Originality may be the most overrated of the writerly virtues. Much more important is the skill of seeing what’s in front of you and rendering it faithfully. The world is a varied place; every person in it is a miracle; every setting is unusual; every event, every encounter is a thing that has never happened in the long history of the world. On top of all that variety is the fact that every observer’s vision is unique. If you will allow yourself to see what you see, and then write what you have seen, you can be sure that originality will take care of itself. That’s not an easy thing to do. Few people write what they have seen. More often, they write what they think they ought to have seen, or they shoehorn experiences and people into familiar categories. It’s a hard habit to break; categorizing and sorting the firehose-blast of experiences and ideas that come our way is a necessary survival skill. But writing is different. Writing is a chance to release experience from man-made categories and say, “Look at this—this thing that exists in the real world.” Writing comes alive when you do that. Oddly enough, faithful imitation is the front door to originality. I gave a version of this speech to a creative writing class last week. Before I was even finished, one of my students raised her hand. “That’s fine,” she said, “but I went to a high school where everybody actually did fit the stereotypes. There were the jocks, the nerdy kids, the farm boys, the Goth kids . . .” I told her I found it hard to believe that her schoolmates, taken one at a time, fit those stereotypes any better than she did herself. But she was insistent. “The whole town,” she said, “it was like any other stereotypical farm town in Montana.” I challenged her on that one too. “Tell us about your town,” I said. “Help us understand what’s so stereotypical about it.” “Think about any farm town,” she said. “Everybody drives around in muddy farm trucks.” We nodded. That did sound maybe a little bit stereotypical. “And at Christmas, everybody goes to the grocery store to drink apple cider and sing Christmas carols.” “You do what at Christmas?” somebody asked. “We go to the grocery store to drink apple cider and sing Christmas carols. Like any other small town.” She was astonished to learn that nobody in the room (except for a classmate who happened to be from a town fifteen miles away from her) had ever heard of such a thing. It soon came out that those stereotypical classmates of hers often rode horses to school, and that her stereotypical principal took care of the horses during the school day. All that to say, there is no such thing as a stereotypical high school or small town or farmer or principal. No stereotype or category can stand against the concrete reality of specific details. This young woman thought she lived in a stereotypical town when in fact she lived in a town where the locals gather at the grocery store to sing Christmas carols, where the high school principal doubles as an hostler. Writing what you see means, among other things, paying attention to the detail that you couldn’t have known about if you hadn’t been there. I’ve got some ideas about what life in small-town Montana is like, but I wouldn’t have guessed the grocery store hymn sing or the high school horse corrals. In one of my online writing classes, a Floridian wrote about the morning she woke up to see snow in her yard—the only time she had seen snow in her life. It wasn’t a bad piece of writing. All the sentences were good, each paragraph hung together, there were some good similes and metaphors to liven things up. But something was missing, and it took me a minute to put my finger on it. The problem was this: her story read exactly like it would have read if you or I had written a story about a little girl in Florida who sees snow for the first time. Everything you would expect was there, from her looking out the window and not believing her eyes, to the annoying little brother hitting her in the back of the head with a snowball, then smirking and ducking behind a tree. But I find it impossible to believe that nothing happened on that day that I couldn’t have predicted. I can’t even predict what’s going to happen in Florida on a regular day—but a snow day? A week or two later, the same writer wrote a piece about watching a lizard shed its skin. She simply told what she saw, and the result was mesmerizing: “Twisting his head as far right as it would go, he grabbed a piece of his skin and pulled it away. It tore with a sound like tissue paper. His jaw moved up and down as he chewed and swallowed. Then he turned his head left, pulled off another section of skin, and swallowed it.” A couple of paragraphs later, the lizard startles and dashes away: “He leaped off the ledge of the porch and into the garden below. A few pieces of skin flew off as he did, but the rest of it stayed on his back as he disappeared into the grass.” That writing is fresh, vivid, sensory. It invites me to experience something I’ve never experienced before. It had never occurred to me that a lizard pulling off his old skin would make a sound like tissue paper. The flakes of skin flying off as the lizard jumps from the porch—who would have guessed that? And yet it makes perfect sense: of course that’s what would happen. But you would only know it if you had been there. That description of the lizard strikes me as highly original. But that originality doesn’t derive from a flight of fancy, or an exercise of imagination. It came from a writer paying attention to the world around her and telling us what she saw.

What did you love in your high school years? A band? A movie? A book that kept you up all night? It’s amazing how, in that fragile time between becoming an adult and still hanging on to childhood, those attachments you can’t explain can shape your passions for the rest of your life. If I think about it long enough, go back far enough, I’d say I write poems today because of Emily Dickinson. She’s a staple of the earliest literature classes, like Shakespearean tragedies and Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” the old stuff you have to read. Demure in photographs, with wide collared dresses and hair pulled back tight. But for me, and I suspect many other slightly awkward and shy teen girls, her poems burrowed deep into something I didn’t have a name for yet. My text books taught the “cleaned up” versions that toned down her eccentric obsession with dashes, but being drilled into memorizing “To make a prairie” and “I never saw a moor” stirred a sense of vast possibility. To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,— One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do If bees are few. I remember memorizing a lot of poems in 10th grade, perhaps the best thing I could have done in learning to love poetry (a story for another time, I think), but somehow in the middle of words upon words, hers always broke through. When I read the lines “I’m nobody — Who are you? / Are you — nobody — too?” it felt like I’d been given a new name. So I’m not the only one who doesn’t find making friends to come naturally. So I’m not the only one that would rather hang out at home with my family than go do . . . whatever teenage girls in little towns do for fun. So maybe, when people expressed dismay that as a homeschool kid I wasn’t going to prom and playing sports, it was okay that I honestly didn’t care. Emily felt like a friend. A weird, reclusive friend who saw the world with a clarity I couldn’t match yet but desperately wanted, who fretted about death and recognized magic riding on the backs of bees. Tenth grade was when I wrote my first poem. I had to. It was an English assignment. It was a quatrain and it rhymed, kind of like hers, though the imagery was way too obvious, but fifteen years later, I can kind of see her influence. It was something about hope being a candle in the night, a faithful guiding light. In retrospect, it wasn’t very good, but it unleashed a good thing, pages and pages of words, and realizing that hey, maybe I could be a writer. What is it about those years in between childhood and adulthood that sets the tone of our stories and follows us forever? Is it because we still hold on to our instinctive desire to keep playing, even though we’re getting acquainted with the sweat of the brow and the harshness of life? Maybe, as we’re starting to feel dampened by the world, a spark of recognition that “there’s a pair of us” is enough to light us up. Sometimes a poet, or even a single poem, can save your life. It can take you the way you are, in a place of darkness, loss or lostness, and, without changing anything, transmute everything, make everything available to you new, having ‘suffered a sea-change/ into something rich and strange. Malcolm Guite

The antidote to an unsustainable life is to stick around a place. I have been thinking about this a bit. At the university where I work, this semester I am teaching as an adjunct, handling the course “Sustainability In Action” for a colleague on sabbatical. Texts on sustainability tend to focus on the very real challenges of climate change and emerging economies and dematerialization. It is good to think about these issues when we think about sustainability, and to try to work on solutions to them. But preceding the sustainability problems that make news headlines comes a decision that regularly goes unnoticed. It is a decision by some person or persons to leave. Here is the versified form of what I am attempting to say. People these days pack up to get to the next place. No one seems to stick around anymore. Who can say they’ve heard laughter after the decades; the same laughter that they’ve heard, over and over before, or the same tears splashing down on the same old floor? People these days hurry off to the next place. Everyone seems headed through a door. They say a story has a start, a middle, and an end. Well then, no great story can only begin over again. Will you stick around here with me my friend? ‘Cause, it takes time to grow. It takes time to know who we are. There’s no easy way to love from afar. People these days hurry off to the next place. Everyone seems headed through a door, but alone. Of course, someone can stick around a place and live unsustainably. It is called avarice—of the deadly sins, it is the one that extracts more from a place than a place has to offer. Ultimately it destroys the place and any creatures who do not escape from the destruction. Avarice demands all, eventually even all life. Usually the avaricious person moves on. Search Google for images of shale mines. Thousands of feet below the wounded landscape you will see nothing but contaminated water pooled. What you will never see deep down the hole is a resort-sized house owned by an executive officer of a mining company. The anecdote to an unsustainable life is to stick around a place. When we stick around a place, we have to make use of it. And if we keep sticking around a place, quickly enough, we recognize we have to use it in such a way as to not use it up. As Wendell Berry says, “We cannot exempt use from care.” This is our call, to use the earth and care for it. It was not a vocation for Adam and Eve that we get to ignore after Genesis 3. Use with care is our livelihood. Depending on how one envisions the new heavens and new earth, use with care is our eternal vocation. I tend to think that is where we are headed: a place where we properly tend the places where we live. Not a place we sustain, but a place where we flourish and have no desire to leave. What we get now are glimpses of this future, vignettes of people in community caring for the places they stick around. [Editor’s note: If you missed it last week, also check out Sandra McCracken’s “From Smallest Seed: Music Inspired by Community and Conservation” which deals with similar issues.]

Last night’s Local Show was pretty incredible. Thanks to Andy Gullahorn for leading the team and to Jill Phillips, Jeremy Casella, and Andrew Osenga for such a great evening of music. Jill played some new songs, Andy played some funny (and some heartbreaking) songs, Osenga played an old favorite (“The Ball Game”) and some new favorites too, and Jeremy reminded everyone why Death in Reverse is such an awesome album. Special thanks to Arthur Alligood who was a good sport and played a new song when we asked him, and to Randall Goodgame for the Dylan tune. The evening wrapped up with the group covering Rich Mullins (the second Mullins cover of the night), and we even got it on video for you (sorry about the audio quality). Thanks to all who came out to last night’s show. We hope you enjoyed the evening as much as we did. The next show is on September 30th and features Andrew Peterson, Ben Shive, Lori Chaffer, and Buddy Greene—but there’s no telling who else may show up. Tickets are available here.

I’ll go ahead and assume everyone’s already heard that U2’s new album, Songs of Innocence, is available for free from iTunes. That’s a great deal right there. I’m a giant U2 fan and I’m still waiting for a chance to listen to the record. My fingers are crossed. The release reminded me of this, though, which I meant to share several weeks ago. It’s a cover of U2’s “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” by Jenny & Tyler, with special guests Sara Groves and a virtual choir of internet folks (anyone here in that choir?). It’s pretty awesome. Check it out.

Here are the first few cards that I’ve painted. I took a lot of your suggestions and, well, take a look! This has been a fun project and I think I’m going to do more. One of the reasons for this is when I painted the squirrel, several people told me it looked evil—its eye creeped them out. But it turns out that its creepy eye is what made it a favorite among several other friends. You can’t please them all. Or maybe you can. I figured, why not make another line of cards, a line of slightly odd and creepy Christmas cards for my friends who appreciate the slightly odd and creepy? And so that’s what I’m going to do.

