O Christ Our Healer, There is no end to malady, sickness, injury, and disease in this broken world, so there is no end to the line of hurting people who daily need my tending. Therefore give me grace, O God, that I might be generous with my kindness, and that in this healing and care-taking vocation my hands might become an extension of your hands, and my service a conduit for your mercy. For it is often not an easy place to be— so near to suffering, to injury, to pain, to emergency and fear and confusion, and sometimes even to dying and death and grief— but I believe it is exactly the sort of place you would be, O Lord, amongst those who hurt. So let my practice of medicine be centered in an understanding of your heart. Let me practice medicine because you are a healing God who feels compassion and extends mercy. Let me practice medicine because you are near to those who are in need, to those who face grief and loss. Let me practice medicine as a willing servant of your redemption, pushing back—by means of my vocation— the effects of the fall. Let my presence in this place lend a human face to your compassion. Even when my schedule is crammed with appointments, rounds, or duties, let me never view my patients as mere tasks on a to-do list. Give me grace instead to be always— even in our brief encounters—attentive and responsive to the hearts of human beings made in your image. Let me extend kindness and mercy even to those who are too angry, frightened, bitter, or in pain to respond with anything but venom. Let me especially love them, for they suffer— even more than from physical ailment—from a lack of understanding or experience of your overwhelming grace and mercy and love. Let their time with me be to them a taste that might awaken a hopeful hunger in their hearts. I can do none of these things on my own. Apart from your grace, I have no grace to give. So give me your grace in greater measure, O Lord. Let me find also, in the midst of such constant need, a rhythm of service and rest that will enable my own soul to be tended and nourished— that in the time I spend with patients I will have a deeper repository of patience and kindness to share with them. Teach me how better to balance my duties and my days, so that this work would not make me absent from the lives of my family and friends and church. Let me be well-woven into those communities and relationships, enjoying ample time with them, being available to them, and caring for their needs even as I allow them to care for mine. Let me never be so consumed by my vocation that those closest to me suffer negligence. I would not just be a doctor or a nurse or a medical provider, O God. I would be a minister of your healing and compassion at work in your world. I would be a living witness of your love expressed in a practical care of people. I would be your disciple in this place, at this time, among these people. So give grace, Lord Christ. Give me grace this day and all days, that I might serve you well by loving and serving others in this healing trade, ever laboring in view of that day when your kingdom will be fully realized, at the great mending of the world, at the great ending of all ills. Let me play a small part in that great work, today. Amen. We invite you to join us in praying for our communities, those in medical professions, and those ill with sickness and fear. This liturgy is from Every Moment Holy by Doug McKelvey. We’ve updated the downloads section of the Every Moment Holy website to include liturgies like this one with special relevance to the coronavirus pandemic.

If an individual follower of Jesus might have—in addition to their general calling to imitate their Lord at all times—a more specific calling (or at least a more specific outworking of that general calling) that leads them to particular labors, specific good works, and the focus on meeting needs within or serving some segment of culture, then might specific communities of believers also have distinct callings? If so, how is such a calling discerned, and how do distinct individuals with varying personalities and skill-sets find their places within that larger community calling? On Hutchmoot Sunday two years ago, Lise (my wife—and no, it’s not misspelled) and I were having lunch with Bailey McGee and her husband Wes. Bailey began describing the strong parallels between her vocation as a labor & delivery nurse and the roles she plays in her husband’s highly creative work as a luthier. As I listened, I immediately thought, “Oh, that’s a cool Hutchmoot session topic, this idea of midwifing creativity, of what the larger role of community might be in the creation process.” As Bailey continued to expound on the topic though, I soon realized what she was talking about was actually an essential element of this even larger and more fundamental discussion: a discussion of what it might mean to cultivate a collective vision of ourselves as functioning parts of the body of Christ, mutually nurturing, encouraging, serving and equipping one another unto the end that—as a community—we might multiply the creation and reach of those redemptive works to which we are called. After all, in the kingdom of God, the work of one person is never the work of one person. Doug McKelvey The first step in realizing such a vision is perhaps to learn to recognize how much we truly do need one another, how interdependent the Body of Christ actually is, first on our Lord (whose position as the head of we, the body, should not be under-considered), but also in daily ways on one another. And if scripture is to be believed, that includes all of us. Even those of us who sometimes struggle to see ourselves as anything but weird, awkward, and untalented. Only as we begin to grasp this truth can we rightly begin to see ourselves together offering good service and redemptive gifts to the church, the culture, the world. After all, in the kingdom of God, the work of one person is never the work of one person. When Bailey and I some months later decided to explore these topics in a Hutchmoot session, I offered the title “Midwife Crisis” as a lame pun and it unfortunately stuck. But I think a better title might have been “This Is How the Work Gets Done” so I’m opting for that as a title here. (Any early Charlie Peacock fans out there will get the reference…) More about that in a later post. In this quick intro I’m just trying to lay the groundwork for discussion of the larger ideas we’ll be exploring, which might include: What does it mean to be the Body of Christ? Are communities of believers sometimes called and equipped for specific collective works? What is the role of the individual in the calling of community? What is the role of a “non-artist” in a creative community and why are non-artists essential to the health and functioning of creative community? And what are we, who gather under this curious moniker of The Rabbit Room, particularly about in our shared journey? In addition to each of our personal callings, and the callings of the local churches we are members of, do we as a group also have our own collective calling? And if so, how do we discern, name and cultivate that call together, artists and accountants alike? How do we best use the various resources we have to further the work that we might already be collectively engaged in? Or to pare that tangle of questions into a slightly more manageable tangle: Who are we? What is our collective vision? How do we spur one another on to love and good deeds? How do we function as a community confirming our calling, together enabling and multiplying the work and the reach of it? I don’t envision that Bailey and I will get around to exploring each of those questions in exhaustive detail in these posts. Our intent is more about stirring the beginnings of a conversation here, knowing that others will need to take up those threads if the conversation is to go anywhere productive and have any significance to the Rabbit Room moving forward. Hopefully this will be a good beginning though. And in the final post of the series (if I can wait that long) I plan to unveil what I hope will be exciting news for this community and folks beyond it as well, about a new work we hope to launch in 2020 that some of you will almost certainly have opportunity to be involved in over the years to come. I’m now “passing the mic” to one Bailey Berry McGee, whose presence in the Rabbit Room these past couple of years has been nothing short of a gift.

In a world so wired and interconnected, our anxious hearts are pummeled by an endless barrage of troubling news. We are daily aware of more grief, O Lord, than we can rightly consider, of more suffering and scandal than we can respond to, of more hostility, hatred, horror, and injustice than we can engage with compassion. But you, O Jesus, are not disquieted by such news of cruelty and terror and war. You are neither anxious nor overwhelmed. You carried the full weight of the suffering of a broken world when you hung upon the cross, and you carry it still. When the cacophony of universal distress unsettles us, remind us that we are but small and finite creatures, never designed to carry the vast abstractions of great burdens, for our arms are too short and our strength is too small. Justice and mercy, healing and redemption, are your great labors. And yes, it is your good pleasure to accomplish such works through your people, but you have never asked any one of us to undertake more than your grace will enable us to fulfill. Guard us then from shutting down our empathy or walling off our hearts because of the glut of unactionable misery that floods our awareness. You have many children in many places around this globe. Move each of our hearts to compassionately respond to those needs that intersect our actual lives, that in all places your body might be actively addressing the pain and brokenness of this world, each of us liberated and empowered by your Spirit to fulfill the small part of your redemptive work assigned to us. Give us discernment in the face of troubling news reports. Give us discernment to know when to pray, when to speak out, when to act, and when to simply shut off our screens and our devices, and to sit quietly in your presence, casting the burdens of this world upon the strong shoulders of the one who alone is able to bear them up. Amen. This liturgy is from Every Moment Holy by Doug McKelvey. We’ve updated the downloads section of the Every Moment Holy website to include liturgies like this one with special relevance to the coronavirus pandemic.

The other day my wife found the artifact. While cleaning out the basement, she emerged upstairs with a dusty, unopened box containing a Yeti microphone, an ideal mic for beginning podcasters. Taped to the side was the receipt dated April, 2013. I could only shake my head and smile. I knew I’d felt the resistance for several years but here was proof. A full six years before I’d launched the podcast called The Resistance, a series all about facing your fears, I’d bought the tools to do it only to leave them in a basement. Six years. * * * I couldn’t stop quitting even after I’d decided to start the podcast. In fact, I’d already spent a couple thousand dollars by the time I quit for the tenth time. Those aren’t exaggerations in either direction. I’m the kind of person who needs the perfect environment before I can start something. The dishes in the other room have to be done before I can write at home. My own writing environment has to be pristine. It’s just the way I’ve always worked (really, they’re the excuses I’ve always made). That means I had to spend money before I started the podcast. Forget the Yeti, since that’s for beginners (and so old now). You only get one shot, Eminem once told me, and I wanted to make sure I had it right—at least as right as you can have it when you’re a beginner. Before any guests had been booked or a single practice run had been made, I’d bought a nice microphone and stand, a pre-amp and something called a CloudLifter. I hired someone to create a logo and another designer to make a web site. I commissioned yet another friend to write the theme song. For several weeks, I went back and forth with each creative partner. Less of this. More of that. I’m thinking something else entirely. Even after everything was in place, I couldn’t stop quitting. After holding onto the idea for seven years, after buying my first mic six years earlier, it still took about eleven months to announce that I had a finished product ready to roll out. In fact, I had the interviews finished for every single episode six months before I released anything at all. I quit every single stage of this creative process (and not in a I-just-need-a-day-away-from-this sort of emotional moment). At every turn, it became too much. The fears were overwhelming. The doubts were suffocating. No one was waiting for this podcast. No one was asking for me to do this. I was already plenty busy, and the idea of putting myself out there in this way felt like a needlessly humiliating exercise. I felt vulnerable and alone and reached for every fig leaf I could find for some time. A quick re-introduction for those of you who are new to the podcast. The Resistance is an interview-based podcast inspired by Stephen Pressfield’s book The War of Art. In each episode, we ask various people in the creative arts to respond to a single statement: “Most of us have two lives: the life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands the Resistance.” We then allow the conversation to flow from there. It's my deepest desire that these conversations can offer hope, encouragement, challenge, perspective, and language for the Resistance that you face as well. Matt Conner I’ve been in music/entertainment journalism for nearly 20 years now and I’ve interviewed over 2,000 artists and authors, composers and directors in that time. My conversations have always occupied the deeper end of the pool, and when I read Pressfield’s book the first time, I recognized that most of my stories centered around some form of Resistance. It wasn’t long until the idea of a podcast took shape. It took seven years because of my own resistance, but it was always about a single goal: helping others face their own resistance. * * * Today we’re thrilled to announce The Resistance is back—for good. And we’re bringing a few changes along with us. First, there are no more seasons. What began as “Season One” is now an ongoing podcast. Second, we have a reintroduction episode today and next week, we’ll sit down with Knives Out composer Nathan Johnson. From there, we’ll have a new interview every two weeks! I’m thrilled with our early conversations already ready to go, with poets like Li-Young Lee and Jericho Brown, artists like Sierra Hull, Mindy Smith and Alex Ebert (the man behind Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros), and bands like The Lone Bellow and Stars. Finally, we’ve got a more conversational approach this time around. My close friend Jay Kirkpatrick—who some of you might know as the musical right hand for Josh Garrels—has been the glue all along in this endeavor as the audio engineer, and you’ll hear more from him this season along with a new friend, Isaac Pellerin, who is helping in several ways. As always, it’s my deepest desire that these conversations can offer hope, encouragement, challenge, perspective, and language for the Resistance that you face as well. We look forward to meeting you on the journey ahead. Click here to listen to “The Resistance: A Reintroduction.”

