The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Christiana Peterson, author of Awakened by Death: Live-Giving Lessons from the Mystics. Jonathan Rogers and Christiana Peterson discuss the link between mysticism and mortality, our culture’s lack of rituals for confronting death, the writer’s role in engaging with mortality as an antidote for self-absorption, and death’s ability to teach compassion. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 48 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

Every month the moon grows to fullness, wanes to nothing, then grows back toward fullness again. That’s how it looks from here, anyway. In fact, the moon is just the moon, always there and always the same size, however it appears to us. This conceit is the jumping-off place for Janna Barber’s new memoir, Hidden in Shadow. From where we sit, God is often hidden in shadow. Nevertheless, God is always there. “I’m afraid my faith cycles through similar phases,” Janna writes, with characteristic frankness (and this is only the tip of the frankness iceberg). She continues: When it’s strong and healthy, its light pervades every corner of my heart, and I can’t picture it any other way. But shadows of darkness and doubt show up pretty often, and little by little, I lose sight of my faith altogether. This cycle repeats itself more often than I’d like, or more often than I’d like to admit, anyway. Most of the chapters of Hidden in Shadow run through this cycle: the faith of the memoirist wanes in the midst of sorrow and trouble, then waxes again—also in the midst of sorrow and trouble. Each chapter title is a place and a name: “Highway 17 — 1988.” “Silver Creek Drive — 1989.” “Julianne St. — 1990.” That seems innocuous enough, except that each of those place names represents another stop for little Janna as she grew up the daughter of a preacher who moved from difficult church to difficult church across Arkansas, staying only a year or two or three. We see young Janna learn to cope, largely by making herself invisible. We see her learn to cuss and learn to doubt and learn to keep her feelings to herself. Hidden in Shadow is one woman’s honest reckoning with the truth that even as our faith waxes and wanes, God is constant, and he loves his children even when they don’t know what he’s up to—which is to say, he loves his children all the time. Jonathan Rogers In one scene, an eleven-year-old Janna arrives home to an empty house and jumps to the conclusion that the Rapture has come and she’s been left behind. The scene could easily have been played for laughs, but it is surprisingly moving, encapsulating all the insecurities of a preacher’s kid who believes the stories but has a hard time believing that God loves her—and not just a preacher’s kid, but a preacher’s middle child, who has come to expect to be overlooked and left behind. As she moves into adulthood, the memoirist’s difficulties grow more difficult. She struggles with depression, she lives through miscarriages. She reconciles with her mother, she struggles with her children, she learns to let her children go. She takes up writing as a kind of self-care, then battles writer’s block. She learns to be angry at God, and she learns that God can handle her anger. In the end, Janna Barber spares us the tidy conclusion. Faith, as she says, is cyclical. Hidden in Shadow is not the story of one woman’s march from misery to triumph, or a guidebook to a faith that only waxes and never wanes. Instead, it is one woman’s honest reckoning with the truth that even as our faith waxes and wanes, God is constant, and he loves his children even when they don’t know what he’s up to—which is to say, he loves his children all the time. Click here to view Hidden in Shadow in the Rabbit Room Store. And click here to visit Janna Barber’s website.

The news was bleak. Despite decades of hit songs like “Blue Skies” and “Always” and enviable celebrity status under the pen name Irving Berlin (originally named Israel), by the turn of the 1930s America’s songwriter had peaked and was sliding with the stock market into oblivion. Not only was the country entering the Depression, but, more personal to Berlin, his only infant son had died on Christmas day in 1928, the new medium of the radio was killing his beloved music industry with free music, and he couldn’t seem to muster up any songs capable of fighting back the closing darkness. Though he plodded on with the habit of writing in the early 1930s, nothing he could pen would measure up in his eyes. As far as he could see his most joyous era was coming to an end, the country was collapsing, and the cliché phrases he daily penned were painful reminders of his draining well. We can see now what he couldn’t. At least one of the pathetic attempts at a song he discarded, “How Deep is the Ocean,” would eventually make its way to radio, the medium he so feared, and rack up all kinds of royalties, re-recordings, and celebrity performances. Less measurable is what that song would come to mean in the private lives of individuals. My wife, Lyndsay, has her own story with it. Her father, who outwardly often had a brusque, sarcastic exterior, was never more tender than when he would sing his favorite old standards with his daughters. Even after the most icy conversation, he could warm the chilled air by placing his hands on Lyndsay’s face and launching into a few lines from musicals like Annie, Ain’t Misbehavin’, or Fiddler on the Roof. “How Deep is the Ocean” was one of the most repeated though. They didn’t even sing it. They would recite it to each other fondly whenever she was old enough to part ways after a visit. Later when he gave her away to me at our wedding, he whispered it into her ear. On his deathbed over a decade later, she whispered it into his. How much do I love you? I’ll tell you no lie. How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? —”How Deep is the Ocean” Those lines were a gift, a parting benediction that repeatedly made even more tangible their deepest bond. Back when Berlin was writing one painfully dull phrase after another, he could see neither the public glory to come nor the private significance of the song amongst strangers. When we look back at the story of Israel at the birth of Christ from the vantage point of our 21st century explosions of holiday merriment, it is good to remember what Israel could and couldn’t see. The story of Advent invites us to persist in faith, to keep writing, to keep welcoming, to keep trusting not only the unseen heavens but God’s continuous covert work in the least newsworthy happenings on earth. Chris Slaten They could see the oppressive weight of Roman power. Empire after empire had captured, subdued, assimilated, and exterminated all but a remnant of the promised nation of God, and the Roman empire was just another conquest in this bleak chain. While there is some dispute about the purpose for the census at the time of Joseph and Mary’s journey, at the very least lives had to be uprooted and put on hold in order to travel to accommodate the mandate. One possibility is that it was initiated to account for taxation. If that is the case the census was another physical reminder that their hard earned shekels fed the relentless hand of Rome, the roads, the military, and the ubiquitous, egocentric artwork of their oppressors. Even their holiest standing temple was a government funded building project intended to remind them of Herod’s kindness, despite his habit of killing them. Today, the awkward Christmas dinner where the grandfather starts ranting about the IRS and government overreach might actually be an accurate recreation of the kinds of conversations being had in the rooms that were too crowded for Joseph and Mary. Anyone who looked instead to the hope that could come from within Israel faced a people crumbling from their divisions. Irreconcilable arguments between the conservative Pharisees, the liberal Sadducees, and the isolationist Essenes. Traitorous Jewish tax collectors pillaging their neighbors. A centuries-old bitter rivalry with the Samaritan Jews of the northern kingdom. Fiery debates between loyalists to Herod and those who longed for a descendent of David on the throne. Zealots stockpiling militia gear. All of this news mattered. The young couple looking for a place to stay did not, even though they carried the king who would serve a new, everlasting empire made up of enemies from every contentious faction, even Roman oppressors. Like Israel, like Berlin we can only see so far. But there is a gift that comes with recognizing our inability to see when we’ve penned words that will mean the world to someone else or brushed up against the Messiah. When we assume our blindness to the significance of the most ordinary moments, it makes way for mystery. It relieves the pressing weight of mass media events by allowing room for faith, an assurance of solid realities beyond the limits of our perception, “the conviction of things not seen.” The story of Advent invites us to persist in faith, to keep writing, to keep welcoming, to keep trusting not only the unseen heavens but God’s continuous covert work in the least newsworthy happenings on earth. Mary did know this. She had been given a privileged glimpse of Yahweh’s hidden, steadfast hand, and we can hear it in the words she chose as she privately rejoiced with her relative Elizabeth. Now we can rejoice with her: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name. And his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever. —Luke 1:46-56 (ESV) [Author’s Note: The dynamic explored here of God’s hidden work during catastrophic events was inspired by the song “Apocalypse” by the New Empires, which sings on a literal level about devastation during the Middle Ages and John Wycliffe, whom some call the “Morning Star” of the Reformation. On a figurative level those images can be taken much more broadly, particularly in 2020.] Original art for this post by Breezy Brookshire.

As a hard, strange year draws to a close, the season of Advent feels so timely and necessary. We enter the long, dark nights of winter, and even as we look forward to Christmas, there’s still the unshakeable sense that it’s going to be so different this year, our joy marked by grief for traditions put aside, canceled travel plans, absent loved ones, and the heavy toll of every loss and grief. For this reason, I’m thankful for Caroline Cobb’s new album, A Seed, A Sunrise. This is not your average jolly Christmas record, but instead it’s a collection of original songs that trace the story of hope coming into the world. From humanity’s broken beginning to the arrival of hope to the longing for Christ’s return, these songs provide the perfect soundtrack for the ache that feels especially strong this year. I had a chance to chat with Caroline over Zoom (of course) about her Scripture songs project, her new Advent album, and why it feels especially meaningful to release these songs in 2020. So this is your third album, and I understand it’s a continuation of a year-long project to record a song for every book of the Bible. Can you tell me about the story behind that? That started back in 2011. So, I was about to turn 30 on 11/11/11, and I thought that was a cool date. I had always written songs, but I had never really made a goal like that for myself. So I decided to write a song for every book of the Bible in one year, and it really married these two loves I had—songwriting and understanding God’s word as a story, seeing all the connections and enjoying his Word as a beautiful, rich thing. That began this trajectory of consistently writing songs from Scripture. With each album I would put out it was as if I was telling a big story. So similar to, you know, Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God, there’s that concept of tracing a story way back to the beginning, all the way to when Christ was born. But for me it was different angles. The first album was called The Blood and the Breath, and it traced the story of death to life, songs that tell the story of redemption. And then the second one was A Home and a Hunger. I got to write about it on The Rabbit Room when it came out, and that one is more about the ache, this tension between the already and the not yet. A Seed, A Sunrise is part of a set of two albums that I recorded at the same time with producer Isaac Wardell (Josh Garrels, Porter’s Gate, Sandra McCracken). As the first entry, A Seed, A Sunrise is an Advent themed album, and the idea is to have this anthology of work that tells the story. The analogy I use is that it’s like a diamond. It’s so beautiful, but from so many different angles, you can just keep turning it and telling the story again and again and again. And you know, we’ll never plumb the depths of God’s story, which is what anchors our stories. I get to keep turning this diamond and telling this story in the way that I feel God has called me to do. And then the next one is really about Jesus and his compassionate life. The other albums were really panoramic, and this one zooms in on Jesus. Right now I’m calling it A King and His Kindness. I have in my head ideas for other themes and concepts in the future. It’s just something that I really love to do. While spending time with A Seed, A Sunrise, I did notice the narrative arc just kind of spanning from the beginning. It doesn’t feel like a traditional Christmas album in that way. It starts at the beginning. Exactly. I can’t help but see all the ways that it ties together. Like the first song on this Advent album really starts in Genesis 3. And then by the end, you’re talking about Jesus returning. So it does sort of go from the Fall and exile to Jesus coming and returning. The theme of the whole thing is like exile, homesickness and ache. And yeah, it’s not a traditional Christmas album. We talked about doing some carols, but I just had too many of my own songs. We just decided to do it a little differently and pull from Isaiah and lots of your typical liturgical Advent readings and things like that to make this more of a longing album than a Bing Crosby/Jingle Bells type thing. Yeah, as much as I love Christmas music, I think so many of us are all in for a collection of original songs. When I started playing this, I thought oh, this feels like Advent. I get that sense of longing and exile. Yeah, I think in 2020 we all are feeling that even more. I mean, it’s always been there. As Christians, we’re supposed to always be marked by this feeling of homesickness throughout the year, but at Advent we especially focus on it. I think in 2020 we’re all like, oh man… come back and heal this thing. We recorded these songs in February, a week or two before the tornado in East Nashville, and then I feel like 2020 just went from there. Some of the songs are older but for the most part I wrote them all within a year in 2019. As you’ve been bringing the songs and revisiting them for the release, do you feel like their meaning has shifted for you at all? It feels strange to say it, but the songs feel more relevant now. Again, I feel like as Christians, we should always be aware that we’re aching for a King and a Kingdom where everything will be set right. But I think 2020 has sort of uncovered our feelings of mortality and our awareness of broken systems around us, the brokenness within us. The pandemic not only made us aware of our mortality and our fragility, but also some of those other things that we had, our comforts and our idols. For me, God has used this to pull the rug out from underneath some of those things, and it’s made me more aware of the fact that nothing can be truly satisfying except for God. I think the election has caused us to think about how we want a King that upholds justice and righteousness, you know? And all the wildfires—it just reminded me of the desolation that we see in Isaiah, this idea of barren wilderness and ashes and how God promises gardens growing out of that. There’s sort of a tangible sense of that Advent longing brought on by the long list of things that have happened in 2020, between the election and racial injustice and natural disasters. The story of redemption is like a diamond. It's so beautiful, but from so many different angles, you can just keep turning it and telling the story again and again and again. Caroline Cobb I don’t want to say I’m excited to put this music out into this climate, because I wish it wasn’t happening at all. But I feel like it’s the right kind of Christmas music for this year. And I’m thankful that I get to come alongside people and give them a soundtrack that gives them that dissonance, where they can both voice longing and also joy. Because there’s a lot of joy on the album too, but I think the joy has been made more beautiful for the longing that comes before it, you know? It’s a privilege to release this into this particular Advent season. Yeah. I felt that too. It’s almost like everything terrible that’s happened this year has just been doing a slow work of exposure on an individual level, on a church wide level. I feel like we’re just having to really confront some difficult stuff. I do feel like it has been an exposing year, but I don’t feel like there’s been much resolution except to look to the Lord and say “how long” and “we need you.” Help us to bring your kingdom into this, to push back the darkness, to be lights. Could you speak to the garden imagery that runs through the album? I was really struck by the recurring theme of the garden, of hope for growth, especially heading into winter. I was writing a lot from Isaiah, so that’s a motif that he has. Gardens, and also light. I’m not sure it happened consciously, but those just started infiltrating the songs I was writing, this idea of a barren wasteland, and into that this beautiful garden. And then the same thing with this idea that the light is shining into the darkness. And that’s the idea of Advent, right? Advent is this time we set aside to purposefully look around and say it’s dark and we’re waiting for the light to come. And I feel like a garden is more beautiful if you know that before the garden was there it was a desert. What is your hope for these songs and the people who hear them? I’m hoping that this album and these songs are a good companion for people in this particular Advent and going forward. I think they give voice to this “How long, O Lord” ache and the hope that we have in Christ at the same time. And I think that, as Christians, we live in that already and not yet place constantly. I almost didn’t pitch this as an Advent album. I really feel like you could listen to this all year because it’s our story. And there’s definitely a lot of songs on there that, you know, if you weren’t familiar with Advent, you might not say oh, that’s a Christmas song. I’m hoping that people can continue to listen to this, and I love the idea of people just going about their day and, you know, taking a run or changing their kid’s diaper or working from home and having this story, God’s story, that they’re able to marinate in. As they do their everyday stuff, they can rehearse it and remember it and be rooted in it. That’s my hope with really every album. Learn more about Caroline Cobb’s new album A Seed, A Sunrise at her website.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Randall Goodgame, songwriter, TV show host, and leader of the Slugs & Bugs universe. Jonathan Rogers and Randall Goodgame discuss the essential role of collaboration in all of Randall’s work, the importance of writing out of freedom and not out of condemnation, and the irrepressibility of childlike joy. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 49 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

