The birdhouse fell in a storm. We found it the next morning lying on the ground, roof split, blue eggs cracked and broken. We could make out the bend of a tiny wing, the puckered skin where dark feathers prepared to grow. We had seen the mating pair of Eastern bluebirds as they chose this house and made their nest. Their blue feathers were like jewels flashing in the early morning light. On this morning, the father bird swooped from a nearby branch and landed on the deck to call out his grief. The mother must have escaped. We didn’t see her body. But the babies were gone, dead before they saw our hill or found their wings and soared up to rest in the maple tree. We cried, the kids and I, but my son stormed to his room. There was no point in having a world, he said, if there had to be so much suffering. Why not end it all, blow the planet to smithereens, if this is how it has to be? It’s an overreaction, an eleven-year-old response, and it is also a valid question. Sometimes, growing up makes us less honest about how much it hurts to be alive. We lower our expectations and make broad statements about the inevitability of suffering, as though that will mitigate the pain when it comes. But here was my son, feeling every bit of it, and not even for himself. For baby birds. He struggles with an all-or-nothing mentality, my boy. One mistake on a math test has him berating himself for his failure. “My stupid brain,” he says, insulting a mind that just calculated nineteen of twenty problems correctly. He’s famous at our house for announcing the latest thing that has broken, that isn’t working the way it should. He just wants things to be right and good, and he cannot understand how broken things can be good. I sat on his bedside and talked about the sadness of the fallen birdhouse and the loss of the baby birds. I talked about his beautiful heart that is full of love for creation. I remembered “Letter to the Editor,” and J Lind singing “It’s not that hard to find a flaw when the earth is red in tooth and claw, but I’d like to learn to love it anyway.” It seemed to me that the song crystallized my son’s struggle, that this would be the journey of his life—to learn to love a world where baby birds die in storms and yet, the mother and father return next spring to try again. I talked and explained and clarified, trying to give my son language for the state of the world and his battle with it, while the realization of my hypocrisy settled over me. Ninth grade was my first year of public school. I went from a small Christian school with a class of 30 eighth-graders and enough friends to feel content and academic demands I could easily meet to Burns Jr. High School, where my peers were at least a year ahead of me in math and science and my English teacher took me outside for a serious chat after mid-terms and the girls at the lunch table talked about sex with their boyfriends. At the beginning of the year, I wore pleated pants and trouser socks and loafers because they felt like a wild departure from the skirts and pantyhose requirements of my former school. I was once mistaken for a teacher. I was terribly lonely. Sometimes, growing up makes us less honest about how much it hurts to be alive. Helena Sorensen That same year, what had been a scratch or possibly a mosquito bite on my right shoulder became a little mound of scar tissue that refused to resolve itself. There was plenty to reject about myself in those days. I was unremarkable and not athletic. Somehow, inevitably, I chose or received the worst haircut anyone could dream up. My eyebrows were too thick. I didn’t wear makeup. I didn’t know that everyone else felt as I did—that they were mostly getting it wrong, that there wasn’t much to love about themselves. I gritted my teeth and endured adolescence, and it wasn’t until the end of my senior year of high school that I thought maybe I was a sort of pretty-ish person. Some things I outgrew. Some things I accepted. But the scar remained and spread. I visited this doctor and that. I had injections. I once read about a salve that would attack cancer cells (if there were any to be attacked), and I spread it over the scar and sat up all night in pain while the salve burned the skin on my shoulder. The scar was much worse after that, and doctors shook their heads. They took pictures to send to colleagues. “We’re not sure.” “No guarantees.” “Your best bet…” In the last few years, more scars have developed, and I’ve adjusted my wardrobe accordingly. Nothing sleeveless. No V-necks. Fabrics that don’t cling. I’m trying to avoid recoils and staring. If I had a story to tell—an accident or a brilliant recovery—it might be different. What I have are mystery and unanswered questions. So I get up in the morning and ignore the mirrors and cover every inch of skin I can cover, and I reject myself completely. This is a body that has climbed mountains and raised its voice in song and grown and nourished new human beings. It has created worlds and thrust its hands into the soil to plant seeds and embraced hurting people. And it is broken and scarred and I do not know how to love it. I thought my son was the perfectionist. Maybe he is just more honest than I am. Honesty would compel me to admit that no part of my life is perfect. There is not one relationship without history and hurt; there is no work I’ve undertaken that paid off as I hoped it might. My house needs attention, my parenting is lacking, and the soil in our yard is heavy clay, full of roots. Scar tissue is overtaking my skin, devouring the little beauty I’ve tried so hard to hold onto. My grief is overwhelming. It is older and deeper than my son’s. I’m just better at hiding it. I do not know if I have spoken the truth about the bluebirds returning. They may not. Twenty-five years I have prayed for healing, and my body is in worse condition than when I began to pray. Some days I see the appeal of my son’s proposal. If we didn’t have a world, baby birds couldn’t die. If I didn’t have a body, my heart couldn’t ache. All I have are broken things. I don’t know how; I don’t know where to begin. But I’d like to learn to love them anyway.

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 3: Precious Impermanence by Jennifer Trafton.] Recently I was struck by the surprisingly earthy language used by 15th century Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cramner to describe the ancient—and at first glance, rather lofty—practice of lectio divina. This practice consists of reading a passage of scripture aloud three times and meditating on various prompts between each reading. How could something like that be anything other than airy and “spiritual”? Ah, but read how Cramner described it: Let us ruminate, and, as it were, chew the cud, that we may have the sweet juice, spiritual effect, marrow, honey, kernel, taste, comfort and consolation of them. —Homily on Scripture, Archbishop Thomas Cramner, emphasis mine Wow! “Chew the cud”? “Sweet juice”? “Marrow”? Am I the only one who thinks this sounds more like a homely chef instructing you on how to taste his hearty stew, eyes crazed with rapturous delight in the aromas and flavors of his concoction? Taken out of context, the very last thing I would think he’s talking about is. . . lectio divina. So, why? What height of revelation would lead a student of scripture to use such base language to articulate his experience? To confound my pretentious heart with such foolishness? Indeed, let’s lower the bar further—is there anything (aside from delicious food itself) that I regularly taste with such intention, deliberation, and conscious savoring as Cramner tastes scripture? Well, my self-conscious persona aspires to savor all of life with a zeal like that—knowing the name and song of every bird, quietly consulting my vast inner library when a friend needs help thinking of a quote from some writer, observing with unwavering comprehension every last intricate detail imbued in an obscure work of art. But alas, I’m afraid the awkward self-consciousness of my aspiration disqualifies it immediately from authentic devotion. Because as you can see, there’s no self-consciousness involved in Cramner’s description of how we ought to “ruminate” on scripture. His tone is rather more like the self-forgetful delight of a child with a mouthful of wild blueberries, or sitting rapt with attention at the climax of their favorite story. Yes, maybe that’s more like what it means to taste. We are no strangers to the notion of consuming. Our entire commercial economy is built on the cornerstone of consumption. We live our lives under its devouring shadow. And when we run out of physical things to “consume,” we consume media. But for all our consuming, we don’t taste much of what we consume. In fact, it’s in the interest of Netflix for us not to taste the media we consume, because tasting comes too close to savoring, which comes too close to an awareness of the limits of our appetite; the worst thing would be for our hunger to finally reach satiation. It may be that we “hear, but do not understand; see, but do not perceive” (Isaiah 6:9), and consume but do not taste. If we are going to recover our sense of taste—that awareness that leads us to savor, pay attention, and listen—we’ll need to ask ourselves where the seeds of that awareness were first planted in us and how they continue to grow. And believe it or not, for this member of the millennial generation, it all began with the iPod. And oh, how I dearly miss it. I know, I know: digital music = bad. Physical music = good. Surely the only noble way to listen to music, to “chew” its proverbial “cud,” is to put a vinyl on and scour its liner notes, absorbed in the real sound coming out of real speakers. Right? No. To the contrary, I am a passionate adherent of Neil Postman’s haunting insight that the medium is its own kind of message. To put James K. A. Smith’s liturgical spin on it, there are nuances embedded in the many ways we experience music as embodied creatures. These nuances are intimately bound up with how we hear it, and the story is always more complicated than we think. Live to chew the cud of what brings you life. It won't make you a good consumer—but it will make you a good human. Drew Miller In our last “Lost Art of Listening” post, Jennifer shared her childhood instinct to preserve all her favorite songs by writing down their lyrics and internalizing them, lest they should ever vanish from her life. And there was planted in her the seed of taste, the posture of savoring, visiting and revisiting, listening and re-listening. I deeply relate to that anecdote because I had a similar inclination when I was in about the eighth or ninth grade—the desire to memorize my favorite albums from front to back. The logic went something like this: sometimes, during extended time with extended family, or long days on vacation when my iPod was out of reach, I could cure my boredom by knowing so intimately the contours of every song on Why Should the Fire Die? that I could effectively listen to it in my head, thereby getting myself through 47 minutes of unoccupied time! It took practice, of course, and repeated listening, so that I could remember every detail, every instrumental flourish. But practice makes perfect (I also managed to memorize Continuum and the ineffable Under the Table and Dreaming). This skill came in handy in other contexts, as well—doing chores, taking walks, zoning out in class (oops), and trying to fall asleep. On some restless nights even now, I start to doze off right around the middle of “Can’t Complain,” track 5 of course. Perhaps to the disapproval of my principled elders, it wasn’t even the car stereo that taught me to savor music like that. It was the enticing, far-reaching library of my iPod, whose alphabetical list of artist names became so ingrained in my memory that I could still recite the gist of it to you twelve years later. In the broad sweeps of technological history, it’s tempting to lump the iPod together with the advent of streaming, regarding it as a sort of voice calling in the wilderness to prepare the way for Spotify. But that is far from the truth, because my lived experience of Spotify is qualitatively different from my lived experience of the iPod. It’s like comparing apples (pun intended) to oranges. And my theory is that this distinction arises primarily from the fact that Spotify is inherently an online experience, while the iPod is not. There is a reason that our primary analogy for encountering the internet is one of surfing and not diving. The internet is by nature surface-oriented. In no other area of life is our experience of one thing so determined by the fact that we could be experiencing any other conceivable thing instead, and with a single click. Hyperlinks beckon us ever onward, skipping across vast distances of data, but hardly ever stopping to taste what we’ve consumed. Just think: how many times have you logged into social media, lost yourself for about five minutes, put down your phone, then struggled to remember what you even saw while scrolling? It takes real effort not to have your memory hijacked while on the internet. With every song I play on Spotify, I listen with the silent but pervasive awareness that I could be listening to practically anything else. As Chris rightly pointed out, that’s an astounding resource to have at my fingertips, and I’m quite grateful for it. But in the absence of any limits on what I can listen to, it takes far more effort to stay absorbed with just one album or artist for long. Contrast this now with the iPod, which is an offline experience. My options in this case are determined not by the endless availability of a streaming service, but by the music I have loved enough to buy, download to my iTunes (RIP), and then sync to my iPod. There’s an investment level there—a literal ownership—that profoundly influences my experience. When I turn on my iPod, I don’t see the pure potentiality of a search bar; I see the list of beloved artists whose work I have tasted enough to make my own, to enshrine in my own personal canon of music. And it’s even worth mentioning that once I press play on the album of my choice, it will play from beginning to end, then stop—unlike Spotify, which propels my listening experience from what I have chosen to what their algorithms have chosen for me. Listening to music on the iPod is a bounded experience, whose kind limitations elevate rather than diminish my experience. I don’t want to end this post lost in the weeds of various media and their idiosyncrasies, debating which is better and which is worse. It’s by accident that I am of the iPod generation, and so I claim it just as Andrew has claimed the tape cassettes. To bring it all the way back to the beginning, I think the analogy of eating, tasting, and savoring can remind us of what is at the heart of this discussion. However alarming our cultural trend toward attention illiteracy may feel, the need to stop and listen is not a luxury; it’s a hunger. And hunger must finally be filled—not with ever more distractions and advertisements, but with nourishment. As long as there are humans, they will be hungry to lose themselves in something bigger than themselves, to taste and not come away empty. So everyday and everywhere, tend to your sense of taste. Stop and savor what is before you. Live to chew the cud of what brings you life. It won’t make you a good consumer—but it will make you a good human. Click here to read Part 5: The Case for Nostalgia by Leslie E. Thompson.

