[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 4: Sounding, Re-sounding, and the Antiphonal Shape of the World.] How accurate one has to be with one’s prepositions! Perhaps it was a preposition wrong that set the whole world awry. —Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion The truth is, I’m not much of a stickler for grammar. But I do love this passage from Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion. I love the prospect of all of history teetering precariously, balanced on the back of a couple innocuous looking letters. And I love thinking about whether Williams could actually be right. Could a mere “without” where there should have been a “within”—or perhaps an “above” that should have been “below”—really set the whole world out of joint? The prepositions under discussion in this part of Williams’ novel are “of” and “in,” but the preposition I have in mind right now is “through.” In particular, I’m interested in the last little bit of the Nicene Creed devoted to the Holy Spirit. “I believe in the Holy Spirit” it reads, “who has spoken through the prophets.” “Through the prophets” is not only a creedal expression, but a biblical one as well: “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets.” (Hebrews 1:1) So from one source or the other we may have heard the phrase often enough that it no longer strikes us as unusual. But it is. We speak of people, to people, and about people. If we aren’t careful we sometimes speak over them or past them. We speak for those we want to assist and against those we want to resist. We may speak down to someone we don’t care for or into a situation we care about very much. But—apart from a president dispatching an ambassador, or a foreign visitor employing a translator—we are unlikely to speak through someone. Nevertheless this is how scripture describes the work of God’s Spirit in the prophets: “The Spirit of the Lord spoke through me,” King David declares on his deathbed. (2 Samuel 23:2) What sort of significance, if any, attaches to this particular preposition? One way of reading “through the prophets” might be to construe the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the prophet as more or less the same as one of the examples I just cited. Perhaps the Holy Spirit speaks through the prophet the way a foreign speaker speaks through her translator. But this isn’t very satisfying. A translator is, more or less, a necessary evil. In almost every instance we would prefer that the speaker be able to address her audience directly, but the barrier of differing languages means she cannot. And so she employs a translator, whose job is essentially that of a courier, shuttling words from the speaker to listener by the most direct route possible (and preferably, not touching or tampering with the package along the way!). In a situation like high level government negotiations for instance, the perfect translator (we might imagine) would be the one who adds nothing at all of his own voice. We don’t want the translator hammering out delicate international policy. That’s the job of the government official. The translator needs to keep his own voice out of things. Is this how it works when God’s Spirit “speaks through the prophets,” then? Again this isn’t very satisfying. First of all, if God is able and willing to speak (and speaking is pretty much what we see God doing throughout scripture, from the “Let there be!” of Genesis 1 to the concluding invitation: “Come!” of Revelation 22); if God is able and willing to speak, then why would God have to employ the “necessary evil” of a courier service? I remember standing with my parents outside the sanctuary of our church while an adult friend asked Mom and Dad some question about me. I was a boy of eight or nine. “So what does Steven think about . . . ?” Dad smiled and looked at me. “I think he’s probably big enough to speak for himself. What do you think Steven?” Isn’t God “big enough to speak for himself”? So why the prophets? Plainly, God is able to speak directly, without an intermediary; there are plenty of instances in scripture where we see just this happening. And yet, God delights, God chooses, to speak through others. God is pleased that we should hear the word of God through a human voice. Which brings us back to the matter of prepositions. God, in his freedom, has not only determined to speak to us, but through us. We are not just projects, but partners in God’s work of creation and redemption. So, no: the through of “through the prophets,” is not the “through” of an interpreter; a paid courier. It is the “through” of breath. As we’ve been considering over the last few posts, Spirit (in both Greek and Hebrew) also means breath (or wind), and certainly, speaking through the prophets is one of the obvious ways the activity of the Holy Spirit is breath-like. How then do wind and breath create sound? Not independently, certainly. We do not hear either wind or breath “by itself,” so much as we hear the objects over which and through which (there it is again) they pass. This is the case whether we are talking about the wind moving through the trees in my yard or the breath passing through vocal folds in my larynx. The wind does not “have” sound, but “makes” sound, collaboratively, as it were; in conversation with its environment. In the same way, theologian Etienne Vetö writes that the Holy Spirit “rarely speaks directly but rather . . . inspires others to speak.” So for instance, “Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: ‘Rulers and elders of the people!’” (Acts 4:8) The early opponents of Christianity found they were unable to stand up against Stephen and “the Spirit with which he was speaking.” (Acts 6:10) Paul’s “message and . . . preaching were . . . a demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” (1 Corinthians 2:4) Jesus refers to “David . . . speaking by the Holy Spirit” (Mark 12:36) And he begins his own public ministry by declaring: “The Spirit of the Lord . . . [has] anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. . . to proclaim release to the captives . . . . To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.” (Luke 4:18-19) There is a deferential quality to the Spirit’s work, whereby the Spirit empowers others to speak. There is a deferential quality to the Spirit’s work, whereby the Spirit empowers others to speak. Steve Guthrie This observation helps us think through another concern that has been raised about the Spirit speaking “through the prophets.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge was uncomfortable with the traditional doctrine of biblical inspiration (as he understood it), because it seemed to him that it obliterated the voices and the personalities of the human authors of scripture. In the Bible, he writes, we find writings of extraordinary beauty; “heart-awakening utterances of human hearts—of men of like faculties and passions with myself, mourning, rejoicing, suffering, triumphing.” But if we say that these writers were directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, he complains, then we make of God “O bear with me, if I say— [a] Ventriloquist.” We turn authors like King David, “the sweet Psalmist of Israel [into] . . . a mere instrument . . . an automaton poet.” If we say that it is God’s Spirit “speaking through” the authors of scripture, then the Bible becomes not a living breathing chorus of human voices, but simply “a hollow passage for a voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their names, and yet is but one voice, and the same; and no man uttered it, and never in a human heart was it conceived.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit) But it seems to me that this objection doesn’t take the biblical language of breath—or the Holy Spirit’s role as the Breath of God—nearly seriously enough. If we really take our bearings from the statement that “all scripture is God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16), then we will be pointed toward a very different sort of understanding of scripture than the one Coleridge warns against. For breath (as we’ve already said) does not “have” a sound, so much as it sounds in collaboration with all that it passes through. We might ask then: when someone speaks, do we hear the sound of their breath? Or of their vocal folds? Or of the resonating cavity of their mouth, lips, tongue, and nose? The answer, of course, (just as it was when you were back in school) is: “D. All of the above.” Coleridge worries that talk of “inspiration” (being en-spirited, or “breathed into”) turns someone like King David into “a mere instrument.” The metaphor of “instrument” belongs to Coleridge, not the Bible, but it’s still worth considering for a moment. Over the last couple of years my daughter Lucy has been learning to play the bassoon, but recently she discovered an old trumpet we had brought back from my parents’ house, and decided she wanted to try to learn to play that as well. Whether playing bassoon or trumpet, the same breath—Lucy-Breath—is at work. Neverthless (you will be unsurprised to learn) the sound of our newly acquired trumpet remains entirely different from that of the bassoon. There is no danger of mistaking one for the other. Indeed, when we took the trumpet to a local band store to be serviced, the technician spent several minutes telling us the reasons why this particular trumpet would have this distinctive sort of sound. (It turns out the trumpet is from the 1920s! Not worth much money, but still!) Again, as I said, the “player and instrument” metaphor isn’t one that scripture uses to describe how the Spirit speaks through the prophets. The point is simply that Coleridge tosses out the phrase “mere instrument” altogether too easily. Try talking with a professional violinist or guitarist about their “mere instrument.” There is no such thing. So we return to a different version of the same question I posed earlier: when I hear Lucy practicing in her room, do I hear Lucy, or do I hear her bassoon? And again, the answer is: Yes. And in just the same way, we might ask: When we read Isaiah, or Galatians, or a Psalm, do we hear the voice of the Holy Spirit or the voice of Isaiah, Paul, and David? Yes. Of course, scripture, and God’s work in inspiring scripture, is unique. And likewise, it would be wildly presumptuous for any of us to put ourselves on a level with Isaiah or Paul. And yet, there is a sense in which this “through the prophets” reveals something of how God works among his people generally. In the Old Testament, Moses tells Joshua: “I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29) On the morning of the first Pentecost, Peter declares that Moses’s wish has been fulfilled: “this [the events of Pentecost] is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.’” (Acts 2:16-19) Now, we who follow Jesus also have God’s Spirit. Now we who follow Jesus are also those whom God speaks through. A preposition, as Charles Williams’ character suggests, can change the very character of the world. The preposition matters, because prepositions tell us about the nature of the relationship between one thing and another: “Prepositions, so called because they are commonly put before the words to which they are applied, serve to connect words with one another, and to shew the relation between them.” (Robert Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar) This little syllable tells us something about the kind of relationship God desires to have with the world he has made. Living in the Spirit, Etienne Vetö writes, means a way of being in which “each of our acts has two actors.” And so Paul can say “I labor, striving according to His power, which mightily works within me.” Is it Paul who labors, or God? Does Paul strive with all his might, or is it God mightily at work? Yes, indeed. The Spirit draws us into a world of more than one voice sounding at once—out of the realm of opposing alternatives and into the world of through. [Editor’s note: click here to read Part 6: The Man Who Read with his Mouth Closed (And the Spirit Who Didn’t).]

