What are you looking for?

Twelve years ago at a Wesleyan college in Indiana, I played my first show as Andrew Peterson’s full-time right-hand man. Tonight in Greeley, Colorado, I played my last. At least for now. In January of 2002 I was 22 years old and newly married. I had come to Nashville two years prior to pursue my goal of playing sessions. I also hoped to be a sideman to a great songwriter. I just didn’t know who that might be. Rich Mullins had died in 1997, my freshman year of college. I figured eventually somebody had to pick up that torch and run with it. I wanted to run alongside. I met Andrew through my friend Mark, who was AP’s college roommate. Mark told me I was meeting the next Rich Mullins. The magic words! I wrote a string arrangement of Andrew’s song “Faith To Be Strong” for a class project and sent the recording to AP. It worked. He hired me to write strings for Behold The Lamb Of God, which was then in its second year of touring. After the show, AP asked me to come on the road in the spring. Little did I know . . . Now it’s March 2nd, 2014. Beth and I have been married almost thirteen years. We have four kids. Our oldest is 10 and our youngest is 5. The goal of being a session player never quite came to full fruition for the best reason possible: production got in the way. I spend nearly every day in the studio helping one artist or another shape her best songs into a cohesive, inspiring, truthful recording that will help her say what she needs to say and take the next step on the path marked out for her. I always said I’d travel with Andrew until he made me stop. But anyone who’s been around record-making can tell you that production is a more-than-full-time job. Sometimes I work average hours, but when the river’s in flood you can find me in the studio 15 hours a day for days on end. In those seasons I am keenly aware that I am just one man. It took me a while to admit—because I didn’t want it to be true—that I can’t be the husband, dad, and producer I’m called to be AND be the drop-everything, fully-present sideman I want AP to have. Here’s a sidebar about sidemen. The artist’s ministry is to the audience; the sideman’s ministry is to the artist. The artist carries a heavy burden, and when that gets too heavy the sideman carries the artist. It’s Sam Gamgee work. Sometimes I was good at it. Most of the time I flat-out sucked. Sidemen have our own signature blend of psychoses. The sideman feels like he’s always about ten feet away from someone really interesting. I think there’s a movie with a similar title now, and that only corroborates my story. The sideman finishes second every night. As AP has said, if he does his job right, he becomes invisible. People have come up to me five minutes after I played my heart out and said, “Weren’t you the drummer?” Yes. Yes I was. Boo hoo, Ben! Woe is you! That’s not my point. My point is that everything I’ve just said about sideman work turns out to be what’s lovely and sanctifying about it. So John the Baptist has this great ministry going. He’s baptizing in the desert and people are coming out in droves. Then Jesus comes along and takes the limelight. What does John say? “He must increase, I must decrease.” And there was never one greater than John the Baptist! Then Jesus starts his ministry and what does he say? “I do nothing on my own but only what I see my father doing.” I love the way the Message translates Colossians 3:3. “Be content with obscurity, like Christ.” Obscurity is appropriate attire for human beings. It looks really good on us. The sad fact is, I have a fame idol. Not a front-page fame idol. More like an “everybody whose opinion matters knows who Ben is and thinks he’s the best at everything” fame idol. And now that I’ve made my most humbling admission, you have to send me yours. What could kill a fame idol deader than a nightly spoonful of second-place? I used to think it tasted bitter. Now I like to keep it in a hip flask and sip it. Production, for example, tastes so much better spiked with obscurity. My best days in the studio are preceded by the following prayer: “Lord, I am going to the studio today not to be served but to serve and to give my life.” So I recommend sideman work, with all its glorious difficulties. Especially if you can find an Andrew Peterson. Andrew knows his calling and because of this he has incredible spine. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him make a move that wasn’t in keeping with his calling. And it’s a worthy one. It’s all about mining the depths of his own wounded-ness and coming up with the kind of rare jewels in which the poor in spirit see their own reflection. His songs are like Harry Potter’s thestrals; you can only see the winged horses if you’ve experienced death. The people who appreciate Andrew’s music the most are the ones who’ve known real sorrow. AP himself has been Job-tested as of late, kind of punched in the gut over and over by the accuser. I’m proud of him for hanging in there, staying in community, seeking out counsel and encouragement. Go and do likewise. As for our relationship, Andrew and I have spent enough time together to know every last one of each other’s stories and most of each other’s flaws. And yet I’ve never questioned whether our friendship mattered to him. Andrew takes community very seriously. He meets conflict head-on because he sees the kingdom coming and he wants to enter it alongside his brothers. He’s prone to point out the elephant in the room with disarming bluntness. Some of the words I most needed to hear, whether I welcomed them or not, were spoken by AP. Finally, it goes without saying that Andrew possesses a hard-to-match creative intelligence. It manifests itself in story, wit, and insight. He wrote Light For The Lost Boy (the whole record) in about two weeks. He’s always adding irons to the fire, new projects that will keep him fresh and engaged. Or wear him out! When you engage in a critical discussion with Andrew, you know you’ve met your match. To say working with Andrew has sharpened me as a writer doesn’t do the last 12 years justice. I learned the writing life from Andrew. Tonight we closed the show with “Don’t You Want To Thank Someone.” It’s my favorite AP song. Yes, I do want to thank someone. Thank you, Lord, for giving me the gift of these years. As I walked off stage tonight I glanced back at my keyboard world. I thought, “Goodbye, little domain; it’s time for me to go.” Thank you, Lord for the time I spent on that piano bench, ten feet from someone really interesting. Thank you for the whole trip. From the car to the shuttle to the ticket counter, through security, to Starbucks, to the gate, to the jetway, to the plane, to the jetway, to baggage, to the rental car, to Chipotle, to the used book store, to the venue, to soundcheck, to dinner, to the green room, to the stage, to the green room, to the rental car, to the hotel, and eventually to bed. Goodnight AP. I’ll see you one of these mornings and we’ll do it again.

Here’s a story I once heard about a colorful character somewhere in the great state of Missouri. It was told to me for the truth. The fellow who told me the story had been a lawyer near Kansas City. He was coming out of the courthouse one bright afternoon, he said, when he saw a family across the way: a four- or five-year-old daughter, a mother, and a father whose hair was styled in a feechie-ish manner—short in the front but cascading in the back down below the scoop of his white tank top. Also, he had a parrot on his shoulder. The father nudged the little girl and pointed up at the upper floor of the courthouse. “Baby,” he said, “wave hello to Granddaddy.” The little girl waved enthusiastically, and the onlooking lawyer looked up to see a wizened old hand reaching through the bars of the upstairs cell window to wave back. “A touching scene of filial devotion,” I think was how the lawyer described it. The errand of mercy complete, the little girl looked up at her father and sweetly asked, “Diddy, can you take me to McDonald’s to get some french fries?” “I sure can, darling,” the father answered. Then he pointed at the parrot on his shoulder. “Just let me swing by and take Freebird home first.” Before I heard that story, it had never occurred to me to want a parrot. Now I want one just so I can name him Freebird. Bonus parrot-related anecdote: A friend of mine has a parrot named Mr. Quito. (To my friend’s chagrin, Mr. Quito turned out to be a she-parrot—a fact that came to light when Mr. Quito was several years old.) When my friend moved to a new house, he locked Mr. Quito in the closet below the stairs so that s/he would be out of the movers’ way and wouldn’t be stressed out at the sight of the house being in such disarray (who knew parrots were so particular?). But Mr. Quito was a little stressed out in spite of it all. He spent much of the day repeating, “Let me out of here! Rrrawk! Let me out of here!” It was discomfiting to the movers, who gave each other concerned looks every time they walked past the stairs. Finally, unable to stand the cruelty of it any longer, one of the movers leaned down and called through the keyhole, “It’s all right, Grandma—we’ll be out of here in a little while. I’m sure he’ll let you out then.”

[I wrote this to encourage every single person on earth to purchase Beyond the Frame, the new album by Andy Gullahorn. Get it here. There’s also a great review of the album by Jonathan Rogers here. –AP] “Write it like you would say it.” I can’t tell you how many times over the years that maxim has snapped me out of whatever florid garbage I was writing. It’s a good idea to emulate your heroes, to ask yourself when you get to the bridge, “What would Paul Simon do?” Or when you happen upon a guitar part which, miracle of miracles, sounds unique enough to try and build a song on upon, to ask, “How does James Taylor get into a part like this?” Steal boldly, I say. But most often, when I’m scribbling in a notebook the nonsense that I hope will become a not-unbearable song, when it’s late and I’m sleepy and I’m stuck, stuck, stuck, I remember these words: “Write it like you would say it.”  It usually opens the door to the lyric I was looking for. It keeps me from putting on airs, which we’re all prone to do. People can spot a fake a mile away. It’s the difference between reading a speech from a podium and looking someone in the eye and telling them “I love you.” It communicates to the listener that you’re not pulling any punches but you’re not blocking any either. “Trust me,” it says. “This might hurt, but if we make it out alive we’ll be better for it.” If I had to name one bit of advice that has brought me back to center more than any other, it would be that. “Write it like you would say it.” Who gave me that advice? Andy Gullahorn. And on each of his albums he provides example after example of honest, excellent songwriting which always invites me in to a face-to-face conversation that leads to something genuine and healing. Sometimes it’s humor. I’ve seen a lot of concerts over the years but I’ve never, ever seen anyone else make the room laugh merely at the word “Hello.” Ben and I always look at one another in wonder when, yet again, the crowd chuckles at Andy’s greeting, whether we’re in Sweden or Connecticut or Texas. The Gullahorn Hello, apparently, is a universal language. And few things delight me like sitting on the side stage and watching the crowd react to a song like “I Haven’t Either.” They have no idea what’s coming, I think. And then I realize that, though I’ve heard the song hundreds of times, it’s still doing its work on me too. Tears spring to my eyes, conviction comes quick on the heels of my laughter. It’s one of the best working examples I know of C. S. Lewis’s principle of sneaking past “watchful dragons.” Lewis wrote in an essay called “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” “I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.” Enter Andy Gullahorn, stripping away the audience’s self-righteousness or shame or their expectation that they were going to have to listen to a bunch of uptight, guilt-ridden Christians blubbering about Jesus. Instead they get a song about skinny jeans. Or about country music or shopping malls. “I could hang out with this guy,” they think. (And they actually can, if they’re in a certain Nashville bowling alley on Wednesdays.) And then, gently, lovingly, Gully slips past their watchful dragons and surprises them with a moment of grace. Not judgment, not high-falutin’ Bible talk. Just an honest conversation. That grace may bring conviction for the self-righteous, or it may be a gentle assurance to the lowly sinner that, despite their worst fears there is a great and graceful Person in the world who loves them as they are and not as they should be. I find myself on both sides of the coin from one minute to the next. Amazingly, both can happen at the same time, to the same person, when they’re listening to an Andy Gullahorn song. Gully’s humor is often the first thing people mention, but the conversation never stays there. It quickly moves to awe at his ability to do what some call a ninja move. Let the record show that he is no comedy act, however often people tumble into the aisles in guffaws—even if he is, truly, one of the funniest people I know. His best songs are the ones that cut to the heart, and what I see in those songs is that—you guessed it—he writes it like he would say it. That, my friends, is the real ninja move. We all live with our defenses up. Ron Block has written much about the “false self,” something we’re all familiar with. We’re afraid to be known. I’m terrified of it. We’re all hiding the Mr. Hyde lurking inside our Dr. Jekyll. But Andy asks us to be brave enough to open the cage. Maybe, he suggests, the best way to kill the monster is to expose it to sunlight. And he leads by example, writing about his own inconsistency, his own pain, his own silliness—each song daring the listener to open that dungeon door a little wider, asking us if we’re really happy with the way things are. We know we aren’t, but we’re too scared to take another step. Andy’s songs are a hand in the dark. He tells us in the opening song of Beyond the Frame, “If you need a friend to do some dying with you, I will.” It’s easy to imagine Jesus saying the same to us, isn’t it? Jesus doesn’t just tell us in the New Testament that the Christian life is a hard one, that death is a prerequisite to finding the life he offers—he also showed us. He blazed the trail, laying down his life for the glory of the Father. The Master tells us as we timidly open our hearts to the pain of love, “I’ve done this before, and I know it hurts, child. But this is the only way. I’m right here with you. Don’t be afraid.” I’ve been a fan of Andy Gullahorn since Old Hat, his first indie record about 15 years ago. I’ve seen him grow at great cost, and I’ve seen him pour that hard-earned wisdom into his songs. I’ve also seen, first-hand, the effect of his songs on people in the audience, and it not only causes me to praise God for Andy Gullahorn, it reawakens my wonder at the power of songs as an art form. Three or four minutes, a few chords, a few words—and then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, a heart is changed. At the very least, in a world where we walk around numb as lepers so much of the time, a song can make you actually feel something, a tingle in a place you thought long dead. That’s what this album did for me. Beyond the Frame, from the first track to the last, is Andy’s most evocative work yet. Not only are the songs arguably the best and most passionate he’s ever written, the production bar has been raised. There are colors in the palette that we haven’t heard on a Gullahorn record, but it’s so tastefully and naturally done that I can’t put my finger on exactly what has changed (other than the welcome addition of piano). The last third of the album leads us into that dungeon I was telling you about. Into the darkness of the tomb. But then with the final song comes Easter morning. Birdsong. And with it the strong, gentle and wise reminder that all that time I was afraid of the dark, so afraid that I wore myself out building walls, laboring long to keep every single shaft of light from illuminating the truth, there was nothing to fear. Something good was, and is, coming, and it’s worth the cost. So next time I sit down to write a song I’ll ask myself, as I have for years, what my songwriting heroes would do. Right at the top of that list is a guy named Andy Gullahorn, reminding me to have the guts to write it like I would say it. It’s a principle that’s simple and yet packed with meaning, just like his songs. It’s not just advice for songwriting, though; it’s a good way to live. Dash all pretense; be who you are; kick down the walls; love the listener. It’s scary, sure. But good songwriting is a call to courage, on both sides of the exchange. Andy Gullahorn is one of the bravest people I know.

