Fellowship . It’s the only reason to be on Facebook! We are a tight online community sort of like Rabbit Room, but we (a mix of pastors and musicians) talk liturgy and worship stuff. And my community of women—Kate, Amber, and Keiko, who played cello. The second track, “Lord Have Mercy” features all my friends half-way through the song, my supportive musical community, who remotely provided their voices to form a choir. Yeah, I wrote the songs sitting on my bed during isolation and ordering Amazon Fresh. But the record wouldn’t be here without my community.  It’s true that we all have something to grieve after this hard year, and I join you in hoping for this music to do something healing and beautiful for many people. How did God meet you through making this record when it comes to your own 2020 grief? That’s a great question. Grief is a funny thing. At first, it hits you hard like planes flying overhead dropping bombs on you every minute, then after awhile, an hour, then a week, then a year, then every couple of years or so until it lessens into a faded painful memory. Life halted completely for everyone in 2020. For me, too. I had work trips planned, my son was graduating from language school (and I missed it), and many other things. But new grief brings out old grief a lot of times, and creating has a way of working out the grief you still had left from an old wound. My sister died of anorexia in 2010 at the age of 33. She had no community and she died alone. She isolated herself from everyone because of her mental illness. It crushed me when she died. We grew up like twins, and she even isolated herself from me. A letter I had written her was sitting in her mailbox while she was on her deathbed. I found out when that letter returned to me with the word “deceased” on it. When Kate sent me the lyrics to “Martha’s Song,” I felt like my heart stopped. The lyric retells Martha’s perspective on her encounter with Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus before Jesus raises him from the dead. When I went to record the vocals of that song (in my closet!), I couldn’t stop crying. I probably did a thousand takes. I cried every time. It took me a week to get through it. I cried for my sister, but then I was also crying for others who would lose a loved one. The reality of the pandemic really hit me. Death is not right. And it’s okay to say so. You can learn more about Rachel and her music at her website . Click here to listen to Requiem on Spotify , and click here to listen on Apple Music . And click here to learn more about Cardiphonia’s project, facilitated by Rachel, Daughter Zion’s Woe. Jen Rose Yokel is a poet, freelance writer, and spiritual director. Her words have appeared at She Reads Truth, CCM Magazine, and other publications, and she released her first poetry collection Ruins & Kingdoms in 2015. Originally from Central Florida, she now makes her home in Fall River, Massachusetts with her husband Chris, where you can find her enjoying used bookstores and good coffee.

by Chris Thiessen I knew my priorities in life were out of order. I knew it was making me anxious. I knew I needed a weekend away to go and sort out myself. I  didn’t  know that doing so would cause me to hate one of my greatest loves, music, as a result. About a month ago, I got away to Chattanooga with the purpose of assessing my life—how I spend my time, brain energy, love. On the first night there, over a personal-sized pizza (another of my greatest loves), I began reading James K. A. Smith’s  On the Road with St. Augustine  for no other reason than I wanted something thoughtful to read, and it was sitting in my Kindle app already. There in chapter one, I was met by a North African theologian who lived 1,700 years away from this pizza-indulging writer, yet who knew exactly what I longed for—a reordering of loves, a conversion from my anxious, unsettled self into a newly-liberated person. So with Augustine as my weekend guide, I set about dissecting my patterns, rhythms, and desires to find the foci of disorder and refocus them elsewhere. Though it pained me to admit, it became clear that music was the very core of my disorder and anxiety. Music—the time spent listening to it, absorbing it, writing about it, reading about it, etc.—was taking up such a large space in my brain that I feel it was in a way (though perhaps not so obvious externally) suppressing my relationships and other loves and desires. To paint a sort of picture of the grip music has had on my life, I averaged listening to 3-4 albums a day in 2020 and the first months of 2021. I’ve obsessively written down every album I’ve listened to for the past five years. I have a feed of music publications that sends me hundreds of daily headlines so I make sure I don’t miss a single thing happening in the music industry. Dozens of press releases hit my inbox daily. Twitter sends all the hottest and coldest takes from experts and writers across the industry. Music journalists have the pressure of not only being up-to-date, but actually trying to stay three or more months ahead of the game if they want to be published and heard and read. And that’s what I wanted. That’s why I’ve tried to keep up with this insane pace of consuming music even while a pandemic rages on; even while having a separate full-time job; even while being in my first year and a half of fatherhood. In Chattanooga, I had to finally make a confession:  I can’t be a music journalist . I’ve been chasing ambitions that simply can’t work with the rest of my life and hopes and loves. Even my love of music was, I believe, diminished by my attempts to use it to say something “important” or discover “the next best thing,” instead of allowing it to move me and challenge me first. Admittedly, I’m being a little harsh. I’ve been moved and challenged by plenty of music in recent years from Nick Cave’s haunting meditations on death and life eternal on  Ghosteen  to Kacey Musgraves’ sweet, butterfly-inducing melodies on  Golden Hour to Kendrick Lamar ’s prophetic words across a trilogy of perfect albums. Still, the ambition of a music journalist always led me to approach music with the questions “What’s  my  angle?” and “What can  I  say about this?” rather than first asking “What is the  artist  feeling? Expressing? Hoping for? Challenging the world to be? Challenging  me  to be?” It’s been a month since these revelations unfolded. I came back from Chattanooga feeling relieved, yes, but at the same time, disheartened. I didn’t want to listen to music at all. The thought of it caused a visceral reaction in my gut, akin to when one consumes one too many personal-sized pizzas (something  I’ve  certainly never experienced…). Throughout March, I’d try on occasion. I’d throw on some Peaceful Piano while working or Beatles for my own carpool karaoke or Lenten songs during Holy Week. But I hated the thought of listening to something new or listening analytically or meaningfully. Friends, hating a thing you’ve loved dearly is no fun feeling. But, if it is truly something worth loving, this hate—these visceral reactions and callous feelings—can’t last. Chris Thiessen Friends, hating a thing you’ve loved dearly is no fun feeling. But, if it is truly something worth loving, this hate—these visceral reactions and callous feelings—can’t last. In discussing the disordering and reordering of loves, Augustine says that tension like what I’ve experienced the last month is to be expected. There should be a “resistance of what I have become to what I used to be.” I had begun to love music wrongly, perhaps exploitatively. That love needed to be broken down, torn apart, shredded, and then remade—remolded by a love for creation and creator (little c and big C), for the wonderful, unmatched purpose music (and other art) holds as a means of spreading beauty, emotions deeper than words, hopes higher than thoughts, and stories truer than facts. This past Tuesday, two days after Easter Sunday, I felt the beginnings of resurrection in my love for music. The repulsion I felt toward music was lifted, and I felt free to once again enjoy music wholeheartedly. I know my relationship with music won’t (and can’t) be the same as it was prior to this month-long sadness. I feel no pull to return to those obsessive rhythms I held before as a faux music journalist. But that’s the purpose of reorder and resurrection: to strip away what was destructive and magnify what was good and right and worthwhile. I’m looking forward to leaning into this journey and learning to love music in ways I previously couldn’t have imagined. Click here to read more of Chris’s writing at Quarter Notes.

by the Rabbit Room The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Rachel Pieh Jones, author of Pillars: How Muslim Friends Led Me Closer to Jesus . Rachel Pieh Jones has been living and writing in the Horn of Africa for the last eighteen years. Her new memoir is Pillars: How Muslim Friends Led Me Closer to Jesus . In this episode, Rachel and Jonathan Rogers discuss the value of being an outsider and what it means to be a witness. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 15 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

