I’m pleased to be able to offer here, in full, the first chapter of Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death. When my doctor told me I was dying, I came alive. Three days before my fortieth birthday I was admitted to the emergency room. A bacterial infection had destroyed my mitral valve and I was in the early stages of heart failure. That day and the two years that followed are the setting for this book. They are the setting, but they are not the subject. This is a book about what happens when affliction and faith collide. I am a husband, father of four, pastor, and author living in the greatest “big small town” in America—Nashville, Tennessee. I lead a simple life. I get up early for work. I am rarely awake past 11:00 p.m. My wife and I go to bed tired. I have never dug a well in Africa or jumped out of an airplane. I am suspicious of people who use the word “epic” to describe their desired life. I am a simple man, and I do not presume that my story of affliction is all that unusual. But it is not the uncommon parts 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. I have committed myself to the work of paying as much attention as I can to the medical, spiritual, relational, emotional, pharmaceutical, and physical experiences of this journey my failing heart has set me on. I have asked a lot of questions and taken a lot of notes and used them to write the chapters that make up this book. Affliction awakens us to things we might not have seen otherwise. 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. I have discovered that many in my position have felt the same way. I want to interrogate my affliction. What happens when a person stands at the edge of their mortality and looks out into the eternal? What happens when a doctor tells a man he is dying? If that person believes in God (which I do), what will become of his faith? Will the spiritual premises he trusted as dependable foundations all those years earlier suddenly fail? Will he require certain personal outcomes in order for his faith to hold? And if so, is that even faith? Or is that nothing more than a house of cards too easily toppled by the winds of suffering? I do not want simply to endure my affliction. I want to experience it—to receive it as an adventure and follow it to its end. I find the whole business fascinating. Knowing that I come to this season having seen the world only through the eyes of the well, I ask God to help me see whatever this struggle might reveal. There is nothing automatic about learning to see with new eyes. In the early 1700s, doctors in the West discovered how to remove cataracts from the eyes of blind patients, giving them the ability to see. Annie Dillard, in her Pulitzer Prize–winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, wrote about what the experience of seeing for the first time was like for these people, many of whom had been blind since birth. One might presume the sensation would have been like someone turning on a light in a dark room—bringing clarity and information to an otherwise bewildering existence. But for many of these newly sighted people, who had already learned how to navigate the world through their other senses, the sudden ability to see was what confused them. For the majority of patients, concepts like depth, size, shape, and space were nearly impossible to grasp. Dillard wrote, “For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning.” These patients had no categories for what they were seeing, and this was more than many of them could bear. Many became depressed because when they gained the ability to see, they lost the world as they knew it. Vision became a new form of blindness. In response to their frustration, some simply refused to use their eyes. One doctor said of his patient, “Her unfortunate father, who had hoped for so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and she is never happier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness.” For those who did not refuse their new sight, they had to learn how to use it. One man “practiced his vision in a strange fashion; thus he takes off one of his boots, throws it some way off in front of him, and then attempts to gauge the distance at which it lies; he takes a few steps toward the boot and tries to grasp it; on failing to reach it, he moves on a step or two and gropes for the boot until he finally gets hold of it.” For those who practiced using their new eyes, the world they learned to see was filled with wonder. One twenty-two-year-old was so overwhelmed by the world’s brightness that she kept her eyes shut tight for two weeks following her surgery. When at last she gathered the courage to open them “she did not recognize any objects, but the more she directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful!’” I want to know those moments when confusion gives way to beauty and wonder. I believe moments like these are bound to come for me in this season of affliction, if I look for them. When one such moment happened for Annie Dillard herself, she said, “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” For my whole life I have seen the world through the eyes of the well. This is all I have ever known. But now, I have been lifted and struck, and I want to hear what resounds in me. Though I may stumble for a time like a man reaching for his boot, I want to learn to see the world through the eyes of affliction. This will be a challenge because I see this world and my place in it through the lens of what I already know. I can’t help it. A dog is a dog and a pear is a pear. I can’t see “Eden before Adam gave names.” But affliction has the power, I believe, to quiet the voices in my head that think they already know everything. Seeing through my suffering won’t show me a new world. Rather, it will show me more of the world I think I already know. Affliction is bound to find us, and when it does whatever faith we profess, along with all its convictions regarding the meaning of this life and the next, is tested. Some affliction comes suddenly and lasts only a moment. Other affliction comes and takes us out of this world. Often though, affliction grabs us like an unsuspected wave and tosses us around in its currents for a season before washing us back up onto our familiar shores. What then? Do we thank our lucky stars that we survived and try to return to the life we knew before any of this happened? Is that even an option? And if so, at what cost? Affliction shapes our lives. It comes for us all—in our own personal distress or in the sufferings of those we love. It has come for me, and I know it will come again. The least I can do is pay attention. I do not wish to waste my pain. (Pick up a copy of Struck here.) [Copyright © 2017 by Russ Ramsey. Published by InterVarsity Press. Used with permission.]

This past year has been, what you might call on LinkedIn, a “season of transition,” which is French for “I’m figuring it out all over again.” My label gig ended about a year ago and the road life, besides the occasional show or short tour with good friends, is not something worth putting my family through again. So now what? I’ve spent quite a bit of time praying, hiking, and talking with trusted friends and it has confirmed what I have known all along. What I love to do is walk with artists and songwriters, helping them write great music, make wise business decisions, and lead a healthy artistic life. I’ve been quietly doing this quite a bit for the past year and it’s been life-giving and exciting. But I can’t keep meeting people for coffee without some sort of financial structure to provide for my family, so I’m taking my own advice and believing that my time and work are valuable. That’s why I’m now offering Artist Consultations and Artist Development for hire. Nothing gives me greater joy than the time I get to spend pouring into people in this way. I hope that my years of experience across the music industry can prove beneficial to people, and we can help folks make plans to finally be able to do the good things they’ve always wanted to do. If you’re interested you can read more about this at Andrewosenga.com. If I can be of service to you as you’re trying to navigate the next steps in your music career, feel free to reach out.

I saw a quote-photo posted on Twitter the other day: “I dread writing poetry, for, I suppose, the following reasons: a poem is a terrible journey, a painful effort of concentrating the imagination; words are an extremely difficult medium to use, and sometimes when one has spent days trying to say a thing clearly one finds that one has only said it dully; above all, the writing of a poem brings one face to face with one’s own personality with all its familiar and clumsy limitations.” — Stephen Spender, “The Making of a Poem” This quote has a context, and the author may have meant something entirely different. But taken by itself, as posted, it annoyed me. Writing, or playing music, or any form of art certainly has its hard moments, times of frustration, disappointment, a sense of lack. But there is no faith or motivation in staying there. So I rewrote it for my own amusement. “I love playing music, for, I suppose, the following reasons: a song is a beautiful journey, an expressive flow of focusing the imagination; music is a wonderful medium to use, and sometimes when one has spent days working on a tune one finds that there are always more and better ways to play it, because music is infinite; above all, the playing of music can be sometimes daunting because it brings one face to face with one’s own God-given, wondrous, complicated personality with all of its endless, eternal potential.” — Ron Block, “The Making of Music.” In my life I have seen some of the creative process of varied people: T. Bone Burnett working on the O Brother soundtrack and Down From The Mountain shows, Kate Rusby and Damien O’Kane arranging songs for Kate’s record, writing songs with Rebecca Reynolds. I’ve worked with Alison Krauss for nearly 26 years. And I’ve worked on my own material, my own songs, my own practice of music for nearly 40 years. The best music I have made, and the best I’ve seen others make, has not been from a continual over-focus on “How hard this is!” I have been through hard bits in the studio, where I’m basically thinking, “What’s the name of that truck-driving school?” I’ve been stuck before. “This is hard” solidifies into “I don’t know if I can” which then brings, “I’ll muscle my way through it.” This never ends well. If I’m stuck, it is not because I’m being lazy. It’s because of thinking, “This is so terribly, extremely difficult, and painful, and I am so clumsy and limited.” This brings stress and tension to my body, which makes it impossible to play music freely. It can bring procrastination, avoidance, and the use of various anesthetics—food, drink, television. I went through a phase performing with Alison Krauss & Union Station where I was feeling stress and tension before the shows. The solution wasn’t to try harder, to practice more, to be even more prepared (Make no mistake. I am a preparer. That is my bottom line.). The answer to the stress was to sit in a chair in the dressing room before the show, with the lights shut off, breathe in deeply for a few minutes until my entire body was relaxed (sitting up so as not to fall asleep), and then thank God: “Thank you that I get to play music. Thank you for this band, for this show, for these people. Thank you for putting me here, for filling my life with yourself, with filling me with sufficiency and power to do this work well.” After about 20 minutes of this meditation on reasons to be grateful, I’d get up and get dressed for the show. This attitude of gratefulness, fullness, and sufficiency changed my entire attitude. I walked out on stage every night thinking, “This is going to be  awesome.” “Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder,” said G. K. Chesterton. I felt better, played better, was more relaxed, spontaneous, and present. I see this attitude in the people I mentioned, and other high-level artists I’ve worked with. There’s an acknowledgement of the hard parts, but undergirding it all is the love of the activity and a sense of sufficiency and gratitude in doing it. We can acknowledge the hard bits. Of course it can be hard. Anything we want to excel in is going to be tough at times. But down beneath the toughness is desire, love, pleasure, fullness, and a sense of sufficiency, even if we have to water the ground on top and till the  topsoil to find it. Chesterton also said, “Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.” The lynchpin of these two views is faith—a sense of gratefulness, fullness, and sufficiency. These things are cultivated; it is the easy thing to stay on the top of the hard ground and live in the terrible, the painful, the difficult, the dull, the clumsy, the limited. To live in gratitude, fullness, and a sense of sufficiency takes cultivation. We thank, we trust, we sit our posterior in the chair and write, or practice, or study, and by that cultivation we become “artists of a large and wholesome vitality.”