“If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes,” Annie Dillard declares, “he might say, unblushing, ‘Nobody’s.’ In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.” As someone who spends most of his working life around 20-year-olds, it’s worth saying first of all—I think Dillard is being a bit uncharitable. Nevertheless, this passage came to mind recently; not as I was talking to a young poet, but as I was watching Tiger King. There is a difference, Dillard says, between someone who loves poetry, and someone who loves to be called A Poet. And, it seems to me, there’s also a difference between a person who loves big cats, and a “Big-Cat-Person” (as a number of the principle characters in Tiger King call themselves). The first (in both instances) is captivated by beauty. The second wants to take beauty captive. Or at least, “the Big-Cat-Person” wants beauty attached to herself in some way. She turns a proper noun into an adjective, and creates a hyphenated extension of her own identity. That was one thought I had after watching the series. The other was: “Gosh—it seems like there’s some sort of strange connection between ‘Big Cat People’ and polygamy.” Let’s start with that second observation. The series’ most obvious exponent of the Big Cat/Big Marriage convergence is the Tiger King himself, Joe Exotic. At the start of the series Joe is simultaneously married to John Finlay and Travis Moldonado, and shortly after Travis’s accidental death, Joe marries again; this time to Dillon Passage. Then there is Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, who has even more expansive domestic arrangments than the Tiger King. He lives on a private compound surrounded by wild animals and a small harem of female keepers. Other characters in the series estimate that Doc has somewhere between three and nine wives and/or girlfriends. The series also introduces viewers to Don Lewis—second husband of Joe Exotic’s arch-nemesis Carole Baskin, and another collector of big cats. In the course of the series we learn that he was also a serial collector of girlfriends and mistresses. (Indeed one of those mistresses was Carole, for whom Don left his previous wife.) Likewise, Joe Exotic’s sometime business partner Jeff Lowe is a self-described partier, playboy, and a “swinger.” Toward the end of the series Jeff and his wife Lauren reveal that they are expecting a baby. What Jeff is most excited about though, is the arrival of their new “hot nanny.” “If you’re gonna bring in [a nanny],” Jeff confides to the camera with a leer, “why not bring in one that’s enjoyable to look at?” I suppose at one level the preceding only amounts to the least remarkable news story in all of history: lots of middle-aged men are coarse, lecherous, serial adulterers. But moving beyond that depressingly obvious observation, it also struck me that perhaps behind these two different kinds of behavior—acquiring lots of large cats, and acquiring lots of spouses—there might be a single impulse: a desire to procure and possess beauty. If so, the bars and cages of G. W. Zoo would be one expression of this impulse. The tattoo scrawled across John Finlay’s lower abdomen—“Privately Owned By Joe Exotic”—would be another. Both manifest a longing to control and cage; a desire to enforce proximity and access to wildness, beauty, youth, and strength. If there’s anything to that line of thinking, then Tiger King may offer more than just the sideshow spectacle of sequined shirts and murder-for-hire schemes. Maybe it also provides us with an anatomy, or even better, a pathology of the human encounter with beauty. It shows us what that encounter looks and acts like, when it becomes diseased. The pathology pops up in a particularly creepy joke that Jeff makes early in the series. I won’t repeat it here, but the point of Jeff’s attempt at locker room wit is: tiger cubs are a pretty awesome way to lure women up to your Las Vegas hotel suite. Who would have guessed? But apparently this is something Doc Antle knows as well. Young women like Barbara Miller travel across the country to work as apprentices at Doc Antle’s big cat park. Why? By all accounts the hours are long, the work is grinding, and the pay is poor. But: they get to be near the animals. There are multiple layers of irony here. Their interest in one type of predator brings these women under the control of another. They are drawn into a kind of captivity by the promise of spending time in a cage. They aspire to be keepers and end up being kept. “What are these poor women thinking?” I shout at the TV. On the screen, a snapshot shows half a dozen or more young women in the back of a limousine, sprawled around and across a smirking Doc Antle. But then, it occurs to me, the hands-on tiger encounter that Doc Antle and Jeff Lowe use to attract women is the same lure that sustains every one of the big cat parks profiled in the series. Tour packages for “Doc Antle’s Myrtle Beach Safari” begin at about $350, but visitors don’t come just to look at the animals. They come to have a “wildlife encounter.” The website for Myrtle Beach Safari shows visitors cuddling, petting, playing, and swimming with the animals. No cameras are allowed, but for an extra $150 (and upwards), you can add a “digital photo” package, and receive a file of instagram-ready images of you and your kids, spouse, or signficant other grinning at the camera, snuggled cheek to cheek with a baby tiger. Beauty, it turns out, can be profitable. It’s “attract-ive”—it draws. And that means that, as with any other attraction, you can charge admission. Beauty can be a source of power for those who have it under their control. Again, this isn’t exactly a novel insight. A multi-billion dollar pornography industry testifies to the fact that attractiveness can be monetized and desire exploited for profit. We don’t want to just gaze at beauty. We want to enter into it and have it enter into us. We want to share in it and somehow attach its name to ours. Steve Guthrie Is that also why customers line up outside “Doc Antle’s Mytrle Beach Safari”? Is a desire for power and influence why they pay to have their photo taken with a lion cub? Probably not. Most of them, I’m sure, really do love big cats. Maybe it’s just that that draws them. But then I think of those expensive photo packages again; the tourists holding tiger cubs up against their face for the camera. And that (strangely enough) reminds me of Annie Dillard’s conversation with her student. The aspiring poet, you’ll recall, was drawn to poetry; but more than that, Dillard complains, he was drawn to the idea of being A Poet. “He likes,” Dillard says, “the thought of himself in a hat.” (And who can’t sympathize with that young man? Am I the only person who has carried some particular book around, mostly because I wanted people to think of me as “the kind of person who reads that sort of book?” Or even, because I wanted to think of myself as “the kind of person who reads that sort of book!”) We want to be in the neighborhood of beauty, not just because we hope to see something beautiful, but in the hope that we can be beautiful. We want to be connected with it, associate ourselves with it. Like a tourist nuzzling a tiger cub to his cheek, we hope it might rub off on us. We want to find a way to surround and wrap ourselves in it, like Carole Baskin in her tiger print blouses and tiger print wallpaper. Like teenagers crowding around the popular kid at a party, or an aging playboy draping his arm around a woman half his age, Doc Antle parades past his visitors on the back of an elephant. In each case we hope we’ll be declared “guilty by association;” that others might mistake “proximity” for “resemblance.” We don’t want to just gaze at beauty. We want to enter into it and have it enter into us. We want to share in it and somehow attach its name to ours. And so “Joe Schreibvogel” becomes “Joe Exotic,” and then (rather poignantly), “Joe Maldonado-Passage.” And so Annie Dillard’s student wants to be called “A Poet.” None of that means there is anything wrong with being drawn to beauty, or with wanting to be beautiful (or with wanting to be a poet for that matter). These are good things. Remember, we’ve been considering the pathologies of beauty—the ways even loveliness gets twisted around. That’s one of the things that’s easiest to recognize in Tiger King. The series shows us more clearly than any theology textbook, that (in the words of Martin Luther) “our nature is so curved in upon itself at its deepest levels that it . . . bends the best gifts of God toward itself.” But this insight is double-edged. It means on the one hand that the longing for beauty can lead to some pretty dark places and depraved acts. But it also means, on the other, that a lot of what is dark and depraved arises at some level from a longing for beauty. So we are told, “The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God.” (A famous quote usually attributed to G. K. Chesterton, but which apparently comes from Scottish author Bruce Marshall.) Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why—despite the undeniably reprehensible things he does—at the end of the series I still find Joe Exotic kind of endearing. Behind his staggering vanity and casual violence, I think I can dimly discern a desperate, heartbreaking desire to be near beauty; more than that, to be beautiful. I watched Tiger King while I was self-quarantined in my basement (I’d just returned from two weeks overseas). It was Holy Week as well. The juxtaposition of Christ’s passion, pandemic anxiety, social distancing, and Joe Exotic’s mullet seems as bizarre to me now as it seemed illuminating then. At the moment, it felt as if something important crystalized in my mind; about proximity, infection, and being ritually unclean; about what we can and can’t acquire by being close to its source. About one person identifying himself with another, attaching himself to another, in order to share in his goodness (or badness). One of the oldest and most universal forms of magic (I recall from my college world religions class) is “sympathetic magic.” These are charms and incantations that work by way of resemblance and contagion. You wear the claw of the bear and as a result you possess something of the strength of the bear. You obtain the feathers of an eagle, and so, have something of the eagle’s grace and beauty. And with a few adjustments and modifications, this same form of magic continues to be practiced in the world of business, academics, and entertainment. Want to be successful? Surround yourself with successful people. Want to be the best? Start spending time with the best. Want to be well known? Start cultivating connections with people who are well known. Like begets like. Wear the claw of the bear. Wrap yourself in leopard skin. Have your picture taken with a beautiful woman—or a beautiful lion cub. Rename yourself “Big-Cat-Person” or “Tiger King.” All of this has a kind of ancient and intuitive sense to it. But it is strikingly different—in fact, it is the complete inversion—of the way of Jesus and his cross. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9) In the gospels we meet someone who touches lepers, surrounds himself with outcasts, and is called a friend of sinners. He identifies himself with the weak and the wretched, and by his proximity makes them well and whole. Most dramatically, at the climax of his passion, he is made a prisoner and condemned as a criminal. Which means that, interestingly enough, near the end of Jesus’ story, he occupies the same role Joe Exotic occupies at the end of Tiger King. Jesus tells his followers (Matthew 25) that he is particularly close to those who are poor, naked, sick and imprisoned. Joe Exotic then, finally ends up in the neighborhood of Beauty; not on the gaudy throne slapped together for his reality show, but in the prison cell where he is placed among those who have been declared guilty.

In Season 2, Episode 7, Drew Miller talks with Jeremy Casella and Ben Shive about the making of Jeremy’s song, “Many Waters.” Drew, Jeremy, and Ben discuss the magic of mixing high language with common vernacular—in both music and lyrics—and God’s utter lack of pretense. They also geek out over those delicious chords in the second verse of “Many Waters.” Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 7 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 Diana Glyer, author of Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings. In this episode, Jonathan and Diana discuss how the Inklings got started and the factors that contributed to their health, the sharpening power of writing groups, and the “curse of knowledge”—knowing so well what you’re trying to say that you’re unable to say it well. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 20 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.

“Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: if you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first time.” —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill We do not always pay special attention to the everyday objects around us. They become commonplace to us, fading into background noise or scenery, as we go about our lives. Even people begin to look commonplace. We see nothing particularly “glorious” or “wondrous” about them. We tend to disregard the subtle intricacies of our fellow creations. Inspired by Chesterton’s quote, I decided to explore the concept of seeing by spending thirty days visiting a tree, which I came to know as Henry. Thirty days is not quite a thousand times, but it is the same practice of trying to see something in a new way. I have realized how impatient and how creative I can be in distracting myself from learning to see something—even if it is only a tree—in a new way. Henry is a mature oak tree on the edge of the small park beside the public library in Wheaton, Illinois. He stands straight and proud with no split limbs at the base. There are a lot of scars that tell their stories in his bark. A small landscaped circle of broad-leafed plants surround the mulched base of the tree. A big flat limestone rock sits on one side with a depression that frequently collects rain or a passer-by who has a fondness for trees. I find myself talking to Henry as if he is a person. Before he had a specific name, I addressed him as “Mr. Oak Tree,” and always made sure to say “thank you” and “goodbye” and “‘til tomorrow,” as good manners have taught me. It is funny that we should give human characteristics to anything we tend to spend an extended period of time with. We begin to make that thing, object, or animal more special than a first cursory glance would make it. We begin to see it as something more. It has meaning, purpose, significance—at least to us. We are catching glimpses of glory, and perhaps a cold, as we stand out in the rain and stare up into the wet leaves of an oak tree. Henry has become my oak tree. I possess him. He is special to me and me alone. Why do I think I can own a tree that is rooted in a public park? Why do I automatically think “mine” when I had no part in creating or shaping or nurturing this tree? All I do is look at it, and take fallen leaves and twigs and acorns, and write nonsensical observations in my notebook. I do not own this tree but I say “mine” when my friends go on the walk to the park with me on some of my observation days, and I show them the tree. I wonder if Henry tells the neighboring evergreen whenever I come by, “That’s my girl. She visits me every day.” I am not sure if I would find that creepy or flattering. And all the while the squirrels in his crown tend to be a little wary of me getting too close to their tree. “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” —C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory” I met a little girl on the first day, when I was exploring the park to find the tree that would become mine for the next thirty days. The little girl liked the pen in my hand. I think she was the only passerby who smiled at me during my observations. Most of the people do not even bother to give me a second glance. I wonder if I fail to give them a second glance too. C. S. Lewis, in his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” speaks of re-seeing other people—not just ourselves—in light of the glory he has placed in his creation. I cannot see people like that. I cannot see a tree like a little kid sees it, completely full of the wonder imbued in it. I can see the moss and the cracks, the dried and roughened places in the bark. I see the faults and the things that offend me, hurt me, and remind me of my own messed up life when I look at other people. I do not see the deeper, ineffable good that God has breathed into each one of us as he spoke us into being. I struggle to see it even in myself. Often when I visit Henry, I like to imagine him in another place or world, or perhaps even reinvent what he is or looks like. Henry reminds me of a great storybook tree, the start of a grand adventure. He marks the entrance into the great Lantern Waste of Narnia. His roots cover the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Henry is conducting a gathering of the Ents, and secretly invites me. He is a castle governed by squirrels that love to run carefree along the parapets. He sits at the heart of Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood’s camp of merry men. In my child’s eye he is big enough to be found among the redwoods and sequoias of Dinotopia’s Treetown as a brontosaurus strolls along with his head in the leaves. Henry is a mature oak tree on the edge of the small park beside the public library in Wheaton, Illinois. Alexandra Claus My favorite way to imagine Henry comes from a treasured picture book from my childhood. The story of Go, Dog, Go! ends with a scene in which dozens of different types of dogs engaged in all manner of ridiculous activities—like playing ping pong or wearing crazy party hats—drive their cars up to this great big tree with a huge crown of leaves. The last picture shows this treetop filled with dogs, all having fabulous fun at a party. The image itself is rather silly, especially when I apply it to Henry, my dignified oak tree. Yet somehow it still fits. There are moments during my evening visits, just around dusk, when the orange lamps in the park blink on and this place feels like home, something deep-down familiar. Henry has become part of home for me too; he is familiar and known and a comforting sight. “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” —Genesis 1:31 Once, I imagine Henry to be a column in a grand green ballroom, hung with lots of lanterns emitting warm yellow light and the stars above adding their silvery shine. I like to imagine myself dancing in such a natural, beautiful ballroom. It feels safe. It feels like home. It is the place that I imagine some great Ending will finally be, or perhaps the Beginning. I think of the times in my life when I fail to see the beauty and the shared kinship of others. I think of the moments when my relationships fracture, when we are each so caught up with the worries and problems in our heads that it all cascades out. Yet it is in the aftermath of these fractures that we often begin to understand what it means to see the glory that God has put into each human being. We see the shared fallen-ness and the shared redemption, as well as the shared grace of God. In chapter 12 of Romans I find the phrase, “Love must be sincere.” I am still trying to understand what that means, but I am catching glimpses here and there. I must first begin to re-see people, must understand how to really look at them. I want to look at people with the same child-like wonder that I look at Henry. I want to think fondly of home with these people I pass by every day, my fellow travelers on our great journey to the grand green ballroom. What I find to be the most special and fruitful part of my experience with Henry is seeing how everything and everyone else in the park has taken on a new image, not just my tree. I am learning how to take time to notice how Henry relates to the whole. The edge of the park is lined by a low gray brick wall. The beautiful and imaginative world of Henry the oak tree lies beyond the stone border, waiting to be explored. The park is now a place of slowing down and taking time to see. I am learning to be patient as I begin to see the goodness in every oak tree and chattering squirrel, in every man and woman and child. In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor speaks of the “anagogical vision” that writers need to have in order to view someone or something simultaneously on different levels. This is what we begin to see when we are able to look at both the broken nature and God’s glorious restoration of another person, or even of ourselves. O’Connor says that the act of writing fiction “is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” Seeing well is integral to writing and to living. Humanity comes with a lot of “dustiness,” but there is much good to be found there. We just have to be willing to look for it.

