What are you looking for?

Loiter, even briefly, near the Rabbit Room and you’ll surely hear the word. And even if you don’t hear it mentioned, you’ll surely sense its impact. There are two reasons, primarily. One, because it preoccupied the Inklings—the original Rabbit Room regulars—especially C. S. Lewis. Two, because it’s one of those aspects of life that seems to require another’s articulation of it before our own awareness of it. You guessed it. I’m talking about Sehnsucht. It was a word beloved of the German Romantic poets like Goethe and as such attracted Lewis’s attention, via his hero George MacDonald. You can tell that a language is struggling when it has to borrow from another. So inevitably, what the word grapples with is hard to define in English. “Disorienting longing” might be one definition, while simultaneously being a “blissful longing;” an experience with intimations of a transcendent reality, another. It’s that profound—if fleeting—sense, not only that there’s more to existence than anything in this life, but also that the beyond is where we belong. That’s why we yearn for it. That momentary awareness is what Lewis encapsulated (somewhat confusingly, I think) in the word joy. It was a crucial apologetic for his belief in God. We need it deeper At the most recent Hutchmoot, the concept of Sehnsucht featured. A lot. I expect it does so every year. The problem is that to the unfamiliar, it seems pretentious; to the regular, almost clichéd; but to the desperate for the really real, it’s indispensable. This is because the experience it articulates is reassuringly complex. These days, western culture has an infuriating tendency to find comfort in crude simplifications: the strapline, the soundbite, the elevator pitch, the bullet points. They make life easier or more efficient. Or so we’re told. And so we settle for them. But too often, their comfort is illusory. They’re never enough, because life doesn’t work like that. So these days, I find myself increasingly saying (or, more likely, muttering under my breath), “It’s more complicated than that…” As puddles are to wells, so soundbites are to reality. This is because the experience of Sehnsucht is multifaceted and paradoxical. It brings pleasure and wonder but also cuts deep and hard. It is frustratingly momentary and yet it somehow tethers us to the eternal. Each of us encounters it uniquely—a result of our unique matrix of genetics, background, culture, temperament, and experience—yet it seems a universal phenomenon. But we should expect nothing less if the Teacher is to be believed. “[God] has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) That final clause by itself ought to hold any glib theological formula in check—while, of course, never to be set against the importance of what God has revealed. We need it darker Leonard Cohen’s final album, You Want It Darker, was a haunting, starkly beautiful meditation on mortality. As I blogged at the time, it was strange that David Bowie had also released his last work earlier that year (2016). Both were relentlessly creating while cancer was corroding them; both were determined to leave a posthumous musical legacy; both were intent on peering unflinchingly into the darkness. But while I was profoundly affected by both albums, it is Cohen’s that has stood the test of the last four years for me. Bowie’s darkness is creepier, displaying an almost gleeful relish in occult mystery, whereas Cohen is prepared to plumb the depths of human pain and perplexity, even when he has been the cause of both. He provokes us with You Want It Darker. He seems to be saying, “Well, you did want me to be real, didn’t you?! So I’ll do just that.” He’s going to face reality, however dark it gets. Impending death often does that for people, doesn’t it? Once you stop denying mortality, it’s hard to deny anything else. Up until then, as Eliot noted early in his Four Quartets, our tendency is to settle for mirages: … human kind Cannot bear very much reality. The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot But thankfully, we don’t need only to wait until life’s autumn to face reality. Moments of Sehnsucht have a similarly sobering effect. What about those moments of being spellbound with wonder? Or swept up in the sublime or ecstatic? Our God-given, exquisite yearning reminds us that the object of our wonder can never fully satisfy. It was coming to terms with this reality that was instrumental in C. S. Lewis’s conversion. Tim Keller often refers to this in his preaching: Tolkien talked and said to Lewis, “You know when you’re in the presence of great art, there’s a joy you experience, but the joy is never delivered by that great art. The art makes you feel there’s ultimate truth, but it’s not ultimate truth. It makes you feel there’s perfect love, but it’s not perfect love. It makes you feel there’s meaning. Even as you experience it, you realize this feeling is just coming through the art, but actually there’s an underlying reality from which we’re cut off that we never feel we can quite get to that we so need, that we so want.” Lewis looked at Tolkien and he said, “Of course I know all that. Everybody understands that.” [Lewis continued,] “Yes, the great music, the great books, the old myths, the great legends, how they make you feel like there really is meaning …” Then he looked at Tolkien and said, “But myths are lies, though breathed through silver.” Tolkien looked at him and said, “No, they’re not.” He began to make two points Lewis never forgot. The first point he says is, “Think of the logic here. How is it possible that you would, unlike the animals, feel there is an underlying reality, that there is a meaning and there is a truth, and there is a love nothing in this world can satisfy if that doesn’t exist anywhere?” Christmas Wisdom, Tim Keller This means that Sehnsucht is a surprising hindrance to our worship of created things. We are forced to recognize that there is something greater or deeper beyond. If what is ultimate is alone deserving of our worship (as only the Creator can be), then we are foolish to rest here. The person driving to London doesn’t pitch a tent at the first road sign pointing to London. But what about the times when we are wracked with private anguish? Or those times when we are overcome with compassion for the agonies of others? Doesn’t our longing for the home beyond lift our eyes and reassure us? Suffering, let alone death, will never—no, can never—have the final word. Those fleeting touches of Sehnsucht bring us solace in a broken creation. We were not made for this; we were made for perfection. Why else would we even be tempted to strive for it? Sometimes people need it darker before they can get to that point. But doing so is no less than following in the Master’s steps. He is enthroned, but he will never not be the slain lamb on the throne. We need it safer But here’s the thing I love about Hutchmoot. It is safe. Take note. I didn’t say comfortable—reality is rarely comfortable (is it ever?). Nor did I say easy—reality is rarely easy. And I am definitely not suggesting it’s safe because it provides a retreat from reality. I mean rather that it offers the gift of healthy safety. That is crucial because facing reality is risky, at times painful and bewildering. It can leave us intensely broken. Yet, simultaneously, it is crucial when we are confronted by beauty and artistry. It's that profound—if fleeting—sense, not only that there's more to existence than anything in this life, but also that the beyond is where we belong. That's why we yearn for it. Mark Meynell So many of our contemporaries seem to try to inoculate themselves with a ready wit and easy cynicism. They want to guard against the threat of wonder and awe, thickening what Charles Taylor so helpfully called “buffering.” In the secular west, we are “buffered selves,” surrounded by experiences and artifacts that keep us several steps removed from transcendent reality. We’re immersed—”encased” might be a better word—in the results of human manufacture. Consequently it’s nigh on impossible to see why God is even relevant. How easily we disdain our dependence for our every breath on the sustaining power of the living God. But in a place such as Hutchmoot, we can relish the wondrous and beautiful together. Sure, beholders’ eyes have different perspectives. But we know what it ultimately means: we have hope. Hope for something even better, more beautiful, more breath-taking. For the sum of all our sub-creations is nothing compared to the new creation that God has promised. This year’s Hutchmoot was precisely that. No one person’s experience of it will be like another’s—the range of break-out sessions ensures that. But I had an overwhelming sense of mutual support as we peered into the darkness, precisely because we could do it together and because our tears are safe. The read-through of Pete Peterson’s dramatization of Corrie ten Boom’s memoir The Hiding Place was a case in point. We longed for a world where Holocaust horrors could never occur, yet we could see the agonizing beauty of hard-won forgiveness, quite apart from the astonishing artistry involved in presenting the drama. It broke me utterly. But it couldn’t leave me hopeless. At this and other points during the weekend, I saw God’s startling power to redeem in and through darkness. He can sustain us through pain. But he can turn the pain itself into a means of his grace. Just think about that for a moment. We might regard all kinds of things as divine means of grace: our friends in times of need and distress; a particular sermon that lifts our eyes or spirits; a bump in the road that jolts us awake just as we nod off at the wheel. Then, of course, there are the sacraments of baptism and communion which are the most traditionally understood means of grace. We rarely imagine that our sufferings might themselves function along such lines. But in God’s hands, they do, miraculously. So those ephemeral flickers of the really real in the life after life all serve to make our yearning grow deeper and more intense.

The book engrossed me so much that I found myself continuing to read it while going on a rollercoaster with my then young son. And I have the photographic evidence to prove it. Well, to be strictly truthful, I thought it might be cool to spice up the roller-photo with a book, and this was the one I was in at the time: F. S. Michaels’ Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything. But it is certainly engrossing. It’s important and chilling, and deservedly won the 2011 NCTE George Orwell Award. She exposes something so pervasive and insidious that we rarely give it a moment’s thought. I’m referring to today’s prevailing monoculture, what Michaels terms the economic story. The word monoculture comes from the world of agriculture, applied to the planting of one crop to the exclusion of all others—which inevitably damages carefully balanced ecosystems. This book uses monoculture as a metaphor for contemporary society. The resulting damage has not simply been ecological (though it certainly has been that). It has been ethical, social, and spiritual. The economic story is built on the assumption that human beings are all essentially thinkers—remember Descartes’ definition of being? “I think, therefore I am.” If that is all we are, then it follows that we will behave rationally and in our own self-interest. The development of human society becomes predictable and, therefore, programmable. This is why the communists put such faith in their five-year plans and capitalists raise funds on the basis of their business plans. Neat economic models are powerful because they appear to account perfectly for everything in society. But what are the consequences in practice? Economic growth is deemed unequivocally good. This is true for individuals, corporations and nations. Apart from anything else, it’s what fuels the American Dream. Long-term loyalties to individuals or groups (such as using the same baker or butcher for years) are less ideal, since they tend to hinder either money-saving or profit-growth. Related to this, geographical mobility is crucial for economic development. Economic units should always be prepared to uproot to wherever there is work or they can create income-generation. So do you see? Everything has been reduced: I am an economic unit, my social interactions are transactions, and even my giving is driven by self-interest. Have you noticed, for example, how corporate social responsibility has grown exponentially in recent years? This is often because firms have experienced catastrophic damage to their brands (and thus their profits) when they tried to get away with ignoring the repercussions of their activities. This economic story has been totalizing: it affects everything from healthcare, government, and the military right down to leisure and even church life. Michaels quotes theologian Darrell Guder: It is now clear, as we look back over the last 100-125 years, that the value systems and operating structures of the large American corporation have become the dominant model for the institutional church… They acknowledge that many things once deemed important in the Christian life do not fit in the management/marketing scheme of spirituality, and conclude that not surprisingly, these matters are neglected in a marketing paradigm. As far as I know, she is not a Christian, but I couldn’t help but wince when she quotes a former senior executive from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association: …our job is to dispense the world’s greatest product—with the greatest economy—to the greatest number of people—as fast as possible. Unsurprisingly, the arts have suffered from this monoculture. “Successful” music is too often gauged by its effectiveness at generating income (so often for executives rather than composers). Cinematic or theatrical productions ride high only when box office tills jangle. Art only makes headlines when it breaks auction house records. When was the last time you saw a news item focused on how challenging or thought-provoking an artwork was, rather than its price? This was precisely what Banksy was recoiling against by installing a shredder into his Girl with a Balloon when sold at Sothebys in London last year. He has apparently since claimed that he wanted the whole image to be shredded, not only half. Who knows!? The irony, of course, is that Banksy’s piece is now worth even more. The values of the Kingdom of God are never necessarily pragmatic nor lucrative nor popular. Instead we are called to value what our king values: truth, beauty, justice, mercy, and love. Mark Meynell I’ve been chewing on all this for years, not least because four years living in East Africa transformed how we perceive western assumptions (in our better moments). Those who know Wendell Berry’s writing will recognize resonance with one of his most important prophetic undercurrents. Or as one of Oscar Wilde’s characters so artfully put it, “Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Our monoculture’s reductionism mutilates on many fronts. It dehumanizes us. And it is antithetical to the Kingdom of God. This should be obvious. Just look at how often Jesus subverts the prevailing economic story of his own day. Matthew 29:1-16. Jesus’s strange parable of the vineyard workers. Everybody gets the same pay, regardless of how many hours they have worked. The earliest workers whinge, despite the owner’s generosity and their initial agreement with the amount. Mark 14:4-9. Jesus rebukes the critics of the woman who anoints him with her tears and expensive oil (even though they said it could be sold for “more than year’s wages” to help the poor). “She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have… But you will not always have me.” That is unexpected, to say the least. Luke 15:4. To explain his reasons for “eating with sinners and tax-collectors,” Jesus offers this peculiar analogy: “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?” It’s peculiar because most business people will make a calculation at this point, surely? The shepherd will hunt down the lost sheep only if the flock is safe. Otherwise, it’s not worth the risk. But such is Jesus’s commitment to individuals (not to mention the fact that he is sovereign!)—he is determined to go after the lost sheep. John 2:15-16. “So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!'” This is as far from Jesus meek and mild as it’s possible to get. He painstakingly makes a whip to close down some exceedingly lucrative business opportunities. Worship is emphatically not to be monetized. But perhaps the most subversive of them all has to be his interpretation of something he spotted at the temple: He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. “Truly I tell you,” he said, “this poor widow has put in more than all the others.” Luke 21:2-3 This makes no economic sense whatsoever. But it makes all the spiritual sense in the world. Sacrifice and humble integrity are the surest signs of a heart dedicated to the Lord. But unless we grasp the centrality of a relationship with God, Jesus will always seem to spout gibberish. If the job of the artist (through whatever medium) is in part to expose the emperor’s new clothes and to hint or point at something far better, then what she or he makes can never be reduced to mere currency. Value and worth surely transcend such things, even perhaps into the next life. After all, what will the rulers be bringing with them? …the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendour into it. Revelation 21:23-24 Now, this is no recipe for naiveté. Artists need to eat, which means earning enough to pay their bills. And didn’t Jesus himself use an economic model to convey the importance of making the most of one’s God-given gifts in this life? He told the Parable of the Talents (or “Bags of Gold,” as the NIV has it) to make precisely this point. Nor is it an excuse for the shoddy or mediocre which is immune to criticism or professional assessment (as if offering my mite, out of my poverty, justifies what is actually bad art). Nevertheless, we must resist at all costs the temptation to reductionism, despite the fact that we are immersed in it. The values of the Kingdom of God are never necessarily pragmatic (“it’s good because it works”) nor lucrative (“it’s good because it sells”) nor popular (“it’s good because the majority likes it”). Instead we are called to value what our king values: truth, beauty, justice, mercy, and love. Our art doesn’t necessarily have to have all of these at the same time—ultimately only God can pull that off! But I suspect this is why it’s worth making art for its own sake, for then, it is seeking to relish these great kingdom values rather than function as a means to another end. Living and making on these terms will offer the world something far more valuable than economic worth, even if it gets dismissed as just a mite.

