Dear aspiring young “Christian Greys,” I’ll be honest, this latest trend has left me bewildered, heartbroken, and very afraid for you. I’m afraid because the things that have hurt and broken you, leaving you less than you were ever meant to be, are now being applauded, encouraged, and dressed up as love. I’m afraid because the road you are on is a dangerous one, and it’s not going to end the way you hope. I’m sorry that life has been unkind to you. I’m sorry that you’ve been encouraged to settle for money when you needed so much more. I’m sorry that pain has twisted your idea of love until all you have left is a distorted reflection in a broken mirror. And I feel I must tell you something else. I have two daughters and you are not what I want for them. No matter how beautiful and charming you think you are, as a boyfriend you will not be welcome in our home. You see, we believe that love is about putting someone else first, even when it’s difficult. We believe that hurting people to make yourself feel good is cowardly and weak. We believe that abuse and violence of any kind are wrong. It’s not romantic, it’s not attractive, and it certainly isn’t love. I can’t tell you how to live your life. You have every right to make your own choices. However, I do have the right to choose the kind of love I will pursue and I am praying my daughters will have the courage to do the same. I am praying they will find someone who is man enough to love them when they make mistakes and admit it when he makes them too. I’m praying that the man lucky enough to win their hearts will realize that their bodies will not always look the way they do in their twenties and that he’ll be ok with that because he knows love is so much more than physical attraction. I’m praying they will have the privilege of experiencing love that has grown in the furnace of heartache and laughter and forgiveness and time. Most of all, I’m praying that, despite all the images they are bombarded with, they will choose to listen to the voice of a God who loves them utterly and wants to give them a relationship that is a small reflection of that infinite, sacrificial, “always and forever” love. I realize that what I’m saying to you will probably not be well received. You’ll think I’m a prude or a religious fanatic with no grip on reality. The truth is, I don’t really care about that. This morning I looked at my two beautiful girls, so full of hope and expectation, and I realized that, for their sake, I had to take a stand for love. And so, this Valentines Day, I am taking the opportunity to tell you that I totally and unashamedly reject your definition of love. Heidi

Late in the pre-kid dawn of our marriage, Lyndsay and I drove a packed-to-the-windows Honda Accord named “Donovan” from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Los Angeles, California—one last hoorah before the great chains of children. It was our first summer off together as teachers, so we had little money, but we did have weeks of time to stay out West drifting freely between National Parks and downtown hostels. Expecting the wide open splendor of the trails to provide fresh inspiration for songwriting, I bought a Martin Backpacker and kept a small notebook at hand. The real inspiration, though, didn’t come out of the free wilderness, but instead from the cramped confines of Donovan, who held us together and moved us forward through twenty questions and road rage, babyfaced naps and tense interrogations, coffee and Funyuns, wonder and back pain. A continuously moving vehicle is a great image for marriage: the commitment to travel together leaves no good escape, or, as David Mitchel once pointed out to me, “At least not without someone getting really hurt.” At one point we weathered a dark fight while cruising the Pacific Coast Highway, but Donovan kept us going through the venomous jabs, through the cold silence, through irritated boredom and impatience, until we reached camp and enough forgiveness to sleep on. The next day we drove back out to see all the beauty we had missed and eventually a song came. I would go so far as to say that weeks later when we returned home from our exotic excursion, that experience helped us to become a little readier to move towards that next level of being tied down. That sounds terrible, but it was game changing for us. It is one of the most vivid places in our marriage where we began to see that some of the most beautiful, freeing revelations and experiences come not from liberty, but from limitations—like cars, marriage, and parenthood. Recently I pieced together an amatuer home-movie music video of footage from our trip. Little known fact: while the song was born of the experience I mentioned, it was also influenced by a Pixar movie released that summer, so much so that a small part of our trip involved recreating one of its scenes shortly after we had stood outside the gates of Pixar studios in Oakland trying to convince the guard to give us a tour. Look for a brief easter egg in the video.

They say the first album is always about loss. Whether midstream or shortly thereafter, an artist’s first album is typically about loss of some kind—love lost, dreams shattered, expectations unmet. After interviewing well over 1,000 artists and reviewing God knows how many releases, the maxim is true that some sort of grief is the central subject for most songwriters when first starting out. The reason should be obvious, since songwriting, as with any creative endeavor, often begins as a cathartic exercise. There’s a working out, a processing that happens when I write, when painters paint, when sculptors mold and shape. As I write, I’m figuring out who I am both before, during, and after the event that drew me to my desk. We naturally gravitate to our own outlet to work through the situations we find ourselves in, both good and bad. After the first album, other subjects arise. In my experience, the progression begins at the heart and moves outward from there. I often find artists moving through their past, family trauma, or other more joyful experiences in their second or third albums. Many veteran artists eventually move to topics outside of themselves, topics they are passionate about regarding politics or the state of the world. After several releases, many veteran artists will begin to sing solely about the world as they see it and speak to grander themes of love, violence, beauty, and what it means to be human. I love this last stage, but it’s rare to see a songwriter arrive outside of him/herself. It’s no secret that making a living as a songwriter and performing artist is a tough gig, and only the strong survive. I don’t have any concrete figures, but the run for most artists has to be an album or two at most for the average length of a recording career. What that means is that the music we most commonly come in contact with is likely closer to ground zero in content—dealing, once again, with issues of the heart. Then there are artists like Jill Phillips. I was two-years-old when I first heard “Steel Bars” (not really, but there’s no need to admit I’m nearing 40) and it blew me away. Caedmon’s Call was on tour somewhere outside of Columbus, Ohio, and I convinced a few friends to drive the distance with me. Jill opened the show with a simple five-or-so songs and I was hooked. I bought everything that rhymed with Jill on the merch table and headed home to listen to the songs on that debut record. We still play that album from time to time and remember it fondly. Through the first few albums, there are many songs from Jill that follow the expected progression—songs that speak from the heart about the highs and lows of faith. They are songs that wrestle with sin-nature, destructive thoughts and habits, hope lost and found. They’re often personal songs that resonate so powerfully because of the vulnerability on display–songs like “Wrecking Ball” or “Last Time” or “Dry Town” that have spoken to me at key moments when I was processing my own story. Enter Mortar & Stone. It’s a different sort of release, one which Jill describes as an album of encouragement for the community around her. The songs are songs about the struggles and sorrows of her neighbors, her friends, her family. They are songs that originate in the stories outside of her own. She has become an artistic observer. This is what Richard Rohr refers to as eldership in Falling Upward, perhaps the most affecting book I’ve read in the last several years. It’s a short work on Christian aging in which Rohr illuminates the passage available to all of us to move from knowledge to wisdom, from our young, reactionary selves into something more stable, more present, more compassionate. Those willing to engage in the difficult, counter-cultural work of true life transformation, not religious exercises, will become the elders from which we glean true wisdom. They have worked out their own stories and can speak truthfully, gracefully to the stories of others. I believe this is the beauty of Jill’s music. As a mother, wife and artist, we have been privy to her own transformation over the course of several albums, and now, on Mortar and Stone, we can begin to enjoy new pearls of wisdom from someone who has done the hard work. It’s a rare gift to find a songwriter at this stage, several albums into her career, and we’re blessed to have several such artists present in the Rabbit Room community. #JillPhillips

Charles Williams is one of those guys who seems to be perpetually on my “Read This Next!” shelf. Almost every time I talk with Lanier Ivester there comes a point in the conversation when her chin drops and her mouth hangs wide open for three or four minutes while she processes the information that I have not yet read The Place of the Lion. Sorry, Lanier, it’s still true. He’s still the Inkling about which I haven’t one. I know there are a lot of others out there in my position and today I’m here to help. Part of the problem is that his books are hard to find, but I just heard that Open Road Media has now published ebooks of seven of Williams’ titles, including War in Heaven, and Descent into Hell. If you’re the e-reading type, check them out. If Lanier buys me a Kindle, I promise to read The Place of the Lion immediately.