I’ve tried for years to write a poem about an onion. I’ve had little success, but the effort is quite apropos, as I owe a lot to this little bulb. I know some people don’t like the onion. It is the weep-maker, the Jeremiah of vegetables. Readers of Robert Farrar Capon will perhaps have a little more sympathy (see The Supper of the Lamb), but for me, it is the gateway through which I must often go. I am the chef around our house. I started this journey long ago, when I was a kid eating canned pasta I heated in a yellow sauce pot on my mother’s electric range. I couldn’t leave it just as the manufacturers intended. It had to have basil. This stuff was dried and finely diced, little more than jade confetti. Regardless, it did add a cool, herbal tone that balanced out the meaty, cloying over-boldness of Franco-American’s signature sauce. I added a few more things and ate the whole mess over white bread spread with cold butter. From that point, I grew to improving my scrambled egg technique and making vague attempts at sautéed mushrooms in college. Now I’m protective of my iron skillets and my good knife, and I don’t cook greens unless I have at least an hour and a half; I prefer three—two to cook and one to rest them until dinnertime. That said, I get stumped. After a long day, or after a week of cooking dinner every night and warring against a dirty kitchen, I simply don’t possess the creativity to take measure of what’s in the fridge and compile it into some newfangled permutation I haven’t tried in a while. Enter, the humble onion. You get a little butter, preferably unsalted, and toss it in the iron skillet on high. Cast iron is the ox of the kitchen—stolid, slow-and-steady, and, when you need it to be, an unstoppable force. Dice your onions or slice them thin and toss them in right before the butter starts to foam. Turn the heat to just above medium. The cast iron will catch and hold the residual high heat and apply it evenly. Move the onions around with a wooden spatula or spoon until each piece is heated through without inner cold spots. Then cover those babies up, turn ‘em on low, and let ‘em think about their sins awhile. Sweating onions in butter draws out their waters and sugars and steeps the whole shebang, mellowing the acidity into a sweet, golden delight. Don’t feel pressured to come up with something to capture the Nobel committee or vie for a Pulitzer. Sometimes the motion itself is enough. Adam Whipple It’s at this point that I begin to find my way toward figuring out supper. Creatively speaking, if I don’t know what to cook, sautéing onions will loosen my writer’s block—or chef’s block, as it were. I’ve done it so much that I can be on auto-pilot somewhat, and the very action, even though I’m familiar enough to do it reflexively, gets me cooking. It knocks the rust off my imaginative machinery and gets things moving. The motion of the muse is encouraging, and I begin to see the possibilities before me. I’ll remember a packet of sausage, or some kale languishing in the crisper. I’ll think of white wine and chicken stock and butter—always more butter. Eventually, my wife will wander into the kitchen and ask what’s for supper, and I’ll have something to say besides “Can we go out for Mexican?” Being quarantined, some of us have felt both the blessing and the burden of too much time. Our prayers are with those slammed, exposed heroes of our society—doctors and nurses, grocery store clerks, garbage collectors, local policy makers, and the like. Staying home, furloughed from work, we still want to do our part. Yet if we give any attention at all to our imaginative proclivities, we may find ourselves paralyzed by the sudden appearance of too many possibilities. If one can do absolutely any-thing, then doing some-thing can be difficult. We need to sauté onions. We need something that will at least get our mental wires humming. This will be different for every person, I expect. As a songwriter, I like listening to new records or going to concerts. I’m guilty of taking a notebook to a show, then escaping the venue halfway through because some line or progression stirred a latent idea and I had to write it down. It takes me a month to listen to a new CD, because I try to drink in every drop of artistic offering. In the interim, various chords or melodic ideas set loose my own thoughts and concepts, and I have to pause and explore those impulses to see where they lead. What we’re talking about is essentially starter fluid, that noxious accelerant you spray into the lawnmower carburetor every March. All of a sudden, there’s work to do and a sudden influx of gasoline, but if you keep yanking the cord, the engine gets flooded and does nothing. You need a jump start. Who knows what it is or will be? Maybe it’s a walk in the woods, or sitting and watching the downtown stoplights blink for no one in the wee hours of the morning. Maybe it’s viewing a highbrow film that you don’t even like. Maybe it’s driving or showering. Whatever it is, don’t feel pressured, what with all your free time, to come up with something to capture the Nobel committee or vie for a Pulitzer. Sometimes the motion itself is enough. We create because we were made creative, and even adding to the slush pile is better than doing nothing out of fear. Shooting the moon for prizes is a little prideful anyway. All you really need is an onion, and maybe a little butter.

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 4: Chew the Cud by Drew Miller.] Here’s my great confession: If you were to look in my musical library and scroll through the albums, artists, and playlists I’ve curated over the years, it’s likely you would think I’ve listened to really terrible music. I was recently nominated to participate in the 10 Days of Influential Albums on Facebook. As the game goes, we were to share with “no explanations, no reviews, only covers.” Not one to play by arbitrary rules set on something as silly as social media, I offered brief explanations and reviews—but this was no small feat. As I suspected, this activity was fraught with insecurity while I asked myself why particular albums influenced me. In fact, I even retracted my Day 1 choice around Day 7 because I was so ashamed of my choice. I just couldn’t handle the pressure! The weight I felt of having to explain the quilt of my musical taste was great—as I’m no musicologist, how is this even possible? What if these albums aren’t considered “cool?” What if others will think of me as a lesser connoisseur of the musical art form? I had seen older generations share their lists: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell. My ten albums seemed like molehills next to the Denali that were others’ choices. But while they didn’t change the course of musical history, they’re my musical history. The two most recent blogs in this series, brilliantly written by Jennifer Trafton and Drew Miller, dance around the subject of nostalgia. Jennifer remembers listening to Amy Grant on cassette, hanging onto every word. Drew longs for the days of the iPod click wheel as a listening tool—both remembering when music consumption was new to our understanding of the world and we had begun our romance with it. Through the years, I’ve harbored deep insecurity and embarrassment about the artists and albums I’ve chosen to take up space in my heart, but I’ve come to realize that I can’t change anything about the experiences that led me to these pieces of art. And to think that we have ultimate and complete control over our musical tastes is a fallacy. Having not grown up in a musical family, the experience I had in musical feasting was tied to the things that heightened my awareness of the world around me. Early on, this meant the tunes in the musicals I was in, or the songs we sang on the playground (for generational context: my first CDs were Hanson’s Middle of Nowhere and the Titanic soundtrack—and buddy, did we sing them on the monkeybars!). Later, my musical taste was informed by things like concerts and sleepovers, mostly done in the confines of an evangelical church setting. The early 2000s was the height of the marriage between small town America’s youth groups and music label marketing departments. We were the street teams for these “major label” musicians, and the employees at the label depended on us at a time when digital consumption was devouring their budgets. To think that we have ultimate and complete control over our musical tastes is a fallacy. Leslie E. Thompson Music was integral to our youth group gatherings, but it was a Contemporary Christian radio-fed experience (save the bands we found on fringe stages at music festivals like Underoath, Project 86 and Norma Jean). It was heavily censored, largely uninformed about musical prowess, and riddled with guilt. In fact, each year our youth group did what was called a “Sin Burn.” We were invited to bring items that reminded us of our sin, things that kept us from following God, and publicly burn them in a barrel. Remember in Arrested Development when George Michael went to a “CD Burning” party? It was exactly that. In his talk the week before, our pastor always reminded us of the kid who brought his entire CD collection, filled with albums by Korn and Limp Bizkit, and tossed it into the flames (I’m sure he went on to say the kid started listening to bands like Skillet and his life became much holier). We were being taught that unless it was approved by our youth group, it was wrong. To hear this message during formative years of artistic discovery and understanding meant we cut off ties to things that may have given us a deeper, richer, more profound understanding of music and its beauty. If we consider the music we listen to as a companion, I was being taught to make friends selectively and with reservation. Then there was the question of where to obtain the music once we found it. My generation was caught in a windstorm of confusion with newly available digital avenues, both legal and illegal. Those of us who still had dial-up internet were left buying CDs at garage sales or waiting until Christmas when Santa made his rounds. Pepsi bottle caps sometimes provided us with free iTunes downloads, and the occasional iTunes gift card gave us resources to download the songs we had been wanting to put on our iPods—usually radio singles or individual songs we heard from a friend. These restraints did little to support healthy listening habits. Pair this with an early indoctrination of selective music listening, and my skills in collecting great music were stunted. I sometimes grieve that my parents were too young to participate in the British Invasion, thereby depriving me of hearing stories about the Beatles. Or that they were too disinterested in the bands that seem to have peppered the vintage vinyl collection of the parents who were raising musical geniuses I have come to admire. But this way of thinking is unfair. My mother kept several brilliant CDs in the car, namely The Best of James Taylor and Johnny Cash’s My Mother’s Hymn Book. Unfortunately, these were in my life at a time when I was being taught to equate music with nothing more than emotional stimulation, and the subtle profundity and maturity of these records were mostly lost on me. But not entirely. It wasn’t until I started playing at the local coffee shop that I remembered these acoustic guitar-driven albums. So I listened closer and heard James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.” You may or may not know that this song provides the perfect backdrop for a particularly poignant moment in the classic movie, Remember the Titans…but I certainly knew. I remembered the emotional depth of the introduction of those words and that melody, and it stuck. Several years later, I dated an older college guy. He listened to writers like Iron and Wine, Damien Rice, and Dennison Whitmer. I would awaken in the morning to lyrics in my Myspace inbox from John Denver, Copeland, and Mae. Emotional connections like these and the “mountaintop experiences” of youth group trips formed a bond between me and those bands/writers which now brings a certain nostalgia and comfort. Revisiting their work is a reminder of simpler days when music listening wasn’t so complicated. Yes, many of my peers in the music industry would call the bands I listened to “crap.” Many would scoff at the sub-par lyrics, or the simplistic chord progressions. But those were the bands that were at my disposal. They were my friends in moments I felt alone. These artists sat with me virtually as I wept over heartache. Or played in the background as I begged for God to speak to me—oftentimes saying what was needed in that exact moment. They were the bands that inspired me to dream, or to learn how to play a guitar with tiny feeble hands as I went cross eyed from reading the 30-page tab I printed from Ultimate Guitar. As I recall these vulnerable moments in my musical journey, it occurs to me that nostalgia and familiarity are often the real driving forces that develop our musical tastes—perhaps more than anything else. And why should we be embarrassed about that? I’ve spent most of adulthood intimidated by those who wax poetic about albums that garner critical acclaim, but that I’ve never heard about. Yes, I confess, I was one of the people who tweeted, “Who’s Boney Bear?” when Bon Iver won Best New Artist at the Grammys in 2012. I’ve tried my hardest to be at the forefront of the musical trends. I attempted to retune my ear to DirtyLoops and Snarky Puppy. I gave Lana Del Ray a chance. But after I finished “putting in my time” with these new records over the years, I would always return to my mix CDs filled with Christian pop/punk, emocore, and 90s Christian radio tunes, and a weight would lift off my shoulders as I remembered I didn’t have to try so hard after all. Musical discovery requires a willingness to have beliefs challenged and expectations dismantled. This is a good thing—it encourages us to be brave when faced with new artistic ideas and perspectives because we may find that we learn to appreciate, love, and even adopt them. However, returning to the music of one’s youth feels like putting on a pair of well-worn shoes. This music fits perfectly in each nook and cranny of our artistic understanding because it’s the exact thing that formed it. Much of my life has been spent wishing I was someone else, with someone else’s sensibilities and contexts. A person who can name every Beatles record and buys the whole album instead of just the radio single. But, I’m not. And I have to be okay with that. I can continue to develop my tastes and learn why some things may be more artistically rich than others. But these newfound artists and albums won’t be the ones I’ll play when I seek comfort and understanding from the music that has known me the longest. Much like old friends, my old music knows my doubts, my fears, the things that have haunted me since I first knew how to ask big questions. I’m not ashamed of long-time friends who welcome me with open arms and provide a safe place to land—why should I be ashamed of those artists, musicians, and albums who offer the same? Click here to read Part 6: A Scarcity of Mind by Shigé Clark.

I wasn’t expecting to see so clear a picture of Jesus in Pixar’s latest movie, Onward, though I ought to know by now that unexpected places are his favorites. He’s always turning up with a wink and a grin when my mind is elsewhere and my defenses are down. But while I hold Pixar in high esteem, I wasn’t drawn to this story. The landscape was too familiar. Who needs more interstates or cell phones or bustle? Probably my disdain for technology and “progress” and all the unavoidable stuff of life in 2020 that seems worthy of contempt prevents me from seeing Jesus more often. But it feels true that God prefers pastoral settings, in 1811; he is right at home with and easily accessible to people spinning wool or plowing a field. But technology has ejected God from the world. Right? He would never sit with me as I type or chat on a cell phone. Would he? So there I was, not expecting much, when the movie began and the narrator gave a brief opening monologue. Onward is set in a time and place that has lost its sense of itself. Once upon a time (you know the drill) there was magic. The world was full of wonder and adventure and quests for enchantment, until the quest for convenience took priority. Our introduction to the world of Onward stirs our sense of loss and abandonment. The characters are disconnected from their history and from each other. They no longer know who they are. This is especially true of Ian, a young elf coming into manhood without ever having known his father. His sixteenth birthday has arrived, and his longing to fill this hole in his heart (his history, his life) has become all but unbearable. He gets out of bed and slips into his dad’s old sweatshirt. He plays a tape recording of his father’s voice. It’s one half of a conversation—a few words, a laugh. Ian fills in the missing pieces in a heartbreaking parody of connection. If he knew more about his father, Ian thinks, he might know more about himself. When he bumps into one of his dad’s old college friends, Ian presses the man for details. He learns that his father wore purple socks. His father was bold. Ian wonders if he could be bold, too. He sets out for school with that intention, but he fails at every turn. It looks as though a handful of other people’s memories, a photograph or two, and a few descriptors are not enough for Ian to know his father. Ian’s older brother, Barley, has all the confidence Ian lacks. Barley bubbles with enthusiasm and a clearly defined sense of self. He’s graduated from high school, and now he spends his days rebuilding a dilapidated van and playing an interactive game called “Quests of Yore.” When the boys’ mother gives them a gift held in reserve for sixteen years, it’s Barley who knows what to do. The gift is a wizard’s staff and stone and a spell to bring their father back to life for one day. Barley recognizes all of it. He sees the lengths to which their father must have gone to make this possible. We’re searching for a Father we hardly know, and the knowledge we have feels on most days like more of a burden than a revelation. But Someone has been with us through the whole outrageous, impossible journey. Helena Sorensen And Barley knows this isn’t a game; the magic is real. The man himself is materializing from the ground up—brown leather lace-ups, purple striped socks, khaki pants, belt—when the stone shatters and everything stops. Now, beyond hope, Ian has a piece of his father. But the man he’s longed to know has no arms, no hands, no face, no eyes, no heart. So the brothers embark on a quest to replace the stone and finish the spell. It has to happen in a single day, and Ian knows nothing about magic. Fortunately, Barley’s “Quests of Yore” expertise (knowledge everyone considered arcane and ridiculous until now) proves critical to the recovery of the stone. “Trust me,” Barley says. And very hesitantly, Ian does. Ian practices spells, and Barley encourages him. When Ian fails, Barley says, “Hey, it was a good start.” They retrieve information from the Manticore, escape a gang of biker pixies, and send Guinivere the Van on a glorious last flight. They walk across a bottomless chasm, sail on an underground river, and battle a stone dragon. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and Ian is clutching his list of hopes. (It’s a real list. He’s written it all down.) He wants to play catch with his father. He wants to take a walk with him, have a heart-to-heart, laugh together. He wants to see his father’s eyes, know his father’s heart. He wants to feel his father’s embrace. Ian doesn’t get any of those things. Not in this story, not on this day. He is as desolate as we are, lost in a world that doesn’t know itself, burdened with half a father, and the wrong half at that. Throughout his adventure, in fact, Ian’s experience of his father has been a constant frustration. Legs don’t speak. They have to be dragged around on a retractable leash. This father is a hindrance. He’s dead weight. Yet Ian cannot let go of this pair of legs and of the hope they represent. And what about Barley? He’s not a likely hero. Some of the characters describe him as a screw-up because he doesn’t do any of the usual things in the usual ways. He’s the one who leads Ian off the map. He is also good-natured, encouraging, joyful, childlike, constant, resourceful, hopeful, and fun. For him, the journey is an adventure and a celebration. He teaches his little brother to speak from his heart, to focus his attention, to tell the truth, to use what he has. When Ian steps out over a dark chasm, Barley says, “You can do this. Believe with every step. I’ve got you.” When Ian is forced to drive the van into dense traffic on the interstate, Barley cheers him on. He is with Ian at every step, pointing the way to their father. And that’s just it. The tale would be a tragedy if Ian never saw the truth. In the final moments, as Ian, in despair, releases his hopes of meeting his father, he discovers that someone has already given him everything he longed for. His brother has laughed with him, talked with him, shared his life. Barley has spoken the words he needed to hear. Barley has never left. In the quest to find his father, Ian was blind to the steadfast presence of his older brother. That was the discovery I needed, the one that made me cry. In a time and place so marked by destruction and desolation, it’s the discovery we all need. We’re searching for a Father we hardly know, and the knowledge we have feels on most days like more of a burden than a revelation. But Someone has been with us through the whole outrageous, impossible journey. We have laughed with him, learned from him, and shared our days with him. He is no more at home in cathedrals and pastures than he is at our computers, in our vans, in jeans. He wouldn’t dream of being anywhere else. And if on this day we cannot manage to feel the embrace of the Father, the embrace of the Elder Brother will tell us everything we need to know.