Assuming that artists are to be visionary prophets, what might that look like? I think it means pursuing at least three separate (though not mutually exclusive) goals. Truth: Exposing the False, Reflecting the Real Of course, the very notion of truth is often rejected by contemporary culture. The common assumption is that there are no shared foundations on which to base any statements or criticisms of the culture. But if we are followers of Christ, then we have a duty not to be conformed in our minds to the way the world thinks (as Paul wrote in Romans 12:1-2) but to be transformed. Scripture is the foundation for that intellectual and spiritual renewal and the benchmark for our understanding of renewal. Now we can be oblique, we can be metaphorical, we can be allusive and elusive—but I would argue that we always have to be true. Do we not have the duty to expose the false in whatever form it comes? I love this point by Calvin Seerveld: Art, like anything else, is relevant if it supplies what is needed. Art that is popular is supplying what is wanted, but not necessarily what is needed, and may not therefore be relevant. Let me give you an example. I was talking a while back to someone in our church who worked as a scriptwriter for a number of TV shows (including a big British soap opera and other well-known series that have been exported globally). She works hard to bring her faith to bear on what is a hostile and difficult environment. But one of her goals is always to be true to reality in plot lines. So take one of the lies of our age: it doesn’t matter how many people you sleep with as long as it’s always consensual. It is easy for soaps to portray easy sex as having no consequences. But in the moral, created universe, that is simply not true. Sex has extraordinary power to destroy and damage some or all concerned. So when she writes about people having affairs, my friend ensures that there is no such thing as consequence-free sex, for the simple reason that there isn’t in real life. It is fascinating to see that this seems to be implicitly acknowledged in a number of the most compelling shows of recent years. The Wire and Mad Men are cases in point—both are gripping in large part because they show how sin has consequences. Steve Turner picks up another example. The Catholic painter Georges Rouault, like many of his contemporaries, painted prostitutes, but the art critic Louis Vauxcelles noticed the difference: “Unlike Lautrec,” he wrote, “when he [Rouault] paints a prostitute there is no cruel pleasure in seeing vice exalted by a creature. He suffers and he weeps.” Now I suppose you might apply Philippians 4 crudely and say that being confronted with something like prostitution is hardly lovely or noble. But take that line and you actually find yourself coming into conflict with Jesus himself. He never exploited prostitutes or took pleasure from them; instead he suffered and wept with them. And they with him. And they loved him for it. Like when he was anointed by the so-called sinful woman in Luke 7. Could we not expose the horrors of human trafficking through an integrated application of our Christian imaginations? Sometimes this will entail reflecting the ugly in our world, because that is the real, that is the true. After all, what is a war artist trying to do? What else is Picasso’s Guernica seeking? That is a colossal work driven by the artist’s awakened rage at the horrors of war. But Flannery O’Connor puts it best: My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse and for the unacceptable… Redemption is meaningless unless there is a cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause. This is not to suggest that we should relish the ugly—there is of course a place for beauty—for there is a place for raising our eyes above the mundane and grubby to the transcendent. Beauty: Exposing the Idolatrous, Reflecting the Wondrous I put this in the same breath as idolatry because the Romantic movement in the last 150 years or so has idolized beauty to such an extent that some reacted against it by relishing the ugly and bestial. It was an understandable reaction—because it seemed to focus only on some unreal ideal—a feeling that perhaps harked back to art fixated on the Greek myths with heroes located in stylized Italian landscapes where everything was in its sun-drenched perfection. But it is not a helpful reaction. Instead, I think beauty’s greatest purpose is to draw us in and point us beyond itself. We don’t worship beauty, for that is no different from any other idolatry. We don’t worship created things but the Creator. So the Christian artist’s challenge in portraying beauty is to use it to reflect the truly wondrous. T. Bone Burnett, speaking to the L.A. Weekly, said: If Jesus is the Light of the World, there are two kinds of songs you can write. You can write songs about the light, or you can write songs about what you can see from the light. That’s what I try to do. A poet who did just that was Gerard Manley Hopkins. He responded superbly to the challenges of living in an urbanized and concretized world that attempted to suppress the wonder of the divine in creation. A lovely case in point is his poem God’s Grandeur. Hope: Exposing the Baseless, Reflecting the Future Back in 2011, the Royal Academy in London put on a fascinating exhibition exploring the development of Soviet architecture in the first two decades of the USSR. It was fascinating. The centerpiece of the exhibition was a huge scale model in the RA’s grand courtyard of the planned monument to the Third International outside St Petersburg. It would have been vast, dwarfing the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It was never built but it is a good emblem for the ethos. It is a dynamic helter-skelter-like structure, driving forward and upwards at an angle into the sky, symbolic of a confident modernity that knows where it is going. The Soviet state would only commission art that glorified the state or was sufficiently “ideologically pure” (it was to inspire citizens about the guaranteed and glorious future of Communism. Everything—and I mean, everything—had to work towards this.) But this is not hope; it is politically imperative unreality, an idolatrous delusion. And it was oppressive. Look at some of the images from the era’s propaganda. It is crushing and inhumane. It brooks no dissent. It is the ultimate “Get with the program” kind of art. That is not liberating hope; that is bludgeoning jackboot art. There is nothing organic, real or plausible about this kind of hope. So, we need to clarify terms. For the Christian, hope is fundamental. Without it we would desiccate and be crushed. And if our art is to be integrated, it should surely reflect that hope, in some shape or form. I’ve no idea how—that’s your job! But how else are we going to combat the prevailing cynicism and even despair of modern cultural life if we don’t somehow point beyond it to something more? That doesn’t mean we always have to have glimmers of dawn on the horizon, or paint a rainbow on everything. Certainly not. But surely one of our most urgent questions, and one of our society’s most pressing needs, is for us to find a vocabulary of hope. And at the heart of that hope must be God’s mercy in Christ and his Cross. Here is Steve Turner again: It is easy to state the bare facts of the cross. The difficulty is to do it in a way that is consistent with the rest of our art and that engages our audience. It is easy to write a song that says “the Savior of the world died on a tree/ in order to save you and me” but how many people have their perceptions rattled by such language? Art should be helping us see things as if we had never seen them before. “We need to clean our windows,” said writer J. R. R. Tolkien, “so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity.” Lest we get ideas above our station and become so wrapped up in our own creativity that we forget we can never do more than reflect the Lord’s great creative acts, check out this little ditty by Joyce Kilmer, rather wonderfully using the same rhyme that Steve Turner rightly mocked: “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God could make a tree.” Mark Meynell’s new book, When Darkness Seems My Closest Friend, is now available in the Rabbit Room Store. Click here to learn more.

For nine years, I was on the senior staff of All Souls, Langham Place in London. Many in the USA will know it as the church where John Stott attended throughout his long life (he joined as a toddler and only at 86 moved to his retirement home). But in the UK, if people are aware of it at all, All Souls is more likely to be known as “the BBC church.” This is because Broadcasting House is our immediate neighbor, literally a few paces away, and for many years, it was the church from which BBC Radio’s Daily Service was broadcast every morning. A few years ago, Broadcasting House underwent a mammoth redevelopment. This inevitably caused huge disturbances for a decade or so, and throughout the process, they went on a big PR exercise with the neighbors. I was invited to a tour of local religious leaders in late 2011, and it was hard not to be impressed by the vast well dug several stories into the ground. In what is now the largest news broadcasting center in the world, the centerpiece is the main news studio. Because of its close proximity to the London Underground’s Bakerloo line just below it, the entire studio had to be built on a cushion of air. Only then could the vibrations and noise every few minutes be contained. But in the end, that was not the thing that struck me most. We were assembled in the BBC’s Council Chamber at the front of the original 1930s part of the building. Despite sitting under the intimidating portrait of founding Director-General Lord Reith, my eyes kept being drawn to the Latin motto on the corporation’s coat of arms opposite. It’s actually a quote from the Bible—surprising enough for a secular public broadcasting body. Yet, as if to illustrate the perennial dangers of shorthand, it is actually one word from the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, taken from Philippians 4:8. Here it is in full: de cetero fratres quaecumque sunt vera quaecumque pudica quaecumque iusta quaecumque sancta quaecumque amabilia quaecumque bonae famae si qua virtus si qua laus haec cogitate So what is the BBC's motto? It is quaecunque, an alternative spelling of the word repeated six times above (clearly the verse's most significant word). As will be obvious to all who know the verse, it has a simple meaning: whatever. It made me chuckle every time I glanced up. You can just hear its teenage sneer, accompanied by a dismissive shrug of passive aggressive apathy. Integrated Christian art must have a place for the ugly and the despairing. Because that is the way our world is. We can still inspire people to reflect on, and indeed long for, the beautiful and noble. But that doesn't necessitate art that is itself beautiful and noble. Mark Meynell Now to be fair, that hardly describes the BBC. Despite its critics (and there are many), I am actually a fan, and it is an organization full of those who do genuinely strive after excellence. I only wish they took the whole of the Pauline quotation a little more seriously. Nevertheless, the motto did seem an unwittingly telling comment on contemporary society. Convictions, confidences, conventions—all are routinely dismissed with a shrug (or something worse). To the extent that a national broadcaster reflects, rather than shapes, a national culture, the BBC will inevitably communicate aspects of this—especially when it comes to those things that modernity demands to be excluded from the public square, like religion. “Whatever… that’s fine… unless you take it seriously enough to actually believe this stuff…” Lord Reith was in fact a Christian believer, in a rather austere Scottish Presbyterian mold. He held deep convictions about the great good that a national broadcaster could potentially accomplish, and he famously embedded the aims of “entertaining, informing and educating” into the corporation’s ethos. That is undoubtedly what motivated the adoption of the Philippians 4 motto to think on “whatever is true, noble, right, and pure.” Now, of course, when Paul wrote to the Philippians, he was encouraging them to live godly lives, or more specifically, godly lives of thought. And that is a noble aspiration. Crucial, in fact. It is wonderfully open-ended, too. Here Paul is not laying down prescriptive rules, but inspiring his readers to figure it out for themselves in the context of their own lives and contexts. It is something that all involved in the creative arts do well to embrace. It occasions a profound challenge to know ourselves, to acknowledge our own fallibility and temptations. Each of us is different. One person’s beartrap is another person’s irrelevance. We should bear that in mind when debating the sometimes very fine line between art and pornography, say. Or between what is an acceptable or unacceptable level of violence on screen or on canvas. But the truth is, at times, Philippians 4:8-9 has become a rod for artists’ backs. Too often, these verses have been wielded by various powers-that-be as a tool of coercion and control, in order to restrict what can be created. Paintings have to be lovely and pure, words must be clean, themes must be inspiring, and the arts must always be improving and “noble” (whatever that word means). You get the idea. But that is to miss the point. For not only are beauty and nobility notoriously relative to the eyes and ears of the beholder; this approach too often has led Christians down the blind alleys of kitsch, clichés and platitudes. But if we are to take the visionary prophetic as our model for creativity, which perhaps means to take our cue from the Old Testament prophets, then our horizons need to be far greater. For it means that integrated Christian art must have a place for the ugly and the despairing. Because that is the way our world is. We can still inspire people to reflect on, and indeed long for, the beautiful and noble. But that doesn’t necessitate art that is itself beautiful and noble. We are not propagandists. Calvin Seerveld is surely right here: You cannot bludgeon people with Christian art into accepting Jesus Christ. But neither should you settle for just being as dispassionately good as the secular artist, adding: ‘I do it for Jesus, you know.’ It is the crux of your task as a communal body of fellow Christian artists to fire your art until it emits sparks that warm, or burn, those it reaches. (Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves, (Piquant, 2001) p35)

Just the mention in some Christian circles of Modern (capital M) Art (capital A) will guarantee glazed eyes, knowing smirks, and a handful on the edge ready to pounce. Someone may well mention the infamous “pile of bricks” bought for a fortune by London’s Tate Modern and they’ll pour scorn with words like “even my five-year-old could do that.” It won’t cut much ice to argue that their five-year-old could not have done that (as Susie Hodge has argued in her intriguing if a little uneven book from 2012, Why Your Five-Year-Old Could Not Have Done That.) Neither will it help much to mention that the Tate Modern was the UK’s second most popular attraction in 2017, and that is despite being a decommissioned 1940s Power Station and containing only artworks made since 1900. Something about that place must be connecting with people! But let’s leave that to one side for now. There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of nonsense out there. And there’s a lot of bad art. Incidentally, by art and artists I mean not just the visual arts but all creativity: musical, literary, theatrical, cinematic, architectural. But just as you shouldn’t dismiss the whole idea of cricket after watching bad players or reject the idea of preaching after listening to bad preachers, so I’m sure we can agree that we should never reject any art form on account of its worst manifestations. We should take the best seriously. And by best, I don’t mean high art as opposed to low or pop art. In many ways, I reject the distinction. I’m quite prepared to recognize the multi-textured scenery of a computer game or the delectability of a hit single. The problem is that many Christian creative people receive little support from their churches and pastors, if not actual incomprehension and outright hostility. There are many reasons for this, beyond the scope of this post. Perhaps there is a modernist or evangelical suspicion about the non-verbal, as if words were the only ‘certain’ means by which to communicate. Perhaps there is a fear of the supposedly iconoclastic, bohemian, or subversive tendencies of creative people. Perhaps it is simply because people are nonplussed by an alien subculture that they find hard to understand. Whatever the reason, this situation is tragic. Reducing creative people’s church contributions to a trendy event flyer, or church website, or sermon illustration, is both a terrible waste and an insult to the Creator of human creativity. It treats the arts as mere tools, essentially reducing their function to propaganda. A while back, I was speaking to a tiny fellowship of Christians studying at one of London’s art colleges to encourage them. If you think being a creative person in church puts you in a minority, then just try being a Christian at the aggressively secular University of the Arts London! I wanted to give them something to aspire to, give them hope in their creative work. But this was not driven by a desire to fuel ambitions or motivate for success. It was out of a genuine belief that creative people have a God-given role, a mandate to serve the wider community through, not despite, their creativity. But this is not just for those involved at the creative cutting edge. It ought to bring a universally beneficial byproduct. By considering what art could and perhaps should be, we can then better discern what is good art, even in places where we least expect it. To be creative is to fill space with something new. At a certain point in time, a created object does not exist, but at another it does exist. All because an individual or group worked to bring it into existence. Even in the smallest of ways, it has thereby changed the world. And all who engage with that new object are somehow changed or affected. Artists help us to see what we didn't see, perhaps because we didn't notice or perhaps because we didn't want to notice. Great art demands deeper and more intentional looking, listening, and feeling. Mark Meynell To fill that space is first to imagine it filled. It may not be that its creator has fully conceived of it; it may end up as a very different thing from what was first imagined. But imagination is fundamental and God-given, for good or ill. All Christians are (whether we like it or not) theologians who seek to understand and live in God’s world in acknowledgment and dependence on God; perhaps, then, we should see Christian creativity as a theology of the imagination. That brings with it two significant roles, I think. (i) Theological Visionaries There is a UK chain of opticians called Specsavers that has produced a string of amusing advertisements in recent years. Each one shows the predicaments people get themselves into because they never got their eyes tested. One has a pair of senior citizens calmly sitting on a nice park bench to eat their sandwiches only to discover that they accidentally sat in the front carriage of a roller-coaster; or there are the space shuttle pilots who accidentally land at Luton airport outside London. Each advertisement ends with the tagline “should have gone to Specsavers.” It’s all quite fun and just a little bit silly. Artists are life’s equivalent of Specsavers. Artists help us to see what we didn’t see, perhaps because we didn’t notice or perhaps because we didn’t want to notice. Great art demands deeper and more intentional looking, listening, and feeling. After all, why privilege the eye above our other senses? They are all creation gifts. David Hockney is a painter who has spent a lot of time looking and helping us to look, and he appreciates others who have done the same for him. In a fascinating series of conversations with the English art critic Martin Gayford, he tells a lovely story from a few years back. There was a fantastic Monet exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. They got a million people to see it. There are forty-six Monets in the Art Institute’s collection, which they lend to other exhibitions, so a lot of museums owed them a favour. As a result, for this exhibition they had got together about a hundred and fifty of his paintings. I went to see it one Sunday morning. It was fabulous. When I came out, I started looking at the bushes on Michigan Avenue with a little more care, because Monet had looked at his surroundings with such attention. He made you see more. Van Gogh does that for you too. He makes you see the world around just a little more intensely. And you enjoy seeing it like that, or I do. All good art does that in some way. A poem articulates a previously undefinable moment; a song expresses the contradictions of emotional reality; a novel helps us empathize with an enemy or alien; a painting helps us to see that a lawn may actually contain all kinds of reds and pinks rather than the uniform greens we always assumed it had. Because the artist has seen, we can see. But that is only half of it. Great artists do not just sense better than most of us; they can then do something about it. They can communicate it better than most. That is what gives them authority. (ii) Creative Prophets Those involved in the arts and media have taken on the role of prophet for our generation. It is no longer the philosophers, the statesmen or the preachers. These days, the prophetic is far more likely to be encountered in the Tate Modern or Hollywood than it is in a cathedral or Capitol building. Which grants those who are creative an influence that most of us lack, whether they like it or not. That is not a little intimidating. In fact, I hope it is intimidating. Because this is nothing to be blasé or whimsical about. As Peter Parker was famously told before becoming Spiderman: “with great power comes great responsibility.” That is a weight to bear. Here is Hockney again, later in his conversation with Martin Gayford. Now they’ve gone on to discussing Picasso. After all, any discussion of art in the 20th Century has to! Gayford begins with an anecdote he’d heard about from Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson. Lucien Clergue, the photographer, knew Picasso incredibly well. The other day he said to me, ‘You know, Picasso saved my life.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yes it was after a bullfight in Arles.’ Lucien said he had been feeling fine, had lost a bit of weight but wasn’t worried. Out of the blue Picasso said to him, ‘You must go instantly to a hospital.’ Lucien asked ‘why?’ Picasso said, ‘You’ve got something seriously wrong with you.’ Lucien was damned if he was going to do it, but Jacqueline [Picasso’s wife] added, ‘When Pablo says that, for God’s sake go.’ So he went, and the doctors had him taken straight into the operating theatre. They said he had an extremely rare type of peritonitis, which is lethal. The bad thing about it is that it doesn’t manifest itself in pain, it just kills you. Picasso used to say quite often, ‘I’m a prophet’. After Gayford finished telling this story, Hockney was in total agreement: Picasso was a prophet. He must have seen something, most likely in Clergue’s face. Picasso must have looked at more faces than almost anybody, and he didn’t look at them like a photographer. He would have been thinking how would you draw it? Most people don’t look at a face too long; they tend to look away. But you do if you are painting a portrait. Rembrandt put more in the face than anyone before or since, because he saw more. That was the eye—and the heart. It is not enough to see something (in this case, something dangerous). It is necessary to communicate it. On another occasion, Picasso’s seeing would result in his overwhelmingly damning masterpiece, Guernica (1937), a seeing that brought tremendous responsibility. Mark Meynell will be speaking at Hutchmoot this year. Click here to learn more about him and his new book, When Darkness Seems My Closest Friend, at his website.