The world has a lot of definitions for love. Deep affection, fondness, tenderness, warmth, intimacy, attachment, endearment; devotion, adoration, doting, idolization, worship; passion, ardor, desire, lust, yearning, infatuation. Compassion, caring, concern, friendliness, friendship, kindness, charity, goodwill, sympathy, kindliness, altruism, unselfishness, philanthropy, benevolence. When I see the Jesus of the Gospels, I see the best of these definitions displayed, his deep affection for John, the tenderness toward Peter after his denial. I see his compassion and goodwill poured into the woman in John 8, and that little man Zacchaeus. I also see his anger toward the Pharisees, a love for sinners turned upon the self-righteous weapons of comparison and self-vaunting used to destroy lives. But central, always central, is his adoration for and wholehearted committal to his Father, a passion that spilled out in a flood to redeem a world of men and women cut off from God.There is a reliant trust flowing from the Jesus of the Gospels, which except for the wilderness and Gethsemane seems to flow spontaneously, easily, richly. There is an awareness of total weakness and ability: “I can do nothing of myself,” and an admission of total strength: “The Father in me does the works.” The paradox of humility and boldness within the same Man. The word “agape” has been often spoken of as “God’s love.” But in John 3:19 Jesus said, “…this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved (agapao) darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.” To hate light is to love darkness. To love light is to hate darkness. Within the believer’s inner core is a new motive power; he is a partaker of the divine nature; it is the opposite of the Eph 2:2 spirit, “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience” (apeithia, literally, the obstinately unconvinced). The Love which laid down his life for his enemies is now a pulsating light within the believer which has the ability to conquer darkness. This Power within us is for others, even at the expense of himself. Does that mean we never feel the desire to self-protect, or to strike back at those who hurt us, that we are never tempted? Of course not. Like Jesus, we are human, with all the capacities of feeling he possessed and displayed. We are temptable; it is a built-in characteristic of our humanity. Temptation is the very thing which gives rise to choice: So-and-so hurt me. I want to strike back. Do I? Well, who am I? I am a partaker of the divine nature. As such, I am energized and empowered at my core to forgive, to be for others, no matter what the cost. To plug into that Power  by faith brings life and peace through us to others. To fail to do so is to deal death to others. The agape which produces love for God and others, then, is a whole-hearted commitment to faithing in the Lord within us, trusting that his grace, his love, his power to love God and others inside us is sufficient for the job. It is trusting an inner Power for the needs of the moment. Does loving light and hating darkness mean we can never sin? No. What it does mean is that we can’t live there. Something eats at us, a sense that we are not being everything we are meant to be, a sense of failure, a sense of wrong that we cannot shake. 1John says if we are abiding in Christ we are not sinning, and if we are sinning we are not abiding. To abide, trust, rely, is to turn on Love’s switch and let the power flow that lights up the world. What is this love of light, then? What is agape? If it can be distilled down to one sentence, it would seem to me love is a wholehearted committal of oneself to something or someone, no matter what the cost. It is the love of a good mother and father for a child. It is the best of the love of lovers when divested of self-love. It is the love of Hudson Taylor for the people of China. It is agape, whole-hearted commitment-love which gives itself for the best of the beloved thing or person. It is not intellectual, or springing merely from feeling. But it engages the intellect, and awakens the other loves within the soul. To be continued.

[Editor’s note: You may have missed Hutchmoot this year, but Jennifer Trafton’s session was so good that we talked her into turning it into an post so we could share it with the rest of the world. Thanks, Jennifer.] I grew up in a book-loving family. Bookshelves oozed over the walls of our home, spreading farther and farther into the unused spaces as the years went by. We went to the library on Saturdays and brought home towers of books. One of the books my mother read aloud to me when I was ten was The Neverending Story, but this was one of those rare occasions when the movie version actually left a deeper imprint on my imagination. It was one of the defining films of my childhood—with its wonderful hint that those stories I was reading in books had an immense and fragile and beautiful reality behind them, and that I was always on the verge of falling into that other world, or seeing it fall into mine. My father read The Chronicles of Narnia to me (many times), and it filled me with a sense of the grand Story-ness of life—a feeling reinforced years later when I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time as a college freshman. I spent hours curled up on my bed with a profound longing in my heart, as if the veil had been pulled back for an instant on the Epic that I knew the world really possessed, if only I could live always in this glorious awareness of it. “The supreme adventure is being born,” said G. K. Chesterton. “Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story.” I think there is a sense in which the story of my own life and of my vocation as a writer is the story of one who is desperately trying to grow up without ever becoming a grown-up. One of my favorite writers when I was a child was Madeleine L’Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time. In her essay “The Key, the Door, the Road,” she talks about the difference between childish and childlike: A childish book, like a childish person, is limited, unspontaneous, closed in . . . But the childlike book, like the childlike person, breaks out of all boundaries. And joy is the key. Several years ago we took our children to Monticello, and I remember the feeling we all had of the fun Jefferson must have had with his experiments, his preposterous perpetual clock, for instance: what sheer, childlike delight it must have given him. Perhaps Lewis Carroll was really happy only when he was with children, especially when he was writing for them. Joy sparks the pages of Alice [in Wonderland], and how much more profound it is than most of his ponderous works for grownups. . . . But in the battering around of growing up the child gets hurt, and he puts on a shell of protection; he is frightened, and he slams doors. Real maturity lies in having the courage to open doors again, or, when they are pointed out, to go through them. This courage to keep reopening those doors, to break out of the adult shell of protection, to let joy loose in all its childlike messiness, is a daily struggle for me. But that is precisely why I will keep reading children’s books until the day I die, and why I know that I must keep writing them even if no one ever reads them. L’Engle said elsewhere, “My work is real work, and real work is play, not drudgery.” I have thought about this concept a great deal, because I am often asked why I am writing books for children. Sometimes it is with the implication that I have an ulterior motive—such as presenting a “message” or getting my foot in the publishing door by writing an “easier” kind of book (ha!). Sometimes people have sincerely thanked me as if I’m committing some noble act of benevolence. But the fact is, my motives aren’t nearly so heroic. I write children’s stories because when my imagination sits down to play, that is what comes out. It’s simply one of the best ways I’ve found to be myself. As a child I spent hours surrounded by my dolls and toys, scrunched between a bed and a wall, or under a desk, or in the bathroom. Barbie got kidnapped by a witch, and the Purple Pie Man commanded a pirate ship. Towels draped over chairs and boxes became a house or a hideout. I loved that magical space of time between turning off the light and going to sleep, when the whole earth was a blanket of silence around my shoulders, and I could drift into the next chapter of a secret story. These years of childhood are the last years of true imaginative freedom (because that’s what play is), the years when pure comedy is possible, without the bite of satire or the burn of cynicism. So it is primarily on paper now, in the act of creativity, that the child in me comes out to play again. When I am writing a story, I am back in my old bedroom, sending the creatures of my imagination off on wild adventures, stretching the universe into goofy new shapes with complete freedom, away from adult eyes and the chattering criticism of the world. If I kept thinking, “I am doing something that could shape the character and virtue of a child, redeem the brokenness of their world, teach them important lessons about life, etc.” the playing would stop, the grown-up mind would reassert itself, and the art would end. All of those other things are happy byproducts if they happen, but that is not my business. My job is to play with the pieces of the world I’ve been given, find the delight inherent in them, make something delightful out of them. Even if the only one delighted is me. I have read many theological discussions and defenses of the arts, and I am always torn in my response to them. For one thing, it saddens me when we feel the need to justify art by making it serve some other non-artistic purpose like teaching morality. But also, many of these defenses of art (think of Christian justifications for fantasy) seem to be afflicted with excessive seriousness, even self-importance. Do I believe that art can be a catalyst for social change, a commentator on the human condition, a conveyer of truth, a powerful agent of transformation in people’s lives? Yes! But to have to go about our business as artists while wearing that heavy mantle of responsibility seems crippling to me. And here is where I think the world of children’s literature has much insight to offer to these discussions about faith and the arts, because, perhaps more than any other genre, it reminds us of the redemptive power of a pure and holy silliness. Take Edward Lear’s poem “The Jumblies”, which I read regularly to jump-start the creative juices in my head. There is a kind of reckless, joyful dancing with words there that reminds me of another favorite poem by Lewis Carroll: `Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” I love poems and stories like this that stretch the boundaries of what could be, almost as if they were thumbing their noses at a world that insists, This is how life is, and saying instead, Not necessarily. Imagine if it were different. Imagine lovely monkeys with lollipop paws and bandersnatches and places with names like the Chankly Bore. Imagine little people with green heads and blue hands embarking on epic adventures in unpredictably leaky sailing vessels. How can we possibly grasp the mystery of God and heavenly realities unless we have first allowed stories to take the lid off of what we think of as reality so that the stuff of creation can bubble over in shapes beyond our expectations? My favorite stories—and the stories I hope to write—provoke the question, “What if there is more to the world than what I see on the surface?” They make me more open to a world where the marvelous and the miraculous are possible. And they do it in a way that is delightful. That is what I mean by a holy silliness. Yes, there is a profound need for art that plumbs the depths of human depravity and suffering and shows that redemption is possible within that darkness. But there is also a profound need for art that creates spaces of innocence—innocent play, innocent joy, innocent beauty—in a world where innocence is violently stripped away from even the youngest children, and where adults have spent so long choking in the smog of corruption that they have forgotten what it is like to breathe pure fresh air. I will defend and defend the belief that the deepest reality of human life that we must impress upon children is not that life is hard and death is inevitable and they need to get used to sadness and darkness and make the best of it. The deepest reality is joy. The prize hidden under the scratch-and-win card of life is a beauty so big that no happy ending in a story can even come close to approximating it. War is a horrific stain on the floor of an extravagant ballroom. Tears are temporary; laughter is eternal. I am so grateful for art that takes us to the emotional place of the Cross—that place where we are forced to face the agony of evil in this world and walk through the door of pain to the other side. The courage and honesty of such artists is breathtaking to me. I long for more art that offers me Resurrection . . . Eden regained. The beauty of children’s literature is that it allows space for both—innocence and redemption, pain and silliness, honesty and happy endings. I think of the blending of joy and grief in E. B. White’s classic Charlotte’s Web, Katherine Paterson’s The Bridge to Terabithia, and Kate DiCamillo’s novels. Beside these I hold up the playfulness of Mr. Popper’s Penguins, James and the Giant Peach, Winnie-the-Pooh, and The Wizard of Oz. There is something about such books that cleanses me, like a baptism. Jesus did say, after all, that we must become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. This attitude of playing—does that mean writing is easy? No! It is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I am not a garrulous talker or a prolific writer; words trickle out slowly. Laughter fights every day against fear. There are many, many times when I feel anything but playful. The work still has to happen. But I work in the trust that the delight is merely temporarily submerged. The times of playing make the other times of painful slogging worth struggling through and overcoming: The joy is the fuel for the hard effort. Every day when I sat down to write The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, the writing felt like trying to strain Mount Everest through a sieve. I was paralyzed by the fear of what other people would think, how the world would receive my little story that had been so private and dear to me for so long. That was the grown-up in me forgetting that I was supposed to be playing. And one of the things that encouraged and challenged me during that time was the story of King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant—unselfconscious, unashamed, childlike, his whole being thrust into the simple joyful act of the dance, caring only about the eyes of God upon him. I have a friend who is a ballet teacher, and she tells me about the great difference she sees between the children she teaches and the adults. Children dance as if they had burst out of the womb with the uncontrollable urge to wiggle in front of the universe; they dance with complete freedom. But as we grow up, the need to Not Look Silly in Front of Other People stiffens our limbs and shrinks our ability to express ourselves freely with our bodies. We move through the world in limited, socially acceptable patterns. We stop dancing. Creating something, like praying, is one of the most vulnerable, self-revealing things we do in this world. And if we are embarrassed to be caught in the act in front of other people, or if we cover our raw hearts in crowd-pleasing dress, we will kill the soul of our creation. Instead, we should let our art dance with reckless abandon, and if only God sees and loves it, we have no need for another audience; all other appreciating eyes are unexpected gifts. The moments when we achieve that state of complete unselfconsciousness—those are the moments when we are children again, innocent, naked and unashamed in the Garden of Eden. Pablo Picasso said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” I heard a story about a college art teacher whose seven-year-old daughter asked him what he did at work. He told her that his job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at him, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?” In J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories,” he talks about Recovery as one of the things that reading fairy tales offers us: “We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. In that sense only a taste for them may make us, or keep us, childish. Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. . . . We need . . . to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.” This recovery reminds me of G. K. Chesterton again: “At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.” This is why adults should read children’s books. Go back and reread the books you loved when you were a child. Dig for that submerged sunrise of wonder. Remember. Not to dwell in sentimental nostalgia, but to exercise a muscle that tends to go flabby with age. And then: Go out and be creative the way you were when you were a little girl or a little boy. Play. Make a beautiful mess. When I write, when I play on paper, I’m practicing. I’m practicing for the day when the world will be turned right side up again. The day when God will set aside my paper dreams and teach me how to make a star. The day when human life is revised and polished and the true story finally emerges—a story of freedom, fresh air, laughter, and children playing. [The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic by Jennifer Trafton is available in the Rabbit Room store.]