The deluge of frightful information we wake up to daily—though helpful in navigating a disease-ridden world with wisdom and love—ceases to be helpful when it eclipses everything else in sight. So when the Rabbit Room staff gathered on Monday to ask what it means to do the work before us in such a time as this, the answer took the familiar form of providing content that would contribute to the health of our imaginations, the sustaining of hope, and the de-escalation of anxiety—from our homes to yours. So consider this following list to be a sort of digital care package for you and your loved ones. We hope these resources help you retain peace, endurance, and even togetherness (though of the technological kind) in days that threaten chaos. The Local Show: Streaming Edition Last night we began The Local Show: Streaming Edition, an in-the-round show where each artist tunes in from their own homes to share some songs. We’ll be doing our best to host one of these every Tuesday night until social distancing measures are lifted. Our hope is to provide a weekly opportunity to gather together, even if only online, to be nourished by some tunes. These concerts will be accessible via Facebook and YouTube. In addition, we are encouraging viewers to make donations to our Facebook fundraiser for touring musicians. As a result of the coronavirus, many artists have had to cancel their shows, which can be devastating when touring is the main source of income, so we want to do whatever we can to help. 100% of funds raised will go directly to touring artists who have lost shows due to current events. Slugs & Bugs Online Sing-Alongs Yesterday morning, Slugs & Bugs livestreamed a special sing-along. Don’t think they’re not going to do that again! (Psst: rumor has it that their next sing-along will take place on Saturday at 4:00pm.) Follow Slugs & Bugs on Facebook and Instagram to know when to tune in. Gullahorn Happy Hour: Quarantine Edition Andy and Jill Gullahorn went live on Facebook Monday night for what they dubbed Gullahorn Happy Hour: Quarantine Edition. They sang songs, took requests, and provided a bit of camaraderie for all of us stuck at home. They’ll be doing more of those, too—stay tuned at Andy’s Facebook and Instagram pages to know when the next livestream will happen. Wingfeather Saga Readalong with Andrew Peterson Beginning on Friday, Andrew Peterson will be reading On the Edge of The Dark Sea of Darkness every night at 7:00pm via Facebook Live. Tune in nightly at Andrew’s Facebook page to journey through this story together. Fin’s Revolution with A. S. Peterson Now is a great time to dig into the Fin’s Revolution Podcast, wherein A. S. Peterson reads through the entirety of The Fiddler’s Gun (and yes, he does all the voices). If you’d like to read this marvelous book, and you’d like the author himself to read it to you, then look no further. Online Read-Aloud & Resources: Jennifer Trafton Jennifer has an e-newsletter that includes reading recommendations, creative prompts, occasional free coloring pages, and other resources. Click here to sign up. Starting March 19th and continuing through April 4th, Jennifer will be doing a live read-aloud of Henry and the Chalk Dragon every day at 10:00am CST. Join in at Jennifer’s Facebook page. Jennifer teaches online creative writing classes for kids and families. They are independent study and thus open to all ages, though they’re aimed primarily at 8-13 year olds. She’s currently offering a 15% off coupon for any one of her 6-week classes (“Playing with Words,” “What If,” and “Spies in the Universe”)—just use the code BECREATIVE2020. There is also a free Henry and the Chalk Dragon class, plus she plans to add more short workshops in the coming weeks. Click here to register for one of Jennifer’s online classes. Online Classes: Jonathan Rogers Free Stuff Thursday, March 19th at 7:30pm—Jonathan’s free monthly webinar. A scintillating discussion of commas! If you can apply eight or ten clear rules, you can get your commas right every time. The less-good news about commas is that you have to know a good bit of grammar in order to apply those eight or ten rules. In this webinar, we will review the comma rules as well as the underlying grammar that governs their use. Click here to register. Saturday, March 21st at 10:00am—A Facebook Live mini-lesson drawn from Jonathan’s upcoming Writing With Atticus online class. This one will be about finding your unique voice. Scout Finch, the first-person narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird, has one of the most unique and compelling voices in American literature. In this thirty-minute lesson, drawn from his upcoming “Writing With Atticus” class, author and teacher Jonathan Rogers will discuss voice in Harper Lee’s classic and consider ways you as a writer can find and express your unique voice. Click here to learn more. And after Jennifer finishes her read-aloud, Jonathan will run a Bog Owl book club. Details to come. Not-Free Stuff Writing With Atticus. Thursday afternoons, April 2nd—May 7th. Participants will read through To Kill a Mockingbird together with an eye to see what Harper Lee can teach about writing. (For adults and high-schoolers). Click here for more information. Fiction Workshop. March 30th—April 24th. In this four-week intensive on fiction-writing, participants will work on a single story (5000 words max) for the whole four weeks, writing and rewriting, getting feedback from Jonathan as well as from fellow writers. Limited to 6 participants. Click here to register. Great Homeschool Convention Resource Package One especially disappointing result of the pandemic was that we had to cancel our involvement in the next few homeschool conventions. Though there’s no replacement for getting to see you in person, we’re providing some free homeschooling resources for the next month at the following links: Henry & the Chalk Dragon Curriculum Guide (by Jennifer Trafton) The Wilderking Trilogy Curriculum Guide (by Jonathan Rogers) The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog Reading Guide (by Doug McKelvey) These guides contain a wealth of fun activities to accompany the books themselves—hours of learning and fun for you and your family. Hutchmoot 2013 Complete Audio Archive This archive contains seventeen hours of audio from sessions like “The Art of Hymnody” with Keith Getty and Kevin Twit, “Writing Close to the Earth” with Andrew Peterson and Jonathan Rogers, and Leif Enger’s keynote address. Hutchmoot 2014 Complete Audio Archive And this archive includes over eighteen hours of audio from sessions like “The Whole World is Listening In” with Charlie Peacock, “Working with the Better Half” with Don Chaffer, Lori Chaffer, Andy Gullahorn, & Jill Phillips, and Luci Shaw’s keynote address. Both archives are normally available for $30 in our store, but we’re giving them away for free for the next month. Every Moment Holy: Free Liturgy Downloads Lastly, we’ve curated a collection of liturgies from Every Moment Holy that carry special significance for the time in which we find ourselves. Visit EveryMomentHoly.com/Liturgies for free downloads of these choices, including “For Those Flooded by Too Much Information,” “For a Sick Day,” and “For Medical Providers.” All of us are familiar with that tired question, “What use is art?” At times, it’s difficult to answer, and we’re hard-pressed to point to the tangible results of singing, storytelling, and mundane acts of creativity. And yet, when that question exits the realm of theory and enters the world of immediate experience, the answer becomes as simple as it is clear: art pushes against the darkness, fortifies the soul, and lightens our burdens. In times like these, it’s abundantly clear that art is no mere luxury. So as long as the darkness bears us down, we invite you to join us in lighting a candle.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Lee Camp, author of Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians. A man of many interests, Lee Camp is a theology professor, the host of the Tokens variety show, and the author of Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians. In this episode, Jonathan and Lee discuss Lee’s controversially orthodox assertions, the necessity for a hermeneutic of love, and the inextricability of true hope and the courage to encounter a new story. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 12 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

As a child, I heard a lot about the end of the world—the mark of the Beast, the demise of America, the million-man army that would spread destruction over the face of the earth. Things were going badly wrong, they said, and soon the sun would be darkened. And being an earnest child, I went about gathering fears and confirmations of doom and storing them away like cankerous fruit. I was thirty years old before I considered the possibility that the Apocalypse might not be imminent. I can tell you where I was when it happened. I was standing in a back room of our house, watching sunlight stream through the leaves of the poplar tree. I was talking on the phone with a friend, and he made a comment about the kingdom of God growing and spreading, bringing love and light to everything it touched. I knew that moment was significant, even as I stared out the window, trying to follow his train of thought. Could it be? Was there an alternate ending to the story? What if, through struggle and hardship, we were pressing toward a fuller revelation of the love of God? What if the Spirit was moving and working in ways that brought hope and healing and joy? I could hardly take it in. My understanding of the future had been cemented in my thinking. It would take time to find a crack and grow through it. Turns out, that’s what my writing career has been. I’ve spent the last decade trying to imagine a different ending for the story of humanity. I did it in the Shiloh Series. After ages of darkness, light breaks through the Shadow, and the people are dazzled by the revelation of all they did not see. I’m doing it again in The Door on Half-Bald Hill, journeying with suffering people toward an expected, and terrible, end. And though it is strange to say, I love the people of Blackthorn. I love Idris and Corann and Deirdre and Muriel. I love Barra, the chief with the spear in his hand, and the rambunctious fosterlings and Calder and Shannan, the elderly couple who live by the ash tree. I love them because their imaginations have failed them as thoroughly as their leaders have failed them, as the old ways have failed them, as the world has failed them. They move me because I know just how that feels. They move me, too, with their dogged determination to carry on. They cannot help themselves. It’s the way they see the world. One of the beautiful things about the ancient Celtic people was their concept of flow. As I built the world of Tír Ársa, I read several books of Celtic myths, Irish fairy tales and folklore, and ancient Irish history. In my reading, I came across a description of Celtic thought that stuck with me and ultimately served as the frame for the story. One writer described the Celts as a kind of foil to the Romans. The Romans, he said, insisted on “life marked out in squares.” They built straight roads and sent square units of soldiers, unfeeling phalanxes, to conquer the world, to claim yet more land and draw yet more squares. Their minds were full of lines and corners. What if there is time for the wine to ferment, time to hold a feast in celebration? What if we are not abandoned, and the story arcs toward something wonderful? Helena Sorensen The Celts rejected such thinking. For them, everything was woven together. Everything flowed. Time was fluid. Life was fluid. Feelings arced and curved like the landscape. And all things were bound together, bending over and back again, winding gracefully toward some unexpected destination. They lived with a joyful sense of impermanence. They had no written language, and their houses, stables, and meeting halls were constructed with wood, with no thought that they should stand the test of time. They built walls without mortar, stacking dry stones one upon another, knowing their sons and daughters could reclaim the stones and rebuild as they saw fit. For them, life was rounded, each year a circle, a wheel that rolled on and on. They ran onto the battlefield pell-mell, naked and painted and screaming. The Romans looked down their noses and called them barbarians, but they were terrified by the intensity of their passion. In Roman thought, the Celts saw an ordered, bloodless stagnancy, and they would live to extremes to avoid it. By all accounts, they were glad to die on the battlefield, for the fighting made them feel alive, and death was merely a curve in the endless flow of existence. Illustration by Stephen Crotts. Click to preorder The Door on Half-Bald Hill. I wonder about our inclination to shape our lives as the Romans did. We build houses and cities on square plots of land. Our time is stacked like blocks—square days lining up to make square months that pile into years. We seek straight lines of ascendancy and conquest. But we’re always bumping into limits. We’re blocked by ceilings of rigid thought. Move outside the square and you’re in danger of being impaled on a sharp corner. But where is the turn? The flow? Our imaginations fall short. There’s a scene in The Door on Half-Bald Hill when Idris, the bard, asks Llyr, the old fisherman, how long he’ll continue to sail the seas in his coracle. Llyr’s labor has been fruitless; his one small victory has proven empty. Yet Llyr responds with scorn, as though the question offends him deeply. “As long as the wind blows,” he says. In another scene, Idris is far from the village. It’s time to harvest sloeberries and brambleberries and make hedgerow wine. But Idris realizes with horror that there may not be time for the fruit to ferment. Will they take the trouble to pick the berries, he wonders, when they’re likely to die before the wine is ready? It’s a moment of panic, when Idris bumps against an expected ending. But the people of Blackthorn, knowing what he knows and being no fools, still harvest the berries. They set them in buckets to ferment. They persist in the flow of life, trusting, beyond all reason, in the bends and turns that shape the world into unanticipated beauty. They move forward, afraid and yet determined, until the moment when the ending surprises them. My longing for new endings has not diminished. Maybe I will always be writing my way toward them. How better to stretch my imagination beyond the ordered squares of doom that are every day presented to me? What if there is time for the wine to ferment, time to hold a feast in celebration? What if we are not abandoned, and the story arcs toward something wonderful? What if there is room to imagine a million different endings? Click here to preorder The Door on Half-Bald Hill in the Rabbit Room Store. Illustration by Stephen Crotts

