What are you looking for?

These days, I tend to find myself bemoaning my own easy distractedness. I took a little bit of a social media fast in the opening weeks of the year, and I resolved at the end of that experience to be more measured in my use of social media, but let’s be honest: I fell pretty quickly back into old habits. I guess it’s at least good that I’m aware of my backslide? Gotta start somewhere. I certainly make the effort to get away from busyness and distraction through nature, as hard as that is at times. But I’m realizing that even that is not always enough. I was listening to a friend’s sermon recently about Jesus’ retreats into the wilderness, and he expressed how it isn’t that hard for him to be solitary or get away from distraction, yet the greater difficulty is often that of achieving internal silence. I couldn’t agree more, particularly as someone who tends to run hamster wheels in my head. How do we stop long enough to hear our own thoughts, and to let those settle down into stillness? All this brings me to something else that occurred a few months ago. We lost Mary Oliver, one of America’s greatest living poets, on January 17th. While I haven’t spent as much time with her poetry as I’d like, I’ve spent enough to feel her impact on me. In her poetry I’ve found a kindred soul who wanted to walk in nature and write. Mary Oliver’s writing has been somewhat ridiculed as less than sophisticated by some critics, but for me, the appeal of her work has always been its deceptively simple attentiveness to the small things around us in the natural world. I think she recognized this criticism and pushed back against it in poems like “Foolishness? No, It’s Not” (one of my favorites): Sometimes I spend all day trying to count the leaves on a single tree. To do this I have to climb branch by branch and write down the numbers in a little book. So I suppose, from their point of view, it’s reasonable that my friends say: what foolishness! She’s got her head in the clouds again. But it’s not. Of course I have to give up, but by then I’m half crazy with the wonder of it — the abundance of the leaves, the quietness of the branches, the hopelessness of my effort. And I am in that delicious and important place, roaring with laughter, full of earth-praise. It would be easy to look at Oliver’s life as one of romantic abandon, endlessly wandering in and rhapsodizing about nature. But underlying her work is a discipline of attention. As her poem “Yes! No!” so simply states, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” Tangible Items I’m realizing that part of my distractedness and lack of internal stillness is this lack of paying attention, which, by the way, is not the same as “paying attention” to what’s happening on social media. I need to give myself time, not only to escape from distraction, but to observe and listen to my own inner life and the life happening around me. I’ve also realized that I need tools to help me practice this. Here are some of the ones that have been helping me. Back in April, I bought a rosary, and I’ve found it helpful in focusing when I go for walks or pray. Just wrapping it around my wrist and fingering the cross while walking has been a way to bring my wandering thoughts back over and over. I also had this image from artist Scott Erickson tattooed on my forearm just a few weeks ago as a reminder to bring my full heart and attention to each day. Speaking of Scott Erickson, I’ve previously written about the book he created with writer Justin McRoberts called Prayer. I’ve found the short, meaningful prayers and images in it very helpful in forcing me to stop and listen to my own life, motives, actions, etc. Habits, Practices, and Rhythms I think if we want to be more attentive in our lives, we have to create habits and practices and rhythms that foster this. I’ll be the first to admit that I am not all that great at doing this consistently. But some of the things I’ve already mentioned above have been ways I’ve tried to implement some rhythms in my life. Two things that are important for me and that I’m pretty good at are walks in nature and reading thoughtful, reflective books. One new habit I’ve incorporated is following people who are different than me (a white, middle class, cisgendered man) on Twitter so that I pay attention to what life is like for people outside of my own socioeconomic bubble. Sabbath I think the third important aspect to paying attention that I’ve found true in my own life is creating Sabbath, or rest. I’m actually writing this while sitting in a cottage on the water on Mt. Desert Island in Maine. My wife and I have made a habit of coming here most of the years we’ve been married, and you can read about some of those experiences here. We usually come right after I’m done teaching for the school year. There’s something about this island, with its rugged rocky coasts, pine trees, mountains, and the surrounding ocean that’s good for my soul. I feel a little slower and more in tune with nature, for at least the few days we’re here. Maybe you can’t escape to an island (and frankly I get to do this maybe once a year), but can you create spaces of rest in your life that allow you to stop, slow down, and be attentive? What I’ve realized in engaging these practices and rhythms and rests is that my attention has become a form of prayer, of communion with God. I grew up sometimes thinking that prayer was this strange one-sided conversation with a man in the sky where we just asked for things. As I’ve grown older I’ve realized that God is always speaking, in your heart, in the birdsong, in the ocean’s roar, in the quiet among the trees. We’re often just too busy to notice. May that be less and less so.

Today marks the end of our collective study of the book of Ephesians! Thank you for walking through this endlessly fascinating letter with us. We hope you’ve learned something new about this particular letter, the New Testament letters in general, and the way we can relate to them across time and space. To close out, here’s a list of resources for further reading, watching, and listening as well as links to each individual post in this series. Resources The Bible Project Videos NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible by Keener & Walton How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth & How to Read the Bible Book by Book by Stuart & Fee Ephesians Commentary by Stephen Fowl Living-letters.com (Stephen Trafton’s ministry, reading New Testament letters from stage) Instagram/Facebook: @experiencelivingletters Ephesians Study Series Heidi Johnston’s Interview with Stephen Trafton Michael Card’s Introduction to Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians Ephesians 1: The Lyric and Music of the Gospel by Russ Ramsey Ephesians 2: The Cosmic Drama of Redemption by Rob Wheeler Ephesians 3 and the Big Picture by Rebecca Reynolds Ephesians 4: Living Together in Grace & Truth by S. D. Smith Ephesians 5: Walking in Love by Heidi Johnston Ephesians 6 and the Road Less Traveled by Mark Meynell

As the great philosopher once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” I think I deceive myself into believing I’m pretty good at following that advice. I take time to stop and engage meaningful art on a daily basis, sure. But I’m an expert in avoiding life’s stresses by lesser means too. I play mini-golf on my iPhone enough to be counted among America’s top 1,000. I turn that off and check Twitter, then Facebook, then Gmail for new messages and validation. Then I cycle back to Twitter to see if anything new had appeared in the previous two minutes. Somehow, I don’t think this is what the philosopher meant when he invited us to “stop and look around once in a while.” But still, I’d rather be on my phone than actually be at rest. In listening to The Arcadian Wild’s newest record, Finch in the Pantry, I heard these struggles and insecurities echoed back to me. Of course, the delicate bluegrass instrumentation and three-part harmonies made the pill a little easier to swallow. The album begins with “Hey, Runner,” a blistering tune filled with intricately interwoven mandolins and guitars. “You better run fast / Get it done even if it takes all night,” the chorus warns, reminding us of the world’s mantra to prioritize work over rest and quantity over quality. As the song continues at an anxiety-inducing tempo, The Arcadian Wild ask us to examine the speed at which life is currently pushing us. However, distraction is often a much easier route than quiet self-examination. Even as I try to write this, I feel a million urges to direct my attention elsewhere, a sentiment intimately expressed in the song “Silence, A Stranger.” The pleading ballad begins, “Silence is a stranger that I’ve never let inside / I hear him knocking, but I do not dare reply.” Silent reflection is such a vital precursor to personal and spiritual growth, yet it remains a constant adversary to our insecurities and self-dissatisfaction. The daily struggle with silence reminds me of Paul in Romans 7 as he laments doing what he hates and not what he knows is right. However, there is a hope which cuts through every distraction and commands, “Peace, be still.” Our only requirement is surrender, like in the song’s final stanza, “Quiet, I’m listening this time / I need you on my side / I’m out of reasons why / I can’t keep up this fight / I want to feel alive.” Even when we’re able to confess surrender and embrace internal quiet for a time, the world continuously throws stumbling blocks in the way as the very next song explores. The ironically upbeat “Food Truck Blues” reminds us that the daily grind is necessary since “We’re all trying to get our bread, pay rent, and just survive.” Our need to move up in life from “fry cook to the Opry” pushes us to continue taking life into our own hands instead of resting on the hope we’ve found. Despite moments of clarity, it seems the mental “Civil War” wages for eternity. “What if we never really stop?” The Arcadian Wild ask, acknowledging the tendency to remain busy even when they shouldn’t. In this light, eternity is exhausting—an endless “wondering if and when you’ll reach the other side,” as they sing on “The Graduate.” However, there’s more of the story to tell, and eternity itself has already been redeemed. In one chorus, The Arcadian Wild have so passionately and gracefully conveyed foundational theology and exhorted us to hold on tightly to these wonderful and eternal gifts. Chris Thiessen As I listen to the album’s penultimate track, I’m filled with thankfulness for two of the greatest gifts we are given in this life. The first is the confidence which allows us to instead wonder “when, not if, we’ll reach the other side,” no longer burdened by the world’s anxieties. The second is the church, a “body of broken bones” built together on the promise that “together, we’ll make our way home.” In one chorus, The Arcadian Wild have so passionately and gracefully conveyed foundational theology and exhorted us to hold on tightly to these wonderful and eternal gifts. As the album neared its close, I couldn’t help but think again about the album’s title, Finch in the Pantry. I’ve never asked them what it means or what the inspiration is. However, it reminds me of one of my favorite passages of scripture. “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” Finches don’t belong in pantries, spending their days worrying about their food stock and stuffing themselves with what they’ve accumulated. In the same way we have no need for anxiety about our pantries, whether it’s the literal kitchen pantry or the ones we own for storing money, social status, etc. Finch in the Pantry reminds us that we have no need for the “get it while you can” or “live while you’re young” attitude propounded by the great philosopher. “Life moves pretty fast,” it’s true. But what the philosopher didn’t realize is that it never ends. As the album’s final “Benediction” tells us, “Death has already lost.” Eternal life has won. I hope I can experience it as God intended, always embracing the freedom to wander through and enjoy this infinite wild. Click here to visit The Arcadian Wild’s website.

Denison Witmer could no longer comply with demands. Back in 2013, the singer-songwriter was tired of trying to make everything work. He was pushing the proverbial rock uphill in a number of ways—from being a family man for a wife and two young children to his role as a singer-songwriter to making money as a carpenter and craftsman. There was a passion for each, but there was also the pull. The strain felt to keep up with each facet became too much, and in the end, Denison says he was a frustrated artist who was not doing anything particularly well in a life that was already too full. So he did what few of us often have the courage to do. He pulled the plug. It’s been six years since we’ve heard from Denison the Artist. In that time, he’s settled into normal life of work and play, friends and family. He’s nurtured the relationships that mattered most without ever knowing if his passion and talent for music would ever come back around again. Maybe he would shy away from such comparisons, but the sacrifice feels a bit Abrahamic. These days, Denison Witmer has a new full-length album in the works and a beautiful new song, “Augustine.” His perspective has shifted after several seasons away from the craft. He’s learned a lot about himself, his family, and the staying power of his artistic community. Click here to listen to the new episode.

