Wherein Jen Rose Yokel reads her poem “When I See It” and her piece “Beneath the Flood,” Rebecca Reynolds reads her poems “Dear Students” and “The Farmer,” Jonathan Rogers reads his short story “When the Angel Stirred the Waters,” and Drew Miller thanks you for listening to Season 1 of The Molehill Podcast. First published in Volume 2 of The Molehill, “When the Angel Stirred the Waters” is something of a riot. The story unfolds in the backwaters of Florida and directly downstream from Flannery O’Connor. It involves a mermaid, a fistfight at a beloved whirlhole, and for those of you who are curious, yes—an alligator. Click here to listen to “S1 E8: When the Angel Stirred the Waters.” And click here to subscribe on Apple Podcasts and here to subscribe on Spotify. Transcripts are available for The Molehill Podcast. Click here to view them. Artwork by the inimitable Stephen Crotts Words of Befuddlement graphic by Mindy Cook Original Molehill Podcast theme music by Zach & Maggie Other music featured in this episode: “Ruminate” & “Wish for Bridges” by Brooke Waggoner “We Will” by Chris Coleman “A Light So Fair” by Ron Block

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Anne Snyder, editor-in-chief of Comment Magazine. Jonathan Rogers and Anne Snyder discuss our culture’s antipathy towards institutions, the role of theological reflection during a time of crisis, and her work with Comment Magazine to serve both readers and writers in uniting thought and action. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 42 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 this final installment, I want to say a few words about Lucy Maud’s personal challenges as a writer. Even a casual perusal of her journals reveals the fact that Maud was a creature of intense, sometimes crippling moods. I don’t think anyone could be capable of communicating the full scope of human joys and sorrows like she did without being intimately acquainted with both the heights and the depths. And it’s a dangerous business. Many an artist has run aground on the shoals of their own passionate natures. Although Anne Shirley was a gentler version of her own extremes, Maud well-knew the both wings of anticipation and the depths of despair. And like Emily Starr, Maud had to come to terms with what she really believed to be the creative force acting in the universe. At the beginning of Emily of New Moon, young Emily learns from the brusque and rather brutal housekeeper, Ellen Greene, that her father is going to die. Ellen has told Emily that “finding fault with God” is the absolute wickedest thing anyone could ever do. But Emily has no one else to blame, and she just tells God just what she thinks about it. Unable to keep such a terrible thing to herself, however, she confesses to her father that she doesn’t like God anymore. Douglas Starr laughed—the laugh Emily liked best.“Yes you do, honey. You can’t help liking God. He is Love itself, you know. You mustn’t mix him up with Ellen Green’s God, of course.Emily didn’t know exactly what Father meant. But all at once she found she wasn’t afraid any longer…She felt as if love was all about her and around her, breathed out from some great, invisible, hovering Tenderness. One couldn’t be afraid or bitter where love was—and love was everywhere…    Emily of New Moon When the news came out in 2008 that Maud suffered from massive depression, which may have led to, or at least hastened, her death, a lot of people were shocked. I remember coming across online comments expressing disappointment that Lucy Maud wasn’t all she appeared to be from her books, as if her struggles somehow discredited her ideals. Academics made something of a sensation out of it, only too glad, perhaps, to add her to the canon of tortured female geniuses. But people just could not seem to account for the light she brought into the world, in the midst of such personal darkness. But let me tell you what this news did for me: I was absolutely bowled over with admiration and respect. Writing for her was not so much an escape, as an antidote. It was not an act of denial, but an act of defiance. Lanier Ivester As early as the 1890s her journals start bearing witness to bouts of devastating depression, usually brought on by some event that underscored her vulnerability. The death of one her dearest friends in 1897 nearly crippled her, and at the end of 1910 she suffered what we would call a nervous breakdown as a result of a prolonged and unnamed worry in her life. Unfortunately for her, and for so many sufferers from what was known as “neaurasthenia” in that day, there were few options beyond bromides and silence. Bromides were a commonly prescribed remedy for depression in the nineteenth century; a practice which persisted into the mid-twentieth century, when researchers began to realize (and doctors began to admit) that many of the patients in psych hospitals were not suffering so much from mental illness, but bromide poisoning. As in all too many cases, the cure was worse than the disease. Montgomery’s husband, Ewan, a Presbyterian minister consumed morbidly—and heartbreakingly—with the fear that he was not one of the ‘elect,’ had been treated for depression himself as early as 1919. He was later to develop the classic symptoms of bromide poisoning—the tragic upshot of which was that he was prescribed more bromide. It’s very likely that this medication which was supposed to help him destroyed his life. And there is evidence to suggest that bromides had a similarly, though not as outwardly dramatic, impact on Montgomery’s later life, as well. In a painful passage from her journal, written after her recovery from the 1910 attack, Maud confides: I have heard hell described as “a world from which hope was excluded.” Then I was in hell for those three weeks. I had NO hope. I could not realize any possible escape from suffering. You might wonder what is a pregnancy pillow and if a pregnancy pillow is necessary. A pregnancy pillow is a pillow that is meant to support your growing body throughout pregnancy. They are often called maternity pillows and they help to relieve pressure that your back and hips, along with other parts of your body, might feel. When you decide to pick the best pregnancy pillow for you, take a serious look at the considerations. Determine what type of pillow works best for your needs, and take a look at the features that matter the most. Those will help you make the right pick for you! #pregily #maternity. It seemed to me that I must exist in that anguish forever…      The Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 1 As I’ve already mentioned, 1937 was a year of almost unbearable sadness for her. Strikingly (for all her habitual “writing out”), it is a year of which she leaves no account in her journal; all we have was written after the fact. Nevertheless, 1937 was the year that Maud struck up a cheerful and encouraging correspondence with the aspiring young writer, Violet May King. In one of her letters, Maud tells Violet that the ability to see beauty in the world is “a birthright a princess might envy.” In another place, referring to the “happy ending” debate raging in the disenchanted 1930s literary circles, Maud said in defense of her happy endings that “the world must have something to keep it alive.” In writing to Violet, Maud doesn’t deny the fact of her personal struggles, but the undeniable focus of these letters is to keep this young woman from giving up on her literary dreams. I’m not trying to paint Maud as a faultless paragon. She was a very human, very wounded woman who made beautiful things in the face of often horrifying inner odds. But looking back over Maud’s books, and examining her life, I keep asking myself, “What was her greatest gift? What was her real legacy?” And what it boils down to—for me, at least—is hope. Montgomery’s stories give us hope—hope as readers; hope as artists. Lanier Ivester Hope that, in the face of war, and mass destruction, and illness and suffering, that the delights and vagaries and foibles of human nature still matter. That second chances actually do happen and that redemption is an active force at work in a broken world. That the pinewoods are just as real as the pigsties. That “Douglas Starr’s” God, not “Ellen Green’s” god, is running the universe. Montgomery’s stories give us hope—hope as readers; hope as artists. And this is absolutely mind-blowing, considering the fact that she struggled so mightily to keep hope alive in herself. This woman was so brave. She didn’t give herself up to the darkness and refuse to write at all. And she didn’t give into it and write what the darkness was dictating to her. That takes tremendous—I would say, superhuman—courage. Writing for her was not so much an escape, as an antidote. It was not an act of denial, but an act of defiance. When WWI shattered the world that she knew and loved, she kept writing of that world in order to keep reminding the world of what on earth they were fighting for. Two of her most optimistic books, Anne of the Island and Anne’s House of Dreams, were written while WWI was raging. And in WWII, Polish troops were issued copies of Anne of the Island to take to the front with them. WWII effectively broke her heart, I think, after all the optimism that WWI really would be the war to end all wars. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the wars raging in her personal life. But she never stopped incarnating her ideals in irresistibly human heroines. She never stopped articulating Beauty, Truth and Goodness, over and over and over again. She fought her stories into the world. But she never got so caught up in the battle that she forgot what she was fighting for. I think this passage from The Story Girl beautifully expresses Lucy Maud’s own heritage: Well, The Story Girl was right—There is such a place as fairyland—but … only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland. In Parts One, Two and Three of this series, I looked at some of the ways Lucy Maud Montgomery continues to enchant her readers over a hundred years after the publication of Anne of Green Gables, and examined a few of the practical means by which she accomplished that enduring magic.

I’m going to tell you a secret. This is one of those details of the writing process that feels so intimate I’m almost embarrassed to share it. When I did not yet know my heroine’s name would be Persimmony Smudge, for much of the first draft of The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic I called her “Joy.” I knew that would not be her name in the book; it was a bit of shorthand, a placeholder. My early notebooks are filled with it. I named her that while she was still lost, grumpy, prone to temper tantrums and pouting—in fact, rather (in the first draft) a little brat—anything but joyful. She certainly did not Embody an Idea. I called her that, in part, because even though I didn’t know exactly how the story was going to go, I had already glimpsed the ending—one moment in particular, one scene, in which something profoundly true and good would burst out of her in messy ecstasy. And so, underneath and deeper than the name of Persimmony, there was Joy, and in giving her that word to wear at the beginning of our journey together, I gave her an arc and a climax. To be named is to be set upon the path of an adventure. “No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations.” “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” “There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” For it is naming that marks you as part of creation. You are not nothing. You are unique in all the cosmos. You are loved. You are. Jennifer Trafton My favorite story about naming is Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wind in the Door, the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. Evil forces of hatred, dissension, and annihilation are ripping holes in the universe, and Meg Murry learns that she, along with her new cherubim partner Proginoskes (a singular cherubim; he is most certainly not a cherub), is a Namer. Proginoskes has learned the names of all the stars in all the galaxies “to help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be,” and Meg must similarly reach out with love, seeing in even the most despised of characters the seed of what they are meant to become, telling them their true names, their true selves. For it is naming that marks you as part of creation. You are not nothing. You are unique in all the cosmos. You are loved. You are. To be named is to be known. This is why, as an author, it’s so vitally important to me to get the names of my characters right. Persimmony, when I eventually settled on it, was meaningful to me—like persimmon, the bitter fruit that ripens to sweetness. Smudge—unheroic, unimportant, ironic. And even though Persimmony Smudge exists only in my imagination and the imaginations of those who read the story, she will always exist—she can’t un-exist now, can’t undo her own story. Though she is not matter, she matters (to use L’Engle’s pun) because she is named and known. I created her. I named her (twice!) She is. I have a friend who, more than anyone else I’ve known, is a Namer. She has named me Beautiful, Playful, Fierce, Bold, or my favorite, recorded in my “encouragement” file, Giant Walking Womb of Creation. That is her special gift: to find the broken people and remind them of their names, or give them new ones. “This is the word that defines you,” she seems to be saying, “not the false words you’ve been calling yourself or others less loving have called you.” And because she is a poet, she is uniquely able to craft words that make people seem like the most epic versions of themselves. I imagine her like Adam sitting on a stone in Eden as the creatures pass by, laying a hand on each and saying gently, “You are…” There’s a beautiful audacity to this kind of naming. It’s one thing to say to a frightened person, “Hey, I know you’re scared, but try to be braver. You can do it.” It’s quite another to say, “Your name is Brave. I love you for it. Go and be who you are.” There are a number of people in my life who love me far better than I love myself and who remind me, daily, of the names I am too afraid to accept. I want to say, “Don’t name me Artist when I’m not. Don’t name me Gentle when I’m not. Don’t name me Lovely when I’m not.” I know how far removed my real nature is from these words. It was precisely this discomfort that made me think recently of Persimmony squirming in the audacious, misfitting first draft I stuck her into. I imagine her stomping her foot and saying, “Don’t name me Joy when that is nothing like me.” I have a feeling that if God bent down today and whispered my true name, the name written on a white stone, the name he gave me before the world began, it would not be an immediate comfort to me. There would be no warm fuzzies. I would not say, “Of course! I always knew it would be that!” I expect I wouldn’t recognize it at all or understand what it had to do with the person I see inside myself. There would be a baffling sense of disconnect. Perhaps it is best that we not know our name too early in the story. It might terrify us. Imagine going to a timid little girl who gets spooked by her own shadow and telling her, “Actually, your real name is Deadly-Dragon-Piercer.” The implication of the plot to come, no matter what the resolution, might be too much for her. The poor girl would never come out of her bedroom. If I must someday be known as Excruciating-Torture-Chamber-Survivor, I’d rather not know it ahead of time, thank you anyway. It is enough for me to know that the name is there, underneath and deeper than the name Jennifer—that the Author gave it to me even before he wrote life into my bones, that it will shine out of me in the climactic scene when I finally grow into its meaning, and it will be the name that defines me as a character in the Great Story. Someday I’ll be told, gently, just as if I were to put my arm around Persimmony at the end of her story and say to her, “In the beginning, before you were born on paper, when I dreamed you into being and set your feet upon a journey, I named you Joy. And now, finally, you know why.”

Silence is a masterpiece that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. I don’t know when I’ve ever seen an adaptation that so well translates the nuance of its source material. But after seeing the film, my wife made a critical observation of the story that I think is worth pointing out. As I believe everyone knows, the story deals with persecution and suffering and the nature of apostasy. It’s gut-wrenching, and doesn’t give easy answers, doesn’t let anyone off the hook. It’s a swamp of impossible moral choices and subtleties that ought to unsettle anyone who watches (or reads) it. But in the midst of its portrayal of suffering and persecution, what’s missing is a discussion of resurrection. The Christian perspective on suffering and death fundamentally changes in the light of bodily resurrection, and it’s notable that none of the priests in the story make any mention of it. Why? One possible reason is that it’s difficult to discuss resurrection in the context of a story about suffering without seeming like you’re explaining away the unpleasantness or offering a trite answer to a painful reality. It’s kind of like telling a friend at a funeral to cheer up because “heaven’s got a new angel”—an unhelpful or even hurtful sentiment in a moment of grief. Or maybe Endo, and by extension Scorsese, was primarily concerned with the subject of suffering and apostasy and limited his authorial lens in order to keep the focus on those issues, choosing not to engage the wider implications of resurrection. None of this lessens my love for the book or the film, but the question looms large and makes me wonder about the omission. Would my feelings about Rodrigues’s choices be different if he’d demonstrated a more robust Christian theology? What differences are there between what we see of Endo’s portrayal of martyrs and apostates in Japan versus what history tells us of other martyrs, specifically those of the early church? How does a concrete belief in the resurrection of the body explain those differences? Does Silence embody a meaningful view of the resurrection? If so, how? If not, why? I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on the matter, or on the film/book in general. What do you think?