This post should really be called, “How We Make a Record”, or even “How We’re Making This Record”.  There are a thousand ways to skin a cat, or to write a song, or to make a chocolate chip cookie–this just happens to be our recipe. That said, in some ways I’m still as mystified by it as I ever was. I remember lying on my bed in high school with two cabinet speakers on either side of my head, listening to Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason, getting delightfully lost in the music and wondering how on earth this band of Brits transferred their music to two-inch tape, then to cassette, then to the record store, then to Lake Butler, Florida, to my speakers, to my ears, and finally to my adolescent noggin. (That album is still one of my favorites, by the way, and features a mind-blowing cover photograph. Yes, those are real beds, on a real beach, pre-Photoshop.) So with just a few chords under my fingers and a whole lot of ambition, not to mention the absence of enough guys in my little town to really start a band, I decided to try and figure out how to make music. I saved up four hundred bucks that I earned mowing yards and stocking shelves at the local IGA and bought a Tascam four-track recorder, a machine I was certain would revolutionize my life—not just musically but relationally, since now I would be able to prove to the girls in school that I was worth something. “You see,” I imagined myself explaining to them, “I can record four separate tracks onto just one cassette, which allows me to play the bass, the guitar, the drums, and sing, then mix it all together for your listening pleasure, ladies,” at which point their eyes would flutter and they would faint to the floor in a pile of crimped hair and leg warmers. But that was just the recording gear. I also needed a studio. Enter my pal Wade Howell, also known as the Conundrum. He was a football player who was also a part-time atheist, a sax player, guitar player, and Dungeon & Dragons player. Needless to say, we were fast friends. (For the record, Wade ended up going to seminary and is now a professor and a fine family man.) Wade’s grandfather died and left him a single-wide trailer in the woods, where we set up an old drum kit and a few mics I scavenged from the church sound cabinet. After school, while Wade was at football practice, I often sped down the sandy road to the trailer in my Dodge Omni, plugged in his electric guitar, and pretended I was David Gilmour or Tom Petty. Once, because my girlfriend liked Garth Brooks, I used my trusty Tascam to record the drums, piano, bass, and vocals for the song “The Dance”. Oh, what wouldn’t give to know where that cassette is now. But after the first few months with the Tascam, the magic was gone. I didn’t want to just record Skynyrd songs. I wanted to make my own. But I had no idea what to sing about, and the few songs I managed to write were even worse than I thought they were at the time. I played them bashfully for my buddies, enjoying the feeling of having made something even though I was inwardly discontent. It strikes me now that I was in possession of an inner-critic even then, which agitated me. I wanted to be content with my lame songs, but I couldn’t be. Whatever pride I felt was in having made something—anything at all—not necessarily in the quality of what had been made. So I shared my songs with the few friends who cared to hear them, and felt good when they liked them, but was discontent without knowing why. Not long after graduation, I joined a rock band and sold the Tascam, figuring that I’d leave recording to the experts and focus on rocking instead. Fast-forward two years. The rocking was safely behind me. I was now in college, married, and taking serious steps with our band Planet X to record a demo. At the time, I had no idea there was such a thing as indie music. As far as we knew, the game plan was to record a demo and shop it around in Nashville. (We were but babes in the woods.) So Lou, the only guy in the band with any money, bought some gear and we set out to record our stuff after-hours in the college practice rooms. It turned out fine enough, but it was a far cry from what it needed to be. Eventually the band broke up, I started doing my own concerts, and I realized I had enough of my own songs to record a short album. I borrowed $3,000 from my grandma, took a Greyhound to Nashville—just like they do in the movies—was picked up at the bus station by my old roommate Mark Claassen (who’s still my neighbor, by the way), and we spent the weekend recording my independent record Walk. It was terrifying, exhilarating, and exhausting. We were in a real studio. We hardly slept. We recorded, mixed, and mastered eight songs in 2.5 days. There were no drugs involved. I took the Greyhound home (a grueling 26 hour trip, what with all the bus stops and all), a 22-year-old kid with a shiny, $3,000 CD in his guitar case and not a dime to his name. Jamie, of course, was all-in, as she’s always been. That little eight-song CD was what I sold at concerts for the next three years, and I’ll be forever glad for the way it paid the rent. But the farther I got from it the more I loathed it. I became painfully embarrassed at my voice, my pitch, and my songs, because I had come to know better. I had toured with the Caedmon’s Call guys for fifty shows, which exposed me to some great music and a much better understanding of what it meant to be a songwriter; I was no longer doing the Florida church camp circuit, but was trying to make a go of a real career, and that meant I could no longer be content with my mediocre best. I had to work at it, learn to be objective, and—this is the big one—to ask for help, help, help. Which brings me to three weeks ago in East Nashville when I walked into Cason Cooley’s studio, a warm room strung with lights and fragrant with incense, jammed full of guitars and pianos and books, and sat down with the Captains Courageous to start a new project. I looked around, thinking about all the other times I had done this very thing, marveling at how little I still knew about it. What do we do first? Do we sit around and play the songs for a day? Do we record scratch guitars? Do we pore over lyrics first? In some ways, it’s like looking at a hoarder’s house and wondering where to begin the cleanup. It’s also like looking out at a fallow field, steeling your resolve to tame it, furrow it, and plant–but you know it’s littered with stones and it’s going to be harder than you think. I often think of Indiana Jones and his leap of faith in the third movie. I’m 37 years old. This isn’t my first rodeo. I shouldn’t feel that old fear, anxiety, or self-doubt, should I? Then again, maybe I should. As soon as you think you know what you’re doing, you’re in big trouble. So before we opened a single guitar case, we talked. I sat with Ben Shive, Andy Gullahorn, and Cason and told them I felt awfully unprepared. I doubted the songs. I was nervous about the musical direction the record seemed to want to take. I wondered if I was up to the task. I told them about the theme that had arisen in many of the songs: loss of innocence, the grief of growing up, the ache for the coming Kingdom, the sehnsucht I experience when I see my children on the cusp of the thousand joys and the thousand heartaches of young-adulthood. Then we prayed. We asked for help. Ever since I read Lanier Ivester’s beautiful post about Bach (if you haven’t read it, you must), I’ve written the words “Jesu juva” in my journal when I’m writing a lyric. It’s latin for “Jesus, help!”, and there’s no better prayer for the beginning of an adventure. Jesus, you’re the source of beauty: help us make something beautiful; Jesus, you’re the Word that was with God in the beginning, the Word that made all creation: give us words and be with us in this beginning of this creation; Jesus, you’re the light of the world: light our way into this mystery; Jesus, you love perfectly and with perfect humility: let this imperfect music bear your perfect love to every ear that hears it. We said, “Amen.” Then I took a deep breath, opened the guitar case, and leapt.

You know what a simile is? It’s like a metaphor. Well, Hutchmoot is like a Justin Gerard illustration. You look at the whole thing and you are amazed. But look closer at its many parts and there are little wonders in every corner. So, I take Hutchmoot as a whole and am astonished. It was one of the most wonder-full events of my life, once again. It’s difficult to sit here, even more than a week later, and try to come up with words to convey what it was like, without really reducing the experience. But, I’ll try. The two words that seem to best describe Hutchmoot as a whole for me are Belonging and Longing. Belonging Others have written more (and more beautifully) about this experience, but it is truly amazing. It’s as if you have finally walked into the Cheers bar and the song is true, everybody knows your name and everyone’s glad you’re there. Sure, they may know your name only because you were a good fellow and wore your name badge, but still, it’s special. It’s fun to connect with so many people, many of whom you know and also know you because of either last year’s Hutchmoot, or The Rabbit Room. It is so special to see a face, hear a name, then experience a kind of awakening as you realize that this person is that person who has so encouraged you through comments at The Rabbit Room. The smiling face in front of you is the person who wrote those words which made your heart soar for the life-giving encouragement they gave you. And they are just as you imagined them, flawed and fantastic. More, you have something to offer and much more to receive. You belong here not just for what you have in common, but for what others have that you need to hear. And, almost beyond belief, there are those who need to hear what you have to say as well. It’s as if God has saved up presents from many lean Christmases and given them all at once. A feeling of deep, uncomplicated gratitude rests on me at Hutchmoot. I belong. It’s plainer than most places I’ve ever been. It almost feels like you are that puzzle piece and you are sliding into the place for which you were so carefully designed. Not for all of life, but for now. The fit is snug. And the picture, as a whole, is something beautiful and unexpected. It’s a dawn scene, and there’s green everywhere. Longing I was raised in West Virginia (by very West Virginian parents) until I was twelve years old. I am thoroughly Appalachian and especially Mountaineerish. At twelve, my family moved to Africa. In fact, I turned thirteen in South Africa the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison. For a while I felt almost as if I had been amputated, so great was my longing for home. Later, I was given eyes to see the gift I had been given. Gratitude for what I had been given and deep appreciation for the place I now considered a second home overcame what had been despair. But I never got over my home. I never became less than a West Virginian. Only more. I was adopted as a Zulu, immersed in English and Afrikaans culture. I added cricket and rugby to football and basketball. I never stopped loving and longing for the West Virginia hills. Sometimes, on rare occasions, we would meet someone from America, even West Virginia. Those moments were transporting. In my heart I was home again, among my own people. Then the moment would end, our well-met fellow Mountaineer would be on his way and a longing for home would stir inside me like a living thing. When will I be home? Hutchmoot is like that. Except the longing isn’t for a state, or a town. The longing I feel at Hutchmoot is for a Kingdom. Hutchmoot feels like an extended trailer for the Kingdom of God. It stirs up in me a longing for united community, for careful and passionate love of beauty, truth, and goodness. Mostly I am stirred up with longing for that Gardener King and his new creation, for that City coming down. The marriage of heaven and earth. I have been to many events which felt like a fight –even a good, noble fight. But this feels like what good fights are for. This feels like the song and what the song is about. I loved being at Hutchmoot. In so many, many ways. It was and remains a cherished gift of grace from God. What I received there is more than I can say, or say well. The particulars of my own experience will have to be talked of elsewhere, or kept as a secret. I won’t elaborate on seeing a handmade name tag, a folded up paper in a back pocket, receiving forceful, life-giving affirmations, waking up with God-given jokes, and good dreams of friendship in old age. But all these little parts, and the whole blessed event, have worked in me a deep miracle. Maybe it’s just the miracle of thankfulness. That I could so deeply feel such genuine gratitude, is itself a gift. I’m convinced Andrew Peterson has been called by God to the work of gathering this community. I won’t say that I don’t understand how I fit in, or why I am asked to serve this incredible group. I can’t anymore, because Andrew will yell at me and has threatened worse. But I do say that I feel it keenly as an astonishing work of grace in my life. I earned nothing, but was called, invited, and welcomed. I could say more about that, but I won’t. I’ll just say that I thank God for my friend, Andrew. And I thank God for the community which has grown up like a secret garden and nourished so many of us so well. In the introduction to Mere Christianity, Lewis talks about the little rooms which make up the different denominations and traditions of different groups of Christians. These little rooms, he says, are connected to the great hall where all of Christendom resides. He aims to write for the great hall, the large, common room. Hutchmoot feels like a sample of that great hall. It’s fitting that this blessed event ended with a room-full of Christians from many different little rooms singing the Doxology. I will never forget that song and that singing. Thank you, Giver. Your Kingdom Come. Praise him all creatures here below. Amen.