You are not too old for lullabies. But you may have forgotten how good they are for your soul. C. S. Lewis believed a children’s story that could only be enjoyed by children is not actually a good children’s story at all. For proof of his success in defying such a trend, I can readily confirm that his heart-gripping Narnia series moved me more deeply as an adult than it ever did as a child.* * See, for example, the time my college roommate walked out of her bedroom on a Saturday morning to find me in tears at our apartment’s kitchen table over the de-dragoning chapter in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Surely the same is true of lullabies—those mind-easing, spirit-softening, heart-assuring melodies that tuck us into love and peace—which means the best ones must be just as good (or better) for our adult souls too. J. J. Heller explained that she wrote her lullaby albums to be songs that spoke just as deeply to adults as children so that parents could enjoy them too—even if (when?) their kids tirelessly requested that they be played over and over again…because honestly, has anyone over the age of three ever wanted to hear “If You’re Happy and You Know It” more than once? (And all the parents said, “Amen. Preach. Come, Lord Jesus.”) I’m so thankful for these artists. I’m so thankful for their work. And I’m most thankful for the great Author of our faith moving them to pen lullabies for both his grownup children and their children too. I’ve lifted my eyes once again to the hope of Heller’s “In the Morning” when the sun sets with a heaviness of uncertainties and disappointments, looking ahead to the promises of new mercies (Lamentations 3:22) and joy for sorrows (Psalm 30:5) as he satisfies us each morning with his steadfast love (Psalm 90:14). We need lullabies. We need them to restore our childlike heart to childlike faith, reminding us that we are smaller and more dependent than we think—but also more deeply loved and perfectly taken care of than we can imagine. Kaitlin Miller I’ve fought for resilient joy in sorrow with the defiantly gentle battle cry of Christy Nockels’ “Pitter Patter Goes the Rain,” and have been captivated by the bedtime story fairy tale of “Always Remember to Never Forget”—which actually is no fairy tale at all, but our own divine love story of a “maiden so lovely and a Hero so true.” I’ve set my morning alarm for Scripture Lullabies’ “Steadfast Love” to waken me into the day with a crescendo of gratitude and trust. I’ve clung to the assurance of Audrey Assad’s “Little Light” that God is always near, even when the shadowy voices of empty spaces threaten a darker tune. I’ve laid my head down under the banner of Ellie Holcomb’s “He Loves Us,” as the sign-off of one day and the starting point of the next. And I’ve sat under the flood of a father’s love washing over me in Slugs & Bugs’ “Beautiful Girl,” overwhelmed by the unconditional steadfastness of a good father and our Good Father too. We need lullabies. We need them to repeat the sounding joy of the Lord our God singing over us (Zephaniah 3:17). We need them to restore our childlike heart to childlike faith, reminding us that we are smaller and more dependent than we think—but also more deeply loved and perfectly taken care of than we can imagine. We need them to lay us to rest, just as our Good Shepherd makes us (not just “allows us” or “advises us”) to lie down in green pastures (Psalm 23:2), ceasing from our striving, toils, and fears. And we need them to assure us that the safety we felt in the protective embrace of those who have cared for us pales in comparison to the safety of being held in our Good Shepherd’s arms—tender enough to carry us close to his heart (Isaiah 40:11), but strong enough to defend us from any harm that would threaten us in the night. The word “lullaby” comes from just what we would expect: being lulled into saying goodbye. And goodness, how we need this even more desperately as we grow—to be continually lulled by our Heavenly Father into saying goodbye to the temporary, visible shadows of this passing earth, always at rest in him with the sweet dreams of a new world and the sure hope that we will one day wake to find all those dreams come true. We’ve made a playlist that includes all the lullabies mentioned in this post—click here to listen on Spotify and here to listen on Apple Music.

If I were to pursue a blue collar career, I think I’d enjoy truck driving. It’s probably more stressful work than it seems, but the idea of having hours out on the road alone with my thoughts and music sounds like a dream to my introverted mind. There’s something about the road that invites a sense of wonder about infinite things. As Bilbo Baggins sings, “The road goes ever on and on / Down from the door where it began / Now far ahead the road has gone / And I must follow, if I can.” The road stretches forever into our past, reminding us of people who have traveled before us and places which we’ve called home. It also stretches forever forward, offering a lifetime of experiences and filling us with a yearning to see just what wonders the next stop holds. On the other hand, the road in and of itself is a lonely place—a wilderness with no specific address. When you’re on the road, you’re not really anywhere. You’re only passing through with the hope of arriving in a place where you belong. You may feel “Down in the Valley” for a time, but still, that hope is enough to propel us forward, foot still on the gas, down the long and winding road that leads to Love’s door. Musicians (like the one I’ve just quoted) have traveled the world’s roads for centuries, offering us a wealth of songs expressing each one of our wide-ranging emotions from loneliness to affection, homesickness to wanderlust. With this playlist, we hope to provide a soundtrack to your next trip out on the road. Whether you’re crossing the country via minivan with your family or driving alone in an 18-wheeler, may these songs encourage you on the journey and remind you of the glorious destination awaiting you. Click here to listen to our Road Trip playlist on Spotify. And here to listen on Apple Music. Thanks to all who contributed to this Rabbit Room playlist: John Barber, Ron Block, Matt Conner, Randall Goodgame, Lanier Ivester, Jonny Jimison, Pete Peterson, Jill Phillips, Jonathan Rogers, Joe Sutphin, Janie Townsend, Jennifer Trafton, and Chris Yokel.

If you check your internet sources, it’s either Teddy Roosevelt or a biblical figure. The source matters not. Rather it’s just important to know that someone once said it: Comparison is the thief of joy. Most of us have learned well the truth behind this phrase. Social media apps have us scrolling past one perfect life after another—perfect dishes next to perfect workouts next to perfect vacations. All the while we question our imperfect choices. Resentment builds. Jealousy surfaces. Our conversation with indie pop artist Sarah Jaffe speaks directly to the shadow side of comparison and how destructive it can be if we let it rule our mindset. As an artist, Sarah says social media can be her worst enemy, a distracting or even dangerous noise that steals her passion and fervor for what she loves most. Sarah, who has two new EPs on the way (This is Better Pt. 1 & 2) on July 19 has learned the hard way to be very intentional with her time and efforts in her hopes to keep the “Dark Energy” away, as she sings so aptly on her latest single: “Dark energy stay away from me / I’m gonna fight for myself / Lethargy, you can go to hell / You were never really a friend to me.” Join us for a new episode of The Resistance on comparison, intention, and the wrestling involved in it all with one of Austin’s best and brightest.

In 1905, a young Hilda Edwards entered onto the scene in Christmas Cove, Maine, likely weary from her trip from England. She was only fifteen years old and had come over from her home in Bristol to live with her uncle, a professor at Smith College. I imagine the cool, salty air hitting her nostrils for the first time. The sounds of waves lapping and sloshing. Her eyes would have scanned the pebbled carpet of the shore and the lavender-pink sky that fell as a blanket to cover distant islands, which were turning a deep purple in twilight. She may have wondered what on earth could be more beautiful. It wouldn’t be too presumptuous to think that she loved this place, because she traveled widely after her stint in Christmas Cove. And she came back. She saw the world, took in its beauty—and then, in her last act, Hilda returned to make her final home on Maine’s shore. And then she did something curious. She dropped flower seeds. In secret. She let them fall out of her pocket on her long walks to the post office. When she was feeling brave, she would toss them out of the passenger window of friends’ cars. The sharp and salty air from the opened windows made her hair dance wildly, the strands straightened and curled against her face. Maybe it hid a secret smile. If you feel familiarity rising, you may know the children’s story of Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. Cooney magically wrapped all of these stories up in a little girl, Alice, who sits on the lap of her uncle. The uncle tells Alice (who is a young Miss Rumphius) that she must find a way to make the world more beautiful. Miss Rumphius, like Hilda, travels the world. And Miss Rumphius, like Hilda, comes back to settle in Maine and plant lupines. Cooney’s Lupine Lady planted seeds in response to her uncle’s charge to make the world more beautiful. But I think the real Hilda Edwards had a deeper storm brewing. I think Hilda planted lupines out of a longing for home, and I think they fell to the ground like hopeful tears. Lupines are not native to Maine; Hilda sent off for her seeds to be imported from her England home, where she would have seen them standing and leaning with the wind in familiar fields. It’s hard to imagine why she felt compelled to add to Maine’s native Lilies and Rhododendrons in this new land that she loved so much, unless she had a longing to walk with her palms spread and fingers combing through the lupines’ stalks— the way she may have done as a child. Hilda started with a garden of lupines in her own backyard, and then, in the fall, she would cut stalks of them and shake their seeds over a wider space. Next came her secret imports into town, as she quietly expanded her garden wider and wider. Hilda made the world more beautiful in secret, just like Cooney’s Miss Rumphius. But she made the world more beautiful as a secondary endeavor, after first making it look more like home. Maybe it's not that we must first do something, but that we must first long for something. Elizabeth Harwell Last summer, I saw Hilda’s lupines in Maine. These majestic spires spring up for a two-week show all along the Maine coast, and I was lucky enough to be there for it. The sight was arresting and seeing them stirred up the call in me: What must I do to make the world more beautiful? The lupines all stood with perfect posture, like purple and blue maidens, quietly watching the sea. Of course she wanted them here. Of course she couldn’t imagine her life without them. I loved seeing one woman’s hunger for home spreading like a purple-blue fire, burning Maine’s shore with a blooming nostalgia. When I first encountered the story of the Lupine Lady through Barbara Cooney’s storybook, I felt paralyzed by the charge: You must do something to make the world more beautiful. Because, like Miss Rumphius, I think the world is already quite nice. What could I add to it, really? Hilda’s lupines tell me that it will not be my striving for a purpose that will spill over with beauty. Beauty will come from a deeper place— a hunger for heaven and earth to collide. And maybe I have something to give there. Perhaps I can squeeze my wrist through the crack of the door to heaven and wiggle it back through with a bag of seeds. Maybe it’s not that we must first do something, but that we must first long for something. And our longings will fall out of our pockets on the walk to the post office, and they will be flung out into the wind from car windows. And they will grow purpley-blue on the seashore, watching and waiting with their faces to the sea. Artwork credit: “Ocean Coast Lupine Flowers” by Laura Tasheiko

