The food is cooking. The sessions are set. The soundcheck is underway. Folders are printed. Art and books and other fine wares are on display. Surprises are in store. There’s a Hutchmoot at hand. Travel safely. Arrive in good cheer. We’re going to have a fine weekend. In the words of Robert Farrar Capon: I wish you well. May your table be graced with lovely women and good men. May you drink well enough to drown the envy of youth in the satisfactions of maturity… May there be singing at our table before the night is done, and old, broad jokes to fling at the stars and tell them we are men. We are great, my friend; we shall not be saved for trampling that greatness under foot… Come then; leap upon these mountains, skip upon these hills and heights of earth. The road to Heaven does not run from the world but through it. The longest Session of all is no discontinuation of these sessions here, but a lifting of them all by priestly love. It is a place for men, not ghosts—for the risen gorgeousness of the New Earth and for the glorious earthiness of the True Jerusalem. Eat well then. Between our love and His Priesthood, He makes all things new. Our Last Home will be home indeed. Until then? We Hutchmoot. (Verbed.)

At Hutchmoot, there are so many ways that we offer ourselves to one another: through stories, songs, conversations in the hallway, listening intently, and sharing meals, to name only a few. The etymological roots of the word liturgy suggest that it is a “work of and for the people”—in this sense, every Hutchmoot is one big liturgy composed of countless small ones. Every logistical detail and fleeting decision weave together to form one shared work of celebration, communion, and hopefully worship. That’s the goal, anyway. And as lofty as that sounds, it is a goal achieved not by impressive feats of artistic prowess or piercing insights, but by the smallest, most mundane kindnesses we can give to each other. Hospitality, vulnerability, community—all these words at risk of trendiness—the ideals they represent come to life in the nooks and crannies of our days. As in any vast, coordinated effort like this, every one of us brings our hopes and fears, our griefs and gifts to the table. It’s a beautiful and fragile thing to gather—in being loved, we risk being known. So whether you will be joining us in person this year or not, we ask that you would join us in prayer for the many souls being brought together. Below you’ll find a liturgy from Every Moment Holy that may assist in your prayer. A Liturgy to Begin a Purposeful Gathering Leader: And so are we gathered here, uniquely in all of history, we particular people in this singular time and place. People: Accomplish your purposes among us, O God. Tune our hearts to the voice of your Spirit. Wake us to be present to you and to one another in these shared hours we are given. For it is you, O Lord, who have so gathered us from our various places, and you alone who know our hearts and our needs. Among us are some who arrive anxious, some who are lonely, some who suffer pain or sorrow. May we in our joys find grace to enter the sorrows of others. Among us are some who arrive rejoicing, hearts made light by good news, good health, glad anticipation. May we in our sorrows find grace to embrace the joys of others. Let us prize these moments and care for one another deeply—for each of us, and our relationships to one another, are precious and fleeting. Amen. This poster was made by Stephen Crotts. You can view more of his work here.

Click through for this week’s edition of Jonny Jimison’s Rabbit Trails. Click here to check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

The most important thing in your life is not what you do; it’s who you become. That’s what you will take into eternity. – Dallas Willard Greetings, Rabbitarians! It brings me great joy to once more invite you to hop on over to the Renovaré Book Club, where we are about to begin a new season. This year we’ll be reading together: Book One: Becoming Dallas Willard: The Formation of a Philosopher, Teacher, and Christ Follower, written by Dallas’s close friend Gary Moon. The story of how Dallas grew into the philosophy professor who made a huge Kingdom dent with books like The Divine Conspiracy and Renovation of the Heart is fascinating and hope-sparking. Gary Moon himself will be facilitating our journey through this book. Book Two: Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies, by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung. Everyone I know who has read this book has said it was a game changer in terms of how they detected and dealt with vice in their own lives. We’re pleased to have the author herself guiding us through this transformative work. Book Three: The Cloud of Unknowing. Sometimes it seems like this enigmatic classic is a bit like Woodstock—everyone claims to have had a point of contact with it, but few can remember the details. One of our favo(u)rite Brits, James Catford, will be helping us give this book a real go. (For those of you who have no idea what Woodstock was, think Coachella, but muddier.) Book Four: Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion, by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. Many of you may know Jonathan through his social justice work with Shane Claiborne (and others), and especially through his contributions to Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. We’re very glad Jonathan agreed to lead us through this important new offering…a book for such a time as this. Are you feeling drawn to this opportunity? The first week of reading begins October 1st. Membership in the Club includes weekly guides through the books, exclusive resources from the authors/facilitators, online community, and, in about 74 (and growing) locations, the option to join or start an in-person discussion group. Good things happen when Rabbitarians and Renovarians meet. We hope you will join us in the Club.

I wrote this three summers ago, a few months after I had graduated college. I was in the middle of a real sea-change, a marked shift in the way I began to approach my own emotions and my own story. It was as though God had been asking me to wake up and finally, I was able to fight through the sleepiness and open up my eyes. This piece was born out of those moments of gracious eye-opening. Sometimes people ingest something that they shouldn’t, like something poisonous, and the only solution is to vomit. Ipecac syrup comes in handy for this. I’ve (thankfully) never had to endure that process, but I hear that’s the way it goes. The bad thing in you has to come out somehow and there are times that vomiting is the only way. It isn’t pretty, but it’s effective. Afterwards, though the process was painful and gross and altogether unpleasant, you are better for it. It is vaguely more complicated when it comes to ingesting something that isn’t quite physical. Lies, maybe. Untruths about the world and my place in it. There is no ipecac syrup for unwanted internalized lies. “We are what we eat” applies to more than just food. It applies to words, both spoken and unspoken. It applies to actions. It applies to lack of action. I take in those things, internalize them, and sometimes that’s the end of it. There is no intake form and no data collection about whether that was the best thing to ingest. I just take it in and it becomes a part of me. On my worst days, I take those thoughts at face value. Someone said that about me? Someone treated me in such a way that reflects they think this about who I am? It must be true. On my best days, I take thoughts captive and hold them up to the person of Christ. Does this thing that was given to me (this thought, this word, this feeling) reflect the character of the God I know? Is it true, noble, right, pure, lovely? Is it patient? Is it kind? If not, I don’t want it. I show it the door. I have suspected for a while that there are some ways in which I operate that are not God’s best for me. There are behaviors that I have learned, truths that I have exchanged for lies, and general understandings of my existence in this world that do not line up with what God tells me about what He is like and what He is all about. Some of this stems from my own sin. Some of this stems from the sin of others of which I have been on the receiving end. Most of this stems from the reality that the world is just not as it should be. We are so far from Eden. There are ways in which I think my body has learned to cope with the poison, whether this poison manifests in the form of my own destructive self-talk, or works itself out in my sometimes less-than-healthy behaviors towards other people. I have manipulated myself into being able to either hide these realities away, so that I am the only one privy to their existence, or brush them off as just some sort of manufacturing error, merely a glitch in my personality, merely an inconvenient reality, but one that is here to stay. And now, in the thick of the heat and of the humidity and of the dog-days-of-a-Tennessee-summer, God has shown me my poison for what it is. I know this poison, these lies, quite well. I know the taste and I've become comfortable with the sting as I choke it down. I might even call it an addiction. It is not uncommon to become attached to the very thing that causes us harm because at least therein lies some consistency. Kelsey Miller It turns out that not all of the words, thoughts, and actions I have ingested were for my good. Some of them, even from people I loved, served to harm me. Not every word that has been spoken over me has been good, true, or beautiful. Some, in fact, were the exact opposite. Some of those words and actions were twisted to appear as such from a distance, drawing me in with the hope that they would be as life-giving as they promised, but the closer I got, the more evident it became that they were merely counterfeit in light of the real thing. Some words I have ingested are poisonous. Lacking that knowledge, I had taken them in, considered them as facts, and allowed them to shape me accordingly. They have bred in me behaviors and instilled in me patterns of thinking that I no longer even question. But in reality, they are wrong, unhealthy, and leading me further away from the fullness of life that Christ has given to us. They have to go. To be honest, I am not sure I would have made them leave myself. I know this poison, these lies, quite well. I know the taste and I’ve become comfortable with the sting as I choke it down. I might even call it an addiction. It is not uncommon to become attached to the very thing that causes us harm because at least therein lies some consistency. But though reliable, the poison is destroying me, numbing me to joy, love, and grace. And yet I turn my back on these things, preferring the intoxication of my own self-hatred. But God in His infinite mercy, having already waged and won the war for my soul, has led me forth in a battle against this poison. And though I imagine He too hoped there would be another way, He knows, like I do, that sometimes ipecac is the best answer and the only choice left is to hold on tight and vomit up the bad stuff. It feels especially brutal because it is a slow exile. It doesn’t happen all at once. There is no quick or practical ipecac solution to this problem. This makes sense because it didn’t happen all at once. It took years for this poison to become a part of me. I took more than one swig. In practice, the obedience of this expulsion has looked like a whole lot of truth telling and a whole lot of crying, often simultaneous. I have spent the better part of the last month crying about one thing or another, as God continues to give me the boldness and courage to say out loud what I have kept locked away for months or even years. It turns out there is some deep emotion surrounding telling your secrets. But especially for me, as a human who is so connected and in tune with my body as it is, there is grace in crying these tears in particular. As I voice the worst stuff, as I give names to the poisons that I have ingested, the physicality of crying stands in place of vomiting. It isn’t pretty. But I can feel the poison being expelled from my body. I don’t have to guess. It is gone. It is indeed finished. I can only hope it stays away for good. It feels fitting that all of this would happen in the thick of Ordinary Time, the glorious majority of the liturgical calendar. Here, we merely rest in the ordinariness of our lives, trusting that this too can be an incubator for God to do His best work. Embracing this, I hope to act in direct contrast to the thought that I must be doing something impressive for God to take notice. So, for now, I’ll do the ordinary things. I’ll keep going to counseling. I’ll keep communing with my people. I’ll keep telling my secrets. And though I had hoped this was the case all along, I am now able to see it in practice: He stays with me in sickness and in health. For better or for worse. He’s in it for the long haul, the whole haul, vomiting and all, and even when I grow weary of me, He is patient and faithful. There is no ipecac for the emotional poison we ingest. But there is Jesus, and He knows our insides and our outsides and the sides we have been told to hide away. He is privy to our pain, mindful of our suffering, and He knows what we need if only we would have the courage to ask. Artwork credit: Energy Field & Water by Nancy Reyner Acrylic on canvas

[Editor’s note: This piece was written by our friend Mary McCampbell, who we are excited to have at Hutchmoot this year. Enjoy, and be sure to check out her session if you plan to attend.] A few years ago, when preparing notes for a class discussion on Terence Malick’s 2011 film, The Tree of Life, I began to feel very uncomfortable about typing notes and viewing the film simultaneously. I realized that Malick’s film, which pushes the viewer into a disorienting space where he or she must explore what the film’s opening voiceover calls the “two ways to live”—the way of nature and the way of grace—demanded my complete attention. Watching the film felt like participation in a sacred act, and my rather clinical academic analysis seemed like a violation of sorts. Our attentiveness, or lack thereof, to the 'glory' of the film tells us something about our own sojourning, about the particular kind of attentiveness, amidst both pain and beauty, that is formative in the development of our own spirituality. Mary McCampbell The film is both abstract and concrete as it invites us to consider the relationship between its macro-narrative—God, the creation of the world, and the moral structure of the universe—and its micro-narrative of the O’Brien family as they grapple with questions of suffering, justice, and the knowledge of God. Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) follows the self-serving, purely pragmatic “way of nature” until he finally realizes that “I dishonored it all and did not notice the glory.” O’Brien learns that, in order to love his family, God, and creation, he must notice its complexity and allow himself to be ushered into a space of awe and wonder. The Tree of Life, a highly conceptual, impressionistic coming of age film focused particularly on the internal landscape and spiritual journey of Jack O’Brien, causes its viewers to think about their own relationship with beauty and its ultimate source. Our attentiveness, or lack thereof, to the “glory”of the film tells us something about our own sojourning, about the particular kind of attentiveness, amidst both pain and beauty, that is formative in the development of our own spirituality. By forcing his viewers into a sometimes uncomfortable state of confusion, Malick often leads us into a state of wonder. The film demands patience, contemplation, attentiveness; and these are things that many moviegoers, nurtured on quick and easy Hollywood feel-good formulas, are not ready to give to it. Sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno claimed that popular art has been “standardized;” by this, he means that what he called “the culture industry” provides simple, formulaic “art” forms that are created in order to tell us what we want and then sell it back to us. In this sense, we are formed in the image of our culture as we find comfort and false sustenance in these things that we have been trained to think we need and love. Perhaps this is one reason we (the American public) find ourselves so uncomfortable in front of abstraction that cannot be understood immediately. In a sense, we are culturally trained to become Mr. O’Brien; we learn that the most important things are instant and formulaic, giving us a false sense of fulfillment because they meet one of two goals: increasing our power or entertaining us. These are the standardized norms of mass American culture, and anything that challenges these norms is often simplistically labeled “boring” or “weird.” How fascinating it is that Mr. O’Brien is played by Brad Pitt, the twinkling star of so many mass produced Hollywood flicks. Interestingly, many moviegoers felt led astray, cheated, and angry when seeing this film; they wanted their money back. But Pitt’s Mr. O’Brien teaches us to be humble in front of the mystery of both beauty and suffering; he teaches us to become like children and re-enter a state of wonder: “I wanted to be loved because I was great; a big man. I’m nothing. Look at the glory around us; trees, birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all, and didn’t notice the glory. I’m a foolish man.” This article was originally published at Relief Journal and can be viewed by clicking here.

