This morning I am making cinnamon rolls. How many “covid confessions” have already circulated over text from friends, announcing that in spite of Lent chocolate and wine are free-flowing in our homes again? “It’s just too much,” we all agree. Because suddenly we are submitting to a fast we did not chose: our mobility—perhaps the defining feature of our time—is utterly restricted. For centuries, Benedictine monks have taken a vow of “stability,” promising to remain in the community they enter for the remainder of their lives, and not move from monastery to monastery. Not only are we used to dashing from store to store, appointment to lesson to meeting to work-out and home again, we expect to move our household—perhaps several times in our lives—across country or even across oceans. I would never have thought to fast from mobility during Lent. Chocolate, wine, even (before having children) my morning cup of coffee, but not mobility. What can be learned about God and self that cannot be learned in any other way but by staying in one place for a long time? I have become accustomed to facing my inordinate dependence on sugar, caffeine and alcohol during Lent, but to face my inordinate dependence upon my mobility? I’m tempted to say, before the fast has even really begun, “It’s just too much.” On the last grocery run I made before school closures and cancellations of every sort started to fall like dominoes, I looked into my cart from the back of a long line and groped for some inner reassurance that I had chosen what I should, that I had what our family needed for now. (How long is now?) Beets and potatoes because they store well. Five boxes of three different kinds of tea—one my new favorite, “Tension Tamer.” I reached for words that could speak for me, this time from 19th century Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins: I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet. —G. M. Hopkins In his characteristically highly wrought style, Hopkins confronts his own propensity to look for comfort where true comfort cannot be found: in the darkness of his own depression and anxiety. I cast for comfort I can no more get / By groping round my comfortless…“comfortless,” being something of his own shorthand for “comfortlessness,” or resistance to comfort. I looked up from the contents of my cart and exchanged forced grimace-smiles with the person in line behind me. I glanced over the contents of his cart. Why didn’t I get seltzer, too? Maybe I’m groping for comfort with these cinnamon rolls. Slicing the rolled dough into spiraling rounds, I arrange them in the pan and leave them to rise briefly on the counter beside the red-and-yellow tulips. Back in December, I had filled several pots with bulbs and left them in the basement until green tips appeared. I had known I would be pining for spring by February. I just didn’t know how much I would need these unanxious blooms. Later in Hopkins’ poem he exhorts himself: …call off thoughts awhile Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room… —G. M. Hopkins Maybe these cinnamon rolls are helping me to “leave comfort root-room.” Hopkins’ poem ends: …let joy size At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile ‘s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile. —G. M. Hopkins I love the idea that God’s smile is not “wrung,” not twisted dry and drained of readiness to take pleasure. And I love that an “unforeseen time”—a surprising, joyful moment for Hopkins—was found in gazing on a “pied” or dappled sky blasting a colorful stretch of end-of-day light between silhouetted mountains. We gather at the kitchen table, pour freshly brewed coffee and lean over the Pyrex dish of lavishly glazed, gooey, yeasty rolls. Today and every day this is far more than a “bare necessity,” and in that way, these cinnamon rolls are essential. We lift bites too big for our mouths on our forks and whoop, “Praise God for sunshine! Praise God for Jacob! Praise God for Lily! Praise God for Sarah, for Joshua! Praise God for cinnamon rolls!” Walk the lovely, lit mile, I tell myself, and sink my teeth into the sweetness. I leave my phone on the kitchen counter, silenced. It is cold out, but sunny, and we take our sugar-crashing bodies out to the unfinished tree fort to clear last autumn’s fallen maple leaves, and to add some railings, and a rope ladder. For now the plan for what to do with this time is to start with “finishing the unfinished.” The tree fort. The primed, but not painted doors and windowsills. Books—so many books—with an old receipt or a pencil marking my place a third of the way through. So much gets stuck half-way there. To stay put is to face all the unfinishedness our busyness and procrastination help us ignore or deny. Right now there is a thread-bare flannel sheet lying on the floor outside my bedroom. It’s been there for two weeks, waiting for me to follow through with my plan to cut it up into dust rags. To face all this unfinishedness is also a confrontation with mortality. Death is the great interruption. Someday I will be snatched from my relationships, my work, my projects, perhaps mid-sentence. Perhaps with pen in hand. Perhaps the flannel sheet will still be lying in the hallway. We live and work at L’Abri, a Christian study center, where our first job is to welcome people. It was very strange to abruptly and prematurely send people away with so much left undone. It is good that finished work—in the ultimate sense—is not ours to do. Finished work—in the ultimate sense—is not ours to do. Sarah Chestnut The evening of the day we announced the decision to end our term early and told people to make immediate travel plans, Joshua still gave the scheduled lecture he’d been preparing. Chosen months ago, the topic suddenly seemed even weightier, and certainly timely: Between the Cross and Resurrection: Reflections on Jesus’ Death and Our Own. If Ash Wednesday a few weeks ago didn’t get people thinking about their mortality, words like “pandemic,” “quarantine,” and “uncertainty” definitely did. Joshua confessed his own “creedal befuddlement”: when Christians affirm, in the Apostle’s Creed, “He descended to the dead,” what does this mean? Where was Jesus on Saturday after he died and before he rose again? Where was Jesus when he was dead? Where do we go—if anywhere—when we die? Is where the right question? Now, submitting to a mobility fast and facing so much in my life that is unfinished, I am able to better imagine myself into the first disciples’ complete bewilderment over how much can change in one week’s time. Jesus’ final words, “It is finished,” reverberate meaninglessly. What could this possibly mean? Nothing is finished. Everything has been upended, left undone. But in the greatest act and statement of completion, Jesus wasn’t saying, “The End.” Projected on the screen behind Joshua throughout his lecture was an icon of the resurrection, also known as “The Harrowing of Hades,” or Christ’s descent. Clothed in white and gold, Jesus is standing on the cross, on the gates of death and Hades, is trampling down death by death, and he is heaving Adam and Eve, representative of all humanity, from their tombs. My friend Nickaela often says, as a reminder to us both, “Because of the resurrection, the worst thing will never be the final thing.”

Nickaela also says, “Sundays are hard because we are homesick for heaven.” We feel the rupture of what was always meant to be together: earth and heaven. Earth-and-heaven. We feel how unheavenly earth is. We feel how unearthly heaven seems. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Kingdom this earth, our Father. Sundays are hard because we feel so far from home. We feel the toll our mobility has taken. The gears have been grinding all week as we learn to move at a different pace in an oh-so-familiar place. We feel now the toll that running from ourselves and from God has been taking every minute of every day. Give us this day. This day, O Lord. Our church is live-streaming the service this morning. Our L’Abri co-workers and housemates are streaming the service for their church from the sunny, tiled floor room in our house because they are helping to lead their congregation through a pastoral transition. We “go” to their church this morning because it is here and I feel pangs of anxiety and guilt. I’m feeling lost right now in more ways than one. The fact is, even before COVID-19 social distancing measures, we were moving toward the periphery of our church, beginning an exit and a transition to a different church. The main reason is geographical: we live 23.4 miles (thank you, Google) from our church, which in metro Boston feels like traveling to a different world every Sunday. What does it mean to go to church right now? What does it mean to be the church right now? Herbert looked at the altar and saw his heart. He looked at the walls of St. Andrew’s and saw stones…perhaps he looked out at the gathering of parishioners and also saw stones: Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy name: That if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. —George Herbert On the first Palm Sunday, Jesus said of the exultant multitude, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:36-40). The apostle Peter—named “Rock”—clearly thought a lot about what it means to be a stone. He wrote to the church in exile under Nero’s violent persecutions: As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. —1 Peter 2:4-5 I imagine Jesus, standing on the threshold of my heart, taking a long, affectionate look around. I see him enter and lay his hands on the stony walls. I hear him say, we can work with this. I think of so many scattered stones praying quietly in their homes this morning, perhaps joining live-streamed church services and singing along with the hymns coming through computer speakers. We can work with this. We’ve always been working with this. What is God doing with this whole constellation of events? Pandemic and shortages of protective equipment. School closures, church “closures,” shifting timelines, uncertain projections, uncertainty projected. Our economy poised on a precipice. My heart, the broken altar. My life and so many lives, scattered stones for the building of a spiritual house. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. —Ezekiel 36:26 We can work with this. For years—decades even—I have breezed past Psalm 23. It’s everywhere, after all. On pillows, framed in cross-stitch, on kitschy posters—everybody knows it. And like every good adolescent (and we all know how prolonged adolescence is these days), I rejected the familiar and the popular because it was…familiar and popular. And, I wrongly thought, it just seems too nice. I cast for comfort I can no more getBy groping round my comfortless… The worst thing is not the last thing. Sarah Chestnut Throughout this past year, I have returned to Psalm 23 like…well, a hungry sheep to good pasture, a thirsty sheep to quiet waters. I have prayed it at night, as part of the liturgy of the pillows, prayed it when my heartbeat is too loud in my head, prayed it driving to and from my children’s schools, prayed it as a song, prayed it half-said, prayed it under my breath and when making bread. And this past week I have prayed it again and again walking the half-mile lane that runs through our neighborhood. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. I have prayed this Psalm standing in my children’s bedroom doorways, brushing my hand over the doorframes, imagining the Hebrew people in Egypt painting lamb’s blood on their doorposts. I have prayed for Jesus’ blood to mark our doorposts. Then I’ve second-guessed that prayer. If I pray this am I saying COVID-19 is a plague on the earth, a mighty act of judgement which is also a mighty act of deliverance? Who can say that? Who is being judged? Who is being delivered? I pray Christ’s blood on our doorposts, yes, as a plea that coronavirus will pass over our house and all who have sheltered here, but I pray it even more as a way to rehearse my ultimate hope whether or not illness finds its way to us. I pray and I plea Christ’s blood because, in Christ, judgement has already come. Death has been met and mastered. The worst thing is not the last thing. It is not Friday; it is not Saturday; it is Sunday, resurrection day. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; The last enemy to be destroyed is death. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Death is swallowed up in victory. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Today I might die. Yesterday I did not. All of my tomorrows belong to you, Lord Jesus.