On one of the golden swan song days of last October, my husband and I took our two small daughters to see the Claude Monet: Truth of Nature exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. Afterward, the road home was illuminated by a parting shot from the ripe autumn sun. The signs and curbs and fences stood fully exposed to it, as if they were having their faces washed by light. All too soon, dusk descended. But as we drove, my thoughts lingered on one word whose mention and reiteration throughout the exhibit had caught me by surprise. Truth. A time-lapse video of the water lilies in Monet’s garden had ended with the artist’s own words: “You have to know how to seize just the right moment in a landscape instantaneously, because that particular moment will never come again, and you’re always wondering if the impression you got was truthful.” Monet was known for working on several canvases at a time in this effort to “seize just the right moment,” going from one to the next as the light and colors shifted. He was so intent on accurately conveying the scene before him that he had to stop painting if he could no longer capture what he had glimpsed: I’m chasing the merest sliver of color. . . I want to grasp the intangible . . . Color, any color, lasts a second, sometimes three or four minutes at most. What to do, what to paint in three or four minutes? They’re gone, you have to stop. Ah, how painting makes me suffer! —Wall text, Coming into Giverny in Winter, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO He became a master at working quickly to capture these colors, usually outdoors. Small strokes, dabs, and unintelligible dashes of paint melded together to create fresh portrayals of the evanescent beauty and texture around him. I had known about these hallmarks of Impressionism, but I’d never realized how intently Monet and his colleagues tied their art to the notion of truth-telling. These “mere impressions,” at first derided by contemporary critics, were meant to be more than a fanciful, personal take on the world; they were meant to provide a window to the reality of light, color, and movement in a particular location at a specific time. Monet’s pursuit of truth has been shared by artists through the ages. John Ruskin believed “the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see” (Modern Painters III, Part IV, Chapter XVI ‘Of Modern Landscape’). According to this view, the onus is on the artist to “tell what [s/he] saw” as simply and as clearly as possible—not crudely, as with a litany of facts or a slew of haphazard images—but so that the viewer, the reader, or the listener can plainly perceive the subject at hand and perhaps comprehend some true aspect of it anew. Of course this isn’t the only consideration that artists must keep in mind, but it is a crucial one. When they forget or neglect this charge, they run the risk of dwindling into the fate of C. S. Lewis’s painter ghost in The Great Divorce: “No. You’re forgetting,” said the Spirit. “That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about the light.” “Oh, that’s ages ago,” said the Ghost. “One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.” “One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.” —C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9 Monet’s emphasis on accurately relaying the impression of a moment, I think, spared him from being consumed by this form of self-love. It helped him not to become so caught up in the art of the telling that the given object—the truth he wished to represent—was obscured. Impressionism and Writing I strive with words, not paint, but Monet’s methods have helped me reconsider some of my own. I am, for example, frequently too wordy for my own taste. At the outset of any draft I’m tempted to put forward an intertwined mass of ideas all at once, keeping in all the connections I can think of rather than unsnarling the skein and plaiting it into order for the reader. This desire sometimes makes it desperately hard to “murder my darlings,” and, unchecked, would probably render the reader desperate to see the point I’m trying to make. But the short brushstrokes in The Parc Monceau (1878) call my attention to the cool sun-dappled beauty of the scene simply by being brushstrokes. The oil paint is thick; the bristle-marks are visible. Monet did not attempt to conceal or blend or make individual masterpieces out of them. These dots and dashes remind me of Chaim Potok’s novels, in which simple words and straightforward sentences—even the unremarkable but recurring appearance of two gendarmes in The Gift of Asher Lev—make up an utterly absorbing world. “Suddenly he was weeping, silently,” Potok’s narrator says at an unexpected place in The Gift: “He sat there, silently and unashamedly weeping, the drawing in his hands. Devorah looked down at her plate. The children were very quiet. ‘This kind of art I appreciate,’ my father said through his tears. ‘Please excuse me for a moment.'” There is perhaps nothing momentous about these words in a bald excerpt, but when I read them for the first time with the charged history of the characters fresh in my mind—suddenly I was the one weeping. Kenneth Grahame recently caught my attention in a similar way with a description of a winter scene: “[Mole] nosed his way over a field open and trackless and bare in the faint starlight.” “Open” and “bare” I skimmed without much thought, treating them as the sturdy lexical bookends they were, but “trackless”! “Trackless” brought to life the lonely, wintry, silent expanse that lay between the heroes and home, all in the span of a single word. Finally, in the same vein, I’ve found that some of my favorite passages by Tolkien weave their enchantment through unembellished color. White shores. Green country. Grey rain-curtain. A rising red sun amid gold and red autumn trees. The author who had an endless supply of actual and invented words available to him chose a basic palette to make Middle-earth real for us, and I am both intrigued and grateful. These writers, in verbal complement to Monet, remind me that vivid writing calls for more than piecing together interesting turns of phrase. Not every paragraph can be a showpiece, and not every paragraph should be one. Like canvases scattered around a garden, the amount of truth that comes through in my work will depend on how much Light has passed through my life. Amy Baik Lee The masters who transport us work with the exact same materials as beginners. They have learned, however, that sometimes fewer paint strokes, words, or musical notes are more effective than layer upon layer of the same. They have honed their pacing, refusing to overwhelm the senses continually, so that we are drawn to the places of emphasis in their works. As Linda Sue Park notes, “The challenge is to make it whole, seamless, so that story and language aren’t separate concerns, but work together to enhance each other.” The smallest building blocks are thereby arranged into a luminous whole. And there is a certain humility I’ve glimpsed in this restraint and rhythm that I am trying to learn: the humility of an artist hieing herself out of the way so that another can see. Impressionism and Kingdom Living When an artist does this well, a thread of consistency forms. This particular mark of creative skill is not an ability to mention the same pet subject in every piece, but the ability to relate any subject in the same distinct way. Authors thus become recognizable by voice, photographers by style. I find it fascinating to trace the steps by which certain juvenilia developed into beloved literature or to consider how world events and movements shaped specific artists and musicians. Passing on what you see, after all, means that you must first figure out how you will take in the view before you, as well as the world at large. Monet established both a way of noticing his surroundings and a means of communicating them, so that even the paintings he created when cataracts affected his vision were unmistakably his. But for those who believe there is a deeper truth and gladness undergirding the world—a story that runs through the whole of history and creation—the thread of consistency goes even further, beyond the bounds of the artistic sphere. The truth we tell as believers asks also for a constancy of soul. This is the kind of thing the church says all the time but which I am always in danger of forgetting, and so warrants repeating to myself again, and again, and again: the simple acts and the hidden dashes of our lives comprise the greatest part of our work here. The tone of our words, the responses we give to small children and strangers, the voluntary acts of love that seem so much less pressing than the next deadline, the prayers we offer in the dark: all of these matter, and I gloss over them at my peril. The smallest moments will prove or disprove the integrity of our art—whatever our main creative channels may be—and ultimately shape the whole of our lives. If I wish to be a better writer in the service of my King, then, I have to pay heed to the above principles not merely at my desk but throughout the rest of my life. Restraint over thoughtlessness. Sensibility spent in hospitality. A refusal to become enamored with my tools and my reputation, and a willingness to get out of the way so that Christ might be seen. Like canvases scattered around a garden, the amount of truth that comes through in my work will depend on how much Light has passed through my life. The artists who have succeeded in truthfully conveying visual forms to me have permanently changed the way I see. I’ve walked beside garden ponds and down many country lanes, but Monet has gifted me with the wondrous possibility that I might see rain-ripples on my street that are as blue and brilliant as the puddles in The Geese. Through his perspective I’ve discovered that the everyday splendor of straw-colored light falls on both the grainstacks in Giverny and the avenues of Denver. And I am left with the quiet resolve to tell the truths I know as clearly and as well as I can, so that they may add up to one honest impression of the Great Creator’s glory. To live them, so that these brief numbered days might gleam with the evidence of His work: the deep color of renewal seeping into every corner of this life. Click here to read more of Amy’s writing at her blog.

Somehow Sarah Siskind has saved her best work for her own albums. That’s a difficult feat for a songwriter who has written for the likes of Alison Krauss, Wynonna, and Randy Travis. She’s toured with Bonnie and Bon Iver. With over 20 songs placed on the hit TV drama Nashville alone, she is a master craftswoman who has learned to navigate the commercial side without sacrificing substance. Who you are isn’t where you’re from But where you’re from is always close And when you go digging in that dirt Get ready for what you fear the most —Sarah Siskind, “Carolina” Despite her experience and success, Sarah’s latest album, Modern Appalachia, reveals an insecure artist opening herself—her wounds, her fears, her doubts—at very personal levels. From the opening track, “Me and Now,” she digs deep and admits the uncertainty that comes with solitude. Only God completes me and he says to be still Why’s it so hard to try and see how that feels It’s just me and now, it’s just me and now —Sarah Siskind, “Me and Now” Sarah’s openness as an artist is also what makes for such meaningful conversation. As a parent, she struggles to manage family and career. As an artist, she’s hungry for the time and space to create. On this side of divorce, she wrestles with being alone for the first time in her life. Sarah’s willingness to share from these wells allow her to connect and offer hope in ways that few artists can. 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 music industry veteran and host of The Pivot podcast Andrew Osenga. In this episode, Jonathan and Andrew talk about what Andrew’s podcast has taught him about listening, the multilayered complexities of career, and how his own pivots have changed the way he approaches songwriting. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 29 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. 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.

While reading Wendell Berry’s story collection, That Distant Land, I was struck by this description of a character named Martha Elizabeth Coulter: She was a woman always near to smiling, sometimes to laughter. Her face, it seems, had been made to smile. It was a face that assented wholly to the being of whatever or whomever she looked at. —Wendell Berry, That Distant Land I don’t know whether Wendell Berry is a student of Thomas Aquinas, but that description of Martha Elizabeth as a person who “assented wholly to the being” of the people and things around her sounds like the kind of thing Aquinas would say. That idea of assent is key to Aquinas’s understanding of love. And, as I will argue, it’s a major reason to write; in fact, assent may be the writer’s most important reason of all. I’ll be paraphrasing and quoting from Josef Pieper, who was himself paraphrasing Aquinas. (The page numbers below refer to Faith, Hope, and Love, which collects three of Pieper’s long essays.) We can mean a lot of different things when we use the word “love.” I love my wife and family. I love Jesus. I love watermelon. I love good books. I’m not misusing the word “love” in any of those sentences, but neither does the word mean quite the same thing in any of those sentences. What all of those usages share is the idea of approval. And, as Pieper writes: This [approval] is first of all to be taken in the literal sense of the word’s root: loving someone or something is to find him or it probus, the Latin word for “good.” It is a way of turning to him or it and saying, “It’s good that you exist; it’s good that you’re in the world!” —p. 163-4 Martha Elizabeth Coulter was always on the verge of smiling because she loved her world so much. She assented to its being. She would make a good writer, it seems to me. When you read a book like Brian Doyle’s One Long River of Song or Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations, it is clear that those writers approve of the world around them. You get the strong sense that it is good that the world exists—that everything is worth our attention. I should mention assenting to a fellow creature’s being is not the same thing as assenting to that creature’s behavior. Often, loving our neighbors means wanting more for them than they want for themselves. To write out of love does not mean to write or think uncritically. But love doesn’t leave room for us to say to (or about) another creature, “It would be better if you didn’t exist.” It doesn’t even leave room for us to say “You are beneath my attention.” This world exists because God thinks it is a good idea. To love the world and our fellow creatures is simply to say that God's not wrong. Jonathan Rogers Pieper points out that assent or approval is an expression of the will. To love someone or something is to say, “I want you to exist.” I know we usually think of the will as that inner force that makes us go out and get something or accomplish something or make some change in the world, but consider what Aquinas has to say on the subject: “The will knows not only the act of striving for what it does not yet have but also the other act: of loving what it already possesses and rejoicing in that” (p.165). If you’ve seen Hamilton, you’ll know that Alexander Hamilton had incredible force of will when it came to striving for what he didn’t yet have, but his downfall derived from the fact that he lacked the will to love and rejoice in the good things that were right in front of him. Writing, like all creative work, starts with seeing—paying attention to what is in front of you and loving the world and your reader enough to give an account of what you have seen. And, as you already know, love is generative: it always gives birth to something new. (I can send my kids screaming from the room just by saying, “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…”) Josef Pieper again: “The most extreme form of affirmation that can possibly be conceived of is creatio, making to be, in the strict sense of the word” (p.170). God created the world for the simple reason that he wanted to. And then he spoke those words of approval: “It is good. It is good. It is very good.” Creative work—in any case, the creative work I want to do—starts with agreeing with that assessment. It is good that this world exists. It is good that each of God’s creatures exists. Sometimes we write to celebrate. Sometimes we write to lament or to reprove. But let us not lose sight of this most fundamental fact: This world exists because God thinks it is a good idea. To love the world and our fellow creatures is simply to say that God’s not wrong. This piece was originally shared in Jonathan’s weekly Habit Newsletter. If you’d like your own inbox to be graced with such insight—and with staggering frequency, at that—you can sign up for it by clicking here.