Since the conception of the Every Moment Holy project, we’ve always known it would be illustrated. We wanted to find a way to capture the style and look of sacred images but infuse them with “ordinary” scenes and subjects. Author Doug McKelvey and I both had clear ideas of what direction the illustration should take, and so finding the right artist for the book was a source of a lot of discussion and hand-wringing. Enter Ned Bustard. When we saw the work he’d done in Revealed: A Storybook Bible for Grown-Ups, we knew we’d found our man. Ned caught the vision for the book right away and I’m anxious to show you how he’s bringing Doug’s liturgies to life visually. Though his name might not be familiar to the Rabbit Room audience (yet), he’s cut from familiar cloth. He’s an author of children’s fiction and historical fiction, and he’s the editor behind two books that get at the root of what the Rabbit Room is all about: It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God, and It Was Good: Making Music to the Glory of God. He’s the creative director at Square Halo Books, a board member at ASCHA (The Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art), and on staff with CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts). And beyond all that, he’s just a downright nice guy. I’m so glad I have the chance to introduce him to all of you through this interview in which we discuss Barry Moser, printmaking, Christian symbolism, the creative process, and plenty of other stuff. Say hello to Ned Bustard. PP: So Ned, Let me first say how happy I am that you’re gracing Every Moment Holy with your work. The book is going to be great, and your illustrations are a big part of the recipe. It was important for us to find an illustrator who would catch the vision of the book and I feel like you’re doing just that. NB: I’m extremely excited about this project. Earlier this year when Andrew and I were talking about upcoming book projects that our companies were developing, he described EMH and I nearly fell on the floor. I’ve been a huge fan of Doug’s writing since he collaborated with Charlie Peacock years ago. And I grew up with a love of prayerbooks because my grandfather’s church used them. I have a large collection of them and often pillage them when writing the liturgy for my church’s worship services. And on top of all that, the inspiration for my printmaking is medieval woodcuts. Combine all those influences together and it’s no surprise that I shamelessly asked Andrew to be considered. PP: But let’s start at the beginning. I’m a huge fan of Barry Moser, and when I first saw some of your stuff, I thought to myself, this is a man who loves Barry Moser. Was I right? NB: I must say it’s quite an honor that you would connect me with Barry Moser in your mind. He’s an amazing artist whose work has kept me spellbound for years. I have his illustrated Bible sitting on the book shelf right next to me as we’re talking. His work is magnificent. His craftsmanship is superb, and his work has such deep passion in it. Years ago I had the good fortune to design a book of Gregory Wolfe’s writing that was accompanied by Moser’s engravings. In the process I got to hold the works in my hands to scan them, and I felt like I was holding mithral. Ah, forgive me… I’m geeking out. The short answer is: yes, I love Barry Moser’s work. PP: Can you explain how you create your work? This stuff is all a mystery to me, and it’s fascinating. Are you carving linoleum or wood or what? Take me through the process from conception to print. NB: Relief printmaking is a very simple method of making art. And its simplicity is what I love about it. The connection this technique has with early Bibles and prayerbooks makes it a perfect visual medium for Every Moment Holy. My day job is offering people illustration and graphic design services. When I started in the field it was all work done by hand, but the industry changed, and now nearly all I do is computerized (not that this is a bad thing, generally). One aspect I like about printmaking is that it is so gritty, earthy, and non-computerized. There is no copy/paste or save-as. And there is something that feels more “real” to me than what I do with my computer. The basic process is that I draw on a block of linoleum, cut away everything that I want to be white, roll ink on the block, lay a piece of paper on it, rub it hard to get a clean impression, and pull off the paper and hang it up to dry. Then I ink it and apply paper again and again until I have as many reproductions as I desire. I usually use a printing press to make the impression, and I almost always use the computer to work out my compositions before transferring them to the linoleum. For example, the first print I completed for this book began as a doodle I scanned into my computer over which I laid in a photo I had my daughter take of me with a laptop and cell phone (to get spacial relationships correct). Many decisions were made on the fly as I was cutting the block, but the basic image had most of the kinks worked out on the computer, allowing me more freedom as I cut the block. PP: Can you talk a little about that image in particular? I know you love Christian symbology. How does that find its way into your work? “New Creation” from Revealed: A Storybook Bible for Grown-Ups NB: I love designing logos. I’m passionate about communicating meaning and giving the viewer as much symbolism as I can. This love of telling a story through icons is apparent in my printmaking as well. An extreme example of this is the piece I made called “New Creation,” in Revealed: A Storybook Bible for Grown-Ups. In that piece symbols for the 12 Apostles and 12 Tribes swirl around a new Earth full of things representing Christ, the Church, Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the Trinity, martyrs, New Jerusalem, and more. One of my favorite books is Signs and Symbols in Christian Art by George Ferguson (it sits on a shelf next to opposite Moser’s Bible). In that reference book there are oodles of animals, plants, colors, and more that I regularly draw from for my artwork. Certainly I load my pieces with more symbols than most folks have the education or inclination to decipher, but I enjoy knowing that they are in there for the person who cares enough to spend the time decoding it. Print block for “A Liturgy for Those Who Consume Media” This first piece for Every Moment Holy isn’t overloaded with symbolism, but there is plenty there to tell the story. In that print a man in the boat sits, preoccupied with with his various electronic devices atop the crest of a wave while the wind blows and a raven looks out intently towards the horizon. As a good pilgrim he should be rowing his boat to shore, but instead he is “surfing” the dark seas of the internet without any care for where he is going. The raven/blackbird is a symbol for sin, and he is at his post looking to guide the oblivious traveler. The wind is blowing the opposite direction, and possessing three parts is a symbol for the Trinity. PP: I love that. Our vision for the book is that the illustrations capture the holy inherent in the ordinary, and that image is a perfect example. How long does it take you to to carve a block once the artwork is up to snuff? NB: I’d guess an hour for something like that. Maybe more. I try not to keep track of how long it takes me to cut a block because it would depress me too much if I factored that time into what I’m able to charge for a print. Even if you only include paper, ink, and the time it takes to pull the prints, my hourly rate ends up well below minimum wage. I know the “New Creation” print took over 40 hours to cut, because I was curious, and made it a point to keep track. Obviously, it would be much easier and quicker to create these images on the computer, but like I said, the prints feel more real than a computer illustration, and the cutting and printing process always gives me happy mistakes and irregularities that add to the charm and grittiness of the final pieces. My friend Matthew Clark (an amazing printmaker who everyone should know about) once said that those unplanned anomalies in the process had been described to him as “gifts from the printing gods.” Of course, as a good elder in my church, I would have to describe them as good and delightful markings predestined to be in the artwork “according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.” PP: I wish someone would come up with something wise to say that would make me feel better about typos in published books. Authors, I guess, are doomed by perfection. A collaboration between Ned Bustard and Matthew Clark I love that you work in such a tactile medium. The physicality of the final piece is what makes block cutting and printing such a compelling form of illustration. The inherent flaws in the process are part of what make the work beautiful. Which makes it so fitting for this book. Do we need to add a liturgy “For Those Who Create Block Cuts On Small Publishing Budgets?” I’m joking, but now that I think of it, a liturgy for “Those Who Create Images” might be something to consider. NB: I’m often reluctant to open the books I design when they arrive from the printer because I know as soon as I do I will find a mistake. Never fails. PP: Are there any liturgies you’re particularly looking forward to illustrating? NB: The liturgy for a Husband and Wife at the End of the Day was very moving to me when I first read it. I’m eager to work on that one. I also am eager to work on the liturgy about home repair. I had my little brother pose for my reference for that piece and I think it will be fun to cut a block depicting him. More than a specific liturgy, I am looking forward to making a bunch of them so I can see the visual themes that emerge and listen in on the conversations between various pieces in the series. I dont have plans for them as a whole, but I am sure motifs will emerge and symbols will tie diverse prints together across the book. PP: I’m so glad you brought this up. I have a similar experience each year when I edit together The Molehill, the Rabbit Room’s literary journal. I get submissions from writers all over the country and it’s always fascinating to watch for the themes and images that emerge to form a cohesive whole. Having read what Doug has written for this book so far, I’m already seeing how it’s coming together and it’s beautiful. I can’t wait to see how his work informs yours. NB: One of the great blessings for me, personally, about having the privilege to be part of this Rabbit Room book project is that it affirms what God has been doing in my life for many years. Early on in my career as an illustrator I found my work developing in a style i dubbed “faux gothic.”  I worked and worked at it out of my passion for celtic and medieval art. I really saw no place for it, but it seemed to spring naturally from who God had wired me to be. Then I added to that aesthetic a passion for printmaking. Still not knowing why I was doing it or having any idea of where it might find a home. And now Every Moment Holy has been laid in my lap! I’m not saying folks should keep following their creative passions and one day the Rabbit Room will affirm all of their efforts with a cool project like this, but what I DO believe is that we should work hard to grow in our disciplines (writing, music, art, bee keeping, etc) as a way to give glory to God—and then not be surprised when we see the Lord bless us. There is no way to say what “success” will look like—soli deo gloria—but we need to be faithful, work hard, and see what fruit comes from it all. And we may not see the fruit. For example, I have heard that many people have been positively affected by my book It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God, but I’ve met only a few here and there. I just need to trust God that he is raising the harvest he wants to see grow from the seeds we have planted in faith. PP: Amen. I think that’s the perspective all of us have with this book. And I think that’s the way we approach so much of the work we do at the Rabbit Room. We plant seeds. And then we trust God to make it grow. Thanks for the conversation, Ned. I look forward to seeing the rest of your work on this book. To learn more about Every Moment Holy, visit the campaign page (and share it with your friends!).

One of the topics I’m asked to speak about most often at churches and conferences and in workshops is how God is helping churches see their neighborhoods with fresh eyes. But lately I’ve also been drawn to another aspect of this relationship. In particular, what if it is within the context of the Neighborhood that the Church itself is best seen? The metaphor I keep coming back to is one of bioluminescence, the chemical process by which organisms—fireflies, some deep-sea fish, and other creatures—emit light. (The word derives from the prefix bio-, meaning “life,” and lumen, or “light.”) I’m especially interested in bioluminescent algae and plankton, which can make waves glow, illuminate footprints in the wet sand, or appear as miles-long light trails behind ocean ships. As followers of Jesus, we have the light of Christ inside us. We are 'theoluminescent.' John Pattison In his autobiography, Jim Lovell, the commander of the Apollo 13 mission and a former Navy pilot, recalled the time in 1950 when he had to perform his first night landing on an aircraft carrier. Through a series of unfortunate events, he had gone off course. His instrument panel had shorted out (as had the cockpit light), there was no moon, and thick clouds blocked out the stars. He was plunged into darkness, with no sense of where to find his ship, the USS Shangri-La. But when his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw a faint greenish trail in the water below him. He recognized it immediately as the phosphorescent algae being churned up by the propeller of the aircraft carrier, a road leading him back home. Robert Macfarlane, the British author of The Wild Places, describes wading into the sea of an island cove near Scotland, and “flinging long streaks of fire” from his fingertips like Merlin. “When it was undisturbed, the water was still and black. But where it was stirred, it burned with light.” Macfarlane also told this amazing story: In 2004, a father and son were sailing in the Gulf of Mexico when their yacht was capsized by a gust of wind, sixty miles offshore. They clung to the hull, as it was carried on the powerful currents of the Gulf. After night fell, the water became rich with phosphorescence, and the air was filled with a high discordant music, made of many different notes: the siren song of dolphins. The drifting pair also saw that they were are at the centre of two rough circles of phosphorescence, one turning within the other. The inner circle of light, they realised, was a ring of dolphins, swimming around the upturned boat, and the outer circle was a ring of sharks, swimming around the dolphins. The dolphins were protecting the father and his son, keeping the sharks from them. Bioluminescent marine organisms live at least just below the surface of the water. They all have the capacity to make light, but they’re so small that they can only be seen in community with each other. “By processes not entirely understood,” says Macfarlane, “these simple creatures ignite into light when jostled. They convert the energy of movement into the energy of radiance.” Maybe you’re starting to see why I’m so drawn to this image, and why I think it’s relevant to my work with Slow Church. As followers of Jesus, we have the light of Christ inside us. We are “theoluminescent.” St. Paul told Christians in the city of Ephesus to “walk in the way of love”: For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord…[Everything] exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. (Ephesians 5:8-10, 13) In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:14-16) Theoluminescent, we are “children of the light” (John 12:36). For too long, many displaced and disembodied churches have lived above or apart from their neighborhoods. (My coauthor and I talk about this in Chapter 3 of the Slow Church book.) But what if the Church got below the surface? What if we moved more of our lives into the ongoing life of our neighborhoods? What if we let ourselves be jostled and churned up in our particular places? And what if we did all this within the context of communities of other believers? I think what would happen is that the Church, like those bioluminescent organisms, would turn the energy of movement into the energy of radiance. We would be a trail of light pointing the way home. By God’s grace, we would shine. Image Credit: The image above is from a beautiful scene in the 2012 film Life of Pi. Here’s the full scene: Go Deeper: I’d love to connect and hear about the work you’re doing in your own neighborhood. You can find me on Facebook and on Twitter. If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to the Slow Church blog. As a way of saying thank you, you’ll also get a free copy of the ebook, Growing Deeper in Our Church Communities. #Bioluminescence #Church #LifeofPi #RobertMacFarlane #Place

An artist friend and I had a long talk a while back about the types of people that make up the human race. According to him, most people fall into one of two camps: the leaders and the followers. “Then there’s this fringe element,” he said. “You know, the gonzos, the folks that never really feel like they fit in anywhere. They wouldn’t consider themselves leaders in a million years, but they’re way too individualistic to consent to anything that looked like following, either.” These, he says, are the artists—the thinkers, the writers, the painters, storytellers, musicians, scientists, what-have-you; the ones who observe and articulate the human condition from what often feels like the outside. These are the ones whose notes and colors and theories and words seep into the busy lives of the leaders and the followers, influencing them in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. They pour courage and insight into the human race; they affirm what matters most; they expose the lunacies of the particular generation they happen to inhabit, and they expend superhuman energy interpreting things—important things, true things, culture-shaping things—which the leaders and followers then experience and are eventually affected by. “It’s the fringe element that changes the world,” he told me. “If they’re brave enough.” I mentioned the excruciating sensitivity required of these interpreters, the curse of such harrowing insight into what it means to be alive—which comes coupled with the wonder and joy and sublimity of…being alive. “It must hurt them terribly,” I said. “All that knowing and making known. It must feel like pouring out their hearts’ blood, over and over and over again. And the fringe element rarely sees the real fruit of their labors.” “Maybe,” my friend posed thoughtfully, “maybe they,” and the look he gave me said we, “are meant to take that fall for the rest of humanity. Almost like a martyrdom for the greater good.” His words have haunted me ever since. What do y’all think?

