Note: Tickets for Hutchmoot 2019 will go on sale April 2nd @ 1pm CST. The first time I heard Carolyn Arends in concert I was wrestling with no small amount of envy. She was opening for Rich Mullins on the Brother’s Keeper tour on November 12, 1995, and the show was at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. At that point I was in Bible College in Florida. I had only ever driven through Nashville on the way to somewhere else, but since I’d never seen Rich Mullins live, and since Jamie and I were considering moving to Music City to make a go at this whole songwriting thing, it seemed like as good an excuse as any to visit. The afternoon of the show my friend Mark told me about the opener, this new artist named Carolyn Arends (pronounced like “errands”), and how she was like a female Rich Mullins. That afternoon with some skepticism I unfolded the cassette tape and read through her lyrics. I fashioned myself something of a lyric snob, so I wanted to investigate this person whom Rich evidently thought good enough to bring on tour. I was captivated. Before I had heard a note of her music, I was in love with her songwriting. There was a deftness and attention to detail in her words that was rare and humbling. That night during her set she talked about how geeked out she was about playing the Ryman (she even took a picture of the crowd to document it), and that was my first clue that the Ryman was someplace special. Her demeanor was winsome and humble, and it was immediately clear that she belonged on that stage with Rich and Ashley Cleveland. After the concert I approached the stage and thanked her for her songs, and then I tried to weasel my way in to meet Rich. (I’ve written about that embarrassing moment elsewhere.) Ashley Cleveland, Rich Mullins, and Carolyn Arends in 1995 The point is, I’ve admired Carolyn for the last twenty-four years. Not only has she consistently released record after record of truly great songs, she’s also written countless essays for Christianity Today–essays that are as winsome and humble as her stage presence that night at the Ryman. Her prose is as deft as her lyrics, and it glows with an effortless kindness and wisdom. You can tell she’s not putting it on. It’s hard to imagine Carolyn not smiling while she’s writing. Those essays were collected in a book called Wrestling With Angels, which I devoured. She also wrote Living the Questions and Theology in Aisle Seven, both of which I plan to devour as soon as possible. But she’s so much more than just a good songwriter and essayist. As you’ll remember if you’ve been around the Rabbit Room for the last few years, we’ve partnered with the Renovaré Book Club a few times–Renovaré is a ministry founded by Richard J. Foster, where Carolyn is the Director of Education. I grabbed this from her bio on their website: “She’s written and released 12 albums and is the author of three critically acclaimed books. 15 of Carolyn’s songs have become top 10 radio singles on the Canadian pop and US Christian charts. Carolyn has earned two Dove Awards, three Juno Nominations, and was recognized as the West Coast Music Awards’ Songwriter of the Year. Her prose has been recognized by The Word Guild, The Evangelical Press Association and The Canadian Church Press Awards. In addition to her busy touring and speaking schedule, Carolyn has been a regular columnist for Christianity Today and is an adjunct professor at ACTS Seminary, Pacific Life Bible College, and Columbia Bible College. She has a degree in Psychology and English from Trinity Western University and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Regent College. She lives in Surrey, BC with her husband, Mark, and their children Benjamin and Bethany. Like I said, she’s so much more than a songwriter. It’s my great pleasure to tell you that Carolyn is coming to Nashville in October to share that winsome, humble wisdom with us at Hutchmoot. We’ve emailed back and forth quite a bit over the years, but I think this will be the first time we’ve met since that night at the Ryman Auditorium in 1995. I was an instant fan back then, but my admiration for her and the way she’s stewarded her gifts has grown deeper and deeper over the years. I can’t wait to for her to share those gifts with the Rabbit Room. Note: Tickets for Hutchmoot 2019 will go on sale April 2nd @ 1pm CST.

In the blissfully bucolic English village where I found myself living a few years ago, there were only two reasonable sources for takeout when my workday went long. On the low end was the fish and chips counter, affectionately known to Brits as the chippie, where a prior experience with cod made haddock the only wise option. A few paces up the street and the quality scale, however, was an Indian restaurant, a self-styled fine dining establishment with an impressive ten-page, full-color menu. Indian food is to Brits what Mexican food is to Americans. In the same way that our cousins across the pond know what a taco is, I too was familiar with curry when I arrived in England. Few Englishmen, however, are acquainted with the burrito, and many were alarmed at my profound ignorance of the basics of Indian cuisine. When ordering takeout alone on a Tuesday evening, the expansive menu threatened to incapacitate me. What was a lowly Yankee like me to do with twenty chicken curry options and fourteen manager specials with names like Jardaloo Sali Boti? I had so many options, so much potential for choice, that the resulting option paralysis once led me to warm up leftover soup rather than place an order. THE PARADOX OF CHOICE Staring at the ten sprawling pages of the Indian menu during those hungry English nights, I came to a clearer understanding of what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls “the paradox of choice.” As modern people, we place a high value on our capacity to choose. We don’t want anyone to limit our ability to make free choices, and we insist that this capacity for choice is the essence of freedom. But many of us have found that this capacity for unlimited choice does not necessarily bring liberation, but an altogether new kind of bondage. This happens, for example, when we scroll through our social media feeds and see all the things that we could be doing, our cognitive energies soon worn down by the multiplicity of options. Ironically, instead of choosing something, many of us end up retreating “into the passive, screeny leisure that is the signature of our technological moment,” as Tim Wu puts it. What writer, faced with the frigid emptiness of a Word document and the siren song of their Twitter feed, has not found this to be the case? The “freedom” to scroll often kicks to the curb the greater freedom to write. In my frustration over this, I’ve come to D.C. Schindler and Wendell Berry for aid. These two thinkers have helped me realize how, in our option-abundant world, we are often quite fuzzy in our thinking about the nature of freedom and choice. In a world of possibility, we would do well to embrace the liberation of limitation. ACTION AND POTENTIAL Let’s begin with a question: What is more important, having the potential to choose from a variety of options, or actually acting to choose something? Here in the modern world, we tend to believe that potential is more important than action. Whether we’re searching for a college, shopping at the mall, picking out a show on Netflix, or even looking at the results of a pregnancy test, we see the capacity for choice as the essence of freedom. If my potential to choose is limited—if my choice is determined by someone or something else, or even limited by prior choices I’ve made—I am not free. Potential is more important than action because freedom is the state where no one is stopping me from choosing. This is a widely held notion in our culture. It is also a remarkably new idea. If you asked a panel of philosophers and religious sages throughout history to share their thoughts about action and potential, they would insist that we’ve got it precisely backwards. To the classical mind in particular (think figures such as Plato and Aristotle), action is always more important than potential. They would wholeheartedly affirm what philosopher D.C. Schindler calls “the absolute priority of actuality to potency (and thus to power and possibility)”. To understand this, let’s say I hired a life coach and asked her, “Do I have the potentialto be a prize-winning body builder?” Here in 2019, she might assume that I am hiring her to say, “Of course you have the potential. You can be anything that you want to be and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If you can dream it, you can be it!” If fruitfulness were instantaneous and always sure, hope would be an unnecessary virtue. Phillip Johnston With little more than my question to go on, however, the classical mind would be more circumspect. Upon hearing about my desire to be a bodybuilder, Aristotle would take a good look at my life and observe that I rarely go to the gym and that I sometimes eat my fair share of kettle chips at 10:30 in the morning. They would affirm that I have more potential to be a bodybuilder than, say, a hamster does, but they would insist that my potential is right now quite unreal. Sure, I have potential, but it’s currently an impotent potential. But all is not lost. If I were to take action, if I were to trade kettle chips for kale and submit myself to rigorous physical training, my true potential would actually start to strengthen. Action liberates potential. The ancient sages are right. To the extent that we fail to choose something and commit ourselves to it, we are simply wallowing in impotent potential—we are not actually free. True potential only begins to emerge after we act. We do not become free by dwelling in possibility, but by making contact with something real. FORM AND FREEDOM To understand more clearly the way action liberates potential, it is helpful to understand the vital relationship between form and freedom. A form is simply a set of limitations that contains and cultivates real potential. If we forsake forms, we abandon the freedom that can only be found within them. The most common example of this is the fish in water. The water is the form that liberates the fish’s freedom, its potential to swim and flourish as a creature of the sea. Some hypothetical fish might desire to be free from the limitations of water—“Don’t tell me I can’t be a land fish!”—but there is no real freedom outside of the ocean, only impotent potential. If a pianist yearns for the freedom to play Bach’s Goldberg Variations, she must submit to the form that liberates it: days, months, and years of practice under the wise authority of a teacher who knows how to cultivate the potential for playing Bach. After stepping into this form, the pianist will be limited in her capacity to choose other things. She’ll miss out on a few get-togethers with friends and will likely be ignorant of the latest social media memes, but each sacrifice is a tiny liberation of her freedom to play the Goldbergs and bring delight to all who listen. The same is true of poetry. As Wendell Berry notes, a poem must be made of words, it cannot be about everything, and “if it is unspeakable or unmusical, it is not poetry.” This is the form. The poet must submit tothese limitations, as well as to his editors who will place their keen eyes and red pens on his verse before publication. Additionally, unless the poet is writing in free verse, he must also choose a literal poetic form—a 3-phrase haiku, a 5-line limerick, or a 14-line sonnet. The priest and poet Malcolm Guite could choose to write a lengthy theological treatise about how Jesus is the vine and his followers are the branches, but in his capable hands, the constraints of sonnet form—three quatrains and a couplet—provoke something lovelier than many homilies: How might it feel to be part of the vine? Not just to see the vineyard from afar Or even pluck the clusters, press the wine, But to be grafted in, to feel the stir Of inward sap that rises from our root, Himself deep planted in the ground of Love, To feel a leaf unfold a tender shoot, As tendrils curled unfurl, as branches give A little to the swelling of the grape, In gradual perfection, round and full, To bear within oneself the joy and hope Of God’s good vintage, till it’s ripe and whole. What might it mean to bide and to abide In such rich love as makes the poor heart glad? This is how form nurtures the potential of language to bring forth poetry. Form liberates beauty. POETRY AND MARRIAGE Perhaps you’ve run into a version of the successful thirty-something guy who goes on regular dates, but just can’t seem to settle down. Part of him longs for the intimacy of a long-term relationship, but another part is deeply fearful of how marriage would close off his access to other options. Won’t the form of marriage limit his freedom, particularly the freedom to choose a different spouse if it turns out he’s made a mistake? The anxiety behind this question is ever-present for all of us whether we are choosing a spouse, an artistic medium, a church community, or even the next novel to read. Forms limit our capacity to choose. Entering into a form means not entering into another one. In an age riddled with FOMO, the first thing we think about is how much we will miss out on by choosing one thing instead of another. But form does not exist to limit freedom. Just as exercise yields strength and practice cultivates musicianship, the purpose of form is to liberate the bounty of the unexpected. This is the deep wisdom of Wendell Berry’s little-known essay “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms” (found in the collection Standing by Words). Like poetry, Berry writes, marriage has a form: “the mutual promise of a man and a woman to live together, to love and help each other, in mutual fidelity, until death.” This is the “technical” aspect of the form. Like all forms, however, marriage is more than simply a list of boundaries. The boundaries are there to serve “an opening, a generosity toward possibility” at the center. These two aspects of form, the technical and the generous, are inseparable. No person can ever take joy in the second without welcoming the first. As Berry insists, “To forsake the way is to forsake the possibility.” In marriage, the technical aspect of the form tells the couple that when they have their first big fight, bolting for the door is not an option. Rather than cut and run, they will need to get creative. With patience, forbearance, and the hard-won wisdom of other couples, they must trust that the form’s generous aspect will one day unfurl, that unexpected goodness and unknown gifts are possible for their relationship. Fidelity to the form means fidelity to each other, and it drives the couple beyond what they have “the poor power to expect” in the aftermath of their clash. It drives them into hope. Like a gardener, each day of fidelity to one’s spouse is another day to till the soil in hope that fresh flowers will spring up from the ground of love. Growth is not automatic, nor is it ever guaranteed. But if fruitfulness were instantaneous and always sure, hope would be an unnecessary virtue. As Berry writes, A certain awesome futurity, then, is the inescapable condition of word-giving [i.e. marriage vows, a couple’s entrance into the form of marriage]… for we speak into no future that we know, much less into one that we desire, but into one that is unknown. But that it is unknown requires us to be generous toward it, and requires our generosity to be full and unconditional. The unknown is the mercy and it may be the redemption of the known. The dogged hope of marriage is that over days, months, and years of self-giving love, a union unimaginable on the the couple’s wedding day might come into being. “The faith,” Berry writes, “is that by staying and only by staying, we will learn something of the truth, that the truth is good to know, and that it is always both different and larger than we thought.” This “different and larger” truth is what a world of options and perpetual FOMO constantly prevents us from seeing: that fidelity to people, places, and practices—these commitments that close us off from other options—actually liberate us to receive previously unknown goodness into our personal and communal life. “The unknown is the mercy and it may be the redemption of the known.” Remember this whenever you’re next faced with the paradox of choice. Committing to that single thing—writing the story, finishing the poem, painting the picture, attending to the needs of your neighbor—might mean that you lose some options, but it will prepare the ground of your life for good things you do not yet have the power to expect. Remember, too, to seek wisdom from those who know and love you. When it comes to the bounty of the yet-unknown, they will be the ones most able to help you “hope for it, await it, and prepare its welcome,” as Wendell Berry urges. I discovered this, silly as it sounds, when I took my takeout anxiety to my British friend Tom, a longtime curry veteran. He coaxed me into ordering Duck Tak-a-Tan, a curry from Pakistan with a slightly sweet and sour sauce enhanced with tamarind. Not yet a duck connaisseur, I was quite conscious when placing my first order that “we speak into no future that we know, much less into one that we desire, but into one that is unknown.” But Tom and Wendell were right. Unexpected goodness, indeed. Phillip Johnston is an editor, researcher, and speaker based in East Nashville. A former staff member at English L’Abri, Phillip is also the curator of Three Things, a newsletter digest of three resources to help readers better engage with God, neighbor, and culture. In his spare time, he geeks out on slow movies, Bach cantatas, liturgical theology, and all things food. Phillip will be giving a lecture with a similar theme this Saturday evening with the Friends of L’Abri Nashville group. If you are interested in learning more about Friends of L’Abri Nashville you can find that here. If you are in Nashville and would like to participate in the dinner, discussion and lecture on Saturday evening, please reach out to Rob at rlwheel(at)gmail.com.