This post is part of the "Behind the Curtain" series in which creators share about the process of making their work and the deeper themes behind it. Houston Coley and his wife Debbie are missional documentary filmmakers from Atlanta and Czech Republic. Houston is a YouTube video essayist, self-described 'theme park theologian', and the artistic director of a nonprofit called Art Within. Read more of his work on Substack. Last summer, my wife Debbie and I spent three months at L’Abri Fellowship in Greatham, England. The two of us met there, so in many ways, it was like coming home. This time, though, we had a mission beyond the usual: we were making a feature documentary called A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers. If you don’t know much about L’Abri, it may be because they deliberately avoid advertising themselves; in fact, when the staff of the English branch of L’Abri agreed to allow us to make a documentary, they did it under the condition that it would not be a commercial trying to get people to attend L’Abri. Hopefully, rather than putting the particulars of this place on a pedestal to market to the world, the film awakens spiritual imagination about a “way of being” that can also be embodied elsewhere. L’Abri Fellowship was founded in 1955 by Francis and Edith Schaeffer in the Swiss Alps, with the second (and now, largest) branch opening in the rolling downs of South England in 1971. Among people who have been to L’Abri, it is infamously difficult to describe with one tidy label. I think the truest comparison might be Rivendell from The Lord of The Rings: a place for weary and wounded travelers to stop on their journey, to rest and engage with beauty and reality, to try and prepare themselves to head back out on their quest. Tolkien said, “Rivendell was the perfect house, whether you liked food or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.” For the many people who pass through the creaky front door at English L’Abri, it can feel much the same. English L’Abri is located in a 16th-century manor house in Hampshire, and students of all ages, backgrounds, and nationalities come to stay during three-month terms—some for a day, some for a weekend, others for the entire term. A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers, the film that my wife Debbie and I shot last year, is a feature documentary chronicling one summer at English L'Abri. The film follows a group of students as they look for belonging, wrestle with doubts & uncertainty, and grapple with finding spirituality and community in their ordinary lives back home. Making a Film About Community in Community During the first month, one fact became clear: making a documentary about community while living in community was going to be a far more complicated task than we’d anticipated. In French, L’Abri means “the shelter,” and as such, many of the people who come to L’Abri are seeking refuge from the busyness, distraction, trauma, or hardship of their normal lives; to make matters more complex, most of the students who were coming for this term did not know that we would be attempting to make a documentary during their stay. Many of the great cinema-veritè documentaries involve a filmmaker becoming so invisible that they’re able to exist as a fly on the wall. In the early weeks of our time at L’Abri, our experience could not have been further from that one; every time the cameras came out, people seemed tense and uncomfortable. At L’Abri, students are encouraged to keep most media technology (computers, smartphones, etc.) out-of-sight in their room, except on Thursdays, the weekly day off. To some, our cameras often felt like a breach of the commitment that L’Abri would become a shelter for those who came through its doors. Despite all of this, in the first few days of our stay, we attempted to be resolute. We were determined not to let a day go to waste without capturing something worthwhile on film; after all, we had two months ahead of us, but every day felt like a ticking clock of precious time (and potentially profound moments) going undocumented and unobserved. Very quickly, however, the workers at L’Abri gave us some pointed and deliberate advice: they encouraged us to spend the first three weeks of the term without filming at all, using that time to be present with the community and get to know the students around us. It was difficult wisdom to hear, but we heeded it nonetheless. Slowly, gradually, we accepted that these early weeks would be for sewing seeds, not harvesting. Fighting our fast-paced productivity-driven inclinations, it felt like God was directing our attention toward “people” over “project.” We needed to work to preserve the sacred shelter of L’Abri that had made us want to make our film in the first place—and as we slowed down, we started to get closer to the community around us outside the context of filming. As artists, it can be hard for us—all of us—to allow ourselves to be known without our cameras, paintbrushes, guitars, microphones, or the other instruments of our trades that can serve to give us a sense of purpose and identity in the face of a strange new community of strange new faces. But knowing a person’s art or knowing their skill with a guitar is not the same as knowing the person. For Debbie and I to gain trust, we first needed to be known also as dishwashers, as gardeners, as carrot-choppers, as guests at a lunch table, as volleyball players, as quiet listeners, and as friends. About three weeks into the term, the workers at L’Abri allowed us to have one of the weekly film discussion nights to show the students our previous documentary, Love In The Time of Corona, and our concept short film for the L’Abri documentary featuring former L’Abri workers Andy and Lindsey Patton. It was the first time we’d ever shown any of our films to an audience of more than one—and both seemed to resonate deeply. After showing both films, we had an open discussion with the community about our documentary plans, engaged with questions and logistics of when not to film, and ended with prayer. Going into the term, our clumsy approach to making the documentary had been to assume everyone was okay with being filmed unless they told us otherwise. In those early weeks of waiting, as we’d walked through the tunnel of overhanging trees on nearby Church Lane every day, it had become very clear that the more integral approach would be to assume no one was okay with being filmed unless they agreed to participate. As filmmakers, it was a difficult change of mindset to make, but one that would ultimately produce more fruit and personal trust in the long term. After our screening night, we requested that everyone come to speak with us personally in the next few days to tell us how they felt about being filmed, either in the background or in more focused interviews. What a huge answer to prayer it was when nearly everyone told us that they were okay with being onscreen! Filming throughout the remainder of the summer remained a bumpy road; some who were usually at ease with cameras could change their mind from day to day, new students continued to arrive from week to week, and the advance scheduling of our filming times meant that spontaneous moments were more difficult to capture. Even so, with every passing week, relationships and dynamics—both in front of the camera and behind it—only became more natural, more trusting, and more full of grace and understanding. As trust increased, our opportunities to capture spontaneous moments became more possible. As the summer drew to a close, there was more vulnerability in everything we shot—and a stronger dramatic question in every interview about returning to the “world outside.” Slowly, that question arose as one of the central questions of the documentary. Increasingly, the students were concerned about the challenges involved in leaving L’Abri to return home and try to embody it elsewhere. I don’t think we would have been able to capture these questions in the same way if we’d started shooting in the early weeks of term. It was because we’d been forced to slow down that our relationships were strong enough for our central idea to emerge. We walked away unsure of exactly what story we had, but certain there was something powerful in it. Sharing a Film About Community in Community In the spring of 2023, we had the opportunity to work on the documentary from North Wind Manor, the building that houses the Rabbit Room. Every day, we set up our laptops beside the fire, put our headphones on, and got to work editing the more than 70 hours of footage we’d shot at L’Abri. Words cannot express the comfort and catharsis of being able to work on A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers at North Wind Manor, a place that could probably also be described as a kingdom of the same things. Rewatching, transcribing, structuring, and editing has been its own tedious journey—one that we are still far away from finishing—but along the way, we found many reasons to praise God for the story he’d been telling beneath the surface of everything we captured. In a way we never understood at the time of filming, this is a story about spiritual imagination and the courage to pursue the vision of the New Creation even in your ordinary life. This past month, we screened one hour of the rough cut of A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers to an audience of around 80 people at Hutchmoot, the Rabbit Room’s annual conference. It felt like a culmination of a film about community to show parts of it in community. The difference between experiencing something at home alone on your laptop and witnessing it with a room of other people in fellowship cannot be overstated. I think, in many ways, art experienced in community becomes fundamentally different art, more like itself. The most cathartic part of showing A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers at Hutchmoot was the laughter. Contrary to the idea of L’Abri as a quiet, meditative monastery with little humor to be found, our documentary includes a lot of the whimsy and silliness of a typical term. Jokes and funny moments that made us chuckle during the editing process generated big, affirming laughs in the room at Hutchmoot. The more contemplative moments were elevated by people, too; watching a film in the presence of other people means that it’s difficult to check your phone when things get slow, forcing you to engage with patience and silence. More than anything, our experience of art nourished by community—both in making the film at L’Abri and in showing it at Hutchmoot—has encouraged us to hold more gatherings to show the film at churches and homes all over when it’s finished. The connectivity of the internet can be a beautiful thing, and we still plan to release the film for free online, but the value of art experienced in physical fellowship cannot be replicated. Funding a Film About Community in Community Early on in the process of funding A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers, Debbie and I received an offer from a small streaming service to pay for the entire film’s budget if we’d release it exclusively on their platform. We considered it for weeks, and eventually politely refused. From the start, our hope has been that the film would be accessible, easy to share without needing to pay for a subscription, and that the funding would come from a community of people who care deeply about the ideas it explores. Despite the finished trailer and preview at Hutchmoot, we still have a long way of editing, sound mixing, musical scoring, marketing, and touring to go. If funds allow, we’re even planning to do follow-up interviews with several L’Abri students again in their home countries around Europe. We’re also creating a L’Abri-inspired tie-in album called “Songs From The Shelter,” featuring music by artists who have had experiences with L’Abri—and our dream is to premiere the film at The Belcourt Theatre in Nashville in Summer 2024. Because of this, we’ve launched a Kickstarter this week to raise the finishing funds for the project with a deadline of Friday, December 1st. Backers of various tiers can get the physical version of the film when it is released, attend various showings when they occur, and be the first to know about our progress as we work to finish in the spring. We’d deeply appreciate having you along for the journey.

Andy Patton is on staff with the Rabbit Room and is a former staff member of L'Abri Fellowship in England. He holds an M.A. in theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He writes at The Darking Psalter (creative rewordings of the Psalms paired with new poetry), Three Things (a monthly digest of resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God), and Pattern Bible (reflections on biblical images in the Bible). There are no two ways around it, Four Quartets is a dense and difficult poem. If you Google “I thought about getting into poetry and then decided not to because it was too complicated, obscure, and opaque”, you might see a picture of T. S. Eliot’s smiling face high in the search results. And this is coming from a guy who named his firstborn son “Eliot” because I couldn’t name him Four Quartets. Eliot can be downright inscrutable. He lapses into other languages without translation. He changes scene and tone without transition. He alludes to other works constantly without attribution. His poems need footnotes - which he sometimes supplies and sometimes doesn’t. Four Quartets is a labyrinth, and sometimes when you enter the labyrinth, you get lost. Despite that, it also might be one of the greatest Christian poems ever written. Though there is joy in wandering on your own through the beautiful labyrinth of the Four Quartets, if you bring along a guide in your initial forays into this masterpiece, you may save yourself discomfort and confusion. In preparing for the lecture below, I sought the counsel of many guides who had gone before me and written to tell about it. I collected their advice in the form of the lecture below. May it guide you safely in your wanderings inside this immortal and important poem. [Note: This lecture was given at English L’Abri, a Christian study center in Southern England that offers hospitality and shelter for people all over the world.]

It wasn't too long ago that music videos were somewhat of a luxury item in music - especially Christian music. In the decade of 2001-2010, it was a no man's land for music videos. MTV and VH1 had essentially pivoted away from showcasing videos, YouTube was in its infancy, and Instagram didn't even exist yet. Back in 2010, I interviewed Andrew Peterson, not long after the release of "Dancing in the Minefields" - his first career music video. Andrew shared, "We live in an entirely different world than when I started playing music ten or twelve years ago. It used to be, if you made a music video, where was it going to get played - on ZTV or TBN late at night? I don’t know how that works. But I knew that I wasn’t ever watching Christian music videos. Now with YouTube, the Internet, and blogging and stuff, I was like, 'Hey, maybe we should try doing this thing.' We ended up deciding in a meeting in about five minutes to make a video for 'Dancing in the Minefields.'" As of today, that music video has over 2 million views. Today, we live in a much more visual world, and videos of all varieties (lyrics, live performances, visualizers, conceptual, reels, etc) are nearly symbiotic with the making and releasing of new music. One of the wonderful gifts that music videos give us is to experience music with more than just our ears. This art form is at times a practical tool like an extra layer of marketing. But there are also magical moments where the music video showcases a deeper level of artistic expression that can make a good song great, and a great song iconic. Can you think of the songs "Thriller," "Take On Me," or "Single Ladies" without imagining the music videos? Here we have selected five music videos from artists of faith - all released in 2023 - that are beautiful visually and musically and draw us into a deeper story through the craft of music video making. "Two Sides" by Gabrielle Grace Creating a story around an artist's reflections on personal grief is not easy to pull off with integrity. The acting, story arc, videography, and artistic direction in this video pull me in and emotionally grip me every time I see it. I'm blown away that this is a fully independent video done on a shoestring budget. It shows that good storytelling is more valuable than high budgets. "Lead Us Again" by DOE The setting is one that many in the Rabbit Room have been a part of - planning and leading a worship service. This prayerful song aligns us with the Holy Spirit as our Guide, instead of yoking ourselves to human agendas and performance. The color orange takes on spiritual symbolism, and in one scene orange paint covers over a detailed worship service schedule. There are lots of visual and artistic nuggets in this one. "Hope" by NF We cannot talk 2023 music videos without this one - from a production standpoint one of the best music videos of the year in any genre, showcased by the over 100 reaction videos by vloggers on YouTube. It is symbolic, cinematic, and with better videography than many Hollywood movies. Plus, this track - visually and musically - wrestles with big themes like defining success, regrets, forgiveness, and mental health. "Kind" by Cory Asbury There is a trigger warning for this one as the concept deals with a death in a hospital. The concept of turning a music video into a full short film has been an effective medium for decades - for example, Michael Jackson's "Thriller," Celine Dion's "It's All Coming Back to Me Now," and Taylor Swift's "All Too Well." In this November 2023 release, directors Kaiser Cunningham and Taylor Kelly tell a gripping story of a marriage in crisis, the hope of restoration, and the bitterness of grief. A lot went into the making of this video, and it's worth the 7-minute ride. "Only Time Will Tell" by JJ Heller The video features a real-life couple who gave birth to their fourth child in 2019, and in early 2023 underwent a double mastectomy for a recent breast cancer diagnosis. The genuine personal footage (filmed by Joy Prouty and edited by Dave Heller) adds an intimate touch that gives the song a deeper context. The song tries to move love from a feeling, a romance, or even a vow and move it into a space marked only by the depth of years. In the same way, the personal footage of one family's real journey gives an incarnational space for this song to have a deeper impact. Dave Trout is a claw game conqueror, pepperoni pizza connoisseur, and indie music curator. As founder of UTR Media, he hosts four podcasts, manages six streaming playlists, and produces events, Kickstarters, and special projects. Find his work at https://utrmedia.org. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