On April 19th, 2016 I was able to sit down for a moment with Jan Peterson, wife of author and pastor Eugene Peterson, in their home in Lakeside, Montana. We were visiting for the filming of my husband David’s project with Eugene and Bono on the Psalms. While there was a lot of buzz and excitement about having Bono out to Lakeside, and while we hoped getting Eugene and Bono together would be inspiring and encouraging for many, the person I was most excited to share time with was Jan. I hoped that sitting down to ask Jan a few questions would yield an equally inspiring and encouraging conversation. I was not disappointed. Knowing that Jan and Eugene have been committed to some of the kinds of life practices to which David and I feel committed made me anxious to get her thoughts recorded. We talked together about hospitality, ministry, rhythm, art, home, food, and the Sabbath, while we sat in her living room overlooking Flathead Lake. It was a rich feast, and I’m delighted to share some of the thoughts she shared with me. Phaedra Jean Taylor: Jan, I know that you and Eugene have a lot of people in and out of your home. What is one meal you love to make for people? Jan Peterson: Dear me . . . (laughs). Can we come back to this? PJT: Of course! How about you tell us what has been one of your proudest moments? JP: What has been one of my proudest moments? It’s been more than a moment. Seeing how painful my son’s time was while going through his divorce. The way he did it, I couldn’t be more proud of him. He suffered so. Sure hurts a mother’s heart. It was so painful for him but he came out of it like a knight in shining armor; he really did. He’s been blessed by getting married again. That is something I’m so proud of. PJT: If you could go back and talk to the 30-year-old version of yourself, what would you say to her? JP: I might say to learn how to set priorities and not say yes to everything. Anne Lamott says “no” is a complete sentence. Just to keep my life more in balance. Not be spread out so thin. PJT: So what have been some boundaries you’ve learned to put in place to have a healthy life? JP: That I’m not supposed to take care of everybody. People in your church that are obviously hurting, or your next-door neighbor, or the woman two doors away from you, or whatever. You can be there for them, but you’re not to be their healer or the answer for their problems. When you get involved in someone’s life and you find yourself maybe doing a little bit too much or putting too much of the concern on you, you need to know that God is there in the middle of it working as well. PJT: What is your favorite way to take care of people? The people that you are supposed to take care of. JP: If they’re close by, then certainly personal one-on-one visits are very significant and very important. Your presence means a lot. If they’re at a distance, a note here and there to keep them going, to let them know that you’re remembering them in your thoughts and in your prayers. I think those two things. Telephone calls can make a big difference as well. PJT: I love all of those, because they are simple. JP: Right. Absolutely. PJT: How have you learned to practice keeping the Sabbath? And how is it different now from when Eugene was in active parish ministry or when he was teaching? JP: If you’re active in the parish, you can’t have a Sabbath on Sunday. We would take Monday and we’d pack up a lunch and go for a hike along the rivers. Maryland has some beautiful places to hike along rivers and hills. Now we light two candles on Saturday at supper because that’s the Jewish tradition of Sabbath, beginning the evening before. We say a little saying of, “Blessed are thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe Who sanctified us by Thy commandments, and commanded us to keep the Sabbath rest.” Then, in the next succeeding meals at sundown on Sunday, as I light the two candles, “We light these two candles to remind us of our creation and our redemption.” The candles and words are significant, I think, for both of us. It is just a beautiful reminder of what you’re entering into. Then we go to church on Sunday morning. We come home and have lunch and read and rest. Take a walk. Then read like we do every evening anyway. He doesn’t go up to his office; I don’t let him go up there! I often try to fix enough for Saturday night supper to have leftovers so I’m not cooking that much. PJT: When did you start keeping the Sabbath in an intentional way? JP: That was when we were in Maryland, and Lee, our youngest, was eight years old. We had to wait until the kids were all in school before we could take hikes or go off our own. I was probably 35 and Gene was probably 38 then. One thing I loved about it was not necessarily a God thing. It was that I had my husband all to myself for a whole afternoon. Morning and afternoon. That was new. In the church where we were, on our Sabbath, they didn’t call us. They really stayed clear unless there was an emergency. There's a difference between serving and being a servant. When I'm serving, I'm in charge. If I'm a servant, you're part of it. If you want to do something to help me, I'll let you do it because that's allowing you in. Jan Peterson PJT: Both of you have mentioned that you’re committed to a “simply, daily, rhythmic life.” When Eugene was a pastor, you led an incredibly full life and had many people to take care of and interact with. Lately, he’s had seasons of lots of traveling and speaking or writing. In both situations where your schedule has been . . . maybe irregular would be a good word . . . how have you protected this idea? JP: Well, I’m not sure. For me, it was really hard because about the time that he started being invited to do these things (speaking, traveling, writing) was the time that I was entering our empty nest syndrome. I have no kids at home now. He’s going off without me. We never would have thought to ask if they would pay my way as well. And when he became more well known, then they’d just automatically invite us. I felt like, “Am I just supposed to go out of the house and work, doggone it?” I was angry. I didn’t do it well within myself. There was a period at that time where I was kind of resentful. Here I am, we have time now to be together, and we can’t do it because he’s not going to be around. Eventually, somehow or other, I got the message to him. He was probably a little bit more careful in saying “yes” to everything when he got invited somewhere. It kind of evolved, I think. PJT: I’m thinking of our life right now. It can be really hard because every week could look different than the last. We have a desire to have rhythm in our life. How do you do that when you don’t have a job that starts and ends? What are the things that are the most important to protect? JP: To have some time together each day. I think if that’s something that you’ve done that’s important, you don’t give that up. You guard it. And going out on a date together. Going out to dinner and having a date. PJT: I know you and Eugene read out loud together at night. JP: Yes, and we also have what we call “cliff time.” Two chairs out on the cliff, where I go in the early morning for my prayer time. We did that when we were praying about his job, wondering if God was saying it’s time to leave Christ Our King. We would go out there every noontime and sit and talk and pray together. For him, it’s time for us in the middle of the day. He’s been working up there all morning long. I’ve been going to my Tai Chi class a couple mornings a week. Doing household stuff, cooking, and whatever. What I regularly do. It is nice just to be able to say whatever comes to us, what we need to talk about. Maybe there are some things we need to make a decision about. That’s very helpful because those things can just get pushed aside. It’s important to me. It’s helpful for me to have time to talk about them. We’ve been busy lately and he told me yesterday, “Every day this next week we’re going to have cliff time.” That’s good. We’re going to reconnect that way. PJT: What are you reading out loud right now? JP: We finished Home by Marilynne Robinson. Really enjoyed that. Ivan Doig, do you know that name? He was a Montana person and did a lot of his writing here. A number of years ago he moved to the coast. He still wrote about Montana. I said to Gene, “I think we might want to reread one of Ivan Doig’s books.” He went up there in his closet and he found a book that he didn’t think either one of us had read together. It’s a new one. It’s probably the only one we have that we haven’t read. We really like him. PJT: Eugene has talked about how being a pastor is being in the game with people, not sitting on the sidelines. You were in a program to study social work when you were younger, and social work is an area in which you are very much expected to be “in the game” with people. Did being in pastoral ministry with Eugene feel like a similar thing to what you thought social work might be like? JP: I think probably that social work and being a pastor’s wife is kind of the same thing. It has more to do with caring for people. Being interested in people. Relating. I had plenty of relational work in the church, for sure. Especially with the church in our home for two and a half years with two babies being born and a toddler besides. Gene accused me of trying to increase the membership! I couldn’t do a lot in those early years with the little ones. I think it was more caring, and just being interested in people and learning their stories, and being hospitable as I could in my home. Photo by Taylor Martyn PJT: What does hospitality mean to you? JP: Hospitality is serving people and helping people who are in our home. We listen. If they stay in our home, I fix meals and prepare a bed and so forth for them. I read something about—I think it is Benedict’s Rule of Hospitality—that there’s a difference between serving and being a servant. When I’m serving, I’m in charge. If I’m a servant, you’re part of it. If you want to do something to help me, I’ll let you do it because that’s allowing you in. You’re not being in charge. I’m not being in charge. I like that clarification. It was good for me. I think we treat people that way. I think we allow people to feel like they have a place in our home when they’re here. They’re not just being taken care of. PJT: I love that: inviting people in to be a part of it with you. It’s not just about you doing something that makes you feel good. It’s about being with them as well. I love that distinction. JP: It really was helpful. It kind of hit me right between the eyes too. I was guilty of serving but not being a servant. PJT: When we were talking at lunch, you said that you lived a lot of places, but you didn’t feel like there was one place that was your home. Now you live in Montana, which is where Eugene grew up, so he has deep roots here. Would you say you feel like you belong to this place as well? And what does home mean to you? JP: I think when we lived in Bel Air, I never thought about any of these. Never had any of these thoughts. It was a small town. We had a community with the church people and my neighbors. There was a lot of neighbor stuff going on. I never even thought about this. I had family, my kids, my husband. My parents and my sister and her two boys were in Baltimore. It was 20 miles away so we got to see them a lot. I was always very glad for that. Family is a big factor in that—knowing people and being involved in the community, which I would say I am not here. I have moments when I’m in the car, alone, going into Kalispell, for instance, to shop or run errands. I just think, “I don’t belong.” I think it’s maybe more the family thing because I have no family in Baltimore or in Bel Air anymore. None in Alabama. My brother, my lone relative in my original family, is in Durham, North Carolina. I think home is a family thing. As long as I’ve got Gene, I’m going to be okay. It would be hard for me to live here alone. PT: What are the elements that make a home a home, not just the place that you live in for a while? JP: Home is really, for me, a place of security and stability. I’d rather be here than anywhere out there, including going out to dinner. I like to cook, thankfully. PT: Your home is filled with a lot of art — original art, objects of craft, baskets, and ceramics. What is it about original art that you think is important for a home? JP: It lives, for one thing. Like the picture over here. We got it in Safed, north of Galilee. It’s an art town. Met the artist. He was proud of himself that he didn’t wear glasses. He did all that fine cursive—in Hebrew, the Pentateuch, first five books of the Bible—are all written out. For the book of Lamentations, if you look closely, you’ll be able to see the letters as the river flowing down. Posters are tinny. They’re going to pass out of your life. They’re not going to stay with you. Whereas real artwork will. PT: Each thing has its own story. JP: It really does. PT: In one of Eugene’s books he says: “The holy is found in unexpected places.” Which I love. In what unexpected place have you found the holy? JP: Gene wrote that? PT: Yes, somewhere. I don’t remember where. JP: (Laughs.) I haven’t memorized everything he wrote. When we lived in Vancouver, I thought I might like to help serve somewhere. Paul Stevens was a professor, and his wife had a Bible study with some elderly people at the hospital. She was a chaplain there. At one time I thought I would like to do palliative care, go be at the hospital with people who were dying. I visited one man and I tell you, he just wore me out. That was a bummer. It was very unpleasant. I thought, this is not what I thought I was going to be doing. He was just complaining and complaining. After that I started helping Gail, Paul’s wife, with her Bible study. Getting the patients moved down to this room. One day Gail told me she had a patient that she thought I might like to go visit. It was actually a husband and wife that were in the same room together. I would go over there once a week and I would visit with Myrtle and Roy. He had been a surgeon. He was retired, of course. They were both in bed. The first time I went over and visited she was sitting up in a wheelchair because she was down the hall and I went to find her. She was reading John Bright’s book The Kingdom of God. This big thick book. This little old lady. (Laughs.) She was very alive. To make a long story short, I went and visited them every week because I could walk over from our apartment to the hospital extended care. I loved it. I would always pray with them at the end. One day their daughter-in-law called me and said Myrtle was really failing and she would probably not be with us much longer: “I thought you would want to know.” Gene had been in the hospital because he had some cancer stuff and they knew that I was busy with that and might not know. The next morning I hied over there and do you know what? She prayed for me on her deathbed. That was an unexpected holy. When Roy died, Terry, their son, asked me if I would have a part in the funeral, say something about his father. It was a blessing. I really loved doing that. I’d never done that before. I never felt I could be tied down to once a week doing something regular when I was a pastor’s wife. So this was just a privilege to me. I just loved it. And it kind of came full circle back to the palliative care that I was wanting to give and wasn’t satisfactory to me. PT: It happened anyway. JP: Yeah, it happened anyway. It just dawned on me that it kind of came full circle. PT: So . . . did you think of a meal that you really love to cook for people? JP: I like to make bacon and pancakes for breakfast when we have houseguests. The Flathead secret recipe. That would be it. This interview was originally published four years ago at Art House America. You can learn more about Phaedra Jean Taylor at her website.