If I’m honest, I’ve followed Jesus most of my life, and sometimes I don’t know how to pray. If you’ve been part of the Christian spiritual tradition for any length of time, you probably have collected a few ideas of what prayer is and is not, both from teaching and practice. Is prayer just pulling the lever of a cosmic slot machine and hoping everything lines up? Is prayer a non-verbal, mystical experience of the Divine? Is prayer simply reciting the words of other saints from the past? Does God need my prayers or do I need them? And then there’s the mechanics: do I use a prayer book? Do I look at an icon? Do I look at nothing and scrunch my eyes closed tight? Do I use formal language or do I talk casually to God? Figuring out the “right” way to commune with God can be a bit paralyzing at times, to the point where sometimes I just give up. Which is why it was comforting to read these words from Justin McRoberts at the beginning of his book with Scott Erickson, Prayer: 40 Days of Practice: “As I have with so much else in my process of faith, I [have] allowed mechanics to trump essence. I thought I needed all the right elements properly executed in order to pray.” Processed with VSCO with a2 preset As McRoberts goes on to say, “I think you will agree that the method of delivery, be it glass or plastic or the cupped shape of a human hand, can be very helpful and might even be beautiful, but it is the act of drinking that matters first.” What McRoberts, as a writer, and Erickson, as an illustrator, have done in Prayer is try to simplify some of those mechanics in a way that leads to connection and communion. Each prayer is formed by a few simple lines of meditation accompanied by an image. For me in particular, the idea of using images to unlock my inner spiritual life has proven revelatory. Scott explains the purpose of the images in this way: We’ve all read a book that has pictures in it. Most likely the illustrations creatively visualized the words being communicated in the story. If it was a children’s book, the images did all the heavy lifting in keeping your attention. That’s how most of us experience imagery. But I don’t think that’s what these [prayer] images are for. I think imagery is another language entirely. Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg agrees, writing in his book How God Changes Your Brain, “Drawing is a form of communication that is neurologically distinct from writing and speech….In essence, words and picture are two integrated elements of language, and most words…have in ‘image’ quality associated with them. If the right hemisphere is injured, words and pictures lose their meaning.” He continues, “Words are not enough to describe a spiritual experience.” Prayer is a conversation about everything. Words and images are vital tools that can help us grow in this endless and ongoing conversation, but we must understand that the words and images we use are not the content itself. They are excavation tools that help dig toward and into the real content: the ongoing, ever present conversation between us and the Divine. I can say for myself that engaging with Prayer has reinvigorated this conversation with God in my own life. If you find this book intriguing, I encourage you to check it out and hope that it will enrich your own prayer life as well.

You can now listen to our playlist of the songs that were performed at April 2nd’s Local Show, both on Spotify and Apple Music! Click through for our fourth playlist of the season along with a recap of the night written by our beloved Local Show (un)official mascot, Jared Malament. In this week’s edition of the Local Show, we got to welcome rookies Sarah Kroger and Jilian Linklater, then hear again from Josh Wilson and Jason Gray. It’s not too often that you watch someone tune their guitar while still playing, but that’s just what the amazing Josh Wilson did on his song “Borrow.” And just as important as the songs, we heard great stories too; Jason Gray shared a particularly poignant story about his experience with Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” The show is well worth a watch, if you have the opportunity. —Jared Malament Set List Sarah Kroger: “Hallelujah Is Our Song” Josh Wilson: “Borrow” Jilian Linklater: “Queen of Overthinking” (unreleased) Jason Gray: “Be Your Own Kind of Beautiful” Sarah Kroger: “I Choose You” Josh Wilson: “Tonight” (unreleased) Jilian Linklater: “Christine” (unreleased) Jason Gray: “Becoming” Sarah Kroger: “When I See You” (coming soon) Josh Wilson: “Self Less” Jilian Linklater: “Wildflower” (unreleased) Jason Gray: “The Bridge” (unreleased) Sarah Kroger: “Unbroken Family” (unreleased) Josh Wilson: “Jesus Is Alive” Jilian Linklater: “I’m Coming For You” (coming soon) Jason Gray: “Order Disorder Reorder” (unreleased) Click here to listen to the playlist from our second Local Show of the season on Spotify. And click here to listen on Apple Music.

Welcome to the third episode our new podcast led by Dr. Steve Guthrie: The Artist’s Creed. In a series of interviews with various artists in our community, Steve draws on the tenets of the Nicene Creed to develop a rich vision of the relationship between the voice of God and the voice of the artist—constructing an “artist’s creed” of sorts. Episode 3 features a conversation with fantasy author Helena Sorensen about what it means to escape into literary worlds and the importance of the unseen. Click here to listen to the third episode of The Artist’s Creed.