A couple of days ago, we introduced you to Ned Bustard, the illustrator for Every Moment Holy. We gave you an early look at his work, and here’s a peek at the liturgy that goes along with that image. We’re also happy to announce that we’ve decided to include in the book a list of everyone who has helped bring this project to life (we’ll give those who wish to be anonymous a chance to opt out). If you’d like your name to be printed in Every Moment Holy‘s list of patrons, please join us by making a donation on the campaign page. And one more big announcement: We’ve decided that our 3rd quarter thank-you gift to our members will be a hot-off-the-press copy of Every Moment Holy. So if you’d like to be one of the first people to hold a copy of the book, consider becoming a member today. (Note that quarterly thank-you gifts are given out each quarter to those who have been recurring members for a minimum of 2 months of the given quarter. So don’t wait until it’s too late to start your membership.) A Liturgy Before Consuming Media from Every Moment Holy (copyright 2017 by Douglas McKelvey) O Discerning Spirit who alone judges all things rightly, now be present in my mind and active in my imagination as I prepare to engage with the claims and questions of my culture, incarnated in the stories that people tell. Let me experience mediums of art and expression, neither as a passive consumer nor as an entertainment glutton, but rather as one who through such works would more fully and compassionately enter this ongoing human conversation of mystery and meaning, wonder and beauty, good and evil, sorrow and joy, fear and love. All truth is your truth, O Lord, and all beauty is your beauty. Therefore use human expressions of celebration and longing as catalysts to draw my mind towards ever deeper insight, my imagination into new and wondering awe, and my heartbeat into closer rhythm with your own. Shape my vision by your fixed precepts, and tutor me, Holy Spirit, that I might learn to discern the difference between those stories that are whole, echoing the greater narrative of your redemption, and those that are bent or broken, failing to trace accurately the patterns of your eternal thoughts and so failing to name rightly the true condition of humanity and of all creation. Grant me wisdom to divide rightly; to separate form from content, craft from narrative, and meaning from emotion. Bless me with the great discernment to be able to celebrate the stamp of your divine image revealed in an excellence of craft and artistry even while grieving a paucity of meaning and hope in the same work. Guard my mind against the old enticement to believe a lie simply because it is beautifully told. Let me not be careless. Give me right conviction to judge my own motives in that which I approve, teaching me to be always mindful of that which I consume, and thoughtful of the ways in which I consume it. Impart to me keener knowledge of the limits of my own heart in light of my own particular brokenness, that I might choose what would be for my flourishing and not for my harm. And give me the grace to understand that what causes me to stumble might bear no ill consequence for another of your children, so that while I am to care for my brothers and sisters, I must also allow them, in matters of conscience, the freedom to sometimes choose a thing your Spirit convicts me to refrain from. Even so, let my own freedoms in Christ never be flaunted or exercised in such a way as to give cause for confusion, temptation, or stumbling in others. May the stories I partake of, and the ways in which I engage with them make me in the end a more empathetic Christ-bearer, more compassionate, more aware of my own brokenness and need for grace, better able to understand the hopes and fears and failings of my fellow humans so that I might more authentically live and learn and love among them unto the end that all of our many stories might somehow be more beautifully woven into your own greater story. Amen. So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who does not condemn himself by what he approves. —Romans 14:22

In this year’s Best Films of 2016 Rabbit Room podcast, one of the chosen films was… a TV show. Cheating? Sure. But it makes sense to me—over the past ten years or so, the lines have blurred between TV and film. TV production, at its best, is on the level of studio filmmaking, and film franchises are more episodic. We binge-watch movies and shows at home. As far as I’m concerned: —Sherlock is a BBC film series, while Doctor Who is a BBC show —Stranger Things is Netflix show, while The Crown is a Netflix film series —DC Comics movies comprise a film series, while Marvel movies are MCU show episodes —The Force Awakens was a new Star Wars film, while Rogue One was the first part of a Star Wars anthology show That’s where I stand on the film/show dichotomy. I can’t seem to hammer down any specific criteria, but I know what feels like a show to me and what feels like a movie. How do you distinguish a film from a show? Does this dichotomy need definition, or do we need to coin hybrid terms for a in-between production?

Andrew Osenga is spinning some new creative plates these days, from a new career focus on helping young, developing artists find their footing to a new online songwriting course to his instrumental project After Lake (iTunes). From the outside, it’s easy to assume Osenga is enjoying a fruitful, inspired season filled with joy and creativity. Instead, to hear him explain it, the new ventures have organically grown from a tough season of fear and insecurity, confusion and a search for identity. When I first heard you mention an instrumental project, my mind jumped to your four-EP series where you indulged a bit more there than ever. Does this have any roots there? Does it go farther back than even that? A bit, yeah. I really love listening to instrumental music when I’m doing the administrative parts of my work—email, scheduling, bills, etc.—and usually there’s just a lot more melodies going on in my head than I have worthwhile thoughts to share. [Laughs] I did a couple instrumental pieces on Leonard, which was the first time I’d really done anything like that, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This past year has been a pretty tough season of transition for me, and transition into what I still don’t quite know. There have been some days where I just didn’t know where I should be putting my name. I realized I had two options: 1.) Spiral into depression and emotional Facebook suicide, which is where you scroll forever and decide everyone’s life is amazing and yours is the worst, or 2.) I could go do something productive. For the past few months I’ve been choosing option 2, most of the time, and so I go down to my studio in the mornings and write until lunch, either new songs, of which I have a ton and hope to share later this year, or these instrumental pieces. This first collection is the fruit of that first initial bout of productive energy, all done this March. Where does the name “After Lake” come from, besides just sounding cool? I googled “Hipster Band Name Generator” clicked on the first link and “After Lake” was there when it loaded. “That’s pretty cool,” I thought. You’ve got licensing information in the middle of the new website. Is that a primary goal for this, to have the music available to appear in movies, television, etc.? Yeah, the real financial hope for this stuff is that it gets picked up and used in film or TV placements. The long term hope is that building a catalog of music that could fit there would eventually help fund the time it will take to invest in the next phase of my career. When you take away the lyrical expectations of songwriting, how does that change the creative experience for you? Oh man, it is so freeing. Like most writers, I ran out of my “feelings” about halfway through my second record. Then I had to go looking for things to write about. I write a lot of songs and so I can get to feeling like I’m constantly just telling the same three stories. Without worrying about the lyrics or the time it takes to get a great vocal I’m able to move really quickly from idea to completed work. It’s a nice palate cleanser, and interestingly enough, though I’m not using words, I feel I have a lot to say right now, and I can often say it best with tones and melodies. I’m working on a second collection now which I hope to release in June. I give advice to artists all the time where I tell them to set aside regular time to write, but of course, that’s something I’ve never actually done myself until this year. Once I started taking my own advice and writing every day I have just had a flood of new songs come through. I’m back on a lyrical wave right now, so I’m going to ride it until it crests and then get back to After Lake and the next volume of those pieces. You mentioned the last few months you’ve been channeling that energy into something productive. Has that given way to the thing you’ve needed? Or are you still searching in a way, emotionally? In a tangible way, not yet. I’m still very much on that journey with a blindfold. Emotionally, though, it has been a precious gift. I started writing songs as a way to process my thoughts and feelings, and as the hobby became a career it became less about that and more about writing things that, while true, and real, and important to me, could also bring income to provide for my family. In this season it’s been more about writing to reclaim a sense of my own identity, who I am apart from my career and who I am in relationship to God. A lot of it may never end up for public consumption but it’s been important work to do as a person. I think a lot of readers will read your statement about not following your own advice and nod along in agreement. What is it that you think kept you from taking your own advice until now? You know, there were seasons when I was a full-time artist that I would write very regularly. Usually before a record, I would put the time on my calendar and be diligent. Over the last few years, I’ve had other things going on 9 to 5 and have done the traditional “hobby-style” writing, which means you only write late at night when you’re really really sad. [Laughs] I guess I told myself I was too busy: the same thing we all tell ourselves when we’re avoiding something we know is better for us than Netflix and Instagram. It is crazy how productive but it has been to just put time on my calendar to write and then follow through on that commitment. It makes sense. If you actually make the time to write three times a week, 40 weeks a year, there’s just no way you won’t have some good songs by the end of that year. What other creative plates are you spinning these days? This past year I’ve done a lot, and I mean a lot, of soul searching, trying to figure out what I really want to spend the second half of my career doing. The conclusion is that I love walking with songwriters and artists. It’s a strange calling and not an easy one, and so my heart is to help guide people to avoid the mistakes I made and to have a healthy artistic life, whatever that needs to look like for them. That may eventually lead me back into a record label or publishing company, we’ll see, but right now I have the freedom to serve whoever knocks on the door, and that’s kind of beautiful. So what I’ve been doing this season so far has been writing in the morning and then consulting in the afternoons. I help out with A&R duties for a few smaller record companies or management firms and then do a lot of Artist Development consulting, where I sit with artists and help them figure out their goals, their resources, and make plans to do the things they want to do. it’s life-giving work that I really enjoy, and I’m hoping I can serve people enough there that it can grow into a sustainable business. I’ve been putting together an online songwriting course, as well, which I hope to beta-test for Rabbit Room folks sometime this Summer. #AfterLake #AndrewOsenga

One of the great things about writings songs (or books, or painting portraits, or recording podcasts) is that you don’t need permission. You need time, a couple tools (often way less than you think you need) and the will to Make Something. The news will always be stressful, Instagram will always make you feel like your life isn’t as great as somebody else’s, TV will always promise rest but leave you more tired. We justify our distractions and give them so much of our lives. They will never pay you back. It’s pretty darn rare that you spend four hours staring at screens and get up thinking, “Wow, that was really worth it! I’m better for that experience.” So look up from the news, hold the instagram app until it does its little “delete me” dance, throw a blanket over the TV and put the remote on a high shelf in a different room. Get out that notebook. Set up your easel. Take a walk and hum a new tune. No one can stop you but yourself. Make Something. You will never regret that you did. Source: Make Something — ANDREW OSENGA

A lot of you may be familiar with Sara Masarik’s Plumfield and Paideia blog and the Potato Peel Pie Book Community on Facebook. If not, keep reading. This month they are beginning a series of reading quests from Doug McKelvey and Jamin Still’s Stories We Shared book journal, and it’s definitely something you should get in on. Here’s Sara’s intro to the adventure from her blog: At Plumfield and Paideia, we believe that every child is a reader (even if they don’t know it yet) and that every family should have a read-aloud culture. In our Facebook group, Potato Peel Pie Book Community, we have had the privilege of journeying with many families who are trying to navigate the waters of reading and the seas of books – good and bad. Along the way, we have realized the importance of pointing people in the direction of really good and great books in a wide variety of genres. In May of 2016, Doug McKelvey and Jamin Still created a gorgeous family read-aloud book journal, a beautiful place for families to track the books they share together. We believe that this journal will be a legacy item that reveals the “ropes that we could feel but could not see” which allows families to scoop up stars and wishes together. In that journal, they added an absolutely inspired piece: Reading Quests. These reading challenges focus a reader in a particular direction and give them a kind of scavenger hunt list that they can use to go on a reading adventure! We loved this idea so much that we asked Doug and the Rabbit Room if we could partner with them and build a community-wide challenge. So, find your coat… your shoes and your hat… it is time to go on an adventure together! Here is how this going to work: Each month, on this site, we will feature one of the reading quests from The Stories We Shared family reading journal. During that month, we will post an article with details of that quest and links to reviews of books we recommend that would qualify for the quest. On our Facebook page, we will post a link to a submission form where families can suggest books that fit the quest criteria. At the end of the month we will publish a list of our favorite suggestions! Also on our Facebook page, we will post a thread asking families to post a picture from their family questing adventure. The photo could be a picture of their child reading, a photo of their completed quest page in the journal, or anything else that fits in with the spirit of the adventure. We welcome your creativity! At the end of the month, we will randomly select one submission to win a fantastic prize: a copy of The Stories We Shared journal plus one Rabbit Room book we love. We are starting in June with the Literary Zookeeper Quest. Click here to visit Plumfield and Paideia and get the full scoop. Source: Quest Adventure – Plumfield and Paideia