There are so many things to care about, so many broken things that need fixing, so many wounds that need mending, so much good waiting to happen in our world. As a songwriter by vocation and a biology teacher’s daughter, a couple years ago, I found myself standing (metaphorically) at the intersection of writing songs and hymns, reading National Geographic, nurturing my two young children, and performing as a musician. I made an album called Desire Like Dynamite which explores conservation, faith, and relationships. Nature. God. People. Three elements, one revolving dance. Around that same time, I met Peter and Miranda Harris, founders of A Rocha International, a Christian conservation organization. I found such resonance in their vision for hope and renewal in the world. I started wondering what a life that includes conservation could look like for me personally, and for our community in Nashville. To backtrack several years: I had been part of an annual retreat of songwriters in Tulsa hosted by my friends (and pop-star-harmony-singing-brothers) the Hansons. Each year, different songwriters were invited to come for a weekend to write in rotating small groups. It was a fruitful experience, and it sparked much growth and creativity from all the artists through the practice of collaboration. Relationships. Faith. Ecology. Songwriting. These ideas tumbled around in my head, and I began to wonder, what role could songwriting play in the work of conservation? I know from years working with Indelible Grace and the retuned hymn movement that we are shaped by what we sing. What songs do we sing at our churches about the beauty of creation? Do we ever confess our ecological sins against God’s world, corporately or personally? The ideas crystallized in April 2013, when we hosted our first Nashville A Rocha songwriter retreat. We kept it simple—a meal, conversation, and a day of songwriting together in small groups, all of it shaped by my experience of songwriting with friends in Tulsa, my love for renewing old hymns, and the belief that we are shaped by the songs that we sing. We wanted to bring people together around the table and around ecological themes to see what would come of it. The result was a collection of eight songs, which we recorded and assembled into an album, From Smallest Seed: The A Rocha Project (Vol. 1). During this same time, the Nashville chapter of A Rocha was growing, and then Jenna (and Trevor) Henderson started officially working for Nashville A Rocha. Conversations were springing up all over the neighborhood. Jill and Andy Gullahorn hosted Creation Care Camp in their backyard. A small group started meeting to explore the idea of doing conservation work in our urban and suburban yards. Four of us planted urban rain gardens, taking notes on the “before and after” of birds and insects that came to visit. In these small activities, the dichotomy between what is often labeled politically “liberal” or “conservative” was being pulled toward the middle. Reintegration. Small things bringing renewal between people and place. As I look around at the work of A Rocha in 20 countries around the world, one of the most significant things I notice is that each project is unique to the particulars of its place. Some A Rocha programs focus on agriculture, others on birds. Education is often part of the work, as is research, and, in some places, poverty alleviation. Earlier this year I visited the A Rocha project in Surrey, British Columbia, where they have robust and wide ranging activities centered around generous acres of property, including housing and family meals with L’Abri-like hospitality. Each of the A Rocha locations and projects brings people, the needs of the community, and creation into better harmony. Even the word “harmony” is a fitting metaphor of what it means to ring out one chord with many voices. As we in Nashville A Rocha continue to figure out the shape of our work, we are slowly learning to be more attentive to the place where we live, and we’re looking for ways to cultivate that kind of harmony, to improve the balance of that place. Liz Whiting Pierce, a doctoral student in Ethics and Society at Emory University, was a guest with us this August for the songwriter retreat and observed: “The educational value of the rain gardens and the backyard habitats is that they teach city people to pay attention to what is actually happening in their eco-systems. They get to engage it physically and therefore emotionally.” Nashville A Rocha’s holistic hope is that as the songwriting retreats nourish the musicians, the music that grows out of these relationships can help to shape the affections of the church more broadly around the themes of creation care. From there, the resources that flow back in from the music can support the science and practice of local conservation work and maybe even spark more local efforts around the Southeast and the U.S. Liz continues, “If it gets woven into educational curricula and church maintenance, people also start to feel what it’s like to draw ecological realities into their interpersonal relationships; they become co-stewards. The social part is important. One of the values of church is that it gives us a tradition and a community to belong to. Other eco-friendly activities (recycling, planting trees, cycling to work) don’t necessarily give people that sense of belonging (to other people, to a place or to God).” To love what God loves, in the songs we write, in the ordinariness of our neighborhood, and in the butterflies that visit our backyards—love in action means education and humility to begin to re-integrate our daily actions with consequences. The effects of how we spend our money, how we spend our time, or what we choose to eat are often hidden. At the recent retreat, David and Sarah Dark encouraged us to “re-member” where we are from and who we are becoming. To put things back together that have been falsely divorced. In the words of Wendell Berry, “We’ve got to learn to orient our education to the possibility [of] going home to our neighborhood. Go be a good neighbor. It’s rich beyond telling.” Building up biodiversity in the backyard, building stronger relationships with each other and to our place, sustains a robust cycle of nourishment, to the glory of God. So being a neighbor begins with the smallest seed—just eight songs. It begins by sharing a meal with the family next door. It begins by planting a rain garden to help reabsorb the roof top run off in the front yard, or with Flo Paris teaching neighborhood kids how to build bug houses at Shelby Park. It is faithfulness in the daily-ness of the work. So, set a bench out in your yard. Watch and pray. Who knows what harvest may come of small things? [From Smallest Seed, volume 1 of The A Rocha Project is now available. The CD features music by Don & Lori Chaffer (Waterdeep), Kenny Meeks, Sandra McCracken, Buddy Greene, Sarah Masen, Susan Enan, Jordan Brooke Hamlin, Sara Groves, Andy Gullahorn, Jill Phillips, Chelsey Scott, Kellie Haddock, and Flo Paris. Click here to check it out.]

Why would you go back to normal, if you found out that life could be so much more? If you found a reality so much better than what the world was offering you? This is what some of the best fantasy literature reminds me of and points me toward. Now when it comes to fantasy, there are different kinds. There’s the fantasy of a Tolkien, which immerses us in an entirely different realm from our own. Then there’s the fantasy that starts grounded in the normal world then pulls back a veil into a realm of wonder. This is the fantasy of Lewis’s Narnia books, of the Harry Potter series, and of some of my personal favorites like Stephen Lawhead’s Song of Albion trilogy and, most recently, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Neverwhere. And while I love Tolkien, what I particularly love about these latter books is the way they reawaken me to the magic threaded through the fabric of creation. Alan Jacobs argues along these lines in a recent essay, “Fantasy and the Buffered Self”: [T]he desire for a world resonant with spiritual meaning, of one kind or another, does not easily die — perhaps cannot die until humanity itself does. Technology is power, but disenchanted power. And so the more dominant mechanical and then electronic technologies become as shapers of the social order, the more ingenious grow the strategies of resistance to their disenchanting force — the strategies by which we deny the necessary materiality of power. In the literary realm, the chief such strategy is the emergence of fantasy genre. Why is this drive to re-enchant ourselves so tenacious? Or even further, why is it important? The reason is that such fantasies, while not true, do point us to a truth about the world, that the physical is woven inextricably with the spiritual. As Christians we have also been somewhat guilty of disenchanting ourselves with bad theology, particularly in our portrayal of heaven. We have often imagined and spoken of heaven as being a long way off, “up there” somewhere, removed from the fallen world. But the reality is that heaven and earth are not so far apart. As N. T. Wright says in his book Surprised By Hope: Basically, heaven and earth in biblical cosmology . . . are two different dimensions of God’s good creation. . . . When the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time. Heaven is not so much far up in the clouds as it is right next to you, just beyond the veil of our space-time-matter dimension. And heaven is liable to burst through, or we to stumble into it, perhaps in the form of a burning bush, or three mysterious visitors come for dinner, or a carpenter from Nazareth. But it is easy to forget about these things in our rational day and age, where the signs seem increasingly subtle. And so in our imaginations we stumble through wardrobes or jump on trains headed for schools of magic. But as we do so, let us not get so lost in the realm of fantasy that we fail to look about us. Let us listen for a brush of angels’ wings behind a veil of wind. Let us keep our eyes open for what the Celts called the “thin places” of the world, for as Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, Earth’s crammed with heaven And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries. Not one day, in the artist’s ecstasy, But every day, feast, fast, or working-day, The spiritual significance burn through The hieroglyphic of material shows, Henceforward he would paint the globe with wings, And reverence fish and fowl, the bull, the tree, And even his very body as a man.

This is the second of four EPs from the “Heart & Soul, Flesh & Bone” collection, each individual project being an exploration of a different genre. Soul is the kind of music I play when I’m just sitting with a guitar, thinking about something else. I’ve always loved old Van Morrison records, and I wanted to make music that gave me that same feeling. This collection of songs turned out to be mainly a love letter to my family. (And kind of also to my Strat.) These last few months have seen some major life change as I chose to leave my full-time touring-musician career for the 9-to-5 A&R guy gig. These songs are the obvious working out of a new set of goals and priorities. They were also about the most fun I’ve ever had making music. Shane [Wilson] got amazing sounds and Brent [Milligan], Jacob [Schrodt] and Ben [Shive] were the best band you could imagine. Also, this was the first time my entire family has participated in one of my records. That was a blast. Here’s a bit more about each song. “Set Me Free”https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/1_Soul_clips.mp3 Let’s be honest. This one’s mainly an excuse for that groove. “Don’t Lose Heart”https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2_Soul_clips.mp3 This song is for my daughters. It’s based on something Brent said one night, “Whatever you do, whatever happens, the important thing is that you never lose heart.” I thought that was beautiful. I lost a few good years to being a selfish cynic and a few more to panic and fear. It’s not about never giving up, sometimes you need to because you learn that few things are worth losing everything for. But who you ARE, how your particular heart beats. THAT is important. “Soul On Fire”https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/3_Soul_clips.mp3 A song about the people I love most and how they inspire me. My Creator, my daughters, and my bride. When I’m done writing songs, and when I’m just done in general, I hope that people can look back at my work and see that the thread was how much I love, admire, and am grateful to live my life with the people I love. “Leave It While I Love It”https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/4_Soul_clips.mp3 This one is about the realization that I have loved playing music for a living for a long time, but that I was done doing it full-time. I came to Nashville 17 years ago hoping to do just a fraction of the amazing things I ended up doing. It was such an amazing gift, but not nearly as amazing as the gift of being a husband and a father. For me, the job had gotten to the point where to provide for them I had to be away from them, and that was no longer worth it. I’ve seen good friends lose their families to chase some mythical dream of “success.” I’ve seen others get cynical and bitter when the doors that used to swing open for them were now opening for people half their age instead. I just didn’t want to go down those roads and was grateful for the answered prayer of a job that uses my love of music, people, and the story of God’s redemption. My kids sang on this. That might be cheesy, but I don’t care. I love it so much. “Just Be”https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/5_Soul_clips.mp3 I’m addicted to my devices. Sometimes the Lord speaks through them, but usually I’m just chasing distraction. And I’m tired of it. “The Bird Who Was Friday”https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/6_Soul_clips.mp3 Who knows what this is about? Each little vignette has meaning to me, but together it’s a sort of vision. Somewhat akin to G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday” (hence the title). I just loved the melody and thought about various scenes that were playing out in my heart among my family and friends, and this sort of appeared. I haven’t written a lot of stream-of-consciousness type songs before, but this is just one of my favorite musical creations of my career. [Heart and Soul are available here. And don’t miss Andrew Osenga at The Local Show next Tuesday (Sept. 16th). Tickets are available here.] #AndrewOsenga

