The third in a weekly, six-part Lenten series exploring themes of human frailty and suffering through music, story, and art. This week’s post features art by Brooke West and Mark Meynell’s reading of “A Liturgy for the Anniversary of a Loss,” from Doug McKelvey’s Every Moment Holy, Vol. II. An Image: Heart by Brooke West Brooke reflects on the moment that led to this piece: Looking at this piece still makes me physically ache, and it’s about six years old. I created it one morning, on the heels of some sweet journaling and prayer time, while my kids were still sleeping and the house was quiet (those beautiful, stolen moments are so few and far between!). My oldest child had just started kindergarten, and the realization that a piece of my heart was skipping around outside my body (and outside of my control) took my breath away that morning. This piece has become a nonverbal lament and a concession of my powerlessness in the face of a big, scary, unknown world. —Brooke West A Liturgy for the Anniversary of a Loss I have felt its approach in the back of my mind, O Lord, like a burden tilting toward me across the calendar. I have felt its long approach, and now it has arrived. This is the day that marks the anniversary of a loss, and waking to it, I must drink again from the stream of a sorrow that cannot be fully remedied in this life. O Christ, redeem this day. I do not ask that these lingerings of grief be erased, but that the fingers of your grace would work this memory as a baker kneads a dough, till the leaven of rising hope transforms it from within, into a form holding now in that same sorrow the surety of your presence, so that when I look again at that loss, I see you in the deepest gloom of it, weeping with me, even as I hear you whispering that this is not the end, but only the still grey of the dawn before the world begins. And if that is so, then let that which broke me upon this day in a past year, now be seen as the beginning of my remaking into a Christ-follower more sympathetic, more compassionate, and more conscious of my frailty and of my daily dependence upon you; as one more invested in the hope of the resurrection of the body and the return of the King, than ever I had been before. Let this loss-hollowed day arrive in years to come as the kindling of a fire in my bones, spurring me to seek in this short life that which is eternal. Let the past wound, and the memory of it, push me to be present with you in ways that I was not before. Do not waste my greatest sorrows, O God, but use them to teach me to live in your presence—fully alive to pain and joy and sorrow and hope— in the places where my shattering and your shaping meet. Amen. Click here to download “A Liturgy for the Anniversary of a Loss.”

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Benjamin Myers, author of A Poetics of Orthodoxy: Christian Truth as Aesthetic Foundation. In A Poetics of Orthodoxy, poet Ben Myers makes the case that Christian orthodoxy provides a “reality-based way of knowing what kinds of poetry, what poetic characteristics, most resonate with true human experience.” Poetry, he argues, is a kind of re-incarnation (not THAT kind of reincarnation), and so works against the disembodying tendencies of the digital age. In this episode of The Habit Podcast, Ben Myers and Jonathan Rogers discuss the dangers of gnosticism and the embarrassment caused by beauty, among other things. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 8 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.

Five years ago, the Rabbit Room restructured as a 501(c)3 non-profit and one of the great benefits of that decision was the formation of the Board of Directors, a group of people that generously donate their time and energy to come alongside us and help guide the organization. These folks have been a huge blessing over the years, and Kenny Woodhull has led the charge as our Chairman of the Board. He brought with him a wealth of experience and wisdom, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the Rabbit Room wouldn’t be what it is without his leadership. This past December, Kenny stepped down as the Lord called him to serve others and pursue other opportunities. We wish him all the best and look forward to seeing him back at North Wind Manor in the years to come, not to balance a budget, but simply to hang out and enjoy the company. Thank you, Kenny. We’re grateful. Kenny Woodhull But as Kenny moves on, we’re delighted to announce that two others are stepping into the ranks to help guide the Rabbit Room in its mission. Over the years, we’ve developed close relationships with both of these new members and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome them to the Rabbit Room’s Board of Directors. Drumroll please: Santosh John joins us from Atlanta where he’s spent the past few years planting house churches and developing his vision for a non-profit organization that aims to help 3rd-cultural people find their voices, tell their stories, sing their songs, and build for the Kingdom. He and his family have been invaluable friends over the years and have been a frequent sounding-board and source of wisdom in our lives. It’s with great pleasure that we welcome him to the Rabbit Room board with his wealth of experience and his passion and love for the Kingdom. (Click here to watch Santosh’s Hutchmoot: Homebound session.) Santosh John Buddy Greene has been making music in Nashville (and around the world) for more than 30 years, and many of you will know him for, if nothing else, his mad harmonica skills at the Behold the Lamb of God shows at the Ryman. But more than a mere musician, Buddy is also a lover of the Gospel, a passionate student of Scripture, and a man with a heart for people and especially for cross-cultural bridge-building. His amiable wisdom and ready laugh have been a gift to many of us over the years, and it’s with great thanks that we welcome him into the work of the Rabbit Room. (Click here to watch Buddy’s Hutchmoot: Homebound session.) Buddy Greene We’re genuinely overwhelmed by the blessing of these three men and the generous devotion of their time. It’s with great anticipation that we look forward to working with Santosh and Buddy in the years ahead. So welcome to the crew. We’re glad you’re here.

This October, from North Wind Manor in Nashville, Tennessee, we’re once again sending you a taste of the Rabbit Room in the form of Hutchmoot: Homebound. Over the course of this multi-day digital event, you and your family and friends will be able to access a rich variety of content including music and, as always, sessions and workshops on art, music, and story from a variety of speakers. We even have a few surprises in store. But on top of all of that, we aim to provide you with tools and opportunities to connect with people in real time right where you are, wherever you are (and yes, that includes international folks). Once the event is over, we hope you’ll feel the boundaries of home have expanded to include new faces, new voices, and new ideas. There’s no limit to how many can join. So everyone who wants to join the feast will be able to find a seat at the table. What to Expect If you are unfamiliar with Hutchmoot: Homebound, here’s the rundown: it’s a digital event spanning from Friday, October 8th to Sunday, October 10th. It began last year as a way of holding our annual arts conference (Hutchmoot) without putting any participants at risk of contracting coronavirus, and it was so much fun that we’ve decided to do it again this year. All tickets will grant you complete access to the private Hutchmoot: Homebound website where content will be shared over the course of these three days. This website will function as the main hub of the event. We are beyond excited to share that our Keynote Speaker for Hutchmoot: Homebound 2021 will be the one and only Malcolm Guite. There will also be plenty more speakers, musicians, and artists of all sorts—stay tuned as we continue to share more information. Beyond Digital One of our favorite parts of last year’s Hutchmoot: Homebound was the many creative ways that guests were able to connect with one another, even from a distance. So just like last year, we will be providing you with a set of tools and opportunities to help you foster community right where you are. And finally, even though Hutchmoot is online this year, we believe it should be more than merely digital, so once again we are putting together a box of mysteries just for you: the Mystery Moot Kit. What’s inside? You’ll have to wait and see, but its contents will make the Hutchmoot: Homebound experience all the more tactile and special, should you choose to request one. Tickets Choose the option that’s right for you: $50 – Complete Package (includes Mystery Moot Kit) ($60 International) Available ONLY while Mystery Moot Kit supplies last (or until July 1st)! Complete access to all Hutchmoot: Homebound website content (sessions, music, chats, and other surprises), plus we’ll mail you our Mystery Moot Kit, which includes all kinds of supplies that will help you make the most of your Hutchmoot experience. $150 / $250 – Small Group Package (for 5 or 10 people) Available ONLY while Mystery Moot Kit supplies last (or until July 1st)! If you’d like to invite friends over and participate in Hutchmoot as a small group, we’ve got you covered. This package offers complete access to all Hutchmoot: Homebound website content (sessions, music, chats, and other surprises) for ONE account so that you can project video to a device of your choice at home. And we’ll ship the contents of 5 or 10 Mystery Moot Kits so everyone gets their own materials. *If you choose the small group package, we strongly encourage you to abide by the regulations in place in your area to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Please do keep the group small and act responsibly for the good and well-being of your neighbors.* FAQ We’ve tried to cover all the bases, but we realize that there are lots of moving pieces and you may have a question that hasn’t been addressed by this post. That’s why we’ve put together this FAQ page on the Hutchmoot: Homebound website. There you will find answers to questions practical, logistical, and existential (if you’re lucky).

On a bench in our kitchen, visible from every part of the room, there is an old screw top jar decorated with a strip of fading wallpaper and some ribbon that was once glossy and smooth. We call it our memory jar. Throughout the year we fill it with scribbled memories of little moments that would easily be forgotten. Silly jokes. Spontaneous picnics. Thoughtful gestures. Each New Year’s Eve we put on a pot of tea and open the jar, taking it in turns to relive some of the memories from the year that has passed. There is always a lot of laughter, punctuated with shouts of That was so cute! and Oh, Yes! I had completely forgotten about that! and Let’s do that again this year! As last year rolled relentlessly on with all its inherent uncertainty, we began to notice something unexpected. Over the past few years, as our girls have grown and life has become busier, it has taken less time to empty the jar. However, by the summer of 2020 the jar was already pretty full. By autumn it was packed, and by the start of winter you had to push the bits of paper down to squeeze another in. Despite the challenges, there was much about 2020 that was good. As we adjusted to the enforced rhythms of a quieter, more solitary life, I confess I entered our first lockdown with a pervading sense of optimism. Not for all that was unfolding in our world, but for the silver lining of unbroken time with family. Opportunities to put right the things I regret. Time to read and bake and just talk. Time to study the Bible with my daughters and pray with my husband. Time to make memories and laugh and do school in a whole new way. The biggest surprise was the grief that ran just below the surface of even the good memories. Heidi Johnston All those moments, and many more that I hadn’t anticipated, will stay with me forever. If I’m honest, by September I was already mentally drafting a post about the rich beauty that can be found in the midst of so much darkness. However, as we sat down to open our memory jar on New Years Eve, the biggest surprise was the grief that ran just below the surface of even the good memories. So many of the things we chose to recollect began with the words “even though it was hard” or “even when we were finding it tough.” For the first time since the tradition began, even though previous years have held more specific and overtly painful challenges, the opening of the jar released more tears than laughter. In a way that we hadn’t fully named until that moment, it became clear that each of us had quietly begun to measure success simply in terms of survival. For me, the most unexpected aspect of this pandemic has been one that I am still processing. It would be so much easier if I could simply list the things I have learned but life is rarely that linear and, for now, I still have as many questions as answers. I am, however, becoming aware that God has been using this time of quiet and isolation to refine me in unexpected ways. To call it refining is an act of desperate hope because, right now, it still just feels like breaking. All this time at home has meant facing my own brokenness in a way that busyness and noise had previously allowed me to avoid. It turns out that silence and isolation have a way of stripping back your defences. Among other things, I’ve realised consciously for the first time that I have a distinct and powerful bias towards legalism. This tendency first became apparent as I struggled to keep up with the new coronavirus regulations. Here, in the UK, there was a new coronavirus briefing every day. Regulations and restrictions, sometimes dependant on your postcode, were either tightened or relaxed. To make matters worse, in Northern Ireland we were getting simultaneous briefings from our First and Deputy First Ministers (one after the other) with different regulations again. The tension of trying to work out which rules applied and then ensuring that my family complied as best we could created a constant underlying stress. Gradually, the Holy Spirit began to nudge my consciousness with the suggestion that my desire to keep the rules wasn’t limited to the pandemic. Even when it comes to faith, the exhausting tyrants of perfection and legalism are always there, breathing over my shoulder and laughing at what I perceive to be my failures. We are spending time as a family but we are fighting too much. We are studying the Bible but it’s too rushed. We’re eating good meals but I resent that I’m the one doing all the cooking. We’re watching movies but the plots are too light. They aren’t teaching us about redemption. It’s remarkable how often I take God’s blessings and turn them into frantic attempts to achieve an unattainable standard, cheapening the grace that has already been so extravagantly secured on my behalf. Grasping for something that was never promised while at the same time forfeiting the peace that is my birth right as a child of God. As a concept, brokenness is a common theme in Christian circles, and rightly so. Yet there is a danger (for me anyway) of putting an almost romantic spin on it. It’s often the veil I pull over my sin to make it acceptable. It’s the bias I allow myself when mentally comparing my weaknesses with the sin of others. Unlike the concept, the reality of brokenness cannot be spun. When God gives us a glimpse of our own foolish rebellion it’s hard to do anything but weep. The season of Lent is both a fitting companion for this unsettling grief and a bright shard of hope that removes the sting of despair. Heidi Johnston The season of Lent is both a fitting companion for this unsettling grief and a bright shard of hope that removes the sting of despair. Amidst so much that seems fragile and unsure, Lent offers the inescapable certainty that it will be followed by Easter and the glorious, transforming truth of the resurrection. God doesn’t bring us low so that he can keep us there. If he allows us to see the horror of who we really are, it is always so that we can look with fresh eyes at the truth of who he is. There is a powerful refrain in Rend Collective’s “Weep With Me” that says, “Turn this lament into a love song.” If I have one prayer for this season of my life, that would be it. Sometimes it takes a glimpse of our own brokenness, in all its inescapable ugliness, to turn our eyes back to the only one who can be utterly, completely and forever relied upon. If I have slipped into a view of holiness that relies on my own achievement, then the grace of God’s breaking is not to release me from a desire for holiness, but to transform my restless striving into holiness that is a response to the outrageous love of God. Even when the piercing light of God’s presence illuminates things that cause us temporary pain, our greatest joy will always be found there, reveling in his grace and cultivating the kind of authentic holiness that, while it may be difficult, is ultimately grace-filled and life-giving. When we see what we are capable of, sin may grieve us more deeply but it will shock us less, not only in our own lives but also in the lives of others. It is no more within my power or my calling to save myself than it is to force others to submit to Christ’s rule in their lives, however noble I believe my intentions to be. Our family has been watching The Chosen over the past few weeks and one line, spoken by Peter’s wife, has been lodged in my mind. Overwhelmed by the impact of Jesus in her own life, she says to Peter, “Thank you for obeying and following Him. You led Him here.” What if the best way to impact the lives of others is to cultivate a heart that is alert to his voice and responding in obedience? What if the very things that will lead others to Christ are the humility and love which overflow from the grace that has been lavished on us? If anything has become clear in the last twelve months, it’s that building our identities around things that are shakeable, whether around or within us, will leave us constantly at the mercy of any new storm that blows through our lives. Systems will fail us. People will let us down. Some days we will glance in the mirror and come face to face with our own, sometimes staggering, failures. Yet it is at this very point—when my own sin is exposed, my fearful heart is laid bare and all that is shakeable has been shaken—that I am drawn back once again to the cross. There, because of all that Christ has done, I find myself in possession of the very thing I have so spectacularly failed to procure through my own efforts. Written in grace, the banner over me declares: “Holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation” (Col. 1:22).