“We feel ourselves wounded by what is wretched, foul, and fell, but we are sometimes wounded by the beauty as well, for when it whispers, it whispers of the world that might have been our birthright, now banished…” —Douglas McKelvey, Every Moment Holy It’s currently snowing as I write this in Michigan. In these northern parts, nature is lovely all year round (except for our mucky pre-Spring), but it’s downright resplendent when it’s snowy. But even our most spectacular winter wonderlands are mere mud pies compared with a New England winter. Just Google some pictures for proof; there’s snow everywhere—thick, sparkling, brilliant snow stilling the bustle of the villages, bowing the shoulders of the ancient evergreens, and beckoning you to the glowing hearth of a farmhouse. This is winter’s splendor at its best. If beauty alone were enough to instill joy in the heart, then Robert Frost should have been elated. After all, he was surrounded by New England nature; even his name connotes the smell of fresh-tilled earth, the swaying of the wind in the trees, and the commemoration of nature in verse. But, as you know, beauty is not enough to spark joy—at least not for everyone all the time. As Douglas McKelvey observes above, it’s possible to be “wounded by the beauty” as well as brokenness. This may be especially true for poets. In his masterful little gem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost seems to celebrate the beauty of a winter night. The snow, the silence, the darkness, loneliness, and unsettling last line…wait, what? As you may know, many of his poems are like flowers: small and lovely, but concealing a dark tangle of roots below the surface. A little digging in the dirt of this poem reveals that Frost, like many of us, feels sadness in the face of beauty as well. Can you hear it in the lines below? Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. —Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” Despite the beauty of this moonlit winterscape, the poet seems solemn. Why so serious? Because the scene only serves to remind him of his solitude. In fact, within these four short stanzas, we find accusation, loneliness, and reluctant endurance. He starts by musing about the owner of the woods, a man with a distant house and more important matters to attend to. Is it a stretch to see Frost’s view of God here? I don’t think so. Whatever his religion (which he purposely left ambiguous), he sure didn’t see God as loving and involved. Here he subtly accuses God of being remote and unaware. As untrue as that may be, I know many of us have felt the same way before, and at those times the vast beauty of the world only adds insult to injury. If God is so grand and so distant, how can he possibly see or care? On the days you find yourself tempted to stay in the woods, remember those who need you to keep your promises and travel the miles with them. They’re keeping the hearth warm for you, even on the darkest evening of the year. Emily Zaiser Wade Frost doesn’t find much solace on earth, either. He’s surrounded by beauty, but it feels dark, cold, and silent to him. On the “darkest evening of the year,” he stops “between the woods and frozen lake” with no friendly fireside in sight. He is alone. In fact, the only inquiry after his welfare and intentions is the shake of his horse’s harness bells. We, too, often feel isolated despite a home to return to and a contact list full of friends. Even the beauty of a song, a story, or a family gathering can strike a chord of sadness in our hearts, and we don’t know why. Frost’s struggle is not foreign to us. But the poet doesn’t seem repelled by this bleak midwinter scene; rather, he calls the woods “lovely.” He is content to stop and stay indefinitely, watching the ground stack higher and higher with muffling blankets of snow. Maybe if he sits there long enough, it will cover him up, too. (He considers a similar escape in his masterful poem, “Birches.”) The wind whispers that no one would notice if he disappeared forever. To me, this is the most sobering part of the poem. It’s a reminder that no one is immune to despair’s lies: no one sees, no one cares, no one would miss me. In the face of such isolation, darkness, and silence, what is Frost’s conclusion? Does he heed the siren song toward hopelessness and oblivion? No. Like the flick of his horse’s bells, he shakes off his trance-like meditations and calls to mind his duty to return home. Before he succumbs to “sleep” (a sleep that would not end at sunrise), he must travel many more miles. Although with a weary resignation, he chooses to persevere. Now, we may be surprised by how much we relate with Frost. As believers, surely we’re exempt from such sorrow, right? If only that were true. The fall brought the curse of death, decay, and brokenness on all things, and our hearts are no exception. So is there any hope? You’d better believe it! For those who weep over beauty, brokenness, and life in general, be encouraged. As McKelvey observes above, we’ve been banished from union with Eden’s beauty. “We cannot mingle with the splendours we see,” says C. S. Lewis. But the good news is that “all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.” While we can relate to Frost’s sentiments, we also have a tremendous hope: we believe that one day God will take “the ache of all creation and turn it inside-out.” Hallelujah! Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus. So next time beauty brings a tear to your eye and a tightness to your chest, thank God. The Author of all beautiful things is drawing you to himself. No matter how lovely this world may be, it’s not our true home; it’s only the far country. Our sorrow in the face of banishment is a reminder of this. Realistically, this truth will be hard to feel at times. On the days you find yourself tempted to stay in the woods, remember those who need you to keep your promises and travel the miles with them. They’re keeping the hearth warm for you, even on the darkest evening of the year. And, while the village may feel distant, the One who owns the woods is much nearer than you think. Click here to read more of Emily’s writing.

In Season 2, Episode 8, Drew Miller talks with Ella Mine and Evan Redwine about the making of Ella’s song, “Sound & Fury.” Drew, Ella, and Evan discuss Ella’s process of discerning how to tell such a personal story in the form of a concept album, the integral role of Shakespeare in “Sound & Fury,” and the tricky process of faithfully adapting a live performance into a crystallized record. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 8 of The Second Muse. Transcripts are now available for The Second Muse! You can find them by clicking here. They are typically one or two episodes behind. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

Jericho Brown was not waiting for these rewards, although we’re certain he’ll gladly receive them. Brown is a brilliant poet, one of America’s living literary geniuses, who was recently given the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2019 collection, The Tradition. It’s the latest honor bestowed, the crown jewel thus far for a gifted lyricist who has already earned plenty of acclaim and accolades on a global scale. Yet Brown remains close to the ground—or rather, his call—in our conversation with him. The rewards are present, but the resistance even more so. He’s a man called to his craft, an artist called to a conflictive posture—to speak truth to a culture he must also inhabit. He’s both insider and outsider and must remain so in order to further his work. Our conversation with Jericho Brown is one about reward and resistance. It asks tough questions about how far the burning heart inside can carry a person. Is a sense of calling enough? What if the rewards aren’t there when we believe we need them? Brown has earned his Pulitzer (and then some) but it required a long lean into lonely spaces. Click here to listen to this newest episode of The Resistance. And here to learn more about The Resistance Podcast.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Leif Enger, author of Virgil Wander and Peace Like A River. In this episode, Jonathan and Leif discuss Leif’s love of beautiful places in his favorite novels, the ability of readers to feel the delight of the author, and the magic of discovering the way a story goes as you’re writing it. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 21 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.

“He Will Redeem It All” started as a dedication to two friends—one had just lost her sister to cancer, and another unfairly lost his job. Both of these friends held their heads high during their trials, trusting that God would operate even while sorrow and uncertainty seemed to carry the day. Fast forward one year. I had no idea this song would come out as the whole world is suffering from the same hardships as my two friends, yet on a massive scale: illness and job loss. So the dedication of this song hopefully embraces everyone. But even so. The last thing you want to say to someone who’s suffering is, “Don’t worry! God is going to reverse all of this!” Well, OK, that may be true. But it somehow never cures the actual pain does it? Truth isn’t necessarily an analgesic. Redemption may be in the future; but the pain is here now. So I offer this song up for all of us, humbly, to believe that God will redeem every part of this pandemic—all the suffering, all the loss. And as always, my dear friend Ben Shive collaborated with me as songwriter and producer.

“And the wrens have returned and they’re nesting In the hollow of that oak where his heart once had been And he lifts up his arms in a blessing for being born again” — Rich Mullins, “The Color Green” Rich Mullins wasn’t writing about Corann, the Druid, from Helena Sorensen’s The Door on Half-Bald Hill, but he could have been. In fact, it’s about halfway through the novel that the wrens leave, and hope along with them. There’s just no way around it: the days we occupy right now are filled with uncertainty. It’s what takes up space in our minds and in our conversations. It’s what sets us at each other’s throats and, somehow, unites us. We’ve got no idea what the future holds and, on many days, it seems like what’s to come won’t be pleasant. How long will this last? What’s the next thing coming? Where do we look for leadership? How do we find the way forward? And, above all, where do we look for hope? The best fantasy novels are beyond or outside time. They have the prescience and authenticity to feel at home in any era they’re read, despite whatever combination of futuristic and ancient trappings they may have. But they also feel urgent, like they’re happening right now. They take what’s time-tested, remove it from a time we know, and turn it into universal truth. Helena Sorensen’s new novel, The Door on Half-Bald Hill, is such a novel. In the world of Baileléan created by Sorensen, a fantasy world inspired in part by Irish fairy tales, legends, and lore, the people are dying. Since the last Bloodmoon, the water has become poisonous and is spreading all across the land, slowly overtaking all the crops and livestock. The people persist in the old ways, looking to their Druids, their high priests, for salvation, but the Druids cannot divine the source of the darkness. Instead, it’s the Ovate, Zinerva, who brings a message back from the other side. Her message? “Do not fear death. Embrace it as a friend, as a lover. It waits to return your embrace.” In other words, stop trying to save yourselves and, instead, find freedom in the darkness. But Idris, the bard, the ollamh, the hero of our story, searches through the old tales for the answer. Idris is the keeper of the Word. He is the one that remembers. But how can he be victorious over death when “the ollamh carries no weapon. He has only the Word”? In describing the world she’s created, Sorenson’s prose is plaintive and mournful. And while it’s never verbose or flowery, her descriptions of the physical world are intricately wrought, and they carry the weight of the people’s sadness. The characters’ conversations are agonizingly terse, speaking only what is necessary, and their sparseness is pregnant with doubt. The effect of all of this is that, by the climax of the story, we feel as burdened as the people we’ve come to care for. Sorensen also doesn’t provide us with an elaborate mythology, even though there is obviously one at work. Instead, we are begged to fill in the gaps for ourselves, and our mind’s eyes are allowed to run wild. In a masterful work of writing, Sorensen’s prose calls to mind Cormac McCarthy and his direct, to-the-point style. For writers like these, the best way to evoke imagination in the reader is by letting them do the work for you. Sorensen’s is the very best kind of prose. It’s the kind of prose that augments and illustrates what’s happening through its very style. When we’re granted description, it’s to describe what’s been lost. Mentions of beautiful things are there to tell us what’s missing, not what is in abundance. We feel the starkness and destitution of the land by virtue of how Sorensen tells it, not merely by what she says about it. In that, it reads like poetry—not particularly poetic language, but the style informing the substance. This is a novel that will reward a second or third read. The Door on Half-Bald Hill begins the way all great fantasy begins. . . with a door. Where does the door go? What’s on the other side? How do we get through? Well, you’ll have to journey along with Idris to find out, but the payoff is worth the trip. In Lev Grossman’s (author of the modern fantasy novels The Magicians Trilogy) analysis of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he says: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a powerful illustration of why fantasy matters in the first place. Yes, the Narnia books are works of Christian apology, works that celebrate joy and love—but what I was conscious of as a little boy, if not in any analytical way, was the deep grief encoded in the books. Particularly in the initial wardrobe passage. There’s a sense of anger and grief and despair that causes Lewis to want to discard the entire war, set it aside in the favor of something better. You can feel him telling you—I know it’s awful, truly terrible, but that’s not all there is. There’s another option. Lucy, as she enters the wardrobe, takes the other option. I remember feeling this way as a child, too. I remember thinking, “Yes, of course there is. Of course this isn’t all there is. There must be something else.” —Lev Grossman In Half-Bald Hill, we’re introduced to the door in the prologue, but we aren’t allowed to travel through like Lucy did. Instead, we’re stuck in the war. But it’s not a war fought with violence—it’s a war fraught with hopelessness. Sorensen paints a picture, both vibrant and destitute, of a world stuck in liminal space, waiting for what’s next. The crops are dying. The animals are stillborn. The children are sick. The leaders are answerless. And Idris, the Bard, longs to provide the hope that people are looking for, even if he doesn’t know how. Idris must find the way through and out. But in a time when the old ways are failing, he does not know how. “Is there anything I can say that will counter Zinerva’s message? Can my words bring any hope at all?” . . . I am the Keeper of the Word. Mine is the right to speak, and the necessity. It does not matter if my words defy the finality of Zinerva’s message. It does not matter if they even soften the blow. I am the ollamh. I must speak. —Helena Sorensen, The Door on Half-Bald Hill If you’re lost in a bog of hopelessness; if you’re gazing out the window wondering who is going to lead us through this; if you’re at your wit's end, The Door on Half-Bald Hill is a fire in the cold night. Not only will it fill you with warmth, it will light your way home. John Barber And so, in a time when we all feel adrift and uncertain about the future, when we’re wondering what’s coming next, and whether or not things are only going to get worse, Sorensen’s book tells us to look to the storytellers, and, in an Escher-like twist of logic, it’s books like hers that help lead the way through the darkness. Where should we be looking for hope? First, like Idris, we go back to the old, old stories. We remember them as they’ve always been told, and we listen to those who tell them. It would be easy to turn The Door on Half-Bald Hill into an allegory about the gospel, but to do so would be to minimize the artistry at work here. Much like Lewis’ most famous work, the gospel is here, but to limit the application thus would remove the novel’s immediacy. In fact, The Door on Half-Bald Hill is a novel for such a time as this. It’s a story that talks to us right now. If you’re lost in a bog of hopelessness; if you’re gazing out the window wondering who is going to lead us through this; if you’re at your wit’s end, The Door on Half-Bald Hill is a fire in the cold night. Not only will it fill you with warmth, it will light your way home. Look to the storyteller. And in the meantime, join Corann in the hopeful waiting. “Corann.” He huffs a sigh and turns to me. “Will the wren sing to you in the morning?” “No,” he says. “But I will sit and wait for it all the same.” —Helena Sorensen, The Door on Half-Bald Hill