by J Lind Depression has been the low-hanging fruit of our family tree, along with addiction. It’s an ongoing chicken-and-egg as to what-causes-what. I experienced my first bout of major depression at the ripe age of eleven, spurred on by a scene of Bill and Ted playing Twister with Death. You read that right. I don’t remember much about the movie, probably because my green brain sponged it. (Truly. I couldn’t have told you anything about it, not the title or the scene, until a synchronous moment a couple years ago.) But I vividly remember that night, telling my neighbor I didn’t feel right and then running home, hopeful that I’d be spared some impending doom. I didn’t have language for it at the time, but looking back, I interpret it as my first encounter with death: I was confronted with not just any old mortality, but my mortality. Twister indeed. For the next few months, I slept poorly and cried often, positive emotions few and far between. That’s when I discovered my healing balm: music. For the first time, I felt moved by a song I’d heard at our non-denom church, prompting me to rip “God of Wonders” off Limewire and listen on my dad’s CD Walkman. That song parted the clouds for me, time and again, maybe even giving me the space to find words for the feelings. My dad listened to me intently and with a sense of familiarity. His brother, my namesake, had killed himself, and I suspect it was the black dog in my dad that set him on the path that culminated in AA, where my folks met. A wave of relief crashed over me as I reached for the words. We both cried. Building Fences My depression gradually lifted, and I soon became aware of a deep-seated fear that the black dog would return. So I took to building fences. I guiltily “acquired” thousands of CCM songs from the bowels of the internet; I started playing guitar for the skater-grunge youth group at our church, where I wrote my first songs; I cultivated a steady diet of apologetics, from Lee Strobel to William Lane Craig to C. S. Lewis. But the dog had grown, too. Depression at fourteen was similar to depression at eleven but, in my mind, even more intense. Again, I vividly remember that sense of pitch-black apathy rolling down me like a raw egg. Again, I lost sleep and my appetite and any interest in the social luxuries of being an eighth grader. The breaking point came on a rainy day in my youth group, when the dog bit me in the middle of a worship song that I happened to be leading. Not here, not in this place. I choked, got out of dodge, and again cried out loud with my dad. You can’t always get back through the wardrobe, though, and I’m grateful that my family found a psychiatrist. I had a few sessions with a therapist and started antidepressants. I don’t know exactly why or how it happened, but the dog slowly retreated. In the decade following the dog’s unexpected return, I set to work on yet another round of new-and-improved fences. I pursued music, my highest fence. I also followed my interests in philosophy, another sturdy fence, to Princeton and Oxford, where I hoped to become some sort of creative apologist, a la Lewis. And for five years I sat with patients in hospice, half-hoping to befriend death and do away with fences all together. I learned a lot, and together these experiences set something in motion. Faith and Certainty “Deconstruction” or “disorientation” or “disorder,” as some folks call it, is a painful process that, for me, just sort of happened. My paradigm stopped working. It didn’t feel like a series of vocal sins that finally toppled my tower of understanding, or like taking an oath to Richard Dawkins after a failed duel with my former Jedi master. It was more like being handed some square-peg experiences that just didn’t fit. There were clearly gaping holes in my fences, so some of them had to come down, against my will. It was honest and paralyzing. After experiencing it, I couldn’t go back to where I had been before. The other side of disorientation, deconstruction, and disorder is a new thing: re-orientation, re-construction, re-order. New fences. Here’s the problem, as I see it: can we trust any fence to be sturdy enough to keep all of life’s dogs at bay, especially once we come to appreciate the fact that our most prized fences have failed us? That is, I don’t think the desolation of “the dark night of the soul” is simply the result of finding some gaping hole in any one fence. I think it’s more about realizing, on some broader existential playing field, that being human means that even our best fences will have holes . And some things—like dogs, or God—will still get over the fence. We’re limited. In this state of being human, or in this state of being limited , I’ve found some consolation: I’m alone, and I’m also not. That is, there’s a host of witnesses stretching back through the millenia who have walked this path, building their own fences only to watch them come down. The known, the unknown, the abyss, the resurrection—it’s an ancient wheel, and it seems that faulty fences are part of the deal. And yes, certainty is comforting. But certainty certainly won’t always be there. And maybe that’s a good thing. What if, for example, certainty and faith were diametrically opposed? What if you not only encountered Christ in the tabernacle but also when you were treading water in the deep? What if the greatest feat of Peter wasn’t that he died a martyr but that he believed despite having seen the miracles? It could be the case that proofs, for all their short-term comfort, actually make faith more difficult. And faith can’t be fenced in. What if the greatest feat of Peter wasn’t that he died a martyr but that he believed despite having seen the miracles? J Lind In this state of being limited, I recognize that I’m destined to keep building fences. But maybe, after a few painful failures, I can ask certainty to step aside. Moved as I am by visions of milk and honey and the kingdom of heaven, maybe I can hammer in the pegs with some lightness and levity, appreciating that this is, after all, yet another fence. Of course, I’ll still need to keep half an eye open for that big black dog, or for the divine—but that might even change the way I relate to each of them. On this side of the fence, I’m not in the Land of Canaan, or the New Jerusalem; I’m in the desert of uncertainty. And maybe faith is, too. You can listen to J’s new concept album, The Land of Canaan , here , and order it now in the Rabbit Room Store . It’s a new and original story, and it’s also not.

by the Rabbit Room There’s a strong biblical connection between people and trees. They both come from dirt. They’re both told to bear fruit. In fact, arboreal language is so often applied to humans that it’s easy to miss, whether we’re talking about family trees, passing along our seed, cutting someone off like a branch, being rooted to a place, or bearing the fruit of the Spirit. It’s hard to deny that trees mean something, theologically speaking. This book is in many ways a memoir, but it’s also an attempt to wake up the reader to the glory of God shining through his creation. One of his first commands to Adam and Eve was to “work and keep” the garden (Genesis 2:15). Award-winning author and songwriter Andrew Peterson, being as honest as possible, seeks to give glory to God by spreading out his roots and raising his branches, trusting that by reading his story, you’ll encounter yours. Hopefully, you’ll see that the God of the Garden is and has always been present, working and keeping what he loves. Sometimes he plants, sometimes he prunes, but in his goodness he intends to reap a harvest of righteousness. The God of the Garden releases on October 26th. Click here to place your pre-order in the Rabbit Room Bookstore .

by Shigé Clark When I discovered the Rabbit Room, I was blown away that a group like this had existed in the world all this time without my knowledge. Honestly, that hasn’t changed. I act less astounded these days—since it would be weird for me to go around with my mouth hanging open—but I’m still blown away. Imagine me, out in the void, carrying forth my lonely but unsnuffable torch with the conviction that God is a storyteller, that art matters in a deep and abiding way, and that sub-creation is one of the most beautiful and compelling ways he reveals himself in the world. Imagine this defiant little soldier (in this metaphor, I am small so as to be dwarfed by the oppressive night—just roll with it) stomping tight-lipped through the darkness, only to round some invisible corner and find an encampment full of bonfires burning beneath the stars. Hands wave in welcome and beckon me to add my torch to the flames, and I’m frozen in disbelief at the edge of the sudden swell of light. In many ways, I’m still standing there. So, when someone discovers the Rabbit Room, or—like me now—has been following for years and finds themselves freshly impacted, it’s as if they’ve stumbled up beside me at the edge of the camp and we’re just staring at each other in wonder. When that happens, I often get questions. Folks want to know how best to throw in their support (if they’re looking to bunk down in the encampment and make it their own, I suggest membership ), but often they want to know where to lay their torch for a while. They’ve caught the vision, they’re excited, and they’re asking for the best place to get involved. I know exactly how that feels. May you know that you’re welcomed. May you be inspired. And if you’re looking for a place to set your torch, I hope you find it here. Shigé Clark Others come with a specific passion. Our community is full of amazing people who know how difficult an artist’s calling is and want to ease that struggle—those who want to help unique works and creators thrive where they might otherwise wither for lack of support. I share that passion myself, and I’ve hated not having a place to send them where they could know their gift would go toward helping the artists they love. General donations are incredible, and necessary, but it’s encouraging to know the specific need your gift is meeting, or to be able to direct your funds toward a need God has specifically called you to meet. I’ve been part of this encampment long enough now that when people come stumbling up, I want to hear them, answer their questions, and be able to direct them to where they can set their torch. So here it is, call me the camp cartographer. We’ve set up a new group of designated funds that speak to the core focuses of our Rabbit Room mission. As I said, general donations are essential, but if God has called you to this work and you want to know a more specific way to offer support, we’ve drawn you a map. The Artist Support Fund For those who specifically want to care for and nurture writers, musicians, and artists of all types in their creative work, there is now the Artist Support Fund . The Rabbit Room began with a group of musicians inspired by the Inklings to aid and encourage each other in Kingdom-oriented creation. Fifteen years later, the support and cultivation of artists is still at the core of our identity—especially those “square peg” creators doing good work without a place to land in conventional markets. Whether offering relief to struggling artists, providing retreat or workspace opportunities, facilitating mentorship and education, or other types of care, donations to this fund provide a dedicated way for us to bless the people who’ve blessed us with their work. The St. Anne’s Fund Named for the house of refuge in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength , the St. Anne’s Fund supports pastors, teachers, mentors, and others in ministry for the nourishment of Christ-centered communities. With this fund, we want to provide opportunities for rest and retreat, discipleship, community engagement, and other forms of care to those doing their own forms of Rabbit Room-aligned ministry. Gifts to this fund help us take care of the people who spend their time pouring into others for the sake of the Kingdom and the life of the world. The North Wind Manor Fund Now that North Wind Manor is practically complete (there are still some bolts to tighten and lands to scape), we want to make sure that the space we’ve built reflects the Rabbit Room’s dedication to beauty, hospitality, and stewardship of a God-given place. This fund supports the regular needs of repairs, cleaning, utilities, and stocking essentials—but, more than that, it goes toward investing in the beauty of the space, the hosting of events with generosity, and the local sourcing of food and supplies in order to serve the community. Sponsorships Through sponsorship we’re able to fund specific events and programs, like Hutchmoot , The Local Show , and the Rabbit Room Podcast Network . Hutchmoot: Homebound is possible because of the sponsors that come alongside us. The Local Show has been free this year (and last)—despite actually costing more to produce—due to the generosity of sponsors like The Cook Family Foundation and Ronald Blue Trust. If you have a specific program or event that you love and want to support, sponsorship is the way to go. I hope this map provides some helpful direction for those stumbling into this encampment of God’s goodness. I believe he led us to this place for a reason, and I’m glad you’re here. May you know that you’re welcomed. May you be inspired. And if you’re looking for a place to set your torch, I hope you find it here.