The fourth in a weekly, six-part Lenten series exploring themes of human frailty and suffering through music, story, and art. This week’s post features art by Kyra Hinton and a live performance of “Wheel of Love” by Ella Mine. An Image: “Dust to Life” by Kyra Hinton Kyra tells the story behind this piece: This piece was created on a foundation of prayers; of wrestling with the Creator of a people broken and breaking. The words under the paint are of grief and anger that the name of a just and loving God has been used alongside so much evil and hatred. Where is the God who threatens millstones around the necks of those who lead astray the little ones? If there will be justice, will there also be mercy for those who only knew His name to be synonymous with hatred? Can He rise beyond the flags of misrepresentation, and bring them close? Creating this piece was an act of working out these fears and longings. As I did, words once covered up rose to the surface, promising hope beyond my understanding. —Kyra Hinton A Song: “Wheel of Love” by Ella Mine

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, history professor at Calvin University and author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Jonathan and Kristin discuss stories as a means of reframing reality, the role of fear in political storytelling, and confirmation bias. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 9 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 once read a story about a man scurrying furtively home from work, and trying not to draw attention to himself. He hears a group of people call derisively after him in a language he doesn’t understand. He passes a racial slur in graffiti on the wall of his building. As he hunkers down to his family meal in a squalid, noisy apartment, he reflects on his beautiful home (a place of familiar languages, and of plenty), and the tickets in his pocket that will finally take them back. I can’t remember the name of the story, but I remember how well it caused me to imagine the insecurity and the unhomeliness of this man’s life as a refugee. Some time later, I thought about that story again when I found myself addressed in 1 Peter in these words, “Dear friends […] aliens and strangers in the world” (2:11). Another version renders it “foreigners and exiles.” I acknowledge I have never been a refugee, and apart from borders closing behind me if I leave this country to go home, I have not experienced being trapped somewhere against my will. But I do know what it is to be an exile and a stranger in this world. Oh, how I know it. What drew me first to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead books was how well she seemed to know it too. What I read that day in 1 Peter, in those oddly reassuring words, was that there was some deep reason—beyond depression, beyond heartache, beyond burn-out—that I felt an ache of un-belonging, of being crucially out of sync. It thrums deep in my very soul: not created for this world. Home is somewhere else. As it happens, my home is another country, and I will be packing to leave this one soon, possibly for ever. So, when I first picked up Robinson’s much anticipated 2020 novel Jack, my touch was light: I was careful not to mark the book, withholding my loyalty and usual pencilled engagement (because it had a cover I did not like and I was not too conflicted about replacing it once I got home with the version that matches the rest of my set). But it pulled a response from me. I began using bits of paper to mark pages (never have a bookmark on hand), and then committed to underlining phrases in a light pencil. Soon afterwards I was literally writing the questions that the text raised in its margins. It was like a conversation, with my contribution beside the text, and scribbled all over the receipt that came with it. My mute feeling of strangeness in the world thrilled as I read an author that gave it voice again. Although the novel gave me much cause for reflection, not least of which is a commentary on race relations, I found myself instead pondering the loneliness that comes from pursuing harmlessness as a virtue. Loneliness is a global pandemic—and in times of COVID-19, I do not use that word lightly. Robinson’s books always seem to resonate with that old friend. During the pandemic, the world has internalised this vocabulary of harm and consequence in a way that we never have before. We “may not worry so much for our own sakes,” for example, but we would hate to harm someone else by accident. Jack’s modest ambition is to live out his life without causing harm to others. He’s the prodigal son of a small-town preacher, and yet it seems that “harmlessness was more than he could aspire to” (Jack 138). He just seems to cause harm wherever he goes. It is a heart-breaking self-portrait. It made me wonder if harmlessness is the goal of many people. Of course, it isn’t put across in so many words. When people speak about what kind of legacy they might want to leave behind, their answer is more the positive statement of that idea of harmlessness: I’d like to do good, to be remembered as good, to leave the world a little better: essentially, not to do bad. To be, in effect, harmless. To cause less harm than good so that whatever imprint of you is left, good or bad, the result is balanced. Robinson seems to suggest, however, that there is inevitable collateral damage. Even Jack’s efforts to keep himself aloof, unattached, and cause no ripples, leaves him lonelier. We are irredeemably and hopelessly human, brushing up against other irredeemable and hopeless humans. Harm is an occupational hazard. As John Ames mused, “a thing that does not exist in relation to anything else cannot be said to exist itself” (Gilead 54). We exist in relationship, however flawed or redemptive these relationships may be. I first met Jack in Robinson’s first book in this series, Gilead. Like John Ames, its narrator, I was a little suspicious of Jack at first. In the sequel, Home, I cried over him—for his lostness and desperation to belong, irretrievably (and unaccountably) outside. Home, the emblematic location where one is supposed to feel most “at home,” is strange and alienating to Jack—so much so that one day he is halfway through a suicide attempt before his sister Glory catches him. Although this distressing episode serves to make her even more empathetic to Jack’s tortured state, it simultaneously estranges them further. Glory is stripped of any illusion she may once have had about her impact on him; to hold in contempt all her efforts to love him out of his loneliness, his actions even strike her as uncommonly selfish. To Ames, Jack is only the agent behind a spate of premeditated and malicious pranks. These acts, which are to Ames incomprehensible, hamper his compassion for Jack: they are “sly and lonely” mischief (Gilead 208). Only many years later, he at last begins to ask himself “How lonely would a child have to be to have time to make such a nuisance of himself?” (208). Yet the reader is never without some modicum of compassion for Jack. In him the loneliness of the world is writ large. Robinson seems to suggest that loneliness is both inherent and unavoidable, something which, despite human effort, can never quite be overcome. If, as Henri Nouwen has written, loneliness is the 'deep incision on the surface of our existence,' then there is something beautiful in that we all share the same scar. Amy Stimson Despite his aspiration to harmlessness, Jack feels a desperation, as do we all, to mark “a sort of ‘I exist!’” (102) on some corner of the world, to be heard, to be met there and acknowledged. Though he is terrified to be known in all his wretchedness, at the same time he is longing to be seen. In some way, even his acts of self-sabotage, that preclude him from all manner of relationships and employment, are a kind of confession. Those petty thefts and fickleness, his misdemeanours, are a showing and a self-declaration. They are meant to shatter the illusions of those who think too well of him. He cannot bear to enjoy a person’s love or good opinion, believing it to be built on delusion. Even what he wears tells this story. Clothes make the man just as actions do. He reflects often that his clothes make a hypocrite of him. The first time he meets Della, she mistakes him for a pastor. So he covers himself with wretchedness, thinking he has spared anyone having better reasons for hating him than he had already given. Painfully aware of his traitorous appearance, whatever he wears, he is nevertheless a naked man in his clothes, a literal and figurative fabrication of himself or (something he fears more) a full revelation of the very worst of him. In Jack I read the deepest fears of broken humanity, but also of my own heart. I was reminded of something Timothy Keller once wrote, that “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known but not loved is our greatest fear. To be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God” (The Meaning of Marriage). I am always aware of the gaps Robinson leaves, so that where human relationship and interaction fail, the reader feels the need for the God who steps into the breach. Keller’s observation touches the tragedy at the heart of Jack’s story. Jack refuses love on the grounds that anyone who really knows him could not love him. Yet he clothes himself with mystery, enjoying various guises—a reverend minister, a professor, a stranger named Bradshaw, “Slick,” or “That White Man”—afraid of his deepest unloveliness. But to be truly known and truly loved? In some ways, Robinson writes grace into Jack’s story so profoundly that everything can be viewed as grace. Jack’s brother Teddy is an unflinching source of remedial grace. Della is the embodiment of unconditional love that gradually loves Jack a little out of his obscurity, the same Christlike way that Ames loves his wife in Lila. There is a kind of redemption for Jack in his own book—and even the events in this narrative shed light and bring beauty to bear upon events in the others, especially in Home. It makes me think that if, as Henri Nouwen has written, loneliness is the “deep incision on the surface of our existence” (The Wounded Healer 84), then there is something beautiful in that we all share the same scar. The Teddys and the Dellas (and even the Ameses, to some extent) hint at the hope that even if we have other scars, deeper wounds, greater wretchedness, there is One who looks even on those, and loves, despite it. Jack’s tragedy, and perhaps ours, is that we don’t trust the “despite.”

The Hutchmoot Podcast features some of our favorite sessions recorded at our annual conference which celebrates art, music, story, and faith in all their many intersections. Today, it is our pleasure to share Ruth Naomi Floyd’s session “A Theology of the Blues & Belonging” from 2020’s Hutchmoot: Homebound, in both video and audio form. You can watch Ruth’s session below, in which she explores how the blues were birthed from the African American Spirituals, which is the root of American music. This body of music is deeply Christian in its pursuit of justice, and its lament is the ache for human dignity and belonging. Click here to listen to this episode of The Hutchmoot Podcast.