[Editor’s note: click here to read Part 5: The Preposition of Love.] “We believe in the Holy Spirit. . . Who has spoken through the prophets.” —The Nicene Creed I am sitting in the upstairs office space of the Barn, by North Wind Manor. (The reconstruction of North Wind Manor that has been going on over the past several months is almost finished, and the place looks amazing!) Three staff members are in the room with me: Shigé, Pete, and Chris; each seated at a desk, each reading. What are they reading? I don’t know. I could find out, but I would have to ask. And this is one way in which reading in the contemporary world is different than it was (at least most of the time) in the ancient world. A famous story from St. Augustine’s (354-430) Confessions illustrates this point. A key figure in Augustine’s conversion to Christianity was the great preacher and theologian, Ambrose of Milan (340-397). Even before he became a Christian, Augustine admired Ambrose and looked for opportunities to speak with him privately. That wasn’t easy, because most of the time Ambrose was surrounded by people, and busy with the demands of his work as a bishop. Augustine recalls that when he had time to himself, Ambrose “restored. . . his mind with reading,” and then, in a fascinating passage, he describes the way in which Ambrose read: “When he was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” Augustine wonders “if he read silently perhaps to protect himself in case he had a hearer interested.” If someone happened to overhear Ambrose reading, Augustine reasons, they might ask him to explain some difficult passage, or they might even want to debate some point in the text. Or maybe, Augustine suggests, “the need to preserve his voice, which used easily to become hoarse, could have been a very fair reason for silent reading. Whatever motive he had for his habit,” he concludes, “the man had a good reason for what he did.” (Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 3) What is remarkable about this passage is what it finds remarkable. Ambrose’s habit of silent reading was unusual enough that Augustine pauses to take note of it. More than that, Augustine suggests a few possible explanations of why, even though this man clearly was engaged in reading words, nevertheless (surprisingly!) “his voice and tongue were silent.” The story reminds us that for much of history, even the reading of texts was an oral and aural happening. In fact, ancient texts not only sounded; very often they sounded tunefully. Certainly this was the case for much of scripture. Imagine you are present in the synagogue at Nazareth on the sabbath morning described in chapter 4 of Luke. Jesus stands up to read the passage given to him from the book of Isaiah. What do you hear? In all likelihood you hear Jesus singing (or technically “cantillating”) the words of Isaiah. (You can hear a modern recording of Hebrew scripture being cantillated here.) The Hebrew scriptures still are chanted in this fashion today. “Come to a synagogue on a Sabbath,” writes the Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner, “and you will hear the Torah not read but sung loud and clear, in ancient chant, melody matching natural sounds of the very words God says.” Many rabbis believe that this practice of singing the scriptures extends all the way back to the reading of the law described in Nehemiah 8. Some even suggest it was instituted by Moses himself. In a passage that should warm the hearts of musicians everywhere, we meet Moses just before his death—in his final appearance before the Israelites—not in the role of Warrior, or Miracle-Worker, but Singer-Songwriter. God tells Moses: “Write down this song and teach it to the Israelites and have them sing it.” So Moses wrote “the words of this law from beginning to end. . . and recited the words of this song from beginning to end in the hearing of the whole assembly of Israel.” (Deuteronomy 31:19, 24, 30) Singing wasn’t just a way of “dressing up” scriptural texts for public worship services, either. This also was how Jews of Jesus’ day studied scripture. Rabbi Akiva (who lived from 50 to 130 AD; just a generation or so after Jesus) urges students of the Torah to study diligently, telling them: “Sing every day, sing every day. . . [R]eview your studies like a song that one sings over and over.” (Sanhedrin 99b) Another ancient Jewish text advises: “One who studies Torah through song demonstrates that he is fond of his learning,” but: “concerning anyone who reads from the Torah without a melody, or studies the Mishna without a song, the verse states: ‘So too I gave them statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live.’ (Ezekiel 20:25)” (Megillah 32a) Breath carries voice, not text. Steve Guthrie This tuneful method of presenting the scriptures then passes very naturally from the synagogue and the yeshiva into the life of the Christian church. The first Christian monks organized their days around the regular chanting and singing of the psalms, a practice that eventually would be adopted by the entire monastic tradition. The Rule of St. Benedict, one of the earliest and most influential guides to the monastic life, sets out a daily pattern of services—seven each day, and one each night—that would allow monks to sing through all one-hundred and fifty psalms in the course of a week. This regular, methodical singing of the psalms was the chief business the monks were to pursue, a work so important it was sometimes called the “Opus Dei”—“the work of God.” Outside of these eight daily services, Benedict urged the monks to learn silence: “So important is silence,” he said, “that permission to speak should seldom be granted even to mature disciples, no matter how good or holy or constructive their talk.” (Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 6). You could say then, that in a way, the life of a monk had a kind of sonic organization: periods of silence, surrounded by the regular singing of the psalms. The spiritual life meant learning to steward sound well; cultivating attentiveness on the one hand, and training one’s voice on the other. All of this sounding and singing of scripture casts a fresh light on (or perhaps we should say, adds greater resonance to!) the words of the Nicene Creed: “We believe in the Holy Spirit. . . who has spoken through the prophets.” The Holy Spirit (as we’ve repeated each week throughout this series) is the Breath of God. And at least in the most straightforward and immediate sense, breath carries voice, not text. The creed does not identify the Spirit as the one who “produces the message communicated by the prophets,” or who “shares the information written down by the prophets,” but the one who “spoke by the prophets.” What our short survey indicates is that for much of the church’s history, the prophetic word inspired by the Spirit has been spoken indeed. This isn’t to deny the Holy Spirit’s role in inspiring written scriptures, or to suggest the Spirit is unable to work through text on a page. As Augustine’s anecdote indicates, people read silently in the ancient world too; and even in biblical times people engaged with scripture as readers as well as speakers, singers, or listeners. But immersed as we are in the world of silent text (you’re reading text now; are your lips moving?), we might need to be reminded of something that would have been obvious to earlier generations: when the Nicene Creed says that the Holy Spirit has spoken through the prophets, the phrase “has spoken” is not only a metaphor. The Holy Spirit brought about the sounding of human voices; real sounds that encounter us in the world of sense. What is more, for most of history, a vital dimension of Christian discipleship has been ordering and engaging with sound—listening, speaking, and singing. Ambrose may have read with his mouth closed, but he was an exception, and in the centuries since he has remained so. What difference does this make? Why emphasize all of this “out-loudness”? The materiality of song, the concrete sounding of scriptures, reminds us that the fruits of the Spirit are not just pleasant feelings, but are virtues and practices worked out in the routines of our lives, and manifested in ways that can be seen and heard. Steve Guthrie Let’s return to the monastery. It’s easy (at least it’s easy for me) to associate “spirituality” with a sort of vague, inward attitude; a general outlook that recognizes something beyond day-to-day realities, or an openness to mystery. What I don’t think of when I hear the word “spirituality” is getting out of bed at midnight, 3:00am, 6:00am, 9:00am, and noon to chant the psalms, and then dragging myself back to the chapel three more times over the remaining twelve hours to do the same thing again. Whatever associations the word may have for me, for the great Christian spiritual tradition of monasticism, “spirituality” had everything to do with day-to-day realities. In fact, it was what the monks set their watches by. (Or would have been, if medieval monks had worn watches.) The life of the Spirit was not only an inward attitude, but an outward set of practices. It was something you could see and hear. It included mystery, yes. But it also had the specific shape of this particular melody, sung by these voices, gathered in this space. The materiality of song, the concrete sounding of scriptures, reminds us that the fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, and so on) are not just pleasant feelings, but are virtues and practices worked out in the routines of our lives, and manifested in ways that can be seen and (again) heard. A Jewish text we quoted earlier highlights another reason for emphasizing the sounding dimension of the prophetic word. The one who studies Torah through song, it says, shows “that he is fond of his learning.” The word the Spirit speaks has a delightful character to it, that appeals to our senses in all their bodiliness. In Ezekiel 3, the Lord tells the prophet to eat the scroll he is giving him. “So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.” (Ezekiel 3:3; see also Revelation 10:9-10 and Psalm 119:103) When we recall its “out-loudness,” we are reminded that the word the Spirit delivers through the prophets is not a sterile inventory of abstractions. It is beautiful; and those who repeat it in word and melody beautify it. The 4th-century theologian Athanasius wrote a letter explaining why we should not just speak but sing the psalms. “The Lord,” he says, “wishing the melody of the words to be a symbol of the spiritual harmony in a soul, has ordered that the odes be chanted tunefully, and the Psalms recited with song. The desire of the soul is this—to be beautifully disposed.” Life in the Spirit embraces the true, and the good, and also the beautiful. Life in the Spirit has an aesthetic dimension. The sounding word inhabits—more than that, creates—a shared space. Steve Guthrie That’s one reason I enjoy imagining Jesus singing in the synagogue—forming not just concepts, but sounds. (Matthew 26:30 and Mark 14:26 also mention Jesus singing.) We may speak (legitimately) of the “still, small voice” of the Spirit, and the mysterious leading we sometimes experience through an inner sense. All of this is just fine, but it might cause us to think of the Spirit’s voice as something that arises within us only, rather than something that also meets us from outside. Jesus the Messiah (that is, the one anointed with the Spirit) meets us as a material reality in the world of mass and extension and acoustical vibrations. His voice comes to us incarnated in the sound of a historical language, with its own regional accent; in a tune that employs the musical conventions of a given time and place. The eternal Word of God takes to himself a body which then engages our bodies. The Word clothes himself not only in human flesh but in human culture, working in and through both flesh and culture, that both might be healed and made whole. Yesterday afternoon, I was sitting in the upstairs office space of the Barn, by North Wind Manor. Three staff members were in the room with me: Shigé, Pete, and Chris; each seated at a desk, each reading. What were they reading? I don’t know about Shigé or Pete. But Chris was reading an article about a controversial issue that has been widely discussed over the last few weeks. I know this because as the other three of us sat, each absorbed in our own texts, a voice sounded. Chris said: “Oh my goodness. Listen to this!” And we did. I tried at first to shut it out, to stay focused on the page in front of me. But every voice is a call, and I couldn’t resist. Three conversation-filled hours later I finally pushed back my chair and said: “I need to go home.” “How was your day?” My wife Julie asked a little later. “It was good. I didn’t get much of my work done. But we had a great conversation.” The phrases continued resonating in my head as Julie went about other business. What does make for “a good day”? Do I want to do “my work”? Or be part of a conversation? Here is one more reason why all this soundingness matters. The sounding word inhabits—more than that, creates—a shared space. The work space in the Barn is not that large, and yet here were four people, each “in their own world.” Yes, of course, there are times when we need to retreat into a private space. At this very moment my earbuds are firmly embedded, the white noise generator on my phone piping a wash of sound directly to my brain, precisely so I won’t be distracted by the music playing in the room and the things my colleagues are talking about. But the negative example is instructive. I employ one sound to suppress another. Their sound creates a shared world, one I really can’t afford to visit right now. (I promised I’d have the essay finished today!) So I create a separate aural space as a way of remaining outside a shared world and a shared conversation. One of the primary works of the Holy Spirit is to create community. “We were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body,” Paul writes, “whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.” (1 Corinthians 12:13). And this is yet another reason for emphasizing the soundingness of the Spirit. The Spirit’s work of creating community is not unrelated to the Spirit’s work of speaking through the prophets. A spoken voice creates a resonant field, one large enough for others to enter. And when I hear this voice—particularly if it is winsome and tuneful—I may be drawn out from “my work” into a shared work. Perhaps, even into the opus dei—the work of God.