Good music has a way of fostering community, and sometimes that community begets more good music. A collaborative album between Ron Block and Jeff Taylor has seemed like a natural for years now, and the occasions the two gifted players have shared the stage have built steady anticipation. The result is Trouble Go Down, an album of sweet hymns and songs that warm the spirit. The collaboration was made richer when the pair turned to Rebecca Reynolds for lyrics to several of the melodies. I spoke with Ron and Rebecca at Hutchmoot 2017 and learned about their approach to songcraft, the subtle distinctions between poetry and lyrics, and the difference between a fine port wine and a beer-can helmet. Tell me about your songwriting process. Does it stay fairly regimented as to who writes the music and who writes the lyrics? Rebecca Reynolds: Generally, I’m lyrics and they’re music. Ron Block: There might be a little adjustment. She’ll say, “The melody goes down here but I’d like it to go up.” Or I’ll say, “This word reads well and sounds good but it doesn’t sing well. Can we change it?” We’ll modify little things here and there. The process is fascinating to someone who is not a songwriter. To read words and then hear a melody in your head, or to hear notes and imagine words to match, is a bit mystical to me. RB: Art is evocative. When she sends lyrics, I read them and I think, how does that make me feel? Then I get out a guitar, and I don’t have a left-brain analytical thing going on. It’s very right-brained for me. RR: A lot of times the words are already in there. For a couple of songs, I listen two or three times and think, There’s something that melody is trying to sing. Oh, it sounds like that. Then you send it back and ask if that’s what they intended the song to mean. What’s an example of a tune that was trying to sing words? RR: The words were definitely in “Trouble Go Down.” RB: I remember she said it feels like a mixture of King James English and Kentucky back woods. RR: It reminded me of these Kentucky Music Weekend fesitvals I’d go to growing up. I thought, there’s one of those songs that I used to hear growing up. So it was easy to find that feeling in it. What are some of the differences in writing poetry—even rhyming poetry—versus song lyrics? RR: A lot of the principles transfer. The main thing is, especially when I was first writing songs (and I’m still making this mistake), that there’s a density to written poetry, but in song poetry or lryics, Ron reminds me, if it’s too dense, people will have trouble unpacking it. It needs to be simpler when it’s musical. So, in terms of the meter, even if you’re looking at enjambment or the line breaks or the movement, and little quirky things like where you’re going to ask a question and answer the question, or—you know how a sonnet works, where you have 14 lines but then on line 9 you’re going to have the volta, or like a haiku when you’re trying to create tension and then answer it—a lot of those elemental things you can have in a song, but you can’t have those super-dense, academic images or words or people get lost. RB: Poetry is like when you sip port. You don’t chug port. You sip it, and it explodes, and it gives a burst of revelation. And then after that you sip again. That’s what poetry’s like. If you go to the other end of the spectrum, some brands of popular music are like the helmet with the two beer cans and the straws, and you flip a switch and it all goes down your gullet. That’s all you’re going to get out of that song—that one little shot of high, and you’re never going to get anything else out of that song. There’s nothing there. There’s a spectrum between port and this immediate experience. And somewhere in between are guys like Paul Simon. You get something out of it on the first listen but as you listen more and more it deepens. In poetry, sometimes you don’t get anything on the first reading, but then slowly you start to see something. In music you can’t do that to too great a degree because the listener generally is not going to be as patient as a literary reader of poetry. The listener is just going to skip to the next song, and then they’re never going to listen to it again. That’s what we’ve had to do. She can write very dense poetry, and less dense poetry. Instead of a series of images in each line, I’ve got to have a central image to the whole song, and then speak to that image in each verse. “Gather Ye” is that, it’s a nature image, and it shows who God is in all these aspects of nature. RR: One of the things I’ve started doing—it won’t show up much on this record but if we get to do another one it will—I’ve been listening to opera (because my literary agent really likes opera). One of the things that’s different is the pace. It’s good for me to see that musical poetry works differently than written poetry. You have to let people have time. I was talking here at Hutchmoot with a friend about how I write album reviews, how I let it play in the background for a while before my first dedicated listen. I mentioned that the really great song reaches out of the background and grabs me. I think that’s the middle you’re talking about—a song commands attention but is not bewildering or overwhelming. RB: There’s a wide middle ground. I really do think that some forms of popular music try to push to be almost too simplistic. Sometimes that happens. To me the best ground for lyrics is the wide middle ground. Even on one record. Here’s a little bit more dense one for people to chew on, and here’s one that’s simple for everybody. And then you sequence them carefully. RB: Yes, then you choose what goes where on the record. RR: And we dropped one that I loved but it was too dense. “Hail Thou.” The meaning was beautiful. RB: The poetry was beautiful. And I’ll probably put it out eventually as a demo or something, ’cause it’s a cool track. RR: You could pick it apart and see what matches with what and unpack it… RB: …but most listeners aren’t going to do that. Regarding density, I think there’s a place in bluegrass that is different on that scale than maybe other genres. RB: Yes, again in pop-influenced music—and this is not a slam, it’s just the way things are—in pop-influenced music there’s an instrumental hook, some theme that happens. In bluegrass there might be that theme, but it tends to be more varied. Popular forms of music tend to be more static. In my musical sense, which is foundationally the bluegrass kind of sense, I tend toward that. I think Jeff does too. But, for instance, “Gather Ye” has that theme that he plays—it’s the same theme. We access some of that, but it’s a little more complex—kind of Irishy-classical. I’m going to speak out of my league in music theory here, but you have a few parts both lyrically and musically in a couple of the songs that are almost like a fugue, with repetition of phrase, either musical or lyrical, and that’s not trivial. You don’t hear that a lot in. Does that come from a random set of ideas that are working at the time, or some deeper influences? RB: I think it’s both. Speaking instrumentally, when we’re sitting there arranging something, it has to ring true inside me or inside Jeff. Sometimes there’s something missing, and I can’t identify it. The only way to remedy it is experimentation. Let me try this—can you try this? Then you kinda find it. Sometimes it’s experimentation that helps you find those things that are repetitive but not mindlessly so. Even in that repetition there is variation. It maintains an interest. One of the things you have to do as a musician, whether you’re taking a solo or writing a song, you are juggling the listener’s expectation. They expect the melody, so I can throw them a curveball a little bit. If I’m playing a hymn, I’m playing the melody and playing the lines, but then I’ll go, I feel like doing this thing that twists the phrasing just a little bit so they don’t fall asleep. You’re playing with their expectation. They say, “Oh, I didn’t expect that, that’s cool,” and then, “Ah… I did expect that, that’s nice.” I think you can abuse that, too, and frustrate the listener. RB: Yes, you can go too far in either direction. It can be boring, or it can be an abstract thing that never repeats and has no melody. Ron, your vocal range seemed really big on this album. Was that you continuing to grow and stretch yourself? You write the notes; you’re in control of the range. RB: Remember “Inside the Actor’s Studio”? Both Richard Dreyfuss and Sally Field were asked, “What made you take that script?” They both said something along the lines of, “Because it scared me to death.” That place of, Am I going to be able to do this?, that’s the place of growth. When we were doing these melodies and choosing these keys, sometimes I’d think, that’s pretty wide. But I went to my vocal coach, and we figured it out. You have to grow. It forces you to grow. This record has helped me move into new places. This might sound terribly contrived, but I wanted to get each of you to talk about the other’s contribution to one song. RR: Can I pick an instrumental? I listen to “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” over and over again. It makes me do what the song says—to lean. Whatever I’m thinking and wrestling with, when that comes on, I’m not listening to a record. It puts me in that place where I’m leaning on the arms of God. It’s like prayer almost. The way he plays that takes me out of the temporal realm and puts me in the eternal realm. Actively. RB: The purpose of the record was to have the guy who’s driving to work thinking, I fought with my boss yesterday and I don’t want to face him, or the mom that’s struggling with her teenage son. They can put this record on and go, I remember. I can do it. RB: I want to talk about “Everything Broken and Everything Beautiful.” I love what she did with that. “The fog angels bathe in a choir of praise, yield to the sun as it rises.” I remember many times overlooking a river and in the morning you see those wisps of fog and as the sun comes up it begins to burn them off and they yield. So that image of us yielding to God, yielding to the sun as it rises. Remember what I was saying about writing reviews? That line grabbed me by the ears out of the background and said, “I’m going to blow you away right now.” RR: I was at a state park, really early in the morning, and it has these beautiful bodies of water. I turned around a corner and there was this strange fog—there were hundreds of these little tendrils and it looked like at the top they were opening, almost gasping, and I thought, I just saw something amazing. I was reading something at the time that made me think about unity and submission. RB: That’s how a poet views the world. Last question. “His Love Will Bear You On” has half the Rabbit Room on the vocal! How did that come about? RR: We were talking about wanting it to be like the end of Hutchmoot, when everybody sings the Doxology. We wanted to catch some of that spirit. RB: I love that when you listen, you can go, oh, there’s Ellie, and that voice sounds familiar, who’s on the right? It captures that sense of community. RR: We wanted it to be an invitation. [Trouble Go Down is available in the Rabbit Room Store.]

This post is adapted from a talk given at Hutchmoot 2016. T. S. Eliot is one of the most iconic poets of modern times. In fact some would probably label him one of the most original poets of the 20th century. And yet, when we study his own philosophy and poetry, Eliot does not seem all that interested in being “original” in the sense that we understand it. He is rather, as Thomas Rees puts it, a “master of eclectic synthesis.” Eliot is famously known for saying something along the lines of “bad poets imitate; good poets steal.” What he really said is a little more involved. In discussing how 17th century English dramatist Philip Massinger borrowed from Shakespeare, Eliot wrote: “One of the surest of tests [of greatness] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion” (The Sacred Wood). Eliot believed that the poet must be a student of poetic tradition and his contemporary environment, and through such study would arrive at a poetic distillation of the two. He thought a poet must embody “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer.” At the same time, he also believed that any new poem shifted how one would view past art. For him, tradition and the present existed in a dynamic relationship, in which the former was carefully studied and respected and incorporated into the latter, and the peculiar distillation of the latter served to shed new light on the former. A perfect example of this is Eliot’s famous poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” On the one hand, it has a highly individualistic feeling, presenting the inner monologue of a man disenchanted and weary of modern life. But Eliot achieves this expression by “remixing” and “stealing” from a variety of sources, including Dante, Shakespeare (Hamlet and Twelfth Night), Rudyard Kipling (from whom he got the idea of the title), and the Bible (John the Baptist and the parable of Lazarus and the rich man)—at least. Eliot distilled them all with his own unique style, but understanding the allusions enriches our understanding of the poem. Modern poet Billy Collins presents Eliot’s idea in a slightly different way when talking about the oft used expression “finding your voice”: “What I don’t like about the expression ‘finding your voice’ is that it’s very mystifying in the minds of young people. It makes you feel — made me feel when I first heard it — that your voice is tied up with your authenticity, that your voice lies deep within you, at some root bottom of your soul, and that to find your voice you need to fall into deep introspection… you have to gaze deeply into yourself. The frustration and the anxiety is that maybe you won’t find anything there. That you’re on this terrible quest to nowhere. Let me reassure you that it’s not that mysterious. Your voice has an external source. It is not lying within you. It is lying in other people’s poetry. It is lying on the shelves of the library. To find your voice, you need to read deeply. You need to look inside yourself, of course, for material, because poetry is something that honors subjectivity. It honors your interiority. It honors what’s inside. But to find a way to express that, you have to look outside yourself. Read widely, read all the poetry you can get your hands on. And in your reading, you’re searching for something. Not so much your voice. You’re searching for poets that make you jealous. Professors of writing call this “literary influence.” It’s jealousy. And it’s with every art, whether you play the saxophone, or do charcoal drawings. You’re looking to get influenced by people who make you furiously jealous. Read widely. Find poets that make you envious. And then copy them. Try to get like them.You know, you read a great poem in a magazine somewhere, and you just can’t stand the fact that you didn’t write it. What do you do? Well, you can’t get whiteout, and blank out the poet’s name and write yours in — that’s not fair. But you can say, “Okay, I didn’t write that poem, let me write a poem like that, that’s sort of my version of that.” And that’s basically the way you grow….After you find your voice, you realize there’s really only one person to imitate, and that’s yourself. You do it by combining different influences. I think the first part of it is you do slavish imitations, which are almost like travesties, you know. But gradually you come under the right influences, picking and choosing, and being selective, and then maybe your voice is the combination of 6 or 8 other voices that you have managed to blend in such a way that no one can recognize the sources. You can take intimacy from Whitman, you can learn the dash from Emily Dickinson…you can pick a little bit from every writer and you combine them. This allows you to be authentic. That’s one of the paradoxes of the writing life: that the way to originality is through imitation.” What Eliot and Collins are both talking about here is something Austin Kleon refers to as the Artist’s Family Tree. In his book Steal Like An Artist he writes: “Marcel Duchamp said, ‘I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.’ This is actually a pretty good method for studying—if you try to devour the history of your discipline all at once, you’ll choke. Instead, chew on one thinker—writer, artist, activist, role model—you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start you own branch. Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff…. The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.” For those of us who create, achieving something unique in our art will likely be both easier and harder than we thought. Easier in that it might not involve incessant navel gazing and endless soul-searching for our “authentic voice,” but harder in that it will involve the hard work of time spent at the feet of those who have gone before us, and time spent distilling all of those influences through practice until we arrive at something that feels like our own. As Karen Burke Lefevre puts it in Invention As a Social Act: “There will always be great need for individual initiative, but no matter how inventive an individual wants to be, he will be influenced for better or for worse by the intellectual company he keeps. On top of Mt. Mansfield in Vermont, there are thirty-year-old trees that are only three feet tall. If a tree begins to grow taller, extending beyond the protection of the others, it dies. The moral for inventors [and artists]: Plant yourself in a tall forest if you hope to have ideas of stature.”

The Founder is a good film. From the story of Ray Kroc’s invention of fast food, to the acting (Michael Keaton, Laura Dern, and Nick Offerman), The Founder is an enjoyable ride that reveals Kroc’s rise to the top of the most American of empires. But hours after the credits rolled, I realized why I felt so empty after watching it. The Founder is soulless. The story of Ray Kroc’s fast food empire isn’t rooted so much in good ole hard work as it is acting at all times somewhere between “duplicitous” and “wicked.” Originally, McDonalds was a single San Bernadino hamburger joint with lines around the block, run by two brothers who perfected the art of fast food. An efficient work station (30 seconds from grill to customer!), simple menu (burgers, fries and cokes!) and convenient packaging (you can throw it away!) brought families by the carload and eventually drew Kroc’s attention. From there, Kroc’s natural salesmanship and relentless drive for more (in any area of life) broke through the McDonald brothers’ defenses, allowing Kroc to legally oversee and take over franchising for the brand. A few legal loopholes later, the McDonald brothers found themselves outsiders looking in to their own company. And they weren’t the only characters with such perspective, since Kroc also steals the wife of a fellow businessman in Minneapolis who buys into the company. The bottom line: If you have something Ray Kroc wants, he will find a way to take it. This story is nothing new in Hollywood. Wolf of Wall Street tells the same tale. So does every movie made about the recent financial crisis (Margin Call, The Big Short). The problem is that the villains in those movies are treated as villainous. They are horrible people doing horrible things and the distance is felt between audience and protagonist, a necessary gap I was unable to understand until watching The Founder. Watching Michael Keaton deceive anyone and everyone was a thrill, and I was cheering him on the entire way. During those two hours, I was excited to see Keaton swindle the McDonald brothers out of their rightful share of the (crazy) profits. “They had no vision for what McDonalds could be.” I was agreeing with Keaton, who’d also outwitted me. “Her husband doesn’t appreciate her,” was my initial response to why Joan Smith (Linda Cardellini) should be with Kroc instead. Maybe that’s why I have issues with The Founder even so long after watching it in the first place — that I stand among those who were duped by Ray Kroc. For 115 minutes, I also gave Kroc whatever he desired — my attention, my approval — even as he completely disregarded any needs of my own. He bridged the gap that typically exists in these kinds of films, allowing me to empathize with a man who deserves only scorn. Maybe that makes The Founder a better film than I realized.

“When we avoid…the suffering of others…what we’re really avoiding is the cross. Embracing refugees, welcoming them, is welcoming Jesus, and we’re missing out on the opportunity to do that when we hold them at arm’s length.”