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 5: The Case for Nostalgia by Leslie E. Thompson.] When I was twelve years old, my parents bought me the 10th Anniversary Concert recording of Les Misérables on VHS. I’d begun to demonstrate a zeal for musicals, starting with the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack, which I listened to on repeat until I could sing you the entire thing through—with all its varying parts—from start to finish. The only other musical recording we had was a VHS of CATS (which I also watched repeatedly and will unabashedly defend), and my parents figured that they ought to guide my budding passion toward a higher quality of musical theatre. Hence, my introduction to Les Misérables. To this day, I can vividly recall sitting at the foot of our tv (way too close to the screen) watching that concert over and over again. I can still feel my eyes locked wide in wonder, how the orchestral music hit me like a tidal wave and soaked into every cell of my little body and left my skin buzzing. I can still feel certain lyrics engraving themselves into my bones, and others that seeded in my mind to grow slowly over the years before blooming. I tell you this to demonstrate that I get it. I came up somewhere between the cassette tape era that Andrew and Jennifer described and Drew’s era of the iPod (though of course, I eventually got there too). Mine was the time of the CD—played on a clunky portable-CD-player that bounced against my leg, causing the track to skip every fifteen seconds or so, and a lavender boombox on my nightstand where I transitioned when the skipping got too aggravating. I understand what it is to have to wait for new music, to be forced to listen to one record at a time, to pore endlessly over the liner notes and learn the background of each song and its creators. I understand how scarcity can make a thing more precious. It’s easy to take experiences like that and conclude that scarcity is the superior musical experience. Drew likens our interaction with music to that of food and discusses the difference between consuming and savoring. Surely, we’re more prone to savor if we get only one meal a day, and we’ve had to scrape and scrounge to get it! I picture him hobbit-like at his metaphorical table, tucking into a delicious supper for which he can name every ingredient and treasures each flavor in its full magnificence. It’s an alluring image, but for me it begs the question: where is that meal collected from? In a place of scarcity, how do we encounter the music that we come to treasure? My parents introduced me to Les Misérables, Leslie talks about discovering music in her youth group, and Andrew reminisces about drooling over the tapes in his friend’s car and later offering album suggestions to his daughter. In a posture of scarcity, we’re compelled to collect our music from the people around us, from our families, and friends, and those we interact with day-to-day. There’s a certain beauty in that—a sense of community and commonality in beloved things (again, I think of hobbits with their close-knit culture and common, simple values)—but there’s a danger in it too. When our music is gathered by proximity, we risk only being introduced to and reinforcing our own cultural tastes. If we aren’t careful, what seems like depth can become entrenchment, and darkrooms can become echo-chambers. When our music is gathered by proximity, we risk only being introduced to and reinforcing our own cultural tastes. If we aren't careful, what seems like depth can become entrenchment, and darkrooms can become echo-chambers. Shigé Clark I’ll be forever grateful to my parents for guiding me toward Les Mis; yet, that same, thoughtful guidance would have never sat me down in front of the marvel that is Hamilton—in fact, it would have firmly steered me away. In the culture I grew up in, rap was generally viewed with disdain (the couple “safe” exceptions conspicuously being white guys, irrespective of theological richness), and the minute a cuss word showed up in the lyrics, forget about it. Coming from that culture, when people started telling me about this new musical where American revolutionary history meets rap and hip hop, I thought, “Well, that sounds terrible.” It was YouTube that recommended the video of Lin-Manuel Miranda being laughed at in the White House as he debuted Hamilton’s opening song, piquing my curiosity enough to check it out. It was Spotify that offered me the chance to listen to the soundtrack, when my skepticism of something outside my usual tastes would never have led me to risk the money and level of commitment to buy the full album on CD. No one I knew was listening to Hamilton (in fact, my friends and family were actively scoffing at it); no one was going to lend me their copy or vouch for its excellence. If the time of musical scarcity had persisted, Hamilton would have remained this peripheral thing that I heard about sometimes, some musical out there in the nether that people with different (clearly lesser) artistic tastes were raving about. I would never have experienced one of the most masterful and moving works I’ve ever encountered—one that, among other things, depicts the power of God’s forgiveness in a way that nothing has for me since Les Mis. After I’d fallen head-over-heels for the work, it was YouTube again that offered interviews from the creators and cast. There I learned about the influences that shaped the writing and composition, seeing for the first time the artistry that goes into rap and the unique capability it has to tell a story where other lyrical forms would fail. There I began to learn about the lineage of unfamiliar genres and those who helped form them. There my perspective on my country’s history was challenged by those who were seeing themselves in its founding story for the first time—a feeling that I’ve never had to face, despite being a third-generation immigrant. My new respect for this artform opened my mind to a thousand other works and artists that I had before automatically dismissed, and the accessibility of today’s music put them all at my fingertips. Beyond the rap and hip hop artists it sent me to, appreciation for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work also lead me to his first musical In the Heights, where I got a second helping of raw perspective from a story set in an immigrant-dominated neighborhood, along with a healthy heap of Latin-American music influences that I had been similarly closed-off to. Far from surfing, each new discovery was like diving into a pool of water and exploring a hidden complex of caves, knowing I could swim deeper and deeper and never reach its end, and eventually resurfacing, just to dive into the next one. What Drew described in his article as “skipping across vast distances of data, but hardly ever stopping to taste what we’ve consumed” has for me, instead, been a tumbling down into endless, branching rabbit holes of ever-increasing depth, emerging in a Wonderland of music completely alien to my own experience. Here’s why this is important—music, I think more than anything, is dripping with the experience and perspectives of our fellow humankind, each an inimitable shard of God’s own image. It’s too easy—natural, even—to find the aspect of God’s nature that most resonates with us and cling to it, calling it good, calling it best, as though God Himself and all His image-bearers aren’t more multifaceted than we could ever hope to begin to grasp. If we aren’t careful, scarcity can become an excuse to maintain our blind spots in perpetuity. I’ve used Hamilton and my own cultural expansion as an example, but this concept is limitless in its application. Jennifer references our staff discussion of Billie Eilish, and how she and others like her speak to a generational perspective that is key to understanding some of our biggest current struggles (in that same conversation, Chris introduced me to the works of Mac Miller and Juice WRLD, who speak in that same space, and whom—I think it’s important to note—I would never have been willing to hear about, much less check out, if not for the way Hamilton had already opened me up to new forms of music). Mark Meynell has spoken to how Shostakovich’s symphonies can teach us about the experience of those who suffered under Stalin’s control in the Soviet Union. After last year’s Hutchmoot concert, my friend said that she almost walked out of Ella Mine’s remarkable record Dream War because the darkness it addresses was so uncomfortable for her. It’s just not how she thinks or wants to see the world, she said—but she stayed, because she recognized that this was some people’s experience, and she wanted to understand. Sure, we can stay in the Shire and revel in the Berry-esque beauty of knowing every path and neighbor’s name, but who among us would rather have stayed in the Shire than travel with the Fellowship? Shigé Clark And isn’t that the glorious divinity of it? The opportunity to step into another person’s perspective and feel it in a way that only music allows? We call music the universal language for a reason—it has the potential to be the most uniting force in existence. It can introduce us to levels of empathy we could never have imagined. Or it can be a source of further division. Scarcity of music carries on its back the risk of scarcity of mind, where we wrap ourselves in our warm, comfortable genre coats and throw on a nostalgia scarf for good measure and remark to each other how the world isn’t cold. To Leslie’s well-made point in the previous article, this doesn’t mean we need to be ashamed or can’t feast joyfully in the music that most resonates with us. After all this time, Les Misérables is still my favorite musical, and probably still the one I’ve listened to the most. But I needed Hamilton. I needed In the Heights. I needed the expansion of perspective that’s led to the 467 songs on my Musicals playlist. And you know what? This ubiquity of music hasn’t diluted the depth in that expansion. Are there songs and artists on my playlists that I know nothing about, and albums I’ve skimmed through, failing to give them a fair chance? For sure, and certainly there’s more to those artists and their works than my attention has credited them. But that’s only because I’m busy engaging just as deeply with other works as I ever engaged back in my times of scarcity. The fact that algorithms lead me away from Hamilton to discover the scope of other works hasn’t stopped me from soaking it up just as deeply as Les Misérables. I have sat in that same, rapt attention, with the same wonder thrumming through me, digging into every note, line, rhyme, refrain, and devastating detail of its 2hr23min soundtrack. In fact, as Chris alludes to in his post on the topic, the availability of the internet has only increased the depth with which I engage art. I’ve been able to dig further into the history and complexity of Les Misérables through the internet than I ever could have hoped to through a book of liner notes. Scarcity may call to us like the close-knit community of the Shire, but the splendor of the Lord of the Rings stories is that our heroes leave, and are made better for it. Andrew describes ubiquity as “the glut of new music at our fingertips,” but I see the current ubiquity of music less as a smorgasbord arrayed before us to gorge on without tasting, and more as the whole wide world opened up at my doorstep, waiting to sweep me away. If the constraints of the iPod are for Drew like Bilbo sitting down to savor a meal in its full magnificence, then YouTube and Spotify have been Gandalf beckoning me from my doorway with a company of dwarves at his back. “I’m looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging.” Sure, we can stay in the Shire and revel in the Berry-esque beauty of knowing every path and neighbor’s name, but who among us would rather have stayed in the Shire than travel with the Fellowship? Would we really forego the unfamiliar beauties of Rivendell, Lothlórien, Moria, Rohan, and Gondor? Are we really content for our world to be so small, and our knowledge of the greater story so limited? And—as Jennifer alludes to in her post—perhaps traveling there and back again not only serves to expand our perspective and edify us as people, but will even serve to make us realize and appreciate, all anew, the familiar things we loved before. Click here to read Part 7: Can I Get a Witness? by Pete Peterson.

The montage that runs under the opening credits of Jojo Rabbit is one of the most insightful moments in a movie full of insights. Newsreel footage of Nazi youth rallies is accompanied by The Beatles’ “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand” (a German language version of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” that The Beatles recorded in 1964). Frenzied, dewy-eyed teenage girls scream “Heil Hitler!” But if you weren’t watching their lips closely, you might think they were screaming “Paul!” or “Ringo!” Arms wave frantically in the air, like those of excited fans at Shea Stadium. It is only after the second or third shot that you realize that the hands are extended in a Nazi salute. Likewise the hysterical cheering running along in the background might have been recorded at the Nuremburg rallies, or it might have been the crowd at the Ed Sullivan Theater (“Ladies and gentlemen . . . The Beatles!!”). Like a lot of the movie that follows, it’s a sequence that is simultaneously funny and unsettling. Probably (I was left thinking) some of the people carrying out the genocides of the 1940s spent the 1930s, not as little hardcore junior fascists, but as star-struck teenagers. Perhaps one of the greatest evils in human history had its roots, not only in twisted philosophy and racial hatred, but also in herd mentality, hype, and peer pressure. Could that be right? Could the same impulse that leads a teenager to wear a Billie Eilish t-shirt also lead him to wear a swastika? This idea, which is presented so powerfully in the opening sequence, is one of the subtexts of the entire film. Cruel and barbaric ideologies like National Socialism (the movie suggests) are fueled, at least in part, by pretty typical teenage impulses like hero-worship and the desire to be part of the crowd. For instance, Jojo’s indoctrination takes place at Hitler Jugend Camp, but it would only require minor adjustments to wardrobe and dialog to transform it into the camps run every summer by the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, or your local church youth group. Writer/Director Taiki Waititi very clearly plays up this wild incongruity for comic effect. (Nazi Summer Camp!! Crafts! Hand Grenades! Anti-Semitic Propaganda! S’mores!) “FRAULEIN RAHM: Now, get your things together kids, it’s time to burn some books! CHILDREN: Yayyyy!!!” —Jojo Rabbit screenplay Likewise, Jojo’s bedroom (to take another example) is plainly the bedroom of a 10 year-old boy, but with Nazi flags and propaganda occupying the places where one would normally expect to see posters of baseball players and Metallica. And of course, the central conceit of the film is that Hitler is not only the Führer of Nazi Germany, but is also Jojo’s imaginary best friend. (And he delivers exactly the sort of goofy dialog a 10 year-old might imagine.) Jojo Rabbit offers us Nazism refracted through the adoring eyes of a hero-worshipping, adventure-starved fanboy. But Waititi presses his point even further. It’s not just that National Socialism seems fun and exciting to pre-adolescents. The adult Nazis, the soldiers, and even the Gestapo are portrayed as credulous, grown-up teenagers. They exchange sensationalistic anti-Semitic tall tales, like kids telling fantastical horror stories at a sleep-over. They “heil Hitler” one another compulsively, like members of a treehouse club exchanging a secret handshake. In one of the movie’s climactic scenes, Elsa, the Jew hiding in Jojo’s crawlspace, insists on exposing this childishness as childishness: “You’re not a Nazi, Jojo. You’re a 10 year old kid who ‘likes’ Swastikas and ‘likes’ dressing up in a funny uniform and wants to be part of a club.” —Jojo Rabbit screenplay Elsa’s speech is wonderful. But the fact that she’s correctly diagnosed Jojo—and the dismissiveness in her voice—shouldn’t lead us to underestimate just how powerful that impulse is; that desire “to be part of a club.” There are few instincts more basic. If the God who exists in an eternal community of Father, Son, and Spirit has likewise made us for community, then the desire to be part—of a family, of a community—is at the heart of our human identity. I did not (thank you Lord God) have to struggle against a peer group fascinated by swastikas and hand grenades. But as a student, and then as a teacher, I have seen the same sort of group dynamic portrayed in Jojo Rabbit acted out dozens of times. In the course of their education people regularly undertake major philosophical and ideological shifts, not so much because of argument and reflection, but out of a vague sense of “this is how everyone looks at things,” and a desire to keep in step. If there’s one thing the film makes clear, it’s that groups are misled not by hearing too many voices, but by hearing too few. Steve Guthrie The fact that Jojo Rabbit is a comedy is fitting too. One of the most powerful ways groups exercise this compulsion toward conformity is through laughter. This is not only the case in the film, but in my own experience as well. Reflect for a moment on the persuasive power of humor; how firmly we feel drawn away from a prior certainty merely by an ironic eye-roll; how easily a sardonic grin can cause us to adjust the direction of a comment midstream; how decisively a chuckle and a shake of the head seem to defeat deeply held convictions. Everyone laughs at that way of thinking; therefore that way of thinking must be laughable! I had a significant crisis of faith my first year of college, and it was precipitated in just this way, by a classroom outburst of laughter. The simple evidence of my classmates’ reaction seemed self-evidently persuasive. I felt suddenly ashamed. Oh no—they’re laughing! The things I believe are ridiculous. In the movie as well, hatred of Jews manifests itself not so often in violence as in mockery. Immediately I think of the Great Precedent for this: “They twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand. Then they knelt in front of him and mocked him. ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’” (Mtt. 27:29) “Then Herod and his soldiers ridiculed and mocked him.” (Luke 23:11) “In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves.” (Mark 15:31) When Gestapo agents discover Yoohoo Jew (Jojo’s illustrated “exposé of the Jews”), they page through the fantastical and grotesque depictions, dissolving into helpless giggles. “Oh, this is hilarious!” the head agent gasps. “I must thank you for this. You have really made my day.” Of course, mockery is not the only kind of laughter: “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy!” (Psalm 126:1-2) And even mockery can function, not only as an indoctrination, but as a kind of deliverance. This is the claim of the two quotations C. S. Lewis uses as an epigraph to The Screwtape Letters: “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” —Martin Luther “The devil…that proud spirit…cannot endure to be mocked.” —Thomas Moore In a way, this is the project of the entire film. Taiki Waititi has produced his own version of Yoohoo Jew: an exposé of the Nazis that unmasks them as not only cruel and inhuman, but also as childish and ridiculous. And if laughter can be not only corrosive but redemptive, the same of course is true of others’ influence. It’s easy to imagine watching the opening “Fascism-as-Beatlemania” sequence of Jojo Rabbit, and deciding that the wisest course of action is (to quote another Beatles song): “Think For Yourself.” Be an individual; don’t follow the crowd; don’t listen to others. Do what seems best to you and don’t give a rip about what anyone else thinks. This is, more or less, the Modern Western Enlightenment response to the dangers of credulity and herd mentality. The philosopher Immanuel Kant defined “Enlightenment” as having the “courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. . . ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.” (Was ist Aufklärung?, 1784) So in other words, Kant’s prescription is resolute self-reliance; a refusal to base one’s beliefs on the testimony of others. This, I think, is precisely the wrong response. In the film, it’s not rugged individualism that rescues Jojo from Nazism, but love. Indeed, if there’s one thing the film makes clear, it’s that groups are misled not by hearing too many voices, but by hearing too few. Jojo’s problem is not a group that’s grown too large, but a group whose boundaries have grown too small. Similarly, the antidote for his anti-Semitism is not isolation but encountering a Jew. He is terrified by his first meeting with Elsa, which is telling. She is as much a threat to him as he is to her; though admittedly, they pose different kinds of threat to one another. Elsa needs to hide from the Nazis to remain alive; the Nazis need Elsa to hide to remain Nazis. If she reveals herself, she simultaneously reveals the silliness of their propaganda. (“How would you know if you saw [a Jew]?” Jojo’s friend Yorki asks. “They can look just like us.” “Oh I’d know,” Jojo assures him. “I’d feel its head for horns. And they smell like Brussels Sprouts.”) This is a sobering idea for those (like myself) who homeschool our children. It may be that the greatest danger to our children is not being exposed to the multiple sinful perspectives of the world, but being limited to the single sinful perspective of their parents. Jojo is rescued by finding himself in another, more life-giving and expansive community. He abandons Hitler when the boundaries of National Socialism prove too narrow to accommodate his devotion to his mother and his growing love for Elsa. The bonds forged with the Hitler Youth can’t be maintained without breaking other bonds that are deeper and more resilient. This, in fact, very much resembles the miracle that unfolds in the early church. The first Christians (just like many of us) were people who found their primary identity in family or tribe, in their social class or status, in their religious or cultural heritage. But Paul declares that now, “there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.” (Gal. 3:28) One of the most radical things the early church did was have Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free people, men and women share the same bread and the same cup. Shockingly, the members of this disparate body come to call one another “brother” and “sister.” Just as Jojo discovers (to his horror) that he loves the Jew living behind the hidden space in the wall, so first century Gentiles discovered that they loved the Jews seated around them at table. (And likewise, first century Jews discovered they loved the Gentiles seated around them.) Their new identity (“brother to a Jew;” “sister to a slave,”) overflowed the banks of their old identity (“Jew, NOT a Gentile;” “Free person, RATHER THAN a slave”). My daughter Sophie (at whose urging I watched the movie in the first place) tells me that one of the first decisions Waititi made when making Jojo Rabbit was choosing David Bowie’s “Heroes” to play over the final scene and closing credits: I will be king And you You will be queen Though nothing Will drive them away We can beat them Just for one day We can be heroes Just for one day —”Heroes,” David Bowie I don’t know the reason for Waititi’s choice, but to my mind the two songs at either end of the film—“I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “Heroes”—perfectly frame the tensions at the heart of the story. Jojo and Elsa certainly are heroes; each rescuing the other from the Nazis, in different sorts of ways. On the other hand, ironically, it is precisely hero-worship from which Jojo’s heroine rescues him. Likewise, Waititi uses the opening soundtrack of “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand” to showcase the destructive power of one sort of hero worship. And how can we counter the kind of fanaticism on display there? The answer the film offers is summarized in the same impulse for personal connection the song expresses: “Come—give me your hand.”