The morning of March 3, 2020, will be forever remembered by Middle Tennesseans as the day a tornado traversed nearly 60 miles and left utter devastation in its path. The day bears an added significance for me, as it was the first day of a bucket list trip to see the 48th Iditarod dog sled race in Alaska. For both of these things to happen on the same day caused a peculiar confluence of emotion—an uncomfortable concoction of regret, joy, pain, confusion, and elation. When the tornado first ripped through our neighborhood at one in the morning, I immediately and rightly prepared myself to give up this trip I had been wanting to take since fourth grade. It’s not right to be joyful right now; we don’t deserve this. We need to stay home and be with our community. But then, as I swept up glass in our kitchen at 2:00 in the morning, my sweet husband said, “I can’t go on this trip. But you’re going, and you’re going this morning.” Our driveway was covered by a 70-year-old poplar tree that was uprooted in the storm (one of about 30 trees we lost), so with the help of a neighbor I was whisked to the airport in the wee hours of the morning. It felt very much like an escape, and in several ways, it was. In the weeks leading up to the trip, I began to sense that I needed to disappear and be completely shaken from normalcy—which for me meant to be cold, makeup-less, tired, and smelling of dogs. If I’m honest, I’ve been restless in recent months. Maybe you’ve felt this way, too. I’ve felt like that eighteen year old girl again—on the brink of womanhood, itching to make new friends, ready to experience newness. When you’re eighteen, you can pick up and go to college. When you’re twenty-nine, picking up and leaving without cause looks an awful lot like abandoning community and running away from your problems. There are people I love here. There’s good work to be done here. But for eight days, Alaska would be my disappearing act, my great escape. There were a few final projects to complete for clients before I was able to turn off completely, so I had planned to use the airplane time to work, taking advantage of the on-flight wifi (a true wonder). Between completing tasks, I stared at social media, watching as the sun rose over Nashville to show the reality of the storm’s devastation. Pictures of our home began to arrive from my husband, who immediately readied his chainsaw at the first sign of light to begin cutting a way out of the driveway. My head echoed with what he’d said in the moments after the tornado passed over: “We need to pray right now and thank God we weren’t hit any worse.” In the darkness, we could tell there were large trees that had been uprooted and laid down on either side of the house, but the sunlight revealed how close we were to having lost our home. He sent photos and videos of our property, and our neighbor posted her own pictures of trees that fell on her cars and the havoc wreaked on our street. From six miles in the air, I felt the opposite of what I had expected to feel on this flight: I longed to be home. I longed to put on my bibs and gloves and get to work. My husband told me people were showing up to help without question—dozens of them on a Tuesday morning. I was missing the evidence of a community’s true beauty, all because I had left and abandoned them for my own enjoyment. At first it was hard to see that leaving was still the right decision, though several friends reminded me of this through text as I hurtled through the sky between Nashville and Seattle. I remember saying to Allan, my go-to conversationalist and wise sage during heavy times: “This doesn’t feel right, but somehow, I think it is.” “You’re right,” Allan assured me. Community looks like people asking me how my husband needed help when I couldn’t be there to care for him. Community looks like people bringing him food (as a powerlifting lumberjack, he needs a lot of it). Community looks like families with their wee children picking up branches and giving my husband coloring pages to brighten his mood. Community looks like others taking photos of the help we were receiving. Community looks like people saying, “Mike, what do we need to do so you can join Leslie in Alaska?” I went to Alaska to escape home. But Alaska became a reminder of what makes home so beautiful in the first place. Leslie E. Thompson Community also took the shape of comfort from strangers while in a distant land. I had gone to Alaska to become an observer, to melt away and blend into the tapestry of big coats and hats and gloves, but we cannot hide from kindness and grace, even in our parkas and massive fur hats. I was given a borrowed community in this new place. From the moment I set foot on Alaskan soil, I was welcomed. And when people asked where I was from (the Iditarod brings about many tourists, and, obviously, I was one of them), I was met with an immediate, “Are you okay? Is your family okay?” Everyone knew about the tornado that happened just hours before, even in a part of the world that’s so far north it’s basically Russia. I think more of the residents listen to NPR than most folks in the “lower 48,” and apparently, NPR’s coverage of the storms was extensive. Everyone knew about what happened, everyone had seen pictures, everyone wanted to help. I could almost see their hearts reaching out and grabbing for mine. The knee-jerk reaction to care for others in crisis is something we cannot help. Due to the extreme kindness of several of our friends, and the quick turnaround from insurance and contractors, my husband joined me in Alaska two days later. We spent our time with the crew of an Iditarod legend, four-time champion Lance Mackey. (The reasons he’s legendary are infinite, but I’ll start with this: he’s the only person to win the race four times in a row. I had him on my podcast a few years ago, so if you’d like to learn more about him, you can listen here). I wanted a backstage, all-access pass, roadie experience, and that’s what we got. We broke bread with Lance and his family, we listened as he told stories from the trail, we held his children and cared for them while their parents were tending to race events. We hung out with big, amazing, loud, high-energy dogs and led them to the starting line of the 1049 mile race. We stayed up late. We stared at mountains. We were dang cold. We got tattoos. And everywhere we went, people asked how we were. We left Nashville to escape and disappear, but instead we were seen and acknowledged by strangers. These people became our surrogate community. In the midst of their own crisis and high-stake events, they became the family we needed. I recall an evening at night’s end in the local haunt, Club Paris. It’s an Anchorage institution with the best steaks in town and a vibe that only fifty years of being on the “downtown strip” could produce. I sat across from my host, Kevin, as he told everyone at the table about my journey to Alaska. My eyes scanned the room and saw Lance across the bar recalling stories about his mother who passed last year, Lance’s children and partner giggling and running around the chairs and tables, and those who had put on the fundraising event cleaning up with beers in hand. I realized this was a membership, and I was being welcomed into it. Southern hospitality is great, but the welcome into Alaskan membership is even better. James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” played us out of the bar that evening as everyone left humming that familiar melody on their way home. That week, I discovered that there’s a little bit of home everywhere. I heard the whisper of home as I watched Hobo Jim, a Nashville songwriter and Alaskan superstar, playing to adoring fans. I heard the echoes of home as Johnny Cash played at a local bar. I felt the embrace of home when strangers wrapped me in southern-style hugs after learning what we had gone through. I am not a gifted enough writer to bend words in a way that will make you feel what we felt in Alaska. We are stereotypical in this way: just about everyone who lives there was, at one point, a visitor that couldn’t get the state out of their heart. For Christmas, my mom gifted me a copy of Peter Jenkins’ book Looking for Alaska. Peter (another Nashvillian!) has the best job of all time. He meets people and experiences their lives and then writes about it. I assume he even gets paid for it. What a dream. He’s most known for his book, A Walk Across America, in which he wrote about his experience walking across the country. In Looking for Alaska, Jenkins moves to Seward, Alaska, for eighteen months and submerges himself in the culture. He observes, he listens, he experiences. I began reading the book in the weeks leading up to our trip, and this passage struck me: Different seasons of the year, of life, demand different kinds of output. There is a time to sow and a time to reap. Sometimes it’s more mental, sometimes it’s almost purely physical. And at times your heart and spirit rule. —Peter Jenkins, Looking for Alaska I am reminded of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. There is a time for everything, we are told. I find it of note that at a time when I should have been physically in the act of helping the community, I was being called to a time of healing instead. I trace other times in life when I feel as though I should be in one season, but the one I’ve found myself in looks entirely different. Maybe this is something you resonate with as well. It will take years to return to normalcy on our homestead. Downed trees will have to stay where they lay, dented land will have to fill itself in, tree roots will have to remain exposed. But the pain of seeing the displacement of these things is tempered with the reminder that during the season of crisis, there was comfort. During the chaos, there was the order of love and care both near and far. They will serve as reminders that while our hearts yearn to see and experience new things, and yes, sometimes disappear, we cannot find ourselves without the oversight of a creator who loves us and cares for our needs. I went to Alaska to escape home. But Alaska became a reminder of what makes home so beautiful in the first place.

I’ve wanted to write for weeks, to speak something hopeful and life-giving into the world’s collective anxiety. But the words feel stuck, dried up. They come flickering in the middle of the night or while I wash dishes, only to evaporate in the cold light of my computer screen. For all of us makers, this is supposedly our time. You see the posts on Facebook and Twitter, doing their best to spin some hope. Finish that manuscript. Learn that instrument. Check in with everybody. The world has slowed, all our classes and meetings and events have been canceled, so there’s no excuse anymore, right? It’s the slowing of life, the removal of barriers to the good stuff, creativity and connection. There is no inspirational Instagram post telling you to sit on the floor for half an hour to pet your dog and cry. Some days, this isolated life is a well of beauty and kindness. I do my work, spend time reading, check in with friends and family, and make a beautiful, tasty dinner. And then there are the days when the to-do list stares back, but all I see are the constant news articles, the social media notifications, the monotony of homebound life where time loses meaning. In this strange, slow new world, where many of us are working from home, deleting canceled events from our calendars, suddenly homeschooling, or finding new stretches of unfilled time, it’s tempting to feel a need to do things. And as I try to find the shape of my life for now, I’ve had to give myself permission to go a little easier on myself. If you need to hear this too, may I extend the same grace to you. Permission Note #1: It’s okay if you can’t make art right now. It’s a strange time to be a maker right now. Sure, I’ve already worked from home for a while, so it’s not like there’s a full day job eating up my time. But suddenly, the calendar is empty, errands are compressed and minimized, and staying home is the expected norm for us all. What a great time to write poems, keep up my blog, and pitch to all the places I have on my “People I Want to Write For” list, right? We see the memes, the encouraging commentary: stay home and finish your novel, paint the canvases, learn the instrument, insert your medium of choice. Worse, some of us may feel pressure to look for more paid work, or finally start that crafty side hustle. I’ve been feeling a low-level struggle for days because I wanted to write this post, but couldn’t get my head around words. Recently, in The Rabbit Room Chinwag Facebook group, I saw this question raised: Are any of you finding it nearly impossible to create art right now? I’m not consciously anxious about COVID-19, but my adrenaline level is SO HIGH! I can’t get myself to focus on anything, much less working with my hands. If this is you, know that it’s okay to not feel creative. It may be frustrating and painful. Maybe you even feel like you have art you could be giving, if it weren’t so much work to get up and keep moving during the day. But it doesn’t mean the work isn’t happening. You don’t know the songs, stories, poems, and paintings that are sparking and swirling in the depths of your being. Give yourself a little room. If you must write, write in secret about the shape of these different days, about unnameable griefs and mundane joys. Maybe these are the days of listening to new music, rereading your favorite books, playing interesting podcasts while you wash the dishes. Author Kaitlin Curtice had this to say in a recent Twitter thread: It is OK if you aren’t producing or creating right now… Grief and trauma affect us all in different ways, but they do AFFECT US. Is it hard to create right now? That’s okay. We need YOU, because at some point, it will be time again, and we will be ready. I don’t know about you, but I call that good news. Permission Note #2: It’s okay to check in on yourself too. One day, after a Zoom meeting for work, a long phone call with my family, and preparation for an online gathering of church friends, I remarked to my husband, “I feel like I’ve done way more socializing since we started social distancing.” It was a joke, but like all jokes, there was a kernel of truth hiding inside. Staying connected takes a lot of work right now. It’s a vital thing to do right now, for our own sanity and for the good of our neighbors. We check in on older friends and relatives to make sure their needs are met. We check in on single friends who are far from home and feeling lonely. We check in on people we know who struggle with anxiety and depression, and on parents who suddenly have all their kids at home and are trying to juggle a new normal schedule. Be kind to yourself. This is how we heal. Jen Rose Yokel But sometimes, especially if you are a helper or empathetic type, the weight of all this checking in can be hard to bear. We live in a unique time where just about everyone we know is struggling against a common fear, even though it takes many forms. It could mean many conversations, all of them weighty with no solid end in sight. It could mean the vague feeling that somehow your own weight isn’t as heavy as others’, the compulsion to keep giving, giving, giving. That same grief and trauma that saps our creative energy? It can also mess with our capacity to give and care for others. Don’t be afraid to pause and check in with yourself now and then. Where are you feeling heavy or fearful? Those are places worth tending to. It may mean taking a day off from looking in on others to pray about those weights, to cry and talk it through with someone who gives you life, to schedule a remote appointment with a therapist or pastor or spiritual director, and, yes, maybe even create a little something if you can. I realize carving out that time may be hard for you, especially if you have children to care for or a demanding job. (Especially medical care providers. I see you.) So consider this permission. Consider it a gentle nudge to find a little space where you can, even just a couple minutes in the middle of a household chore, or a moment of stillness right before bed. Be kind to yourself. This is how we heal.