I can’t remember for sure how it started. I think I was just driving around in my car when a phrase suddenly came to mind: “Here’s to the weak ones…” And those words must have reminded me of the first line of Apple’s iconic “Think Different” advertising campaign (“Here’s to the crazy ones…”) because all of a sudden I was imagining what it would have sounded like if Steve Jobs had translated the Beatitudes. The “Think Different” campaign debuted in 1997. Print ads featured black-and-white photos of rebels and misfits like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali, Jim Henson, Albert Einstein, and many others. The TV spots, narrated by Richard Dreyffus, began with the memorable line, “Here’s to the crazy ones…” Here is that one-minute commercial: If we imagine the Sermon on the Mount as the constitution for the Kingdom of God, the Beatitudes are its world-inverting preamble. Instead of trying to win favor with the religious, political, and moneyed elites, Jesus blesses the poor in spirit, the pure in heart, the grieving, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran priest who was assassinated in 1980 for his outspoken advocacy for the poor and his criticism of the brutal military regime in El Salvador, said this of the Beatitudes: “Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down.” Even Kurt Vonnegut, the self-described “Christ-loving atheist,” was “enchanted” by the Sermon on the Mount. “If Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being,” he said in a 1999 commencement address at Agnes Scott College. “I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.” In his 2005 book, A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut wrote: For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. “Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!” If Steve Jobs had a created a campaign for the Beatitudes, I imagine it would feature images of people like Romero, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. Mother Teresa, and other heroes of the faith who were “crazy” enough to follow hard after Jesus. I don’t know, maybe it should even include Kurt Vonnegut, who, even though he could never fully accept Jesus’s divinity, still let Jesus change his heart in ways that challenge me as a Christian. I think of this as the “Live Different” campaign. The image below has my preferred formatting. Below that you’ll find the plain text version. The plain text version… If Steve Jobs Translated the Beatitudes Here’s to the weak ones. The outcasts. The broken. The peacemakers. The ragamuffin royalty who will inherit a new world. The ones who see God through open eyes and open hearts. They don’t long for power. And they have no respect for status. You can insult them, spread lies about them, disbelieve, vilify or persecute them. About the only thing you can’t do is dishearten them. Because God is changing them, they change things. They comfort. They show mercy. They heal. They mourn with those who mourn. They love. They are filled to overflowing with goodness. And while some may see them as the weak ones, I say they are blessed. Because the people who give up everything to follow me in this life, will get it all back and more in the next. Go Deeper: I’d love to connect and hear about the work you’re doing in your own neighborhood. You can find me on Facebook and on Twitter. If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to the Slow Church blog. As a way of saying thank you, you’ll also get a free copy of the ebook, Growing Deeper in Our Church Communities. #Beatitudes #Mashups #SermonontheMount #SteveJobs

In October 1949, a brassy New Yorker named Helene Hanff wrote a letter to a staid London bookseller named Frank Doel. “I am a poor writer,” she told him, “with an antiquarian taste in books.” She knew exactly what she was looking for: essays by Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Robert Lewis Stevenson. And a Latin Vulgate Bible. “If you have clean secondhand copies,” she wrote, “for no more than $5.00 each, will you consider this a purchase order and send them to me?” A month later, and in admirable good faith, a package arrived from London. “The Stevenson is so fine it embarrasses my orange-crate bookshelves,” Helene wrote back. “I never knew a book could be such a joy to the touch.” Enclosing a five dollar bill and a single for change, she dispatched her response with an added plea for “translated” prices in future: “I don’t add too well in plain American, I haven’t a prayer of ever mastering bilingual arithmetic.” Thus commenced a twenty-year correspondence that filled Helene’s shelves and sealed a firm friendship, not only with Frank Doel, but with his wife and daughters, and with the entire staff of the little bookshop at 84, Charing Cross Road. When Frank died unexpectedly in 1968, Helene was a failed playwright, and an out-of-work screenwriter. She didn’t know where the next paycheck was going to come from; she didn’t know how she was going to pay the rent. The news of Frank’s death came like one blow too many in an already brutal year. “I began to cry and I couldn’t stop,” she wrote later.  “I don’t know at what point in my crying I began to mutter over and over: “I have to write it. I have to write it.” Over the next few months, Helene shaped her correspondence with Frank into a story she knew no one would ever publish. But that wasn’t what mattered. Frank’s friendship deserved a memorial; the treasures that crowded her “orange-crate bookshelves” called forth a response. No one was more surprised than Helene Hanff when 84, Charing Cross Road became a cult classic overnight. Lanier Ivester It was too long for a short story; too short for a book. But—amazingly—a publisher named Dick Grossman wanted it. No one was more surprised than Helene Hanff when 84, Charing Cross Road became a cult classic overnight. Fan mail and phone calls poured in from all over the world. A respected English publisher snatched it up; it was made into a BBC television series, a London West End production, a Broadway play, and a major motion picture starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. Helene’s financial worries were over. She had attained a success of fairytale proportions. But even that was secondary to the connections she’d made—first in books, then in relationship—to the men and women who shaped her story, who helped articulate who she was in context of noble ideals and generous friendship. Helene’s debt of love was immeasurable. But the story didn’t end there. As a matter of fact, it didn’t even begin there. Back in the 1930s Helene was an aspiring writer with no hope of a college education. The Great Depression was raging, and scholarships were scarce. Helene knew that if she wanted to be a good writer she would have to be taught to be a great reader. And if she wanted teachers, she was going to have to find them herself. So she went to the most logical place: her local public library. “What I wanted was the Best,” she wrote. “Written in language I could understand.” Most of the textbooks were lofty and academic, completely over her head. She sampled the entire alphabet, pulling one book after another, and replacing them in turn with a sinking heart. When she reached the ‘Qs’ there was only one selection: a thin series of essays by a Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. A quick glance at his bio told her, among other things, that he was a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, and that to his students at Cambridge (where he still taught), he was known affectionately as ‘Q.’ “If you wanted instruction on how to read and write English, Oxford-and-Cambridge was definitely the Best,” she reasoned. So she took him home. For the rest of that summer—and for the next several years—she devoted herself to Q’s teachings, taking every scrap of advice to heart, and reading every book he so much as alluded to in his lectures. Q became her mentor, the Virgil to her Dante, the George MacDonald to her C. S. Lewis, guiding her skillfully and faithfully through the landscape of English literature until it felt like native turf. And it was Q—and the scarcity of his recommendations in American versions—who eventually led her back across the Pond, to a bookseller named Frank Doel, and a little shop at 84, Charing Cross Road. “I owed [Q] whatever literary education I had,” she wrote, “and enough training in the craft of writing to have kept myself alive by it… I owed him my shelves full of books—Wherefore I owed him 84, Charing Cross Road—and the hundreds, if not thousands of friends [that book] had brought me. It was an awesome legacy for a Cambridge don to have conferred on a lowly pupil he never knew existed three thousand miles away.” I think that the story of Frank and Helene and Q is a beautiful image of the connections that happen here at the Rabbit Room. At Hutchmoot last year, my friend Chris Slaten and I presented a session wherein we talked about some of the literary responses to the disenchantments of our age, and I went into how C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and their ilk looked back to the robust sacramentalism of the Medieval period to inform their fantasy novels. At this moment in time, I’m midway through an undergraduate course in English at Oxford University, and much of the inspiration for my talk came from a Middle English literature class that set my mind on fire in ways I never expected. The greatest joy of my studies has been the connections I’m making between periods of literature and the story of humanity—it’s like I keep bumping into Jesus amid the radiance of medieval manuscripts and the clear heights of antiquity. And every time I do, I find that one of my heroes has already been there. I mean, I knew that Lewis and Tolkien were medievalists, and that Dorothy Sayers’ translation of Dante was almost as stupendous a feat as the Comedy itself. I knew that Charles Williams pulled heavily from medieval thought in his incarnational theology. But when you go back and find them there, warming their hands, as it were, around the Christ-light that lives at the heart of every good and true and noble thing—well, it’s like showing up at a huge party and realizing that all of your best friends are already there. 'I want to know how you see all these things in books,' she said. Lanier Ivester The connections between me and my literary heroes—between my literary heroes and each other—happen because we love, and we’re looking for, the Same Thing. After that Hutchmoot session, a young woman came up to me and looked me right in the eye. “I want to know how you see all these things in books,” she said. She was a senior in high school, with dreams of becoming an English major, and she wanted to know, point blank, How do we make these connections between human stories and God’s story? How do you find Jesus in the books you love? It was one of the best questions anyone has ever asked me. We chatted briefly about resources and academic examples. But I told her: “Sweetheart—You’re doing it. The fact that you’re asking means you’re already looking. And I promise you—if you’re looking for Him, in art, literature, the beauty of the world—you will find Him. He’s everywhere.” As G. M. Hopkins put it, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in eyes and limbs not His…” Literature—like all of the arts—is either redemptive or it’s destructive. It’s either marked by God’s presence, or it’s haunted by His absence. But you can’t miss Him—even if you have no idea what you’re looking at. After Jesus fed the 5000, he had His disciples go around and pick up all the leftover pieces of bread “that nothing may be lost.” And, as we all know, those fragments, garnered from five barley loaves that had just fed over 5000 people filled up twelve whole baskets. I like to think that’s a picture of how the truth-bearing fragments we pick up along the way, the stories and songs by which our own souls are nourished and over which we connect with other people, are exponentially redemptive, generative of a life larger than the poets, songwriters, storytellers and artists could ever had imagined. And it reminds me what an important work this is—to keep gathering up these fragments—these splinters of a shattered Eden—and sharing them with other people, reminding them, as we do that the Story’s not over. I was in Oxford last May, and in between lectures and meetings, I basically followed my heroes all over that golden city, keeping trysts I hadn’t had time for on previous visits. I visited Charles Williams’ grave at Holywell. I had tea with friends at The Kilns, and I had tea by myself at the Eastgate Hotel where Jack and Tollers kept their sacrosanct Monday date. I holed up for hours in one of the oak reading bays of Duke Humfrey’s library, and I stumbled into the Oxford Oratory where G. M. Hopkins, of all dear souls, was curate. On my last day, I skipped a lecture to wander Addison’s Walk, the loved haunt of C. S. Lewis at Magdalen College. There was this muddy little byway branching off of the main walk leading to a stone bench in front of the gate to the Water Meadow, and I sat there in the sunshine for a solid hour contemplating the view of flower-sprinkled mead and golden spires beyond, thinking of all I owed Jack and his friends. It was so poignant to think that I was in Oxford, that I’d been flashing that university card in and out of colleges and libraries all week, not on my own inspiration or merit, but because my heroes had been here before me. I was here because they were here—and because they had left something behind for me to trace, to pick up and to carry forward. Lewis, Tolkien and the others entrusted us with these overflowing baskets of fragments, leftover splendors of a world that was and will be again, truths and beauties upon which they had been fed, and which they, in turn, broke open to feed the world. This kind of holy generosity calls forth a response, to not only enjoy such deeply incarnational creative acts, but to interact with them, to carry their riches forward in our own lives, to interpret their truths in our own unique voice. In like manner, from my very first encounter with the Rabbit Room I was goaded with this overwhelming longing to respond. To add an emphatic, “Yes! Me, too!” to the truths and beauties I found here. To roll up my sleeves in the good, hard work of articulating the Kingdom to a broken world. And to generate that kind of life in another human being—isn’t that the most creative work of all? But the legacy of the Rabbit Room won’t end with these folks, or even with their works, any more than it started with them. I firmly believe that because they’ve responded to the longings kindled by what they found among the pages of Lewis and Tolkien, Chesterton and George MacDonald, and so many others, that they’re paving the way for other Lewises and Tolkiens and Chestertons to take up the golden thread long after they’re gone. I can’t help but imagine, someday, ages and ages hence, people coming to Andrew’s Chapter House, or North Wind Manor, or The Well Coffeehouse, making pilgrimage in much the same way as I’d followed Lewis and Hopkins all over Oxford— Like I’d walked up and down Charing Cross Road in London five years ago, looking for number 84— I picture these people, people yet-unborn, seeking somehow to connect with a larger story, to respond to the good things this community fostered in some kind of tangible way. But it won’t be Andrew or Eric or Rebecca or Jonathan or Jennifer they’re looking for—it will be the unique glimpse of Jesus which they gave them. Can’t you just see it? They’ll stoop, pick up a fragment of bread so alive it feels like a hot coal in their hands. In faithfulness they’ll give thanks, break it— And that fragment will feed hundreds, if not thousands. If not more… This is a transcript  from the Rabbit Room Live event in November 2016.