Last year, a wild, devastating galactic ride called Infinity War roared into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I shared my thoughts in a post here at the Rabbit Room because I couldn’t contain my enthusiasm. Now I find myself in the same situation, this time with the newest MCU film, Captain Marvel. So just like last time, let me emphasize that this article assumes you have seen the movie. Major spoilers ahead! One can’t be too careful in an internet conversation, so let’s start our discussion with a high-five and an agreement that we’re allowed to disagree. What I’m about to share are my own reactions to the film, and I’d love to listen to yours if you’ll listen to mine. But me? I loved it. Every high-soaring, shape-shifting, flerken minute of it. This was a movie of delightful surprises, from the sweet Stan Lee tribute in the opening to the a-ha reveals of MCU continuity to the ‘90s throwback details. We not only saw younger versions of our S.H.I.E.L.D. pals Fury and Coulton, but also a pre-Guardians of the Galaxy Ronan, and a surprising—and significant—appearance by the tesseract, the Infinity Stone that started it all. I’m still giddy about the revelation that Carol Danvers is an Infinity Stone horcrux. Brilliant! But the film’s best surprise, the game-changing heart of the movie, was its major plot twist. After two acts of savage battle against the devious, goblin-like Skrulls, Carol learns something unthinkable: everything she knows about the Skrulls is wrong. The Skrulls are good guys. But in the comics, the Skrulls have never been good guys. The Skrulls debuted way back in 1961, in issue #2 of Fantastic Four, the comic book series that launched the Marvel universe as we know it. That issue begins with the Fantastic Four using their powers maliciously—Mister Fantastic switches off the power for the city, Invisible Woman steals diamonds, the Thing smashes a drilling tower, and the Human Torch scorches through a statue dedication ceremony and melts the statue. If this sounds completely out of character for our heroes (except maybe the Human Torch), well, say hello to the Skrulls. A quartet of shape-shifting Skrulls has taken the place of the Fantastic Four, to discredit them and turn humanity against them. Once this threat has been neutralized, “no power on earth can stop the Skrull invasion!” Though the Fantastic Four stop the invasion within twenty-three pages, the pattern continued for the next fifty-plus years of comics: the Skrulls invade and conquer planets, but thanks to our Marvel superheroes, the earth was a nut they could never quite crack. Meanwhile, major wars raged on between the Kree and Skrulls. Although the Kree were often brutal and duplicitous, in their war against the Skrulls, root for the Kree. The Skrulls are bad news. The story engaged me more fully due to my familiarity with the source material, not because it was represented faithfully, but because it was subverted. Jonny Jimison But that made them great villains. 2008’s Secret Invasion series revealed that Skrulls have been living on earth for years, using their shape-shifting abilities to assume the identities of powerful individuals—sleeper agents, preparing for the Skrull invasion. The series tagline was also its theme: “Who do you trust?” In the months leading up to Captain Marvel, it was a safe bet that we were about to see ground laid for a cinematic Secret Invasion: the crafty aliens would integrate themselves into society in this ‘90s-era prequel, so that in modern-day films, we could see our heroes discover that some of them had been Skrulls for years. As I entered the theater to watch Captain Marvel, the thought of trusting the Skrulls never entered my mind. But everything I knew about the Skrulls was wrong. Carol Danvers had to unlearn years of Kree training to see the Skrulls for who they really were. I had to unlearn years of Marvel comics to see the Skrulls for who they really were. And thus Marvel undermined their own sixty-year storytelling tradition to take me on Carol’s journey. The story engaged me more fully due to my familiarity with the source material, not because it was represented faithfully, but because it was subverted. But sometimes I want the story to stay true to the source material. When a movie undoes my expectations, sometimes I love it, and sometimes I hate it. On a recent episode of the Libromania podcast, Jeffrey Overstreet and Steven Greydanus had a thoughtful conversation about some of their favorite movie adaptations. I’m quoting from Greydanus here: There are multiple ways in which a film can engage its source material: you can try to make a film that’s as faithful as possible. You can also try to be faithful in spirit. But then there’s a third kind of engagement which I think is very interesting, where the filmmaker is subversive of the source material in some way, where they engage it critically. What I think provides an interesting challenge to these kinds of questions, though, is when a film departs from its source material in such a way that you feel like something has been lost and something more interesting has not been put in its place. As a storyteller, I want to understand more fully when to deliver on expectations and when to subvert them. Captain Marvel gave me what I think is a pretty good reference point—by undermining everything that I knew about the Skrulls, they helped me identify more directly with the hero and her journey. In a word, the result in me was empathy. I feel for you, Carol Danvers. And we both feel for the Skrulls—misunderstood, in desperate times, in a desperate galaxy. Aren’t we all? But that’s just one example, so let’s keep the ball rolling. Has a story ever subverted your expectations in a good way?

Lent is a season for looking inward, for seeking repentance for the things we’ve “done and left undone,” as the liturgies say. This Lent, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the “things undone” part. You know the conversations about racism and racial injustice. They surface everywhere, whether in the stories of confrontation from the DC marches in January, or in witnessing insensitive, or even casually racist attitudes in your own community. Until we can place ourselves in a position of listening and humility, of trusting the stories of oppressed and marginalized people, can we ever really, truly seek peace? But what if we were listening people, slow to judgement and quick to compassion? What if peacemaking starts with addressing the collective sins in our own communities… namely the racism undergirding America and the ways the church has failed to step in? Before reconciliation comes repentance. And repentance begins with submitting to the stories around us. We’ve found a new book that can help. This spring, join us as we read Jemar Tisby’s brand new book The Color of Compromise together. Released in January of this year, The Color of Compromise offers a historical survey from America’s colonial days and the foundations of slavery to Black Lives Matter and America’s ongoing conversation about racism and equality. Along the way, Tisby presents a challenging portrait of sustained injustice in American Christianity, while offering hopeful ways forward so we the church can resist our complicity and fight injustice together. Our hope is that these six weeks will provide a safe, open place to wrestle with these difficult conversations, acknowledge and lament our roles in an unjust world, and consider ways to move forward in repentance and love. We may not come up with all the answers, but we’re confident this will be hard but good and fruitful work. Starting next week, we’ll offer reflections on the week’s reading, some questions to consider, and opportunities to discuss the book both on the Rabbit Room blog and in a private Facebook group. You can get started by ordering the book from The Rabbit Room Store and requesting to join the Facebook group here.

Last year about this time, Jennifer and I watched a movie called Risen about the aftermath of the Crucifixion. The film turned out to be mostly good (which is saying a lot considering Jesus literally takes off like a rocket ship during the ascension). I have a difficult time watching film adaptations of biblical stories because when they come from a Christian production team, they tend to misunderstand the art of filmmaking and storytelling, and when they come from secular production teams, they tend to misunderstand Christianity. Rare is the film that lands in the middle. Risen, however, took a unique perspective on the Resurrection story and mostly succeeded. I considered it a win. So why was Jennifer crying when it ended? She was struck, and strongly, by something I’d completely missed. In the film’s key scene, the centurion who’s been trying to prove that Christ’s body has been stolen stumbles into the upper room and witnesses the man he crucified enjoying a meal with the disciples. He’s dumbfounded—and even welcomed. Jesus is alive, enjoying the company of his friends, hugging them, laughing with them. And amid all the awe and brotherly affection on display, there’s a quick shot of Mary Magdalene standing in the corner looking on with a mild smile. Therein lay the painful message of the film for my wife: This isn’t for you—this beautiful person, this Christ, is here for them, for the men, for his friends. That probably seems dramatic to some of you, especially if you’re male. But I immediately recognized how hurtful it must be to so often feel you’re on the outside looking in. It was an eye-opener. For a story to resonate at its strongest, we must feel we are a part of it, we must see ourselves represented in it. And Scripture is poorly served if we’re telling the story of Christ and missing the importance of Mary, the first witness to the Resurrection, the Apostle to the Apostles. After all, for half of the people on the planet, she’s one of the ways in which God says, “You too are a part of my story.” Another year. Another Easter movie. This past week we watched Mary Magdalene, a new film starring Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, and Chiwitel Ejiofor, and I was hopeful that not only would Mary be redeemed from the historical injustice of being cast as a prostitute, but that the film, told from her perspective, would begin to amend the oversight of films like Risen. The film is wondrously quiet and beautifully shot. Rooney Mara’s Mary is so compelling to watch that you can hardly look away from her. She’s presented as a midwife who feels called to a life beyond that of a wife and mother. Her father and brother don’t approve of this longing in her and try to literally exorcise her demons in order to get her to marry the man they’ve arranged for her. It’s in the midst of this that Jesus comes to town and she hears him calling out for those who will to come and be fishers of men. This first act of the film is breathtaking. It reveals the reality of a woman’s life in that time and place and the heroic act it must have been for Mary to defy her father to follow a man not her husband. Peter and the others sacrifice their work and their families to follow, but in this story Mary risks the retribution of her father and the shattering of her reputation to heed Christ’s call. When Mary’s father asks Jesus, “Is this what you want? To divide children from their families?” Jesus responds: “Mothers from sons. Daughters from fathers,” and in that context, heard from the feminine perspective, Christ’s call to to follow him takes on a whole new set of colors. The film follows the relationship of Mary and Jesus on the road to Jerusalem and the Crucifixion, and in large part does so with lovely restraint. There’s no hint of a romantic relationship (thankfully) and it’s wonderful to watch his interactions with Mary. They are each quiet, gentle, empathic—whispered moments of close friendship. Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of Jesus is sometimes delightful, sometimes strange, and as I watched, I was willing to overlook the occasional strangeness of his performance and the pseudo-scriptural things he had to say as long as the story could maintain its direction and end well. For the record, I think if you’re going to put Jesus into your movie, he should either be silent or speak primarily in scriptural quotes, especially when he’s teaching. What happens here is a sort of poetic elision of scriptural ideas that sound like scripture but aren’t. It almost works. But is almost good enough when we’re talking about the Word of God? I hadn't realized until I saw Mary Magdalene how hungry I am to see a feminine perspective of the Gospel story more prominently on display in film. Pete Peterson Before Jesus goes to Gethsemane, he and Mary have a brief conversation, a quiet moment, in which he tells her, “You will be my witness.” This statement filled me with hope. One of the greatest attestations of the Resurrection is that the first witnesses to it are women. In the society of the day, women could not testify in court. Women’s voices didn’t matter. No one would invent something as fantastical as the Resurrection and then suggest that a women would be its star witness. It’s the kind of detail that can only be true. And it’s also the kind of detail by which the Kingdom of God turns everything we know on its head. And so to hear Christ proclaim to Mary that she would be his witness was a sign that the film might be winding up to hit a home run. Maybe I shouldn’t have hoped for so much. The film comes, after all, from a secular production team. Yes, Mary is the first witness to the Resurrection, but what follows drives the film off the orthodoxical cliff it had been so treacherously teetering along. As she reports what she’s seen to the Apostles, they disbelieve. They don’t even run to see if she’s telling the truth. Instead we’re given a scene in which Mary and Peter argue over the true meaning of Christ’s message, and Peter demands to know why he appeared to her alone. Mary argues that what Jesus taught all along is that we need to be more compassionate to the sick, the poor, the weak, that the power to bring forth the Kingdom resides within each of us. Peter argues that the Kingdom is yet to come, that Christ will return and overturn all the governments of the world, bringing the rebellion they’d been looking for. They are both missing the mark here, yet the filmmaker comes down firmly in Mary’s camp. Mary’s response, and the denoument of the film? “That’s not his message. It’s yours,” she says, implying that the church Peter would go on to found would be an epic missing of the entire point. She tells him that the “world only changes as we change,” resolving Jesus’ message into a tired humanism and setting up the idea that Peter’s church might even want to distance itself from her, maybe to the point of slandering her with stories of prostitution. “You weakened us,” he tells her. “You weakened Him.” I want to shake them both. The film ends with Mary returning to the tomb alone to visit the resurrected Christ. This is disappointing, troubling in a multitude of ways. But let’s recognize that this is not all the film has to offer. There’s a wealth of good material here in the final scenes and elsewhere and I believe in praising that which is praiseworthy. The final scene ends the film on a touching and intimate note that culminates with the parable of the mustard seed. Mary Magdalene is a beautiful film. It boasts some fantastic performances. Its landscapes and cinematography are gorgeous. The contemplative tone is lovely and poetic. The way it immerses the viewer in the story in a grounded way and through a unique perspective is remarkable. The diversity of its cast is wonderful to see. And it’s a film that, despite its regrettable end point and a few bumps along the way, takes us on a tour of a lot of wonderful territory. It’s a film in which many may see themselves in the Gospel story in a way they never have before, and that’s a good and beautiful thing. I hadn’t realized until I saw Mary Magdalene how hungry I am to see a feminine perspective of the Gospel story more prominently on display in film. I want more films that allow my wife to see herself represented as a beloved and valued heir of the King. I want to see more films that teach the young girls of the world how important they are in the Kingdom. I want more films that validate the callings of women to all areas of life, and leadership, and prominence in both society and the church. I don’t want these virtues at the expense of orthodoxy, but I also don’t want them at the expense of artistic excellence and meaningful storytelling. One day, we’ll have both, and all these things will resolve into glory. Until then, I take what I can get. And that means I’ll leave the bad where I find it, but I’m also happy to look for the good and take what I can from Mary Magdalene.