For a long time in the early years of my Christian walk, I felt quite schizophrenic. I was generously discipled by older believers, which meant that I learned huge amounts and grew rapidly. As a result, I came to love the Gospel and the Bible deeply. This led in turn to ministry opportunities, Church of England ordination, and service in two UK churches and at a small seminary in Uganda. It was a fairly tried and tested evangelical (of a British kind) path. But something was always missing. I had grown up in a very artistic home, with three generations of painters in the family, and had been involved in music of all kinds from an early age. Words, images, sounds: in their different ways, each held me enthralled. But the realms of aesthetics and beauty seemed tangential at best to my experience of discipleship; at worst, they might even be a hindrance. To compound the problem, whenever I pursued one of these aesthetic interests, they would invariably be portrayed in ways that were cynical, if not downright hostile, towards traditional worldviews such as my own Christian faith. The impression I received from the spirit of the age was that unless art is being provocative, subversive or seditious, it isn’t valid. Which is not to say that provocative, subversive, seditious art is always bad; there are times when art must be precisely these things. But only these things? The prevailing assumption in our western culture seems to be that we’ve grown out of what our forebears believed; we’re now mature. So even if our ancestors produced exquisite works of art to express their beliefs, we have no need today to take seriously those beliefs underlying their works. Which is, of course, bizarre. Few would dream, say, of interpreting Brecht’s plays without his Marxism, Camus’s novels without his existentialism, or even the music of Cat Stephens without his subsequent Muslim beliefs. So for years, I was presented the choice between theological conviction without aesthetic integrity or aesthetic integrity without theological conviction. Either way, theology and art didn’t seem capable of getting along. I sensed there had to be another way, but couldn’t tell you what it was. I sensed in my time at Hutchmoot a deep, even infectious, commitment to the lordship of Christ; and it was precisely this commitment which fueled the determination to explore human creativity in all its forms. Mark Meynell The first place to put me on the right track was Francis Schaeffer’s great legacy, L’Abri. It has been an oasis for me. I first started going to English L’Abri in 1990 as a university undergraduate. It blew me away to discover tapes of Christian thinkers speaking about everything from Voltaire to Velazquez, Madonna to Modernism, humor to hospitality. I made long-lasting friends and witnessed the possibility of taking seriously Kuyper’s great maxim, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ does not cry, ‘Mine!'” Hutchmoot seems to have found a way of doing a similar thing. I sensed in my time there a deep, even infectious, commitment to the lordship of Christ; and it was precisely this commitment which fueled the determination to explore human creativity in all its forms. I was thrilled to find a happy marriage of orthodoxy with the human imagination. It is clear from the Rabbit Room website that this organization highly prizes a thriving community life. Yet it is one thing to advocate for community and quite another to live it. Of course, three or four days at a conference is never sufficient to reveal the authenticity of a community, but it was clear to me the depth of relationships that returning guests enjoyed. They were able to pick up directly from where they left off the year before. It can be tricky for a newcomer like me in such circumstances, but the meals and refreshment breaks proved that most guests were more than happy to include those they didn’t know. But why is this important, when so much artistic work depends directly on solitude? Well, regardless of the circumstances in which we work, as divine image-bearers we all need others—especially when we become too self-sufficient or even self-important to remember it. We are not islands, as the great John Donne rightly insisted. This was one of the most helpful themes I picked up in Andy Crouch’s plenary session at Hutchmoot. By making community life so central—through wonderful touches like John Cal’s marvelous menu stories, the workshops, and the encouragements to work together for God’s glory rather than our own—it seems to me that the Rabbit Room has got something right. I left knowing more clearly what I need to grow and stay spiritually healthy and creative in the coming months. It would be fantastic if Hutchmoot UK can develop soon. But regardless of that possibility, I hope that all of us in our different places can find ways to live out some of these core Hutchmoot values until we meet again next year.

It was an idle conversation with an old friend in ministry, essentially. We both spend a fair amount of time at our desks and so we chat most days, mainly about triviality and absurdity. It keeps me going on the days when I don’t actually speak to a soul for hours on end, and I like to think it does him good, too. We often turn to matters of music, literature, and the arts generally, not least because both of us have been sustained by them in life’s dark valleys. So earlier this week, Beethoven’s late string quartets (Op. 127, 130-133, 135, written between 1825 and 1826) came up. They were his last major works. They were misunderstood and neglected at the time, but their posthumous reputation has been astonishing, with scholars and performers alike hailing them as high watermarks of human achievement. My friend said that these pieces kept him going during a time of acute family crisis. I’d listened to them before, and even heard one or two in concert. But in all honesty, I don’t think I’d ever actually heard them. I certainly couldn’t appreciate exactly why they had been such lifesavers. So I’ve started listening to them again, but properly this time. Picture the context: Beethoven is in his mid fifties, but since his thirties had become increasingly aware of weakened hearing. By 1820 he was profoundly deaf, though there is some debate about the extent. We do know that regular social interaction was now impossible, so everything would be written in his “conversation books.” He was also troubled by various serious medical complaints. None of this curtailed composition, of course, but it did slow him down. Still, in his now silent, final years, he completed such aural miracles as his Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony, and the last piano sonatas. As well as the late quartets. Now I love great swaths of chamber music—for me, that of Schubert, Brahms, and Dvorak (with some of Mozart) are my mainstays. I particularly love pieces in which the quartet partners with a solo instrument, such as clarinet or piano. But string quartets, the purest expression of the form, have often floated over my head, feeling too ivory-towered, arid, or inaccessible. So I asked my friend what it was about these pieces in particular that helped him. This is what he came back with: It’s such involving music, an objective correlative for the knotted muscles and compound fractures of the soul, the confused and chaotic journeys.But it has its own knots and U-turns too, the emotional-musical architecture of another universe, a different set of journeys. So it draws you out of yourself in its own insistence: “Stop listening to yourself! Listen to my story, feel my mountains and chasms. You’ll have to stop hearing your own whispers if you are going to get mine!”And where Ludwig scores so high is that his are both real and beautiful. So in summary, Beethoven’s saying, “Listen to the way I can make patterns out of my pain and end up in peace.” I was stunned. Those thoughts have rattled around my cranium ever since. What we need is art that looks horror in the face. What we yearn for is redemption from that horror. The problem is that our world has despaired of ever finding it. But Christian hope has proven itself resilient in the face of horror again and again. Mark Meynell If there is a section in these quartets that clearly corresponds to that culminating peace, it must surely be third, central movement of the Fifteenth String Quartet (Op. 132). That alone can last nearly twenty minutes (almost half the length of the whole piece), and it was written after Beethoven was confined to his bed by an illness that he feared would finish him off. So he described this movement as “a holy song of thanks (Heiliger Dankgesang) to the divinity, from one made well.” Words cannot do justice to it—which is presumably why he expressed himself in music rather than poetry. But it is ineffably sublime. As it happens, he would succumb finally to illness in the following year. And the rest of this quartet, as well as the others, do express all the inevitable fears, confusions, and puzzles of our mortality. But that movement was my way in. I was beginning to “get it.” After the twentieth century’s accumulated horrors, artists in all media have found it impossible to be real without eschewing beauty. Sometimes ugliness renders beauty inadmissible, even offensive. As Theodor Adorno famously claimed, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (though please do read this helpful post on what he was getting at in that misunderstood phrase, and how he later refined the idea). What we need is art that looks horror in the face. What we yearn for is redemption from that horror. The problem is that our world has despaired of ever finding it. But Christian hope has proven itself resilient in the face of horror again and again. And I suspect the reason these late quartets exert such a majestic influence is that they are both “real and beautiful.” They “make patterns out of my pain and end up in peace.” Which naturally made me think of Jackson Pollock’s (in)famous “drip paintings.” London’s Royal Academy put on a remarkable exhibition in 2016, gathering in one place a host of works from the Abstract Expressionism movement that flourished mainly in 1950s New York. Rothko, de Kooning, Krasner—they were all there, as were many others. And of course, so was Pollock. I’d never seen him live before. It was an unexpectedly visceral experience. I had previously assumed his works were random, accidental, somehow artless. How ignorant! My standout was his vast 1952 work, Blue Poles. It is nearly fifteen feet wide. Yet, despite its scale, it is surprisingly intricate and complex. What’s more, it felt alive and dynamic (which is an incongruous thing to say of hardened oil paint fixed into two-dimensional place decades previously). Yes, Pollock was dripping or spattering paint from tins to make it, but precious little of it was random. Here was astonishing design that was only perceptible by stepping back. It was fractal-like. Get too close, it is impossible to discern how that fractal pattern expands and multiplies. “What is it of, though?” I hear some complain. Well, Pollock tells us: blue poles. Eight of them, in fact. But I think he’s playing with us a little. “You need a name? Ok, I’ll give you one.” But it doesn’t really get us very far. They might be poles, but they’re only gestures towards something pole-like. The painting is more like an invitation to an intricately woven but lively choreography. There are many layers of paintwork, many different dimensions to this dance, many separate patterns. But here’s the point: patterns do exist at the heart of this apparent randomness. And yet there are times when it seems confusing, uncompromising, and even ugly. A hideous beauty, perhaps. The day before my friend and I were conversing, I came across some extreme magnifications of butterfly wings on the internet. They are mesmerizingly beautiful: such intricate order and clarity even when it is so tiny that distances need to be measured in microns. There is order and wonder here. In these images we are privy to sights that the naked eye of previous generations could never imagine, but which have been present since the dawn of time in their God-given order. Musical patterns woven out of unimaginable pain; vast patterns blazing out of the apparent chaos of oil-paint dripped onto a warehouse floor; microscopic patterns invisible but God-given all along. Is it any wonder that we long for a context for the elements of our stories, a sense of purpose and place? That is how the world was made. And the greatest art seems to reflect that in the most surprising ways. This is not to be mistaken for rigidity or dehumanizing order (perhaps epitomized by the modernist extremes of Mondrian in his numbered Compositions). So perhaps this is one place where the arts and sciences can at last be reconciled again. Didn’t the great astronomer Johannes Kepler once say that he was “merely thinking God’s thoughts after him?” Perhaps artists can seek to do the same. Mark Meynell’s new book, When Darkness Seems My Closest Friend, is available here at the Rabbit Room store. Photo by Chris Perani

Author’s Note: Last May (2016) I enlisted Jamin Still’s visual genius and together we launched a crowdfunding campaign to bring our picture book, The Wishes of the Fish King, to print as a Rabbit Room Press project. Hopefully all of you who partnered with us either have your book(s) already or, if you also ordered the family book journal Stories We Shared, you’ll have them soon. For those who didn’t get in on the initial campaign but are still interested in securing a copy by Christmas, the Rabbit Room Store is your new best friend. This week I thought to pen an article expounding on the themes of the book and delving into my reasons for writing it, but before doing so I happened to read a random tweet from someone who had just discovered an article I wrote and posted during the crowdfunding campaign last May. I skimmed back over it and thought “Oh. Okay. Huh. So I already said pretty much everything I had to say. Funny. I don’t remember writing that.” Like I tell my kids: “If my brain was a computer, it would all be RAM. There is no hard drive.” No matter how many times I do something, it’s always the first time. So with a few tweaks to make it more relevant to the post-publishing stage of the Fish King project, I (re)present to you my already mentally-misplaced essay “Remembering What We Mean.” (Because apparently, I need more help than most with remembering pretty much anything.) _________________________________ “Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” –G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy It might not be a bad idea just to let Chesterton drop the mic right there and leave readers in a wide and silent space to ponder his ponderous words. Still, at the risk of slapping bumper stickers on the sunset, I want to unpack this notion of Chesterton’s and make it a bit more personal. Because it is so very personal. My Anglican pastor tells me that for him, consecrating the elements for communion was a huge step the first time it was his responsibility to perform the ceremony. The act of consecration is a conscious drawing forth, a lifting up, a marking out, a recognition of these particular things as holy—not because this bread and this wine are any more holy than all other bread and all other wine, but because by this conscious act we are reminding ourselves of the truth that everything in the world will one day be this; all parts of creation will one day be seen for what they truly are, viewed again through the knowledge of their consecration, both in their parts and in the whole. And so, this bread and this cup of wine, so consecrated, are a first fruits, are a reminder, are a means of refocusing our vision with a greater clarity that sees all things, even if only for this flickering moment, as they more truly and eternally are, each imbued with a holy light. Chesterton’s point about the work of fairy tales is, I think, exactly that same point. Fairy tales… make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. Fairy tales employ the tool of the fantastic to jar us back to a truer vision that sees that all things are fantastic. Wonder is an appropriate response to all things because all things are wonderfully made. Though few of us can remember that earliest season of awakened wonder, there yet was a time when everything was new to our hearts and minds and senses, when everything was an unfolding delight. There was a first time we first saw the ripe redness of a strawberry. There was a first time we encountered a rushing stream and dipped our bare feet in the giddy laughter of it. There was a first time we met the sort of rollicking, affable beast we call a dog, and reveled in the uproarious, comic beauty of its romp. There was a time when all things were new and so were seen and encountered as the wonders they actually are. And the work of fairy tales, according to Chesterton, is to rescue that wonder from the grey sediments it has long been silted over with. Songs penned by Mark Heard in the ’80s and early ’90s had a profound influence on my own development as a lyricist. One of the devastating lines that early etched itself in my consciousness came from the song “Worry Too Much:” It’s these sandpaper eyes It’s the way they rub the lustre from what is seen It’s the way we tell ourselves that all these things are normal Till we can’t remember what we mean. Fairy tales, apparently, are about helping us remember what we mean. They’re about helping us see things with the lustre recovered. Because that’s the true nature of nature and of all creation. It shines from within with a bright, luminous glow, with a deep “magic.” When we are children, we see it. We see it with aching clarity. And then our vision goes flat, fuzzy, out-of-focus. We grow bored, tired, wounded, cynical. We lose the ability to see the wonder for what it is. We gravitate instead to the novel, the flashy, the garish, consuming all that we can, addict-like, in a long, misguided attempt to reclaim those lost wonders by sheer excess and volume. By the age of 12 most of us have forgotten that an earlier sense of Eden ever existed in our lives. It takes something like a fairy tale, or a consecration, to pull our vision back into true focus. To lift an element out of the commonality of our banal slog, and to show us again that this singular thing is fraught with wonder. And if this thing is so fraught, then is not everything? Have you forgotten? we are asked. Look again! I recently completed a collaborative book project with painter/illustrator Jamin Still. The Wishes of the Fish King is a manuscript I wrote when my oldest daughter was two. We lived in a house on a hill in a forest. The hill swept down and out into magnificent views of fields and pond and forest and faraway hills and even a forest island set in the midst of the billowing field grasses. At dusk we would join hands and walk together, exploring our own little corner of the world. For my daughter Anastina Mansi, it was a season of perpetual wonder, of the unfolding of creation, of all things shiny and new and resplendent with their native glories. For me, it was a time of shedding my old cynicism, of negating my sandpaper vision, and of seeing the world anew as my daughter saw it, bright and joyful! Of course, there was simultaneously the sense that I carried of the fleetingness of things. I knew this was but a small window in the span of my daughter’s life. With it came an attendant and consequent grieving for the passing of that small season even as we were still walking and breathing in the midst of it. For a mother or father watching their small child delight in the newly-discovered creation, there is that bittersweetness that comes from the knowledge of the loss and the longing they will one day encounter. Andrew Peterson sings in “Don’t You Want To Thank Someone”: And when the world is new again And the children of the king Are ancient in their youth again Maybe it’s a better thing To be more than merely innocent But to be broken, then redeemed by love. This is the wellspring of the bittersweetness. It flows from the knowing that our children cannot remain in the bright place they are. They will have to walk their own wild journey through pain, woundedness, heartache, suffering, brokenness and loss. They will lose this true and delightful vision of creation somewhere along the way, just as each of us has in our own journeys. But as their parents we have lived long enough that we can also see further ahead to the even greater joy that will await them beyond those sorrows. We can look ahead to the time when vision will be eternally renewed and that first innocent delight and the brokenness and sorrow that followed it will all be wrapped up in the same glorious redemption that restores our delight but that does ever so much more than simply restore. We hold this promise and anticipate the coming advent that will see the redemption of our vision of all things and of our place in them, making it right and true and new and as unbreakable and as beautiful as diamonds shot with a fairy light. And though we cannot see it all that way yet, we have caught enough glimpses in stories and songs and paintings and starfields and moonrises and sunsets and romping dogs and glad streams and giddy romances to know that it is real and that it is already breaking into our brittle-edged world. We will see one day with such an unbroken, sacramental vision. All things. All things for the inexhaustible wonders that they hold, for the inexhaustible glories they reveal of the mind of the artist and storyteller who created them. But fairy tales, and luminous paintings, and the voices of cellos and the taste of a wild, sun-warmed blackberry or the sparkling of a chalice held aloft or the visual force and scale of a wide, windswept ocean can sometimes jar us back to that sacramental vision, even if only for a brief, precious moment. That is the particular notion that resides at the heart of what I set out to accomplish with The Wishes of the Fish King. I want adults to read it and lose themselves in the rhythm of the words and in the glow of the paintings and to remember what it was to see the world anew. And I want the words and images to nest in the hearts and memories of young children so that their vision might be more sacramentally shaped as they grow. I want them to one day return to the story as adults with young children of their own that they might be reminded again of the delightful garden they once knew and of the shining city that awaits. I know it is a lofty goal. And I knew from the outset that I was unequipped to pull it off adequately. But my prayer with such endeavors is always that the whole will somehow be more than the sum of the parts and that there will be spaces between my words that winds of another world might blow through. I think that my hope is to create sacramental spaces where more important things can happen that don’t even involve me. If in twenty years I have mastered one aspect of being a writer, it is the ability to step back and let a thing go, knowing that its journey from here will scarcely involve me, and that the rest is dependent upon the Spirit whispering as the Spirit pleases through such imperfect offerings. As such, I took a strange, third-person encouragement in observing that the words of the story, paired for the first time with one of Jamin’s illustrations, were having a noticeable effect on me. The painting was called “The Sea of Fields.” Even as a chalk sketch over a base coat it was already stunning. I wasn’t able to look at it without some emotion, as it was a fantastical rendering of a place and time I once inhabited. The tone is magical and perilous and fairytale-esque. And yet I saw the real place clearly pictured there. In fact, the blend of fantasy and memory created a layered vision that held the essence of that time more vividly than any photograph ever could. This fairy tale visual re-interpretation of that physical location and era, offered a keener sight of the deeper reality of the wonder and the beauty of it than a camera ever could capture. Jamin’s painting held an iconic familiarity in its placement of the house atop the great hill, sweeping down to the wind-rippled fields and the forest island. I saw it clearly as my old home. This was once my land. I walked it. I fished it. I tended it. My second daughter was born here. I saw the terrain and the history. But in that painting, I saw also, as if in hindsight, the eternal glory that filled it as well. I saw the light. I saw all at once what was and what is and what is to come. And upon viewing the painting something in me rises and says Yes, that was always how it was, even when I couldn’t see it. The Sea of Fields is a sacramental painting of a real place and a real time in the lives of real people. And I was one of them. And I hope that though this story began as a personal reflection to capture for my daughter the memories of that bright season, that it will still function for others as a window flung open to the bright, sacramental nature of their own corner of creation and of their own lives and relationships and of their own histories of glory and brokenness, and especially of that brief season with their young children when all the world is seen as new. I hope that in some small way The Wishes of the Fish King will help children to grow wise and will help adults to grow childlike. And with that, now I finally will just step out of the way and let Chesterton bring the point home, because in his continuing words resides the point of it all… “…[G]rown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” [Chesterton drops the mic, walks off stage.] __________________________________________________________________________________ The Wishes of the Fish King hardback, as well as the Audiobook/Original Musical Score CD version, are available now from the Rabbit Room Store. And checkout Amazon.com where we’re giving away the ebook for free for a limited time.