I was supposed to be on a plane to Ireland this morning. We were supposed to spend St. Patrick’s Day with our dear friends Heidi and Glenn outside of Belfast; catch AP’s concert in Newtownards; catch a ferry next weekend over to Scotland. We’d booked our car, our cottage in the Lake District (once owned by Beatrix Potter, no less!), and our city-hopper from London back to Dublin. And we’d reserved our seats, months in advance, at the famed Sheldonian Theatre, for my Oxford Awards Ceremony—a panoply and circumstance to cap off four years of study and ambition (and not a little daydreaming). I got the email from the University on Thursday: the ceremony had been cancelled. Not postponed or rescheduled—cancelled. A word we’ve become all-too-familiar with of late, but which greeted my tear-blurred eyes that morning with brutal finality. Such a sad end to my academic journey. And what was done could not be undone. All the rest of that day I carried the grief of the thing in a heart already over-capacity with anxiety and uncertainty. Should we travel at all? Philip and I asked each other eleventy-dozen times. We messaged our friends in the U.K.; we prayed; we obsessed over Google News. By the time we officially pulled the plug, the decision had all but been made for us. Nevertheless, it all felt so horribly wrong. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick,” I told Heidi. “Yes,” she replied. “But it’s only deferred. As a wise man once said, ‘We’ll look back on these tears as old tales…'” I knew she was right. And I also knew that missing out on a special trip was a very privileged sort of suffering compared to the real hardships others were facing. My own misery, however, was such compelling company that I slouched through the next day or so with the air of one the whole world had injured. Within twenty-four hours, of course, the rest of the world was disappointed, inconvenienced, and otherwise thwarted right along with me. I stood outside Costco, fingering my membership card, wondering if it was worth it to brave those empty shelves and hour-long lines for a couple of cauliflower-crust pizzas and hopefully a pound or two of fresh tomatoes. (It wasn’t.) At Kroger, the wine aisle was the only one that seemed untouched by the pre-National Emergency chaos. “Why aren’t people stocking up on this?” one of my fellow shoppers wanted to know. “I know, right?” I said with a laugh, scanning the selection. I went with a Chianti. In solidarity. Despite such brief levity, however, I couldn’t help but notice that things felt different—charged with a mutual apprehension I had not known since September of 2001. No one was rude or pushy or greedy (I hadn’t been there when the now sold-out toilet paper was delivered, of course). They were just—careful. Everyone seemed extra-sensitive about butting their cart in front of another’s at the end of an aisle, or of displaying the least allergenic sniffle. Most poignant were the older people, threading nearly empty carts white-knuckled among nearly empty shelves. I wanted to stop every one of them and say, “Here—let me shop for you!” Only, apart from the cans of Le Sueur English peas and rag-tag frozen dinners they’d already managed to procure, there wasn’t a whole lot to choose from. Let boredom clear the ground of your soul. Translate your disappointment and fear into something tangibly, defiantly beautiful. Lanier Ivester Later that afternoon, I sat in the waiting room at the vet’s office, my cat Wemmick in a crate at my feet. I usually pass the time in such cases with a book, or a quick perusal of Instagram. But on this occasion, I couldn’t take my eyes off the people around me. Some were clutching leashes, awaiting test results. One woman hustled past, dashing tears away, with an empty collar in her hands. An elderly couple had their eyes glued on the television in the corner, with its relentless red headlines racing across the screen. I caught the woman’s gaze for a moment, and my own faltered under the fear I read there. The last of my self-pity slunk away, I think, under that haunting look. Where would that woman find herself in the lineup of a triage situation if things got really bad? Suddenly, staying home seemed way less of an injustice than a rather chastened act of love. Last week, just days before we were to depart for Europe, our beloved Rabbit Room compatriot and master gardener Julie Witmer came for a flying visit. We walked all over the yard making notes and staking off beds. We drank copious amounts of Yorkshire Gold. We dug iris tubers and daffodil bulbs in a mizzling rain. And through it all we talked about the incarnational work of making a garden, a home, a life. “It matters,” Julie said, looking up from a sketch of my new kitchen plot. “Everything matters—more than we know.” I couldn’t agree more. If we believe that the Kingdom of heaven is already among us, then every creative thing we do is an act of reclamation, be it settling an iris where it really wants to flourish, growing food in our backyard, or brainstorming unique ways to care for people from a distance. Pandemic conditions do not alter the fact that the work of our hearts, hands, and minds enflesh unseen realities, or that redemption is something God invites us to participate in—even in ‘circumstances that seem unpropitious.’ The fact is, we’re suddenly living under a worldwide Golden Rule. Few of us have ever had the opportunity to care for total strangers in such a wholesale, practical capacity. For all its disruptions, this virus is teaching us an unforgettable thing or two about loving our neighbor as ourselves. I’m sad that I can’t jump on a plane and be with people I love right now, and I’m sad to miss a once-in-a-lifetime experience at the Sheldonian. But far more than that, I’m desperately grateful to know that we still live in a world that values some of its most vulnerable. I take heart in the fact that we’re willing to collectively care for our at-risk, be it the ill, the immune-compromised, or the elderly. My newsfeed is thronged with worst-case scenarios and end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it forecasts. But it also tells me that quarantined Italians are singing from their balconies, and that healthy people in my own county are willingly curbing their freedoms for the sake of people they will never know. It may seem counter-intuitive (it certainly seems unprecedented) but we really can socially distance out of love, instead of isolating out of fear. We can stay small, practical, local; we can believe in better days while flooding the present with creative intention. Let me get a little motherly here and say that “this, too, shall pass,” but that we will all come out changed on the other side, hopefully stronger, hopefully cherishing each other even more. Don’t try to carry the whole weight of this thing, even in your imagination. (Especially in your imagination.) Don’t be afraid—greater is He that is in us than all the microbes that are in the world. Turn off the news for an evening, or a day; do a puzzle with your people, or listen to an audiobook together. Don’t buy more than you need. Check on your neighbors. Offer to pick up groceries for an older person (and leave them at the door), or gift them with a delivery service (and give the courier a good tip). Keep sharing the funny memes. Plant a garden, write a song, learn to make coq au vin. Let boredom clear the ground of your soul. Translate your disappointment and fear into something tangibly, defiantly beautiful. And remember to be kind to yourself—these are challenging days, and we’re all dealing with hopes deferred. Remember that kindness is also contagious. Remember that you are wildly, irrationally, unconditionally loved. And remember that, for once, we all have the chance to live the way our grandmothers told us to all along: wash your hands, cover your mouth. And do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

I don’t think of myself as artistic. At best, I can say that I created eight beautiful children of varying hues and temperaments. My love of science and research led to my career as a labor and delivery nurse. That’s not to say there isn’t magic and creativity required in my work, but I felt much more at home in a birthing suite than an art studio. Even now the idea of those parties where everyone goes and paints the same picture at a studio makes me break out in hives. So when I agreed to go to Hutchmoot three years ago with my husband Wes, I worried I wouldn’t fit in at all. Like maybe there would be a screening test to check in: “Do you play guitar, mandolin, or fiddle? Have you recently published a novel, essay, or popular blog post? What is your favorite medium for artistic expression? Nothing? None of these? Okay ma’am, we’re going to have to ask you to wait in your car for your husband to finish the conference.” I went because it was so important to him. He needed community and encouragement in his artistic pursuits, so I was along for the ride simply to support him. I have to admit, I almost chickened out in the car as I watched all these people confidently striding through the doors, some running to hug each other’s necks, others already laughing loudly (side note: I have since learned that this is not actually how everyone feels and that if I had just looked at the cars around me I might have seen others having the same internal struggle). I was fully prepared to be the outsider the whole weekend, and just hoped they had good food and a comfortable couch I could sit on while I waited. But that’s not what happened. Not only did I make a new lifelong friend before I even made it out of the merch area, over the course of the weekend I unexpectedly found my people. These were people who gave voice to ideas that had been forming in my heart and mind unnamed for years; people who sang songs that awakened longing in my soul; people who stirred up excitement and encouragement in me that I felt needed to be shared. In a sort of epiphany moment I realized that since I wasn’t an artist or musician or writer, I actually had more time and energy to encourage and support those doing the work I loved. I spent the next year diving into anything and everything that had to do with the Rabbit Room. I read the back issues of posts, listened to old podcasts, found new writers to read and musicians to listen to. I developed deep friendships with people I met online in the Facebook Chinwag. And I loved it! The next year at Hutchmoot I realized I was now the one squealing with delight over reunions with long missed friends. Everything felt richer. In the midst of all this, however, as I forged friendships with more and more artists, a question was nagging at me: do I really have a place in this community as someone who isn’t an artist? I wrestled with this insecurity, thinking surely I wasn’t the only non-artist at Hutchmoot or in the Rabbit Room extended family. But did I truly belong? Did I have just as valid a reason to claim a seat at the table as everyone else? Or were there “preferred” people, the artists, who alone get to occupy those seats while I have to content myself to just walk behind and pat them on the back? The question at the root of it all was this: Do we all belong, have a role and meaning, within the Rabbit Room, and really, within the body of Christ? It was in this context of considering my role as a non-artist that a conversation with Doug McKelvey took place, and ultimately led to our collaboration on a 2019 Hutchmoot session that focused on that very topic. In that conversation I explained how I was noticing the parallels between my role on the maternity ward and the way I help and serve my husband at home in his creative ventures. It was intriguing to me to think in these terms, because I had never once questioned the validity or importance of my role at work. It was only in other areas of life that I had struggled to see my role, and myself, as valuable. As a labor and delivery nurse I spend my nights helping laboring women make the transition from woman to mother. My job has many roles, and the more I thought about them, the more I could see parallels for how I help Wes bring about the “birth” of his works of art at home. Sometimes I’m a bouncer or gatekeeper, just making sure random unwanted people don’t crash the birthday party at inopportune times. Other times I am an advocate, pleading the case to help buy my patient as much time as I can so that she can try to avoid a cesarean section, or convince the doctor to let her have that epidural now instead of making her wait. I crack jokes and tell stories to help an anxious woman or nervous dad feel more comfortable. I sometimes have to go find that nervous dad who has wandered off for coffee at the worst time and make sure he doesn’t miss anything important—you know, like the birth of his firstborn. I am a guide who has walked the road before, a cheerleader who really believes the patient in my care can do this, a coach telling her how to breathe, a time-keeper who says it’s not time to push yet, a drill sergeant who says forcefully “get it together! You can do this!” and helps them snap out of the despair that tempts them to believe they’re defeated, so that they can muster courage for a final push to get that baby out. Most importantly, I help a woman find the strength she already has to do what she was created to do. And then, when finally the moment arrives and all the sweat and tears and pain and exertion pay off in the welcoming of a child to this world, I am always in awe. It never gets old. I’m there to assist in that intimate moment when the new mom holds her baby for the first time. I see that look of wonder as she meets this new person who has changed her life. I’m not the one giving birth, this isn’t my baby, but in some small way I get to be part of the miracle. The effort and the experience and the joy are shared. We all work together, each playing their part, so that the project comes to fruition and the reach and impact of the work are amplified. Bailey McGee The more I considered this, the more I could see that being present to witness a guitar being created, or to hear the beauty of a song finally coming together, or to read and give feedback or encouragement on the seventh revision of a novel is no less a participation in a miracle of sub-creation. I may not be the one giving birth to those works either, but just as before, I can be a facilitator, an intercessor, an encourager, and a witness. I am as much a participant in the process here because it isn’t just about the physical act of “making” but also about everything that aids or hinders that creative process. I can care and nurture my people as they find the strength to do what they were called to do, then share in the joy and stewardship of this creation as it goes on to fulfill its redemptive purpose. So just as my role at work makes me a participant in the birthing stories of so many women, so my role in relation to craftspeople, writers, artists, and musicians allows me to participate in the birthing of their good works. And every single one of these works, these acts of creation that send beacons of hope and messages about God’s love and redemption out into the world, are important. At least one reason The Rabbit Room exists is to bring into the world art that would nourish the community, the church, and the culture. It was a revelation for me to finally realize that just because I’m not the one actually creating the art doesn’t mean artists don’t need what I personally bring to this community. Community nourishes that art. I love the image that someone offered (probably Doug) that it’s like we’re launching spears into the world, works that might penetrate the shadows and drive back the darkness. But any particular song or painting or book is just the tip of that spear. And no one just lobs a spear tip and expects anything to come of it. It has to have a shaft with weight and length in order for the spear to be balanced, to fly true and to hit its mark with enough power to penetrate. We, the rest of the community, whether we also consider ourselves artists or not, together are the shaft, the binding, the eye that spies the target, the feet planted for stability, and the arm that flings the spear so that it travels far, not to mention those who worked behind the scene in prayer and intercession. We all work together, each playing their part, so that the project comes to fruition and the reach and impact of the work are amplified. I remember a conversation with Carrie Givens and several others about what to call myself as I struggled to find my place in this community. We tossed around several suggestions, some better than others. While I loved the nod to Oscar N. Reteep as an appreciator, I was leaning toward the term patroness (mostly because it sounds like I’m a character in a Jane Austin book) even though I don’t get to spend nearly as much money supporting other people’s projects as I would like. “You’re a namer,” Carrie interjected matter-of-factly (and somewhat ironically, as she was the one doing the “naming” in that moment). But the idea resonated and stuck with me. Carrie further explained how she first encountered this concept of “namers” in a blog post: “Finally, reading Madeleine L’Engle’s book, A Wind in the Door, I found it: Theo (Vincent Van Gogh’s brother) was a Namer. . . Namers remind us who we are and that our endeavors are worth doing. . .” Carrie Givens is, of course, herself a Namer of the first order. Her observations and encouragements have been instrumental in helping me find my own role here in The Rabbit Room. Further along in Carrie’s post she references Diana Glyer’s use (in her book Bandersnatch) of the related term Resonator as a term to describe “anyone who acts as a friendly, interested, supportive audience.” Glyer says that “Resonators give feedback, praise, encouragement, and offer help and promote an artist’s work.” Carrie goes on to say: I would call namers a subset of this category, with the specific role of telling, affirming, and reminding the artist of who he or she is. The Inklings, Glyer notes, served as resonators for one another, exerting a mutual, beneficial, shaping influence on each other’s writings and in each other’s lives. “For All the Namers,” Carrie Givens Also discussing Glyer’s work, Andrew Peterson writes: One of the central tenets of the Rabbit Room is that art nourishes community, and community nourishes art. And to me the profound thing about that idea is that the friendships—the heart-shaping relationships, the Christ-centered community—will outlast the works themselves. . . If you want to write good books, good songs, good poems, you need some talent, yes. You also need to work hard, practice a lot, cultivate self-discipline, and study the greats. But you also need good friends. You need fellowship. You need community. “The Inklings, Diana Glyer, and the Art of Community,” Andrew Peterson So what does this mean for each of us in our families, our churches, our communities—and yes, in this far-flung, sometimes hard to define, but dearly-loved group we know as The Rabbit Room? I would suggest that it first means we should take the Apostle Paul seriously when he writes: For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. 1 Corinthians 12:14-26 This is the place where we first must meet. We are all part of the body of Christ, and we have come together to make up this unique collection of people. And here, if scripture is to be believed, we are not only all welcome at the table, but we are each individually needed and necessary. We aren’t here by accident. Each of us has a role to play, whether it’s in actively creating, or actively loving, serving, encouraging, facilitating, and amplifying the creativity of another. And a beautiful aspect of the Rabbit Room is that often we can shift between roles, free to use our gifts however they best serve the work and people involved. So I must take seriously my role as a midwife for the creative processes going on around me, because the Kingdom is advanced by each of us playing our part—at the end of the day, this is how the work gets done. This is how we grow, and how we together love the world that so desperately needs the beauty, the wonder, the joy, the hope, the healing, forgiveness, redemption, and resurrection offered in the person of Christ. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. Ephesians 4:15-16. That’s the vision, the blueprint. Okay, so great. I’ve come to recognize myself as having a role to play in that work, as not being an outsider but one who belongs here. Now what does that actually look like? For me, it meant starting at home. When my husband, Wes is working on a guitar or other project, he can lose himself in the process. He becomes intensely focused on his work, sometimes forgetting even to eat. I can step into a role of midwifing that process. I can do practical things like take him some food (in his case, a taco). Keep the kids occupied. Pay the bills and do the dishes while he’s in the frantic last few days before a deadline (because artists never procrastinate until the last minute. Ever.) I can answer those phone calls and reply to texts from his mom. I even listen to him play the guitar in the last stages of crafting, giving my honest but non-professional opinion. We as a community share the privilege, the labors, and the joy of what transpires when we come together, all of us, to make sure the work gets done—that our collective calling is fulfilled, that our peculiar role in the story of God's Kingdom is well-played. Bailey McGee I think it’s important to note here that everyone can do something. You do not have to be a world-class guitarist or know the difference between steel string and classical to just listen and given your honest feedback. I’m happy to read the novel my daughter is writing, even though I’m the last person you should come to for help with grammar (thanks to everyone who edited this for me!). I can help with what I know and show caring involvement, even if I don’t have technical knowledge. Here’s the great thing about the body of Christ: Other people do have that knowledge. That’s someone else’s job, and praise Jesus someone understands commas. We are just called to do what we can, where we are, to build up this community. But just because we aren’t always the ones creating the work of art doesn’t mean sacrifices and hard work aren’t asked of us. Keeping the house running with those aforementioned eight kids while Wes backs up a friend on guitar at a Mass on Saturday evenings can be a lot of work. But I know with my help, new manifestations of goodness and light are being ushered into the world. And sometimes, something else happens. In Exodus 1:15-21 we meet Shiphrah and Puah, Hebrew midwives told by Pharaoh to kill all the Hebrew baby boys. They defy him and let the boys live. The text says they are given families of their own for being faithful. I think something interesting can happen when you spend your time pouring into the lives of others, helping them to live more fully into their own callings. Sometimes God makes room to pour into you when you have poured yourself into others. I am the last person who ever thought I could be creative. But, after being around all you lovely people, I started wanting to create too. My personality tends toward the practical, so since I like to eat, I began to experiment with the crafting of creative—maybe even artistic?—pies. Getting involved in this community helped me to see that even making a pie could be a way to send light into the world. If Doug will indulge the slight change to one of his liturgies: Let us make this day a pie that would point to that day, a meal to remind of the beauty and the love and the promise undergirding all creation. Let us make a pie to remind our pilgrim guests that life will not always be so burdened, that their days of exile will end, and that they will feast at last joyfully in the city of their hope, at the table of their God-King, at the wedding fest of their Prince , at the dawning of a golden age, untouched by mortal sorrows. from “A Liturgy for the Preparation of an Artisan Meal,” Doug McKelvey Here we each steward gifts for the benefit of others, whatever those gifts may be. Each of us steward the power to remind each other (in so many ways) that this life will not always be so hard, this world not always so broken, and that we are standing on that burning edge of dawn where the rising light of redemption is already visible. We as a community share the privilege, the labors, and the joy of what transpires when we come together, all of us, to make sure the work gets done—that our collective calling is fulfilled, that our peculiar role in the story of God’s Kingdom is well-played. We all belong, we all are needed, we all have a part to play to see Christ glorified in our midst and in our world.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Trillia Newbell, author of Sacred Endurance: Finding Grace and Strength for a Lasting Faith. Trillia Newbell is the author of several books including United: Captured by God’s Vision for Diversity, and, most recently, Sacred Endurance: Finding Grace and Strength for a Lasting Faith. She is a former journalist and currently the Director of Community Outreach for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention. Jonathan and Trillia discuss the role of endurance in a writer’s life, the importance of being realistic about what it means to do the work, and writing as bearing witness to reality rather than inventing it. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 13 of The Habit Podcast. [Editor’s note: Next Thursday Jonathan is launching a new online class called Writing With Atticus. Participants will read through To Kill A Mockingbird with a writer’s eye, learning how to apply Harper Lee’s techniques to their own writing. Find out more at TheHabit.co/Mockingbird.] Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