by the Rabbit Room What happens when a self-assured university student comes home as a “chivalric” English gentleman, ready to assume responsibility for his sisters and the family estate, but somehow wakes up the next morning as a stranger in Fairyland? Come join us on an adventure in which the young Anodos is forced to reassess his assumptions about both himself and others–and eventually to deconstruct his entire concept of a hero. Within the realm of faerie, he begins to build a completely different way of engaging with the world and to adopt a whole new understanding of honor and even of self. Reading this short novel radically impacted C. S. Lewis, who said the journey of Anodos showed him holiness and “baptized” his imagination. He returned to it again and again, claiming in later years that Phantastes had shaped his philosophy of life and even his vocational attitude more than any other book. About the Group MacDonald scholar and lecturer Kirstin Jeffery Johnson leads a read-through and discussion of Phantastes , providing context and guidance for navigating an often bewildering but profoundly moving and influential fantasy novel. The “live” version of this book group (including the online forum) opens May 24 and will include Zoom chats every Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m. CST for five weeks. However, you are welcome to join at any time, even after the live chats have ended. The discussions will be archived, and the forum will be open indefinitely for new registrants to continue reading and discussing the book. Here’s a note from Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson to kick off our discussion of MacDonald: “Hello all & welcome! I look forward to meeting you. And I’d love to know, as we prep for our first gathering, if folk are coming to Phantastes for the first time, if you’ve tried it before but faltered, or if you are amongst the rabid re-readers. If you’ve put it off or put it down, then go ahead and share why. If you can’t stop coming back—share that too! The goal, of course, is to convert you all into Lewis-style addicts… Also—let us know if you are new to MacDonald altogether. If you are a selective fan or a die-hard, what’s your favourite MacDonald reading?” Click here to register for this reading group. And click here to join the conversation in our discussion forums. Phantastes  is available in the Rabbit Room Store.

by the Rabbit Room The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Lancia E. Smith, the founder of a quarterly online magazine called Cultivating and the Cultivating Project, a nurtured community of writers and artists committed to pursuing spiritual maturity and creative excellence. Lancia writes about brilliant people doing brilliantly good things related to faith, character formation, and the creative arts. She is also a photographer and portraitist. In this episode, Lancia and Jonathan talk about the relationship between editing and discipleship, the balance of sensitivity and maturity, and the habit of cultivating wonder. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 18 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

by the Rabbit Room Songs from the Silent Passage is a new collection of essays by various members of the Chrysostom Society (Eugene Peterson, Matthew Dickerson, Luci Shaw, and more) which explores the breadth and depth of Walt Wangerin Jr, a writer who has wandered through a passage and returned with news of a far country. In celebration of release day, we’re excited to share with you an excerpt from Luci Shaw’s essay as well as an interview between Luci and fellow contributor Matthew Dickerson. Matthew Dickerson : When did you first meet Walt? What was your impression? Luci Shaw : I first met Walter Wangerin during a visit to my alma mater, Wheaton College. It was Spiritual Emphasis Week and Walt had been invited as the featured speaker. The place was packed with students and visitors but I managed to get in to the standing-room-only space at the back of the chapel. What impressed me about Walt’s preaching that day was the intensity and the flow of his language. At the time I thought “He’s overdoing it. Too many adjectives, too many words.” But as I listened, overwhelmed by his enthusiasm as story after story rolled from his tongue, I sensed an expansiveness in his understanding of divine grace. He was tall and his face reminded me of a hawk or an eagle, fierce, intense. His first book, The Book of the Dun Cow was followed by a score of other unique, imaginative, powerful books. Matthew : Did your impression change over the years as you got to know him better? Luci : Years later he was invited to join the Chrysostom Society of Christian writers as we had gathered at Laity Lodge in the Texas hill country. At that point he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer, had been through courses of chemotherapy and was now hooked up to an oxygen tank on wheels. It followed him like a puppy as he strode around the place. His wife Ruthanne (Thanne) was with him, her quiet spirit a contrast to his almost fierce intensity. He told stories of his father, the original Walter Wangerin, a Lutheran pastor, and his children. Matthew : Are there any stories about interactions with Walt that stand out as particularly meaningful? Or funny? Or insightful? Luci : More years later, a group of our Chrysostom Society friends were present in the field house of Calvin College to hear him give a keynote speech at the annual Festival of Faith and Writing. His cancer was quite advanced at that point. We’d found a block of seats near the front of the auditorium and before he went up to the platform to speak he approached us and blessed each of us, individually, telling us it might be our final meeting with him. But he survived, pushing back against the disease with a kind of intense power that felt like the hand of God protecting and preserving him, urging him. Matthew : Did you engage with Walt as a fellow writer? Do you think the Chrysostom Society had an impact on Walt’s writings? Or did you see Walt or his writings having an impact on your own poetry? Luci : Walt proved himself to be a prolific wordsmith. Books and sermons flowed out of him in torrents, as well as wild and wonderful poetry. He once sent me a large, untidy manuscript of poems for my response, the same sort of thing Madeleine L’Engle had presented me with for editing and printing. The poems varied widely in skill and scope. Many were quite lovely and powerful, but the collection didn’t hang together as a whole. I gave him some feedback and he took it manfully! Click here to view Songs from the Silent Passage in the Rabbit Room Store. Excerpt from Luci Shaw’s Essay, “Letters from the Land of Cancer” Letters from the Land of Cancer is a brief book about a large concern. It is about time—the time we have left to live on this planet, each and all of us who are mortal. “Terminal” is the appropriate term, when, in the midst of a full and flourishing life, we are jerked to a halt by something that is bigger than we are, that takes over our lives, our thinking, our plans for the future. The book is about the aggressive shock we feel at the announcement that something over which we have little control is invading our bodies and seeping into our minds and souls. For many years I have known and admired Walt Wangerin, the friend who wrote these letters out of the extremity of his cancer, describing his progress through the entire dis-easy process of early symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, and resolution. In one letter, he describes his discoveries as “dispatches,” as if he has gone ahead of us, to some distant front, and must send back detailed descriptions of what is going on out there, what must be prepared for. Though the themes of cancer and dying may seem unduly morbid to the young and healthy, they can, in this small book, offer an understanding of what matters in life and faith. These themes engaged Wangerin’s keen and perceptive mind and, once published as Letters from the Land of Cancer , became a source of insight into how we might view the reason for our life, and our life in God, as well as how we can learn to deal with these mysteries. Having had my own brush with the threat of cancer, I have a personal appreciation of Walt’s predicament, a visceral response to the threat of an illness unto death. We, who started our lives as utterly helpless infants, may find ourselves infantile again, giving our very existence over to our caretakers. And, as Wangerin says, we may need to allow ourselves to be comforted, as a baby is comforted: lifted, carried, sung to, rocked in the consoling arms of our parents. And of our Parent. Fed, clothed, blessed by love in the midst of pain and the questions that accompany it. Wangerin’s illustration of this dependency, given at the end of a sermon at his Grace Church, is memorable. He puts his thumb in his mouth and sucks it, as a baby will! This is the practice of mortality. When Walt first received a diagnosis of cancer, which his physician told him had metastasized to his lymph nodes from somewhere else, he began to document his inner and outer life in the form of letters to his family and friends. He had noticed a swelling in his neck, and after examinations and PET scans, and after becoming acquainted with all the varied arcane devices that penetrate human flesh for discovery, he was informed of his disease. His immediate response, voiced in early letters, was, “This is a new adventure.” But we secretly wondered, “Walt, are you and your doctors setting up a new business— Doctors & Dying, Incorporated ?” The letters came to us at intervals, as personal, almost chatty stories, informal, as if he were in the room with us. And now, in these printed pages, he speaks to us again with a similar intimacy, but speaks to a wider audience. His reflections may mirror our own, but they extend them and fill them with flesh and spirit. He writes with such disarming spontaneity—sometimes from the chair in his doctor’s office as he waits for an appointment—that we feel we are face to face with him. We sense the brush of breath against the cheek as we read his words. This is how true friendship works: Walt was examining what was happening by way of his self-consciousness and his own pastoral wisdom, and passing on his findings to us, his buddies, his community, in a continuing reportage. At the time, we could not know how long the letters would keep coming. Walt tends, in his fiction, to a certain idiosyncratic style, almost as if he were writing prophetic messages similar to the proclamations of biblical prophets. These letters are far more informal, more candid and straightforward, and often decorated with snatches of conversation and imagery. Initially, he did not seem to intend these letters to be published. But now, here they are, for our benefit and understanding. In a sense, he has kept these letters as a journal for himself and us so that his experience wouldn’t get lost in a haze of forgetfulness. He expected bodily fatigue, pain, and weakness, but could not know, between each interval of writing, what the disease or the therapies would do to his mind. Or for how long he would be able to express himself coherently. His powers of description have always been invigorating, imaginative, and are spoken into the air and our minds with magisterial authority and insight. His epistles to the community of friendship retain that power. But at the time he was writing them, we all wondered, “For how long?” Click here to view Songs from the Silent Passage in the Rabbit Room Store. Luci Shaw is a poet and essayist, and since 1988 she has been Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver. Author of over thirty-nine books of poetry and creative non-fiction, her writing has appeared in numerous literary and religious journals. In 2013 she received the 10th annual Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University . Her recent collection, The Generosity, was released in August 2020, by Paraclete Press, and a new collection, Angels Everywhere , is scheduled for publication this year. Matthew Dickerson (co-editor and contributor to Songs from the Silent Passage ) is the author of the three-volume fantasy novel The Gifted, The Betrayed, and Illengond (collectively titled The Daegmon War) and the medieval historical novels The Finnsburg Encounter and The Rood and the Torc. He has also written several books about J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and fantasy literature. He first wrote about the literature of Walterin Wangerin Jr as a chapter in his co-authored book From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook of Myth and Fantasy.