There’s a string of three towns outside Fall River, Massachusetts that I nicknamed “The S Towns” because Somerset, Swansea, and Seekonk all line up along the highway as you drive toward Providence. (Technically, Rehoboth is in there somewhere, but for the sake of mnemonic I pretend it isn’t. Sorry, Rehoboth.) In my many visits over the past year and a half, I learned them by their names and landmarks. Somerset is across the Braga Bridge as you’re leaving Fall River, and the first thing you see are the power plant’s water cooling towers (we call them the “cloud-makers”). Seekonk has a freestanding Starbucks in a sea of Dunkin Donuts and the Irish jewelry shop where my engagement ring was found. I think I have relatives in Swansea somewhere. So there are The S Towns. I saw them laid out on a map the other day and it made more sense. Home is where you know how the roads intersect and you can always find your way back to family and a hot meal after a long day of exploring. You don’t have to worry about the oncoming night. You make your way, trust your instincts, and soon you can see the welcoming lights in the window. One warm Saturday afternoon, I was driving home from my first solo adventure as a New England resident, a trip to Newport, Rhode Island, for bookstores and writing time by the sea, and I got almost lost—not completely lost, but derailed enough for an extra long drive home. I was driving along the highway, talking on the phone to my family back in Florida, and before I knew it a sign was welcoming me to Swansea. I was a good three towns past my exit before I realized I’d gone too far. There’s a secret to making a place home though. Getting lost isn’t the enemy. It comes with panic and helplessness sometimes, but the only way to learn your way is to get lost a few times. You drive around a bit, pull off the road, check the map on your phone, scan for some familiar road name or number, drive some more, and over time, the pieces start to intersect. All that wasted time starts to draw up a map of real landmarks and surprises and moments of recognition. Almost two months after that first trip, I was driving home from one of those S Towns with no GPS, no map, nothing to go on but memory. As the bridge came into view and the city skyline emerged over the harbor’s horizon, I could feel somewhere deep in my bones a recognition, the feeling of coming home. I’d like to think that soon, very soon, I’ll know the winding back country of the South Coast just like I knew my way through the sprawl of Central Florida towns. Already I feel it growing, the names of roads and points of the compass orienting themselves, lining up, building a sense of place.

“The sacred exists and is stronger than all our rebellions.” Czeslaw Milosz Skipping the qualifiers, we live in an era where rebellion has been mainstreamed. Rebellion is, ironically, very conventional. Pedestrian even. The pervasiveness of rebellion extends to literature and media for children, driving the stories most kids are exposed to every day. I’ll go on record and say this is mostly horrible. Like, civilization-destroying, enemy-embracing horrible. We want our kids to be who they are uniquely called to be. We want them to have disruptive imaginations. Of course, it all depends on what they are disrupting. Since rebellion is conventional now, the unconventional thing is to reject rebellion. What we want is to disrupt this very religious, institutionalized, conventional rebellion. We want to object to this tired routine of being out-of-order. Since we are Christians, we are called to submission. This terrifying word is the primary characteristic of the follower of Christ. It is literally what being a disciple means (to follow behind). We are called to a different story than the conventional rebellion of the ancient dragon in the garden. The story is a familiar one, and here we are, still in it. At the front of our programs there’s a roster, a gallery of who’s who. There in bold we see that the rebel dragon is the bad guy. All the world’s a stage and rebellion is wicked, dragons are evil, and we don’t have to eat his fruit and so become his food. And we need not only know the personnel, but their locations. “God is in heaven, you are on earth, so let your words be few…” (From Ecclesiastes 5) Listen, oh boy, don’t mean to bust your bubble . . . but there is a hierarchy in creation. God is the boss. And his authority is not a cage, but a key. His authority is an endowment. He is love. And his authority is loving. This also goes for the authority he establishes. Of course, if you’re a parent like me, then it’s apparent we don’t exercise this God-ordained authority with the perfect love of our Father. But we have a chance to deal a counter-stroke in this great battle against rebellion and if we are to do this it must be in and through love. One avenue of opportunity for this refreshing counter-stroke is in the arts. Not only is rebellion writ large on the calling card of the enemy of our souls, but it’s also profoundly cliche in art. How many more movies do we need where the parents are hellacious buffoons in ties and aprons and our rebellious teenager with ripped jeans, who never makes eye contact (except with girls/victims), is proven to be the truly virtuous one. He followed his dream. The man tried to keep him down. He peels out in his Trans-am. He’s against the system . . . ZZZzzzzzzzzzzz. Wake me up when the formulaic drivel is done. Caveat: I know that these stories represent a sad and repressive reality in many homes. That stinks. Let’s not do that. Grace and Truth. Caveat about caveats: I’m trying not to qualify everything, but I give in sometimes. So, the tired cliche of rebellious victory, or that rebellion = virtue, is pretty well played out, right? Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be. There are some places where the type is actually played against and something like a true nuance is evident (Pixar’s Brave), but it’s still pervasive. I believe it’s pervasive because it is part of our civic religion and our storytellers are writing out of that religious conviction, spreading the “good news” to the unconverted and encouraging the true believers. Down with authority, all the way up. We aim to stick it to “the man,” because we can’t quite get at God with such short arms. But what an opportunity we have to tell more nuanced stories. See, the answer isn’t to rebalance the scales by always and only portraying parents and other God-ordained authorities as basically perfect. That isn’t honest either. It’s to recapture the comprehensive nature of the Christian story. Christians believe the world was good, that creation was beautiful, and that harmony is intended. So, when we tell stories about harmony and beauty and peace, we tell true stories. But there was a fall, and since then sin and death are an unavoidable reality, a loud, discordant note in the symphony of mankind. When we tell stories where things are fouled up, we tell truthfully. When we tell stories with evil and suffering that resolve in triumph of beauty through self-giving love, we tell perhaps the most truthful kind of story of all. But they all fit and the varieties possible are almost innumerable. The Christian story is not narrow and confining. The Christian storyteller is not as limited as she has been led to believe. The Christian story has a genuine accounting for the way the world is, as well as for the indescribable longing we feel for resolution. In my view, the Christian worldview is the most broad, comprehensive, and reasonable of all. And the most ripe for tales. Of course it’s possible to tell stories in a dishonest way about the way God made the world. It’s possible (and cliche, even) to represent rebellion as equal to virtue. I’m not saying Christians should rally to authoritarianism, or anything like it. Only that we should respect the created order of God’s world. That our expectation of “ordinate” should be what God says in his Word, not what our sentimental (and vapid) civic religion dictates. I think a couple of things are important to consider: 1) Whenever there’s a deep-seated cultural dogma (in this case, that rebellion= virtue), there’s an honest, artful opportunity to work against that cliche. 2) Christians should consider avoiding championing a cultural dogma at odds with reality (like rebellion = virtue) by attaching Christian language to it. I am thinking of many of the same nuances you are. Yes, Christians should rebel against racism, abortion, sexual perversity, and other cultural features which are evil, contrary to Scripture’s teaching, and at odds with human flourishing. But that “rebellion” is really a humble alignment with the ordinate nature of the world God made –and is remaking. It’s conservative in that it holds to truths delivered. It’s progressive in that it clings to a virtue we see ahead in the coming Kingdom of God. It transcends the latest cultural kurfuffles, but does not ignore the evil they embrace. I do believe God’s loving authority is not a cage, but a key. Storytellers have a unique opportunity to help unbind us from the spell that makes that key seem evil. —–   —–   —– Image by GrayscalexBassGDMCR This originally appeared at Story Warren.