[Editor’s Note: Laura Boggs has been a friend since I first met her at Hutchmoot, and she’s been a good friend and writing partner of Lanier Ivester for far longer than that. She’s a fine writer and you should bounce over to her blog and have a look around right after you read this fine Christmas meditation. -Pete Peterson] We do it every year. It’s always there, the unspoken expectation that this Christmas will be bigger and shinier and sweeter than the one before. By the end of Christmas Day, when the shreds of paper and ribbon are picked up off the floor and we can’t possibly eat another morsel, if the topics of politics and religion have been successfully dodged and no one got sick and everyone is feeling fat and happy, we might look at each other in triumph and breathe. We did it. We had the best Christmas ever. Again. But every Christmas has its cares. Sometimes the pain is acute and we feel cheated. Other years we find we can’t conjure up feelings of good will toward men, not when we’re in line at Wal-mart, at least. There’s always somebody or something missing, even if we can’t put our finger on it. What do you think about when the church lights are dimmed and you’re holding the little candle you’ve been issued and you’re trying not to get wax on your Christmas Eve finest as you sing ‘Silent Night’? Why the lump in the throat? After my grandfather died one December, I shared a hymnal with my Nana during service and heard her voice crack with fresh grief. A few years later, when she was gone too, my sad ‘Silent Night’ was for her. Or was it? Maybe it was relief, in some strange way, to have a reason to be melancholy. I’m not talking about being moved by the symbol of the Light in the darkness. I’m talking poor me, a sense that all is not right with the world at a moment when it should at least seem to be. During my self-absorbed teenage years, the awkward and lonely years that follow childhood wonder, the littlest nothing could put a dent in a perfectly decent Christmas. Those were the days of a boy not calling for a promised New Year’s date so aren’t all those sad songs on the radio just for me, and no one understands, and why aren’t I having as much fun as I used to—and what am I looking for? What I had not found, I could not name and, for the most part, knew of only through my sense of its precious and puzzling and haunting absence. And maybe we can never name it by its final, true, and holy name, and maybe it is largely through its absence that, this side of Paradise, we will ever know it. ~ from The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner I’ve since been crowned mistress of my household’s Christmas. Cares still come, of course. There was the Christmas three years ago when, Sadie, our special needs six-year-old became alarmingly lethargic, and we found ourselves in the emergency room on Christmas Eve. Never did Doritos from a vending machine taste more stale. But we got to go home and put Sadie to bed and eat a midnight meal by firelight, and she got well a few days later. I often wonder about those Whos down in Who-ville, who fah who forazed and dah who dorazed minus all the trimmings. Would I have it in me to do that? Last Christmas Eve, with my candle lit, I watched Sadie, who had a seizure at the service’s start and was content to rest her curly head on her daddy’s shoulder, her long, dark eyelashes framing sleepy eyes. I tried not to think about her seizures or her surgery scheduled for the next week. Who ever thought we’d need a neurosurgeon? But even on Christmas Eve, one can never entirely leave the world behind, and although the world is full of gifts and splendor, they are sometimes wrapped in sorrow and trials. I think we take stock of things at Christmas, whether we set out to or not. I took stock a few months after Sadie was born, and there was a flash of an instant when these shadowlands felt almost like home. The Spouse and I had come home late one Saturday night from a beautiful Christmas party, and I cradled my newest girl in my arms, sitting on the couch with my dress spilling around and the house quiet and the tree lights golden and I thought everything was strangely perfect. That was folly, and I knew it at the time, which marred the lovely moment a little. I resist the marred moments—doesn’t everyone?—trying especially hard to avoid them during the time of the year most wonderful. But something has finally sunk in this year, and I think it would make those Whos proud, though I’m ashamed it has taken this long to feel like I could fah who foraze with the best of them. At the risk of sounding like a simpleton, I’ll tell you what my mind has finally whispered to my heart: Christmas is not about me. We wish each other merry Christmas, and that is all fine and good. Then we ask each other, “How was your Christmas?” But at some level, we forget that Christmas just is, no matter how we celebrate or with whom or whether we altogether ignore the whole business. No matter what, a baby was born in a stable and God came and humbled himself and lived with us to serve and died for us to save. Love came down, and a free gift (no strings attached) is offered to everyone, even me. There’s not a thing I—or my circumstances—can add or subtract to that.

Our identity in Christ has profound practical applications, and each one of those sounds across the landscape of our new life with the promise of hope and strength. We are new creations, holy, one spirit with the Lord. We no longer live but Christ lives in us as our righteousness. We now are to live by reliance on him. These statements ask us to move differently into each day we are given, but what does it look like experientially to put our entire spirit, soul, and body into faithing in the new Reality? Well, first of all it means opening our eyes to our real identity, eating his flesh and drinking his blood, building our self-concept on who Christ is, in us, what he has accomplished on our behalf, what he will accomplish through us. The Bible gives a completely different picture of reality than the world. Identity comes from God, not from performance, not from behavior. Christianity is not a “climb to the top of the mountain and become a guru” religion. It is a living, active, in-this-moment reliance on an indwelling Person, who has come to live inside us by grace through the Cross. The first question is, “Do I really believe this? Does Christ live in me?” The second question would be, “Is he willing and able to live through me, as if it were me living, if I faithe in him?” If we don’t believe these propositions, it’s high time to get the Bible out and start digging, because we are believing in a sub-Christian Word of God. But let’s say we know these two things as Fact. What then, does it look like? How does it work out in real-time? A relationship is built on trust. Confidence. Mutual love. Also, it is built. As we relate, trust grows. Confidence builds. Love grows deeper, bigger. We can’t build a close, deep relationship with a transcendent God who is somewhere “way up there” and who never speaks to us, anymore than a husband and wife could live 2000 miles apart for all the years of their marriage and only write letters. We need the immanent to begin to reveal the transcendent. As faithers in Jesus Christ, we have been given the very source and ground of Life itself; in him all things live and move and have their being, and he holds all things together. Inside of me, inside of you, lives the power that spoke, and nothing became everything. Does he not have the power to keep us from sin, to manifest love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, humility, and faith through us? As this relationship is revealed, shown forth, built, we become more confident. The unseen becomes more real than the seen. Jesus becomes more real than circumstances, or fears, or all the other things we feel in our souls. Back to the original question. What, then, does “betting the farm” look like? In any situation, especially those of temptation, it means reiterating to ourselves that Christ is our real-time, here-and-now righteousness. More specifically, Christ is the particular virtue we need to get through the temptation moment. If we need patience, endurance, we have the patient, enduring One living inside us. We can turn to him in faith to let his patience and endurance flow through us. I sometimes say things out loud, if alone. Lord, you are perfect patience within me. I am betting the farm that your patience is flowing through me right this moment; Christ is living through me right here, right now.. I am putting my complete faith in you here. Then I step out in expectation that he will do what he has promised: “I will cause you to walk in my ways, and keep my statutes.” To use another example, let’s say we need purity in a particular situation. Well, who am I? I’m just a cup, a vessel, a branch. I have no ability to independently produce fruit, to be pure on my own. But who is Jesus? He is the source of Purity. Where is he? Well, he lives inside of me. Can that purity, or patience, or joy, or love, be transmitted from his Spirit in me into my spirit, through my soul, through my body, my life, my actions? That question, answered rightly, is where the spinning tires hit the pavement and squeal off, squirrelly at first, but soon gaining speed and stability. What about the rules? What about the commands? The commands are there partly to reveal – they reveal when we are not abiding, when we have tripped up in our trust and have started again to try being righteous by our own steam. The cure is to go back out of Romans 7 via the narrow gate called No Condemnation in Christ and get back into living in the faith-life of Romans 8. But I run ahead; that’s all for the next post.

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket. I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” –From The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams I sat in the theater, huddled around the stage with a hundred strangers, and watched as the narrator sauntered out of the darkness and smirked at us. Those words, the first of his opening soliloquy, made me nod and smile and whisper to myself, “I’m going to enjoy this.” I’m not sure what it is that keeps me from the theater. Every time I go, I’m glad I did. But it seems I usually hear about productions after they’ve come and gone. There’s no marquee next to the mall to remind me of what I’m missing, and there’s no stage version of a Fandango app to feed me show times and reviews. So, too often, plays by local theater companies slip by under my radar until I hear about them from someone else long after the curtain has fallen. But seeing Studio Tenn’s production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and most recently, The Miracle Worker (now playing), reminded me once again what I forget all too easily: that the stage is a magical place. For all the explosions and special effects and cinematic trickery that movies offer, there is no substitute for sitting twenty feet from a cast of actors and watching their lives unfold and fall apart right there in the room with you. It’s easy to maintain emotional distance from an eighty foot movie screen, but when you sit in front of a gifted actress and watch her weep, hear her heaving breath, see the quivering of her lips, the redness in her eyes, and the pain in her voice, there’s no getting away from it. That’s the power of the stage. It’s right in front of you. It’s inescapable. In demands your attention. Tennessee Williams knew that when he gave his narrator those words. He’s telling us that the stage may not look like a St. Louis tenement, the room may not have walls, the actors may be mere pretenders in the end, but despite all of that, something real is about to happen. Something important is going to be said. He’s going to paint a picture of the truth with a palette of illusion. And he’s going to do it right in front of our eyes. That’s a bold goal but it ought to be the mission of every storyteller no matter the medium. My job as a writer is to whittle my story down to the bare truth at its heart and then build around it the best illusions I can muster, illusions that support and even illuminate without distracting. The failure to understand this is precisely why so many films fall flat—the storyteller is enraptured by his own illusion and forgets to paint the truth. If there’s not a kernel of truth at the heart of the story, then all the action sequences, precise prose, and emotionally manipulative music on earth can’t save it. And the opposite is true as well. If your story has a solid foundation, then the audience will want desperately to believe in your illusions. They will want to believe because they’ll see the truth in the story. They’ll forget that the set doesn’t look like a St. Louis tenement or an Alabama mansion. They will pay no attention to the props as they roll onto and off of the stage. They may even forget that the theater around them exists at all, because for a precious few hours the truth is unfolding before them, inescapably, right in front of their eyes. When the lights come up at the end of the show, they’ll feel like they’ve returned from some far away place, having briefly been voyeurs at the window of another life. The truth of the story has sold the illusion. And they believe it. That’s great storytelling. That’s what every teller of every tale ought to aspire to. If you’re in the Nashville area, check out Studio Tenn’s website (www.studiotenn.com) and find out what’s playing; they’re casting spectacular illusions.

A few weeks ago a friend passed me this excellent article from the New York Times by Marilynne Robinson (the author of Gilead). My meager agreement isn’t going to do justice to Miss Robinson or her article, so I’m simply going to pass her words directly on to you. Here’s an excerpt: Old Jonathan Edwards wrote, “It has all along been God’s manner to open new scenes, and to bring forth to view things new and wonderful.” These scenes are the narrative method of the Bible, which assumes a steady march of history, the continuous unfolding of significant event, from the primordial quarrel of two brothers in a field to supper with a stranger at Emmaus. There is a cosmic irony in the veil of insignificance that obscures the new and wonderful. Moments of the highest import pass among people who are so marginal that conventional history would not have noticed them: aliens, the enslaved, people themselves utterly unaware that their lives would have consequence. The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world’s eyes. This assumption is by no means inevitable. Most cultures have written about demigods and kings and heroes. Whatever the deeper reasons for the realist fascination with the ordinary, it is generous even when it is cruel, simply in the fact of looking as directly as it can at people as they are and insisting that insensitivity or banality matters. The Old Testament prophets did this, too. Read the complete article here.

Charles Kingsley (1819—1875) was an English priest known for such novels as Westward Ho!, for his political essays, for his poetry, and for his collections of sermons. Kingsley was involved in the Christian Socialist movement, and often wrote his novels to expose injustice. Kingsley is best known for his children’s novel, The Water-Babies (1863), which he wrote to teach Christian values. The main character is a ten-year-old chimneysweep named Tom. Due to mistreatment, Tom is chased out of town where he drowns in a river. Fairies turn him into a creature called a water-baby, and assign him a task. This book helped lead to an act of Parliament which prevented children being forced to climb chimneys. He was appointed the Queen’s chaplain in 1859, and became a professor at Cambridge University in 1860. Kingsley was also friends with the Scottish novelist George MacDonald. A LAMENT The merry merry lark was up and singing, And the hare was out and feeding on the lea; And the merry merry bells below were ringing, When my child’s laugh rang through me. Now the hare is snared and dead beside the snow-yard, And the lark beside the dreary winter sea; And the baby in his cradle in the churchyard Sleeps sound till the bell brings me. And here’s another: THE DEAD CHURCH Wild wild wind, wilt thou never cease thy sighing? Dark dark night, wilt thou never wear away? Cold cold church, in thy death sleep lying, The Lent is past, thy Passion here, but not thine Easter-day. Peace, faint heart, though the night be dark and sighing; Rest, fair corpse, where thy Lord himself hath lain. Weep, dear Lord, above thy bride low lying; Thy tears shall wake her frozen limbs to life and health again.

One of the best things about life in Nashville is that I often find myself saying things like: “I’ll be right back, I’ve got to go to the spaceship for a minute.” How often do you get to say something like that while being completely matter-of-fact? It’s true, there’s a spaceship next door to my office and there’s a lonely astronaut inside it making awesome music. There’s a spacesuit and everything. I drove past it a few days ago while the door was open and it looked so cool I thought it might have actually been a tunnel into tomorrow. The record will be finished sometime this spring, and while Andy–I mean Leonard–isn’t ready to unveil the full-production tracks yet, he’s been awesome enough to record acoustic versions of three of the songs as a sneak preview. Here’s one, and you can download this and the other two when you pre-order the record in the Rabbit Room store. “Beat Of My Heart” by Andrew Osenga