If you’re like me, you have some childhood and early adolescent memories of listening to certain songs that gave you a magical impression of seamlessness, as if they had always existed in all their wholeness, just the way they met your ears. You may remember exactly where you were and what day it was when you first had an experience like this with music—it may very well be that these memories act as threshold moments marking your awakening to the sheer scope of music. I was in the backseat of my parents’ Pacifica during an excursion to Nashville, my big sister riding shotgun and my dad driving, when he turned on the radio to Lightning 100. They were playing “Smoothie Song” by Nickel Creek. It was love at first listen; it is no overstatement to say I’ve never been the same. That moment shaped my taste for thoughtful, vibrant, harmonically inventive acoustic music. On vacation in Florida, my sister picked up a weird-looking CD, immediately recognizable to my eager, thirteen year-old eyes as a token of college coolness that I was surely on the cusp of “getting” if it weren’t for my premature ears. It was called Come On Feel the Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens. She put it in the CD player and I recall feeling overstimulated by a bright density of kaleidoscopic melodies bursting from the speakers. When I was in eighth grade, I was in my bedroom one evening reading Mat Kearney’s blog (because that’s obviously what you do when you’re in eighth grade) and I stumbled on his recommendation of a new Nashville artist named Brooke Waggoner. I clicked the link to her MySpace page and listened to “Hush If You Must” through my headphones. An elaborate, gorgeous strings section followed her piano through a non sequitur change in time signature immediately after the first chorus; I encountered for the first time a melding of through-composed classical music with pop sensibilities. I’m certain that this sort of experience can be had with other forms of art, too, but there’s something distinctly timeless, inalterable, and enduring about a pristine recording—every sound occupies just the space it must as if by some cosmic moral obligation, and to think of a recording like that in the process of being made feels almost scandalizing. To consider that there was a moment in time when Jeff Buckley sang the final take of his song “Grace”—or his legendary version of “Hallelujah,” for that matter—feels like an irreverent insult against the completeness of those recordings in their final form. And perhaps it’s just that characteristic of completion that I’m trying to articulate. Music, as a uniquely time-bound art, has the astounding ability to lift us out of the sequential time of which it consists and into an eternal sort of time for which it reaches. And in an age proliferated by studio recordings, the chiseled changelessness of the music we consume only augments this feature. Sadly, as we grow up, we learn to spot the seams, even in what first appeared to be exhaustively seamless to our younger, more impressionable selves. Alas, I’ll never forget when I heard a moment in Buckley’s “Lilac Wine” when two vocal takes were clearly cut and spliced together. Or even, maybe more subtly, the moment when I first thought, “I’m not sure I love every little thing about Sufjan Stevens’ songwriting anymore.” As we grow and mature, the scales fall off our eyes, we peer behind the curtain, and we see the toil of our favorite art: the hidden struggle of incompletion. Our standards rise higher. More and more easily, fresh new music stales. Which makes it that much more impressive when we encounter exceptions—when a song so captures our imagination that once again, we do not see through the magic to the artifice beneath, but are, against our better judgment, transported to another time and place, one that seems always to have been there waiting for us. It was December of my first year out of college and I was an intern with little work to do and much time to fill when I pulled my headphones out of my backpack and listened to Remember Us To Life by Regina Spektor. And I might as well have been eleven years old again in the backseat of my parents’ car. The entire album successfully evaded each of my watchful dragons, who, I might add, are very watchful. Much joy has been stolen from me by the watchfulness of my personal dragons, but, like judges with insufficient evidence, they shrugged their shoulders and pronounced Spektor’s record spotless. Every lyric, every melody, even every instrumentation and production choice shimmered with the completion of a piece of art fully, but not overly, wrought. I felt like Mary Berry confronted with the possibility of a perfect pastry. This was a good, good bake. A previous album by Regina Spektor called Far had enamored me when I was in tenth grade, but in the years following, I began to discover elements of her craft that left me craving more. Certain songs survived my criticism, but others seemed, to return to my Mary Berry analogy, a bit under-baked. Spektor has described her style as “surreal”—her lyrics fit together not with the logic of wakefulness, but of dreams, where abrupt and fantastical images demand not intellectual explanation, but affective response. Consequently, Spektor’s music has always struck me as gimmicky at worst (she makes playful seal noises in her song “Folding Chair” and overdoes this weird, abrasive breathing thing in her otherwise gorgeous song “Open”) and strikingly perceptive at best (as in classics like “Samson” or her breathtaking song “Laughing With”). However, in Remember Us To Life, Spektor’s penchant for giving voice to the pre-conscious stirrings of our imaginations has developed to full maturity—and for the first time, her voice as an artist has been expertly supported by an intricate web of instruments, produced to completion. The album’s cohesion is established by this thread of her dreamlike imagination woven inseparably with a production style that brings it to life. The result is an experience, both sonic and lyrical, of purposeful fragments, seemingly unrelated, swimming hazily around like the day’s fleeting memories flashing in your mind as you drift off to sleep. “Bleeding Heart” tells the tale of adolescent angst with poignant accuracy: Someday you’ll grow up and then you’ll forget All of the pain you endured Until you walk by a sad pair of eyes And up will come back all the hurt And you’ll see their pain as they look away And you want to help, but there’s just no way ‘Cause you won the war, so it’s not your turn But everything inside still burns “The Trapper and the Furrier” is a cultural critique whose music embodies the primal sins that its lyrics condemn: The lawyer and the pharmacist went walking in paradise And all the sick were around them with fevers unbreaking Crying and bleeding and coughing and shaking And arms outstretched, prescription collecting “Obsolete” describes with arresting clarity deep fears of emptiness: This is how I feel right now: Obsolete manuscript No one needs, no one reads Pages lost, incomplete No one knows what it means The climax of the album, “Sellers of Flowers,” unfolds like a cryptic riddle pleading our human need for life beyond death, for meaning beyond banal evil: The sellers of flowers buy up old roses They pull off dead petals like old heads of lettuce And sell them as new ones for cheaper and fairer But they die by the morning, so who is the winner? Not the roses, not the buyers, not the sellers Maybe winter In moments when my ears are tired, when the familiarity of the most common musical tropes obfuscates my ability to hear and resonate with even the truest of songs, it is helpful to remember that what I need is not—contrary to popular belief and the spirit of our age—more novelty. I don’t need a word or a melody that I’ve never heard. Tolkien himself famously and unfashionably argued not for freshly-paved roads of originality, but for the well-trod paths of convention. It is not the tree’s fault that we have forgotten the wonder of trees; it is rather our eyes that have grown weary of the seeing. In Remember Us To Life, Regina Spektor has awoken me to the sweet desire for a world I have never visited, but which is a truer, realer version of the world as I know it. The magic of this record is not in newness, but in a gracing of tried and true conventions with unwearied ears. The normal realities of daily life—the images and memories, the desires, the fears—are all there in recognizable form, but portrayed by a narrator searching for meaning, for answers, for the slightest trace of a world more lasting than our own. It is this commitment to the integrity of her dream-like songs that gives Spektor’s album a lasting beauty—the kind of beauty that reminds us to hope for our very own world made seamless and whole.

The great thing about Google is that it takes you straight to the information you want to find (or, in any case, straight to the information that the Keeper of the Algorithm wants you to find). The great thing about every other method of organizing and/or delivering information is that it doesn’t take you straight to the information you want to find. Back when I was walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways, if you wanted to know something you had to go to the library and get a book. And in order to get that book, you had to walk past a lot of other books. This quaint fact accounts for a good 20% of my education. Fetching a book about, say, Shakespeare required me to scan whole shelves of other books about Shakespeare—books I didn’t even know I wanted or needed to read. In graduate school it wasn’t unusual for me to emerge from the stacks with six or seven books, but not the one I originally went looking for. You don’t know what you don’t know, and sometimes the only way to find out is through that highly inefficient, often inconvenient process known as wandering around. But as G. K. Chesterton observed, “an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.” I thought of those old pre-Internet wanderings yesterday when my children were discussing the French and Spanish words for ham. Back before Merriam-Webster.com was a thing, I used to noodle around in the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED. The OED is a miracle. (The Professor and the Madman, by the way, is a fascinating little book about how the OED came to be.) The OED, according to its own website, is “the most complete record of the English language ever assembled.” At twenty volumes, I should think so. I have the “compact” edition, which crams all the entries from twenty reasonable-sized volumes into two huge folio volumes, each three inches thick and weighing fifteen pounds together. Either of the two would be the biggest book in my house. They come with a magnifying glass. The dictionary websites are incredibly efficient. You want to know what a word means or where it came from? You’re only a couple of seconds away. Not so with the OED. The OED is a place to ramble (especially if your eyes are still young). One of my favorite rambles came when I was curious about the words gamble and gambol. I figured they both came from whatever root gave us the word game, since to gamble is to play games of chance, and to gambol about is to run and jump and play games, probably in a meadow. I was curious as to how and when the meaning diverged between playing dangerous games on the one hand and playing innocent games on the other. That is exactly the kind of information that is on offer in the OED. But the OED surprised me. The two words, though homophones, are unrelated. Gamble does ultimately derive from the Anglo-Saxon root that gave us game. But gambol has a more interesting history that leads down quite a rabbit trail. But why, you may ask, is it necessary to know these things about ham and gamboling? That one is easy to answer: It is not necessary. But the unnecessary is the most important thing about us. Jonathan Rogers Gambol is more closely related to the word ham than to the word gamble. The late Latin camba or gamba means leg. Hence the French jambon, the Spanish jamon, and the English ham—the cut of meat that comes from the leg of a hog. This root is also the source of the now-obsolete gam, meaning the leg of a human being, and especially an adult female human being, as in “The palooka elbowed the wise guy and said, ‘Get a load of the gams on that dame.’” To gambol is to kick up one’s legs. A form of the word originally came into the language from the French gambade, which describes the curveting of a horse. The same root, gamba, also gives us jamb, the leg that holds up a doorway, and iamb, a metrical foot of poetry (as in iambic pentameter). A gambrel roof is that barn-style roof that has an extra bend between the roofline and the eave, like the bend of a horse’s back leg. I’ll conclude this discourse with the word gambit (not to be confused with gamut, which has its own fascinating story). A gambit is a stratagem or a calculated move. The word is often associated with chess, in which a player will put a pawn at risk in order to gain an advantage against an opponent. So where do you suppose the word gambit comes from? Is it more closely related to gamble and game, or to gambol and ham? You would think gamble, wouldn’t you? A stratagem is always a gamble, a risk. And chess, of course, is a game. But before gambit referred to a chess strategy, it referred a wrestling strategy—the strategy of gaining an advantage over one’s opponent by tripping up his legs. The Italians called it a gambetto. Thanks for indulging me (if, indeed, you are still indulging me). You had more efficient ways to use your time than to meander along the various paths that derive from the late Latin word gamba. But this letter is a celebration of inefficiency. When we don’t know what we don’t know, an efficient search often turns out to be a case of making better time to a place you don’t need to be. I am highly grateful for the efficiency of Google and Merriam-Webster.com. I used both to check my facts about gamble, gambol, ham, and gambit. But without that old inefficient, inconvenient (and time-honored) tradition of flipping through a dusty book, I don’t suppose I would have ever known about the connections between those words. I take that back: one could definitely discover those connections via the Internet, but only if one were using the Internet inefficiently. But why, you may ask, is it necessary to know these things about ham and gamboling? That one is easy to answer: It is not necessary. But the unnecessary is the most important thing about us. The ever-delightful Jonathan Rogers now has a brand new platform for his online courses! Check it out by clicking here, and see if there’s a course you’d like to enroll in. It’s fancy and impressive.