Tish Harrison Warren’s book Prayer in the Night is out in the world now. In it, her dark night of the soul is framed in the context of Compline from the Book of Common Prayer: Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, Soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; And all for your love’s sake. Amen. —Compline, The Book of Common Prayer This is nothing like an objective review. Sheesh, it’s probably not really a review. It’s a week or so later than Drew Miller asked me to have this because Tish and her family just stayed with us in Nashville during their move from Pittsburgh to Texas, and we needed to clean up the house out of “pandemic comfortably dirty” mode to “we can move everybody around and fit two families in” mode. Also, I make a cameo in the book. So: not objective. The Warrens are some of our closest friends, the kind of people with whom we might just possibly up and create a commune. It comes up every time we hang out. Praying daily prayer and homeschooling and writing books and gathering people and brewing beer and building stuff and raising chickens and goats… we’d do that. The gift of Prayer in the Night is that, even if you are not mentioned by name, she is telling your story of being in the dark. Tish is lighting candles for you. Katy Bowser We first met when I was on the Indelible Grace tour (twenty years ago?) and had been in a van full of guys for a month. She was an intern at a church in Winston-Salem, and invited me out for a beer and girl time. A couple of years later I hung out with her (and her Jonathan and my Kenny) at a crawfish boil in High Shoals, GA. Then we ran into them on a friend’s porch in my Nashville neighborhood, and not long after the Warrens moved in two blocks away. We had babies, we strolled around East Nashville solving the world’s problems and learning how to be moms. Our friendship has mostly developed over one decade, but a lot has happened in this one decade, for each of our families. So, as Tish wrote, I prayed for protection around her. It couldn’t have been easy work. There are two wonders about Prayer in the Night. The first is that it sounds just like Tish. As many reviewers have commented now, it’s like sitting with a close friend and pouring your hearts out. It’s so personal. Tish wrote it after a heartbreaking year. She had too many dear ones die, and she came far too close to dying. She did not come by this book lightly. Secondly, not unlike her acclaimed Liturgy of the Ordinary, she chooses a form that has shaped her heart and mind to shape her story. Prayer in the Night begins with crisis, with Tish in emergency miscarriage. While bleeding profusely and being rushed into the hospital, she calls to Jonathan to pray Compline with her. She joins ranks with the Church Invisible in a prayer prayed in the dark for centuries, planting herself in the context of the big story, and calling on the God who is telling it. Like Chaunteceleer in Wangerin’s The Book of the Dun Cow, she is crowing the most real reality into the blackness. In her chapter “Soothe the Suffering,” Tish observes: Scripted prayers—the prayers of Compline, the Psalms, or any other received prayers—are not static. As we pray them, we read our own lives back into the words we pray. Our own biographies shape our understanding of these prayers as much as these prayers shape us and our own stories. —Tish Harrison Warren Prayer in the Night is a meta-example of this interaction of life and prayer, inviting gentle but thorough triage. As R.E.M. says, “everybody hurts.” As Tish works her way through compline, she tells stories from her life, from scripture, from church history, from a breadth of disciplines. Indeed, her experience as a priest, a daughter, a writer, a mother, a wife, a friend, all come to bear here: she uses it all. For a few paragraphs, she tells my story. The gift of Prayer in the Night is that, even if you are not mentioned by name, she is telling your story of being in the dark. Tish is lighting candles for you. I started writing “messy sonnets” during Advent this year, and read one around our church’s Epiphany bonfire at Andrew and Jamie Peterson’s house. Afterward, Andrew asked if I liked sonnets, and we geeked out for a minute over the beauty of working out something ineffable and mysterious in a highly structured form. The counterintuitive freedom of creating in a form can be a heady sensation. Tish likens not just liturgy but the Christian life to a sonnet, with Christian doctrine as “the grammar and syntax.” She celebrates both the scaffolding structure and the improvisation and newness within which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit breathe. As if to illustrate her point, she uses a (ridiculously beautiful) Julie Miller song and some physics to back it up. Sheesh. So, non-objectively, with my heart encouraged, with deep love for the author: this book is for you, because you live in a hurting world, and everybody hurts. As I’ve already shared Compline at the beginning here, I don’t think it will spoil your read to tell you that Prayer in the Night ends gloriously, hopefully: “And all for Your love’s sake, Amen.” Click here to view Prayer in the Night in the Rabbit Room Store.

Like any production, we start with Act I. I’ve thought about Moses a lot in the last year—bent and grey, hunched over some cut of stretched goat skin or the last bit of papyrus he’d been carrying around since the day he headed out from Egypt. We think of him tall and scraggly over the red sea, arms cruciform. We think of him at the front of history’s most famous caravan. We think of him grabbing a snake by the neck as it hardens into a staff again. We think of him striking rocks, turning water iron in blood or sweet with a branch, heading home from a day’s work with arms full of manna. But until this year, I didn’t think of him like this: scratching out letters in patterns of parallelism and rhythm—the Hebrew way. I didn’t think of how, after all was said and done—right before God tucked him into the earth like a father with his sleepy son—scraggly Moses took up poetry. I don’t know if David found it. Maybe some servant boy unearthed it from a dusty urn. But somewhere between “The Lord is my Shepherd” and “Your word is a lamp to my feet” comes Moses’ ancient voice from his Yahweh-dug wilderness bed. Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. When I first decided to take on a lyrical exposition of Psalm 90, I knew research would be no small thing. Theological precision is important to me always, and always when writing. Thus the first step of this project for me was to sit down with fifteen pastors and theologians and priests and professors and rabbis to discuss anything regarding Psalm 90: its history, context, structure, etc. This required, of course, that I move past the first two verses of the Psalm. So: Act II. You return man to dust and say, “Return, O children of man!” I spent a rainy night in Nashville on a Zoom call with my cousin Ben at 6:00 am in South Asia, where he loves and serves a Muslim community. He gave me a more literal translation of the Hebrew here: “You crush humanity into dust”—Jack and the beanstalk like. I wonder if Moses felt the grit in his bones as he scratched those letters. Moses didn’t observe Lent the way we do, with a priest’s thumbprint cross on his forehead. He knew the heat of Yahweh’s palm against his face, the burn of his back passing by, the way God’s voice doesn’t crack. He didn’t follow a line of congregants to the front kneelers; he drew near to the thick darkness where God was, while the rest of the people drew back (Ex. 20:21). God drew near, with those divine eyes we dare not meet in dreams that are yet our only hope, full of terror and mercy both. Hannah Hubin One of those folks in the back—the far back, a couple thousand Old Testament cubits back—was, I think, T. S. Eliot, who writes in “The Hollow Men” of the divine eyes he “dare not meet in dreams.” He describes in his own poetic detail, not unlike the poetry of Moses, how he wears “such deliberate disguises” to hide himself from the horror of holiness. I can see him standing far off, hiding from the eyes of divine love, covered in a myriad of costumes like a 5th grade Halloween party without the candy corn. But Lent doesn’t take kindly to the fine art of costume design. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. And Moses, who might just know more about Lent than all of us combined, pushes his poem in full Hebrew force to the wrath of God, the brevity of man, the vanity of vanities, the terror of those eyes: verse after verse for me to exposit and describe and elaborate in lyric. One thing is for sure: Eliot’s disguises aren’t going to make it. As late fall edged to Christmas, I finished the draft text: 3 acts and 19 individual parts: 12 songs, 5 spoken texts, and 2 instrumentals—a verse-by-verse exposition, moving through Psalm 90, with a bit of Eliot interwoven. There’s a lot of lament, because, I think, lament is a good bit of what Moses meant. And there is wonder, and there is fear, and there is the terror of the divine eyes, and there is the thick darkness where God was, and there is dust. There’s a lot of dust. There’s also Act III. Moses didn’t observe Easter the way we do, but he observed God in ways we can’t—at least, not now. So when he asks the Lord to Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil, he didn’t need to beat Peter to the tomb to know something of resurrection. He knew that drawing near to the darkness of Sinai meant drawing near to hope. So did Eliot, when he writes that he will remain “Sightless, unless/The eyes reappear/…The hope only/Of empty men.” Those holy eyes—they are God’s toward us. They are grace toward us. As we edge closer and closer to Holy Week, the seven bands who have generously labored to set my text to music are finalizing their arrangements and performance. Last week, Ella Mine sent me a demo track to a song that lies near the end of the production, where she sings with the fierceness few can muster: Thou art my fear and thou art my only claim; the face of terror and the face of mercy are the same. Either way, my Lord, don’t relent your claim. Two years after publishing “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Eliot made his way from the back of the crowd and up to Sinai, baptized into the Church of England. Sometime after he put down his psalmist pen, Moses was led up the top of another mountain by the Lord. God drew near, with those divine eyes we dare not meet in dreams that are yet our only hope, full of terror and mercy both. He showed Moses the land, and then he tucked him into the earth. And Moses, who knew so much of the dusty, ashen, Lenten life, knew also, I think, something of what comes next. ALL THE WRECKED LIGHT: a lyrical exposition of Psalm 90 by Hannah Hubin will be presented at Christ Presbyterian Church in Brentwood on Holy Tuesday, March 30th, at 7:00 pm, featuring performances by Dennis Parker, Cardiff State, Ella Mine, St. Dawn in Slumber, Wild Harbors, Justin Schumacher, and Carousel Rogues.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Hannah Anderson, author of Turning of Days: Lessons from Nature, Season, and Spirit. Author, gardener, and woods-walker Hannah Anderson wrote, “More than a metaphor, the natural world is a living, pulsating experience of truth that surrounds and enfolds us, teaching us deep realities without words.” She puts words to many of those wordless realities in her new book, The Turning of Days: Lessons from Nature, Season, and Spirit. In this episode, Hannah and Jonathan Rogers talk about observation, repetition, “gardening shame,” and cooperating with forces of a broken world. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 10 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.

Three Things Newsletter has curated a collection of poems entitled “Conversations,” composed by various poets in the L’Abri community. It is our pleasure to share two of these poems with you today: “First Last Words” by Sarah Crowley Chestnut and “Words for Morning” by Liz Snell. First Last Words Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” —Luke 23:42-43 Life was a bone out of joint. I was not the first—I would not be the last— to ride the wreckage of the hell-bent. Each want clawed my belly to shreds— and it ate me. Maybe any way you cut it, forgiveness cuts slant. Did I just ask for the one thing I’d never had? Riding those rails like a reckoning, I cannot say what strange jewel unearthed itself: some clue to refute the thousand proofs I was damned before my life began. So I bled in earnest. And I tell you, his words burned like a brand, and life was something I wanted, could have, but could not have guessed. I tell you, when they swung clubs to break my bones the end of the end was already gone and I split—as if on reflex—into a shock of a smile. And it laid with me. And it carried me the first of countless, uncharted miles. —Sarah Crowley Chestnut Words for Morning Before the dawn’s delivery the mourning dove’s low note swings beneath a waterfall of lighter calls. She speaks no meaning, only liturgy of sound. In that early garden, man was blinking in the light when God said, name the animals. Adam, still alone, thought he could title every beast, not knowing yet the heart’s small creatures too fleet for words. Now we name the birds by thinking of ourselves and not of any true unhappiness in those grey wings. (How peaceful to repeat a solitary call, leave others to explain.) I can only name what language has allowed. Language is naming me. Language is finisterre, Earth’s edge, but I have wheeled into a formless sea and waved the disappearing shore. Whatever broods here, let it speak my uncreated words in that old tongue that buckled mountains, plucked up valleys, and, though knowing every battering to come, for this whole world said only, it is good. —Liz Snell Click here to read the rest of the “Conversations” collection at Three Things Newsletter’s website.