[Editor’s Note: Lanier Ivester wasn’t able to make it to Hutchmoot this year, but while we were convening in Nashville, she stopped by the original Eagle and Child Pub in Oxford, England where she sat down in the Inklings’ Rabbit Room and wrote this post. We read it aloud during “The Telling of Tales” at Hutchmoot.] Oxford is a golden city. The yellow Cotswold limestone from which it was raised seems to have drawn into itself the warmth and light of all the sunny days it has ever known, so that even in the rain it glows like a watercolor of Turner’s. But in the last rays of a vanishing day it awakens to a radiance so aureate it will literally take the breath away, if not the heart along with it, while a crystalline fire kindles in every leaded pane and the cobbled streets, emptied of tourists for the day, grow quiet and begin to remember their past. Poets and martyrs, theologians, painters, and storytellers have all haunted these edifices for centuries, and the time-blackened passages between them are crowded with invisible shrines and unofficial monuments to greatness. The first time I came here I was twenty-three years old and star-struck with literary hero worship. I wanted to see where a tongue-tied Charles Dodgson spun tales of Wonderland to a little girl named Alice, and I longed for a glimpse of the brown River Isis where Kenneth Graham had spent his school days messing about in boats. I gaped, agog, at Matthew Arnold’s “dreaming spires” from the top of St. Mary the Virgin and I knelt upon timeworn benches for evensong in the chapel of Tolkien’s Exeter. I even snuck into a lecture at All Soul’s—but that’s another story, and college porters tell no tales. More than anything, though, I wanted to find C.S. Lewis. I wanted to walk the cloisters of Magdalen where he must have sauntered thousands of times, his hands tucked contemplatively behind his billowing black robe or gesticulating in lively debate with another don. I wanted to see his favorite path along the Cher, bordering the deer park, where he loved to stroll and think his long, lovely thoughts. Most of all, I wanted to visit The Eagle and Child, the pub on St. Giles enshrined in the hearts of all Lewisites and Tolkies as the meeting place of the Inklings. “They called it The Bird and Baby,” my friend told me, who was a student at Oxford and self-appointed tour guide for the week. “And they met here every Tuesday night during term.” He pointed out The Room as we came in, flattening ourselves against the ancient oak paneling to make way for other patrons going out. I didn’t know then that it was the Rabbit Room, or what that would mean to me in future days. And it was so crowded with locals vying for a spot near the little hearth on that January night, that I barely caught more than a glimpse of the brass plaque on the wall proclaiming its illustrious heritage. But it was enough. I was there, where titans had been. Surely their influence lingered, a bequest to the unlost wanderers who came here seeking they hardly knew what. Heavens! There might even be a portal to a place we had never been but were all homesick for. We five ambled to a table near the middle of the pub, where we promptly instated ourselves, intent on soaking up the atmosphere with a thoroughness that would have satisfied Miss Eleanor Lavish’s most exacting standards for immersion. One of the guys whipped out a pack of cards and a game of Hearts commenced which lasted so long a bartender eventually came over to our table and asked us to leave. Evidently our one round of Coke was not sufficient inducement to prefer our patronage to that of the thronging customers who were standing about, drinks in hand. So, I guess I can say, among other peculiarities of my life, I have been thrown out of The Eagle and Child. But not before another long look at the Rabbit Room, and a certain photograph in particular hanging over the hearth of a portly gentleman with a penetrating gaze. What was it about Lewis that prompted such a pilgrimage? I had been pursuing beloved authors all over Great Britain in the weeks previous, from Wordsworth’s Windermere to Bronte’s moors. I had traveled by ferry to the tiny island of Iona in the Scottish Hebrides to trace the miraculous spread of my faith, and I’d had an opportunity to worship at the lively and dynamic Holy Trinity in London. But—I was almost ashamed to admit it—nothing had moved me to quite such an intensity as this crowded pub on a winter’s night. The magic was so palpable I could almost touch it. Lewis’s writings had both validated my longings and touched a blaze to them. Where well-meaning others had offered me my faith as a morality play, he had given me a fairy tale. And I had seen, with that unmistakable stab of confronted reality, that I was in it. Perils and imponderables and impossible joys: these were my lot as a child of God, and Lewis had shone an ancient lamp upon my birthright. I wanted to verbalize my gratitude, here of all places, but the words at my command were inadequate. Fortunately for me, I was in company with those who understood. We had smiled, and clinked our Cokes. And known. Ten years later, it happened again. Only I was at home in the States, staring at a computer screen, alone at my own desk. And yet, not alone, as the vigorous virtual community I had just stumbled upon was so insistent to avow. Not alone. Was that not, perhaps, Lewis’ greatest gift: the assurance that God had entrusted the same visions to other souls; that this was no solitary pilgrimage through enemy territory, but an intentional campaign of an organized host? It was as if for years I had been huddling over my own little blaze of artistic hope, endeavoring to keep it alight, only to look up and realize that the hillsides all around me were dotted with bonfires and beacons. A cloud of flaming witnesses. A fellowship. What I had stumbled upon, of course, was a gathering of God’s artists who were compassionate enough to allow their hearts to be broken over this world’s sorrow and brave enough to believe in beauty, truth and goodness in the face of it all. They, like Lewis himself, were saying things I had always known but hadn’t known I’d known. In short, They were telling the Truth, and they were telling it in a way that was alive. These people not only believed in fairyland–they knew it was Home. Last summer this community took on flesh. I still remember how nervous I was, walking into the Church of the Redeemer, clutching Philip’s hand and feeling like something stupid was just on the tip of my tongue. It was, of course. I immediately mistook Pete for Andrew and called Evie “Ee-vee.” But it wasn’t five minutes into that invocation of Andrew’s that my mind was drawn blessedly away from myself and my silly inadequacies and swept up into the remarkable story that was telling itself all around me. And just as in the very best stories, I was an indispensable part of it, ludicrous as it might seem at first glance. An unlikely heroine, in a room full of people who felt exactly as I did. The friendships inaugurated that weekend had an air of Kingdom freshness about them and a sympathy as of long years’ duration. This was the real Rabbit Room, embodied in a living conviction that there was a meaning in joy, even at its most inexpressible and fleeting and a reason for hope, even when the world seemed crumbling to tragedy all around us. And that any effort to contribute to the great undergirding conspiracy of goodness by creative human effort had its resounding affirmation in the heavenlies. I had a striking realization in the middle of Jennifer and Pete’s wedding not a month before, so thunderingly obvious it nearly bowled me over right there in the pew. It was during Russ’s reading of the Gospel, the centerpiece of an Anglican service, and as the holy words filled the room a holy awareness settled itself in my heart. This was it: The Gospel was what it’s all about. It was the hilarity behind all these kindred connections in the Rabbit Room; the essence of all the “what, you, too?” moments at Hutchmoot last year. It was the author and end of all these artistic ambitions and it was the immaculate original of the deathless vows that were being taken before our eyes that August afternoon. In the way that only the most stupendous things can do, the truth overwhelmed me with its titanic presence, like the giant sustaining Jennifer’s Mount Majestic. We Rabbit Roomers are not just lovers of Lewis and Tolkien; we love who they loved. We’re not out to solve the mysteries of the universe, but to celebrate them. Philip and I are here in Oxford, but our hearts will be in Nashville this weekend, with a curious and courageous band of artistic adventurers, gathered not merely to share their stories, but to tell each other the Gospel in a thousand unique ways. The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and give you peace.

When I was on the 2010 Behold The Lamb Of God Christmas tour, I debuted one of the new songs from my upcoming record, A Way To See In The Dark. I was encouraged by how warmly it was received, and people have been asking about it ever since so I thought I’d share it and the story behind it here. The song is called “The Sound Of Our Breathing” and it was inspired by a teaching I heard a few years ago about how God’s name, YHWH, is comprised of aspirated consonants that, spoken, are the sound of breathing. It was a big concept that proved challenging to turn into a succinct lyric. I could have written it as a folksy singer/songwriter kind of song with twelve verses that took time to expound the idea, but when I was fishing for a melody and came upon what would end up being the pre-chorus (the name of God is the sound of our breathing / hallelujahs rise on the wings of our hearts beating), I fell in love with the idea of writing it as a pop/rock radio kind of song. That was the most challenging way to write a challenging song, but I get excited about that kind of thing. The kind of songs we’ve come to expect to hear on the radio can sometimes be disappointing, but I haven’t given up on it and its listeners just yet (see my comment 27 below for thoughts about radio singles). So it felt very missional to me to write it this way and it was also an invigorating creative challenge. Pop/rock anthem = less lyrics = really challenging when you have a big idea to convey. I’m not sure it has radio potential – time will tell – but it was an good challenge creatively to write the song in that direction. I was at a songwriter’s retreat a year ago in Eastern Washington and I brought the song to Doug McKelvey and Seth Mosely who were willing to tackle the challenge and bring it across the finish line with me. “The Sound Of Our Breathing” is the fruit of our labor and I hope you like how it turned out (you can listen to it at the bottom of this post) For the special edition of the record, I wrote a piece about the idea that inspired the song and I’ve included that for you here. The song follows: The Sound Of Our Breathing Take a breath and breathe it out. Do it again, slowly, and try to mean it. Breathing – of all things maybe we take it most for granted. Do we ever wonder why we are built this way, this soft machine of ours always pumping oxygen in and out? In sadness, we breathe heavy sighs. In joy, our lungs feel almost like they will burst. In fear we hold our breath and have to be told to breathe slowly to help us calm down. When we’re about to do something hard, we take a deep breath to find our courage. When I think about it, breathing looks almost like a kind of praying. I heard a teaching not long ago about the moment when Moses had the nerve to ask God what his name is. God was gracious enough to answer, and the name he gave is recorded in the original Hebrew as YHWH. Over time we’ve arbitrarily added an “a” and an “e” in there to get YaHWeH, presumably because we have a preference for vowels. But scholars have noted that the letters YHWH represent breathing sounds, aspirated consonants that in the Hebrew alphabet would be transliterated like this: Yod, rhymes with “rode”, which we transliterate “Y” He, rhymes with “say”, which we transliterate “H” Vav, like “lava”, which we transliterate “V” or “W” He rhymes with “say”, which we transliterate “H” A wonderful question rises to excite the imagination: what if the name of God is the sound of breathing? This is a beautiful thought to me, especially considering that for centuries there have been those who have insisted that the name of God is so holy that we dare not speak it because of how unworthy we are. How generous of God to choose to give himself a name that we can’t help but speak every moment we’re alive. All of us, always, everywhere, waking, sleeping, with the name of God on our lips. In his Nooma video, Breathe, Rob Bell (a pastor whose obvious gifts of curiosity and a knack for asking provocative questions can get him into trouble) wonders what this means in key moments like when a baby is born – newly arrived on planet earth, must they take their first breath, or rather speak the name of God if they are to be alive here? On our deathbed, do we breathe our last breath? Or is it that we cease to be alive when the name of God is no longer on our lips? The most ironic of his questions is also the most beautiful: he wonders about the moment when an atheist friend looks across the table at you and says, “there. is. no. God”. And of course what you hear is “Yod. He. Vav. He.” There are few better illustrations of both God’s largesse as well as his humility, his omnipresence as well as his singular intimate presence within each of us. Breathe in. Breathe out. “He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs… the word that saves is right here, as near as the tongue in your mouth…” (Romans 8:28, 10:8 The Message) [To pre-order A Way To See In The Dark in either the standard or special edition (which features stories like this and 8 additional tracks including an acoustic version of “The Sound Of Our Breathing“, go to jasongraymusic.com. Pre-ordering will give you an instant download of the current single, “Remind Me Who I Am”.] The Sound Of Our Breathing Jason Gray, Doug McKelvey, Seth Mosely [audio:soundofbreathing.mp3] Everybody draws their very first breath with Your name upon their lips Every one of us is born of dust but come alive with heaven’s kiss The name of God is the sound of our breathing Hallelujahs rise on the wings of our hearts beating Breathe in, breathe out, speak it aloud Oh oh, oh oh The glory surrounds, this is the sound Oh oh, oh oh Moses bare foot at the burning bush wants to know who spoke to him The answer is unspeakable like the rush of a gentle wind The name of God is the sound of our breathing Hallelujahs rise on the wings of our hearts beating Breathe in, breathe out, speak it aloud Oh oh, oh oh The glory surrounds, this is the sound Oh oh, oh oh In him we live and move and have our being We speak the name as long as we are breathing So breathe in Breathe out… Doubters and deceivers, skeptics and believers we speak it just the same From birth to death, every single breath is whispering Your name