In Season 2, Episode 3, Drew Miller talks with J Lind and Lucas Morton about the album they made together, For What It’s Worth, specifically its title track. In this episode, Drew, J, and Lucas discuss the necessity of listening to negative emotions while writing songs, the deceivingly difficult work of self-honesty, and the mutual contingency of beauty and suffering. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 3 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 author Nancy Guthrie. In this episode, Jonathan and Nancy discuss the invaluable resource of deep focus, research as practicing the posture of learning, and the clarifying power of talking before writing. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 16 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.

The world is different now. We’re hunkering down. Thus far, for us Whipples, the price of that is small. I know it’s not small for everyone. The Psalms make a lot more sense these days. Our prayer is for doctors and scientists, now more than ever. In the meantime, the Spirit has been teaching me things I had forgotten. In times of war—wars on people or wars on germs—folks squeezed by dearth of one kind or another tend to gain perspective by the bucketful. You see them start to appreciate small things. Soldiers limited to MREs come up with little recipes crafted of freeze-dried parts. Prisoners on a chain gang invent and reinvent heart-wrenching work songs out of the pieces of their former lives. Aid organization annals are full of stories of children ecstatic over eight crayons that many over-entertained kids would ignore out of hand. I’m not saying that a time of illness and death is a good time. Pandemics are products of the Fall and—as any reader of the Book of Job knows—they are not necessarily devoid of diabolical influence. Yet part of the good the Lord wrings from such difficulties is a reminder of the sweetness of our pleasures. Hardship strips away our pretension and pettiness. Most of us have enough pettiness to spare anyway. When I was twenty, for example, I knew everything. And of the everything I knew, I knew Jimmy Buffett music was not serious art. I remember listening to the man as a child, sitting in the back of my grandparents’ car. To me, it felt like a phase my family went through, like workout videos or weekly hibachi food. I enjoyed the Ricky Skaggs phase and the Ray Stevens phase. Then came “Fruitcakes” and “Everybody’s Got a Cousin in Miami” and “Quietly Making Noise.” I was eleven when this record came out, and my grandparents still lived off Freewill Road in Cleveland. Across the street was a cow pasture in which I don’t remember ever seeing any cows. It was somewhere I longed to roam. I always had the vague desire to vault the barbed wire and see what lay on the far side of that field. It was a Rubicon. Jimmy Buffett did not cross Rubicons. The man made two 70s-country style records. Then he began a reefer journey of burrowing into a beach bum character he either crafted or unearthed, like an id from the depths of his banana boat soul. I sang along as a young kid, but beginning in high school, I built an ideological Babel of what was worth listening to. I labeled it Good Art. It did not include Jimmy Buffett. Nor did it include any of the top forty hits puttering out of my community’s staticky transistors. They liked Aerosmith; I liked Counting Crows. They liked Faith Hill and Limp Bizkit; I went in for Michal Hromek and Crux and Caedmon’s Call. I liked challenging lyricism and an amount of unpredictable structure. If the music was going to give me everything it thought I wanted, I didn’t care. I'm convinced that, of all the good things we enjoy, God enjoys them more than any of us. It is not pedantic for us to remind each other of all that is good. Adam Whipple Twenty years and four kids stripped away much of those old, arbitrary ideologies. Then last summer, in the mysterious calculus of God’s irony, my friend Ethan asked me to come play gigs with him—at Margaritaville. If you don’t know, Margaritaville isn’t just a song anymore; it’s a high-quality themed hotel. The staff wear Hawaiian shirts. They pipe a coconut sunscreen smell into the lobby even in the rain-sodden dead of February. There are real parrots in cages near the bar. I succumbed to the gig for financial reasons, and because I love hanging out with Ethan. He’s a dedicated student of whatever he puts his mind to. He had already done vast amounts of research about the son of a son of a sailor and become an armchair expert—and unlikely evangelist—for Jimmy Buffett’s songwriting. This is a guy who held staunch, informed opinions on large swaths of nineties alternative, and here he was touting the brilliance of “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” He’s my good friend, and I know better than to argue with him when he believes something that strongly. So I didn’t say anything. It took playing the shows for me to understand the appeal, though. We’d load up our gear and drive to Gatlinburg. Seven o’clock would roll around, and we’d play our way through one cover after another: The Beach Boys, Chris Stapleton, Jack Johnson, Johnny Cash, Smashing Pumpkins, Journey, and, of course, Jimmy Buffett, to whom Ethan referred as “Uncle Jimmy.” The intimate little bar crowds ate it up. We’d get them used to the motion of the show and pull out “Sweet Caroline” or “The Weight,” highly singable group participation numbers. Peppering the set were songs by the Fruitcake-man himself: “Pencil Thin Mustache” or “Come Monday” or “Fins.” We’d even throw in sad, drink-by-yourself bits like “A Pirate Looks at 40.” Looking at the faces of vacationers from all over the country, I started to get it. These folks came to the bar to listen to us because, for that slight moment of a major chord or a perfect rhyme, everything was alright. We got the privilege of being part of these people’s respite from bills and jobs and news cycles and neighborhood association meetings. One of the ingrained pretensions swept away by dearth—even a forcible dearth of social contact—is that of the lofty pleasure. It is the self-involved pleasure of eating, drinking, or doing things one doesn’t necessarily like on the grounds that they are somehow higher than the simple joys of the proletariat. I’m guilty of it, of course. Kids and mortgages tend to tear down these ivory towers for me, but playing Jimmy Buffett covers helps too. The consummate ‘Gulf and Western’ singer-songwriter makes the music he wants to make, after all. He’s only been in danger of winning a Grammy twice. Both times, it was over crowd-pleaser collaborations with powerhouse country artists; it was never for his beachier tunes. Most of Jimmy Buffett’s songs revolve around simple pleasures. Like conch fritters and étouffée, these songs are comfort food. At times like these, we could all use a little comfort food. And it’s okay. Sure, sometimes you’re watching Dada plays Off Broadway and drinking keto coffee. Other days, you’re the people of Walmart. I’ve got news for you: the Psalms were written for the people of Walmart. They’re sweatpants psalms. They’re Oh-God-Y2K-is-coming psalms. The writers ask God to do cringeworthy things to their enemies. They’re suicidal and angry and beset by fears. And these songs are also congregational music, meant to bring us relief. And it’s okay. In my head, I hear Tom Hanks’ Fred Rogers from A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, looking at a tacky Christmas photo and saying, “That’s a nice picture. It gives me a good feeling to see them all together like that.” It’s not a great work of art, but it does give us a good feeling. Maybe it’s not Wolfgang Puck, but it is Spaghettios, and it gives us a good feeling. Maybe it’s Jimmy Buffett, and it’s musical comfort food. I’m convinced that, of all the good things we enjoy, God enjoys them more than any of us. The unassailable mirth hidden within sharing simple pleasures and offering them to our neighbors, be they cups of cold water or Jimmy Buffett songs, is one of the gifts most generously given to us on this mortal plane. There are many reasons to weep. There is nothing new under the sun. Even still, it is not pedantic for us to remind each other of all that is good. Enjoy, and be ye comforted.

The Brave Artists Club is a free family art experience featuring a variety of artistic activities and mediums taught by illustrators, cartoonists, painters, potters, leatherworkers, and writers who are part of the Rabbit Room community. We hope this fun, eclectic journey will spark imagination, camaraderie, and creative courage. Artists leading this class include Eddy Efaw, Growley Leather Co., John Hendrix, Kyra Hinton, Jonny Jimison, Aedan Peterson, Benjamin Schipper, Karen Schipper, Jamin Still, Phaedra Taylor, and myself! Designed especially for families to do together, it is appropriate for all ages (though some activities are more geared towards younger kids, some older). Use your own parental discretion about which activities are suitable and safe for your kids. Those under 10 may need extra assistance. Almost all the activities in this class are adaptable to whatever art supplies you already have around your house (pencils, pens, crayons, markers, white paper, scissors, glue, etc). One exception is the watercolor activity, for which you’ll need a set of watercolor paints (a kid’s pan set is fine) and brushes. Since this is a self-paced course, it does not necessarily include individual feedback from the teachers. There is, however, a community forum which allows families to post their art for others to see, and to encourage each others’ art.