I am a Christian at a loss for words. In fact, speaking from a Christian perspective feels something like tiptoeing through a minefield of words: I can barely write without worrying that the words I’m using will either implode with cultural baggage or lie dormant underground, meaning nothing. Allow me to demonstrate. I mock Chick-fil-A as I stuff waffle fries into my mouth. I’ve been reluctantly cuffing my jeans for several months now. “Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord” is my guilty pleasure. When searching for a C. S. Lewis quote, I mistakenly open my Bible to the New Testament. I still get a little too excited that communion at my church involves real wine. I liked banjos before they were cool. I believe the word “creative” was never meant to be used as a noun to describe a type of person. I know just enough Hebrew to decipher the majority of forearm tattoos. I cringe at phrases like “facilitating community” and “intentional vulnerability,” yet crave these things at my core. I have been searching for a new word, when what I need is a true word. Drew Miller So here I am, flailing in a sea of failing words, and my first instinct is to throw them away and look for new ones. I go shopping on Wikipedia for a new spirituality as nonchalantly as if I were shopping for new clothes. I borrow from various traditions and languages, attempting to escape the suffocation of my own, only to find that I get tired of those too. I have been searching for a new word, when what I need is a true word. Every word is a promise we keep by speaking, a promise made to protect the hope that humans are still capable of telling the truth. True words, then, are promises as-yet unbroken, little pictures of fidelity reminding us that we can still trust each other. But what happens when we break these promises? We kill words. There are about as many ways to kill words as there are to kill people, but here I’ll list the three most common as I see them. First and least harmful, we kill words through sheer repetition. When this happens, the deceased word is then referred to as a “cliche.” Cliches are like the poor songs that get overplayed on the radio: they aren’t necessarily bad or untrue–in fact they are often overused because they have something good to say–it’s just that I never want to hear “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz ever again. Second and more serious, we kill words through dishonesty. These dead words are called lies. This is pretty straightforward: a breakdown occurs between what I’m saying and reality, causing people to lose trust in me. My word is no longer true. We are speaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in the presence of what we have said. Wendell Berry Last and most dangerous, we kill words by using them violently. Words that have been used violently are referred to as “bad words:” vulgarity, prejudice, and hate speech, for example. Wendell Berry has written, “We are speaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in the presence of what we have said.” We have all stood in the presence of truth, deception, joy, and exhaustion, whether from our own words or the words of others. We know from experience, then, that the health of a language indicates the health of those dealing in that language. Our world is filled to the brim with words, and the turnover rate for these words is ever-increasing. The chattering of news networks, emails, and advertisements hardly gives us a chance to stand “in the presence of what we have said.” This constant frenzy does considerable damage to our words, rendering some useless and others dangerous until we struggle to speak meaningfully at all. And yet there is one ancient word that manages to rise from the ashes no matter how many ways we kill it. This is no ordinary word; it also happens to be a person: the word that was “made flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14) This person I speak of was marred and mangled, bloodied and beaten. His name has been deceitfully bought and sold, invoked for acts of mass violence, and domesticated into empty cliches. This person suffered the deepest alienation humanity has ever known: the cavern between Creator and creature. His name has been used as a weapon to further this alienation, to sprinkle salt into his own wounds. But this word has proven true, not in spite of these atrocities, but because he can be found binding up wounds in the thick of them. He is to be trusted because “by his wounds we are healed.” (Isaiah 53:5) When the truth of this gospel sinks into my heart, I react in one of two ways. Sometimes, I am even more at a loss for words than before. I gag at all the ways I have spoken of Jesus, whether harmful, presumptuous, or just plain silly. I struggle to form one complete sentence about him. I may try to write a song, because songs seem more durable than plain speech, but I fail in the attempt. Finally, I resolve myself to silence. Other times, the truth of this one eternal word suddenly enlivens all the other words. In my joy, all my abuse of language doesn’t matter to me anymore. I want to say all the words because they are all so beautiful. I begin to love speaking of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, my Father in heaven, and his kingdom coming to earth. I resolve myself to speech, saying, “I will never hesitate to speak the gospel again.” But have you ever said a word over and over again so many times that it sounded like gibberish? Have you ever looked at someone you love, and then all of a sudden, they look completely unfamiliar to you? No matter the resonance of my silence or my words, I usually end up feeling like I’m speaking gibberish and praying to a stranger. I recently told one of my past professors about this. He said, “I think it’s a good thing that you’ve realized you don’t actually know Jesus.” I asked him why, and he reminded me that just when we think we know everything there is to know about someone we love, we discover that we don’t know them at all. As odd as it sounds, I take a strange comfort in the humiliation of knowing I don’t know Jesus. At least from here, I can begin to know him with greater sincerity.

[Cracking the Cover interviewed Jennifer Trafton recently, and they talk about writing, the creative process, Henry and the Chalk Dragon, and many other good things.] Why do you write? Why specifically for young people? The author Susan Cooper once said we’re all at the mercy of the imagination we were born with—I’ve got an imagination that needs to spill out of me in stories, and they happen to be the kind of stories that have buried giants, walking trees, poison-tongued jumping tortoises, runaway dragons, and children with wild imaginations at their center, because those are the kind of stories I most enjoy reading. I also just find children endlessly fascinating as human beings. I love their fresh perspective on the world, their lack of cynicism, the fantastic ideas they dream up, and their embrace of silliness as well as mystery. I love the questions they ask. For many years, I tried desperately to be a grown-up and to pursue some sort of normal grown-up career with a paycheck and a retirement fund and all of that, but alas! The pull of giants and dragons and ten-year-old heroines in eccentric hats was far too strong, and I walked one day into the children’s section of the bookstore, spread my arms wide, and bellowed (at least in my heart), “These are my people!” After that, my fate was sealed. So I write “for children” because I feel like, at the level of the imagination, and in the stories I love to read and love to write, I’m one of them. [Read the entire interview.]

Back in 2010, my husband and I attended our first (and the first!) Hutchmoot. It was exciting, and a little surreal, to contemplate a face-to-face gathering of a fellowship that had formerly been confined to my computer screen. (It was also slightly terrifying—I broke out in hives on our way to Nashville.) We were accompanied by some of our best friends, a couple whom Philip and I not only love to travel with, but regard among our most trusted companions. Early in our marriage, we identified a cluster of people with whom, God-willing, we wanted to walk through life; we called them our “always yes” friends, deciding ahead of time our default response to their needs, requests or invitations. In short, if they asked, the answer was “yes,” if it were at all humanly possible. And Luke and Laura were at the top of that list. It’s no exaggeration to say that the weekend was life-altering. For three days we enjoyed excellent music, gourmet food, and penetrating conversation. We attended lectures on George MacDonald, Annie Dillard, and Flannery O’Connor. We met some of our heroes, and we heard Walt Wangerin deliver a breathtaking address on the real work of an artist in a heartbroken and homesick world: “We are shapers”, he told us, taken literally from the Old English word for artist. “We come upon the mess and apart from our own wisdom we make order of it.” That concept was so luminous it lit a fire in my heart. I longed to make that kind of art, to create a world out of the raw materials I had at hand and invite others in to help make sense of their own worlds. “Artists weave the world around those who have no world or personhood or name”, Walt told us, and, in a way, that’s what this weekend had done for me. In discovering this community, I’d found my people at last; putting solid faces and personalities and friendships behind words on a screen had altered not only my inner landscape, but my outer one, as well. My ambitions had received a thoroughly good scrubbing and my reading list had increased ten-fold. I was brimming with a desire to create, not merely words on paper, but a physical context within which all the holy ideals we’d been talking about could flourish, bloom, bear fruit. In short, a great conversation had begun, and I didn’t want it end. We actually didn’t see much of Luke and Laura over the weekend, each of us making a point to reach out to people we wouldn’t have met otherwise. However, as soon as we were back home Monday morning, Laura fired off one of her characteristically to-the-point emails. “What do we do now?” she wanted to know. It was the question I had been asking myself all morning, in the doldrums of post-trip laundry and letdown. I was already wistful over the lively fellowship we had left behind in Nashville, and the multitude of “what, you, too?” moments the weekend had entailed. I wish we had something like that in Atlanta, I thought, for the hundredth time, as I sorted and folded, making order of a house that had not seen my touch in four days. But Laura would not be satisfied with wistfulness. As far as she was concerned, this experience demanded a response. And she wasn’t going to let me get off with a mere blog post or journal entry. “Let’s have lunch,” she went on. “This week.” Which was interpreted to mean she had an Idea. My instincts proved accurate, for scarcely had we been seated at one of our favorite little French places a few days later, than she leaned forward and smiled a smile of the inspired. “I think that we should start a couples’ book club,” she said. “To start discussing all of these things we talked about at Hutchmoot.” It was a brilliant idea, almost a done deal the moment it was out of her mouth. Of course—what better way to carry forward the encouragement and inspiration we had received than to nourish it in our own sphere? What better way to enflesh the ideals we had been celebrating and the authors who articulated them, than to develop these ideals within the varying perspectives of trusted friends? We spent the remainder of our lunch discussing logistics and outlining a basic infrastructure, but on the whole, our plan was quite simple. It needed to be regular (survival depended on this, first and foremost), and it had to be intimate enough for honest conversation. We wanted men and women with whom we agreed on the essentials of our faith, but whom we trusted enough to enter the fray over non-essentials. In short, we wanted to be challenged, sharpened. Refined. Membership was capped at twelve, not out of exclusivity but pure necessity. There are plenty of opportunities in life for a come-one-come-all approach; this, however, was not one of them. In theory, each member could select a book for each month; in reality we’ve yet to read twelve books in a year. But there was an even greater incentive for limitation: Laura and I agreed unequivocally that we all had to fit around one table. Sharing a meal was requisite for the kind of community we were seeking to nurture, and if we got too big for one conversation, we were too big. (Few people, we realized, actually have a dining table large enough for twelve, but anyone can tack on a card table and a piano bench. And when a room is ringed with loved, candlelit faces, no one notices the furniture.) Invitations were extended and warmly accepted, and the following month we held our inaugural meeting. It was a playfully uproarious meal to which each couple contributed; my house smelled so good and was so full of laughter and candlelight that one friend said it felt like Christmas. And when the club name was submitted for approval it was met with a general shout of enthusiasm: “The Notions” we called ourselves, as a nod to the Oxford Inklings, and its unfinished fictional counterpart by J.R.R. Tolkien. (It was also at that meeting, I think, that I received my club sobriquet, “Chuck”, for my very Charles Williams-ish tendencies towards the refilling of wine glasses and the steady supply of ale.) When we retired to the den for coffee and formal discussion, I opened with some thoughts about the vision for this club and the motivation behind Laura’s idea. I told about Nashville and how inspired we were by all these artists and their works (as well as our own charge to create in the image of a Creator) but how the biggest takeaway was that we were not meant to do this alone. We were designed to take this artistic journey of life and faith and discovery in company of others. From its very inception, The Notions put me in mind of the book of Nehemiah, wherein the builders labored among the rubble of Jerusalem, rebuilding a wall with tools in one hand and weapons in the other. It was hard work, isolating work, and a good metaphor for the task of keeping and shaping culture in a world of decaying standards and crumbling absolutes. “The work is extensive and spread out,” Nehemiah told his companions, “and we are widely separated from each other along the wall.” So what did he do? He instituted a trumpet call that would summon everyone together, for refreshment, instructions, encouragement. “That’s kind of what this is,” I told the others. “A monthly “sounding of the trumpet,” where we can gather to remind each other who we are and what kinds of lives we want to lead.” Appropriately enough, we had chosen T. S. Eliot’s “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” for our first reading, and the discussion went better than Laura or I could have hoped. Everyone contributed stimulating thoughts, and there was even enough healthy disagreement to make things truly lively and real. Philip got up quietly and made more coffee and people stole in and out serving themselves, unwilling to disturb the conversation or to miss any of it themselves. We talked about what it really means to ‘build the Church’: what impedes and what spurs us along. What our ‘small lights’ look like and why our art matters. There was never a lull, never a comment or a question that fell flat, but many a reading from the text, citings of cross-references, and scrutiny against the standard of Scripture. The ultimate success of the evening can be summed up in the fact that it was well-past midnight before anyone realized. In the years since we’ve read dozens of books, poems, essays. We’ve gone en masse to local shows of artists we admire, and we’ve plotted weekend getaways for twelve. At Christmas our meeting is a black tie affair, but all the rest of the year it’s easy and casual. Hospitality (as opposed to “entertaining”) is a guiding principle, and while table settings are created with the utmost care (and often subtly themed) dinner is potluck to make things light on the hostess. From the beginning soup has been our mainstay: with diets ranging from vegetarian to gluten-free to hardcore Paleo, soup is the most accommodating dish, lending itself to endless variety. But with a couple of pots of something savory, a big salad, bread, dessert, a few bottles of wine, and a regular date on the calendar, we’ve developed a no-fail recipe for intentional community. Throw in a little Dorothy Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, Gerard Manly Hopkins or C. S. Lewis, and you’ve got yourself a feast. Not to mention a Fellowship. Originally published on Humane Pursuits.