[This week’s guest post (in two parts) is by Matthew Aughtry, whom you may recall created this short film, and this “What is Hutchmoot” short. Check out Matthew’s Vimeo channel to see his beard and his other work.] This past summer I took a class at Fuller Theological Seminary on the theology of C. S. Lewis. In many ways I can trace my journey to seminary back to Lewis’s influence on me even from childhood, so it was a wonderful opportunity to re-read some of my favorite writings from him and read other books I’d been meaning to read for years (as a result I read Till We Have Faces for the first time and it quickly became my favorite of his writings). As part of the class we had to write a research paper on a topic of our choice, assuming the professor approved. I had several ideas but finally landed on an exploration of Lewis’s view of childhood. Since the class covered Lewis’s life as well as his writings, I thought it would be interesting to see what could be gleaned about this subject from both spheres. No doubt the fact that I was due to become a father in September affected my choice. Let’s start with a snapshot of our culture’s view of childhood. Four years ago two separate surveys reported that most children and adolescents in Britain wanted to be famous for a living. When asked what their ideal career was, half of the sixteen year-olds answered, “Celebrity.”[1] The other report revealed, “the top three career aspirations for five- to eleven-year-olds in Britain were sports star, pop star, and actor, compared with teacher, banker, and doctor twenty-five years ago.”[2] Why has attaining fame has become so desirable in the last quarter century, particularly to young people? If one is willing to entertain the idea that the primary stories that our culture propagates to children help to shape their identities and what they desire, then it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that imaginary worlds primarily populated with princes and princesses who live happily ever after in a large castle are ideal primers for the adoration of the rich and the famous. But what would an alternative children’s narrative look like? Perhaps it would look like Narnia. Reading Lewis, it becomes clear that his vision of childhood is opposed to the prevailing culture’s view that children should desire to become princes and princesses by instead envisaging a world where they are destined to be kings and queens, insisting that responsibility is not something to be avoided, yet maintaining that a certain childlikeness is necessary if one is truly to grow up. Lewis himself grew up in Ireland amidst rolling hills and, perhaps more importantly, his father’s library. A great deal of Lewis’s young life was spent reading a large number of books while also making up stories of his own. As a child, he and his brother created their own magical world and populated it not only with talking animals but also with seemingly endless stories that took place within its boundaries. Unfortunately, the story of Lewis’s childhood is incomplete without mentioning the death of his mother. This tragedy meant that from an early age Lewis had to learn what it meant to be self-reliant. Shipping him off to school, Lewis’s father was little help in his time of grief; whether he was ever much help at all is unsure. This informs Lewis’s own understanding that growing up partially involves learning not to rely on one’s caretakers. Yet Lewis was not wholly without aid after the death of his mother. He still had his brother with whom he remained close for the rest of his life. He had his love of books, which helped give shape to his own imagination and offered some solace. Finally, he had his studies. After some awful experiences at school, Lewis found himself under the roof and tutelage William Kirkpatrick. It is evident from Lewis’s writings and work that he put great value in being challenged and in challenging others, and Kirkpatrick was the one who taught Lewis the benefits of this intellectual rigor. Because he valued challenges so much, I can only imagine what Lewis would think of the practice of giving each child a trophy regardless of his or her performance. In one of his correspondences in the wonderful book Letters to Children, Lewis is appalled to hear that a school in Florida, which one of his pen pals attends, bases grades on attendance rather than comprehension of the subject.[3] We cannot know what would have happened to Lewis if he had been left in one of the schools he deplored and never met his great tutor, but we do know that the boy that entered Kirkpatrick’s care grew into a man who embraced a variety of difficult challenges, intellectual and otherwise, and eventually became one of the most respected thinkers of the 20th Century. Certainly his teacher guided him, but mostly he challenged him. Lewis carried at least some form of this expectation of students with him in his own teaching career, and it extended, it seems, even to children. The aforementioned book, Letters to Children, offers many examples of Lewis’s ideas regarding challenges and expectation. Some of the children who wrote letters to him also included original work, such as bits of poetry and passages of prose. Lewis, ever the literary critic, does not let them off easy due to their age. In a letter to a young girl named Joan, he criticizes her stories about talking animals by insisting that they either need to occupy a more realistic world or one that is completely imaginary before ending the letter by writing that the poem she sent has good content “but the verse ‘creaks’ a bit!”[4] In another letter to the same girl, he mentions an essay she sent him, and he criticizes not only her execution but also for the content writing, “I think you are exaggerating a bit at the end. Everything I need is in my soul? The Heck it is!”[5] From today’s standards some may view Lewis as a rather dreadful person when reading these letters. However, one must also keep in mind that he was under no compulsion to write these letters at all. The very act of putting pen to paper in response to a fan letter is in itself a great kindness that very few authors employ as regularly as Lewis did. Additionally, one notices that most of the children who receive criticism from him also write back. More than that, they write back with new pieces of work for him to critique. Lewis could simply have written that their work was good without ever actually reading a bit of it, but his specific notes and suggestions make it clear that he not only read the material but also took the time to offer insight on how to improve it. He believed that challenge and honest criticism is better than faint praise, even for children. Not only does he give tough notes, he also refuses to give easy answers. When a girl named Hila writes to ask him what name Aslan is called by in our world, something he alludes to in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis gives her clues instead of simply telling her the answer, and by doing so he encourages her to utilize her own critical thinking. Additionally, when a boy named Jonathan writes to him to inquire what the possibility of Lewis writing more Narnia books is he responds, “I’m afraid there will be no more of these stories. But why don’t you try writing some Narnian tales? I began to write when I was about your age and it was the greatest fun. Do try!”[6] It seems that as highly as Lewis values reading, he discourages children becoming consumers only. Lewis himself consumed massive quantities of books as a child but that consumption was also an impetus for him to tell his own tales. There are a wide variety of entertainment options for children today, and while it is fair to say that some are better than others, it also seems fair to assert that Lewis would encourage us to see that no matter what children consume it is imperative that they also create. The stories they love may fuel their imagination, of course, but their imaginations should be utilized productively. Jonathan isn’t the only writer encouraged to explore the world of Narnia with new stories, and he is certainly not the only letter writer to beg Lewis to write more books in the series. Their popularity is undeniable, and it is within these tales that we find the fullest vision regarding what childhood is and should be for Lewis. [Read Part 2 here.] _________________ [1] Alison Kershaw, “Fame the Career Choice for Half of 16-year-olds.” The Independent. February 17, 2010. Accessed August 26, 2014. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/fame-the-career-choice-for-half-of-16yearolds-1902338.html [2] Emma Brockes, “I Want to Be Famous.” The Guardian. April 16, 2010. Accessed August 26, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/17/i-want-to-be-famous. [3] C. S. Lewis and Lyle W. Dorsett, Letters to Children (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 88. [4] Lewis and Dorsett, Letters to Children, 80. [5] Lewis and Dorsett, Letters to Children, 87. [6] Lewis and Dorsett, Letters to Children, 89.

Last year, right at the last minute, I heard the strange tale of Matthew Perryman Jones teaming up with the Nashville Ballet for a live-music and dance performance called “. . . but the flowers have yet to come.” I have to confess that ballet is something I tend to view with a narrowed eye, but I didn’t want to pass up the chance to see Matthew performing live, so I snatched up a couple of tickets. It didn’t hurt that taking my wife to the ballet made for a great Valentine’s Day date. As it turned out, I got way more than I bargained for. The show began with two other dance performances, one of which was an interpretation of Anton Checkov’s relationship with his wife through letters and was incredible—alone worth the price of admission. The main attraction, though, was the Perryman Jones performance. Matthew and a full band played some of my favorite songs off both the new album and the previous, while the Nashville Ballet took the main stage. I’m no good at knowing what I’m looking at when I watch dance, but I thoroughly enjoyed this. Mandatory and most important element is a quadrangular cape with a hole for the head and four tassels at the edges. The cape itself, called a talit katan or arbekanfes, can be hidden under clothing or worn over a shirt, but the brushes are always straightened over trousers. Jewishist offers the best Jewish clothes and Israel accessories in United States with worldwide delivery. In ancient times, the tallit — a cape, a cloak — was a rectangular veil that served as part of everyday clothing; Brushes were attached to its corners according to the biblical prescription of tzitzit. Read more at Jewishist.com and shop online! #Judaica. If you know Matthew’s music, you know it’s bittersweet and full of longing, frustration, and passion. The dance captures those feelings perfectly. I was mesmerized. I was also shocked at how much work and creativity had gone into a production that only saw three or four lightly attended performances. It just seemed wrong for that many people to work so hard at something only to have it enjoyed so briefly. So it was with considerable excitement that I heard the show was coming back this Valentine’s Day weekend. There are only three performances: February 13th, 14th, and 15th. If you are in Nashville and need something awesome to do for Valentine’s Day. This is it. Check out the “Making of” and teaser videos below. Don’t miss it.

It was intended to be a simple project: recondition an old, rusted, industrial light fixture, and install it as the porch light on the small office/art space I recently built (The Asylum). From the wiring, rewiring, custom cutting a new gasket seal, to finding and retro-fitting a new socket into an old housing, I have had to assemble, backtrack, disassemble, reconfigure, and, not least of all, resist the urge to smash the thing to the ground out of total exasperation. Avoiding any obvious wine parables, summoning new light out of an old light fixture has been anything but simple. Nothing is easy, not even shining. I discovered the fixture years ago in my mother-in-law’s Louisiana back yard. Hidden not under a bushel, as the Sunday school song goes, I found it beneath an interlocking mat of weeds in a mound of fire ant dirt. I extracted the piece, not with the intention of reconditioning it for use, but for the sake of its aesthetic—its color, shape, curves, maverick appeal—and for its possibilities. Only years later, after I had begun construction on my office, did it occur to me that I already had that which I needed for a porch light: the piece had been collecting years of dust and brown recluse spiders on a low shelf in my tool shed. Surely, I thought, even with zero experience, I could manage to coax light from the rusted, decrepit fixture. Nearly every step of the DIY building project was a trial by fire. Though untrained and lacking legitimate carpentry skills, the one trait I have going for me is that I am a willing and stubborn learner. When someone reacts to seeing my now-complete office (“You are so handy. I could never do that.”) my inner response is something like, “I have no idea what I am doing. If I can do this, anybody can.” And I absolutely mean it. I have never been good at making plans; mostly I invent them as I go. At each stage of construction I had no choice but to learn how to do what needed to be done in order to move on to the next phase, that next step requiring yet another tutorial (and trial). I didn’t want for physical assistance or advice from friends who had construction experience. Were it not for an old friend—who just so happens to be a carpenter—I might still be  perplexed atop my ladder, pencil behind my ear, attempting to calculate correct roof pitch and bird’s mouth rafter cuts. Imagine snow falling, me in winter coat and gloves, still perched atop my ladder, pencil chewed down to a nub, and you begin to get an idea of how slow a learner I am, and how easily I freeze and get overwhelmed. Zürich Escort and Sex. Mathematics aside, the physical challenges of the project were accompanied by massive overdoses of self-doubt, frustration, and exasperation. Even this innocuous porch light, intended to be a token of memory to my late father-in-law, caused me moments of crippling defeat. Some things, like some people, shine more easily than others. Nothing is easy. While growing up, I heard my father say those words numerous times, typically through gritted teeth while he was in the middle of a household repair. It was not difficult to tell when dad had reached his boiling point. To his credit, he did his best to collect himself and avoid exploding in rage in front of his family, particularly his two young sons who had, more than likely, insisted on “helping” him. Now in my forties, with two boys who like to “help” me with projects, I look to my dad with awe for his ability to keep it together during those high-blood-pressure moments of anger at not only a temporary challenge, but something far bigger. Which, in a way, is what any one of us is ultimately angry about. An apple rarely falls far from its tree. Like any homeowner, I’ve had to face household repairs head-on in the interest of frugality—along with a morbid fetish for a challenge. Due to a recalcitrant gene, however, I continue to bite off more than I can chew, and were I able to step back and see myself from a distance, I might plead, “What on earth makes you think you can do this?” I suppose I can’t—but the foolishness, as far as I can tell, seems to lie not in failing, but in failing to try. Failure is unworthy of fear. Like being brave, maybe shining and joy are things we learn by rote, by taking apart and reassembling, by trouble-shooting, by rewiring and reconfiguring, by rethinking. And by making use of the tools and materials already at our disposal, perhaps covered in dust, weeds, and neglect. We persist. And in persisting, we do what needs to be done in order to move forward and realize completion. Though nothing I’m saying here is new under the sun, I will always need to learn to take the few, small, short-lived victories as they come. I must revel, however briefly or silently, in those small victories, and whether I flip my office light switch on for the first or the umpteenth time, with incandescent light bursting forth from the filaments, I should remind myself that I do not belong to the Fall, but rather to the living and the lighting to be done in its wake. Nothing is easy, not even living.