A little over a week ago, my brother Joel and I forayed out into the darkling streets of nine o’clock London to catch a late concert at Royal Albert Hall. We wanted to stave off the end-of-trip rue attending our last night in London by filling it with music. Solemn, startling music as it happened. When Joel discovered that it was John Tavener’s Ikon of Light we were slated to hear, he was quite enthused. Even I, with a far lesser knowledge of classical or choral music, was glad to find that this was the concert on offer. Oddly enough, I had encountered snippets of Tavener here and there and found his choral music arresting, if not always easily accessible. “In tonight’s piece, one must think of the string section’s part as the cry of the soul, its reaching toward the light. And the answering choir, as the voice of the light itself.” With that command, he stepped off stage, the lights died in the high, echoing space, leaving only the spotlighted stage and the circle of three violinists with the black mass of the choir curved in a half moon behind them. When the last high note of the quick tuning was accomplished, the violinists lifted their bows and for a moment, waited. Arrested by their patient poise, the audience stilled, attention inexorably drawn to the waiting three on stage. The music began almost before I was aware; a single note thrummed from a single violin. A note of yearning that gathered insistence as the voice of the second violin joined its plea. But timid. The simple melody was a question, a request presented almost in fear. Soul’s cry into the night. And it was met with the mighty, sudden crash of the choir, a startling, almost trenchant declaration of song that answered the wistful violin so robustly one felt the violin might retract in frightened silence. But into the shocking hush that followed the choral statement came the violin’s renewed plea. The melody was a low request, a strengthened desire, and the voice of the second violin added a note of resolve that made the music something that reached into the darkness with set intent. The taste of that crashing light had strengthened the soul, heightened its longing. And when the light answered, the answer was richer than before. On it went, back a forth, a conversation of a concert between violin and voice, soul and light, song and silence. And with the introductory words in my mind the music became a story to me, the image of my own soul’s hungry, yearning journey through the long valley of this life under high, cold stars. The music sang my constant inner reach toward the mountains of a future, an eternity, almost unimaginable, sang my ache for that fragile, silver line of dawn I sometimes glimpse to come and set me free from the darkness. Ah, the darkness. For the shadows were palpable that night. Death stalked the night just outside of the music in the suffering of the wider world, in the secret, very present sorrows of my own heart, and in the memories haunting the concert. For the performance that night was couched in the memory of death, given on the hundredth anniversary of Britain’s entry upon WWI. The music was chosen to usher listeners all over the country (hearing it via the BBC) into a contemplative hour in which people were invited to switch off their lights in memory and tribute to the multitudes who died on the battlefields of the Great War. The darkness came very close when the music was done. For the host came back on stage and asked those who had been given electric candles to switch them on. For an instant, light reigned as the hall shimmered with hundreds of starlike lights that danced in the hands of those who waved them through the shadows. And then, they were told to switch them off. At once, the stars died. And the loss of them felt like grief, like the dying out of the countless hopes and loves and joys of those whose lives so tragically ended. The hall grew dark and loudly quiet. An actor took the stage then and read the words from the announcement a hundred years before that had plunged the whole country into a time of such sorrow. And silence reigned. For a few moments, everyone kept their seats. No fidgeting scratched against the quiet now. No quick breath, no tap of foot. As if the utter, unnatural silence of hundreds in one room could offer some tribute to the dead, we kept a steeled hush. And in it, caged in it, I thought of the ongoing march of death through the world. I thought of those soldiers, hundreds of thousands, dead in their prime, now dust. I thought of the fighting in Gaza, the starving of children in Iraq, the wailing of their mothers. I thought, almost with shame, of my own small pains and felt them joined with the wars and famines and fights raging throughout the world at the very moment of our vigil. A rustle from the stage drew my eye and I realized that the concert had ended. No light came up, no closing word was spoken. The choir and musicians left the stage, and in silence, the audience got to its feet and we left that darkened hall with its fierce echo of music, its record of sorrow begging for the grace of light. Out into the twilit darkness of late night London we strode. And for a long time, we simply walked. We skipped the first tube stop and walked the deserted dirt paths around the edge of Hyde Park. When the gravity of the silence that closed the concert had worn off a little in the temperate air with the heat of our breath and hard thump of our feet, we began to discuss the music. How it promised so much, those crashing affirmations of hope cried out through the notes of Tavener’s work. But how pervasive, how disturbing was the silence that followed the darkness. How is hope kept in a night-black world? Funny, isn’t it, how small sorrows can be borne, loneliness and minutiae and the tiny losses and tiny deaths attending every ordinary day. But when they are coupled with the raging griefs of the world, and joined by a tragedy or even a moment of deep loneliness, the sadness can seem almost too much to bear. Even now, a hundred years on from the war that was supposed to end all wars with new battles seeming to spring up every day, we have to ask ourselves what it means for light to come in the darkness. What hope do we have for peace? For safety? What does it mean to live by light, to reach for it, to believe it’s promise when people die and children suffer? How does the promise of light answer our pain? And how do we order our lives, our aching lives, in response? We rounded a corner, swift in foot and thought, and stopped abruptly in our tracks. The trees around the park drew back and a long vista of city roofs and steeples and high rise apartment buildings stabbed the navy sky. But above them all, stronger, taller, outreaching them by what seemed a mile rose a mighty shaft of light that shot right up toward the stars and bloomed into a blazing orb. The light shaft was like a sword, like a prophet’s staff, clean and bright and unbreakable, searing through dark and mist. I recalled that someone had told me that a column of light would blaze in London to mark the WWI centenary. I was awed by that light. My eyes held fast to it, marveling at its power, the way the darkness fell back from it. Immediately, the words from the Gospel of John came to my mind, “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” I have always savored that verse and the presence of that word, “comprehend,” with its different shades of meaning. The darkness neither understands the light, nor can it grasp it, wrap its hands around it, assimilate it into itself. Light, even a pinpoint star of it, will always stand free of shadow. And abruptly I remembered the last piece of music played at the concert. In the solemn drama of chosen silence and dark, I had forgotten that the high, startling music in Ikon of Light and the similar piece that followed were closed by a short, simple choral arrangement of a poem by William Blake. The song was so gentle, so humble, it slipped almost forgettably in at the end of the musical battle before it. But it grew now in my mind, the rich, woven music and the words like a seed bearing fruit at just the right moment: Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life, and bid thee feed By the stream and o’er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing, woolly, bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice? Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee; He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb. He is meek, and he is mild. He became a little child. I, a child, and thou a lamb, We are called by his name. Little lamb, God bless thee! Little lamb, God bless thee! I stopped at the corner before the Tube stop, breathing hard. In that instant, the many symbols, the music, the light, the wavering dark that I had witnessed that evening drew together into a blazing truth. And I knew that whoever had planned that concert had chosen the Blake song to be the quiet answer to the darkness that would inevitably attend us out of the hall. As we dispersed into the night, that song was a gift to accompany us, a shepherd in the valley of the shadow teaching us how to hope. For the Light whom the darkness could not overcome was a Lamb. A little lamb, a tiny, wailing babe born in a stable. And he was the Light of the world, and his “life was the light of men.” He was lifted up, blazing, into the sky of history just like the standard of light stabbing the London horizon. And when He was bound to a crude, hooked, splintery cross, beaten until his brightness faded into blood and pain, it seemed at first that Light could die. Like the millions of others on the battlefields and barren mountaintops. Like the hearts whose light is extinguished by loneliness or desolation. But the darkness could not comprehend Him. He blazed straight out, unconquerable Light splitting open the tomb. But even better? That conquering Light wasn’t only outside of us, on the horizon of history. The Light indwelt us. By the gift of that fragile, gentle lamb, Light made his home in our hearts. When any soul now truly cries out for the presence of the light, like the violins in their keening desire, the answer isn’t merely a crashing glory outside ourselves, nor even just the promise of Light to one day conquer. Our answer is the voice of Love speaking within us, eternal Light present now, burning in the core room of our hearts. In us, day has dawned. And by that Light we live. In its strength, we order our days not by the darkness we see, but by the great dawn that indwells us, the ever-present promise of the healing that will one day spill over and remake the broken world. We are driven by Light, shaped by it, mobilized to embody its splendor for the rest still caught in the night. My breath came quicker. Eyes fixed upon that column of light, that fierce declaration of remembrance proclaiming that the brave and the dead will not be forgotten, I no longer sat passive in the darkness of my doubt. That London memorial came because of the many who chose to live by hope. Who understood that to live by Light is no longer to sit and question the darkness, passive, inert, waiting for light to answer for us. Rather, we wield that light ourselves, craft its beauty, cup it and offer it to those in the shadows, and in so doing, we become the answer to the darkness ourselves. We build, create, sacrifice, love, form homes, make songs, speak out the great stories and fight the great battles. Over and over again, we answer the darkness with our own small flame, kindled in us by the lamb whose Light was could not be vanquished. By setting ablaze our countless small campfires of hope, we gesture to the great, eternal day that will one day come and conquer the night forever. My mind and body and skin and bones felt suddenly steeled and strong, straight as the sword-like light before me. And a single phrase, learned long ago, ran through my head as I finally ran for my Tube stop. Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur. Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” —Jesus of Nazareth Several years ago I decided that I was going to give Paul Simon my undivided attention. For reasons I cannot explain, I had never really listened to him beyond what I heard on the radio and MTV back when MTV played music videos. Since so many of my friends regarded Simon as one of their favorite songwriters, I decided I would download the iTunes Essential Paul Simon playlist and listen to nothing else for at least a month. I was immediately taken in by the brilliance, complexity, and originality not just of the music, but of the artist himself. Paul Simon has been a consistent treasure in American songwriting for over five decades. I find that amazing. Early this year, I decided I would do for Bruce Springsteen what I had done for Paul Simon. This would be The Year of the Boss. As it was with Simon, many of my friends considered Springsteen to be one of the great American artists. So I asked them where I should begin. I already had his Greatest Hits and Nebraska. I added The Ghost of Tom Joad, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Tunnel of Love, and Human Touch. These have been my soundtrack for the better part of this year, and I have been thinking a lot about where this musical journey has taken me. Here are two things I’ve learned during The Year of the Boss. First, I have learned that I am not blown away by Bruce Springsteen in the way that I was with Paul Simon. I thought pretty much every Paul Simon song I heard was brilliant. Springsteen’s catalog, on the other hand, contains many songs, and even some entire records that do nothing for me. I can’t seem to connect. Some of his music doesn’t age gracefully. Some of his songs just don’t land. I could go on, and I know I’m being unfair, but you get the point. Springsteen is, to me, hit or miss. The second thing I’ve learned during The Year of the Boss is that I have trouble extending and, as a result, receiving mercy. There were a number of times when I almost wrote Springsteen off for not connecting—I, the grumpy muppet in the balcony, and he, the struggling troubadour trying to win me over. Never mind that millions of people around the world, including most of my musically savvy friends, were saying I should pay attention. There’s an anecdote about an art student who went to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. He stood before her for a while as a frown formed at the corners of his mouth. The docent came over and asked the art student if he had any questions about DaVinci’s masterpiece. The art student said, “Not really. I just don’t see what the big deal is, that’s all.” The docent looked down on the poor art student and said, “Son, this is the Mona Lisa. The critic does not judge the Mona Lisa; the Mona Lisa judges her critics.” Springsteen’s greatness does not require my validation. Had I, in my initial ambivalence, become the poor art student frowning at the Mona Lisa? I decided to give him more time and here’s where it has taken me. Bruce Springsteen is a genius. Some of the best songs I’ve ever heard come from him. The Ghost of Tom Joad, Dancin’ In The Dark, Glory Days, Highway Patrolman, If I Should Fall Behind, and Devils and Dust, to name a few, are simply incredible. There is a world Springsteen wants to tell me about, and it is up to me to decide if I want to pay attention. Do I sit coolly in the arena as he shouts above the din, “Are you not entertained?” What should he expect of me? Should I require an artist to feed my preferences one hundred percent of the time? Is it fair to dismiss him if he doesn’t? The truth is I often do dismiss, and in the process I forget what it means to live the life of an artist. The artist puts himself or herself out there, risking their creative ideas in the hopes of connecting meaningful truths to a willing audience. This is an act of mercy. They endeavor to convey the complexity of romantic love or the pain of a broken heart or the nuanced fear of growing older or the carnage of war into a three-minute song, a window-sized canvas, a chapter in a book, or twenty lines of poetry. It is an impossible task, and yet they work, they risk, they suffer, they edit, they scrap, they refine, and then eventually they go public. Sometimes they hit their mark. Other times they miss. Either way, before long they’re back at it. And that, in some measure, warrants my respect. Springsteen’s power as an artist comes to us through the world he creates and then populates. His characters live a dusty, blue-collar existence where you can almost hear the slap of the screen door against the clapboard house as they head off for another day at the mill. You get to know these men and women as they wile away their time working for the union, riding their border patrols, rekindling old flames at the bar, sitting in their prison cells, or wondering about the wrath of God. How they spend their days matters because, as Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” As a student of humanity, Bruce Springsteen has put words to many of the joys and sorrows we all experience. His catalog, like anyone’s, has its share of hits and misses. But some of his hits have brought greater clarity to how I see the world and my own place in it, and I want to receive that as an act of mercy from him to me. Had I withheld the mercy to listen a little more patiently and carefully, I would not have received the mercy he offers through his art. I am grateful for the life and music of Bruce Springsteen. Bob Dylan, you’re next.