Have you ever read Hans Christian Andersen’s original The Little Mermaid? Not that Disney introduced us to an inadequate interpretation. It’s just there’s something special about Andersen’s fairytales, how he captures sweeping hope and sharp sorrow without muddling a story’s simplicity. Many of my friends would object by saying Andersen’s Mermaid in particular is wickedly depressing and weird (without spoiling too much, I will at least give you a hint by saying it does not end like the movie). But I think there is something to be said for stories about more than getting everything you want exactly how and when you want it. Original fairytales are often darker than their 20th century cinematic makeovers suggest, and this darkness has much to do with the depth of despair and sadness their authors employ during the process of transporting their protagonists and villains from “Point A” to “Point B.” Despite every hero or heroine’s best intentions, the adventure never goes as planned. Usually, there is a mess of hardship before anyone achieves wisdom or peace. But then, even the plot of a Disney or Don Bluth film romps through heartache and disappointment before the victorious, happy ending arrives. It comes off playfully, since usually there are animals singing and at least one ensemble musical number. Even so, no hero or princess or talking animal reaches their destination unscathed or shielded from necessary sacrifices. No one makes it through without being changed. We were playing a house concert in Chicago when I first understood that People, People is a fairy tale. We wrote every song in the thick of growing up, discovering for ourselves that trying to live a hopeful life often looks and feels more like a shot in the dark, much more so than it did when we were younger. Consequently, People, People narrates humans embarking, weaving, and lurching this way and that, sniffing out shortcuts through life to avoid the pain of transformation. Like any unlikely hero trekking toward glory or treasure or true love, we set out with the naïve wish to grow and gain without losing something first. Unable to relinquish our hold on what makes us feel secure and known, we shudder in the face of pain and discouragement, our shame and our pride, our utter helplessness, things most certain to draw us from ourselves and redefine us in ways we could never imagine on our own. These things we swallow, silence, and deny. We reprogram our minds to forget them. We dive headlong into them with every intention of rewiring ourselves and our circumstances, only to find that we dove alone and can’t resurface without help, and furthermore did not possess the proper tools for rewiring to begin with. This writhing and wrestling for victory despite obstacles is not only at the heart of every fairy story, but every human story. This is the heart of the Gospel, in which something arduous and seemingly insurmountable happened by necessity so that an impossibly joyful conclusion would occur. People, People is a compilation of songs telling the story of healing and marking various stops along the road to redemption. Each song contributes to the story differently. “Inside Your Head” spurs a spiral of doubts and fears, a winding realization that life is not what it should be and people are powerless to overcome evil when attempting to do so on their own terms. “Fall” mimics an actual fairy tale, describing a personified snowflake as she launches herself into flight before realizing she is plummeting to conformity, lamenting her shattered sense of identity before finding freedom in it. “Common Sense” darkly parodies pop punk music, declaring isolation and insecurity with a laugh so the weight of choosing to live in one’s own shame and loneliness might be less noticeable. “Drink It Down” begins with a confession of weakness in the face of one’s own sin and darkness, but then revels in the wisdom that experiencing life’s brokenness is an integral part of knowing the character and power of Jesus. Every song walks further and further into a mingling of light and darkness. At the end of the narrative, the title track concludes that the only way to find resurrection for lost and dying things is by first plunging into loss and death. From this, the truest gifts and the fullest life are found. J. R. R. Tolkien writes that fairytales are not certifiable fairytales unless a miraculous reversal of evil and sadness abruptly takes place. It’s more than a happy ending. It’s a healing. My favorite thing about People, People is its vibrant declaration that such a thorough restoration for humanity is not only possible, but promised. When our story ends, there will be a tangible banishment of every sad thing. The victor has already risen up, and the enemy is already vanquished. So we can set off on our adventure with full confidence in the hope and love and wholeness we’re after, despite our weaknesses, despite the monsters lurking ahead and behind and within. We can set off with assurance and rejoicing, because there’s so much more than a happy ending awaiting us. The Orchardist’s People, People: Act I is available here.

When someone unfamiliar with Rich Mullins asks me where to start, I always tell them A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band. The irony is, when that record released in 1993 during my freshman year of college, my roommates and I were a bit cold to it at first. We were connoisseurs of the rest of his catalog and had been covering his songs at youth events and in special music slots for a while, so it was with a lot of excitement that we tore off the cellophane and put the CD in the player. We liked it, but were a bit underwhelmed. But some of the best works of art play hard to get—sometimes you have to spend some time, give the songs space, live some life with them at your side, before they open themselves up to you. So it was with the Ragamuffin album. Now I put it up there with Paul Simon’s Graceland, Counting Crows’s August and Everything After, and Marc Cohn’s first record as one of the finest albums ever made. It was the last album that Reed Arvin produced for Rich, and feels like the culmination of everything they were working towards for all those years. Those lush strings, Chris McHugh’s massive drums, Rich’s dulcimers (lap and hammered), Jimmy Abegg’s tasteful electric guitars, Reed’s piano playing, Billy Crockett’s ridiculously pretty acoustic guitars, were the perfect undergirding for Rich’s raspy voice and those gorgeous, epic lyrics. Almost 25 years later, I still marvel at their power. Last year my friend Scott Mulvahill put on a tribute show for Paul Simon’s Graceland, and it was one of my favorite nights of music ever. No exaggeration. A bunch of stellar musicians who loved Graceland learned every note, every background vocal, every word, and invited their friends to celebrate it with them. We weren’t there to celebrate Simon so much as this thing, this work of art, that he helped to put into the world. In a town where everybody’s trying to get noticed, there was something magical about the fact that everybody on the stage was there to draw attention something else. That was the night I had the idea for this show. That’s why we’re going to try to replicate the album note-for-note. Because the Ragamuffin album isn’t just about Rich. It was his songs, yes, but it’s also about Reed Arvin’s production, about Jimmy, Chris, Rick, Billy, Matt, Danny, and the other musicians and vocalists and engineers who came together in community and happened to make something that’s as powerful now as it was twenty-four years ago. Most of all, though, we hope the gift the Lord gave to Rich will spill out into the audience, and that all of our attention will be drawn past the beam of light that was that record and to the source of the light, whose name is Jesus. I think that’s what Rich would want. The first half of the concert will be much like the Behold the Lamb shows. We’ll have some special guests play their favorite Rich songs, tell some stories, have some fun. Then after the intermission we’ll play through A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band. One more fun fact: the first time I ever saw Rich live, it was at the Ryman, with Carolyn Arends and Ashley Cleveland on the tour for this album. This is me geeking out. I can hardly wait. Tickets are on sale now.

Well friends, I’m about to go all academic on you – or at least as academic as art, story, song obsessed me can get – by giving you a taste of what I’ve been working on in the past couple of years. I yearn to write here, to have time to work out more creatively the ideas I’m discovering academically. That will come –  and this season of study is so rich. But I hate to leave a static silence, so I’ll let you see where my curiosity has been roaming in the past year. (And you can pray for me as I study for my exams – three more weeks!) This essay was one from last year in which I looked at different models of atonement theology through the lens of art. I will admit, I have combined theology and art or literature in as many of my essays as I could because I so believe in the imagination as a ‘truth-bearing faculty’ (thank you, Malcolm Guite). I deeply believe that theological truth can be encountered and known in a ‘language without words’, and the power of this shapes us in a further and different way from doctrinal statements alone. In art, story, or song, we are given the chance to see theology afresh, to encounter its power and beauty in image. So. It’s a bit technical. But I’ll work it out someday in poetry and story too. Let us begin: In the opening to his book on the subject of beauty as ‘a category indispensable to Christian thought’, David Bentley Hart observes that ‘the church has no argument …more convincing than the form of Christ.’[i] Hans Urs von Balthasar echoes this by describing the ‘beauty’ of the Cross, noting that it is ‘unbearable’ to a worldly aesthetic.[ii] Yet one of the primary ways that the Cross has been presented throughout history is in countless works of art, created both for the sacred realm of church, and the wider arena of culture. That these works of image and imagination are also ‘arguments’, able to communicate theological truth, is where this essay begins. For as John Ruskin, the great art critic observed, ‘great nations write their autobiographies in ‘their deeds…their words… and the book of their art…and the last is the most trustworthy’[iii]. Replacing ‘nations’ with the institution of the Church, this essay will open with a brief exploration of the way in which the form of Christ is presented in the autobiography of its art, presenting both theological claims and the history of the Church in a language without words. Our specific focus will then turn to artistic depictions of Christ’s death, and the theologies of atonement that they embody. We will survey major models of atonement theology, using this basis to explore what two specific pieces of art communicate regarding the death of Christ. The pieces of focus will be the ‘vine cross’ mosaic in the apse of the church of San Clemente, in Rome, and a lithograph by Walter Spitzer, created as an illustration for the French writer Malraux’s novel, La Tentation de l’occident (The Temptation of the West). To open, we must briefly examine the validity of art as a means of theological communication. In a modern context shaped by Enlightenment empiricism, truth, even theology, is commonly regarded as the transmission of objective statements that can be analysed and argued. This concept of knowing is one that grew concurrently with the scientific age, in which materialism and objectivity moulded our understanding of knowledge as something observed and quantified. But as postmodern theory, not to mention theologians like Rowan Williams, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and generations of our ancestors would instantly recognize, some knowledge cannot be reduced to stated information. In evaluating the potential of art to communicate theology, we must first recognize that truth can be present in a language other than words, whether of image, emotion, or experience. In Richard Viladesau’s explanation, the communication of art is ‘nonverbal, but… not for that reason pre-rational or pre-spiritual’[iv]. Art can actually be ‘a way of thinking’[v] theologically in and of itself, allowing us a qualitatively different understanding via image and symbol from the knowledge gained by ratiocination. Jeremy Begbie says that ‘the arts give expression to a metaphorical way of perceiving the world… which reminds us there is always more to the world than we can name, control, and grasp’[vi]. Rather than standing apart from the doctrine we wish to understand, quantifying and describing it, we can look through a piece of art, gaining a ‘symbolic apprehension’ of ‘theological truth’[vii]. This immersive knowledge is precisely the alternate view that a piece of art can offer us as we look through its portrayal of Christ. Gerardus van der Leeuw gives this theological shape with his assertion (quoted by Viladesau) that ‘a theological understanding of the arts must begin with soteriology,’ with Christ’s incarnational representation of God giving ‘art and religion their common essence as answers’[viii] or responses to the startling fact of the Incarnation. In this, one hears echoes of Tolkien’s idea that artists are ‘co-creators’, makers made in the image of a Creator, or the poet Madeleine L’Engle’s concept of the artist as participating in the ‘courageous obedience’ of Mary, mother of Jesus, becoming a ‘bearer of the work’[ix] at the request of the Holy Spirit. Both writers recognise that art shares in the incarnational task of Christ as He comes to live in all believers so that the believing artist can participate with the Holy Spirit in revealing Christ to the world. The resulting multifaceted presentation of Christ powerfully conveys the reality that theology is not static nor wholly contained in one doctrinal system. In a mode profoundly different from stated truth, art allows us to ‘see’ the crucifixion through another’s eyes, enlarging our own perspective while helping us to recognise the limited nature of our view point when it remains in isolation. When centuries of artistic portrayals of the same theological event are set side-by-side, we immediately grasp the various ways in which the artists have seen this event, and the theological ideas shaping their aesthetic communication. Art is thus inherently a portrayal of church history as well, enfleshing the doctrinal arguments and developments of the Church in the imagery of its devotional, architectural, and popular art. As witnessed in Richard Harries’ book examining ‘the passion in art’[x] through the centuries, artists of every age ‘could not avoid making a doctrinal point’[xi] in their works. The art of the catacombs, of church basilicas, or prayer books and privately commissioned paintings, is a unique record of theological debate and imagination. Art is thus uniquely suited to a discussion of differing theological viewpoints in that a picture offers a literally alternate point of ‘view’, not a differently worded or argued statement. We encounter their particular theological emphasis in the immediacy of image. [Read Art & Theology pt. 2.] ‘Vine Cross’ in apse of San Clemente, Rome [i] Hart, David Bentley The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2004), p. 3 [ii] von Balthasar, quoted in Viladesau, Richard, Theological Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 149 [iii] Ruskin, John St. Mark’s Rest: The history of Venice, written for the help of the few travellers who still care for her monuments, (Oxford: 1879), pg. vii [iv] Viladesau, Richard, Theological Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pg. 16 [v] Viladesau, Richard, Theological Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pg. 16 [vi] Housley, Kathleen L., ‘A Conversation with Jeremy Begbie’ in Image Journal, retrieved from https://www.imagejournal.org/article/a-conversation-with-jeremy-begbie/, 17 July 2016 [vii] Guite, Malcolm Faith, Hope, and Poetry (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2012) [viii] Ibid [ix]  L’Engle, Madeleine, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1980) p. 18 [x] Harries, Richard The Passion in Art (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004) [xi] Ibid, 29 Source: Art & Theology | Thoroughly Alive