When it comes to information, humanity has been playing a vast game of Tetris for thousands of years. New blocks of information are constantly being formed as we acquire new knowledge. As we encounter them, our objective is to rotate and place these informational blocks into our experience. This was easier for our ancestors. The blocks were falling slowly from the sky. There was time to attend to each one, make a decision, and move on. But those were the early rounds. As any child of the 80s knows, the game of Tetris rapidly escalates. The blocks fall faster with each round until it’s hard to keep up. In the 21st century, information is coming toward us at lightning speed. We have less time to assess, order, and fit things together neatly. We live daily with our failure to join up our thinking. We have gaps in our knowledge and a growing number of things that conflict with what we thought we knew. Today, in the game of information-Tetris, we are in the lightning rounds. We can feel overwhelmed if we are conscious of losing control. We feel distracted when we are not, lacking focus and intention. Time slips away. The music of the game is playing faster and faster and we sense that something has got to give. Information overload and the toll it takes on our attention has become a cultural conversation. Self-help books and mindfulness courses proliferate as we try to get a grip on our productivity, our ability to process information, and our increasingly fragile memories. Often overlooked, however, is our informational environment’s profound effect on our capacity to love. Because love is intimately connected with attention, our habits of distraction shape the way in which we love or fail to love the people and places in our care. What is Love? This connection might sound tenuous to you at first blush. After all, in the Western tradition, we have tended to see ourselves as thinking animals, the objects of our affection determined solely by our decision making. The truth of the matter is that our desires tell us more about who we really are and what we truly love. For instance, I am fully aware of what healthy eating looks like. I know in my mind that it does not involve late night visits to the refrigerator. If my thoughts and beliefs were the decisive factor, I would never find myself spoon in hand, eating ice cream straight from the tub at 11:22 pm. But my ritual of late-night snacking has formed me into a lover of ice cream. I love the pleasure of ice cream more than I love the goal of health. Love is committed attending. Phillip Johnston Our love is the fuel of our action, drawing us toward the desires of our heart. We are driven more by desire than by knowledge. We bear in our hearts a vision of what we want and are propelled toward that vision, often in spite of firmly held convictions. “You are what you love,” writes philosopher James K. A. Smith, “but you might not love what you think.” Love is a fathomless mystery, but one possible definition of love is this: Love is committed attending. Attending is more than just showing up; it’s less “He wasn’t in attendance today” and more “Look how that mother attends to her daughter.” Attending means offering more than a momentary glance or a short period of concentration. Attending is active presence, the consistent application of energy toward something rather than away from it. Do you want to identify the objects of your love? If so, ask yourself, “Who or what receives the most of my active presence?” The honest answers to that question can be unsettling. I may say I love reading and I back up this claim by lining my home with books. What does it mean, then, if I spend the majority of my free hours scrolling through Instagram, playing games on my iPad, and surveying the Netflix terrain? Clearly, I don’t love reading as much as I think I do. I may have had a love for books once, but my committed attending has since found new objects. Or, think of a spouse who cheats on their beloved three times in a short span and each time comes back saying, “You’ve always been the one I loved the most!” The spouse might truly think they love their partner most, but their committed attending has been directed elsewhere, turned toward someone else whom they feel is more fulfilling than their spouse. The objects of our committed attending are the objects of our love. Love and the Attention Economy Once we understand how intimately love is connected with attention, we are ready to see the many ways that information overload inhibits our loving. In our data-rich world, each piece of digital information that distracts us claims a portion of our attention, a portion of our capacity to love. As our digital distraction levels go up, our capacity for real-life loving goes down. The more distracted we are by the digital, the more our love is turned away from those who need and deserve it, and toward the sources of our distraction. Where your attention is, there your love will be also. The struggle for love is only intensified by the fact that we live within the power structures of the attention economy. Our attention is a precious resource for us, but in the twenty-first century, our attention is seen as a commodity, a cash crop ripe for the picking. Tim Wu describes an “attention merchant” as someone who puts forward a product for a low cost or for free in order to harvest human attention and sell it to someone else. In the nineteenth century, the first attention merchants were newspaper publishers who offered consumers free tabloid newspapers chock full of advertisements. Readers thought they were getting a cheap paper, but the real customers were the advertisers.The newspaper was not the product; the readers were. In our day, the bulk of advertising growth from year to year is shared between two great attention merchants extraordinaire — Facebook and Google. With the world’s most sophisticated technology at their disposal, these Silicon Valley giants offer a bonanza of free (or affordable) products and services for the primary purpose of attention harvesting. The information collected from us reveals our interests, our habits, and even our weaknesses. The resulting data allows the attention merchants to profile each user and create an all encompassing climate of desire for each individual – an endless stream of product offerings, restaurant choices, likes, and glittering images of the lives we want but do not have. An internal report leaked in 2017 revealed that Facebook could identify when teen users were feeling “insecure”, “worthless”, or needing “a confidence boost.” As The Guardian recently reported, “Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive ‘likes’ for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder.” It is no accident, then, that we are plagued by distraction here in the attention economy. It is partially, if not wholly, the result of thousands of hours of careful psychological research and data gathering by technology companies who are fully aware of what colors, sounds, images, notifications, and other persuasive tools have the highest odds capturing our attention. The next time you feel defeated after spending more time on your phone than you originally intended, think of it as a victory for the attention merchants. Your committed attending is their most valuable product. All they need is your love. Paying Attention As our attention is diverted for profit, we may come to neglect other things that have a more legitimate claim on our committed attending. That may be a job or an education, our communities or our environment. It may be the God we claim to worship. It could be our partner or spouse. Many children are growing up today with the ‘continuous partial attention’ of a parent on their smartphone. James Williams is a former Google employee who has used his insider knowledge of the attention economy to write critically about it. He came up with our opening Tetris metaphor, and in his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, he offers this axiom to help us understand technology in the twenty-first century: There’s a deep misalignment between the goals we have for ourselves and the goals our technologies have for us. Think about this as you scroll through Instagram and see an ad for that thing you didn’t know you wanted, and that you’ll now be thinking about for days on end. Consider it at 11:22 pm when Netflix starts autoplaying the next episode of your new favorite show. Remember it when you receive a bundle of notifications on your phone in those bleary moments before you crawl into bed to rest your body and mind. These moments of self-reflection will shelter you, if only for a moment, from the lightning rounds of information Tetris that thunder all around. It will provide you with even the smallest bit of energy necessary to take that salvaged portion of your love and to call your grandmother, take your spouse on a date, pray for your children, be emotionally available for your community, or unearth that forgotten hobby that once gave you such joy. In the attention economy, these deceptively simple acts of paying attention to the things that matter most are acts of resistance. They are the essential first steps to becoming a better lover. What exactly we are paying when we pay attention? James Williams says: You pay with all the things you could have attended to, but didn’t: all the goals you didn’t pursue, all the actions you didn’t take, and all the possible yous you could have been, had you attended to those other things. Attention is paid in possible futures forgone. … We pay attention with the lives we might have lived. Your attention is precious. Protect it with care. Offer it with intention in a lifetime of love. Phillip Johnston is an editor, researcher, and speaker based in Nashville, Tennessee. A former staff member at English L’Abri, Phillip is also the curator of Three Things, a newsletter digest of three resources to help readers better engage with God, neighbor, and culture. In his spare time, he geeks out on slow movies, Bach cantatas, liturgical theology, and all things food.

The weird thing is, I’ve never liked U2. From the few short clips I’d seen, Bono seemed arrogant and intentionally obtuse. Pictures of U2 concerts felt too big and too flashy to be sincere. I didn’t like how urban U2’s music felt—all that concrete, all those dirty streets, and so much black leather. His world was a foreign planet to a Wendell Berry country girl. Furthermore, the aesthetic of Bono’s music sounded angry, lost, and scratchy. I had trouble finding melodies and coherence. Lately, however, Bono’s thinking and writing has been used by God to teach me some things about faith that I needed to hear. This began when Mark Meynell challenged me to slow down and actually listen to Bono’s music. I endured a few links at first to be polite—building bridges and all that. But even as I fast forwarded through Bono’s tunes, barbs started to stick. As a former literature teacher, I felt that first twinge when I landed on the word, “Mephisto.” Here I hit pause, wrote Mark and said, “Wait. This has to be Mephistopheles. Did Bono know Dr. Faustus?” Surely he didn’t understand medieval literary figures. Surely he didn’t read books. Mark laughed and told me I had a lot more surprises ahead. Spot on. Again and again, similar realizations came to light. I began to see intentionality, artistry, and moreover, courage to express intense spiritual honesty with the Lord. “He’s a psalmist!” I wrote. “I didn’t realize Bono was a psalmist!” Mark sent a YouTube interview between Eugene Peterson and Bono, and I was stunned as I watched these two great men discuss components of an honest life of faith. This odd, urban creature I had mocked for years was what I call, “One of us.” I don’t find these people very often. The whole record—the doubt, the testing, the questions—is encased in a grace that cannot be broken. Rebecca Reynolds Several years ago, I was fairly irked when U2 released Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. In the immediate months before this news broke, I had been teaching William Blake, daydreaming about releasing my own creation with those titles. When Bono beat me to it, I assumed a vacant pop star had stumbled into a cute angle on old poetry and had wrecked the whole concept. But in the past few weeks, as I have listened to some of U2’s live concerts online, I have realized that Bono not only understood Blake’s tension perfectly—but that he had also hit on the core of why talking about this tension was vital to a postmodern world. So, I have gone back to the very beginning. I’m reading Bono’s records. Not listening—reading. Some of you will say that’s the wrong way to do U2, but I’m trained to be a literary critic, and this music holds up to that sort of scrutiny. Oddly, the Lord has used this exercise to help me learn to pray more deeply. As a firstborn doer, I easily slip into a faith driven by head knowledge and willpower—reading restlessly—trying to avoid pain, loneliness, and doubt. Bono’s lyrics are showing me that my hands weren’t made to carry all that alone. I need to make room and time to be with God honestly and emotionally as well—not just believe in him at arm’s length. Eugene Peterson wrote: “…prayer is personal language or it is nothing. God is personal, empathetic ally personal: three-personed personal. When we use impersonal language in this most personal of all relations, the language doesn’t work.” That’s what Bono is helping me attempt. Below are some of my impressions from U2’s first record, Boy. Before you read them, please know these are not interpretive arguments—just initial, reactive work. I haven’t studied Bono’s life enough to know him well yet, so if you are a hardcore U2 groupie, be gentle. (And literature nerds, this is more of a Reader-Response piece than a New Historical or Formalist response.) That said, I hope showing you how his writing impacts someone else will encourage you to get real with God as well. “I Will Follow” Here is the security of a mother-type love that chases after us relentlessly, even as we try things, and fail, and learn about our humanity. (This is a perfect theological image to begin a record that delves into devastatingly hard questions.) “If you walk away, walk away, I will follow.” What a promise. “Twilight” The transition from boy to man. Here is that liminal space of not being sure how to be. There seems to be a subtle Hamlet reference in one line and an influence throughout. (The late night play is everything. “The play is the thing.”—remember how the play was used to “out” Claudius?) Singer is afraid of being outed as a guilty imposter while trying to grow into this world where even the old aren’t sure how it works. (But the fascinating thing is—Hamlet is actually the rightful heir. I feel that undercurrent in this song, through he never writes it in.) “An Cat Dubh” Clearly, this is about a seductress. But it’s more than that. It’s about being hunted by people who want to use us without healing us. I think in Celtic culture, the blackbird is a symbol of impending war. (Which is why, I’m assuming, he used the Gaelic here.) It’s so interesting that he says, “She waits to break my will.” How does a seductress do this? By pretty, vulnerable, flattering allure. By promise of physical pleasure. A game of cat and mouse. “Into the Heart” Then, here is a post-bad-love affair struggle—a longing for innocence regained. Can we go back into childlikeness after being in such darkness? (This theme comes again later in his records, we know. But I see it starting here.) “Out of Control” Wrestling with the very first existentialist questions we hit. We had nothing to do with landing here alive, and we can’t determine when we are going to die. It’s this weird span of existence that seems irrational and undirectable. Meanwhile, looking back through human history, there’s blood at Eden’s gate—the gate that was supposed to keep us from paradise has been opened by blood if we will be childlike. (I wonder if “I fought fate, there’s blood at the garden gate” is sung by Christ.) It seems like this ties back to “Into The Heart.” The feeling that childlikeness is some sort of key, but we are often afraid to really go there. “Stories for Boys” Seems to be about escapism. But this song reads two different ways, depending on how you look at it. I think it relates back to “Into The Heart”-–but I can’t tell if it’s describing a healthy, redemptive, imaginative experience or if it’s showing how imaginative distraction can prevent us from achieving real childlikeness. Because of where it sits in the album, I lean toward the latter. Especially because of what’s in “The Ocean.” “The Ocean” Another landmark song in the record like “Into The Heart.” The drug-like imaginative distractions of “Stories For Boys” have been stripped away. The writer stands vulnerable and honest before the sea. It’s confessional, as he identifies with Dorian Gray, seeing himself in reality, with all of his inner workings. Weirdly, beautifully—this raw knowledge of his own fallenness seems to be the context for a potential future ministry (in our weakness, we are strong). Note that odd transition from identity as Dorian Gray to feeling like a star. And then, there’s almost a baptism. “A Day Without Me” After a strong realization that he could be significant as a healer on the planet, he goes into what reminds me of one of Hamlet’s suicidal soliloquies. The landslide into doubt—do I even actually matter? What would happen if I weren’t here? So fascinating that he put “The Ocean” and “A Day Without Me” together. It’s so much how this always works in a real soul. “Another Time, Another Place” I know this is set up like a song about a woman, but I just don’t buy it entirely. I think it’s about sehnsucht. It also works as the antithesis of “An Cat Dubh,” which fits if the album works a bit like a chiasmus. “The Electric Co.” So, electric shock therapy. A legalistic, materialistic, graceless jolt after catching a glimpse of Sehnseucht. And this is the worst possible thing that could happen to the kid in “Twilight” (chiasmus again). Brilliant placement here. Because we always just barely catch a glimpse of grace and then somehow land in the midst of a damning, condemning, unhelpful external modification plan. “Shadows and Tall Trees” This is the title of a chapter in Lord of the Flies. Why is this significant? Because on Golding’s island, all of the boys are without mothers—it’s a pocket of humanity that seems to have nobody chasing it. This chapter is one of the most haunting of all, the one most despair-laden. If this song had been on the record without “I Will Follow”-–if this album didn’t work like a chiasmus—it would end in hopelessness. But we already know that there’s a mother chasing no matter what. After several verses/choruses of existentialist doubt, there’s this brilliant bridge, “Do you feel in me anything redeeming, any worthwhile feeling? Is love like a tightrope hanging on my ceiling?” But he’s already given us the answer to this question in the very first song. “If you walk away, walk away, I walk away, walk away. I will follow.” It can’t be a tightrope because love is utterly secure. The whole record—the doubt, the testing, the questions—is encased in a grace that cannot be broken. Such security.