A few weeks ago, my seventeen-year-old daughter Skye told me she wanted to take a walk and listen to a complete album, top-to-bottom. She said she was tired of listening to singles, and, though she spins full records all the time, wanted to experience an artist’s work in an intentional way. To my great pleasure, she asked what she should listen to. I stood up in the garden where I was weeding and told her the first album that popped into my head: Josh Ritter’s So Runs the World Away. (I wrote about what a revelation that record was to me here in the Rabbit Room a few years back.) She came back about an hour later and we talked about the songs—most of which she had heard, though they had most likely been cherry-picked in a playlist or played in the background at our house. It’s a different thing altogether to sit and listen to a full record, each song a part of a larger opus. Now, if a member of Generation Z is telling me she’s growing weary of singles, something must be up. I’ve been thinking that for years, but I can be sort of a curmudgeon when it comes to music. Granted, Skye is a singer/songwriter, a musician, and has grown up in a musical home—but the fact that she arrived at that conclusion on her own makes me wonder if she’s not alone. Spotify has not only changed the way we listen to music, it’s changed our relationship to it. My feelings toward Spotify are complicated, because I railed against it when it first arrived. (For our purposes, I’m referring to Spotify, Apple Music, and any other similar streaming platform.) Friends in Sweden, where it started, told me in so many words, “You can fight it all you want, but this is the future of music.” Well, I fought it all I wanted, and it was still the future of music. My record label also saw it before I did, and pushed me to release my albums there for years before I finally conceded defeat. I’ve made my peace with it, honest. (And now for a small rant: I still maintain that if there were two tiny tweaks to the platform, things would be so much better. First, there should be a paywall after, say, the third listen of a song. If you’ve listened to a song thrice, I’d say it’s time you paid a dollar to the people who made it. The best argument for Spotify is that it’s a great way to discover music. I totally agree. But after three listens, I think it’s safe to say that you’ve discovered it, right? Easy. Now support the folks who made it. Second, why not treat new music like new movies? Nobody expects brand-new movies to be free on Netflix on the opening weekend (quarantine anomalies notwithstanding). If you want to see the new Star Wars, then you go pay the ten bucks and watch it in the theater. If you don’t want to do that, you can wait a few months and watch it at home. This is how movies are funded. If you want the new Coldplay record when it comes out, just buy it—or wait a few months and then listen on Spotify. I realize it’s too late for this tweak, because the philosophy of the model is entrenched. The bird has flown. But my first point is doable. And I also realize it’ll never happen. As a side note, a third grievance is the death of liner notes. Why on earth don’t Spotify and iTunes have a “credits” link on every album so people can see who played what, who produced it, where it was recorded, who got thanked, etc.? It would be so easy, and it would draw attention to the many, many people who help make the music we love. Here ends the rant.) Ubiquity makes us giants, and puts the world at our fingertips; scarcity makes us small enough to see that the little things are vast. Andrew Peterson My hunch is that the combination of 1) the quick and easy thrill of being able to listen to anything you want whenever you want and 2) the glut of new music at our fingertips, has sucked some of the enjoyment out of the listening experience. This is really about scarcity versus ubiquity. False dichotomies are a pet peeve of mine, so I’m not saying that old is always better or that new is always better (though I’ll admit I tend to err on the side of the former). But I am suggesting that the above combination of on-demand music coupled with millions of options is causing us to drift away from something really wonderful and enriching, and to drift toward something that’s wearing us out (evidenced in Skye’s desire to sink into an album for a change). When I was a kid, we didn’t have much money. That meant it was a big deal if I saved the ten bucks to buy a tape at Turtle’s Music in Gainesville. When I got home I would smell the cassette, unfold the booklet, and read the tiny liner notes while I listened. I would treat the tape like it was a rare jewel. I had to think twice before I lent it to someone, and I always made sure I got it back when they were finished. The cassette was a treasure. When I rode in my buddy Joe’s 280 ZX I would drool all over the tapes in his Case Logic case and beg him to lend me the newest Tom Petty album. He had to think about it hard, because if he did, it meant he couldn’t listen to it in the meantime. He would miss it, pine for it, until I gave it back. Not only was the artifact itself a treasure, it wasn’t easy to skip songs—which meant you discovered buried treasures within the treasure. You had to suffer through songs you didn’t like in order to get to the ones you did, giving the B-sides time to grow on you, with the happy result that they became favorites. Nowadays, if I don’t like a song it’s really easy to remove it from a playlist and never give it another shot, and I’m certain that by doing so I’m missing out on some great music. This came up recently in a Rabbit Room meeting. I was talking to Chris Thiessen, who reviews a lot of albums, and asked him how he knows an album well enough to review it if it just came out. To my great relief, he said he tries to listen to a record from front to back at least five times before he writes about it. That’s a good discipline, especially if it’s a bad record. I honestly don’t know how reviewers do it. But I’d argue that even five academic listens in one weekend is nothing to what it’s like to live with a record for a few months because it’s the only thing in your car. A few examples are in order. 1. Counting Crows. Their first record is a masterpiece. A game-changer. One of the great albums of all time, in my not-so-humble opinion. The second album, Recovering the Satellites is grittier, rockier, and takes some time. I honestly didn’t like it at first. But I kept listening, because I was a fan. After a few months it grew on me more and more, and now I’d argue that it was the perfect follow up to that perfect first record. 2. Rich Mullins. A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band. Honestly wasn’t sure about it at first. I liked a few songs, but didn’t get it. Then one day, after a few months, I realized it was magnificent. His last album, Brother’s Keeper is another example. A lot of people don’t like it, but I think it’s wonderful, and it’s because I let it steep. 3. Bob Dylan. Blood on the Tracks. A classic, recommended to me by Randall Goodgame. It was my first real listen to Dylan, and it took about eleven listens. 4. Alison Krauss and Union Station. So Long, So Wrong. Truly a masterpiece of an album. But in the late-nineties I didn’t think I liked country or bluegrass. Boy, was I wrong. And it took driving around America with Gabe Scott for a few years to realize it. My point is this: if I made a list of my very favorite albums of all time, I’m pretty sure most of them cost me some time and effort before they really clicked. The key was the scarcity. The fact that the CD or tape lived in my car and I didn’t have the world at my fingertips meant that I gave the songs time to unfold themselves to me, to surprise me, to shift the tectonic plates of my taste and understanding enough that the next time I looked out the window I could tell the landscape had subtly broadened. The time spent with the music was the key that unlocked it—and the music, in turn, was the key that unlocked something in me. None of that would have happened if I had bumped up against a difficult song and merely skipped it or removed it from the playlist. Back then, the interface made it a little more difficult to banish a song into outer darkness. But now, the path of least resistance is to make a knee-jerk decision about a song and never revisit it, or to mean to go back and listen again but forget because eighty-five new albums came out today. So rather than peddling a false dichotomy, I suggest meeting somewhere in the middle. If you’re a fogey like me, it’s good to remember that old is not necessarily better. I absolutely love the fact that my kids love music. They’re always discovering new stuff. Folks, I’m here to tell you that there’s some wonderful music being made today, by people half your age. Some of the stuff my kids like is tough for me at first, but by paying attention and giving it time I not only honor my progeny and get to know them better, I get to put my money where my mouth is and do the work of learning to like something new. (PSA: if your kids are playing an album loud enough for you to hear, chances are they want you to like it. They might be telling you something about their hearts.) On the other hand, it’s good to submit to some self-imposed limits. Rather than Pandora, or a playlist, try what Skye did and commit to one record, front to back. Put it on repeat. Don’t let yourself skip anything. Sink in. Take my word for it: the artist worked hard deciding what order the songs should be in, and dreams of listeners experiencing it as a whole. My best argument for scarcity is this: for years our family vacations have been marked by one or two albums on repeat. When we went out west, it was Riders in the Sky. A few summers ago it was the second Colony House album. Another it was Coldplay’s Viva la Vida. By choosing our “vacation album,” we’re imprinting those songs with that memory of that place. A record can be a cloud storage drive for a memory. It’s just floating out there, and when the right music plays it downloads like a bolt of lightning. To this day, when Riders in the Sky’s Silver Jubilee record comes on I’m in Yellowstone National Park and a herd of memories stampedes through my mind. There’s a lot to be said for ubiquity. I sure am glad I can find a song I want to hear in a few clicks. Indeed, Paul Simon, these are the days of miracle and wonder. But scarcity can be like fertilizer for your soul. Slowing down enough to savor one thing for a long time can teach you to enjoy everything a little more. Ubiquity makes us giants, and puts the world at our fingertips; scarcity makes us small enough to see that the little things are vast. Click here to read Part 2: Miracles & Wonders by Chris Thiessen.

I’ve been asked to write a brief pronunciation guide for anyone who might need help with character and place names in The Door on Half-Bald Hill. Pronunciation guides are tricky! It’s always easier to hear a new word than to decode it by means of the kind of weird, inconsistent descriptors I’m about to give. Two quick rules of thumb. First, when you come across a strange name in a piece of fiction, make your peace with it right away. Keep it simple and logical. You don’t want to trip over it every time the word appears. Second, assume that the writer was going for something beautiful. Nobody wants to work with ugly, ungainly words for years on end. It should sound nice when you say it aloud and when you think it in your head. Here goes. Idris: sounds like you think it does. Idris Elba. Corann: COR – un, rhymes with “foreign.” Deirdre, Muriel, Calder, Shannan, Sloane, Etain, Murdoch, Pixie, Vaughn, and Brennan: all sound just like you’d imagine. Hard “c” at the end of “Murdoch.” Barra: I can’t think of a rhyming word! Wait. Okay. Think of an excessively wealthy Southern woman who’s very proud of her family lineage. One of the older characters in Gone with the Wind, for example. Imagine her saying “horror,” and you should have it. Llyr: rhymes with “steer” and “clear.” Llyr steers the coracle through the clear water. Clodagh: CLO-dah. Ignore the “g.” Rhymes with “Yoda.” Saoirse: Think Saoirse Ronan. This insane combination of vowels makes a sound somewhere between a long “e” and a short “e.” Say “Seershah,” but flatten your tongue a bit. Cogath Tornech: CO-goth TORE-neck. This is the War of Thunder. Necks get torn. Tír Ársa: TEER AHR-suh. Oh, the fair land of Tír Ársa! The sound of these words should fill you with longing and bittersweet memories! If it doesn’t, say them differently. Tullagh Sé: TOO-luh SAY. This first syllable rhymes with words like “took” and “look,” so you can remember it like this—“We took a look at the Tullagh Sé.” Baileléan: Trickiest word in the book. Think “balalaika” without the “aika.” Slap an “ane” on there instead. Laure Hittle divides that last syllable ever-so-subtly in two, and it’s gorgeous. Fir Bolg: feer BOLG. First syllable rhymes with “fear.” Because you should fear them. They’re the Lightning Men. They will eat up your land. That syllable also rhymes with the “Tír” of “Tír Ársa,” but I didn’t add the accent because the Fir Bolg are part of Irish/Celtic Mythology. Like so many elements of The Door on Half-Bald Hill, I didn’t make them up. But maybe I should have added the accent. Hmmmm. Well. You can’t win ‘em all.