It’s easy to reach for Chrome or Birds of Relocation when you want to listen to Eric Peters since those albums resonate with a powerful authenticity, but some of his finest material is found on albums like 2003’s Miracle of Forgetting. “The Ending” is the album’s lead track and it’s also our song of the week, a reminder of Eric’s extended history of writing beautiful, honest songs that meet us where we are and remind us of a greater hope. In addition to the album stream below, check out this acoustic version via Under the Radar as well. “The Ending” by Eric Peters from the album Miracle of Forgetting today came in earnest with a smile on its face wry as it was cunning pure as it was base now my days are numbered like the sands in the sea I held onto hoping as long as hope held onto me it came with a thunder but it made not a sound it came down like an angel from heaven to the cold, cold ground don’t say it’s over when the world’s gone mad I’ve seen the ending and it’s not so bad don’t say it’s over when you lose your heart cause the ending is where you start the world lost its reason the sky laid to waste all that was hopeless is borne on your face it hurts every moment in the fight for your life keep your chin up hoping it’s the life of the fight don’t say it’s over when the world’s gone mad I’ve seen the ending and it’s not so bad don’t say it’s over when you lose your heart I want to know why we fall so hard and why hope for tomorrow can seem so far away don’t say it’s over when the world’s gone mad I’ve seen the ending and it’s not so bad don’t say it’s over when you lose your heart ’cause the ending is where we start

The other night after dinner, Philip and I took to our bikes for a starlit ride along the beach. The island here has so little light pollution, and as there was no moon, I was obliged to use the flashlight on my iPhone to see—much less navigate—the twisting path between palms and salt cedars that leads to the shore. I always forget just how dramatic a starry night actually is until I come to the ocean; there’s something about the combination of a fathomless sea heaving gently in the darkness and a midnight dome of uncountable stars that puts me in my place more effectively than anything else on earth. My soul is awed by God’s heavens and stilled by His waters—a process that’s as reliable as it is difficult to explain. The beach was deserted at that hour, and the lights from the neighboring island across the sound were painting the retreating tide with bold splashes of silver and gold. And overhead, all that wonder of inexhaustible space. I hopped off my bike and stared till I grew dizzy—the longer you looked, the more stars became visible. The Milky Way was a clear swath of silver dust, the night was gentle as only a night in late summer can be, and the windsong in our ears was an invitation to dance. It was all so beautiful I could hardly bear it. “Why does it hurt?” I shouted to Philip above the wind and the tide. It’s a question I’ve asked myself a million times—why does Beauty hail us with a stab? The sights, scents, sounds of this place are beloved to me since my youth; they greet me with the warm companionship of old friends. And yet, there’s a twinge of sorrow that accompanies the desperate gladness with which I immerse myself in these familiar shades: a strange sadness lurks beneath the sunshot glooms of the live oaks; a gentle pathos wavers in the wine-golden sunshine. Fleetingness is certainly a factor: knowing that another exile awaits on the other side of this blessed sojourn lends a poignancy to our days (I have to stop myself from ticking them off in my mind). But it’s more than that. More, also, than the tender associations with which this island is crowded for me. I’ve spent many of the very happiest hours of my life under its trees, along its beach, on this very sun-warmed veranda from which I write. This place keeps my times for me, holds my summers alive and well, refreshes me with the dew of my own youth every time I return. This is all part of the sweet pain, to be sure—but not nearly all. I was talking with a very dear friend recently about the way Beauty works on us, and how the modern mind seems to regard it with a growing distrust. “Beauty opens wounds,” she said, and I knew she was on to something. Beauty tugs and pulls and points. And when someone reacts negatively to Beauty’s proddings, it probably means there’s some raw nerve that its arrows have reached, some unhealed place its rays have revealed. Beauty engages the realest, most vulnerable part of us—the part we like to keep hidden under appearances and sufficiencies and achievements. The part that’s most uniquely, exquisitely us. This hardnosed old world of ours can drive even the stoutest of hearts into hiding—but Beauty won’t have it. It goes after us, piercing our darkness with its indomitable light, wooing our souls back into Wonder and Youth and Hope. But it’s a painful process, especially when the cares of life conspire to keep us so occupied we hardly notice the hard crust of practicalities forming over our tenderest places. It hurts a bit to have that crust chipped away; Beauty must wound before it can heal. I once heard a lecturer say that all real sickness, of body or mind, is, at its essential core, homesickness. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. We’re always looking for that “other country,” the place we remember in the oldest part of our souls where there was no such thing as tears or pain or death. And, with typical human ingenuity, we’re often looking in the all the wrong spots, in all the wrong sorts of ways. All the success and money and health in the world won’t buy us back that original innocence, that sweet naïveté of sorrow—yet, Beauty tells us, the story’s not over. There’s a redemption in the works of which all the loveliness in the world is token in pledge. Beauty is a path along which we catch a glimpse of the chimneystacks of home; it is a lamp in the window on a dark night, a song remembered from our infancy. Beauty sings what the youngest part of our souls already knows: this is only the beginning. Every heart that has ever entered this world has been or will be broken, and this exile is at the heart of it. Everything that we know instinctively “ought not to be” only underscores our alien status. We’re like expats, startled into inarticulable emotion by some scent or sound or breath of wind that reminds us where we’ve come from. I suppose that’s why the physical sensations of sorrow and joy are so similar, even to the point of pain: they’re both drawing us back to the same place. I’d scarcely realized what a protective crust had formed over my deepest sensibilities, but after a summer of very grownup cares, I’m learning to bare my soul to Beauty all over again. I’m remembering what it means to stagger under the splendor of sunlight on water, to bow my heart to a kingfisher in flight or the parable of a live oak cloaked in the grave clothes of Spanish moss. I greet God’s emissaries in the fragrance of the marsh grass and the wild, joy-cries of the gulls overhead. And when He stains His sea and sky with violet and salmon-pink from the rim of the world, I welcome the sweet wound of it all, knowing that these beauties but house the real Treasure. I read this sonnet to Philip on the beach last night—as usual, dear old Gerard Manley says it better than anyone: Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize. Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows. Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! These are indeed the barn; withindoors house The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows. G. M. Hopkins, The Starlight Night Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985) The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. ~Anne Frank

Back in 2008, I remember pacing in the lobby of a coffee shop in Kansas City as I talked on the phone with someone who’s new friendship would prove to be one of the more formative Andrew Peterson and I had only known each other for a while, but one discussion we returned to as often as we spoke was the topic of the story of Scripture. He, as a songwriter, and I, as a pastor, both invested much of our creative energies into telling the story of how God has dealt mercifully with a broken humanity. In particular, he and I were both drawn personally and professionally to those pivotal narratives from the Gospels—the Nativity and the Passion. That day on the phone we were talking about the challenges of trying to tell the Easter story well—noting how different the Easter story is from the Christmas story in the literature of the Bible. From Eden to the manger, the Christmas narrative stays largely at 30,000 feet as it unveils humanity’s epic need for a Savior. Sure, it swoops down to tell us about the shepherds, wisemen, and the stable outside of Bethlehem. But there is a cosmic quality to the Christmas story that even includes a star in the west as a character. The Easter story, however, is told mostly from down in the dirt. Chapter after chapter are given to day-to-day, even hour-to-hour, details as they unfold in real time and space. Close to half of John’s Gospel is devoted to only four days time in one small city. It was during that phone conversation when I decided I wanted to write Behold the King of Glory—though I did not yet know what I would call it. I wanted to get on the ground level and unpack the narrative of Jesus’s death and resurrection. I wanted to mine the details and display the drama of the unfolding story of what Jesus meant when he said he would lay his life down only to take it up again. Though I tabled that book idea in favor of writing its companion, Behold the Lamb of God: An Advent Narrative, I always knew the time would come when I would return to Behold the King. I could not have imagined at the time that I would write the book from my new home in Nashville, and that Andrew and his brother Pete would be the friends and sounding boards they have become. I asked Andrew to join me as a musical guest for my book release partly because I have the deepest respect for him as an artist, but also because I would not have written this book without his friendship. Andrew represents one of the things I love so much about my friends in this community. We help each other. We pour water on each other’s ideas and help them grow. We encourage each other. And more often than any of us deserve, we get to watch the genesis of one another’s ideas blossom into developed revelations.

Today I’m delighted to announce that Rabbit Room Press is now making available two original plays by National Book Award-winner Walter Wangerin Jr. These are “mystery plays,” but don’t confuse that term with “plays about Sherlock Holmes.” Click the link for more information, but mystery plays are a venerable tradition of presenting Bible stories in the form of stage drama. Rachel Weeping for Her Children is written for Epiphany and tells the story of Herod and the Magi. It’s beautiful and tragic, harrowing even. The second is written for Palm Sunday: The Way of the Cross (The Cry of the Whole Congregation), and it draws the entire audience into the story. One could think of it as a sort of liturgy, or an amped up responsive reading. Think about Holy Week and imagine the parts the congregation might play. It promises to be a powerful experience, and if either of these sound familiar it might be because you’ve seen them before. They’ve been performed all over the country. Both of these plays are now available in the Rabbit Room store. We are offering them both as low-cost evaluation copies, so that you can read the material to decide if it’s right for your theater or church, and as performance copies, which grant rights for reproduction and live performance. I hope some of you will let us know when your performance happens. I’d love to attend, and if anyone takes pictures, please forward them to me so that I can share them with Walt. Easter is coming up quickly. It’s not too late to get started!