When I tell people I’ve written a book about death, hands down, the most common response I receive is laughter. I take no offense, though. It’s not a cruel, mocking sort of laughter. We joke about death by instinct, the way an eight year old laughs when someone passes gas. It’s socially unacceptable, therefore hilarious. Maybe it’s wishful thinking on my part, but I take this response as confirmation of a major reason I wrote the book in the first place. Our society has placed a taboo over honest, straightforward talk about death. Perhaps without realizing it, many of us have accepted an unspoken agreement not to go there. One of the first writers to describe this taboo was a British sociologist named Geoffrey Gorer, writing back in the 1950s. In an essay called “The Pornography of Death,” Gorer suggested that death had become to the twentieth century what sex was to the nineteenth century. Even as the prominence of sex broadened—in conversation, in mainstream television, in what kids are allowed to see and know—death was pushed further out of sight and out of mind. (“The Pornography of Death,” Encounter, October, 1955, 49–52). This taboo on death is something we impose on our culture, wittingly or not. But the taboo also imposes something on us that we ought to recognize and take seriously. It distorts our view of reality and allows us to live as if death is someone else’s problem. What the taboo does to us is the deeper insight of Gorer’s essay, and the reason for its provocative title. When you suppress honest talk about basic human experiences, interest in them doesn’t disappear. The interest itself is irrepressible. But that interest bubbles up in perverted forms. With sex you get pornography. With death you get zombie movies. What porn is to monogamous married sexuality death-on-screen has become to death-in-reality. Think about it: the deaths shown in our most popular shows and movies are violent deaths. They come to relatively young people who usually aren’t expecting to die. Characters aren’t dying of old age and natural decay. They’re dying because a psychopath, a mafia hit man, or a zombie killed them. You don’t watch these shows for insight into genuine human experience. You watch them to escape from genuine human experience. Too often where death shows up in popular culture, it belongs to a fantasy world. It’s newsworthy. It’s tragic. It’s psychopathic or maybe apocalyptic. But one way or another, death is exotic. It’s something that happens to someone else. But death, of course, is not exotic. It’s as basic to human experience as birth, eating and sleeping. The great danger of our taboo on honest talk about death is that it enables self-deception. It feeds a distorted detachment from my own personal mortality. In our time and place, where death is often banished from polite company, we will struggle to experience the beauty and power of Jesus because we've numbed ourselves to the problem he came to solve. Matt McCullough Contrast this detachment from death to the prayer of the psalmist in Psalm 90: “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Behind this prayer is the consistent conviction of the Bible: to live well in the world as it is, we have to account for death with honesty. If we’re willing to push through the taboo on death we’ll find wisdom on the other side. But honesty about death can lead us to something far more precious even than wisdom. This honesty can lead us to Jesus, to a clearer view of his beauty and power, to a deeper awareness of his life-giving relevance to everything we face. We need to overcome our detachment from death so that we can enjoy a deeper attachment to Jesus. There is a direct correlation between our sensitivity to death’s sting and our ability to savor Jesus’s promises to us. The gap between the promises of the gospel we affirm and our experience of those promises in life—between what we know and what we know—is a timeless struggle. But what aggravates that gap can vary from culture to culture. In our time and place, where death is often banished from polite company, we will struggle to experience the beauty and power of Jesus because we’ve numbed ourselves to the problem he came to solve. In John 11, Jesus made resurrection a bedrock promise of the gospel. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (Jn 11:25-26). But what good is resurrection to those who are living like immortals? “If death is not a daily reality,” Walter Wangerin has written, “then Christ’s triumph over death is neither daily nor real. Worship and proclamation and even faith itself take on a dream-like, unreal air, and Jesus is reduced to something like a long-term insurance policy, filed and forgotten—whereas he can be our necessary ally, an immediate, continuing friend, the holy destroyer of death and the devil, my own beautiful savior” (Mourning into Dancing, 29-30). There is a beautiful irony here, with the power to change your life: If we want to enjoy the precious relevance of Jesus in our day-to-day, we need to bring the truth about death into our day-to-day. Death-awareness is our path into the liberating, life-giving truth about Jesus. When we’re honest about what death means for who we are, for what we hope to accomplish, for everything we love about life—when we’re driven to cry out with Paul, “who will deliver me from this body of death?”—we’re made ready to join with Paul in joyful relief, and to mean it deep down: “thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom 7:24-25). Click here to check out Matt’s excellent book, Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope in the Rabbit Room Store. This post originally appeared on Desiring God. You can view it by clicking here. Artwork credit: Dawn Waters Baker www.dawnwatersbaker.com “To the Lowest Place” 60×48 (inches) on Canvas Available through Waterfall Mansion www.waterfallmansion.com

Almost twenty years ago, while I was at university, my parents decided to move back to the seaside village in Northern Ireland where I had spent the first twelve years of my life. We relocated several times during my teens and, for me, this latest move felt like a step backwards. I visited for their first Christmas “back home” with no intention of joining them on any permanent basis. On Christmas day a guy with ginger hair and a smile that was contagious gave the children’s talk in their new church. The response to his self-deprecating humor was evidence that he was not only well known but also well loved. Long story short, I ended up staying. Two years later we were married. I went into marriage believing that there were some things I could fix about Glenn. One was what I considered to be a slightly infantile obsession with the town that would now be my home. I shared my plans with him regularly. I wanted to move somewhere that was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. I wanted to find a place where we could have a ministry together, fully exercising our gifts in a way that suited us exactly. Again and again he agreed that it all sounded great, assured me that we would think about it and then carried on doing exactly what he always did: working in the same schools, being part of the same church, spending time with the same people. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year. This Christmas it will be twenty years since I first sat in the congregation and watched Glenn captivate the children in the front rows. Lots of those kids are married now and I’ve lost count of the number who asked him to perform their wedding ceremonies. I’ve begun to notice something over the last couple of years. When my husband is asked to speak at weddings or funerals, he rarely has to ask the families for stories to tell. He already knows them. Like the characters in Wendell Berry’s Port William stories, their lives have intersected and merged with his so many times over the past four decades that it’s hard to tell where his story ends and theirs begin. To be untethered by roots or commitment is seen as a great achievement in our upside down world. Undoubtedly, there are particular callings and seasons in life that require us to set out, even temporarily, in search of new things. The world is full of rich stories and unexpected wonder and there is something irreplaceable about the adventure of meeting new people and discovering new places. I suspect that part of me will always be straining to see what is just beyond the next horizon. Having said that, I wonder how often my longing for something new has simply been an attempt to validate a pattern of dissatisfaction that no new church or town or community will fix. What if, sometimes, cutting your lines and setting sail just means you are adrift? When Cain murdered Abel, his punishment was that he would forever be a vagrant and a wanderer. From that time on he would have no home and no permanent community. Genesis 4:13 tells us that Cain considered the punishment too much to bear. I'm learning that deep community may be so slow to grow that we only get to do it once or twice in a lifetime. I'm learning that it's a choice to be present in a certain space and time with a certain group of people, whatever that costs. Heidi Johnston When God called the nation of Israel to live as his people, he placed them in a specific piece of land. Its location was genius, making it a through route for much of the world’s trade traffic but one of the main weapons in the Israelite arsenal was their community life. By witnessing the way God’s people continued to live in relationship with each other, living intentionally according to the pattern God had given them, those looking on would see the heart of God. My natural instinct is still to run away when things get hard or monotonous or overly ordinary but I’m learning that community at its best is a long-term plan. I’m learning that deep community may be so slow to grow that we only get to do it once or twice in a lifetime. I’m learning that it’s a choice to be present in a certain space and time with a certain group of people, whatever that costs. It means continuing to bring yourself and your gifts to the table and offering them up for the sake of people who may not always understand what you are doing or why you are there. When others say or do the painful things, committing to community means choosing to stay and forgive when the voices in your head are screaming, “Pack up and move on.” If, like me, you have a tendency to say and do stupid things, sooner or later you are going to have to walk back into the room, look people in the eye and take responsibility for your own brokenness. A friend of mine came to see me a few months ago, after a difficult season in her personal life caused her to withdraw for a while from many of the people she knew. Truthfully, I was surprised to see her. Many of my memories of our conversations end with me kicking myself on the way home for the stupid things I said or the wise things I didn’t say. When I asked, she told me she came to me because I had been there for her for twenty years. The reality is that I had done very little to shape her life in any intentional or significant way. When she said I had been there, she meant that I had literally, physically been present in her life for twenty years. It may be an obvious point but it struck me for the first time that to be in someone’s life for twenty years takes twenty years. It turned out that while Glenn had been intentionally building community, I had been doing it almost by accident. While I was trying to fix Glenn’s devotion to the people he has spent his life with, that same community had been slowly teaching me how rare and beautiful it can be to commit your life to one particular patch of earth and the people who share it with you. With the passing of two decades I have found myself living within the rhythms Glenn chose for us, unaware of the way the framework of my life has been shifting. In my own introverted, bumbling way I have become part of something richer than I have ever experienced before. I have no doubt that greater intentionality on my part could have made the experience richer still. I don’t have Glenn’s openness with people and my impact on our town doesn’t compare to his. Our church faces the same struggles with personality, politics, misunderstanding and brokenness that are common wherever you go. Left to my own devices, there have been many times when I would have given up in frustration. Honestly, it’s not uncommon for me to look around the place where my story has taken root and be overwhelmed in the same moment by a deep sense of belonging and a desire to be somewhere else. However, with the passage of time and to my great surprise, I have found myself in a place where I know and am known. Where I least expected to find it, because love would not let me leave, I have fallen clumsily into a place I’m learning to call home.

I know better than to say that I’m a Springsteen fan. It’s not because I don’t listen to Springsteen. I do. I have most of his catalog in my iTunes folder. Nebraska is one of my favorite albums, and thank goodness for The Rising and Devils and Dust, albums that did some justice to the experience of 9/11 and the second Gulf War. So, I’m plenty familiar with Springsteen and enjoy his music immensely. I hesitate to call myself a fan, however, because I know a few, and I have nothing in comparison to their life-altering devotion. Springsteen is not an item on their bucket list. Springsteen is in the oxygen they breathe. So, for instance, they might drop all the details of their life and get on a plane and fly across the country to attend a concert, maybe even for the third or fourth time on a particular tour. A dear friend of mine has been to countless Springsteen concerts. His boys are now old enough that they’ve been through the Springsteen catechism and attend concerts with their father. Recently, the boys went to a U2 concert and were disappointed at the weak effort of the lads from Dublin who could only manage to play for two hours, far below the Springsteen standard, who on his most recent tour played one night for four hours. For my friend and others—you know who you are—Springsteen doesn’t just talk about life. He delivers it. It’s a through-your ears-to-your-heart, throughout-your-body kind of life. Springsteen has a way of making me ache when I listen to him...the ache for escape, to run, the desperate need for there to be more. To follow the indeterminate destination of the road, or to be carried someplace by the river which makes us clean. Mark Love Don’t get me wrong: there’s some church in his music. It’s not hard to scratch on a Springsteen lyric and find some sort of faith allusion. I don’t know if you saw Springsteen’s interview with Stephen Colbert on the Late Show upon the release of his memoir a few years ago,  but they talked about the way their Catholicism shaped them. It can’t help but be present in his music. I saw an earlier interview with Springsteen in which he talked about how the themes of faith, of resurrection and hope, show up in his music. He didn’t write directly about these things. In other words, he wasn’t intentionally writing songs of faith or about faith. It was more that the rhythms and smells and dispositions of his early religious training got deep inside of him so that no expression was devoid of them. In his memoir, a brilliant read, he writes: In Catholicism, there existed the poetry, danger and darkness that reflected my imagination and my inner self. I found a land of great and harsh beauty, of fantastic stories, of unimaginable punishment and infinite reward. It was a glorious and pathetic place I was either shaped for or fit right into. It has walked alongside me as a waking dream my whole life. So as a young adult I tried to make sense of it. I tried to meet its challenge for the very reasons that there are souls to lose and a kingdom of love to be gained. I laid what I’d absorbed across the hardscrabble lives of my family, friends and neighbors. I turned it into something I could grapple with, understand, something I could even find faith in. As funny as it sounds, I have a “personal” relationship with Jesus. He remains one of my fathers, though as with my own father, I no longer believe in his godly power. I believe deeply in his love, his ability to save . . . but not to damn . . . enough of that. In his interview with Stephen Colbert, he actually talked about his songs in gospel terms. “The verses,” he said, “are the blues. The chorus is the gospel. It’s how I think of a song when I write.” The chorus, he says, is where he tries to bring some “transcendence.” Maybe the themes are getting more explicit the deeper Springsteen goes into his career. The allusions seem more obvious in Devils and Dust and Radio Nowhere. The friend I spoke of earlier says he’s reconnecting with his Catholicism. Maybe. But this is not, I think, Springsteen’s primary appeal to my more spiritually sensitive friends. His appeal comes more, I think, from his ability to name our common experience poetically, and in doing so, to make it transcendent. Our everyday experience is shot through with meaning, with a beat, with a turn of a phrase, and in performance with an embodied passion. It’s this sensibility, I think, that you hear in his memoir when he writes about the neighborhood he grew up in: There is a place here— you can hear it, smell it— where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures, play baseball, die, make love, have kids, drink themselves drunk on spring nights and do their best to hold off the demons that seek to destroy us, our homes, our families, our town. Here we live in the shadow of the steeple, where the holy rubber meets the road, all crookedly blessed in God’s mercy, in the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, race-riot-creating, oddball-hating, soul-shaking, love-and-fear-making, heartbreaking town of Freehold, New Jersey. Let the service begin. Life as worship. Where the holy rubber meets the road. Blues and gospel. Laying it across the hardscrabble lives of friends and families. The truth. Springsteen has a way of making me ache when I listen to him. He touches places I’ve been and feelings I’ve had. Some of it in sepia tones, home, glory days, regret and longing for home. But some of it is the ache for escape, to run, the desperate need for there to be more. To follow the indeterminate destination of the road, or to be carried someplace by the river which makes us clean. He captures something of the beautiful and horrible ambiguity of life.  Oh that our worship on Sundays could hold this beautiful and horrible ambiguity! Too often our worship “papers over” our reality. It’s too glib, too easily moves to happy or joyous. It’s all gospel and no blues. It scarcely notices injustice or hardscrabble lives, and in so doing, reduces the gospel. One final thought about Springsteen. It’s rock and roll that carries all of this, that both holds the lyrics and creates the space for them. But it’s more than that. The words are embodied in the performance—in the sweat and the movement and the beat and the way the sound moves through your chest. At a Springsteen concert, we’re not “brains on sticks,” to use Jamie Smith’s memorable phrase. We’re bodies connected to light and sound and others and the world. It’s not escape. It’s just the opposite. It’s connection. One that we long for. One that we desire. Bruuuce. This post originally appeared on the Tokens Show website. In November, the Tokens Show will be visiting the Ryman Auditorium for a special Thanksgiving show! Grab your tickets here.