by the Rabbit Room Season Two of The Artist’s Creed begins Wednesday, May 19th. Over the course of six episodes, Steve Guthrie and Drew Miller will explore the relationship between the sounding world and the Holy Spirit. They’ll ask what we can learn about God through music, speech, breath, and voice, starting next week with “Episode 1: The Sound Breath Makes.” Click through to hear an excerpt from this first episode. Each episode of this new season centers on a post from Steve Guthrie’s blog series, “Spirit & Sound,” in which he discusses what our sense of sound and hearing can reveal to us about God and his creation—from “The Sound Breath Makes” to “Sounding, Re-sounding, and the Antiphonal Shape of the World” to “The Man Who Read With His Mouth Closed (And the Spirit Who Didn’t).” Click here to listen to The Artist’s Creed. Episode 1 airs next Wednesday, May 19th . Transcripts for Season Two will be available upon each episode’s release.

by the Rabbit Room Rabbit Room Press’s latest title, “Songs from the Silent Passage,” features essays from an assortment of writers on the influence of Walt Wangerin. One of those writers is Eugene Peterson, and we’re so grateful that his voice is part of this collection. If you’ve heard of Walt Wangerin but haven’t yet encountered his work, this collection of essays is a perfect place to begin. Read on for an excerpt from Peterson’s essay. Chauntecleer and the Pastoral Imagination Reading the Dun Cow novels turned out to be, in retrospect, a significant event in the shaping of my pastoral imagination. After I was ordained and admitted to the company of pastors, I expected to be in conversation with men and women who would be colleagues attentive to the nature of congregation: the beauty of holiness, the care of souls, the craft of preaching. What I found was a “company of shopkeepers,” preoccupied with shopkeepers’ concerns: how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from the competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers would lay out more money. I began to look around for congenial companions. The search was not easy, but help came in the form of a novel, The Book of the Dun Cow , written by Walter Wangerin Jr. It embedded itself in my imagination and along with his subsequent books has continued for nearly forty years to clarify and deepen my understanding and practice of the life of a pastor. What I am writing here is not so much about Wangerin as such but about his considerable influence on my life as a pastor and writer. Geoffrey Chaucer and Walter Wangerin Jr. One of my assignments as a student at Seattle Pacific University in my final year (1954) was to write a weekly opinion column for The Falcon , our student newspaper. In one issue my opening sentence was, “This is the dullest thing since calculus and Chaucer . . .” (I no longer remember “the thing” that I was referring to). I soon got a call from my English professor, who was also advisor to the paper, asking me to come and see her. I showed up and she asked me, “Eugene, have you ever read Chaucer?” I confessed that I had not. She followed up with, “And I assume you know nothing about calculus either?” I admitted my ignorance. Without further comment she turned around, reached for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , and as she handed it to me, said, quite severely it seemed to me, “Read this, and don’t come back until you have read the whole thing.” She was my favorite professor and had always treated me kindly, but by the tone of her voice, I knew I was in trouble. I showed up four days later (it’s a long book) thoroughly chagrined, for those four days had put me in the company of twenty-nine pilgrims on their way to Canterbury who amused themselves on their journey by telling stories—of adventures and trials, some bawdy and some charming, some of moral philosophical reflection, some of tragedy and some of romance. Twenty-three of the pilgrims told stories and only one out of the twenty-three was dull. By this time, her severity had been replaced by her customary kindness. In the years that followed, whenever she read a poem or essay that I had written for a periodical, she wrote a note of appreciation that kept our friendship up-to-date. I also learned from others that while teaching her writing course she sometimes would drop my part in the Chaucer incident into the classroom conversation. Several years later, as a newly ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church (UPCUSA), I was given an assignment to develop a new congregation near a small town in Maryland (Bel Air) that was fast becoming a suburb of Baltimore. I was pleased to be asked and, ill-equipped as I was, accompanied by my wife and two-year-old firstborn, embraced my new employment with enthusiasm. There was a burgeoning interest in the church in those years, with experts offering seminars and books exploring the dynamics and procedures for approaching a “generation that knew not Joseph” to get them to listen to the story of Jesus and become part of the body of Christ. It was the early sixties, the Decade of the Death of God. Church attendance was plummeting. Anxiety—among some approaching something more like hysteria—was widespread as the influence of the Christian church seemed to be swiftly eroding while secular humanism was replacing what many had assumed, probably mistakenly, was a “Christian Nation.” Innovations were proposed, desperate applications of tourniquets to staunch the flow of blood from the body of Christ. Churches were modified or designed so they didn’t look like churches. The “church growth” movement got most of the headlines—megachurches that seemed to some of us to be mostly “mega” and very little “church.” Meanwhile the primary reaction of the established, so-called mainline churches in response to the challenge was to initiate strategies for developing new congregations. My denomination was energetically recruiting pastors to implement this particular strategy. I counted myself fortunate to be asked to be in on something fresh and new, challenging and demanding, but still “church.” I understood that my task was to implement a gathering of men and women who would sit still and be quiet long enough to become aware of God’s word and presence in the neighborhood in addition to attending to their own souls. In anticipation of the population growth in the area, my denomination had purchased six acres of farmland two miles from the existing Presbyterian Church, an historic colonial congregation located in the center of the town but landlocked with no room for expansion. It was an aging but still vigorous body of Christ, so instead of relocating the church (to “where the people are”), a frequently employed strategy in those years, they requested the denomination develop another congregation. I was aware, of course, of the advice being handed down by the growing cadre of experts who were telling men and women like me how to counteract the demise of the church by replacing it with something “relevant” to this new post-modern, post-church generation. I attended occasional seminars that seemed promising and read the current books that contained the latest wisdom. But a day came when I read this sentence, written by one of the acclaimed promoters of church renewal: “The size of your parking lot will have a lot more to do with the success of your church than any text you will preach.” That sentence raised a red flag. More and more I sensed that I was being encouraged to develop public relations skills borrowed almost verbatim from the world of business. None of these “mentors” seemed to have anything but a cursory interest in theology or people. Theirs was a mindset obsessed with statistics, programs, and demographics. I found myself immersed in a depersonalized world with no relationships. That’s when I picked up and started reading Walt Wangerin’s novel The Book of the Dun Cow and overnight recovered what I would now name a “pastoral imagination.” I say “recovered” because I had already begun to develop a sense of coherence with congregation and worship, with people and God in the place and circumstances that had been given to me, a place where I would cultivate a sense of the holy in the ordinary. Chaucer and Wangerin entered my story and replaced the experts on relevance that had been boring me to death. You can read the rest of Eugene Peterson’s essay in Songs from the Silent Passage, available in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

by Leslie E. Thompson As a rule, I don’t take well to the separation of men and women in artmaking. I don’t think that individual sexes hold the keys to a certain set of artistic or personality traits, nor do I believe either have a creative advantage over the other. While this is true, I’m often struck by the impact of women in my life and marvel at the particular perspective they provide that so deeply relates to my own. Perhaps this is why Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter left me with tear-dampened cheeks and a soul-shaken spirit at each reading, while Jayber Crow was simply an enjoyable (albeit, uniquely enjoyable) read. For this reason, I’ve found myself drawn to the Faithful project just released into the world. “Project” hardly begins to cover the footprint of the book, music, live event, eventual podcast—it’s more akin to a movement or concept. At its core, Faithful begins with stories of women in the Bible and invites female artists of all kinds to interact with them. Artists like Amy Grant, Ellie Holcomb, Ginny Owens, Jess Ray, Taylor Leonhardt, Sandra McCracken, Leslie Jordan, and so many others joined forces with writers like Sally Lloyd-Jones, Ann Voskamp, Trillia Newbell, and Ruth Chou Simons to reflect on the Biblical narrative through a female lens—and write about it. The result is an exploration of themes that find their way into the hearts and minds of women throughout generations through song and written word. Faithful began with a series of writing retreats in Nashville’s Art House as participants were given prompts from the Bible of women whose own stories tell us more about the faithfulness of the Creator. Biblical figures like Ruth, Esther, Mary, and Miriam were offered as reflection points. Writers were encouraged to join with musicians and let the miraculous ways of artmaking bring forth something new. Admittedly, some of the authors found themselves feeling unequipped to handle the pressure of writing a song (as the joke was made in the livestream event, “before this, I didn’t know what a ‘bridge’ was…”). Despite their insecurity, their words were invited to take shape not only through song in a recorded album, but also through the written word in the form of the beautifully-bound book that accompanies the project. There’s even a Faithful necklace created in partnership with the ethically-conscious brand ABLE. The passing down of wisdom and truth from generation to generation isn’t unique to a female or male perspective, but I’ve been grateful for the ways it has impacted my own experience as a woman making sense of that which surrounds me. And how wonderful when these themes can be translated into song, story, and art. Faithful defends the honor of telling stories from the female perspective in a world that often either seeks to silence that perspective or can’t fully realize the breadth of its meaning. Our own experiences of God’s faithfulness can galvanize others as the stories of biblical characters spur us on. Faithful defends the honor of telling stories from the female perspective in a world that often either seeks to silence that perspective or can't fully realize the breadth of its meaning. Leslie E. Thompson I found this to be true in my recent history when my husband and I suffered a miscarriage. Through this experience, I found a new perspective of the story of the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. The physical undoings of a pregnancy through miscarriage can bring similar symptoms with weeks of pain, and when I first remembered this story I was moved at the response of Jesus as the woman grabs his cloak. He felt all twelve years of her pain, embarrassment, discouragement, hopelessness—he knew her struggle, and he knew the depth to which she desired healing. My own pain pales in comparison to a twelve-year battle, but Jesus’ response to this woman reminds me of his kindness and grace in my life. The stories we hear in Sunday school become tangible when we experience the human reality they reflect, and the gracious healing of the one who has made us. One doesn’t need to be a woman to realize that there is a deep, rich culture of womanhood in the stories of the Bible. And regardless of what your own culture looked like in church or out of it, we do well to take these stories in mind and amplify those whose voices are hushed in the scriptures, but whose stories speak volumes of what Jesus has done. One such story highlighted on the Faithful record is that of Rahab, who is known in the Old Testament as a prostitute whose aid in the hiding spies sent by Joshua to investigate Jericho resulted in a victory for the Israelites. The story is short, as is often the case with women in the Bible, but mention of Rahab is made in Hebrews as an example of a person of faith and good works, and—perhaps most notable—Rahab shows up in the lineage of Christ as the mother of Boaz. From these small bits in scripture, the song “Rahab’s Lullaby (God Above, God Below)” was created. The Faithful livestream event allowed the writers to share their conversation in the co-writing room, and the comment was made that Rahab surely sang to her son about the goodness of God as her family was spared due to her faithfulness. The body of Christ is fully realized in men and women alike, and while traits are found across the male/female divide, there is a comfort in hearing voices with like-but-unique-timbres singing and telling of uncertainty, perseverance, joy, and ultimately, hope. Throughout the Faithful project, hope is put on full display. Sally Lloyd-Jones offers a particularly beautiful poem in the book inspired by the personhood of Eve: Eve, you’re not the worst of us. You’re just the first of us. —Sally Lloyd-Jones In recent years, the illustration of a pregnant Mary introducing her swollen belly to a downcast Eve has made its rounds on social media. The piece comes from Sister Grace Remington from the Sisters of the Mississippi Abbey in Iowa. The gospel brings together in a single image two characters separated by thousands of years and an entire Testament in the Bible. Eve holds the end of the string that runs throughout the biblical narrative and is eventually placed in the hands of a young Mary—who surely learned of Eve, the woman who took and ate and set forth the motion of God’s great plan of redemption. Mary must have considered Eve and the purpose of that story in her own life. “Mary & Eve” by Scott Erickson, based off of Sister Grace Remington’s original. In the same way, we can find great meaning and purpose by reading about those who have gone before us and whose characters are on display in the Scriptures. And as God continues to work his plan of rescue, we build upon those stories in hope for a day when we can meet these women in the flesh, as God’s New Earth brings life for all eternity. Sally ends her poem with this: At the end of time, Eve, I see you at the Wedding feast of the Lamb. When everything sad will come untrue… And as we sit together at His table, Eve, I hear Him say with tears and great laughter—  Take,  And eat! —Sally Lloyd-Jones ] The album is available now wherever you find your music. Find the book and all other information at faithfulproject.com .