[Editor’s note: Say hello to Shannon McDermott. She wrote this piece after reading the Wingfeather Saga and she’s agreed to let us use it here as a guest post. Thanks, Shannon.] Outstanding among those beliefs that are universally characteristic of the religion of superstition is the conviction that “a man’s name is the essence of his being” (one Hebrew text says “a man’s name is his person” and another, “his name is his soul”). —Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition There’s an old superstition that names are powerful. Many cultures have believed that to know a person’s name is to have power over him, or to be freed from his power. The principle has been extended to the supernatural, with people seeking to conjure up the power of gods, angels, and demons by invoking their names. Like all superstitions, this one shows both fear and a desire to control. Magic, real magic, has made great use of it; sorcerers, too, believed in the power of names. From the eleventh century come reports of witnesses – “learned and trustworthy men” – who claimed “that they had themselves seen magicians write names upon reeds and olive-leaves, which they cast before robbers and thus prevented their passage, or, having written such names upon new sherds, threw them into a raging sea and mollified it, or threw them before a man to bring about his sudden death.” This idea has endured in folk tales – most famously in Rumpelstiltskin – and is now an established trope in modern fantasy and even, on occasion, sci-fi. Despite its various disreputable associations, it has a presence in Christian fantasy. So how is a superstition transformed into a staple of fiction? It begins when people stop believing. If you genuinely believe in the mystic power of names, you will take it seriously – hiding your real name like people hide their PIN number, or worrying that you’ll curse your child by giving him an unlucky name. When you stop believing, the fun begins. What in our world would be bad science, or mere superstition, is the operating laws of different worlds. Everyone who reads speculative fiction knows this. In Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga, names and their power are at the heart of the story. The villains transform human beings into monsters by melding them with other creatures and then giving them new names. Their old selves are submerged and they become willing pawns for the villains. But unless and until the new name is given, the transformation remains incomplete. The victim’s old self is much closer to the surface and it’s easier for him to come back. For these people, to hear their true names is painful. But it is also, if they don’t rebel, healing – and not for any magical, other-world reason. Their true names hurt and heal because the hearing reminds them who they were and what they lost; it brings them back to themselves. The power-of-names theme is echoed throughout the saga. A lesser villain calls his enslaved workers ‘tools’ and tells them they have no names; the revolution begins when the workers start to share their names and band together. “What is a real name?” asks one character early on, hinting at hidden names and the truths hidden with them. And through it all the admonition and reminder comes again and again, Remember who you are. Names, a character within the books says, have power. But it would be more true, even in his own world, to say that names have meaning. A person’s name is representative of his self, and to forget your name is to forget who you are. Unlike the old folk tales, there is no danger in telling others your true name, only in forgetting it yourself; there’s no power in knowing the names of others, only in making them forget their names. Such subtle alteration is another way to revive and change old myths into new stories. Most legends and fairy tales, along with the fairy tale-worthy superstitions, are open for this sort of reconstruction, pagan origins or no. Have you ever been struck by a story’s transformation of a myth or superstition? Is there a myth or superstition you think ripe for such transformation? Note: This article has been cross-posted to SpeculativeFaith. Visit Shannon’s website here.

The inaugural Hutchmoot in 2010 was something else. All the speakers were amazing. Walter Wangerin, Jr. was masterful. Months later, Wangerin visited San Diego to see the premier of the Lamb’s Players Theatre production of his The Book of the Dun Cow. Chauntecleer and Cockatrice battled it out above the stage suspended by theatrical wires. It was awesome. There is a small café next to the theatre and during intermission Leanne and I sat chatting with Walter Wangerin. We mentioned Hutchmoot. “You’re some of those young musicians then,” he said. “No, just fans of the musicians, and of writers like you,” we replied. I added, “Clearly, you have never heard me sing.” We discussed writing and his writing process and publishing and some small talk I cannot remember anymore. The mission of Lamb’s Players Theatre is to “tell good stories well.” It’s one of the most simply stated mission statements I have ever read. Over the years we’ve spent quite a bit of time at Lamb’s and so have experienced their mission statement in action. They fulfill their mission with abandon. When Les Misérables made the lineup for Lamb’s 2014 season, I knew we had to take the kids. Our oldest daughter saw the movie. That’s one of my major parenting regrets, that I took her to see that royally stupid movie before taking her to the theatrical production. Just one more topic to discuss with her therapist some day. “So then Eponine sings, ‘…a stranger’s just a stranger…’ and like literally a stranger walks right by her. And I am wondering, what am I missing? Tom Hooper must think I’m like an imbecile.” “Hmm. So, your parents took you to see the movie before the Broadway production?” “Yes.” “We’re going to need at least three more sessions,” says her therapist jotting something down on a yellow legal notepad. Well anyway, for now we’ve been listening the 1996 Royal Albert Hall recording of Les Misérables in preparation for seeing the show at Lamb’s. I’m feeling some guilty defensiveness, because we are taking our 9-year-old. She’s read The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Charlotte’s Web, all of which contain themes at least as mature as what she will see at Les Misérables . . . minus the innkeeper and his wife . . . and “Lovely Ladies,” which on our drive home the other night Leanne paused then looked at me with saucer eyes and said, “You better explain.” Bridget played it cool as I bumbled through the details Fantine’s fate. I keep having conversations in my mind. “Look, I saw a 5-year-old at Batman: The Dark Night. That was wrong. But Les Mis is one of the most moving stories ever penned and then adapted for the stage. Plus, she’s at an 8th-grade reading level.” Saint Augustine just shakes his head. “It’s a comedy not a tragedy, Augustine. The pleasure is in the redemption not the suffering.” “Sure reminds me of Carthage,” he says. Okay. Maybe at least two of our daughters will need therapy. I’ll have to report back in a few days after the show. But shows like Les Misérables are a kind of therapy in their own right. The kind that makes you worse then eventually better. This world is so harsh. So awful. Who needs to see tragedies in ancient Carthage when we have headlines in modern-day Mosul? Bring on the comedies that mess us up at a young age, giving us hope and teaching us to rejoice that, despite the odds and the injustice and the bloodshed, even so, through tears in our eyes we will see redemption win the day.Come with meWhere chains will never bind youAll your griefAt last, at last behind you.Lord in Heaven,Look down on him in mercy…To love another personIs to see the face of God!

Sometimes, in a particular season of life, a passage or book of the Bible can grab hold of you and wrap its words around your soul. For me that book is Deuteronomy. For several years now it has been a faithful companion, its thinly veiled beauty stirring my heart and giving me a clearer picture of the God I have claimed to know. I love it because it pulses with the hope of a new beginning. The Israelites are almost there. Egypt is finally behind them and the wandering has come to an end. The home they sang about when slavery broke their backs and bent their heads is so close they can almost touch it. Anticipation runs high as the dying flame of hope bursts into life once more. As they stand there, poised between the dream and the reality, Moses tells the old tale once more. The story of a God who made a promise and then kept it against all the odds. A God who heard the cries of his people and rescued them, freeing slaves and making them sons. Then, from the heart of this God to the heart of his people comes a plea to choose to live in the fullness of all that he is and all that he has done. Pursue me. Love me. Obey me. Make me your starting point, the goal of your journey and your strength along the way. Anchor yourselves in my words and my commandments so that you will know me and live like you are mine. Let me fight for you and guide you and hold you in my arms. Let me show you how I love you. Believe that you are the treasured children of the Most High God and then live like it is true. Choose life. Heady with anticipation, the promises come quickly to their lips. Hearts full of all that he offers, they forge ahead into the Promised Land. I love it because in many ways it is my story. I have stood there on the border so many times, awestruck by the goodness of a faithful God. Tired of wandering, and ready for so much more. Faith is strong, hope is real, and the promises come easily. I need the story because it reminds me how easy it is to forget. Recently, I began to read the book of Lamentations. The contrast is astonishing. From the first verse it is a discordant wail that jars against the hope of Deuteronomy. A dark mirror image of all that could have been. Deathly silence in streets that should have been alive with worship. Mourning where there should have been feasting. All that was precious consumed by the effort to simply survive. I find myself wondering how such a thing is possible. How does the drumbeat of hope and purpose that echoed across the plains of Moab become the anguished cry of Lamentations? After all that they have seen, how could they not be so consumed by Him that nothing else could steal their hearts? Then I remember that the ground I stand on is so much richer than the plains of Moab. Even the stunning picture of God’s heart, running through Deuteronomy, pales beside the image of that same God hanging on a Roman cross, crushing the darkness of Lamentations with the weight of his love. How could I not be so consumed by Him that nothing else can steal my heart? Yet so often I find myself walking in my own deserted streets. Restlessness where there should be peace. Anger where God longs to pour in his love. Stagnant pools fed by my own imagination instead of the renewing that comes from his word. Weariness where he longs to give me rest. That’s when the anguish of Lamentations becomes my own. Then, just as the fingers of despair and guilt begin to tighten their grip, I remember a little verse in Deuteronomy 31 v.21 which astonished me when I first read it. It says “I know the intent which they are developing today, before I have brought them into the land which I swore. (NASB)” What did he know? He knew that the inevitable would happen. That good intentions would become bad choices. That the fire of passion would be dulled by the daily grind of life and that someday they would look around and realize their story had not turned out the way they thought it would. He knew that they would take the gifts he gave them and twist and shape them into something they were never meant to be. He knew they would turn away and reject him, that those chosen to bear his image would instead deface it before a watching world. He knew and yet he loved them. Even as I make my promises, he knows that I will fall more often than I stand. He knows that my heart can be weak and that pain can take its toll on my resolve. He knows there will be times when I will stay silent rather than stand up and take his name. He knows that there is an inevitability to my story that every part of me wants to deny. He knows and yet he loves me. Not only that, knowing all that I am, he offers me the choice again. Pursue me. Love me. Obey me. Make me your starting point, the goal of your journey and your strength along the way. Anchor yourself in my words and my commandments so that you will know me and live like you are mine. Let me fight for you and guide you and hold you in my arms. Let me show you how I love you. Believe that you are the treasured child of the Most High God and then live like it is true. Choose life. Then, once more, he fills my empty streets with singing and offers living water to my thirsty soul, reminding me that the steadfastness of his heart will always be greater than the waywardness of mine. That hope alone urges me to make the promises again and take another step in the direction of home.