Click through for this week’s edition of Jonny Jimison’s Rabbit Trails. Click here to check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

Back in November of 2017, I had the pleasure of interviewing Andy Gullahorn about his new record, Everything As It Should Be, the craft of songwriting, the balance between boldness and humility, and what he has learned from the arc of his career. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Andy is currently in the middle of a Kickstarter project to fund the finishing of his new record, and he’s got twelve days to go. Click here to learn more about the project and choose how to support him. Andy Gullahorn: In 2016 I didn’t write any songs. It was just a slump. I don’t know if you know this, but there was a political campaign going on that year— Drew Miller: Oh really? AG: Yeah, for president or something. Anyway, for me, it’s hard when people don’t get along. So if I write a song, it has to be the one that brings everybody together. And that song didn’t come. I was kinda waiting on that one to show up all year. Drew: Did you have an ideal for what a song like that would be? AG: Yeah, and it was paralyzing. I was thinking, “Okay, if I write this song, it’s got to be something that will get people on both sides of the issue to really see each other.” But that’s such a huge task. Drew: Well, it’s hard to do that without it becoming kitschy. AG: It was stupid for other reasons, too. Drew: Do you have a list? AG: It was stupid of me to think that I could do that—not that songs can’t do that, but it was stupid to think that I particularly have some power to do that. Drew: To elect yourself to that task? AG: Yeah. So I had to back off and start thinking and writing small and close to home. There ended up being a couple songs about wider culture on this record, but for the most part, the songs ended up becoming an exercise in living on my side of the street, tending to what is before me rather than trying to think so big. So I had the songs, but it was a really busy year with working on other people’s records, which always come before mine in my pecking order. So rather than rushing the whole process, I made a completely acoustic version of the record. The full version will come out later in 2018. Drew: So if you were thinking too big at first, wanting to bring the whole world together, and then you decided to stick more to your own story, how did the writing go when you started to think smaller? Did you ever feel like you hit a moment where you found where the songs were? AG: The truth is, I hadn’t even picked up the guitar and tried to write in a while. There were seasons when I was really busy, so that would make it hard, but even when those seasons were over, I would realize I hadn’t written a song in a couple months and then get scared. Like, what if it just won’t happen, or what if I fail? And then if I try and fail, that’s worse than not trying at all. So sometime during 2017 I began to take my own advice: I put my guitar in my bedroom and committed to playing five minutes a day, just picking it up, and then within a few days a song came right out. It’s what I call my middle aged love song—the title track, “Everything’s As It Should Be.” It’s about life being imperfect and messy. I came to a point with writing songs where I thought, “If I don’t write another song, I’m okay.” It’s not even that I didn’t write any songs because I was depressed or there was something wrong. It was that good things were happening, I was happy with where I was, so maybe the fact that I wasn’t writing anymore meant I had finally figured out who I was. Drew: Is that a major component of songwriting for you, to figure out who you are? AG: It’s certainly part of it. I mean, I’ve been writing songs since I was fifteen. And there was definitely a time when I asked, “If I’m not a songwriter, what am I?” It’s the reason I got into music. So I just forced myself to write out of sheer exercise, and the song that came out ended up being about marriage and family. That’s what it needed to be. Drew: That’s helpful for me to hear—the role of songwriting in your life shifting over time. Being able to ask yourself the question, “How else can I make myself useful in the world?” is its own tough but liberating process. AG: I don’t even feel like songwriting is the best thing I have to offer my community—I may be better equipped at other things and enjoy other things—but it all stems from that sense of identity I receive from songwriting. I also have never had another job, so I don’t know what else I would actually do. Drew: I’d love to hear your take on the arc of your career in general, to put everything in context. How do you interpret that story for yourself? AG: There have been plenty of iterations of what life and music have looked like, and they have all been ultimately anchored to songwriting. I began as a student at Belmont University. I wanted to live in Nashville. I got married right out of college to Jill, and she got a Christian record deal. I started writing for a Christian publishing company. I played guitar for my wife and stopped playing my own music. I was happy to do that; I loved being a guitar player and writing with her. We did that pretty much from 1998 till a little bit after my daughter was born in 2004. So about six years of that. Then, when Jill wanted to be home more with the kids and not travel as much, that’s when I realized I had only really been a guitar player for the last six years. So what should I do? That’s when I did another record, and Andrew asked if I could open for him on tour and play guitar for him. That was the beginning of about ten years of traveling with him and Ben Shive whenever I wasn’t traveling with Jill. There were some shows with Andrew, lots of shows with Jill, and a few of my own, and in time, my own shows began to outnumber the other ones. Drew: And that sounds like growth. AG: I guess—it wasn’t my game plan, though. I would have been fine playing guitar for other people the rest of my life. I love traveling and playing music. And playing with others helps me know what I want to write and say. To me, songwriting has been the boat I got into that has taken me to a bunch of different places. If I wasn’t writing songs, how would I have been on the road with Andrew for ten years, for instance? So I trusted it enough to wait and see which doors open and which doors close, to just follow it. In that way, my role has been almost a passive one. And recently, I’ve found myself in many therapeutic settings—playing at counseling retreats, for instance. Drew: One of the first impressions I receive in listening to your songs is that they are emotionally intelligent. Whatever the song may be, it is holding the complexities of multiple feelings at the same time and navigating through it. AG: It’s a common thing for counselors to use my songs in their practice, then have me come out and play for some retreat, and then by the end of that, I’ve been inspired to write more songs. It’s definitely become a cyclical, self-reinforcing thing. And one reason for it is that I’ve needed a lot of therapy myself. I love the recovery community. I can write songs in that language because I’m lucky to be around it and immersed in it. When you talk about the songs sounding emotionally intelligent—I always feel like they’re way ahead of me. They’re paving the road before me. I want to be that emotionally intelligent, so I write myself into it. Drew: You know, you mentioned off-handedly that you feel as if you’re a passive participant, just riding this boat of songwriting to see where it takes you. I know that especially in Nashville, there can be a sort of opportunistic, self-promotional culture around music. Is there any correlation between that culture and your inclination to wait and see rather than seize and grab? AG: Maybe. I think part of it is just my personality. Part of it can also be fear. It’s not all a good thing. It could be that it feels better to have somebody ask you to do something than to make it happen on your own. That could be pride. But there is something good about it, too—personality-wise, Jill is the same way: first day of school at Belmont, people are out on the yards showing off with their guitars, and they’re good at it. But when we were students, Jill and I were both reluctant to mention that we were songwriters. Over the years, there have been a number of times when I could have cashed in all my chips. There’s part of me that wants to take advantage of situations, but there have been enough times of not forcing it that I’ve built up trust: maybe this waiting will come back around someday and pay off, and maybe it won’t, but I’m happy with what I do. In a world that’s pretty ambitious with self-promotion, I find that it is a liberating posture to cultivate contentedness. I mean, I have other things I enjoy besides music—badminton, you know. Music is everything to me, but it’s not that important. Jill and I see plenty of young artists come around who make their first record, do a big marketing blitz, have a bunch of publicity, you see their name everywhere, and we think, “Man, they just left us in the dust,” and then three years later they’re burned out because they’ve played too many shows. We’ve watched that happen, and that’s one way to do it. It may even be the right way to do it for some people, but I would be happy if I was eighty years old traveling around and doing what I’m doing right now. It’s more of a long game for me. So if we’re in it for the long haul, it’s important to be kind to people. Drew: I get that reservation and the value of that reservation. There is something valuable about waiting to be noticed and asked to do something. If you just insert yourself into every opportunity you have, you’ll never know if you would have been appointed, rather than appointing yourself. AG: I remember I was at this retreat sometime where the speaker was talking about a meeting at Mars Candy Company, and their question was, “How much money should we make this year?” Not how much could we make, but how much should we make. Drew: What an admirable question for a candy bar company! AG: Yeah, like what would it mean for us to do this? What are the other costs? Having a balanced, healthy life is priceless. Could I be on the road 200 dates a year? Maybe. Could I make a lot more money than I make now? Maybe. But I’ve seen the cost of that in other people’s lives and I’ve seen the cost in my own life, so how much money should I make? Drew: Well that’s coming from an entirely different ethic of life, right? One thing I’ve heard Danny Bryant say in a lot of his sermons is “Be your strand.” If the Kingdom can be described as this intricately woven tapestry, you are no more than one strand in it. So be that strand, wait patiently, do what is before you, and be faithful to where and when and who you are. Do you have any thoughts on that, making those spiritual dimensions more explicit? I think that’s an urgent issue for Christians who are artists. AG: Part of that process of figuring out whatever it is I’m supposed to be and do is figuring out what I’m not supposed to do. So I could lead worship. And I have nothing against that, but I know that’s not what I’m called to do. I can do it well, but I don’t think I should. Am I called to write the biggest hit on pop Christian radio? I’ve tried, and it doesn’t work out very well. That’s not to say God can’t work in mysterious ways, but at a certain point I had to realize I needed to stop trying to write this generic pop Christian song. And especially in artistic circles, people will say stuff like, “I didn’t write that song—God wrote that song. I’m just a vessel.” And I honestly think that’s ridiculous. God would write a much better song if he was writing it himself! So the key is being small, but it’s also realizing that in that small strand, there’s responsibility and there’s power. I can be humble and believe my songs have the power to save lives at the same time. Because if songs have that power—and I don’t think that power is from me—I can hone my skills, take what I’ve learned, and let it become more than what it is with the help of God’s grace. Drew: That’s the mark of a truly good song, too. I would go so far as to say that any truly good song is more than what the writer brought to it. AG: Yeah. And for me, it’s about being small and humble, but also recognizing that being small doesn’t mean shrugging off your job. To pretend that there’s not power in my music is to disrespect the one who gave me this music. Drew: And that’s such a problem in Christian culture: being overly minimizing of human effort and ability out of “humility.” If we are to believe the gospel, we have to believe that God has invested in our flourishing, in our dignity and freedom and responsibility. So sure, we’re vessels, but we’re also active participants. Our call is to both actively participate in redemptive work and do so in such a way that we’re treating everything as a gift that ultimately has a greater source. AG: One of my songwriting heroes, David Wilcox—I could see him walking up to someone and saying, “I have a really important song for you that you need to hear.” And years ago I could imagine myself thinking, “Gosh David, calm down. Don’t be so self-important.” But to him, he’s not attached to the song as if it’s his. Anyone who’s written a good song knows it’s not really theirs. So when you show up with your gifts, but aren’t totally attached to them, you can say stuff like that. You can be bold. You don’t have to apologize for what you have to offer. If you’re a doctor and a patient is telling you about their symptoms, it would be crazy for you to say, “Well, I mean I don’t want to play the hero here or anything, but if you’re interested—I mean, I know there are so many drugs out there on the market that you’re inundated with every day, but—I have this medicine that could help you. If I may be so bold.” No! You say, “Here, this medicine will help.” Because you’re not overly attached to it. You’re doing your job. Drew: You’re being faithful to what’s before you. AG: And David has been a huge part of that growth for me. He does that so well. He shows up to write the songs, then holds them lightly and can let go of them, too. That’s what I hope to be able to do myself as well. Click here to visit Andy’s Kickstarter page and support his new album.