by the Rabbit Room The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. In this 100th episode of The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers and producer Drew Miller play back and discuss favorite moments from the first 99 episodes, as identified by listeners. Click here to listen to the 100th episode of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

by Mark Meynell Going viral is, I would imagine, a standard goal of most professional photographers. A brief glance at his Twitter feed suggests that this happens fairly frequently to Jonathan Brady, a British photojournalist for the Press Association. Well, it happened again recently and it’s obvious why. For it is Brady who gets the credit for what had to be the image of an extraordinary week in an extraordinary season: the Queen sitting alone at the funeral of Prince Philip. It is one of those pictures that doesn’t merely capture a unique moment but somehow manages to communicate meaning at many different levels simultaneously. If it weren’t such a sombre occasion, it would be serendipitous. In case you’re anxious, my purpose here is not to wax lyrical about the advantages of constitutional monarchy over other forms such as executive presidencies, say. That would be entirely superfluous because they’re completely and utterly obvious to all the world. Instead, my aim is to meander through what makes the image itself so powerful. Now, before I get uncharacteristically overcharged (for a stuffed-shirted Englishman, that is), just consider the technical prowess of the photograph’s composition. This will have been partly achieved through cropping during the editing process undoubtedly, but the ingredients all had to be in place to make that possible. We’re in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, the castle’s private chapel. It is a stunning medieval masterpiece, so it would take a perverse kind of genius to make it anything other than photogenic! So Brady has that advantage at least. But consider the lines in his image. Start with the unmissable diagonals , formed by the parallel lines of the pews and memorial wall plaques. If you extend them, they would eventually converge in the far distance, just as in an Old Master landscape that has thoroughly mastered perspective. One of Claude Lorrain’s classical scenes , perhaps. But note where these lines draw the eye. Not at some invisible point in infinity, but at their widest point on the left; we are quite naturally drawn back to the lone figure in the pews. Or take the rule-of-thirds , one of the basic techniques for image composition, in painting, photography and cinema. Apply lines at a third and two-thirds of the way along the vertical and horizontal axes and the image is divided into nine segments (as in tic-tac-toe, or noughts-and-crosses as we call it over here). Lo and behold, the photo’s subject fits perfectly into one of those segments. Finally, throw in central lines to both axes and what do you find? The top of the figure’s mask and the tip of her nose lie on that horizontal line precisely. That is entirely apt since when chatting with a friend, we naturally focus on the centre of their face. Even though in this instance she is looking into the middle distance, the fact of the centre of her face falling on the central line gives the viewer an unconscious connection. Now, of course, this is all very clinical. Because this is not just any lone figure in any old building. It’s the Queen! Sitting alone at the funeral of her husband of 74 years, just two months before his 100th birthday and days before her own 95th. For all the incongruities and occasional absurdities of monarchies in the twenty-first century, despite the vast wealth, heritage and privileges that it has brought the Windsor family—incidentally, that’s an artificial name created during World War I because their true surname, inherited from Queen Victoria’s German husband Prince Albert, should be Saxe-Coburg-Gotha—this is a painful, and indeed very human, scene. Even the most ardent republicans (lower case ‘r’!) can look beyond all the flummery and baggage to see that. It is profoundly poignant. Stories about Prince Philip have abounded in recent days, things that few knew and most had no right to know. He could be controversial at times, some of his views might leave something to be desired, while addicts of Netflix’s The Crown might presume confidence about all kinds of biographical details. (Never forget it’s fictionalised!) But of the many remarkable things about the Duke of Edinburgh, it was his unwavering commitment to duty and service that stood out. Which meant, in particular, serving his wife, often a couple of paces behind her. For seven and half decades. It takes a man of rare calibre and security (still) to handle that. No wonder she called him her ‘strength and stay’. And now she’s alone, an aloneness that only the widowed truly know. Yet for the Queen it brings a unique burden because if you think about it, she has never known what it is to be the monarch without her husband beside her. They had been married for five years already when her father George VI died. The camera does lie, as we all should know. I admit to a degree of outrage that she should be left all alone like this at such a painful moment, assuming that it was the result of Covid-distancing rules. In actual fact, Brady froze her total isolation in those pews from just a passing moment; they would fill up (albeit with necessary spaces) within minutes. But you would never know that from the photo. Despite that—or perhaps even because of that—this viral image communicated a profoundly relatable truth. Yes—she really is alone now, humanly speaking. At least two British newspaper cartoonists (Peter Brookes in The Times and Christian Adams in the Evening Standard ) sought to convey the same thought (see below). But Brady’s photograph makes the point far more persuasively. It requires no captions nor additional images. She must have sat in that chapel thousands of times over her long life. Moreover, this was hardly the first time she’d had to wear funeral black from head to toe there. But it was certainly the first to do so in that universal icon of the pandemic, a face mask. This is by no means the first pandemic of human history. Yet it is the first in which the whole of humanity has battled the virus, (often defeating it, but too often being defeated by it), while simultaneously being kept informed about that battle. Various sites provide minute-by-minute statistical updates of the global state of play. We can each now doom-scroll to our heart’s discontent. All seven billion of us have been affected by COVID-19, and many of us have lost loved ones and precious friends to that contemptible microbe. Prince Philip was not killed by COVID, of course; but his final months were surely dominated by its presence. So at his funeral, attendance was restricted to only thirty close family while his beloved wife sat masked. And distanced. There is a cruel irony about that. Many commentators have observed that for constitutional monarchy to ‘work,’ it requires an indefinable brew of magic and mystery, particularly around the monarch herself. She must be politically neutral, for example (which is why she never gives interviews). How else can she represent everybody? She needs to be unlike the rest of us, in some ways; there needs to be that degree of distance from us ordinary citizens on the street (and by the way, we are citizens now, not ‘subjects’!). So, the less we know, the more effective the system, something which makes life for the monarchy increasingly fraught in the era of 24/7 news cycles. The media have reduced, and at times eroded, that distance altogether. The ensuing scenes are not always pretty. This will no doubt seem very alien to observers in the States and elsewhere. A quirky legacy of history, perhaps, only good to keep tourism and tabloids in business. But I found myself profoundly moved, perhaps unexpectedly. So here is the strangest thing, made all the stranger for it being conveyed through one of the most extraordinary and unique people in history: in art as in life, the more specific and personal an experience might be, the more universally it resonates. Mark Meynell I love my country as I hope you do yours. Yet living for a few years as a child in Asia, working in East Africa between 2001 and 2005, and now having a travelling job focused primarily in Eastern Europe, radically affects my perspectives. One is that I simply cannot be a nationalist. Not as a Christian, not as a modern citizen. That just makes no sense to me. I grew to appreciate and love the UK while being abroad; to that extent, I guess you could say I’m a patriot. But I also grew to love many other places and people too, because it was obvious to me that while they had characteristics, habits and traditions that were different from ours certainly, some were far better! As George Bernard Shaw brilliantly put it, “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…” So even if my feelings surrounding this image were somehow shaped by patriotism, that did not lie at the heart of it. Because, for me as a pastor, I couldn’t help but see beyond the titles and splendour, the history and the scandals. For as Jonathan Brady’s photograph showed us, here was a person experiencing realities that every single one of us must face. We witnessed a monarch who was truly one of us. She sits slightly hunched, subdued and sombre, and perhaps a little scared (just as C. S. Lewis articulated in A Grief Observed ). We can barely see her eyes; they’re like dark pinpricks, staring ahead at nothing in particular, staring into a Philip-less future. It is so sad. And human. So here is the strangest thing, made all the stranger for it being conveyed through one of the most extraordinary and unique people in history: in art as in life, the more specific and personal an experience might be, the more universally it resonates. Conversely, the more generalities we grope for in the hope of building bridges with the many, the fewer connections we actually make. Such generalities leave us cold. It is precisely the uniqueness of another’s experience that makes it so precious. And universal. For here is grief. But I can’t leave it there. Both the Queen and Prince Philip shared a profound faith in Christ. This funeral, for all its pain and sadness, therefore, does not constitute an eternal farewell, but a hope-filled Au Revoir (French for ‘until the next time’). So, let us close with the weighty words of a clerical poet, one who himself knew the mixed blessing of being favoured by one of Elizabeth II’s ancestors: John Donne, pressed into ordination by James I (aka James VI of Scotland). Because of Christ, we can all know this to be true as well. Death, be not proud, though some have called thee  Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;  For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow  Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.  From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,  Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,  And soonest our best men with thee do go,  Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.  Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,  And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,  And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well  And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?  One short sleep past, we wake eternally  And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. —John Donne, “Death Be Not Proud”