The last time we tried to sell our house we made the mistake of putting the cart before the horse. We did that in this way: before any buyer made an offer on our house we started looking at replacements. Our agent showed us places in our price range. And that is how we met Spooky. We were not in a financial position to consider the kinds of homes that show as if Sunset Magazine had just finished a photo shoot there. Instead we visited the kinds of homes missing toilets, which the previous residents had taken with them on eviction day. We encouraged ourselves, “Lots of our friends have tackled fixer-uppers. So can we!” Spooky lived with his owner in a townhouse we visited. We entered through a stairwell hallway that led to the living area above the garage. “Don’t mind Spooky,” said Spooky’s master. “She likes people.” Spooky’s master was a rotund balding man wearing a white sleeveless undershirt and sweat pants. He lounged on a red leather couch in front of a 70 inch flat screen TV. Spooky was a tender-hearted cattle dog with congenital heterochromia iridis. Clearly, Spooky’s master had not moved from his perch recently. All about the floors were tales of Spooky—clumps of Spooky fur unswept, partially-eaten Spooky bones left to dry out, Spooky toys ignored. We made our way around Spooky’s home and, can I tell you, we saw potential. Unlike the townhouse we had visited just before, Spooky’s home did not have an entire room devoted to Darth Maul and a note on the door leading into the garage, “Beware of cats.” We left Spooky’s home thinking it was definitely a top choice, if we could only sell ours. But no one wanted to buy our house years ago. And someone else bought Spooky’s. Over the last few of months we have been at it again. Our house is on the market. Just like before, we desire to downsize our home and mortgage. Yet unlike last time, we are not looking at replacements until someone makes an acceptable offer. And that’s just it. No one has. Yesterday I was talking with a friend. “You’re selling your house? I know someone who just sold his. One day on the market. Cash offer for way more than he was asking.” I have heard this kind of story for several months now. Another friend described the scene at the house of a person he knows, “A half-dozen couples violently bidding against each other and house sold by 6 p.m.—first day.” Whenever I hear these stories I think, even Spooky’s house eventually sold. What is wrong with ours? And so Leanne and I have burdened the responsibility of our house not selling. Before each showing we feverishly vacuum pet fur. We scrub the bamboo floors and kitchen tile. We arrange the throw blankets and pillows as if preparing a “Cozy Home” board on Pinterest. Nothing. Not even a lowball offer. And so we have tried harder. Scrubbed more. Removed furniture to make the house look larger. Before each showing we hide the toaster and coffee maker in cabinets to make the kitchen counters look spacious. Nothing. A couple weeks ago Leanne got some empowering advice about the matter. “Stand down,” the person said. “Quit trying so hard.” I do not think Leanne’s advice-giver knew about Spooky, but if she had then she might have reminded her that we were planning to buy Spooky’s home despite the fact that Spooky had done everything in her canine power to make the deal an unattractive prospect. Spooky’s home was gag-worthy. But that would not have stopped us. Because sometimes a person is not after what is cleanest or pet free or most spacious or walking distance from top schools or at the end of a cul-de-sac or a home that you treasure because your beautiful daughters have grown up in it and they have turned out to be such wonderful people. Sometimes a person just wants four full bedrooms, instead of three plus a loft. Maybe God is teaching us something, some fruit of the Spirit like patience or self-control or gentleness or perhaps righteous indignation. Or maybe he’s just teaching us the fundamental fact of life, “You cannot solve this—any of this—by your effort. Stand down!” I sure wish whatever I did would seal the deal, though. Put in effort X get out result Y. In my brighter moments I know that is not how it works. A euphemism for “Stand down!” is “Lord have mercy!” Amen.

I first encountered Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in elementary school, when I memorized and performed it for the school assembly. The way my teachers explained it to me back then, I thought Robert Frost seemed like an artsy sort of motivational speaker—a popularized self-help poet. The message was essentially this: Go after your dreams, even if its difficult. Take the road less traveled. I have often heard “The Road Not Taken” referenced in ways that, paraphrased, encourage people to “take the higher road” or “make your own way.” I think of our meme-saturated social media that pulls choice lines from great literary works and turns them into the equivalent of the terrified kitten, paws clinging to a tree branch—“Hang in there, baby!”—and I see that popular attention to the poem largely rests in the last two lines: I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference. Given a closer (and more comprehensive) reading, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” does little to satisfy a broad cultural impulse toward the moral of the story or any simplistic resolution to make us feel better about ourselves and our choices. Frost sets up the tension between these two roads from the very first line. He expresses his desire to walk both paths. He goes back and forth in his evaluation of the roads—several times. He looks down one, then takes the other, then stops to think about both of them. One of the paths has the “better claim” because it is “grassy and want[ing] wear”; yet in the very next two lines, Frost says that when he really ponders about it, they are worn “really about the same.” Later he says that they “equally lay” in the leaves and tells himself that he will come back to the other path “another day,” indicating that he sees these as equally valid options. Of course, he waffles yet again and says that he doubts he’ll ever return to this fork in the road. Why this back and forth? Frost is saying less about which road is better and more about the inner conflict itself—or about what comes after the inner conflict has passed. The “yellow wood” where Frost has encountered these paths brings to mind the image of leaves changing in the autumn months and connotes a degree of weariness in life or, at the very least, aging and perhaps coming death.  The yellow leaves become even more important later in the poem, in lines 11 and 12: And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black. The roads, he writes, lay in the leaves. In reality, if leaves have fallen across a road, it is the leaves that are strewn across the road. In other words, between leaves and a road, the road would be the predecessor—the least transient or changing of the two, the thing that was there before the leaves. Instead, Frost reverses this perception by placing the paths in the leaves, seeming to make the yellow leaves more important than the roads themselves. The fact that he does not see the leaves as being (yet) “trodden black” indicates that the perceived death or ending has not yet come. The leaves still hold their color, but there is a strong awareness of the decay of life and the passing of seasons. The perspective (a different ordering of priorities) brought on with age becomes stronger than the pressure of making the right decision. In the final stanza, Frost takes us back to the beginning—to the fork in the road: I shall be telling this with a sigh  / Somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference. As he stands at the fork in the road this time, though, there is one road in mind and it is the  “less traveled” one. But how could one of the roads be less traveled if, before, they were both worn “about the same”? The key here is in the first two lines of the concluding stanza. He speaks of this less travelled road “with a sigh” and from the perspective of a distant future. The poet is thus looking back on what seemed at the time to be a very important decision and from this perspective all the inner conflict has been resolved. The decision itself has diminished in its importance. There is no moral to the story — and this is, perhaps, the key message of “The Road Not Taken.” Frost doesn’t find resolution within the poem. As important as any given decision may be,  he doesn’t try to tell us which road was better. Instead, he tells us that life will always be racked with doubts and regrets and when we are aging and approaching death, we will see how little all of those decisions really mattered. I do not mean to say that Frost is telling us that nothing matters—rather that the crossroad decisions matter less than the way live along the way and the beauty we allow to overpower our anxiety. Perhaps the road “less travelled” is the one that teaches us the freedom of bypassing all our deliberations by understanding that the roads themselves are less important than the yellow woods surrounding them—the leaves, the beauty around us, and the passing of time. Afterword: If Robert Frost was asked to create a meme with a more accurate representation of  his poem, it might look like this:

Growing up, I had a clock radio at my headboard. As a rule, I was to be in bed by ten. This posed a problem for me on Monday nights, because I had to miss my favorite show, Monday Night Football. But I had a sneaky solution. I knew how to dial in the local ABC affiliate on my clock radio. I would then tuck the clock under my my pillow and lay my ear directly over the speaker. One Monday night I was laying there in the dark, discreetly taking in the action, when the drama began to build. The 49ers were giving a beating to the Raiders, and Jerry Rice had just tied Jim Brown’s record of 126 touchdowns. It became apparent that he was going to try to break the record that night. I couldn’t take it any longer, there was only so much imagery I could create in my mind. I had to see what was going on with my own eyes. I shut my clock radio off and crept out of my room and down the hall to the living room. I turned on the TV and muted the volume, hoping that neither parent would notice a flickering, blueish glow under their bedroom door. I sat there in total silence, two feet away from the screen, trying to keep my composure as Rice crossed the goal line once more with arms spread wide in victory. I was breaking the rules but Jerry was breaking the record. And I didn’t get caught, not that night or any of the sneaky Monday nights that followed. For years I would look back fondly on those silent nights, until it came full circle. When we were first married, my wife, Gina, was not a fan of football. More precisely, she was not a fan of the screaming and yelling that invariably came with men watching football. So I didn’t push it on her and I didn’t watch the sport I loved—until one Sunday while I was sick on the couch. Gina told me it would be fine to have a game on as long as there was no yelling involved. The game was full of drama, including the heartbreaking story of Doug Flutie’s little boy as well as Doug’s harrowing return to the NFL. The game came down to the wire and went into overtime. I never yelled. I didn’t holler. I quietly kept my cool as Gina found herself drawn into the real-life drama and passion of the game. From that day on, I would have the greatest football buddy ever. We watch any and every NFL game together, whether or not our team is playing. We rarely raise our voices at the TV, just the occasional cheers and boos. Football may be a violent sport, but it brings several hours of peace into our home each Sunday. And for this reason we rarely watch the Super Bowl with others. We don’t attend Super Bowl parties. We just sit at home and enjoy the final night of our favorite pastime, with a little sadness that it will be over in a few hours—until it returns in September. Until then, I can look back to that old clock radio with appreciation for the reserve and composure that its silent football taught me.