Yesterday, the heaviness of a world under a global pandemic became an almost unbearable weight on my soul. Social media led me down hallways of suffering, of fear, of self-righteousness. Someone tried to pull me down a YouTube rabbit hole and another pulled me toward a debate in a comment section. I’m embarrassed by the amount of time I spent yesterday being yanked around from one talking head to the next; and also by the amount of time I spent forming rebuttals in my head and arguments I would counter with, should I ever have the courage to voice what I think Christians ought to be saying right now—or, maybe more importantly, not saying. I was in a sad state of affairs. The virus was wreaking havoc on bodies, the fear was eating away at both our souls and our economy, and the desire to be right about things was destroying our ability to see our neighbors as people. I left our new (virtual) public square weary of the world God created. I thought He must be weary, too. After getting the kids in bed, I put my phone on the nightstand and gladly traded it out for Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb. It’s my second read-through, even more savory than the first. I slid my thumb into the gap between pages and let my pen roll out, which was marking my place at Chapter Two: The First Session. Ah, the onion chapter. If you haven’t read The Supper of the Lamb, you have a real gem waiting for you. It is part cookbook, part memoir, part theology, part philosophy… It’s actually quite hard to describe what it is, but what it’s like is like having the most colorful and enjoyable guest at your dinner table. The entire book is a recipe for one meal: Lamb for Eight Persons Four Times, but it is dealt with leisurely and unhurried, like any good dinner party. Take for example Chapter Two: The First Session, in which Capon asks the reader to sit with the first ingredient, an onion, for 60 minutes. I closed the book for a minute and thought about the audacity of the request. Yesterday, I had a lot of people telling me how I should be spending an hour: Watch this video; Read this article; Google this name; Do your own research. But Capon was the first person to ask me to have a session with an inanimate object. Admittedly, I didn’t leave the comfort of my bed to retrieve an onion, but I did spend an hour considering an imaginary one with the help of Capon’s words. “You are convinced, of course,” he begins, “that you know what an onion is.” It is because God made the world out of joy that He will bring it back Home in love. Elizabeth Harwell A novel virus, no. I can humbly admit my gaps in knowledge there. But surely, I knew an onion. As it turns out, Capon’s assumptions about my arrogance proved true. Do you know what an onion is? Have you considered the “elegant dryness” and “understated display of wealth” of its outer skin? Have you thought about the colors or the nestling structure of its insides? Have you compared it to cathedrals or delighted in its watery make-up? I considered the onion and it changed my narrative. Sitting with a real thing—a thought of God that I could hold in my hands— reminded me that He is not weary of the world that He made, but He delights in it. He likes the world, and therefore we exist. Capon concludes the onion session with these words: Perhaps now you have seen at least dimly that the uniquenesses of creation are the result of continuous creative support, of effective regard by no mean lover. He likes onions, therefore they are. The fit, the colors, the smell, the tensions, the tastes, the textures, the lines, the shapes are a response, not to some forgotten decree that there may as well be onions as turnips, but to His present delight—His intimate and immediate joy in all you have seen, and in the thousand other wonders you do not even suspect. —Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb His present delight. I drifted to sleep in the comfort of those words—the God who holds the world together also delights in that world. He has good reason to preserve it. When I woke up this morning, I decided it was necessary to have my own session with an onion. And yet, unfortunately, our pantry was bare. Then I remembered that I had already done this exercise in a writing class I took with Jonathan Rogers. In this particular exercise, Dr. Rogers had asked us to sit with an inanimate object, like Capon’s onion, and to consider it for what it was—not for what we thought we knew it to be. I had chosen a mussel shell, and this morning I pulled that essay and that shell back out to have another practice in focused consideration. The blue mussel shell is displayed, piled amongst other shells from a trip to Maine, in an heirloom silver dish in our dining room. I picked it up for study, wiggling it out from under and scraping it against the rest of its transplanted neighborhood. It was cold in my hands, like the glassy waters that bit my toes when I first bent over to take it from its cobblestone carpet on Maine’s shore. Separated from its mirrored partner, the half-shell spooned the curve of my palm and my thumb moved to bed where the mussel once lay. The inside is pearly smooth—without blemish smooth, as if it must be the ruling line by which all smooth things are measured. I moved the shell under a lamp, because the little pearl valley deserved illuminated consideration. The inside shone milk white with a puddle of blueberry blue bleeding out from the center and inking towards the north and south of this long and hollow cave. The iridescence summoned my eyes to follow the jumps of light, giving gifts of color with each tiny twist to the right or left. Here is secret beauty—only for the delight of the humble mussel and his Maker! What an entire world to the mussel who called this shell home. I like knowing that no other mussel will move in, plastering over nail holes and hanging his own pictures. No one else would have seen his inner sanctuary, but he and His Maker, had I not collected it on the shore. A secret joy. God’s present delight. We are not some forgotten decree that there may as well be Earth as Jupiter. We are His very good idea and His present delight. Elizabeth Harwell There are no YouTube videos, or forum discussions, or peer-reviewed articles that could have given my feet such sure landing in the way the mussel shell did this morning. That shell represented one of thousands (millions?) of pearly homes that will never lay bare in front of human eyes—miles of ocean floor, covered in secret delights, that began as thoughts in my Father’s mind. We humans can be so self-important that we’ve never considered that God is enjoying parts of creation that none of us will ever see. Could the proverbial tree actually fall without someone there to hear it? Yes, it can, and it does. Sitting with that shell allowed me to stick my head through the door of a secret room, where I could enjoy God’s quiet mirth. His delight in the world does not depend on any audience, and there is such comfort in that sort of steadfastness. Imagine the security of being able to see your dad smiling over you, when he thought you were sleeping. Being reaffirmed in God’s love for His world stirred up hope in my soul: It is because God made the world out of joy that He will bring it back Home in love. When we delight in the world with its Maker, we can also grieve it properly. Do we feel the world is broken? We certainly do. Should we speak against the brokenness? We absolutely must. We love it too much to let it suffer. We love our neighbor too much to look away. But before we allow ourselves to believe that God has given up on us or has grown weary with us, we need not look further than our backyards to see the ways in which He is tethered to this world in delight. Genesis tells us that He crowned His work “good.” The Psalms tell us that the earth echoes this joy back to Him in song. Revelation tells us that He cares so much about our world that He’s not going to scrap it in the end but make it new. As Capon puts it, He will “bring the city Home.” God so loved the world. I’m asking you, with Capon, won’t you leave the public square for an hour to sit with an onion? A mussel shell? A pinecone? Your child’s eyelashes? Your neighbor’s smile? We are not some forgotten decree that there may as well be Earth as Jupiter. We are His very good idea and His present delight. Take hope, friends. Run back into the public square carrying a renewed delight in this world that God made, and let your speech be seasoned with the hope that He will not—cannot—forsake it. He loves it too much.

Early in C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, when Aslan gives Jill Pole the quest of rescuing Prince Rilian of Narnia, he also gives Jill four signs by which she might fulfill the quest. Before sending her to Narnia, though, Aslan warns Jill. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. —C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair Like Jill in Narnia, members of Christ’s Church must carry out our vocations in a world whose air is thick and often confuses the mind. In this we have forerunners—the prophets and apostles—who left us God-inspired written testimony about carrying out the mission of God in the world. Holy Scripture is sufficiently capacious to contain “signs” not only for one quest as discrete as Jill’s, but for the full range of vocations given to all “good stewards of God’s varied grace.” But like the signs Jill received from Aslan, the signs of Scripture may not look as we expect when we meet them in the world. Thus the importance of knowing them by heart. One way the task of learning Scripture by heart can be made easier is by setting its God-breathed words to music: rhythm and melody aid memorization and turn drudgery to delight. The delight is doubled and trebled when we sing the words of Scripture with others—either in a congregation or the “little church” of a household. Remember and Proclaim takes ten brief and well-chosen passages of Scripture and makes them singable, danceable (for my sixteen-month-old daughter), and memorable. David Mitchel This is where the work of the Corner Room is invaluable. For several years, this fine group of musicians, based at Cahaba Park Church and led by its minister of music Adam Wright, has set Scripture to song. Their latest project, Remember and Proclaim, was written particularly for children. But these Scripture-songs are excellent for family worship. If the musical styles represented on the album are eclectic—ranging from bluegrass to early–1960s pop—the beauty of the melodies and tastefulness of the accompaniment make the tracks go together. Remember and Proclaim takes ten brief and well-chosen passages of Scripture and makes them singable, danceable (for my sixteen-month-old daughter), and memorable. After opening with an invigorating jolt of praise (Psalm 106), Remember and Proclaim touches a handful of key Scriptural “signs,” the remembrance of which is essential to the vocation of any saint—young or old—in the world. The first sign is Story: the faithful promises of Christ’s first Advent (Isaiah 9:6–7, Zechariah 9) and his second (Revelation 22). The second sign is Identity: that we are crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20) and being made new in him (2 Corinthians 5:17). The third sign is Faithfulness: that we embody faithfulness by fortitude and resolution in facing trials (1 John 3:5, James 1:2–5). And the fourth sign is Assurance: that God faithfully holds and steadies us even in trying times (Isaiah 41:10, Romans 8:38–39). The Corner Room has served Christ’s Church well by setting these Scripture-signs in memorable Scripture-songs. Remember and Proclaim should nourish the homes where God’s people grow, and prepare them for their parts in the great vocation of Christ in the world. Remember and Proclaim releases tomorrow. Click here to learn more about it at The Corner Room’s website.

Now open for enrollment, Belmont University Professor Steve Guthrie leads a reading group for John M. Perkins’ powerful book Let Justice Roll Down. Students will join one another in reading and discussion. The book group, which includes Zoom chats every Thursday night at 7:30pm, begins this coming Monday, August 3 and continues through August 28. You are welcome to join at any time. The discussions will be archived, and the forums will be open indefinitely for new registrants to continue reading and discussing the book. Steve Guthrie’s Introduction to the Course Let Justice Roll Down is available in the Rabbit Room Store. No purchase necessary to join the reading group. About the Book His brother died in his arms, shot by a deputy marshall. He was beaten and tortured by the sheriff and state police. But through it all he returned good for evil, love for hate, progress for prejudice, and brought hope to black and white alike. The story of John Perkins is no ordinary story. Rather, it is a gripping portrayal of what happens when faith thrusts a person into the midst of a struggle against racism, oppression, and injustice. It is about the costs of discipleship—the jailings, the floggings, the despair, the sacrifice. And it is about the transforming work of faith that allowed John to respond to such overwhelming indignities with miraculous compassion, vision, and hope. Click here to enroll in this course.