The fall of 2005 was a big time for the Time Warner media empire. On the movie side of things, they put out the Dukes of Hazzard. Time Warner Book Group, meanwhile, was publishing Jonathan Rogers’ book, The World According to Narnia: Christian Themes in C.S. Lewis’s Beloved Chronicles. The excitement, apparently, was more than Time Warner could handle. The very next year, Time Warner sold its book division to Hachette Book Group, and shortly after that The World According to Narnia ceased to exist as a paperback book. (The Dukes of Hazzard, on the other hand, seems to be doing just fine). But Time Warner’s loss is the Rabbit Room’s gain. We are happy to announce the new, Rabbit Room Press edition of The World According to Narnia. We are now taking orders, to be shipped in early September. If you order now, you will be helping to fund the first print run. We appreciate all orders, of course, but pre-orders help us order bigger print runs and save per-unit. To give you an idea of what to expect from The World According to Narnia, here’s an excerpt from the introduction. If you like what you read, order here. Introduction: Imagining Reality C.S. Lewis once received a letter from the mother of a nine-year-old boy named Laurence. Laurence was afraid the Chronicles of Narnia had led him into idolatry: he felt he loved the Great Lion Aslan more than he loved Jesus. What, the mother wanted to know, should she say to her son? Lewis always took the sensitivities of children seriously, and his response to Laurence’s concerns was characteristically thoughtful and reassuring. He wrote, Laurence can’t really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that’s what he’s doing. For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus: and perhaps more than he ever did before. That, really, is how the Narnia stories do their work on you. Instead of giving you a lecture on the importance of staying warm, Lewis builds a fire and says, “Here—feel this.” You can hardly help but love Aslan for the things he says and does. You can hardly help but desire what’s good and right and true. You can hardly help but feel that a life of virtue is an adventure you wouldn’t want to miss out on. Christianity begins with a set of truths to believe, presented in the form of a story: God became a man, lived a perfect life, died to pay for the sins of his people, and rose again to lead them into heaven. But faith, in the end, isn’t just about acknowledging truths, even truths as important as those. The facts can only matter to us—really matter—if they are translated to our wills and desires. And that happens by way of the imagination. As Lewis put it, “Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.” Imagination is a serious business. It makes it possible for us to feel awe. It gives substance to our yearnings for something beyond ourselves. Imagination is what convinces us that there’s more to the world than meets the eye. And isn’t that the first principle of faith? As young Laurence found, the truths of the gospel can leave a believer cold. That’s not a comment on the gospel or its power, but rather a comment on the state of the human heart, which can sleep through whole hurricanes of love and grace. The gospel permeates the life of the believer by way of the imagination. The Chronicles of Narnia awaken the reader to the imaginative possibilities of the Gospel that have been there all along. The Chronicles serve as a reminder that if the Gospel doesn’t fill you with overwhelming awe and joy and fear and hope, you may not have really understood what the Gospel says. *** One of the delicious ironies of Narnia is the fact that Lewis so carefully constructs a world of metaphor in order to insist that the God of the Bible is not a mere metaphor. Throughout the Chronicles, characters who think they’re using imaginative language turn out to be talking about real life. Digory’s Aunt Letty idly wishes for “fruit from the land of youth” to heal Digory’s mother; Digory goes to the land of youth and fetches some. In Prince Caspian, Trumpkin the Dwarf thinks Susan’s Horn of help is make-believe, but once he hears it, he wonders why nobody blew it sooner. In The Silver Chair, Jill Pole sees a peculiar line of huge rocks and wonders if they might have given rise to legends of giants in the North. Then the rocks stand up and reveal themselves to be real giants. Lewis can be unsparing toward those who would reduce Aslan to an abstraction or an idea rather than a living, breathing Lion, more real than the whole world put together. Consider the scene toward the end of The Horse and His Boy in which Bree, a rather self-satisfied Talking Horse, tries to explain his concept of Aslan to Hwin and Aravis: “No doubt,” continued Bree, “when they speak of him as a Lion, they only mean he is as strong as a lion or (to our enemies) as fierce as a lion. Or something of that kind. Even a little girl like you, Aravis, must see that it would be quite absurd to suppose he is a real lion. Indeed, it would be disrespectful. If he was a lion he’d have to be a beast just like the rest of us. Why!” (and here Bree began laughing) “If he was a lion he’d have four paws, and a tail, and Whiskers!” Enamored of his own voice, his eyes half-closed with smug superiority, Bree doesn’t notice what Hwin and Aravis can’t miss: Aslan the Great Lion approaching from behind. The brush of Aslan’s whisker against his ear is enough to send Bree running for terror and for shame at having been such a fool. Aslan appears on the scene with an alarming reality that makes the “real world” seem pale and shadowy by comparison. “Touch me,” Aslan insists. “Here are my paws, here is my tail, these are my whiskers.” Aslan is no abstraction, but a true Beast, as concrete as Bree himself. It is a supremely Narnian moment: the old, familiar story of Doubting Thomas springs vividly to life as the reader comes to terms with what it would be like to be face to face with God made flesh. In the end, things work out well for Bree because he realizes he is a fool and he wishes to be wise. Uncle Andrew, the magician of The Magician’s Nephew, doesn’t fare so well. As Lewis writes, “What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what kind of person you are.” And Uncle Andrew is the kind of person who can’t see any reality beyond the one he has created for himself. Uncle Andrew, like Digory, Polly, and Frank the Cabman, is on hand at the creation of Narnia. But whereas the others are enraptured by Aslan’s creation song and the miracle of a world appearing where there had been no world before, Andrew is so self-absorbed and terrified that he misses the whole thing. Or, rather, by an act of the will he chooses to miss it: “‘Of course it can’t really have been singing,’ he thought, ‘I must have imagined it. I’ve been letting my nerves get out of order. Who ever heard of a lion singing?’ and the longer and more beautifully the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring.” It takes imagination to step outside one’s presuppositions. Andrew’s materialistic worldview doesn’t allow for talking animals. In the absence of imagination, Andrew finds it easier to explain away the things he sees and hears than to come to terms with them. He understands growling and barking. He understands fear. But he’s lost the ability to understand a miracle when he sees one. “The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are,” writes Lewis, “is that you very often succeed.” Over and over again, the Narnia books demonstrate that imagination is more than just make-believe. Sometimes it takes imagination to see what’s right in front of your face. Imagination is the way we step outside ourselves, challenge our assumptions. Imagination, you might say, is just another word for open-mindedness. But we must not make the mistake of thinking that Narnia represents the triumph of imagination over reason. Rather, it represents the triumph of reason and good sense by way of imagination. Consider Peter and Susan’s conversation with Professor Kirke in Chapter Five of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lucy’s insistence that she has been to Narnia has made them suspect she’s going mad—especially since she claims to have been there with Edmund, who denies the whole thing. But when they express their concern to the Professor, his response astonishes them: “‘How do you know,’ he asked, ‘that your sister’s story is not true?’” It’s a moment of real enlightenment for Peter and Susan. They had been unable to reason out the contradictions between Lucy’s story and Edmund’s because they were starting from the wrong set of presuppositions. As the Professor makes clear, to say that a thing is unexpected or even unprecedented is not, logically speaking, the same thing as saying it’s impossible or untrue. The Professor doesn’t defy reason. Rather, he insists on a more rigorous logic than Peter and Susan had applied before. There are three logical possibilities, according to the Professor: Lucy is lying, Lucy is insane, or Lucy is telling the truth. From a strictly logical point of view, the third possibility—that Lucy is telling the truth—seems at least as likely as the other two. And yet pure logic doesn’t seem to be enough to justify such an unexpected conclusion. It takes a certain amount of imagination even to leave such a possibility on the table. That’s what Narnia means: shedding your preconceived notions of what’s true and real, and opening yourself up to the possibility that your categories—or the categories that have been foisted upon you—aren’t sufficient to make sense of the world you live in. Lewis uses fantasy to talk about the real world because it takes imagination to see what’s true and real in this world too. The very basis of the Christian life is the ability to stand outside this world and see that this isn’t all there is. From where we sit, the things of earth look so real and solid that it’s hard to believe there’s something more real and more solid; it’s hard even to leave that possibility on the table. It takes a certain amount of imagination to see that God imbues every blade of grass, every conversation, every relationship with eternal meaning. It takes imagination to feel the truth of the Gospel in our truest selves.

Madeline L’Engle’s Walking on Water was the first book I ever read that explored the role of the Christian in the arts. For me, it was a game changer. Not only did it rearrange my thinking about what I felt called to, it affirmed and distilled many of my beliefs (and opinions) about the way Christians should approach their work—not just art, but any work. After Walking on Water I discovered more and more books about the creative life—a much richer subject than all those how-to-write books I was reading. The former is a healthy and helpful exploration of a corner of God’s kingdom (the process of subcreation), about the great mystery of the creative act and its implications for a Christian—the why of art. The other sort of books, the How to Write a Novel in Five Easy Steps sort, may be helpful to a point, but spending too much time there is getting the cart before the horse. Why books are all about the horse; How books are about the cart. You can fill your brain with practical advice, but that’s akin to loading a horseless cart with cargo. You’ll just sit there. (Good grief, I’ve gone this far, so I might as well exhaust the metaphor.) Reading L’Engle’s book was like strapping a galloping Clydesdale to my little wagon. Along the way, many of those parcels of advice rattled loose, or I cast them off once I realized their lack of usefulness, but the horse? It’s still moving. So what are some of those horse-before-the-cart books? The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard. “On Fairy Stories,” the essay by Tolkien. Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. Mystery and Manners, by Flannery O’Connor. Speak What We Feel, by Frederick Buechner, The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers. To show that I’m not outright dismissing the more practical books on writing, I should mention two indispensable books—required reading around these parts: The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, and On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. Stephen King’s On Writing is a good one, too, which straddles both approaches. (Look! Another horse-riding metaphor!) I’ve just discovered a new and invaluable book on the subject of art and faith, one that I suspect will be around for a long time: Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and Spirit, by Luci Shaw. Luci has been writing poetry and non-fiction for many years and is a member of the Chrysostom Society along with Walter Wangerin, Jr., Eugene Peterson, and the late Madeline L’Engle, among others. And a history that rich gives her voice in Breath for the Bones a gentle and loving authority. It’s clear that she’s thought long about God and art and good work, and she delivers those hard-earned thoughts in beautiful, well-wrought prose. It’s no exaggeration to say that I underlined more of this book than any other book I’ve read. I could go on about it, but I’ll let Luci speak for herself. Here are a few things I underlined: “Despite this groping, creativity’s call is to find that way to tell, to show, to sing, to paint epiphany—at least to attempt what was seen in the third heaven or what is hoped for despite the darkening glass—even on this solid and unyielding earth.” “There is no society on earth that does not attempt to decorate or embellish or enhance its dwelling places, its garments, its artifacts, its language, or the human body itself—either with graphic design or fabric or song or word or ritual. Maybe art and religion are aligned because religion also addresses the world in its attempt to seek and find, knock, and trust that God will open the door to truth, beauty, and the meaning of our living.” “For Christians to shun, fear, or condemn the arts seems as anti-God as atheism. The creative imagination as expressed in the arts can glorify God and illuminate the human spirit with his truth.” “Metaphor is imagination serving truth.” “But rather than speaking in abstracts or talking in large, nebulous generalities, good writing needs to be—as we have seen it flooding the teachings of Scripture—tied to concrete images and details, what C. S. Lewis called ‘the tether and pang of the particular.’ It’s important to paint a picture, as Jesus did, that the reader can see or feel his or her way into.” “Every time we tell a story or write a poem or compose an essay, we give chaos a way of reintegrating into order; we reverse entropy; pattern and meaning begin to overcome randomness and decay.” “The Bible doesn’t teach theology systematically. It tells stories.” “All my life I have been requesting the same thing—‘a baptized imagination’ as C. S. Lewis called it, with a wide enough faith to see the numinous in the ordinary.” “A tree can’t thrash its branches; it waits for the wind to move them. I can manufacture neither poems nor spiritual power, but my task is to be on the spot, watching, ready when the breeze picks up.” There are many, many more, but I’ll stop there. Breath for the Bones contains chapter after chapter, line after line of beautiful, robust wisdom from the pen of a poet. Whether you’re a writer or not, you should read this book, for a few reasons. First, it’s is an essential call for Christians to consider the place and power of art in God’s Kingdom and in their own lives—which is a primary focus of the Rabbit Room. Second, it’s because I’m thrilled to announce that Luci Shaw is our keynote speaker for Hutchmoot 2014. We’ve been dying to make this announcement for months, and we’re deeply honored to have her.