by Mark Meynell As Andrew reminded us in a piece posted just recently , Easter Sunday is when it’s all just getting started. It’s no accident that the Easter season in the church calendar lasts for several weeks. So as we get back into the swing of another series of 5&1 posts, I feel no embarrassment in starting with the theme. This is because that Sunday morning in Palestine triggered the greatest revolution the world has ever known. And it’s not done yet… There’s such a vast treasury of music for and about the season, for the simple reason that the Church (in all her different manifestations during the last millennium) has been the single most significant patron of composers and musicians, bar none. With Easter being so fundamental to the faith, it’s no wonder that it became an aural focal point. So, it’s been painful to make selections! You will undoubtedly have your favourites, perhaps drawn from Handel’s Messiah , Bach’s B Minor Mass or Easter Oratorio , and Vaughan-Williams’ 5 Mystical Songs . Instead, I’ve tried to pick out several choral wonders which will be less familiar. Haec Dies (‘This day’) William Byrd (?1543-1623, English) Voces8 Byrd was a composer whose genius enabled him to weather the stormy uncertainties of the English Reformation like his teacher and mentor Thomas Tallis. It seems that he actually became a Roman Catholic at a time when to do so was increasingly regarded as treacherous (the Pope declared in 1570 that Catholics had no obligation to swear allegiance to Elizabeth I since she was ‘the pretended Queen of England’ and excommunicated as a heretic). Byrd was one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance and this concise anthem is one I always loved singing. It is simply a setting of the Latin version of Psalm 118:24 but is often sung at Easter. After all, this is the day that only the Lord could make, as Lord both of Creation and Redemption. The different voices come in one by one, rather like bells peeling for Easter morning. Then the Exultemus (let us rejoice) gets the toes tapping, seeming to dare us to jump to our feet for a jolly jig. This is deep joy, Renaissance-style! Translation: This is the day the Lord has made: let us rejoice and be glad in it. Alleluia, alleluia. 2. O Dulce Lignum (O Sweet Wood) from Passion & Resurrection Ēriks Ešenvalds (1977- , Latvian) Hannah Consenz (soprano), Ethan Sperry (conductor) Portland State University Chamber Choir, Portland State University String Ensemble Four centuries later, our subject is identical but the sound-world light years away. Ešenvalds spent his first growing up in the USSR state of Latvia, but he studied at the Latvian Baptist Seminary (he’s still very committed to his Baptist church) and later at the Latvian Academy of Music. He is now one of the most sought-after and celebrated choral composers and I’m on the edge of my seat every time I hear of a new work from his pen. This track is the final section in a four-part work for soloists, choir and strings called Passion and Resurrection . It opens with a soprano solo, in Latin, accompanied only by the reverberations around her. It is stark, haunting and mysterious. We don’t really know where we are. Unexpectedly, the strings join her, with the choir quietly chanting. If anything, this deepens the mystery but it is utterly beguiling. After a couple of minutes, there is a brief pause; before a change of tone. The strings now sound cinematic, heightening our sense of expectation. The choir then sing in English and matters quickly escalate to the triumphant repetition of ‘The Lord is Risen!’ The chanting returns—but it is now what is going on. The early mystery of the piece was like the pre-dawn mist in that Jerusalem cemetery of old, the Latin solo a meditation on the horrors of Friday. It is a dialogue first between the two angels and Mary (Mariam in the original Greek) and then, miraculously, not the gardener but the Lord himself. The choir sings a gentle, rocking address to her, ‘Mariam.’ Her response (‘Rabboni’) is so tender and achingly beautiful. The sort of music that you cry happy tears to. 3. Christus Vincit Sir James Macmillan (1959- , Scottish) Choir of New College, Oxford, Edward Higginbottom (cond.) Another fairly contemporary piece now. We’ve already encountered Macmillan in the 5&1s. In the Advent list , his extraordinary Percussion Concerto Veni, Veni Emmanuel was the long piece. We’re at the other end of the musical spectrum now, with this 6-minute miniature for unaccompanied (or ‘a capella’ ) choir. The text is drawn from 12th century ‘Worcester Acclamations’, Christus vincit , and Macmillan wrote it for the choir of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. This explains the meditative pace, composed specifically to allow for the vast acoustics of Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece. On first hearing, it perhaps doesn’t sound especially triumphant. But there is so much going on in it, with its power growing with each listen. There is a dialogue between the choir and a very demanding soprano solo (or in this recording, treble solo) that seems to float in the stratosphere far above, with unsettling leaps (right up to a top B, two octaves above middle C which Macmillan insists should be quiet!) and haunting, meandering lines. What I admire especially about this piece, however, is that it plots a different part from shouts of Easter joy and triumph. Those, of course, have their place. But the approach here is more settled, a meditation on deep, unwavering convictions which give grounds for hope, especially for a troubled world in which Christ does not seem to rule at times. This piece is insistent, convinced in what is true. That makes the final Alleluias all the more wondrous. 4. God is Gone Up (Op. 27, No. 2) Gerald Finzi (1901-1956, English) Christopher Whitton (organ), Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, Christopher Robinson (cond.) The eagle-eyed will have noticed that, in actual fact, the Easter season ended yesterday! We have had several weeks of joyful celebration of the living Saviour, but yesterday was Ascension Day (in the western church calendar; Eastern Orthodoxy has it on June 10th this year). So here is a piece that celebrates that moment, almost comical as the disciples gormlessly gawp upwards in their initial confusion. Gerald Finzi was a composer known for the ‘Englishness’ of his music, a protégé of the likes of the conductor Sir Adrian Boult and composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams (who helped him get a job teaching at London’s Royal Academy of Music). He hated London, though, and with his young family moved to the West Country, where he composed and grew apples! He is much loved for his choral works especially, many of which have become English cathedral staples (although you shouldn’t miss his Shakespeare songs and clarinet music). The irony of all this is that Finzi was actually of Italian and Jewish descent and was agnostic in religious matters. This didn’t hold him back—and this short anthem is a glorious reminder of the triumph of Ascension Day. 5. Easter Hymn (“Inneggiamo, il Signor non è morto”) and Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana (1890) Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945, Italian) Agnes Baltsa (soprano), Vera Baniewicz (contralto), Philharmonia Orchestra, Chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Giuseppe Sinopoli (cond.) Time now to flee the frigid wastes of northern Europe and relish some Mediterranean sun and melodrama. Time now for some Italian opera. Easter is not regularly featured on the operatic stage, because the themes of opera tend more to revolve around passionate loves and jealousies rather than the Christ’s passion and empty tomb. The main exception would be Wagner’s Parsifal . But there is also this 1-act gem, an opera that took the world by storm when it was entered into a competition in 1890. It manages to combine both forms of passion! Based on a short story and play called Cavalleria rusticana (‘rustic chivalry’) by Giovanni Verga, Mascagni won first prize, having to take forty curtain calls! The action takes place one Easter morning in a Sicilian village square and revolves around a classic love triangle. Santuzza is a young girl who has been seduced by a soldier Turiddu, even though the latter is still in love with his former fiancée Lola (who married some other bloke while Turiddu was on military service). All a bit of a mess, frankly. But the backdrop is the Easter service taking place in the church behind, a fact that serves to expose the religious hypocrisies in the community as well as the repercussions of Turiddu’s behaviour. Santuzza is broken and feels unworthy, so is reluctant to go in. She asks Lucia to pray for her as she is sympathetic to her plight (despite being Turiddu’s mother). So, these two women sing while the church is filled with a glorious Easter hymn. After that, I could hardly leave out the sheer gorgeousness of the Intermezzo , the opera’s most famous bit, which accompanies the villagers as they leave the square. Italian romanticism at its highest! 5th Movement (Im Tempo des Scherzos / In the tempo of the scherzo) from Symphony No. 2, The ‘Resurrection’ (1895) Gustav Mahler (1860-1911, Austrian) Berlin Philharmonic, Rundfunkchor Berlin, Sir Simon Rattle (cond.) Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for musical G-forces like you’ve never heard before. We have not encountered Mahler on our 5&1 journey before now but it has to happen at some point. The title of his majestic second symphony is a bit of a clue for why it must appear now. Yes, it comes as the one major piece of the 5&1, for the simple reason that it lasts half an hour. But it is itself only the fifth movement! The whole work lasts a gob-smacking 90 minutes. I still haven’t ever heard it live but it is overwhelming because there is never a dull moment. Glorious! Mahler worked on it for six years and it quickly became one of his most popular compositions. It marked the first time he explicitly expressed his fascination and passion for questions of transcendence and the afterlife. He had been at a funeral of a close friend in which he heard some verses by Friederich Klopstock. He later said, ‘it struck me like lightning’. He set these words to music, adding several more verses of his own. The movement is complex (unsurprisingly). But it opens with an orchestral cry of despair (drawn from the third movement) and then develops into what he called ‘the march of the dead’, culminating in ‘a Great Summons’ on the horns. Then the choir comes in, taking the Klopstock/Mahler text verse by verse. As if the sound couldn’t get bigger, Mahler throws in parts for an organ and church bells (which he purchased specially for performances). He would later write, ‘The increasing tension, working up to the final climax, is so tremendous that I don’t know myself, now that it is over, how I ever came to write it.’