Some walls are built to keep something out. Others are built to keep something in. But there’s another kind of wall, a wall that defines the boundaries of a place in order to make that place more beautiful, and to demonstrate a kind of affection. (I wrote about it a few years ago in a post called “You Shall Be My Pumpkins.”) I started building a dry stack stone wall about three weeks ago on a chilly day in January. As is usually the case, I had no idea what I was doing. When I started keeping bees, I got my dad’s bee supplies leftover from his short stint as a beekeeper, ordered a queen, and asked questions later. This is, I realize, in flagrant opposition to Jesus’s parable about counting the cost, but it’s a weakness I can’t seem to shake. Planning bores the tar out of me. When the mood strikes to build something or write something or draw something, I dive right in because who has time to do homework when there’s something cool to be done? This kind of behavior drives some people crazy (my long-suffering and wonderful manager, Christie, for example), but even though I get myself into pickles sometimes I happen to think the pickle is part of the fun. Back to the wall. I love stone walls. I love them in Tennessee, I love them in the British Isles, and I love them in New England when ex-convicts played by Morgan Freeman discover secret notes from Andy Dufresne hidden in them. We have an old wall here at the Warren that was built before the Civil War, and every time I walk beside it my imagination is dancing with images of the people who made it. I wonder why it was put there in the first place. You have to mean to build a stone wall, you know? Someone on Facebook, on seeing a photo of my progress, said that they had a revelation about the existence of God when they spotted a dry stack wall while driving through the countryside. The wall couldn’t have happened on accident; it was put there with a great deal of work and consideration. When I researched the cost of building one I was deflated by the fact that a four-foot wall costs, on average, about $100 a foot, so I never got around to starting one. But then. Then, the Peterson family was given a mighty gift. Julie Witmer, who has a bona fide English Gardener’s certificate, emailed one day from her home in Pennsylvania and offered to come to the Warren with her family for a weekend and help us map out a master plan for our property. We live on five acres, about half of which is wooded. The other half is pasture, more or less, and while it’s pretty to look at, that much space makes landscaping difficult. Eric Peters, on the other hand, lives with his family in East Nashville in a lovely little house with a fenced backyard and a front porch and a sidewalk. His flowerbeds are gorgeous and diligently weeded. His backyard has little nooks and crannies that are lovingly landscaped. Whenever we visit the Peters house I’m always a little envious because he has a defined space to work with—a frame for the picture, so to speak. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining—just saying that a few acres of pasture makes landscaping tricky. There was no getting around it. It was time to build that wall. I went out one day with my boys, a few shovels, and some string, took a deep breath, and started digging. That was a few weeks ago. Andrew Peterson All that to say, when the Witmers offered their kind assistance, we jumped at the chance. A few months after their visit, during which Julie took lots of pictures and measurements and sketches, she sent us what she called the Thirty Year Plan. It’s beautiful. You can see our house from a bird’s eye view, and all around it are splashes of color where amsonia and hydrangea and yarrow are placed among walking paths and raised vegetable garden beds and raspberry arbors. In a column on the right is a list of all the plants she recommends and how many of each we’ll need. We framed her plan and hung it on the wall, a practical piece of art. When I study the plan, I can almost smell the flowers as I move around inside her dream. Then I tear my eyes away and look out the window at a bare yard, and I’m struck by the tension between the hope and the reality, the future and the present, as if the expectation of the thing haunts the property. To my delight, the plan included a stone wall that borders an English garden in our front yard. Like I said, it’s the Thirty Year Plan. There’s no way on earth we could find the money or the time to do it all at once, but we can do a little each year, so I decided on a whim to start on the front yard. But how to begin? I ordered a few of the plants this winter, to be shipped at planting time in early spring. I knew I’d need to mulch the yard to kill the grass, but it wouldn’t make sense to do that unless there was some definition to the area. There was no getting around it. It was time to build that wall. I went out one day with my boys, a few shovels, and some string, took a deep breath, and started digging. That was a few weeks ago. I had no idea how many thousands of pounds of rock I’d need to lift, how many pairs of work gloves I would wear through (two so far, and I’m about to need a third), or how much I would obsess every waking minute over rocks, rocks, rocks. On every drive I’m scanning the sides of the roads for the right kinds of stone, every time I walk our property I come back to the front yard hefting a stone from the woods, every morning when I wake up the first order of business is opening the blinds to evaluate yesterday’s work. It’s been a deeply satisfying process—a few hours each day of either driving to get more rocks from the roadside, dumping them in the yard, sifting through them for the right rock, tapping little shims into the spaces with a hammer to make sure they fit tightly, running out of stones and in exasperation driving out to find more. Slowly but surely the wall came to be. I’d get mentally fatigued and head in to the house for a drink of water, wondering what on earth I had gotten myself into, and then I’d see the Witmer garden plan on the wall. After a few minutes of studying the Thirty Year Plan I’d nod resolutely and walk out into a physical version of it—under construction to be sure, but the manifestation of Julie’s imagination no less—and I’d find a fresh wind to carry me through the next layer of stone. Saturday I built the falsework for a stone archway. The archway wasn’t in her plan, but our family agreed that there just had to be one. We’d seen so many of them still standing in the ruins of abbeys and castles in Britain and Ireland that the thought of having one in our front yard was too good to pass up. Yes, I’m following the Witmer plan, but just like writing a book, it’s good to leave room for surprises. When I told my brother Pete I was going to build an old school arch he scoffed (that’s what big brothers do). “How are you going to do that?” he scoffed. I counter-scoffed with a shrug and told him, “The glory of the interweb.” It turns out I’m not the only oddball out there interested in stone arches. People have been doing this for thousands of years, I figured, so it wasn’t a question of “Is it possible?” but a question of “Am I crazy enough to try it?” First I built up the wall on the sides of the gap to reinforce the outward pressure of the arch. Then I built what’s called “falsework,” a wooden support in the shape of the arch. The falsework is held up by  four 2×6 legs, screwed in so that once the arch is complete I can just unscrew them (verrrrry carefully) and let gravity do the rest. I stood the frame in the gap and right about then Pete came over to scoff some more. “That thing’s gonna fall, you know.” “You’re probably right. But I’m going to try.” “Well, call me when you’re ready. I’ll have the car warmed up to take you to the hospital.” I know my big brother well enough to know that his scoffery is meant as encouragement, because he knows that if there’s one thing that can motivate a little brother it’s the desire to gloat over his big brother’s unjust scoffing. I placed the rocks on the falsework slowly, heaving them up from my pickup bed one at a time and then shimming them into place. The keystone went on last, followed by several more shims, just to make sure the whole thing was tight as a drum. I called Pete and shouted for my family to come watch. To make a long story short, it worked. Pete was congratulatory. I wasn’t too gloaty, I don’t think. The gravity of the earth tugs constantly, unwaveringly down, and that half-circle of ancient stones wedged against one another just hang in the air as if they were always meant to do that very thing. (Pete, by the way, gloated on Facebook that he was the first to walk under it.) Here’s the deal. I’ve had plenty of time, as you can imagine, to think while I’m out there laying stone. In the mornings I’ve even prayed quite a bit that this wall-building process would be a kind of worship, and that God would show me something. And he did. For weeks now, working with stones lifted from their graves in the Old Earth to give them new and beautiful purpose, I haven’t stopped thinking about the New Earth. The New Creation. That map on the wall was born of someone else’s imagination and expertise. From a far country Julie cast a vision for our lives. We hung that vision on our wall as a picture not of what is, but of what will be. When we look at it, our minds can’t help but wander to the day when, thirty years hence, we’ll move around inside the real thing. When I get tired, discouraged, forgetful of what on earth I’m doing out there in the yard, I look at the map and remember: there’s a world that is coming—a world I could never have imagined on my own, a world born out of a gardener’s mind. I have been invited into the building of that world. It’s not just theory. It’s not just pie-in-the-sky. It’s stone and sweat and work and wonder, all to make our little corner of Tennessee look a bit more like the Kingdom of God. This archway is not meant to keep anyone or anything out or in. When we’re standing in our garden, the gate will beckon us out into the wild pasture. When we’re in the pasture, the archway will beckon us into the order and fragrance of the garden. The wall is the frame of the picture, which makes not just the painting more beautiful, but also the very room it inhabits. And the arch? The arch is neither a way in or out, but a way through, a passage that honors the going and the coming, just as the mouth is for breath and for song, both of which are necessary for survival.

If you’re in the Nashville area, we want to invite you to join our friends at Covenant Seminary on March 3rd and 4th for this special seminar led by Denis Haack of the Ransom Fellowship. Professor Haack was mentored by Francis and Edith Schaeffer and he brings a love for music, film, and visual art that engages the Church both in how to appreciate these mediums as good art as well as how to engage with them as communication about the truth of God’s world. Denis is the author of The Rest of Success: What the World Didn’t Tell You About Having It All. We’re delighted to be a sponsor of the event and we’re offering a huge discount to Rabbit Room readers. The seminar costs $48 to attend, but if you use the code “rabbitroom” during registration you’ll get a $33 discount, bringing the registration down to just $15. That’s a great deal for a two-day seminar! Here’s a description of what’s in store: Human culture began at creation, receiving God’s blessing as part of what was “very good.” Then the fall fractured human creativity from God’s glory, so that now culture is both for blessing and for curse. As God’s redeemed people we can learn to be discerning rather than defensive or reactionary, making and responding to culture under Christ’s Lordship and so anticipate the restoration of all things. In an age of disbelief when Christian faith is seen as unattractive and unnecessary, when hostility to faith is increasing, every believer can demonstrate that the God they serve is the God of truth, goodness and beauty beyond our wildest imagining. In this class we will begin a conversation about seeing culture and human creativity biblically, developing skill in cultural discernment, and being faithful in ordinary life as a witness to the gospel in our increasingly diverse world. We hope to see you there. Click here to register. TIME & DATE Friday March 3: 7–9pm Saturday March 4: 8am–5pm LOCATION West End Community Church Nashville, TN SPEAKER Professor Denis Haack is the Director of Ransom Fellowship, a ministry devoted to teaching Christians the art of discernment amid popular culture. Denis is the author of The Rest of Success: What the World Didn’t Tell You About Having It All and has written articles for such journals as: Reformation & Revival Journal; Eternity; Covenant; and, World. You can find his ministry at www.ransomfellowship.org.

In the middle of January, I took two weeks off from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It’s a tricky experiment when one of your jobs is managing social media, but setting all my apps to work accounts and actively avoiding Facebook’s Home button when I dropped in to schedule updates was enough to hold me back from unintentional journeys down the Internet rabbit hole. Though I missed the voices of my wise and funny friends, there were plenty of things I was grateful to leave behind — illogical bickering among strangers, comment thread rage, dramatic clickbait “news,” and incessant ads, to name a few. If I had to describe those two almost-unplugged weeks, I’d say it felt like a fog lifting, like the voices screaming about everything wrong with the world quieted until I could hear something true again. Sometimes, I wish I could make the break permanent. Hey, I can’t fix the world, so why should I let arguing and opinions drag me down? Today, I present two ideas I’ve held in tension since returning to the social media machine, two ideas I’m not sure how to reconcile. Perhaps you’ve struggled here too, or have some insights on surviving this constantly connected culture. Idea One: I don’t want to be totally uninformed or let compassion fatigue set in. On one of my first days back, as I scrolled through my Facebook feed wishing everything wasn’t deadly serious, Matt Conner posted something that shifted my perspective: “It’s one thing to need an escapist moment in the middle of a bad day — to go see a movie or binge watch a few episodes of The Office after a long week at your own place of work. It’s another entirely to wish away something deemed negative or divisive because you’re uncomfortable. Those with the most rights are the ones who are tired talking about them.” Or in other words, to say “I can’t take any more negativity” is a luxury statement. My “negativity” is another’s everyday struggle. How can I turn away from the real hurting human behind the scared or angry tweet? “We’re living in a society in which facts are thrown away, yet somehow we’re already growing “tired” of being informed?” Idea Two: How much information is too much? When do the voices grow so loud I can barely form a thought for myself? Some, like writer Alan Jacobs, suggest massively scaling back on the quick bursts of information and hot takes to take a long view: “On social media today everyone is in a state of high alarm all the time. Which leads me to something I didn’t mention explicitly in my year in technology post: my efforts to get onto a longer news frequency… I have come to believe that it is impossible for anyone who is regularly on social media to have a balanced and accurate understanding of what is happening in the world. To follow a minute-by-minute cycle of news is to be constantly threatened by illusion.” All this leaves me wondering if our breakdown in honest dialogue and simple civility might be born in that constant “high alarm,” this stream of panicked noise all around us. It’s one thing to be informed, but now it seems we have to be informed AND have an opinion five minutes after anything happens—be first to speak, make some noise, amplify. And before you know it, it’s hard to tell which voice is yours and which is the sum of the rumblings all around. I am grateful for the space and community we’ve cultivated here, for slow takes and careful thought, for Civil Language and the via media. And now I’m wondering, how can we successfully live in this tension?  How can we keep informed about the harm done to our neighbors, stay humble and alert, but take in the flood of information without drowning? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