On the morning flight from Paris to JFK, I knew I had to put down in words what it did to my heart and my spirit to see Notre-Dame in person. I did not know the words would come spilling out of me when I heard news of the fire two months after that flight. It is with unspeakable relief that I acknowledge not all of the church was reduced to ashes. Even so, it seems right to simply submit these words as they are, having been begun when it seemed everything would be engulfed and lost, and having been finished only after news came that the towers and the façade were saved. The cathedral is burning. I am an ocean away, with a bowl of untouched leftover Thai carryout sitting in front of me, and I can hear someone’s dishwasher laboring in the apartment above mine, and the cathedral is burning. Someone said in a news article that nothing would be left. It’s beautiful outside, a flawless April afternoon. It’s nighttime in Paris now. They said nothing would be left. When I was not even a teenager, I learned that the gargoyles perched all over Notre-Dame were not terrible of face and form to inspire horror of God in the hearts of incoming congregants; I learned they were ghastly so that demons would be daunted, that darkness was to be fought with darkness so light could be preserved inside the church, and the worshipers would be safe. God’s very fragile, very weak and very loved children could not fight shadows off themselves and rest in His presence at the same time—something else would have to do it for us. It was my first introduction to the upside-down logic of the Gospel—death is life, ugliness can be most beautiful, suffering is inextricably tied to true joy. The gargoyles of Notre-Dame proved pivotal in my perception of reality as I grew, a testament to just how quiet and even misunderstood goodness has to be sometimes in order to run its course without being stopped and stared at, kept from its work. I wanted to see those gargoyles in person, to stand inside the cathedral and crane my neck backward and gaze above me. I have wanted that since I was small. In many stories that were precious to me during my childhood, Notre-Dame was the setting for major dramatic action. It’s a unique place in which to scaffold a story, because it’s hardly a setting so much as a character of its own. Its heart clangs or hums, empathetic according to the predicaments and emotions riveting the characters. In a Ray Bradbury book I try to read every October, the cathedral is a looming structure on which lonely souls are collected and displayed lest someone should come looking for any one of them on a rescue mission of steadfast love. In some ways, not to be dramatic about it, I am beginning to wonder if my own encounter with the cathedral was part of such a rescue mission, only I was the lonely creature being collected and the steadfast love was already there, awaiting my arrival as if it had been drawing me toward itself all my life. It had been a bleak autumn and a bleak winter here in Tennessee. Grief was ravaging my friends. Prayers had gone unanswered, perhaps unheard, perhaps uncared for. I could not find whatever light God had supposedly fixed within me, that little radiant thing inside that reminds us we’re born of light, nourished by it, bound to it—I could not find mine. In an adventurous fit, I had bought a plane ticket to Paris the September before this season began. I am not prone to adventurous fits of international proportions, but I’ve been obsessed with Paris since I was a little girl and had never been abroad before. I suppose I was fed up with waiting around to go. It turned out to be a merciful thing that I had something to look forward to as midwinter passed. At the very least, it seemed a change of scene and a suitcase full of European chocolate would improve my mood for a time. Any disruption to my world was welcome. God Almighty is with us. He is here, and He is not the weaker for it. Janie Townsend With a friend and a city map we could barely read, I wandered the city of Paris on an exquisitely blue February day until the cathedral rose before us across the gleaming river. If I thought gazing upon Notre-Dame for the first time was transfixing, shuffling inside was another thing altogether. I stood inside the cathedral and craned my neck backward as I had dreamed of doing for at least half my life. The certainty that the Almighty God is physically near to us while remaining vaster than reality itself pressed down upon me, and I could not have believed we are alone in the universe if I had tried with all my doubtful, bitter might. I could not have believed I was alone. My eyes were guided upward, and somehow I could see His face and sturdy, outstretched arms in the intricacies of design, in the deep quiet of the cavernous vault. God Almighty is with us, I thought breathlessly as I stood there all but gaping. He is here, and He is not the weaker for it. It was like the closing of a wound, that realization—after a time of mourning and total inability to keep from wallowing in isolation I could not free myself from without the care of those around me. Like the closing of a wound, being told as if to my face that I had not been alone the entire time. There’s more I could say about what I experienced, sensed and received in my time within those stone walls, and certainly more I could tell of what it meant to see Notre-Dame with my own eyes after a lifetime of imagining myself beneath its shadow. I am stunned that I was summoned to behold it before it was forever changed by near-devastation, and I am dumbfounded with gratitude that so much is left of it, that I could see videos online of people standing outside in the fire-lit night while they sang hymns for hours and hoped together, regardless of what they believe. My prayers go out to the people of France and the citizens of Paris, who must have felt as though they were watching someone die. Holy Week has begun soberly for them, and for me as well—and yet, for me, it has begun with thankfulness so deep I don’t know if I can hold it, because God did preserve much of the place where He last surprised me with His nearness. May we celebrate that nearness this week and for the rest of the Easter season and for the rest of the year. May our lives be marked by remembrance and proclamation of His nearness to us. May our lives be marked by remembrance and proclamation that we are never alone.

Episode 4 of The Artist’s Creed with Steve Guthrie is now available! In a series of interviews with various artists in our community, Steve draws on the tenets of the Nicene Creed to develop a rich vision of the relationship between the voice of God and the voice of the artist—constructing an “artist’s creed” of sorts. In this new episode, Steve Guthrie interviews Pete Peterson about the unique gift of theater as an incarnational, embodied art form—what can this physical enactment of story teach us about the way God has chosen to tell his story? Click here to listen to the fourth episode of The Artist’s Creed.

We recently came across this elegantly simple video that visually guides the viewer through Christ’s last words from the cross with the help of Andrew Peterson’s song “Last Words.” It was made by Victory of the Lamb Church in Franklin, Wisconsin, and was originally shared at their Good Friday service last year. We offer it here today as a Good Friday meditation.

Happy Easter, everyone! We hope today marks the beginning of some good, heartfelt celebration for you and yours. To help get the party started, we’ve made a collection of springtime liturgies available for free download on the Every Moment Holy website. These include liturgies for gardening, planting flowers, feasting with friends, and more. Included in this blog post is the full liturgy of Praise to the King of Creation and a link to download the rest. Enjoy, and go eat a delicious meal with the ones you love! Leader: Our thoughts of you, O Lord, have been too small, too few— for seldom have we considered how specific is the exercising of your authority, extending as it does into the myriad particulars of creation. People: There is no quarter over which you are not king. And as creation hurtles toward its liberation and redemption, the full implications of your deep Lordship are yet to be revealed in countless facets unconsidered: Christ, you are the Snow King. You are the Maker of All Weathers. You are The King of Sunlight and Storms, The King of Grey Skies and Rain. You are The Rain King, The Sun King, the Hurricane King. You are the King of Autumn and King of Spring. And our thoughts of you, O Lord, have been too small, too few. The old and impotent gods our ancestors once believed in were, at their best, but imperfect pictures of you, whose strength and goodness and creative majesty and wonderful mystery and love exceed those old rumors as sunlight exceeds the tiny dimness of stars reflected in a dark and wavering pool. The fairy tales crafted by our old cultures hinted at you, though they knew it not. Yet their perfect princes and blessed ends were yearnings for all that has found fulfillment in you. You are the Lord of the Harvest. The Grain King, The Wine King, The God of Plenty, The God of Hearth and Home. You are The Hill King, The Wildflower King, King of the Great Bears, King of Canyons. You are The Monarch of Meadows, The Lord of the Lava Fields, Ruler of the Desert Wastes, The Polar King, The Rainbow King, The King of the Southern Cross, and The King of the Northern Lights. You are the King of the Rabbits, and The Lord of Tall Trees. You are the God of Youth and the God of Age. You are The Acorn King, The River God, The Swamp King, King of Glades, King of Dells, Ruler of All Hummingbirds. You are The Horse Lord, The Crag King, Lord of the Bees, King of the Walruses, Commander of Rhinos, Lord of the Lightning Bugs, Cave Lord, Mountain King, Ruler of the Grassy Plains, God of the Valleys. You are The Captain of the Clouds, The Wolf King, The King of the Cockatoos. And our thoughts of you, O Lord, have been too small, too few. For your claim over creation is vast. You are The Lord of Antarctica, the King of California, the King of the Scottish Hills, and the King of the Nile. You are the weaver of the unseen fabrics of the world. You are Lord of the Atoms, The Ruler of Electrons, The Lord of Gravity, and The King of Quarks. Your dominion enfolds the earth and rises beyond it to the furthest extremes of the stars. You are Lord of the Vast Empty Spaces. You are The King of the Constellations, The Black Hole King, Lord of Novas Exploding, Lord of Speeding Light, High King of Galaxies, King of Orion, King of the Moon. And still, even still, our thoughts of you have been too small, too few. You are the God of Justice, The God of Wisdom, The God of Mercy, The God of Redemption. You are The Lord of Love. All of this is true. But our thoughts of you are still too few, for our minds are too small to conceive of them all, let alone to contain them. You were before all things, you created all things, and in you all things are held together. There is no corner of creation you will fail to redeem. You are Lord of Lords, and King of Kings, O Jesus Christ, our King of Everything. Amen. Click here to view all free Easter liturgy downloads on the Every Moment Holy website. And download the King of Creation liturgy here.Download

If you’re looking for some new music for the Easter season, our friends at The Corner Room have a new album out this month! Following the tradition of their Psalms records and Love Never Ends, With His Wounds We Are Healed is a musical interpretation of Isaiah 53, told in five elegantly arranged movements. For the past several years, The Corner Room (a worship collective from Cahaba Park Church in Birmingham, AL) have set out to connect music to Scripture, word for word. With His Wounds takes every word from Isaiah 53 and sets the somber passage against a warm, hopeful folk backdrop. As a bonus, the album includes all the instrumental tracks, so you can enjoy the beautiful arrangements on their own. From the first swelling strings of Movement 1 to the triumphant buildup and final bells that close the album, this is a lovely soundtrack for meditating on Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection this Easter season. Get to know The Corner Room at their website and pick up a copy of the album at The Rabbit Room store.