Outside, coursing in from the west, the amber and violet gloaming has begun. Dinner is over, and I sit at the piano. Behind me a stream of girlish laughter twirls and dashes through the living room in response to the film music I’m playing, but my own shoulders are weighted, as if a hollow has been carved between them, and lead poured in. Somehow I’m always startled by the physical heaviness of grief. In the past two weeks, I have watched Christians say things I did not think it was possible for Christ-followers to say. I’ve written and second-guessed emails regarding the upcoming school year, closed my laptop, and wept: for the gracious administrators, for our conflicted friends, for the generation of children growing up in such a time, for hearts so hardened that callousness and cruelty are the default response in conversation—and for my own heart, which is often no better in its retaliatory thoughts. And I’ve barred myself from thinking about paperwork that should have been processed months ago, now delayed by a year and quite possibly more, that would have enabled our family to finally move closer. The delights I’ve had in times of well-being and plenty have lasted me a season and no more, but the truths, beauties, and hopes that have held my attention through hard struggle I keep with me still—joys kindled upon the very taper of grief. Amy Baik Lee I try not to think about what certain widespread sentiments mean for the future of this community, this city, this country. I’ve squashed my own speculation on what ripples my current decisions may cause six months, a year, five years from now. Things might change in any number of directions, of course, and it’s no good inviting imagined troubles in. But tonight, no matter what pragmatic reason and shrewder souls might have to say about it all, my heart feels crushed. The soundtrack pieces are finished, and my fingers have begun an old, quiet, steadfast hymn. The windows are open, and I suspect that the evening air is carrying the notes outside, but for once I don’t get up to close the sash and click the lock shut. “Be Thou My Vision” soon carries into “Amazing Grace,” and then “For the Beauty of the Earth.” I think of Hardy’s darkling thrush choosing to “fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom,” and I find myself playing the songs as one who is listening to their poignancy from another home. I play them as beautifully as I know how. Afterward I close the windows and come into my room, where the daylight is almost gone. I light a candle for the first time in ages, but make no move towards the lamp; the dim illumination from the pale blue twilight and the small, flickering flame is all I would like for now. Tonight, prayer is a fathoms-deep space of listening: a cry that my voice is insufficient to utter. Even the attempt is too great. The sky fades to silver, pewter rainclouds smudging downward like a child’s thumbprint in the far distance. In the garden the chain of small lanterns begins its nightly glow. And Psalm 57 comes, unbidden. No—more accurately, I ask for a psalm, and this is the one that comes to the foreground of my thought, and this is what I take up and pray. Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by… . My soul is in the midst of lions; I lie down amid fiery beasts— the children of man, whose teeth are spears and arrows, whose tongues are sharp swords. Be exalted, O God, above the heavens! Let your glory be over all the earth! —Psalm 57:1, 4-5 (ESV) As I set the Bible down again, the memory of another candle in the dark comes back. About fifteen years ago, I struck a match, touched it to a candle wick, and knelt to pray in my college apartment. I was worried that I was somehow not as elated as I should be—as I had once imagined I would be—in the dating relationship that had recently begun. It makes me smile to think of it now, but at the time I was truly perplexed. Shouldn’t I be happier? Did the lack of blissfulness bode ill for this relationship? Meanwhile, the candle refused to burn. I had trimmed the wick too close to the wax, and the resulting tiny blue glow had to be coaxed with care into a proper tongue of fire. But something happened in the process that I scribbled down later with an amateur (and undeniably dramatic) poet’s pen: Blue ball of flame, precariously curled A fetus of fire as yet unfurled— One breath enough to secure a cold fate, Leave weary wick crumbling in its wake— Alone now lights a dim prayer-filled room Tenaciously spurning its likely doom. In troubled air the timid question hangs: Can true love begin sans ecstatic pangs? Two eyes, cast downward, glance slowly about, Belying a heart long perplexed with doubt When, fixed on flame, alerted gaze beholds The fearless breaking of blue into gold A Father’s voice speaks to glad heart made bold: “That Joy is stronger which slowly unfolds.” Whatever the merits of the rest of the sonnet, the last line has proven true. The delicately rolled beeswax curls inward as it melts; I watch small spires form along the crown of the candle. Perhaps this is also a time for a leaner joy—a stronger joy—one that can go through the stifling hours from dusk until dawn because it burns from denser fuel. The delights I’ve had in times of well-being and plenty have lasted me a season and no more, but the truths, beauties, and hopes that have held my attention through hard struggle I keep with me still—joys kindled upon the very taper of grief. Tonight, then, I remember that the evidence of sacrificial love is abroad, even in these times. That it is good to have a heart alive enough to be stung by thoughtless words born of disordered affections. Thanks be to God for a lasting hope that’s steady enough to help me get up in the morning, and for sorrow that dims my surroundings enough to goad my feet towards the throne of grace. I have taken refuge in a Lord who lends language for my tears, and whose goodness to me through the years has prevented me, though pressed, from being utterly crushed. Because of Him, I’ve known what it is to be struck down but not destroyed. Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; let Your glory be over all the earth. The candle trails an ephemeral flourish of smoke. It will stand here through the coming watches of the day, this small dormant pillar of fire, marking the site of inextinguishable joy given by degrees amid gathering shadows. Of One who comes to give the oil of gladness instead of mourning.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Cindy Bunch, author of Be Kind to Yourself and associate publisher and director of editorial at InterVarsity Press. In this episode, Jonathan and Cindy talk about how to maintain a healthy relationship with the inner critic, the many misplaced wishes that writers often throw onto their writing, and the mystery of which readers resonate and which readers don’t. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 30 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. 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.

The renovation of North Wind Manor is nearly complete! The fireplace from Tolkien’s Oxford house is up and ready, just waiting for a fire to bring it to life and books to surround it with good company. Construction is estimated for completion next month, and then it’s on to furnishing! We’re crafting an intentional space to cultivate hospitality, creativity, and rest. A place of community, where creators can gather to cultivate and share their craft. Where theologians and authors passing through can hold symposiums and lectures. A place of beauty, where guests can rest and revive for the callings God has placed on them. J. R. R. Tolkien’s fireplace As we move into the next phase of modeling and furnishing to shape that atmosphere, we’re grateful for any continued support. Because we anticipate that this space is going to host a lot of people through the years, we want to fill the space with well-made and beautiful furnishings that will last a long time. If you’d like to cover any specific needs, here are some of the things we’re working toward as we turn this space from mere construction into a comfortable and rejuvenating space: Indoor 1. Bar stools for the island – $2000 2. Large dining room table – $2500 3. Chairs for the dining table – $2000 4. Pillows and throws – $1500 5. Lighting and accessories – $1500 6. Kitchen Ware – $3000 7. Bathrooms – $500 Outdoor 1. Table – $1800 2. Chairs for Table – $2000 3. Fireplace seating – $3000 4. Additional seating area – $1500 5. Rocking chairs – $2500 6. Porch swings – $2000 7. Rugs – $600 8. Plants/planters – $500 9. End tables – $400 Thank you for all the support and generosity you’ve invested to bring the work this far! We’re thrilled to be so close to completion, and looking forward to the day when we can gather safely with community in this space God has given us to steward.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with singer/songwriter and hymn writer Sandra McCracken. In this episode, Jonathan and Sandra talk about the formative power of hymns, the ancient balance established by the psalms between lament and a vision for what lies ahead, Sandra’s first book, and the role of true confidence in human flourishing. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 31 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. 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.

Eric Hilton’s approach would be difficult to mimic even if the world didn’t feel as if it was presently falling apart. As one half of renowned electronic duo Thievery Corporation, Eric (along with his musical partner Rob Garza) is responsible for a massive catalog spanning the last quarter century. He’s influenced an entire generation of producers and DJs, and with three solo releases slated for 2020, he remains as busy as ever as an artist. Through it all, it’s Eric’s positive disposition that stands out so meaningfully—especially in the midst of a global pandemic. Infinite Everywhere is his new (and first) solo release, and it’s filled with uplifting and inspiring instrumental tracks. The end result is a heartening listen—the natural overflow from his chosen posture. It’s hard to maintain an optimistic outlook these days, but Eric Hilton has learned that it’s part of the artistic discipline. To choose otherwise would only serve to shut down the flow for an artist who has so much more to offer than what he already has. It’s how he fights Resistance and it’s just one part of our conversation on this episode. Click here to listen to this newest episode of The Resistance. And here to learn more about The Resistance Podcast.

I’ve never ridden a tandem bicycle. I imagine it takes a measure of coordination and balance I simply don’t possess. More than that, however, I imagine it requires an intimate understanding of your pedaling partner—an understanding of their tendencies, knee-jerk reactions, rhythms, strengths, weaknesses, and on and on. I can only name a handful of people with whom I share this understanding; I imagine you’d say the same. And yet, we’re called in this life to much more daunting, collaborative endeavors than a bike ride. On Tandem, the most recent release from Waterdeep, husband and wife duo Don and Lori Chaffer explore these endeavors—both through personal and societal relationships—with tender care and grace. And they do it without any of the cheesy bike metaphors I employed in the first paragraph. Now 25 years into their career, the Chaffers sound perfectly in sync. Lori’s voice soars like the Söderberg sisters (First Aid Kit) or Florence Welch (Florence & the Machine); Don remains steadily grounded, like a livelier Sam Beam (Iron & Wine); and their beautiful harmony is bolstered by a marriage of acoustic guitar propulsions and angelic string and vocal layers. Everything about this album lyrically and musically calls out for unity, for things to be on earth as they are in heaven. But don’t expect any “We Are the World” or “Kumbaya” moments here. Throughout Tandem’s tracklist, the Chaffers see unity as a battle to be won through one-on-one relationships, not grand, utopian statements. Their lyrics are both personal and ambiguous, often written to a “you” which could be someone very specific to them, or it could be me, the listener. This songwriting approach allows us to experience the music in two ways—both from the point of view of the addresser and the addressee. Take, for example, mid-album song “We Made It Out.” Here, Lori reminisces on a childhood friendship set adrift. “I went holy roller and you went wild,” she recalls, and yet, she recognizes that despite any differences, “we made it out.” I’ll admit, my tendency is to identify with either the holy roller or the wild child, not both, but the grace with which each of the song’s characters is treated requires us to see ourselves in both walks of life, to find the commonalities with our neighbor rather than dividing lines. On the album’s opening song, “Know Your Name,” we’re again encouraged to dig deeper than surface-level social titles and fight for intimate relationships. The opening verse calls these ostracizing categorizations by name: “You’re a cardboard sign / You’re the back of the line / You’re a bratty little kid / You’re ‘everybody knows what your mama did.’” However, when the hopeful chorus comes in, the lines “They don’t even know your name / You know you’re a burning flame” remind us that social labels are irrelevant. We are, each of us, called to be neighbors, united in mind and thought and sowing God’s kingdom rather than human competition. Yet, especially in our Western context, competition is the name of the game. The idea of scarcity turns our interests inward, even when we have everything we need to find contentment. On “Over the Snow,” Waterdeep reminds us of our fallen nature, confessing, “There is nothing we don’t want / We may want for nothing / But there’s always something / Always something we will hunt.” In this context, Christ asks us to rebel against our self-preserving desires and open our tables and storerooms to one another. “Yet with more or with less / We make everyone our guest,” the Chaffers sing on the gorgeous “Blessing.” Everything about this album lyrically and musically calls out for unity, for things to be on earth as they are in heaven. Chris Thiessen This, it seems, is the Chaffers’ key encouragement for living in tandem with our neighbor and for loving one another as Christ loves us and offers his invitation freely. I admit, in recent months I’ve bought into “Us vs. Thems” and have failed to extend grace in divisive moments (we’ve experienced a lot of those lately, haven’t we?). Waterdeep has offered me an important reminder in Tandem that a hospitable heart opens closed doors, and a “gentle answer turns away wrath.” Sure, there are things in this world that are scarce. But the most central thing which unites us—the freedom of Christ’s hope and salvation—knows no bounds. There is room for every person at the table, and this gift casts a blinding beam across every shadow line seeking to set us apart. Even so, embracing this unifying reality (like riding a tandem bicycle) may not be as easy as a walk in the park. It requires patience, care, and communication to overcome the falls and skinned knees both riders will inevitably endure (especially with someone as clumsy as me). I want to believe, however, that the struggle will only deepen our devotion to each other and collapse every barrier seeking to separate us. Click here to view Tandem on Waterdeep’s website.

At long last, an album we have eagerly anticipated for more than a year now has been officially released: Ella Mine’s Dream War. If you were at Hutchmoot 2019, you may remember being overtaken by Ella’s powerful performance of her debut album as part of the show “Well: Exploring the Healing Power of Art.” With Dream War, she has managed to name depths of the human experience that often go unnamed, creating a hospitable space where the listener might untangle the mystery of their own emotions. \Ella’s distinctive voice is far-reaching and impartial to genre, incorporating a mastery of classical piano with a sonic palette characteristic of progressive rock. She’s unafraid to traverse great artistic distances in small spaces. Even within a single song, seas of meticulously layered electric guitars will be followed by shimmers of sunlight on water cast by picks against acoustic strings, harmony quickly overtaken by fierce chromaticism, rushing walls of sound cut short by vulnerable moments of intimacy between her solo vocal and piano, and even momentary appearances of bagpipe and cello, which lend an air of epic fantasy to a far-reaching tale. The cumulative effect is an organic confluence of the personal and the archetypal. I wanted to write with a musical language that could name and illuminate painful and ambiguous feelings like lostness, the desire to give up, and even dread. Ella Mine Ella’s musical instincts were honed under the formal discipline of Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music for six years, where she studied classical piano performance, followed by a university degree in music. These years of training would see Ella’s sharp intuition augmented with an expansive musical vocabulary, allowing her own idiosyncratic voice to emerge and flourish. A talented visual artist as well, Ella Mine’s musical aspirations were always more holistic and expansive than writing and recording collections of songs. Her passion was to create an immersive, transformative experience for her audience; something that she and they could get lost in. She knew from the outset that she wanted Dream War to land as a fully-formed, seamlessly cohesive, movie-score-like, symphonic experience. “As a teenager with chronic amplified pain,” Ella says, “I was prescribed a medication and had a severe adverse reaction that affected the functioning of my brain. I was suddenly overwhelmed by fear, confusion, intrusive and violent thoughts and dreams, akathisia, and a host of other psychoactive effects. Whether I was asleep or awake, everything around me was like a nightmare.” After many years of recovery, Ella started writing the songs she most needed to hear. But more than that, she wrote what she knew other people would need to hear. The “fuel to her fire” in creating Dream War was the knowledge that other people were experiencing the same kinds of oppressive darkness that she herself had come to know too well. “Since I had come out (mostly intact) on the other side,” Ella explains, “I set out to pave a sonic space in which we can connect with painful emotions we often push away. When our language is limited, our understanding is also limited. So I wanted to write with a musical language that could name and illuminate painful and ambiguous feelings like lostness, the desire to give up, and even dread.” Together, the songs of Dream War ask, “How are we to dream, hope, and love again after our first dreams have been crushed, our first hopes dashed, and our first loves ravaged?” All throughout, Ella Mine asks these questions with dexterity, poise, and an ambition born of courage. It is impossible to hear any one of these songs without feeling compelled to listen intently, and that is the magic of Ella’s songwriting: the sense that you’re listening not only to one songwriter’s story, but to the untold depths of your own. Click here to view Dream War in the Rabbit Room Store and here to learn more at Ella Mine’s website. Further Reading & Listening In this Rabbit Room interview, Ella goes further in depth about the story that led to Dream War. She also makes an appearance in Season 2 of The Second Muse, where her song “Sound + Fury” is explored in depth.