I think we all have memories of finishing a favorite childhood book—of turning the final page and feeling as if we’ve lived a lifetime in the space between those two covers. We will never forget where we were the day Aslan came alive again, just as people never forget where they were when they heard that Kennedy was shot or a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I still remember vividly that family car trip when everyone filed into Wendy’s for a lunch and bathroom break except me—I was still sitting in our minivan, unable to tear myself away from the last pages of Jane Eyre. Here is another such memory: 12 years old, propped up on my pillows with a reading light on, long past my bedtime. My mother walked in to find me sobbing and asked what was wrong. “It’s just so sad … and so good,” I cried. I was reading the final chapters of the final book in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne series, Rilla of Ingleside (about Anne’s youngest daughter). That book looms large for me when I think of those tipping point years between childhood and adolescence. It was, I think, one of my first experiences, in literature, of good grief, a grief that contains the world’s suffering in its heart and yet reaches past the darkness to find something beautiful on the other side. It was a feeling I was later to encounter on a much larger scale in books like The Lord of the Rings. But Rilla was important to me at that stage of my life because it was a depiction of real grown-up suffering in the real world—in this case a world in the throes of the Great War. All things great are wound up with all things little. L. M. Montgomery Like many of Montgomery’s novels, Rilla of Ingleside has been cursed with modern covers that make it look like the most saccharine of teenage romance novels—a travesty, as well as a false advertising. Teen romances are not typically filled with acerbic commentaries on Kaiser Wilhelm II by matronly Canadian housekeepers. And in this romance, between the first dance and the final kiss, a girl’s soul must pass through the fires of hell as she learns womanhood through self-sacrifice, heart-numbing grief, and quietly heroic perseverance. Not to mention orphaned babies in soup tureens. Only a few years after I finished that book, I would be sobbing in my bedroom again because my own world had just been plunged into war—Operation Desert Storm—and like Rilla I felt the foundations of my childhood security crumble away beneath me. Could anything be beautiful again? Would I have to endure what Rilla and Walter and Anne and Gilbert had to endure? When Lanier Ivester approached me about leading a session on L. M. Montgomery at Hutchmoot with her, my first thought was, “What do I have to say that anyone in the audience who grew up with Anne Shirley couldn’t say from their own overflowing heart? She was the kindred spirit who led me by the hand through my girlhood. The end.” And my second thought was, “Lanier Ivester is the living embodiment of L. M. Montgomery. I could simply point to her and sit down again. Enough said.” I’m actually serious, and I’m not trying to embarrass Lanier with praise. As I was re-reading some of my favorite Montgomery books—and a few new ones like The Blue Castle which I had missed out on thirty years ago—I felt deeply convicted. Here I am saying that this author has been one of the most influential authors in my life, but what does that really mean, for me? Have I put into practice the lessons I learned from her? If so, why does nearly every poetic sentence, every rapturous phrase, remind me not of myself but of my dear friend—who doesn’t simply pay lip service to her muse’s vision, she lives and breathes it, and everyone around her sees the fruits of it. And so that was my challenge to myself as I thought about what to say to the Hutchmoot audience. Why have Montgomery’s books been so important to me, and what am I going to do about it? Case in point: All my life I’ve longed to live in a place that deserved a name. In Montgomery’s books every good and beautiful spot of earth was christened with fairy tale fervor: Green Gables, Windy Poplars, Rainbow Valley, New Moon, Silver Bush, Lantern Hill, the Lake of Shining Waters. People rarely name their houses anymore, perhaps because they are so often temporary abodes in our migratory culture, perhaps because modern homes lack individual personalities that make them seem as alive as the people who live inside them. And it’s not so easy to believe in the poetry of place while surrounded by the prosaic world of suburban America. I don’t think anyone has ever impersonated the Lady of Shalott while floating down Mill Creek under the concrete overhang of Old Hickory Boulevard with its ungraceful blooms of air-brushed graffiti. But why not? Why is there so little “scope for the imagination” in our ugly modern cities? Would Pan ever coming piping through our manicured hedges? When we moved into North Wind Manor, we knew of course that we would give the house a name, just like the Warren next door. But I didn’t just fall in love with a house; I love the whole hill on which our few little houses stand, surrounded by a slender halo of woods that shield us from the sight of the neighborhoods beyond. I let some of the neighborhood kids in one of my writing tutorials reimagine our hill as their own fantasy domain, and they came up with “The Woods of the Moon,” which is an Anne-Shirley-ish name if ever I heard one, and I think it will always be the Woods of the Moon for me from now on. But there are other spots I want to give names to as well . . . The wide green clearing in those woods where the old piano once stood—now weather-beaten down to a pile of splinters and keys—with the stones of a dried-up waterfall rising like the grand stairway of a fairy ballroom. The little dimple in the line of trees in our backyard where a writing cottage may someday stand. The old rickety bridge over the nearby creek, with the “No Trespassing” sign universally ignored by the Peterson clan. That one particular shady bend in the greenway where a canopy of trees hides the houses from view and the Black-eyed Susans come out to play. But I haven’t named them yet. I have utterly failed Anne. However, I hereby vow that I will, in Lucy Maud’s honor, listen carefully to these beloved places as they tell me what they want to be called. Because I don’t want to go through my life surrounded by beauty and treating it simply as the background for my busy story. I want to invite it into my heart as a friend, speak its name, and let it remind me of my own. Yes, Montgomery’s books make me want to go see Prince Edward Island, but even more than that, they make me want to find Prince Edward Island here, in my own surroundings. I recently came across someone praising L. M. Montgomery’s “eloquent descriptions of nature” and it struck as an odd thing to say because in all of my years of reading her books I never would have thought of her writing in that way. The woods, the ponds, the flowers, the seas, the stars—these aren’t “nature,” these are characters for Montgomery. They are as much a part of the story as Anne and Emily and Pat and Jane. They are a large part of the reason why Anne and Emily and Pat and Jane are who they are. Here is her description of the sea in Anne’s House of Dreams: The woods are never solitary—they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unsharable sorrow which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce it’s infinite mystery– we may only wander, awed and spell-bound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only—a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. Did you just find some random bugs in your bed? Perhaps something has been eating the food in your pantry? Or maybe you’ve noticed a colony of fire ants have taken refuge in your backyard. Well, you’re in luck, because PestHit – Best Pest Control Product Reviews is here to help you get rid of your bug and rodent problems. From bed bugs, ants, mosquitoes, chipmunks, and more, PestHit can help guide you along your pest killing journey. Just select the type of bug you’re dealing with below to get started. #pesthit #pest control #kill pests #best pest control product reviews #pesthit reviews #pests. The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of the archangels. This isn’t just a beautiful world to Montgomery; it’s an enchanted world. There is a glimmer of holiness in every sunrise. This is one of the most important things Montgomery does for me. I spend so much of my life looking down—at my laptop, at my phone, at my lesson plans, at my book. But when I read one of her novels, she makes me look up. She makes me not want to miss anything. And not just look up at the sea or the woods. Look up at people. Montgomery, more than any other writer I know, falls so much in love with her minor characters that she sometimes forgets who her protagonists are. It almost at times seems like a bait-and-switch. “Ha! You thought this book was about newlywed Anne and Gilbert, did you? Well, let me just introduce you to Captain Jim . . .” But I love this quirk in her. As a storyteller she finds people in all their flaws and eccentricities endlessly fascinating, for she knows that behind every human face, no matter how ordinary, is an untold epic. Town gossips and reprobate drunkards, lonely teachers and absentminded preachers, motherly old maids and rascally schoolboys—the more obscure or overlooked or misunderstood they are, the more you may sure that they have a tale to spin that will make you laugh or break your heart—if you will only make a cup of tea, pull up a chair by the fire, and listen. But the ones we all love most are her heroines, and what has always impressed me is that Montgomery could write about the growing pains of imaginative young girls without a hint of condescension. This is precisely what made her books feel like friends to those of us who saw ourselves in Anne Shirley or Emily Bird Starr. Montgomery knelt down gently like a comrade; she knew the tragedy of not owning a dress with puffed sleeves; she understood that “It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable”; she felt the explosive grief of a girl sobbing on her pillow because of a botched hair-dyeing experiment. She climbed down into the depths of despair with her heroines—but she didn’t leave them there. Her female characters remind us that girls have emotions and imaginations that are epic in scope. Some might say melodramatic and sentimental, to be sure. But I tend to think that the 13-girl-old girl, sobbing her heart out over some hurt that seems small to adults, sees a truth in that detail of life that we jaded grown-ups miss. “All things great,” Montgomery says, “are wound up with all things little.” A sonnet is beautiful and brilliant because it is so constrained; yet within its strict little fourteen-line form it contains worlds of truth and emotion. Women’s lives, throughout much of history, have been sonnets. Constrained by conventions, by the demands of home and children, by strict limitations on roles within society, and sometimes by choice. Montgomery’s heroines don’t wander far; their worlds are tiny, focused, and therefore intensely rich. And I think what Montgomery has done so well is to show us the deeply lovely, complex sonnet that is a young girl’s life—or an elderly girl, for she loves the silver-haired child-at-heart as much as the red-haired woman-to-be. Men can spin their cowboy sagas and war stories all they want, but sometimes it takes a female author—a Jane Austen, a Charlotte Bronte, an L. M. Montgomery—to unpack the drama of the human heart danced out in the tightly courteous battlefield of the parlor, the brave self-respect of an unloved governess, the smothered grief of the wife or mother forced to stay at home while her beloved soldier goes off to war. Little boys (and grown-up boys) with swords and guns do not have a monopoly on heroism, as the heroic women in Rilla of Ingleside prove. An adventure of the soul can be as thrilling as a knight’s quest. And the small, commonplace beauties and goodnesses and truths that Montgomery’s girls love so much are precisely the things that wars are fought to protect. Which is another way of saying that Lucy Maud Montgomery was actually a hobbit. From my conversations with the parents of tween and teen girls—and with the girls themselves—I have begun to fear that my generation will be the last to have grown up with a shared love for Anne. I am told that even the book-loving, imaginative daughters of my friends are no longer drawn to Prince Edward Island in their dreams the way we were. I don’t know why this is; it’s not as if these books were contemporary when I was growing up. They were always old-fashioned. That was precisely their appeal to me. But I wonder: what has taken their place? Will the girls of this generation, and the next, be given the things I was given by Anne Shirley, through other stories? Or is something being irretrievably lost if authors like L.M. Montgomery and Elizabeth Goudge and others like them fall out of fashion? The thought makes me want to keep writing, to keep pointing to beauty, to corral all of the young girls I see into a room and plead with them like Aunt Josephine, “Make a little room in your life for romance, Anne-girl!” I don’t mean anything so prosaic as dating. I don’t mean chick flicks or Instagram selfies or fashion magazines or bridesmaid dresses that scream pink. I mean the romance of the moonlit wood where fairies might dwell, the thrill of maple leaves in October, plum pudding and currant wine, lacy hand-me-down tablecloths that are good because they are beautiful and nothing more, burly sea captains and curmudgeonly gossips gathered around a fire together spinning yarns, and the humble affection of a tousle-headed chum who treats you with the courtesy of a gentleman. Home is the place of unlikely heroes, and the companionship of a kindred spirit is a majestic thing. “There is so much in the world for us all,” Anne learns through a college professor, “if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it to ourselves—so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful.” And here is why I am convicted most deeply by Montgomery’s books. More than any other author I can think of, she understood that a sensitive, imaginative nature lives in the extremes of heights and depths—with an immense capacity for suffering and grief, and a correspondingly immense capacity for joy and longing. I am so good at the depths; not so good at the heights. I have not exercised and enlarged my capacity for rapture, and in that, more than in anything else, I have failed Anne. I will do better. Tomorrow is a new day, with no mistakes in it yet. And even as the news rains down fresh horrors on our ears each day, and even though in the face of mass shootings and ISIS terror, Green Gables can seem like a sentimental dream, I will dig out these books again and again for the rest of my life, to remind myself that even though beauty may be eclipsed by tragedy for a time, it is not any less real. “I love to smell flowers in the dark,” Anne says. “You get hold of their soul then.” Smelling flowers in the dark: that to me epitomizes what Montgomery accomplished, in her own life of striving and heartbreak, in her writing, and in her lasting impact on millions of readers who, in the midst of their own darkness, desperately need to catch the scent of beauty’s soul. Though life may sometimes feel like “a perfect graveyard of buried hopes,” it is worth living, Montgomery reminds us, “as long as there’s a laugh in it.” Laughter is Rilla Blythe’s calling in the wake of a hellish and hideous Great War—healing laughter and warm friendship and faith in a new world being birthed out of the terrible pangs of the old. For wars will pass away. But tea parties are eternal. [Adapted from a session at Hutchmoot 2015.]

Vincent and Theo: that was the example I was to present. How did Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo exemplify “the artist in the heart of community”? I struggled at first to determine what to call the role Theo Van Gogh played in his brother Vincent’s life. I remember talking about it with a friend, describing what I’d learned about all the things Theo had and been for Vincent—patron, caregiver, brother, friend, champion. My friend said he was the person that a book dedication is made out to. Exactly—except that’s still a really long title for a role. The one part of speech that’s the most important thing in the language is the name. Names are the very basic, life-giving term in language. Eugene Peterson, Godspeed In Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, a biographical novel about Vincent Van Gogh based on the letters he sent his brother Theo, there is a scene between the brothers that seems to be the essence of what their relationship was in light of Vincent’s art. Vincent had been serving as an evangelist among the coal-miners of Belgium and threw himself entirely to the service—to the detriment of his own health. He lost his appointment as a missionary but remained in the area beginning to pursue drawing, and continuing to serve the poverty-stricken miners. Theo comes to visit after having stayed away for over a year, to find Vincent sick, fevered, and nearly starving. He gets him food, buys him a bed, and puts him in it to sleep for the first time in days. When Vincent awakes, he watches Theo going through his sketches for a few minutes before speaking. Vincent asks what Theo thinks, but Theo forces him to shave, clean, and eat before he will answer. Vincent begins to defend his lack of direction in a career and his pursuit of art—that he is seeking to be of some purpose in the world. And finally, Theo answers. “I’ve believed in you, and had implicit faith in you since the earliest days…and I haven’t any less faith now. I need only to be near you to believe that anything you do will eventually come right.” He goes on, “I have a suspicion that behind all of these abstractions you’ve been dealing in, there is something you want to do. Something you feel is ultimately right for you and will finally bring you to happiness and success.” The words open a door for Vincent. Stone describes his response: Vincent looked over at the pile of sketches Theo had been studying under the window. A grin of amazement, incredulity, and at last awareness spread across his face. His eyes opened wide. His mouth opened. His whole personality seemed to burst open wide like the tornasol [sunflower] in the sun. “Why, I’ll be blessed!’ he murmured. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say all along and I didn’t know it.” Theo’s eyes followed his to the sketches. “I thought so,” he said. Vincent was quivering with excitement and joy. He seemed to have suddenly awakened from some profound sleep. “Theo! You knew it before I did! I wouldn’t let myself think about it. I was afraid. Of course there’s something I must do. It’s the thing I’ve pointed towards all my life and I never suspected it….Something has been trying to push itself out of me all these years and I wouldn’t let it.” It was Theo who woke Vincent to the truth: he was an artist. I will never forget the first time I heard someone tell me I was a storyteller. I may have been told it before that, and I certainly told stories all along, but I had not heard it before. I was a senior in college, sitting in the back of a van with the alumni director, Louise Riley, after we’d been representing the university at a conference together. In the thread of conversation she said, almost off-hand, “Well, of course. You’re a storyteller.” It was a revelation. And it was one of the pieces God used to change my path and move me toward storytelling and creativity as a vocation. I believe artists need the kind of community that Theo was for Vincent—the person who can look in, with unwavering eyes, and see what is true. And also the person who has the guts to speak it. Reading through Stone’s book, there were many times I felt that Theo should have just given up on Vincent. Vincent bullied him, harangued him, and wouldn’t listen to him. But Theo kept faithful, introducing Vincent to the impressionists, telling him when it was time to leave Paris and become his own artist, and reminding him of truth over and over again. It was this role I tried to find a term for. Yes, Theo supported Vincent financially, he introduced him to other artists, he served as a dealer for Vincent’s work. But he was more than a patron, more than a networker, more than an agent. Finally, reading Madeleine L’Engle’s book, A Wind in the Door, I found it: Theo was a Namer. L’Engle’s book is steeped in the concept of Naming. Her protagonist Meg is partnered with a cherubim named Proginoskes, and they are faced with fighting the Echthroi, beings that X. Progo takes Meg to look at a sky full of stars and they watch as a line of black appears with violence. The Echthroi have Xed, says the cherubim, “Annihilated. Negated. Extinguished. Xed.” Trying to explain the Echthroi and how they work, Progo says, I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming—making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn’t need to hate. That’s why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished. As Meg fights against the Echthroi she learns that to Name people she must love them. That is her weapon against the darkness—and it’s not an easy one to wield. To do so, she must see clearly who she is, and move past her own hatred and anger to see clearly the one she is Naming. [Spoilers ahead] Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga recognizes the value of Naming. Gnag the Nameless is the great terror to the Wingfeathers. Abandoned, crippled, unloved, never named. The lack is what shapes him. He grows into Gnag the Nameless, hungry for power, for destruction. But the heroes realize in the end that [spoiler]all along, Gnag has always been hungry for one thing only: a name. And, reading the First Book, they discover that his mother loved him, and she named him. And that is the undoing of his evil and the satisfaction of his soul. In Naming him, the Wingfeathers fight the darkness.[/spoiler] Artists must have Namers. Namers who love you and love your work. They’re not sycophants, but truth-tellers. It may be just one person—that person who delights in your work and tells you the truth about it: needs improvement; love this character; your perspective’s off; ooh, good line; I see the passion in that painting. But we are a forgetful people. Naming is not something that happens once and is done. I was asked recently what the Rabbit Room meant to me and the first image that came to my mind was that of a cairn—a pile of stones that serves as a memorial or a trail marker. In the Old Testament, the Israelites set up cairns to remember God’s faithfulness, his provision, his rescue of them. In the Law, God instituted feasts, regular reminders of who he was, who they were, and their covenant relationship with one another. I encountered the Rabbit Room at a time when I had lost sight of my name: storyteller. I needed this community to remind me. Namers remind us who we are and that our endeavors are worth doing. I once drove an eight-hour car trip with my friend Seth and we spent a good portion of the time figuring out the geography of my fictional kingdom so that I could get the climactic battle to take place in the right area. Seth was a Namer in those hours. He said: it’s worth doing, and it’s worth doing right—let’s figure it out. Diana Glyer uses the term “resonator” to describe “anyone who acts as a friendly, interested, supportive audience” (Bandersnatch). She says that resonators give feedback, praise, encouragement, and offer help and promote an artist’s work. I would call Namers a subset of this category, with the specific role of telling—and reminding—the artist who he is. During her keynote at Hutchmoot 2016, Glyer told a story of a time she was ready to throw in the towel. She’d been trying to get her first book published for years, and had seen no movement. She told her writing group that she was finished, and a friend there told her he saw her walking in to their meeting with a box full of copies of her book. When she told him she couldn’t see that, he replied, “I will see it for you until you see it for yourself.” He named her: author. There are people in the world who do not consider themselves creative. And while I agree with the argument that creativity is a much broader thing than just making art, perhaps some of these people are called to be Namers, rather than artists. Naming is a creative act. The Namers in my life are just as important to the stories I tell as I am. I have one manuscript that will be dedicated to Christine and Saritha, for they were the Namers in a period of darkness when I couldn’t write. They are the ones who reminded me that the story was worth telling. To steal ideas from L’Engle’s book, I would say we are fighting the un-Naming of the universe as we create art. If feasting is an act of war, art is its counterpart. Art is an act of love—to paraphrase Jonathan Rogers: the artist loves his audience and loves his content and wants to introduce the two to one another. But while the artist may be the front line of the battalion, the Namers are the gun loaders, the message runners, the water carriers. The front line would falter and fail without them. [This post was adapted and expanded from a portion of Makers and Thieves: Subcreation and Inspiration, a session at Hutchmoot 2016.]