It’s 2020 and the holidays this year will look different for most of us. Events we look forward to all year may have been cancelled: family Christmas parties, church cookie exchanges, and *sniff, sniff* the Behold the Lamb Tour. But Advent—the season of eagerly awaiting the birth of Christ—hasn’t been cancelled at all. And anything that can point my family’s hearts in that direction is something I want to hold on to. If you haven’t been introduced to Randall Goodgame’s The Slugs & Bugs Show yet, it’s a delightful watch for the whole family with story, songs, puppets, and special guests, but it’s particularly engaging for the under-ten crowd. Goodgame has just released a 50-minute episode called “Make Ready for Christmas” with lots of guest appearances including Andrew Peterson, Ron Bock, Ellie Holcomb, and retired Olympic figure skater Scott Hamilton to name a few. What does it mean to have hope, peace, joy, and love not because of your circumstances but in spite of them? The Slugs & Bugs characters provide a poignant example. Carolyn Leiloglou “Make Ready for Christmas” weaves together several storylines using the four outer candles of the Advent wreath as a framing device. The candles can have different names or meanings depending on your tradition, but the meanings emphasized here are Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. This structure won’t be immediately evident to your kids or even you. Randall simply invites us along on a journey—call it an ADVENTure—of anticipation. During that journey, characters face situations in which things don’t meet their expectations: Maggie isn’t able to give Morty the kind of Christmas she thinks he wants; Doug’s gift suggestions lead to chaos; and bad weather keeps people from showing up for the pageant. What does it mean to have hope, peace, joy, and love not because of your circumstances but in spite of them? The Slugs & Bugs characters provide a poignant example. “Make Ready for Christmas” doesn’t spoon-feed a trite lesson like many children’s programs. Well-woven storylines emphasize multiple connected themes including giving in secret, homelessness, and Christmas traditions in other cultures. There’s even the Magnificat sung by a skunk in a gingerbread house. No, you didn’t read that wrong. It’s a beautiful moment. I don’t want to give the impression that this show is all serious. Your family will be singing along to the “Building a Gingerbread House” song and laughing at Doug the Slug’s Crisis Gift Hotline calls. The show takes its audience through a whole range of emotions. This year especially, when Covid-cancellations are changing the way the Christmas holiday looks for many of us, “Make Ready for Christmas” is a reminder that we can still have peace, that we can choose to give what we have, that we can be thankful and cherish those around us no matter how our circumstances look. And that’s a message that I need to hear just as much as my kids do. Click here to view “Make Ready for Christmas” on the Slugs & Bugs Show website.

My son and a group of his friends got together a few days ago and marked the start of the holiday season with a “hate-watch” marathon of Hallmark Channel Christmas movies. I was genuinely torn when I heard about their plans for the evening. On the one hand, I could kind of relate. I first encountered the Hallmark Channel through my father, the most tender-hearted human I’ve ever known. For the last decade or so of his life, Dad spent each free evening seated at a card table, his attention equally divided between whatever jigsaw puzzle he was working on and whatever movie was playing on the Hallmark Channel. Each touching ending, each improbable-yet-predictable reunion, each romantic resolution would prompt another rush of happy tears from Dad. For my part, when I visited Mom and Dad I spent the evenings wandering in and out of the family room, shaking my head, rolling my eyes, and growing increasingly disgusted with the nightly line-up of cheesy, sentimental TV drivel. So my son came by his impulse to hate-watch honestly. On the other hand: particularly now that Dad has gone, I feel slightly defensive for him. I feel sentimental about his sentimentality, and there is a permanent tender spot in my heart for all the ways he was tender-hearted. Maybe I’m just never satisfied. Dad’s fondness for Hallmark bothered me because it seemed kind of sappy and mawkish. My son’s mockery of Hallmark bothers me because it feels a little bit cynical and sneering. Believe it or not, I’ve been ruminating on all of this for the last week or so as I’ve been thinking about Advent—this time of waiting—and the theme of joy. The Hallmark Channel has been wildly successful at packaging and presenting a particular brand of Christmas joy. Their holiday movies offer a festive and upbeat vision of the season that many (like my dad) find tremendously appealing, and that many others (like my son) find slightly ridiculous. And so I’ve found myself teetering back and forth between my father and my son, and thinking about the specific character of the Joy we celebrate at Advent. Josef Pieper, a 20th century German Catholic philosopher, has been helping to shape and direct my thinking. (Of special interest to Rabbit Room-ers: Pieper was also an admirer of C. S. Lewis, and translated some of Lewis’s writings into German.) Pieper writes: The reason for joy, although it may be encountered in a thousand concrete forms, is always the same: possessing or receiving what one loves, whether actually in the present, hoped for in the future, or remembered in the past. Joy is an expression of love. One who loves nothing and nobody cannot possibly rejoice, no matter how desperately he craves joy. Joy is the response of a lover receiving what he loves. —In Tune With the World: A Theory of Festivity, 23 Receiving What We Love Of the various criticisms of Hallmark Channel movies, two are the most prominent. First, they are predictable. The two leads who can hardly stand each other in the first scene will fall in love by the final commercial break. The high-powered executive stranded in the quaint small town will discover the true meaning of Christmas, and that there are some things more important than money and the executive suite. And so on. Looking out from the opening scene, we already have a clear and unimpeded view of the conclusion. Here is the second critique: the movies aren’t just predictable; they also predictably end “happily ever after.” However many dilemmas, obstacles, difficult backstories, and personality clashes the characters may traverse, we can be confident at the outset that after 90-odd minutes, all will be well in the world. The movies are, for that reason (this second criticism runs), completely unrealistic. “Life’s just not like that,” we complain. “That’s not how things work—where everyone ends up happy, misunderstandings are all cleared up, and everything works out the way it should.” (There are other criticisms or course—mediocre acting, for instance, and uninspired writing. Leave those to the side for a moment.) I once asked Dad about all of this. “Why do you like watching these things so much, Dad? Five minutes in, you already know exactly how the whole thing is going to turn out.” “That’s what I like,” Dad said with a smile. “I’m a simple guy. I like happy endings.” At least at one level there is a correspondence between what Pieper says about joy and what my Dad liked about Hallmark. “The reason for joy” Pieper writes, “is . . . possessing or receiving what one loves, whether actually in the present, hoped for in the future, or remembered in the past.” Joy, in other words, isn’t just a matter of thinking happy thoughts, or “looking on the sunny side.” We rejoice when we “possess or receive” what we love (whether, as Pieper points out, we receive it actually in the present, as a remembered past event, or as a future certainty). Because the ending is certain, the promised joy is possessed even now. And so Dad could chuckle when the protagonist storms out on her Hallmark love interest sixty minutes into the exposition of their romance. We know that what would be distressing or even tragic considered on its own, is actually only an interesting wrinkle in the unfolding romance. Assured of the outcome, we can experience difficulties and complications—even as they arise—as what they will one day be: simply interesting bends in the roads; endearing anecdotes the characters will share years from now at anniversary celebrations. (“Haha! Yes! Your mother actually threw the flowers right in my face, and screamed: ‘I never want to see you again!’”) The word “advent” is from the Latin “advenire”—to come or to arrive. In that sense we could even go so far to say that my Dad’s enjoyment of Hallmark movies had a kind of “advent character” to it. He enjoyed every minute of his evening at the card table, because he knew what was coming. A Christianity that has forgotten how to lament is damaged; a Christianity that has forgotten how to celebrate is dead. Steve Guthrie Joy functions in this advent-like way throughout the scriptures. Faithful people are able to endure or even rejoice in the midst of sufferings, because the joyful outcome is certain. So we read that “Jesus, for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame.” (Heb. 12:2) Likewise, though there were fights and disagreements among the Christians in Philippi, still Paul could write: “ In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy . . . being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 1:4,6) Joy is the response of a lover receiving what he loves. Because we will receive what God has promised, because the outcome is beyond doubt, we experience even now the joy that accompanies the fulfillment of the promise. “Though you have not seen [Jesus],” Peter writes, “you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith.” (1 Peter 1:8-9) This is also the point at which the Hallmark Channel movies run up hard against the second critique mentioned above: life just doesn’t give us these kinds of “happily ever after” endings, we say. We can’t in fact be certain that we will receive any of the things that the Christmas movies promise us: irreproachably good marriages, immaculately happy families, and a deeply meaningful Christmas Eve spent in a charming, snow-fringed New England cottage. We mostly do not experience the sort of airbrushed perfection presented here. We know too that even the loveliest wreaths will fade. We may also think of the billions of poor in our world who could never hope to afford—or even dream of visiting—the delightful farmhouse in Upstate New York featured in the closing shot; with hardwood floors, and Pottery Barn furniture arranged tastefully around the stone fireplace. So if joy is “receiving or possessing” the thing we love, then the Hallmark movies offer us a false joy. Not because they offer us goods unworthy of our love, but because the goods they offer cannot be possessed: reliably, or permanently, or equitably. Adjourning the Chambers of Pessimism Having said all of that, I still don’t feel any better when I think of my son and his friends, laughing at the latest round of offerings from Hallmark and Co. I feel sad, in fact. My sweet, tender-hearted father exits stage left, and enter then the Hate Watchers; enter then the skeptics and the brutal realists; enter the sneering dismissal, and the sarcastic two-word review available to every sixth-grader: Yeah, right! This doesn’t seem like any sort of improvement. Gullibility may not be one of the fruit of the Spirit, but neither is cynicism. This is in fact an issue of profound importance at this particular cultural moment. Over the last several months our nation has had to confront extraordinary challenges and sorrows: a pandemic; racial tensions; protests; a brutally contentious election; claims of fraud; threats of civil war. The question I’m interested in here is not what we should do, but how we should be. What sort of disposition, what sort of outlook, and demeanor should we have? We might retreat into cheery indifference. Things aren’t that bad—everything will be fine. Please don’t disrupt my happily ever after; my hot chocolate is getting cold. Conversely we might descend into bitterness and despair. Things are hopeless—there’s no way to fix this. There are no happily ever afters. They are both soul-destroying responses. A Christianity that has forgotten how to lament is damaged; a Christianity that has forgotten how to celebrate is dead. “Christianity is a unique religion of joy,” writes theologian Jürgen Moltmann. And Martin Luther King, Jr., at a time when there was little reason for optimism, likewise insisted: The dawn will come. Disappointment, sorrow, and despair are born at midnight, but morning follows. “Weeping may endure for a night” the psalmist writes “but joy cometh in the morning.” This faith adjourns the assemblies of hopelessness and brings new light into the dark chambers of pessimism. —“A Knock at Midnight” When we rejoice, we put the forces of terror and destruction on notice: your days are numbered. Steve Guthrie And so, at the very moment I am rolling my eyes at another sweater-wearing single dad with perfect teeth, I also want to argue in defense of happy endings. At the very least, I want to push back against a more general mistrust of such. Ernest Hemmingway wrote that “all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.” (Death in the Afternoon) Of course Hemmingway is right. Who could argue with that? And yet, it seems that the Christian must. The one Really True Story—the truest story, which is the plumb-line of every other story, does in fact have a happy ending. The world’s ending is a comedy, not a tragedy. What does that mean? It doesn’t undo the little happinesses and joys of Hallmark. Instead it underwrites and redeems them. It doesn’t so much expose these little paradises as a lie; rather it welcomes them in to the truth to which they are clumsily gesturing. An Advent Joy is wildly inclusive. In good times it says: “This lovely moment is an icon of the loveliness that will one day enfold all of creation.” It says, “This little family get-together, with all of its quirks and eccentricities, is a sacrament of the reconciliation of all people and all things that God is surely bringing about.” In this time of waiting (Advent) I am experiencing now a little bit of what is coming. Neither on the other hand does Advent Joy ignore the suffering of the world. In fact, to celebrate “Advent” is necessarily to insist on both the ultimate arrival of Joy and the present persistence of disappointment. If we say that the fullness of Joy is coming (advenire), then we likewise acknowledge that it is not here. (“Who hopes for what they already have?” Paul asks. (Rom. 8:24)) Advent Joy does not deny the world’s sorrow. Rather, it insists that sorrow is not the last word. “I see the injustice,” it says, “and yet justice will be done.” “I see the brokenness,” it acknowledges, “and yet there will be healing.” “I see the division and anger. And yet at the last day there will be love and community.” This kind of joy is profoundly countercultural. It is an act of winsome rebellion against the powers and authorities of this present evil age. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” When we rejoice, we put the forces of terror and destruction on notice: your days are numbered. My dad’s fondness for Hallmark, I said earlier, struck me as sentimental. And my son’s disdain, I said, seems cynical. But on further reflection, I think that maybe those assessments are too one-sided. I think my son probably laughs at Hallmark Christmas because he believes things are a lot more broken than they are portrayed in the movies. And I think my father probably wept at Hallmark Christmas because he believed things are more hopeful and beautiful than they are portrayed on the nightly news. They both are right; and in this season it is right for us to join them both; weeping and laughing with Advent Joy. Original art for this post by Jonny Jimison.