What if I told you I just read a book that made brushing my teeth feel like a holy act? I actually got all weepy over them. My teeth, I mean. But to explain why, I need to back up about eight years. When I moved to Nashville, I felt like a spiritual vagabond. For years I’d drifted from church to church, denomination to denomination, unable to find a place I belonged. I struggled with intellectual doubts, inner inertia, and the deadening of my feelings of worship. I could barely sing along with hymns anymore. I simply stood mute, waiting for them to end. Four years of editing a magazine in the Chicago suburbs had left me feeling marooned—as a single professional woman in a sea of families, and as a misfit believer in a Christian subculture I didn’t often like and certainly didn’t feel at home in anymore. But soon after moving here, I joined a group of women who met regularly to talk about our passions—whether art, dance, film, social justice, food, or simple living. The first night, a young woman named Tish Warren, with a scarf around her tousled hair and a playful intensity in her face, plopped into a chair beside mine and said, “You were the editor of Christian History magazine? I have such a crush on you.” As it turned out, Tish and her husband and I had all gone to the same college and seminary—so we had plenty to talk about. I learned she attended an Anglican church in town, and weary of all my years of church hopping, I went to their service the following Sunday. I never left. It wasn’t that I considered myself an Anglican—theologically, I have my differences. I stayed because of the liturgy. Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. Frederick Buechner Liturgy, literally “the work of the people,” typically refers to the pattern and rituals of worship. In some churches, this pattern is fairly simple (singing, prayer, sermon, offering, prayer), while in others it’s more elaborate. In the Anglican church in which I now found myself—at least compared to what I’d been used to in the past—it was downright gymnastic. Up, down, kneel, pray, up, down, read, turn, bow, sing, shout, throw your hand out, kneel again, up, down . . . . Every Sunday morning, I arrived (like I had for so many years) empty, dry, cynical, incapable of worshiping on my own. And every Sunday morning, the liturgy took me by the hand—physically, it seemed—and led me through the motions of worship, put into my mouth words that I couldn’t pray alone. Here was a service in which I was less a spectator than an actor in a drama, constantly moving, constantly speaking the lines of a beautiful script that had been spoken for hundreds of years. I was no longer mute. Every Sunday I knelt on a bench beside strangers, bowed my head, and held my cupped hands out to receive communion, and I felt as if I was receiving my dose of grace to get me through the coming week. That ritual, that posture, taught my heart what it had forgotten. It was the actual bodily kneeling and holding out of my hands, again and again and again, that reawakened the desire for something to fill those empty palms. I realized that, underneath my messy, disordered artistic personality, I’ve been a liturgical being my whole life. Concrete acts of tradition and ritual—habits of family holidays or childhood actions repeated so many times that memories and meanings were rolled up in them like snowballs—have always been precious to me. I’m an undisciplined scatterbrain who needs a liturgy to take me by the hand and lead me through the motions of a life well-lived, form me into the postures that will give my heart a healthy shape, turn my longings towards what is good rather than what depletes and wastes me. My journals for decades have been full of ill-fated attempts to fit my daily life into a pattern, an order, that is not merely productive but meaningful, beautiful, touching something transcendent. Throw in a good dose of 41-year-old mid-life angst and there’s been a choir of accusatory voices in my head lately: I’m letting life slip through my undisciplined fingers like water. I must be a constant disappointment to God. What is the purpose of my days? What am I doing with my life, anyway? When my friend Tish’s book—her first, I hope, of many—arrived in the mail, I couldn’t wait to read it simply because Tish had written it. What I didn’t know was how deeply I needed her words, in much the same way as I needed her church eight years ago. Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life by Tish Harrison Warren (InterVarsity Press, 2016) is, in simplest terms, a meditation upon a single ordinary day, from waking to sleeping. (In fact, if you have time, I recommend reading it straight through in one day.) With gentle hospitality and humility, Tish welcomes us into her own mundane moments and through them points us to a deeper understanding of the holy humdrum of being human beings in the world. “We tend to want a Christian life with the dull bits cut out,” she says. But what if the dull bits are precisely the places where the light shines through? “What if all these boring parts matter to God? What if days passed in ways that seem small and insignificant to us are weighty with meaning and part of the abundant life that God has for us?” There are so many ways in which such a book could be written badly. In the hands of a less theologically and historically sensitive author, it could have been a vague rumination about all of life being “spiritual” and God being in the details and how we can meet Jesus wherever we are. But in Tish’s hands the subject feels as solid and rooted as an ancient oak tree. In the years since I met her, Tish and her husband (both church history aficionados) have become ordained Anglican priests, and though this is certainly not an Anglican book—it is accessible to anyone, no matter what denomination—I believe Tish’s deep embeddedness in a church tradition is what sets this book apart and gives it a depth that I often find lacking in Christian books aimed at my generation. “If I am to spend my whole life being transformed by the good news of Jesus,” she explains, “I must learn how grand, sweeping truths—doctrine, theology, ecclesiology, Christology—rub against the texture of an ordinary day.” The word texture is perfectly chosen here, because it is precisely in the gritty, knobbly, chapped, and rumpled earthiness of our lives that these grand truths embody themselves each day. Tish expresses big ideas in simple, winsome language, wearing both her hats of seminary-trained theologian and sticky-peanut-butter-fingered mom of two young children, effortlessly flowing between the transcendent and the tongue-in-cheek. “Teeth. So needy,” she jokes in one breath, while in the next she’s pointing us (and those minty molars) towards the hope of resurrected glory. Liturgy of the Ordinary reminds me that the unflashy routines I do unthinkingly every day are—or could be, if only I paid attention—pregnant with spiritual meaning. Making the bed (forming chaos into order), brushing my teeth (proclaiming that my body will be redeemed), eating leftovers (thanking God for his abundant and often overlooked provision), answering my email (participating, even through the tedious tasks of my own small vocation, in the mission Dei, the mission of God to redeem every part of creation), pausing for a cup of tea (embracing beauty in adoration of the One who gave me senses to enjoy it)—these habits can, if I let them, become a liturgy leading me through the day, turning my heart slowly, by practice and repetition, into healthy paths of desire and contentment and hope. “There is no task too small or too routine to reflect God’s glory and worth,” Tish writes. But she pushes us even deeper still. In each chapter she connects an ordinary, habitual moment in her own day with a particular aspect of corporate worship: Baptism, Word and Sacrament, confession, the passing of the peace, “smells and bells,” etc. This was what most surprised me in the book, and it was a little revelation to me, or maybe a reminder of what was always obvious under the surface. Oh, yeah. What I do in church on Sunday, the motions I go through in The Liturgy, is practice for the little liturgies—the habits and rituals that collect memory and meaning like snowballs—throughout the daily grind of my week. And those ordinary rituals of my week are little pictures of what the pattern of Sunday worship ultimately points to. Our waking moment each morning is a reenactment and remembrance of the baptismal proclamation that “before you know it, before you doubt it, before you confess it, before you can sing it yourself, you are beloved by God, not by your effort but because of what Christ has done on your behalf.” We rise into an identity given to us, not earned, donning it like the clothes we put on. We rise as bodies, messy and blessed, and when we stare bleary-eyed into the mirror we are staring at a work of art far more stunning and sacred than the Sistine Chapel. There is a sense in which every meal is a little Eucharist, every passing encounter a chance to pass the peace. The calendar of the Christian year—the rhythm of waiting and hoping patiently in the in-between time, preparing for the celebration to come—is prefigured in the most mundane and irritating of situations, sitting in a car stuck in traffic: on the way, but not there yet. For years I have felt as if the posture of kneeling and cupping my hands for the communion bread has been forming, physically kneading, my heart into a posture of submission and desire for grace. But I needed Tish’s reminder that when I leave that sanctuary to go out into the world, I am not bereft of liturgies to take me by the hand and guide me through the daily drama of a faith I feel unable to sustain on my own. Nor is anything radically monastic required of me—only a submission to my own creatureliness, and a recognition of its God-given beauty. When I wake, I wake already beloved. And when I lie down to sleep, I rest in trust. “Listen to your life,” writes Frederick Buechner. “See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” In her chapter, “Calling a Friend,” Tish likens Christian friendship to the antiphonal back-and-forth of congregational prayers, responsive Psalm readings, sermons interlaced with Amens. Call and response. We speak truth to each other and with each other, again and again. So, in case you’re wondering, this isn’t a review of Tish’s book. Not really. After all, she is my friend—my co-communicant. How could I write a review? No, I’m just here in the congregation answering back, Yes. Say it, sister. I hear you. Amen. What a joy it is to me that God has given me so many friends who are writers, artists, singers, actors, pastors—with whom I get to live out this continual antiphon. Even when we differ. Even when we acknowledge our own and each other’s incompleteness, the muteness of our hearts as we kneel for communion together. Call and response. Peace of Christ to you, Tish. Thank you for making me cry over my toothbrush. [Liturgy of the Ordinary is available in the Rabbit Room Store.]

A recent discussion among friends was really more of a lament. Christmas feels odd this year, we said. That’s not really true. “Odd” is the wrong word. Maybe “sorrowful” or at least some reflection of the idea that it doesn’t feel, well, Christmas-y. Whatever that means. Singing songs about comfort and joy feels weird when our interconnected world confronts me with the reality of Aleppo. I can’t rid myself of these images. The faraway look on a toddler’s face, so far from my own son who bounces with joy from one piece of furniture to another while making up songs that flow so freely from his heart. The ensuing arguments about the treatment of such refugees only worsen the feeling, since we’re not discussing nameless, faceless cases. I’ve seen them which makes looking past them that much harder. This holiday season only exacerbates the tension between the joy of Christmas and the lived-out reality of those running from destruction. After all, I’m preaching from a story that sounds eerily similar: a genocidal decree intent on the slaughter of innocent children, the blessed hope for the nations somehow cowering as a vulnerable baby sheltered by his poor, oppressed, minority family. What if a photographer could have captured the look on Jesus’ face or his mother, Mary, as they fled certain death under Herod’s rule. I’m reminded of Jürgen Moltmann’s beautiful words about the power of the juxtaposition — the defenseless child disarming the rest of us — in his book, The Power of the Powerless. He writes: The kingdom of peace comes through a child, and liberation is bestowed on the people who become as children: disarmingingly defenseless, disarming through their defenselessness, and making others defenseless because they themselves are so disarming. After the prophet’s (Isaiah 9) mighty visions of the destruction of all power and the forceful annihilation of all coercion, we are now suddenly face to face with this inconspicuous child. It sounds so paradoxical that some interpreters have assumed that this is a later interpolation. The prisoners who have to fight for their rights also find it difficult to understand how this child can help them. But it is really quite logical. For what the prophet says about the eternal peace of God which satisfies our longings can only come to meet us, whether we are frightened slaves or aggressive masters, in the form of a child. A child is defenseless. A child is innocent. A child is the beginning of new life. His defenselessness makes our armaments superfluous. We can put away the rifles and open our clenched fists. His innocence redeems us from the curse of the evil act that is bound to breed ever more evil. We no longer have to go on like this. And his birth opens up for us the future of a life in peace that is different from all life hitherto, since that life was bound up with death. ‘For to us a child is born. To us a son is given. The government is upon his shoulders.’ The liberator becomes a pleading child in our world, armed to the teeth as it is. And this child will become the liberator for the new world of peace. That is why his rule means life, not death; peace, not war; freedom, not oppression. This sovereignty lies on the defenseless innocent and hopeful shoulders of this child. This makes our fresh start into the future meaningful and possible. The oppressed will be free from oppression. And they will also be free from the dreams of darkness, the visions of revenge. They stand up and rejoice, and their rejoicing frees their masters too from their brutal armaments. The oppressors with their cudgels, their iron shoes and their bloody coats will be freed from their grim machinations and will leave the poor in peace. For the new human being has been born, and a new humanity which no longer knows either masters or slaves, either oppressed or oppressors. This is God’s initiative on behalf of this betrayed and tormented humanity. ‘The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.’ It is the zeal of his ardent love. * * * But is this really possible here and now, or is it just a dream? There is nothing against dreams if they are good ones. The prophet gave the people in darkness, and us, this unforgettable dream. We should remain true to it. But he could only see the shadowy outline of the name of the divine child, born for the freedom of the world; he called him Wonderful Counselor, Mighty Hero, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. The New Testament proclaims to us the person himself. He is Jesus Christ, the child in the manger, the preacher on the mount, the tormented man on the cross, the risen liberator. So, according to the New Testament the dream of a liberator, and the dream of peace, is not merely a dream. The liberator is already present and his power is already among us. We can follow him, even today making visible something of the peace, liberty and righteousness of the kingdom that he will complete. It is no longer impossible. It has become possible for us in fellowship with him. Let us share in his new creation of the world and — born again to a living hope — live as new men and women. The zeal of the Lord be with us all.