Nearly four years ago, when Helena Sorensen and I had our first conversations about publishing The Door on Half-Bald Hill, we didn’t have any idea how relevant it would prove to be here in the midst of the COVID-19 quarantine. It’s a tale of an isolated people whose world is on the verge of collapse amid blight and plague, and it’s the journey of a young man who refuses to believe the end is inevitable. Though the emotional and physical landscape of the book is bleak, its destination is bright as the dawn. To find that right now, at this strange moment in history, that we have a beautiful book that can speak directly into the fears and questions that people are experiencing seems more than a little surreal. It seems blessed, if I’m honest. And so, even though the physical book won’t be available until May 22 (and manufacturing delays are likely), we (both Helena and Rabbit Room Press) want to get this story out there so people can be blessed by it right now. To that end, today we’re emailing a PDF of the book (complete with artwork by Stephen Crotts) to everyone who has pre-ordered it. And we’re making it available as a free download for anyone else who pre-orders it through the Rabbit Room Store. Click here to read my introduction to the book (hint: I love it), and then get thee to the Rabbit Room Store to pre-order it if you haven’t already. I hope it’s a balm for your soul. I know it has been for mine.

Dear Ask Doug, My grandparents are always gushing about some dude on the radio® named “Paul Harvey,” as if I should know who that is. Well, I don’t, and I never have. And when I tell them so they just make little huffing noises through their noses and turn to stare derisively into the middle-distance®. They’ve also threatened to write me out of their will because of my so-called historical paucities of the first order® and also for something they refer to as generational insolence of the third order®. I don’t get it. Sometimes I wonder if my family is just weird. Anyway, can you tell me Who was this Paul Harvey?, and what was his enduring contribution to Western Civilization®? Also, do you know if it’s possible to sue your own grandparents, and win, without them ever finding out? —Accused of Insolence in Ipswich Dear Ipsolence, First, I question whether you fully grasp the purposes of a registered trademark symbol. Just a hunch, but I’d hazard the term “Western Civilization” has been used in print before. Also, as a general note, I no longer offer specific legal advice as relates to family squabbles, revokable trusts (or mistrusts), lines of dynastic succession, perpetual right to live in a parent’s basement, etc., so I’m just going to politely ignore those rather too personal aspects of your communication and turn my attention instead to your primary line of inquiry. Inheritance and copyright laws notwithstanding, I was delighted to receive your question regarding Paul Harvey, as that’s pretty much the subject I had already decided to devote this column to anyway. Perhaps the following knowledge, once mastered, will allow you to finally impress and patch things over with your grandsire and grandame. Please try to pay attention. This is likely going to require a rather long and elaborate explanation, perhaps even split into two parts, with each being more impressive than the last! Let’s begin. Who Was This Paul Harvey and Why Should You Care? Beloved radio personality Paul Harvey was a man gifted with a unique voice that, even according to the begrudging praise of his rivals, could “flow over a hot razor like melted butter.” Love him or hate him, listeners always knew who was talking. It was Paul. Paul Harvey. The man who wouldn’t shut up. And people loved him for that. For a period of 68 consecutive years, there was never a moment when Paul Harvey’s distinctive croon was not bouncing somewhere round the ionosphere, owing to the proliferation of his many programs aired on more than 60,002 stations1. At the height of his career, Harvey was hosting four-hundred-sixty-four daily, syndicated, radio programs and employing an army of seventeen-thousand-fourteen2 researchers, mic technicians, and tongue-harpies (a kind of physical therapist who specializes in loosening the muscles of the lips, mouth and throat; also known as an “LMT Man3,” a “speed bagger4,” a “tonsil donkey,” or a “palette jockey”). Harvey’s staff actually represented a greater population at the time than that of the mysterious territories that were soon to become Wyoming, if you didn’t count the Native Americans5. Though all of his radio shows were popular, Paul Harvey’s most successful program was the short, human-interest feature named “The Rest Of The Story” in which the “un-peered potentate of the wireless domain6” would relate some little-known bit of history from a clever angle, giving the story an anecdotal twist at the very end of the telling so that listeners would experience that pleasurable aha! moment of connecting the dots to a larger story: “Ah, so that little orphaned chimney sweep with the oddly prehensile toes rose to become the lion of Britain, Winston Churchill,” or “Oh, so the chemical mixture that frustrated housewife threw together in her kitchen sink became the local anesthetic we now know as lidocaine,” or “Well I’ll be blinkered, Jummy! I never knew that old tom on The Little Rascals was actually a dog in a zippered cat suit!” Listeners loved the program, even forming “Harvey Parlor Clubs” to enjoy the program in the company of fellow Pauly-Philes®, typically while nibbling a bylaw-mandated spread of mashed brazil nuts, curly creamed pork tails, and Flattened Toledo Tea Cakes7, and consuming gallons of the fermented oatmeal drippings popularly referred to as “Van Winkle’s Delight.” These practices now sound like the quaint effervescence (or radioactive decay?) of a more innocent time, but we shouldn’t forget that a generation raised on the program spent their childhoods acting out Harvey’s colorful anecdotes, and slapping one another in the face before shouting “Now you know the rest of the story, Jack!” In fact, the generation that came of age between the turbulence of the idealistic but ill-advised, 1952 “Cub Scout Coup8” and the hopeful advent of the two-fisted-sippy-cup9 in 1974 were generally so shaped by the broadcasts they came to be collectively referred to by sociologists as “The Harvey Quints,” though, of course, there were in actuality more than five of them10. After forty-two years of continuous “The Rest of the Story” broadcasts however, the constant acquisition of new material became an ongoing problem for Harvey’s research team. There simply wasn’t enough history that had happened yet at that time11 to continue to sustain entirely new episodes of the show. Unbeknownst to Harvey, his staff began at that time to cleverly alloy fictitious elements with stories that were mostly true, finding that this little trick would afford them opportunity to repurpose episodes Harvey (whose memory spanned no more than ten years12) had broadcast decades earlier. The war13 was on at the time, and with so much attention diverted elsewhere, the “unsustainable ruse bound to eventually break the heart of the whole world®” actually succeeded for several “happy, golden, deluded years®.” And on that relatively pleasant note I feel we should hit pause, affording you a week or two to digest the happier half of this sad recounting, before we don our metaphorical14 mud-boots and wade into the fetid, sloshy murk ever stagnating within the seedy underbelly of broadcast history® to explore the inevitable downfall of that seemingly innocent and gilded age and of her most noble figurehead, Mr. Harvey and of the small, Spanish goat he was never seen without15. It is not a pretty tale, but perhaps it is at least one from which you might glean the fruit of some very heavy-handed moralizing. Honestly, I still can’t believe you’re thinking of suing your own grandparents. I’m trying to tell this story, but almost the whole time, that’s all I’ve been thinking about. End, Part the First