Welcome to Week 6 of The Rabbit Reads Book Group: Culture Making. We’ve reached the end of the book together! As we consider the final chapters this week, we’ll take a deeper look at discerning our unique call to be culture makers. We’d love to hear your thoughts and insights in the comments. In the early chapters of Culture Making, Andy Crouch makes a big statement: “the only way to change culture is to make more of it.” And so, for the past six weeks, we’ve been slowly unraveling exactly what that means. But the more we talk about the massive project of shifting our deeply ingrained cultures, the more clearly we see that on our own, changing the world is harder than we think. Perhaps, for all of us, it’s even an impossible task, where the best we can do is trust that God is doing the work and accept his invitation to join the adventure. In other words, once we release the need to be world-changers, to quit our ordinary lives and do something big and radical for Jesus, we find ourselves free to change culture the only way we can: through little things, great love, and the help of a few friends along the way. I think we’re all, at some point or another, trying to figure out our calling. We’ve been told that we can change the world if we figure out our unique vocation, the place where (to paraphrase Frederick Buechner) the world’s need and our gladness meet. But what about those of us who are doing work that doesn’t feel all that necessary to the flourishing of the world? Or those who don’t exactly find deep gladness in washing another load of laundry or filing another insurance claim? Who are your people? Who could you count on to work with you? Who do you know that calls out the beautiful in you? Jen Rose Yokel If you’re in one of those places, were you hoping this book would give you a little more direction on calling? I’m raising my hand here. I’ve spent the past year or two drifting between total confidence in the goodness of my work and wondering if maybe God has something different for me… if I could just figure out what that is. In the end, this book still doesn’t answer all the questions about my Big Important Calling, but at least now I have a few hopeful ideas to nudge me in the right direction. Finding your calling isn’t something you settle once you pick your college major, start a career, get married, and buy a house. It’s an ongoing, lifelong process of discernment, and the good news is you don’t have to go it alone. Here are three areas to consider as you discern your call. Power We don’t really like to talk about power, but if we’re honest, we all want at least a little bit. In this world where anyone with a smartphone and an Instagram account can become an influencer, power and platform seem more attainable than ever. And yet at the same time, it feels even harder to grasp. A connected world reveals our blind spots, our privilege, and our lack. Power, as defined in Culture Making, is “the ability to propose a new cultural good,” with a chance it will actually succeed. As you discern what you can make of the world, take an honest look at the power you already have. Where are you privileged in connections and influence? And who are you sharing your power with? Keep in mind that, while none of us are immune to the temptations of power, all of us can practice stewardship (using it well) and service (sharing it with others) to do beautiful work for the Kingdom. Community So you have a little bit of power and influence. We all do (even if it’s only in our families, workplace, church, or friendships.) But still, that’s not everything we need. To make and change culture, you need a community. Crouch proposes that the best collaborative relationships start with three people; surely we all can name at least two friends to join us in God’s work. Who are your people? Who could you count on to work with you? And if you still aren’t sure what you’re supposed to be working on, who do you know that calls out the beautiful in you and can see your gifts and strengths? When you gather your three around a table, you never know what could happen. Grace Finally, consider everything you have—your power, your community, your influence—as a gift of grace. It’s tempting to think changing the world happens with the perfect genius idea, determination, or hard work. But just as change begins in tiny groups and power starts small, everything ultimately begins in gratitude and delight. What has graced your life? What goodness do you have that you didn’t earn? In the end, we can’t grasp for power or force our communities any more than we can change the family or town we were born into. Every place we end up is a grace-touched place. And though you still have to discipline yourself, though you can and will fail, and though you can bet grace will lead you to places of pain, just the grace to wake up every morning is a gift. Maybe that’s enough. Look for the powerless around you, and consider how you can serve them. Look for problems you can work toward solving. Look for the people who align with your hopeful vision, and invite them into the process of discerning and living out your true calling. The world needs you (yes, you!) to be a culture maker. Thanks for joining us in our reading of Culture Making! Though the book club is done, the conversation doesn’t have to be! Our discussion at The Rabbit Room Forum is still open, and you can catch up on all our blog posts right here.

Hello, old friends. I feel a little shy jumping straight back into the jollity of the Rabbit Room after such a long absence, but I’ve missed this place too much to delay any longer. I think my posts here dwindled about the same time I moved to Oxford. I’d fully intended to be the Rabbit Room’s UK correspondent, but I ended up holding on for dear life as I found myself falling in love with theology, turning a one-year certificate into a three-year degree, then also falling in love with and marrying my husband (an adorable Dutchman named Thomas whom I’m scheming and dreaming of bringing to Hutchmoot someday), and while I was at it, having a baby (her name is Lilian–she’s elfin-sized and blue-eyed and already very opinionated and the joy of my heart). Yes, I’m still mostly sane, thank you. But also very glad to have the margin to jump back into the conversation here now and then. And I think I’ll begin by telling you about the subject that has gripped my imagination and set me to wrestling and researching for years to come. Theodicy. Before I came to Oxford, I had never heard the word “theodicy,” which is basically the theological attempt to vindicate the goodness of God in view of the existence of evil. But the moment I heard and understood that word, I knew it was my topic. It has been my topic ever since I was nine years old and fascinated by butterflies; it’s the reason I fell in love with the work of J. R. R. Tolkien when I was seventeen years old. It’s also one of the great reasons I take such joy in the Rabbit Room and find it to be such a home for the soul and why I hope you’ll weigh in with your thoughts if I write about what I’m studying now and then in the future. Let me explain, and let me start with butterflies because that’s where I first began to understand what theodicy was. The summer I turned nine, my family moved to the sun-baked wilds of Texas hill country. The space of our rural life was an abrupt wonder to me; the stretch of those western skies with storms rolling through them like ocean surf, the unfettered blackness of the night with the thick, spattered stars. And the butterflies. Early one hot, crackly morning I went for a ramble in my grandmother’s garden and discovered a dewy-winged marvel of a creature, all midnight black and iridescent blue with orbs of white that glimmered up at me like eyes. I ran to get my grandmother and show her this wonder. “Oh, it’s a swallowtail,” she said, nonchalantly, as if this creature, this glimmering wonder looking like something from the realm of myth was a matter of the everyday. She marched inside and pulled an old Audubon guide off the shelf. “There, look,” she said, “it’s a spicebush swallowtail.” From that moment, butterflies became my obsessive study as I immersed myself in the world of tiger and spicebush swallowtails, fritillaries and buckeyes, painted ladies, and that rare blue ghost, the “Diana.” I haunted the fields round our old ranch house, my eyes trained to catch the slightest flicker of wings. One day, I chased a buckeye through a field of yellow grass; it tantalized me, landing every few seconds in the dirt and closing its wings so that the camouflage brown of its underside blended into the dirt. I would crouch in wait until suddenly the earth somewhere near my hands seemed to slip apart into flashed glimpse of some otherworld reflected in the burst of orange and azure that were the butterfly’s magical wings. I remember sitting back and laughing after my fifth attempt to catch the little thing, delighted in the hunt after that beauty, the way it flashed out, an unexpected grace in the brown landscape, the way it made me hungry and happy all at once. Even at that age, I recognized that the darkness I saw presented a powerful narrative about existence: it closed the horizons of hope by caging me in with fear; it cut me off from relationship as I drew away in shame from others; it told me that the bleak, shattered reality I experienced was the ultimate reality of the world itself. Sarah Clarkson I sat back on my heels, alert and still. And suddenly, my sense of time was suspended as I lifted my face to the great blue dome of the Texas sky, brimmed with the honey-tinged light of late afternoon. The sounds of the earth grew distant and a quiet came into my mind and body. For one mesmerizing moment I became aware of the personal, present goodness thrumming in every atom of the world around me. I knew I was encountering God. And I knew I was loved. And the next instant the buzz of the cicadas and the far off cough of a pickup roared back into my ears and time stomped forward and I was a sunburned little girl with grass-stains on her jeans, chasing butterflies. But it was as if, for a moment, the brown wings of the cosmos itself had fluttered open, and what I glimpsed was the mesmerizing beauty of Love, a beauty stronger and more real than anything else I knew. And that was saying something because the summer of the butterflies was also the summer that my imagination went haywire with the first tremors of the earthquake that would later be diagnosed as OCD. For several months, I knew a powerful, daily darkness that I didn’t know how to tell anyone. It would take another almost ten years before anyone gave a name to my interior malady, one marked not by a fear of germs or the need for symmetry that is the common notion of OCD, but by its lesser-known manifestation in vivid, intrusive images of violent things happening to me and to those I loved, images that shattered my sense of safety and left me feeling broken and guilty. At nine years old, I was confronted with evil (because that’s the only name I can give to what I saw in my mind), with the inescapable sadness of a broken mind and the story told in the world by sorrow. Even at that age, I recognized that the darkness I saw presented a powerful narrative about existence: it closed the horizons of hope by caging me in with fear; it cut me off from relationship as I drew away in shame from others; it told me that the bleak, shattered reality I experienced was the ultimate reality of the world itself. Against that knowledge then, was set the moment of luminous sight I found in the goodness of the butterfly, in the flickered glimpse of a Beauty untouchable by shadow, outside of time and yet present to me in it, affirming me as its own and drawing me out of time and suffering to itself. I knew that Beauty told the truer story and so it was, in that instant, my theodicy, my way of clinging to the goodness of God in the midst of pain. I'm pretty darn convinced that what our skeptical, despairing world needs isn't more arguments trying to rationalize evil and defend an abstract redemption, but rather narratives that immerse us in stories where beauty invades suffering, where characters can act in hope, where the horizons of possibility are open to redemption, to Tolkien's eucatastrophe, the 'unexpected grace of a happy ending.' Sarah Clarkson Eight years later I encountered that Beauty again in a saving way in an actual story, Tolkien’s good old epic to be exact. I was in my late teens and to my continuing and ever evolving grapple with OCD was added profound disillusionment with my faith. I didn’t trust Christians. I didn’t like the God they worshiped, who, I had been told simplistically, willed all the bad things that happened to me. If everything was determined, and God caused harm, I saw no point in acting courageously or creatively and the horizons of my life seemed suddenly to shrink in discouragement and lethargy. I began to read The Lord of the Rings in sheer boredom but into the shadowland of my mind crashed the epic of Middle Earth, with a story that set me back on my feet and told me I had a choice to make, a quest to follow, that livened me to beauty and made me hungry, with an aching, healthful yearning for a goodness I could barely name. I looked up from The Lord of the Rings upon my own existence with healed eyes that could imagine God as the king who arrived in my own world with “healing in his hands.” And in that moment, Tolkien’s work operated upon me as a theodicy, an argument for God’s goodness despite the existence of evil. When I arrived at Oxford and began to pore over tomes of doctrine outlining all the different arguments for God’s goodness, all the schemes to explain the presence of evil in the world, I realized that the best theodicies I could find were outlined and rather dry arguments for something I had already encountered much more viscerally in the hope that came to me like a rope to a drowning woman in the form of beauty and story, image and song. That realization sent me into six months of work on a mini-dissertation on how beauty teaches us to hope, how stories narrate us out of despair and into action. At the end of it all, I’m pretty darn convinced that what our skeptical, despairing world needs isn’t more arguments trying to rationalize evil and defend an abstract redemption, but rather narratives that immerse us in stories where beauty invades suffering, where characters can act in hope, where the horizons of possibility are open to redemption, to Tolkien’s eucatastrophe, the “unexpected grace of the happy ending.” So, I want to write those stories of course (someday I’ll finish that novel), but I’m also going to spend the next year doing a longer dissertation on why the works of imagination—stories and songs, art and drama—may be one of the best ways we have of offering a profoundly Christian theodicy to a broken and skeptical world doubtful of God’s existence because life is just so sad sometimes. The reason I want to tell you about this is because, well, I’ll be wrestling with these themes for years to come I think, and they might just show up here. But also, and much more importantly for me, the Rabbit Room is a space in which I have encountered, countless times, that “light and high beauty” (Sam Gamgee, in Mordor), that vision of goodness that is, I think, what a robust theodicy must offer. In these crazy years of study and change, I’ve thought often of you here, keeping alive the flame of hope with story and song, laughter and the hobbit-like fellowship that I have come to love in Rabbit Room gatherings. This is, I think, a deeply theodical community because it is a fellowship of storytellers and lovers, of those who acknowledge the profound brokenness of the world even while kindling the holy fires of creativity, imagination, and community in which we glimpse the redemption that is drawing our own stories forward to wholeness. I love what is being created here; I love the Beauty you all speak and sing and give in all that happens here. You keep me rooted in hope and for that I’m continually grateful (and determined to make it to Hutchmoot again). Bless you all if you made it this far. It’s good to be back. Sarah Clarkson’s brand new book, Book Girl, is now available at the Rabbit Room Store. Click here to learn more.

Today we begin the closing weekend of Frankenstein with five final performances. It’s been a ton of fun to watch this show get to its feet and learn to run. I’m at Lipscomb University this morning, about to walk in and talk to a group of students about theater, and as I do so, I’m overwhelmed by how lucky I am that I get to do this kind of work. The experience of writing a story and then seeing it incarnated in three dimensions on a stage is surreal. It’s scary, but it’s also exhilarating. There’s a community of dozens of people who have all brought their various crafts to bear on the story and the result is something we all own collectively. I’m thankful for that because it means the lights and the set and the costumes and the makeup and the performances all carry my work when the words alone aren’t enough. That’s the exhilarating part. We carry one another. We work on something so long and so hard that we can no longer be the best judge of it. At that point we have to trust those around us to tell us the truth. Pete Peterson Last week, Jennifer and I were on the way to one of the final dress rehearsals and I was wringing my hands because I was concerned the show wasn’t ready and would be a disaster. She didn’t believe me and I told her in complete seriousness: “Do you have any idea what it’s like to create something and expect to love it, and then feel absolute terror when you realize it’s turned into something horrible and you can’t stop it?” She immediately started laughing and asked me to think about what I’d just said. Then I was laughing too (and the ghost of Victor Frankenstein shook his head bemusedly). But all irony aside, that is the scary part, isn’t it? We work on something so long and so hard that we can no longer be the best judge of it. At that point we have to trust those around us to tell us the truth. So I’m grateful for all the folks who have connected with the story and understood it and been moved by it. Thank you. Thank you for telling me, and thank you for passing the word on to others. I’m humbled by every single person who has given it their time and attention. I don’t know if Frankenstein will have a life beyond this short run. But I’m deeply thankful for Matt Logan and Studio Tenn for trusting me with the story and incarnating it so beautifully. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ve still got time, but tickets are going fast. Get thee to the theater. Get your tickets here.