Birds of Relocation is the new album from Eric Peters and by his own description it is “shockingly bright.” Then again, the artist often described as authentic and vulnerable is quick to assure me that he’ll never be far from theshadowy valley. If you’ve taken in the beauty of albums like Scarce or Chrome then you realize just how beautiful Peters’ hopeful expressions amidst sorrow can truly be. Via Kickstarter, many of you enabled Eric to record Birds of Relocation, an album informed by an famous ornithologist that Eric relates to on a personal level. Here’s the story of Eric’s near-crippling journey between one album and the next and the joy he found in having you all along with him. RR: In the past year, your need to create has branched out quite a bit. Why do you think that is? EP: In 2010 and 2011, I read a couple of books that greatly affected, encouraged and, honestly, changed me, or at least drew me out of my self-built confines. My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok and Richard Rhodes’ excellent biography of ornithologist, failed entrepreneur, and artist, John James Audubon each revealed and awakened something in me that, because I was either too dense, too dark, or too oblivious, I had avoided simply on the grounds that I was afraid–or if not from fear, then from my penchant for lending an ear to the foul voices in my head. I was afraid to try something new, like painting. I’m drawn to color. I need light. Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings, with those bright, short, bold strokes, set off mesmerizing, vivid scenes of swirling, breathing movement. The shades, the textures, the colors, the light–my word. It was ultimately in reading Audubon’s story that I recognized a bit of myself: his love for birds and being outdoors, his early failure as a businessman, his fight to keep hoping amid depression post-bankruptcy, and, thankfully, his ultimate decision to lean into his talents of drawing and painting, which led to his self-publishing an immense seven-volume work, The Birds of America, an opus that took him fourteen years to complete. By leaning into the talent he loved and knew he possessed, he trusted himself to his art, to his craft, and, I believe, it made him a better man. At the very least, he left the world works of lasting beauty. “Hopes are shy birds,” he wrote in his journal, “seldom reached by the best of guns.” For me, painting is a new expression, one that I don’t profess to be particularly skilled or talented at, but one that’s a joy nonetheless. I’m finding that I paint very much like I write songs: big scenes, quick and short strokes, abstract and arcane at times, but with every new glance the work reveals a new layer that, at first, might have gone unnoticed. I’m so grateful for this season, this ripe, fruitful time, to proclaim, “To hell with fear,” to move–to MOVE!–this is such a vital aspect of my story, to hack away at the bonds of crippling mental paralysis. I might very well fail, but I’m going to try to move, for my movements dismantle hell, its lies, its plaguing voices, its breaths of fear. RR: In the past few years you’ve been through some dark places in your life and a lot of that went into your last album, Chrome. Do you feel like you’re on the far side of that valley now? Is this record an answer to those old struggles? EP: Birds of Relocation, in many ways, feels like a response, a bright and vibrant reply to Chrome. This is my ninth studio album, and it’s quite possibly the most thematically cohesive and consistent of them all. I look on these eleven new songs and marvel at their mere existence, how they came to be, the places and depths from where they came, their playful levity, their breadth, their thrill at being, their not giving up on me–their life. By now I’ve learned that I am never, and never will be, far away from that valley. For better or worse it’s the nature of who I am, the way of my brain’s workings, its faulty connections and misgivings. But light, as we know, can explore and explode its way into the darkest of darks, illuminating long lost, forgotten, or cringing hope. From the dawn of my songwriting days, I have written about the waxing and waning of hope–some things won’t change–but with this album I feel that presence, the reality of actual life, a contentedness of soul. There is a sadness that never ventures far from my side; I don’t know why, I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s always present with me, loitering. The question is a matter of what I do with it, how I respond, it’s the where and when of choosing to hope, which voices do I listen to and lean into. I see the songs on Birds of Relocation as heralding the beauty born out of struggle, grief, sorrow, sadness, and depression–all pointing and leading to the infiltration of long-awaited light. RR: You used the phrase that you never will be far away from that valley. Is this the first album that you’ve been settled into that idea? EP: I believe so, yes. Though it was not easily identifiable to me early on, it is a reality I have slowly been learning about myself since the writing and recording of Scarce (2006) when I felt my general depression began to clearly make its presence known in my songs. 2008-2009 was a mentally brutal year. Friends had affairs, there was a rapid trilogy of deaths in our family, there were hurricanes, I was struggling to find work even though I had just released a brand new album (Chrome, 2009), and I bore what, at the time, felt like the humilitation of having to take a temp job and having to deal with general career disappointment. Couple all that with my chronic low self-esteem and my learning how to be a parent to two very young boys who seemed more like wedges than bonds between me and my wife. I reached a low–though pivotal–point during the summer of 2010 when my anxiety and darkness crippled me nearly to the point of being unable to function. I remember at one point not being able to physically move, think clearly, or make any decisions, thinking assuredly–and believing it–that, with the exception of my wife and boys, the world would be better off without me, that I was inconsequential, and that no one would care if I were gone. I immediately called a very dear psychiatrist friend of mine who had reached out to me earlier that year, and I asked for help. To ask for help is humbling. I began seeing a counselor late that summer, and soon thereafter I went on medication. These actions changed my life. Though I’m still susceptible–I never expected to be cured–I have a clearer thought process now. I’m more consistent. I’m less prone to utter apathy and acedia. I’m able to enjoy my life more. In short, I’m able to be grateful. Seeing clearly is a new grace. The apostle Paul had his “thorn,” which he wrote would be with him his entire life; mine happens to be depression. I’m prepared to walk on with that thorn in my side, but now I’m armed with age, knowledge, hindsight, modern medicine, dear friends, and a wife whose grace has been incalculable. I have the necessary components to function. These eleven new songs are shockingly bright. I’m just glad folks are willing to go on the ride with me, to follow me through the dark. RR: That’s beautiful to hear about the songs being “shockingly bright”. Do you have a favorite example from the new album? EP: “The New Year” caught me off guard in a really pleasant way. The song feels like an addendum to another of the new songs, “The Old Year,” an exclamation point, a sort of “I’m staking my claim,” anthemic and epic. My producer, Ben Shive, was a huge part of bringing that out. RR: After Chrome, I’m assuming there was a legitimate thought of setting the guitar down. Was there a point where you considered leaving music, as a career, behind? EP: I’m always thinking I need to hang it up, or find a stable nine-to-five. And then I think, for good reason, that a cubicle job would ruin and crush me. Apologies for the melodrama, but in some ways I believe that would be true for me. I hear people speak of their “callings” and their assuredness in them. I can’t say I can always relate to that level of confidence. Some days I feel I am doing what I am absolutely born to do; then other, darker, days, when there are no shows on the calendar, or I go months without an adequate paycheck, I wonder what on earth I am doing wasting my life, or wasting anyone’s time with my so-called art. As narcissistic as this sounds, the reality is that I enjoy writing songs that I would want to listen to over and over again. It doesn’t make a bit of sense to me to write songs that cater to a certain crowd, group, or demographic. I can’t be that person. I can only be Eric Peters, a.k.a., Pappy, Eeyore, glass half-empty guy. Ha, that probably explains much of my commercial failure, eh? RR: Can you give us an idea of what you felt when the Kickstarter campaign became successful and you crossed that threshold? EP: Relief. The initial push during the first two weeks was thrilling, then there was about a week-and-a-half (of a four week campaign) where it nearly stalled, and I was only halfway to the goal ($12,000). In my typical Eeyore, Pappy way, I immediately conjured a worst case scenario: I was going to be the first of my friends to fail to reach their goal. Figuring nobody cared anymore, I would hang it up, get a job flipping burgers, and move on with life. Thankfully it didn’t play out that way, and I have this opportunity to share eleven new songs with people. It was probably more stressful than I should have made it, but in the end it was gratifying to know that folks do, indeed, care about my music. RR: Any concrete plans after the release? EP: No immediate, major plans, other than to embark on what I’m hoping will be a lengthy fall CD release tour, ideally with a small band to help bring these songs to form. In the meantime, I will continue painting, taking photos, and offering the fruit of that work for sale on my website. And let us not forget Good Neighbor Lawncare, my side business. #BirdsofRelocation #EricPeters

What Is Love? Part I – Definitions What Is Love? Part II – Gethsemane Jeanne Guyon wrote, “You must see the wisdom of God’s plan in allowing . . . troubles to happen . . . There are two ways of handling little children. One is to give them all they want when they want it. Another is to give them only what is good for them so that they will grow up into maturity and not be spoiled. Your wise Father chooses the best way for you.” (Intimacy With Christ) If we are parents, giving our children a strong sense of being loved through attention and affection is the foundation. But it is also imperative to allow appropriate suffering into our children’s lives. Without it they cannot grow; without it they will be left without empathy, compassion, self-discipline, respect for authority, and will not accept responsibility for their actions. Much of this suffering will have to do with their actions. Actions have consequences; in the lives of our children, negative actions must be allowed to produce negative results. Our love must not be conditional, but we make their circumstances contingent upon their actions. A child who whines continually must be shown that whining produces a negative effect, every time – removal from the society of dad or mom to sit alone on a bed. Some suffering will have nothing to do with their actions. If my son wants something very much, and I believe it would not be beneficial or even detrimental for him to have, I should say no, no matter how good it seems to him. Other suffering has much less to do with what is good for him. Ultimately, I want him to be a benefit to others. I want him to be loving, kind, strong, creative, because I want him to love others, and benefit the world. So he must learn to get up on time; he must learn to not leave his clothes lying on the floor. He must learn to help those younger than himself, even when he doesn’t feel like it. He must do chores of some kind, and learn to do good work with a good attitude, to be a benefit to his future wife and children, and others in the world. Suffering is necessary. Now, to my son, no suffering seems pleasant or even relevant at the time. He cannot see why he must go with me to take the trash to the dump. He is reading! I am interrupting! Why can’t his sister go? It doesn’t make any sense to him. But I know that some form of having to do what he doesn’t want to do is good for him, and good for the other people in his future – wife, children, friends, co-workers, and even enemies. I am an earthly father. I am looking to my son’s eternal future, yes, but I cannot fully see the circumstances there. Mostly I am preparing him for life in this world, knowing that a man cannot always do what he wants, cannot always follow the strongest impulse, cannot long avoid taking the garbage out or getting up at a certain time or being courteous to others. My son may be called on to do great things, like providing for and raising a family, and great things require great character. If I am not preparing my son for this (and in many moments I have not), I am not loving my son. As a parent I am often to sacrifice my son’s immediate wants and desires for what I know he can and must be for others in the future. The heavenly Father has eternal goals and plans for us beyond anything we could imagine. He may be preparing us to rule cities and judge angels, or to write the new royal score for the King’s symphony. Whatever it is, it will require love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, humility, and moderation (the ability to go the right length and no further with our desires) – and especially courage. Why did God put his Son through an earthly life of being colored as a bastard (“We are not born of fornication. We are children of Abraham!”)? He was given to a fate of no reputation, despised, a wanderer, no place here he could call home, driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness alone to be tempted personally by  Satan. He was hated and persecuted endlessly by the religious leaders. His short-lived adulation by the populace came to nothing; in no time at all they were shouting “Crucify him!” And of course we know his end: mocked, hit in the face, whipped, made to carry a heavy beam on a bleeding back, then thick, dull spikes hammered through skin, piercing hands and feet, smashing through flesh and bone, tendons, nerves. More mocking and cruelty. And finally the worst – “My God, my God” (not “my Father”), “Why have you forsaken me?” This was the love of God? The Father knew the end result, saw the end from the beginning. He knew the joy suffering would produce, not only in the life of Jesus but through him flowing outward to an eternal Kingdom of saved people. But Jesus, having set aside his omniscience, had to wrestle with his humanity, his own desires, and subject them to the Father’s will. All Jesus knew was that the Father is good, and works all things after the counsel of his own will, working all things together for good to them that love God and are called according to his purpose. Jesus said, “Not my will, but thine be done. In essence, “The Father’s will is my will, too, my deepest will.” In Gethsemane, when he finally stood and walked to meet the mob, he knew within himself that he was made for this moment, knowing he was not merely a human being but a unification of the human and Divine.

I’m obsessing over the music of Josh Ritter. Last year, Pete and I met Evie Coates at the coffee shop to talk about Hutchmoot 2010. We talked about the program, the menu, the number of forks we needed, then we drove over to Church of the Redeemer so Evie could check out the kitchen. I rode in her fabled old red truck and she asked if I had ever heard of Josh Ritter. When I said no she looked at me like I should be ashamed of myself, then she played me a song called “Another New World” from Ritter’s new album So Runs the World Away. I was mesmerized. The song was about this Ernest Shackleton-type captain, an adventurer who musters a crew to voyage with him to the frozen north because he believes a new world lay hidden, waiting “for whoever can break through the ice”. Ritter’s voice was both intense and easy on the ears, the story the song told was haunting and sad and mysterious, and I wanted to hear it again. And again. But at that point we pulled into the church and planned Hutchmoot instead. Later that day she texted me the two songs I should buy from that album in case I was still wary of getting the whole thing: “Another New World” and one called “The Curse”. I forked my $1.98 over to iTunes and listened to the songs a few times, then one night on the road Ben and I watched the music video for “The Curse”, at which point I realized that–get this–the song was about a mummy who falls in love with the archaeologist who discovers him. And with that, ladies and germs, I was in. I bought the album and listened to it about thirty times, marveling, above all, at Ritter’s lyrics and the stories he tells. If you know me at all, you know I’m a word nerd. I love to read a book in which I can sense the author’s love affair with the tools of his trade. I want to marvel not just at good stories, but good sentences. So I geeked out when I heard Josh Ritter sing these lines (from his tale of the voyage of the Annabel Lee): After that it got colder, and the world got quiet, It was never quite day or quite night. And the sea turned the color of sky Turned the color of sea turned the color of ice. After that all around us was fastness, One vast glassy desert of arsenic white, And the waves that once lifted us, Shifted instead into drifts against Annabel’s sides. Now, before you read on, do yourself a favor and read that lyric again. Read it aloud. If you’re at work, cover your mouth and whisper it to yourself (that’s what I do at Starbucks). That, my friends, is the work of a ninja. That’s the kind of evocative, alliterative, narrative, imaginative, roll-off-the-tongue writing I dream about. Evie has now cost me about thirty bucks, because I’ve since bought Ben Shive So Runs the World Away, and bought myself The Animal Years, Ritter’s previous album, as well as In the Dark: Live at Vicar Street, recorded in Dublin. And that’s rare for me. I just don’t do that. I usually get into a new artist like I get into a cold swimming pool. I’m the guy who orders the same thing at the restaurant every time, not because I’m picky but because when I find something I like I stick to it. If you looked at my iTunes library you’d still see (other than the Square Peg Alliance) mostly Rich Mullins, Marc Cohn, and James Taylor, the three dudes I cut my songwriting teeth on. I just don’t get into new artists easily. That’s why I was excited to discover Josh Ritter. Not only do I love the sound, I love that he’s telling me something, and I get the sense that, whatever it is, he believes it–or at least, he’s willing to ask good questions about his doubts. His songs are rife with Biblical references (enough to make me wonder if he grew up in the church), as well as literary ones, though it’s hard to know exactly where he’s coming from, spiritually. I get the feeling sometimes that he’s mad at the God he doesn’t think exists. Here’s a line from a 9-minute epic from The Animal Years called “Thin Blue Flame”, a song I can’t get enough of: If God’s up there he’s in a cold dark room The heavenly hosts are just the cold dark moons He bent down and made the world in seven days And ever since he’s been a-walking away It’s a bitter and misinformed depiction of God. (The Gospel is basically the exact opposite of what he claims here. God made the world in (six) days, and ever since he’s been interacting with it, flowering it with beauty, redeeming it, calling to his people, and eventually walking not away but into the world itself.) Ritter goes on in the song to sing about the horrors of war, of amputees and missiles as the only answer from above. There’s layer on layer of imagery, everything from Hamlet to Laurel and Hardy, and it builds to a fever of anger and emotion at the state of the world. But at the end of the song, after he’s said his piece, he seems to take a deep breath. He seems to wake from a nightmare and paints, more or less, a picture of heaven: I woke beneath a clear blue sky The sun a shout, the breeze a sigh My old hometown and the streets I knew Were wrapped up in a royal blue I heard my friends laughing out across the fields The girls in the gloaming and the birds on the wheel The raw smell of horses and the warm smell of hay Cicadas electric in the heat of the day A run of Three Sisters and the flush of the land And the lake was a diamond in the valley’s hand The straight of the highway and the scattered out hearts They were coming together they pulling apart And angels everywhere were in my midst In the ones that I loved in the ones that I kissed I wondered what it was I’d been looking for up above Heaven is so big there ain’t no need to look up So I stopped looking for royal cities in the air Only a full house gonna have a prayer I think he’s trying to answer all the outrage of the first half of the song with the reminder that somehow a world of beauty, friendship, and peace persists. This last stanza is loaded with card-playing references (notice all the words like “straight”, “flush”, “hand”, “hearts”, and “diamond”), which is cool, even if I don’t totally get it. But then comes the line, “Heaven is so big there ain’t no need to look up”. I get what he’s trying to say, or at least I think I do, which is that maybe our time would be better spent not dreaming of some pie-in-the-sky in the sweet by-and-by. I think he thinks he’s pronouncing some indictment on Christianity, as if God wants us to let the earth go to rot and ruin because we lucky few are going to heaven anyway. Of course, that’s far from true. The Church is called to love, and love, and love; it’s an army embattled with the forces of darkness–forces that do want to see the world burn. But if C.S. Lewis was right (and I think he was), then those of us in Christ will discover in heaven that heaven had, in a sense, overlapped our time on earth. Heaven really is bigger than he thinks, and because of Christ, it’s all around us, making everything sad come untrue (thank you, Samwise and Jason Gray). From The Great Divorce: “But what, you ask, of earth? Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.” The many good and beautiful things Ritter describes in that last stanza are, for those in Christ, the waves of heaven lapping up on our shores, washing back over our lives here. Lewis goes on to say that those who give themselves over to Hell will find that the same is true: they were already at its dark edges. Lewis: “And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.’” So Ritter is asking good questions. I don’t necessarily agree with his answers, but that doesn’t keep me from being amazed by the songs–and the songs suggest to me that he’s paying attention, watching and listening to the part of his spirit that resonates with a certain secret fire. And if he keeps writing songs this good I think he’s going to have to try pretty hard to ignore the source of all that richness. His imagination and sense of poetry and narrative are a rare gift, and I’m intrigued enough to keep listening. And listening. The same way I listen to Paul Simon’s Graceland. I don’t get every song, and that’s part of why I keep coming back. My hat is off to Josh Ritter. Please keep writing. Here’s “The Curse”, along with the lyric and a video if you want to know more. Buy the song here. [audio:TheCurse.mp3] The Curse He opens his eyes falls in love at first sight With the girl in the doorway What beautiful lines and how full of life After thousands of years what a face to wake up to He holds back a sigh as she touches his arm She dusts off the bed where ‘til now he’s been sleeping And under miles of stone, the dried fig of his heart Under scarab and bone starts back to its beating She carries him home in a beautiful boat He watches the sea from a porthole in stowage He can hear all she says as she sits by his bed And one day his lips answer her in her own language The days quickly pass he loves making her laugh The first time he moves it’s her hair that he touches She asks, “Are you cursed?” he says, “I think that I’m cured” Then he talks of the Nile and the girls in bulrushes In New York he is laid in a glass covered case He pretends he is dead people crowd round to see him But each night she comes round and the two wander down The halls of the tomb that she calls a museum Often he stops to rest but then less and less Then it’s her that looks tired staying up asking questions He learns how to read from the papers that she Is writing about him and he makes corrections It’s his face on her book more and more come to look Families from Iowa, Upper West Siders Then one day it’s too much he decides to get up And as chaos ensues he walks outside to find her She’s using a cane and her face looks too pale But she’s happy to see him as they walk he supports her She asks “Are you cursed?” but his answer’s obscured In a sandstorm of flashbulbs and rowdy reporters Such reanimation the two tour the nation He gets out of limos he meets other women Her speaks of her fondly their nights in the museum But she’s just one more rag now he’s dragging behind him She stops going out she just lies there in bed In hotels in whatever towns they are speaking Then her face starts to set and her hands start to fold And one day the dried fig of her heart stops its beating Long ago in the ship she asked, “Why pyramids?” He said, “Think of them as an immense invitation” She asked, “Are you cursed?” He said, “I think that I’m cured” Then he kissed her and hoped that she’d forget that question For Josh Ritter, Mummies and Shakespeare Are the Stuff of Music from Mike Fritz on Vimeo.