Welcome to “The Great Day of the Lord”—a fifty day-long season called Easter in which we find ourselves sent into the world, confident that the One who sent us will finish what he’s started. Resurrection is real, our hope is not in vain, and our eyes and ears are newly open to the great gladness of a world being remade. We offer you this batch of songs to accompany you through Eastertide. Andrew’s blog post said it well: “I feel in my chest a loosening of tension, a relief that the grieving of Lent is past, the hard-fought self-discipline is behind me, and I can enter the days of work and rest with a subtly euphoric freedom from the thistle and thorn that infests the ground. I’m still working in the fields, but for now it’s with gladness and not groaning.” Click here to listen to our Easter playlist on Spotify. And here to listen on Apple Music. Photo by Tori Thiessen Here’s what some of our contributors had to say about their song choices. “The Color Green” by Rich Mullins This song holds the same swelling joy and gratitude I feel considering Easter, and it reflects the glory and wonder of all things being made new. —Shigé Clark “Christ Has Risen” by Matt Maher The couplet that reads, “O Church, come stand in the light / The glory of God has defeated the night” gets me every time. —Matt Conner “After the Storm” by Mumford & Sons Feels like a modern-day Psalm 22. —Chris Yokel “Out of Hiding” by Steffany Gretzinger People say Jesus was thinking of us when he died on the cross, but this song reminds me how he was also thinking of us when he defeated death and rose from the grave. He fought Satan and won eternity for me. We’re not far from home, friends. So encouraging. —Janna Barber “When I See You” by Audrey Assad “My heart unfolds like a flower in the sun / My fear grows cold in the light of your love.” It reminds me of the moment Mary recognizes the resurrected Jesus, and it feels like the hope of spring. —Jen Yokel “Appalachia Waltz” by Mark O’Connor, Yo-Yo Ma, and Edgar Meyer Easter makes me want to listen to heart-meltingly beautiful instrumental music. This song is where that desire led me this year. —Drew Miller “He’s Alive” by Dolly Parton I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Dolly Parton’s “He’s Alive.” I love this chorus. —Jill Phillips “We Will Feast in the House of Zion” by Sandra McCracken This one reminds me that Easter is not just a day, it’s a season: a 50-day feast pointing towards that glorious Day when everything Jesus accomplished in His crucifixion and resurrection will be fully realized in the lives of His saints. I can’t wait. —Lanier Ivester Click here to listen to our Easter playlist on Spotify. And here to listen on Apple Music. What are some songs that express the season of Easter for you? Please share in the comments section!

We’ve got a new episode of Fixed In Post up and ready to listen to! In this episode, Pete Peterson and John Barber talk about the new movie Us. Jordan Peele made a big splash with his first film, Get Out. Now he’s back with Us. It’s taking theaters by storm and, yes, John and Pete have thoughts. Is Peele the new Hitchcock? How is Us about us? Is it better than Get Out? In this episode of Fixed In Post, our hosts dive headlong into the terrifying mystery of Us. John Barber and Pete Peterson are fascinated, infuriated, and gobsmacked by the art of cinema. In other words, they’re in love with the movies. In Fixed In Post, they discuss the joy, the disappointment, and the magic of film. Listen to the new episode here. And click here to browse the Rabbit Room Podcast Network.

Now available for streaming are songs from April 16th’s Local Show, both on Spotify and Apple Music! Click through for our fifth playlist of the season along with a recap of the night written by Jared Malament, patron saint of the Local Show. The most recent edition of the Local Show featured the gifts of Leslie Jordan (of All Sons & Daughters), Christopher Williams, Frankie Barranco, Taylor Leonhardt and special guest LOVKN. They opened their hearts to us with tales of learning the stories of absent parents, the struggles of knowing our own worth, and the five stages of grief. Taylor Leonhardt opened the show with her song “Everything,” a perfect reminder of Christ’s sacrifice during Holy Week’s lead-up to the Easter season. —Jared Malament Set List Taylor Leonhardt: “Everything” Frankie Barranco: “For You O God Will Be My Strength” (unreleased) Christopher Williams: “Gather” Leslie Jordan: “I Wait” Taylor Leonhardt: “Hard Conversation” (unreleased) Frankie Barranco: “Autumn” (unreleased) Christopher Williams: “Because You Are” Leslie Jordan: “Suzy Rain” (unreleased) LVKN: “Pilot of My Own Life” (unreleased) LVKN: “Go Easy on Me” (unreleased) Taylor Leonhardt: “Diamonds” Frankie Barranco: “Depression (Standing)” (unreleased) Christopher Williams: “I Cannot Know You” Leslie Jordan: “Instruments of Peace” (unreleased) Taylor Leonhardt: “Poetry” (unreleased) Frankie Barranco: “Acceptance (Breath In, Breathe Out)” (unreleased) Christopher Williams: “The River” Leslie Jordan: “Ever Flowing Fountain” (unreleased) Click here to listen to the playlist on Spotify. And click here to listen on Apple Music.

We’re excited to share with you Episode 5 of The Artist’s Creed with Steve Guthrie—the second to last episode in the series, featuring Dr. David Dark. In a series of interviews with various artists in our community, Steve draws on the tenets of the Nicene Creed to develop a rich vision of the relationship between the voice of God and the voice of the artist—constructing an “artist’s creed” of sorts. In this episode, Steve Guthrie and David Dark discuss the generative, boundary-confounding work of the Spirit in wider culture, using the career of U2 as a jumping off point. Click here to listen to the fifth episode of The Artist’s Creed.

It’s hard to believe we’re already over a quarter of the way through the year 2019! We’d like to take this opportunity to heartily thank our members for their indispensable support and to share the high points of what we’ve been up to so far this year. If you’re interested in becoming a member, you can learn more at rabbitroom.com/donate. Rabbit Room on the Road — We’ve been going on the road with the Great Homeschool Convention. Rabbit Room on the Road includes four breakout sessions on stories and imagination, concerts by Andrew Peterson and Slugs & Bugs, and full access to the exhibit hall and other convention activities. It’s been a great way for folks across the country to get a taste of the Rabbit Room and Hutchmoot, and we’ve enjoyed getting to interact with friends old and new. Registration is still available on the Great Homeschool Convention website. We just got back from Cincinnati, OH yesterday—we’ll be in Ontario, CA in June and finishing off with Rochester, NY and Jacksonville, FL in August. Hutchmoot US & UK — Yes, we now have to specify which Hutchmoot we’re talking about! The first EVER Hutchmoot UK was announced this quarter, and will take place 18-20 July 2019 at St. Andrew’s Church in North Oxford. We’re thrilled to begin a new chapter of cultivating community across the world, especially in a place just a twenty-minute walk from the original Rabbit Room in the Eagle and Child pub and literally on the same block as Tolkien’s old house. We’re glad to have Steve Turner as keynote speaker. You can find more information on him and Hutchmoot UK here at the website. This year, tickets for Hutchmoot US 2019 sold out in less than two minutes. We continue to be grateful and humbled by the enthusiasm surrounding this gathering, and your help makes it possible every year. This year’s keynote speaker will be Carolyn Arends. Be sure to keep an eye out for updates on the website. We hope to see you there! North Wind Manor — Construction began this quarter for the long-awaited North Wind Manor. With your help, we’ve raised $394,000 toward the project, putting us just over 12% away from our goal of $450,000. The frame of our operations center is now up! After dreaming and planning for many years, the Rabbit Room is on its way to having a physical space to call its own. Every Moment Holy — Last week, Rabbit Room members received these discount codes for sharing Every Moment Holy, and now we’re extending them to the entire community! These codes are for you and anyone you want to share them with. Use the code GiftEMH at checkout for 25% off any order of 10+ copies. In addition, share this link with as many friends as you’d like, and they can use the code ForaFriend to get 25% off of their own order of Every Moment Holy. Thank you for helping us steward this work well! The Shiloh Series— Helena Sorensen’s Shiloh series has been reprinted by Rabbit Room Press! To celebrate, we posted a delightful article by Jonny Jimison describing the series. You can find Helena’s trilogy in the Rabbit Room Store. The Local Show — The Local Show Spring 2019 season is nearing its end and has been a blast. Livestream is available for anyone who wants to tune in, and we’ve begun compiling Spotify and Apple Music playlists for the songs and artists featured at each show. There are still two shows left in the Spring season! Dates, line-ups, and tickets are available at store.RabbitRoom.com. Seasonal Playlists — Speaking of playlists, we’ve started a new tradition of compiling songs from folks connected to the Rabbit Room and releasing them to community. Thus far, we’ve done playlists covering Favorites from 2018, Advent, Valentine’s Day, Lent, and Easter. You can find all the compilations on Spotify and Apple Music. The Rabbit Room Podcast Network — The podcast network continues to expand! The Second Muse, The Hutchmoot Podcast, and Rabbit Room Classic have been joined by The Artist’s Creed, Fixed in Post, and The Membership. Our newest addition, The Resistance, is coming soon. You can find them all on the podcast network page. Friends of L’Abri — The Rabbit Room is supporting Friends of L’Abri as they develop their first ever conference in Nashville. The two-day conference will take place 26-27 July and will include small group discussions, meals together, an evening of music from local artists, and an environment to nurture conversation and questions.