In Season 2, Episode 4, Drew Miller talks with Ben Shive about his album, The Cymbal Crashing Clouds, and together they break down his song “The Fire Pit.” Drew and Ben discuss the scandal of parables, the indispensability of collaboration, and the implications of sabbath for the creative process. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 4 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 Laura Fabrycky, author of Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus: Exploring the World and Wisdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In this episode, Jonathan and Laura discuss the multiple competing narratives of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the centrality of place in the stories of our lives, and connections between writing and civic housekeeping. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 17 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.

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 1: Ubiquity & Scarcity by Andrew Peterson.] Friends, I believe I am falling victim to one of the classic blunders—the most famous of which is never get involved in a land war in Asia—but only slightly less known is this: never go against a Peterson when your job is on the line! I kid. And yet… Last week, Andrew Peterson made an argument for the recovery of the “lost art of listening” and scarcity in music. In it, he shared about his experience growing up with cassettes and CDs, poring over liner notes, and the process of learning to love an album’s deeper cuts. He argues that the ubiquity offered by Spotify and the digital age has made it easy to speed past these experiences and engage with more music on a surface level, rather than dive deep. Today, I’m tasked with offering a rebuttal—an alternate view of our musical landscape and its implications on our capability to intentionally engage with art. But I’d first like to establish some common ground. I absolutely agree and affirm the need to sit, slow down, and pay attention to what we’re listening to with the same respect we offer films at the theater. After all, the artist spent months—perhaps years—crafting this collection of music for our enjoyment and enrichment. Can’t we offer them at least an hour’s attention? Andrew covered this subject well, and I don’t want to spend too much time doubling down on it. What I’d like to do instead is push back against the idea that streaming-era ubiquity undercuts the process of truly living with an album. The choice between intentional listening and playing background music is not new to Generation Z or Millennials or Gen Xers. Before the algorithms of Spotify and Pandora came along to compete for our musical attention, there were mixtapes—collections of songs cherry picked so we could ignore the album cuts we didn’t like. Furthermore, radio programmers have been curating America’s musical taste and pushing singles for just about 100 years. Deconstructing the album is not a novel idea. The choice has always been there: do we allow ourselves and others to control a piece of art and conform it to our needs, or do we allow an artist to speak to us in the way they intended? Surprisingly, a look at recent Billboard charts suggests that America is actually taking a slowed-down approach to music. While social commentators like to highlight Gen Z’s shortening attention span, last year, 21-year-old Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” became the longest-running number single in history, holding the spot for 19 weeks. That’s nearly five months dominated by a single song. Additionally, it’s now commonplace for entire albums to appear on the Hot 100 chart at the same time, instead of just a single or two. In 2018, Drake claimed seven of the top ten spots when his album Scorpion dropped. This year, The Weeknd’s album After Hours also appeared on the chart in its entirety. What this all suggests is that people are listening. They’re listening to albums from cover to cover. They’re taking their time. But I’m not here to talk about how ubiquity has served the world’s biggest pop stars. They were doing fine before the streaming era, and they’ll be doing fine in whatever era comes next (may the vinyl revolution come soon!). The true “miracles and wonders” of the streaming era begin with the opening of the gates to independent artists. Never in music’s history has it been as possible for an independent artist to gather an audience. Now, please don’t mishear me. It will never be easy for independent artists, but the tools available—from platforms like Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Audiomack, and Spotify, to digital distributors like TuneCore and CD Baby, to recording software like GarageBand, Pro Tools, and FL Studio—are simply unprecedented. Music creation, distribution, and promotion is at every artist’s fingertips. It’s truly amazing. However, it also adds to music’s ubiquitous, saturated market, making it difficult for artists to vie for an audience’s attention. We should never shy away from allowing our curiosity to wander to the world’s very edges in search of truth and hope, especially in times like right now when it’s easy to be cooped up with our own thoughts and emotions. Chris Thiessen This is the world I find myself in every day as a music writer, a world with enough music—old and new, popular and underground, traditional and experimental—to fill the Library of Alexandria hundreds of times over, all for $9.99 a month. Yes, it’s easy to devalue music in this current landscape. Yes, it’s easy to get lost in the unnavigable waves of sound pouring out of speakers incessantly. However, music’s ubiquity is not our enemy. If we as music listeners are not finding art to engage with on the level Andrew shared about with Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Counting Crows’ Recovering the Satellites, we can’t blame Spotify. We can’t blame this new fad or that. We can only blame ourselves. Instead, we should be harnessing this immense wealth of art to: 1) Explore music’s vastness and discover what truly speaks to us, 2) Give attention to a diverse collection of artists whose stories are different from ours and drive us deeper toward truth, and 3) Discover music’s deep interconnectedness and weave together a beautiful picture of the world through art. Let me share a bit about my relationship with music to demonstrate what I mean. I wasn’t much of an “album listener” until about five years ago. I simply didn’t have the tools to critically analyze art and find deeper meaning in its melodies until college. Before then, I listened to albums on occasion (Switchfoot’s The Beautiful Letdown will forever be an important part of my story), but mostly I cherry picked songs to fit my mood and my needs. Most of the time, that meant songs that sounded impressive on my guitar with a lot of distortion (read: Stryper). In 2016, I decided I needed to broaden my horizons and discover more music if I were to truly understand it as an art form and, through it, understand the world I live in. A passage from C. S. Lewis’s Surprised By Joy had been gnawing at me: “It had, heaven help me, never occurred to me that what I called my thoughts needed to be [based] on anything. Kirk once more drew a conclusion…‘Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?’” You see, I had opinions about music, but what they were based on, I couldn’t say. And this is where my undying gratitude for music’s ubiquity enters. In 2017, I set a goal to listen to 500 unique albums in a year—a goal I thought was well-intended, but one I wouldn’t actually reach. I wanted to know the depth and vastness of music, instead of sequester myself off in the niche of Christian hard rock and metal. That year, I listened to 732 unique albums (yes, I’m a nerd and have the list). I listened to new releases which changed my life from Kendrick Lamar’s multi-layered masterpiece DAMN. to Mount Eerie’s devastating exploration of death on A Crow Looked At Me. I dove deep into older artists who have become essential to my musical taste and spiritual formation like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Bob Dylan. That year, to be honest, I didn’t listen to a lot of records on repeat. I was simply trying to listen to as much variety as I could (still with intentionality). Yet, it’s amazing that when I look back on the list, I can remember exactly where I was for so many listens. I remember walking in an East Nashville park soundtracked by Tyler, The Creator’s Flower Boy or doing dishes in our tiny on-campus apartment to 2Pac’s All Eyez On Me. I remember blasting Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band on the Run with Annaleigh on our way to see my musical hero in concert. I’m so thankful for these memories, which I carry with me even as I plow forward in daily music discovery. In the three years since, I’ve tried to slow down my approach somewhat. A balance must be struck between constantly discovering and sitting with a piece over time. I still listen to plenty of albums (217 so far this year), but I’m learning to give them enough time to sit, to glean from them what the artist is communicating and what I can learn from it, to earn “the right to have an opinion” by living with the music. Still, the accessibility of diverse music has been instrumental in my growth. The amount of life lessons and perspectives I’ve experienced as a result of easier access simply couldn’t be matched by any other era of music. For example, through rapper Saba’s Care For Me, I was thrust into the bleak outlook of a young African-American man growing up in Chicago. Through Nigerian-British funk group Ibibio Sound Machine’s Doko Mien, I heard stories in a unique language about coming to the water for rest from labor and stress. Through Brandi Carlile’s By the Way, I Forgive You, I was prepared to practice the compassion and selflessness of being a parent. I wasn’t listening to any of these artists five years ago. I can’t imagine my life without them now. The world of music is infinite. It’s okay to be overwhelmed and not know where to start. As a music writer, I still feel that way all the time. But we should never shy away from allowing our curiosity to wander to the world’s very edges in search of truth and hope, especially in times like right now when it’s easy to be cooped up with our own thoughts and emotions. To that end, I want to provide some resources which will help you recapture the lost art of listening and make sense of this immense world of art. 1. Liner notes & Lyrics: Andrew mentioned his grief over the loss of liner notes, and I feel his pain. However, there are wonderful digital resources to fill this void, at least in part. Genius is a hub with lyrics to basically every song in existence. What makes it even better though is it often offers the song’s credits as well as commentary from the Genius community (Note: this is open source like Wikipedia, but oftentimes, the artists themselves chime in with their own commentaries). Additional resources for credits and album information include Discogs, WhoSampled, and AllMusic. 2. Critical Publications: It should be noted that the ratings and opinions of music critics are exactly that: opinions. They should never dictate your own opinion about music, but there are some publications devoted to true storytelling and editorial writing which I find insightful and help me consider music from different points of view. Among my favorites are Pitchfork, DJBooth, Bandcamp Daily, and of course, our own reviews at The Rabbit Room. But there are so many others that might fit your tastes! Aggregate sites: If you’re looking for new music releases, my favorite resource is Album of the Year, which provides new release lists as well as an aggregation of critical writing on the albums. If you’re looking for past releases, Wikipedia is a wealth of information and has music pages for each year. Though not always accurate or complete, it’s pretty dang helpful. Of course, this doesn’t even include the insane amount of interviews, concert videos, documentaries, video essays, and so much more you can find on YouTube and elsewhere. The resources are endless, and the potential for deeper connection with music today is unparalleled. So, of course, play Paul Simon’s Graceland for the millionth time, and you’re sure to still glean new revelations in these days of miracles and wonders. But please don’t stop there; the world is too big! Let that record lead you to Shaka Zulu by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whose South African isicathamiya was highlighted on Graceland. Then let that lead you north to Nigerian activist Fela Kuti whose 1977 album Fear Not For Man was released amidst 200 different arrests by a corrupt government. Then listen to Mos Def’s Black On Both Sides, which sampled Kuti 20 years later to highlight the ongoing reality of oppression. Then listen to Rich Mullins’ A Liturgy, A Legacy, & A Ragamuffin Band to realize that the battle of hope and fear connects entirely different styles of music. Then listen to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and The War on Drugs’ Lost in the Dream to hear how the midwest landscape has served as muse for generations of American songwriters. Then listen to… I could go on, but I’ll let you continue that listening journey yourself. Click here to read Part 3: Precious Impermanence by Jennifer Trafton.