If you were at Hutchmoot this year, I hope you had time to appreciate the wealth of talented illustrators in attendance. Every year there seems to be a couple more of these guys sitting at the table drawing and painting and being awesome. This year, Stephen Hesselman (a fine illustrator himself) asked each of them to draw something that he could then ink, and the result is an awesome snapshot of the Hutchmoot cadre of illustrators. But it didn’t stop there. After Hutchmoot ended, Stephen continued to solicit art from friends and attendees he met over the weekend and apply his ink to their work. I love Stephen’s selflessness in this little project of his. He put a lot of work into shining the spotlight on others and the results are fantastic. Take a look for yourself. Pencil: Jamin Still, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Jay Myers, Ink: Stephen Hessleman Pencil: Aedan Peterson, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: John Hendrix, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Joe Sutphin, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Jenny Dorf, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Benjamin Schipper, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Will Kelly, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Jonny Jimison, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Lisa Eldred, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: John Haney, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Wendy Lane Hesselman, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Ken Priebe, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Ben Humeniuk, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Michael Regina, Ink: Stephen Hesselman Pencil: Richard Jenkins, Ink: Stephen Hesselman

If you’re geographically challenged, you might not realize just how majestic the mountains are in southern Indiana. Every year or so, I grew up riding across the state to a small town called Paoli, packed in a 15-passenger van with other kids from my youth group for our semi-regular ski retreat to Paoli Peaks. It wasn’t until later in life that I realized those peaks are nothing more than a single smaller hill, and all that snow was manufactured by machines actually called “snow guns.” However, during those years and well into early adulthood, I was convinced that I was good at skiing. Paoli Peaks had not presented much of a problem. Several years later, I was taking youth groups of my own in newer 15-passenger vans to other Midwestern ski sites, this time in Michigan at places called Swiss Valley and Timber Ridge. These peaks were slightly larger and a bit more advanced, but my ski sensibilities met the challenges just fine. If you asked me in those years about activities I enjoyed, I’d have definitely mentioned skiing. I had no idea what I was talking about. In my mid-twenties, a friend invited me to speak at a ski retreat in Colorado. Copper Mountain, to be specific, nestled right next to Breckenridge the heart of real ski territory. I accepted, of course. Speaking at a ski retreat or seaside resort is an automatic “yes” (just a note for anyone interested in extending any further invitations). Unfortunately I had no idea what I was in for, and the resulting weekend was humiliating in a number of ways. My friend had tried to warn me in advance: . “Have you skiied before?” “Yes.” “Are you good?” “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” “Have you been skiing in Colorado? Because Colorado skiing is different than—” “I’ll be fine.” “And I’m not sure how in shape you are, but even being in the mountain air is something to account for. You’ll want to…” [keeps talking] At that point I wasn’t paying much attention. I certainly don’t remember anything he said, other than realizing that, at some level, he was warning me about altitude and oxygen and nutrition. He was experienced enough to know that Colorado skiing — real skiing — is exhausting exercise if you’re not ready for it. Cardiovascular health is key. Hydration is very important. There are key ways to eat, to prepare, to approach a weekend of skiing. I paid zero attention to all of this. The results of that weekend played out predictably. The total vertical drop at Paoli Peaks is 300 feet. At Copper Mountain, it’s 2,600-plus. The ski lift itself took 25 minutes to get to the top. I could have watched an entire episode of Seinfeld in the time it took to even start skiing. After struggling off the lift and looking down at my final destination, I realized that no previous experience had prepared me for this. To even use the same term, to call it skiing, was inaccurate. Halfway down the mountain, I kid you not, a group of 4- and 5-year-olds who were taking a lesson stopped right next to me as their instructor had to help me out. “Hold on, guys,” she said. “This man needs some help.” She proceeded to help me back up while all 8 or so toddlers stopped skiing without any issue. Once I’d located my missing ski and pole, they moved on down EZ Road. I’m pretty sure I fell down again the moment they turned around. It took me 5.5 hours to get down that mountain, taking a path that was literally called EZ Road. I missed lunch entirely and didn’t get back to our table in the lodge until mid-afternoon. One chaperone thought I was enjoying myself so much that I’d just decided to indulge skiing all day at the expense of taking any sort of lunch break — until she saw the look on my face. My body shut down after that. I was angry and embarrassed. I was exhausted and stressed. I was hungry and thirsty and more tired than I can ever remember being before that moment. It took me considerable effort to remove my snowsuit from over my clothes, but once I did, I never even thought of putting it back on. I was finished with the mountain. Looking back, I realize that my primary error was that I failed to understand the demands of the mountain, even when I’d been warned ahead of time. The mountains of Paoli, Indiana do not require the same demands as those in Colorado, and it’s a reality I could only understand when I was face-to-face with this new mountain. I have a feeling that even if I’d listened to my friend and respected the journey a bit more, I’d have still been thrown off by the sheer enormity of it all. Recently, I was reading through the lectionary and came upon a passage from Isaiah 2. It conjured this memory for me because of its mountain imagery. Even more, it presents a mountain of enormous magnitude with demands of its own. 1 This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem: 2 In the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. 3 Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.” The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 4 He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. 5 Come, descendants of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord. As with most prophetic texts, there are multiple layers of truth to be found here. In a sense, there is a direct application for the time in which Isaiah lives and yet there are also future ramifications here, that there will be a day when all things will bend toward the mountain of God. The Lord’s temple will be established as the highest mountain of all, exalted above all the other hills that have been named as the most majestic in our world. The Christian’s vision of the future is set here: even with the grandeur of all created things around us, a new mountain will be established that will capture the attention and awe of everyone and everything. This is nothing new for the Christian. We should be used to the idea that, at the end of all things, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess — that at the culmination of the kingdom of God, when the kingdoms of this world finally meet their end, we will all find ourselves overwhelmed by the light and love of King Jesus. But it’s also here in Isaiah that we find out what such a warning means for our daily lives today. Just as I failed to hear the warning of the mountain I would soon visit, it’s possible for us to acknowledge this coming mountain marked by God’s presence without also preparing for it. Yet this mountain also has its demands, asking us to learn his ways and walk in his paths. We are then instructed what happens when the mountain appears. Our cycles of violence will end. Our weapons of warfare will become civic tools. The dividing lines between us will be blurred in an ultimate globalization where enmity between nations will cease to exist. The demands of this mountain are laid out to us as a vision of the future. Yet in the end, we are then encouraged to “walk in the light of the Lord.” We participate now in a new lived-out reality called the kingdom of God, enacting our future hope out in our present age. It is here in the present that our tools of destruction be transformed into tools of construction. It is here that our violent cycles should give way to new schools of thought/action. Abraham Joshua Heschel, a prominent Jewish theologian in the 20th century, wrote, “When the prophets appeared, they proclaimed that might is not supreme, that the sword is an abomination, that violence is obscene. The sword, they said, shall be destroyed. The prophets, questioning man’s infatuation with might, insisted not only on the immorality but also on the futility and absurdity of war … What is the ultimate profit of all the arms, alliances, and victories? Destruction, agony, death.” Perhaps, like myself, most of us will not change until we’re confronted with the reality of a new mountain, that we will refuse to address our violent selves until we’re overwhelmed by the beauty of something greater. But I believe we can begin to showcase the beauty of the peaceful presence of God before the establishment of this mountain, that it is possible to walk in God’s paths in the here and now and that his light can lead us there.

A few [months] ago a wonderful little film showed up online. It featured one of my favorite authors, Eugene Peterson, having a conversation about the Psalms with Bono, one of my favorite songwriters. It actually brought tears to my eyes, not just because of the good content but because the video was so well done. I even texted the filmmaker Nathan Clarke to tell him so. But Bono said something that prompted a Twitter response from me, and that response stirred up a good discussion on the internet—a discussion that I hope will bear some good fruit. At one point Bono says, “I’m talking about dishonesty that I find a lot of in Christian art. A lot of dishonesty. And I think it’s a shame because these are people who are vulnerable to God—in a good way—vulnerable. I mean porous, open. I would love if this conversation would inspire people who are writing [with] these beautiful voices, these beautiful gospel songs [to] write a song about their bad marriage. Write a song about how they’re pissed off at the government. Because that’s what God wants from you. The truth…and that truthfulness…will blow things apart. Why I’m suspicious of Christians is because of this lack of realism. And I’d like to see more of that in life, and in art, and in music.” It’s clear that Bono, for whom I have a lot of respect, is shooting from the hip, and while it’s tempting to criticize and parse every word he’s saying, it would do us all good to remember how many conversations we’ve had over coffee that we’re thankful weren’t being recorded, and aren’t being listened to hundreds of thousands of times. (As of this writing, the video has almost 350,000 views.) It’s important to keep the context in mind, and to recognize the spirit of what he’s saying. My Twitter response was this: “I get where Bono is coming from, but the fact is, there’s TONS of honest Christian art. It just isn’t mainstream.” Allow me to expound, now that I’m not constrained to 140 characters. First, there’s no shortage of honesty in art created by Christians. (For the sake of this argument I’m going to assume we mean honest and excellent. There are plenty of bad songs that are honest, and we certainly don’t need more of those.) I think Bono was speaking broadly, about the whole of popular Christian music, and like I said, I get where he’s coming from. There’s no Psalm-like anger or vengeance or confession there—though there’s plenty of Psalm-like joy and praise, much of it lifted straight from the Bible. But I bristle whenever I hear people complain about the state of Christian music because there’s so much good music, good writing, good visual art being made by followers of Jesus. When they say, “Christian music is so bad,” I answer, “What are you listening to? Because I can name scores of songwriters who are Christians whose music is excellent, honest, beautiful and true, not to mention well-produced.” Jill Phillips? Andy Gullahorn? Josh Garrels? Jon Foreman? Sandra McCracken? Thad Cockrell? Colony House? U2? You could say the same thing about books. “Christian books are so cheesy,” says the guy holding the Amish romance. But what about Walt Wangerin? Marilynne Robinson? Frederick Buechner? Eugene Peterson? Leif Enger? Wendell Berry? The problem, you see, isn’t that Christian artists lack honesty. It’s that the masses seem to prefer something else, and that something else casts a long shadow. There have always been, and will always be, followers of Jesus working away in the shadow of what’s popular, using their gifts to season their communities with honest and beautiful art. And I will always harbor a crazy hope that some of it will break into the mainstream so that even the most cynical listener might encounter the honesty that Bono’s talking about. If nothing else, I hope that this conversation prompts some people to seek out the artists that aren’t played on the radio every five minutes. Part of the reason I started the Rabbit Room years ago was to draw attention to good, true, and beautiful works of art that were more or less ignored by the mainstream. So in one sense, Bono’s exactly right. I hope that his conversation leads those with influence in popular Christian music to consider the Psalms, to acknowledge the responsibility that comes with their massive cultural impact. That means putting songs into the world that the audience might need to hear, songs that might reflect not what’s hip and safe but what’s beautiful and true and honest. And on the other hand, I want Bono to listen to some of my friends. I’d love to see him draw attention to the many who are too explicitly Christian in content for the mainstream yet don’t stand a chance on Christian radio because they don’t reflect the sonic homogeny of the decade. Let’s talk about the artists who are baring their souls, troubadours and prophets with beautifully imperfect voices and stunning rhymes, songs about divorce and heartbreak and doubt, just like the Psalms—but also like the Psalms, songs about God’s steadfast kindness, his tender mercy, our desperate need for rescue. They’re out there, Bono, doing exactly what you and Eugene described. How can we draw more attention to what’s working than to what’s broken? This piece originally appeared in CCM Magazine. David Taylor, professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, was the producer of the video with Bono and Eugene. He’s a brilliant guy and has compiled a wonderful page of resources for a deeper encounter with the Psalms. Check it out here.

I was raised to believe Bruce Springsteen was, indeed, The Boss. Vivid memories remain from my childhood with the windows rolled down in our old Ford LTD and Bruce’s “Glory Days” or “My Hometown” or “Born in the U.S.A.” blaring loudly. As a young adult, I found myself digging into the back catalog while appreciating each new release — from the beauty of “Badlands” to more recent gems like the entire second half of Magic. The truth is, I’m a sucker for similar artists as well, with a hearty appetite for what you might consider heartland rock or barroom rock. Everyone has their own terms for it; all I know is that I’m just fine if you wanna play Tom Petty or Ryan Adams or Dawes or Jackson Browne or Neil Finn or Van Morrison. These artists are storytellers. They’re also straightforward. There’s a sincerity at work in their compositions, honest men telling honest tales with their hearts always tucked inside their rolled up sleeves. I bring all of this up because I’ve always been surprised that John Tibbs has never received any real attention around the Rabbit Room. His influences are largely the artists I’ve already mentioned along with bands like The Lone Bellow. His last album was produced by Ben Shive and features Ellie Holcomb as a guest vocalist. He’s toured with Audrey Assad, Crowder and Matt Maher along with CCM heavyweights like Casting Crowns, Jeremy Camp and Newsboys. He even just wrapped his 2016 touring calendar with a show with Jason Gray. In other words, you should be surprised that you’ve never his music (if you haven’t already). But sometimes these things take a proper introduction, so allow me to give you one. John released his first full-length album, Dead Man Walking, last year on Fair Trade (Phil Wickham, etc.), which was produced by Shive. Here’s the opening track, “Silver in Stone.” The title track features Ellie Holcomb, so of course you need to hear “Dead Man Walking.” For a closer look at John’s worshipful side (since he got his start as a worship leader in Indiana), you might enjoy “Everything I Need.” And if you’re interested in finding out more about John’s music, ministry and upcoming tour calendar, you can find all kinds of details at his website. #JohnTibbs

Sarah Arthur, a writer and speaker, is one of the preliminary fiction judges for CT’s annual book awards. She put a list together of what she’s looking for as she wades through the potential finalists, and it’s a good reminder for any of us working to write a novel. (Read the list here.) Early on in the piece she makes an important disclaimer: I’m one of those grumpy English majors who walks into a Christian bookstore and wants to know why Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Anne Tyler’s Saint Maybe aren’t on the shelves. As authors of faith, we stand in a long literary tradition that did not start with Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness and is not limited to the Christian Booksellers Association. It goes much further back and reaches much farther out. This is how the good news of the gospel works. This idea is one I’ve heard N.D. Wilson point out—that Christians have zero reason to be embarrassed about the art the Church has put into the world over the centuries, and I would argue that some, if not most, of the greatest novelists of our age have been Christians. I would add Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, The Lord of the Rings, Till We Have Faces, and The Book of the Dun Cow to the list. What else?