I started writing songs when I was in High School. In recent years, life, calling, and family have redirected my creative bandwidth to other endeavors—good work I love and happily give myself to. But in recent years a desire to write songs has returned. So I’ve been knocking off the rust a little. Songs from Struck is a short EP inspired by the events described in my book Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death. In the spring of 2013, I developed a blood-borne bacterial infection that destroyed my mitral valve and required urgent open-heart surgery. Struck (the book) chronicles that experience, from the onset of affliction through diagnosis, surgery, recovery, and re-entry. My story is the setting for the book, but it is not the subject. Struck is a book about what happens when affliction and faith collide. I wanted to explore the common experiences afflicted people share—the onset of a sense of frailty, the fear, the grief, the humor, the routines, the new ways of relating to people who love us and are afraid for us and for themselves. I committed myself to the work of paying as much attention as I could to the medical, spiritual, relational, emotional, pharmaceutical, and physical experiences of this journey my failing heart had set me on. I asked a lot of questions and took a lot of notes and used them to write the chapters that make up the book. Along the way, some of those same themes became Songs from Struck. Dance with Me (Track 1) is the song mentioned in Chapter 6: The Letters. My good friend Andy Osenga (who plays all the instruments you hear on the EP except drums, which were played by the amazing Paul Eckberg, and violin, played by the brilliant Daniel Fisher) offered to help me record this song for my wife to mark this season of our marriage. Due to the dangers involved in my surgery, we knew we needed to record my vocals before I went under. I’ll never forget when Andy said, “Let’s get your vocals now, and I’ll take care of the rest.” That was the same day I gave him the letters I had written to my wife and children, and asked him to hold them for me. It was a holy moment, and a bold responsibility for him to assume on my behalf. I sang this vocal while I was still hooked up to an IV antibiotic pump. The shaker in the chorus is actually one of my many pill bottles.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/01-Dance-with-Me.mp3 The Ballad of Andy Catlett (Track 2) is inspired by Wendell Berry’s short novel Remembering, which explores themes of anger and forgiveness discussed in Chapter 11: Tornado in a Trailer Park. Berry’s novel powerfully unpacks what it is like to suffer an affliction that takes away a person’s ability or strength. In Remembering, Andy Catlett loses his right hand in a farming accident. Being right handed, Andy felt he lost his hold on the world. He couldn’t dress himself. He couldn’t even write his own name. He took out his frustrations on those who were trying to love him. Eventually, his wife sat him down and told him that if he wanted to get better, one thing he would have to do would be to ask her to forgive him for how he was treating her. All the anger and indignation of being a victim rose up inside of him and he thought about leaving her and starting over. But he came to realize that her love for him was an anchor that held him in the one place he belonged—broken as he was. Anger in affliction can be profoundly disorienting. Love is a true north.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/02-The-Ballad-of-Andy-Catlett.mp3 Both Alive (Track 3 – co-written with Andrew Osenga) tells a story based on themes discussed in Chapter 5: The Distance. When someone goes through some kind of suffering, affliction, or loss, those who are close to them go through it too, each in their own way. But even though they’re both struggling through the same thing, they experience it differently—which can create a strange and hard to understand feeling of distance. Often it is the things we share in common that make us feel most distant from one another. This song doesn’t attempt to solve this phenomenon (I don’t know if that’s possible). But it does try to recognize it, describe it, and shine some light on it because there is great power in naming.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/03-Both-Alive.mp3 [Songs from Struck is available on iTunes, Spotify, and here in the Rabbit Room. Use the discount code “Struck” in the Rabbit Room Store to get it for free. You can also pre-order Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death.]

Lately, I have been thinking about the theology of art. Almost certainly this is a bad use of my mind, as I am neither a theologian nor an artist. But I cannot help myself. And I feel compelled to think out loud, as it were, here on the Rabbit Room. At first, I considered writing a bunch of paragraphs making some points about theology and art. Is there a Christian way to do art? One paragraph would say this. Another paragraph would say that. A conclusion would end with such and such. Inevitably I would sound like a pseudo-intellectual frump, though. While I am not a practiced storyteller, it seemed better to me to attempt to work through my thoughts on a theology of art in narrative form. That is how the “Sojourner’s Dilemma” came to be. Perhaps there will be other stories on this theme. Interpretations and discussion are welcome. The Sojourner’s Dilemma Let us call the territory in question Houven. The borders of Houven were established in the Southern Hemisphere sometime in the twelfth century. By the end of the sixteenth century, Houven had disappeared from maps. Throughout its four-hundred-year existence, Houven prospered. In one way more than all others, however, did the territory flourish—its people were creative geniuses. Houvenians were prolific artists, more so than the people of Florence or modern-day Portlandia. Houvenian artists pursued many media. Oil on canvas. Tapestry. They were sculptors and architects and musicians and poets. Yet they were most known for their perfection of pottery. They threw, glazed, and fired plates and bowls and goblets unmatched by any pottery before or any since. It was said that the plates were so gorgeous and of such fine quality that no person eating a meal off of Houvenian dinnerware could become fat. (This seems suspicious to me, because I would think a person enthralled by the dinnerware would lose track of his caloric intake and overeat. But, I am just telling you what was said.) Likewise, Houvenian goblets lacked imperfection. It was said drinking from a Houvenian goblet was the smoothest moment of one’s life. (Whatever that means.) The point is, the Houvenians were master potters. There is a way to create perfect pottery. For four hundred years, Houvenian potters did it. Once a traveling artist from another territory, likely in the Northern Hemisphere, came and sojourned in Houven. Knowing something of the potter’s craft, the sojourner marveled at the Houvenian creations. The proportions were exact. The glaze even. The designs were Platonic. She even pretended one time to be tipsy and dropped a plate, which broke into several pieces. Really the sojourner had had nothing to drink and was in her right mind. But she pretended to stagger when she picked up the pieces and then gaped with amazement at the perfection of the clay exposed by the fracture. She played the scene well, and the Houvenians, thinking she stared at the shard like a drunkard, insisted she go to bed early to sleep off her liquor. The sojourner lay in bed awake that night thinking. Pottery was not her artistic gifting. The sojourner had a lazy right eye that made depth perception impossible and her pottery lopsided. But she was a genius when it came to mixing colors, unmatched by any artist on earth. (The lazy eye meant she kept to abstraction when she painted.) The sojourner lay in bed thinking, and then she determined what she would do. Waiting three days, so the Houvenians would not relegate her ideas to the ignorance produced by a hangover, the sojourner approached the chief potter of the Houvenian potter’s guild. She said, “Chief potter, you are aware, I believe, that it is as an artist from another land that I have come to sojourn with you here in Houven. I have these many days been on the watch, observing the Houvenian artists at work. The painters are expert. The weavers are expert. The sculptors are expert.” The chief potter knew where this was headed, for he had heard praise like this before. He let the sojourner continue. She continued, “The musicians are expert. The taxidermists are expert. The architects are expert. The poets are expert.” She drew in a contemplative breath, “And you, sir, must surely know there is no art in all the world as lovely as the pottery of Houven.” He replied, “Yes.” The sojourner reached into the satchel she had over her shoulder and took out many pieces of canvas. She laid them on the floor in front of the chief potter. He looked down and straightaway began to weep. He had never seen such colors. It overwhelmed him. He said, “I believe my eyes have now seen the perfection of light.” This is going well, thought the sojourner. So she spoke to the chief potter, saying, “Thank you for your praise! If I may appeal to your kindness and to the great keenness of your affections, then can I speak freely? I have seen no pottery more perfect than yours. And you say you have seen no mixture of color as perfect as,” she toed the ground, “mine. Could we not join what happenstance has kept apart? Would not the combination of perfected pottery and perfected color make a work of art more perfect still?” Solemnity was no longer on the chief potter’s face. In fact, he now appeared logical. “Woman,” he inquired. “You are not from Houven?” She shook her head. “Well, then those colors were mixed up somewhere other than Houven. Thus, those colors are not from Houven, are they?” She shook her head again and also made a puzzled brow. “Well, then if I were to allow you to wet Houvenian pottery – which you yourself call perfect – with non-Houvenian color, it could not possibly remain Houvenian or, as I prefer to say, exactly as it should be.” The chief potter then called a guard, which immediately took the sojourner to the Houvenian border and shoved her across. Those armed men stood with menacing looks, waiting for the sojourner to walk away and out of sight. Something like this encounter with the sojourner happened only a handful of times throughout Houvenian history. Each time, the Houvenians banished the intruder and by doing so, for four hundred years, preserved the distinctly Houvenian way of creating art, especially pottery.