This is the eulogy I read at my grandmother’s funeral on November 29, 2010. Evelyn Dowdy Ross was born May 10, 1918 in Pitts, Georgia, a tiny little town in Wilcox County. She was raised mostly in Fitzgerald. She was one of eight children in a loving and lively family that worked hard to scratch a living out of South Georgia’s sandy soil. There were two older brothers—Carl and Oliver—and then six beautiful girls: Leone, Aline, Irene, Judy, Evelyn, and Audrey. Evelyn was the one with flaming red hair—a slip of a girl with a ready smile and blue eyes that were quick and kind. The story of how Evelyn learned to play the piano tells quite a bit about who she was and where she came from. On her eighth or ninth birthday her brothers—who had gone away to Florida to seek their fortune—sent her a little money for her birthday. She spent it on a correspondence course to learn to play the piano. This in spite of the fact that her family had no piano. But Evelyn loved beauty, and she believed as firmly in things she couldn’t see as in the things she could.  When the correspondence course arrived in the mail, she found a plank and measured and marked the 88 keys of a piano—the white keys and the black keys containing every musical possibility there is…but only in the imagination of a little girl who heard music where others heard silence. Every day she pounded away on that plank, as faithful to the work as any concert pianist. And every day she prayed that God would give her the gift of musicianship, that she might give the gift right back to him for his glory. In time her father, seeing how hard his daughter had worked, figured out a way to buy a used piano on installments, and little Evelyn filled that dusty farmhouse with the hymns of the faith. She was never a great musician, but she was faithful to her promise. She gave her gift back to God, serving for years as a church pianist. The brothers convinced their parents to move with the girls to South Florida, where the Land Boom of the twenties was creating more opprontuities than there were people. It was a short sojourn in Florida, but it was eventful, and Evelyn often told stories of that time. She told, for instance, of their move from Georgia. The family’s household goods were piled in a pickup truck, and she was perched on top of the pile like Grandma Clampett, facing backwards as the truck drove southward. Trundling through one little town, she waved at the locals as if she were the Rose Bowl Queen and the piled-up pickup were her float.  The locals waved back and smiled. As they got further down the main drag, the people waved more enthusiastically. Evelyn stepped up her waving, pleased at the townspeople’s reception. A few locals started waving with two hands. Some pointed, some laughed, and some yelled something to her, but little Evelyn couldn’t understand what they were saying. Sensing at last that something was amiss, she turned around just in time to duck beneath a banner stretched across Main Street (it was advertising a Tomato Festival or something) that the townspeople were trying to warn her about. Evelyn loved to tell that story. She didn’t mind being the butt of her own joke, as long as it was a good joke. While in Florida, Evelyn was baptized in the Atlantic Ocean. She also spent a night in jail. (Now is not the time to keep secrets). They hadn’t been in Florida very long when a terrible hurricaneblew through–the still-famous Hurricane of 1926. She was staying with a cousin whose father was the sheriff of the little town. He decided the jailhouse was the safest place to weather the storm, so he sent his family there along with little Evelyn. As far as I know, it was the only night she ever spent behind bars. I love to picture that little girl having these adventures so far from home. The Florida adventure didn’t even last a year. The Dowdys were Georgia people, and farmers, and the prosperity of the Florida Land Boom was no match for the hardscrabble comforts of kith and kin back home. Her next big adventure was college—as far-fetched a scheme as the piano lessons. She got accepted into Norman Junior College in Norman Park, GA, but it wasn’t at all clear how she was going to pay for it. Some of the money she borrowed from the bank, but every term it was an adventure figuring out how she was going to pay. Her sister Judy paid some of her tuition. Leone made the clothes she would need. She scratched and fought to go to college. When she got there, however, she was terribly homesick. “If I could have just seen a yellow dog I recognized from Fitzgerald,” she said, “I would have cried for joy.” It wasn’t long, however, before she settled in.  She made friends at Norman Park who remained her friends as long as they lived. From Norman Park she went on to Tift College in Forsyth. She started her teaching career in Fitzgerald in the 30s. That first year she lived in a house with three other young teachers. The four of them remained close for the rest of their lives. You may notice a pattern emerging. Everlyn had a gift for deep and abiding friendship. She wasn’t just personable, though she was certainly that. She was a true and faithful friend.  She was genuinely interested in other people and she genuinely hoped the best for them. She was generous with her time, generous with compliments and good will. She made everybody feel better about themselves, especially men. Anybody who came into contact with her thought, “Well, maybe I’m more lovable than I realized.” Which is to say, Evelyn was truly an agent of grace. She was eager for everybody she met to know that God loved them unconditionally, and she treated people in a way that it wasn’t so hard to imagine that it might be true. One Sunday in 1940 or 1941, a young man Evelyn had never seen before came to her Sunday School class. He was new to town, a salesman for a meat packing house. His name was Abe Ross. They married on December 12, 1941, just five days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Evelyn taught school that day; she also made the chicken salad for the reception. She was an outlandishly faithful wife to Abe. He was a big-hearted man and one of the funniest. Evelyn lived to serve him. I don’t suppose he ever saw the bottom of an ice cube in his tea glass from the day they married to the day he died. That marriage was a picture of grace if ever there was one. Surely Abe wondered every day what he had done to deserve such beauty and such devotion. The only answer, of course, was that he didn’t. Nobody could. Together Abe and Evelyn raised three children—Betsy, Dan, and Nancy—whom Evelyn never spanked. Having taught for ten years, Evelyn took ten years off to be at home with the kids while they were little. In 1955 the Rosses moved to Warner Robins, Georgia. I think it might have been the best thing that ever happened to Warner Robins. Evelyn taught for a year at Thomas Elementary, then she settled in at Lindsey Elementary. She taught there, mostly third grade, for twenty-three years, until she retired in 1979. For the rest of her life, it seemed, every time she went to a restaurant or any other public place in Warner Robins, somebody stopped her to say she taught them in third grade. For her family, it is always a pleasure to hear “Your mother (or grandmother) taught me in third grade.” We never fear what the person might say next. Evelyn had a gift for handling difficult students. She always gave the hard ones a job to do and praised them for handling their responsibilities so well. And soon they were great friends. As a former student told me at the visitation, Evelyn was never punitive, but she always communicated to her students what she expected of them. And they always met her expectations—eventually. I’ve also spoken with more than one former colleague who said, “Evelyn taught me how to teach.” She was as generous to her peers as she was to her students, and they loved her for it. Evelyn made everything seem easy. But things were never as easy as they seemed. Abe ran a sausage plant on Ignico Drive and later on 247 near the banks of the Eecheconnee Creek. That was a hard business, and at times it seemed all the money Abe made had to go back into the business. Many were the days when Evelyn got up, got the kids off to school, taught a full day of school, came back to the sausage plant to work a few hours, cooked and served supper, put the kids to bed, then graded papers. Not to mention the Wednesday evenings when she had to play the piano for choir practice and prayer meeting. But she never complained. She never looked harried. She carried on with that almost otherworldly serenity that came from a deep and abiding faith in a God who loved her and had a good plan for her life. She was truly graceful. I mean that literally. Her life was full of grace—grace received and grace extended. Evelyn scattered beauty wherever she went, and everyone she knew was better for it, whether they deserved it or not. She had a dignity about her that had nothing to do with her outward circumstances. Whether times were hard or relatively easy, she was just Evelyn. She dressed beautifully even if she had to make the dresses herself, and she always wore her lipstick—and strongly recommended that the women she was close to wear theirs too. She had the same ready smile and gentle laugh; her beauty seemed to deepen as her red hair faded to white. Even as her body declined, she never lost that dignified bearing of hers. And she never failed to honor the dignity of others. Evelyn had seven grandchildren and nineteen grandchildren, each of whom had reason to believe that he or she was her favorite. Every one of us was her sugar baby, as she told us every time she saw us. She never failed to tell one of her children that she loved them every time she saw them. She loved well, and she was well-loved. Evelyn was the last of her generation. Her brothers and sisters all went on before her, along with their wives and husbands. Abe died in 1983; his five brothers and sisters and all their wives and husbands have died too. Evelyn loved that wild rumpus of a family, and they loved her. But they were all gone in her last years—every one of them. For twenty-seven years she was a widow—twenty seven years! Shortly before I got married myself, she told me, “It’s a hard thing not to be the most important person in anybody’s life.” She never quite understood how much she meant to so many people. But look around. This room is full of people to whom Evelyn Ross was exceedingly important. And, by the way, she thought you were exceedingly important too. For ninety-two years Evelyn kept reaching out beyond herself. She never grew tired of loving people. If she was physically able, she was in church every time the doors were open. She was traveling all over the country with her roving band of tourists until not very long ago. For nine years, well into her eighties, she taught English as a second language in Central Baptist’s language school. She always had time for anyone who needed her time and attention. She was a joy to the very end of her life. As her body failed, she could have gotten grouchy and no one would have blamed her; but she never did. Evelyn Ross was a woman of deep faith and remarkable faithfulness her whole life. She was always that little girl who took piano lessons without a piano. She lived by faith, not by sight. But she doesn’t live by faith any more. Now her faith has become sight.  And things she only glimpsed in a glass darkly she now sees fully and face to face. Yes, she was faithful, but as she knew all along, what really mattered was God’s faithfulness in Christ, who has now received her into his rest. The work he began in her long ago is now complete. After twenty-seven years of widowhood, Evelyn is a bride again, feasting at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. And her beauty here is nothing to her beauty there—where the beauties of her youth combine with the beauties of her old age and beauties that we can’t even imagine yet. Her hair isn’t white there, but red again, blazing with the brightness of a dozen suns. As Frederick Buechner said, “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.” What a joy it is to think of Evelyn reunited with those she had lost—her parents, her sisters, her husband Abe, her son Dan, all those friends. After so many goodbyes, there she is, waiting to welcome us into the Long Hello. Halleluiah.