The church in Ephesus had a fascinating back-story. Made up of people from every social and cultural background imaginable, from those steeped in Old Testament law to others raised in a culture of ritual prostitution and sorcery, it was as diverse as any modern church. Men and women who once stood on opposite sides of the ancient canyons of sex, race, and social standing now found themselves shoulder to shoulder, facing the enormous challenge to live and love as the body of Christ. As Paul writes his stunning letter to the Ephesians, deep fatherly love evident in every line, he begins by reminding them of their story. For three chapters blessing upon blessing tumble over each other, coming to a crescendo as he prays that the reality of their position before God would take root, deepening their understanding of who God is and transforming their lives. Fast on the heels of this outpouring of favour comes the question raised at the beginning of Chapter 4. “If all this is true, then what?? How do we respond to this undeserved torrent of grace?” You have a part to play in building and nurturing the body of Christ Heidi Johnston It is often said that wisdom is asking the right questions. If this is true then the prevailing questions, particularly within Western Christianity, reveal not only a growing lack of wisdom but also a tendency towards a highly individualistic view of the Gospel. Again and again we ask; What is God doing in my life? How are my needs being met by the church? Where can I find a place where my talents are appreciated? Pushing back against this mind-set, Paul reminds the Ephesians that grace not only sealed their place as children of God but also placed them firmly within His Kingdom. When we are welcomed by God, we are welcomed as part of His Church. While our individual, intimate relationship with God is both beautiful and crucial, it cannot properly exist outside of the rag tag bunch of broken souls who have been touched by the same grace. As God’s people, indwelt by the same Holy Spirit, we have been given a pre-existing supernatural bond that supersedes our differences. Paul, knowing the importance of this gift, urges the church in Ephesus to preserve it, doggedly clinging to unity as they give sacrificially of themselves for the good of the kingdom they are now part of. Like Jesus, Paul sees the way we respond to others as the first indicator of our intimacy with God. It is in this context of intentional community that Paul turns to the subject of spiritual gifts, taking an approach that is perhaps very different from the one that has been sneaking into our collective understanding. There is a beautiful passage in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when, in the midst of a long and difficult journey, Father Christmas arrives with gifts for the Pevensie children. The conversation goes like this: “These are your presents,” was the answer, “and they are tools not toys. The time to use them is perhaps near at hand. Bear them well.” With these words he handed to Peter a shield and a sword. The shield was the colour of silver and across it there was ramped a red lion, as bright as a ripe strawberry at the moment when you pick it. The hilt of the sword was of gold and it had a sheath and a sword belt and everything it needed, and it was just the right size and weight for Peter to use. Peter was silent and solemn as he received these gifts, for he felt they were a very serious kind of present.” There is a gift for each child – a sword and shield for Peter, a bow and horn for Susan, and a dagger and cordial for Lucy. Each gift is directly related to the personality and role of the child but each is given for the good of Narnia. Rather than diminishing the value of the gift itself, this knowledge adds a solemnity and significance that would otherwise be lacking. While it is important to know what your gift is, I think it is equally important to understand the purpose for which it was given. Rather than simply a pat on the back from a benevolent father or a weapon in the fight for pole position, any gift we have is given as a crucial and integral part of the battle to defend, strengthen and build the Church of Christ. Eph 4 v11-13 says, “And he gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” Whatever it is that demonstrates God’s character at work in your life, according to Paul, you have a role in getting God’s people ready for service. You have a part to play in building and nurturing the body of Christ and encouraging others towards wisdom and holiness, mending broken bones and helping other believers walk their road with a surer step. Paul reminds the Ephesians that the gifts they bring, however small, form part of the glue that holds the Church together, helping God’s people to cling to the supernatural unity that will mark them out as followers of Jesus. As we each, individually, lay down our skills and talents for the good of the Kingdom, we help one another come to an intimate, authentic, life shaping knowledge of God. Together, we are better equipped to fulfill our created purpose, reaching maturity in faith and living lives that are marked by and reflect the fullness of Christ. [continued in Part 2]

What does it look like when writers, artists, poets, musicians and storytellers choose to use their gifts for the glory of God? Have you ever wondered why God chose to work into you a love of words? A vivid imagination? An ability to write poetry or compose music? An appreciation of colour and form and an ability to translate that into something tangible? At Hutchmoot 2015, Michael Card spoke about the importance of imagination when coming to Scripture. Not imagination in the sense of dreaming up something that is not true, but the kind of holy imagination that helps us engage more deeply with truth. If I could point to one thing that has changed my Christian life it would be when I began to see Scripture as an epic story rather than disjointed books. We can be so factual about our faith. So theologically correct. I believe good stories help us exercise our imagination and awaken the sense of wonder that allows us to view God’s word with a sense of holy awe. Whether it is through stories, songs, poems, art, or some other creative expression of the heart of God, the role of people with gifts like these cannot be underestimated within the Church. Heidi Johnston I will never forget the first time I read about Aslan’s death on the stone table. I was a small child but I remember sobbing uncontrollably, totally overwhelmed by the enormity of it. Even then I think I knew on some level that my tears were for something more than Aslan. The power of that story took the truth of the cross and buried it deeper in my heart, allowing me to feel the awesome truth of Jesus’ sacrifice in a way that went beyond mental understanding. I know that I am better for it. I am not suggesting for one moment that we abandon theology in favour of stories but I do believe that the one can be better understood in the presence of the other. In many ways the storyteller also plays the role of prophet, allowing us for just a moment to see something beyond our natural vision. Last year, my friend Lanier Ivester wrote a beautiful post called “Creativity: Spiritual Battle and Spiritual Discipline” which changed my understanding of this. Sarah Clarkson had previously written about a time when she had asked God to give her a picture of what he was calling her to do through her writing. She says this: Instantly, I do mean instantly, a Millais painting came to my thought. It has long enchanted me for its vivid, startling image—that of a blind young girl sitting amidst a glory of a golden field with two rainbows like stairways to heaven behind her. Not a bit of it can she see. But in that painting, a small child sits next to the blind girl, peeking out from under her cloak, neck craned in awe at the glory, telling the blind one of all the beauty. And I knew in that image that my task, as a soul, but particularly as a writer, is to be that child. Lanier responded by asking God for a similar picture and I in turn did the same. On both occasions God answered in a way that was different and yet full of the same sense of purpose. I love the way Lanier sums up Sarah’s picture: “Write the rainbow, God told her. Tell this broken world of things it cannot see.” A few years ago I was speaking at a conference in Edinburgh and during my talk I mentioned the Chronicles of Narnia. Afterwards a lady came over and told me this story. She was a teacher in an inner city school. Some of the kids in her class had really difficult lives, evidenced by the defensive hostility they instinctively employed. As part of their course the teacher read through The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At the end of a class, as everyone filed out, she noticed one particular girl at the back of the room. Visibly upset, the girl remained in her seat. When the teacher asked her what was wrong the girl mumbled through her tears, “I just wish Aslan was real. I feel like he would understand me.” Stories have a way of slipping past our defences in a way that can both break and heal us, softening hard ground in readiness for the Sower. In a similar way, stories allow us to step back and view our own lives from a distance, perhaps seeing things we were otherwise too close to notice. The story of David and Nathan, in 2 Samuel 12, is a powerful example. After David’s adultery with Bathsheba and subsequent murder of Uriah, Nathan the prophet comes to visit him. Instead of confronting him with his sin, Nathan tells David a story about a rich man who took a poor man’s lamb and slaughtered it for a banquet, despite the fact that he had countless animals of his own. Incensed, David applies Scripture and pronounces judgement. When the truth is revealed, the power of the story is such that David is utterly broken by the revelation of his own heart, throwing himself on God’s grace with the raw grief of Psalm 51. I grew up outside Belfast at a time when there was a sharp divide between the Protestant and Catholic communities. With very little contact between the two communities I had a subconscious wariness of those on the “other side.” When I was ten, I read a book called Across the Barricades. Telling the story of two teenagers from opposite sides of the peace wall who embarked on a relationship, it was a Northern Irish Romeo and Juliet that was based in a culture I knew. It brought a sense of familiarity to people I would not otherwise have come into contact with at that stage in my life. In allowing me to enter their world, it chipped away at the distance between us and broke down the prejudice that could easily have taken root. Stories can deeply influence and develop our sense of community. When I read sweeping stories like Narnia or the Wingfeather Saga, or watch movies like Star Wars, they stir within me a sense of common purpose that can only find it’s true expression in the Kingdom of God. I don’t believe it is a coincidence that the picture of community modelled so beautifully amongst those who gather at the Rabbit Room goes hand in hand with a profound love of story. There are times in our lives when we are faced with things that weigh down upon us and stop us in our tracks. For me, this has often been when the poets, songwriters, and musicians step in like angels of light, helping me name the struggle and grieve it’s presence, while at the same time bringing hope. Biblically, this is the world of the Psalms. The place where questions are asked, hurts are expressed, and trust is affirmed, even in the darkness. It is a place to wrestle with deep questions, acknowledging the pain and yet, at the same time, choosing to cling to the belief that God is good. For me, the most moving example of this is Psalm 73. Alongside guttural cries of deep pain and confusion come beautiful declarations of faith. Pain and trust, co-existing around the central truth in verse 17 that only God’s presence is the difference between struggle and despair. This is the tension that is so beautifully expressed in songs like Andrew Peterson’s “The Rain Keeps Falling,” anthems that step in again and again to strengthen us in our weariness and walk beside us in our searching. Music has a mysterious power to move us. While I have little musical ability, my appreciation of music has been forever altered by Ben Shive’s Hutchmoot session on the language of music. Despite the fact that most of what he said was far beyond my understanding, I left the session deeply moved by the ways that different music can make us feel. In some ways the patterns and their affects can be understood (well, by Ben anyway) and yet there is still mystery. Why does music impact us the way it does? It seems, even from the womb, God has breathed into us a response to music that goes beyond our conscious thought. It is interesting that in 1 Samuel 16, when Saul finds himself repeatedly gripped by an evil spirit, the only relief he can find comes when David is summoned to play his harp. Similarly, in 2 Kings 4, when Elisha is faced with a situation which makes him so angry that he struggles to hear God’s voice, he calls for a musician to play so that he will be able to listen to God. Life, of course, is not all shadow. There are seasons when light breaks through and illuminates the path ahead. In the paradox of God’s sovereignty, there are often times when the sorrow and the rejoicing go hand in hand. Whether in joy or suffering, the poets and songwriters and musicians have a glorious role in calling God’s people to worship. There is a beautiful moment in 1 Chronicles 15 v 16, when David asks the Levites to “appoint their relatives the singers, with instruments of music, harps, lyres, loud-sounding cymbals, to raise sounds of joy.” Similarly, the ability of visual artists to change the way we look at the world astonishes me. Throughout Scripture God repeatedly uses the visual to communicate with His people. In a bush that was ablaze and yet growing within the flame, God called Moses, teaching him about His character and preparing him for the role he would play in the nation of Israel. For Peter in Acts 10, the image of a blanket let down from heaven and filled with all kinds of unclean animals was the catalyst for the welcome of the Gentiles into the Church. With one image God was able to sum up his call to Sarah and Lanier. Whether it is through stories, songs, poems, art, or some other creative expression of the heart of God, the role of people with gifts like these cannot be underestimated within the Church. In Ephesians 4 v14-15 Paul gives us a glimpse of the impact this sacrificial offering of our gifts will have. “As a result we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ.” In bringing our gifts to the Church we help each other to stand firm, protecting one another from being tossed here and there by everything that comes our way. For weeks now the words of a hymn have been lodged in my heart and mind. Still my soul be still Do not be moved By lesser lights and fleeting shadows Hold onto His ways With shield of faith Against temptations flaming arrows (Keith & Kristyn Getty / Stuart Townend) Until recently, I tended to think of temptation only in terms of sin. While that is an obvious and very real part of the struggle, I have been learning that there is also a temptation to despair. In a season of struggle, that is the temptation I have faced. Yet, as proof of what I thought I already knew, the gifts of others, in so many forms, have helped me to stand firm. Pointing me again and again to the One who is the source and the reason for hope. Not only do we have a role in helping others hold fast, we also teach one another to handle truth well. Not just to know it and let it change us, not just to speak it out but to do it all in love. Has there ever been a time when we needed this skill more? To invest intentionally and sacrificially in each other is to mature together, gradually growing in understanding, holiness, and humility and becoming more like Christ. Paul finishes this section with a final emphasis on the importance of this growing together and the part we each play in the process. “ …we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love” (v16). If we as the Church are “fitted and held together by what every joint supplies,” if the body grows “according to the proper working of each individual part,” then the roles we have been given are not optional. According to Paul, if we choose not to offer our gifts to God’s people the church is impoverished. Madeleine L’Engle said, “We can’t take any credit for our talents, it’s how we use them that counts.” It is important that we are good stewards of our gifts, honing them and making them the best they can be, all the time remembering that the wisdom and strength we need to use them comes only from God. A friend of mine said recently that your prayer life is a barometer of how much you need God. We may have been given gifts but the task is still bigger than we are. There is great freedom in understanding that. Without grounding ourselves in God’s word and cultivating His heart we will fail, either because our strength gives out or because we begin to believe we have strength enough without him. The stirring exhortations of Ephesians chapter four are always a response to the grace of chapters one to three. In the same way, our service for God rings true when it is a response to everything God has already done for us. If you don’t understand how important your gift is the church will be weaker for it. However, the responsibility that comes with that knowledge must be balanced with an understanding of the fact that we exist as part of the Kingdom. We are not lone rangers. Not even the introverts. We are not created to exist in solitude, or even to hang out in groups of like-minded people, praising and seeking praise. Paul makes it clear here and also in 1 Corinthians 12 that our gifts are for the common good. People who consider a love of stories to be an indication of spiritual immaturity have often mystified me. I wonder if one of the reasons they devalue story is that they have a narrow view of the collaborative nature of Kingdom work? If I, alone, am called to fully explain the gospel in everything I do, then stories or songs or art, in isolation, will have limited benefit. On the other hand, if they form part of a richer tapestry, where artists and theologians and caregivers and mums and pastors and teachers each bring their gift and offer it for the good of the Kingdom, the result is a fuller, more authentic picture of the heart of God. We are called to step into a story that is bigger than ourselves and to bring every gift we have to the collective task of telling it. Individually, we can perfect and master the gifts and talents God has given us. And so we should. However, unless they are offered sacrificially to the Church, for the glory of God, they will always fall short of the very purpose for which they have been given. Gifts of and for the Church (Part 1)

One day Rebecca Reynolds sent me these poetic lyrics combining the imagery of a dead leaf falling to the ground, evensong floating out from a cathedral, and sunlight through stained glass, evoking thoughts of times of burnout, the still small voice, and the varied colors of personality which light up when God is held in trust. C. S. Lewis said, “How monotonously alike all the great conquerors and tyrants have been; how gloriously different are the saints!” I had the chorus melody as it is, but the verse melody needed some work. Jeff Taylor came into it and gave us a beautiful, quiet verse to contrast the strength of longing in the chorus. Ellie Holcomb was an easy choice to sing it; she does the job supremely. Never having worked with her before in the studio, I found her to be eminently professional, wonderfully personable and likeable, and of course a stellar singer. Her voice rings with truthfulness and honesty. Big thanks to her for such a quality job. I sang the lead vocal on the chorus and she pushes so well against my voice, sailing up there with ease. Jeff and I recorded this on piano and guitar with Barry Bales on bass, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, and John Mock on bodhran. Jeff added accordion, and I added several guitars and two banjo parts. It adds a higher dynamic of longing to the record. “Alight Thou In Me” – featuring Ellie Holcomb Music: Jeff Taylor/Seek 1st/ASCAP and Ron Block/Moonlight Canyon Publishing/BMI Lyrics: Rebecca Reynolds/Wynken Owl/BMI Soft bends the morn, Slight and grey, Bruised by the span of the night. Fragile and frail, Dust to dust. Deep calls to Deep, calls to Deep, To Deep. CHORUS Alight Thou in me, Thy spectrum a hymn, Vision indwelling, Burn bright, Thou, within. VERSE TWO Blown evensong, Poor and dim, Worn to a sigh in the loss. Flutter and fall, Hush to stone. Death calls to life, calls to Life, To Life. CHORUS Alight Thou in me, Thy spectrum a hymn, Vision indwelling, Burn bright, Thou, within.

One of my favorite anticipations of the new year is the first book I will read. Some time ago, for a few years in a row, I started each new January rereading Frederick Buechner’s Godric. And I’ve returned more than once to Augustine’s Confessions. This year I wanted to start fresh. Thinking about it, I recalled a piece in The New Yorker about Ursula K. Le Guin (here’s the link), an author I’m ashamed to say I had never read. I was attracted to Le Guin and her husband Charles’s evening ritual and thought, “Surely she must write the kinds of stories I like to read.” She does. I began 2017 reading The Left Hand of Darkness. The book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1970 for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year. It is an installment in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, the next one of which I’m attracted to is The Dispossessed. The story of The Left Hand of Darkness is worth discussing. Yet, that is not what I want to do here. You see, in the reprinted editions of the book, Le Guin added a provocative introduction. Let me quote some of it: Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find–if it’s a good novel–that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a few face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed. Why is that? How come I can finish a novel and be sure that it has influenced my life in some profound way, yet when I go to explain what way I have been changed, I cannot easily do it? What is it about truth that makes it so hard to articulate the way it changes us? It occurs to me that day-to-day we are not very close to truth. From the most petty of untruths, for example, how we reply, “Doing fine,” to the question, “How’s it going?” to the most exaggerated untruths, like how we might respond, “Unconditionally,” to the question, “Do you love me?” Moment-by-moment we live not completely truthful lives. Untruths and half-truths sound familiar to us in our finite experiences. Le Guin says that the novelist’s business is telling lies in an effort to shed some light on the truth. The storyteller makes up something that, strictly speaking, is not true in order to elucidate what is true. When done well, the novelist’s message is at the same time irresistible and odd. It draws in readers, but, because truth is so unfamiliar to us readers, it is difficult to explain what we have been drawn closer to. It is a fine way to begin a new year, reading fiction that’s about truth which I cannot quite put my finger on. Now I have something to ponder in 2017!