I was browsing my copy of Letters of C. S. Lewis (a British first edition, of course!)  and happened upon this little gem. Those of us who write would do well to heed this advice—especially the part about not listening to the radio, for which we should substitute Netflix, Facebook, and bingeing on podcasts. It’s not that those things are necessarily bad, but if you’re going to indulge in them you forfeit your right to ever complain about not having time to finish your book. I’m preaching to myself here, of course. I also had a hard time with number seven, because computers. On with the list! TO A SCHOOLGIRL IN AMERICA, who had written (at her teacher’s suggestion) to request advice on writing. 14 December, 1959 It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt. Turn off the Radio. Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines. Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again. Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about. . . .) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he wants to know—the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his. When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier. Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training. Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.

Last weekend I got to see U2’s Joshua Tree anniversary tour, which was epic and amazing, but it wasn’t the only incredible thing I saw that day. As we waited for the show to begin, a constant stream of poetry scrolled across the giant screen. At first I wasn’t paying much attention. I saw something by Walt Whitman, something by Solomon (I think), and other fascinating snatches of verse, mostly things I hadn’t encountered before. Then about five minutes before showtime, I caught an opening line that jumped out and captivated me with its strangeness: “Moth-force a small town always has, given the night.” I don’t know about you, but I can’t read something like that and not wonder what the next line is going to be. I mean, moth-force? Really? This is either going to be a poem about an epic Kaiju battle or something more in line with G. M. Hopkins. If I’m honest, I can get just as excited about either of those things. Matt Conner was sitting next to me and trying to say something (probably a pun), but I held up my hand and said, “Wait a minute, I’ve got to read this.” It wasn’t about Kaiju. When the final line scrolled out of view, I was almost breathless. I’ve rarely read a poem and been so captivated by it on the first reading. The poet is James Dickey. The title is “The Strength of Fields.” I may be in the minority in my ignorance of Dickey, but I’m so glad U2 made the introduction. (He’s also the author, and screenwriter, of Deliverance.) Below is the poem in full. I hope you are as a baffled by it and as moved by it as I was. I’m including it first without Dickey’s line-breaks and spacing, since that’s how I encountered it. But I’m following it up with his intended formatting (which I don’t pretend to understand). If you like this one, you should also check out “The Heaven of Animals.” “The Strength of Fields” by James Dickey … a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power and a life-enhancing return … —Van Gennep: Rites de Passage Moth-force a small town always has, Given the night. What field-forms can be, Outlying the small civic light-decisions over A man walking near home? Men are not where he is Exactly now, but they are around him Around him like the strength Of fields. The solar system floats on Above him in town-moths. Tell me, train-sound, With all your long-lost grief, What I can give. Dear Lord of all the fields What am I going to do? Street-lights, blue-force and frail As the homes of men, tell me how to do it How to withdraw How to penetrate and find the source Of the power you always had Light as a moth, and rising With the level and moonlit expansion Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men. You? I? What difference is there? We can all be saved By a secret blooming. Now as I walk The night and you walk with me We know simplicity Is close to the source that sleeping men Search for in their home-deep beds. We know that the sun is away We know that the sun can be conquered By moths, in blue home-town air. The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under The pastures. They look on and help. Tell me, freight-train, When there is no one else To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts, Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar Like the profound, unstoppable craving Of nations for their wish. Hunger, time and the moon: The moon lying on the brain as on the excited sea as on The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake With purpose. Wild hope can always spring From tended strength. Everything is in that. That and nothing but kindness. More kindness, dear Lord Of the renewing green. That is where it all has to start: With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less Than save every sleeping one And night-walking one Of us. My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can. “The Strength of Fields” by James Dickey [Original formatting] Moth-force a small town always has, Given the night. What field-forms can be, Outlying the small civic light-decisions over A man walking near home? Men are not where he is Exactly now, but they are around him    around him like the strength Of fields.    The solar system floats on Above him in town-moths. Tell me, train-sound, With all your long-lost grief, what I can give. Dear Lord of all the fields what am I going to do? Street-lights, blue-force and frail As the homes of men, tell me how to do it    how To withdraw    how to penetrate and find the source Of the power you always had light as a moth, and rising With the level and moonlit expansion Of the fields around, and the sleep of hoping men. You?    I?    What difference is there?    We can all be saved By a secret blooming. Now as I walk The night    and you walk with me    we know simplicity Is close to the source that sleeping men Search for in their home-deep beds. We know that the sun is away    we know that the sun can be conquered By moths, in blue home-town air. The stars splinter, pointed and wild. The dead lie under The pastures.    They look on and help.    Tell me, freight-train, When there is no one else To hear. Tell me in a voice the sea Would have, if it had not a better one: as it lifts, Hundreds of miles away, its fumbling, deep-structured roar Like the profound, unstoppable craving Of nations for their wish. Hunger, time and the moon: The moon lying on the brain as on the excited sea    as on The strength of fields. Lord, let me shake With purpose.    Wild hope can always spring From tended strength.    Everything is in that. That and nothing but kindness.    More kindness, dear Lord Of the renewing green.    That is where it all has to start: With the simplest things. More kindness will do nothing less Than save every sleeping one And night-walking one Of us. My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can.

It’s rare for me to impulse buy a brand new book the year it comes out. But it was hard to resist the minimalist cover and absurdly long yet awesome title The Way of the Dragon or The Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus’ Path of Power in a Church that has Abandoned It. Provocative? Yes, but underneath the stark claim is a gentle, thoughtful, and essential message to a church culture that can easily fall into a power-driven, celebrity-loving trap. “But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic… But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.” James 3:14-17 The Way of the Dragon is part theological inquiry, part travelog, and part friendly wisdom to anyone in ministry. Pastor Jamin Goggin and theology professor Kyle Strobel begin with a question — What does Christian power look like? As they confronted their own temptations to leverage the world’s way of power, new questions arose: “What happens if the church rejects the power of Christ? What happens when Christians embody a worldly approach to power and try to use that to advance Christ’s kingdom?” Scripture calls us to reject  selfish ambition and boasting and embrace the humble “wisdom from above,” but how does that work in a world of social media maneuvering and rock star pastors? Weighty questions, for sure. And who better to ask than people who don’t look like powerful leaders, but who have have lived and served in relative obscurity and humility for decades? Rather than fumble for an answer themselves, Jamin and Kyle spent five years traveling the world to interview seven “sages” of the faith, people 70 or older who have quietly and faithfully lived the way of Jesus. Some are well known, like Eugene Peterson, J. I. Packer, and the late Dallas Willard, and some have lived behind the scenes of larger movements, like John Perkins and Jean Vanier. As they introduce us to the quiet wisdom of these sages, Jamin and Kyle explore power found in weakness, and how that revolutionary humility can change the world. “We choose: we follow the dragon and his beasts along their parade route… taking on whatever role is necessary to make a good show and get the applause of the crowds in order to get access to power and become self-important. Or we follow the Lamb along a farmyard route… in order to become, simply, our eternal selves in an eternal city.” – Eugene Peterson If you’re looking for writing that criticizes evangelicalism, calls out bad leaders, or laments shallow faith, well, there are plenty of blogs and books to scratch that itch. The beautiful thing about The Way of the Dragon is how the authors refuse to take cheap shots, maintaining love and hope for the church. Learning about these sages is an encouragement that lifelong faith and hope is possible, whether in John Perkins choosing non-violence over hate in the fight for civil rights, Jean Vanier’s gentle recollections of serving the disabled, or the tenderness exchanged between James Houston and his beloved wife Rita as she struggled with dementia. In this spirit of love are sobering warnings though, exposing the power structures lurking behind business-like church culture and calling us to give up control to embrace humility and suffering. While especially aimed at folks in pastoral ministry, anyone who loves the church enough to know how good intentions often go awry will find plenty to think about in these pages. Recommended for… Readers of Slow Church by John Pattison and Christopher Smith will find a similar mix of convicting insights and generous spirit. You might even say the vision for “slow church” begins with humility and service. I’m also currently reading Falling Upward by Richard Rohr, and though they have little in common, Rohr’s exploration of hitting the bottom of yourself before you rise and grow resonates in a similar way for me.