A few weeks ago, I finally sat down and listened to Breaking Benjamin’s latest album Ember, and it has since become one of my favorite albums. Something fundamental clicked into place for me with this piece, and I’ve been trying for the last few weeks to unravel exactly what that is. Bands that fall into the alternative metal, alternative rock, and post-grunge genres have been a staple of my musical tastes since I was old enough to choose for myself. Amidst all the shredding and screaming, I found the authentic expression of a deep-rooted ache—one I couldn’t quite put a finger on until I read Doug McKelvey’s “A Liturgy for Those Who Weep Without Knowing Why.” If you haven’t read it, you should absolutely go read the whole thing right now. Just in case your mouse is broken, or you’ve been assailed by a sudden onset of finger-paralysis, here’s an excerpt to show you what I’m getting at: “There is so much lost in this world, O Lord, so much that aches and groans and shivers for want of redemption, so much that seems dislocated, upended, desecrated, unhinged — Even in our own hearts we bear the mark of all that is broken. What is best in this world has been bashed and battered and trodden down. What was meant to be the substance has become the brittle shell, haunted by the ghosts of a glory so long crumbled that only its rubble is remembered now. Is it any wonder we should weep sometimes, without knowing why? It might be anything. And then again, it might be everything.” Ah, yes. There it is. I can’t tell you how much I resonate with the language of this liturgy. Dislocated. Upended. Desecrated. Unhinged. I once wrote in a poem, “The world is wrong / bent on its axle.” Yet, while many of us sense all that has not yet been redeemed and are filled with an understandable sorrow, that hasn’t been my reaction. I bear the mark of all that is broken. I see that what is best has been bashed, and battered, and trodden down. I sense the wrongness of the world, and it doesn’t make me sad. It makes me angry. Historically, the music I’ve found that manages to capture the tone and expression of that anger lacks the depth and discernment to make it meaningful. Christians are generally uncomfortable with anger; while sorrow and sehnsucht are largely recognized as signposts pointing toward the kingdom to come, rage receives no such consideration. At best it’s seen as an immaturity to grow out of and more often as a revelatory flaw in character. This produces a scenario where those of us who feel anger at the broken world are forced to choose between music that encapsulates the feeling and music that comes from a place of deeper truth. We as Christians have created a cultural divide where the only music left to express such an undercurrent of rage is made by those who don’t understand why they’re angry. Most metal bands—along with their sister and sub-genres—are the musical embodiment of the rebel without a cause, grasping at insufficient explanations for the fury that fuels them and assigning it to whatever seems to meet the mark at the time. They skim across the surface, hitting on symptoms without ever addressing the disease, and leaving their listeners feeling understood but ultimately unfulfilled. Into this gap stepped Breaking Benjamin. With its reformation in 2014 with Dark Before Dawn, one of my already-favorite bands underwent a significant thematic shift, while retaining its traditional style and tone. Ember followed in 2018 and turned out to be the realization of something I have always longed for without even knowing it: the candid expression of rage from a foundation of spiritual truth. I posit that sorrow and anger are merely two roads diverged in a wood, ultimately ending at the same destination. Some of us need to cry, but some of us need to scream. Shigé Clark This album is the most honest depiction of loss and grief I’ve ever encountered. Rather than the soft, pseudo-salving tones of most grief-related songs, the interplay of music and lyrics in Ember drags the listener through a war zone—a gut-wrenching journey of light and darkness, cold and warmth, burial and resurrection. It paints the picture of a man attempting to wrench himself up from a cavernous pit. The way is twisted and obscured in shadow. Ground is gained and lost. Faith is an oil-slicked rope constantly slipping in the climber’s grip. Hope is an act of defiance. Most Christian music is in such a hurry to get to hope that it ends up feeling like a lie to anyone tuned into the devastation of the world—a cheap curtain drawn over the smoking wreckage. Ember dares to plunge you to the very bottom of the pit, leave you there to shiver, and make you wrestle and claw to resurface. When you do, the redemption feels real. The hope rings true. Hints at the underlying source of the singer’s fury are woven through the album from the start. “Feed the Wolf” sets the story off with a rejection of the destructive, violent side of anger, which the griever is tempted to use as self-protection, drawing an immediate distinction between that and the anger that resounds through the remaining songs. Lines like “fight with folded hands” and “stay reformed, erase this perfect world” in “Red Cold River,” along with “I don’t want to live inside this hell / I was born to live inside this hell” in “Tourniquet” clue the listener in to the true nature of the battle being fought in the face of a broken world, even before the album directly addresses it. “Psycho” offers a roiling, visceral illustration of the fight for faith against all apparent logic, calling to mind the laments of Job. Here the listener finds the album’s first hints of the hope we see in Psalm 139, where even the furthest depths and darkness are not out of God’s reach. The album reaches its nadir at “Dark of You,” where the singer extrapolates from his personal grief and at last brings the listener directly to the true source of all the pain and rage: the fallen, broken state of mankind. Reminiscent of Ecclesiastes, he groans over the pointlessness of existence—yet the song ends in pleading repetition of a single line: “Save this selfish world.” From there, the album pivots—not into a sudden happy hopefulness, but as with a renewed strength and resolve, having focused the churning anger toward its rightful target. “Down” has become one of my all-time favorite songs. “Into your eyes I live Beautifully broken Fight! We’ll fight And bury our lives We’ll break these chains And wash it away Oh light Carry me over the ground Heavy won’t hold me down.” Oh man, what a turnaround! I could talk for pages about just these lines (I won’t though, don’t worry). I feel like it’s important to reiterate here that this song is still angry, it just understands where the anger belongs. The faith and the hope are not the end of the pain and doubt, but defiant in the face of it. There are still four songs left. The singer isn’t done struggling, but the struggle has changed, in a subtle but central way. The next song, “Torn in Two,” encapsulates it beautifully in one line, “Broken, I crawl back to life” (with the shredding and screaming to match). The rest of the album carries that theme through, ending on a hopeful note in the final song—like the first hints of sunrise breaking over the horizon: Hope will guide you to the end and there will be no last goodbye For all who live and die, leave it all behind Take away the dark inside, and lead me to the light I could go on. It has taken all of my restraint to hold myself back from diving into a full-scale analysis of the entire album line-by-line. I could geek out over the musical and lyrical layering used throughout to depict cognitive dissonance, the poetic compression of multiple concepts into single lines, or the individual themes within certain songs that I’ll continue to carry with me. Catch me in person sometime, and if you want to hear about it, I’ll talk your ear off. Better yet, listen to the album and experience it for yourself. For those who feel the brokenness of creation like the battering fall of an endless rain and need to weep along with the world, I understand. For those who feel it like the searing burn of a consuming inferno and need to rage along with the world, know that you are not alone. I posit that sorrow and anger are merely two roads diverged in a wood, ultimately ending at the same destination. Some of us need to cry, but some of us need to scream. This album was for me like someone finally giving me that permission. In a world of rebels without a cause, Ember understands the source of the nameless anger. If Doug McKelvey will permit me, I ask, “Is it any wonder we should rage sometimes, without knowing why? It might be anything. And then again, it might be everything.” Perhaps someday there will be liturgies for rage. Until then, there is Ember, and I’m grateful we have Breaking Benjamin to plant the signpost. Click here to listen to this record on Spotify.

The best of us move forward without hesitation. Dave Monks doesn’t operate that way—even though he should. As the front man for one of Toronto’s biggest bands, Tokyo Police Club, Monks has well over a decade of experience writing and recording and releasing music to the world, not to mention his own solo work. At this point, Monks should be moving forward without hesitation—musically speaking—coasting past any resistance that might surface in the form of fear or doubt. Instead, the idea that materializes again and again in our conversation with Monks is one of permission. Despite his experience, Monks says he’s still reticent to put out music that might defy expectations. He’s hesitant to bring something to his band that might be left of center. He’s uncertain whether it’s okay to, once again, carve out time and space to pursue other musical interests away from the band—even as he also knows they will be 100 percent supportive of him. If these sort of doubts sound familiar, it’s because they plague the majority of us who long to obey the fragile impulses that call to us in our most honest moments. Somewhere we feel the impulse to follow the business idea, the writing prompt, the musical influence and yet we’re frozen, looking to those around us for permission to actually follow through with it. This latest episode of The Resistance opens up a raw conversation about permission that’s so relatable. Instead of looking to others for approval, what if we could learn to obey those impulses without contemplation of what others might say or think? Sometimes our greatest fear might be pointing to the change we need to make the most. Click here to listen to Episode 8 of The Resistance.

Just a few blocks down the street is the Eagle and Child, home of the original Rabbit Room, and in every ancient nook and cranny of these old spires and streets and trees and pubs there’s a hint of old poetry or a remnant of a good story. Gerard Manley Hopkins said mass in the mornings and scratched out verse in these backrooms and garden walks. Dorothy Sayers plotted out her mysteries just around the corner. Professor Tolkien noted the prancing pony on the shingle of the White Horse over there. And Lewis walked ’round the water meadow one morning and dreamt of summer coming true. All these years and tales and songs later, here we are. Hutchmoot: Oxford The doors are open. Come on in. We’ve spent a lot of sweat and tears and prayer in putting the weekend together, and we can’t wait for you to join us. JJ is in the kitchen and supper smells fine. Let’s get busy. Convene the Hutchmoot.