I experience winter, if not as a kind of death, then at least as a closing in of the margins of life. The light grows shorter, the cold creeps in. The days betray, ending too soon. I tend to take this personally. I sink into winter. I sink into places inside. Places where fears, regrets and insecurities gnaw in the long darkness like rats beneath the planking. Places where hope is no longer a given, but a thing that must be hard won in the battle for each moment. My heart drifts sometimes into a blanketed hibernation. Grey hours smear into days that blur into bleared weeks. I raise my head to realize, sometimes, that I’ve gone seven days without leaving my house. On a practical level, productivity plummets. I’m still trying to jumpstart the day when it’s suddenly over, the hours unredeemed. It is all about the loss of light. My brain knows this. It’s physiology. I need more sunlight than these days have to offer. But that’s not how my heart experiences it. My heart is certain things have somehow gone wrong in ways that cannot be put to rights. That today’s losses might never be restored. My heart cries out that this condition is spiritual rather than merely physiological. At the lowest moments, my fears tell me my life is a waste. That I have achieved nothing. That I’ll never be able to make a living at what I do. That those who depend on me are doomed to perpetual disappointment. That the things I create are without practical value. That God is no longer present with me, or I with Him. That I am alone. That I stand outside the bright, advancing kingdom, passed over and deemed unfit for service, while my life devolves slowly downward, parts flying off at odd angles like a slow motion car wreck. . . . there will be no hope of real comfort if we do not first acknowledge that a great and perplexing gulf of grief and sorrow is present in our world and, at times, in our own lives. Douglas McKelvey Perhaps that’s why I have dreams sometimes, of driving at night on dangerously dark and steep and winding roads. Dim headlights barely penetrate the shadows. Sometimes I realize I’m driving in reverse though I don’t know why. The gas and brake pedals are strangely unresponsive, or I forget how to work them altogether. I anticipate the crash to come. I know I’m plummeting over the cliff or certain to hit another car or, in the worst of such dreams, to run over a pedestrian. I know it long seconds before it happens. Waking from one of those dreams sometimes means that I carry through the morning a lingering sense that is not unlike the experience of my passage through the dark days of winter. For in these months I also can’t see where I’m going. The light I have no longer illumines my path. The darkness closes in. The road is unknown and treacherous. I don’t remember my destination or understand what to do next. I fear it’s too late to do anything, that the crash is now unavoidable, or has perhaps even already happened. The psalmist says: I am like a desert owl, like an owl among the ruins. I lie awake; I have become like a bird alone on a roof. And again: My days are like the evening shadow; I wither away like grass. And I say, Amen. I too have felt this: The hollowing of life. The collapse of days and dreams. The loss of light. I long for the return of warmth and light as I long for a resurrection. Perhaps that’s why I’ve found myself again and again writing stories of characters whose lives are upended, whose hopes are dashed, whose strength—as it turns out—is not enough. Characters who find themselves wandering the shadowed valleys, haunting the ruins of their own former dreams. Owls among the ruins. A bird alone on a roof. For me, such stories are like the writing of a kind of psalm. They ask the same questions: Is God yet present? Is He mindful of me? Is He disappointed in me? Am I abandoned? What has become of my heart? I know that pain and loss and sorrow are real. They are part of our experience in this world. So I find myself compelled to ask Is there a grace and a love that can coexist with that and, rather than being nullified by it, somehow be more profoundly manifest in the midst of it? These questions of theodicy cannot be satisfactorily approached by anything less than story, I think, for any mathematical solution, however elegant, would forever ring hollow in the ears of Job. Or in the ears of any of us, for that matter, who suffer loss and confusion even of the lesser, daily varieties. But I’ve always instinctively held that any answer that could not address Job’s devastating losses would be an answer fatally flawed and ultimately without power to comfort or to heal or to redeem. Anything less is a lie, no matter how well-intended. For there will be no hope of real comfort if we do not first acknowledge that a great and perplexing gulf of grief and sorrow is present in our world and, at times, in our own lives. One does not receive the Angel’s blessing without the sleepless wrestling and the wounding, it would seem. One does not see God in the whirlwind without confronting the whirlwind. So for me, the reason I sometimes write stories (and the reason I usually cannot plot a narrative out in advance of writing it), is because the act of writing has become a way of chasing God into the darkness and impenetrable shadows of fear and grief and loss and sorrow and abandonment. Because a grace that cannot be found in those places is ultimately a lie. And if I were to predetermine how a story must end before I even began writing it, then there could be no honest wrestling with those enduring questions. The struggle would be stillborn, never incarnated in the story. And where there is no honest wrestling, I believe there can be no meaningful resolution. Grace, after all, is not a thing that can be quantified or forced. If it does not somehow surprise even the writer when it enters the story, then it is probably just an artifice of his or her own devising, calculated, and without effect. Such false grace is the literary equivalent of telling a friend who has just lost a child that “It happened for a reason.” This is why writing some stories hurts. I fear in the writing of a story, as in the living of life, that I will venture into the narrative and not be met. That my needs and inadequacies and poverties will be exposed in the process, and I will die the death that follows such revelations, and there will be no resurrection and no redemption. That I will end the attempt in a more confused and degraded state than that in which I began, crouched alone in the bomb crater of my own failures. Flannery O’ Connor wrote “The Christian writer does not decide what would be good for the world and proceed to deliver it. Like a very doubtful Jacob, he confronts what stands in his path and wonders if he will come out of the struggle at all.” "The ability of the writer to pen a narrative with any real power in it rests at least in part in a willingness to let the story play out on its own terms. The writer must not assume that grace is going to intervene in the narrative." - Douglas McKelvey It doesn’t matter how many stories I write. I doubt to the very end of most whether I can come out of the struggle. I am forced to my knees by the process, pleading that I will be met and not abandoned. Fears and insecurities swirl and assail chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. It does not get better with age and experience. It gets worse. To write a story sometimes is to be stripped of all dignity. It is not merely to acknowledge, but to experience moment by moment my own utter helplessness. But where else can I go and what else can I do? This is my vocation. Perhaps, though I don’t know how to quantify such things, it is even my calling. So even when I cannot be cheerful therein, I still wish to be faithful. But on some level, it seems that writing is the place I go to die. I did not realize that until this moment, but there it is: Writing is the place I go to die. Epiphanies for me are usually instinctual, requiring afterwards a long, slow process to work their way down through layers of cognition and translation. So if you can allow me some months or years to more fully understand the ways in which that statement is true and why I instinctively know it to be true, perhaps I’ll be able to give a more satisfactory exegesis. In the meantime, here’s the point I was heading towards: The ability of the writer to pen a narrative with any real power in it rests at least in part in a willingness to let the story play out on its own terms. The writer must not assume that grace is going to intervene in the narrative. That urge to easily relieve the tension of unanswered questions, to tie things up neatly, must be resisted. Only then can the presence of a greater mercy become manifest in some wild way that in the end is authentic and organic and as unexpected as it is inevitable. And I have found that the soul is likely to be wrung like a dishrag in the process. The story bleeds into one’s own life, opening the old wounds. Twenty years ago I wrote my first published book. It was an emotionally discordant time in my life. I felt suckerpunched. I was grieving the loss of things I had not previously considered I might lose. I was also reading the works of Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky, both of whom displayed that Russian penchant for raising questions of evil and suffering and of the presence or absence of God, and also that (sometimes jarring to Western readers) habit of not tying up all the frayed threads and loose ends of their stories but letting them play out more like the subjective experience of real life. The gravity of those writers nudged my own orbit, affirming the sanctity of leaning into those frayed edges of life, of mining the roots of those cragged and weather-beaten mountains. So I began my literary endeavors (small though they’ve been), in that very spot: a sort of Ground Zero of the soul, asking the question What becomes of people emerging from the rubble of what had been their lives? I asked the question, at least in part, because I personally needed to know if there was a satisfactory answer. Where do we go and where do we turn and what narrative do we hold to when our own best plans have failed, when our long labors have come to nought, when the hopes we planted have bloomed as fields of sorrows instead? Who, or what, can hold us then? Are we truly alone and adrift and pushed by mindless winds? Or is there a presence that holds us yet, a presence that transcends and quiets those very questions? Will we be met? Will we be met amongst these ruins? I wrote my first book twenty years ago, flinging those questions into the darkness ahead of me, hoping they would somehow be answered. In The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog there is the character of a gentle widower who faces the threat of even greater loss than what he has already endured. His young daughter, who is also the narrator, faces the threat of deeper sorrows as well. Can I see now that that man stood in the place of my fears and that the girl stood in the place of my own heart? That she was the embodiment of the hope and faith I wasn’t certain could survive intact if the peace of existence was suddenly overturned? If all that had been settled was suddenly thrown into doubt? If everything didn’t work out okay? Can I see now, though I didn’t know it then, that the story was a psalm, acknowledging My days are like the evening shadow, and then moving on to the refrain: Will I be met? Will I be met? Will I be met? As I wrote, I did not see the grace approaching in the way that it finally manifest in that story. Its arrival was sudden, unexpected, and more costly than I had anticipated. And yet, I knew on some deep level that it was true to the narrative that had preceded it. I lived through the story emotionally as I wrote it and there were points at which I wept. The answer given to the questions I asked was not, in the end, even about answers, but about presence. And confronted with such presence, I suddenly knew my questions were all the wrong questions anyway. They weren’t even the right category. And maybe it’s that very experience I’ve now lived through more than once as a writer, of venturing into the wilds of an uncharted story, risking and fearing utter failure, and yet then of somehow finding myself met, maybe it’s that experience that keeps me in the fight now—or at least in the daily struggle to return to the fight—through these dark, cold days. Maybe it’s that which stops me from just giving in to the collective weight of winter and numbing myself till spring. Maybe it is when I can step back to see my own life as story, that I can recognize the same pattern at work. There are days, yes, when I don’t feel much tangible hope of a variety solid enough to latch onto. When the narrative running in my head has gone off the rails. There are weeks and even months when my life isn’t really working very well—not by any objective measure I would place on it. There are seasons when I am like an owl among the ruins, or like a man crouched in the gray ashen fallout of a former city who wants nothing more than a warm blanket, a stiff shot of vodka and a long sleep without dreams. But I know this now: I know that a life of obedience cannot be about my feelings. I know in my head even when I cannot grasp it in my heart, that we will sail this ship across the winter solstice and the days will begin to lengthen again and the world will slowly warm and my own circadian rhythms will swing back into balance and all existence will reawaken into light and hope. It will not be my life circumstances that change. But hope will have returned, and that feeling, that sense of hope, will change my perspective and my vocation will grow easier again. And when that awakening comes, I know that I will either awaken from an anesthetized hibernation in some deep snow den, having lost months with little to show for the days, or I will awaken to turn and look at the fields behind me, at the path I have forced (even if I was sometimes sleepwalking) through six-foot snow drifts, dragging the dead weight of my heart on a chain behind me. I will turn and see the work I have completed in that time. I will see that even these hard days have had their good redemptions and their forward movements. Maybe, in hindsight, I will see that I was not so alone as I imagined. And so I write now as a means of calling my own heart back. It has taken me four days to weave this one short essay, because the light is so transient, so insubstantial, and my hope is always caving in. I confront again and again the doubt that I can finish even a short essay. Sometimes the doubt wins and I collapse and retreat from the task. But the next morning, I call my heart back again, and I make another run at it. I try to still the voices and the fears enough to sit myself down, just to write a few more words, just to show up and see what might happen. Just to be present once again. And if I am present today—if despite what I feel and fear, I am present—who knows what might come of it? Perhaps, somehow, I’ll even be met. Rabbit Room Press is set to reprint Douglas Kaine McKelvey’s first book The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog, in March of 2017. Boasting a beautiful new cover painted by Zach Franzen, this reprint will mark the first time in fifteen years that McKelvey’s critically-acclaimed frontier fantasy tale will return to print and to wide availability. The Angel is now offered for pre-sale in the Rabbit Room Store. With enough pre-sales momentum over the next few weeks, we’ll be able to budget some of those funds for interior sketch illustrations for the book as well. If you’d like to play a part in making that happen, please pre-order a copy and spread the word: More pre-sales = more interior illustrations! #writing #depression #DougMcKelvey #Story #hope #struggle #McKelvey #AngelKnewPapa #Stories

We want North Wind Manor to be a hospitable place for everyone. We had such a great response from Open Hours: Fika (Swedish coffee break) each Wednesday from 1:00 - 4:00 that we later added Quiet Hours: Stilla (Swedish for quiet and peaceful) each Friday morning from 9:00 - 12:00. Fika, with its community, coziness, and intentional pause brings to the space a vibrant hum of conversation, laughter, and music, whereas Stilla quiet hours is to provide a calmer space for deeper focus. These times have been so wonderful and each week offers a different group and energy based on those who choose to join in. That said, we’ve had a sad ache in our heart of hearts knowing that something is still missing. So it is with great joy that the Rabbit Room proudly presents…. Open Hours: Pyjämaslëëpövr (Swedish for slumber party). Although American culture has no exact cultural equivalent, the Nordic countries have a long and deep tradition of Pyjämaslëëpövr. It fills the mysterious liminal space between a junior high girls' slumber party and a networking cocktail party for local professionals. Starting at midnight each Tuesday night and wrapping up with a collective primal scream as the sun rises in the east. We’ll be eating Köttbullar, round hand-formed meatballs made from pork, slathered in lingonberry jam, Pannkakor, pancakes slathered in lingonberry jam, and Surströmming, fermented herring slathered in lingonberry jam, while we dance the Dansa runt stolen, and play round after round of our favorites, Kalle Anka-leken and Spelet med äpplet, till we pass out from a mixture of exhaustion and glee. And hey, if a pillow fight breaks in the midst of all that, that would be seen as a success as well! So pull out your pajamas, don your Svenska mössan, grab your favorite stuffed animal and come on out ya’ll! [Editor's note: now that April 1 has passed, I am at liberty to add the disclaimer that this was an April Fool's joke. While we celebrate whatever Scandinavian-inspired traditions you get up to between midnight and dawn... please don't do them at North Wind Manor.]

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself in several situations where someone’s asked me a question about The Fiddler’s Gun or Fiddler’s Green and I legitimately couldn’t remember the story well enough to answer. If that sounds ridiculous to you, you’re not wrong—it sounds even more ridiculous to me. But it’s true. Each time that’s happened, I’ve had the nagging thought that I should re-read the books sometime just so I know what they are about if someone asks. But that’s also a terrifying thought. I’m well aware that I’ve grown as a writer since that first novel, and the thought of going back and witnessing that reality first-hand sounds humbling. I mean, it’s in print now. It’s too late to change it. What if I hate it? Then I realized that 2019 is the 10-year anniversary of the publication of The Fiddler’s Gun, and I thought I ought to celebrate that somehow. My brother has been bugging me for a long time to publish an omnibus edition, putting both books into one volume with fresh artwork. I like that idea, but if I’m being pragmatic, I wonder how many people would really buy a book that’s over 600 pages long. Some would, sure. But enough to make it worth the time and expense? I remain suspicious of this idea. And besides, if I ever do decide to re-issue these books, I’m bound and determined that they be heavily illustrated, and that’s going to be a lot of work for some poor artist. So not yet, I say. Maybe some other anniversary. But for this 10th, I did have an idea. I needed to read those books again after all. Tap-tap. Microphone? Check. Books? Check. Reading voice? Doing my best. Recording studio? My closet works, right? You heard me. I’m recording all of this in my closet. Laugh it up—it works. But why a podcast instead of an audiobook? Good question. People have been asking for an audiobook for years. My wife would probably tell you that I’m oppositionally defiant and therefore will always do the opposite of whatever I’m asked. That’s not true (at all), but in this case, I just thought a podcast sounded like more fun. Part of the reason for reading the books is to re-evaluate them with fresh eyes, and that’s not something for which an audiobook provides an avenue. But a podcast gives me the leeway to record other material, like backstory that got cut but remains compelling, or to provide reflections on the hows and the whys of the writing process itself in the form of bonus episodes. That’s the kind of thing I can get really excited about. So a podcast it is (though once complete, I’m sure I’ll compile it all for the audiobook market). And so here we are. This is going to be fun. In fact, it already is. I asked Tyler Rydosz, a local musician, to compose the music (which makes me cry almost every time I listen to it), and I asked Stephen Crotts to create some new artwork (which is completely awesome). The rest is up to me. I’ll be spending a lot of time in the closet in the next few weeks, and I’ll be brushing up on my French accents (gulp!). Pray for me. An introductory episode and the prologue, “The Beginning,” are available now. “Part I: Foundations” (season 1) will go live, appropriately, on July the Fourth, Independence Day, and Parts II-V will follow in August, September, October, and November with over 70 episodes all told. Click here to view the podcast page, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and enjoy the ride. Welcome to Fin’s Revolution. An American legend, one chapter at a time. Bonus Announcement: After great strife and terrible contention with Amazon, The Fiddler’s Gun and Fiddler’s Green are now available on Kindle once more. Pete Peterson is the author of the Revolutionary War adventure The Fiddler’s Gun and its sequel Fiddler’s Green. Among the many strange things he’s been in life are the following: U.S Marine air traffic controller, television editor, art teacher and boatwright at the Florida Sheriffs Boys Ranch, and progenitor of the mysterious Budge-Nuzzard. He lives in Nashville with his wife, Jennifer, where he's the Executive Director of the Rabbit Room and Managing Editor of Rabbit Room Press.