I can’t remember the first time I met Arthur Alligood, but early on in our relationship, I nailed a catfish to his dad’s back fence. In Southern parlance, that may mean we grew up together, even though we didn’t. I’ve surely given Arthur pause like that a few times over the years, from when I fried said catfish in his kitchen, with his skillet—while he looked on in quiet desperation—to when I slept on his couch and left behind nothing but a knife. In return for these disconcerting forays into friendship, he has given me music that carried me through darkness like a coal car heading into the light. If you’ll recall, Arthur started out with Formerly and Worship Circle Records and made his way through several independent projects. He released Under the Gray and One Silver Needle, featuring a filled-out sound and playing with folks like Leland Sklar and Jim Keltner. In and around these projects, he consistently returned to what seemed like the sonic home ground of a stripped-down acoustic sound. It fit rather perfectly. 2015’s The Shadow Can’t Have Me featured what felt like his most vulnerable tone yet. I knew he had been recording after that, but I hadn’t heard anything about it. Then I saw him when I was in town last year. “I’ve been messing around with synthesizers,” he told me. “It’s going to be totally different.” The record finally emerged in the middle of August, blossoming like a sudden flash of goldenrod on some country road. Different it is, indeed, yet it is completely and undeniably Arthur. Portage opens with a delightful paradox. The instrumentation is electronic, but the ambience of the song feels quite natural, reminiscent of a long, pensive hike up a lonely mountain trail. The lyrics themselves seem to look down onto life from a distance. It’s us versus them, the good guys against the bad. The bad ones are out of country or somewhere across town. Out of sight, out of heart, we’d rather judge than understand. We’re doctors plagued by blindness, the foolishness of man.Where went all the wisdom? “The Foolishness of Man” serves as a kind of preface. The curtain opens and we are walking together on this journey that we have chosen—or that chose us. The place we were before was full of turbulence that tortured the heart, but here is balm that says—at least, in one sense—that we don’t have to remain as we are. This is a record of pilgrimage. I stand here on the shoreline. I will take the portage path, ‘Cause only love will end this hatred, the foolishness of man. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the music is haunted by echoes of wide, crystalline views—there was the recent Alligood family trip out west. Such things tend to have a profound and unaccountable effect on artists and their art. The first song even ends with a full cathartic minute of slow, melodic chord swells, wrapping us in one final embrace as we walk the trail into the unknown, led by some definite but hidden truth. After bidding the world’s turmoil and nonsense farewell, much of Portage centers on the various joys and sorrows of walking the sojourner’s road. There are the moments of strength and steady headway near the beginning, such as in “Where the Sparks Fly Upward.” I know what flame burns in the distance; I know what fire calls in the night. Out in the clear, covered up in mystery I know the soul seeks till its finds. Of course, as anyone who has backpacked can tell you, there are also times of numbness, of despair and deep ache. Some break like twigs with a snap; Some run like thieves, never turning back. A coward is an easy find. The mirror always shows me mine.— “Since I Left to Go” In this, Portage follows a certain narrative arc. There are the ear-worm tracks, leaning into pop sensibilities even while maintaining Arthur’s characteristic conversational delivery, but there is also the centerpiece “Since I Left to Go,” a track that asks a little more of the listener. It’s a confession, and like some of the imprecatory psalms, it doesn’t let up. In the context of the project though, it’s exactly where it needs to be. The whole EP is deserving of a committed hearing. Personally, I suggest you put it on repeat. Certain refrains are likely to emerge in your soul at a later time—probably just when you need to hear them most. I can see myself driving to work, reeling from having to discipline one of my kids or angry at my own wandering eyes. Arthur’s voice will surface like a corked bottle with a note inside. “You are more than your old mistakes,” it will say. “Join me. I won’t live in fear. I refuse.” That the new project is based in an electronic sound does not exclude all things with strings. Well-placed electric guitars with just the right amount of distortion provide a great foil to the vocal on “Old Mistakes” and carry the progressions in “I Won’t Live in Fear.” “Since I Left to Go” makes smart use of the guitar-ukulele, giving the instrument a more orchestral voicing than ukuleles usually get. There are pianos and a bright hi-strung guitar. If anything, this setup makes me excited to hear this music live, given the possibility that there might exist two versions of each song—the album version and a single-acoustic rendition. So many lines on Portage are truths I need to hear on repeat. I’m also excited for the second installment, whenever that comes out, but Vol. 1 will be seeing multiple plays in my house. I didn’t know I could get all this for nailing a catfish to someone’s fence. I’ll make sure to do that more often in the future. You can pick up Portage Volume 1 here at the Rabbit Room Store.

Welcome to Week Five of The Rabbit Reads Book Group: Culture Making. We’re almost done! This week, we’re looking at Chapters 12 – 14, in which we’re reminded that actually, we can’t always change the world… but maybe that’s good news. Everybody wants to change the world. It’s the promise ingrained in campaign slogans and vision statements. We hear it from pastors, entrepreneurs, and politicians. Brands sell everything from clothes to coffee with the promise of doing good in the world. And for a lot of people in my generation, we haven’t found our dream job if it isn’t somehow meaningful. Everybody wants to change the world. Some would say it’s even our divine calling. But can we? Really? Here’s a quick recap of our reading so far in Culture Making. In Part 1, we defined some terms: culture is what we make of the world, and cultural goods are the things we make to shape the world. We also considered our roles as cultivators and creators and the postures we take toward the world. In Part 2, we took a tour through the Biblical narrative, from the very beginning, where God invites his creation to share in creative power, and through the story of Israel, Jesus, and the early church, all the way to the culmination of God’s redemption project in the New Jerusalem. Now it’s time to look at what all this means for us today. For the last two weeks of our book group, we’re going to explore our calling, and that begins with knowing our limitations. *** As we’ve seen in earlier chapters, the only way to effectively change culture is to make more of it. We can cultivate what we already have and we can create new ways to solve problems and promote human flourishing, contributing to God’s ongoing restoration project. But there’s a trick here: we can’t predict or control anything we make. It’s such a small example I almost feel embarrassed to use it, but I’m thinking about this in terms of my own work. My job is mostly creative. I write copy and social media content for a local non-profit. Part of learning to do my job better is studying what’s working, taking online courses, or asking industry peers for suggestions. I can research what works for others, learn strategies, and pay attention to what has and hasn’t worked in the past. But in the end, can I control which Facebook post will take off, or predict what will fall flat? No, not really. I can only make things, trust that I did my best, and keep trying. Perhaps, if you’re one of the many artists hanging around The Rabbit Room, you know this feeling all too well. You can pour your soul into a song or a poem or a blog, and nothing happens. You can make a wonderful meal for your family and realize they really just want takeout. And yet you keep on making…because maybe it can’t change the world, but it can contribute something good, and, if nothing else, change you, the maker. A statement like “Why We Can’t Change the World” might look discouraging, but I hope you read this chapter and realized that actually, it’s humbling, even freeing. Maybe you can’t change the world. Or maybe you can, but you can’t predict what needs to be done or control your creations once they’re set free. Once you let go of the idea of doing something epic—starting the company, writing the book, even voting for the right person or supporting the right cause—you are free to joyfully participate in God’s work. Once you notice who God uses to move the horizons of the possible, powerful and powerless people alike, you can live with humility and sobriety into the new creation. “God is at work precisely in the places where the impossible seems absolute. Our calling is to join him in what he is already doing…” (pg 216) It’s not all on you. And that is good, good news. *** Next week (our last week of the book club!), we will wrap up our reading with some practical diagnostic questions for discerning our calling in the world. But for this week, consider this: What does the idea of calling mean to you? What do you feel called to do or be? And do you have any stories about a time when you felt a distinct call on your life? Feel free to share your insights, favorite quotes, or thoughts on calling and changing the world in comments! And if you’re interested in further conversation, visit our book group thread at The Rabbit Room Forum.

I remember when I had no imagination for how ugly the process of redemption can look. It seems like that change in the landscape of my mind marks the point in life when I could say with certainty that I had grown up. In that moment, whatever or whenever it was, hope suddenly meant something different, something heavy and precious. It wasn’t pretty—not in the traditional sense of the word anyway. Learning to carry it hurt me, and I had to get used to the weight of something so worth holding, so demanding of a firm grip. I’m probably the eighteen-thousandth person on the Rabbit Room mailing list to declare that Flannery O’Connor’s short stories played a role in developing my language for this newfound perception of grace and the moments signifying its entry into our lives, the sanctifying it promises or in some cases threatens to do. When I finished “Good Country People” for the first time, I was lying on my back with the book opened flat, paper-down on my stomach while I pressed my fists against my eyes and tried to get a grip on how such a bizarre story, with sour-tasting characters and a seemingly bleak, sharp-edged ending, could make me feel I was actually breathing easier. A similar confusing comfort strikes me when I watch Martin McDonagh’s movies. A brief synopsis of his career in case his name is new to you: he achieved acclaim in the storytelling scene as a playwright first, and the scripts he published in the 90s and early 2000s earned distinguished shelf-space particularly in Ireland’s library of plays. He stepped away from theatre to write and direct his own films for a while and only recently returned to stage work again, having verbalized his preference for filmmaking. His feature length films—In Bruges (2008), Seven Psychopaths (2012) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)—are distinctly recognizable by their raucous, impertinent dark humor; characters often exploding with absurdity while maintaining disarming believability, who are humanized at surprising times whether or not you want them to be; and violence that’s so jarring it’s comical one moment and sobering the next. Inevitably, some moviegoers will find McDonagh’s filmography is not their cup of tea. In this case, their stance may be that he does nothing more than cram his screenplays with cartoonish gore and language unrestricted to the point of being almost unpalatable for the sake of style, that he does no caretaking for anything lovely or good with his writing. I can’t deny that he reveres American standards of profanity censorship very little if at all, and hyperreal violence is part of his signature. I am wearied knowing there is enough ugly talk and unneeded bloodshed in the world without media adding to it, but I also can’t pretend I don’t have a softly morbid sense of humor myself. What’s more, I can’t escape the suspicion that something powerful happens when Martin McDonagh tells a story, not despite but because of how he tells it: that this powerful something is good, and glorifies the things art should glorify in a Kingdom ruled by a loving God. The courses on which his characters find themselves reveal the spaces, in their lives and ours, where grace hangs indomitably overhead before collapsing over our skulls, altering forever the horizon before us and hardly being gentle about it. Janie Townsend Not unlike Flannery O’Connor, McDonagh bequeaths his protagonists and antagonists with dysfunctional moral compasses and ample negative or at least questionable qualities so that viewers can’t always be sure who the “good” and “bad” guys are. He sends his (anti)heroes into wayward explorations of themselves, others, the world, the possibility that this world is not where reality stops—he corners them against the hope for hope, although this tends to look more gruesome on screen than it sounds in a sentence. Their crooked stories of growth and decline, sin and forgiveness build with intensity and macabre hilarity, fracturing into sincerity and tenderness sometimes without warning, immediately spiraling into more quips and shootouts and impeccable soundtrack selections. The courses on which his characters find themselves reveal the spaces, in their lives and ours, where grace hangs indomitably overhead before collapsing over our skulls, altering forever the horizon before us and hardly being gentle about it. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson’s characters in McDonagh’s premier film, In Bruges, find themselves facing judgment and potential deliverance of sorts after a slipshod assassination assignment leaves them both more or less stranded in Belgium with their regrets, copious illegal substances used for self-medication, and each other. Seven Psychopaths focuses on three friends and a handful of nutcases (these circles overlap) who somehow manage to encourage each other existentially after becoming entangled in a wacky mob vendetta. Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell play gleefully flawed, at times reprehensible, at times lovable citizens of Ebbing, Missouri in McDonagh’s latest cinematic endeavor about a crusade for justice that careens out of control. Their characters endure trauma, loss, underserved sympathy, unsolicited and backhanded helpings of humility, and reassurances just substantial enough to carry them through life if only for one more day. In each film, you can’t quite hate any of the significant characters and you can’t say anyone is perfect or even ideal. But everyone, repellent or attractive for whatever reason, encounters surprising gusts of redeeming power amidst and often because of their hideous errors and unconventional brushes with fierce, persevering love. In some moments, this love shows itself when outlandish, hard mercy ambushes a character and strips away whatever framework they thought they had, disrupting their existence so a richer one might begin. The “hard mercy” to which I’m referring could be any painful, warped or initially sinful thing—a protagonist witnessing a grisly death, another enduring an agonizing injury that leaves them severely scarred, a mistake that jerks the story’s plot or at least one character’s arc in a different direction than the audience anticipates. In other moments, the vulnerability and compassion in one character affront and consequently nourish the vulnerability and compassion of another. Penetrating kindness then connects players in a plot—players who may even be enemies—if only for a second, and the unshakable humanness of people and our capacities for love are celebrated all the more resonantly because such instances of tenderness are shared within a context of dominating darkness. There is a fresh and fervent regard for humanity in McDonagh's films, and a love for life made somehow more tangible to me because of the carnage or cruelty the characters have to muddle through. Janie Townsend No one ever up and changes, suddenly a saint after all the wrong they’ve done or overlooked—but no one isn’t changed, and every character lands at the starting line of a narrative warping their murky past (and present) into a shape the script doesn’t run long enough to reveal. Not everyone necessarily receives the reshaping, which is partly why McDonagh’s stories remind me so much of O’Connor’s—in “Good Country People,” Hulga is inhospitably subjected to hope in renewal, but the reader never finds out whether she accepts her helplessness and the liberation that comes with it. I can’t be certain of McDonagh’s beliefs about God, Jesus or the afterlife—he was raised Catholic and, like his screenwriter protagonist from Seven Psychopaths explains regarding his own work, writes a descent amount of “heaven and hell stuff” in his movies. At any rate, his films aren’t being sold on DVD and Blu-Ray at any Lifeway stores. He’s said himself that he isn’t someone who avidly tries to broadcast a message with his art, but that he has wanted his movies to be life-affirming, ultimately. I have a feeling the impish delight with which he enlivens characters, dialogue and plot structures on screen and stage is the means and end of his work, which is the wonderfully simple call for anyone saddled with a need to be creative. But whether he means to or not, his upside-down, twisted truth-telling digs into the relentless, often leveling process of redemption as it barrels forth before us, hollowing out a way we have no choice but to follow—unless of course we decide to stop or go back the way we came, a way which never quite looks how it did when we travelled it the first time and rarely offers us life when revisited. The humor is jet black and the gore is garish at times, so I would suggest you do research and watch trailers before inviting your neighbors to a Martin McDonagh movie night. My affinity for his storytelling is in no way an insult to anyone with different taste buds just as anyone else’s differing opinion would not be an inherent insult to mine. Every person is a broken person, so every artist is a broken artist, and of course there are things about any bloody action flick or gritty drama that probably don’t teach us about the Kingdom of Heaven. But there is a fresh and fervent regard for humanity in McDonagh’s films, and a love for life somehow made more tangible to me because of the carnage or cruelty the characters have to muddle through. His lines make me laugh and his characters teach me a sort of grace and joy for myself that the Lord is ever encouraging me to hunger for. His stories help me hope. That is enough to make me sure that, in his own way, Martin McDonagh is a caretaker of something good indeed.