“As long as we’re singing, we might as well be smiling, too.” As I interviewed Randall about the new Slugs & Bugs album last week, he spoke that sentence so matter-of-factly that I knew he believed it the way a person believes more with each morning that the sun will rise tomorrow, too. And I wrote it down immediately. Among many other things, we talked about making beds, changing light bulbs, and scooping up your dog’s poop, but I found that the thread tying our whole conversation together was an abiding conviction that a child’s sincere laughter can tell us more about what is ultimately true than any number of books. And what is true is that the joy and delight of the Creator himself keeps this world turning, even and especially when we are most tempted to despair of whether it can really be true at all. It’s my delight to share here a transcription of our conversation. I hope it reminds you, as it did me, of this joy that lives at the heart of the universe. If you want to learn more about what Randall & co. is up to, then click here to explore their Slugstarter, where they are raising support for a brand new album full of silly songs: Modern Kid. Drew: So where did Modern Kid begin? Randall: Modern Kid came about because I feel so strongly about the mission of Slugs & Bugs: I want the way we walk around in the world as believers to be reflected in the stuff I make, whether it’s songs, books, or a TV show. We had made four records of scripture songs in a row. And as great as that is, it skews towards the Sundays of our lives. So I started to feel the need for everyday songs, about all the other days—something about the grocery store, or making your bed, or walking the dog, or— D: Pangolins! An everyday Tennessee encounter. R: Why yes, of course! The root of it is that I had wanted to balance out our mission and vision by reflecting in these songs how we walk around in the world, and celebrate it, no matter the context. Jesus comes with us everywhere we go, no matter whether we’re changing a light bulb or singing in a choir. I wanted some changing-the-lightbulb songs. D: That was one of the main questions I wanted to ask you: I’ve sensed those two strands in the voice of Slugs & Bugs, one being scripture songs and the other being silly songs. Those are two formats that convey different sides of the same coin. So I was curious to hear: Has that always been a given for you, those two channels as a writer? Which one came first? R: Sure. So it began with writing songs, period. When my kids were little, I was just writing songs about them, to them, lullabies, silly songs. But even to call them silly songs is to presume I was trying to write something silly. I was just writing songs. I’ve always had humor in my songs, anyway—not in every song, but I’ve always approached songs with the “Cheeseburger in Paradise” influence. As long as we’re singing, we might as well be smiling, too. So it was natural to dig into that more when writing songs for kids. But before I wrote scripture songs, I wrote gospel songs: songs that are specifically about the gospel, where Jesus and his mission are central. So I had songs like “Stop, Christ Is Speaking” and “God Makes Messy Things Beautiful” and “God Made Me Like He Made the Sea.” It wasn’t until we started homeschooling our kids that I started writing scripture songs, and it was more utilitarian then. And it worked so well that I started recording them for Slugs & Bugs, and that was so powerful for me that it occupied my attention for nine years. D: I really appreciate hearing how what has grown into two categories began so organically with the need that you’re filling. R: Thanks. You know, deep in the DNA of these silly songs is the philosophy that by being childlike as adults, we are tapping into an aspect of our personhood that Jesus is calling us to anyway. In three out of the four gospels, Jesus says, “If you don’t come to me like a child, you can’t enter the Kingdom.” Silliness, by its very nature, is childlike. There’s a self-forgetfulness required in order to be silly. It’s also required in order to be a disciple. I usually tell the congregation in my concerts that silliness is discipleship practice: you have to not take yourself seriously and forget about yourself, and it’s really in the service of someone else. You’re being silly for your kid, stepping into what it looks like to be a disciple. Being silly with people is an opportunity to bask in a joyful sincerity. No one's being made fun of and no one's hurting; we're just rejoicing. Randall Goodgame In that way, singing a crazy song about table tennis or a pangolin or poop in a bag is an invitation to joy for joy’s sake; joy is the one thing that remains in heaven, along with love. I mean, it’s not like I’m singing silly songs for the sole purpose of making people better disciples. First and foremost, it’s just fun. Everybody needs to laugh, especially right now. I definitely see the Lord’s hand in the timing of this record. D: I’m reminded of the Wendell Berry quote: “Be joyful, though you’ve considered all the facts.” It’s a tall order, but it’s also kind of imperative, you know? If you’re going to survive, you have to find joy. And there’s something so defiant in a time like this to refuse to give in to despair—it’s worth rejoicing simply that we’re here and alive. And that sounds like what you’re doing. The invitation to silliness and self-forgetfulness—it’s impossible to remain in control while you’re laughing. R: Because the gospel is true, we as believers get to step into it with this joy and play and silliness, with this great power that is proclaiming, defiantly, the truth of what’s really most true about all of creation. As opposed to the nihilist who says, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” There’s no power in that. It’s really just despair. D: There’s really no joy in that, either. R: Right, it’s intellectually dishonest, a sort of fabricated, false joy. But we get to rejoice in the Lord always. D: Another element of a child’s joy is sobriety. When you talk about the nihilist and that joyless attempt at some sort of pleasure—that’s not sober; it’s not fully present in the way that a child’s laughter is fully present. There’s something even more dignified about an unbridled silliness that confounds the wisdom of the world. R: It’s also so completely earnest and sincere. It’s trusting. When you’re being tickled by your dad, you’re not scared, even though you’re completely vulnerable. Being silly with people is an opportunity to bask in a joyful sincerity. No one’s being made fun of and no one’s hurting; we’re just rejoicing. D: There’s something so medicinal about that invitation. R: It’s very grounded in what is most true about the world. As believers, we get to know that truth: it’s that Christ has the victory. When we sing, “Catapultanaugahikawallawallarickitikianapoodloodlakastanvilletown”—there’s this instinct in all of us that says, “How dare you sing a thing like that in a time like this?” Well, let me tell you how I can. Because I’ve been invited to “be joyful in all circumstances.” D: It is daring to sing like that in a time like this. R: It’s a daring characteristic of a healthy disciple. Because if you’re despairing, you’re really not reflecting the final word. D: That’s so beautiful. Let’s take a minute to talk about the particulars of this record. You said you wanted to lean in the direction of writing about changing light bulbs. So where did that take you? Take us through some of the daily life that’s being covered by the songs on this record. R: Part of the DNA of Slugs & Bugs is planting our flag in the ground that Jesus is the Lord of dish-washing and diaper-changing as much as he is the Lord of baptisms. Every moment holy, so to speak! So my son Ben and I were out walking our dog, and you know, it’s the worst scooping up that poop. Like, am I really going to pick up this animal’s poop? You know, yes I am, because it’s right in front of this neighbor’s mailbox. So I scooped the poop, and we’re walking along, and then I just start singing as I’m swinging it, “Poop in a bag, poop in a bag! I’ve got hot, fresh poop in a bag!” That grossed out my son and made him laugh. And I thought, “I love that melody. This has got to be a song.” D: And it’s such a memorable melody. You sure did work it up! I was so beside myself while you were playing it at the Local Show on your piano, and just how through-composed it is. You took it to its absolute fullest fruition in a way that was delightfully surprising. R: Oh my gosh, Drew! That is food for my soul. That’s always what I’m trying to do. Well, I spent a good, long time working on it. So there’s that one, and then there’s a song about a balloon. You know how when a kid’s got a balloon, it’s very important to them! But I wanted to try to find a way to say that a balloon can’t last forever, and it’s okay to just love it while you’ve got it. While it won’t be here forever, it’s awesome while it’s here. There’s another song about making your bed, and it sort of ended up taking the form of an old-fashioned folk song—“fi diddle-diddle aye-yay”—you know that song that goes, “There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza”? D: Yes, the boy in that song is so clueless! R: Yeah! Well in this one, there’s this poor little boy who can’t remember to make his bed. So he ties a string around his finger to help him remember, but he forgets there’s a string on his finger. So he doesn’t make his bed. So then he puts a feather in his bible, but he forgets to read his bible, so he doesn’t make the bed. So then he tries putting his cat in the bathtub. That kind of thing. D: So what ends up doing it for him? R: Well I’ll tell you—spoiler alert! As a consequence of trying all these other things, finally the song goes, “the bugs flew in and the bat chased the bugs, and the cat chased the bat and the dog chased the cat, and the goose chased the dog and mom chased the goose and dad chased mom, and now everybody’s gone, so I tried to pick my nose. And then I felt the string around my finger, so I made my bed.” So he makes his bed! D: It worked! R: Yeah, and then the end is this great anthem where there’s this shouting, “I made my bed!” And Don Chaffer is to thank for that. D: That sounds marvelously like Don Chaffer. R: Oh yeah, man. D: Well the last thing I want to get some information about for people is of course the Slugstarter: what exactly is happening, how folks can get involved, and where the Slugstarter idea came from. R:  Well, it’s our version of a Kickstarter campaign. I had crowdfunded the last five or so records through Kickstarter, but I wanted this one to be more personalized for our website. So the other fun, new thing about this record is that there are characters from the Slugs & Bugs Show all over the record. So Doug the Slug and Sparky the Lightning Bug both appear, and many others. That was a lot of fun, working with puppeteers, having them come in and sing. But also bridging the worlds together—the books, the show, the raccoons, and now Doug and Sparky—lots of kids out there have fallen in love with Doug the Slug, so it was a real treat getting to have him come in. Watching a slug play the melodica is really a sight to behold, so that alone was worth the price of admission for me. D: I can only imagine. Well I’m so excited, and I really resonate with what you’re saying about the timing. On the one hand, it’s really hard to release anything into the world right now. But on the other hand, we’ve got a lot of time on our hands and a huge need for joy and delight. I think it’s the perfect time for a record like this, that’s so intent on celebrating daily life. This is what we need, and I appreciate you laboring to put it into the world. R: It was a deep joy to make, and I have to thank Ben Shive and Don Chaffer for their unmistakable influence on this one. I’m in some seriously blessed creative company. This project started in joy, so I’m hoping that joy is what listeners will hear through their speakers.

When I was in high school, I carved out a piece of my humanities education to study stained glass windows, old cathedrals of European kingdoms, and the men who made them fine—medieval artists smelling strong of a long day’s labor, Middle Age wet mortar, and musty, dark communion wine. These men made beauty meant to age, with secret dyes that centuries of chemists in white lab coats have not yet learned to redesign that grow bolder and brighter year after year of sun and dust and time—years longer than any artist can survive. The moment those windows were made was the moment they were most decayed, and that is all the artist ever saw, and every generation watched the colors slowly come alive. My own sunlit halls of memory are not segmented in perfect cuts of colored glass but blurred in pink and white calico, my face pressed up against the apron you always wore when you were in the kitchen—smelling either of fresh-brewed, hot mint tea or taco meat, depending on what you just made for me—and your old living room is filled with Christmas gifts, wrapped, colored bright, to open soon, mysterious to me as tumbled piles of old medieval stone. Your sacred intercession for me all those years, starting from before I was born, is still carrying me home. Hannah Hubin I remember sitting in your living room in my turquoise one-piece fleece pajamas with the teddy bear embroidered on the right shoulder, forcing my bare toes into the loose, unraveling weave of your couch, watching Little House on the Prairie reruns on the Hallmark channel. Except we never made it very far into the episode because all I ever wanted to see was the opening scene, when little Sidney Greenbush playing Carrie face-plants into the field. I thought it was cute, and I guess you thought I was too, because you would stand behind me, leaning over against the back of the couch, with the old TiVo remote in your hand for a good several minutes, rewinding the opening over and over again. I didn’t know when I was four how well-acquainted of a person I would become with falling down, but maybe you did. Anyhow, I’ve always known you didn’t mind. In the autumn, we went to the pumpkin patch and had our picture taken with a scarecrow wearing a Cubs shirt. On Saturday mornings, we pulled out the newspaper, circled the ads, and went to all the garage sales listed, you and me and my mom: three generations, centuries removed from medieval cathedrals, rummaging through garages to find something beautiful. We both know I could be a perfect devil as a little girl—fully-equipped with a pink and purple My Little Pony Pitchfork—and for the sake of Mom’s sanity and the paint on our walls, you would come over in the afternoons and sit me down next to one of Mom’s overflowing laundry baskets and match socks with me and talk to me and listen to me talk. Sometimes we had tea, and I still drink coffee out of your old china often, sometimes when I write, like this. We took a lot of walks together, I remember that. I remember one walk later on, towards the end. Still, even that close, I don’t think I knew you were sick. I remember we walked to the end of the subdivision we shared, and when we came to the last house, I sat my stubborn butt down on the sidewalk and told you I was too tired to walk back and proceeded into a good summary of how difficult my life was at five years old. You must have been very weary by then. Everyone I’ve ever talked to knows chemo is exhausting. You carried me home on your back. Until I grew up and started trying to be “literary”—whatever that means—you were the only person I knew who wrote poetry. It’s how you prayed for grandkids. I might be a little less stubborn and a little less lazy than that little girl plopped down on the sidewalk—maybe—but I know your sacred intercession for me all those years, starting from before I was born, is still carrying me home. I think about you a lot, and how I was given your name and your dark hair, how your care of me for the few years our two lives overlapped continues to press into me and hem around me and push me on into something more of grace than I ever could have sought out on my own. I think often of who you were as a grandmother, a poet, a cook, an artist: sleeves rolled, apron on, making beautiful the ancient art of loving people you would never live to see grow old. And though it’s been, I guess, just fifteen years of sun and dust and time since you first left us for the old and high cathedral of the sky, I’ve seen enough to say: the grey is now an azure shade, and I wish you could be told that all your yellow has been turning gold.