Our backyard is surrounded by blessed groves. There’s a black maple directly behind the house, standing virtually alone in the path of the west wind. A couple of teenaged walnut trees toss their tennis ball fruits to the ground with slack-armed irregularity. At the south end, near “The Swamp,” green ash and cottonwoods spear the airspace, vying for sunlight. Storm-beaten in my neighbor’s yard, venerable poplars and oaks rain down the leathery opacity of their leaf litter. I collect all of it, every scrap of autumn-shed habiliment from these disrobing hardwoods. Wielding a backpack leaf-blower—and imagining I’m a ghostbuster—I work the leaves into the garden patch, putting the November soil to bed under thick coverlets. Lie down. Draw breath. Shabath from your labors. In Wendell Berry’s exemplary poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” he mentions “the two inches of humus / that will build under the trees / every thousand years.” It’s a fitting set of lines for a poet and philosopher who’s part soil scientist, but two inches every millennium? That’s about as much yield as my first savings account. With the leaves and some attendant compost, I try to amend this accumulation, to give manna to the dearth-wrack of our urban tillage. Ever since I first started growing things, I’ve been haunted not only by the Cherokee system of companion planting, but also by the Torah passages on letting the ground rest. Dirt, like all temporal things, is not inexhaustible. We all need this. I need it. I need a break, a practicum of stillness—but it isn’t often what I want. Whatever else the garden teaches me, it teaches me the humility of my limitations. Adam Whipple I recently read some author’s lament that writer’s block was his default station in life. I figured I had a good idea what he meant. Labor doesn’t get accomplished by waiting for the right feeling. If I need to be in a certain mental place to work, I have to wrench myself into that place by some force of will. Creativity, as Paul Collins writes, is “a pumping of thoracic bellows”— breathing, making the effort. The false ideology that inspiration sometimes sells us is that we must wait until we can spit out something that’s perfect from the very beginning. It’s a lie. Sure, once in a while I guess good art shoots like rainbow-spume from some nostril or other. People do occasionally write songs in flashes of brilliance, but mostly, it’s straight-up work. Waiting on inspiration is a losing game, time being what’s lost. In songwriting, you have to make do with bits of choruses or the recycled stubs of orphaned codas. The muse who will not sew a coat of these patchwork fragments will die of the cold. I believe that working can produce results, that creativity is more blue collar than high school me ever knew or wanted to think. If you want to make art, you often fire a parting shot at the muse and crack on without her. Still, on the other side of work, it has to be said that fallow time—that listless period of uncertain backbuilding—seems to be just as necessary as labor. It is one of the truths of post-Fall entropy that not many springs in life are ever-flowing. I’ve always wanted a potager. In Scotland, the word is kailyaird—that is, the “kale yard”—the wild-haired kitchen garden meant to flaunt its seasonal flora on the supper table year-round. I want summers with tomatoes like ribald ornaments, bumbershoot leaves of crookneck squash, and curlicues of purple kale. I want to follow it with okra, its siren blossoms debauching the flights of mud daubers and bees. I want autumn and winter squashes, cabbages and greens and endless tendrils of bean plants. I want parsnips curing their sugars with the first frost. I’m not sure how practical it all is, either in gardening or in the humanities. A friend once told me, in so many words, that those who fail to go out and live life will never have anything to write about. If I spend every waking moment scribbling in a notebook, for example, I’ll soon run out of valuable material to fill the page. Everything needs its Sabbath, perhaps. My wife and I used to sing this Nichole Nordeman song called “Every Season:” Everything in time and under heaven Finally falls asleep Ugh. I hate sleep. Needing it, even—I shudder—delighting in it, seems nearly indecent to me. Even if I’m tired during the day, I reflexively apologize to my wife for taking a nap. She doesn’t require this of me, you understand; I’m just that self-absorbed with my own imagined productivity. Never mind that Jesus slept. I’m almost certain that Jonathan Edwards didn’t. In fifty-four years of earthly pilgrimage, I think Edwards only amassed eighty-six minutes of actual REM. I foolishly love that idea, the thought of piddling away into the night, creating new things while mere mortals sleep, being caught up in the sheer forward motion of whatever fresh challenge is currently holding my attention. Even lying in bed, I tend to strain my mind for some delightful juxtaposition of words, hoping to extract a last ounce of viability from whatever waking moments are left. There it is: the irritant mote of one of my many hypocrisies. I’m actually happy to preach Sabbath to others, yet hubristic enough to imagine I’m a superman. I love characters who don’t need sleep—or who seem to make do instead with coffee or nicotine or meditation. I enjoy the Lord of the Rings palantír scene in which Gandalf sleeps with both eyes open. The elves walk under the stars and sing all night. Data, from Star Trek, does whatever Data does at three in the morning. Even characters who simply awaken to some inner summons and wander about in the middle of the night are envious to me. There are people in this world who wake up and suffer insomnia. In my idiocy and self-absorption, I’m jealous. Of course, I’ve literally slept through earthquakes before—in the plural. I haven’t even begun to push my soil to the point of a kailyaird. For now, it needs rehabilitation—a good rhythm of Sabbath, honest labor, and caregiving. Perhaps one day, I will join the talented Scots and the French and work the dance of horticulture all twelve or thirteen moons of the year. I’m certain there’s a good deal of give and take to it. As for myself and for the work of creating, a break here or there will do. Even at the beginning of all Creation, there was a day of rest. Whatever else the garden teaches me, it teaches me the humility of my limitations. Now, if you’ll pardon me, it’s a bit late.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Christine Flanagan, English professor at the University of the Sciences in Pennsylvania and editor of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. In this episode, Jonathan and Christine talk about the fascinatingly elusive influence of Caroline Gordon on Flannery O’Connor, the mystifying invisibility of some writers in our collective historical record, and the indispensability of thoughtful, engaged critique from a trusted mentor. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 32 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. 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.

In the 1960s, Robert Coles was the child psychologist who treated Ruby Bridges, six years old, black, integrating a white elementary school in New Orleans. He would hate my use of the word treated. Rather, he listened to Ruby’s story as he counseled her through the massive life disruption and trauma that was integration during the Civil Rights movement. Later, he would write a book about what he learned from these brave children, and he would win a Pulitzer for it. In another book, The Call of Stories, Coles wonders: What if we don’t jump to conclusions trying to fix others? What if, instead, we “listen carefully, record faithfully, understand as fully as possible”? Coles also talks about the novels that formed his childhood—not only the ones he read, but also the books his parents read aloud in the evenings. What a boring thing to do! When the young Coles pressed his father about why he and his mother read together and discussed Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, his father explained that these stories held reservoirs of wisdom. “Your mother and I feel rescued by these books.” In 2017, I attended the first meeting of a multi-ethnic group that meets in my city. The facilitator asked, “What is something you appreciate about your culture?” That’s often a difficult question for white Americans to answer. We have trouble pinning down just what our culture is without throwing it in relief against other cultures, other ethnicities. After long thought, I decided, Books. The wealth of Western philosophy and storytelling that has come down through the literature of my European ancestors and American contemporaries. But something rubbed uncomfortably when I said so in the meeting. A grain of sand in the oyster shell. Here is what you really look like, the best books show, like a mirror, like a blow to the skull. Like rescue. Rebecca D. Martin When I was in college twenty years ago, majoring in English Education, American Literature was not my jam. But it was required, so I struck out and enrolled in Contemporary American Lit, and to my horror, found myself reading Richard Wright’s Native Son. I read the initial chapters and then put the book down, and I could not, I could not make myself read the rest of that disturbing, galling story. Prejudice, terror, accidental murder, dismemberment. Who wanted to saturate their imagination with these things? What good could come of reading this? I withdrew from the class and retreated into a more comfortable mental space. I enrolled in an American Naturalism and Realism course, in which the stories, though dark-edged if I had known how to listen, were less challenging to my daily narrative. Black poet Amiri Baraka tells the story from another perspective. His grandmother would return home from dressing white women’s hair in the 1940s and bring her grandson white literature for him to read, including Dickens. He tried those books, but the pictures they painted didn’t reflect the life he lived. Instead, he says, “I knew the stories of the Black South,” the stories of African American writers, like Richard Wright. Baraka was stunned by Richard Wright when he first read him, and in fact worried for the author’s safety; surely someone was out to kill Wright for the kind of racial things he had put in print in mid-century America. Poet Wanda Coleman says, “At home, I lived in a Black world and no matter what [books by white writers] I read, it did not reflect my life.” She discovered Richard Wright’s 1930s and 40s fiction belatedly. Literature written by black men was taboo in her school until the late 1950s. Imagine! “Contraband,” she says; you’d get suspended for bringing it on campus. When she started reading what she calls Black literature—W. E. B. DuBois, Ann Petry—she found rescue. “There was the entrance to my world as I was struggling to survive in it.” The grain of sand in my oyster shell shows itself: a lack of recognition that there is just as rich a culture of literature and thought cherished by other ethnicities than mine, by people of color. More than cherished—held onto as a lifeline. And my own imagination and conscience are, in fact, in dangerous waters without it. I can picture the withdrawal slip I filled out for that American Lit class back in college. Reason for Withdrawal Request: “I prefer to focus on a different type of literature.” Never mind the famous, controversial words Franz Kafka once said in a letter to a friend: Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? . . . What we need are books that hit us like . . . suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. Do I wish to alter what I said the other day in the racial unity meeting? Like Baraka, like Coleman, I was an avid reader as a child. I was formed by fiction, by the practice of listening and learning, of putting myself into the stories of others. But whose stories? At worst, petty escapism (though often with a troubling strain of racism that my eyes weren’t open to). But at best, Dostoevsky and Austen, the Brontes, Marilynne Robinson. Dickens’s Little Dorrit, which is about how being imprisoned can become a lifelong internal identity, and A Christmas Carol, which is a story not about Christmas, but about social justice. It makes sense that white books did nothing for Baraka, but Dickens’s British culture was my inroad, driving his stories into my soul. Here is another reality, these good books say, when I listen. They show forth the oppressed, the poor, the forgotten, the economically-draining, the socially threatening, the wounded, the imprisoned, the worn down. Here is what you really look like, the best books show, like a mirror, like a blow to the skull. Like rescue. Their words have been picks, pounding these forty-some-odd years, though the cracks in my privileged consciousness have taken a painfully long time to appear. What will drive the pick straight through and crack my world wide open? Another black poet, Toi Derricotte, asks, “How can we wake / From a dream / We are born into”? If Baraka and Coleman’s experiences told them nothing of the white world’s stories, how can I hope to understand theirs? Baraka challenges: Afro-American literature . . . is one of the most influential and important in the world. Particularly given the contest of its creation, in the cauldron of racism, racial violence, and dismissal. It reveals American lives, culture and history in a depth that nothing else is able to do. Kafka uses that word, suicide, and I don’t think he uses it lightly when he says books should hit us this way. When we are touched by the terrible instance of someone taking his or her own life, we are gutted. We sorrow and grieve. We wonder what could have been done differently. We resolve to pay better attention. We  are changed. . . or at least we should be. Jesus speaks of a different kind of death, a good one. “Whoever loves his life loses it,” he says. And, “Go! Sell all that you have.” And again, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” What life? What wealth? The grain of sand rubs me again, and I see it for what it is. Self, I say, You wealthy white woman, give away the riches that are your white privilege. Lay your own story down. Yes. I can choose to set aside my own narrative, and let others sound forth their stories, even if they leave me shaken. Because if I ignore the real narrative of this country, if I stop being formed and informed by the lives of others, what is left? And how can I wake from the dream—or is it nightmare?—I’ve inherited, a citizen of this beautiful, broken, blended nation, if I won’t listen to stories that bite and sting? Click here to read more of Rebecca’s writing at her blog.