The Fin’s Revolution Podcast is back with the next 15 chapters of the tale! This month marks 10 years since the publication of Fiddler’s Green, and as he did with The Fiddler’s Gun, the author, Pete Peterson, is revisiting the story by reading it aloud via podcast. Join Fin Button and her crew of outcasts as they embark on a voyage to the Mediterranean in search of a lost countess and an end to the war. To win the prize, Fin will need the help of an ancient seafaring order, the Knights of Malta—and the resolve of one faithful knight could alter more than just the outcome of the revolution. It could mend the heart of a lonely girl and give rise to an American legend. Part 3, “The Crossing” (chapters 26-40), is now available via the Rabbit Room Podcast Network. Look for part 4 (and more bonus content) coming soon! Click here to listen to the Fin’s Revolution Podcast. And click here to view The Fiddler’s Gun in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with writer and letter enthusiast Reagan Dregge. Jonathan Rogers and Reagan Dregge discuss Reagan’s love and practice of the art of physical letter-writing, the personal attention it involves from sender to recipient, and the inherent embodiment of putting pen to paper. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 50 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

I started a most fantastic book last week, but I’ll get there in a minute. Eight years ago, I stood over a sliver of kitchen counter in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, pale and tight-eyed with lack of sleep in the blue light of a computer screen. I was still in my uniform, feet aching in subpar combat boots because I walked everywhere and didn’t know the good brands yet. Outside it was icy and dark, and I had to be up at 0530 to ride my bike to PT in the snow, but I was making breakfast. Because it was morning in Alabama, and I was straining to maintain a connection with my younger brothers from literally half a world away. My brother Pieter woke up early so that we could share a meal together before he took off on his own bike to the high school down the street. We were testing out fun holiday-themed foods. This time we carved snowmen out of toast, with an orange-wedge nose and two eyes made out of chocolate. Mine was a sad thing to behold, particularly since I lacked several of the decorative ingredients and had to make do with random odds and ends (a half-chewed peppermint for a hat, sugar cubes for buttons). My barracks room was cold in every sense of the word, with the world’s scratchiest, most rock-like green chair as a centerpiece. Yet, we laughed as we held our creations up to the screen for inspection and I waved him off to school. Tonight, eight years later, my brother and I bustle around the kitchen in my first home, making our first attempt at meatloaf from the recipe John Cal shared for Hutchmoot: Homebound. We swerve around each other as though we practiced it, darting for ingredients and slipping just out of each other’s way, in that dance that’s only possible with someone you’ve known closely for going on forever. There’s something in me that searches for symmetry—maybe it’s the poet. I’m stirring the meatloaf mixture, my brother hulking over a pot of potatoes beside me, and I’m suddenly struck by the memory of carving snowman-toast on an Army base in Korea. This time around, the meal is truly shared. There’s warmth, and savory scents floating about, and two pairs of hands at a common task. We laugh this time too, particularly when my crotchety old toaster burns one of the bread slices meant for our breadcrumbs, and we race around throwing windows open before my over-eager smoke alarm goes off. We settle down in front of the fireplace, and he clinks his plate against mine. “Cheers,” he says. To the warmth, and the company, and the delicious food we made with our own hands. I wonder if every shattered piece of delight in this life will have its fulfillment in the many rooms of our Father’s house, and we’ll all sit back in a joy we didn’t know enough to hope for and murmur, 'Ah, so this is what it was always meant to be.' Shigé Clark Now about that book I mentioned. I have the great fortune of being in the Supper of the Lamb discussion group that started last week, and oh man, am I glad I joined up. In the first chapter, Robert Farrar Capon talks about delight making treasure of trash, and I can’t help but connect that to our little meal of snowman-toast-over-a-Zoom-call. I think of how I could have seen that moment—as trash. A memory soaked with the grief of distance and difficulty. I could have been overwhelmed by how much it was not what it should have been. But at the time, I was too caught up in delight for what it was. As Capon says: “In a real world, nothing is infinitely bad. […] to be good or bad is not as much of an achievement as to be at all.” My teenage brother—who by common account ought to have viewed making holiday-themed breakfast with his big sister as the lamest of possible activities—wrested himself from sleep before a taxing day of school and wrestling to share a meal with me half a world away, and we carved snowman out of toast together. How delightful. Yes, there’s greater delight in this moment now. Things are more right in this meal than they were in that one. But the distance between the two doesn’t mock our previous joy. Instead, it fulfills it—blooming into our abundance the fullness of the delight we felt in our scarcity. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes with my brother, the ease we get to take beside the fire and beneath the twinkling glow of Christmas lights, are the fruition of the seeds of hope and love sown with toast under the light of a computer screen. It makes me wonder what future meal will be a fulfillment of this one. I wonder if every shattered piece of delight in this life will have its fulfillment in the many rooms of our Father’s house, and we’ll all sit back in a joy we didn’t know enough to hope for and murmur, “Ah, so this is what it was always meant to be.” Thinking back to my cold, blunt barracks room, I can’t help but reflect on this year and all its scarcity. A time when so many meals have become Zoom calls and gatherings have become less than they seemingly ought to be. In such a season, I’m grateful for the power of delight to reshape a thing that might have been garbage, and make it stand, as Capon says, “a million triumphant miles from the trash heap.” I’m grateful for my snowman-toast, my orange rinds, my livestreams, my masked-up meetings, my broken little feasts—for the great delights that they are themselves, and knowing that every foretaste of joy will be fulfilled far beyond what my meager mind can now imagine. Praise God, from whom all blessings flow, and may we not be quick to toss them in the trash heap.

“He wants us to have peace. Happiness. Not to bring suffering on ourselves.” In the film A Hidden Life, a village priest offers this counsel to Franz Jägerstätter, an unassuming Austrian farmer who comes to believe he cannot pledge loyalty to Hitler. Something in me recoiled at hearing the words in this context, but in them I also glimpsed my tendency to conflate the three concepts: peace, happiness, and the absence of suffering. Yes, situations free of pain and conflict are one way to have peace. This awareness has given rise to many a prayer request in my own life, and it’s the reason that the priest and other officials in the film urge Franz to capitulate. Yet these men cling to a sinking ship, trading mast and rudder and hull piecemeal for a few more minutes of sanctioned survival. “God doesn’t care what you say, only what’s in your heart. Say the oath and think what you like,” the same priest asserts. His very words betray the tenuousness of his dearly bought peace, and they reawaken the question I have asked in my darkest, most fear-steeped hours. Where is the peace that will not disintegrate when anxiety throttles, when a child falls seriously ill, when once-friendly faces turn venomous, when the world goes to pieces? The answer has come quietly to me again in the readings for this season. “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38, ESV). The steadfastness in Mary’s reply, even as she ponders the mystery of her role in the story of redemption, has echoed elsewhere in history: through Elisabeth Elliot’s maxim “In acceptance lieth peace,” taken from a poem by Amy Carmichael; in Betsie ten Boom’s “The center of His will is our only safety,” spoken as WWII dogfights seared the night sky overhead. This kind of peace isn’t an embrace of fatalism. It is predicated on at least two truths: that God is a good God, a sovereign, omniscient, and trustworthy God; and that, therefore, the greatest good I can imagine in a given situation may not be the greatest good possible. This is the kind of peace, I believe, that allowed Mary to treasure up the events and words around her in her heart, even as the prophecy came that a sword would pierce her own soul (Luke 2:35, ESV). The piercing would come, the suffering would be unavoidable—but these were not the end of the story. The blow to her soul would, in fact, be evidence of the love of Christ that no sword would ever be able to cleave (Romans 8:35, ESV). The greatest good I can imagine in a given situation may not be the greatest good possible. Amy Baik Lee And that love is the mainstay of the peace I seek. The reconciliation I have with God because of Christ (Rom. 5:1, ESV), the peace that now allows me to bring every request to Him and be shielded in heart and mind (Phil 4:7, ESV), is not a peace of tranquil earthly circumstance. No suffering or trial can shake loose the fact that I belong to Him, and that all things shall be worked together for my good. From my perspective, it is as if I’ve been informed that the enemy has been attacking the wrong target all along, and that this is the most he will ever be able to do. My Home, my heart, and the Source of my steadiness are forever out of his reach, even in the moments when I am exhausted and my vision is clouded from the fight. Franz Jägerstätter reflects the same surety later in the film when, as a prisoner, he is directed to sign the oath: “Sign, and you will go free.” “But I am free,” he responds simply. In the end, the village priest is right; God does want us to have peace. But He does not give to us in such paltry measure and frail security as the world gives. The peace He gives makes us able to get up morning after morning in a world thick with argument and opinion and fear and disease, and sing previously unthinkable words. “What though my joys and comforts die? The Lord my Savior liveth.” It is a peace of relinquishment and of safekeeping guaranteed by a Word far stronger than the offers of man. And it is the peace of pierced souls who are enabled to go on with their scars and wounds, like the One who has gone before them, to love. He said, ‘I will forget the dying faces; The empty places, They shall be filled again. O voices moaning deep within me, cease.’ But vain the word; vain, vain: Not in forgetting lieth peace. He said, ‘I will crowd action upon action, The strife of faction Shall stir me and sustain; O tears that drown the fire of manhood cease.’ But vain the word; vain, vain: Not in endeavour lieth peace. He said, ‘I will withdraw me and be quiet, Why meddle in life’s riot? Shut be my door to pain. Desire, thou dost befool me, thou shalt cease.’ But vain the word; vain, vain: Not in aloofness lieth peace. He said, ‘I will submit; I am defeated. God hath depleted My life of its rich gain. O futile murmurings, why will ye not cease?’ But vain the word; vain, vain: Not in submission lieth peace. He said, ‘I will accept the breaking sorrow Which God tomorrow Will to His son explain.’ Then did the turmoil deep within me cease. Not vain the word, not vain; For in Acceptance lieth peace. —”In Acceptance Lieth Peace,” Amy Carmichael Original art for this post by Breezy Brookshire.

One evening in December of 2018, Kelsey and I had just finished a riveting chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. We had been steadily plodding through the entire series for a couple years now, reading aloud to one another, reliving the tale that had so palpably awakened our imaginations as kids. As I brushed my teeth that night, I reflected on how far we’d come—indeed, how far Harry had come. And perhaps it was the season’s influence, or perhaps it was the prompting of Fate herself, but I suddenly found myself murmuring under my breath, to the tune of that beloved song: “Harry, did you know?” All of us go through life hoping for that singular, defining “light bulb moment”—the one so succinctly summed up by the timeless exclamation of “eureka!” But, elusive as these light bulb moments are known to be, we assume they won’t find us, and we quietly resign ourselves to the realm of the ordinary, not quite able to snuff out that secret hope that our own modesty will entice the muses to take pity and grace us with brilliance—not that this plan has ever worked. And even as the light bulb went off with undeniable force, toothbrush still in hand, I doubted that it was even an original idea—the internet would surely prove to me in short order, as it did with everything, that it’s all been done before. A quick search revealed a “Lily, Did You Know” but—to my complete astonishment—no “Harry, Did You Know” as far as Google could take me. And that was the moment when a playful idea became a moral duty. So I got up my courage to casually throw the idea out to Kelsey. I doubt that my air of casualness masked my sincere feeling of ethical necessity, but I did my best: “The funniest thing just happened! As I was brushing my teeth, I just found myself humming the tune of ‘Mary, Did You Know’…except it was ‘Harry, Did You Know’! Isn’t that just hilarious? Because the thing is, Harry doesn’t know anything. Isn’t that the whole point? The whole story is propelled by what he doesn’t know… I don’t know, I just thought it was funny.” A moment of silence. And then Kelsey burst out laughing, her eyes flickering with excitement. The muses had taken pity. “Well, do you want to write it together?” she asked. Our first co-write? Game on. There was little doubt as Kelsey and I began writing “Harry, Did You Know” that it would be presented to my sister as a Christmas gift. As a little brother, all the magic of Harry Potter was mediated to me by my cool big sister, Jessica. The physical books themselves only made their way into my hands after she had stayed up late into the night on the day of their release, tearing through them herself, learning and cherishing that secret knowledge of what happens next. And without fail, the next morning, positively enthralled by her newfound gnosis, Jessica would hand the book to me—here you go. It’s all yours. But the task of compressing revelation after revelation from 4,224 pages of storytelling into the duration of one song—that was where the real challenge presented itself. Kelsey and I quickly realized we had no choice but to write seven verses, one for each book. We began immediately. Before we knew it, Christmas Eve had arrived. We were about to give and receive gifts with my family, and “Harry, Did You Know” was one line away from being finished. My sister was in the shower. Kelsey and I called a huddle, and by the grace of God, we penned the final lyric just in time to sing it for my sister. Jessica laughed. She cried a little bit. And for the time being, we were satisfied with our work. Since I was busy recording and releasing my first project in 2019, “Harry, Did You Know” was, for a time, forgotten. Then, the following December (2019), Kelsey and I gathered with some friends in our living room to plan an Advent service for our church. Somehow the subject of Harry Potter arose and with it, our idea for this creative endeavor and a first public reading of the lyrics. “Harry, Did You Know” was met with laughter and shaking heads and an especially enthusiastic response from J Lind. This has to be a thing, it was decided. It must come to be. When I look back on it, this was the real impetus for what was to come. The encouragement of friends is central to the Harry Potter series, and so it is in the creation of “Harry, Did You Know.” It may have remained merely a funny idea we had one time were it not for the insistence of our friends that we move forward. And then, just a few months later, as the pandemic began to ravage the world, Kelsey and I realized: if ever there was a year for “Harry, Did You Know,” it’s this one. So we enlisted the expertise of Asher Peterson to orchestrate remotely recorded pieces into a well-ordered whole. We assembled a band: Kirby Waggoner, Cody Spriggs, and Evan Redwine. We asked some friends to lend their voices to the fun: Janie Townsend, Carly Bannister, J Lind, and Becca Jordan. And finally, Mindy Cook edited together the video of our dreams, which opened with perfect cover art from Leslie E. Thompson. Two years later, a light bulb moment has been brought to full expression and fruition. Kelsey and I have laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and even cried a little bit, as we’ve watched this video take shape. This project has played no small part in restoring our joy during one of the darkest years on humanity’s record—it’s our sincere hope that it may do the same for you. Click the names below to learn more about each person featured in this project: Asher Peterson, Evan Redwine, Janie Townsend, Carly Bannister, J Lind, Becca Jordan, Leslie E. Thompson, Mindy Cook