The story goes that in March of 2015, my roommates and I headed out on spring break to Texas. We left the icy remnants of an early-spring storm in Nashville and headed south. Our first full day there was a Sunday and we attended Ecclesia Church in Houston. That morning, Thad Cockrell was there as a guest leading worship and he introduced a song to the congregation that I’d never heard before called, “We Will Feast in the House of Zion.” I sang along with tears in my eyes. Like many 21-year-olds, I was entering somewhat of a deconstruction phase of my faith, beginning to set aside some practices and thoughts that no longer fit as I’d grown and changed. I suppose that’s a nice way to put it. Privately, I wondered if the entire Jesus thing was a sham. Words I’d used for years began to leave a sour taste in my mouth. I now felt uncertain about the lines I had drawn in the sand. But this song was something on which I could stand. I may have felt unsure of just about everything, but I felt sure enough that there would be a feast. I have always hoped that God liked to eat as much as I do. Had I been listening more closely that Sunday at Ecclesia, perhaps I would have heard Thad say that the song was soon to be released on Sandra McCracken’s Psalms record. But I wasn’t. So instead I scoured the internet for weeks, trying to call to mind as many lyrics as I could to find a recording of it. Of course, I did find it eventually, along with a treasure trove of other songs on the Psalms album. I devoured it, and then noticed a small notation in the liner notes: “With gratitude, this album is dedicated to St. Mary of Bethany Parish (Nashville) and Ecclesia Church (Houston).” Curious, I researched. St. Mary of Bethany Parish was a new Anglican church in South Nashville. Drew and I were newly dating and searching for a church to call home together, since part of my deconstruction process was allowing myself to leave the church where I’d spent most of my college years. Mary of Bethany sounded nice enough and so we visited the following Sunday afternoon. Drew and I sat in the car right before the service and breathed shallow breaths, looking for a way to get out of going in. Something about it felt important, so we hyped ourselves up and in we went. I remember that there was a Wendell Berry poem on the front of the bulletin that Sunday—a sign from God if there ever was one—and I remember lots of standing up and sitting down. It was the quietest church service I had ever attended. We were right at home. It has been five years since then. I have prayed and played with the folks at St. Mary’s. I have belly-laughed and lamented with them. Perhaps most joyously of all, I have eaten with them. We’ve practiced for the feast that is coming. I’ve sat at the kitchen counter, taking bites of leftover mac and cheese after Sandra’s kids finished dinner. Drew and I have eaten Friday night pizza with the Braggs. We’ve made soups and salads for potlucks after church and hoped there’d be enough to go around. I’ve laugh-cried with Melinda over our meals at Dozen Bakery. It matters what we ate. But also, it kind of doesn’t. It matters that we ate. And that we ate together. It matters what we ate. But also, it kind of doesn't. It matters that we ate. And that we ate together. Kelsey Miller I became a Christian eleven years ago, a few months after my 16th birthday. The most formative decisions of my life have stemmed from my allegiance to Jesus Christ. But I’m not the Christian I was a decade ago. Sometimes there is no better choice than to let what stands fall and crumble, even if it’s the very foundation beneath your feet. And indeed, I’ve begun to learn how to be a Christian with my feet on the ground and my eyes wide open. I see that there isn’t one square inch of this world that won’t be touched by God’s healing: every person, every blade of grass, every system that now stands broken. But the healing doesn’t come (and never came) through flying away to glory. It comes through incarnation, which stands as the utter denial that redemption can involve anything except flesh-and-blood people, in flesh-and-blood reality. There are resources and language for the deconstruction process, especially now as we all get more honest about the ugly truths embedded in the history of Christianity. But what I haven’t uncovered is helpful language for the reconstruction process. And yet I’ve lived it. I’ve felt it in my body. And what I’ve found so far to be the balm to the vital, painful work of deconstruction is quite simple: friendship. What has kept me from kicking the whole thing to the curb, what has kept me somewhat in touch with this reality of belovedness… it’s friendship. With flesh-and-blood humans who have as many questions as I do. Who love to eat Indian food as much as I do. Who love to laugh and play and wonder and feast as much as I do. God’s love is not as abstract as it used to be because I most often experience it through people whom I know by name. I know God’s love because I know Helena. Because I know Melinda. Because I know Danny, Jon, Mindy, Mary Beth, Nina, Hunter, Beth, Sarah, Hetty, Becca. The list goes ever onward. I know God’s love because I know God’s people. What gets me every time is that we were led to St. Mary’s through a song. I heard a song one time in Texas and it so captured my imagination that I couldn’t rest until I heard it again. And the tumble of gifts that came from that still overflows my cup. I was so used to rules, equating sanctification with self-flagellation. I was so burnt out on trying to protect God’s image. And then came a message that offered me hope, as though God nestled this song into my heart, gently nudged me outside the cage I’d been living in, and asked me to sing. Loud and free. Head thrown back. And to my surprise, I wasn’t the only one singing. God gave me people to sing with. According to the powers that be, friendship isn’t officially a sacrament. But having been on the receiving end of loving friendship that washes me clean of cynicism, I’d like to propose an amendment. Perhaps more than anything else, I’ve felt the grace of God in having a literal seat and voice at the table among men, women, and children who’ve joyfully given up being correct and instead have decided to feast. Photo by Nina Coyle

In Season 2, Episode 5, Drew Miller talks with Asher and Aedan Peterson about the making of “Thunder in a Blue Sky” from Asher’s recent NAMO record. Drew, Asher, and Aedan discuss the gift of a blank page, the importance of beginning somewhere for the simple sake of beginning, and the indispensability of other people’s perspectives. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 5 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 Scott James, pediatric physician and author of Where Is Wisdom? A Treasure Hunt Through God’s Wondrous World, Inspired by Job 28. In this episode, Jonathan and Scott discuss the practical complexity of applying wisdom, the role of empathy in good reading, the instructive power of story for life’s moral questions, and grace as God’s surprise ending. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 18 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 don’t know about y’all, but I’ve felt claustrophobic over the last couple of months. Being at home more has made inescapable my untidiness and disorganization. Clutter crowds my hallway, and dust can no longer be swept under the rug. I’ve noticed how this new reality has affected my listening habits. Dusty, grimy hip-hop samples and lo-fi bedroom pop quietly comfort me from a pair of headphones, reminding me that others, too, feel claustrophobic. The last week or so, I’ve been craving something else though. The weather has been gorgeous. Outside my isolated apartment, creation is rejoicing in vibrant greens and yellows and purples. Sparrows and blue jays sing at the top of their lungs, while our neighborhood mallard couple goes for a daily stroll down the creek and chipmunks skitter across walkways, cheeks filled with crunchy delights. “All is well,” they remind me, and I can’t help but smile. If creation can rejoice, dance, and sing in the midst of a pandemic, so can I. So today, I’m going to turn on all the lights. I’m going to take off my headphones, and play music—happy music—as loudly as I can. I’m going to laugh with silly songs and dance with my five-month-old. I’m going to drive with all the windows down and sing “Walking On Sunshine” as obnoxiously as I can. Because all is well. Click here to listen to this playlist on Apple Music. Thanks to all who contributed to this Rabbit Room playlist: Helena Aman, Janna Barber, John Barber, Jeremy Casella, Shigé Clark, Matt Conner, Randall Goodgame, Steve Guthrie, Lanier Ivester, J Lind, Drew Miller, Kelsey Miller, Eric Peters, Pete Peterson, Jill Phillips, Andrew Russell, Annaleigh Thiessen, Leslie Thompson, Jennifer Trafton, Kirby Waggoner, Hetty White, Chris Yokel, Jen Yokel

Giving Tuesday cometh. No, we haven’t been transported seven months into the future. (Though, with everything that’s happened, would that really come as such a shock at this point?) This year has been bizarre. In the first quarter alone, we’ve had massive wildfires, tornadoes, a global pandemic, and now isolation and economic hardship to boot. The landscape of life has completely changed, and many folks are facing an uncertain future where they don’t know how they’ll feed their families or cover next month’s rent. Many are scared. Many are grieving. And many of us are just trying to figure out how best we can help. So, Giving Tuesday cometh. Last week, we learned that the official website scheduled a new, global date of May 5th “as a response to the unprecedented need caused by COVID-19.” This will be an opportunity for each of us to give or get involved in whatever way we can. In keeping with our mission, the Rabbit Room is raising relief funds for touring musicians who have lost work due to COVID-19. This Tuesday, May 5th, we’ll be matching donations up to $20,000 toward that cause. We want to stress that this is for more than singer-songwriters and solo-artists. There are tons of drummers, guitarists, pianists, and other musicians who help create the music we love and make live shows and tours possible through their hard work, time, and talent. Shut-downs have had an even greater impact on these folks, who don’t have music to stream, products to sell, or livestream shows by which to raise their own funds in the meantime. So, this Tuesday only, the Rabbit Room will match up to $20,000 to help artists currently in need. The best way to donate will be through our Facebook fundraiser (which we’ll set up the day-of, so as not to confuse anyone), but those not on social media can also donate through the website. One of my biggest struggles through all of this has been a sense of helplessness—knowing so many are hurting, yet not knowing precisely where the needs are or what I can do. I’m encouraged and grateful for this opportunity to participate in the work of John 13:35, showing Christ’s love for us by the way we love one another. I hope we can each find a way to join together this Tuesday in service of that most beautiful of commands. Hang in there, everyone. This too shall pass.