To kick off Season Two, Drew Miller talks with Sara Groves and Brown Bannister about the first album they ever made together, Add to the Beauty, and specifically the song “Why It Matters.” In this episode, Drew, Sara, and Brown talk about the deceivingly difficult task of telling the truth in a record, the under-publicized connection between beauty and justice, and the magic of a well-written bridge. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 1 of The Second Muse. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with singer-songwriter Jeremy Casella. Jeremy Casella is a singer-songwriter in Nashville. In this episode, Jonathan and Jeremy discuss songwriting as a means of processing life, the abiding value of failure, and the centrality of truth-telling. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 14 of The Habit Podcast. And click here to view Jeremy’s newest record, Spirit, in the Rabbit Room Store. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

When I first learned about hospice, I focused on death and dying. That’s certainly one focus of hospice—but it’s not the only one. Although the modern hospice movement began with the work of Dr. Cicely Saunders in the 1960s, the concept of “hospice” is much older and wider. It derives from the Latin hospes, which refers to both “guest” and “host.” In medieval Christendom, hospices were hubs of hospitality for the sick and dying as well as for travelers and pilgrims. These early European hospices were common throughout the Middle Ages, phasing out only with the decline of religious orders. When I first became involved with a hospice in college, I didn’t expect to learn about hospitality. I began volunteering because I’d lost loved ones and wanted to learn about death, that cloaked thing that isn’t supposed to sting but usually does anyway. In my four years of involvement in the world of hospice, I’ve learned a little about death and a lot about hospitality. The former is mysterious and maybe inaccessible to my twenty-something brain; the latter is abundant in my life and, I’d argue, hard to avoid once you start looking. Hospitality in Hospice In my most meaningful hospice experiences, the patient-provider relationship has been marked by a distinct depth. The dying person is treated not as an unsolvable medical problem but rather as a guest in the home. To sit with a dying patient is to sit with a living person, to peer through the glass and into some of the strangeness of that last chapter. This perspective colors the relationship and can shift the dynamic from one of living-and-dying to one of host-and-guest. This host-and-guest relationship may be a marker of quality hospice care. While interning with a palliative care organization in New Delhi, I had the opportunity to shadow teams of Indian providers as they visited terminally-ill patients in their homes. In ideal cases, the family and team treated the dying person like a guest of honor; the person’s needs were prioritized, and extra efforts were made to ensure their comfort. Even in America, where most of the people I’ve visited have died in care centers, effective hospices have treated their patients as guests, not as medical consumers. Hospice creates space for comfort and rest. Similarly, my current vocation as a traveling hospice songwriter has not only invited hospitality but depended upon it. I wrote this post while on a month-long tour, a road trip that would be nonsensical if not for the generosity of my hosts. In many cases, these hosts are “strangers”—we’ve never met, several of them are unfamiliar with my work, and yet somehow they remain open to disruption in the form of a wandering musician. These tokens of freedom are hot coals on pessimism, and they're contagious. J Lind My recent encounters with hospitality could fill a book. Two nights ago, one “stranger” refused to let me sleep on their couch; instead, they gave me their bedroom and private bathroom, fresh towels and linens, and the key to their house. Last night, another “stranger,” who is not in any financial position to give, invited me over, let me raid their fridge, and then invited me over again. Others have sent me on my way with bags of food, gallons of antifreeze, and even money to fix my broken windshield. I’ve stayed with more than sixty such hospitable “strangers” coast-to-coast, and I’ve been consistently moved by the absurd grace in it all. Hospitality As Creation Henri Nouwen offers a refreshing take on hospitality: Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. —Nouwen, Reaching Out An open fridge; keys to the house; windshield money. These tokens of freedom are hot coals on pessimism, and they’re contagious; I want to spread the coals and burn the fields, but only to create more free space. I have received a gift, and now I want to pay it forward. The beauty of hospice, I would argue, lies at least in part in its coincidence with this virtue of hospitality, which involves the creation of free space for restoration. To be a caregiver is to be hospitable. To be hospitable is to be creative. And to be creative is to participate in a wider story. You can learn more about J and listen to his music at JLindMusic.com, and purchase his album, For What It’s Worth, here in the Rabbit Room Store.

“Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.”—St. Mark 10:15 One of the great mysteries of the Gospel is its accessibility—its exclusive accessibility—to children and those who would follow the way of childlike receptivity. But what is it about the way of children that so privileges them? Randall Goodgame has spent much of the last decade exploring this mystery. Through the early Slugs & Bugs albums to the Slugs & Bugs: Sing the Bible series, the tours, curricula, Slugs & Bugs books, and television series, Randall has plunged into a vocation that presupposes and speaks to the essential wisdom, honesty, and dignity of children. At each stage of his growth in this vocation, Randall has sacrificed none of the simple honesty of his projects, even as the Slugs & Bugs world has diversified and grown in subtlety and vividness. Whether he set out upon a project of Tolkien-ian world building I know not. But it’s pretty clear that’s where the project has gone, and is going. “You step onto the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.” 1 Development, after all, is a childlike thing. Children develop, and they spare no cost to develop the projects of their joy. To heed the call to this childlike earnestness is repentance, and to re-learn this kind of wonder, laughter and love, the fruit of repentance. David Mitchel With the latest Slugs & Bugs album, Modern Kid, Randall brings the larger Slugs & Bugs project full circle, back to silly songs. But now he brings with him a cast of characters—Doug the Slug, Sparky the Lightning Bug, Carla the Delivery Lady—with formed personalities and recognizable voices (thanks to the delightful voice-over work of Ricky Boyd, James Kemp, and Amy Goodgame). There are witty meditations on animals (“The Pangolin Song”) and prophetic unveilings of the tech-obsessed life (“Modern Kid” and “Cell Phone Jones”) worthy of the child who said the Emperor wore no clothes. There are musical musings on domestic chores like walking the dog (“Poop in a Bag”) and making the bed (“The Bed-Making Song”) and new commercial sponsors (Foster’s Duck & Hedgehog Repellant). Randall has with him one brilliant producer, Ben Shive, who was with him at the beginning as a master workman; and he also has fresh contributions from another outstanding producer, Don Chaffer. The wheel rolls on, and coming full circle makes one circumference’s distance run. And maybe that’s part of what distinguishes the childlikeness Jesus commends from the childishness St. Paul puts away: it moves with the turning of the wheel, rather than curving in on itself by spinning in place. This idea finds beguilingly simple expression in the opening dialogue to “I’ve Got a Balloon”: MS. CARLA: Don’tcha know, I used to love balloons back when I was a little girl. MR. RANDALL: So you don’t like them any more? MS. CARLA: Well—you know, now that you mention it, I do still like balloons. They don’t stay around too long, but they sure can raise a smile while they last. “I’ve Got a Balloon” To love balloons well is to accept a key quality of their balloon-ness: transience. To smile at them while they last is childlike; to resent their going, childish. We see a similar idea, in yet subtler form, in Modern Kid’s title song. In Ben Goodgame’s spoken-word appearance in the song, he describes how he expects to “feel big” by the things he can make, play, and see on an iPad. But as quickly as we hear what he desires from his devices, we hear a response: But if it all went away, I guess I could be okay—if it all went away. But I gotta have just one friend, somebody that knows my name, Somebody that’ll give me five when I see ‘em at the football game. “Modern Kid” The childlike recognize that the common grace of one real friend out in the world surpasses all the triumphs and novelties the pixelated world affords. The friend calls us out of ourselves. That is, in fact, the common grace of all the Creator’s works: they call us out of ourselves, away from our sophisticated devices, to the earnest wonder, laughter, compassion, and affection of a child. To heed the call to this childlike earnestness is repentance, and to re-learn this kind of wonder, laughter and love, the fruit of repentance. If anyone wonders where the “gospel proclamation” is in Modern Kid, it’s in the pangolins, flying ping-pong balls, and dog-doo that feeds the country flies. These fit right in among the sparrows, lilies, pinches of leaven, and mustard seeds. “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight.”2

I’ve been wanting to have this conversation with Helena Sorensen ever since I had the pleasure of reading her last draft of The Door on Half-Bald Hill over the holidays. In this interview, we discuss the choice of partnering with life or with death, the apocalypse, thematic overlap between her story and the drama of Holy Week, the wonders of Celtic mythology, and much more. It was a long conversation, so I’ve broken it down into two parts. You’ll see the rest of our conversation on the blog on Maundy Thursday. Drew: To begin, I must acknowledge the timing of this book. It’s exceptional. This book is entering readers’ hands during a global pandemic. How are you feeling about that as the person who brought it into the world? Helena: Well, it’s very strange! I always thought of it as a book that no one would read. Even Pete and Andrew—they joke about all the books they publish that people will never read, and this one felt like an addition to that list since its inception. So we’ve laughed about it from the beginning. D: How many years ago did it begin? H: 2016 is when I sent it to Pete and I started writing it in 2015. The journey has been frustrating and long. My thinking was that it would finally come out, I’d be so excited, and then I’d move on to the next thing, and that would be it. And it may still be exactly like that. But the timing of the pandemic and the story is—I don’t know if I have words for it. Maybe it will make it more accessible, or make it feel like a more valuable story to people. But nothing has happened yet that would make me know how this story will impact people. D: So let’s bring Holy Week into this: every year, we walk through the story of Holy Week in our imaginations, letting it tell us about the reality we’re in. And now, we’re adding to the mix this story you’re bringing into the world—do you see any gut-level connections between the posture of Holy Week and The Door on Half-Bald Hill? What can we bring as readers and participants into the experience of both? H: One especially potent connection is the theme of waiting. When I think of the kind of waiting we do in the liturgical year, it feels like an extremely active waiting. Hope is an action verb. It’s something we see in the activity of the disciples in the story of the gospels—they’re so confused about who the Messiah is, what they need, and what the end of the story will look like. Just getting up in the morning becomes this statement of faith: there's more here than I can see, and it just might be good. Helena Sorensen That’s true in Half-Bald Hill, too. They run up against the end of a story and they have no idea what it could be, other than death and darkness. But they continue. Their waiting is beautiful because they partner with life instead of partnering with death: they harvest food, plant seeds, continue to see and care for each other, and generally operate as a community. Just getting up in the morning becomes this statement of faith: there’s more here than I can see, and it just might be good. D: You mentioned bumping up against the end of a story. That’s such a provocative phrase. It really rings true to me, even as a fitting descriptor of what we’re experiencing in our world today. How are characters in Half-Bald Hill bumping up against the end of their own story? H: For one thing, their land is sick. It’s giving out, not able to produce the kind of food that will nourish them. In the beginning of the story, a character who’s a kind of leader of the people comes and says, “I have a message from the ancestors! They say it’s time to embrace death. That’s the end of our story.” A lot of characters receive that and say, “Oh. Okay. We didn’t want that to be the end, but if it is, we’ll comply.” So they rush along towards it and call it courage. But the characters you love most in the story are the ones who refuse to receive that and say instead, “No, there’s the possibility of a different ending here and I’m not going to give up.” There are so many ways to partner with death. Cynicism partners with death; it says there’s no good that can surprise me. Unforgiveness partners with death; it says there’s no possibility of life in a relationship that’s broken. Despair partners with death; it says I can see the end and it’s all decided and settled. Free will, then, becomes very important. If you believe we’re operating in a world that is controlled, then this might be a moment when you say, “Well, all the signs are here. Looks like it’s time to give up.” But if you’re operating in a framework of free will, which is how love must operate, all our choices really do matter. Our choice to get up in the morning and plant seeds is a way of partnering with life, believing this isn’t the end. I talked a little bit in my recent Rabbit Room piece about the Celtic knot: where’s the end and where’s the beginning? It’s all wrapped up together and you can’t distinguish one from the other. It makes me think of that verse that says righteousness and peace have kissed each other. There’s this human demand that we must make things right. And there’s this peace of God that says, “I’ve already made it right.” Which is the beginning and which is the end? They’re woven together so beautifully. D: That’s gorgeous. One of the most spine-tingling, spooky parts of the book for me was the refrain—and Pete clarified for me that this is a Yeats reference—“Come away, come away, leave the weeping world behind.” That entered the story repeatedly through the puka. Are pukas real things in Celtic mythology? H: Yes, Irish and Celtic mythology. And the puka tended to be more of a trickster, like playing tricks on people at night. But one of the things pukas did was lure people away. D: I think it could be helpful to go further into all the many ways of partnering with death. Because as you were enumerating them, I had characters from your story flash through my head. And all of them were grandiose. Certainly Zinerva, and the druid who lights himself on fire. That seems to be the climax of this partnership with death. That scene is so potent in my memory. H: I was thinking a lot about how communities as a whole respond to harmful messages like that from leaders they revere, and who speak apparently with the authority of their entire history and folklore—people they ought to be able to trust. That particular Celtic ceremony happened in the autumn each year. At that point it’s starting to get cold, harvest has passed, and the year is moving into darkness. They would make a wheel and roll it down a hill to symbolize the year rolling on past them, onward and onward without ceasing. So in Half-Bald Hill, it’s in a moment like that when the druid takes that wheel away, out of the ceremony and all its attached significance, and uses it for destruction. It’s like he’s saying, “I don’t see where this reality is going and I can’t control where it’s going, so I have to make an end of it right now on my own terms.” Only fear, profound fear, can drive someone to do that. D: When you talk about hitting the end of a story, where it can’t explain what happens next or account for reality anymore, I think of Corann and his endless search. That is something that has huge overlap with Holy Week: that tension between the old and new. How does that theme play itself out in Half-Bald Hill? H: Corann was always a picture of the old ways, but I say that with love for Corann. He’s not just stubborn or stupid. He only knows one way, and he is quite faithful and dogged and relentless in his attempts to wring any ounce of life or hope out of that old way. Everything Idris has ever learned has come from Corann. He’s become who he is because of the work Corann has invested in him. But Corann just believes in the old ways, which have worked for many, many, many generations. I think that was true of the Jewish people when Jesus came. D: In their eyes, it worked! Their systems worked. H: Yes, they had a plan. So for someone to step into that and say, “No, this isn’t ultimate. There’s more here to discover” can be a bit insulting. It feels like, “Hey, you young whipper-snapper, how do you know? You can’t just change this thing willy-nilly!” One gift of the pause we’re in right now is the chance to stop and re-evaluate the old ways, and say, “We’ve been running 90 miles per hour in this direction. Is that the direction we want to be going in?” Likewise in Half-Bald Hill, the characters are forced to a stop. And at the end of the story, it’s the willingness of Idris to venture into something new that sets Corann free. He’s finally able to acknowledge that he was wrong and to laugh. In fact, one of the last things we see in the story is Corann’s laughter: a partnering with life. To listen and collaborate with the Spirit in spite of oneself—that is life, and our last picture of Corann is someone swept away in the beauty of that life. D: What would you say about the connection between openness to the new and the maddening silence that is often there to greet you? The work of hearing this new word is so arduous for Idris. What is the silence for? Why does it take so long? H: Well, I don’t know if you were raised in a tradition that said changing your mind was a moral failing. That was the message I got growing up: the faithful are the ones who get their theology figured out early and stand by it forever. And if that’s where you come from, and then you find yourself in life circumstances that don’t play out the way you were taught they would play out—if you do X, Y, or Z, then God will be obligated to bless you—a lot of us can find ourselves stuck in those times because we were never given the freedom to call those assumptions into question. And that’s the thing: you must feel freedom in order to ask those questions. Often that process begins with trying all the ways you’ve been taught, then encountering the failure of those old ways, then admitting that those ways have failed you, and then finally finding the freedom to share that frustration with yourself. Idris is slow in the beginning because he feels like he’s on his own, like he’s inadequate. He feels ill-equipped to take on this new role. People are looking to him for answers and he doesn’t even know what questions to ask yet. D: I think of the terminology of deconstruction and reconstruction. Perhaps the reason Idris has so much work before him is that he not only has to provide the right answers, but he has to dig himself out of the hole of misconceptions and wrong questions first. H: And as he nears the right question, the last question, the one that must be asked and answered, he becomes quieter and slower and far more grounded. He spends long periods of time doing ordinary things: waiting, watching, listening. You’d think that as the deadline nears, the opposite would happen. But instead, he’s settling down into the things that actually matter most. D: That mirrors the walk of Jesus towards the cross. There’s a resolve that sweeps over the story toward the end. That’s one reason that as a narrative it’s so brilliant: this huge, cosmic event is immanent, but there’s a peace and assurance that undergirds the entire thing. It ensures the reader of what to hope and look for. H: And with all the significance we find in the Last Supper—the body and blood, the Eucharist—the fact that Jesus even stopped at that moment to sit down and have a meal with his disciples is remarkable. How many other things could he have chosen to do? This concludes Part 1 of our conversation. Check back again on Thursday for the rest. In the meantime, check out The Door on Half-Bald Hill in the Rabbit Room Store.