One of the few native green things we have here in the Sonoran Desert is agave. You might be familiar with its syrup, a sweetener that reaches the shelves of only the hippest, Gen-Zestiest cafes. Well folks, the hype might not be overblown. It’s a big family, but the agave that I grew up with in Phoenix is sometimes called the “century plant,” after its long life. (Ever keen on luring fellow humans to the desert, we southwestern Leif Eriksons tacked on a good 70 years.) The century plant is strange for at least a few reasons: (1) it’s a green thing in the desert; (2) in miniature form, it parades as a “succulent” that qualifies as a “good gift;” and (3) it blooms only once after dragging its feet for decades. Pretty neat. But the bloom actually is special. After lying dormant for twenty years, a giant asparagus shoots up out of the plant. This ominous “flower spike” can reach twenty feet in height with petals that might include other-worldly reds, yellow, and purples—rarities in the desert. And how does the wondrous agave cap off this spectacular, long-waited bloom? It dies. That’s right. The agave waits decades to flower, and in its big moment, it decays. Coming into its most beautiful form somehow requires its death. So now, bear with me: imagine that you are this agave. That is, you are a green thing abiding in a harsh environment that threatens your existence; you are perpetually misunderstood, ignored by the passerby blind to your latent potential; and, finally, you are a being whose highest task is inseparable from your own death. Wouldn’t that be terrible? The wondrous agave, post-bloom, mid-death The Lily, My Teacher The Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard follows this thread in The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air (1849), bringing his full religious attention to bear on Christ’s invocation in Matthew 6: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? As a kid, I read this passage as a simple instruction to stop worrying. God will take care of everything, so worrying is a waste of time. But as a young adult, I began taking it less and less seriously until it became more poetic than commanding. Of course, it’d be nice to be like the lily, not having anything to worry about. It’d be nice. Kierkegaard argues that I was closer my first time around. When Jesus instructs his audience to “consider the lily,” he isn’t invoking nature for mere aesthetics. Rather, Christ is commanding me to treat the lily as my teacher, that is, as a master who has accomplished something that we humans, for all our wonderful skyscrapers and iPhones, have neglected. I’m commanded to take the lily as my teacher. So what is the lily supposed to teach me? Kierkegaard finds three lessons. First, I’m to learn unconditional silence. No, he’s not referring to centering prayer, although that might help. This silence is a posture of nothingness before the divine. That is, in truly appreciating my complete otherness from the omni-[insert virtue] god, I’m commanded to shed my false, egoic self and become nothing. This task alone is more than enough for a lifetime (no “post-Christians” for Kierkegaard), and yet it’s a posture that the rest of creation seems to maintain with ease. The roaring ocean is silent; the lily is silent. It’s just us “higher” primates who insist on being something before the divine and, in doing so, fail to become nothing. Second, and only once silent, I’m to learn unconditional obedience. Having become nothing, I can now begin to exist in accordance with the divine will. And this obedience is to be unswerving and unyielding, irrespective of the cost. “Even if,” writes Kierkegaard, …the situation that the lily encounters at precisely the moment it is to spring forth is as unfortunate as possible, is so unfavorable that as far as it can judge in advance with something close to certainty, the lily can predict that it will be snapped off at that very instant, so that its coming into existence becomes its downfall—indeed, so that it seems as if it only came into existence and became lovely in order to perish: the obedient lily submits to this obediently; it knows that such is God’s will, and it springs forth. If you saw it at that moment there would not be the least indication that this unfolding was also its downfall; it sprang forth in such rich, beautiful fashion, so richly and beautifully did it go forth—for the whole thing was just a moment—it went to its downfall in unconditional obedience. Costly indeed. Christ is commanding me to treat the lily as my teacher, that is, as a master who has accomplished something that we humans, for all our wonderful skyscrapers and iPhones, have neglected. J Lind Third, and finally, I’m to learn unconditional joy from the lily. The lily has become nothing before God, relinquishing its egoic will; the lily has obeyed and attained its loveliest form, at the expense of its own life. But the lily’s dance isn’t mechanical. The lily obeys with a joy as resilient as its silence. Not despite its mortal fragility but precisely because of it, the lily is able to cast its deep sorrow on the divine and, in doing so, reap with songs of joy. The lily rejoices over creation: this meal, this weather, this song, this friend. The lily continually sheds its false self and reenters the stream of divine being, an eternal present in which there are no worries about tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow. And this present, where time and eternity touch, narrows the gap such that death itself loses its sting. When I am here, death is not; when death is here, I am not. This very day you are in paradise. I am, in Kierkegaard’s mind, to abide in the divine. And the lily is to be my teacher. Joy in the Desert I recently wrote about my latest excursion to a desert of sorts. In short, I’ve come to believe that my art-making can be more distracting than redemptive, preventing me from actually sitting with the absurd, the impossibility of the promise. And in my last post, I speculated on the ephemeral nature of our private Promised Lands, on how the day that you’ve been waiting for, your long-awaited bloom, might just cut you down. The question that’s surfaced from all my ruminating is this: how do I find joy in this desert? How do I gaze into the abyss without succumbing to paralysis, without it gazing too menacingly back into me? “In the lily’s place,” writes Kierkegaard, “a human being, or we human beings, would certainly despair at the thought that coming into existence and downfall were one, and then in despair we would hinder ourselves in becoming what we could have become, even if only for a moment.” Sitting with the absurd, with the impossibility of the amazing horizons promised to me through my funny strand of this perpetually convalescent religion, is paralyzing. But an evolving faith, like all evolutionary arcs, doesn’t stop at death but starts there; faith pushes off of death, partnering with the immovable mover for leverage and even propulsion. To never gaze into the abyss is to will my own blindness, at my own peril. It can enable a naivety that parades as faith. But when I finally do heed the call and undertake my desert pilgrimage, I face a new danger: my anxiety in the face of the desolation can weigh me down and keep me there, precluding me from my loveliest potential, comically brief and worldly insignificant though that potential might be. And so, here in the desert, the agave is to be my teacher. The agave fully abides in the desert, even while, to us southwestern Leif Eriksons, it just looks stuck. The agave actually abides for twenty years in preparation for its highest task. And its bloom is spectacular, and lethal. And the agave doesn’t stumble in the face of death, even its own death, but persists in unconditional silence, obedience, and joy in its flowering, towering ascension. The agave rejoices over its bloom along with the rest of creation, just as my mom rejoices over a sweet spoonful of its syrup in her coffee each morning. This very day the agave is in paradise—in the desert, in its own dying. The agave answers my questions without words, and words probably wouldn’t help me anyway. Writing songs and blogs isn’t evidence of learning; learning is about emulation and implementation. And though I’m an amateur, there seem to be new lessons every day. So for now, or at least for right now, I’m OK with not arriving. The Land of Canaan can wait. There’s so much to learn here in the desert. You can listen to J’s new song, “Lean Into It,” here. And of course, J wishes you all the best in your own desert pilgrimage. You’re obviously alone, and you’re also not.

John Hendrix has created his own unique style by blurring the boundary between text and art, melding it into cohesive story. Nowhere is this more evident than in Miracle Man, his first picture book about Jesus, where Jesus’s very words become an integral part of the illustrations, showing the power of the man who was the word made flesh. When I heard that Hendrix was creating a follow up book, Go and Do Likewise: the Parables and Wisdom of Jesus, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy. The cover of Go and Do Likewise bears an image of Jesus surrounded by children, inviting the reader to approach as a child, though I don’t believe this book is meant only for children. In fact, the dense text on some of the pages suggests it’s clearly aimed at an older audience than most picture books—I’d say age six or seven through adult. Go and Do Likewise presents rich visual imagery imbued with meaning to the careful viewer. The book opens with Jesus sitting on a mountaintop under a large tree. Its branches are backlit by stars which, combined with Jesus’s removed sandals, evokes the image of the burning bush. The tree bears the words “I am the vine,” and Jesus sits under it, eyes closed in prayer, bearing his cross-shaped staff in his hands. And that’s just the first page. In the introduction, Hendrix evokes the image of a journey. Jesus was going somewhere. “Jesus walked… and ever since, people have followed him.” And we follow along as Jesus speaks and teaches, always moving closer to his final destination. Go and Do Likewise retells several of Jesus’s parables in words and illustrations that give us a fresh perspective on just how outside-the-box Jesus’s teachings really were. Even our kids can get to a place where they’ve heard the lesson a thousand times and need it to be made new. These stories recapture our attention as we see the ludicrous extent to which the shepherd goes just to find that one sheep; as we notice the way that Jesus treasures each of the dirty, ragamuffin children who flock to him; as we see how Jesus calls things we consider tragic—emptiness and tears—blessings. Jesus walked...and ever since, people have followed him. John Hendrix Perhaps the retelling that stood out most to me was the parable of the good Samaritan. When we watch the priest and Levite pass the injured man, their excuses sound rather reasonable. They’re the kind of excuses we might make when we pass a homeless person on the street. We’re able to see ourselves as the reasonable pharisees, asking Jesus how we can do what’s right without being put to too much bother. When the Samaritan pays for the injured man’s needs, we feel the sacrifice as he hands over “two precious coins” and further promises to be responsible for any bills incurred. Picture books are meant to be read and reread, and Go and Do Likewise is the kind of book that will reveal more with each subsequent reading. And it’s beautiful enough to adorn any coffee table. The book closes powerfully with a beautiful paraphrase of John 14:6-7. When Thomas complains that the disciples don’t know the way to follow where Jesus is going, he replies: I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but alongside me. If you know me, then you know the Father… and now, and for the rest of time, you do know the way… you do know God. You have seen him, face to face. —John 14:6-7 Go and Do Likewise shows us Jesus in a new way to help both us and our children see him a little more clearly and follow him more closely. Click here to view Go and Do Likewise: The Parables and Wisdom of Jesus in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

Featuring new illustrations and the first-ever Wingfeather comic, Wingfeather Tales is now available, as both a brand new hardcover edition and in audiobook form! Return to the world of the Wingfeather Saga with Andrew Peterson and his all-star author friends. Immerse yourself in a land of bomnubbles and quarreling cousins, sea dragons and book publishers, thieves and Fangs and secret maps. Here within these pages lie six stories of the distant past, lost adventures, forgotten songs, and heartbreaking histories. The Shining Isle is restored, but Aerwiar is vast—and these authors have tales yet to tell: • Explore the inner walls of Yorsha Doon, just West of the Woes of Shreve, on the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, from the eyes of young Safiki in “The Prince of Yorsha Doon” from the creator of Aewiar, Andrew Peterson. • Jennifer Trafton‘s warm and whimsical writing brings to life a publishing nightmare populated by the many beasts of Skree in “The Wooing of Sophelia Stupe.” • Learn the origins of Ollister Pebmrick’s mysterious entry in the Creaturepedia about his encounter with a raggant in “Willow Worlds” by N. D. Wilson. • Travel with young Podo Helmer on an epic hunt for sea dragons in “From the Deeps of the Dragon King” from A. S. Peterson. • Jonathan Rogers presents “The Ballard of Lanric and Rube,” sung by Armulyn the Bard, tale-spinner of the imaginary Shining Isle of Anniera, in On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. • Discover what life was like for Maraly and Gammon in post-war Skree in “Shadowblade and the Florid Sword”—the first-ever Wingfeather comic—by Andrew Peterson. • Douglas McKelvey‘s epic, heartbreakingly hopeful novella “The Places Beyond the Maps” recounts a father’s journey to redemption. You’ll also find delightful illustrations by Justin Gerard, Hein Zaayman, Cory Godbey, John Hendrix, Nicholas Kole, Aedan Peterson, Joe Sutphin, Jay Myers, and Doug TenNapel. Enter a rich, imaginative world that becomes more real, more mysterious, more dangerous, and more beautiful with each story’s telling. Click here to view the hardcover in the Rabbit Room Bookstore. And click here to view the audiobook on Audible.