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Renee Mathis, fellow writing teacher and mentor at the CiRCE Institute’s apprenticeship program. Jonathan Rogers and Renee Mathis discuss Renee’s experience as a Jeopardy champion, her philosophy on mentoring teachers, the teaching methods used by Jesus, rhetoric as the pursuit of truth in community, and the still-relevant application of Aristotle’s principles of rhetoric. Click here to listen to Season 2, Episode 51 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

I learned a French saying the other day: “surveiller comme le lait sur le feu.” It means “to watch like milk on the stove.” As someone who has all but given up on creamy oatmeal, I can appreciate with the French that if you walk away from a saucepan of milk on the burner, bubbles, toil, and trouble will inevitably ensue. I’m glad you could come by today. My grandmother’s candy is dairy-based, so I’ll be standing here a while. Grab some tea, move that cookbook off the barstool, and sit with me while I stir. My grandmother’s birthday was yesterday. She would have been 97. She passed when I was pretty young, but not before leaving me with happy memories and this recipe. My mom held on to it for years but prefers making my grandmother’s other sweets (there’s a piece of Heath bar cake on the counter you can try if you’d like), so she let the candy recipe pass to me, and now it’s mine alone. Well, I guess that’s not quite true. This recipe is mine to keep, but it isn’t mine to share. You see, before it belonged to my mother or my grandmother, it belonged to two elderly ladies with a rental apartment above their home, a proximity to Peabody College, and a dream of opening a candy shoppe in Gatlinburg. My grandmother lived in their apartment when she was in school. They always had a bowl of homemade pecan caramels that they’d happily give to anyone who asked, but the recipe they guarded with dramatic secrecy. That recipe was the key to their candy shoppe dream, so they watched it like milk on the stove. A few years later, my grandmother met my grandfather, and the ladies found themselves in need of a wedding gift. My grandmother had charmed them during their years together, and so they decided to entrust her with their treasure. They specified that my grandmother was not to share their recipe, but she could make and give the candy whenever she wished. I guard the secret of two women with a dream, and I carry the legacy of a couple who loved their community with the ferocity of a million small kindnesses. -Rachel Matar So she did. Every year at Christmastime, my grandparents spent a week boiling and stirring and wrapping hundreds of pecan caramels. Later, my mom and aunt would join them to cut the wrappers and lick the spoons. Year after year, they gave candy away to friends, family, and strangers. If you ever met them, and I hope you did, I bet you’ve tried a piece. My sister works down the hall from a man who interned under my grandfather when he led the engineering department. He’s in his 80s now, but when she brought in the candy a few years ago, he remembered it like the easy laugh of the kind man who first gave it to him. Memories are sticky like that. After my grandparents passed, the candy did, too. See, the recipe is good, but it isn’t easy. You have to stir continuously for hours. I can’t tell you how many, because I don’t know. Is it raining? That’ll change it. Are you using the big pot or the other big pot? That matters, too. And while imperfect candy makes a nice ice cream mix-in, it’s frustrating to spend hours on a project if you know it might not work. So for a while, Christmas candy became just a happy memory. My family chased it through candy stores and mall kiosks, wandering in to see if someone else had cracked the code. “Close,” we’d say, “but not quite it,” and we’d try to hide our disappointment. A few years ago, I was flipping through one of my mom’s recipe notebooks, and I saw the magic yellow glow of an old index card with “Christmas Candy” written in my grandmother’s hand. The instructions were imprecise, but it wasn’t raining, and I like a challenge, so I stepped into the story I already loved. 4 hours of stirring, 12 of cooling, and 5 of wrapping later, I gave it to my family to try. We were quiet as we unwrapped, tasted, and considered before pronouncing a victorious “that’s it.” So now I’m the keeper of this recipe. I guard the secret of two women with a dream, and I carry the legacy of a couple who loved their community with the ferocity of a million small kindnesses. No, I won’t sell any of it, although I’m flattered you asked. But you can take as much as you’d like. There’s still a few hours before the candy is done, so go on and head out if you’re tired. But this recipe is mine, and it’s precious to me. So I’ll watch it like milk on the stove.

A few years ago, my parents rented a beach house for a family reunion. Each of us cooked a few meals during our time, and for one of the meals, we made BLTs. My husband stood over the stove, making enough bacon for over twenty hungry people. We sat around the table, shuffling to make room as everyone filled their plates with sandwiches, chips, and salad. Eventually, he finished frying the last couple slices and started assembling his own sandwich, only to see the plate he had filled with bacon completely empty, save for a few spots of grease. I blushed in embarrassment at my ravenous family. We forgot to tell him the cardinal rule of the table: if you don’t eat fast, you don’t eat. We laugh about that meal now, and we’ve learned to be a little more considerate of others. My husband also eats a bit more quickly around my family. We love eating. But even more than that, we love feasting. But why do we bother feasting? Why gather around the table with good company and good food when we could eat only what’s needed to survive? We don’t feast merely to eat, drink, and be merry, or indulge our appetites like my family seemed to do that day at the beach house. When we feast rightly, we taste the goodness of God, see and participate in the Gospel, and look forward to the eternal feast. TASTE THE GOODNESS OF GOD In The Supper of the Lamb, Robert Farrar Capon wrote, “Man invented cooking before he thought of nutrition. To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste.” We need to recover taste, not for the sake of the food itself, but so that we can taste the goodness of God. King David uses the language of taste in Psalm 34:8, “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!” I think we can almost literally do that as we develop a theology of feasting. At Creation, God could have given us the bare necessities, only food to sustain our bodies. He could have formed us without the need for food. But he gave us food to enjoy. He gave us variety. We have apples and dragon fruit, cinnamon and saffron. We’re able to not just taste food with our mouths, but see beauty on a plate. We can smell freshly baked cookies and hear the sizzling of butter in a pan. There is much to enjoy, much to savor. And it is good (Genesis 1:29-31). When God gave the Israelites the law, he commanded that feasts be kept, that the people eat and drink together in celebration. In Deuteronomy 14, the tithe is spent on a feast. Chapter 16 gives commandments for celebrating three different feasts. Passover as we know, celebrated God bringing the Israelites out of Egypt. The Feast of Weeks was in conjunction with the grain harvest, and The Feast of Booths celebrated the produce of the threshing floor, namely olives and grapes. The importance of feasting was clear in the Jewish mind. The Talmud, the record of rabbinic teachings explaining how to live out the commands of the Torah, devotes an entire section to feasting and festivals. When talking about feasting it says, “There is no rejoicing save with wine.” Wine and rejoicing go hand in hand. So when Jesus turns water into wine at the wedding in John 2, it’s not an arbitrary miracle. It’s essential for the rejoicing itself to continue. And when Jesus uses wine to signify his blood, that is no accident either. God commanded feasts to be observed first so his people remembered who God is and what he’s done, and second, for the joy of his people. SEE AND PARTICIPATE IN THE GOSPEL Fast forward a few years to when Jesus enters the scene. Luke 7 records that Jesus, the Son of Man, came “eating and drinking” (verse 34). He had a reputation. First century Jews took table fellowship and the accompanying etiquette seriously. The Pharisees sought the restoration of Israel, and believed that would happen as the people lived out the call to separation and holiness. When Jesus, then, sits down to eat with the likes of prostitutes, tax collectors, the poor (who were likely ceremonially unclean), he didn’t just commit a social taboo. For the Pharisees, he destroyed the boundary between clean and unclean, holy and unholy—which not only made them mad, but, in their eyes, could contribute to the delay of the promised restoration of Israel. To the Pharisees, Jesus compromised the very heart of the Jewish identity. But in his feasting, we see the Gospel unfold. From his first miracle of turning water to wine, to feeding the 5,000, to eating with the unclean, to his parables, Jesus redefined the meaning of the restoration of Israel and the Kingdom of God. We see in him the fulfillment of Isaiah 55:1, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” Jesus is where we find our satisfaction. He gives living water so we will not thirst again (John 4). He is the Bread of Life (John 6:35), and in him the hungry find their satisfaction (Luke 6:20). And at that great Supper of the Lamb, with an eternal exhale and a shout of joy, we will say together, 'Behold, this is our God...let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.' In the new creation, we won't feast with symbols and foretastes. We will celebrate the marriage supper of the Lamb with the Lamb of God. Sarah Hauser No more clearly do we see Jesus fulfilling our hunger and thirst than in the Lord’s Supper. It’s in the taking of communion that we don’t just see the Gospel, we actually participate in it. This first communion meal acts as a fulcrum, holding the Jewish understanding of feasting and food on one end, and the messianic banquet on the other. All the feasting and food laws and prophetic language in the Old Testament hinge on this meal as Jesus announces the new covenant. There’s wine at the feast, but Jesus says that wine is his blood of the covenant–a strange thing to say, since Jews don’t drink blood (Leviticus 17:10-11)! But once again, Jesus unexpectedly fulfills the law and prophecies. So they reclined at table, participating in the Passover feast as they always had, yet at the same time feasting in a new way. They ate bread, but now bread that stood for the body of Christ about to be broken. They drank wine, but now that wine was a symbol for the atoning blood of Christ. Now we also take the bread and the cup, remembering Christ’s sacrifice. In this feast of communion we participate in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. In this feast, we see and participate in the Gospel. The Passover meal requiring a spotless lamb, hosted by the sacrificial Lamb of God, pointed to the eventual marriage supper of the Lamb. LOOK FORWARD TO THE ETERNAL FEAST Now we look ahead to what is to come. Those who believe Jesus is the Messiah, that he died and was raised declaring victory over sin, feast in a new way. For the early believers, this included freedom to partake in food sacrificed to idols (1 Corinthians 8) and to no longer be bound to a particular diet (Acts 10). Jewish believers were to eat even with those Gentiles they used to consider unclean (Galatians 2). Paul told the Colossians, “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (verses 16-17). The feasts, rituals, and laws in the old covenant were a shadow of the eventual marriage supper of the Lamb at which all believers will feast (Revelation 19). Tim Chester encourages us in A Meal with Jesus saying, “The Christian community is the beginning and sign of God’s coming world – and no more so than when we eat together. Our meals are a foretaste of the future messianic banquet. Our meals reveal the identity of Jesus. Our meals are a proclamation and demonstration of God’s good news.” I experienced a snapshot of this when my family gathered for breakfast one February morning. Shortly before we came to the table, my mom laid in her bedroom dying of pancreatic cancer. My siblings and I gathered around her that morning, knowing this moment was coming and wishing that knowledge made the process of death a little easier. But death is not the way it’s supposed to be. If you’ve lost a loved one, if you’ve stood by the bed as someone breathes their last, you know this in the depths of your soul. That scene in my mom’s bedroom is emblazoned on my mind. I will never forget the sounds of her gasps or the feeling as though someone dropped an anvil on my chest. But just like when we understand our sin, we understand grace all the more, when we see the grotesqueness of death, oh how much sweeter is the hope of resurrection! For those in Christ, death may be inevitable. But it is not final. My mom passed away that morning, and a surprising and almost awkward silence filled those moments after. We didn’t have to change her or feed her, fill pill boxes or wonder how much time she had left. What do we do now? We did the only thing we knew to do. We shuffled into the kitchen, and my brother heated up the cast-iron skillet. Someone else began cracking eggs into a bowl and slicing cheese. I can’t remember exactly, but I’m sure there was bacon being fried, too. We refilled mugs of coffee, and plates clattered as we set the table. And like King David after the death of his son (2 Samuel 12:16-23), we ate. I’ve had five years to reflect on that meal, and for me it embodied so much of the beauty of feasting. We tasted the abundance, provision, and indeed the goodness of our God. We saw death, but at the same time held deep hope in the resurrection. We looked forward, oh did we look forward, to the day when death would be swallowed up forever, and we would sit at the table, face to face, with God himself. Isaiah 25 says, “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken” (verses 7-8). And at that great Supper of the Lamb, with an eternal exhale and a shout of joy, we will say together, “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation” (verse 9). In the new creation, we won’t feast with symbols and foretastes. We will celebrate the marriage supper of the Lamb with the Lamb of God. Friends, this is why we feast. In feasting, we taste the goodness of God, we see and participate in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and we look forward to the day when we will dine, fully restored, with God himself. You can read more of Sarah Hauser’s beautiful writing at sarahjhauser.com.

“Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” –G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Because it is so very personal. My Anglican pastor tells me that for him, consecrating the elements for communion was a huge step the first time it was his responsibility to perform the ceremony. The act of consecration is a conscious drawing forth, a lifting up, a marking out, a recognition of these particular things as holy—not because this bread and this wine are any more holy than all other bread and all other wine, but because by this conscious act we are reminding ourselves of the truth that everything in the world will one day be this; all parts of creation will one day be seen for what they truly are, viewed again through the knowledge of their consecration, both in their parts and in the whole. And so, this bread and this cup of wine, so consecrated, are a first fruits, are a reminder, are a means of refocusing our vision with a greater clarity that sees all things, even if only for this flickering moment, as they more truly and eternally are, each imbued with a holy light. Chesterton’s point about the work of fairy tales is, I think, exactly that same point. Fairy tales… make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. Fairy tales employ the tool of the fantastic to jar us back to a truer vision that sees that all things are fantastic. Wonder is an appropriate response to all things because all things are wonderfully made. Though few of us can remember that earliest season of awakened wonder, there yet was a time when everything was new to our hearts and minds and senses, when everything was an unfolding delight. There was a first time we first saw the ripe redness of a strawberry. There was a first time we encountered a rushing stream and dipped our bare feet in the giddy laughter of it. There was a first time we met the sort of rollicking, affable beast we call a dog, and reveled in the uproarious, comic beauty of its romp. There was a time when all things were new and so were seen and encountered as the wonders they actually are. And the work of fairy tales, according to Chesterton, is to rescue that wonder from the grey sediments it has long been silted over with. Songs penned by Mark Heard in the ’80s and early ’90s had a profound influence on my own development as a lyricist. One of the devastating lines that early etched itself in my consciousness came from the song “Worry Too Much:” It’s these sandpaper eyes It’s the way they rub the lustre from what is seen It’s the way we tell ourselves that all these things are normal Till we can’t remember what we mean. Fairy tales, apparently, are about helping us remember what we mean. They’re about helping us see things with the lustre recovered. Because that’s the true nature of nature and of all creation. It shines from within with a bright, luminous glow, with a deep “magic.” When we are children, we see it. We see it with aching clarity. And then our vision goes flat, fuzzy, out-of-focus. We grow bored, tired, wounded, cynical. We lose the ability to see the wonder for what it is. We gravitate instead to the novel, the flashy, the garish, consuming all that we can, addict-like, in a long, misguided attempt to reclaim those lost wonders by sheer excess and volume. By the age of 12 most of us have forgotten that an earlier sense of Eden ever existed in our lives. It takes something like a fairy tale, or a consecration, to pull our vision back into true focus. To lift an element out of the commonality of our banal slog, and to show us again that this singular thing is fraught with wonder. And if this thing is so fraught, then is not everything? Have you forgotten? we are asked. Look again! I’m now in the middle of a collaborative book project with painter/illustrator Jamin Still. The Wishes of the Fish King is a manuscript I wrote when my oldest daughter was two. We lived in a house on a hill in a forest. The hill swept down and out into magnificent views of fields and pond and forest and faraway hills and even a forest island set in the midst of the billowing field grasses. At dusk we would join hands and walk together, exploring our own little corner of the world. For my daughter Anastina Mansi, it was a season of perpetual wonder, of the unfolding of creation, of all things shiny and new and resplendent with their native glories. For me, it was a time of shedding my old cynicism, of negating my sandpaper vision, and of seeing the world anew as my daughter saw it, bright and joyful! Of course, there was simultaneously the sense that I carried of the fleetingness of things. I knew this was but a small window in the span of my daughter’s life. With it came an attendant and consequent grieving for the passing of that small season even as we were still walking and breathing in the midst of it. For a mother or father watching their small child delight in the newly-discovered creation, there is that bittersweetness that comes from the knowledge of the loss and the longing they will one day encounter. Andrew Peterson sings in “Don’t You Want To Thank Someone:” And when the world is new again And the children of the king Are ancient in their youth again Maybe it’s a better thing To be more than merely innocent But to be broken, then redeemed by love This is the wellspring of the bittersweetness. It flows from the knowing that our children cannot remain in the bright place they are. They will have to walk their own wild journey through pain, woundedness, heartache, suffering, brokenness and loss. They will lose this true and delightful vision of creation somewhere along the way, just as each of us has in our own journeys. But as their parents we have lived long enough that we can also see further ahead to the even greater joy that will await them beyond those sorrows. We can look ahead to the time when vision will be eternally renewed and that first innocent delight and the brokenness and sorrow that followed it will all be wrapped up in the same glorious redemption that restores our delight but that does ever so much more than simply restore. We hold this promise and anticipate the coming advent that will see the redemption of our vision of all things and of our place in them, making it right and true and new and as unbreakable and as beautiful as diamonds shot with a fairy light. And though we cannot see it all that way yet, we have caught enough glimpses in stories and songs and paintings and starfields and moonrises and sunsets and romping dogs and glad streams and giddy romances to know that it is real and that it is already breaking into our brittle-edged world. We will see one day with such an unbroken, sacramental vision. All things. All things for the inexhaustible wonders that they hold, for the inexhaustible glories they reveal of the mind of the artist and storyteller who created them. But fairy tales, and luminous paintings, and the voices of cellos and the taste of a wild, sun-warmed blackberry or the sparkling of a chalice held aloft or the visual force and scale of a wide, windswept ocean can sometimes jar us back to that sacramental vision, even if only for a brief, precious moment. That is the particular notion that resides at the heart of what I’m attempting to do with The Wishes of the Fish King. I want adults to read it and lose themselves in the rhythm of the words and in the glow of the paintings and to remember what it was to see the world anew. And I want the words and images to nest in the hearts and memories of young children so that their vision might be more sacramentally shaped as they grow. I want them to one day return to the story as adults with young children of their own that they might be reminded again of the delightful garden they once knew and of the shining city that awaits. I know it is a lofty goal. And I know that I am unequipped to pull it off adequately. But my prayer with such endeavors is always that the whole will somehow be more than the sum of the parts and that there will be spaces between my words that winds of another world might blow through. I think that my hope is to create sacramental spaces where more important things can happen that don’t even involve me. If in twenty years I have mastered one aspect of being a writer, it is the ability to step back and let a thing go, knowing that its journey from here will scarcely involve me, and that the rest is dependent upon the Spirit whispering as He pleases through such imperfect offerings. As such, I take a strange, third-person encouragement in observing that the words of the story, paired for the first time with Jamin’s latest illustration, are already having a noticeable effect on me. This painting is called The Sea of Fields. Even as a chalk sketch over a base coat it was already stunning. I haven’t been able to look at it without some emotion, as it’s a fantastical rendering of a place and time I once inhabited. The tone is magical and perilous and fairytale-esque. And yet I see the real place clearly pictured here. In fact, the blend of fantasy and memory creates a layered vision that holds the essence of that time more vividly than any photograph ever could. This fairy tale visual re-interpretation of that physical location and era, offers a keener sight of the deeper reality of the wonder and the beauty of it than a camera ever could capture. Jamin’s painting holds an iconic familiarity in its placement of the house atop the great hill, sweeping down to the wind-rippled fields and the forest island. I see it clearly as my old home. This was once my land. I walked it. I fished it. I tended it. My second daughter was born here. I see the terrain and the history. But in this painting, I see also, as if in hindsight, the eternal glory that filled it as well. I see the light. I see all at once what was and what is and what is to come. And something in me rises and says Yes, that was always how it was, even when I couldn’t see it. The Sea of Fields is a sacramental painting of a real place and a real time in the lives of real people. And I was one of them. And I hope that though this story began as a personal reflection to capture for my daughter the memories of that bright season, that it will still function for others as a window flung open to the bright, sacramental nature of their own corner of creation and of their own lives and relationships and of their own histories of glory and brokenness, and especially of that brief season with their young children when all the world is seen as new. I hope that in some small way our book will help children to grow wise and will help adults to grow childlike. And with that, now I finally will just step out of the way and let Chesterton bring the point home, because in his continuing words resides the point of it all… “…[G]rown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” [Chesterton drops the mic, walks off stage.] #GKChesterton #Chesterton #WishesoftheFishKing #delight #DougMcKelvey #Story #sacrament #Stories #JaminStill

I’m feeling a little lost these days, as though I’ve awakened from a troubling dream to find that nothing is where it was or as it was. I’ve entered my forties during a nationwide cultural and religious shift, during a global pandemic, and a future that once presented a hazy but recognizable profile has become a blank. The energy that carried me through other seasons of difficulty has run out. I am groping for the familiar on an alien planet. Without meaning to, I’d slipped into the assumption that the world would go on pretty much as it always had. I picked up the phone and made a call with the certainty that the person I loved would be waiting on the other end of the line. I was sure of what I’d find behind the doors of the homes, businesses, and churches with which I was well acquainted. My interior world was recognizable, if not always comfortable. I knew what I believed. At the very least, I could identify which people, which institutions were sturdy enough to lean on. That’s the trouble with illusions, isn’t it? You don’t know you have them until they’re taken away. Some weeks ago, I stumbled on an old recording of A Horse and His Boy’s “And the World Was an Ocean.” It’s a song I found compelling from my first introduction to it. Its heartbreaking simplicity begs the listener to sing along. Hearing it again surprised me out of a profound silence, and I joined Seth Harper without thought, as if by muscle memory. One day I woke up and the world was an ocean The sun ran in circles to keep me confused My bed was my lifeboat as I was its captain My wits not about me, my spirit diffused. —”And the World Was an Ocean,” A Horse and His Boy Harper’s image of desolation perfectly reflected my reality. I woke one morning to find myself scanning the surface of a vast oceanic void, searching for shorelines. “I am lost in the current,” I sang, “I’m lost in the blue / I am lost without a compass / I am lost without you.” I didn’t know how lost until the singing stirred my grief, didn’t recognize the truth until my tears told me so. Suddenly, the water was everywhere. I found it in my Instagram feed, when a sample of Scott Erickson’s iconography caught my attention. In the image, a hermit crab struggles in a tiny, cramped shell. Erickson is talking about the challenges and gifts of transformation, urging the viewer to recognize that the shell provides only an illusion of safety. His words brought me back to the lifeboat, a small thing in the frame of my mind, a fragile wooden shell pitted against the fury, the mystery, the sheer breathless expanse of the ocean. And then in the course of an ordinary day, as I washed dishes or folded laundry (you know how it is with these things), I remembered a sermon I heard more than a decade ago in which the preacher referred to the fall of mankind as “The Great Gasp.” We were made to live inside the love of God, he said; that love, that water, was the air we were meant to breathe. In turning away from the true face of God, we cast ourselves on dry land, into an environment for which we were entirely unsuited, to gasp and struggle. To die. I pulled up Audrey Assad and Fernando Ortega’s “O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” and set it to play on repeat. “O the deep, deep love of Jesus / Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free / Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me / Underneath me, all around me / Is the current of his love.” I want that love to flow around me and through me. I want to abandon myself to it. But apart from the principle of the thing—the abstract theological imperative—I don’t know how. I have dipped my toe in the water and come away changed, but if I fell in, all the way, I would die. That’s my feeling on the subject. The love of God is infinite and fathomless and it will kill me. It’s the kind of fear you don’t acknowledge on a Sunday morning. I am not so much lost as I am exploring a Welcome more expansive than I ever dreamed possible. It is calling me out of my flimsy boat into the staggering embrace of home. Helena Sorensen Over the last eighteen months, I’ve led several groups in a study of Robin McKinley’s Beauty. The novel is deceivingly simple, with a rich story buried beneath the familiar elements of plot and character, and it’s the only retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” in which the Beast’s love transforms Beauty, and not the other way around. I’m moved by their early encounters, the ones defined by Beauty’s fear. Faced with a gigantic, hairy creature whose motives are unclear, and imagining herself in danger of imminent death, Beauty reacts as anyone would. She tries to protect herself. Her amygdala kicks into gear. She vacillates between freezing and fleeing, with an occasional fight. This in spite of the fact that McKinley’s Beast does nothing to cause her fear. Unlike his Disney counterpart, his faults are a matter of the past; during all Beauty’s sojourn in the castle, he is gentle and undemanding. He defers to her, makes himself vulnerable to her, offering a genuine love that Beauty cannot receive. Why? McKinley doesn’t make the reason explicit, but I learned not long before I began the study that when the amygdala is activated, the pre-frontal cortex is offline. In other words, when a person is in the midst of a fear reaction, the parts of the brain that allow for relational connection are shut down. You cannot be afraid and receive love at the same time. You might say that fear casts out love (as love casts out fear). It’s one or the other. How, then, do we overcome fear and receive love? How do we fall into the ocean when our fingers are biting into the wood of the lifeboat? Those deeply buried fear responses were formed before we understood what was happening to us; they’re intrinsic. Often we are not even aware they exist. As a child, I did not have words to say that the God I was introduced to was a beast. I did not know I was afraid. Someone painted a picture of the Eye of Sauron and called it Holiness. Someone told stories of violence and retribution and called it Love. Someone used “his ways are higher than our ways” as a panacea to justify all manner of horrors and then pointed my young heart toward the monster and said, “This way lies hope.” That these conflicting messages were wrapped in earnestness, in fine clothing and stained glass, in lofty language and lovely music, only complicated the matter. My exterior confidence belied the fundamental reality that, when presented with the Person(s) of God, I was no more than a frightened little girl. Was? Am? I don’t know how to define the overlap of was and is, the layers of truth in my one subjective experience, the past selves I carry with me and those I am and will be. I only know that Beauty eventually uncurled her fingers from the banister where she cowered and stepped up to the Beast and saw him and knew him. In the same way, I am uncurling my fingers from the side of the boat, maybe because it is leaking and doomed, but maybe also because the ocean is beginning to look a little less terrifying. I found the water again in a passage near the end of one of my favorite fantasy novels. Could there be candle flames burning under the water? There could. I knew that, when I was in the ocean, and I even knew how. I understood it just as I understood Dark Matter, the material of the universe that makes up everything that must be there but we cannot find. I found myself thinking of an ocean running beneath the whole universe, like the dark seawater that laps beneath the wooden boards of an old pier: an ocean that stretches from forever to forever and is still small enough to fit inside a bucket, if you have Old Mrs. Hempstock to help you get it in there, and you ask nicely. —Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane Gaiman, it seems, has a sense of the ocean that surrounds and undergirds us; he knows how terrible it looks from the outside, how peaceful from within. Like the old preacher, he grasps the unnerving truth that the ocean is more our home than dry land, that we were made, so to speak, to breathe water. I would like to close, Reader, by tossing you an anchor, but I cannot. I am drifting. The nature of my journey is as mysterious as these strange new surroundings. Don’t fear for me, though. I am not so much lost as I am exploring a Welcome more expansive than I ever dreamed possible. It is calling me out of my flimsy boat into the staggering embrace of home.