by the Rabbit Room In Season Two of The Artist’s Creed, Steve Guthrie and Drew Miller explore the relationship between the sounding world and the Holy Spirit, asking what we can learn about God through music, speech, breath, and voice. In this fifth episode, Steve and Drew discuss what it means for God to “speak through” us, the divine dignifying of the human voice, the unique character of particular musical instruments, the multiplicity of voices in the four gospels, and much more. Tune in every Wednesday at RabbitRoom.com/podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 5: “The Preposition of Love.” And click here to read “Spirit & Sound, Part 5: The Preposition of Love,”  which serves as the baseline for this conversation. Transcripts are available for The Artist’s Creed. Click here to access them.

by the Rabbit Room We are so excited to announce Opening Week at North Wind Manor: a 4-day celebration (July 13th-16th) of the Rabbit Room’s newly rebuilt community space through story, music, art, and community. It’s just the beginning of what we hope will be a continual calendar of events aimed at nourishing Christ-centered communities for the life of the world. We hope you can join us for this exciting week of events! Here’s the run-down on all that we have in store for you. Tuesday: The Local Show The Local Show is the Rabbit Room’s ongoing songwriters’ round show. Previously held at The Well Coffeehouse, we are now pleased to present the concert live from North Wind Manor! Each show features a new line-up of some of Nashville’s best singers and songwriters. But what makes the Local Show special is that the players aren’t just great musicians, they are great friends. The show is one way in which we incarnate the Rabbit Room community, and you’re invited to join the fun. So in celebration of music, we will host the Local Show on Tuesday night, featuring Andrew Peterson , The Arcadian Wild , Buddy Greene , Ron Block , and Jeff Taylor . Click here to reserve your spot at the Local Show. Wednesday Afternoon: Art Gallery Open House Stop by anytime between 10am and 4pm on Wednesday, July 14th to see a variety of art curated by painter Jamin Still . No ticket required for this one! Wednesday Evening: Art Talk with Russ Ramsey In celebration of art, we’ve invited pastor, author, and art enthusiast Russ Ramsey to speak about the work of American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner. Click here to reserve your spot at the Art Talk. Thursday: Storytellers’ Night In celebration of story, we will host a Storytellers’ Night on Thursday night. We’ve invited authors Douglas McKelvey , Andrew Peterson , Pete Peterson , Jonathan Rogers , Helena Sorensen , and Jennifer Trafton to read short stories and excerpts of their works as we gather together. Click here to reserve your spot at Storytellers’ Night. Friday: Film Night And finally, Friday night is Film Night at North Wind Manor. Films combine all four core elements of the Rabbit Room’s mission and purview: story, music, art, and community. For North Wind Manor Opening Week, we will be hosting a film night followed by a moderator-led group discussion about the film. Popcorn shall abound! We can’t reveal the name of the film. However, so you can plan appropriately, it is rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and a rude gesture. Click here to reserve your spot at Film Night. We want events at North Wind Manor to be a gift to the community, so registration is free! If you would like to help support the grand opening and other ongoing events, you can give directly to the North Wind Manor fund , or consider becoming a Rabbit Room member . Everything listed here is only the beginning—we can’t wait to host more life-giving events all throughout the year at North Wind Manor. If you want to be the first to hear about new event announcements, sign up for our email list . P.S. We encourage you to choose just one or two events to attend out of the four that are listed here—we want to do everything we can to allow as many different people to gather at the Manor during Opening Week as possible, and space is limited. Thank you!

by the Rabbit Room In Season Two of The Artist’s Creed, Steve Guthrie and Drew Miller explore the relationship between the sounding world and the Holy Spirit, asking what we can learn about God through music, speech, breath, and voice. In this final episode of Season Two, Steve and Drew discuss the relative novelty of reading silently, our text-oriented society, the inward connotations of “spirituality,” recommendations for incorporating the “out-loud-ness” of scripture into spiritual practices, and much more. Tune in every Wednesday at RabbitRoom.com/podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 6: “The Man Who Read with His Mouth Closed (And the Spirit Who Didn’t).” And click here to read “Spirit & Sound, Part 6: The Man Who Read with His Mouth Closed (And the Spirit Who Didn’t),”  which serves as the baseline for this conversation. Transcripts are available for The Artist’s Creed. Click here to access them.

by the Rabbit Room The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan is joined by Andrew Osenga for the third installment of his special summer series, “Sad Stories Told for Laughs,” in which writers speak of their public humiliations for your edification and entertainment. Andrew Osenga is a singer-songwriter, an artist & repertoire director, and the host of the podcast The Pivot: Stories of People Who Have Made a Change. In this installment of Sad Stories Told for Laughs, Andrew talks about performing to empty seats, losing a toe, and playing a music festival organized by a money launderer. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 25 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

by the Rabbit Room With memories of Opening Week fresh in our minds, we’re excited to announce more free events at North Wind Manor throughout the month of August! Next month, North Wind Manor will be hosting a lecture by Steve Guthrie on the relationship between human and divine creativity, a live filming of The Habit Podcast featuring Don Chaffer, and a live filming of The Molehill Podcast. Read on for more information. North Wind Manor Lectures: Steve Guthrie (August 10th) Like most Christians, I pray for God’s help in my creative work—when I am writing an article, for instance, or giving a talk. But, if God were to answer those prayers, what would that answer look like? Does God do everything while I just get out of the way? Does God do half the work and leave the other half to me (maybe writing the odd numbered pages and leaving me to write the evens)? Or did God just give me a dollop of something called “talent” or “ability” at the beginning of my life, and now it’s up to me to make something out of it? In short, who’s hand “holds the pen”? How should we think about the relationship between God’s creating, and our own? This talk, which was the keynote address at a recent National Convention of the Lilly Network of Church-related Colleges and Universities, will offer a picture of making that leaves room for both God’s activity and our own. —Steve Guthrie The Habit Podcast LIVE: Sad Stories Told for Laughs with Don Chaffer (August 24th) The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. In this episode, Jonathan will be joined by writer and musician Don Chaffer for a special edition of his summer series, “Sad Stories Told for Laughs.” The Molehill Podcast LIVE (September 1st) The Molehill Podcast is an audio anthology of treasured writings, read aloud by the writers themselves, hosted by Drew Miller. Each episode features poetry, stories, and shenanigans, from dubious facts and words of befuddlement to original house music by Zach & Maggie . More details about this particular episode of The Molehill Podcast to come. We want events at North Wind Manor to be a gift to the community, so registration is free! If you would like to help support ongoing events, you can give directly to the North Wind Manor fund , or consider becoming a Rabbit Room member . We’re just getting started with live events at the Manor, and we can’t wait to share with you more of our plans for the rest of the year. Stay tuned for news and updates, and we’ll look forward to seeing you soon.

by the Rabbit Room We’re so excited to announce many more session leaders and musicians who will be joining us at Hutchmoot: Homebound 2021. And since it’s quite a long list of names, we found that the only suitable way to share them would be in classic summer-music-festival-fashion. Drumroll, please! As many names as you see here, there are yet more guests who will be joining us—be on the lookout for another announcement including all visual artists and more. Rabbit Room Members, Guess What! We’ll have some fun, special Hutchmoot content for members again this year! As for what it is? You’ll just have to wait—or become a member—to find out. If you want to learn more about what membership means you can read about it on the blog or on our Become a Member page .