The final post in a weekly Lenten series exploring themes of human frailty and suffering through music, story, and art. This week’s post features art by Brooke West and Trillia Newbell’s reading of “A Liturgy Before Mourning with Those Who Mourn,” from Doug McKelvey’s Every Moment Holy, Vol. II. An Image: Flower by Brooke West Brooke reflects on the inspiration for this piece: This piece was inspired by Gungor’s song “Beautiful Things.” I was experiencing a particularly lenten season in my life, feeling the dark heaviness of my circumstances. In creating this piece, I was able to grieve things that I couldn’t find words to express and lean into the hope that God makes beautiful things from my dust. “All this pain I wonder if I’ll ever find my way I wonder if my life could really change, at all All this earth Could all that is lost ever be found? Could a garden come out from this ground, at all? You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of the dust You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of us All around, Hope is springing up from this old ground Out of chaos life is being found, in you” —Brooke West A Liturgy Before Mourning with Those Who Mourn Leader: O Christ Acquainted with All Our Griefs, People: prepare our hearts to enter now this space of grieving. O God of All Comfort, Lead us humbly into this place of heartbreak. O Spirit Who Moves in the Midst of Our Sorrows, Fill us with a right compassion. Fill us with a right compassion that we would not cross this threshold armed with easy answers, but would enter instead bearing the balm of a divine tenderness best expressed in honest affirmations and small acts of service. Teach us even in this hour, O Lord, how better to mourn with those who mourn, that their burden might in some way be made more bearable by our sharing in it. O Lord, in this place of holy sorrows make us quick to listen, and slow to speak, reminding us how the only true comfort Job received from his friends came not from their many words but from a willingness to sit with him in a silent sympathy of weeping. So let any spoken comforts we offer be the fruits of a real and costly fellowship with those who grieve. The sharing of such sorrows is indeed a good and holy work, O Lord. For you also, Jesus, willingly entered the wounds of this world and wept with your creatures in their brokenness. And you have promised us that wherever your children gather in your name, you will be present as well. So be present with us now in this wounded space, O Spirit of God. Let our presence be sensed as a token of your presence. Let our concern bear unspoken witness to the redemption your love will one day work, even unto the utter and unimaginably glorious reversal of this loss. Now speak, act, and comfort, O Christ. Shepherd us into the sharing of this sorrow. May our hearts be as your heart here, our voices as your voice, our hands as your hands, our tears as your tears. Amen. Click here to download “A Liturgy Before Mourning with Those Who Mourn.”

If you attended Hutchmoot 2019, you’ll remember that our keynote speaker was Carolyn Arends: a down-to-earth, razor-sharp songwriter whose stories, songs, and insights wove the themes of the conference together. For Carolyn, 2020 gave rise to two new projects: a full-length album called Recognition and a hymns EP called In the Morning. I recently had the opportunity for an in-depth conversation with Carolyn about her childhood love of songwriting, the unfolding of her career, her work as Director of Education at Renovaré, and the wonder of parables. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Drew: I know a lot of our audience is already familiar with your work, but for those of us who aren’t, could you provide the broad brushstrokes of how songwriting and your love of the gospel and spirituality have come together in your life, and what that’s looked like for you throughout your career? Carolyn: Well, I was very shy growing up. And as a shy person, while I was very sensitive, I actually wasn’t very self-reflective. So songwriting allowed me to find a voice not only to share with other people, but also to find a window into myself. And very quickly I became hooked on songwriting. And then, God bless them, I was at this small Baptist church and from about twelve years old and on, the pastor would tell me: “Hey, here’s what I’m preaching about this Sunday—could you write a song for me?” Which was amazing that this little church would tolerate a twelve-year-old’s songs! And that really called something out of me. As a kid, I probably would have told you I wanted to be an author—I never conceived of a career in music, even though I was constantly writing. At university, I started in the sciences, and then about four years in, my boyfriend at the time (now my husband) sat me down and said, “You know, it’s kind of obvious to everyone—except you—that you should do something with your music.” And I was like, “Oh, really? Huh!” Truly didn’t see it coming. I graduated with a degree in psychology, but right after graduating and getting married, I met someone from Nashville at Benson Music who invited me to become a staff songwriter. And I thought at the time, This is perfect, because I can write songs for other artists without having to perform them! I was directing a crisis pregnancy center at the time, so I balanced that and songwriting, driving into Nashville periodically. In that journey, I eventually came across the work of Tom Jackson, a performance coach. About a year after I signed my publishing deal, I went to this music conference where Tom was doing a workshop about stage fright. So I snuck into the back of this workshop and heard him say, “You know, performers think that when people come to see them, they want to be impressed, but that’s not true. When someone attends your show, they’re coming for connection. They’re coming to feel loved. So if you find yourself on a stage somewhere, your actual job is to love people.” And so far, that sounded right to me. I remembered being at a U2 concert, feeling like Bono was singing to me. But then he said—and this is what really got me—”Your job is to love, and the enemy of love is self-consciousness.” I realized that my self-consciousness was keeping me from loving people well. Like, you know that thing when you’re walking down the street and someone else is walking towards you, and you have to decide at what point you’re going to acknowledge them? Because if you do it too soon, then what do you do the rest of the time? Self-consciousness! So after he said that, I went home and I played at this little writer’s night at a club in Vancouver. I was so nervous and self-conscious in the green room, and I just said a little prayer: “Help me not to be self-conscious, and help me to love the people in the audience well tonight.” And I went out on stage, and for the first time ever, I wasn’t worried that I would say something stupid or hit a bad note. I was just fascinated with the people in the room: Why are they here on a rainy Thursday night? And I just had a blast playing songs for them. It’s very rare in life that a switch gets flipped like that so quickly, but I’ve loved playing music for people ever since. And that’s how it turned into a recording career, which became very consuming for me. I did four albums for a label in Nashville, and then I started to have kids and realized I couldn’t maintain the touring that was necessary. So I went independent and found a rhythm where two weeks out of every month, I would rent a van and go play a few shows on weekends and come back home. God was gently, one step at a time, nudging me out into something more open and spacious and saturated with his grace. Carolyn Arends Alongside that, I was finding more and more opportunities for other kinds of writing. That started when my third album came out, and my label asked if I would write a piece of prose to go with it. That album was deeply influenced by both the death of Rich Mullins and the birth of my first child. And it turned out that almost as many people responded to my prose as responded to the album itself, which opened up doors to other kinds of writing as well. So I wrote a book called Living the Questions, Christianity Today asked me to become a columnist, and in that time—still doing music, also writing—God was doing this thing in me where I grew up in this kind of Christianity that, while beautiful, was rather walled in. So God was gently, one step at a time, nudging me out into something more open and spacious and saturated with his grace. So I started to sense an invitation to be a bit of a bridge for providing others with opportunities for that same kind of growth. I have artist friends who are iconoclasts and have this prophetic edge, and they want to burn it all down! That’s not who I am, but there has been this invitation in my life to help people take the next steps in their spiritual journey. So my vocational life has turned out to be this huge, complicated, knotted ball of yarn where I get to be that bridge in multiple ways: through music, writing, teaching at universities, and in the last five years, my work at Renovaré as well. Drew: Right. I’d love to hear about Renovaré and your work there. How did Renovaré come into the picture for you? Your role is Director of Education? Carolyn: Yes! I should probably give some quick backstory on Renovaré. So it was founded by this guy named Richard Foster, who wrote Celebration of Discipline. You know how you find your wells throughout your life—the resources of various sorts that seem to be part of the conversation God is having with you? Well I just had all these books on my bookshelf that had “Renovaré” on the spine, but I didn’t know they were even an organization. Richard Foster had been really helpful to me, as well as Dallas Willard. They have this collection called Devotional Classics, for example, and I remember being on a tour opening for Steven Curtis Chapman, and we were using that book as a band! So the threads of Renovaré go way back, even though I didn’t realize it. About five years ago, I had gone back to school for a Masters in Theology at Regent College. I was on an alumni Facebook page and saw that Renovaré was looking for a Director of Education. I’d been free-lance my whole life, but when I read that posting, I felt like someone hit a tuning fork and put it on my chest, and I just began to buzz! I walked out to my husband and said, “I think I know what I’m supposed to do when I grow up!” Recognition is an album about slowly getting better at recognizing the sound of God clearing his throat in everything going on around you. Carolyn Arends The job said it could be done from anywhere in America, so I sent them an email and said, “You know, Canada is just over the line—would you consider me?” So it turns out that after Richard wrote these books, there were so many church communities asking for help. His first book, Celebration of Discipline, was just saying, “Yeah, we’ve been saved by God’s grace, but there are so many ways we can cooperate with that grace in our lives, and people have been experimenting with just that—spiritual disciplines—for a couple thousand years.” So when he wrote that book, so many church communities asked if he could come help with these disciplines. And then he put this community together, Renovaré, and they’ve been inviting people into a more intentional, interactive, experiential life with God for a little over thirty years now. It’s crazy how God works—this job brings all the threads of my life together: music, my experience in higher education, other forms of writing, and even indie artist skills like making budgets, promoting projects, and so on. Drew: So cool. So about the new album, can we begin with the name, Recognition? I find it very intriguing. I have a couple theories: of course there’s the song “Almost Didn’t Recognize You,” which tips off the title a little bit, but I’m curious about other, subtler ways that you would explain how the title informs the whole record. Carolyn: For sure, that song tips my hand. But underlying the whole thing is an idea I’ve been working on since my first album, actually, I Can Hear You. It’s a sort of thesis—everybody says you have one sermon that you essentially preach your whole life. Drew: Fascinating! You know, he wouldn’t use the language of sermons, but I’ve heard Michael Pollan say a similar thing about writers. He believes every single writer in any medium only has one thesis, for their whole life, that they circle back around to over and over again. Carolyn: That’s so true. And for me, I think because I’ve always been a little bit spacey, a little bit of a daydreamer, my thesis has been learning to attend, to pay attention, all the way back to I Can Hear You. There’s a line from Frederick Buechner that says, “God speaks to us in and out of the thick of our days.” And there’s another place where he says that God leaves little hints, little calling cards, all throughout our days. So, just learning to recognize him has been a huge theme of my life. And since being at Renovaré, I’ve learned that that’s a really Jesuit idea. There’s a Jesuit strand of spirituality where you take a long, loving look at the real and you’re constantly listening for what God is saying to you through other people, through your response to art and nature, and through the stupid stuff that happens to you everyday. So Recognition is an album about slowly getting better at recognizing the sound of God clearing his throat in everything going on around you. Drew: I love that phrase, “God clearing his throat.” I don’t want to use this word for you, but I kept thinking as I listened to your album, These songs are parables! And not in a didactic, top-down, imposing sort of way, but in a gentle, nudging, “consider this” sort of way. Would you use the word “parable” yourself? Carolyn: I hadn’t thought of that word, but it delights me. I took a Eugene Peterson course called “Tell It Slant” about the parables of Jesus, and he argued that Jesus very intentionally left things open-ended, so that we would have to enter into the parables and work them out for ourselves. So if my songs could function that way, I’d be delighted. I do love narrative and I love trying to tell a story, much more than “making a point,” so if my songs tell it slant, that would make me very happy. Drew: As these little short-form stories, are the characters in these songs factual, made-up, or somewhere in between? I’d love to hear about a few songs, if you’d like to walk through the stories behind them. Carolyn: Some are definitely characters. “Becoming Human” talks about Pinocchio and King Lear, for example. Drew: So you haven’t met Pinocchio personally? Carolyn: Well, I do know some Pinocchios, but not the one of early legend! (laughter) Drew: Not the OG wooden puppet guy. Got it. Continue! Carolyn: So clearly some are fictional characters or composites, but “Memento Mori” for instance talks about a dream with a monk. And I’m not sure that was a full-on deep sleep dream, but I did have a dream like that, half-awake and half-asleep. Drew: And what a dream it was. Carolyn: Yes. So for some background, memento mori is a phrase that means “remember your death,” and monks of various kinds have long repeated it to each other as a way of putting their lives in perspective. The song itself was tied to this spiritual practice I was invited to do of writing your own obituary, and paying attention to what you hope people will say about you. The author David Brooks has written about the distinction between eulogy virtues and resumé virtues, for instance. Drew: Ouch. Carolyn: Yes! Most of us are working for resumé virtues, right? But at funerals, the questions at play are much different: Were you kind? Did you make time for people? And so on. So I had done this obituary exercise, and then I had this dream about a monk saying “memento mori” to me, so that’s pretty autobiographical! “Pool of Tears” comes from the story of my friend Trevor Hudson, a lifelong pastor from South Africa who teaches at the Renovaré Institute. He did an internship at a church in Washington, D.C. and really admired the pastor at this church. When he was leaving to go back to South Africa, he asked if the pastor had a word for him, which is something that he has done several times before with other people. Which honestly sounds kind of scary to me. And the pastor said, “Yeah, Trevor. Just never forget that every person sits next to their own pool of tears.” Now Trevor is one of the most deeply compassionate people I’ve ever met, and I think it’s because he understands that. A lot of folks have compared “Pool of Tears” to another song I wrote called “Seize the Day,” both of which are composed of a few vignettes. In both cases, these songs are composites: I’m telling true things about people I know, but they’re essentially mash-ups, in which identities have been changed to protect the innocent! When you grieve someone deeply, it's an embodiment of the fact that there was and is great, great love. Carolyn Arends And then there’s “To Cry for You.” I wrote that right before I came to Hutchmoot in 2019. That one is about how I lost my mom, in October of 2018. It was a seismic loss for me. Losing a parent is a huge thing, and my mom was my best friend. I told this story at Hutchmoot—that whole first year of grieving my mom, I just did a horrible job at grief. I don’t know if you can do a good job, but I didn’t understand that part of becoming human is learning to grieve well. And I just kept running from it and running from it, and thinking, Well, my mom was older, so while it’s sad that she’s gone, it’s not out of season. I mean, I’ve had friends who’ve lost children! But I had to learn that my grief is my grief, and I don’t get to sidestep or shortcut it. For me, part of that command to honor your mother and father includes after they’ve died. So when I was running from grief, I got asked to sing at someone else’s funeral, a drummer friend of mine who lost his wife very suddenly. And her son Jordy got up to speak and said, “If you’re wondering if Jordy’s gonna cry, of course I’ll cry: it is my honor to cry for her.” In that moment I realized that all the tears I’d been fighting, I didn’t have to fight them anymore. I could use them to honor her. I remember going to a grief counselor who told me that every day, I needed to set aside a half hour just to grieve. Which sounded awful at the time! But it really is part of becoming fully human. There’s a line in the song that goes, “grief is the work that love must do,” and there’s an author who says, “grief is the tax we pay on loving.” When you grieve someone deeply, it’s an embodiment of the fact that there was and is great, great love. Two and a half years into that grieving process now, it still knocks me off my feet, but I’m beginning to see it as a reminder of my relationship with my mom and a really special love. And as people listen to this album, that’s the song that I’m hearing the most about from people—I guess because everybody’s sitting next to their own pool of tears. Drew: Especially right now. As I was listening to “After This”—that song feels like it’s about 2020. Am I correct? Carolyn: 100%, you nailed it! “After This” is kind of the one that got the ball rolling on this album. In April of 2020, my duo partner Spencer Capier was just recording bits of music for friends’ podcasts, and he recorded this violin melody that he called “After This.” So there we were, two months into Covid, all like Have you ever seen anything like this?? Surely it will be over soon! We were all so traumatized by this new reality! Drew: And eleven months later…here we are. Carolyn: Here we are indeed. So anyway, he sent me this violin melody called “After This,” and I thought it was just beautiful. So I asked, “Would I just totally wreck this if I tried to put words to it?” And he said, “No, please give it a try!” And so we did that, and it was the first thing I’d written and released in ages. We put out a video made up of listeners’ videos and images about their experience with Covid. So that got me all inspired, and I started writing a bunch. I wasn’t even going to put “After This” on the album because it had already been released, but we ended up deciding that it worked great as a sort of afterward to all the other songs. Drew: Plus it’s just begging to be an album closer. It was born for this! Put me in, coach! Carolyn: Yes! That was its destiny. Drew: I did want to mention, too, just how gorgeous the strings are, throughout the whole record. And it wasn’t just the emotional parts like on “After This”—even in “All Flame” for example, there’s this wonderful bluegrassy line that’s initially played by something more picky, like a mandolin. And then when those strings come in and double it—so good. Carolyn: On most of the record, when you hear strings, it’s Spencer. But on “To Cry For You” and “All Flame,” it’s the Love Sponge Strings from Nashville. They’re these four Nashville Symphony strings players who can work with basic lead charts just as well as sheet music. What’s cool about “All Flame” is that Spencer played that main riff on an octave mandolin that he had just bought and was really excited about. Drew: I love that instrument. I want one. Carolyn: It’s really so great. So I sent that riff to the arranger for Love Sponge, and she just said, “Well, let’s play what Spencer’s playing!” They were doing the session in Nashville, and they let me join in via Zoom to watch and shout out ideas. So I’m watching, calling Spencer, and I remember telling him, “You’re not gonna believe the power you have! There’s this incredible string quartet, and they’re just playing whatever you play!” And he just loved it, of course. Drew: And they were so right about that decision! I feel like it’s a testament to the power of different musical voices doing the same thing—when that melody is voiced on an octave mandolin, you expect it. But then when a string quartet plays it, there’s this power infused into it that kicks it up to the next gear. Before we wrap up, I was thinking it would be a good idea to mention your hymns EP as well. We’ve been focusing more on Recognition, but the hymns EP is called In the Morning, and it’s also wonderful. So what do you want Rabbit Room readers to know about In the Morning, where it came from, and what your hopes are for this collection of hymns? Carolyn: Yeah! Thank you—poor In the Morning is getting neglected, only because it’s hard to promote two projects at once. But I’m quite excited about it. I’m not a traditional worship leader, but I’m often in situations where I’m called on to help people voice their worship in song, and over the years, I’ve found some go-to songs that I especially love. So there are seven songs on this album: some are well-loved hymns and others I’ve discovered along the way or have been written by friends of mine. The goal was originally for it to be just me and Spencer with our arrangements, but our Kickstarter went really well, so we added acoustic bass and drums. But it’s still super organic, really rootsy, songs that we feel are just gifts, that have unlocked a place of worship in my heart, and I hope they can do the same for people who listen. Drew: It’s interesting how the role of hymns and worship in our lives has shifted as a result of the pandemic, when we can’t gather together and sing. We’re having to ask, how do we enter the space of worship in new and creative ways? So I love that you’re putting new hymns out, throwing people a line, so that we can enter into a space that maybe we’ve been alienated from over this past year. Carolyn: I would love that so much. And I would also love if it kept the hunger alive to sing together after this, you know? There are two invitations here: one is to realize that there’s nothing insurmountable to God, and we don’t have to worship in a certain way for it to be worship, but I think there is also an invitation to cultivate a holy longing to worship together and not take it for granted when we do meet together again. Drew: It’s been a long year not to get to sing with other people. Carolyn: It sure has. And I love that for all our technology, we really can’t replicate this sense of being in the same room, pushing air together. May the day come soon. Click here to view Recognition in the Rabbit Room Store, and here to view In the Morning in the Rabbit Room Store. Click here to learn more about Carolyn Arends at her website, and here to learn more about Renovaré.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. This week, Jonathan Rogers talks with Winn Collier, Director of the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary and author of A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson. In this episode, Winn and Jonathan Rogers discuss friendship, “earthy spirituality,” and writing that goes beyond the informational and motivational. Click here to listen to Season 3, Episode 11 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.