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 2: Miracles & Wonders by Chris Thiessen.] I was one of those present at the spirited lunch debate between Andrew Peterson and Chris Thiessen (and others) that initially sparked this “Lost Art of Listening” blog conversation, and what I remember most of that particular meal was, not only the copious amounts of cheese dip consumed and the fact that I owed it to a younger generation to pay more attention to Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, but also how in awe I was of my community—the diversity of our views, the intelligence and civility and forceful (ahem) exuberance with which they are expressed, and the deep core of values we share. As I listened to the Rabbit Room staff discuss what has been lost and what has been gained in the changing musical landscape of our culture, my mind bounced down its own chain of associations and I had the sudden memory of an odd, idiosyncratic fear from when I was a teenager. I had a lot of odd, idiosyncratic fears, both then and now (my recurring childhood nightmare was one of existential horror over the concept of infinity); however, this one seemed relevant and meaningful in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on at the time. When I got home, I flipped through my old journals and found an entry from 1991 that expressed this fear I remembered: “When I find a song I like, I want to clasp it to me and never let go. It’s silly, but I’m so terrified of songs being lost forever—I wish I could gather all my beloved music together and never lose it, never forget it.” For me, the issue wasn’t so much scarcity vs. ubiquity, as Andrew put it, but something else: it was music’s impermanence that once made it precious to me. And I wondered where that fear had gone, and what had gone with it. (Rewind) Fifteen-year-old Jennifer is lying on her bedroom floor, listening to Amy Grant’s album Never Alone over and over and over again. By the way, Andrew articulated well the archaic joys of cassette tapes, but he did not mention the carefully acquired skill of pushing in rapid succession (but not too aggressively, lest the tape snag and snarl) the rewind button, then the stop button, then the play button, then stop, rewind, stop, play, stop, fast forward a tiny bit, stop, play—all to get back to the exact beginning point of the song you wanted to hear again. In the most delicate circumstances, a pencil stuck in the middle of one of the reels could work wonders. Rewinding was an art form unto itself. I reveled in those hours of quiet and solitude in my room, and I listened with liner notes in one hand and my journal in the other, poring over lyrics and copying down the ones I loved most. I wrote almost as many songs in my journal in those days as my own entries, because when a song reached down into my soul and touched a string, I couldn’t bear to let it go. The Never Alone album was one of my first experiences of feeling like a singer had shamelessly plagiarized my heart and laid bare all my hidden insecurity and longing and angst, especially “All I ever have to be is what you made me”—which I memorized so thoroughly that it still runs through my head today when I start to forget its truth. (Pause) The only time in my life I have ever fan-girled was last year when Amy Grant sang at the Local Show and I nervously cornered her afterward and gushed about how that song had been one of the most important songs that helped me grow up—and then instantly forgot the name of the song. I will never fan-girl again. (Play) Before writing this post, I found Never Alone on Spotify and listened to the whole album from start to finish while lying on my back on the floor, just as I did in my teens. And it was hard—not because of the music, which brought back a warm flood of memories, but because I couldn’t keep still. I had a constant urge to check my phone, my mind kept wandering to my to-do lists, my limbs were antsy, I fidgeted, I kept checking the Spotify playlist to see what was next. Unless I’m riding in a car on a long trip or sitting in a concert, I simply don’t stop everything else and listen anymore. I rarely give an album the time and attention I give to a book—I listen as I’m doing other things, like the dishes or computer work. Yes, I’m listening, but I’m not deep listening, not like I used to. Now, part of the problem is my ever-shrinking attention span and the ever-growing responsibilities and distractions of adulthood. And part of it, certainly, is the fact that, because of the internet and my peculiar Nashville community, music is swirling around me all the time. But I think a large part of my carelessness about music now (though I love it just as much as I ever did) is that I no longer need to cling—I can always come back to it and listen later or bounce on to the next thing, because the illusion of permanence offered by the internet can, if I let it, diminish the preciousness of what I hear. There’s not only so much of it, but it waits in the shadows for me until I want it, like an obsequious butler. (Rewind) When I was fifteen, I sat with my music as I’d sit with a dying friend. I drank in every last drop of it because I didn’t know how long the moment would last—copying it, singing along with it, committing it to writing, committing it to memory, lest it suddenly vanish from the earth and leave a permanent gap in my heart. It was during my high school years that the music world shifted from cassette tapes to CDs, and I resisted for a long time—because I’m a dinosaur, and because those tapes were precious to me. What if technology kept changing and changing and I could never listen to the older albums anymore because the world would forget them like it was already forgetting the Walkman that played them? But that was just one piece of a much larger fight against time that colored my whole adolescence. I felt impermanence everywhere. The first Gulf War happened when I was fifteen, and the day war was declared I remember running to my room absolutely horrified and sinking into my music. It was the first major world event that blew apart my childhood sense of security. (Little did I know that my future ex-Marine husband was in his own bedroom that day thinking, Yes! Adventure! Let me at it!) War or no war, I was desperately scared of the future. I didn’t want to grow up. I didn’t want to leave home. I didn’t want anything I loved or relied upon to change. Music was a fleeting thing that I could somehow capture, record, rescue. I thought, if only I can still have this song in twenty years, I’ll get through it all. I’ll still be me. My world won’t change too much. If I could nail it down somehow, somewhere, in one more mix-tape or in the pages of my journal, the music would anchor me. When I was fifteen, I sat with my music as I'd sit with a dying friend. Jennifer Trafton I think part of my obsession with my parents’ record collection (other than the fact that, as my dad joked, I was born in the wrong decade) was this same fear of precious things being lost, and of the need to save and preserve them by loving them hard enough. I was fascinated by the way, in those days, many songs seemed to have become part of a common cultural songbook, leaping from album to album as different artists kept them alive—a kind of collective battle, perhaps, against the very impermanence that I feared. And so, while my dad eagerly gave me an education in the musicology of the ‘60s-‘70s, I studied those albums on our shelves—from the Beatles to the Carpenters to Dan Fogelberg. This certainly didn’t help me feel any more at home amongst my peers, since I wasn’t aware of anyone else in my high school who knew who Paul Simon was much less who spent study hall trying to dissect the lyrics of “The Sound of Silence.” But it did mean my dad and I could share quality father-daughter time watching The Peter, Paul, and Mary 25th Anniversary Concert, complete with PBS telethon interruptions and fatherly commentary. And it meant that, if I had anything to do with it, we had to listen to my mother’s Carpenters Christmas album as we were putting up the tree together (and we all had to do it together), because that moment and that album were inseparable. I was cementing a memory of our family’s love, while Karen Carpenter sang, making sure I wouldn’t lose it. We were (and still are) a listening family. It is now ensconced in family lore how my brother Joe, as a four-year-old, would sit beside the huge stereo cabinet in our living room and listen to the entire Star Wars soundtrack on 8-track—not moving from his spot, just listening, from beginning to end, again and again. (He is now the musical director of an opera house.) The very concept of “background music” was always anathema to Joe—if the music’s good, it deserves your full attention—and though his scorn for it never quite fully reformed the rest of us, it has certainly rubbed off on me in lingering feelings of guilt over moments of inattention ever since. We all had our unique tastes—Joe had his Mahler and Bruckner, my other brother Stephen his Broadway soundtracks—but even with our differences, so many of our common touch-points as a family were musical. One of the memories I most treasure is how, every time I returned home from college or seminary, Stephen (still a young teenager) would pull me up to his bedroom and play me every single album or song he had discovered and loved since the last time I was home—a Stephen Sondheim musical, a Mark Lowry parody, an amazing guitar riff in a Burlap to Cashmere song. And in those years before we had books or theology or other common interests to talk about, we sat quietly and listened together for hours, and the music was the ground upon which we built a relationship. (Fast Forward) I adjust to change at glacial speed. I’m always about a decade behind in fashion or technology. The transition from CDs to iTunes was painful for me, and I haven’t yet gotten rid of my old collection. Only very recently, in the last few months, have I finally succumbed to Spotify and Apple Music and other internet streaming services—at first just to listen to Rabbit Room playlists, but also lured by the same delight in musical discovery that Chris described so eloquently in his post, and which Pandora had unlocked for me so wonderfully in the past. Within a few clicks I was overwhelmed. I can listen to any Jim Croce song I want. I can hear almost any kind of music I want, any artist or album I ever loved and thought I lost, right here, in an instant. They have Helen Reddy on here, are you serious? Oh my gosh, I could listen to The Music Machine and Sir Oliver’s Song again? Golly day, I forgot about that song. I forgot I even use the phrase golly day. How could I have forgotten? What on earth would teenage Jennifer have made of all this? It was both exhilarating, and in a very odd way, anticlimactic. Here was permanence, or the illusion of permanence, anyway. And suddenly the very preciousness of that ancient vinyl from my childhood I stumbled across at Goodwill, or the tape I literally played to shreds because I’d pushed the play and rewind buttons too closely together too many times, was diminished a little bit. Or perhaps not. (Rewind) When I was fifteen, I was terrified of the passage of time and clung to the music I loved lest it be carried away by that great tide sweeping over me. What I didn’t yet understand was that time would also change my relationship to those songs, those albums. There are a few that I will never outgrow, but most served their purpose for the time when I needed them and have value to me now only for the purpose of nostalgia. Their preciousness lay precisely in the transience of their role in shaping me for a season. The dying friend I was trying to keep alive was not, in retrospect, the music itself, but the age that I was, the little world I knew, the family moments I cherished, the feeling and the faith a song evoked that seemed frighteningly unstable and fleeting. Instead of my needing to preserve the music, I realize now that the music has preserved something of me. Jennifer Trafton I can measure my life by the albums that defined each stage of my growth. I can tell you the contours of Jesus’ face sketched so vividly for little Jennifer by Michael Card’s music. I can tell you of the Twila Paris concert my dad took me to, and why the song “How Beautiful” haunted me for years afterward. I see so clearly now how the poetry of Rich Mullins’ lyrics—particularly in A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band—sparked a longing for beauty in me that led me to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Yeats, and Hopkins. I can tell you why the Indigo Girls sound like college to me, and how Over the Rhine’s Drunkard’s Prayer got me through the death of a friend and Sarah McLachlan sang me through heartbreak. I can describe for you how I knew I was a goner ten years ago when my new friend Pete gushed over the alliteration and assonance of a particular lyric by The National and wanted to listen to it together so I could share in his ecstasy. Now that I’ve gotten used to the jarring boundlessness of streaming music, I’m so thankful for it—thankful that the semi-permanence (and the ubiquity!) of music on the internet means that I can suddenly find songs I had lost, albums that I’d completely forgotten about. Yet now that I’ve unearthed them again, I’m reclaiming pieces of my life I had forgotten too—past chapters of my identity and my friendships and my family, moments that now flood back to me because they are linked forever with the lyrics and chords of a particular song. (Play) Would I remember the moment of wistful solitude and prayer on a heather-covered hill overlooking Edinburgh on Easter Sunday 1996, separate from the melodies and stories of Michael Card’s The Life on my Walkman (I somehow still listened to cassette tapes even in 1996) underscoring the whole experience? And that was itself, at the time, a deliberate rewind to my childhood faith, which had begun to feel so distant. Would I remember the moment of companionship sitting with one or the other of my brothers, or this or that friend, or my husband, if it had not been captured and sealed into that song we were listening to and bonding over? And now it is the song—rediscovered—that gives me back that moment, that memory, and the bond it produced. Instead of my needing to preserve the music, I realize now that the music (still alive!) has preserved something of me. The only way to let music truly be lost is to stop listening, deeply listening, living through it slowly, letting it seep into the crevices of my mind and my heart, and sharing that experience of deep listening with others I love. So when I fast-forward again to the present, I am more eager than ever to be intentional about finding new music for this moment and digging down into it deeply. I want to find those albums that give voice to my heart and stretch my mind and imagination right now, and fully soak in them, letting their melodies and their poetry shape me and change me until they have done their work in me, and then I can relinquish them to the tide of time without fear, without loss, and receive the new year with its new songs. Rewind. Stop. Play. Listen. Grow. Let go. Because even if the music will last, frozen now in a vast digital cloud of data, this moment, this evening of fellowship, this chapter in my marriage, this particular season of my life, will not. And the intersection point where music and memory meet—that is precious. (Record) Click here to read Part 4: Chew the Cud by Drew Miller.