While shopping for something else entirely, I discovered a pair of white K-Swiss sneakers with red stripes for only $27.00 at a local department store. When I arrived home, I proudly laced them up, sauntered up to my teenage daughter, and thrust my foot into her line of sight. “Check out my new kicks!” I said. She shrugged indifferently and without looking up, said, “That’s sweet, dad. They’re cute.” My consternation was genuine. “Cute? That’s it? These are totally sick!” “First of all, nobody says ‘sick’ anymore dad. That’s so 2016.” Her casual insult demanded a serious rejoinder: “Fine. Then they’re gnarly,” I said. “And K-Swiss is like, I don’t know, the Fred Meyer’s of shoe brands,” she said. “Nobody gets excited about them.” “I’ll have you know these are iconic,” I said. “Once upon a time—never mind how long ago—they were the symbol of wealth, style, and sophistication, having a certain je ne sais. . .” She wasn’t listening and I was suddenly sliding down the rabbit hole of memory, standing in the corner of the cafeteria with other prepubescent males like myself while the paragon of privilege, Randy, sat at a table with his covey of pretty girls. That practiced indifference. That five o’clock shadow. Those K-Swiss shoes… My daughter shook her head pitiably. “You don’t get it,” I said to her. “These shoes are totally rad.” That’s the best explanation of their je ne sais quoi that I could muster. Finding them, well, unexplainable, I staggered beneath the sudden realization that fashion had moved along without me. That I was time’s discarded debris washed ashore while the tides of change rolled inevitably along. When did that happen? I contemplated the wisdom of returning my unremarkable shoes to reclaim my precious twenty-seven bucks (plus tax) but my memory kept careening back to that cafeteria where Randy slouched in his glory like an Olympian god while the rest of us mere mortals mangled our bologna sandwiches and reluctantly waited for English class. There I stood, flat-footed in the kitchen, standing in the awful realization that what I thought was an autonomous decision made free of any influence was just another attempt at being like somebody; in this case, like Randy. I kept the shoes. My ego demanded it and, despite my daughter’s withering remarks, I still thought they were cool. I drove past my old middle school on Wednesday. It was deemed uninhabitable a decade ago. The edifice crumbles year by year and I am surprised to find my memories crumbling with it. The faces of my friends are fading, but the things I liked back then—scratch ’n sniff stickers, Atari, Star Wars, Superman, Dire Straits—still follow me around to this day. The people I hung around with thought they were cool so, inevitably, I found them cool too. My best friend’s dad—a manly man if ever I met one—loved what he called “real music” which meant Dire Straits. And then there was our local high school’s wrestling matches. We were perennial champs, so when the high school gym went dark, the electronic crescendo of “Money For Nothing” rose into the darkness. We stood to our feet as the drum rhythm ratcheted up and when Mark Knopfler’s solo guitar busted loose, the wrestling team streamed into the spotlight while blood rushed to my head. If that weren’t enough, my bus driver would play Starship’s “We Built This City” and Dire Strait’s “Money For Nothing” every day on the way to school. Why do I like Dire Straits? Because the people I loved liked Dire Straits. And, yes, I loved my bus driver. He made me feel like I was actually fun to drive to school, like life was good when I was around—like I was cool. I wasn’t—certainly not as cool as my bus driver—but I wanted to be. And when I decided to “be like Mike,” I did so with the rest of the world. Michael Jordan dazzled us. We all fell under his trance, but it wasn’t until a catchy advertisement put the words in our mouths that we realized, “Hey, we do want to be like Mike.” What was once just an embryonic notion was now a fully formed mental picture. I’m not saying that our generation didn’t actually want to be like Michael Jordan. We did. But what came first? Our longing? Or the song? “Sometimes I dream That he is me You’ve got to see that’s how I dream to be I dream I move, I dream I groove Like Mike If I could be like Mike.” It wasn’t just the basketball skills; Mike was an entire persona. It was the way he carried himself, the way he made everything look effortless, the way he stuck out his tongue while gliding through the air. That’s why we bought his jersey, his clothes, and (perhaps most importantly) his shoes. It had to be the shoes. Anything to be like Mike. That was the dream. I think that dream died for me in 9th grade when I served as the obligatory last man on the bench for our school’s c-squad. In my one opportunity to play in a real game, I had no idea which hoop we were shooting at. Who pays attention to these trivialities anyways when they’re at the end of the bench on a permanent basis? The other team had a full court press on. I made a move, grooved like Mike, broke my defender’s ankles, caught the ball behind the three point line, let it fly. Fade away. Three pointer. Swish…in the wrong hoop. I watched the scoreboard add three points to the wrong ledger. Dream gone. Poof! A virus is contagious, yes, but beauty and creativity and hope are contagious too. And you should perform contact tracing with this good infection just like you should with COVID-19. Ben Palpant These days, I’m forty-five years old and earth-bound. I get nervous if I don’t have the terra firma solidly underfoot. Sure, deep down I still wish I could dunk, but I’ve become a pencil-pushing poet instead. How did that happen? Well, I began to be inspired by other people. And this would be a little embarrassing to my high school self, but I wanted to be like those people whose souls I had encountered in books. Gasp! I wanted to be like those writers who had helped craft my soul, who had enriched my existence. Thinkers like Thomas Howard, artists like Makoto Fujimura, singers like Michael Card, storytellers like John Steinbeck and Pearl S. Buck, poets like Anne Porter and Li-Young Lee and Mary Oliver and Billy Collins. I wanted to be a wordsmith, a craftsman, an artisan like them. I wanted to nourish souls like them and cultivate culture like them even with so much incendiary polarization around me. These were the people I found cool. I wanted to move like them, groove like them. By God, I wanted to see like them. Still do, actually, but they’ve become more than mentors to me after all these years—they’ve become something like peers. I feel a certain level of arrogance just writing that word, but I’ve been learning from them, imitating them, cultivating culture like them long enough to feel a kinship. In my own way, I’m continuing their work, shouldering the same yoke. Let’s trace how I got here. How did I discover these cultural influencers, learn to love them, practice imitating them, and finally end up feeling a communal kinship with them? I got here by way of the good infection. A virus is contagious, yes, and we’ve had more than enough talk about that bad contagion these days. But beauty and creativity and hope are contagious too. And you should perform contact tracing with this good infection just like you should with COVID-19. I came to admire Thomas Howard and Mako Fujimura because my friend Charlie Dowers introduced them to me. I cherish Michael Card as a modern psalmist because the girl I fell in love with in high school and ultimately married listened almost exclusively to his music. I love Anne Porter because my friend Andrew Peterson said, “Read this! Isn’t this just how it is?” I love Mary Oliver because my nineteen year old daughter said, “Dad, I found a poet who makes me want to write poetry!” Sure enough. And I love Steinbeck because my father used to crank through his medical school work so that he could slip away on Sundays to read him. So it goes. The folks I love have introduced me to the folks they love. That’s one of the multiplying powers of community. My loves are proof that community is the fertile soil of our heart’s desires. We end up liking what our friends like. That’s why the righteous choose their friends wisely (Proverbs 12:26). They know that if you walk with the wise, you’ll become wise (Proverbs 13:20), but if you frolic with fools, you’ll become one (I Corinthians 15:33). We need good community so that we can get infected by the best things. What began so many years ago with a friend’s recounting his visit to Mako’s gallery in New York City culminated in a recent visit to Gonzaga University’s Jundt Art Museum—just a few miles from my home—where Makoto Fujimura’s work was on display. Fujimura combines traditional Japanese techniques and materials—pulverized minerals and pigments—to create multi-layered (often over a hundred layers) non-representational paintings that invite us into a somatic engagement. Mako has said that if you want to understand his work, you must sit in front of one painting for at least ten minutes. So I did. I sat in front of his “Silence – Mysterion.” It’s a 33 foot monumental work of art. “Mysterion” is the Greek word Paul uses in Ephesians 6:9 to describe the “mystery of the Gospel.” As David Brooks put it in his New York Times article, after ten minutes “What had seemed like a plain blue field now looked like a galaxy of color.” He was right. At the moment of revelation, I teared up. “Silence – Mysterion” by Makoto Fujimura I owe Mako a debt of gratitude for that moment, but I also owe my friend Charlie a debt of gratitude for nudging me toward Mako’s art and Mako’s thoughts on creativity and culture. I’ve been introduced to Fujimura by way of the good infection, but I’ve come to admire him on his own merits. He is a counter-cultural craftsman whose slow-brewed creative efforts have made an indelible mark on the way I see just about everything. Would I have appreciated Fujimura’s work if a friend hadn’t introduced me to it? Maybe. Would I have discovered Mako on my own? Maybe. But the friendship certainly encouraged that exposure and accelerated my admiration. Despite my rather staunch (and ignorant) loyalty to representational art, I gave Fujimura’s non-representational art a chance because my friend loved it. That’s how community works and, dare I say, that’s what community is for. A community collectively guards certain ideals and steers each other toward those ideals. The members of a community inform and form each other’s desires, correct and calibrate each other, validate and vindicate each other’s work. They remind each other, “This here is what we’re about, not that over there. Let’s keep going further up and further in!” Churches, schools, and families all function this way and they do so intentionally or accidentally. For good or for ill. That’s why the selection of our chosen communities is so important. That’s why the Rabbit Room is so important. Awhile back, I sent a manuscript to Andrew Peterson on a whim because I respected his poetic craftsmanship and I resonated with his outlook on faith and the arts. At the time, I didn’t know about his connection to the Rabbit Room or Rabbit Room Press or Hutchmoot. Truth-be-told, I’m not sure that I had even heard of these before (Embarrassing, I know. Yes, I was living under a rock). He graciously gave me feedback in classic Andrew fashion and then he said, “Oh, by the way, there’s a whole community of like-minded people you might enjoy.” Sure enough, I do. So this is a love letter to the Rabbit Room and to all those communities where the love of God and love for the arts converge. Where God’s Word nourishes creativity. Where craftsmanship, artisanship, and slow-brewed art meet a love for people and the world in which God placed us. Here’s to Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. Here’s to a shared vision of the transformative nature of relationship and art. Here’s to planting trees where polemics and cultural warfare have left only ash. Here’s to things that endure, to timeless work that transcends mere fashion. I’m still wearing those K-Swiss shoes, by the way. I wore them to a coffee shop a few months ago. The twenty-something barista stopped in her tracks. She looked down at them, looked up at me, and said, “Dude, you’re totally rocking the retro. I need a pair of those!” I said, “Sorry, limited edition. The department store had only two pair.” She said, “Well, they’re totally bodacious.” And they are. But these days, I’d trade bodacious for beauty in a heartbeat. Sorry Randy, you can keep your practiced indifference and your fashionable apparel. And that goes for you, too, Mike. I’ve found something better. I’ve found other people to be like. Featured image: “Silence – Mysterion” by Makoto Fujimura

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with bestselling author, pastor, and podcast host Daniel Darling. In this episode, Jonathan and Daniel talk about the complex mystery of motivations that goes into online interaction, the double-edged sword of content curation, and how to communicate well in an age that prioritizes communicating quickly above all else. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 33 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. 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.