Let me say right off the bat that this post is full of spoilers. It oozes spoilers. Spoilaphobic reader, beware. I want to talk about La La Land and that perplexing, polarizing, absolutely perfect ending. To set the scene: I went into the movie cold, soon after it came out. I had watched a trailer, and a friend had told me she’d seen it and wasn’t thrilled with the ending, but I knew nothing more than that. I had no idea how it was being received by the public or the critics, had seen nothing on social media about it. I was not particularly a fan of either Ryan Gosling or Emma Stone. I love classic musicals but thought this could go either way—fun or super cheesy. As soon as it ended, Pete and I looked at each other and both of us said, “I loved every second of that.” For the next 48 hours we did very little except listen to the soundtrack and obsess about seeing La La Land again, and then went back to the theatre for an encore and loved it even more the second time. Given the closeness of its themes to our vocations and our marriage, we decided to make it a new annual Christmas tradition. There are movies that are vegan burgers (I know I’m supposed to appreciate this intellectually but it’s just not tasty to my palate) and movies that are deep dishes of chocolate ice cream (ahem, Meg Ryan + Tom Hanks + cozy bookstores, anyone?). This was one of those rare occasions when I thought I’d found both in one movie: comfort food and an aesthetic A+. It was only after we’d seen it twice that I began hearing rumblings from the rest of the world about the movie—from friends, Facebook, reviews online, debates over award predictions—and realized that it wasn’t just a few people who didn’t like it or didn’t understand it. Hating on La La Land was a thing. The reactions (especially from people I expected to love it) completely blindsided me. And not because I expect everyone to agree with my opinion of a movie. I was almost alone in disliking the movie Hugo. I was in the minority disliking Fantastic Beasts and The Hobbit. I felt “meh” about Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella (another post for another day). Pete and I disagree about movies all the time, and when we do agree, we’re often in disagreement with everyone else we know. I’m well accustomed to disagreeing about movies. This was different, though. My instinctive response to many of the reactions I heard—especially those about the ending, which seems to have pitted friend against friend, husband against wife, almost as sharply as an American presidential election—was not a counter-argument but a double-take: “Wait—what? Are you sure we went to the same film? Maybe you accidentally walked into the wrong theatre and only thought you were seeing La La Land?” It was as if I had asked someone, “Did you like that piece of chocolate cake I gave you?” and he answered, “Fie, the monkey burns with mellow moonflake!” It was that disorienting. All I could do was stand with mouth agape and think, You saw a completely different movie than I did. Maybe we did see different movies. I have no illusion of being an objective critic—I know quite well that I walked into the theatre wearing a particular set of Jennifer-shaped spectacles. So let me tell you about the movie I saw. But first, let me set aside two common criticisms (ignoring the debate about jazz, which I’m not qualified to talk about): First, there are those who think that critics are only fawning over La La Land because it’s a movie about Hollywood. To which I want to reply (with gentle humility and deference, of course), “Um, did you watch this movie?” The movie that says L.A. is a place where everything is worshipped and nothing is valued? The movie that rejects the Hollywood idolization of romance in spite of the fact that doing so has alienated half its audience? The movie in which the actress’s big break only comes after she’s stopped trying to please the movie industry and decides to carve out her own vocational path by telling her homegrown story in live theater? Trust me, I have no loyalty to Hollywood whatsoever. I loved it because it was a movie about calling and joy, and it spoke to me deeply as an introverted writer in Tennessee who has never had the slightest shadow of an ambition to be a famous film star. We live the given life, and not the planned. Wendell Berry Second, I get the feeling a lot of people expected it be a reboot of a classic musical and then were disappointed that it didn’t live up to Singing in the Rain. It’s easy to poke fun at Ryan Gosling’s voice or nitpick over the choreography, but I think this is missing the point. La La Land is not so much a new musical as it is a kind of midrash on the old musicals. That’s one of my favorite things that art can do—stand on the backs of those who came before, comment upon them, and reach for something different. Director Damien Chazelle, was, I think, using the visual language, the tropes, the conventions of the old Hollywood musicals to do something new, to tell a very particular story. (And let’s face it, telling a rich and compelling story was not the top priority for many of those classic movie musicals we love; the plot was often just the thin glue for the song-and-dance numbers.) Case in point: In the middle of a Singing in the Rain-ish song-and-dance number near the beginning of La La Land, a cell phone rings and ruins the moment. That’s not just comic relief; that’s the thematic tension of the entire movie breaking humorously into the scene—fantasy, art, bumping up against reality. As much as they may want to be, as high as their aspirations might soar, Seb and Mia aren’t Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. They aren’t fabulous singers. They aren’t fabulous dancers. They’re ordinary people with cell phones. They’re me. And just like that, with the intrusion of that familiar ringtone, we’re presented with the movie’s central conceit. In the old Hollywood musicals, the musical numbers are just sort of there. There’s no explanation really for why all these people are suddenly singing and dancing. We just accept it. La La Land, however, makes a kind of sense out of that weird alternate reality. Throughout the movie there are two layers to the story: the fantasy/dream layer, and the earthy reality layer. It’s the story, after all, of people who have come to the city with enormous dreams for their lives. The opening ensemble dance on the freeway, “Another Day of Sun,” smacks us in the face with its starry-eyed optimism, followed quickly by the calculating ambition of “Someone in the Crowd.” Later come the more wistful “City of Stars” and the romantic ballet-in-the-air scene at the planetarium. Each of these scenes in the first half of the movie dramatize, outwardly, the inner dreams that swirl in and around and through the characters . . . dreams of glory, success, a place in the world where we fit, a person in the world we fit with. Haven’t you ever been so excited, or so in love, that your heart was tap dancing on the inside? But La La Land juxtaposes that layer of the story with a distinctly unglamorous realism. During the long middle part of the movie (where some people get bored), the songs mostly disappear—for a good reason. Seb and Mia have moved from the dreamy optimism of the opening scenes to the everyday struggle of pursuing those dreams. No one is dancing on the roof of their car or floating in the air or bursting into harmony. This is the real world, after all, where you get rejected so many times you want to give up, where bills have to be paid, where a relationship hurts. The argument they have is the way arguments between couples really work, full of escalating misinterpretations and perfectly-aimed, instantly-regretted arrows. The more I think about it, the more Ryan Gosling’s slightly off-key warble seems appropriate in this movie. It’s not ironic. It’s kind of endearing (in a way that’s completely opposite those “Hey, Girl” memes). Its flaws make him believable. So I’ve said this is a movie about calling and joy, and I’ve said it’s a movie about fantasy and reality. All those themes lead us directly to that controversial ending. When the credits roll, Mia has a successful acting career, an obviously kind and loving husband, and a daughter she adores. Seb, though not married, is sharing his fierce passion for jazz with a packed audience in his very own club. And yet people are saying this movie doesn’t have a happy ending—it’s melancholy and cynical and depressing. Come again? I read somewhere that La La Land depicts the triumph of selfish ambition and success over love, which is ludicrous. For one thing, it is abundantly clear from the start that the story of Seb and Mia is a story of vocation and passion, in contrast to the shallow ambition of those who are simply chasing fame in L.A., the roommates who only go to parties to be seen by the right career-launching person, the boorish writer bragging about how his books are getting talked about. Seb wants to open a jazz club because he loves jazz—with a passion that’s almost irritating and that can’t help but spill out of him onto everyone around him, whether they like it or not. Mia calls him away from the temptations of mere ambition and financial success, calls him back to the roots of his joy in spite of its lonelier and riskier path, because “people love what other people are passionate about.” And not one of those flashy wannabes in the opening musical numbers would have sung the “Audition” song Mia sings at the end, but that’s the Mia we’ve seen blossom in this story—the Mia whose love for acting is grounded in memories of her family, whose old bedroom window in Boulder served as the setting for her childhood dreams as well as her first original play. This part of the movie rang all of my bells, because I am Mia. Not in personality, not in career choice, certainly not in fashion (though I’m still drooling over her red handbag). I’ve been living her struggle for most of my adult life, caught between the strong pull towards artistic and cultural conformity and the terrifying prospect of carving out one’s own unique vocational path despite a strong possibility of failure, the misunderstanding of other people, the financial insecurity, and the ever-present monster of self-doubt. How many times have I stood there like Mia and cried, “I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s too hard. It hurts too much. What if I’m not good enough? . . . But what if I’m not?” So many of Mia’s conversations with Seb reminded me of my conversations with my husband—one side hopeful but hesitant, the other full of effusive reassurances and pointed challenges: “This story is awesome. You are awesome. Who cares what anyone else thinks?” The main difference being that Seb is a jerk for a lot of the movie, and Pete isn’t. Pete would have been sitting in the front row of my debut performance with tears pouring down his face. But Pete has said, in different words, and on countless occasions, “Stop being a baby and go to that audition.” Or, Look, I’m not going to coddle your self-pity, because to do so would be the opposite of loving you. Loving you, right now, means pouring cold water on your self-sabotaging angst and leading you to that desk where you can make the art only you can make and be the person you are meant to be, whether you feel like it or not. If it hadn’t been for that blunt love from Pete (and a few other people close to me) over the last five years, I honestly don’t know whether I would still be writing anything today. Real love is helping the other person become the person he or she is supposed to be, no matter the cost to yourself. When Seb and Mia part because their callings (the callings each of them challenged the other to follow) are taking them in different directions, that’s not romance, but it is love. (Note that I would not be saying this if they were married—because a third, shared calling would then take primacy). And we are richly blessed in life if people come along who love us in that way on our journey—not just the people destined to be our spouses. There have been those who have dropped into my life for a season, or a moment, who did that for me—challenged me to step out of my fear and farther on the path of my calling—and I will forever be grateful. In this sense the ending of La La Land is a whole lot like the ending of Once: the story of two strangers who love each for a brief period with that kind of love, who give each other the courage to take the next steps in the paths they are meant to take, which happen to lead away from each other. And it’s beautiful. Okay, then, why that weird mini-movie dream sequence that interrupts the ending? What’s going on with that, anyway? I’ve heard from many people—including people who were accosted by multiple perplexed husbands seeking explanations as they walked out of the theatre—that this was the sticking point for them. Which makes me sad, because when that sequence started, I felt like I had come home to something. That is exactly how my imagination works. If La La Land had ended with Seb and Mia together and both living their dreams, that would have been frothy wish-fulfillment, and wish-fulfillment is ultimately not emotionally satisfying; we all would have forgotten about the movie the next day. If the movie had ended with the two of them having drifted apart and seeing each other years later in the club, but without the dream sequence, that would have been depressing and cynical. It was the dream sequence, and only the dream sequence, that made this entire movie come together and work. For one thing, it is cinematically magnificent. We began the movie with musical exuberance; we trod through the darker realism of the movie’s second half; we’ve been drawn back into the glow of the dream gently with Mia’s audition. But now, the exuberance floods back onto the screen again as the earlier musical themes return and tangle themselves together like the final movement in a symphony. Visual allusions to old Hollywood musicals like Singing in the Rain and An American in Paris explode like fireworks. (When an author quotes something, do you sit up a listen? Yes, there’s a purpose…) We are swept through a whole range of human emotions in a single wordless sequence like that beautiful montage at the beginning of Pixar’s Up. Joy and melancholy intertwine and dance. Is it Seb’s dream? Is it Mia’s? It doesn’t matter. The question itself is too literal. This is no different from the moment when they take off flying around the planetarium before they kiss. Did that make sense? Not physically, no. But emotionally, it felt true. Reality pauses and there is a moment of communion when they get to play out, together, the fantasy of being in love and seeing your dreams come true. When an artist/writer/filmmaker does that, it’s a signal: hey, let go of your hold on the world a little bit, because I’ve got something to show you that doesn’t fit into literal boxes. There’s a truth beyond logic here. Pay attention. In this sideways reality, Seb and Mia get to live out their alternative “happy” ending. There is a sense in which they will always possess that fantasy; there will always be that parallel dream version of life in which Seb kisses her at the right time and follows her to Paris and there is no conflict and no hard choice. This is the classic Hollywood musical version of Mia and Seb’s story; the perfect movie those freeway dancers at the beginning would have wanted. And here’s the brilliance: it is both joy-giving and ultimately a fantasy, at the same moment. We need those dreams. We need those candy-colored love stories and song-and-dance numbers that happen in our imagination, because they fuel us. But we don’t live in them. And La La Land is a masterpiece because it interweaves the fantasy with the reality in a way that is the very opposite of modern cynicism. It affirms the value of dreaming while at the same time not romanticizing real life. We don’t live in the dream. But the dreaming is still good. There’s one more thing going on here, though. Their “happy ending” is still not quite happy, even in the perfect mini-movie version. Because as the dream sequence comes to a close, we see that in this version Mia has everything: except—notice—her daughter, who has been replaced by a son. (If you have a daughter and a son, ask yourself: are they interchangeable?). But Seb walks with her into someone else’s jazz club, and he is in the audience, not at the piano where he belongs. And because this is a movie about calling and joy, not romance, that would be a betrayal of the whole story. Mia’s love for Seb pushed him in the direction of becoming the person he was supposed to become, creating a space in the world for his own peculiar joy to pour itself out upon other people, just as he pushed her to do. The real tragic ending would have been if he had not been on the stage of that jazz club. Which is why the tension of the ending breaks only in a very quiet, easily overlooked, wordless moment as Mia lingers at the door and looks back at Seb sitting at the piano. And he smiles, just a little, and nods. And her face relaxes into a smile, and she turns away. Did you see the smile? It’s a perfectly nuanced, impeccably timed moment of visual storytelling. Everything is going to be fine. Life is not a movie (we’ve just seen the perfect movie; it failed), but in the end there is a nod and a smile, a quiet acceptance as we turn and walk back to the good life we’ve been given. If that’s not a true happy ending, I don’t know what is. For me, it was profoundly hopeful. I walked out of the theatre with a feeling of release from the angst of grasping my dreams too tightly, of fearing that the future will spin a story of disappointment and sacrifice. No, the joy of the fantasy and the smile of contentment with reality can coexist. It reminded me of one of my favorite lines from a poem of Wendell Berry’s: “We live the given life, and not the planned.” The backlash against La La Land sort of punched me in the gut because the movie so beautifully captured my vocational struggles, my relationship with my husband, and my narrative aesthetic that the criticism felt personal somehow. You don’t get it? Do you get me? Which is obviously very silly. It’s only a movie. But art is like that. It gets under our skin. It wiggles its way into the cracks in our hearts. It can also—if it’s good art (and “La La Land” is good art, whether or not you think it’s great)—be a cipher into which we pour our own experience, our own heartbreak, our own hopes, and it molds itself to the shape we fill it with. As a writer, I desperately need to untether story from literal reality, and I need to know there is audience out there that understands such stories. I’m not talking about pure fantasy, where we’re transported to Middle Earth or some other world and simply exchange one set of reality rules for another. I’m talking about stories that allow us to see our own world, our own rules of reality, stretched like taffy. Some would call this magical realism, and more and more I’m beginning to think that magical realism is the genre that best suits a worldview that takes seriously both the inherent goodness and beauty of the earth and the possibility of transcendence (another post for another day). Art helps us learn to see reality stretched; that is its unique power. That is, in fact, the point of Mia’s climactic audition song; art’s madness is its key to truth, and its messiness is the price we gladly pay for a brief glimpse. A bit of madness is key to give us new colors to see Who knows where it will lead us? And that’s why they need us So bring on the rebels, the ripples from pebbles The painters and poets and plays And here’s to the fools who dream Crazy as they may seem Here’s to the hearts that break Here’s to the mess we make I don’t know how anyone can hear that song and then walk out of the movie theatre saying, “Meh. Kinda cute, but that’s it”—unless you’ve honestly never felt totally out of sync with the world, a little mad, a little too in love with colors no one else seems to see, just a heartbroken mess with a foolish dream to create something lasting. But gosh, over here in crazyland, that’s my heart’s song. I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie that sung it back to me so perfectly. In the musical version of my own life, I’m going to sing and dance very badly. I’m going to make a mess. I’m going to have to sacrifice some good things for the sake of other good things. But I’m trusting that somewhere, someone in the audience will be saying, “That’s beautiful, because that is a real, flawed human life, graced by a dream.”

A few months back I posted a song by one of my new favorite artists, the Swedish band A Treehouse Wait. I’m telling you guys, this album is gorgeous. The production is lush and tasteful and super creative, and they do a great job of showcasing Jenny Wahlström’s crazy good voice. These lyrics! These melodies! I seriously can’t get enough of this music, and it’s not just because I’m Swedish, I promise. If anyone knows how to ache for the green fields of summer, it's the Swedes... Andrew Peterson One of the things I like most in a song is what Rich Mullins was so good at—grand, poetic themes that are grounded in story. The title of Rich’s album Winds of Heaven/Stuff of Earth sums it up. He was a master at writing these sweeping, epic lyrics, and then throwing in a friend’s name (“I remember what Susan said,” “maybe we could borrow Beaker’s bike”) or a city or place name (“Well, the moon moved past Nebraska,” “Once I went to Appalachia, for my father, he was born there”) to remind us that while he’s talking about big ideas, those ideas play themselves out right here on earth, among the people and places we know. It wakes me up to the beauty of our own stories, to the beauty of the world we live in—but it also just wakes me up. I pay closer attention when I remember he’s telling an intimate story about his life—about our lives—not just throwing out grandiose themes. The fact is, the streets where we live, the families we see every day, are the stage for the epic ballad of creation. The song “Waves” by A Treehouse Wait does the same thing. Check it out. Waves will move again and the fields be green When all of the flowers bloom And it will be summer again, I know I can see all the melting ice Can you feel the wind that blows? It’s changing its course now Will we see, and will we run fast with it, And dare to believe that winter is over? The middle verse takes a delightful turn that changes our experience of the song, so that when she circles back around to the first lyric we have the added ache of knowing that she’s actually, literally longing for the coming summer. Come home, John We saved a seat for you We put on some music, too I think you’re gonna like it And if you like I’d come pick you up somewhere Yes, I’ll go a million miles Just shout and I’ll come there I miss you here Please say that you missed me And when summer comes We’ll have light that warms us I’ve been in Sweden in the deep of winter. Once I stayed in a seaside castle in Varberg that was literally covered in drifts of snow. The rivers and lakes were frozen and waveless. The sun only shines for a few hours a day. If anyone knows how to ache for the green fields of summer, it’s the Swedes, and this song captures the wild hope that winter won’t hold sway forever, that those we love who are far away will one day feast with us again. There’s something about the dream of green in the dark of winter that wakes a longing in me like nothing else. This song, and this video, makes the waiting sweet and sad and, praise God, bearable. It will be summer again, I know. Buy the album here.