Three Things Newsletter has curated a collection of poems composed by various poets in the L’Abri community. It is our pleasure to share two of these poems with you today: an interpretation of “Psalm 22” by Andy Patton and “Reservoir” by Anna A. Friedrich. Psalm 22 My God, My God, You are the sparrow’s fall And the flower’s garments. You are the hallowed hammer And the hanging tree. I am poured out like water. Why have you forsaken me, my father? Yet surely I was cast on you from birth. From the ordinary altar of my mother’s womb You have been my God. You are the light’s benediction And the silent sky, Both the chasm and the passage, My canticle and call. I am the veil, gripped and rended, In the darkness until the dying is ended. You have pierced my hands and feet, Yet as long as light has walked between stars You have been my God. You tell the sun your grief And darkness dances across the noon. You are unyielding. I am cross-hearted and heaving. All who cannot keep themselves alive Will kneel before you. You have been my God. You shake the shattered earth of its ancient dead. You are the breath in buried chests Who rise and walk and praise you again. I am the fountain found I am the holy wine swallowed down. I am trussed and scattered. As grapes are crushed, I stagger. Though the beasts surround me, And trouble is near, I will find your face For you have been my God. You dreamed of flesh in the ground, growing. For you are the God of scattered seed. But now I am kernel crushed Chaff blown, flayed and flying. I am the flesh you dreamed of dying. Why are you so far from saving me? I can count all my bones. My heart melts. I lay in the dust. As long as the afflicted have lifted prayers to you, You have been my God I am the holy bread, chewed and eaten. I am the Prince of Peace crowned and beaten. —Andy Patton Reservoir The swans have mated again despite the virus— seven cygnets, fuzzy, golden huddle in the reservoir between their cob and pen. Each in turn dives, apprenticed in the slow current. Crickets still chirp along the banks though it’s almost midday. Poison ivy sprouts across Beale’s path and pollen from white pines dusts the water’s surface and its debris, dusts my skin, dusts everything because this is the season of determination— when winter’s layers peel back like a mask and hope in every species flings wide as if irrevocable. I let their voices accompany the call of the mourning dove into my inner ear— the labyrinth where I’ve heard, equilibrium resides. —Anna A. Friedrich Click here to read more selected poems at Three Things Newsletter’s website.