Stacy Grubb‘s new record, From the Barroom to the Steeple, has just been released. It’s beautiful and features some amazing musicians including Stacy (voice, wow) and Ron Block (banjo, mustache). It’s so good I’m going to prove it to somebody by giving a copy away to a randomly-selected person who comments on this post. —Sam Tell us a little about how you became an international bluegrass sensation? Do not even think about answering this awesome question without mentioning Cathead. (Note: Alan “Cathead” Johnston is Stacy’s dad.) I don’t feel there is an honest answer to this question. How did I drive my family into the poorhouse with bluegrass? Same as every bluegrass performer, mostly. Well, not really. I didn’t grow up listening to bluegrass. I grew up with the option of contemporary Christian or Waylon Jennings. That’s what ol’ Cathead gave me to choose from. At least, for a really long time. When I was a teenager, I got into Mariah Carey and pursued that kind of sound and developed my songwriting. And I’m picking on Cathead. He didn’t object to my Dolly tape I had (it was a gospel record she’d cut). I was probably 4 when I discovered her, and she has been my #1 ever since—even unto this day. But by the time I was in my 20s, I had this blend of Dolly and Mariah vocally (only with not one iota of a hint of Mariah) and my goals with it were just ridiculous. I really bucked the honest truth of my voice, which is that it’s just not designed for R&B. I know, right? Dad had actually not been into bluegrass since his own teen days when he picked with his dad, but he had a re-falling in love with it around the time I was moving back to West Virginia after a few years in Knoxville. He assembled a bluegrass band and asked me to sing in it with him. I’d gone through a lot of years really denying my love of music. I won’t purge all that here. But joining his band flipped a switch for me. Oh, and seeing Alison Krauss & Union Station for the first time in concert had a real impact, too. Again, probably a longer story than you signed up for. The more I sang bluegrass, the more I felt my voice had found a home. God carved me a path that eventually led me into a studio in 2009 and I still can’t really believe it happened. Music and maybe just creating in general is hard. I haven’t always appreciated my opportunities as I should, especially when I’ve felt rejected. Still, I can’t quit doing this thing. What got me here? I guess, the short story is, “One foot in front of the other even when it was the stupid thing to do.” What’s different about this record from the last one? My last record had a more alt-country sound to it. Actually, in the planning phase, I thought we were gearing up to make a bluegrass record. But when I got to the studio, I learned that there may have been a breakdown in communication when I met the drummer and electric guitar player. I just rolled with it. The general consensus of that one on the marketing side was that it was “too bluegrass for country and too country for bluegrass.” Bah! This record is completely acoustic and the production is really scaled back in comparison. I think country music producers (such as the one who produced Hurricane) tend to use instrumentation as a bed to lay a vocal to, whereas bluegrass producers use instrumentation as an extension of the voice and the telling of the story. Clay Hess produced From the Barroom to the Steeple and he’s well accomplished in bluegrass having been a member of high profile groups like Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder and Mountain Heart. He’s also pretty good at dealing with the hurdles of accommodating girl sangers. We’re not so easy to accompany since the only keys we know are girl keys. You’ve been around the Rabbit Room a long time. Has this community been influential in your life? If so, how? Well, I met you in the Rabbit Room! I probably had missed opportunities to meet you in Kroger before, but because of the RR, I learned about you and have come to know your beautiful family, even as it’s grown in numbers. Ron (Block) first told me about the RR. He kept telling me I needed to check it out and I thought it was just for super smart theologians, so I took awhile to come around. When I did, I realized it was also for dingleberry riffraff (or at least that we wouldn’t be tossed out on our cottontails), so I stuck around like a canker sore. The people I’ve met have been life-changing. I think we all know what I’m talking about there. I’m still a Hutchmoot no-show, but I’ve been able to meet a bunch of y’all, anyway. Plus, there’s Story Warren. But there was this post—well, it was a series—that Ron made years ago called “Driving Out the Canaanites.” It dealt with the way God conquered sin and how He works that out in us to relieve us of the bondage of sin. I really can’t describe the impact of that. He also had a series about plugging into our Power Source. There have been so many posts, so many discussions. Honestly, I tell people I’m not actually a real rabbit, but I hang out with a bunch of them. My non-rabbit friends who know about rabbits don’t get it and I’m sad for what they don’t know they’re missing. What’s your favorite color besides the ones we all know about? The only color that I know about that none of y’all know about is maybe the color of the backs of my knees. It’s not a favorite. Kind of a greyish, ghostly white (like sausage gravy) with the fingerprints of a 3-year-old stamped in strawberry jelly. The strawberry jelly is a pretty color. Y’all probably know about that one. Oh, I’ve actually never seen my scalp. None of us know what color it is. It’s a mystery. What can people who want to support you in your music do to help right now? Buy the record if you think you’ll like it, review it (if you do like it . . . don’t be dragging down my star count), requesting me on Bluegrass Junction (SiriusXM), and one big thing that a lot of people might not consider is contacting venues and saying, “Hey, can you bring this girl over here to our town?” Most places have Facebook pages these days. Just leave a post on their wall requesting that they book me at their establishment or festival or living room or just wherever people pay musicians to entertain them.

The small Midwestern town where I was raised is idyllic in many ways. It has a city pool where I spent my boyhood summers swimming with my friends, a dignified sandstone courthouse at the intersection of Jefferson and Main, a single screen movie theatre that was built in the late 1920s, and an annual county fair known as the Pork Festival. The Pork Festival is a nod to our roots. We are a farming community—producers of all manner of crops and livestock. For those who hail from my town, the Pork Festival is part of the rhythm of life. Every September the carnival pulls into town, the streets around the courthouse are blocked off, the tents go up, the vendors with their standard county-fair wares (mirrors frosted with AC/DC and Van Halen logos, nunchuks, and cheap stuffed animals) set up shop, and the entire town adopts the attitude that we are all taking a long weekend together. My earliest memories of independence came from those times when my parents would let my brother and I break free from their watchful eye so we could roam the confines of the festival at night, riding the Scrambler and the Octopus, and buying survival knives and throwing stars with our allowance money. For three days we lived on breaded tenderloin sandwiches, elephant ears, and lemon shake-ups. We were kings in a kingdom flowing with sugar and fried food. The festival’s main event was the parade on Saturday. The best way to describe the Pork Festival parade (and the highest honor I think anyone can bestow on a parade) is to say that it was exactly what you probably imagine when you think of a small town’s big parade. Picture marching bands playing, majorettes twirling their batons, and politicians handing out candy. Smell the exhaust of the Shriners as they zip around like dare-devils on their mini-bikes and go-karts. Cover your ears as the fire trucks and police cruisers roll by at five miles per hour—sirens blaring and officers waving from behind their amber Ray Bans and mustaches. Wave at the smiling beauty pageant winner—Miss Pork Cuisine—as she glides past, perched up there on the trunk of the local dentist’s yellow Mustang convertible. This year’s Molehill contains a poem (below) I wrote about the Pork Festival’s beauty pageant winner and her ride down Main Street as she waves in her satin sash that identifies her as one of our town’s most beautiful treasures. For the young, the beauty pageant represents a sort of rising to the top. But for the older folks, it is a reminder that physical beauty, as the wise king observed, is fleeting. Whenever anyone attempts to capture beauty, they have embarked on an exercise in futility. And yet, we’ll never stop trying because there is something eternal that lurks deep inside us all that knows we were meant for beauty and not decay. So we keep to the work of naming beauty, even as it fades right in front of our eyes. And next year, we start the process all over again. The poem below is not meant to poke fun at Miss Pork Cuisine (the festival committee has since changed the name.) Yes, I am amused by the irony that “Miss Pork Cuisine” was the name on the sash of our town’s beauty pageant winner, but that absurdity is a pretty terrific metaphor for the futility of trying to capture beauty. I enter myself into all sorts of pageantry. There are certain beauties I want to be known for. The same is true of you. Sometimes in this life we win the prize we seek and are given a sash and a seat of honor for a time. It feels good to be prized. But the ride will eventually end. Beauty measured by comparison will inevitably be eclipsed by someone younger, better, or more congenial. The older I get, the more I am okay with all that. I am coming to believe that the best seat in the parade is there on the sidewalk, watching, year after year, as the town grows and changes, and yet still manages to stay the same. _________ Miss Pork Cuisine by Russ Ramsey, 2014 From The Molehill Volume 3 From my chair on the sidewalk in front of the bank, I watch as this year’s Miss Pork Cuisine glides past waving from her perch atop the trunk of the local dentist’s convertible. The Shriners figure eight in choreographed glory behind her, their miniature motorcycles like the train of her robe filling the parade route. She is to this town what the car she sits upon is to the dentist, an achievement in beauty and refinement, a symbol of youth, this year’s model, one of the noticed few. I wave back telling her to enjoy the ride. The parade seems to be moving slowly, but it will be over before she knows it. There will be another next year but it will not belong to her. ___________ Follow Russ on Instagram Follow Russ on Twitter Follow Russ on Facebook

The other day I had a chance to visit the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Even though most of the exhibits remain the same, I like to go at least once every year to refresh my experience and my memory. As a creative and art-conscious person, there’s something pilgrim-like about it. We travel to such centers of art in order to expand our vision and our senses once again. I was thinking something along these lines as I wandered the galleries. I was particularly struck by how galleries remind us of the “reality” of certain types of art. It seems today that more and more art is coming to us through digital means. We pick and download songs through the internet. We stream films or television shows likewise. We can even look at famous paintings or photographs via our computer screens. Granted, real flesh-and-blood artists played real instruments in a studio and created those sounds. Real actors got dirt thrown on them or played out their scenes on sets or somewhere out in the world. But that sometimes gets lost in the magical digitalization through which most of this comes to us. But at the MFA, I was in a repository of real, immediate, touchable art. I was in the Art of the Americas wing, looking at some of my favorite paintings by the early Americans, Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley. Leaning in close, I could see the brushstrokes, still visible after several hundred years. I noticed the cracks seaming the canvas, sometimes even enhancing it. I could “see” the history in a way that is sometimes hard to notice in other art. Each single painting was an objective bridge to some distant and often hard to grasp past. But it was a sign of the reality of that past, that some creative mind took paint to canvas and created one window into his world. The same could be said for the Greek and Romans statues I saw in another gallery. The bust of Augustus I observed went back 2000 years, to the time of Christ. It probably stood as a mark of the empire in some distant Mediterranean outpost. It’s hard for me to put myself into life back then—we all only know our own world—but there it was before me, evidence of another world. Such encounters are a good, healthy reminder that we are not the only brilliant, creative, thoughtful beings in the history of the world.