For my family, like so many others, 2016 was a year punctuated by loss and grief. It was a year of watching as people we loved fought heroic battles, some ending with partings we prayed would not come. In the autumn, on the heels of all that had gone before, a new and unwelcome challenge came into our lives. Sometimes when a storm is gathering it is possible to read the signs. A dip in temperature. An increase in wind. A darkening sky. This particular storm was unleashed without warning, tearing at our roots in its attempt to carry us, disoriented, into the unknown. In September, at the end of what I believed was a pretty routine hospital appointment, a consultant took me into a private room and told me he was almost certain I had colon cancer. I’ve often tried to imagine how I would feel in such a moment. I think, with the ignorance of a melodramatic introvert who spends too much time thinking, I had almost romanticised the grief. The three months that followed were anything but romantic. I found myself plunged into a world of tests, surgery, uncertainty, ugly words, and a stripping away of dignity that made me want to curl into a ball and cry. There are undoubtedly seasons when you are ready to read about triumph and perseverance but there are also times when you just need someone to sit with you in weary sorrow. I think that’s why I found myself in the book of Lamentations. Strangely, it was amidst the apparently hopeless grief of God’s people that I found a reminder of Truth that is bigger than any individual circumstance or emotion, no matter how overwhelming it feels. Lamentations gives me hope because it is real and raw. Its inclusion in Scripture assures me that God is not oblivious to my tears and that my weakness does not in any way compromise His strength. It gives me hope because it reminds me that one story of pain should never be read in isolation. Lamentations opens with these words, “How lonely sits the city That was full of people! She has become like a widow Who was once great among the nations.” (NASB) The story continues in a similar vein. Grief. Suffering. Loss. Fear. Jerusalem is empty and desolate. God’s people are in exile. On every side there is death and oppression and pain. The groans and cries of the dying are met only with the silence of Heaven. The language is haunting. For a widow, pain and loneliness are heightened by the knowledge of what has been. The seat beside her was not always empty. The bed was not always cold. The questions were not always met with silence. Solitude is mocked by the memory of intimacy and the knowledge that it is gone forever. It must have seemed that way to Israel. The old stories were too painful to tell. The temple was destroyed, the walls were broken and their shame was complete. On my second reading I noticed something that changed my understanding of Lamentations. In verse two Israel is not described as a widow but like a widow. In that one small word is the seed of hope. If Israel is a widow then God is dead, hope is gone and despair is the only reality. If she is like a widow then the rich and raw language simply describes the viewpoint God’s people have in that singular moment. A view that is limited by time, experience and understanding. With no such limitations, God’s perspective is entirely different. There is a beautiful passage in Isaiah 54 v 4-8, written over one hundred years before these events took place. Not only does it provide an insight into God’s heart for His people, it also serves as a much-needed reminder that He can see beyond the enormity of our circumstances. Looking ahead, with full knowledge of all that was to come, He warns His people of the danger they are in. He reminds them that, even when the shadows come, they have not been abandoned. Long before the storm clouds start to gather, this is His reassurance, “Fear not, for you will not be put to shame; And do not feel humiliated, for you will not be disgraced; But you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. For your husband is your Maker, Whose name is the Lord of hosts; And your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel, Who is called the God of all the earth”. (NASB) In Lamentations 1 v 4 the streets of Jerusalem are abandoned and the gates are desolate. The place of feasting is filled with groaning, affliction and bitterness. If the story ends there then it is a bitter conclusion indeed. Through the window of history we can look ahead, setting the grief of theses verses alongside the rejoicing of Nehemiah chapter 8. The once empty streets are ringing with joy as the people return from exile. While the pain of Lamentations was undeniably real, the truth of Nehemiah 8 turns it from a bitter and hopeless ending into a painful chapter in a story that is far from over. Within the sorrow of Lamentations there is a bigger truth unfolding. If truth depends simply on what the eyes can see or what the heart can feel then the grief of Lamentations is total. Hope is narrowed until it is hemmed in by the limits of basic human understanding. If we are to survive in the dark days, perhaps even with hope and peace that sit comfortably in tension with our sorrow, we need to catch a glimpse of God’s perspective. To immerse ourselves deeply in His character, His promises and His story in a way that allows us to live honestly in a broken world without surrendering to hopelessness. His goodness is neither proved nor called into question by my story. Heidi Johnston On December 16th, the day before my fortieth birthday, I was told that my original consultant had been mistaken. While some pre-cancerous cells were removed during surgery there was no further treatment required. Throughout the many tearful conversations that took place that day, one theme kept recurring. Again and again I spoke and heard the words, “God is good!” It wasn’t until some time afterwards that I began to reflect on that instinctive response. God is indeed utterly good and I am so thankful that this chapter of my individual story ended well. Having said that, I can’t help but wonder how often I measure God’s goodness by the outcome of my particular circumstance. If my story had ended differently, requiring me to walk the path I feared most, my heart may have faltered and my courage given way but God would still have been good. His goodness is neither proved nor called into question by my story. The truth is, God was good before the answer came. He was good in the uncertainty and the fear, just as He was in the rejoicing. He was good when I received the news and, while I almost hesitate to say it out loud, He would have remained good had the outcome been all that I feared. His goodness is a fact that is bigger than my circumstances and can be relied on as absolutely true. We live in a world that is increasingly hostile to the idea of truth. So much so that the Oxford Dictionaries selected post-truth as their “word of the year” for 2016. In their explanation of the choice, post-truth is defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. My problem is that if truth depends on my experience or my feelings then my strongest anchor point is myself. Back in September I expected that the journey I was facing would change me in some neat, definable way. I thought I would be asked to prove my faith, emerging stronger and wiser, more patient and less broken. It turned out that my emphasis was wrong. There was a test but I was not the one to prove myself. Inevitably, I stumbled and failed in so many ways, confirming little more than my own weakness. God, however, was proving Himself to be all that He had claimed. Walking with me into the shadows, He showed me again that He can be trusted. He could still be trusted a month later when I stood at the funeral of one of my closest friends, helpless in the face of her grieving husband and five teenage children. He could be trusted when I got a call to say that someone else I love had been diagnosed with cancer. He can be trusted when the evil and suffering spilling from my television is almost overwhelming and He can be trusted when I am tempted to believe the whispered suggestion that He has forgotten us. I came out of 2016 infinitely more aware of my own weakness. Yet, even as I felt myself unravelling, I was at the same time sinking more deeply into a truth that is bigger than all my fears. Even as I write this, I have no idea what the future holds for me or for the people I love. I don’t know what storms we will find ourselves walking through or what I’m going to hear the next time I turn on the news. However, if God’s character and goodness are determined by circumstance then my peace and security are held hostage by a frankly terrifying world. In the midst of the lament we need truth that is stronger than our feelings in any given moment. We need it in moments of courage, when we pin hope to our breast like a shield and we need it when we find ourselves face down in the dirt, broken by grief and afraid that God is nowhere to be found. Regardless of circumstance, truth assures us that we are not alone. It reminds us that the God who is present in our pain can see beyond the shadows to the moment when this brokenness will be redeemed forever.

The song “I Am Hidden Away In The Bosom of Christ” began with Rebecca Reynolds’s poignant lyrics that speak of having peace and assurance in troubled times. She sent them to me in an email, and one day I was up at Jeff’s studio and we skyped with Rebecca as we came up with the melody. Jeff and I recorded this at Wildwood Studio on their big Yamaha grand piano, and I used a 1937 Martin D-28. We had Barry Bales play bass, Lisa Forbes and Suzanne Cox did a stellar job on the harmonies, and Tim Crouch’s strings round everything out perfectly. [This song is available in the Rabbit Room Store both on In the Round Vol. 1.] I Am Hidden Away In The Bosom of Christ Music: Jeff Taylor/Seek 1st/ASCAP and Ron Block/Moonlight Canyon Publishing/BMI Lyrics: Rebecca Reynolds/Wynken Owl/BMI When the bright hope of youth, Heaves a lonely grey sigh, I am hidden away, in the bosom of Christ. When a brother betrays, When the black rumor flies, I am hidden away in the bosom of Christ CHORUS When I’m lost in the breaking When I break from the loss When the chaos unfurls And the low waters toss When He giveth and taketh Away in the night I am hidden away In the bosom of Christ When darkness prevails When reason betrays When faith is eclipsed When answers give way Through tremor, and echo, and censure, and blight, I am hidden away, in the bosom of Christ. CHORUS When I’m lost in the breaking When I break from the loss When the chaos unfurls And the low waters toss When He giveth and taketh Away in the night I am hidden away In the bosom of Christ [This song is available in the Rabbit Room Store both on In the Round Vol. 1.]

The more I study this image, the more I find. The whole of creation is caught up in this presentation of the Cross as the cosmic renewal of life, love, and fellowship. I especially love the detail of chickens and flowers and little animals; these are charming but also a powerful image of incarnational life reaching into the very tiniest corners of the ordinary, intent to redeem. Thus, continued: The image central to our first piece of art, the apse mosaic in the church of San Clemente in Rome, is that of the Cross as a living tree whose burgeoning life is a living vine encircling the world in total renewal. Though dating to a later period, this piece robustly embodies the vision of quickened life inherent in the spirit of the early church and its emphasis on Christ’s victory over death. Constructed in the twelfth century and dedicated to Pope St. Clement (supposed to be either first or third in the line of St. Peter’s successors), the mosaic sits over the high altar, drawing the eye to the central figure of a peaceful Christ on a living cross, with the apse filled by the tendrils of the vines that grow from the foot of the cross, each circled vine picturing an aspect of human culture, work, or creation, the whole of the picture crammed with human and animal life and activity. It is fascinating to note that in early Christian portrayals of Christ in art, Jesus was not pictured on the Cross until the 5th century. The early church was intent upon the portrayal of Christ as risen, the victor over death and redeemer of creation. Even in the earliest extant images of the crucifixion (in a series of ivory panels dated c. 420, and a rougher image on a church door from Rome, dating c. 432) the Christ portrayed is alive, alert, and muscular, not defeated by the cross, but defeating it by his very presence on it. The vine cross in St. Clement reflects that life-affirming portrayal. Also worth noting is that though the image of the Cross as the tree of life isn’t frequent, there are other luminous examples, including the 14th c. painting by Pacino di Bonaguida, as well as the much later image created by Sir Edward Burne Jones in 1888 for St Paul’s Within-the-Walls in Rome, suggesting a recurring fascination with this symbolic image.  Christopher Irvine describes it as ‘ubiquitous’ in Christian ‘liturgy and iconography’, alluding to a phrase of the Venerable Bede ‘about the cross being planted at the centre of the world’[1]. The cross, in this great work, reflects exactly that, sitting in the centre of the apse and the centre of what can be seen as a garden, the self-giving of Christ in Gethsemane making it a second and renewed garden of Eden. Furthering this reading are the four streams portrayed as flowing from the foot of the Cross, the four rivers of Eden renewed, with harts portrayed quenching their thirst, a clear allusion to Psalm 42, and also perhaps to the water that Jesus offered to the Samaritan woman. These images of life rooted in and springing forth from Christ’s death communicate several theological ideas. First is the incarnational emphasis on Christ’s given body as restorative of, not just the soul of mankind, or even of peace between God and mankind, but rather the whole of creation. As Torrance made clear in his magisterial work on the Incarnation, the work of Christ was to ‘assume our human nature as we have it in the fallen world that he might heal, sanctify and redeem it’[2]. Christ was the second Adam, Gethsemane was the Garden of Eden renewed, and because of Christ’s already redemptive life, his death accomplishes the victory in which Paul exults in Romans 15:55. ‘Recapitulation’ is the reality pictured in the apse mosaic, a model of atonement drawn from the writings of Ireneaus ‘whose ‘central element is… the restoring and perfecting of creation’ [3]. Indeed, the whole world appears to be framed in the whorled leaves stretching round the apse. Within their circles are images of every aspect of human culture and endeavour; medicine, law, agriculture, religion, right down to the delightful addition of a housewife feeding her chickens in the left hand corner. The vines rooted in the cross directly suggest Jesus’ words at the Last Supper of ‘abide in me’. They present a profoundly Incarnational picture, portraying the whole of creation renewed by its rootedness, its ‘abiding’ in the given body of Jesus. The kingdom of heaven thus comes in the local, particular spaces of daily human life as they are rooted in the Incarnational life of Christ. Second is the cross as a place of life renewed and death defeated, with the emphasis on what is created afresh, rather than what is lost. There is no hint here of God’s wrath or of Christ as punished, elements inherent in a penal view of the atonement (to be discussed below), but rather as God and Christ both participating in the total self-gift of Jesus to restore the lost creation and humanity. The underlying idea is one of victory as a symbol of excruciating torture and violent death has been transformed by Jesus’ sacrificial death into the enduring symbol of verdant life. The atonement emphasis in this work is upon Christ’s self-gift as restorative rather than punitive. His hands are opened upward as he gives his body as the seed from which the new life of humanity and creation grows. His eyes are closed, not in resistance or agony, but in what appears to be quiet acceptance. Irvine observes that though this is not the ‘open-eyed victorious Christ of earlier liturgical art’, his death is portrayed as ‘release…to the new and burgeoning life’ of ‘God’s redeeming work’. [4] Third is the presence of God the Father in this crucifixion and renewal. A strong theology of Incarnation makes God the Father active and present in the person of Christ, not separated from Jesus, but participatory in his redemptive life. God is both ‘the reconciler and the reconciled’[5], and in the mosaic he is represented by the great hand that reaches out of heaven (and the ceiling of the apse) to hold the top of the Cross. There is here, in the words of 20thcentury theologian Gustave Aulen, ‘no cleavage between Incarnation and atonement’[6]. Rather, as Hebrews has it, Christ is the very image of God, and that image, as the contemporary theologian Hans Boersma poignantly argues, is that of a welcoming Father, a hospitable God imaged in the apse by the opened hands of Christ and the protective hand of the Father. The imagery of the apse mosaic is thus of an all-encompassing redemption accomplished in the very person of the incarnate God as his life, and willing death, renews every aspect of humanity and creation. [Read Art & Theology pt. 1.] [1] Irvine, Christopher The Cross and Creation in Christian Liturgy and Art (London: SPCK Publishing, 2013) pg. 163 [2] T.F. Torrance, The Incarnation, (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008) pg. 62 [3] Aulen, Gustaf, Christus Victor (London: SPCK Publishing, 2010) pg. 21 [4] Irvine, Christopher The Cross and Creation in Christian Liturgy and Art (London: SPCK Publishing, 2013) pg. 152 [5] Aulen, Gustaf, Christus Victor (London: SPCK Publishing, 2010) [6] Ibid, 21 Source: Art & Theology (part 2) | Thoroughly Alive