We’ve got a new episode of Fixed in Post—our podcast for the moviegoers among us, wherein co-hosts John Barber and Pete Peterson discuss films they love and what they would have fixed in post-production to make them even better. Except this time, John Barber is not joined by Pete Peterson. He is instead joined by the Rabbit Room’s Director of Sales & Event Programming, Chris Thiessen, who himself wields a sharp pop cultural eye. In this special quarantine edition of the podcast, Chris and John cover two of John’s favorite films—Children of Men and Phantom Thread. Will Chris end up with the same affection for them that John has? Spoiler alert: yes and no. Click here to listen to this special quarantine edition of Fixed in Post.

In Season 2, Episode 9, Drew Miller talks with Don Chaffer about the song “Be Invisible” from his musical, The (Almost) Unforgettable Edwin Booth. Drew and Don discuss the creativity to be found in the “fenced-in areas” of musical theater, the magic of seeing so many people bring your work to life on stage, and art as a way of practicing empathy. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 9 of The Second Muse. Transcripts are now available for The Second Muse! You can find them by clicking here. They are typically one or two episodes behind. 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 Karen Swallow Prior, author of On Reading Well and Booked. In this episode, Jonathan and Karen discuss common mistakes in how we read classic literature, the vaster meaning of the word “comedy,” the excellent new film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, and the difference between portrayal and endorsement in art. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 22 of The Habit Podcast. Check out Karen’s new edition of Austen’s Sense & Sensibility here, with a guide written specifically for Christian readers. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast—they generally run one or two episodes behind. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

“Inside Bag End, Bilbo and Gandalf were sitting at the open window of a small room looking out west onto the garden. The late afternoon was bright and peaceful. The flowers glowed red and golden: snap-dragons and sunflowers, and nasturtiums trailing all over the turf walls and peeping in at the round windows.” —The Fellowship of the Ring “How bright your garden looks!” Gandalf tells Bilbo in the opening chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring. Indeed, the whole chapter has been bright with planning and anticipation for a great celebration, and the Shire glows verdant with meadows and trees. It isn’t popular to start or finish stories with such happiness these days. A ready eye to life’s darker realities is the thing. (I don’t necessarily disagree.) And J. R. R. Tolkien, along with C. S. Lewis, are fast falling out of fashion, partly because of overuse (Give us new Christian writers to read!), partly because of this penchant of theirs: telling stories that come full-circle, and that keep their eye on hope and beauty all the way ’round to the end. Postmoderns cringe, alongside a growing number of Christian writers who want to make sure the grim realities that the gospel addresses get told. (Again, I don’t disagree.) But don’t let’s forget that when Gandalf praises Bilbo’s flowers, this particular tale—Frodo’s tale, at least—is only at its beginning. The battle for Middle Earth has not yet begun in earnest; it certainly hasn’t reached the round windows or doors of Bilbo’s beloved home, Bag End. Gandalf, sitting by Bilbo’s sunny window, knows a broader reality, a tale more akin to those we hear later from Tom Bombadil about dying kingdoms spanning the warring centuries. “How bright your garden looks.” How can he say such a thing? Gandalf, as it turns out, is not merely commenting on the greenery outside the hobbit hole; his words bear the weight of all that Tolkien had seen. And J. R. R. Tolkien had seen a darker side of things. So had C. S. Lewis. Both men had been to war. Both, in fact, saw front line action, Tolkien in the earliest, most horrifying days of the Battle of the Somme, and Lewis a year later in the same region. (It would be a solid eight years before they actually met each other, at an Oxford University faculty meeting.) Lewis was wounded, Tolkien sent home with trench fever. Though Lewis later described his experiences in most grueling and gruesome terms, he also claimed he never thought much about his time in the war, that it hadn’t left lasting memories with him. In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, he can hardly speak of battle training or combat without veering into happier tangents about books, friends, or imaginative fancies. The horrors of his time in France are “cut off from the rest of [his] experience” and are “even in a way unimportant.” I disagree. (So does Joseph Loconte for the length of an entire, excellent book. And even Lewis contradicts himself mightily, relievedly, about this in his letters.) Tolkien never made such a claim. His response to his own time in the trenches of World War I is more definitive, and more definitively negative. In a letter years later to his son Michael, who was enlisted during World War II, Tolkien had certainly not forgotten the suffering and bitterness of the previous war—“One war is enough for any man”—and laments the start of a second. No, Tolkien’s dubious denial about his war experience concerns his fiction: “Personally I do not think that either war had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape.” Ah. The landscape. He means, of course, settings like Helms Deep, the Pellenor Fields, the Middle Earth fighting grounds that reflect the grimy trenches and bleak battlefields he’d actually seen. But there is that other type of landscape even more pervasive in Tolkien’s books, a brighter one. And it begins with Bilbo’s garden. Bilbo’s garden offers a glimpse into the world as it once was, and as it might be again—a reminder of the ordinary things the hobbits set out to save, and of the homely things they are ultimately saved unto, in all their potential nearness and glory. Rebecca D. Martin Bilbo’s garden. Both Lewis and Tolkien approved the value of green spaces and growing things, and both men abhorred their opposite: the ugly machinery of industrialization and purported “progress.” Also, both men were walkers, amblers and observers of the English countryside and of Oxford’s own green meadows and tree-lined college pathways. They were also both medieval scholars, and medieval literature is rife with gardens in a multitude of meanings. For the medievalist Tolkien, as for Bilbo, the garden is a place set apart, separate from the world and its concerns. And it is a common space within the world, too, through which enter friends, family, and even the unbidden stranger. Which means it is also the space through which the adventurer must pass in order to leave home and enter the wide world. Frodo “turned and (following Bilbo, if he had known it) hurried after Peregrin down the garden path.” But along the road, his gate and garden remain ever before his mind’s eye, representing the highest of hopes: returning home. “Then world behind and home ahead / We’ll wander back to home and bed.” In short, Bilbo’s garden offers a glimpse into the world as it once was, and as it might be again—a reminder of the ordinary things the hobbits set out to save, and of the homely things they are ultimately saved unto, in all their potential nearness and glory. For C. S. Lewis, the idea of a garden is the very beginning of imagination. He describes the mossy garden of a biscuit tin lid that his brother, as a young child, had once brought in from outside and decorated: “That was the first beauty I ever knew.” The garden is also, for Lewis, a place of ultimate glorification, an end goal that hearkens back to a perfect beginning. (Think of the Pevensie children in The Last Battle, running up mountain after mountain to reach a hilltop garden again and again that is, each time, more vibrant and real than before.) Tolkien brought the concept full-circle, too: garden was both beginning and end. Here in the opening pages of The Lord of the Rings is Gandalf’s high praise of Bilbo’s yard. And in the very, very end, Sam returns through the same garden’s gate to “yellow light, and fire within,” from garden to garden, from home back to home. “There and back again.” Could this be the trajectory of our own lives’ stories, whatever happens in between, whatever horrors we must walk through to get from start to finish? Tolkien hoped so. Because in the end, it isn’t actually Bilbo’s garden, is it? Some go so far as to say that this isn’t Frodo’s or even Bilbo’s story. Some (including Tolkien) propose that the story ultimately belongs to Sam, who is the faithful gardener. We often think of the ent Treebeard as voicing Tolkien’s clearest statement on the earth and trees and growing things; we hear him in the film version of the story, booming out against Saruman’s environmental destruction: “Gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning!” But Sam Gamgee’s actions resonate louder than any words when he returns from Mordor to quietly, diligently plant grains of Galadriel’s dust. He scatters the contents of her box to flourish the trees and flowers and gardens of the Shire till his homeland is more beautiful, more heavenly, and more distinctly home, than it ever was before. Some readers have accused Bilbo (and hobbits in general) of excessive pining for home. “He wished again and again for his nice bright hobbit-hole. Not for the last time.” But this is neither naiveté nor, worse, denial on the part of the hobbits. Theirs is a poignant response to the gritty actualities of life. So it is that Tolkien, in his fiction, did not stay as quiet on his war experience as he claims. Nor did Lewis remain unaffected. Both men had been up to their necks in mud, grime, and far worse. Bleakness and gunfire, fear and death. In Lewis’s words, both men had seen “the frights, the cold, the smell . . . , the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, . . . the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass.” And what did they return home to write about? Narnia, of all things. The Shire, and the reclamation of Middle Earth. For the poet T. S. Eliot—a contemporary of Tolkien and Lewis, though not one of their writerly circle—“the last of earth left to discover / Is that which was the beginning.” In the beginning was a garden. In the beginning of Bilbo’s story is a window overlooking the yard at Bag End. “How bright your garden looks!” This is not empty chatter. Against the blackest smoke of Mordor, through the awful memory of world wars, despite the darkest pain and loss in bleak everyday life, how bright home shines: the green garden; the ordinary, safe space behind gate and door; the community that peoples our days; the affirmation and hope of bettered things to come. Upon returning from his big adventure in The Hobbit, years before Frodo sets out with the Ring, Bilbo catches sight of “his own Hill in the distance.” He stands still to take it all in, and he waxes poetic: “Eyes that fire and sword have seen and horror in the halls of stone Look at last on meadows green And trees and hills they long have known.” There, also, stand Lewis and Tolkien, one in Narnia, one in the Shire, with all their knowledge of war and worse. Their gaze is toward home, and they are commenting, as it were, on Bilbo’s garden. In literature, as in life, there are worse places to set off from, and there couldn’t be a better place to fight for, and to arrive at in the end.