For a long time, I’ve been fascinated by the Jewish concept of haverim. While it has more than one meaning, a haverim often refers to a group of friends who study Scripture and then discuss it together, earnest in their desire to know it more deeply. It’s not a new idea but it is a rich one. There is something formative about learning together—telling the Story back to one another in ways that help us better understand our place within it. In Ephesians 4: 11-16, Paul talks about the impact of Christian community. As we help one another to better know God, all that we are and all that we do becomes shaped by the truth of who He is and who we are in Him. We’d love you to join us as we read, study, and discuss the book of Ephesians over the next couple of months. Each week we’ll focus on one particular chapter, sharing the challenges and encouragements we find within it. (Note: If you are nervously picturing heated online debate, you can rest easy. This is not intended as a forum for theological wrangling and we’ll be encouraging people to remember that. It’s important to wrestle with hard passages of Scripture but, particularly when those passages are controversial, we believe that is best done face to face over open bibles and good coffee.) As a community rich with artists, musicians, readers and writers who are committed to God’s Word, we have the opportunity to share not only the impact of the text itself, but also the ways in which art and community have helped illuminate or apply it in our lives. Next week, before we dig into the body of the letter, Michael Card will be sharing some background to Ephesians. Then, for the following six weeks, a different Rabbit Room contributor will share their own challenges and encouragements from each chapter in turn. Our hope is that you will not only study along, either alone or with friends, but also that you will share what you have learned. One of the highlights of Hutchmoot 2018 was Stephen Trafton’s Living Letters performance of the book of Ephesians. For me, the impact of listening to Paul’s words—in much the same way as the original audience—engaged my imagination in a new way. In preparation for this series of posts, I caught up with Stephen Trafton and asked him a few questions about Living Letters and his passion for the Bible. HJ: For the benefit of those who are not familiar with your work, tell us a bit about yourself and what you do now. ST: My training is in musical theatre and I’ve performed on Broadway in Les Miserables, on the National Tour of Phantom of the Opera, and around the country at regional theatres. I’m currently the Youth Director at Redeemer Presbyterian Church West Side in NYC. My wife (Juliette) and I also lead a ministry called Living Letters, bringing Scripture to life in churches, colleges, and conferences around the country. HJ: One of the first things that struck me about you was your passion for the Bible. In fact, several of my favourite Bible study resources came straight from your Instagram recommendations! Has Bible study always been important to you? ST: I’m glad you’ve found some of the resources I’ve mentioned helpful! To answer your question, Bible Study has not always been important to me. Although I grew up as a Christian, I never had too much interest in reading the Bible. I think I always found it difficult to be focused on Scripture itself—I preferred to read people who talked about the Bible. It seemed like there was a real distance between my life and the text and I had a hard time getting into it. There was a lot I didn’t understand and, honestly, I found it intimidating and a little boring. It wasn’t until I really studied the Bible about seven or eight years ago and was connected with its contextual background that it started to come alive to me. HJ: How did the idea for Living Letters come about? ST: Juliette and I had been part of a community group with our church led by Max McLean (Fellowship for the Performing Arts). The group was for Broadway actors and met in Times Square on Wednesdays so that we could attend between shows. When the leader left, he asked me to take over. For some reason I can’t remember, I landed on the book of Philippians. Being the son of a New Testament Scholar, I reached out to my father to help me understand, teach, and apply the book to Broadway performers. If this is what God's Word through Paul was saying to them then, how does that same eternal Word speak to us now, in a new context? Stephen Trafton As I spoke with my Dad and explored the commentaries, I was thrust into the circumstances of the letter. I learned what the Philippians were feeling—their hopes and fears and the challenges they faced. I discovered that the letter wasn’t just full of timeless truths, principles and verses in isolation. God’s Word through Paul was inspired to speak to this particular audience, in their particular situation. It was written to them, not directly to me, and it was meant to be both read and understood as a whole letter. That realisation was liberating. Rather than reading the text through my 21st century lens (and potentially making it mean anything I wanted), I began to understand what it meant to that original audience. Here’s the key: once I understood what God’s Word meant to them, it illuminated and clarified what it meant to me and to our group at that time. This process made me realize how crucial it was to set up the context and to hear and interpret the letter as the Philippians would have heard it. I began to think, how could my training in acting and my love of storytelling bring all of this to life? Rather than tell people what the original audience felt, through a lecture or a sermon or a book, how can I set up the necessary context so that my audience feels and experiences the letter as it was first received? What if the imagination of my audience became engaged in a way that was theatrical, embodied, and physical? With the help of my Dad and sister (Jennifer Trafton) on the background and storytelling concept, and my wife’s eye as a Director/Actor/Improvisor, we created a way to interactively and imaginatively bring the context of Philippians to life. After that I performed the entire letter, with the audience “becoming” the Philippian church and encountering the letter as it may have been originally received. HJ: How do you prepare to step into Paul’s shoes? ST: One way I was trained as an actor was with the Uta Hagen Acting method. In preparation for the role you ask lots of questions of the script: Who am I? Where am I? What are my relationships? What do I want? What’s in my way? How will I get what I want? I usually revisit those questions in whichever letter I’m performing, asking myself about Paul’s given circumstances: what he’s thinking, feeling, and seeing: what he’s worried about, hoping for, and looking to accomplish. Also crucial to this process is revisiting what that particular church was going through at the time, such as disunity, suffering, worry, and so on. It’s exciting for me to reflect and study Paul’s intention and explore the variety of ways his intention could be communicated to the recipients of the letter. From the audience’s perspective, this helps them see that Paul’s words are meant to move us in some way—whether to remind us who we are, to comprehend the love of Christ more deeply, or to spur us on to particular actions. This is where “application” comes in. What did Paul want the church to walk away knowing, feeling, doing, and so on? Once we understand that, we can then ask: if this is what God’s Word through Paul was saying to them then, how does that same eternal Word speak to us now, in a new context? Or, as theologian Kevin Vanhoozer conveys in some of his writings: how do we “re-stage the drama” today? HJ: How much has understanding the original audience influenced your reading of the text? ST: I believe that understanding and experiencing the Word in context really clarifies the text and helps audiences reflect on how to apply and live it out in fresh contexts today. Since Paul’s letters were written in the first century to specific groups of people that he names in those letters, there are many features we miss about the cultural contexts. Particular words and phrases that were clear to the original audience can be lost on us today. The body of Christ is made up of many members with different gifts and I am grateful that God has given us gifted scholars and historians who have researched and know much about the first century. If I didn’t know the context, I could take many passages to mean things that might “feel” right to me, but are not at all what Paul was originally communicating. The Spirit may give new applications today but they won’t be less than what they originally were, nor can they ever contradict the original inspiration. I find this both exciting and liberating. In a culture where so many take Scripture out of context, I sense a calling to present the Word and encourage people to study and engage with it—inviting the audience to imagine the context, encounter the Word, and reflect on how that Word is to be lived out today. HJ: If you had the chance to sit down with Paul, what would you ask him? ST: Several questions come to mind. What happened with you and Barnabas? What happened when you confronted Peter about his hypocrisy (Galatians)? I think I’d most like him to tell me—again and again and again—what it was like to hear and see Jesus raised from the dead. HJ: How has learning entire books of the Bible impacted your day- to-day life? ST: Before I have memorized any of the letters, I’ve really studied and meditated on the words, considering what Paul originally meant by them. The meaning was absorbed in my heart and mind and was formed within me. While memorization is challenging, this made it much easier and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to memorize Scripture. Instead of attempting to learn something that is foreign to you, the words you are memorizing have already become part of you and are rich with meaning. For me, this process of meditating, memorizing, and ultimately performing Scripture means that the Spirit can often bring the words and theology to my mind in unexpected places in order to minister to someone. I’ll find myself saying something like, “This reminds me of the Philippians and what they were facing, and this is what Paul said to them…” Sometimes I’m wrestling with something and I will think back to the books I’ve memorized, trying to recall how my situation has potential parallels to what Paul was going through, or what one of his communities was facing. HJ: As we begin studying Ephesians together, do you have any tips for us? Are there any particular themes we should look out for? ST: These are some things I have found helpful: 1. Read the whole letter in one sitting. Read it again and again. See how the book gets bigger and deeper with each reading. 2. Read the letter out loud and see how that gives a different feel and experience. 3. Take notes on Paul’s circumstances and the circumstances of the church. Try to imagine the given circumstances. 4. Try to identify Paul’s objective and intended effect on the audience. Notice not just what he says, but how he says it. Look for the flow of his thought as he seeks his intended effects. Put yourself in the church’s shoes: how is Paul forming you through the letter? 5. Don’t just read it with a personal perspective. Notice how much Paul focuses on the church and life together. 6. Remember Paul is in prison writing all of these words and put yourself in his shoes—get inside his worldview. HJ: Are there any resources in particular that you have found helpful? ST: Here are a few: The Bible Project Videos (Their video summarising Ephesians is included below) NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible by Keener & Walton How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth & How to Read the Bible Book by Book by Stuart & Fee Ephesians Commentary by Stephen Fowl Living-letters.com Instagram/Facebook: @experiencelivingletters

Doug the Slug and Sparky the Lightning Bug got a big surprise from our friend Randall, and they even managed to catch it on video. Click through to watch for yourself! Randall decided that the friendship between Doug the Slug and Sparky the Lightning Bug was so commendable, it would make a great example for kids in his two brand new books, Who Will Play With Me? and Are We Still Friends? Both these books will be available for purchase on May 15th, but until then, you can pre-order them at the Rabbit Room Store. Click here to pre-order Who Will Play With Me? And here for Are We Still Friends?

A cynic remarked that last week’s fire at Notre Dame has turned out to be an excellent excuse for social media users to post pictures of their vacations in Paris. A less cynical interpretation is that the fire at Notre Dame prompted social media users to memorialize an encounter with a work of art and beauty that reminded them that they were living in a bigger story than they typically thought. It is remarkable what that building has meant to people who have only seen it once, to say nothing of Parisians for whom Notre Dame has been part of daily life. In her book Reason for Hope, the primatologist Jane Goodall described her first visit to Notre Dame. She watched the morning sun stream through the Rose Window while Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” filled the place: That moment, a suddenly captured moment of eternity, was perhaps the closest I have ever come to experiencing ecstasy, the ecstasy of the mystic. How could I believe it was the chance gyrations of bits of primeval dust that had led up to that moment in time—the cathedral soaring to the sky; the collective inspiration and faith of those who caused it to be built; the advent of Bach himself; the brain, his brain, that translated truth into music; and the mind that could, as mine did then, comprehend the whole inexorable progression of evolution? Since I cannot believe that this was the result of chance, I have to admit anti-chance. And so I must believe in a guiding power in the universe—in other words, I must believe in God. Father James Schall, a Jesuit priest and philosopher, died the day after the fire at Notre Dame was put out. When I read about his death, I returned to his excellent book, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, figuring Father Schall would have said something relevant to the situation at Notre Dame. I was not disappointed. He wrote: “Beauty, as such, is not useful; yet without it, we would not be what we are. This is why a religion indifferent to beauty is a religion indifferent to the real end for which we are made.” Those are big claims. But the gist is this: every useful thing is useful because it is a means toward something more important. The most important things have meanings in themselves, not because they are a means toward some other end. The awe and reverence inspired by a work like Notre Dame is an end in itself. Without it, as Father Schall said, we would not be what we are. Building Notre Dame was not a pragmatic thing to do. Repairing it won’t be pragmatic either. That impracticality is a clue to why the work is so important. “Pragmatism is a matter of human needs,” wrote G.K. Chesterton, “and one of the first human needs is to be more than a pragmatist.” But even as I think about the transcendence and the beauty of that cathedral, I can’t help thinking about those stonemasons and hod-carriers and carpenters and carpenters’ assistants who showed up for work and did their job in the twelfth century. And the thirteenth century. And the fourteenth. If my math is right, the workers who completed Notre Dame would have been the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the workers who dug the foundations. That’s a lot of people showing up and tending to their business. Very few, I should think, had access to the architectural plans. The overwhelming majority never saw the finished product. And yet Notre Dame could never have been Notre Dame without those workers’ faithfulness to show up and do the work that was in front of them. That’s where civilization comes from: people doing the work that is in front of them. You don’t have to know where the work fits in the big picture. You don’t have to have a complete vision of the finished project. In one of his choruses from The Rock, a play about cathedral-building, T. S. Eliot wrote, I say: Take no thought of the harvest, But only of proper sowing. What work is in front of you today? Show up. Do the work. The harvest will take care of itself.