During our 4th of July road trip, Kelsey and I listened to an interview with Nigella Lawson on The Splendid Table Podcast. She’s a little bothered by the privileging of the term “chef” over “home cook.” When people are just becoming interested in cooking for themselves, where do they turn but to the illustrious chefs on television with their fancy ways of chopping vegetables? And why should chefs get all the glory? What she’s bothered by is the glamour of specialization: this idea that the specialist, the professional who lives and breathes their craft, is the sole possessor of authority over it. Having been brought up a good Wendell Berry reader, I’m trained to see the faults with specialization, but let’s be clear about its merits: specialization brings efficiency, practicality, and a depth of accumulated craft otherwise impossible. Sometimes it’s good to devote your whole life to one thing. Yet all too easily and all too often, the specialized discipline gets cut off from the whole of life. We’re mistaken if we place final authority on the specialist rather than share that authority with folks who encounter the specialist’s work within the whole of their lives. To continue with our cooking example, specialization is the force that separated so many from their home kitchens to begin with. The assumption became that in order to prepare food, you have to know a bunch of stuff, and you’re better off handing over your money to the people who know all the stuff. They’ll do it better than you and they’ll do it for you. Anything less is considered “amateur”—a word synonymous with “inept.” But wait a second. How did that word get such a bad rap? The word amateur finds its root in the Latin word amator, which means “lover.” An amateur is motivated by affection. She loves the discipline to which she aspires. Culturally, that gets translated to, “It’s just a hobby—I don’t get paid for it.” The subtext reads: to do something because you love it is less valid than to do something because it pays. At the risk of this becoming a sermon, let’s compare this perspective to the Parable of the Good Shepherd. We don’t say, “Well, the Good Shepherd ‘loves’ his sheep, but he’s not a real shepherd because he never gets paid.” No! What makes him a Good (and real) Shepherd is that his love inwardly compels him to lay down his life for his sheep. And this motivation is much stronger than the external incentive of a paycheck, which leads the hired hand to merely clock in and clock out. But our culture lands squarely in favor of the hired hand, assuming that it’s always best for the skilled individual to exploit his skills for profit. Food is essential to life. It’s not a luxury. Nigella Lawson challenges us to give dignity back to the amateur—in this case, the home cook. And that movement is well underway, thanks to the efforts of people like Samin Nosrat and Michael Pollan. But what about other disciplines? What about art, story, and music? As participants in the entertainment industry, we are well aware that a different kind of sustenance has also been outsourced—the sustenance of story and song. And in the same spirit that Nigella Lawson seeks to restore legitimacy to the home cook, the Rabbit Room aims to reclaim the dignity of home-storytelling, home-painting, and any other form of amateur creativity. The mark of a good professional is not that they've successfully left behind the amateur spirit—it's that they have retained it even in the sobriety of their profession. Drew Miller This blog, these podcasts, this music, and these books are not just here to entertain you as an audience of consumers. These works are meant to spur you on to be creative yourself. We want to encourage discussions about how creativity takes place in our lives every day; how the impulse towards art, towards making the world around us beautiful, ought to be realized even if we don’t have a book deal or a fancy studio. (Full disclosure: I’m proud to live in Nashville. We’re home to lots of professionals who get paid for quality work. At the same time, this city is woefully prone to over-exalt production value, rendering all that is un-shiny invisible.) When anyone decides to make the leap from amateur to professional, they must endure the complication of their original love. Their craft will now require a greater degree of discipline, replacing their initial infatuation with a “challenging reality better than…fantasy.” But the mark of a good professional is not that they’ve successfully left behind the amateur spirit—it’s that they have retained it even in the sobriety of their profession. And that’s what we want to do at the Rabbit Room: support those professionals who remain amateurs at heart while encouraging an actively engaged readership of proud amateurs who partake in what they love, unafraid to contribute to this beloved body of work. In the Kingdom of God, the amateur is the one who gets all the glory, because the only thing that will get us where we’re going is love—the love of God’s creative, redemptive work and the unabashed desire to participate in it. This is the love at the heart of all creative expression—it’s the excitement of imitating your favorite guitarist when you’ve only learned a few chords, and it’s the fire that keeps us going into adulthood if we are wise and attentive enough to take care of it. Long live the amateur spirit, and may it thrive here. Artwork credit: “Bookshelf Watercolor” by Michaela Kinzel

There are a number of quarries in and around Knoxville where lanky, dusty men used to blast marble out of the hills before the Depression. In fact, if you read the odd town-centric indie publication here or there, you’ll eventually dig your way into a vein of prose in which some loafered, office-bound journalist will wax poetic about the geological intricacies of East Tennessee’s pink marble. We should all dream so big. In earnest, marble from Mead’s Quarry has made it all the way to New York and the District of Columbia. These old holes in the ground, however, have become the stuff of dreams nowadays. They tend to attract college students and hometown creatures alike to their emerald green waters, beckoning the sweltering and the summer-skinned to the coolness of placid depths. As for myself, though, I go in the deep dark of winter. Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t normally brave swimming when it’s frigid outside (though I have before, and you should try it at least once). I go for the echoes. One side of Mead’s Quarry sits low toward the southeastern shore of the lake, where burnt-out lime kilns lie dormant and families of day-hikers prod the trail map for plans. At the other side of the lake, the hulled rock face towers over the water and creates a natural amphitheater. If you swim all the way out there in the summer—which signage advises you against doing—you can glimpse below your feet the unnerving bone-frames of entire fallen trees, pitched whole off the eroded cliffs above. In the dead of winter, though, when the air is thin and not a cricket chirps amid the chill, it’s the perfect place to play the penny whistle. It has become a winter tradition for me: a single song in the deep of night. I usually play the same tune: “Caoineadh cú Chulainn.” It was composed by Bill Whelan for the Riverdance show, as far as I know. It means “Cú Chulainn’s Lament,” named for the mythic Irish folk hero Sétanta who, after killing the mighty hound of a smithy called Chulainn, offered himself as a replacement guard dog. Like many Irish folk heroes, Cú Chulainn—that is, “Chulainn’s dog”—lived a life marked by tragedy. In one tale, he mistakes his own son for an intruder and kills him. In another, he must go to war against his foster father and foster brother. The melody of Whelan’s tune captures the grief of its namesake better than most songs I know. It’s a slow air, marked by a languorous seventh pickup note that bends upward to the tonic before leaping a full fifth. My favorite parts, at least when playing at the quarry, are the pauses. I bend the final notes of the phrases down in the characteristic style before stopping them, and when the curved tones ring across the lake off the moonlit cliffs, their haunting sound more than makes up for the icy air and the late hour. Why would you do a thing like this? is the question begged by my friends or acquaintances. It’s late; it’s freezing. You could be watching Netflix. Honestly, I often would rather be watching Netflix. A movie, these days, represents a two-hour coma away from the unshakable loneliness and evil that poison the very air of this world. It’s the reason I occasionally endure director Michael Bay’s explosion-by-numbers kits with little more than a shrug and good bowl of cereal. Plus, I’ve been kicked out of the quarry by a police officer because somebody was shooting a movie across the street (no, this is true). This poor man was forced to walk off the set of a horror film into the dark woods to find the mysterious, creepy music sound and tell it to go away. The look on his face could’ve won awards. He asked nicely enough, though, for all that. So I took my leave. So, why indeed? Why should I stay up late and fling myself into the January dim for naught but a three minute song and some aural physics? Finding worth and value amid the frigid darkness of this world somehow makes it bearable for me. Even at the deep gashes in the earth, a song can reflect off the old rock bones of a Tennessee hill. Adam Whipple It’s because I have to. It takes no great amount of understanding to see that the world is a dark place. I need to do things that remind me of the coming light, the One that has come and is coming soon. In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the titular character, a framed gulag prisoner under Stalin, takes an almost unaccountable pride in his forced bricklaying work, even to the point of smarting off at his superiors when they don’t seem to care about the quality of the work itself. Out at the dangerously cold job site, where he is but an unjust slave of the soviet, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov laments, of all things, the shoddy workmanship of the prisoner who went before him. In his mind, he could see the wall under the ice, the outside wall of the power plant that was two bricks thick. He didn’t know the man who’d worked on it in his place before. But that guy sure didn’t know his job. He’d messed it up. Shukhov was now getting used to the wall like it was his own. Even though, according to multiple sources, this is the keystone piece of literature that undid the Soviet Union, what one reads in it is not strictly political. Over the course of the narrative, one develops a nagging sense of Shukhov’s desire to do good work for its own sake. The labor, you might even say, is a kind of play for Ivan. The prisoners talk trash and attempt to build faster and better than adjacent teams of workers. There is humanity in the game, in the playing. Of course, we know that play and work are never for their own sake. They are expressions of the Imago Dei, that thing in mankind which will not be squelched. It’s the same thing you find in the field hollers of American slaves and in Chance the Rapper’s gallows humor. It flows forth from the threadbare parquetries of poverty-numbed quilting bees in the South. It wafts upward from a skillet where an old hand stirs gravy out of salt and giblets for lack of something more substantial. I need it. I need to partake in the making and enjoyment of good things, even alone, even in the biting cold, because my very enjoyment of them bespeaks the name of the Uncreated One. Dorothy Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, postulated that it is human creativity itself that comes nearest to defining the Image of God in people. Like Ivan Denisovich, finding worth and value amid the frigid darkness of this world somehow makes it bearable for me. Even at the deep gashes in the earth, a song can reflect off the old rock bones of a Tennessee hill. Even in a place where men inflicted their fallen wills to sate the material lusts of a wide-mawed civilization, one can hear something beautiful echo back and recall that all shall be well. This piece originally appeared on Foundling House. Check it out for more excellent writing.

“Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind about us. Jesus came to change our minds about God.”— Richard Rohr Someone asked me recently why the Bible always presents God in masculine form. She wondered why God, who is spirit, didn’t appear to mankind as a mother. It’s a fair question, and a good one, though I had no good answer for her. Mainly, I ached for the suffering she’d endured and how it had damaged her understanding of God the Father. But if it is true that God is every moment being revealed in story and nature and Scripture and song and billions of faces crafted in God’s image, what is so important about God appearing to us as a Father? Why did Jesus say, instead of “My Mother and I are one,” “My Father and I are one”? Not long before that conversation, my kids and I were watching Peter Pan, and something about the movie surprised me. In this particular adaptation, the filmmakers took a story about the wonder of childhood and the bittersweet beauty of growing up and added a poignant detail. They cast one actor for two roles: Wendy, John, and Michael’s father and Captain Hook. One moment, the children are tumbling into their father’s workplace, thwarting his attempts to impress his boss, seeing their father’s fury and disapproval, and receiving a shouted command to “Grow up!” The next they’re in Neverland, and the sworn enemy of childhood wears the same face. Daddy and Captain Hook are the same. It broke my heart. Like all good fathers, the Good Father is not the enemy of childhood, but the custodian of it. Helena Sorensen To crowds of confused people, Jesus said, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” And they couldn’t make heads or tails of it. They’d drifted so far from the beautiful face of the Father, had lost so completely the love of the Father for the Son. They’d come to see the Father as bloodthirsty. He wore a look of permanent disgust. And his voice? His was the voice of thunder, wasn’t it? The voice of whirlwind and storm? He was the one with the lists of expectations, the one demanding that they grow up, do better, get it right this time. The loving Father had become, in their darkened minds, the sworn enemy of childhood. They needed a Jesus-shield to protect them from his wrath. By then the human race had come of age. They were desperate for a Good Father. They had suffered, they’d seen injustice, and with terrible determination they’d commanded themselves to grow up. They’d stifled all that was fragile and childlike within them. “Except you come as a little child,” Jesus said. But how? How can a little child find the courage to face that all-powerful being? How can Pan snuggle up to Hook? “And this is eternal life,” Jesus said in the gospel of John, “that they might know you.” We couldn’t come as children, couldn’t trust like children, without a Good Father. So Jesus came to give him back to us. On the cross, as he descends into the deepest darkness of humanity, as he takes on himself the lie that the Father cannot be trusted, that the Father has abandoned us, Jesus quotes Psalm 22. He utters Adam’s cry, and it is the cry of a child without a Father. But Jesus is no more abandoned than Adam was. With his very next words, he places himself into the Father’s hands. That impossible act of childlike trust unravels Adam’s failure. The veil that for thousands of years had hidden the beautiful face of God is torn apart, and at last we can see the Father. To our complete astonishment, he doesn’t look like Hook. Like all good fathers, the Good Father is not the enemy of childhood but the custodian of it. I’m praying that the Spirit of God would turn the hearts of children to their Father. That the people of the world, all children of God, would say, “Someone is in charge and he is good.” I’m praying that the Spirit of God would turn the hearts of the fathers to their children. That the fathers of the world would say, “It is good to be a child, for my children and for me, because someone is in charge and he is good.” May we recover the knowledge that it was God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness (II Cor. 4:6), that all good and perfect gifts come from the Father, that in the Father is no darkness, nor any shade of turning away from us (James 1:17). His is the unchanging gaze of love, and in that light we are free to be children again. Today if you hear him, Skipping rocks on the river, Laughing in the garden, Like when you were young Today if you hear him, Walking through the pine woods, Racing down the big hill, Calling you to come Don’t be too grown, oh, For your own sake. Let the children come, Let us become like children today. Today if you hear him, Let your feet take off running, Don’t worry who is watching, Let him kiss you on the face. Don’t be too grown, oh, For your own sake. Let the children come, Let us become like children today. Let the children come, Let us become like children today. —Taylor Leonhardt, “Today If You Hear Him” This article was originally published on The Story Warren. Artwork Credit: “Security” by Dana Jensen