As we enter into Holy Week, we offer you this liturgy from Every Moment Holy, Volume II to be read and relished on Easter Sunday. The text is provided here in this blog post, as well as a link to download a PDF if you’d like to print it out or save it offline. We strongly encourage reading it together with a small group of friends and/or family. Four readers should be designated in advance for the scripture readings. The prelude prayer may be read aloud by the leader or silently contemplated by the participants before the first scripture reading. Prelude Prayer: Sing through me, O Spirit of God. Call forth songs of praise. Let my lips, my tongue, my life proclaim the glories of the Living One who died and conquered death; the Risen One who leads me into life. Leader: You have made all things well, O Christ! People: You have made all things well! What once was lost, you have reclaimed. What had been harmed, you will remake. What was unwell, you now restore. You make all things well! First reader: Hear the word of the Lord: Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. —Hebrews 2:14-15 (NIV) Leader: We, your creatures, O Christ, once endured the cringing lives of slaves, in a long bondage bereft of hope, bowed by the weight of grief, subjected to futility, fettered to our fear of death. But you did not abandon us. You were not content to cede one speck of ground to the enemy of souls, or to the cruel kingdom of death. You were ever mindful of our plight. All praise to you, Lord Christ! For it was your intention from creation’s dawn, not only to make all things, but to make all things right. When your works were despoiled and wrecked by sin and death, you undertook to save and to reclaim what you had first made good. You entered into this—our space and time—to act on our behalf. You took on body, blood, and breath, that you, clothed in our condition, might move in sympathy to save and shelter us. For in the living temple of your flesh, perfect justice and perfect mercy were met and there—in the shedding of your blood— they were forever reconciled in love. So you subdued the sting of sin. By death, you conquered death. You rescued us from the fear of death, and from its power. You have made all things well, O Christ! You have made all things well. Silence is kept. Second reader: Hear the word of the Lord: This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. —2 Timothy 1:9b-10 (NIV) Leader: The powers of darkness sought to swallow you, in death’s black waters, O Christ. But going under that flood, you drank death down like a river. You drank death’s reservoir dry. All praise to you, Lord Christ! You swallowed death for us, and by that act of willing sacrifice, you pushed death back upon itself, like the last lapping wave at the turning of the tide; that high water mark now fading, as death’s dominion ebbs out for all time, its power to terrorize God’s people forever destroyed by God’s own passage through it. Through death, O Lord, you gave us life! You have made all things well, Eternal King! You have made all things well, O Christ! Death’s dark shroud has been rent ragged and pierced through by the first dawning of your resurrection light. And after your return, after the final splintering of that dark night, death will possess no lasting fame; the works of death will win no glory for its name. Hear this promise, O children of God, hear and know: Death will surely die forever, his shoddy works undone, his usurped crown torn from his palsied grasp, his impotence unmasked, his power to harm shattered for all eternity like shards of thinnest glass. Receive the glory due your name, Lord Christ! The grip of death already slips. It cannot slow the steady progress of the resurrection, now advancing, one day to be made visible in the full outworking of its infinite glad implications. The door that led to death has been remade by Christ into the door that opens into everlasting life. You have made all things well. You have made all things well, O Christ! Silence is kept. Third reader: Hear the word of the Lord: For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. —Colossians 1:13-14 (NIV) Leader: Now, O King of All of Space and Time, raise your scepter, declare the advent of the age of the healing and remaking of the world, of the great rejoining of these realms of earth and heaven, of the eternal dwelling of God with his people in this reconstructed temple of Creation. We who live in this shadowland of death’s last stand, await your appearance and command, O Lord! Every longing of our souls, every molecule of our physical bodies, is crying out for, yearning for, reaching for, tilted toward, the irresistible gravity of your being and your glory. Come quickly, Lord Jesus! We await your speaking of the word that will roll up death like an old, disintegrating scroll, bind it with iron bands, and cast it into flames. Christ alone will wear the crown! Christ alone is worthy of the name above all names. Every knee will bow and every tongue proclaim the rightness of his coronation. All sorrows we endure for now are but the rattling gasp that signals death’s defeat. Christ’s heel is planted on death’s neck. Death cannot breathe. And this space in which we grieve is but the long exhale of death’s last expiring breath. This age of passing sorrows is but the long death rattle of death itself. The outcome bears no hint of doubt. The work is done. The victory is won. So death will be undone. All works of death will be undone. And we, whose lives are hid with Christ, in God, will rise to live, eternal, every one. You have made all things well, O Christ! You have made all things well! Silence is kept. Fourth reader: Hear the word of the Lord: We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. —Romans 6:9 (NIV) Leader: The victory is yours, O King! Now claim what is your own! Every inch of earth, all the span of heaven, fields and skies and stars and seas, all continents and forests, all nebulae and galaxies, all creatures and peoples, all principalities and governments, all of time and history, all wonders and mysteries, all loves, all hearts, all lives— All this is yours! The crown, the throne, the prize! The name above all names! The kingdom and the joy! The glory and the praise! The victory over death! The conquering of the grave! O King of Kings, we offer our eternal adoration! Now let your resurrection at last be worked through all the fabric of creation, till every fiber, every atom, every particle in play, is bathed in holy light, consecrated forever as your own. Till every sorrow we’ve sustained is redeemed, restored, renamed; till ones we’ve loved and lost and grieved are joined to us again; till all the brokenness that breaks our world is by your word made whole. You have made all things well, O Lord of Life! O King of Creation! O Christ Who Conquered Death! You have made all things well! You are the radiant end toward which all creation tends. In you dwells the fullness of God, and through you all things are reconciled to God. You are the beginning, and the firstborn from among the dead. You are the firstborn over all creation. You are the church’s living head. In all things you are supreme. All glory is your own eternal glory. You are faithful and true. You have kept your promises. You have done what you said. You have rescued your children and your creation from the futility, from the fear, and from the lingering kingdom of death. You have done what you said. You have made all things well, O King of Earth and Heaven! You have made all things well! O Christ who gives us life, we give you praise! First reader: Hear the word of the Lord: I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. —John 11:25 Second reader: Hear the word of the Lord: On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces. . . In that day they will say, “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the Lord, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.” —Isaiah 25:7-8a, 9 (NIV) Third reader: Hear the word of the Lord: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. —1 Peter 1:3 (NIV) Fourth reader: Hear the word of the Lord: I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades. —Revelation 1:18 (NIV) Silence is kept. The closing section might also be memorized and prayed as often as one is confronted with any works of death yet briefly evident in this world. Crush this age-old darkness, O Christ, in the winepress of your everlasting light. Trample this old darkness and from it draw the wine of everlasting life. Upend all works of death. Make all things new. Make all things right. You have made all things well. You have made all things well. All: You have made all things well, O Christ! Amen! Hope is kept. Click here to download a PDF of this liturgy at the Every Moment Holy website. And click here to view Every Moment Holy, Volume II in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.

I park the van at the top of Section C, and my daughter and I get out into the rain. The spongy ground slopes away from us to the road below, speckled with headstones that are, in turn, speckled with lichen. Already my daughter bends over one, wipes the drizzling rain off its surface, and reads a name aloud. About this cemetery hangs a pleasant sense of disorder. Stones shaped like benches, pillars, or pensive children kneel in the grass, half-sunken where the ground beneath them has settled; moss laps at their edges. Certain monuments here are notorious, like the massive stone angel who has, with her attendant urban legends, nearly eclipsed the family she was meant to memorialize. Broken stones lean in pieces against cottonwood trees whose burly roots slowly shoulder the soil away. Unlike another local cemetery, which styles itself as a “memorial park” and offers natural burial as well as farewell tributes, death is still a presence here, not an unpleasant thought to be sponged away with rebranding. I feel comfortable saying “tombstone” here, or “grave.” As in, “Look at this grave!”—which I call to my daughter when I find one carved to resemble a scroll draped over a log and slicked with real moisture, real moss. She is at my side in a moment and together we puzzle out the inscription. It is beautiful, but it is not his. We have come looking for the grave of a man we never knew and are not related to. He enlisted in the military in June of 1917 and drowned a month later while swimming in the bay. He and his wife lived in our house that year, and we discovered his story while my daughter researched the history of our house for a school project. We thought finding his headstone might help us learn more about him or his family, but coming here was more of a pilgrimage, I think. Finding some physical mark that he was here, that he was more than a newspaper clipping on a screen, more than a typewritten name in a city directory—I think that is what we are really after. We want to see his name in stone, but when we reach Section C, Lot 50, Grave 8-A, where the cemetery’s website assures us he was buried, there is no stone. But there is an old tree, arcing an arthritic branch over the lot with startling grace, and a single rose-colored headstone for a woman who shared his last name and who, if she was his mother (the dates and the nearness of her grave suggest she may have been), would have outlived her son by forty years. We kneel and read her inscription, and I cannot help but place my hand on the stone as though in consolation. So, we find her stone. But not his. My daughter snaps a picture of the spot, that one branch slick and dark with rain, the ground beneath it nearly empty—for other stones are missing, not just his. My daughter photographs the rose-colored stone, too. Then we begin the climb uphill. We came prepared to get wet; we are wet; my feet, in their rubber boots, are leaden with cold. I think maybe my daughter will be disappointed, and she is, but only a little, for somehow finding even that plot was enough. She chatters on about finding his possible-mom, how great that was, and wonders what happened to his stone. I don’t know, I say. We should look up what happens to headstones, where they go. And I think, we know where to find him now, and we are perhaps the only living people in town now who do. That’s something. Finding some physical mark that he was here, that he was more than a newspaper clipping on a screen, more than a typewritten name in a city directory—I think that is what we are really after. Théa Rosenburg Despite the cold, we are not ready to leave. We linger over the graves on the way back up the hill, reading epitaphs. Bits of poems or hymns, or the simply eloquent “Mother” or “Father”—which is to say, “I mattered to someone, I was loved.” Every so often, we see a carved lamb resting atop a small white stone, and the lamb says the same thing but in a heavier, more heartbroken key. We pause by a monument for fallen miners, inscribed with the work of a local poet, which my daughter reads aloud. At one headstone we pause: I am the Resurrection and the Life, it reads, golden moss embossing the letters, and I smile at my daughter. “Maybe we’ll meet him one day,” I say. If we are only bones and breath, nothing more than a mind tuned for survival, then death means nothing. For a time, those who loved us will mourn—they will miss us, perhaps with a ferocity that wakes them weeping. But they too will die and generations will seep away. Moss will fur our headstone and the ground above us will buckle and shift as we dissolve. Saplings will blossom into great old trees whose roots will nudge our headstones aside. Our names may remain for a time—letters on an old bill of sale or a marriage license—but eventually even those will fade. We will return to the dust. And if all we are is flesh, then when that flesh is gone we will be nothing. If that is true, this man is nothing. An unmarked grave, over a hundred years old—a story snapped shut before it finished. But I don’t think that’s true. We may wither and fade like the flowers; our days may be fleeting as the grass. But the Lord never forgets a story—not a soldier falls without him knowing. By some small series of events, my daughter and I get to tell this man’s story, incomplete as our knowledge of it is: a young man enlisted in the army during the Great War. One month later he drowned swimming in the sea. He lived in our house and left behind a wife, who packed her things and moved out by the end of the year. His name was Reuben.

My first poetry book was about light in dark seasons, and was in part the result of wrestling with a fascination with darkness that I’ve carried most of my life. Ironically, but not unexpectedly, my life has never been soaked in darkness. There have been dark seasons, but most of them I have experienced from the outside, or they have turned out to be not so dark as expected. I have had my bouts with depression here and there, but nothing like those of people I know and love. Much of my interest in darkness is probably due to some alchemy of growing up in a homeschooled evangelical Christian subculture and my undying curiosity; I’m not enough of a psychoanalyst to come up with anything deeper than that. I grew up thinking a Christian’s life was all about victory and light and “pressing on the upward way / new heights I’m gaining everyday,” so yay! For the first several years of my young life this made sense and felt right and was borne out in my own personal experiences. But then more real life started to seep in to that experience. I began to hear other people’s stories and truly listen to them. I began to allow myself to feel their hurt. I began to come to terms with my own pain, with the lies I had told myself about what it meant to follow Christ. Perhaps because I came from a culture that looked away from darkness or sought to relegate it to unbelievers and Christians-in-name-only, I leaned pretty hard in the other direction for a number of years. I read and watched increasingly dark and disturbing stories. I grew to prefer them. The honesty I saw in them was intoxicating, but it wasn’t just the honesty that appealed to me. It was the drama of depravity, disease, and despair. This is something Leslie Jamison’s book on addiction narratives, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, wrestles with. She explores her own alcoholism and the addictions of poets and writers throughout history in terms of the stories they were telling and trying to tell. At one point she contrasts two profiles of alcoholic writers: a Life profile on John Berryman entitled “Whisky and Ink” and Charles Jackson’s partially-autobiographical The Lost Weekend: For his part, Berryman loved the Life profile. It showed him a side of himself he wanted to believe in—a prophet surveying his kingdom of empty shot glasses—and fed the delusions that were feeding his drinking. The why-less drinking that Charles Jackson had proposed in The Lost Weekend would have been harder to absorb. That type of buffoonish drinking—with its vaguely comic desperation—didn’t strike the same appealing pose as the poet with his quivering psychic antennae pointed toward death. —Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath The illusion of the tormented artist is partially one of control: I could overcome my addiction, but I don’t because it gives me a private window into the secret realities of the soul. Jamison knows the deception of that illusion, enough to reveal addiction as it is: “a seepage toward death.” I still sense the allure of darkness in my own writing. In my pursuit of honestly engaging the dead and dying world around me, I often feel the pull to step over the thin line demarking empathy and truth-telling into the realm of dramatizing and affirming darkness as desirable, inevitable, and alluring. I often step over that line. I can even locate my identity in stepping over that line. In contrast, a life without darkness tends to sound boring. Jamison reckons with this as well: If addiction stories run on the fuel of darkness—the hypnotic spiral of an ongoing, deepening crisis—then recovery is often seen as the narrative slack, the dull terrain of wellness, a tedious addendum to the riveting blaze. I wasn’t immune; I’d always been enthralled by stories of wreckage. But I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could. —Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath In many of these stories, addiction is not so much a disease as it is a symptom of hidden hurts—of loneliness, of the unquenched desire to be wanted and loved, of the ambition to be significant and known. The sins of the flesh are those actions that bubble up to the surface of broken people, and the hurt will not be healed by the bottle, by porn, by political fervor, by social media likes, by being upheld as a tortured genius poet, or by “making it” as an author. These things will only ever reveal our brokenness unless we turn to the Healer of that brokenness. Recovery happens slowly, in unseen places, without fanfare or originality. We make it inspirational, quotable, and shareable to our peril. Chris Wheeler It’s no surprise that the first step of the Twelve Steps used in recovery is both communal and confessional: “We admitted we were powerless over [insert focus of addiction here]…” Confession of need in a loving community initiates the process of healing. The more I daily confront the darkness within and outside of me with the light of Christ in the community of his saints, the more I understand it as a channel directing my desires beyond itself to an overwhelming light. I look at my darkness not to love it more, but to recognize that I need help to escape it. In confession, I relinquish my darkness into the hands of my Savior who already knows its contours. I share the burden of it with the people around me, and they share their burdens with me. This is the purpose of the Lenten season: to face our need and look to Christ to fill it. In the upside-down kingdom of God, when we turn to him and look him in the face, when we see the severe and gentle mercy of our Savior, our darkness begins to reveal Jesus instead of our own brokenness. We see the failure as it is, and we remember that no depth of failure was too deep for him to reach us. We know the pride in us and we see him humbling himself unto death, even death on the cross, that we might be his. We know our crippling addiction to approval and our desperate desire to be loved, and we know that through spilling his own blood on the cross he has approved and accepted us as his beloved bride. In this light, the work of recovery is not about skyrocketing to victory out of pits of despair. Healing is not about inspirational moments, mountain summits, or applaudable epiphanies. In recovery, I found a community that resisted what I’d always been told about stories—that they had to be unique—suggesting instead that a story was most useful when it wasn’t unique at all, when it understood itself as something that had been lived before and would be lived again. Our stories were valuable because of this redundancy, not despite it. Originality wasn’t the ideal, and beauty wasn’t the point. —Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath Like our creative work and our spiritual lives, recovery happens slowly. It happens in a close, honest community. It happens in unseen places, without fanfare or originality. It is not always beautiful or noteworthy. It doesn’t fit into the algorithms. Its similarity to other stories is unnerving and comforting at once. We make it inspirational, quotable, and shareable to our peril. In the light of Christ, every story bent toward night is a signpost to a happy ending. Every illness is pointing to the cure. Every dark night of the soul is pointing to the rising of the sun. In Lent, we may recognize our need, but we encounter our healing in Easter. As we retell this story during Holy Week, may we look beyond the darkness to the approaching dawn.