Today is Release Day Eve for The Arcadian Wild, and what a release it is! They have been hard at work on a collection of songs elaborately adventurous, mathematically precise, and nourishingly beautiful, and we are lucky to get to share its penultimate track a day before it’s officially out in the world. Does this artwork look familiar? Probably because it was designed by Ned Bustard, the beloved artist behind Every Moment Holy. By the way, this cover is replete with references to the songs inside. The song we are sharing with you today is called “The Graduate”—a lavishly composed tribute to the turbulence and wonder of young adulthood. “We’re wondering,” they sing, “if and when we’ll reach the other side.” Their album indicates that this trio of friends has already reached somewhere special. Click here to visit The Arcadian Wild’s website. You can follow The Arcadian Wild on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

I met my then-future wife in college. Our first date was on December 17, 1996, and just a few days afterward, we each went home for Christmas, her to Hot Springs, Arkansas and me to Orlando. We were a time zone away from each other, and cell phones were yet to be a thing. I knew I’d be talking to her sparingly, and I also knew I was deeply smitten. It’s a hard place to be—young, in new love, and a thousand miles apart. Just a few months prior, Counting Crows had released their sophomore record, Recovering the Satellites. Just like everyone else, I’d been a fan of August and Everything After, an all-time great debut, and I’d made sure to pick up Recovering the day it came out. By the time December came around, I knew every word to every song, and as I rode home to Orlando for that season, with Jeffery Verlander manning the driver’s seat, the songs manifested in a new way. I remember how Jeff drove through the night and the rain, and I sat in the passenger seat with a pen and paper and wrote a poem to Janna. I couldn’t see what I was writing, so the words were scattered around the pages, but I could read them well enough to type them up later. I was an English major and I knew my way around poetic form, but at that moment, it wasn’t Shakespeare or Petrarch that flowed through my pen—it was Adam Duritz. I wrote that poem to the rhythm of Counting Crows’ “Mercury,” a song that includes the lines, “She’s entwined in me/ Crazy as can be/ Yeah, but she’s alright with me.” My version included lines like these (if you know “Mercury,” you can sing this to the tune): She is walking through the grass with me Shooting stars that only she can see On an acre filled with massive trees I sit there while she counts the leaves I watch her patiently She’s kissing every leaf She is completing me Janna and I wrote letters to each other from our respective homes that December, and when we reunited at college in the new year, it felt like it had been years, not only a month. From then on, we knew our song would always be a Counting Crows song. Not “Mercury,” although we loved it, but “A Long December,” which is a song Duritz wrote about visiting a friend in the hospital over a particularly hard season. Did the lyrics actually fit what we’d experienced over that month? Of course not. But did we mean it in our own way when we sang “A long December, and there’s reason to believe/ Maybe this year will be better than the last”? Absolutely we did. And did I think of her every time I heard Adam sing, “All at once you look across a crowded room/ To see the way that light attaches to a girl”? You bet I did. You bet I still do. The first words on Counting Crows’ live album, Across a Wire, are these, “Please welcome my favorite band, Counting Crows.” I don’t know who says them. The set comes from VH1 Storytellers, so I imagine it’s someone that worked there, but I don’t know. What I do know is that I agree with the sentiment. Counting Crows is my favorite band, too. I used to think I knew what it meant to have a favorite band. I thought it meant you loved every note, every song (even the hidden tracks), and every album. It meant you knew every iteration of the band on every record. But the older I get, I’m finding that’s not it at all. Sure, you’ll know those things. But having a favorite band is like having a spouse. Love develops around the particulars of your life, especially the difficulties. Having a favorite band is understanding that the new-love phase is well behind you, and the relationship you have now is so much deeper than it ever was when love and lust were young—when you still wrote love poems out of the loneliness of your heart. Having a favorite band is like having a lover—you never tire of finding new nooks and crannies to explore. I’m in my forties now, and everything isn’t out in front of me like it was back in those college days. I’ve changed, grown up, and made more mistakes than I’d like to admit, and the Crows have grown up along with me. All the phases of my life since high school have been paired with a new Crows record: high school with August and Everything After, college with Recovering the Satellites, newly married and aimless with This Desert Life, the beginnings of fatherhood with Hard Candy, a new city and a new career with Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, being a parent of teenagers with Underwater Sunshine, and launching kids into the world with Somewhere Under Wonderland. Having a favorite band is knowing that, while they don’t know me at all, their songs do. Of course, I don’t like them all. There are songs I once loved, but can’t tolerate any more, like “I Wish I Was a Girl.” There are songs I can’t listen to anymore because of what they dredge up inside of me, like “1492.” Certain songs and I have reached detente—I don’t bother them and they steer clear of me, like “On a Tuesday in Amsterdam Long Ago.” Some of them challenge me to love people I don’t even want to like (“Palisades Park” is especially hard). There are songs that infuriate me with their hardheadedness, and there are songs that never fail to bring tears—I usually skip both types. But, oh, there are the other songs, too. Songs that well up inside me like fire, like “Rain King.” Songs that make remember longing and devotion, like “Sullivan Street.” Some songs, like “Miami,” are for driving late at night with the windows rolled down. There are songs that soothe my troubled spirit, like “Black and Blue.” There are songs that conjure the best of times, like “Mr. Jones.” I’ll never tire of “gray is my favorite color/ I felt so symbolic yesterday/ If I knew Picasso/ I would buy myself a gray guitar and play.” And there are songs that make me relive especially hard times, but in that most self-deprecating, delicious, kind of way, like “Possibility Days.” Having a favorite band is learning to take the delightful with the somber, the effortless with the arduous, and the joyous with the melancholy. All of this makes me sound painfully old, I imagine, but that goes with the territory. If having a favorite band is like being married, then the appreciation only deepens the older you get. In the old days, Janna and I used to drive around small towns in Arkansas in my red Jeep with the top down, singing at the tops of our lungs to “Daylight Fading” or “Have You Seen Me Lately?” Now, my kids beg for me to put Somewhere Under Wonderland in the car’s CD player so they can belt out “Elvis Went to Hollywood” or “Scarecrow.” I sure hope they find a favorite band of their own someday, but if not, the Crows will always be there for them, just like they were for me. With that said…. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome…my favorite band, Counting Crows.

Today, I present to you a children’s book by Corinna Luyken. As is so often the case with me, it was a picture book that succinctly and delicately spoke the simple truth I needed to hear and moved me to tears. When I saw the whimsical dust jacket with fractured text that read The Book of Mistakes propped up near our record player, my husband Chris said, “I brought you a book from the library. I thought you’d like it.” It sat there for a day or two as I hurried about with my eternal to-do list. Late one night, I remembered the lonely book and carried it to the couch. I grabbed a blanket, tucked my feet under Chris’s legs and opened the cover. I started reading aloud, chuckling at the opening sentence and illustrations. “It started…with one mistake.” A pencil drawing of a little round face begins on the first page, and on the next, it gains a left eye that is far bigger than the right eye. The artist tries to remedy the mistake by “making the other eye even bigger, [which] was another mistake.” I laughed as I remembered many times that I’ve done the same thing, trying to “even things out” on a hand-lettering or drawing attempt and making it worse. We turned the page and read, “But the glasses—they were a good idea.” We saw the lopsided face newly adorned with round, green glasses. With the innovation, the off-kilter eyes look like they belong to the girl on the page. They bob within the lenses, giving the impression of magnification. The book continues. It acknowledges each mistake the artist makes. Things are drawn out of proportion. Ink splatters. Stray pencil marks skid across blank space. But the unseen artist never throws the drawing away or starts over. She comes up with new ideas and tries alternate approaches. Color blooms into the pencil drawings bit by bit—spring greens and buttercup yellows and blush pinks. The mistakes are hidden or transformed into new elements of the wardrobe or scenery, and they invite details that make the character more memorable, a tree more fantastic, the setting more magical. On the last several pages, Luyken delivers her message in gentle groups of no more than four words coupled with a twist in the illustrations. I can’t bear to spoil the power in its brevity and beauty for you here. You must find it and read it. Or perhaps, if you’re feeling especially down on yourself, ask a trusted soul to read it to you. When Chris took over and read me the ending, tears would not stop leaking out and spilling down my face. It is not a sad end. It is a hopeful, true end. One I clearly needed to hear. I had to stop writing this post partway through, and I picked it up again at a friend’s house. She and I have different personalities on many counts, but we have enough in common that I decided to read the book to her. She laughed at first, saying, “I love that you’re going to read me a story.” By the last few pages, she joined me in crying, looking up at me and saying, “What just happened?!” She told me a week or so later that she had purchased the book and read it with a few of her teenage counseling clients. She said they both shed tears as well and yet intriguingly took such different things from the story to apply to their lives. Good art and writing invite that. The mistakes are hidden or transformed into new elements of the wardrobe or scenery, and they invite details that make the character more memorable, a tree more fantastic, the setting more magical. Jenna Badeker Perfectionistic tendencies can manifest themselves differently. Some people toil at a task until it is perfect, perhaps losing perspective of what matters and the joy of the work along the way. Some withdraw from dreams and activities at which they know they aren’t perfect, or even “good enough.” Sometimes that looks like avoiding sports at all costs, and sometimes it appears as finding an excuse to once again not pick up the phone to resolve a messy conflict. Some people replay the scene of a mistake over and over in their minds until it becomes distorted and loud and inescapable. Sometimes it’s all of the above, in both big and tiny ways. At least, it can be for me. The relentless self-critic in my head is often hard to silence. This is something I’m working on, or rather, something God is working on in me. The fear of making mistakes is certainly not from him. He invites us to create, to risk, to try again, to learn. When we shy away from potential mistakes or punish ourselves for making them, we reject God’s invitation and his story of who we are. We trade it for a poorly constructed narrative of who we were supposed to be and self-imposed expectations that were never based in truth. I recently purchased a copy of the book for our honorary “framily” nieces and read it to each of them. In their teenage years, I am so hopeful that God will free them from the bonds of unattainable perfection that I see cropping up in their unfolding talents and endeavors. It’s funny how, when talking about the book with them, I could so easily tell them what is true. God made them fearfully and wonderfully. Only he is perfect—if they were perfect, they would not need him. It grieves him when they listen to the voice of shame in their heads that tells them how much they mess up and that they are not enough and never will be. They have freedom in Christ to live and learn and try and fail and create and innovate and get up again. At the end of all of it, they are still perfectly loved—it’s not a sliding scale based on their mistakes and successes. It’s taking a lot of practice to tell myself what I know is true as easily as I can say it to the people I love. I’m daily working on rewiring my thoughts to repeat what God says about me instead of the sum of my mistakes. And that’s precisely where God can use the simplicity of a children’s book to remind me. Click here to view The Book of Mistakes on Amazon.