The wind was bright and sharp, the blue sky cold, our skin reddened with the icy air, but we didn’t mind. The day of the C. S. Lewis symposium at Westminster, we Lewis lovers got to the doors of St. Margaret’s almost an hour before they opened. As I tightened my scarf, I watched the line grow, hundreds of us queued in the chilly air, ready to honor an author whose words had formed us, heart, mind, and soul. But a question grew in my mind as I waited, clapping my hands against the cold, watching my breath etch the frosty air. Why, I wondered, is the draw of C. S. Lewis so strong? What power in his self or stories summoned us from around the world, from all walks of life, to honor his tales and study his thoughts? His books are famous, yes. But so are countless others. Novelists, we have aplenty. Apologists too. And though his status as an Oxford don intrigues us, it’s really not enough to kindle the kind of love that lasts for decades and links the hearts of countless different kinds of souls. I pondered this the rest of the day. Even as I heard the excellent symposium talks, I wondered. I glimpsed the fact that part of it was the extraordinary way that Lewis reconciled reason and imagination. But I felt there was another element still to identify. I mulled it as I walked home that night and as I rode the Tube back to Westminster for the memorial dedication next morning. Only at the end of the service, after two hours crammed with the truths that Lewis strove to tell spoken into the air of that storied, sacred place, echoing down the decades to us, did I finally begin to guess. Two weeks later, I think I understand. We came because Lewis lived a great story. The best tale that Jack Lewis ever told was the tale of his own life and that story lends a power to his words that time cannot dispel. In his essay On Stories, Lewis wrote of the “atmosphere” imbuing his favorite books of “romance.” Some tales were steeped in a certain air beyond the cycle of mere events, an air that struck the reader with a sense of the other or beyond. Whether the long, awful dark of outer space, or the chill, pure sky of Northern myths, some stories let us enter, for a moment, a “sheer state of being” that stirs our souls to life with hunger, awe, or wonder. Human lives have atmospheres as well. Some are a mere series of events. But some lives, like the tales that Lewis loved, are marked by a vibrancy of mind, body, and soul so potent that we taste the numinous in their history and presence. The life of C. S. Lewis is a romance in and of itself. His story bears the atmosphere of pipe smoke and good pints drunk amidst a world of word craft and learning. His tale has the air of hearth-sides and shabby college rooms in which fast friendships and strong opinions played out in brusque good humor and jolly tones. In his tale, the fresh air of long walks and even longer thoughts blows free. His elements are tea and common sense and books and the call of the distant hills. But into this rich air flows a fresher one from the vast beyond; the heady wind of imagination. Who would have thought that an Oxford don skilled in logic, the “best read man” of a generation whose intellect cowed countless students (and peers) could countenance a fairy tale? The atmosphere of Lewis’s story grows wondrous as we marvel that the mind at work in Miracles wove also the tale of a little girl named Lucy and the love she had for a wild, but very good, lion. Talking trees and tea-drinking fauns peer round the corners of Lewis’s life. Lions roar through his dreams and give his story an atmosphere in which any number of wonders might take place. We love his tale because it gives us hope that our own stories could quicken with the wind of imagination. But I think our love of Lewis and his story runs far deeper. In his pithy little book An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis identifies six qualities belonging to the kind of story that he calls a “myth.” He describes myth as a story that is “a permanent object of contemplation—more like a thing than a narration—which works upon us by its peculiar flavour or quality…” Myth, he contends, is a story not dependent on literary finesse or narrative twist. A tale of absolutes, it deals with “impossibles and preternaturals.” “Myth, “ says Lewis “may be sad or joyful but it is always grave.” Last, and most important of all, Lewis believed that in reading myth we encounter some facet of Reality itself. We come up against something, clothed in story, that “will move us as as long as we live.” In tales of dying gods or kings returned or great sea-faring heroes, we apprehend some aspect of eternal Reality. Myth, at its best, gestures to Christ. The life of Lewis was the best kind of myth. Not because he was sinless or brilliant, not because he was a legend, but because he turned every facet of himself to the love of God and that turns a person mythic in the end. Lewis did nothing by halves. From the point of his conversion he followed every logical conclusion demanded by faith. He shirked nothing. His books are certainly marked by reason, by beauty, by vivid imagination. But they are also shaped by an eminently practical faith. His frank, good-humored obedience to worship and pray, confess his sins and love his neighbor, succor the poor and bear the difficult made his very life “a permanent object of contemplation.” His was a heroic virtue, the “impossible or preternatural” virtue that comes through Christ, lived on the scale of the every day. The longer he lived, the more his own story was subsumed into the life of God. His life became a form, as he described, a fixed and lovely object, that gestured fully toward Reality. Perhaps any man who spends a lifetime loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength will begin to grow mythic in the end. The lines grow starker the longer you follow Christ. Sin gets sloughed away. The soul grows crystalline with love and the light of Christ shines through, “lovely to the Father in the features of men’s faces” (Hopkins). Lewis believed his own words in The Weight of Glory and “conducted all his dealings” in such a way that his life was the slow becoming of “everlasting splendor.” His way was not without pain and doubt. His books fully picture the inner dilemmas of temptation. He knew the struggle that comes with truly learning to love. And when death took his beloved wife, Joy, the book that he wrote voiced the anguished abandonment we know in loss. He knew the way that God himself seems to change when suffering obscures our sight. But I remember how Bishop Simon Barrington-Ward described him in the months after Joy’s death: as if he had fought a battle that cost him everything. And yet, “there was almost a light upon his face.” I don’t believe that the stories Lewis told or the truths he argued could wield such power today without the bedrock story of his faithful life. His writing and work were rooted in the primary story of his life. I think that perhaps even his remarkable ability to reconcile reason and imagination grew out of a life in which the concepts of Love were embodied by faith. He chose God and lived Love at every turn, and his life became a living story gesturing toward that Love. When the life of C.S. Lewis is considered, I often hear people wonder who the next Lewis will be. Young Christians are encouraged to pursue rigorous training in reason and apologetics, or aim for the best kind of literary education at a prestigious university. These are fine pursuits for believers who hope to emulate Lewis’s genius at cultural engagement and imaginative apologetics. But if we really want to raise up another Lewis or two, I think we have to start with our own hearts and follow the advice of Lewis himself: Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Look for Christ and you will get Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. Look for yourself and you will get only hatred, loneliness, despair, and ruin. Those words pounded down the corridors and echoed in the air at Westminster Abbey on the day of the memorial service. They came to us in Lewis’s own recorded voice, and they opened the service with a challenge. Everything that followed—the tributes and songs, the prayers and stories honoring Lewis’ life—was framed by his own ringing description of what he thought it meant to live, and live to the full. The story of Lewis confronted each of us present at the service with an invitation: to join the best story that has ever been told. To live the one true myth in Christ. Lewis once said that “you could never find a book long enough” to suit his taste. Like Lucy in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, who found the best tale ever told within the house of a great magician and wished she could read it forever, Lewis himself hungered from childhood to get inside of the great myths he loved. The great, joyous fact of his life was that he actually did. In his love of Christ, Lewis entered the one true myth of the world. He got right inside the best story ever told and his life became a living image of its beauty. And he calls to us, through the stories he left behind, to join him. “Further up and further in!” said Aslan… and Lewis. Shall we follow?

This post is part of the "Behind the Curtain"series in which creators share about the process of making their work and deeper themes behind it. Jonny Jimison is a cartoonist, illustrator, and the creator of the all-ages comic series The Dragon Lord Saga, published by Rabbit Room Press. In addition to drawing playful comics, he loves Thai food, fantasy stories, and playing tabletop games and video games with his wife Elise in their little home in Tennessee. He thinks that you're cool and would love to meet you - come say hello at www.jonnyjimison.com! Art begets art. When I started working on The Dragon Lord Saga, over a decade ago, I had no idea how far this idea would grow or how many people it would touch. But I knew whence it came: I love the epic fantasy world-building of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, rich in lore, backstory, and adventure. I love the classic comic strip humor of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and Walt Kelly’s Pogo — two classic comics are fun and exuberant and so joyfully visual. I’ve spent a lifetime absorbing the stories and art that delighted me, and the result was a unique new concoction I called The Dragon Lord Saga - part fantasy adventure, part cartoon comedy. If you’re new to the series, The Dragon Lord Saga is an epic fantasy in comic book form, told with playful character humor. It’s about two brothers, an impulsive knight named Martin and a cautious stableboy named Marco. Their journeys take them far from home, where they meet a bandit princess and a talking horse, encounter dragons and desperados, and discover a wild fantasy world far beyond their kingdom in the North. But there’s a new spin-off series, called Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga. It’s a series of short comics — a spin-off from the main series that you can read in any order. But more than that, it’s a comic book anthology! Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Tales was my template. After writing four Wingfeather Saga novels, Andrew enlisted a group of writers and illustrators to create their own stories in the world he had created. In the forward to Wingfeather Tales, Andrew writes that the anthology was necessary because “there were castle ruins and cities and jungles full of trolls that I hadn’t yet explored.” I had the same predicament: I’ve come to realize that there are areas of this fantasy world I’ve created that Martin and Marco will never see on their journey through The Dragon Lord Saga. In Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga, I’ve invited some of my favorite cartoonists to tell comic book stories set in my world… but with their own storytelling sensibilities and their own visual style. They went above and beyond, and created some truly incredible tales! It was ambitious to try to create an anthology comic in just six months. But it happened, it expanded to two issues, and we sprung the project on unsuspecting attendees as a surprise release at Hutchmoot! This was only possible because Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga was a collaboration from start to finish. Meet the Contributing Artists John Haney created a comic about a cat named Reginald and a hermit named Batholomew - a playful fable exploring the idea of “losing life by clinging to it and finding life by losing it.” His colorful, exuberant style brought something new to the world I had created, and together, he and I came up with the idea to have the storyteller interrupted mid-story, which set the overall tone for both books. Ben Humeniuk enlisted the help of the two biggest Dragon Lord Saga fans he knows - his kids, Ellie and Peter. Together, the three of them collaborated on a creepy, funny folktale with sly references to the main Dragon Lord Saga series. Their tale features two kids named Grace and Rocky, and the monsters they encounter in the dark woods. Ben, Ellie, and Peter had loads of fun planning the story and designing the characters… and you can feel it on the finished page! Jeshua Koilpillai introduced two new characters — short-tempered Tom Foolery and distinguished Robert Moneysworth — and took them to Snark Island, a location that I had placed on the map but had said nothing about in the books. You can tell in the ensuing adventure that Jeshua relished the opportunity to fill that blank slate with clever character designs, wild environmental world-building, and a comic adventure that escalates into pure comedic chaos before resolving into a happy ending! My wife, Elise Jimison, told a nautical tall tale of sea monsters, prophecy, and a ragtag group of sailors, rendering the whole story in stunning watercolor! I absolutely love watercolor comics, and I don’t see them often enough. Elise used her evocative painting to take us on a journey above the sea, below the sea, onto shore and back again… and she did it all in rhyme, with all the narration and dialogue told as a ballad of the high seas! Stephen Hesselman created Professor Hesselman’s Varmintpedia — creature profiles pairing a creature illustration with “academic notes.” Stephen wrote his notes in character as Professor Hesselman, a creature enthusiast in the world of The Dragon Lord Saga. His illustrations are a delight, and his creature descriptions make me giggle uncontrollably every time. Then there’s Will Kelly, who did the impossible: he took all these wildly different stories and came up with amazing cover illustrations that brought every tale together and beckoned us from the cover into the wild cacophony of delightful stories inside! He really helped tie together the themes of each book — stories from the forest in issue #1, and stories from the sea in issue #2. Even I got in on the act. In addition to overseeing the project, I ended up creating some framing narratives to wrap around the individual stories. My cue here was David Peterson’s Legends of the Guard, an anthology spin-off of his Mouse Guard graphic novels. In Legends of the Guard, Peterson created comics about his mouse characters sitting around the June Alley Inn, swapping stories. When a mouse begins a story, you flip the page and you’re suddenly inside that story, via a comic contributor to the anthology. I followed that pattern to create an eight-page story for each issue, showing the folks in The Dragon Lord Saga who are telling these tales … and just for fun, I made those storytellers my own in-story caricatures of the real-life contributors! My favorite thing about anthologies is the diverse spectrum of story styles and techniques, and I love how that plays out in Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga. Just as I drew from Tolkien’s fantasy and classic comic strips to create The Dragon Lord Saga, each of my contributors drew from their own influences, inspirations, and resources — as well as drawing from The Dragon Lord Saga itself. The results are art and story that never would have happened if we hadn’t all collided into art and story on these pages! Elise used her skill with watercolors, her sailing experience, and her love of monster stories to tell a nautical ballad about a giant sea monster. Ben collaborated with his kids, whose adventure-loving personalities shine through their folktale about monsters in the dark forest. John combined my fantasy world with story ideas he was already exploring, creating a tale larger than either of us could have created on our own. Stephen and Will took what everyone else was creating and remixed it in their own inimitable style. And while my fictional world impacted Jeshua’s story, he also put his mark on my comic — he came in at the eleventh hour to help color one of my framing narratives when the deadline was looming a little too heavy! Art begets art. Inspiration meets inspiration, and something new happens. It’s true of every story, but I love the way that Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga puts that in the front window and lets it shine! But I’ve saved my favorite story for last: We always knew that Elise’s story would take place on the high seas, but as an experienced sailor, creating that story prompted some questions. What elevations can be seen from sea level? Which nations in this fictional world are sea traders, and which have military navies? Would the tides behave as though there is one moon, like our world? Or is there more than one moon? Or NO moons? I had NEVER considered these questions before, and discussing them was so much fun that I asked Elise to create a sea chart for the seas of The Dragon Lord Saga, which she did with a pizzazz and authenticity that befits this wild world we’re creating. The chart is included in issue #2 of Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga. We put it in the center of the book, in case anyone wants to carefully pry up the staples and remove the chart for their own imaginary voyages. Elise brought her curiosity and scientific knowledge, and I brought the world I’ve been creating all these years. Together we created a sea chart that not only inspired her story, but is already inspiring spin-off stories of my own. Art begets art. I hope that the ideas, techniques and art styles in Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga inspire you to new ideas and stories as well! Click here for issue #1 of Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga. Click here for issue #2 of Tales From the Dragon Lord Saga. [For the record, Elise and I decided that the world of The Dragon Lord Saga has two moons. Because that sounds cool and I really wanted to draw that.]