A treasured album is like an old friend. Any longtime music listener has them: those well-worn albums you come back to, not every day but every so often, when you need them. They become more than just a collection of songs. They’re a tangible set of memories. They might evoke a particular place and time when they first connected with you in such a personal way. You turn back to them to revisit those memories, or to seek the wisdom in the songs, just like calling a friend. And each time you say, “We should do this more often.” These are the hopes a good artist imbues into each song—that a unique and sometimes very personal story or feeling will somehow connect to people, transcending the firsthand experiences that built the song. That connection is unpredictable, but when it happens, it can forge a special bond. That’s when a song or album becomes not just a means for entertainment or a tool for ministry, but a very real part of someone’s story. In this new series, we’ll be honoring some of these treasured albums. We’ll invite artists and writers to share the music that occupies a special place in their story, and hopefully introduce you to some gems you might have missed along the way. So, for starters, allow me to introduce you to my dear friend, Clear to Venus by Andrew Peterson. It was his second major-label studio album, and this year it will celebrate its twentieth birthday. (Just look at that baby face on the cover!) Venus is a “road album,” not uncommon when new artists must tour relentlessly while satisfying label obligations and momentum. Many of its songs were written in exotic places like the Super 8 Motel in Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The bulk of the band at that time was Andrew, his wife Jamie on background vocals, and Gabe Scott on BGVs, guitars, accordion, hammered dulcimer, etc. “No More Faith” opens the album with a cheeky declaration: “This is not another song about the mountains.” It was a gutsy call for a sophomore album to call out its predecessor’s biggest single, “Nothing to Say,” about a drive through the American west where “the mountains sing your glory, hallelujah.” But the rest of the opening line takes the cheek away and couches the album in a new reality. This is not another song about the mountains, “except about how hard they are to move.” Oh. The lyrical mastery that sees Peterson give such care and attention to every single word was already abundant, and while this early album is never naïve, there is a youthful ebullience that makes me smile. Mark Geil “So now faith, hope, and love abide these three,” says First Corinthians, “but the greatest of these is love.” I had always thought that a pleasant sentiment, especially for a chapter about love, but then Andrew—like he would so many times in the decades hence—revealed a deeper truth from an ancient story. “I say faith is a burden. It’s a weight to bear,” he sang. That was a brave bit of honesty for early-2000s CCM, and I’m sure it gave his label pause, but that was the line that made me an Andrew Peterson fan for life. “Nothing to Say” was a wonderful praise song. Its follow-up single “The Chasing Song” was clever and confessional. But “No More Faith” was revelatory. That’s why the greatest of these is love! I finally realized, longing for the day when we won’t need faith and hope any more. Clear to Venus has the unfortunate distinction of being released on 9/11/2001, but “No More Faith” somehow spoke into the events of that day with deep empathy. (This is also the song that established AP as a brilliant bridge writer—see also “The Reckoning” and “Don’t You Want to Thank Someone.”) Second track “Mary Picked the Roses” has a unique history. Rich Mullins left the lyrics to this song behind when he died tragically in 1997. Andrew, who has borne the “heir apparent to Mullins” mantle his entire career, was given the lyrics to set to music. I’ve often imagined the weight of that task: to do the song justice, but not be imitative, and to add to so great a legacy. Andrew and Gabe wrote a folksy delight livened by Dan Tyminski’s mandolin. “Isn’t it Love” follows and carries the same bounce over another deep truth. I’ll admit that I missed the gravity of the third verse until I heard the slow version (you can find it on After All These Years), and felt the guilt and thanksgiving in Andrew’s voice as he sang, “And still you died for me.” Clear to Venus makes the personal “old friend” connection for me on two particular songs. “Let Me Sing” is a quiet marvel, a beautifully structured song set to piano and cello. It is remarkable that Andrew wrote this masterpiece in 1996, when he was just 21 years old. When I lapse into a routine of life that leaves layers of mundane crust on my heart, this is the prayer I sing to be made new. It’s my favorite song from the entire AP catalog. And the title track that’s not exactly a title track, “Venus,” is my favorite road song. I’m a sucker for road songs—think “Load Out” or “Turn the Page”—because they often find the artist at their most human state. I’ve never been on tour, but it’s clear that it can wear you down. These are songs that speak to the sacrifice of a calling, and the mix of joy and fulfillment against a longing to just sleep in your own bed for once. I think of this song every time I pass a Hampton Inn, and I can hear the emotions of every artist who has ever given up their time to play their songs for me when Andrew sings, “Still, it isn’t home.” Every song on this album is worthy of mention. Track down the story of Andrew and Eric Peters’ competing coin songs. Delight in the AP-Randall Goodgame story-song “Alaska or Bust.” Don’t miss the Mary Chapin Carpenter cover “Why Walk When You Can Fly.” And there’s even a hidden CD bonus track, because in 2001, hidden CD bonus tracks were the equivalent to Marvel’s post-credits scenes. “Land of the Free” has a clunky line or two, but its heart is in the right place. Clear to Venus is a remarkable work. The lyrical mastery that sees Peterson give such care and attention to every single word was already abundant, and while this early album is never naïve, there is a youthful ebullience that makes me smile. I pull it off the shelf more than any other AP album, and I let it come alongside me for the memories, the comfort, and the truth it always brings. Click here to view Clear to Venus (in physical CD form!) in the Rabbit Room Store.

In his beautiful collection of short stories The Wild Birds, in a moving tale of generosity and adopted family, Wendell Berry writes, “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.” Berry’s concept of membership is one familiar to his readers: an ideal of interwoven, interpersonal community, a giving and receiving that is the opposite of American culture’s rugged individualism and our current state of isolation. Normally a voracious reader, in this pandemic season I have read very few new books. A chronic re-reader anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to invest any emotional energy into a story I couldn’t trust; I desperately needed daily reminders of truth and beauty. Bringing my weary soul to Narnia, Middle-Earth, and Port William reminded me again and again that all shall be well and all shall be well . There are, thankfully, many such stories, but the one I couldn’t keep myself from reading over and over this past year was Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay For Now. Called a “skinny thug” and suspected by all around him of following in the footsteps of his abusive father and delinquent older brothers, Doug Swieteck is a lonely boy with nowhere to be and nowhere to go. Nowhere to go except the library, where he finds himself after moving to a new town his eighth grade year. And there, in the Marysville Free Public Library, Doug is offered grace: an invitation to a membership. Upon seeing the abrasive boy’s fascination with the Arctic Tern in a displayed book of Audubon’s Birds of America, an older librarian gently coaxes Doug into learning to draw, basing each lesson on Audubon’s works. “Red Phalarope” from Audubon’s Birds of America Each bird, each Saturday art lesson with Mr. Powell, gives Doug a place of retreat, a place to fail safely and then succeed, a way to understand the chaotic world around him: “Maybe this happens to you every day, but I think it was the first time I could hardly wait to show something I’d done to someone who would care besides my mother,” he says. “Do you know how that feels?” Through Mr. Powell’s quiet dignity and respect for Doug, he gives a greater gift than even that of art: he gives Doug an invitation into a community. Grace, when freely poured out, cannot be contained. Millie Sweeny True membership does this for each of us, when we are enveloped into a broader body. This gift, we know because of the work of Jesus Christ, is grace. Unasked, unsought, unpayable. And grace, when freely poured out, cannot be contained. In the disciples and apostles of Jesus, this joyful grace changed their ways of seeing, of being human. As it should do for each of us. As it does with Doug. He sees what it means to be human through Audubon’s interpretations of the birds, through his own understanding of being an artist, through the compassion and grace extended to him, and this humanity reaches out from his life to touch those around him, to invite them into membership as well, or to accept their invitations. As his older brothers struggle against the lot set before them, Doug acknowledges their battles with respect: “It’s like the screech of the Black-Backed Gull, crying out into the empty white space around him. You can’t hear it when you look at the picture. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.” When he discovers the traumatic cause of a hated teacher’s anger, Doug stubbornly probes him into accepting help, just as he himself received from Mr. Powell in the library. He understands pain, and grows to understand grace. A genuine grace, a grace that changes. As it must. Doug deserved none of the grace he was given, could not have grown into maturity and kindness without the guidance of wise and persistent mentors. This is not a story of one boy’s struggle against the world, but the story of a boy pulled along into life by those who saw him drowning. Like us. Dragged along into membership by the Holy Spirit, by the godly friends and mentors placed around us by grace, in grace, for grace. It fills up, and it flows out. So we are given, so we give. Doug’s experience shapes him into a young man of courage for those he loves, of respect and empathy for others; he is emboldened to speak out, deciding that “whatever is in the dark is waiting for the Yellow Shank, he’s going to do it anyway.” He is given much, and he gives much. In a season of isolation, where membership and church community and long-time friends feel like a bygone dream, I needed this story. More than once. And now, as we continue in a season of unrest that more closely resembles the anguished Black-Backed Gull than the daring Yellow Shank, I need it still: reminders of how empty are our lives without one another, how poor we are without the gifts of art and literature and friendship. Go read Berry’s The Wild Birds, of course, but alongside it, read Schmidt’s Okay For Now. Recipients of a vast and unasked for grace, all of us. In need of, and given, truth and beauty and belonging in the holy brotherhood of Christ. So we, too, may become what the Brown Pelican is. And even more. Click here to read more of Millie’s writing on the Rabbit Room blog, and here to view Okay for Now in the Rabbit Room Bookstore.