My brother, Orrin Sackett, was big enough to fight bears with a switch. Me, I was the skinny one, tall as Orrin, but no meat to my bones except around the shoulders and arms. The Daybreakers, 1984 The other day I read those words for the first time in about twenty five years and the strangest thing happened. The whole story was there, in front of me, like a rutted track that wound through those same Tennessee hills where the Sacketts started out on their journey west. I could remember every turn, every twist, and most importantly, I could recall exactly where the trail ended. I couldn’t help but smile and the truth was I really wanted to walk that trail again and see all those same sights one more time. That’s the power of a good book, isn’t it? I went and opened another one: It was Indian country, and when our wheel busted none of them would stop. They just rolled on by and left us setting there, my pap and me. Me, I was pushin’ a tall twelve by then… To Tame A Land, 1984 I read that and saw the snow-capped mountains of Colorado, the horses being broken by a gentle hand, the wild towns and dirty sheriffs, the outlaws that live back in the mountains, every bit of it, and again, I wanted to walk those same trails one more time. Between about eight and thirteen years old, I read every book that Louis L’Amour ever published, not once, but probably three of four times each. Since then I’ve read stacks and stacks of great books of modern and western literature (I’ve even taken a class with that title). And I loved so many of those books: Dickens, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Hugo, even that Shakespeare guy. But. None of those “works of literature” caught my imagination when my imagination was at its most vulnerable, wandering around like a lost calf down in the panhandle of Texas. Let’s face it, the covers on mass market paperbacks look a lot more exciting than any high brow college literature cover with its strange and vague geometric shapes. Which do you think a little boy is going to choose? On those school nights, long after bedtime, under the blankets with a flashlight and a crick in my neck, I was riding the long dark trails of Louis L’Amour’s wild west. And that’s how my imagination was formed and given an education. More than my imagination was captured though, and that’s the point I really want to make. In our imaginations we explore other worlds, we put ourselves into situations we’ve never actually been in, and we inevitably wonder: What would we do there? What would we be like? And those kinds of questions, ones of doing and acting, aren’t just questions of the imagination. They are moral and ethical questions. What kind of person would I be if men were stealing my cattle, or had killed my neighbor, or were trying to rob my mine? That’s a profoundly moral dilemma, isn’t it? I wasn’t writing any ethics papers about it, but I was daydreaming about being there and living that life. In those daydreams I had to make moral decisions. I was stretching those ethical muscles for the first time. Of course I didn’t notice or care about any of that when I was reading those books. I was reading them for the guns, for the cattle drives, for the shoot outs of course, and the men and women who made the stories powerful. L’Amour could make a Smith and Wesson .44 caliber Russian revolver sound like Excalibur, Caledfwlch, given to King Arthur by the Lady of the Lake. Man, I wanted one so bad! He made an Appaloosa sound like a fresh-off-the-lot Porsche 911, and he made cattle drives seem like the greatest event in any man’s life. But we are also sponges when we read stories or watch them, and children are more spongy than most. I was reading those books for fun, but my mind was shaped at the same time by the man who created all these characters, put them in different situations, and showed us how they responded to all sorts of trouble. Looking back now, I see how my worldview was shaped by those men and women who walked, rode, swaggered, and staggered across his pages. After a few decades of reflection, it was a fun exercise to think about several ways that the themes Louis L’Amour regularly brought up in his novels ended up shaping my worldview. The first thing I learned was not to carve notches on your gun handle. That sounds strange at first, but bear with me! Louis L’Amour showed a consistent contempt in his stories for the kind of man who would carve a notch on his gun for every man he killed as a way to brag or strike fear into others. Sometimes it was subtle: He had been sent to Yuma after killing a marshal, which would have been his sixth notch if he had been a man for carving notches. Kid Rodelo, 1966 Sometimes it wasn’t so subtle. Some said he had killed eighteen men. The cattle buyer in Dodge claimed the actual figure was twenty-nine. But all of it was talk and nobody knew for sure. Not being a tinhorn, Kilkenny filed no notches on his guns. Kilkenny, 1974 Ryan Tyler, the main character from To Tame A Land says it best: It was nothing to be proud of. Nobody but a tinhorn ever scratched notches on his gun, and I never would. To Tame A Land, 1940 What does a young boy take away from that? It’s cheap to brag about yourself. The characters in L’Amour’s books that did carve notches were typically loud-mouthed, self-centered cowards. They were weak and they spent their lives trying to take advantage of others. Even now I don’t want to be the kind of man who spends all my time boasting about what I’ve done, trying to impress everyone with things that really shouldn’t impress anyone. So in that way, Louis L’Amour formed my moral view of the world. I don’t want to be that kind of person! The second theme that shaped me was L’Amour’s portrayal of romance. I wanted to grow up to be just like the heroes of these books, and the heroes of Louis L’Amour’s books were rarely vengeful, cold hearted, lone killers. Quite the opposite! The men that he seemed to praise the most were men who didn’t quit when things got hard, who built communities, who noticed others and helped them out, and who were tough as old shoe leather when opposition came. That’s what I wanted to be. And what kind of women did these men meet and fall in love with? After all, the thing these men longed for, and fought for, was a home and a strong community. There, where those lights glowed softly in the evening, was the only girl he had ever loved. There, no more than two hundred yards away, with all her warmth, her beauty, her tenderness, and her humor. A girl to walk beside a man, and walk with him, not behind him. Kilkenny, 1974 The idea that a woman would stand tall, walk beside her husband, and have as much strength of character as he did is a mainstay of these stories. That quote about walking beside a man, and not behind him, shows up numerous times in his hundreds of stories. You assume such a girl would have less courage than you? Less Fortitude? You do not understand my sex, Barnabas… Jubal Sackett, 1985 There really are countless other quotes I could put here, but one thing that has struck me in going back and wandering (moseying is the technical term) through these books again is that Louis L’Amour respects every woman he writes into his stories, even the ones who turn out bad or weak. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the girl I met and fell in love with at the age of twelve, while reading these books, turned out to be the same girl I married and built a family with, walking side by side together as partners in our work. She has always been a “woman to ride the river with.” The third thing I learned from L’Amour was to read every chance I got and read as widely as I could. All sorts of books and readers would cross the pages of his books. His characters would be reading Greek philosophy, law, and religious texts mostly. In the same way that he had utter contempt for notches on gun handles, L’Amour had an absolute reverence for the written word. Reading and books play a vital role in his many novels. In our imaginations we explore other worlds, we put ourselves into situations we've never actually been in, and we inevitably wonder: What would we do there? What would we be like? Kevin Morse In The Lonesome Gods, the main character Johannes Verne works in a bookshop briefly, and his love of books leads him to one of the more unique relationships in all of L’amour’s novels. In The Walking Drum, a novel set in medieval Europe, Kerbouchard, the son of a great pirate and a bit of a pirate himself, makes a living for a time as a scribe just so he can study and learn from the books. The reading of Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men is an important plot point in To Tame A Land. Orrin Sackett learns about the law and prepares for the future by reading Blackstone on a cattle drive in The Daybreakers. I can picture the scene where Ruth Macken, a strong and intelligent widow who lost her husband on their trip out west, speaks to the young man, Bendigo Shafter, about the books she and her husband had brought with them. There are fifty of these books, Mr. Shafter, that would give you an education if you read them and no others. Many who consider themselves educated have not read so many or so well. Bendigo Shafter, 1979 These were rough, strong men and women, the kind that people would follow and trust. They were the kind who were willing to work all day and fight when they needed to, and they loved to read. We needed books, we needed something on which to build dreams. Ride the River, 1983 As a young boy just starting out on the ocean of books in the world, it was a strong gust of wind for my sails. They were models I wanted to follow. In each one of these themes, I was forced to ask myself: what kind of person do I want to be, and who do I want to share my life with? One last theme Louis played around with was growing up in the hard lands of the west, and how a person’s worldview is shaped by their experience. In his novel Tucker you meet a young man who is impressed by the kind of guys who carve notches on their guns and brag about themselves. By the end of the book, though, the young man has grown up and he’s traveled Louis L’Amour’s western culture and seen a different kind of man, and he learned from it. All the time I’d been covering country I seen a lot of men who had settled down to building businesses for themselves. Here I was, wasting time chasing after a couple of thieves when I should have been building something for myself… Respect those men who were doing things to make a future? You bet I did. Most of them were busy building, opening new country, and making it better for those who would come after. Tucker, 1971 His journey, like the reader’s, had ultimately torn down one worldview and in its place another had formed and so when, as a man, he met one of the guys he’d been so impressed with as boy, he finally sees him for what he really is. Nobody has a corner on being a fool, kid. We were all fools back there in Texas when we stood around shooting off our mouths about how big and tough we were going to be. Tucker, 1971 Is it strange to say that Louis L’Amour, of all people, was one of the biggest voices in my life as a young man? As I ride the trails again in my imagination and listen in on these men and women, I’m realizing that my mind was being formed all those years ago into the image of all that I was reading. I didn’t even have to notice that it was happening. That’s the power of those mass market paperbacks. It’s the power of every thing we took in as little children. It’s the power of the cartoons we grew up loving, the games we grew up playing, the songs we grew up singing. It’s a power as deep as some of the canyons that run through the mountains in Wyoming, and as unstoppable as the rivers that run through them.