I heard it said once in an interview with Michael Pollan that, when it comes down to it, every writer only really asks one question with their entire career. I can’t decide whether I agree with that assessment. As with all aphorisms, part of me straightens up in my chair with that feeling of eureka! It really is that simple! while another part of me sits back, scratches my chin, and bitterly mutters, That is entirely reductive and unfair to all writers. But, for the purposes of this review, I’ve managed to persuade my skeptical half that this observation is valid, because as I listen to J Lind’s songs, I find that they all ask one existentially rattling question: Where and how are we to find meaning given our inescapable condition of contingency? By contingency, I’m referring to the idea that everything depends upon everything else. For example, think about how you feel when you watch a nature documentary, and all of a sudden that cute little baby tiger is ravenously tearing apart a freshly dead antelope alongside its mother-huntress. Your discomfort arises from realizing that the health of this vulnerable, furry creature you’ve spent the last few minutes coming to know—this miraculous instance of life—is contingent upon the death of another miraculous instance of life. How can this be? How can life be contingent upon death, and vice versa? Is this how creation was intended or not? If you sit with these questions with anything approaching the earnestness of a child, you’ll find yourself very rattled indeed. J Lind’s album For What It’s Worth broadcasts this message from the moment you glance at its cover art. Taking cues from its title track, the cover depicts a tiger posing alongside a deer, accompanied by a vulture—a portrait of contingency. For more on that album, see my review. At its heart, The Land of Canaan is kindred to its predecessor, ultimately dealing with that same fundamental question of contingency. As for how it phrases that question, however, it’s worlds apart. You’ll find no neat and tidy parables here, no cleanly-stated morals, and no dramatic scenes of nature. Instead, before anything else, you’ll find in both the cover art and the first track the familiar and baffling story of Abraham in anguish on Mount Moriah after God has commanded him to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. This story—one of the most foundational religious stories in all of history—is a fitting choice to set the tone for an album that explores the human impulse towards religion, how that impulse can be spoiled, and how it finds its culmination in radical faith-amidst-contingency. Before I go any further, I think it would be helpful to zoom out for a quick aside about engaging with both art and scripture. My wise friend, Shigé Clark, mentioned her gratitude for the BibleProject’s How to Read the Bible podcast series, as it introduced her (and me) to the genre of “meditation literature:” stories which are meant to be entered into, pondered rather than analyzed, and soaked in like a hot bath. Meditation literature contains symbols, turns of phrase, and thematic head-nods that both aid the reader in interpretation and bind them together with the whole constellation of other stories that comprise the Bible. And, as Shigé pointed out to me, The Land of Canaan is itself something like a meditation on the meditation literature in which it is grounded. To help you get started engaging with this meditation of an album, I’ll introduce you to two threads I believe J has woven through it. These two threads begin to intertwine in the moments following any spiritual encounter, and together they form the frayed fabric of religious devotion. The first thread I’ll refer to as the moment of epiphany, and the second thread I’ll call the impulse towards religion. My hope is that these two threads will give you a head start in hearing what this album has to say and forming your own interpretation. We'll never begin the journey if we refuse to begin it precisely where our feet are currently planted. Drew Miller An unadulterated spiritual encounter—whether brought about by a near-death experience, a walk in the woods, a moment of prayer, or anything in between—is by definition an encounter with our own contingency. For example, when I stand on a ledge with a sheer drop-off underneath, it’s thrilling precisely because I can’t go any further. I’ve come up against my ultimate limitation, and it is that limitation which instructs me of my contingency upon the limitless. From such a space of profound human vulnerability, one small existential step can take us across the threshold from a mere “thrill” or “adrenaline rush” into what I’m calling a “moment of epiphany.” This step shifts our awareness from our nervous systems to our very souls with the felt knowledge that there is a Life that was here before we were and will be here long after we’re gone. This epiphany of grace comes naturally and frequently to children, who live their lives with a greater natural capacity for wonder than adults. It’s a form of pure spiritual experience, unburdened by doctrine or law or religion—for now. I say “for now” because none of us can live our entire lives in that state of childlike epiphany. It’s just not practical! We’d be constantly confronted with the fact of our mortality and the vastness of the universe, unable to get anything done. And so, as we grow up, we crystallize that moment of epiphany into a tale that forms the backdrop of our lives. We tell the tale over and over again, increasing our distance from the encounter itself with each re-telling. We codify our encounter with Life into a dependable set of instructions that assure us we are living our own small lives correctly. This movement is our impulse towards religion. It would be a mistake to stop here and privilege the moment of epiphany over religious instinct, or vice versa. The epiphany is as fleetingly miraculous and impossible to reproduce as a solar eclipse. And while it’s all too easy to demonize the religious instinct as nothing more than “putting God in a box,” it’s the only way we can make coherent sense of what has happened to us. We simply must tell some story about our encounter with Life. And so a spiritually rich life is woven in equal parts from these two threads, which are together constantly creating the conditions for us to choose radical faith-amidst-contingency. J does a marvelous job of spotlighting these two threads throughout The Land of Canaan. “Funny” begins with the presence of contingency in the songs of birds fighting for their lives (“Making music as a lifeline / that’s a funny way to sing”), then longs for the simplicity of the religious tale to take the edge off (“So here we go, back to the good times / Writing stories in the stars… That’s just who we are”). “Tangerine Skins” reminisces on the narrator’s childhood car rides with his dad, establishing an analogy with Abraham and Isaac’s journey to Mount Moriah in the process: “Where can I run? Your only son… I cannot say what it means to know you love me / You love me, Dad, I know.” It’s a song heavy with the epiphany of belovedness that makes life livable. But nowhere in The Land of Canaan do these two threads work together with such synchrony and nuance as in “City on a Hill.” In this single song, J simultaneously shows tenderness towards the moment of epiphany without sentimentalizing it and faithfully critiques the impulse towards religion without a trace of cynicism. The chorus of the song conveys both in stride: And were our hearts not burning within us? Did not the rocks cry, “this is why you’re here”? Let us defend this most holy mountain Let none disturb our city on a hill —J Lind, “City on a Hill” Notice how subtly the heart-burning, childlike awe of the first two lines turns to the ownership and line-drawing of the second two lines. Is it wrong to have a most holy mountain? I don’t think so. But who is the narrator seeking to defend it from? Where is the implied threat? In a variation on the chorus at the end of the song, the words shift: And were our hearts not burning within us? Did not the Lord say, “there’s no other way”? Let us protect this most precious garden Because we need it, the apple and the snake —J Lind, “City on a Hill” This is one of J’s playful moments of allusivity, where it’s impossible to totally grasp what he’s saying—but that very looseness, when grounded skillfully in a source text, makes for an excellent entry point into this meditative posture I mentioned before. I can practically hear the voice of Tim Mackie in my head saying, “Okay, now we’re working with the words garden, apple, and snake, which the author clearly intends to hyperlink us back to the story of the Fall.” Within my interpretive framework of the two threads—the moment of epiphany and the impulse towards religion—I would say that this line is citing the Fall as the origin point of Christianity’s religious story, the moment that establishes protagonist and antagonist, the boundaries of in and out. “We need it” in order to locate our own spiritual encounters, our own epiphanies, within a larger context of moral and narrative value judgments—preferably value judgments that will land us inside the “most precious garden.” What makes “City on a Hill” a truly great song is that it values that need for religious context as legitimate, even as it critiques the petrification and weaponization of it. Alexander Schmemann puts it very well in For the Life of the World: “Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man. But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.” And in many ways, that quote gets straight to the heart of The Land of Canaan: it explores the language of religion as a means of grappling with contingency in a world where this wall between God and humanity remains, yet has been promised to be removed once and for all. In an effort to give the listener plenty of space to enter into its meditative posture, The Land of Canaan politely refrains from didactic moralizing. However, if there’s any “moral of the story,” however implicit, it no doubt comes straight from J’s personal hero, Søren Kierkegaard. There are a smattering of moments throughout J’s album that instruct the listener make the leap from the comfort of the religious impulse to the existential tightrope of Kierkegaard’s faith-amidst-contingency. In the final verse of “So It Goes,” J joins Jesus in the moments before his arrest and crucifixion: While sweating in Gethsemane, I prayed one final prayer To find the crack in everything, the truth within the dare So now I’ll take up this old cross to see just how much I can bear There might not be a ‘why’ but I don’t know, I don’t care And so it goes, and so it goes… And in some way, I’m not alone And so it goes —J Lind, “So It Goes” The uniquely transformative gift of the Christian story is that it offers us just this portrait: God in Jesus holding the oh-so-human cup of contingency—praying, just as any of us would, that this cup would pass from him. But in the ultimate moment of self-surrender, Jesus drinks the cup in solidarity with humanity. And so it goes, and so faith becomes possible. Full disclaimer: I don’t know much about Kierkegaard. If you have questions, I bet J would be glad to engage with you in them. But I do know that in his work Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard enters into the story of Abraham and Isaac to investigate the nature of this faith-amidst-contingency. After giving Abraham a peek into the story of Israel, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac, whose very life is Abraham’s miraculous epiphany. In following God’s command, Abraham is brought to his own moment of self-surrender in the face of terrible contingency. In order to carry out God’s request, he must abandon every promise God has made to him—from the promise of his descendants outnumbering the stars to the promised Land of Canaan—and choose naked faith instead. It’s not until Abraham has raised the knife that God stops him, provides a ram in place of Isaac (J ends his album with the words “Agnus Dei,” by the way, which means “lamb of God”), and keeps all his promises. And so it goes, and so Abraham’s radical faith becomes the narrow passage into the entire story of the Bible. By situating his songs within this baffling story, J explores the interwoven threads of epiphany and religious impulse as a drama that takes place against the backdrop of Abraham’s faith. And that faith is the only honest place to go in this life—a surrender of certainty, of our “most holy mountains,” and even of our precious childhood epiphanies, in the hope (with a healthy dose of human doubt) that God will keep his promises. And yet this surrender, this faith-amidst-contingency, must not be treated as an end destination or a reward for “being good.” Cliff’s-edge moments have a way of finding us at various points in our lives without any of our help, and romanticizing them does nothing to help us make the leap of faith. I suppose that’s why J chose the title The Land of Canaan: it may be the promised land, but in a way, it’s not the point. So often, our own narratives of arrival somewhere else keep us from the terrifying gift of the present moment, which is the only way into faith to begin with. This is not to say that there will be no arrival or that there is no fabled “Land of Canaan” where all wrongs will be righted—it’s the promise of redemption that lends meaning to our human struggle to begin with—rather, it is merely to acknowledge that we’ll never begin the journey if we refuse to begin it precisely where our feet are currently planted. As J sings in some of his album’s final lyrics: When you reach the end and drop the pen and reach again, you’ll find That it’s the day that you’ve been waiting for ‘Cause it’s today that you’ve been waiting for —J Lind, “The Day That You’ve Been Waiting For” Listen to The Land of Canaan on Spotify and Apple Music. Visit J’s website and learn more about his music.

I think my paintings may be a subconscious protest. For me, they decry cheap imitations of Christ I have unknowingly been “gifted” along with my Christian upbringing. A plastic collection of bait-and-switch Jesuses. Messiah impersonators that tell me the Maker of the Universe is too disinterested in and disgusted by my earthly experience to provide me with needs intrinsic to my humanity. These Christs are too “spiritual” to care for the myriad and simple ways that brokenness has affected our very being in the world. A global pandemic, economic instability, rampant systematic injustices, the genocide of people in a remote land I’ll likely never be welcomed into, an ocean drowning in the irresponsible refuse of an endlessly consuming population, the declining mental health of a loved one who has been oppressed by years of unhealed festering trauma, and the scrounging survival of the homeless person who shelters in the alley behind my work building—these sufferings culminate like a hundred thousand little splinters too deeply buried for any easy remedy, just like the anxiety that constricts my chest by simply living on this spinning rock floating in the black void of space. These needs, big and small, are what weave the fabric of our humanity. The Gardener 20×24 Oil On Textured Canvas (Commissioned By Private Collector) To get my hopes up, to believe that Christ might care, seems irrationally vulnerable. Mary, the Magdalene, surprisingly mistakes Jesus for the very identity he embodies: a tender and attentive laborer caring for the wellbeing of his garden. A new Adam. The “Cosmic Gardener,” as theologian N. T. Wright calls him. He is slowly and steadily rearranging the universe according to his new order. She thinks this Gardener is too alive, too human to be the one for whom she is searching. Christ is not erasing the human story. His coup de grâce against the curse upon humanity is not the removal of my humanity. His final triumph is undying humanity. Joel Briggs In my daily sufferings with anxiety at the fragility of existence, a Christ who redeems me to an ambiguous half-existence of a floaty nirvana is destructive. No, I need a Christ who cares for my humanness—the joys, struggles, needs, wounds, and delights. I need a Lord and Savior who is redeeming me in my humanness. I need a Christ with dirt under his fingernails and oxygen in his lungs, who is bringing new order to the old chaos, new life to the old, worn-out wastelands. This Christ is not erasing the human story. His coup de grâce against the curse upon humanity is not the removal of my humanity. His final triumph is undying humanity— his physical resurrection, in which human thriving is defined. Perhaps our visions of hope realized were too informed by those cheap mimicries of Christ and their anemic visions of glory. The seemingly fragile promise of the inheritance of all creation is being held in the firm grasp of him who is both gardener and “first of the fruit” of his own garden. Hope seems irrational to our human sensibilities, which are profoundly accustomed to death. The very same Gardener tending these promises has ultimately and finally put death to death. Click here to follow Joel Briggs on Instagram.

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers interviews Philip Yancey, author of more than 25 books including What’s so Amazing about Grace, Disappointment with God, Where is God When It Hurts, and The Jesus I Never Knew. His most recent book, from 2021, is his memoir Where the Light Fell. In this episode, Philip and Jonathan discuss the complex interactions between identity, memory, and memoir, and the journey from fear to gratitude. Click here to listen to Season 4, Episode 5 of The Habit Podcast. Transcripts are now available for The Habit Podcast. Click here to access them. Sponsorship on the Podcast Network Are you interested in teaming up with us to support the work you love? Send an email to our Head of Development, Sarah Katherine, at sarahkatherine@rabbitroom.com if you are interested in becoming a sponsor of our Podcast Network. Rabbit Room Membership Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

In the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, there is a scene where Rory Neary cries into his mashed potatoes. He, along with several other people, have had an encounter with an extra terrestrial that has implanted a shared vision in their consciousness. The thing is, he’s not sure what the image from the vision is. He’s been trying to replicate it with anything he can find. He sees the shadow of it in pillow cases and shaving cream, but when he tries to form it, it’s just not right. As he shovels mashed potatoes onto his plate and begins to try to sculpt them into the image, his family looks on in horror. He starts crying, and then his son starts crying. Throughout the film he defends his odd behavior, saying “this means something”—even though he doesn’t know what. I know that feeling all too well, and I suspect you do too. We write songs and make videos and tell stories that seem to say, “I’ve seen this thing, and I’m trying to show you. So I wrote this song, I made this video…and it’s not quite right, but it means something.” It’s almost the thing, but not quite. And sometimes it’s so far off that I want to crumble it up and trash it. In fact I hate it—I hate the thing I made because it’s not even close to the thing I’m trying to show you. But we can’t stop trying. So over and over, we take our brutish hands and try to carve a river rock into a diamond, spin cotton into silk. But it’s never right, never perfect. It can feel disheartening, pointless even. And there is a certain truth to its pointlessness. We are never going to fashion a perfect replication of the vision. The great artists come close: Beethoven, Shakespeare, Van Gogh. But I have a suspicion that they were frustrated too, for compared to the thing itself, they were closer to our feeble works of art than the goal. What is the point then? Why even try? The ultimate goal is not to find the perfect image, but to let them all go in the face of an actual encounter with the one true God. Hetty White In the practice of Centering Prayer, there are many ways to enter, but one is through images. The monks at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit instructed me to picture getting in an elevator with the Trinity and riding down, down, down, to where my heart is and where encounter happens. Although starting with an image is helpful if like me you are visual, the ultimate goal is not to find the perfect image, but to let them all go in the face of an actual encounter with the one true God. What if all our art, songs, stories, and poems were perfectly imperfect image-elevators down to the heart of the one hearing them, to encounter the one true Artist themself? In a tense scene near the climax of the film, Rory Neary has thrown plants, dirt, chicken wire, and trash cans through the window into his house (much to the horror of his wife and kids) and is working on his biggest recreation of the image yet, when on the television he happens to see the very thing he’s been trying to sculpt: a monument in Wyoming called Devil’s Tower. He knows immediately that’s what he’s been trying to replicate and that’s where he has to go. The vision was a call to a meeting place with the mysterious creatures that implanted the vision in the first place. Isn’t that our hope? That all our brave attempts would be recognized in the end: “oh, that’s what you were trying to draw!” We would see the shadow of the Father’s face and recognize it from each other’s art and lives. And that we would all see and know the invitation to a meeting place, where everyone is invited.