It was all right, I knew, and so I drew lots of pictures of it. Grandma wasn’t sick anymore; Grandma was with Jesus, somewhere in the sweet by and by. I was going to wear a navy velvet dress and black leather shoes and sing “Amazing Grace” with my brother at her funeral. I was only five years old, but I was a pious little child and firmly believed someday I would go see Jesus and her together. The three of us would be very happy, and that was a moment worth drawing pictures of, so I drew lots of pictures of it. Of course it was all right. I drew pictures of it. Then came the time to put on the dress and go to the funeral home and sing “Amazing Grace.” Then came the time to sit down and be quiet and listen to my father tell stories about Grandma. They were good stories. Then, in the middle of my favorite one, he stopped. Although the story wasn’t over, he stopped, eyes red, said a few more words, quiet now, and his voice was thick now when he talked. He stopped again, and he began sobbing. He wasn’t just crying; he was shaking now, weeping, unable to carry on. This was not something I could have drawn a picture of, if I had tried. Still, even without a picture, I can see it all now: my little hands folded in the navy velvet of my lap, my black shoes not quite reaching the floor, my aunt beside me, holding me and a box of tissues at the same time, and my father up in front, beside the casket, weeping. For the first time in five years of living, it was not all right. How could it be? He was my father, and still is, and fathers by definition do not cry. They hold you when you cry. They hold your mother when she comes home late, crying and whispering into his shoulder, “It’s over. She’s home now.” But fathers do not cry. My childish vision of my dad, utterly strong and therefore unmovable, unshaken by any tragedy, died that afternoon in the funeral home. It seemed I had lost not one but two people that day. No, it does not seem all right—that story of a God they call the Morning Star who moved, who left heaven and the sweet by and by for earth, to be cut down by young braggarts, to fall on the beams of a fallen tree, to weep at the side of his friend's casket. Hannah Hubin I thought of that afternoon again a few years ago, when I was sixteen and finishing Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow for the first time. I hope you’ve read it, because it’s one of the books I can honestly say has changed my life forever; and from what I can tell, a lot of folks around here say the same. I also hope you’ve read it because I’m about to spoil the ending. Somewhere in the final few chapters, a young braggart named Troy cuts an ancient forest down to a stack of lumber. The grove is more than a timber stand; it is a symbol for the town of stability and strength—the unmovable, old vision of life—and it falls. When he discovers what Troy has done, the main character Jayber calls himself “a man whose knees were weakening against gravity, who needed to go somewhere and lie down.” Before my father wept at my grandmother’s funeral, I had never seen a forest fall. If I could go back, what would I say to that five year-old girl in the navy velvet dress, walking into the funeral home, holding her father’s hand? “Don’t fool yourself, kid. He’s not as strong as you think he is.” Would I? Is he? Or perhaps I would just sidle up next to her and whisper in her ear, “You’re going to need somewhere to lie down.” I learned last year that the north star—that steady point of navigation—changes ever so slowly. Earth rotates on an axis, and the poles drift through the star field, and we pass from one star to another. Polaris is our north star, but only for now. In the year 13,700 AD, Vega will be our new north star, or so I have been told by friends and foreigners who map the stars better than I. We will have other north stars between Polaris and Vega. Hentai Heroes or Harem Heroes. Here’s more about that, the game is the same, it was rebranded and Hentai Heroes became the main game. Can you see how our finest fixed points move? Can you hear the chainsaws cutting the forest? Do you need to go somewhere and lie down? It’s been fifteen years since my grandmother died—fifteen years since I first saw my dad weep. Since then, I’ve seen him cry again—not often, very rarely; but still, he does sob sometimes. Another forest is falling; can you see it? Would it help if I drew you a picture? I’m afraid I can’t; not of this. It is not all right. We will come to another north star soon. I live just outside city limits, down past West Main. You can imagine how it goes: how the road runs through the downtown square and then along the residential district and all those little wooden structures of history in our antebellum town, then how it all tumbles out into a tree-led drive that rolls less-than-straight home past lumber-slat fences and more wood-framed houses. Wood seems strong and unmovable, but I know better. I’ve read how stable stands of timber fall to lumber, how they crack, shake, and collide against the ground. All it takes is one young braggart to bring them down. Still, we construct our homes from beams already fallen and trust them not to fall again, to be stronger this time, to hold against the wind and the rain. We trust wood to not crack, weaken, and come down in the middle of the night, smothering us in our beds. We walk through forests unafraid. Are we fools for this? If so, we are no more foolish than the generations of mariners who have aligned their sextants with the north star to find their place on this sphere. They have determined their latitude and checked errors in their gyrocompasses and other navigational equipment against the so-called stability of Polaris. For centuries, they have acted in trust that the star does not move and that earth does not move from it. I am afraid to break the news to them. Will their knees weaken against gravity? Will they need to go somewhere to lie down? I hope they don’t go somewhere made of wood.  Wood falls easily, you know. When earth seems to be spinning too quickly through the star field, and I need something solid; when every tree seems to be coming down and I need something stable; when I am weak and I need someone strong, my father is still the first person I call. There have been times, and there still are times, when he cries with me. Why do we trust what we know can be moved, fallen, shaken? We trust our direction, we trust our lives, we trust our last ounce of strength to things and people who seem sometimes not very strong at all. What is strength? Some Wednesdays, every once and a while, when social isolation doesn’t prohibit it and my class schedule allows it, I go to the midweek service at the Anglican church that meets in one of those little wooden buildings on West Main, where there is never enough parking. There is barely enough space inside for the little congregation to stand between the altar and the chairs. I say the prayers, and dip the bread in the wine, and hear the Good Story one more time. Like so much of life, it is not something I can draw a picture of; it does not seem all right. No, it does not seem all right—that story of a God they call the Morning Star who moved, who left heaven and the sweet by and by for earth, to be cut down by young braggarts, to fall on the beams of a fallen tree, to weep at the side of his friend’s casket. Some call it foolish, I know, but I trust his strength to be sufficient for me. Thanks be to God.

What were you doing when you were 10-years-old? Despite the fact she’s lost count of the number of times she’s been asked to play the Grand Ole Opry, bluegrass icon Sierra Hull remembers her first appearance came to her at the age of 10. Those were the same years she signed to Rounder Records, played Carnegie Hall, and got a call from her hero Alison Krauss to join her on stage. Sierra has established more musical milestones than most career artists despite the fact that she’s still in her mid-twenties. She’s been named Mandolin Player of the Year multiple times by the IBMA and earned loads of acclaim and a Grammy nom for her previous album, the Bela Fleck-produced Weighted Mind. What role does Resistance play for an artist who has achieved so much so early? To hear Sierra tell her story, she’s experienced as much Resistance as ever as she’s released her latest album—the stunning masterwork known as 25 Trips. From industry hurdles to lessons learned about believing her own voice, Sierra’s proof that the Resistance hits all of us equally. There’s never a way around it, only through it. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Sierra Hull. Click here to listen to this episode of The Resistance. And here to visit Sierra Hull’s website. And here to learn more about The Resistance Podcast.