This frigid January day finds me working on a number of pieces. I’m rotating them out to let the paint dry and to keep myself engaged. Doing this also gives me time to mentally work through any problems that I run into as I’m painting. The detail of the ship is for an art festival I’ll be participating in. It’s in Albuquerque in March and I’ll be bringing this and a van load of other paintings to sell, many of which haven’t been completed (or started) yet. I’m having fun with these feathers. I think I’m going to carve up that wood, too. These last two details are from a pair of constellations I’m working on for my church, and they’re supposed to convey the main themes of the book of Mark. I’m still not sure whether they’re going to work or not, but I think I’m getting close. My idea is to illustrate the difference between the Messiah the Jews expected and the Messiah that actually came, highlighting those differences through use of imagery and color and line. I used the same star field for both of these paintings, but the oak and the acorn use different stars to make up their constellations – the larger, brighter stars make up the oak, and the smaller, less significant stars make up the acorn. As I said, a work in progress. On a side note, after I worked up the tree I decided I like painting constellations and so I’m going to do a quick series of them. Not real constellations, of course. Fake ones. Follow Jamin on Instagram Follow Jamin on Facebook

We’re just around the corner from the release of Russ Ramsey’s book, Behold the King of Glory: A Narrative of the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. In forty short chapters (just right for devotional reading), Russ tells the story of the Gospels. What I have said before about Behold the Lamb I say again about Behold the King: Russ Ramsey tells a story you’ve heard a hundred times and still haven’t heard enough. With remarkable attention to the facts of the matter, Russ brings to life the story that brings us to life. Here is glory made visible, tangible, audible. Which is to say, here is the Incarnation. Russ and I recently had a chat about Behold the King, three-legged dogs, and the Millennium Falcon. So, Behold the King of Glory is coming out in time for Easter? Crossway will be shipping them any day now to folks who ordered online. January 31 is the official release day, but online orders will be fulfilled as they roll in. Forty chapters for the forty days of Lent? Yes. If you’ve read my first book, Behold the Lamb of God, this book picks up where that one left off—same voice, same chapter length. Whereas Behold the Lamb has 25 chapters so folks can use it as a daily reader for advent, Behold the King was written as a 40-chapter book so folks could do that same for Lent. How do you usually observe Lent? To be honest, I wrote this book as a tool to help me observe Lent better. I grew up going to a church that observed a liturgical calendar (I remember the first thing I ever gave up for Lent was a die-cast metal Millennium Falcon. It sat on top of our refrigerator from Ash Wednesday through Easter Sunday.) That’s amazing. Forty days of not playing with the Millennium Falcon. Have you ever gone forty days without playing with it since? Man, if I could find any of my Star Wars toys, I’d be thrilled. I gave up the news one year. That was a pretty good way to spend Lent. Part of the reason I wrote the book was to give a daily reader to folks who may not come from a liturgical background. For me, the heart of Lent is meditating on the finished work of Christ. Self-denial is a great way to do that, but dwelling on the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, I think, is the best way to prepare for Easter. I should mention, however, that I am not driven so much by the liturgical season as I am the story the season focuses on. The story of Jesus, regardless of when the book is read, was the reason I wrote the book. Here’s what I love about your approach in Behold the Lamb of God and Behold the King of Glory: they’re about incarnation in the most concrete terms possible. The humanity in scripture is deeply moving to me. Compelling. There’s a way of telling the story of Jesus that can still leave things pretty disembodied. In every Christmas pageant I’ve ever seen, for instance, the shepherds wear clean robes. But if you’re envisioning shepherds in clean clothes, you’re not envisioning shepherds; you’re envisioning some kind of disembodied being—a symbol, a placeholder. In Behold the Lamb, the way you talk about shepherds—nasty, rough-edged, marginalized, and altogether necessary—that was transformative for me. Those shepherds look a lot more like people I’ve met than the shepherds of the Christmas pageants do. In Behold the King, you’ve done something similar with the Pharisees. They aren’t just cardboard cutouts of bad guys, but very human. Early on, the Pharisees were folk heroes. They were men of conviction who stood up to idolatrous invaders who sought to defile the temple and their way of worshipping. The Pharisees, at least in their beginnings, were people who wanted to preserve fidelity to scripture among their own people. So they committed themselves to becoming living examples of what it looked like to keep the Law. The problem—as self-righteousness works in all of us—came when they started to believe their own press. Who would be a good modern-day parallel to Pharisees? A good parallel might be the person who sees their family line being destroyed by immoral behavior and decides to take a hard line stance against anything of the sort. But then, they begin to believe they are the only one who is righteous. The Pharisees, as it turns out, are relatable human characters. The more I dig into the stories of the people and parties in scripture, the more I see that they become who they are over time in ways that elicit empathy and warrant understanding. Tell me an insight you got from this process, something that surprised you. One insight I saw again and again was that we become who we are as a result of the lives we live. No one chooses to be a self-righteous stick in the mud. But in our efforts to live good clean lives, or at least lives we can feel good about when we lay our heads on our pillows at night, we set up systems we think amount to a life well lived. So the Pharisees, the political figures—like Pilate or Herod—are people who are living out their assumptions of what constitutes a good life. We are all in the process of doing that same thing. Another insight is that Scripture is full of Easter eggs. Like what? For instance, Jesus led the disciples in a song before leaving the upper room for Gethsemane (Matt 26:30, Mark 14:26). Please tell me it wasn’t “Kum Ba Ya.” It was probably Psalm 118. I have never in my life thought about Jesus singing. Yep. Let’s talk about the day Jesus went back to Nazareth and his friends and neighbors tried to throw him off a cliff. Did you write about that? I did, actually. What I found so poignant about that was that was the last time he ever went back to his hometown. Think of that. You grow up in this town, a neighborhood kid, and then you go out and become a sought after healer and teacher, and whenever you come home, people look at you funny—like they don’t trust you. And it’s because they cannot believe you have become what people say about you. That scene is a moment of great biblical irony. It’s the people of Nazareth living out the slur “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Even they can’t believe something good has come from among them. Was that phrase proverbial? Did everybody know Nazareth was a mean town? It seemed to be a saying: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Like someone might say, “Can anything sophisticated come out of West Virginia”? I’ve known some mean towns. There’s a famously mean one in Georgia called Rhine—speed traps, three-legged dogs, etc… My brother once saw a three legged dog while we were driving down the road and exclaimed, “Look at that one-legged dog!” My dad about crashed the car laughing because, apparently, he pictured a one-legged dog pogoing down the sidewalk. Anyway…I like to imagine Nazareth was like Rhine. It does affect the way one thinks about Jesus, to realize what a tough town he came from. Nazareth was a rough place. An out of the way place. But if you spend any time at all with scripture, you see that the world at that time was a rough place. That does bring up a question of interpretation: What are the dangers in, say, imagining Nazareth as Rhine, Georgia? There’s obvious value in relating the world of Jesus to a world I’m familiar with…but what are the pitfalls of that approach? The pitfalls are that we see through a very Westernized lens. Many of our cultural values are, historically speaking, minority views. We live in a highly sexualized, pop-psychology-influenced culture. We live during a time when we tell children they can be anything they want. In Jesus’ day, that wasn’t common at all. If your dad was a stonemason, guess what you were probably going to be? So how do you as a writer bridge that gap and help the reader to “relate” without Westernizing things? I try to focus on what does translate—which is the human experience of wanting to know where we stand in this life. One of my goals with this book was to stay as faithful to scripture as possible. I did a ton of study with each chapter, trying to bring in as much historical accuracy as I could—details not necessarily in the text, but embraced by New Testament scholars. And I try to make sure that I’m caring for my reader as I write. I read aloud what I’ve written, trying to see if I’ve buried them in a bunch of book-learnin.’ I think about both Behold books as my attempt to help people hide scripture in their hearts by way of their imaginations. I firmly believe the Bible is an amazingly compelling story, very relatable. You do a great job in both books of showing what’s compelling and relatable, and helping me to enter into the story imaginatively. But still, I have some concerns. As much as I love my own imagination, it’s not authoritative. I would submit that we all have made Jesus in our own image (at least in some measure)—and that we can’t help it. We can’t help it, but surely we’re supposed to try to help it, aren’t we? Yes. This is why there is no way to read scripture well unless we read through a lens of humility. It’s part of being the earthbound creatures that we are. God anthropomorphizes himself so we can understand him, and then we anthropomorphize his anthropomorphisms even more. The lens of humility—that’s right on. I know your research process was rigorous: if writing the Behold books has required a lot of imagination, it has been a highly disciplined imagination. Can you describe the process by which you shaped these forty chapters? Yes, I spent many hours with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John open in front of me, trying to make sense of the chronology. I consulted the works of others. I began the slow process of breaking Jesus’ life down into five “Eras”: Obscurity (his early days in Judea, Samaria, and Galilee) Popularity (his preaching tour of Galilee) Rejection Jerusalem and Judea (mostly from Luke and John), and Passion Week. From there I broke those down into smaller epochs that would become the chapters. Then I gathered study materials for each chapter and studied, took notes and mapped out the key acts of each mini-story. Were there research resources that were particularly valuable to you? Anything you kept going back to? I found that, for the purpose of this book, I had to create my own. I found a lot of resources that were great for certain parts of the research—like a few solid chronological syntheses of the four Gospels—but no one resource that covered all the parts. I made a manila folder that had maps and timelines and Scripture references all on one place—things to keep me between the lines as I was writing. I still have it. Interesting Do the research, and then trust your research. There is a third Behold book to be written. More story to tell. I won’t name it explicitly, but anyone with a New Testament should be able to figure it out. I already figured it out. You’re going to retell the Book of Revelation. Swing and a miss. [Click here to order Behold the King of Glory.]

I’m stealing this from Dave Bruno’s blog because it’s awesome and he forgot to post it here. Carve out a few minutes this evening, click the link below, and read Dr. King’s sermon, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians.” Happy MLK Day. Click here to read the full sermon.