“Home, is it just a word? Or is it something you carry within you?” In the opening minutes of Chloe Zhao’s film Nomadland, we see these words inked on the arm of an Amazon employee named Angela, who is showing off tattoos to her new friend, Fern. It’s a quick scene that may not seem particularly noteworthy, however, nothing in this movie is extraneous or insignificant. The words of this tattoo present us with both a portent of what’s to come and the central tension of the entire film. Fern (played by Frances McDormand) has recently endured back-to-back tragedies: the death of her husband and the closing of her longtime job at a gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada. Very soon, she will swap her belongings for a van and adopt the life of a nomad, crisscrossing the western United States in search of work and roadside community. As she meets other nomads, she will face questions that are at once timely and timeless: Where in this rapidly-changing world do I belong? How do I put down roots when all that was familiar has washed away? Can home be found on the edges of the maps? If you haven’t seen Nomadland yet, I heartily recommend it. The movie was named Best Picture at the 2021 Oscars, where McDormand and Zhao also won awards for acting and directing, respectively. I saw the film months ago, but I’m still thinking about it. Primarily, this is because it reminds me of someone who, on the surface, has little in common with the oddball wanderers of modern America: C. S. Lewis. Shortly after seeing Nomadland, I started reading Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy. In that book, Lewis recounts his decades-long journey to faith in Christ, tracing the impact of a mysterious sensation that he calls “Joy.” Lewis compares Joy to the German word sehnsucht, defining it as an “inconsolable longing” in the human heart for “we know not what.” What do the nomads of Zhao’s film have to do with Lewis’s Joy? I believe that Nomadland is packed with echoes of that bewildering, bittersweet desire. If we listen closely to those echoes, we can learn some profound things about both the nature of Joy and humanity’s search for that elusive destination: home. Shaken Loose According to C. S. Lewis, Joy is dynamic. It’s an elusive desire which appears unexpectedly and vanishes far more quickly than we want it to. While it may be sparked by familiar things—an illustration in a book, the smell of morning mist, or a glimpse of distant hills—it always surprises and unsettles us, compelling us to find it again. This is because of its fleeting nature and its unique intensity. Joy carries with it a sense of what Lewis calls “incalculable importance,” a transcendent spark that feels otherworldly and makes all other pursuits seem “insignificant in comparison.” Unlike other desires, we can’t manufacture or control it. As Lewis says, Joy “is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’” Joy is on the move, and it gets us moving, too. Once we’ve encountered it, we are never quite the same. The characters in Nomadland (many of them played by real-life nomads) have varied reasons for leaving society behind. Like Fern, some are bereaved and unemployed. Others are battling depression, chronic illness, or symptoms of PTSD. Still others are pursuing adventure and a deeper, richer way of life. Despite their differences, all of them have been shaken loose from what was familiar, launched into uncharted territory by experiences that changed them, rendering them unable or unwilling to thrive in traditional settings. Chloe Zhao highlights their uniqueness with close-up camera shots that dwell on weathered skin, lines etched in faces, and the glow of restless eyes. She invites us to empathize with these characters by lingering on numerous scenes of everyday life, work, and play. These mundane moments are punctuated here and there with scenes of astonishing beauty: buffalo rustling through a sea of tall grass, hundreds of birds wheeling in the air beside a cave wall, a sunset blazing over the Badlands, and a desert sky splashed with starlight. Like our own stories, the lives of Zhao’s characters are multifaceted—slow and meandering and chock-full of ordinariness, yet also riven with glory. Like Fern and her companions, those of us who have experienced what Lewis calls “the stab of Joy” and committed ourselves to pursuing its source are square pegs in round holes—what the Bible calls “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11). Having tasted a desire that no earthly comfort can assuage, we are compelled into motion. Our starting points may vary, but our quest is the same. We are drawn inexorably onward, lured by a high and holy wind that fills us with longing for something else, something more, and something beyond. We have no hope of controlling that wind, but if we allow it to carry us, we may find ourselves swept to places and people we never expected to encounter. Like Fern, we may find ourselves shedding old goals, old entanglements, and old coping mechanisms in our efforts to track down that peculiar spark, yet also discovering new joys along the way. We may traverse the highways and byways of the world, but we are no longer “of the world” (John 17:6). We have been displaced. On the Outside Looking In In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis describes Joy as an ache—a desire that, while pleasurable, is tinged with bitterness. This melancholy strain is not only a consequence of Joy’s absence, but is also an intrinsic part of Joy itself. Reflecting on his own experience of sehnsucht, Lewis identifies the feeling as something “almost like heartbreak.” Elsewhere, he calls it “a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss.” Joy as Lewis defines it is interwoven with grief. While Chloe Zhao’s film explores the appeals of life on the road, it refuses to romanticize the experiences of its subjects. Fern and her friends are vulnerable to many hardships, from difficulties finding stable work to the vicissitudes of the natural environment. Cinematographer Joshua James Richards underscores these struggles with camera shots that expose the vast, silent barrenness of the Badlands and the Arizona Desert. In such places, a broken van becomes a terrifying prospect. Fern’s relationships are laced with the sorrow of inevitable goodbyes. During one raw scene, her sister tells her, “I would have loved having you around all these years. You left a big hole by leaving.” Throughout the film, we see Fern repeatedly gravitating toward the firm beams and warm embers of family. Yet again and again, that old itch that Joni Mitchell dubbed “the urge for going” sends her retreating back into the wilderness. Frances McDormand’s performance here is masterful, betraying the depths of Fern’s yearning and grief in quiet, subtle expressions and the fires of a relentlessly searching gaze. The bitter aftertaste of Joy reminds us that despite its glories, our road is a hard one, and we are further away from the source of our longing than we had imagined. Jeshua Hayden In the pages of Scripture, we learn that suffering is part and parcel of our journey toward Joy. 1 Chronicles 29:15 connects life as a sojourner with the ache of continual transience: “Our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no abiding.” In his letter to the Jewish exiles, the Apostle Peter describes the Christian sojourn as a battleground, which is fraught with temptation and peril: “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11). Like the characters of Zhao’s film, those of us who chase Joy into the wild must eventually confront the fact that our best efforts to achieve happiness are imperfect. Beauty crumbles away, the fires of longing fade with time, and our thirst for lasting fulfillment collides with the reality that this world isn’t as it should be. The bitter aftertaste of Joy reminds us that despite its glories, our road is a hard one, and we are further away from the source of our longing than we had imagined. Like Fern, who thumps against the glowing windows of home with the persistence of a determined moth, we find ourselves on the outside looking in. Called Home Musing on the strange character of Joy, C. S. Lewis describes the desire as something akin to memory: “All Joy reminds.” On the final page of his autobiography, he elaborates this idea by comparing Joy to a signpost. Unlike other desires, Joy doesn’t merely lead us to the physical object or experience that inspired it. Instead, it points beyond itself to something that is farther off and more difficult to name. What does Joy remind us of, and where is it pointing us? Lewis answers these questions in his book Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” There is a reason why our encounters with sehnsucht feel otherworldly. That ache is a memory of another time and place—an echo of an Eden that was lost when humanity disavowed its creator and a seismic evil sundered the cosmos, fracturing everything in its wake. It is also a signpost pointing us to a time and place yet to come—to an Eden regained, healed of all the sin and sickness and sorrow that ravaged it. The Joy that Lewis writes about is a both a remnant of paradise lost and an invitation from the God who is making all things new again. In the last analysis, it’s a call to come home. Near the beginning of Nomadland, a girl asks Fern if she is homeless. “No, I’m not homeless,” Fern replies. “I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?” Throughout the film, as we watch Fern roam from place to place, we’re invited to ask ourselves that very question. Is home a physical place, or is it something that we take with us? Can those without roots ever truly be at home in this world? Zhao’s film challenges us to linger in spaces of tension, inviting us into the physical and existential wilderness that Fern and her friends must navigate. We’re encouraged to walk a mile in their shoes—to see ourselves as fellow sojourners, set adrift between the past we’ve left behind and the future we’re longing to participate in. As we read in Hebrews 13:14, those of us who await God’s new creation “do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” Like Fern, we’re still on the road. Yet for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, there is profound consolation to be glimpsed in Nomadland, tattooed on an Amazon worker’s arm. In the Apostle John’s depiction of the New Jerusalem, we witness the ultimate balm for our homesickness: our savior, Jesus, dwelling among the people he has redeemed by his blood. He, more than any physical space, is our truest home—the source of our Joy and the satisfaction of our longings. What comfort does this vision offer us in our wilderness wanderings today? Elsewhere in the New Testament, Christians are told that the same savior who will one day welcome us home now lives within each of us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Faced with the questions posed by Angela’s tattoo, we can honestly answer, “Yes and amen.” Yes, home is just a word; more specifically, it is a name. And yes, it is also something we carry within us—a fellow traveler, who has promised to be with us “to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). Reflecting on Nomadland and its resonances with Lewis’s Joy, we might find ourselves agreeing with the words of George MacDonald: “Yea, no home at last will do, but the home of God’s heart.”

The Local Show is returning next month to North Wind Manor! As we prepare to get the new season underway, I want to talk a little bit about why I love being a part of it. In order to do that, however, I need to share some reflections I’ve had this week. Despite what social media might have us believe, culture—the perspectives, practices, and priorities of a particular people—doesn’t change rapidly. Rather, culture change happens slowly and locally. Most often, you can’t even recognize it has happened until you’re looking in the rearview mirror. I was reminded of these truths last week while watching a new Showtime documentary titled You’re Watching Video Music Box. The film, directed by hip-hop legend Nasir “Nas” Jones, explores the history of hip-hop from its largely underground status in 1983 to the present through the lens of one of its most faithful documentarians, Ralph McDaniels. In 1983, McDaniels recognized something important was happening in parties across New York City and set out to make a TV program on public access television. Despite its humble, local placement (compared to the national reach of later show Yo! MTV Raps), Video Music Box became an integral part of New York City in the ’80s and ’90s, offering virtually unknown artists a platform to refine their craft and promote their music to their city. Some of those underground artists included Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige, and Wu-Tang Clan. You may have heard of them. While those artists went on to become global superstars, McDaniels remained rooted in his NYC community, filming local shows and building community one TV interview or shout-out at a time. Side note: apparently the idea of doing a “shout-out” to someone literally came from Video Music Box. Mind blown. Anyways… McDaniels’ commitment to the roots of his community—allowing art to nourish community and community to nourish art at a neighborly level—reminds me why I love organizing our Local Show at the Rabbit Room. Our songwriters’ round is nothing flashy. It’s not pretentious. It’s not about being the next viral thing. It’s just four artists and their instruments, a few dozen community members, some forgotten lyrics, plenty of jokes, probably tears. It’s a picture that in some ways looks so different from the one McDaniels painted in NYC. But underneath, I think there’s a lot of shared understanding. Our goal at The Local Show is to create a space for connecting, where musicians and storytellers in our local community have a chance to share their gifts with their neighbors, and then have a scone (or three) together. Chris Thiessen Sure, we like to talk about changing culture. We long to see the world redeemed. We hope that what we do—the music we make, the conversations we have—makes a difference. And we want it ASAP. But changing culture, especially on a large scale, can’t be our aim. Rather, it’s a result of good, faithful work. And so our goal at The Local Show—like that of Ralph McDaniels at Video Music Box—is to create a space for connecting, where musicians and storytellers in our local community have a chance to share their gifts with their neighbors, and then have a scone (or three) together. Here, roots are watered. Music is made. God is glorified. I’m thrilled to be a part of it and to hear those whispers breathing life into the world. As we look ahead to the rest of 2022, we’ve decided to make The Local Show a monthly endeavor at North Wind Manor, rather than two biweekly seasons as it has been in the past. So beginning on March 1st, the Local Show will be hosted at North Wind Manor every first Tuesday of the month going forward (with probable exceptions in December and January). Tickets for the March 1st show are going on sale today, and you can buy those here. More shows will be announced soon via social media and at www.rabbitroom.com/events. Additionally, in an effort to better foster the local-ness of The Local Show, we are going to scale back the livestreamed nature of the show. We will, therefore, be livestreaming one show per quarter moving forward. This allows us to still connect our neighbors across the globe with the show every so often, while also allowing us to remove the cameras and focus on being more present in the room for the other two shows. We will announce with plenty of heads up which shows will be livestreamed, and they will remain free to everyone as always! So get your tickets now and watch your email for more updates on The Local Show. We’ll see you there! P.S. I’d like to do a shout-out to all the donors and sponsors that have made this community-building, art-creating work possible over the years. If you’re interested in partnering with us and learning more about what it means to be a sponsor, we’d love to talk with you! Please reach out to Sarah Katherine at sarahkatherine@rabbitroom.com