On May 8, 2012, it was announced that Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are and countless other books, had passed away. As I got on the train to work that morning, browsing through Twitter on my phone and reading news reports about Sendak, his life and his art, I stumbled upon a link in which National Public Radio re-posted their final interview with him at age eighty-three, done by Terry Gross just a few months prior. Nineteen minutes later, at the end of the interview, I stepped off the train fighting back tears and trying not to make a blubbering spectacle of myself. What I had heard was a story and testimony all at once extremely beautiful, extremely sad, full of mystery, and, quite unexpectedly, a testament to God’s faithfulness. I was hearing for the first time the longings of an artist who I only knew in a relatively small manner, but who I discovered meant more to me than I fully realized. I knew of him mostly through Where the Wild Things Are, one of my favorite books from childhood, plus some fond memories of seeing the films and books for Really Rosie and The Nutshell Library in elementary school. When I was young, I appreciated Wild Things in particular as a good story with fascinating pictures. Even in high school it stayed with me as I painted a famous scene from the book on the back of my denim jacket. When I started reading the book out loud to my own kids as an adult, I fell in love with it in a whole new way, marveling just as much at how it sounds as how it looks. I also look at this story as having similarities to the parable of the Prodigal Son: the boy Max lashes out at his mother and goes off on a wild rumpus adventure with the wild things, only to long for returning home, where he smells good things to eat and finds his supper still waiting for him. And it is still hot. I have since become a serious student of Sendak, collecting more of his books, sharing them with my kids, digging up interviews, and implementing his influence into my own unfolding work as a writer and illustrator of children’s stories. Observing the work of Maurice Sendak becomes all the more significant when learning more about his life and how it impacted his art. In previous NPR interviews over the years (collected here), he talks about how much of his life was spent looking out of a window while sick in bed, watching life in his Brooklyn neighborhood as it happened outside. (A great deal of this influence is evident in his first books Kenny’s Window and The Sign on Rosie’s Door.) Sendak even tells a riveting tale of his own childhood memory seeing an angel out his window, and describes it in full detail. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again. Maurice Sendak Another story, told by Wicked author Gregory Maguire (also on NPR here), tells us about him giving Maurice a gift in the hospital before he died: a photograph of Lewis Carroll sitting on the edge of his window, with his feet hanging outside. These repeated symbolic images of windows are interesting: the world that Sendak saw beyond his own window, and then finally, near his life’s end, a symbolic image of another author he had admired, sitting on the edge of a window as if ready to venture into another world—a world, to borrow from another one of Sendak’s book titles, Outside Over There. What is profound about Maurice Sendak’s final NPR interview in particular is how he wrestles, through real tears, with his adamant disbelief in God and the visions which call to him from “outside over there” anyway. The interview begins with Terry Gross talking to Maurice about his latest book, which would turn out to be his final one, called Bumble Ardy, about a rebellious orphaned pig who is not allowed to have fun. When he turns nine he throws a birthday party for himself with a bunch of grubby swine, only to be disciplined by his aunt when she gets home, so Bumble Ardy promises “I’ll never turn ten.” Maurice and Terry talk about the mystery of that line, “I’ll never turn ten,” and Sendak says, “I won’t pretend that I know exactly what it means. I only know it touches me deeply, and when I thought of it, I was so happy I thought of it. It came to me, which is what the creative act is all about. Things come to you without you necessarily knowing what they mean.” He relates this to his unhappy childhood; growing up in a Jewish family in the shadow of the Holocaust, the evil and pain that event caused his family played a big part in his giving up on God and not believing in His goodness. But he also talks about the people who are taking care of him later in life, his life-long friend and neighbor Lynn and her mother, who in his words, was “a saint in the best sense of that word, the best sense of what I imagine Christianity is all about.” He talks about his older brother Jack Sendak, whom he says “made my childhood bearable. More importantly to my life, he saved my life. He drew me away from the lack of comprehension that existed between me and my parents, and he took his time with me to draw pictures and read stories and live a kind of fantastical life.” His brother Jack would pass away in 1995. He talks a great deal about other people who have passed away, as he finds he is out-living many who he has loved so dearly. He talks about the death of his partner Eugene who he lived with for fifty years, and describes the central bond of their companionship, which was to travel together, read books together, and most importantly, to listen to music. He talks again about Bumble-Ardy and how he was writing it as Eugene was in the house dying of cancer, and how writing the book became an expression of his pain and loss. Part of the reason that Terry Gross is able to dig this deep into this many personal stories with Maurice is that they had a long history of interviews which went back several years. There is a level of trust, friendship and love that exists between these two people having this conversation, and it’s in this context of trust that Gross is able to explore the following questions with him, in this excerpt from the interview transcript: (Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=140435330) GROSS: We’ve talked before about how, you know, you’re Jewish but you’re very secular. You don’t believe in God. You don’t…SENDAK: No, I don’t.GROSS: Yeah. And I think having friends who die, getting older, getting closer toward the end of life tests people’s faith and it also tests people’s atheism. It sounds like your atheism is staying strong.(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)SENDAK: Is what?GROSS: Staying strong.SENDAK: Yes. I’m not unhappy about becoming old. I’m not unhappy about what must be. It makes me cry only when I see my friends go before me and life is emptied. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again. And it’s like a dream life. I am reading a biography of Samuel Palmer, which is written by a woman in England. I can’t remember her name. And it’s sort of how I feel now, when he was just beginning to gain his strength as a creative man and beginning to see nature. But he believed in God, you see, and in heaven, and he believed in hell. Goodness gracious, that must have made life much easier. It’s harder for us non-believers.But, you know, there’s something I’m finding out as I’m aging – that I am in love with the world. And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they’re beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music. You know, I don’t think I’m rationalizing anything. I really don’t. This is all inevitable and I have no control over it. “Bumble-ardy” was a combination of the deepest pain and the wondrous feeling of coming into my own and it took a long time. It took a very long time, but it’s genuine. Unless I’m crazy. I could be crazy and you could be talking to a crazy person.GROSS: I don’t think so.(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)SENDAK: I don’t know anymore and I don’t care. … GROSS: Well, I’m so glad you have a new book. I’m really glad we had a chance to talk.SENDAK: I am too.GROSS: And I wish you all good things.SENDAK: I wish you all good things. Live your life, live your life, live your life. I won’t pretend I know exactly what was going on in Maurice’s head or his heart as he spoke, but what I heard that morning on the train was a reminder that no matter how adamant we are, how stubborn we are, how much we want to deny God or disbelieve in Him, or the idea of Him, God is faithful and he keeps moving. He doesn’t force Himself upon us, but He doesn’t give up either. He speaks to us by any means possible: through the kindness of others, through music, books, and art (even works of art which are not considered “religious”), through hundred-year-old maple trees, and through the beautiful world He has made. From any perspective, art and beauty can give us a glimpse past the windows of our lives, and in the worst of circumstances, can give us hope. Despite all of the sorrow and tragedy we create or receive, even if our hearts are willfully closed to God we may still surrender to beauty, and when the Holy Spirit takes us to the edge of ourselves, we may surrender to Him as well. Among the wild things in our lives that threaten to eat us up, stories from artists like Maurice Sendak can awaken us to a possibility: that we may see an angel through our window, or that we may smell good things to eat, and find our supper is still waiting for us. And it is still hot.

I was fourteen, walking into the gym for my first day of high school summer basketball camp. Switching from a small, Catholic middle school to a huge county high school was terrifying, so the night before I had stayed up late, weaving colored ribbons through two metal hair barrettes. Red, white, and blue—the team colors. I wore those to practice because I wanted to let the natives know that I was friendly.

 My hometown was the seat of the first diocese west of the Appalachian mountains, established in 1808 by Pope Pius VII. Our diocese ministered to Catholics between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River until 1841. In many areas of the South, Catholicism is shunned, but where I grew up, it was revered. Tourists would come from all over the world to visit our cathedral. I had grown up Southern Baptist, so I was accustomed to free-flowing emotions, pot luck dinners, and lots of hugs.  “The priesthood of the believer,” was more than just a doctrine–it was a way of life. We were congregational-led and democratic. Sunday School classes left room for debate, and because we felt personally responsible for guarding and giving the truth, we opened our Bibles and wrestled over nuance. None of that had prepared me for the first time I would attend Mass at St. Joseph’s basilica. The vaulted ceilings seemed to lift my soul up and out of my body like a balloon full of helium. Even before my classmates began to kneel and genuflect, I felt a compulsion to fall to my knees. I wondered if we entered in silent reverence to keep us all from shouting out in awe. So much was foreign to me there—the stations of the cross, the holy water that first dripped then clung to the fingertips of my friends, the statue of a kind-eyed saint I did not know, the recitations, “Lamb of God, take away the sins of the world. Lamb of God, take away the sins of the world. Lamb of God, take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us.” The artwork on the walls was holy, serious, and dark instead of bright and jovial like Baptist classroom posters. My heart pounded. I didn’t know that I was a poet then, but this sanctuary fit my instincts. I knew the purpose of liturgy without having to be taught. What they were doing here made sense to me. I held my breath when the ancient songs were sung. The Catholics were happy to have moved past Latin with Vatican II, but I drank up every bit of the good old stuff that they had kept. Mass felt like wandering into Lothlorien, or like reading George MacDonald’s Lilith, an enchanted world. Older Catholics spoke out of love for mystery instead of on fire with certainty. The part of my soul that responds to the transcendent quickened. During those years, I grew close to a nun and a priest. Father Bill would dress up like a clown, red-nose and all. He was different from a pastor, undivided by family demands so that his focus was singular. I loved his levity and his humility. Sister Theresa was maybe 4’9”, Italian, fierce. When the boys were terrible, she’d let out a string of foreign words that I was glad I couldn’t understand. Once I saw her throw a hardback grammar book at a kid named Doug. Honestly, he deserved it. With me, she was ever gentle. She asked me what I believed during catechism class, knowing good and well that I was Southern Baptist. When my classmates dared to giggle, she told them sternly that Baptists knew how to study their Bibles and that Catholics had a lot to learn from them. She told us stories of saints and miracles that delighted me, even if I didn’t fully believe all of them. She was probably close to 70, but her countenance lit up like a child’s when she spoke about the Eucharist. I had been taught the sufficiency of Christ for over a decade, so there were times when I thought Sister Theresa was too focused on working to please Jesus. Other times, however, I heard “faith without works is dead” ringing in her devotion. Her influence on my heart was like the book of James balancing out the book of Galatians. Every day at lunch, Sister Theresa would eat half a grapefruit with a spoon that had a jagged blade on one side. I would watch her work out the sections, worried that she would cut herself to pieces. But she was old, agile, and unafraid. She let me section out my doctrine with a blade, too. She relaxed around me, creating a barrier of protection around our dialogue, and I loved her for it. It was in this Catholic school that I learned to play basketball. I was a moderate little player, not squirrely enough to play point guard, and not tall enough to play center. But I made a solid forward, and I could play second guard in a pinch. My biggest strength was that I hustled. Every single game, I gave it all I had. The same love and support that filled our catechism classes ruled our court. Coaches were thorough and engaged. They corrected us and believed in us, insisting on good sportsmanship. We learned to cheer for one another and reach a hand to our enemies when they fell. I stumbled; I learned from my mistakes; I thrived. God, if you want me to be innocent, why did you leave me here where that’s impossible? Rebecca Reynolds But in ninth grade, I switched to the big county school, and county was a different planet.  Bloody fights in the hallways. A constant reek of body odor, and pot, and stale denim. A smoking area for teachers and students. Field parties on the weekends. Apathy. Metallica. Giant mullets and black eyeliner. A different cadence. A different vernacular. When I walked into the gymnasium that first summer, I knew in an instant that everything had changed. The first thing I noticed—high school girls moved like the boys I had always known, throwing themselves at hard angles between steps. Their jaws were clenched, and several of them kept a sort of permanent snarl on their faces. I had seen television shows with rough street gangs, but the saunter, the taunt, the threat, the dare—I had never seen any of this in a living female. Earlier that summer I had practiced walking up and down underneath the long tunnel of catalpa trees, my head up and my shoulders back, learning to plant my heels so that they came down softly and with dignity. Nearly every toddler learns to walk, of course, but as a child becomes a woman, her weight begins to collect in different places, so she has to learn to walk a second time. If she doesn’t, she won’t know how to hold her chest or her hips; she will let her breasts fold in, and bend over, and sort of clunk along. I wanted to float, so balancing a thick novel on my head, I had walked back and forth under those catalpa trees, squishing black and yellow caterpillars that fell en masse onto the asphalt below. Even though I was scared to death to walk into that high school gym, I remembered the grace I had practiced. Held my head up. Held my shoulders back. “Get them damned ribbons outta your hair, Princess,” one of the seniors barked. “I don’t know what kind of f***** world you come from,” said another, “But this is serious ball here at the County, and the next time I see you wearing s**t like that, I’m gonna up and rip them out myself.” Apparently the upperclassmen held some sort of authority. The other freshman laughed as I scrambled with the clips. “Damned rich private school kid,” I heard somebody whisper. The other seniors glowered, which silenced the freshmen. They looked around nervously to see what they should do instead, then took a hard jaw line. When the coach walked in, I saw something in his eyes I haven’t seen in many people since. It felt like a liquid hatred, the sort of hatred that feels like it’s doing you a favor by despising you. On bus trips,  if we hadn’t performed well in a game, he would stand at the front, arms on two seats, swaying back and forth with the motion of the bus,  and pointing out girls one at a time. 

He would say, “Thomas, I know your momma. I know your daddy. I know what kind of s**t they are. And you played like s**t tonight because you came from a s**t family, and unless you get your s**t together, you’re always going to be s**t just like your s***ty people.” I’d never heard anybody talk like that in my whole life. I looked down at my knees, hoping he wouldn’t notice me. One by one he would work through us, berating us, trying to figure out what would hurt us the most. I will never forget the first time he addressed me, “You, Kelley, you wish you were back at that prep school don’t you.” (It wasn’t a question.) “All those rich folks baby their kids like precious little treasures. Well you’re not precious here, Kelley. You’re nothing here.” My parents weren’t rich. We didn’t even go to restaurants. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t say anything but, “Yes, sir.” None of us ever said anything but, “Yes, sir. No, sir.” Some of my first exposures to sexual talk were among this crowd. In the locker rooms, the girls would laugh in smoky, harsh voices, telling stories about man bodies while they pulled up their knee socks and tightened their high tops. For them, sex was about conquest, about exposing men as fools. Sex was power—something that gave teenage girls the right to call grown men by their first names.