Click through for this week’s edition of Jonny Jimison’s Rabbit Trails. Click here to check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

Every summer when I was a kid I was given the amazing freedom to walk down Elm Road to the neighborhood pool about a mile away. There I spent most of my summer days practicing my dives, playing 500 with Dave the ice cream man, and frolicking barefoot with my friends. There was an utterly beautiful simplicity to those summer days, when I could do almost anything I wanted. It was an amazing gift, except for one summer day when I was about ten, when I missed an important send-off celebration at my house. Periodically throughout my childhood, our family hosted high school-aged international students. The gathering I missed was for our Egyptian student, Hani, who had just graduated. I don’t remember when I figured out that I missed the party, but I was heartbroken that I would not be present to celebrate with family and friends. To this day, I believe I may have been forgotten in the haste of the party planning. Truthfully, as a young kid, I was probably too wrapped up in my own summer day agenda to notice what was going on around me. In my twenty plus years of playing music for a living, I have played every kind of venue from speakeasy club to living room to dive bar to theatre to church and last night, I gathered with about fifty folks in a small barn in the middle of a field in Canton, GA. They came not because they had any idea who I was, but because their friends who were hosting invited them into this beautiful story of a night. There was a distant sunset, hands being held, pockets of laughter, a small bonfire, crickets singing in the background, people in lawn chairs sharing tasty food and wine, and the end of a spring day whose oppressive heat finally shed its weight for a cool evening that required a jacket for many. It was a night probably much like the one I missed in my youth, except now I’m an adult with a guitar and a djembe and the privilege of taking two hours to journey through songs and stories, in hopes that at the end of the night this collection of strangers might end up as friends collectively leaning into a shared experience. It was a night of celebrating and coming together to be still. Although I never mentioned the name of Jesus once, I know that he was present, as my prayer was that he would speak to all who gathered in the midst of this beautiful evening. That is my hope and prayer on Sunday mornings as well as every time I have the opportunity to sing in front of people—that Jesus would speak through the words I sing and that He would meet us in the spaces we gather, both physically and spiritually. There is great power when we come together, and as my producer friend Roy Salmond writes, “We cannot gather alone…we need others to gather with.” It is not only biblical; it’s human nature. It’s how we are wired and why we are created the way we are: To be known, to feel safe To be honest and unafraid To leave the past, run into hope To find together we are not alone I need you, you need me This is why we gather To remember why we matter And yet much of the daily world that surrounds us pushes back on this elemental truth that we need one another. Our handheld technology boasts its unifying spirit and connectivity, but I often feel it driving us apart, pedaling fear and isolation, stirring anxiety and palpable restlessness. We have always been a forgetful people, especially when it comes to remembering who is in control and whose we are, and our devices are only fostering further belief of what we are not, what we don’t have, and stripping away the little room we leave open for God to work on our behalf. We are told we are the master of our own stories, posting the details we want people to see, the amazing life of the beloved we live, with calculated steps, knowing that whatever happens only happens because we brought it forth into happening. At a church I was guest leading this past winter, I was dumbstruck by stepping into a culture for 24 hours that might be more commonplace than I imagined; an entire worship team individually huddled like silos over their phones during every still moment in between making music together and leading the congregation in worship. There was little conversation, no diving into the depths of our stories, what the Lord was teaching us, nor even dialogue about the sermon that particular morning. And as I sat quietly amidst the strangers, unsure of how to engage and respond, it occurred to me that something might need to change. To share our story, silence the noise To hear the wisdom in the tremble of a voice To carry healing for all the scars To know we’re more than our broken hearts Sandra is one of the more senior members in the small neighborhood church I lead worship with and I will never forget her reading of scripture during Advent: she was so overcome by the power of the Word that she broke down in tears. After pausing for several moments, we collectively watched her wrestle with and embrace the unbelievable beauty of the Gospel story, taking in the tender reading of the truth of a living Savior coming into this world as a baby, seen through the eyes and wisdom of a woman in her late 60s, fully acknowledging his healing power in her life. At that moment the room was still, probably much like that night in the stable when Jesus was born. When we help each other fight the fear Be present with one another We’ll find that’s where the life of God is lived In Exodus 14, just before the Lord parts the Red Sea through Moses, he tells the Israelites, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today…I will fight for you, you need only to be still.” In that tense moment, God’s people had forgotten where they were. They had forgotten how they got there. And they had forgotten whose they were. Lost in their short-sighted desert existence, Moses called them back into the bigger story that God was writing for them, through a simple call—to be still. In those days, stillness definitely looked different than it does now, but much like those who have gone before us, silence is still silence and stillness, stillness. I wrote the song, “Gather,” as a rallying cry and a reminder that we are not alone, even though we may feel like we are in our modern world. It’s a song that celebrates this deep communion not only with one another but with our living Creator. He yearns for us to be at rest in him so we can have space to receive his love, grace, and mercy. I know he longs for me not to fill my still moments with busy useless knowledge in a silo void of connection, all while stories unfold around me. Be it a stoplight, waiting in line at a store, at the airport awaiting takeoff—so many empty moments where I know he is saying, “Pick up your head, my beloved, and see what is happening around you and what I have for you to witness. I will fight for you…you need only to be still.” When you mourn the death of your earthly father; when you celebrate the marriage of two people; when your only son learns how to ride a bike for the first time; when your community is splintering and you feel alone; when you pray musically on Sunday morning; when you sit around a fire with your bride and laugh together; when you watch the news and can’t process what you’re watching; he is present and he is calling out to you. To give courage, to hear it now We are beloved This is holy ground In Mark 6, Jesus walks out on the water to his disciples and states, “Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.” He offers a holy courage to them as he steps in the boat in the middle of the wind and waves. He is reminding them who he is at that moment and they are reminded whose they are. I firmly believe Jesus offers us the same courage in every moment of our days and that he also calls us as a body to offer that courage to those he places in our path. He’s got enough courage to go around and when we come together face to face and create those holy moments of stillness, we too will know whose we are and that we truly matter in the Kingdom of God. I need you, you need me This is why we gather To remember why we matter Click here to check out Christopher’s record, Gather, in the Rabbit Room Store. Click here to visit Christopher’s website. First published in WORSHIP LEADER MAGAZINE SUMMER 2018, copyright (c) 2018.

Welcome to Week Four of The Rabbit Reads Book Group: Culture Making. This week, we’re looking at Chapters 9 – 11 and focusing on the ways the Resurrection and the Spirit have empowered God’s people to make real, lasting change…maybe even eternal change. Read on for this week’s reflection, and share your insights, questions, or favorite quotes in the comments below! It’s hard to deny that something happened. What should have been a brief disruption quickly turned into outrageous claims of an executed man coming back to life. His small band of misfit followers went from scared out of their minds to claiming they’d seen him, eaten with him, and touched the wounds. Saul, an educated Jewish leader and Roman citizen, stopped persecuting Christians and instead traversed the empire to teach the gospel, planting churches along the way. From there, this weird little movement only grew. Jesus was the Messiah, they said. He told them to go and spread his story, love others, change the world. What began as a very specific religion among very specific people exploded into a multinational force. By AD 350 Christianity was not only legal, but claimed by half the Roman Empire. And today, we’re still talking about it. Something happened—something paradigm-shifting. World-shattering. Something true. *** Over the last couple weeks, we’ve been looking at Part 2 of Culture Making, in which Andy Crouch takes us on a tour of culture’s role in the Biblical narrative. We looked at how the creation account of Genesis presented a God unlike any other, a Creator who actually empowered his own creatures to create with him (if you missed it, Laure Hittle wrote a fantastic exploration of this topic last week). We explored the implications of the Fall and when human creativity goes awry in Babel. We looked at the call of Abram and how God’s restoration project began with a tiny imperfect nation. And we saw how Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection became the hinge of history, a culture-shaking event that still influences the world today. So here we are. In this week’s chapters, we see how the early church grew into a massive movement, and how God’s chosen family opened the way for the redemption of nations. This story is our inheritance. This is the story we live in still. *** Why Christianity? Why didn’t this whole thing fizzle out, leaving Jesus as a footnote in history? Crouch cites Rodney Stark’s book The Rise of Christianity for some insight. Perhaps part of the church’s growth came from their involvement with culture, serving their neighbors and facing challenges in loving, creative ways. In one example, Stark writes about the Christian response when disease swept through Roman cities. “In the face of terrible conditions, pagan elites and their priests simply fled the cities. The only functioning social network left behind was the church, which provided basic nursing care to Christians and non-Christians alike, along with a hope that transcended death.” (pg 156-157) So perhaps the spread of Christianity wasn’t from winning arguments, having the best theology, or providing concrete proof of the resurrection. The proof was in people who actually believed it, living like they had nothing to fear. When crises came, Christians were there, “innovating new ways of solving challenges that they shared with their neighbors.” (pg 157) The same Spirit that arrived at Pentecost and united a diverse crowd in Jerusalem empowered these earliest believers to make something new—the same Spirit behind some of history’s most beautiful movements of hope, restoration, and justice. The work of the Spirit isn’t merely internal self-improvement; it’s a transformation that spills out in powerful movements of grace. If you believe who Jesus is and what he said is true, enough to not fear death, then imagine the wonders that can be accomplished. “The belief of Christians that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead made them culture makers, and the culture they created was so attractive that by the fourth century A.D., an entire empire was on the verge of faith. (159) *** In Chapter 10, Crouch takes a look at the mysteries of Revelation with special attention to a surprising idea: in Isaiah’s vision of the future Holy City, the nations bring their wealth, from the ships of Tarshish to the glory of Lebanon. (Is 60:9, 11-13) There’s a suggestion that the best and most beautiful work of the nations has a place in eternity, a place to be purified and transformed, like gold beaten to translucence, ready to beautify the culmination of all Creation. Kind of makes you want to make something that lasts, doesn’t it? *** This week, can you think of any ways you’ve seen the world transformed by Christians facing outward? Take the time to consider with gratitude how the Spirit has worked in your life, and perhaps how this calls you to be a culture maker in God’s great restoration project. We’d love to hear your insights in the comments! If you want to dig deeper, we’ll have more questions for discussion at The Rabbit Room Forum. New here? Catch up on all the blog posts so far when you click here for the first post in this series. (Art in featured image: Golden Sea by Makoto Fujimura)

Rise and walk. He was saying this to a man who had lain there begging in dirt and filth for years. It was ridiculous to expect any action at all. To require such a man to rise, and even walk, was beyond any sense of decency. It was pointless and cruel. Stretch forth thine hand. The arm was withered, useless, and had been so for a long time. Any reasonable person could see the man was doomed to live with only one working hand. Why torture the poor man? Go your way; your son is made well. The man could have responded, “It’s an entire day’s walk back to my house. How do I know he’s made well? What if I go all that way and he isn’t? And how do you know he is well?” “But I’ve been unable to stand or walk for years. My legs are atrophied.” “Stretch forth my hand? Can’t you see it’s withered? I can’t stretch it forth. Let me go back and check with my doctor. I wouldn’t want to do any further damage.” But instead, each one made his gesture. The lame man rose up and walked. The man stretched forth his withered hand. The worried man stopped worrying and went home to his son. These were the gestures caused by faith, but what caused faith to rise, to stretch, to come home? It was one, single, actual look at the face of Jesus. They saw clarity, reality, sanity, grace, and the love of God in his eyes. They saw he was no charlatan, and definitely not a madman. They saw the living Truth, the Way, and the Life. This is what real contact with Jesus does to us—intimate, close, holy communion. We cannot help but believe, trust, rely—we cannot help but faithe. And the gesture that follows, whatever it may be, is the (super)natural outcome of the faith produced by that moment of truly knowing God. Faith isn’t something we drum up or fight for. We don’t pull up our faith-bootstraps and try to believe. Faith is more than intellectual assent to ideas about God; it is the outcome of any real moment of intimate contact with him. When we are fearful or unbelieving, when we look at the future with trepidation, or when our mind is spinning with past losses, what can we do? Well, what do we do when we are cold? We pull our chairs up to the hearth and get closer to the fire. We step into the warmth and light of the sun. The safest place for the unbelieving believer, that cringing child, is to recognize our access to the throne of grace through Jesus Christ, and to stand in communion with the living God. We see him for who he is: grace, love, compassion, mercy, strength, power. The unbelief melts away. God’s child, long-lame from cringing with fear, suddenly hears the words, “Rise and walk.” We are bought with a price. Nothing can undo that. We have been born into God’s family—we are sons and daughters of God. We have access to the throne and the face of God by grace, through Jesus Christ. We are indwelled by the Holy Spirit, who will guide, reveal, and teach us. Our job is simply to see, to look, to listen. In that moment, when we are knowing God for who he really is—the consuming Fire—our hearts catch fire. Faith is re-lit; it expels the cold darkness of fear and unbelief. Rise and walk. Stretch forth your hand. Go home. All is well. The living Word speaks. Faith-strength fills us, and we rise. The weight of unbelief falls off; the thick chains we believed bound us were really only cobwebs and dust, and we shake it from our coats and from our feet. The fruit of that reawakened reliance? Christ lives in you and is the power of God for your deliverance. Stretch forth your hand and write your story. Rise up and write your song. Love your enemies, and do good to them that persecute you. Forgive your husband. Love your wife. Grow your children well by encouraging them; don’t embitter them by being hyper-critical. The applications are endless, but the root begins in one single thing: contact with the heart of God.