by Ben Palpant If his name had been Tommy or Jack, this story wouldn’t need much explanation. And if it were normal for a doctor’s son to play with hospital patients, then I wouldn’t need to explain why I played Legos with Losokoi. The only normal thing about the situation was my motivation for playing with him day after day. He was a grateful kid. That, my friends, is a universal magnet. And I never saw him ungrateful even up to his death. But I get ahead of myself. I spent the formative years of my childhood in Kenya, Africa where my father was the only physician in a rural hospital. My mother would visit the patients to pray for them, and what would be more natural than to drag her children along? She made me bring my bag of legos along to play with any children who might need some friendship. I don’t remember enjoying the experience very much—largely because I hated the sight of suffering, and the smell of Betadyne mixed with human sweat made me gag—but Losokoi was different. His smile stands out in my memory more than anything else. Dazzling teeth. A spark of light shining in his eyes. When he smiled at me, I felt like an old friend of his, beloved and longed for and finally reunited after a long separation even though we were both only eight years old and we had just met. I remember, too, his quiet spirit and the way his whole body—eyes, mouth, even the slow gesticulation of his hands—exuded gratitude. When he said thank you , it was almost an unnecessary redundancy. He had already been thanking me all along. All this remained so strongly with me after his death that I forgot the details of his suffering and had to ask dad many years later. Losokoi suffered from Tuberculosis of the brain. He was brought from an outlying tribe. His body had decayed to such a degree that bed sores developed. The hospital staff had to roll him periodically to keep the pustules from peeling away, but they couldn’t keep up. His short stay in the hospital was an agonizing one, but all I can remember is his radiance. He did not obsess over the questions, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” He just expressed gratitude. After only a couple of months, he died in the night. None of the staff wanted to deal with the dead body, so Dad had to take care of it in the pre-dawn darkness. He woke me up so I could help him open doors and navigate his way to the morgue. I don’t remember any of that event. I remember only a pervading sense of shocked disappointment as if the sun had fallen suddenly and permanently out of the sky. When finished, we walked the few hundred feet back to our house for breakfast. We held hands around the table and dad prayed, but couldn’t finish. I opened my eyes. He was crying—a quiet, heaving grief I have seen only a handful of times in my entire life. Mom picked up where he had left off, finishing the prayer with thanksgiving for life, for Losokoi, for God’s abundant goodness. Delight's expression always takes the form of gratitude. When we delight, we give thanks. Ben Palpant Long after that morning, I wondered at his tears. For many years I assumed he wept for Losokoi, but now that I’m a father, I think he wept for me. He wept for my loss and for the horrible nature of death itself—an unwelcome reminder of our broken state—that had suddenly loomed over my childhood. I’m sure that deep down, my father also grieved the arrival of the fork in the road that death inevitably brings and he wondered if I would choose my life’s path wisely. Two roads diverge at the point of pain. One toward gratitude and joy. The other, toward self-pity and bitterness. The first is the road less travelled. The second is an eight lane freeway that cuts through every generation, every nation, every tribe, every political party, and every family. It is the primary thoroughfare of the human heart and those who travel it feel justified by its heavy traffic. Francis Schaeffer once said that “the beginning of man’s rebellion against God was, and is, the lack of a thankful heart.” His conviction resonates with Scripture. The Bible focuses so heavily on thankfulness that one gets a sneaky suspicion that we’re hardwired to self-destruct if we stop giving thanks. God’s people battle by giving thanks (2 Chronicles 20:21-24). God’s people give thanks at all times and in all seasons (Psalm 92:1-4). God’s people approach his throne with thankful hearts, replacing anxiety with gratitude (Phil. 4:6-7). God’s people give thanks for all things and in every circumstance (Eph. 5:19-20, 2 Thess. 5:18). It’s easy to read this biblical theme in light of our parents who reminded us to “say thank you.” And we often did so, albeit begrudgingly. But getting us to say thank you is not, I think, the ultimate goal of these passages. Saying thank you is the lowest standard, the bare minimum. The real goal is delight . Delight’s expression always takes the form of gratitude. When we delight, we give thanks. When we don’t delight, we have to work hard to act thankful. And everyone knows that acting thankful and being thankful are not the same thing. Of course, if I don’t feel thankful, it’s better to act thankful than to act the way I feel. But I’d like to reach the point in life when I’m so thankful that I don’t have to act anymore. Let’s get back to Losokoi. He didn’t have to act thankful because he was thankful. And just in case you didn’t notice, Losokoi’s gratitude was not circumstantial—proof that sadness and delight can coexist. His anguish was real. His delight and gratitude were real too. My little acts of kindness gave him great delight. Even the hospital staff’s efforts gave him cause for gratitude. That kind of selfless thankfulness is increasingly rare, largely, I think, because our affluence has made us discontented and we’re busy fighting for our own way, our own stuff, our own rights. As long as we’re fighting for ourselves, we can’t delight in others. One test of our gratitude is the degree to which we’re making for others. Delight begets creativity. Do you remember the first time you encountered a quail? What an enigmatic revelation! I bet you ran to find some paper and crayons so you could capture delight. This is just a theory, mind you, a hunch. My theory is that humanity’s best art is born out of some form of gratitude. True, ungrateful people can make art. Selfish people can too (Aren’t we all a little fearful, a little selfish?), but the work we create out of selfishness usually lacks the radiance, the transcendence, the universal appeal of anything created out of delight. The lessons Losokoi’s short life gives us extend to communities. Like him, communities can take the road less traveled toward gratitude and away from self-pity. He was, by all definitions, impoverished, hurting, even sick, but he was also incredibly healthy in every way that mattered. The same can be true of your community. Impoverished, hurting communities can still radiate joy, but rarely by accident. Joy in suffering is usually the byproduct of habitual gratitude. Thankful communities point outward. They limit narcissism and selfishness and self-protection by the very nature of their emotional momentum. Our hearts, like any other vehicle, have difficulty changing momentum once they get rolling. We best be sure that our momentum is carrying us toward gratitude, otherwise we’ll find ourselves stuck in a traffic jam on the eight lane freeway. The Gospels give us several compelling stories of thankfulness, but one in particular can point the way as we learn to live like Losokoi. Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to the town of Bethany where he had previously raised Lazarus from the dead. A dinner was prepared for him there. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those reclining with him at table. Mary took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” Sounds philanthropic enough, but I don’t think they really cared about the poor. What they cared about was the embarrassing extravagance of the gesture. Why couldn’t her gratitude be mild and respectable like theirs? So they scolded her. But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me.” Isn’t this the incarnation of Psalm 50:23? “The one who offers thanksgiving as sacrifice glorifies me.” Let Mary of Bethany and Losokoi show us how to give thanks. They know the story they’re in. It has moved them to tears of gratitude. The generosity of God has transformed their hearts and propelled them passed scrutiny into an emotional engagement with Jesus that consumes all of their person: body, mind, and spirit. Mary’s response to this welling gratefulness was to beautify the Beautiful One, to anoint the Anointed One. It was lavish generosity responding to lavish generosity. This is the spring from which all creativity and all Christian work flow. This is the spring around which every flourishing Christian community builds. This, my friends, is where we begin the important work of lighting the dark.

by the Rabbit Room The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with songwriting duo JJ & Dave Heller. JJ Heller writes lullabies with her husband Dave and sings them for children, their parents, and the children inside the parents. Since 2017, the Hellers have released a new song on Spotify the first Friday of every month. One of those songs, “Hand to Hold,” grew into a  picture book  by the same title, released a couple of weeks ago. In this episode, JJ and Dave talk with Jonathan Rogers about bedtime liturgies and the work of giving language to parents’ deepest hopes for their children. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 31 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

by Carolyn Leiloglou When my kids were little, they loved when I read to them—they still do—and they especially loved when I sang to them, even though my voice is nothing special. But putting those two activities together, a book you could sing, that was a favorite that they would beg for again and again. Hand to Hold  by JJ Heller is one of those special books you can sing (but only if you want to). Heller is a singer-songwriter who has become known for her beautiful lullaby albums, which are enjoyed by parents as much as their kids. Her new book,  Hand to Hold,  is a picture book version of her song by the same title. But you don’t have to know the melody or sing it to enjoy this book with your child. The rhyming text flows beautifully when read aloud. This is the kind of book I can imagine becoming part of a bedtime ritual, bringing comfort and love at the end of the day. So much of this book is about the wonder of childhood: in nature, in the seasons, in exploring the world around them. Each page features a mother and daughter just doing ordinary things like baking cookies, skipping stones, or building a snowman. But it’s clear from the illustrations that the little girl is full of wonder and joy. Wonder is so natural for children, but it’s something we often lose touch with as adults. As parents, sometimes we can renew our wonder through the eyes of our children. One of my favorite page spreads shows the little girl staring up at fireflies while her mother watches her. Those of us with kids know that feeling of experiencing wonder or joy while watching our children. Hand to Hold invites us into that experience of vicarious wonder with these lines: You help me find the magic in ordinary days. Each minute is a marvel. No moment is the same. You notice every sunset, reminding me what’s true. You’re full of awe and wonder, and I’m in awe of you. — Hand to Hold , JJ Heller This prayer that her child would never lose the wonder in her soul surely applies to the parent reader as well. May we keep or regain the wonder in our souls, perhaps reawakened to it through the eyes of our children, so that we can approach with the heart of a child our Heavenly Father, whose hand is always there for us to hold. Click here to view Hand to Hold in the Rabbit Room Bookstore. Carolyn Leiloglou is the author of Library’s Most Wanted and the Noah Green Junior Zookeeper series. Her poems and stories have been published in Highlights, Clubhouse Jr., Cricket, and more. You can find her on her blog, housefullofbookworms.com , where she reviews her favorite children’s books each month.