 The Apostle Paul once said, “I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil,”  but I didn’t know how to be innocent there. To be naïve was to be slaughtered. I learned how to cuss, learned how to throw an elbow, learned how to deflect attack with a cold stare. I learned how to stop acting like I cared because caring was weakness, and predators smell blood in the water from miles off. “God, if you want me to be innocent, why did you leave me here where that’s impossible?” I prayed. When our teenagers are about to fly the nest, we fill them full of strategic training programs that promise to defend them from the wicked ways of the world. But no matter what information you’ve given a kid, it’s going to be overwhelming for him to walk into a cultural current so strong that he can’t keep his balance. A person can’t think her way out of a tsunami when she’s dodging broken trees, and floating cars, and metric tons of water force full of jagged edges of metal and wood. I was thrown around. Cut up. Knocked half silly. But floating in the top of the flood waters, God sent mystery once more to sustain me. He gave me an art teacher, and her room was my oasis. I fed myself from that garden, spattered my clothes with acrylic paint and clay, found refuge in that concrete prison with no windows. My teacher had formed a little posse of thinkers and dreamers, teachers who met in the early mornings and saw beyond the walls that held us in. They talked about literature, politics, philosophy, ideology, plays, exhibits. They were my foretaste of The Eagle and Child—my first introduction to The Rabbit Room. Sometimes on the weekends I would drive over to the basilica after Mass. I would pull the doors open and sneak in, genuflecting clumsy as a Protestant, then sliding in the pew to pour my heart out to God. The physical act of kneeling felt good after working so hard to be vulgar and violent. When I was finished praying, I’d sit and look up at all the saints staring down at me, wondering if I would want to talk to a beatified human if I thought I could. I decided no—even if I had the option, I’d rather talk to Jesus directly. I came to that conclusion without feeling judgment or pride. It’s just how I wanted things to be. Behind me were rows of candles folks would light, praying for their beloved deceased. I didn’t believe in praying for this either, but there was something about the intimate silence of that practice which stirred a fierce homesickness inside me. Homesickness that would become a homing device. “Peace of Christ be with you,” whispered an older woman, leaving the candles to give me her hand. I took it in mine, feeling her soft, thin skin rolling around on her bones. “And also with you,” I responded, though I wasn’t sure if that was right. Thirty years have passed since those days. My high school memories are now filtered through a heart that has been broken and humbled. I don’t remember which year it was when I stopped wanting to hide from those older girls who barked and bit and started wishing I could have just adopted them. And now when I think about my old angry coach or the Metallica-loving, pot-smoking crowd, all walking with their heads down and their hearts full of shame and fury, I want to lift up their chins and look them straight in the eyes. I see how the enemy of the imago Dei prowled around the poor and the abandoned, telling all of them from birth that they would never amount to anything. He provoked them with hot irons. He lied to them. He lied so persistently. He lied until we all believed him. Now I also see that I misunderstood the Apostle Paul’s expectations. When he wrote that he wanted Christ’s followers to be wise and innocent, he wasn’t calling them to be withdrawn from the world. He wasn’t holding a high, moral hoop for them to jump through. He was wanting us to work out our identity in Christ, smack in the middle of the darkness. He was showing us what was possible for lonely, scared kids stuck in a concrete country school. The Greek word for “wise” describes someone who is skilled, cultivated, learned. But this is not just cognitive knowledge, it’s a strategic, practical sort of wisdom. It’s about comprehending our surroundings with honesty and insight, then naming what we find without bias, projection, or exaggeration. Once we understand the facts of the matter, we’re to be discreet. You might even call it street smart. We don’t bulldoze with the truth—we are artisans. To be “innocent” means that we are unmixed. The innocent are pure like a pure metal or an undiluted wine. Innocent people do not live in denial or in hiding; they don’t giggle and flush with a maidenly ignorance. Like a bolt of cloth can be pure linen, the innocent are woven from one fiber. No matter where you place linen, it remains linen. The innocent are also authentic like that friend who tells you the whole truth without flinching. Regardless of their surroundings, they have learned to embrace the truth Christ has declared about them, and so they walk in it. Reflecting on all those years helps me see that something inside me was hungry for wisdom and innocence like this. While I walked through the catalpa trees longing to balance the newfound weight of a frightening world with grace, I was looking for the ability to hold steady and poised, no matter what names were thrown at me. When I found places to kneel amid a culture that sauntered and throat punched, I was eager to live a life of artisan focus. When I felt that sharp homesickness—even while the bus tires jolted and shuddered with the angry roar—I was looking for the discernment of one who walks eagerly toward her own telos. I was ashamed of those inclinations when they first came to me, ashamed to be a holy fool. But I shouldn’t have been ashamed because these were longings of mystery. These were leaps of a soul into the vaulted basilica of the heavenly places. Pilgrims had gone before me, extending their bare, bony hands to me, whispering, “The peace of Christ to you,”  and in offering this much, they had created a pregnant pause. A vacuum. “And also with you.” “Lift up your hearts to the Lord.” “It is right to give him thanks and praise.” Father, all-powerful and ever living God, we do well always and everywhere to give you thanks through Jesus Christ our Lord. Through his cross and resurrection he freed us from sin and death and called us to the glory that has made us a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people set apart. Everywhere we proclaim your mighty works for you have called us out of darkness into your own wonderful light. And so, with all the choirs of angels in heaven we proclaim your glory and join in their unending hymn of praise: Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. Father, You are holy indeed, and all creation rightly gives You praise. All life, all holiness comes from You, through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, by the working of the Holy Spirit. From age to age you gather a people to yourself, so that from east to west a perfect offering may be made to the glory of Your name. Part 1 Part 2

While I have long been an appreciator of the church calendar, Lent is the season that I have taken the longest to appreciate, mostly due to shallow evangelical understandings of Roman Catholic traditions (fish on Fridays?). Traditionally, Lent is a 40 day period (connected to Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness) before Easter that involves preparing to observe Christ’s sacrificial death, and the contemplation of sin and its mortal consequences. It begins with the imposition of ashes as a remembrance of mortality (“For dust you are, and to dust you shall return”), and ends with the remembrance of Jesus’ own embrace of death on our behalf. If you are observing the season, here are some film, book, album, and general listening recommendations to accompany you along the way to Easter: Last Days in the Desert Rodrigo Garcia’s film is a haunting portrayal of Jesus’ 40 days of fasting and temptation in the wilderness of Judea. While the film does involve him being tempted by Satan (also played by McGregor), none of the three temptations presented in the Gospel accounts are involved. Rather, Jesus encounters a family in conflict: a father too scared of the wider world to let his son go, a son struggling with his desire to see more of that world, and a dying mother. As Jesus struggles to understand his own identity and God’s apparent silence, he wrestles with how to help this family and what that means for his larger role in the world. Capturing the most unique individual in history has always been a tricky and dangerous affair, but in an industry often saturated with films where Jesus seems slightly ethereal, Last Days in the Desert offers a fascinating imaginative look into Jesus’ human struggles. P. S. The minimalist score is also great to listen to. Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana Anne Rice’s two-part series on the life of Jesus, Christ the Lord, has become one of my favorites pairs of books. The first book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, has become a new traditional Advent read for me, as it offers us a wonderfully constructed and respectful look into the mind of 7-year-old Jesus as he returns from Egypt to the Holy Land, and attempts to uncover the mystery of his birth. The second book, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, picks up the story several decades later, leading through the year before Jesus’ entry into public ministry. Of particular Lenten interest is the latter third of the book, which involves Jesus’ baptism and 40 days in the wilderness. David Crowder Band’s Give Us Rest DCB’s epic double album finale is a perennial favorite for me around this time. Based on the structure of a Catholic requiem mass, the album moves from the darkness of death, sin, and hopelessness to the glory of resurrection. The first disc is probably more appropriate to the Lent season, while the second disc focuses on the resurrection. Russ Ramsey Twofer Our own Russ Ramsey’s Behold the King of Glory is a fantastic devotional for the Lent season, journeying through the entirety of Jesus’ ministry up through Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter. Russ’ new book, Struck, coming out on March 14, details his struggle with facing sudden open-heart surgery, and the ensuing tornado of fear, anxiety, anger, depression, and renewed faith that came out of that experience. You can hear him talk about it a little more here. The Liturgists Lent Meditations The Liturgists Podcast is currently doing a series of daily lectio divina for Lent. Each daily meditation is about 8 minutes long, and walks you through a short passage of Scripture. If you’d like to listen to the meditations, you can become a $5 a month contributor to The Liturgists on Patreon. Plus, if you download the Patreon app to your phone, you’ll automatically get the new meditations everyday and can listen to them right on your phone.

I’m a writer, and that means I spent a lot of years feeling like a kid standing awkwardly at the edge of the playground with a third arm growing out of someplace an arm shouldn’t grow. I tried to hide it most of the time, that arm, but occasionally I’d wave it around and people would look at it and say things like “Wow, that’s really great and stuff,” and then they’d run off and play with the two-armed kids, and I’d go back to doing freakish five-pointed cartwheels because, dang it, the world needed my five-point cartwheels and those two-armed people didn’t know what they were missing. Analogies are fun. Eventually, I moved to another city and met a whole bunch of other three-armed kids, and boy was that great. We did tons of cartwheels. And we did them together. And for a while we’d point at each other and say things like “Hey, your cartwheel form is a little off,” and “Thanks, I never noticed that before,” and “Boy, my third arm is so much stronger these days.” But after a while, we got tired of cartwheel judging and just enjoyed the company. And I realized that what I needed a lot more than for people to checkout my cartwheels was just the opportunity to hang out with a bunch of other people with odd numbers of arms and feel like we were all okay and kind of normal. I’ve come a long way since those days, but I look around sometimes and see other three-armed kids in the area and they’re often asking around for someone to give them pointers on their cartwheel technique, which really just sounds like a chore a lot of the time and isn’t necessarily what they need anyway because I’m pretty sure what they’d really benefit from the most is a group of odd-armed people to get to know so they can feel like they are okay and then they’ll learn to do awesome cartwheels eventually because everyone else is doing them and cartwheels are fun and, wow, everyone’s third arms are getting stronger all the time. Good job, analogy. Take a knee. (That was ridiculous, I know.) The gift of being surrounded by friends who are writers is precious to me. It’s a powerful encouragement to live in community with people who know what it’s like to struggle with the craft, who understand the ups and downs, and who will tell you when to keep up the good work or when to put away the bad. But often when I hear of writers’ groups, the focus is on the sharing of writing and gathering of critique rather than the sharing of burdens or the simple enjoyment of laughter and community. It is my opinion that the better group to be a part of is the one that’s less about the writing and more about the writer. Writing is largely a solitary act, and writers need one another in ways broader and deeper than mere offerings of praise and critique. To that end, I’m founding the Rabbit Room Writers’ Fellowship—something that sounds really formal but will hopefully be pretty casual in practice. If you’re looking for a regimented critique group, you might want to look elsewhere, but if you’re a writer and you recognize your need for community, you’re welcome here. What will we do? Come and find out. It’s my hope that the Rabbit Room can provide a space and time for writers to find in one another what they need to grow as artists, as thinkers, as followers of Christ, and as friends. We three-armed kids need to stick together. I’ll host the fellowship here at North Wind Manor in Nashville on Saturday, March 18th @ 2pm. There’s no price, and no prerequisite, except that you aspire to write and you bring a copy of a favorite book. You’re welcome here. We hope you’ll come. If you’d like to join us, shoot me an RSVP at pete@rabbitroom.com, and if you know a writer who needs this kind of community, please let them know they are invited.

Five years ago, Russ Ramsey almost died. A bacterial infection found purchase in the mitral valve of his heart and chawed it to a fare-thee-well. Describing the sonogram in which he saw the inner workings of his own heart, Russ wrote that his mitral valve, in contrast to the tight little doors of the other three valves, “looked like two pieces of spaghetti flapping around with no apparent purpose or design.” Surgeons at Vanderbilt University Medical Center sawed open Russ’s chest and repaired the valve. After the surgery, Russ survived a minor stroke, an opioid fog, cardiac rehab, and depression. He slowly regained his strength. But he has never been the same. Russ tells the story of this perilous journey in Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death. It was all a shocking and most uncommon series of events for Russ and his family and the rest of us who love him. Nevertheless, Russ writes in the first chapter of Struck, It is not the uncommon part of our suffering I am drawn to write about. I want to explore the common experiences afflicted people share—the onset of a sense of frailty, the fear, the grief, the humor, the routines, the new ways of relating to people who love us and are afraid for us and for themselves. Indeed, suffering is one of the most common things in the world. Those of us who aren’t currently suffering have either recently come out of suffering or will soon be headed into it. That’s why Struck is such an important book. Even if suffering is common, Russ’s approach to suffering is not. He writes, When I first learned of the severity of my condition I felt afraid, of course. But the prevailing sensation wasn’t fear. It was wonder—curiosity, even exhilaration. I felt that I was at the beginning of a great adventure—one I instinctively did not want to miss. Struck awakens that same curiosity and wonder in the reader. This isn’t a book of advice, nor is it a book that draws simple and obvious lessons about a sick heart in need of repair by the Great Physician. (To the contrary, in this book Russ asks such questions as, “What if it was God who broke my heart?”). No, this is a book about paying attention. “Seeing through my suffering won’t show me a new world,” Russ writes. Rather, it will show me more of the world I think I know.” That’s what reading Struck is like. Like all great writing, Struck shows us more of the world we think we know. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment when I was lifted up and struck. Annie Dillard Russ wrestles honestly with his suffering—not just the physical pain and peril, but the doubts and fears, the relational difficulties, the depression, the death of a friend who declined even as he recovered—and he doesn’t let go until he gets a blessing. Then he bestows that blessing on the reader. The title Struck comes from Annie Dillard: “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment when I was lifted up and struck.” As Russ beautifully demonstrates, to be struck by suffering is not only to be stricken, but also to be struck like a bell, resonating at the frequencies of a world we cannot see. When we face affliction, we typically hope for a recovery so complete that in retrospect, after we have returned to normal, our suffering will seem no more than a bump in the road or a blip on the radar. Struck makes a convincing case that returning to normal is a pretty paltry hope. In our suffering, let us hope instead for transformation. Early in his ordeal, Russ wrote, “I cannot help but think that perhaps my life, up to this point, has taken place in a kind of womb from which I am about to be delivered.” Can it be that suffering births us to newness of life? Can it be that it is God who breaks our hearts? For those of us who love Russ Ramsey, it is obvious that his recovery from affliction has not been a return to normal. He has been transformed by his suffering and by his recovery. God is doing a new thing in Russ, and Struck is one of its first-fruits. [Struck is available in the Rabbit Room Store.]

Last week, the internet nearly caved in on itself when a happy toddler in white glasses and a yellow sweater danced her way into her father’s live interview on a BBC news program. If you have not seen the video I’m talking about, watch it here. Trying to describe it would be like trying to describe DaVinci’s Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David. It’s best just to see it for yourself. Once you’ve watched these glorious 47 seconds a dozen times or so, you might want to read this hilarious play-by-play from The Telegraph. Also, it seems mom’s pants might not have been on all the way. The BBC did a follow-up interview with the family in the video, and it will make you love them even more. They are just people—a humble, funny, intelligent couple raising little children who could not care less about the BBC, politics in South Korea, or how important dad’s job is. For the children in the video, those things might as well not even exist. All they see is dad, and all they want is a piece of his attention. And you can see it on the dad’s face that he wants to give it, even as he and his wife valiantly try to recover the moment so he can finish his thought on live television about the political climate of East Asia. A while back, Tim Keller wrote, “The only person who dares wake up a king at 3:00 AM for a glass of water is a child.” This video is a picture of that. For the dad, access to being on live TV required a lot—years of school, practice talking on camera, and immersion in culture and politics. For the children, on the other hand, access to their father is no trouble at all. They just dance right in. And we love it. We love it because we can relate to the parents and because we want to be the kids. Thanks to the technological age we’re in, within days of this interview someone created this gif of those children, and now it seems to be showing up everywhere as a universal expression of celebration and approval. In my opinion, this is a perfect example of creating art to the glory of God. Someone used their gifts to make a sharable gif which celebrates innocence and joy even as it pokes fun at the absurdity and futility of our attempts to keep things together. And here’s the most beautiful part. Those kids still have no idea the joy they’ve brought the watching world. Why? Because to them, we might as well not even exist. To them, only four people witnessed that moment. To them, it all happened at home, and it was all okay. Why wouldn’t it be?

Randall Goodgame, he of the Slugs and Bugs, has lately taken to hanging out at the monkey bars to talk theology with the big kids. He also comes armed with the best ’80s TV theme song since The Facts of Life. Check out the first two episodes featuring Russ Ramsey (the Presbyterian), Russell Moore (the Baptist), and Thomas McKenzie (the Anglican): Russ Ramsey is an author and associate pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee. He just released Struck – a wonderful book about marriage, friendship, a heart surgery, parenting, and living a life of faith during trying times. Highly recommended. Russell Moore is the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. His book  Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel is a must-read for Christians in the United States of America. Thomas McKenzie is the pastor of Church of the Redeemer in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of The Anglican Way, a guidebook for the Anglican tradition. Also check out the Kickstarter campaign for TWO new Slugs & Bugs albums! Source: A Baptist, an Anglican, and a Presbyterian Walk Into a Monkey Bar – Episode 1 | Slugs and Bugs