Think of every barnyard animal you know. Cow. Pig. Chicken. Sheep. Horse. Duck. Goose. Every one of those words derives from Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon). If you were to kick around the farm with the poet who wrote Beowulf, the two of you would use the same words (or, in any case, very similar words) for all the animals you saw (except turkeys; turkeys didn’t come to England until five or eight centuries after the Beowulf poet died). And, by the way, you would even use all the same words for the male and female variations for each animal. Bull, boar, sow, rooster, hen, ram, ewe, mare, drake, and gander are all Old English words. The one exception is stallion, for reasons that will soon become apparent. But when the farmer calls you in for dinner, your easy communication with the Beowulf poet will quickly break down. When farm animals move from the barnyard to the dinner table, they drop their Old English names. The cow is now beef. The pig is pork. The sheep is mutton. The chicken, duck, and goose are now poultry. If you’ve ever taken a class in the history of the English language, you already know why all the names for barnyard animals derive from Anglo-Saxon and all the names for meat are of Latin origin. In 1066 AD the Norman French, led by William the Conqueror, defeated the English at the Battle of Hastings. King Harold II took an arrow through the eyeball, and that was the end of the Anglo-Saxons’ rule over the island that was named for them (England=Angle-Land). The Anglo-Saxons didn’t go anywhere. The population of Britain was still overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon; but the ruling families were all French. The guy out in the barnyard or pasture taking care of the chickens and sheep and pigs and cows and ducks and geese was Anglo-Saxon; there was no reason for him to change the names he called the animals. But when those same animals were slaughtered and cooked for the French landowner and his family, they thoroughly enjoyed their boeuf or porc or moton or poulterie. (That Anglo-Saxon farmhand, by the way, wasn’t getting a lot of meat. He was eating a lot of beans and peas—both Old English words.) Though the French ousted the Anglo-Saxon nobility in England, the French language never ousted the Anglo-Saxon language. Instead, Anglo-Saxon (Old English) absorbed thousands and thousands of French (that is to say, Latinate) words. For the most part, those new French words didn’t replace the English words. They were simply added to the English lexicon. So our language has countless word-pairs in which a word of Old English origin and a word of Latinate origin mean the same thing. Here are a few: Old English (Anglo-Saxon)Norman French (Latinate)     light     illumination     ask     inquire     answer     reply     hearty     cordial     snake     serpent     reckless     intrepid     belongings     property     follow     ensue     wild     savage Once you understand these dynamics, you understand a lot about English diction (or word choice, if you prefer the more Anglo-Saxon phrasing). Say you have a vocabulary that includes both Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words (which you do). And say the servants and farm hands use the Anglo-Saxon words, but the noble families in the village use the Latinate words. Also, the clergy speak Latin, the law and all other government business is conducted in French and Latin, and if there are any scientists or philosophers in your town, they do their work in Latin too. Which is going to feel more respectable and intelligent and highfalutin to you? The Old English diction, or the Latinate diction? It’s been 952 years since the Battle of Hastings, but we English speakers, when we want to sound smart and respectable, still trot out those Latinate words. And yet…and yet. It is true that the great majority of words in the English lexicon ultimately derive from Latin. Nevertheless, Anglo-Saxon is your native tongue. Here’s what I mean: depending on whom you ask or how your dictionary is arranged, anywhere from 2/3 to 3/4 of the words in an English dictionary derive from Latin or Greek. Scan a page or two of any dictionary with word origins, and you will see what I mean. But of the 100 most commonly used words in English, guess how many come from Latin or Greek. Whatever you just guessed, it was too high. Of the 100 most-used words in English, exactly ZERO derive from Latin or Greek. They’re all Old English words. Oh, and the next 100 most commonly used words, #101-200 on the English hit parade—how many of those do you think derive from Latin or Greek? I’ve read different answers, but the highest I’ve ever seen is five. So even though our lexicon as a whole is about 70% Latinate or Greek, no more that 2.5% of the 200 words you use most often are non-Anglo-Saxon words. You are a speaker of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) who also happens to know tons and tons of Latinate words. English speakers respond at a gut level to Old-English words. They feel like the stuff of the world. Before you started school, you navigated the world mostly with Old-English words: milk, mother, father, tree, dog, sun, moon, ball, dirt, house. You learned the Latinate words at school, from books. There are exceptions, and lots of them. flower, rock, and cat all have Latin origins. But the fact that it has never occurred to you, or to me, that rock and cat are Latinate proves my point: these words feel homey and natural because they don’t feel like they could have come from Latin. The Latinate words I’m talking about are the ones that you learned for your Friday vocabulary tests—words that are just fancier synonyms for Anglo-Saxon words you already know. Osculate for kiss. Illuminate for light up. Here’s an interesting exercise that demonstrates the different registers we associate with Old English words and Latinate words: Think of a cuss word. Any English cuss word will do. Do you have your cuss word? That word derives from Anglo-Saxon. The Beowulf poet would have known that word, or some closely related version of it. How do I know? I’m pretty sure I know all the cuss words, and I’ve looked up all their origins. Writing is an act of hospitality. It's an act of welcome. And one way to welcome your reader is to speak in her native tongue when you can. Jonathan Rogers The cuss words are among the oldest words in the language. And nobody has ever had any success in getting new ones to stick. One of my sons tried when he was three or four. He started using naked as a cuss word. We’d be trying to leave the house, everybody scrambling for shoes and socks, maybe pants, and my son would say, “Where’s my naked tennis shoes?” He had the syntax right, the inflection. Also, allow me to point out that naked is an Anglo-Saxon word. What I’m saying is that the kid had instincts. If ever a new cuss word had a chance, it was this one. But it never caught on, and my son abandoned the project before he even started kindergarten. But I digress. Let us return to your Anglo-Saxon cuss word. Now, imagine you had some reason to speak to your grandmother about the topic covered by that cuss word. How would you phrase your remarks? I’ll give you a minute to ponder that one… Ok. Whatever words you chose, I’d say there’s about a 95% chance that they were of Latin or Greek origin. Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Norman French (Latinate) constitute two registers of the English language. The Anglo-Saxon register tends to be earthier, and the Latinate register tends to be “higher,” more abstract. You use these registers naturally, whether you think about the origins of the words you use or not. We English speakers have had 952 years of practice at it. No wonder we can do it without thinking. The ability to move between these multiple registers is one of the great gifts of this language of ours. English always gives us many options for saying the same thing—options that carry many shades of meaning. And while it is true that I am suspicious of excessive Latinisms, there are plenty of ideas that you simply can’t communicate without that Latinate register. This essay, in which a writer tries to explain atomic theory using only words of Old-English origin, illustrates this truth in hilarious fashion. Let me return to a point I made earlier: Anglo-Saxon is your native tongue. It is your reader’s native tongue. Yes, there are plenty of good reasons to use Latinate words, but I suggest that you rely on Anglo-Saxon (Old English) words as much as you can unless you have a good reason to do otherwise. Writing is an act of hospitality. It’s an act of welcome. And one way to welcome your reader is to speak in her native tongue when you can. The writers of the King James Bible seemed to understand this truth. Check out these three verses, three of the most familiar in the whole Bible. I have underlined all the words of Latinate origin. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. That’s 62 words. Only three of them are of Latin origin. Sometimes writing requires that we go up and get big ideas. We have the language for that. Sometimes—more often, I would suggest—the writer’s gift to the reader is to bring big ideas down to earth. Here’s to earthy language. If you enjoyed this excellent advice and are interested in more, you can sign up for Jonathan’s weekly newsletter here.

I was standing in the parking lot of our little Valrico, Florida church when a man from the congregation came up to shake my hand. His expression was earnest, his voice impassioned, when he said, “I pray that one day millions of people will hear your voice.” It was an extravagant compliment, and kindly meant, but it was a dangerous thing for a teenager to hear. I had been on stage for as long as I could remember. When I was very young, no more than six years old, I sang a duet with my mother at a women’s event, and we were awarded the privilege of going through the buffet line first. This was heady stuff for a girl from Fort Lonesome. From there, I embarked on an illustrious musical career, including a starring role in the fifth-grade play, “Christmas from Scratch” and a gig singing backup for Sarah Brightman in three cities. I spent countless hours performing—on the piano, as a soloist, in every imaginable combination of singers, as a composer, as a conductor, even as a dancer. I met my husband because a choir tour overlapped with a family concert. And that was the beginning of the end, I suppose. Marriage, motherhood, homeschooling, and writing took center stage while dust settled on my piano and the memories of my singing days. The question of how to measure success is one I’d rather skip over. The lie that our work is more significant if more people know and love it is entrenched in our thinking. In all fairness, it is difficult to justify the sacrifices we make when only twenty-seven people like an article we wrote, or only a handful download our latest album. It’s challenging to argue in favor of three years’ work on a novel that will sell no more than a hundred copies. On the world stage, a bard was no more than a curiosity. Among his own, his value could scarcely be measured. Helena Sorensen But I came across a fascinating bit of history while researching for my last book. In Ancient Ireland, according to Brehon Law, each member of a tribe or clan was assigned an honor price. The practice is cold, rather inhuman, assigning a monetary value to each person based on his or her worth to the clan. But according to their way of thinking, it was something along the lines of a life insurance policy. If you were to murder a neighboring farmer in a hot rage, for example, you might be required to compensate the farmer’s family with a gift of ten sheep. If you killed the chief in the same way, your grandchildren might spend their lives making payments of food and livestock to pay your debt. But do you know which member of the clan was assigned the highest honor price? It was not the chief or the druid, not the healer or the blacksmith. It was not the most powerful warrior. It was the bard. The bard was the man (or woman) who knew the history of the village and the clan. In a culture with no written language, the bard was assigned the task of memorizing hundreds of stories and songs—all the history of his people, and all the tales they told. A bard was not educated in world cultures. He knew nothing of the goings on in Central America or China. But he knew his people. He knew the stories they favored for each occasion, knew the heroes they revered and the things they had lost. In times of celebration, of birth and harvest, it was the bard who delighted the little tribe with songs of rejoicing and tales of triumph. In times of grief, of battle and hunger, it was the bard who ennobled their suffering. On the world stage, a bard was no more than a curiosity. Among his own, his value could scarcely be measured. This wonderful piece of history came to life when I remembered Andy Dwyer, lead singer of Mouse Rat and resident of Pawnee, Indiana. Andy dreamed of becoming the biggest rock star on the planet. He wanted to crawl out of his little town and into the global spotlight. (What young artist doesn’t hope for that kind of recognition?) But Andy’s finest moment came when the people of Pawnee lost their beloved horse, Li’l Sebastian. Andy was asked to write a memorial song, and the stakes were high. Leslie wanted something “like Candle in the Wind, but five thousand times better,” and the stoic Ron Swanson was determined to “send that glorious beast into the great beyond with a display that rival(ed) the Superbowl half-time show.” The result was an original song of questionable artistry that was deeply satisfying to hundreds of mourners. As viewers of Parks and Recreation, we can watch the citizens of Pawnee waving candles and shedding copious tears and laugh ourselves silly. But Andy’s performance of “Bye, Bye, Li’l Sebastian” was a significant moment for his tribe. It was not the stuff of breaking news. (I doubt the biggest rock star on the planet could have found the time to write that song and sing it on the Pawnee stage.) Andy’s work was powerful and meaningful precisely because it honored his community’s loss in a way that only the local bard could. These days I sing for an audience of two, and they have no interest in the singing I did before I became their mother. I have sung them to sleep when they were weary or sick, drawing from my vast repertoire of lullabies, hymns, Disney ballads, and folk songs. My audience has joined me in rousing Slugs and Bugs sing-alongs. In times of celebration, we’ve turned up the volume on movie scores and danced around the house like lunatics. I suspect my singing will never mean more to anyone in the world. With all respect to the man in the parking lot, you can keep your millions.