Not too long ago, The Atlantic explored the phenomenon of people who do Goodreads reading challenges: Start with a set number of books you want to read in a year. Track how well you’re meeting your goal and see if you make it into the elite percentage of people who manage to read something like fifty books over the course of 365 days. Read to improve and prove yourself. Seeing this, I was reminded of a friend who always felt an unrelenting urgency to read more and faster. “How many books would you say you’ve read so far this month?” she’d anxiously ask, wanting to see how she compared. Whenever someone asks me how much I’ve read in a year, my answer is, “I honestly don’t know.” I’ve never kept a list of all the books I’ve read, even though my mother often urged me to do so in middle and high school. I couldn’t give you any sort of statistics on how many books I’ve finished or how many pages I go through in a day. Sometimes I can’t even recall the titles of all the books I’ve read in a calendar year. But I’m completely unashamed of this because I believe reading ought to be an adventure and a love affair rather than a test of willpower or a self-improvement regimen. It’s best experienced when it is gloriously unproductive, a way to simply awaken the imagination and intellect and forget oneself. Disengaging with the daily, anxious drive to always do more is truly challenging. We all want to feel good about ourselves, to have concrete proof that we’re “getting things done.” We have a unique tendency in our age to make everything about data, statistics, and self-optimization: how will this activity make me as smart, strong, interesting, knowledgeable as it is possible for me to be while fulfilling my productivity quota? It’s tempting to turn books into signposts pointing to how we’ve got everything together. But leisure reading provides an opportunity to forget about all that—to escape the demanding stranglehold of perpetual productivity and breathe for a while. Would you bring your children to an art museum and tell them to look at as many paintings as possible in the hour you’re there? Or would you ask them to sit and observe, letting their imaginations roam in front of whatever work happens to entrance them? In the same way, literature asks for a lingering, thoughtful look, the deep concentration of a person fully immersed in the type of treasures only it can offer. The whole book—from the words written within it to the cover art to the feel of the spine under our fingers—is meant to be savored. It’s a beauty to rest in and reflect on, not a mountain to be conquered. Revel in the glory of losing yourself rather than frantically trying to find yourself. Maria Bonvissuto Focusing on “productive” reading habits also discourages re-reading. Nobody who’s trying to meet a reading goal has time to indulge in that. Few things are more satisfying, though, than coming to know a story by heart, sinking comfortably into worn pages and lines that welcome you like an old, familiar friend. It’s a reunion that may be bitter or sweet, but one that always offers you something deeper, if you’re willing to spend time on it. Some of my old friends are Augustine’s Confessions, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. A roommate of mine is making a goal of re-reading all her old books from middle and high school, like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. “An unliterary man,” C. S. Lewis once wrote, “may be defined as one who reads books once only. . .We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.” Wonder can’t be rushed. The writing of centuries of human civilization transcends our own immediate, temporal goals. Truly fruitful reading brings us out of the temporal realm, towards truth and humility. Books shine a light on all we don’t know, awaken our ache for beauty, and quicken the creative impulse in each one of us. Books are a way for us, in some very small way, to participate in the gratuitous nature of God’s love. By reading for leisure, we can learn how to enjoy something for its own beauty, for the reality that it reveals to us. When the experience of reading is reduced to how much we can get through or how much information we can acquire, we lose this transcendent dimension. To anyone who makes their New Year’s resolution to “be better about reading,” I say bravo—but please, don’t lose the forest for the trees. Don’t make reading into a chore that needs to be plugged through as fast as possible because it’s “good for you” like eating your broccoli is good for you or doing more reps at the gym is good for you. Engage with the written word slowly, savor it, and let the beauty or sorrow or bewilderment of it whisk you away for a while. Revel in the glory of losing yourself rather than frantically trying to find yourself. We’re all painfully aware of the struggle these days to believe that simply being is enough and that we’re not defined by what we accomplish. Let’s preserve reading as a sacred realm for ourselves and our children, untouched by the frantic demands of merit and work. Forget the reading challenge and take your own sweet time. Artwork Credit: “Book Pile XXII” by Ephraim Rubenstein

A year ago my family and I played a concert in Sheffield, England. After it was over we stood in a circle with four British friends and prayed. They were fans and supporters of the Rabbit Room, and we talked about the crazy idea of trying to pull off a Hutchmoot in the U.K. someday. The gist of the prayer was, “Lord, we’d love to do this. If it’s your will, please help us make it happen.” It’s no secret that I love playing on this side of the pond, whether it’s Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia (hello, Sweden!), or Europe in general, so trying to put on a Rabbit Room gathering over here wasn’t a new idea. But it seemed like an impossible one—until a few key people sent me emails that said, “We’d love to see this happen over here, and we’re willing to help.” I came home last summer and excitedly told Pete, “I think it’s time. Let’s do it.” As Executive Director, Pete is in charge of a lot already, and he looked at me with a mixture of hope and dread. Planning and executing Hutchmoot right there in Nashville is hard enough, let alone trying to make it work from the other side of the ocean, but he agreed and we started the long process of planning Hutchmoot UK. I confess, we went into it with a lot of trepidation. Not only were there the logistical concerns (finding the right venue in Oxford, filling the roster with speakers and artists we didn’t yet know, travel and accommodation planning, etc.), but there were also translation questions. Just because something works in Nashville doesn’t mean it’ll work in Oxford. Would people resonate with these ideas, with this format, the way they seem to in America? Not only that, we were worried about disappointing people. When we started Hutchmoot in Nashville there were low expectations; we had nothing to live up to. Many of the people coming to Oxford had heard good things about the U.S. conference and we didn’t want to let anyone down. Pete and I had a lot of conversations about our shared anxiety over the logistics—but I kept coming back to one thing that brought me a lot of comfort: the people. After traveling over here quite a bit I had met so many of the wonderful people who I knew were coming. Tom and Rach Hart, who live on a farm in Suffolk. Jo and Michael Tinker, who have been involved in music ministry for years. Eilidh Patterson, a singer-songwriter from Northern Ireland. Joshua Luke Smith and his wife Kara, from Bath, who are both songwriters. Mark and Rachel Meynell, involved in church work in the U.K. (and beyond) for years. Heidi and Glenn Johnston (and their daughters!), from Northern Ireland, who have come to Nashville Hutchmoot several times. Ross Wilson, Northern Irish painter and sculptor. My British buddy JJ, who is both a concert promoter and a chef. Micah and Katie Coston, from Oxford by way of South Carolina. There were also the Americans flying over to help: Shigé Clark, Chris and Annaleigh Thiessen, Becca Jordan, Doug McKelvey, Rebecca Reynolds, Jonathan and Helena Aman, Phillip and Lanier Ivester. You get the picture. There were people, Christians, all of whom are bright lights in their home communities, all gathering in Oxford to share their spiritual gifts with this Rabbit Room community. Jamie and I were both a bit giddy at the thought of all these friends of ours—many of whom didn’t yet know each other—coming together for three days of feasting in the name of Jesus. What could possibly go wrong? Well, plenty could, I guess. But it didn’t. One of the greatest delights in life, for me, is seeing friendships born. When we gathered in Oxford on the first day to pray, to invite the Lord to work his will in us all weekend, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for the way he answered that prayer a year ago with a resounding “Yes.” People really do gather around the fire of the Gospel to warm themselves before journeying back home to tell the story to their neighbors and families again. Andrew Peterson What a joy it was to listen to the songwriters on the first night, one from Glasgow, one from Derry, one from Manchester, and two from Nashville, all sharing songs that came from such different places and yet all pointed to one King. What a joy to watch Pete try and break up the exuberant conversations happening in every corner of the building so people would go to the next session. What a joy to move through the dining hall and see old and new friends sharing a meal. And what a joy when, after three good days, we sang the doxology together in that fine old church building to end the weekend—and then watched those new connections spill out into the Oxford night with a new story to tell about God’s goodness and provision. Sessions and songs and meals are good, but the people are why this works. Everything else is icing on the cake. We cleaned up the church in a hurry so we could make it to the Lamb and Flag (yes, the same one where the Inklings sometimes hung out) before they closed. We crammed into the pub and raised a toast to the first ever Hutchmoot U.K. just before the bell rang and they turned us out into the Oxford night. These things happen, folks. People really do gather around the fire of the Gospel to warm themselves before journeying back home to tell the story to their neighbors and families again. Our prayer is that this little gathering was a nourishment, that it was an affirmation of the gifts we’ve all been given, and that it brought a fresh passion to love our neighbors in ways that surprise us and them. So, on behalf of the Rabbit Room, allow me to offer our deepest thanks to everyone who showed up and served, everyone who planned, everyone who cleaned, cooked, sang, spoke, laughed, and loved in the belief that these little things are great things in the Kingdom of God. Can we do it again next year? Please? We’d love to hear your thoughts. If you were there, what surprised you? What were the little moments of grace that will stick in your memory? What will you carry home?

There are a great many things to be said about Lilith. Stepping through this arduous, masterful story felt something like watching an artist make his first few meager brushstrokes on a gigantic blank canvas: the first quarter or so of my reading experience was an uncomfortable exercise in waiting for those inaugural brushstrokes to find themselves surrounded by enough context to finally make sense. That first portion felt like work—but then, once I reached the tipping point of comprehension, the meaning of the story compounded exponentially, and those first brushstrokes were revealed in hindsight to be inevitable and unchangeable. To step into this world of MacDonald’s is to become acquainted with a deep and confounding logic equally at work in our own world, and the only viable medium available for him to convey this underlying logic—as evidenced by his story itself—is the highly elusive and allusive genre of fantasy. And this is why talking (and writing) about a book like Lilith is so difficult. The meaning of the story defiantly refuses to be extracted or abstracted. If anything, it’s refracted—through the imaginative lens of the reader, only ever glimpsed from various angles, none of which can be replicated. For this reason, getting to know the meaning of Lilith feels kind of like how I imagine it would feel to learn sign language: picking up on unfamiliar patterns and discovering the way they relate to one another, all in hopes of becoming proficient in a whole new vocabulary of signs with their attached significance. Sometimes it takes the tales of another world to bring our own into focus. Drew Miller But once we have picked up on this new vocabulary, what a language we inherit! Words come attached to the stories they tell and the characters who animate them—anyone who has read Lord of the Rings, The Earthsea Cycle, or the Harry Potter series knows this great pleasure. The mere mention of the Elder Wand, for instance, evokes not just a fictional object, but the timeless human choice between power through violence and power through self-sacrificial love as epitomized by the actions of Voldemort on the one hand and Lily Potter on the other. The Shire is not just a fantastical location; it is an emblem of a fragile Creation whose fate depends unjustly on the whims of war, and whose scourging strikes grief deep into the hearts of our dearest hobbits. It’s my hunch that our attraction to such iconic places and objects as these speaks less of some ignoble impulse to escape into an imaginary world than of our delight in and defense of the precious things of this world. The thing is, with all the overlookable familiarity of this world (our eyes are weary of seeing), sometimes it takes the tales of another world to bring our own into focus. When Nathan had the awful, needful task of making King David aware of his sin (2 Samuel 12), he did not confront him with the bare facts of David’s actions. Instead, Nathan first had to bring alive the weight of evil in David’s imagination. And the medium required for this task? A parable: an other world whose tale of injustice would provoke an anger in David that, paired with conviction, could lead only to repentance. Time and again, we humans are most effectively awakened to the treasures of this world (and the imperative to uphold them) by tidings from another. And this currency of story is a treasure all its own: transferred from imaginary worlds to our lived world, it’s made tangible in the unmistakable virtues of joy, hope, kindness, and long-suffering—virtues which yield exponential return, increasing the value of life itself. The treasure—the inheritance—of MacDonald’s Lilith is marked by a strikingly resilient hope in the face of obstinate evil and the terrifying threshold of death. And this hope surfaces most readily throughout the novel in the open posture of children. We learn in such deceivingly simple sentences that “sleep is too fine a thing ever to be earned,” that “no one who will not sleep can ever wake,” and that “the darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also.” And what is the value of such an inheritance? As Rebecca Reynolds has reflected: Good and evil live on slender electric threads of neurons. Pluck one thread, and all worlds resound at once. Harmony here is harmony there. Dissonance here is dissonance there. . . A promise is a needle running through all dimensions at once. A bond is a bond is a bond. What I love about her word choice is that she speaks of morality without sucking it dry of its aesthetic implications. In short, it is not only right, but beautiful to love and do good. When we draw from the inheritance of a rich story like Lilith (or, you know, the Bible), our consciences are satisfied, yes, but so are our imaginations. I’d like to end with a question: What’s a story from another world that struck a chord with your own? What was the “harmony there” that caused sympathetic vibrations with the “harmony here”? I would love to hear your answer and invite you to write it here in a comment.