[Editor’s note: Jill Phillips has been working on a new album. So, “Matt Conner,” I said, “get you gone and find out what she’s up to.” Thus did he sally forth, and thus with this interview did he return. I have no idea why I’m talking this way.] Just to start, I’d love to get an update on exactly where things are with the new album. I’ve taken a little bit more of a pause in the past month-and-a-half for obvious reasons. We’ve been traveling and everything. But before school let out, we’d gotten to where there were basic tracks for all of the songs—percussion, some overdubs. We actually did some recording three or four weeks ago with Ben Shive, who did piano for one or two songs. We’ve had a cellist come in. So we’ve done a good bit. Maybe we’re a little over halfway done. I still have to do my vocals. I have maybe one or two finished, but I really didn’t want to do those piecemeal. I wanted to be in the zone and do it, so I did one, took a pause, and then I’ll get to the others when the kids start school next week. When they’re home for the summer, it’s just impossible to get that much work done. [Laughs] My goal is to have it done by Hutchmoot. Maybe that’s ambitious, but we’ll give it a shot. This is the longest you’ve gone between recordings, correct? It probably is. I don’t even know how long it’s been, to be honest. It’s been a while. Andy and I alternate doing records, and his last one took longer as well. That means mine will take longer. That’s not his fault. That’s just both of us. [Laughs] His took longer because he was on the road a ton, and I remember him having this realization. He was on the road at Laity Lodge and trying to get it out. He brought recording equipment to Laity, which is his favorite place to be in the world, and then it didn’t work. He just realized, ‘I am not supposed to do this. I’m going to enjoy Laity Lodge. I’m just going to postpone my album. It’s not going to come out for the Christmas tour. It’s just going to come out later.’ So that pushed back my album as well. Honestly, that’s just fine. It really was. I do feel like the kids are at an age where they need you a lot. You think it’s when they’re babies, but it’s now. There are so many activities I need to be there for, and Andy’s been traveling quite a bit. If he’s going to travel at that rate, I need to be home a little more to enable him to travel. So all of that meant that we both probably needed a bit more time. Hopefully we won’t stay at that rate. How does the material usually come together? Do you take things in a thematic direction or is it just culling together the ideas that have developed over a certain period? A bit of both. There have been times when I thought more thematically. I think I still have to think thematically, because even if I’m piecing songs together that have been written over the last few years, I want them to be cohesive. I have a song that I love that’s been written for four or five years. My friends love it and agree it’s a great song, but it’s just not fit on any album that I’ve done. It won’t go on this one either. [Laughs] Maybe one day it will fit in, but I think there has to be cohesion and not just a good song. They have to have a similar tone. They don’t have to be the same, but there has to be a similar purpose. I want someone listening to the record to feel like there’s this cohesion either sonically or lyrically, whatever it is. With this one, Andy is going to produce one of my records for the first time by himself. We’ve never done that before. We’ve done that with the Christmas record and that sort of thing. But I really felt like these songs were lending themselves to a really stripped down, organic approach. I probably won’t always do that. I like to do the full-band production. It’s really fun. But this record in particular, the songs seem a bit more mid-tempo. I mean, I’m not a rock and roll artist, but these songs feel easy, more melodic, more simple. Those are the songs coming out, so I thought we could just do this at home, keep the budget low to do what we want. I also didn’t want to do a Kickstarter this time. It’s been four years and people were really generous. I’ve even got an e-mail saying, ‘Hey, when is your next Kickstarter?’ [Laughs] But I didn’t want to do back-to-back albums with Kickstarter. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to be able to pay for it this time. People were so generous, I just didn’t feel right about asking twice in a row. So we’ll do it at home and keep it in the family and have a bit more control over when it releases—instrumentation, budget, and all of that. It’s turning out really nicely. That song that you said that you have? What is it about it that doesn’t fit? Well, sonically it’s really different. It’s a rock song. It was up. It was really pointed, and I just felt like it just didn’t fit on this record, which is more songs of encouragement. It didn’t sound like it was coming from the same era, because it wasn’t. I remember last record talking with Cason about it. We decided the same thing. We thought it would be fun to produce, it sounds great, but it just didn’t fit with what I was saying with the rest of my songs. So I feel that’s okay. It was from a different time. I have to choose what’s more true for me now and choose the songs accordingly so that I can sing them with authority, with passion, with emotion, and feel like it’s me now. So what is inspiring you at this point? I was talking to a friend about this, and it sounds so Hallmark card that I’m almost hesitant to say it [laughs], but these songs are really about encouragement. For whatever reason, that’s a role that I have had in the past year or two with friends and family. I feel like I’ve been the beneficiary of that from so many friends and mentors and people that I love. The songs that were coming out were songs saying, ‘It’s going to be okay.’ There’s a million songs like that. It’s not like anybody needs mine, but it’s something we need to hear. It’s something everybody needs to hear at some point, maybe every day. I don’t know. So those are a lot of the songs. They’re songs born out of friendship. They’re born out of joy and sorrow and walking with people and people walking with me telling me it’s going to be okay. That’s the gist of where a lot of these are coming from. That’s interesting to me since it feels like Andy’s last album is the same way. Several of those tracks are the stories of others, if I’m correct. It makes sense. It certainly wasn’t intentional. We did write some of the songs together, maybe half or less than half, but it does make sense. We’ve been on that parallel path of finding out what’s really important. The older we get, we realize it’s the people around us, the community, our church, our neighbors, our friends. The songs come out of that. That feeds the songs. That feeds everything. This past year, I had friends who’d gone through really difficult times, friends that have gone through cancer. It’s been hard stuff. At the same time, there’s been this richness and beauty where God has met them and me and everyone that’s involved. It’s been bittersweet, sad to watch people struggle, sad to watch people die, sad to watch things happen that you don’t want to happen to people that you love. At the same time, my faith has been increased a hundredfold. So that’s where I want to write. I want to write in that place, the place that a good friend of mine calls the “both/and.” The honesty of the struggle and the hope. That’s the only thing I want to say. #JillPhillips

Andrew Peterson, our faithful Proprietor, is hard at work on a special “best of” collection, re-recording several old favorites selected by a special fan vote taken earlier this summer. Such compilations are great portals into an artist’s full body of work, but what AP’s fans might not realize is that he also has a great selection of Appendix releases available with demos, alternate versions, live tracks, and other rarities. Our song of the week is a lovely live version of “Canaan Bound” and is one of 25 tracks found on Andrew’s Appendix A: Bootlegs & B-Sides. If you’ve never ventured into the Appendix series, they’re a great addition for any AP fan, old or new. You can use coupon code “CANAAN” to get 15% off of Appendix A in the Rabbit Room store this week. “Canaan Bound (Live)” by Andrew Peterson from the album Appendix A: Bootlegs & B-Sides Sarah, take me by my arm Tomorrow we are Canaan bound Where westward sails the golden sun And Hebron’s hills are amber crowned So bid your troubled heart be still The grass, they say, is soft and green The trees are tall and honey-filled So, Sarah, come and walk with me Like the stars across the heavens flung Like water in the desert sprung Like the grains of sand, our many sons Oh, Sarah, fair and barren one Come to Canaan, come I trembled at the voice of God A voice of love and thunder deep With love He means to save us all And Love has chosen you and me Long after we are dead and gone A thousand years our tale be sung How faith compelled and bore us on How barren Sarah bore a son So come to Canaan, come Where westward sails the golden sun And Hebron’s hills are amber crowned Oh, Sarah, take me by my arm Tomorrow we are Canaan Bound

Today marks yet another important date: it is the 100th birthday of Sheldon Vanauken, author of my favorite book of all time, A Severe Mercy. Having honored dear Davy with a sonnet on her illustrious centennial, I could not bear to let this day pass without acknowledging our great chum Van in like manner (though his gift is in the form of a bit of free verse). Reading A Severe Mercy not only incited an absolute volcanic eruption of latent longing and desire in my life, it breathed a loving affirmation that at once broke my heart and healed it. And though our copy has been nearly read to pieces over the years, I cannot so much as crack the cover without a burning rush of that original joy. This poem refers to Van’s final and ultimate surrender to Christ, some twenty years after Davy’s death, a “return to the Obedience” which led to the writing of this immortal book. Happy Birthday, Van. We owe you the greatest debt. Look forward to telling you all about it over a heavenly pint someday. ~~ O, Cavalier! When once that gallant head went down In fealty unforsworn, And rebel heart consigned to Mercy’s cause, Love’s triumph shook the earth for such proud prize And heaven stooped to smile. Knighted with a poet’s sword, Branded by a lover’s seal, The beauty of your breaking pierced the world.

[Editor’s Note: This Sunday, August 3, is the fiftieth anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s death. This memorial is adapted from Jonathan’s biography of O’Connor, The Terrible Speed of Mercy, which is available in the Rabbit Room store.] Fifty summers ago, Flannery O’Connor was thirty-nine years old. She had battled lupus for most of her adult life, managing the disease with massive doses of corticosteroids, which themselves had serious side effects. As she wrote to a friend, “So far as I can tell, the medicine and the disease run neck & neck to kill you.” In the spring of 1954, a major surgery reactivated O’Connor’s dormant lupus; the tell-tale “lupus rash” broke through the protective steroid barrier, signaling that the disease was back in earnest. O’Connor spent a month in Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital–from May 21 to June 20. A prodigious letter-writer, O’Connor kept up her correspondence from her hospital bed. Through her many hospital stays, she almost always kept up her letter-writing. But she tended to put off fiction-writing until she could get back to her typewriter. The fact that she wrote much of “Parker’s Back” in Piedmont Hospital, in longhand, suggests a sense of urgency that was unusual for this most deliberate writer. O’Connor seemed to understand that there was something different about this hospital stay, about this recurrence of a disease that had come and gone but had been mostly manageable to that point. The letters she wrote that month didn’t have the same cheery tone that she usually assumed in her hospital letters. “I don’t know if I’m making progress or if there’s any to be made,” she wrote her friend Maryat Lee. “Let’s hope they are learning something anyhow.” Writing from the hospital to Janet McKane, a favorite pen-pal, O’Connor mentioned that she admired the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins–and especially the sonnet titled “Spring and Fall.” The poem is a meditation on death, the transience of life, and the nature of sorrow, spoken to a girl named Margaret, whose first taste of grief comes with the dying of the autumn leaves: Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By & by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you wíll weep & know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow’s springs are the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for. Flannery O’Connor would never see autumn leaves again. The day after she wrote this letter, her doctor sent her home–not because she was improving, but because there was nothing else that he could do for her. It is heartbreaking to think of O’Connor in that hospital room, out of medical options, not yet forty and heading home to die, scratching out those sorrowful words to a woman she had never met: Margaret, are you grieving? Once home at Andalusia, O’Connor cycled through ups and downs for six more weeks. She finished “Parker’s Back” and rewrote “The Geranium” her first published story, as “Judgement Day.” Originally a story about pathological homesickness, “Judgement Day” became a meditation on death. In early July, when a priest came to the house to give her communion after so many weeks away from Mass, she asked him to give her the Sacrament of the Sick—the sacrament formerly known as Extreme Unction. Flannery O’Connor lived another three weeks after receiving the Sacrament of the Sick. On Wednesday, July 29, she fell ill and was taken by ambulance to Baldwin General Hospital in Milledgeville. On Sunday, August 2, family and local friends were alerted that the end was near. O’Connor received the Eucharist that day in her hospital bed. She lost consciousness that night, and shortly after midnight on Monday, August 3, 1964, her kidneys failed and she died. O’Connor’s funeral was the next day—a low requiem funeral Mass at Milledgeville’s Sacred Heart Church. None of her out-of-town friends could come on such short notice; only local friends and family were there to see the red clay cover her casket. Two weeks before she died, O’Connor wrote Janet McKane a letter in which she reproduced a prayer to Saint Raphael that she prayed every day: O Raphael, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us: Raphael, angel of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those that we are looking for. May all our movements be guided by your Light and transfigured with your joy. Angel, guide of Tobias, lay the request we now address to you at the feet of him on whose unveiled Face you are privileged to gaze. Lonely and tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of life, we feel the need of calling you and of pleading for the protection of your wings, so that we may not be as strangers in the province of joy, all ignorant of the concerns of our country. Remember the weak, you who are strong, you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder, in a land that is always peaceful, always serene and bright with the resplendent glory of God. It is an amazing thing to think about, this woman who made a name for herself with stories of earthly terror and grotesquerie, meditating every day on the province of joy, preparing herself lest she be ignorant of the concerns of her true country. All that darkness was in the service of eternal brightness. All that violence was in the service of peace and serenity. The writer whose every story was a thunderclap took her place beyond the region of thunder.