Last week, we learned that the official Giving Tuesday website scheduled May 5th to be a new, global Giving Tuesday “as a response to the unprecedented need caused by COVID-19.” So today, each of us has a unique opportunity to give or get involved in whatever way we can. In keeping with our mission, the Rabbit Room is raising relief funds for touring musicians who have lost work due to COVID-19. Today we are matching donations up to $20,000 toward that cause. You can donate through our Facebook fundraiser by clicking here. You can also donate through the website by clicking here. We want to stress that this is for more than singer-songwriters and solo-artists. There are tons of drummers, guitarists, pianists, and other musicians who help create the music we love and make live shows and tours possible through their hard work, time, and talent. Shut-downs have had an even greater impact on these folks, who don’t have music to stream, products to sell, or livestream shows by which to raise their own funds in the meantime. One of my biggest struggles through all of this has been a sense of helplessness—knowing so many are hurting, yet not knowing precisely where the needs are or what I can do. I’m encouraged and grateful for this opportunity to participate in the work of John 13:35, showing Christ’s love for us by the way we love one another. I hope we can each find a way to join together this Tuesday in service of that most beautiful of commands. Click here to donate via our Facebook fundraiser. And here to donate via our website.

Bono had already left the Peterson home on the afternoon of April 19, 2018, in order to fly back to British Columbia. He and his bandmates had been in the middle of rehearsals for the Songs of Innocence tour that was to begin just under a month later, on May 14, in Vancouver. I was sitting at the Peterson’s kitchen table, processing my interview with Bono and Eugene on the psalms. Phaedra, my wife, was with me. I noticed that the film crew had yet to put away their gear. I looked out the window to see that Eugene was sitting by himself on the deck, looking out over Flathead Lake and, beyond it, to the Mission Mountains that form part of the Rocky Mountains. I’d had a longstanding desire to ask Eugene his thoughts on the arts, but figured that I’d do it through letter correspondence. (He didn’t do email). But when I realized that everybody was idling, catching their breath, as it were, I took the opportunity to ask the crew if they wouldn’t mind recording an additional conversation with Eugene. They agreed to it and we decided to set it up on the steps that led onto dock, facing Hughes Bay. I’m deeply grateful for the model of a human being that he left us—of someone who was thoroughly shaped by the gospel, or what he liked to call 'the large country of salvation.' W. David O. Taylor I began the interview by asking Eugene what novels he was currently reading. He told me that he and Jan, his wife, had just finished reading, out loud, as was their custom, Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home. “We’ve read all four of her novels now,” he said. “It’s one in a sequence, and we just think she’s a marvelous writer and enjoy them.” He also mentioned that he’d started a new novel by the Montanan writer, Ivan Doig. I asked him which author had captured his imagination as a young man. He said Wallace Stegner; then he hesitated and corrected himself. “Herman Melville,” he said, as if remembering something long forgotten. He explained: Earlier in my life as a pastor, I read all of Melville’s books. I don’t know what attracted me to them, but Moby Dick was the first one. I realized what a healthy counter-balance he was to the whole transcendental New England stuff, because they didn’t believe in evil, and he knows everything about evil. I just thought it was, for me, it was a good prophylactic against over-idealizing my congregation. I asked him which authors he’d read as a boy. With a smile on his face, he said the Sugar Creek Gang books. Published by Moody Press, this series of books had been wildly popular in the 1940s and ‘50s. I then asked him the $64,000 question. If you could take only three novels to the proverbial island, what would you take? “That’s pretty easy. Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens, and probably Wallace Stegner.” I asked him how the arts had helped him to think about death and dying, and whether there was anything specific that he’d say to young artists on this topic. Bluntly, I wondered out loud: “How does it make you feel to know that you won’t have the same powers of the imagination to write as you’ve done thus far?” Eugene talked at length about the role that his peers, along with his family, played in helping to process his mortality. I then pursued a line of questions around the continued, and perhaps steadily increasing, departure of young Christians from the faith and young artists from the church. This is a question that I had wanted to ask him since I was his student at Regent College, in Vancouver, in the mid-1990s. I ended my conversation by asking him what he would say to a roomful of pastors who expressed interested in the arts. Where should they start? What should they do or see or experience? And I asked him what word of encouragement he would give to young artists, to older artists, and to worship leaders. His answers to these questions make it into the short film that was released yesterday. I should also say, finally, that when I met with Bono three months later in New York City, I asked him the same set of questions, particularly around the subject of mortality, to see what he’d say in light of the biking injury that he’d suffered in December 2014 and that had required five hours of surgery, as well as in light of the death of their longstanding and deeply beloved chaplain Jack Heaslip in early February, the death of Larry Mullen Jr.’s father on May 14, and the death of their manager of thirty years Dennis Sheehan on May 27. It turned out to be a very rich conversation. I’ll forever be grateful for Eugene’s ministry and writing. His influence shows up on nearly every page of my book, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life. But more than this, I’m deeply grateful for the model of a human being that he left us—of someone who was thoroughly shaped by the gospel, or what he liked to call “the large country of salvation.” An artist himself, he loved artists and the worlds that they made possible. To him, their work, at its best, served as a glimpse of the new creation that awaits us, as a kind of sign and a foretaste of Aslan’s country. It’s this love for the arts and, more importantly, for artists as persons that we witness in this all-too brief exchange that I shared with him on a late afternoon in Lakeside, a small town in the middle of mostly nowhere.

In Season 2, Episode 6, Drew Miller talks with Becca Jordan and Lori Chaffer about the making of Becca’s song, “Keeping Time.” Drew, Becca, and Lori discuss the catalyzing conflict between ideas and reality, the rhythms of confidence and insecurity over the course of making a song, and what it means to wait collectively. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 6 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 Malcolm Guite, author of various collections of poetry such as The Word in the Wilderness, After Prayer, and Sounding the Seasons. Poet-priest Malcolm Guite has become one of the most important Christian poets of our time. In this episode, Jonathan and Malcolm discuss the “salvaging of the mistakenly abased gift of imagination,” the vital distinction between what things are and what they are made of, how Malcolm inherited the gift of poetry from his mother, and the invention of writing as the gateway both to remembering and forgetting. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 19 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.

Zach Williams is worried about what you will think of him. Aren’t we all? For many people, the desire to live up to the expectations of others alters our everyday behavior. Actions are filtered through a series of questions, asking whether or not people will be angered, bothered, or burdened by that which we really want to say and do. The same is true of those in the arts. It’s a common subject for artists of all kinds to discuss the “innocence” of their earliest days—back before they knew anyone was even listening or watching. Without an audience, the artist was free to express him/herself in any way, free from the chains of such considerations. The latest episode of The Resistance is all about this tension and how it affects the creative life of Zach Williams and his bandmates (Kanene Donehey Pipkin, Brian Elmquist) in The Lone Bellow. Even after several acclaimed albums, Zach says he’s learning to set aside a need for people pleasing in order to craft the art he’s called to make. If you’ve heard Half Moon Light, the trio’s exquisite new album, you might question the presence of any real creative fears. Yet Zach tells a different story, one filled with shouting matches and a producer who clipped the band’s wings. These fears aren’t yet in the rearview mirror, but the band’s willingness to even wrestle with them is what makes the music so substantive in the first place. Click here to listen to this newest episode of The Resistance. And here to learn more about The Resistance Podcast.

A few years ago, I arrived at a church choir gathering with friends of all ages. An elementary-aged girl had been dropped off by her parents and I noticed her sitting by herself with a shy smile. I smiled back and waved, taking a seat and settling in. My friend Beth arrived shortly after me and within a few moments, she crossed the room, knelt down to look the girl in the eye, and reached out her hand. They shook as Beth asked her what her name was. To be honest, I’d never even considered that as an option. I imagined later what the girl must have felt to have an adult single her out, stoop down to her level, and dignify her with a real-life handshake. All Creatures dignifies children by looking them in the eye and asking them to sing with the voices they have now. Kelsey Miller What does this have to do with All Creatures, the new Rain for Roots album? Their music does the same thing. It dignifies children by looking them in the eye and asking them to sing with the voices they have now. Leading the charge is Sandra McCracken, Flo Paris Oakes, Katy Bowser Hutson, and Alice Smith, and the result is tender-hearted, lively Scripture songs for children and anyone else who needs simple truths to sing. Throughout the album, listeners hear the voices of children and adults singing together, trading verses and harmonies. It reminds me that we’re all part of the larger family of God and every voice has its part. Right off the bat, “All Things Bright and Beautiful” sets the tone for the album as a folky yet groovy, reminding the listeners of the many sweetnesses that God gives us in the natural world: the little flowers, the birds that sing. Some of the chords and progressions remind me distinctly of the kind of music I’d hear on Gilmore Girls, a sort of Sam-Phillipsy vibe. I can give no higher compliment. In “Listen, Listen,” Katy Bowser Hutson draws on the blues as a delightful setting for Psalm 107. It’s boisterous yet controlled and pulls back at just the right moment. In “Only, Ever, Always,” Sandra McCracken and Joseph Bradshaw sing together, “His love, it makes us younger.” Here, I find the crux of what Rain for Roots aims to do in their work: the group reminds us album after album, and this one is no exception, that spiritual growth may have as much to do with growing young as with growing old. The embrace of mystery, waiting, and longing is a posture that comes especially naturally to children—if we are able to abide in that posture, then children we will remain. Flo Paris Oakes sings “Tell Me” with her signature soulfulness. The song feels like a real balm applied to wound, as Flo asks the fearful questions, names those secret fears, and then gently soothes the listener with the medicine of relieving truth: that no darkness, storms, or anger can remove us from the sight and love of God. What a relief. Wherever you are and whatever your voice sounds like, I hope you take a listen to the entirety of All Creatures by Rain for Roots and find your place in its songs. Click here to learn more about All Creatures by Rain for Roots at their website.