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 6: A Scarcity of Mind by Shigé Clark.] Several weeks ago when we began this series on the “lost art of listening,” I don’t know that any of us knew exactly where it would end up. But it’s been a delight to watch the topic develop and gather steam. Andrew, Chris, Drew, Jennifer, Shigé, and Leslie have all articulated valuable facets of why and how we listen to music and carry it with us. It’s my turn now, and I came into this weekend, challenged to write something but honestly having no idea what I might be able to add to such a rich conversation. Like Jennifer and Andrew, I grew up before the digital age and I look back fondly on the charm of those analog systems and the precious scarcity of music in an age when it could be so elusive and impermanent. And like Chris and Shigé, I’m thankful for the marvel of the streaming age and the multiplicity of options and perspectives to which it gives me access. I, too, like Leslie, cherish a massive catalog of beloved music that I recognize leaves a lot to be desired, but I’ve made peace with those deficiencies and give thanks for the good I’ve taken away in spite of them (looking at you, Meat Loaf). And as Drew says, I enjoy chewing the cud of all this goodness, savoring the flavors I’ve come to love over the years and cherishing those tastes as they grow deeper and richer. But what do I have add to all this? Is there anything left to say? A few days ago, I didn’t have any ideas and I told the team I’d probably pass. But then George Floyd. But then Minneapolis. But then Seattle and LA and Atlanta and New York and Charlotte. But then Nashville. I have something to say after all. Listen: Several years ago, I wrote a play called The Battle of Franklin. It was based on the Civil War battle that took place a few miles down the road from where I’m sitting, and I didn’t know what I was getting into. I’m not a historian. At that point I wasn’t even a playwright. I didn’t even know where to start until Matt Logan, the director of the play, handed me several books containing the collected letters of the townsfolk during the Civil War. So I went home and spent hours and days quietly sitting and listening to the people that lived through it, listening to them talk in their own words to their own families about their fears and hopes and anxieties. Out of those letters, a voice and a story slowly emerged. At its heart, I think the play is ultimately about the lost art of listening. It’s about what happens when we cannot hear one another in the midst of our own cacophony. I went on to use those letters as the jumping off point of my writing, and I’m thankful for them and for those who preserved them. But tragically, of all the letters I read, every single one of them was written by a white person. Most slaves, you see, could not read or write, and certainly couldn’t use the postal service. There are no letters left behind to tell of their fears and hopes and questions (at least not in Williamson County, Tennessee). How can we listen to those who cannot speak? One of my hopes for that play was that it would give voice in some small way to those who had been silenced, and based on the reception of the show, I think we did achieve that in some respect. A few years later, I was asked to adapt Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place for the stage. Hers is a tale of courage, sacrifice, suffering, and forgiveness amid the horror of Nazi Germany. But in the process of living with her book and her story, I finally came to understand that one of the most important aspects of it was the nature of witness. Corrie saw and lived through things that we can scarcely imagine, and she dedicated the rest of her life to testifying to what she’d seen to anyone who would listen. That’s what a witness is, someone who proclaims what they’ve seen to whomever will listen. And we need witnesses because none of us have a complete understanding of one another, much less of the world beyond our doors. We need witnesses like Corrie to call us to account and make us look into the darkness if we’re ever to see the light that shines from beyond it. But a witness alone isn’t enough. Someone must listen. To hear is only to collect information; to listen is to follow that information as it leads you into the mystery of another person, of another image of God, of an experience precious beyond words because it is one you cannot access through your own actions or understanding. Pete Peterson The trouble is this: humankind loves to hear, but struggles to listen. And that struggle is getting harder all the time. Social media lets us curate our personal view of the world so we can shut out the voices we don’t want to listen to. And even if we’re not shutting people out, our often insular circles of friends can be entirely excluded from the voices and witness of others we might need to hear in order to have a more complete understanding of those around us. Add to this a 24-hour news machine that has largely given up the honorable calling of journalism in favor of policital opinions and finger-pointing and the peddling of emotion to keep readers clicking. Even those who are trying to listen have trouble knowing who to listen to. When everyone in the room is yelling, is listening even possible? So I think this is what music does. This is what art is for. It bears us witness of mysteries when we have lost the art of listening. When we cannot see the bigotry in our own hearts or actions and cannot bear to hear ourselves mocked on twitter, it may be that Marvin Gaye is the only voice we’re able to hear, maybe for the groove, maybe for the soul, maybe for the nostalgia, but “something’s happening here” and we can’t escape it altogether. I keep thinking about those missing letters. The never-written letters of slaves whose voices are long-lost to the sands of time. Oh, how I wish we could listen to them. Of what deep sorrows might they tell? But then I realize that we are everywhere haunted by their ghosts. The groanings of those voices echo through halls of our history. They took root in jazz and blues and rock and roll and have left no corner of American music untouched by their cry. And now in rap and hip-hop and R&B they have taken on flesh from beyond the grave. They bear witness in a thousand notes and rhymes. They testify to realities that many of us cannot fully know or percieve, yet we have largely deafened ourselves to their testimonies so that we can live in the relative quiet of our incomplete understanding. And so in the absence of a willingness to listen, we have given ourselves over to a cacophony of self-defense that cannot possibly be a joyful noise to anyone. What then are we to do? In the Rabbit Room, for the past few years, we’ve taken on an intentional posture of listening for unheard voices. We’ve recognized that for the most part, we listen primarily to people who look like us, sound like us, think like us. Yet we’ve grown into the conviction that if we’re going to be a community that truly and bodily reflects the Kingdom of God, we need to listen for those unheard voices and welcome them into the room. We also need to look for opportunities to be guests in their rooms. The fact of the matter is that we’re surrounded by witnesses everyday, witnesses to bigotry, systemic racism, poverty, economic inequality, sexual abuse, and a hundred other evils, yet we often only hear rather than listen. To hear is only to collect information; to listen is to follow that information as it leads you into the mystery of another person, of another image of God, of an experience precious beyond words because it is one you cannot access through your own actions or understanding. Indeed, there is loving in listening. A song may lead you out of yourself for three-and-a-half minutes and into the fresh universe of another’s mind. A musical composition may, through the miracle of vibration and resonance, open up a well of empathy that can be accessed in no other way in the world. And for those who have ears to hear, the simple witness of a fellow human may be the difference between life and death, not just for one, but for everyone. And if that’s so, that’s an art that we cannot afford to lose. I want that high and holy art of listening for myself, for my community, for my country. This past year at Hutchmoot, Buddy Greene and Odessa Settles held a session called “We Help Each Other See,” in which they discuss (and sing about) some of the ways in which music has helped them each to better understand the other. Odessa grew up in Nashville amid segregation and she has a wealth of stories to tell and bear witness to. I once asked her how things had changed since then, and she said “Not much.” Here’s an opportunity. Listen: click here to download. Also at Hutchmoot, Mark Meynell and Ruth Naomi Floyd held a discussion called “Music for the Broken: How African-American Spirituals and Shostakovich Sustain Us in the Midst of Suffering.” Do yourself a favor and immerse yourself in Ruth’s otherworldly voice as she sings the testimonies of lost voices. Listen: click here to download. Do you enjoy podcasts? Listen to Jemar Tisby’s Pass the Mic for a wealth of African-American Christian discussions of how to make sense of what’s going on around us every day. Start with this retelling of the story of Fannie Lou Hamer, a name you probably know and a story you probably don’t. Listen to Jemar tesitfy to the passion of a modern saint. You may or may not have seen the movie, but I urge you to read the Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. It’s a window into a world of justice system nightmares that many of us don’t want to admit exists, and unless we start listening, innocent men and women will continue to die right under our noses. It’s terrifying and tragic and beautiful and deeply Christian. To date, I consider Toni Morrison’s Beloved the finest novel I’ve ever read. It’s a triumph of structure, language, and image and I’ll never forget it. It’s a “ghost story” but don’t let that throw you off. It’s about the traumatic effects of slavery and every adult ought to read it at least once. Both Beloved and Just Mercy are availalbe in the Rabbit Room Store. This all began with music so let me bring it back around with this. A few years ago I discovered the music of an artist named Propaganda, and no sooner had I discovered him and started to dig into his music, than he released a new record called Crooked. Here’s what I wrote about it back then: “It’s an album about problems and anger and frustration and the complicated nature of relationships, but it’s not only about how crooked the world is, or about how crooked our hearts are, it’s about making things right. Prop’s ability to paint a landscape of America in all its darkness and light reminds me of the best of Springsteen, and his ability to diagnose social issues with appropriate anger yet without losing hope recalls the best of U2. And it’s all done in his own unique and articulate style mixing spoken word, rap, and R&B together into a symphony of sound and words. If you love poetry and wordplay, you owe it to yourself to pay attention.” That record shook me to my core and I still listen to it on a regular basis. I chew its cud. I listen to it from beginning to end because it’s a beautifully cohesive series of songs put together into an album with an emotional arc and something important to say. The whole album is a testimony. Right now I’m doing my best to be quiet. I’m doing my best to listen. It’s on Spotify, go immerse yourself, and then go look up Sho Baraka and Jackie Hill Perry and so many other voices. But if we’re to reclaim the lost art of listening, in the end we’re also responsible for what we do with it. After all, hearing is passive, but listening is active. To listen is to be moved not only emotionally or empathically, but to action. I cannot receive the testimony of witnesses and remain silent, doing nothing. When I worked with Walt Wangerin to publish a new, expanded, edition of his Miz Lil and the Chronicles of Grace, a beautiful collection of stories that recount his experience working as the pastor of a predominately African-American church, I listened carefully to the testimony of Walt’s tales, but I noted the absence of a voice. Walt’s stories are, of course, brilliantly told and they honor and hallow the community out of which the come, but ulimately, I thought, here are stories of color painted solely in white, and so I asked Walt if we might give the book a fuller sense of itself by commissioning an African-American artist to illustrate the cover and interior. Walt nodded emphatically and a few months later the acclaimed print artist Steve Prince graciously agreed to the work and delivered a handful of exquiste prints that give Walt’s stories back to the silent voices out of which they arise. Some, however, saw those works of art and worried that they were too ethnic, that they would offend those they attempted to depict. So we sent the book to multiple people of color and asked for their reactions, fearing to make a misstep. But “This is us,” they told us. “We feel heard,” and “Thank you.” I talked to Walt about the varying reactions to the artwork and he told me that when he gave the book to his daughter, who is African-American, she was “over the moon” about the pictures. The point is this: had we not first heard the absence of that voice, and then actively included in the process those for whom it spoke, what good might we have failed to do? So listen, yes, but let our listening be as rest before the day’s labor begins—whether that means writing, or playing music, or fighting injustice, or caring for the poor, or serving your church, the Holy Spirit will surely answer. And so, O Lord, let us listen, that we may be listless no longer. Amen.

I make the sign for birch in the gray soil of thought. A tree springs up, its trunk white and straight, its leaves small and rounded. “The birch is the tree of beginnings, of purification, of fire. Let the birch stand in honor of the Bard, who summons the inner flame. The Bard will be poet, musician, and prophet. He will learn the history of our people, all our laws and our lore. The Bard will be Keeper of the Word.” —Helena Sorensen, The Door on Half-Bald Hill If such language and imagery calls to something deep within you (as it does me), then you likewise will not want to place The Door on Half-Bald Hill on your bookshelf once you turn the final page. Rather, you will want to keep it nearby so that re-entry occurs soon. Your mind will keep wandering back, mulling, wondering, the same way that it does with parts of Lowry, MacDonald, Rothfuss, Le Guin. . . even of Tomm Moore as he invokes Yates. Not in the sense that you will be drawing direct correlations to these writers, but in that this is the sort of company that The Door on Half-Bald Hill will keep in the bookshelf of your mind. Distinguishing further: once on that shelf, The Door on Half-Bald Hill will sit closer to Till We Have Faces than Narnia, awaiting readers equipped to participate in mythic telling. For like Till We Have Faces, this is a bardic tale for adults, not for children; a tale for the reader ready for more than entertainment. When I first stepped into this Celtic world summoned by Sorensen, wondering what magic would begin to weave around me, I had to learn to see through protagonist Idris’ eyes, and then to second-guess him and realize that I needed to also look through the eyes of the others. The text kept me wondering, questioning. Is the despair warranted, is it as bad as they think? Worse? Is there a solution? Are the pleasures deceptive, or true joys? Whose visions do I trust? This is a tale of desolation and consolation; a tale that remembers there is a Deeper Magic. Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson And as the story pulled me back into the time of the Oldest Tales, it yet propelled me into the time of the Unfolding Now—not only in its telling of fears in a time of pestilence, of poignant struggles of love and endurance, fear and self-doubt, but also in its showing how perennially necessary is rooted particularity: in, say, the gorse, and sloes, and primroses, the birch, and oak, and yew, without which Britain would not be Britain. Indeed the flora and fauna are so integral to this tale that it becomes obvious that place is an inextricable aspect of community; as the named-&-known species disappear from the landscape, so too do means and ways of a community’s self-knowledge. Not just in jeopardizing occupations, incurring loss of sensory pleasures and of physical sustenance—but by becoming irretrievable images in the very stories of identity. Relationship is central to this tale—in how it develops and grows amongst the persons of course, but also in how it plays out between the dwellers and the land, the hearers and the tales, the traditions and the manner in which they are indwelt. This is a tale of desolation and consolation; a tale that remembers there is a Deeper Magic. And thus Sorensen’s story is also prescient, for the world of her readers currently teeters on the edge of the same losses and needs (of story, identity, persons, place). What acts of courage, of wisdom, of holding the old with the new with the Deeper will pull us back into balance? What might it look like to defiantly choose Life More Abundant? To refuse to lose either memory or metaphor? How do we ask the right questions? This is the journey into which Sorensen invites the reader of The Door on Half-Bald Hill, and in so doing proves herself a sure seanchaí, a “Keeper of the Word.”

Christ Our King, Our world is overtaken by unexpected calamity, and by a host of attending fears, worries, and insecurities. We witness suffering, confusion, and hardship multiplied around us, and we find ourselves swept up in these same anxieties and troubles, dismayed by so many uncertainties. Now we turn to you, O God, in this season of our common distress. Be merciful, O Christ, to those who suffer, to those who worry, to those who grieve, to those who are threatened or harmed in any way by this upheaval. Let your holy compassions be active throughout the world even now— tending the afflicted, comforting the brokenhearted, and bringing hope to many who are hopeless. Use even these hardships to woo our hearts nearer to you, O God. Indeed, O Father, may these days of disquiet become a catalyst for conviction and repentance, for the tendering of our affections, for the stirring of our sympathies, for the refining of our love. We are your people, who are called by you, We need not be troubled or alarmed. Indeed, O Lord, let us love now more fearlessly, remembering that you created us, and appointed us to live in these very places, in the midst of these unsettled times. It is no surprise to you that we are here now, sharing in this turmoil along with the rest of our society, for you have called your children to live as salt and light among the nations, praying and laboring for the flourishing of the communities where we dwell, acting as agents of your forgiveness, salvation, healing, reconciliation, and hope, in the very midst of an often-troubled world. And in these holy vocations you have not left us helpless, O Lord, because you have not left us at all. Your Spirit remains among us. Inhabit now your church, O Spirit of the Risen Christ. Unite and equip your people for the work before them. Father, empower your children to live as your children. In times of distress let us respond, not as those who would instinctively entrench for our own self-preservation, but rather as those who—in imitation of their Lord—would move in humble obedience toward the needs and hurts of their neighborhoods and communities. You were not ashamed to share in our sufferings, Jesus. Let us now be willing to share in yours, serving as your visible witnesses in this broken world. Hear now these words, you children of God, and be greatly encouraged: The Lord’s throne in heaven is yet occupied, his rule is eternal, and his good purposes on earth will be forever accomplished. So we need never be swayed by the brief and passing panics of this age. You are the King of the Ages, O Christ, and history is held in your Father’s hands. We, your people, know the good and glorious end of this story. Our heavenly hope is secure. In this time of widespread suffering then, let us rest afresh in the surpassing peace of that vision, that your whole church on earth might be liberated to love more generously and sacrificially. Now labor in and through us, O Lord, extending and multiplying the many expressions of your mercy. Amen. From Every Moment Holy: Death, Grief, and Hope