“My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.” Thus the eponymous Gladiator, known as “The Spaniard” (aka Russell Crowe), unmasks his true identity to the emperor (Joaquin Phoenix) before the Colosseum masses. The emperor now faces an awkward political calculation: this brilliant fighter is no mere slave—he is the chosen successor of his father, Marcus Aurelius, and therefore his most dangerous rival. Fear of the mob drives him to spare Maximus’s life and the crowds are ecstatic. Here at last is true leadership, true resilience, true power: in the valiant but wronged soldier unjustifiably enslaved, not their sybaritic Caesar draped in perfumes and purple. Throughout the movie, Maximus has faced intolerable odds, as the hero of any rattling yarn must. Survival, quite apart from restitution, is improbable. The empire’s once-loyal servant has become the emperor’s most intractable foe. But it’s an asymmetrical contest and therefore, to the majority of armchair spectators, an unwinnable one. And yet our noble hero overcomes, through a superhuman combination of special-forces-toughness, whip-smart opportunism, and, quite naturally, the fact that he is Russell Crowe. Power and nobility. Or as Maximus’s comrades’ motto would have it, Strength and Honor. If there is a moral to the story at all, it’s that we should never cease to wonder at that elusive Hollywood holy grail, the human spirit (whatever that is). Just search for the hero inside of yourself! Yup, you too can be Maximus, or Katniss, Luke or Rey, Po or Elsa! But the grand story at the heart of Ephesians won’t let us be content with such hackneyed fictions. It subverts this and every other human story, at almost every significant point. Yes, there are peculiar parallels: we read of asymmetrical power relationships, epic battles requiring armor, defensive and offensive maneuvers, a fight against overwhelming odds. There’s even a nice Ephesian resonance with Maximus the Roman citizen spending his entire professional life serving earth’s greatest city despite never having laid eyes on Rome. But that’s where the similarities end. An Asymmetrical Relationship This ought to go without saying, but every person who comes into contact with the living God finds him or herself in a profoundly asymmetrical relationship. How can it be otherwise? The Creator who provides for his creatures, yet creatures we remain; the Omniscient who accommodates himself to those who can know only in part; the Omnipotent who deigns to employ the frail, finite, and deeply flawed as his “coworkers” (1 Cor 3:9); the one whose name is Love and who loves the ones that hate him. No, there is no equality here and never can be. The only way we can possibly relate to God is if he takes the initiative to stoop and to keep on stooping. For all its controversies, that is perhaps why we find that unsettling asymmetry in Ephesians’ so-called Household Code. As was clear in last week’s chapter, there is an equal demand on all believers to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5:21). That doesn’t mean, however, that its applications are identical. Paul grants different roles to different groups. But the key to the husband’s lengthy injunction to love for his wife comes in 5:25: “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” That is no small task. It is far easier to grasp why the child-parent, and perhaps even the slave-master relationships, are necessarily asymmetrical. In the Roman Empire, age, gender, and freedom status profoundly shaped a person’s options. Jesus-shaped power is a threat to the status quo. It is also very hard to do. Mark Meynell In itself, that would have surprised nobody in Paul’s day. There is plenty of evidence that the Household Code was a relatively common ethical form: it’s found most famously in Aristotle’s Politics (Book 1, XIII), but also alluded to in Stoic writings such Seneca’s letters. What is revolutionary about Paul’s household codes is how he subverts them. Even to address wives, children, and slaves at all was startling. Previously, the head of the household (the paterfamilias) was the sole recipient of these codes, because husband, father, and master tended to be one and the same man. But then look what Paul expects of that man: to sacrifice himself for his wife because Christ did, to bring up his children for the Lord, to treat slaves justly because he shares the same heavenly master. Christ takes precedence over each and every role. Christ’s authority relativizes a man’s. Always. That is why African American slaves would often address the Lord Jesus as “Master,” a deliberate reminder both to themselves and their owners that they all submitted to a higher authority. He is the ultimate owner. Such absolute authority might be the grounds for deep anxiety. Indeed, when the prophet Daniel is confronted by a vision of “one like a son of man” who is granted all divine, cosmic power and authority, he is justifiably terrified. (Daniel 7:13-15) Like Tolkien’s ring, such power is too great for a mere mortal human being—until we see what the Son of Man did with it. He had compassion for the most vulnerable to asymmetrical power dynamics (especially if religious): the widows and orphans, the outcasts and aliens, the sinners and tax collectors. He accompanied, he encouraged, he honored, he healed, he taught, he loved. Why would anyone object to that? An Alternative Road The problem is that society has never traditionally recognized such behavior as “power.” If anything, it is its polar opposite. So when worldly powers encounter it, they either smirk and jeer with effortless superiority or attempt to neutralize and crush in bewildered hostility. Jesus-shaped power is a threat to the status quo. It is also very hard to do. It demands a willingness to trust in God, the ultimate Master, often despite what every sense in your body is communicating. But “all that is required” is to stand and remain standing against the devil’s schemes. (6:11-12) No wonder that Christians down the ages try to fight fire with fire. A militaristic passage like Ephesians 6:10-20 might (at first sight) seem quite the justification (and don’t get me started on Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land). Yet from Peter lopping off a soldier’s ear to notorious episodes in Christendom’s history, the results of conflating God’s kingdom with human empires and states never look pretty. Paul teaches that there is a battle; of that there’s no doubt. But it’s primarily a spiritual, rather than material, duel against “the cosmic powers over this present darkness” (6:12), demanding disconcerting strategies and defenses. It pits a Christ-like wielding of power (which puts a premium on sacrifice, altruism, and even submission) against the bullying cruelty of hellish power (which relentlessly exploits, subjugates, and destroys). The outcome of such a battle seems like a foregone conclusion, doesn’t it? Of course hell’s powers will win. How on earth can the former avoid annihilation against such sulfurous, or dare I say it, hideous strength? The clue comes in 6:10. Paul makes no appeal for intensive workouts to build up core strength. In fact, he doesn’t think we need to be strong at all, at least not directly: “Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.” This is a matter of deciding which power center to align yourself with. The primary requirement of the disciple here is to cling on tight to the Lord. The phrase translated “strength of his might” has twice appeared before in Ephesians (1:19 and 3:7), the evidence for which is clear: the Resurrection (1:20). Who wouldn’t want to be on the death-conqueror’s team? That’s awesome power. The challenge is that he had to go to the cross first, which, paradoxically, was the supreme sacrifice of power. As Chesterton pointedly put it, “You cannot defeat the cross, because it is defeat.” How bizarre to have as a rallying point a symbol of weakness and dishonor. No wonder being a foot soldier in this cross-shaped conflict demands an unconventional approach, to say the least: It will be grounded in truth—or to unpack Paul’s metaphor, held together by truth (6:14). So never be deceived by the mere appearance of power, by mistaking barking for biting. It will be a true path to true goodness—this breastplate of righteousness, like the gospel, is a gift. (6:14) Anything less will have “no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh,” as he puts it in Colossians 2:23. It will constantly be prepped for action, like any soldier—but the action is to bring peace, ultimately with God, but in consequence between people(s) (6:15). I suppose it makes the kingdom soldier more UN peacekeeper than imperialist invader. It will defend itself by trusting God’s promises against the Accuser’s barbs and lies (6:16), in particular to guard the head with the confidence of salvation. But because it is a divine gift, assurance is not just possible—it is inherent. It will have only one offensive weapon: a sword. This is not designed to sever limbs but to cut to the heart—with divine truth. And thus we come full-circle. Maximus would never have survived the gladiatorial arena with these defenses. But nobody can ever withstand the devil without them. But the most extraordinary truth of all is that we know the outcome in advance. In movies, that can spoil the effect somewhat. But in the Christian life, it simply makes it livable. Artwork Credit: “Desert Wind” by Joshua Smith

There’s a certain kind of loneliness that comes of never being asked the right questions. Many of us go years at a time subsisting on questions like How’s the job? and How are the kids? Even the slightly superior How are you? without a foundation of relational intimacy and plenty of time to dig in, can be glossed over as easily as a question about the weather. One of my frustrations with social media is the endless stream of information about the people in my life. I receive constant updates on their activities, opinions, and preferences, yet I feel no closer to them. When we meet face to face, I find the flood of digital information has disrupted the normal flow of conversation and deepening relationship. If I’m up to the minute on everything, what remains to be asked? But this problem also exists inside strong communities and friendships. Few people ask questions at all, much less good ones. I’ve paid counselors and spiritual directors for their wisdom and insight, knowing our time together was necessary for my growth. But my deepest hunger was simply for someone to ask the right questions, the ones that press into the pain and joy of my experience. Why should that need be so difficult to meet? Why is that experience uncommon? Perhaps we don’t have time. To ask a thoughtful and probing question carries with it the burden of listening to the answer, of focusing on another person’s story and sitting with the weight of her feelings. Whose schedule has margin for that kind of nebulous encounter? We don’t have the patience. According to John O’Donohue, “greed for destination obliterates the journey,” and an obsession with destinations, with end goals, is a fair diagnostic of our time. We want financial success without labor and sacrifice. We want the pleasures of sexuality without trust or commitment. We want insta-communities that develop without the years of face-to-face interaction that deep relationships require. Or perhaps we don’t know how to make ourselves vulnerable to the risks of relationship. It is easier, after all, to know about five hundred people than to know five. We harbor a secret wish that everyone would arrive on the scene with a bio, a handful of photographs (for reference), and a list of guidelines. Something in my soul sighs deep at that—the idea that all my relational investments could be guaranteed, all outcomes assured. The idea that I could keep the world at arm’s length while appearing to live a full life. Isn’t it fascinating that an omniscient God, the God who knows us inside and out, should be so determined to ask questions? Turn to any passage of Scripture, Old Testament or New, and there’s a good chance you’ll catch him in the act. In the gospels, for example, Jesus is always walking up to someone with an obvious malady, an obvious need, and asking, “What do you want?” He makes no assumptions. Whatever information he’s gained through observation or revelation, he never misses an opportunity to ask a good question. Jesus honors the suffering people he encounters by allowing them to voice their feelings and desires. In person. Face to face. He is relentless in his pursuit of genuine relationship. One stunning example of this commitment takes place on the morning of the resurrection. Jesus, having descended into the depths of human darkness, has risen triumphant. He is Lord of the universe, and he holds the keys of death and hell in his hands. Surely this is a moment to celebrate, to proclaim his unrivaled cosmic power to the world. But Jesus pauses at the garden tomb to talk to a grieving friend. And he doesn’t lecture her about his promise that he would rise again on the third day; he makes no mention of the doctrine of the resurrection as presented by the prophets. In fact, he gives no answers at all. He asks questions, entering Mary’s pain and gently drawing her out as a friend would do. This Jesus, being the same yesterday, today, and forever, and being the exact expression of the person of God the Father, is behaving in the same way God behaves in the Garden of Eden. We’ve missed the connection because for centuries now our focus in the story of the fall has been on the sin of eating the fruit. God said “no,” and man ate, and the rest is history. We see two trees in the garden, one of them bearing the label Immortality, the other Sin. It’s easy to forget that the second tree, the forbidden one, was The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In eating from it, something was changed, something broken. But what? The thing that was broken when mankind ate the fruit was not a moral directive. The thing that was broken was a relationship. Helena Sorensen Last year I bought a language arts curriculum written by a Mormon woman who designed the curriculum to be appropriate for people of all Christian faiths. The emphasis of the text? Morality. It was this woman’s belief that all of us Christian folk could agree on one thing: right and wrong. I’ve heard parents name the knowledge of good and evil (knowing right from wrong) as their chief goal in raising children. This is the fruit the church offers the world. We have a book with all the answers, don’t we? Properly understood and interpreted, the Bible will tell us everything we need to know about good and evil. So we’ll be safe. So we’ll be holy. So we’ll make God smile. Could it be that while claiming to point the world to Christ, we have gorged ourselves on the fruit of the wrong tree? The thing that was broken when mankind ate the fruit was not a moral directive. The thing that was broken was a relationship. Yet in that moment, the moment we name as the darkest in human history, how does God respond? He asks questions. “Where are you?” “Who told you that you were naked?” Knowing the answers, still he persists. He presses into relationship. The God whose holiness, whose “otherness,” is defined by the relationship of the Trinity—the Three who commune together, who know one another, who love by nature without the need for hierarchy—that God can do nothing else. We shrink, as Adam did, from the mysteries of relationship and instead embrace the categories. We divide the world into good and evil. The Pharisees mastered the art of categorization, yet Jesus condemned their efforts. “You search the Scriptures, because in them you think you have life. But you won’t come to me that you might have life.” The only possible fruit of searching the Scriptures to figure out what is right and wrong—to gain the knowledge of good and evil—is death. Why? Because of the terrible distance between knowing about and the kind of knowing that happens in relationship. Distance yourself from the One who is Life, and you enter the realm of death. There are those who prowl the New Testament, studying Jesus, trying to understand the rules by which he lived and mimic them. Jesus confounds them by never doing anything in exactly the same way twice. Does he sleep through storms or rebuke them? Or does he ignore the boat and walk on the water? Are people healed when he anoints them with spit and clay? Or when they turn away believing? Or when they touch the hem of his garment? We can’t nail him down. “I only do what I see with my Father,” he explains. In other words, “I live in relationship with God the Father, through the power of the Spirit, and out of that union I operate moment by moment.” It’s what makes him the most complicated, infuriating person ever to live. The Jews kept waiting for his actions to line up with the “good” side of the chart, while Jesus was off asking questions like, “Woman, where are your accusers?” You can spend a lifetime avoiding the mysteries of relationship, relying on categories to save you. These people are right and those are wrong. Forever and ever, Amen. You can lean into the comforting sterility of checklists. Press this button. Pay this fee. Attend this service. Read this book. Check. Check. Check. Buy your spouse an anniversary gift and call that a good marriage. Have the same conversation every time you bump into a friend (How was your trip? How are the kids?) and call that connection. Check, check. Or sit with someone who is weeping and feel the exposure of silence. Endure the stilted conversation. Share the meal. Take the risk. Ask the hard question. There’s a certain kind of healing that comes of being asked a good question, or many good questions. Where are you? In your heart, in your mind, in your journey? How does that feel? What are you hoping for? What are you afraid of? Questions, and the exchange of hearts they invite, open the door to deep intimacy. They bridge the chasm between knowing about and knowing. When no one is hovering over you, waiting for the right answer, clutching a gavel in judgment, you are free to offer the truth of yourself. Free to be known and loved. It’s the life you were destined for before the foundation of the world, the life of perfect union with the God who asks questions.

For most of us, the idea of sharing something we’ve crafted, even after several editing passes, is terrifying. It’s the reason why we stack paintings against garage walls, and why we occupy the back rows of the local open mic night—content to allow the bravest among us to serve as a proxy of sorts. Imagine how much more vulnerable it would feel to make up something on the spot, to create in the present, and allow a room full of people to take it in. What if there was no timeline, no barrier between creation and release? If you’ve ever seen indie folk duo Lowland Hum in concert, you know the reference. Daniel and Lauren Goans are not only capable of crafting acclaimed acoustic releases—filled with wise, poetic lyrics and sparse, beautiful melodies. The married duo is also known for leaving space in their live shows for spontaneous creativity to burst forth—no matter how vulnerable that might sound. For the Goans, it’s an exercise in courage. It’s trusting the muse. As Lauren says, she can feel like an imposter with nothing to bring to the table. What better way to combat those feelings than to dive into the deep end, as they say, and defy those doubts with a courageous act of creation. Click here to listen to Episode 4 of The Resistance. You can visit the official website of The Resistance here. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.