In Season 2, Episode 2, Drew Miller and Andy Gullahorn dig deep into his song, “The End of a World,” its backstory, and the windy path that land Andy to its final version. In this episode, Drew and Andy discuss Andy’s abiding love of math, the silent power of omission, the symbiotic relationship between convention and invention, and several iterations of “The End of a World” that preceded the final record. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 2 of The Second Muse. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with graphic designer, illustrator, author and printmaker Ned Bustard. In this episode, Jonathan and Ned discuss the fraught topic of success in art, the clarifying effect of working for one’s community, and how he and his wife, Leslie, have planted seeds in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 15 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

I’ve been wanting to have this conversation with Helena Sorensen ever since I had the pleasure of reading her last draft of The Door on Half-Bald Hill over the holidays. In this interview, we discuss the choice of partnering with life or with death, the apocalypse, thematic overlap between her story and the drama of Holy Week, the wonders of Celtic mythology, and much more. It was a long conversation, so I’ve broken it down into two parts. To take us into Maundy Thursday, here’s Part 2. Drew: I’m hearing you lean into this theme of the small tasks and chores of life taking on an eternal significance. I love how you chose a few different village tasks to recur and ground the story. Helena: The place where that began, having something each character was responsible for, began with what Idris would have to do at the end. The question was, “How can these characters go with Idris when he walks through the gate?” So these items became this crucial thing that the characters are always seen in light of. Engl is taking care of the sick baby, and she’s up all night with him, so she has this little candle pot that you always see flickering in the window. Calder, the old man, has this little blossom of flowers he always brings to his wife. What Idris gives at the end is simply his version of that one thing. He doesn’t necessarily see it as this huge, heroic sacrifice. He has the one thing he can give, and that’s what he gives. And I think that’s what all the other characters do as well: exactly what they’re uniquely qualified to do. The fishermen go out and fish because that’s what they can do. Even the little children try to fill up these hollowed-out rocks with rain to bring water to everyone, because that’s what they can do. The only place where that falls apart and doesn’t happen is when the healer, the Ovate, doesn’t do the job that she’s there to do. When she refuses, she partners with death. But all those small tasks are significant because they remind us of what is really true. I wash feet to remember that the body matters. Even when I see it decaying and growing old or getting sick, it matters. Institutions like to determine what the need is, then squeeze that out of people. But community sees the value of each person and asks how we can bring that value to light in a way that benefits all. D: The first book I compared Half-Bald Hill to was Till We Have Faces, because both are marked by a loving engagement with mythology. What especially reminded me of Lewis was that you’re working within this vast, mythological world, but you’re doing so in a way that is both faithful to that world—born out of study and research—and also points ultimately beyond it. There are passages towards the end of your book where Idris bumps up against the light underneath all creation that he doesn’t have a name for. By that point, the mythology has become more than just a narrative device. So what did you discover in bringing your own Christian paradigm to bear on this story? H: Let me start by saying that in the same way that individuals have something to bring to a community that makes it a whole, I think all the various communities of the world, all the people of history, have some aspect of who God is that we can learn from. Even the dark ones. I don’t think the revelation of God is limited to one group of people. Most of us have more knowledge and awareness of Greek mythology, where you have these stories of the gods fighting amongst themselves, acting violently and lustfully, and the humans are the real victims. There’s this huge metaphysical line between humanity and the gods, a real sense of helplessness in the presence of the divine. What if the thing being revealed in apocalypse is good news? Might the full revelation of the goodness and presence of God continually surprise us with joy upon joy? Helena Sorensen In Irish and Celtic mythology, it’s very different. One thing that was so fun about my research was that these people saw the gods as much more on their level. They felt like their gods needed to prosper in order for them to prosper. So that interconnectedness was not just on the human level, but between the human and divine. You even have this story of a king who lays his body down as a bridge for his people to cross over. That was their understanding of leadership. And the joy in their stories is amazing. There’s this overstatement to their stories, this merriment and exaggeration that is quite infectious. In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill talks about how the Latin Church fell into darkness during the collapse of the Roman Empire. During that period, there were these Irish monks who saved crucial manuscripts of scripture from the Roman Empire and then released them out into Europe as civilization rose back up to its knees. And one of the things the Irish did most was to infuse joy into Christianity. I don’t think you can encounter any version of their world, whether pagan or Christian, without finding this abiding joy. It’ll take your breath away. D: Does God delight in precariousness? In history, things so often unfold in such a way that so many landmark events almost don’t happen. It was up to this handful of Irish scribes to make sure that the gospel made it into the rest of the world. How crazy is that? H: The great joke. D: Yes! It’s laughter. H: I don’t know if it was MacDonald or Chesterton who said that the thing Jesus didn’t fully reveal to us was his mirth. He shows us his sorrow, his love, but his joy remains hidden. I want people to feel that at the end of Half-Bald Hill—it’s so precarious, there’s no way there can be a happy ending. But that laughter of God bubbles to the surface; he’s so not afraid and so joyful about the end of the story. Can we enter into that, just a little bit? D: I think a good place to end this conversation is with the idea of apocalypse. We’ve touched on it a bit—coming up against the end of a story. That’s an apocalyptic idea. And apocalypse is at the heart of both your story and Holy Week, as we all bring this anticipation of death. There’s even something very rich in the word “apocalypse:” it doesn’t necessarily mean destruction. It just means a revealing of what was always true. H: There you go! Preach it! D: So there’s still something ending, there’s still death, we’re coming to the limits of our story, but it doesn’t have to mean despair. What sort of closing thoughts might you have for us in this apocalyptic season of our world’s history, when things are being revealed about what was always true? H: The kids and I have been wallowing in Shakespeare passages for the first three months of this year, for homeschooling. And we’ve memorized and talked about that very, very famous passage of Hamlet, the “To Be or Not To Be” speech. He says, “To die would be to sleep. To sleep perchance to dream: there’s the rub. In that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause?” This speech is one of the most heartbreaking I have ever seen in literature: the speaker is in so much anguish that he would love the release of death, but death holds so much terror that he can’t take the risk. Who is the author of that kind of fear? I promise you it’s not God. Sometimes, we can become so trapped in fear that we can’t receive love and can’t receive God. When that amygdala reaction happens, all the relational parts of the brain are shut off— D: The things that make us human. H: Absolutely! And it’s reasonable to run from a bear. We don’t see a bear and try to be sophisticated instead— D: I will now resist acting upon my reptilian instincts! I will instead engage the bear— H: In conversation! We shall be friends! (laughter) Right? But most of us are stuck in that. And again, to partner with death is to say there’s a bear around every corner, that the truest thing about reality is always some new horror. But what if the thing being revealed in apocalypse is good news? Might the full revelation of the goodness and presence of God continually surprise us with joy upon joy? D: That sounds like eucatastrophe, which is a good word for right now, as we are surrounded by catastrophe. I will ask in response: there must be a continuity between the suffering we see as part of the revealing of what is true and that joy you speak of. That feels like the tallest order, the biggest task: to make sense out of that. How do you peel back the curtain and find a plague—find a consequence of partnering with death—but also see it leading beyond into good news? Do you have any advice on how we can take in so much bad news, so much catastrophe, and yet see hints of the eucatastrophe, the good apocalypse underneath? H: I can tell you where I’ve been personally with that question lately. As Christians, so often we’ve been taught that the best we can say is that God did not cause evil, but that he allowed it. But we say a lot of things about God that, if we were to say them about any other human being, we would call that person a monster. Oh, but “his ways are higher than our ways,” right? That’s what we say to convince ourselves that, since he doesn’t play by our rules, his version of love will be unrecognizable and maybe even disturbing to us. If someone is beating or murdering or raping another person, and you stand by and watch it happen—that’s a crime. You can go to jail for that. So there are these places in my heart where I’ve felt towards God, “You’re good, but I also secretly believe you’re a monster,” or “I love you, but I’m also scared to death of you”—and those are all places of suffering. They’re places where God is not fully revealed. I think what “allow” really means is that God says, “I love and value humans so much that I allow them total free will.” All human suffering is a result of human free will, whether individually or collectively. God doesn’t cause, but he does submit. If God stands by in a room and watches as I’m being abused, there’s nothing I can truly do but hate him. I can try to pretend I love him and follow all his rules out of fear, but I can’t love him. However, if God has given us all total freedom, yet has submitted himself inside that total freedom to perpetually work within our nightmare choices to bring about beauty, then I can release God from the expectation that he be a controlling monster. And instead of a master plan, I can lean hard into the love that never gives up, into the redemptive genius of a God who will suffer anything at our hands just to be with us. Click here to view The Door on Half-Bald Hill in the Rabbit Room Store.

Lily, our five-year-old, is standing in the narrow hallway outside her room in only her underwear. It’s bedtime. It’s past bedtime. She should be brushing her teeth. She leans back against the century-old, textured wallpaper. “Mama,” she says seriously as I approach. “I am thinking of Mowgli.” She grins because I grin, and begins to bop up and down, giving herself a back-scratch. I lean against the opposing wall and join in. Look for the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, forget about your worry and your strife! we sing together, dance-scratching our backs against the walls until Lily announces, “Well, that feels much better,” and dashes into her room for a song and prayers. Usually I sing her one song: a nature-loving re-write of “Hush Little Baby.” Tonight she does not have to work hard to convince me to sing another song, and then two more. We made it through our first week of mandated “homeschool” and social distancing. We haven’t been off the property for over a week. California just issued “shelter in place”; Massachusetts will do so soon, too, we expect. Now that there are more tests available, the numbers will sky-rocket. I’ve been thinking about bare necessities more than ever. Settling into bed myself, I go through the liturgy of the pillows: flat one for beneath my knees; feather pillow for my head; the third propped behind me against the headboard, ready to grab if I turn from my back onto my left side. In this position I need something to hold. For the first time in fifteen hours, the house is quiet. Lily and her older brother, Jacob, are sleeping. My husband, Joshua, has gone through his own pillow liturgy and turned onto his right side away from me and is settling into a slower, rhythmic breath pattern that isn’t yet punctuated with snores. I am concentrating on my own breathing, scanning my body for signs of illness. My face feels hotter than usual (fever?). My throat has had a tickle in it for the last week and a lump of phlegm or anxiety (anxiety phlegm?) right in the spot where, on the outside, the neck pools between the collarbones. Right in the spot where I have welcomed kisses. Right in the spot where, on the inside, I imagine a malicious gathering of germs ready to plunge into my lungs. I really have no idea about the anatomy of my respiratory system. I am concentrating on my breathing. I am holding my breath to check my lung capacity. The tickle in my throat seizes and I cough, and cough again (a dry cough?). I reach for that third pillow and turn onto my left side. But now, because my left ear is pressed against a pillow, my head is an echo-chamber for my heartbeat. In poetry, the basic unit of rhythm is the iamb, one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable: bum-BUM. A heartbeat. Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter because it was the rhythm of heartbeat plus breath. Five iambs to a line; five heartbeats to one cycle of breath. To learn lines by heart, you have to get them into your body. You have to get them into your breath. I turn onto my back again and concentrate on lines I’ve learned by heart over the last year: “The Altar” by George Herbert, then “My own heart” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Finally, Psalm 23. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me. Surely goodness and mercy. Surely. I didn’t use to have—or didn’t think I had—a problem with anxiety. But there it is: fear. One of the basic human emotions with all its progeny alive and well in me, too. I look at the “Emotion and Feeling Wheel” a counselor gave me once and name the lump in my throat: dread. And there is worry, inadequacy, helplessness, insecurity, nervousness and panic. Yes, all of these. Yes, I am afraid. This time last year I had recovered from a bad bout with the flu I came down with on the night of my 39th birthday, only to find myself locking horns with fear. Who am I kidding? Locking horns? I was running for my life in the colosseum of my heart and mind. In hindsight, I realize I was hovering on the edge of a full-blown panic attack for about two weeks. Today I might die. Yesterday I did not. All of my tomorrows belong to you, Lord Jesus. Sarah Chestnut At the time, I chastised myself for “being dramatic.” (I recovered from the flu, after all). I could feel my imagination tunnel-visioning on all the possible tragedies, but I couldn’t pull my mind back from that cliff-edge. It was, I see now, a real confrontation with my mortality. A facing-off with one of the most basic truths about human existence—about my existence: contingency. I do not have to be. I am dust and breath. Apart from God’s life-giving breath we all sink back to the dust. I was working on a lecture on the heart at the time. Whatever attempting to pluck an articulate path through the vast terrain of the heart was doing to the blood-pumping muscle off-center in my chest, I don’t know exactly. I know it was stressing it. There were no unstressed beats: bum-BUM. It was BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM all the time. But what the Holy Spirit has been doing with that whole constellation of events—turning 39 (here comes 40 and mid-life); being in bed with the flu for nearly three weeks; acute anxiety—is the work that God has been committed to for every one of us ever since our first parents laid their hearts on the altar of self-sufficiency, ever since they rejected contingency as prerequisite to life. The Spirit has been chipping out my heart of stone, and giving me a heart of flesh. In the biblical imagination, the heart is the seat of the will, the organ of perception, that core part of us that is always worshipping something or someone. 17th century Welsh poet-priest, George Herbert, understood this. Looking at the altar in the little stone church where he pastored, he saw his own heart: A broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant rears, Made of a heart, and cemented with tears: Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workman’s tool hath touch’d the same… —George Herbert The weekly remembrance of Christ’s sacrificial death on our behalf happens on an altar. Here Herbert internalizes that altar and puts Christ’s body and blood, the bread and the wine, right on his own heart. Herbert did not live a long life by our standards, though he reached the average life expectancy for his time, dying at 40 of “consumption,” or tuberculosis. In his lifetime, London theatres were closed at least three times because of “plague.” A common devotional practice of the time was the momento mori, the remembrance of one’s mortality, a daily face-off with the fact that you will die. Even during a time when death was literally at the door, the human heart needed to be reminded of this truth: you are dust and to dust you will return. Last year as I recovered from the flu and was learning how to cope with anxiety, I started every day with a series of slow stretches (You are a body, Sarah! And you are alive!). I ended lying flat on my back on the floor. In this position, I prayed, “Today I might die. Yesterday I did not. All of my tomorrows belong to you, Lord Jesus.” Stating and facing these basic facts became a “bare necessity” of each day, a momento mori.