One of the realities of writing a book is that you almost never understand your first chapter until you’ve written your last one. And invariably your first chapter ends up being the one you work on the most and the one that changes the most. That was certainly the case with The Fiddler’s Gun. In this bonus episode, I’ve pulled out one of the earlier versions of chapter one that contains considerably more background information about the setting and characters. While it has some content I regret having to cut, I’m also confident that cutting it was the right decision. The published version of the book gets the reader right into the story without having to stroll through quite so much exposition. Exposition can be fun, but it can also be a quick turn-off if the reader isn’t yet invested. I’m glad to give this version a bit of new life here in the podcast, though, because I do think it contains some important information that isn’t found elsewhere, and I think there’s a bit of good writing in there as well. I’ll be back next week with another bonus episode in which I go “behind the scenes” as it were and talk with Shigé Clark about the writing of chapters 1-12. And after that, look for Part 2, to follow closely on its heels. Click here to listen to Bonus Episode: Apocrypha and subscribe, and if you’re enjoying the podcast, I’d love it if you left a review on your favorite podcast app.

The song that drew me to The National at first was “I Need My Girl,” and I heard it during a very discouraging season of my life. It’s a worn irony, this aching comfort of sad songs for sad people, but when I first encountered Matt Berninger’s grainy, plaintive lyric “I keep feeling smaller and smaller,” I listened to the song on repeat for two hours. Since then I’ve been a foul-weather follower, if you will. Every time that certain loneliness or melancholy hits harder than normal, I know I’ve got someone who will sit still with me in that place for a while until it’s time to move forward. The National’s new album I Am Easy to Find is like an entire lifetime of those places, slipped into the space of sixteen songs. It is their eighth and longest studio album, and it’s my personal opinion that it cannot be fully appreciated without experiencing the accompanying short film of the same name. The director Mike Mills collaborated with The National to create what amounts to a portrayal of an entire life in less than half an hour. The score tells the story hand-in-hand with micro-moments of one woman’s existence, and the story is thematically linked to the push and pull inherent in that imagery. Throughout, Alicia Vikander’s character remains ageless in appearance in every stage, from newborn to elderly—she is the same person, even as the world and her experience of it shifts around her. We see her losses and gains, her leavings and arrivals, her repetition of experiences over time, her failures and joys. These songs live in the space between deep brokenness and longing for transcendence, always tethered to something more bright and beautiful than their flaws. Chris Wheeler The National surrounds these visuals with a textural soundscape dominated by a series of female vocalists and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, representing a range of identities. And through all of this weaves an unrelenting admission of brokenness, fear, and pride warring against loyalty, faith, and love. The tension is relational, as our love for ourselves pulls us away and our love for others pulls us back. The song “Oblivions” portrays a long-term relationship where both parties don’t really know what they’re getting into: It’s the way you say yes when I ask you to marry me You don’t know what you are doing Do you think you can carry me over this threshold Over and over again into oblivion? Even though the people entering this covenant are different in essence due to their promise, they still carry with them remnants of their old, unattached. They are easy to find, but they are still shifting and growing. The singer admits, “I’ve still got my fear,” but in the midst of the flaws, the other won’t walk away. Similarly, Berninger and vocalist Kate Stables sing together in the title track: There’s a million little battles that I’m never going to win anyway I’m still waiting for you every night with ticker tape, ticker tape. The National’s songs traditionally uphold this tension of attractions as an essential force of existence. These songs live in the space between deep brokenness and longing for transcendence. They are a kind of soundtrack for our current pilgrimage. They aren’t comfortable, and they’re weird and incoherent sometimes, and they wander. But they are always tethered to something more bright and beautiful than their flaws. They uphold high ideals and recognize that humans are consistently unable to reach them unaided. In this way the characters in their songs inhabit familiar space and a familiar tension—especially for those of us who struggle with ourselves in the light of God’s holiness and perfection. And isn’t that all of us? Aren’t we all prodigals, returning home caked with the mud of our wanderings, with fear in our pocket and shame on our backs? I’ve only recently been able to articulate, and that rather poorly, a way of living faithfully in that space between. It has to do with the affections (with help from Jonathan Edwards and James K. A. Smith) and the practice of writing poetry. The best way that I’ve come to understand affection is, admittedly, by contrasting it with my modern conception of emotion. Emotion is something that happens to you. We experience and exhibit various strong feelings as responses to various stimuli—a person, a place, a picture, and so on. Often emotions are fleeting, superficial, and not necessarily related to action. Affections, on the other hand, are connected to both mind and body in a more holistic way. Jonathan Edwards contrasts them with “passions” (or emotions) this way in The Religious Affections: “The affections and passions are frequently spoken of as the same; and yet, in the more common use of speech, there is in some respect a difference; and affection is a word, that in its ordinary signification, seems to be something more extensive than passion; being used for all vigorous lively actings of the will or inclination; but passion for those that are more sudden, and whose effects on the animal spirits are more violent, and the mind more overpowered, and less in its own command.” Ultimately, affections are vitally connected to faith by the inclinations of the will. When we accept Christ, our deepest desires experience a fundamental shift. While we still struggle with wanting those things we wanted in our natural human state, we begin to desire those things that are of God. We are awakened, in a sense, to the loveliness of our Father and alerted to the ugliness of our sin and everything that opposes our Father. In a regenerated person, our godly affections war against our ungodly affections, seeking to submit them to this new paradigm of glorifying and enjoying our God. As we encounter attractions to things that are evil still existent in ourselves, we must fight against them for the sake of a higher attraction. Edwards says it this way: As all the exercises of the inclination and will are either in approving and liking, or disapproving and rejecting; so the affections are of two sorts; they are those by which the soul is carried out to what is in view, cleaving to it, or seeking it; or those by which it is averse from it, and opposes it. Of the former sort are love, desire, hope, joy, gratitude, complacence. Of the latter kind are hatred, fear, anger, grief, and such like; which it is needless now to stand particularly to define. James K. A. Smith, in You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, gets at the same fundamental tension. Jesus didn’t just come into the world to renew our intellect, but to redirect our loves. Jesus’s command to follow him is a command to align our loves and longings with his—to want what God wants, to desire what God desires, to hunger and thirst after God and crave a world where he is all in all—a vision encapsulated by the shorthand “the kingdom of God.” This is why repetition, which we pursue in artistry, liturgy, worship, and prayer, is essential to living life in Christ. As we turn again and again in total need to the face of Christ and receive grace in our brokenness, our desires themselves are shaped. An intellectual understanding of God’s grace cannot change me, but a habitual receiving of his grace does. Like my poet friends in The Poetry Pub (join us there!) I’ve been trying to understand all this through writing poetry. I want to develop a deeper understanding of how to let thrive those affections that make me love God more and more each day. I want to get into the habit of hating my sin and all that stands in opposition to him. So I’m attempting to live in the tension of an attracted life in a similar way to The National, by creating art. Writing poetry becomes a continual wandering and return, a practice in prodigality. Through it I come again and again to the throne of grace to receive what I cannot earn. Through it I repeat God’s promise to me, his name for me, when I have trouble believing both of those things. In some sense, I’m learning to repeat this verse from “So Far So Fast:” Don’t you know someday somebody will come and find you? If you don’t know who you are anymore, they will remind you We don’t see you around here anymore, it’s okay I will say your name out loud and you will be home There are so many things that drive me crazy What you think I am, it’s never been me Hearing you talk always saves me Can you get away and talk to me? And slowly and imperceptibly, with each line and each return, I continue my gradual collapse into Christ.

For the past year, I’ve become deeply compelled by the words desolation and consolation. Neither are words we use a whole lot. But they each carry layers of subtle meaning, and I get the sense that they’ve got a lot to teach us. Desolation is linked with sheer absence. I see this word used most often in reference to a landscape—a desolate ghost town, for instance. And this makes sense, because its verb form, “to desolate,” is nearly synonymous with “to abandon.” A ghost town that has suffered desolation used to be full, but is now empty. The lives that once filled its streets have fled. The body remains, but the spirit is gone. While many negative emotions accompany a word like desolation, the most haunting part to me is that the word itself is indifferent to them. It doesn’t mean “sad,” “lonely” or “despairing”—it simply means empty. Nothing. Absence. Just as desolation implies a past presence that has now fled, consolation implies a prior absence, now filled with palpable presence. And like desolation, it also stems from a verb: “to console.” Those who have never known loss or grief have no need to be consoled. It’s only from a previous emptiness that we hunger and thirst to be filled. Suffice it to say that desolation and consolation are far from opposites. They have much in common: both are always unsolicited. Both leave us different than they found us. And extraordinarily, both provoke song. Psalms 22 and 23 stand side by side for a reason. I realized somewhere along the way that all the songs I’d been writing were either desolation or consolation songs. And once I realized it, I wrote a couple more of each on purpose, and it felt like giving the right name to something that was already happening. And that is how it came to be that I made my first solo record, comprised of two parts: Desolation & Consolation. With my friends Evan Redwine and Lucas Morton, I recorded it at the Art House in three days last January. Art by Mindy Cook I learned a lot over the course of writing, wrestling with, and recording these songs, and it’s my hope that some of what I’ve learned will travel through them and into your ears. Because in today’s world, there are innumerable, devastating iterations of desolation that daily bear us down. If we’re paying attention, the experience of utter emptiness will not fail to find us. We must honor both, because in each we receive the liberating truth of our need. Drew Miller Equally true, if we are lucky to escape cynicism, consolation finds us as well, with a quieter and fiercer relentlessness. “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.” There’s always some measure of defiance in our hope—defiance towards the lie that our end destination is desolation. We must honor both, because in each we receive the liberating truth of our need. We’re taught to hunger so that we may feast. Grief and joy alike stem from an encounter with the gift of being alive and the possibility—the promise—of resurrection. And while the hope of resurrection compels me to affirm that in the end, every tear will be wiped from every eye, it also bids me honor these present tears with the understanding that “those who sow with tears reap songs of joy.” I’ll begin sharing this album on September 6th with the first song from Desolation, and we will step into the darkness. By December, we’ll be entering into Consolation just in time to celebrate Advent. I invite you to walk through these songs with me, paying attention to the questions they stir in you. If you’d like to hear “Into the Darkness” now, click here to sign up for my email list and you’ll receive it in your inbox. You can also click here to pre-save “Into the Darkness” on Spotify.