Sunday before last [editor’s note: It’s now been quite a few Sundays before last], I stood on the airstrip of this little island of ours and watched a single-engine prop plane take off and disappear into the clouds. I felt very much like a heroine in an old black-and-white movie—and suddenly very alone. For Philip was on that plane, a kind pilot friend having offered to spirit him back to the city for the work week, and I was facing the prospect of camping all by myself for six whole days. Not that I was adverse to the plan—it was one of the things that’s making this time by the sea a possibility, and I am grateful, not only to my husband, but to our friend, whose generosity both simplified our scheme and gave Philip a good, old-fashioned adventure. (“You’ve got to see the marshes from the air,” he keeps telling me. “You’ll never look at them the same way again after viewing them from 1000 feet.”) Nor was I necessarily opposed to the prospect of so many days of aloneness: Solitude and I are old friends, and here was certainly an opportunity to renew her acquaintance in an entirely new way. Nevertheless, it was hard to think of being here in this loved place without the one whom my soul loves, and as I stood there under a leaden sky, with the wind snapping my skirt against my legs, a funny little desolation crept over me. I listened until the plane was out of earshot, then I walked slowly back across the runway to my car. The Airstream seemed so empty, even with a nine-month old puppy in residence—if 24 feet of aluminum-sheathed trailer can echo, I swear they did that day. And so, I did what any rational female would do: I sat down on the sofa and had a little cry. After that, I pulled myself together and made a Plan. I was resolved to demonstrate my love and thanks by having much to show for these days—I honestly cannot think of another time in my life when I’ve had absolutely nothing to do but write. Bonnie and I quickly established our little routine, which included, among other things, a nightly FaceTime chat with Philip (fun for me and wholesomely confusing for her!), as well as a morning hour in bed with coffee and journal (well, Bonnie didn’t journal that much—she mostly licked my face and sloshed my coffee). I grew comfortable with the systems, like angling the awning at the threat of rain, and lighting the pilot lights on our Princess stove each morning, and I made a master list of daily requisites: reading, prayer and intentional silence, walks and bike rides, and, of course, writing. I outlined my novelling goals in no uncertain terms: One-half chapter a day. Period. On Monday I picked up a lovely, perfect moon shell—not at the shore, as one might imagine, but at the base of a tree in my own campsite. Was it left there by another pilgrim into silence, some other lone soul learning again or anew the language of solitude? It reminded me of the words of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, from her slim jewel, Gift From the Sea: “Solitude,” says the moon shell. Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the day, some part of each week, and each year . . . the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude. I told one of my best friends before we came down here that I was really looking forward to re-finding my solitude. I’m often alone in the round of my life at home—but being alone is not nearly the same thing as being alone with yourself. To be alone with yourself, there first must be a purposeful silencing of the mental chatter with which we’re all so tempted to swaddle our brains in this busy, productive world of ours—and that can be a terrifying thing, particularly if one has forgotten how healing and helpful the deep silences can be. The data like Date of birth, Address, Permit number, and Expiry dates frequently get created by a phony data generator framework utilized by our suggested merchants. It at that point encodes into the strip and 2D code on the back utilizing best in class standardized tag creating programming which makes your copy Readable. Use proper payment methods to buy a fake id online. So, when you meander around various alcohol shops or age-limited spots you can show your ID to a Bouncer or representative they will utilize a Scanner to peruse your standardized identification. For the only true aloneness, of course, is aloneness with God, open-handed and empty of pretense. How easy it is to base our standing in grace upon our own efforts, howsoever boldly we might declare otherwise. I don’t think I realized how much I’d been congratulating myself over small successes and writhing under habitual failures (that sharp word, that condescending thought, that deadly ingratitude!) until forced to confront the facts in the seclusion of my own soul. All week I carried an image in my mind of a fretful, fussy infant soothed into sudden and unavoidable comfort by the encircling warmth of strong arms which, unlike even the most faithful human embrace, will never let go. My soul is even as a weaned child, said the Psalmist. Be still and know that I am God, said the Lover of my soul. All right, I said, with the wind and the waves and the sea birds circling overhead as witness. I have no other choice. I was taken aback the first week of our sojourn by the crippling fear that seized me every time I sat down to write. It was really amazing, something I had to painfully press through. I’m realizing, the older I get, that the toll of “too much” on my inner equilibrium is getting steeper and steeper, an expense I can ill-afford to perpetuate. And it always manifests after a season of soul neglect as a serious discrepancy in the inspiration department. There were so many negative voices to drown out when I was trying to write I could hardly hear myself think. But somewhere round about Tuesday of the second week, a curious thing happened. I was writing away (rather grimly, I’m afraid), when my imagination caught the faintest prick of light, like a lone firefly amid the murky shades of a dark wood. I hesitated, pencil poised thoughtfully. Then, seeing as I had absolutely nothing to lose but a few pages of bad prose, I followed it. First one fairy lamp appeared, and then another, and another. And before I knew it, I was in love with my story again, writing furiously each day, often till after 7 at night. It just felt so intoxicating to be anchored in the scenes once more, to know that old excitement that presents itself in my heart as physical pain. And it felt so good to fall into bed at night, with a stout mug of chamomile tea and a fat Elizabeth Goudge novel, knowing I’d worked as hard as I was able. Ever so much more work to be done, of course, but we’re moving forward again. And I know it wouldn’t have happened without the gift of this time, this place, and the healing spaces of solitude. Near the end of the week, I rode my bike early to the beach and watched the tide come in. There, alone in the warm sunshine, with the surf pounding in my ears and lapping almost to where I stood, I heard at last the water music that Kreeft was talking about, that endless song which God breathed into His sea, that one lullaby that never grows old: I love you, I love you, I love you . . . Bonnie and I were wild to see Philip on Friday night. I cleaned the Airstream within an inch of its life, put a bottle of wine in the fridge, and strung pretty paper flags on the awning. (I even ventured off my island for a grocery run!) When I saw our little roadster, Happiness Runs, draw up alongside the Airstream, we both exploded out to meet him—Bonnie Blue jumped as high as Philip’s head! I may have been slightly less demonstrative . . . but no less happy to have him back. A joy all the sweeter for an enriching, soul-centering foray into Solitude.

Once upon a time, many long years ago and in a land far, far away, a group of astrologers observed a stellar anomaly. “Look,” said one. “That star. It doesn’t usually appear there, right?” The others nodded and murmured general agreement. What happened next is a matter for speculation only. Maybe the astrologers had a group epiphany about the significance of the star’s odd location in the night sky. Maybe they held a council to debate its significance. Maybe they ran a series of tests, or deferred to the judgment of the eldest or wisest man of their cadre. Whatever their procedure, we do have from St. Matthew a surviving scrap of testimony about their conclusion: A boy had been born King of the Jews. The astrologers gathered some suitable gifts and set out westward toward the land of Judea; and, after consulting with King Herod and the priests and legal scholars in Jerusalem, found the Man Born to be King in a house in Bethlehem. That was over two thousand years ago. And to this day, much of the Western Church keeps an annual feast—Epiphany—where we re-tell the story of the first revelation of Jesus the Messiah to the Gentiles, a story foretold by Isaiah the prophet: “And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.”[1] Among other things, the story is notable for the vocation of its Gentiles: astrology, a vocation mocked for its futility by everyone from that same Isaiah the prophet[2] to the Onion. Indeed those Gentiles would never have got going, but for their vocation. Hold that thought for a moment. A century ago, in an Oxford library, a young man (who should have been studying for exams) found C.N.E. Eliot’s A Finnish Grammar. He likened the discovery to “discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.”[3] Only a rather odd bird would have regarded A Finnish Grammar with the lust of a drunkard or wine snob, but this young man was just that kind of odd bird. Wooden hot tubs for sale, saunas, camping pods, BBQ huts and many more: woodenspasolutions.co.uk. He was a budding philologist who’d started developing his “‘own language’—or series of invented languages.” After his “wine-cellar” discovery those languages would forever bear the Finnish bouquet. And then, when he discovered the Finnish Kalevala, that “set the rocket off in story”—the story that would give a background for the languages.[4] The germ of my attempt to write legends of my own to fit my private languages was the tragic tale of the hapless Kullervo in the Finnish Kalevala.[5] The young man may have been shirking his exam preparation that day, but he was very much “on the job” as a philologist. As a result, we have Middle-earth, and the Rabbit Room, and a chorus of toasts “To the Professor!” every January 3. * * * It may well be that you regard your day job as a “sideline,” a bit of drudgery you perform only to support your family or art habit. If so, then reflect on this: the seed for the creation of Middle-earth was A Finnish Grammar. Are the arcane or mundane details of your day job so arcane or mundane as that? Is there nothing among the details of your job which, if given real attention, might be seed for a world? Or perhaps you regard your day job as disreputable—as much so as, say, astrology or philology[6]. You found this website because a philologist saw a “complete wine-cellar” in a Finnish grammar. Jesus Christ’s first revelation to the Gentiles happened as it did because of astrologers, being astrologers. The creator of the heavens and the earth scatters his seeds wisely, and quite prodigally. Work accordingly, friends. * * * [1] Isaiah 60:3 (AV). [2] Isaiah 47:10-15. [3] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien 214 (Humphrey Carpenter et al. eds., Houghton Mifflin 2000)(1981). [4] Id. [5] Tolkien, Letters at 345. [6] C. S. Lewis, for example, was warned at his “first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist.” C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy 216 (1955).

If you are a 2014 Rabbit Room member, your copy of The Molehill Vol. 3 is presently speeding its way toward your mailbox. If you are a 2015 Rabbit Room member, your copy of The Molehill Vol. 3 along with your membership card, membership certification, and 2015 Rabbit Room mug will depart the launch facility tomorrow morning and rocket its way toward your doorstep with terrifying rapidity. If you pre-ordered The Molehill Vol. 3, your copy will likewise achieve launch velocity tomorrow morning. If you are none of the above, heaven help you. You are missing out on one heck of a great collection of poetry, short stories, non-fiction, recipes, and other work by a whole slew of Rabbit Room word-engineers. Consider the following: —a ghost story by Lanier Ivester —a folk tale by Walter Wangerin, Jr. —a piece of creative non-fiction about an art heist by Russ Ramsey —new poetry by Luci Shaw, Andrew Peterson, Chris Yokel, Jen Rose Yokel, Russ Ramsey, Jonathan Rogers, and Sir Richard Roland —Recipes by Lewis Graham (illustrated by Jennifer Trafton) —A work of illustrated short fiction (in five parts) by Jamin Still —A collaborative piece of cartoon poetry by Jen Rose Yokel and Jonny Jimison —A never-before-published essay by G. K. Chesterton —Let me say that last one again—a never-before-published essay by Gilbert Keith Chesterton!—(not even on the interwebs!) And there’s even more. It’s enough to cram your brain so full of good reading that it’s entirely likely your head will explode and we’ll have to call the school janitor to sprinkle that weird powder all over the puddle that used to be your head. We’re sorry if that happens, but you can’t say you weren’t warned. Click here to order your copy of The Molehill Vol. 3. We’ll aim it your way and hit the bright red candy-like launch button with reckless abandon and frightening alacrity. We swear it.