There’s an ancient story handed down to us in the Old Testament book of Numbers in which a group of people find themselves walking in circles. Their fear of change, their avoidance of Resistance, kept them from entering a portal to something—or somewhere—better. Sound familiar? For acclaimed poet Li-Young Lee, the Resistance represents that door, which when framed this way, emboldens us to face it. It’s just one healthy example of the ways in which Lee views the Resistance at work all around us—calling us to silence, calling us to notice, calling us to portals for growth and revelation. As the author of five poetry books, including The Undressing (2018), Lee has labored against the Resistance to earn prestigious honors such as the American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Award, and Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. Our conversation with Lee opened our eyes to new layers of Resistance—a fearful proposition—even as we were also reminded of the maturation possible when it is faced. Click here to listen to this newest episode of The Resistance. And here to learn more about The Resistance Podcast.

I began writing Collect Prayers the second week of March, around the time that the CDC recommended no gatherings of 50 people or more. At the time, I wrote them in response to specific requests, from both personal friends and strangers on social media asking for words that would help them to cope with their fears. I didn’t imagine I’d keep writing prayers, but new things kept happening that demanded new prayers: a prayer for grocers managing panic-buying shoppers, a prayer for medical professionals overwhelmed by the countless sick, a prayer for anxious children at bedtime. I wrote prayers for dashed plans, untimely deaths, single people, and wearied parents. I wrote a prayer for the beleaguered and the irritated and another for new mercies. I wrote a prayer for geographically separated worship, and, most needfully, I wrote a prayer against the pestilence that stalks in the dark and the plague that destroys at midday. I even wrote a prayer for a neighbor behaving like an idiot, because I figured we all had a neighbor who fit that description, wherever we may live or whatever our political persuasion. The following is a collection of prayers related to the start of school this fall. I tried to imagine the sorts of things that parents and children, along with teachers and school administrators, might be feeling in light of the unpredictable realities that face them in the weeks to come. My heart goes out to all of them, and while I can’t promise that these prayers will magically or immediately change their circumstances, my hope is that in praying them they will sense, in palpable and deeply personal ways, the care-filled love of their Good Shepherd who knows them by name. Practically speaking, these prayers could memorized, they could be printed out and posted in a place that they’ll be easily seen, or they could be reworked from the first person “I and me” to the second person “you and yours,” or even to the third person “he and she and they,” depending on who is praying it. The goal, in the end, isn’t a perfect mark for praying it every day. The goal is simply to keep praying as one can, when one can, trusting always that the Holy Spirit prays in and for us when we can no longer find the right words or even the will to pray. May God bless you as you entrust yourself and others to the Lord in prayer. A Prayer for Children Going to School Dear Jesus, you who promise to be with me always, I pray that you would be with me today as I go to school. Bless my going and my coming. Bless my learning and my playing. Please protect my heart from fear. Please keep me safe. Please give me good friends. Give me joy this day and thank you for loving me from head to toe. In your name. Amen. A Prayer for Children Schooling at Home Dear Jesus, you who promise to be with me always, I pray that you would be with me at home today as I do my school work. Please help me to do my best, help me not to feel alone, and help me to be patient with my family. Give me joy this day and thank you for loving me from head to toe. In your name. Amen. A Prayer for High School and College Students O Lord, you who promise to be with me always, be with me this day as I begin my schoolwork. Keep me in health, I pray, and keep me from harm. In all that I do and say, may I love you with all my heart, mind, soul and strength, and may I love my neighbor as myself, so that I might fulfill your purposes for me and your calling on my life as a student. In Christ’s name. Amen. A Prayer for Parents O Lord, you who promise to guide us through the wilderness and to protect us through the storm, we ask that you would make us wise where we cannot clearly see the way forward, make us brave where we feel afraid, make us strong in the face of our weakness, and make possible what to us seems impossible, so that we might joyfully entrust ourselves and our children into your tender care in these trying and troubling times. In Jesus’ name. Amen. A Prayer for Teachers O Lord, you who have called and equipped the teachers in our community, we pray for them today. Watch over them, provide for them, guide them, sustain them. May you be their sun and shield, so that they might do the work that you have entrusted to them and sense your care in these uncertain times. In Jesus’ name. Amen. A Prayer for School Administrators O God, you who have promised wisdom to all who would ask it, we pray today for school administrators, that you would grant them clarity of mind, unity of spirit, strength of will, a heart of wisdom and the gift of your truth-bearing Spirit, so that they might be enabled to make decisions that lead to the flourishing of their teachers, staff, and students and to the wellbeing of the whole community. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen. For families who may want additional helps for prayer this fall, W. David O. Taylor and his wife Phaedra created a set of illustrated prayer cards that offer both adults and children an opportunity to pray in light of key themes in the Psalms—themes such as honesty and community, sadness and joy, justice and enemies, life and death, and so on. Find them here. This article originally appeared on the website of the Anglican Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Gina Dalfonzo, author of Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C. S. Lewis and writer for Christianity Today, The Atlantic, First Things, and more. In this episode, Jonathan and Gina talk about the often overlooked friendship between Dorothy Sayers and C. S. Lewis, Sayers’ innovative depiction of Jesus in The Man Born to Be King, and her lifelong wrestling with Lewis on the issue of artistic conscience and calling. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 34 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. 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.

The experience of lockdown that gripped much of the world during the Covid–19 crisis was, for me, a strange period in creative terms. New ministry and family pressures brought on by the existence of the virus meant that much of the mental space I rely on for reading and reflection was gone. In the earliest days of isolating and “social distancing” I felt like I had undergone a power cut in terms of writing. Into this silence and darkness these three poems nudged at the door, and eventually came in and made themselves at home. They were those happiest of poetry writing experiences—pieces which felt pre-written in the heart before they entered my mind. Occasionally a poem surprises you as a poet, because it lays bare emotions and anxieties which you were only vaguely aware of before you met your own thoughts written down. To read them after they are written is like remembering and recounting a vivid dream. These are those kinds of pieces. Grace at all times is not something which we rule in or rule out of our way of seeing the world. Instead, it sweetly intrudes into the darkness, and makes a home in the middle of our making the best sense out of the world that we can. Andrew Roycroft “Selah” was written in mid-April, when the uncertainties of Covid–19 seemed to be most intense globally. The airspace over our home, normally punctuated by the lights of commercial aircraft, were now more deeply dark, with Venus taking full advantage of an empty stage to show its glory. Families were at home, away from the preoccupations of work, focused solely on avoiding the plague that seemed so near to our doors. I wrote this poem in order to make a sound in that hushed moment, and the term “Selah” seemed like a good fit. That mysterious term, which disturbs the flow of the Psalms by saying something silent, seemed so appropriate. The poem seems to insist on looking upwards, and I found that the abandonment of form (apart from meter) provided a way of reflecting the tension I felt between the “fixity” of God’s purpose and the seeming fluidity of circumstance. I also felt that “Selah” gave me room to rehabilitate April from the cruelty so often attributed to it, emphasising the life that follows the pains of the final month that feels a little like winter. The Covid–19 crisis sharpened the focus of those thoughts and feelings, and allowed me to run my eye heavenwards and hope-wards again. “Selah” Because the planes no longer fly, I dared tonight to trust the sky, the fixity of stars, the full moon uncrowned by icy light, the true North not now misread as flight, the evening’s settling upwards chill. I would impute good faith to this April, firmly believe in season’s sure ingress, that, in spite of our under-heaven distress, we are in a universe of laws. That— panoplied above all these furloughed cars, populous homes with children’s shadowed dreams— a hand which could constellate such fading lights would wait an age for their sweet demise to give us sight of unfaltering grace. He, from the circle of ravelling earth, soft whispers to our pains, ‘Not death, but birth’. “Distance” was written to reflect the difficulties presented by Covid–19 in terms of community and cohesion in grief. In my work as a pastor I was confronted with the reality of people who were suffering their final illnesses, but whose bedsides I was unable to visit. This was followed by funerals at which I had to remain distant from families engulfed in grief, and I so missed the efficacy of touch to compensate where words are wanting. I opted for the sonnet form, partly as a means of reflecting the constrictions brought on by the pandemic, and partly because of the sheer relief of writing a final couplet in which Jesus crosses the gap caused by the virus. My prayer with this poem is that it might touch something universal among those who have lost loved ones and friends at a time when the grace of gripping another’s hand, cradling a sorrowing friend’s head, and shouldering grief in touchable tangible ways, have been taken from us. “Distance” We will not embrace this day, but maintain our distance, a widening loss marked in time, but not in touch, each moved against the grain as though sorrow would remain in lines and not transgress, nor breach, nor blot, nor blur. These are times of feelings kempt and stayed, of charity retrained to speak that it is there, and reach no hand, but heavenwards to pray. This is charged space, that craves new collision, that would split each atom of exiled grief, bring disordered grace, insist on confusion of homes, and hearts, and limbs, and life. But now, with Mary, Martha, in vacant tears, we eye the gap, for Jesus drawing near. “Shells” was written as a reflection on the shoreside walks which we have been able to enjoy as a family in the later stages of Covid–19 lockdown—a luxury that vulnerable family health had prohibited for months. We live at the lip of the Irish Sea, and have a tradition of bringing home treasures from the beach each time we visit it. A large vase in our hallway has been gradually filling up over the years, and that image of shells rather than sand being emptied into the hourglass really caught my attention. There is something powerful and providential in the arrival of common place shells on the shore, and something vibrant about bringing their colour into our home as a measure of moments spent together. As a parent, time is visibly outgrowing me all of the time, the height and happy maturing of my daughters marks their progress into the world, and foreshadows my eventual regress out of it. That tidal nature of time, the treasuring of filled up hours with things of no monetary value, but of huge emotional value seemed a fitting way to reflect that. Again, the sonnet form raised its hand for this poem, and I was happy to let in, particularly as it afforded me the opportunity to issue an invitation to others to fill up the hours well. “Shells” The vase in the hall holds trophies from all our walks at shore. Shale, fragments of leaden skies, smooth-edged brick ends from Belfast walls, oil painting mussel, canvas of heaven; Dog whelks, tellins, ordinary, like days with the girls, gathered bounty in small hands. Time is a rising tide that we display, in glass, stacked ground in place of sinking sand; Old porcelain with washed out pattern face, a now long-past family’s Sunday best, no more adrift but in our home, the grace of waves turning up lives, from roiling rest. Come then, let’s brim the wide lips of this jar, store up the shells with which we fill these hours. When all three of these poems were delivered, revised, and refined into a more final shape, what surprised me was that “grace” had unconsciously been mentioned in each of them. This was not by my design, but that seemed so appropriate. Grace at all times is not something which we rule in or rule out of our way of seeing the world. Instead, it sweetly intrudes into the darkness, and makes a home in the middle of our making the best sense out of the world that we can. “A Grace Triptych” seemed like a good way to bind these seemingly disparate pieces together, a three-panelled perspective on God’s movement and mercy in the midst of tough times and public fear. Grace is the theme which binds every part of our creative work together, and at a time when public spirit and public health seemed to be mutually in decline, I was deeply grateful for the cohesive force of God’s faithful disposition towards me. My prayer is that the grace which insisted on a place in these poems, might do the same work in the hearts of those who read, whatever their uncertainty or turmoil.