The first trailer for the last Hobbit film has been released, which signals the re-commencement of The Battle of the Five (or more) Opinions of The Hobbit Films. Here in the Rabbit Room we are passionate about our books, our films, and our books made into films. When it comes to Peter Jackson’s second foray into Middle-earth, I know there are strong opinions on both sides. All of this brought to my mind the idea of adaptation, and how we think about that. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to teach The Hobbit to high school students. One week I had them watch the two films, and then we discussed the films vs. the books. In my own search for material, I stumbled across a very helpful discussion of adaptation, and how we think about book-to-film adaptation, by Tolkien scholar Corey Olsen. He deals with the buildup to The Desolation of Smaug, but also spends a bit of time discussing general principles of adaptation. The lecture is pretty long at 2 1/2 hours, but well worth your time if you’d really like to listen. Listen here Olsen’s lecture, and the reemerging discussion with the release of the last Hobbit trailer, has brought some questions to mind that I thought I might share here, and spark some discussion on adaptation in general: 1. How much responsibility does a filmmaker have to adhering strictly to a text vs. creating their own vision of a text? Is an author’s opinion and vision of their own work the final authority? Consider that when you read a story, how you imagine the characters and environment may be very different than how the author does. Does this make you wrong? 2. Is it possible for a filmmaker to improve upon a book in some ways? 3. Is it possible to love both a book and a film adaptation of the book, even if they are significantly different, without betraying a sense of “loyalty” to the original story? 4. How do we navigate the gap between two very different mediums, which require two very different storytelling styles, in a knowledgeable way? Let’s have a good, respectful discussion. Duels are only allowed over whether Galadriel is the fairest of them all.

I’m writing from the bench at the bend in the trail. When we moved to the Warren these woods were a claustrophobic tangle of thorn, privet, and bush honeysuckle (don’t be fooled by the name–bush honeysuckle is a bane). Jamie and the kids and I crouched our way under the brushy eaves, lopping branches here and there, looking for good trees, marveling at huge slabs of limestone and granite peeking out of the soil, wondering how all those old beer bottles ended up under the humus so far from the house. Eventually we cut a series of trails, the path guided by the shape of the land and the fattest trees we could find–mostly cedar and hackberry, but along the way we happily discovered a couple of young sugar maples, a beast of a shumard oak, as well as the Goliath of our woods–a massive tree that neither of the two experts I’ve brought out here could identify. “It looks like a white walnut,” one of them said, “but if it is, that’s the biggest one in Tennessee.” At the center of our little stand of trees is the bowl of a dried up pond, now a marshy wetland thick with waist-high grass and a few willows. When we get a lot of rain there’s a trickle that runs through the center and disappears into the foot of the old earthen dam someone piled up a generation or two ago. The former owner, who grew up here, said that he remembered ice-skating on the pond as a boy. The pond (or, the non-pond, rather) is a feature of our property I can’t stop thinking about. From our first day here seven years ago, I’ve voiced my desire to repair the dam and clear out the brush so that we can have a little fishing hole, something not just for the grandchildren but as a food source in case the Cubans invade like they did in Red Dawn. I’m only half-kidding. Something about having a few acres wakes up the survivalist in a man, which is part of why I so enjoy gardening nowadays. The less I depend on the machine the more connected I feel to the remnants of Eden shimmering at the edges of the natural world. Before you think me too hippie, I should remind you that I’m writing this on a computer, and I enjoy my Netflix account. I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this, except to say that I’ve always had a thing for big projects. For example, the boys and I chainsawed and hacked and lopped the swath of trees between our house and the pond this spring, clearing a section of the slope about twenty yards wide and thirty yards deep—an enormous amount of work that rewarded us with a clear view of the non-pond from the kitchen window. The morning after the clearing was complete I looked down the hill to discover a family of deer drinking from the trickle. Of course, I thought, they’ve probably been drinking down there all these years but we never knew it till now. The fact that the trees are gone hasn’t frightened them off, either, so almost every day I see those beauties graze their way through the bowl. Here’s a strange memory: when I was a kid in Illinois I discovered a pile of shoveled sidewalk snow in someone’s front yard. At some point I decided that that snowpile needed a boy-sized tunnel dug right through the center, so on the way home from kindergarten I stopped every day for about a week and worked, though I had no idea whose house it was. After fifteen minutes or so I’d head home so my mom wouldn’t be worried. All day at school my mind was occupied with that tunnel. It wasn’t as if I had never dug a tunnel in the snow before, and I’ve often wondered why I remember this one so vividly. But there was something simple and delightful to my little six-year-old self about working at this tunnel alone, in secret, a little at a time for a whole week. The day I finally broke through to the other side I brushed the snow off my pants and stood, mittened hands on my hips, and admired my work. Then I felt someone watching me. I turned around and saw a woman in the house at the window, peeking out at me with a kind face. She might have waved. I pretended not to see her. I was deeply embarrassed as I realized that she had probably been watching me for days. Memories choose us. Of all the things that must have happened during my childhood—little adventures, moments of shame or joy or comfort—only a few images, like this one, rise to the surface. And they don’t just rise once. They come to me again and again as if there’s some mystery hidden in all the plainness, as if someday I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and understand why that snow-tunnel is stuck in my head. The next week as I passed the house (on the other side of the street) I noticed that the pile was gone. I’ve always suspected that the woman and her husband never intended to leave it by their driveway, but they noticed a little boy stopping to dig every day and graced me with a week of peaceful, pointless work. I wonder if it gave her something to do, someone to watch for, something to talk about with her husband at dinner during a long, featureless winter. Earlier today I was working on a new song, alone in the house, and it felt just like digging. I wonder if someone was watching from a high window?

There is no such thing as art. There are only artists. —Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art I had that driven home after attending The Rabbit Room’s first-ever gathering in the flesh, saw it living and breathing, laughing and even getting choked up at times. Felt its electricity tingling in my veins and an answering call piercing my heart. In company of some of the most passionate music makers and story tellers and painters and theologians I am ever likely to encounter, I tasted the good bread of Community and drank deep of the wells of Truth. I was privileged to sit in on lectures that made me dizzy with excitement and stimulation, ranging from the works of George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis to Annie Dillard and Flannery O’Connor. I took copious amounts of illegible notes and I told secrets to friends of an hour. I laughed till I cried and I made a fool of myself more than once (always a good thing) and I felt the sweet sting of tears in my eyes as God plunged His words deep with that pain that heals and sings. And I saw Gombrich’s maxim above excavated and built up by an even greater truth, a higher, nobler beauty: “There are no such things as ‘artists’ and ‘non-artists’,” Russ Ramsey told us, sitting at the front of a small classroom with candlelight playing almost symbolically off his face. “There is only lit and unlit.” My apologies to Russ that I cannot for the life of me remember if that was an original or a quote from Annie Dillard (and, you’ll recall, my notes are not going to help me out much). But regardless of their source, he spoke the words into the room and they entered into my soul. I fairly beamed with the joy of them and winced under the longing that welled in me like a vital spring. Lit. Illumined; awake; aware. It’s what my heart desires, even faints for: this kindling touch of Light and Life that is outside of me entirely and yet, miraculously, inconceivably within me by the presence of Jesus Christ in my life. The age-old Incandescence that sets souls aflame with life and selfhood; the Light which is there whether I am or not, loving the world without stint, and without which I cannot live. I want to see it in its glory, be made brave by it for the nameless sufferings and unbearable beauties it reveals. I want to be available, like a painter with brushes in hand or a midwife assisting at a birth, should it please God to strike His flame over my head. And He will: He does it every single day upon every single person on earth, for He has chosen to imprint His likeness, His image, on humankind. And when one of us happens to bow the head and accept the fire, to receive a signal flare of eternal realities in their little corner of the universe, the world calls them ‘artists’. God calls them image-bearers. “When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? And when it is out, who needs it?” (Now that one I know to be Annie, for there’s a tiny ‘A.D.’ scrawled next to it in my notebook.) Not only did I receive such verities, I experienced them. I saw them in action, in life, in the artists around me. One of the shining moments of the weekend was getting to talk to Ron Block, halting and stammering as I was over how much I loved his music, over the fact that the first gift Philip ever gave to me was an Alison Krauss and Union Station album. He grinned like we were old friends and my nerves scurried away, silly things. And when he spoke there was that same electricity I had been encountering all weekend; the same sense of ignition that draws one irresistibly to the Source of the warmth and the light. Here was someone deservedly famous in the world’s accounting. And through his conversation, and later by the treat of his music, he left me with the indelible impression of his selfhood submerged and utterly re-created by redemptive Love. Of his identity in Jesus Christ. And by that mysterious exchange of heavenly courtesy, of my identity in Christ. “Don’t you understand? The Glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors. But the light’s the thing.” “Do you mean there are no famous men?” “They are all famous. They are all known, remembered, recognized by the only Mind that can give a perfect judgment.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce That’s what artists do. As Walt Wangerin charged in his keynote address (worth the trip alone) artists “weave the world around those who have no world or personhood or name”. They create a world out of the raw materials at hand and invite others to experience it in order to make sense of their own. To “interpret” what could never be “made sense of”. “We are shapers”, he told us, taken literally from the Old English word for artist. “We come upon the mess and apart from our own wisdom we make order of it.” It made me think of Catbird Seat’s Waiting for the Artist, a song much beloved to Philip and me in the early days of our romance: Hold me close now I’m Waiting for the artist To paint all my feelings of you, my friend. It’s beyond us, really, this naming of things that either break our hearts or set them free with joy—or both. We need artists to interpret them, to re-create them with an experience we can understand. I need that every day. And if the artist in question is a famous banjo-theologian or the 19th century Scottish grandfather of fantasy or the rather shy four year-old that lives inside of my own heart that isn’t really the sine qua non. It’s the One Transcendent; the One with the match in his hands, holding his flame above these heads as they’re bent over manuscript or canvas or musical instrument. The Creator. Early Sunday morning I was able to carve out some time for coffee and conversation with my heart-friend, Sarah Clarkson. We capered from topic to topic, hardly chasing down one theme before we were off on the scent of another. We laughed over all our shared loves and we clinked our coffee mugs to Oxford. But when she asked me about my writing and my hopes for the future, of my own telling and shaping, I dragged my toe through the mire of insecurity and inadequacy. I fumbled something about being born into the wrong century and never being able to say what I want to say. And she beamed at me across the table, her eyes full of light, and placed her hand on my arm. “Courage, dear heart,” she said low, in the words of Aslan to the timid Lucy. It’s what the whole weekend did for me, encapsulated in one lovely moment of friendship. It put me in courage. It reminded me, exquisitely and rousingly, that I am not alone. And that, of course, makes all the difference.