One of my favorite anticipations of any new year is the first book I will read. Often the first book of a new year is a reread from years past, such as Augustine’s Confessions or Frederick Buechner’s Godric or C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. But 2015 has started well with a new book from the aging (though apparently not much slowing down) historian Mark Noll. His latest book, From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian’s Discovery of the Global Christian Story (Baker Academic, 2014) is typical of Mark Noll when he is asked to speak about himself: it everywhere tells the story of others. The agenda for the book, in the series Turning South: Christian Scholars in an Age of World Christianity edited by Joel Carpenter, is personal memoir. The outcome is an engaging narrative highlighting key elements of Noll’s faith journey and academic career. Yet the main character of the book is Christ’s church universal, which despite foibles and follies manages to survive and even thrive right up to the present day. [Warning: severe Interstellar spoilers ahead] On the first day of this new year, the day before I finished Noll’s page turner, I took my sixteen-year-old daughter to see Interstellar. Yes, there were a few plot holes, some scientific hyperbole, and foreshadowing that stretched for miles (or I should say, hours). But the story was compelling. Two fathers, both asking their children to have faith in them as they try to save humanity. One father, Professor Brand, is visible. His ideas are tangible. By his human wisdom and effort he evokes hope that humanity can save itself. But he is a liar. The father of lies. And his most impressive disciple, Dr. Mann, is, well, a man after his own heart. Through cowardice, selfishness, pride, and attempted murder, Mann nearly destroys humanity. The other father, Joseph Cooper, leaves earth and remains invisible to the humans whose salvation he tries to affect from afar. But eventually he finds a way to communicate with his child. How he does this is a mystery, but the power of sacrificial love plays a big role. His revelation to his daughter is mediated through books. Humanity is saved. When Cooper comes back from his journey (“back from the dead” as film puts it), thanks to Einstein’s theory of relativity he returns not so much as the father but as the son. His aged daughter tells his still-young self that his work there is finished and sends him away to prepare a place for humanity, a colony on a habitable planet. The name Joseph means “God will increase.” As much as I can trust the Internet for facts, it seems Christopher Nolan who wrote and directed Interstellar is not a Christian. Yet, he most definitely is familiar with the story of Christianity. He has turned it into spectacular science-fiction. Whenever I encounter a fictional book or movie like Interstellar my imagination is suckered hook, line, and sinker. I told my daughter on the way home from the theatre, “If a wormhole opens up next to Saturn, I’m out of here.” Who could resist such an adventure? Well, apparently hundreds of millions of Christians, today mostly not living in the West, cannot resist. Though the skeptics who make stories like Interstellar possible would surely deny it, Noll’s story of Christianity around the globe is no tale of science fiction. Someone really did reach across the unknown and communicate a message of salvation through a book. Someone really did die and come back to life. Someone really did leave to prepare a place for humanity. And, just like in the movies, earth really is not where we ultimately belong. A lot of people in our world are living this otherworldly Gospel adventure. The incomprehensible truth of the matter is this is the story all humanity is living. The marvel of the western world is that through the most impressive learning in the history of humanity, it has turned the story of the Gospel into one of the coolest science fiction movies of all time. I confess (truly confess) I am at times more comfortable with the movie version, even though I do not believe it will ever come about and even though I do believe the Gospel version already has come about. Perhaps that is why of all Noll’s insights, one that came late in the book hit me hardest: A religion anchored in the murder of God incarnate is a religion that takes the sinful proclivities of believers as seriously as the entire world’s need for redemption. If taking up the cross and following Christ is the pattern of holiness for individuals and communities, it is no less the pattern for the church universal. For what it is worth, if you have not already seen Interstellar, you should. The spoilers I have provided here will not ruin it for you. (And I suspect there are a handful of Rabbit Roomers who do not even think my spoilers are spoilers.) But after the credits roll and you have spent a restless night pondering theoretical physics, do yourself a favor and pick up Mark Noll’s latest book. Read about how our world is really being really saved. Adventure awaits. P.S. I forgot to mention I watched The Giver tonight with my other daughters . . .

Nate Wilson kicked off our friendship with a bang. When he came to his first Hutchmoot the first thing he did was hand me a first edition of Till We Have Faces, which is possibly (depending on the weather) my favorite  C. S. Lewis book. He didn’t know it was my favorite, which made it an even sweeter gift. Last year I headed up to Moscow, Idaho, to teach at a workshop at New St. Andrews and Nate gave me yet another most excellent gift: a first edition of That Hideous Strength, the final book of the Space Trilogy. I had only read the first two (thanks to Kevan Chandler), and couldn’t really imagine book three outshining the sweep and wildness of Perelandra. One thing is clear: opinions abound about That Hideous Strength. I know of no other Lewis book that polarizes like this one. I’ve talked to quite a few people who never finished it, others who finished it but didn’t like it, and still others (like Nate) who claim that it’s Lewis’s finest work. Well, I just finished it. And while the book as a whole may not have blown my mind like Faces, and while it took me longer to read than any other Lewis book, its effect on me was undeniable for a number of reasons. There’s a word that’s given me a lot of trouble in the last few years. A word that we tout a lot around here. It’s a word that’s easy to use and hard to embody, a word that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and a word that, thanks to Dr. Steve Guthrie, I’m just now beginning to realize represents a great deal of power. That word is chartreuse. I dare you to say it without shuddering at its import! But seriously: the word is community. I’ve called the Rabbit Room “an experiment in community,” and at Hutchmoot we talk about carrying whatever light we encounter back into our communities. I’ve lauded the way the community of Christians here in Nashville has shaped my life and work and ministry. The Local Show is (hopefully) a way to plant community seeds. Community, community, community. I mentioned Steve Guthrie—he’s a brilliant dude, a professor at Belmont University who helped launch the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at St. Andrews University in Scotland. I’m about halfway finished with his book Creator Spirit, and in chapter four he lays out a brilliant case for the way the Holy Spirit is embodied in us through singing and music—particularly the way singing brings about the “Oneness” of the church. He writes: “Those filled with the Spirit . . . listen and respond to one another in songs, hymns, and spiritual songs. As they sing, they gain experience in hearing one another; they learn to move in time and in harmony with those around them. They are reminded that the new humanity in Christ includes voices other than their own—voices of different quality, timbre, and register, to which they must tune their own song. . . In song we learn and enact a kind of mutual submission in which we do not lose, but discover, our voices.” We learn submission and humility, losing ourselves even as we become who we’re meant to be. Our own voice finds its best home when it is joined with the great chorus. If you’ve ever been to the Behold the Lamb concert at the Ryman and sung “It Is Well With My Soul,” you know what I’m talking about. That’s Oneness in the Spirit. That sounds great, right? Then why, you may ask, is music in the church one of the most divisive issues in recent history? You could say the same thing about baptism, about communion, about marriage, Guthrie points out. “Perhaps the fact that we can so easily produce examples of this sort suggests that these practices wound and cause division not despite but because of their power to create community. Bread and water, song, and physical intimacy bind us to one another, but they bind us together in all of our woundedness and in all of our power to wound.” If he’s right, if these beautiful and sacred means of Oneness are at the same time so historically divisive, then maybe it’s because Satan hates them. Maybe he attacks us in these particular ways because he knows that honest, humble, Gospel-centered community is a powerful enfleshment of God’s Kingdom here on earth. Few things gratify the forces of darkness like the destruction of Christian community. That Hideous Strength, like so much of Lewis’s writing, helped me to see not just the sin but the sin behind the sin. Mark and Jane Studdock, the main characters in the story, are constantly beset by the temptation to lean away from the light and toward the darkness, away from humility and toward status, away from submission and toward self-preservation. Mark, who has always longed to be a part of an Inner Ring, is seduced by what he would probably call community: an elite group of scholars and power-players in a sort of shadow organization called the N.I.C.E. The whole organization—which, it turns out, is bent on the destruction of the world—is arranged to make a person feel as though he is comfortably “in” one circle of trust while at the same time uncomfortably “out” of an even deeper one. Everyone in the N.I.C.E. speaks in vagaries, pretentiousness hangs in the air like smoke, and it all wakes in Mark a mad desire to do whatever must be done to move deeper into the “community.” Once they get their claws into him he’s on a crash course for utter destruction. Part of the book’s brilliance is the mounting, pervasive dread one feels while reading of Mark’s slow and steady seduction by the N.I.C.E. I won’t tell you how it ends, but as I read it I recognized something hideous lurking in my own heart. I recognized how cowardly I can be in certain situations, like when I pretend to know what’s going on and I really don’t, or when I say things that don’t mean much of anything because I’m trying to maintain some percieved even keel in a conversation, or when I choose to speak to this person instead of that person because they seem to be on the “inside” of something, or even the perverse satisfaction I feel when I’m on the backstage list at Some Important Person’s concert. All of this is a false and destructive form of community—a faux community. True community is Oneness in the Spirit—it’s a unity of Jew and Gentile, black and white, cool and uncool, artist and plumber, old and young, all singing their own part in one glorious song. That’s what we want the Rabbit Room to exemplify. If you’re reading this and you think there’s some secret we all know that you don’t, or that you’d be happier if you could hang out with the Right People, or if we’re purposely structuring things to keep you out, then rest assured that we’re all knuckle-headed and glorious men and women fumbling about in the palace of this great paradox: by Christ’s mercy we see that we’re beggars at the door, and by Christ’s mercy we discover that we’re children of the King—wonder of wonders, there’s a seat reserved for us at the feast. This year at the Ryman concert, one of the special guests said to me, “Thanks for letting me in, man.” And because of That Hideous Strength I had the presence of mind to say, “This is the Church. We’re all ‘in.'” That’s a song worth singing.