A few readers may recall Dawn Marie’s review of On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. After nearly three years, she’s back, this time with her thoughts on my brother’s book, Fiddler’s Green. Enjoy.

Have you ever looked at an actual Rembrandt? I mean really looked? I have. And it is exhausting. Why? Because Rembrandt was a master. If you are willing to look, he will show more than you can take in. This is what masters do. The Dutch painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) is widely regarded as the greatest painter Europe has ever produced. Even while he was alive, people called him “the master.” Eager, rising artists would study under his watchful eye in his studio. They wanted to learn how to reproduce his technique and form. German art historian Wilhelm von Bode joked that the unintended consequence of this sort of mentorship was that “Rembrandt painted 700 pictures. Of these, 3,000 are still in existence.” The Adoration of the Shepherds Aside from his technical skill, Rembrandt was also a masterful visual storyteller. Every inch of a Rembrandt is filled with intentionality. His use of light to show you what matters (like the radiance coming out from the manger in The Adoration of the Shepherds) and his application of shadows to raise questions (like the dark figure in the upper left corner of his Return of the Prodigal Son) is often imitated, but never quite duplicated. His ability to capture furious motion a single frame (like in The Storm on the Sea of Galilee) plays like an optical illusion. I’ll leave you to discover the great Dutch master on your own. For now, I want to focus on something Rembrandt said: “I can’t paint the way they want me to paint and they know that too. Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can’t do it. I just can’t do it!” Rembrandt knew he was a great artist, no question. But he also knew he wasn’t limitless. And one of his limits (a limit we all share) was his inability to be what people sometimes wanted him to be or to do what people sometimes wanted him to do. This must have been very frustrating at times. Surely there must have been days when he would have loved more than anything else in the world to be exactly what others wanted him to be. I have those days. Return of the Prodigal Son He was so incredibly gifted and for this history will never forget him. But when he tried to train his hands to create another man’s vision, he just couldn’t do it. Neither can I. Neither can you. He was destined to paint Rembrants and Rembrandts only. He had to train his hands. He had to have started somewhere. It’s hard to imagine, but surely there once existed some pretty terrible Rembrandts. Early works. False starts. Work where he was clearly trying too hard. Too self-indulgent. Undisciplined. What’s not hard to imagine, however, is a solitary figure in a lamp-lit room mixing his oils, preening his brushes—thinking and painting and thinking and painting. For what? For mastery. And why? For joy, because the mastery of something leads to a greater enjoyment of it. Singers, musicians, painters, writers, athletes, and artists of every sort know this. The harder we work at something, the more we are able to enjoy it. Rembrandt knew this too. He said, “Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.” Annie Dillard said it another way: “Who will teach me to write? The page, the page, that eternal blankness.” The Storm on the Sea of Galilee All Rembrandt could do was paint and paint and paint. He couldn’t be a different painter. Only Rembrandt. And this is what he sought to master. For this he trained his hands. When I stand before a Rembrandt, my senses come alive and I know I am in the presence of greatness. I am a fool if I don’t at least try to understand the joy that comes from mastery. I’m a fool if I don’t regard myself as his student in those moments when we’re in the room together. His slow patient work of mastering a skill brings me joy. How much more joy must it have brought him to not only stand in front of one of his paintings, as I have, but to then also know that he was the one who created it. A couple hundred years after Rembrandt’s death, there came another student of the Dutch master, the poor and lovely Vincent van Gogh, who said, “Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language. Rembrandt is truly called a magician… that is not an easy calling.” Mastery doesn’t just produce stories. It considers how to tell them, and occasionally even provides new language when there are no words. The canvases Rembrandt left us do so much more than illustrate scenes. They are like the picture of the Dawn Treader that sucked the Pevensies and Eustace into an adventure whose goal was to reach the end of everything in the hopes that beauty would be all that remained. What are you mastering? What are you practicing in order to make clear what you don’t yet know? If you’re anything like me, I’m sure you reach points where you begin to wonder if it might just be easier to plateau. And if not plateau, then quit altogether. Don’t. Please. This world is short on masters, and consequently short on joy too.

Several years ago my web store, the homespun operation which was to become the Rabbit Room, was run in my luxurious garage. Right next to the garbage can, over by the hot water heater, next to the rakes and the bikes and the folding chairs, I had a little workbench set up with a postage machine, a bunch of yellow, padded envelopes, and stacks of CDs. Almost every morning I’d head out there to fill orders in either my pajamas or, in the winter, a coat and scarf. Sometimes when I was on the road a lot, Jamie and the boys would fill orders for me—and “fill orders” doesn’t just mean stuffing envelopes. It means emailing people whose packages were lost in the mail, it means calling to order more CDs and/or books, it means refilling the postage machine and driving to the post office and ordering more packing materials. When I had a new CD release we’d sometimes have 1,000 CDs to mail, so Jamie, Aedan, Asher (Skye was just a baby), and I would make a game of it. The kids dove in with gusto and rammed CDs into envelopes, stamped the envelopes with either MEDIA MAIL or FIRST CLASS while Jamie and I threw packages into bins. What I’m trying to tell you is that it’s a lot of work. When it got to be too much we hired my friend Hitoshi “George” Yamaguchi, then Paul Jones, then Stephen Lamb to help out, and finally Eric Peters managed the store for a while. All those guys will attest to the headache it can be. I should also point out that there’s a lot to enjoy about it, too. It’s fun to recognize repeat customers (who are basically helping us keep the lights on) fun to have the occasional exchange with someone who likes your music, fun to be so closely connected with the process of literally sending the songs into the world for ears to hear. Years ago, when I was on the road a lot more than I am now, Jamie called me from home to tell me she’d just been reprimanded by someone. Her voice trembled. In between diaper changes and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches she had trudged out to the garage in the freezing cold to fill orders in my absence. Someone wanted to expedite shipping and Jamie sent a sweet email back saying that she didn’t know how to do that. Well, the customer replied with some pretty harsh words and told her how lame it was that our website didn’t offer shipping options, and how they were used to professional websites and thought ours was a giant hassle. She cried. I got home, read the email exchange, and was ready to crawl through the modem, emerge into this person’s living room as an Obi Wan hologram, and challenge him to a duel. I couldn’t imagine why someone who liked my music enough to order it from my website would then proceed to chew out my wife for not being web-savvy enough. (I’m still surprised by it, to be honest.) So I cracked my knuckles, rolled my head around a time or two, slammed back a shot of sweet tea, and typed a scathing email. I told the person I didn’t appreciate their tone with my sweet wife, I didn’t appreciate their insensitivity to how hard we were working to amend the situation, I told them I was shocked at their insolence, at their brazen belittling of my wife, and—and—well, you get the point. My mouse hovered over the “Send” button, just long enough for the Holy Spirit to tweak my heart a little. I shrugged it off and sent the email anyway. I stomped back into the house feeling a little guilty and a lot justified, informed my wife that I had just sent the guy an e-whooping, and refilled my sweet tea. I felt good. Except for the part of me that felt kind of dark. I sauntered back to the garage to finish filling orders and checked my email. The person had emailed me back immediately. I opened the email, ready for a fight, and it was immediately clear that the person hadn’t read my e-whooping. The person had sent an unsolicited and sincere apology. They were repentant and kind, and expressed gratitude for Jamie’s hard work. The person had been having a very stressful day, and goofed up. I felt terrible. I was horrified by the knowledge that any second that person would read my angry words. The Spirit tweaked me again with what must have been a holy “I told you so.” Then an error message popped up. “Message not sent,” it read. “Server error.” (Server error, indeed.) It seemed as though God had reached into the internet, grabbed my boneheaded email, and flung it back into my computer, sparing the other person quite a bit of pain. Ever since that day, which we’ll call Huge Sigh of Relief Day, I’ve tried to wait days, even weeks, before replying to an email that provokes me. I also try to let someone else read it too and offer feedback. Many times after a few days I realize a reply isn’t necessary at all. The world spins on and the rebuttal that once seemed so vital to the maintenance of my honor turns out to be rather dishonorable instead. A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense. Proverbs 19:11

Welcome, friends, to the new Rabbit Room. Some of you may remember a post from a zillion years ago called “The Suggestion Box,” where I asked you to tell me what you were looking for in an upgrade. You answered diligently, I put the suggestions into categories, and . . . a zillion years went quietly by. Well, thanks to our friend Jonathan Forsythe at Makeshift Creative, we’ve managed to wrangle the new site into the corral. Let me tell you about some of the changes: Prettiness. Jonathan Forsythe is the Verner Panton of web design. Verner Panton is a famous Danish interior designer I just discovered by googling “famous interior designers.” He—Jonathan, that is—bent over backwards to make a site that would resemble the website we would like to visit in our wildest dreams. Sharing. Let’s face it. Twitter and Facebook are here to stay. At least until they’re gone. In the meantime, we’ve entered the frenzy by making it easy for you to share your favorite Rabbit Room posts with your “friends” and “followers,” and also with “total strangers” and “people you only know through social media networks.” Functionality. Remember those tabs? “Story,” “Art,” “Music,” and such? Well, they were a decent idea, but they never did much good. They were, in the words of Eric Peters, “just dead weight, like a big ol’ mole.” So they’re gone. You’ll also notice that you can peruse the archives. At last, you can find that one post we wrote, about that one topic that one day. We’ve been putting up a post almost every weekday since 2007, so there’s a lot of interesting stuff buried in there if I say so myself, on behalf of ourselves. Podcasts! The podcast is finally alive again. We’re hoping to put one up every other week. Today’s features Randall Goodgame and a fun conversation about his seedy early days when he played jazzy versions of Jimmy Buffet songs for the old dudes in Polos at the yacht club brunch. (This is not a joke.) You can still get the podcast from iTunes, or you can subscribe and listen right here. Events. We’ve added a widget to the home page that will let you know about upcoming concerts and speaking events featuring Rabbit Room contributors and members of the Square Peg Alliance. What, you didn’t think the Rabbit Room writers were just sitting around every day reading The Silmarillion, did you? No, no. We’re traversing these United States with our guitars and swords, and we like meeting you guys. There are more little tweaks, but that’ll get you started. I’m sure there are going to be a few hiccups since this is a new baby and all, so have a look around and tell us what you think. If you run into any problems just leave a comment in this post and we’ll do our best to figure it out. When I say “we” I mean “Jonathan.” And when I say “Jonathan” I mean Jonathan Forsythe, the Verner Panton of web design. Speaking of comments, I need to address one more issue: Moderation. While the posts have remained more or less consistent in matters content, diverse though it is, the nature of some of the discussion has shifted. Over the years we’ve managed to navigate some pretty sticky topics with very little moderation; the conversation was civil and respectful and (for me, at least) enlightening. Lately, though, the nature of the comments has subtly shifted in a way that’s hard to articulate, and that shift has led to the moderation (read: deleting) of some comments. It’s also led to repeated complaints via emails and face-to-face conversations from long-time readers of the Rabbit Room, informing us that they’ve stopped reading the comment section altogether. Yipes! So, as the Proprietor of this establishment, I want to set some ground rules. (I also want to repeat the exclamation “Yipes!” for emphasis.) 1) Be sure your comment is gracious. Give the other commenters and/or authors the benefit of the doubt, and speak the truth in love. 2) Avoid nitpicking. If the comment doesn’t add real light to the conversation, or if it derails the conversation from the author’s subject, there’s a chance it could be deleted. (Note: I’m not talking about funny stuff, or lighthearted bandying. That’s all fine, to a point. I’m talking about critical nitpicking.) 3) Try not to overpost. I’m really glad we have such a high level of interaction, but sometimes a lot of comments from the same person can make the place feel like–well, like an Oxford pub where one person is talking louder than everyone else and dominating the conversation. Be content, from time to time, to simply sip your ale and listen. 4) Use good syntax. (Now it’s me doing the nitpicking, isn’t it?) As a general rule, don’t use exclamation points. As an absolute rule, don’t ever use two or more in a row. Check your spelling. Take your time, when at all possible, to make the sentences read well. I know it’s a pain when you’ve submitted a comment and realize too late that there’s a typo. A lot of you guys are diligent about posting a follow up comment with your correction, and whenever I see that I’m happy to sneak around back and fix it for you. This isn’t me saying that every comment has to be crafted out of immaculate, perfectly written sentences–Lord knows, our posts have plenty of errors. But here’s the thing: we’re shooting for excellence. It’s not like this has been a huge problem. I’m just throwing it out there, being the Proprietor and all. 5) Wake not the sleeping giant. What I mean is, if a topic has 98 comments and you read the first few, then scroll to the bottom and raise a bunch of questions, and then your post is moderated, it might be because the points you’re raising have already been addressed and re-addressed, hashed and re-hashed, and it’s just time to close the book. Picture a group of friends in the back room of that same Oxford pub who, having sucked the marrow out of some topic, are sick of it and ready to move on to the fish and chips–only to have some guy or gal burst into the room and loudly opine about the dead topic. I’ve never wanted the Rabbit Room to be a place for argument and debate, but rather a haven for discussion and even a place to experience beauty. That’s why we try not to write negative reviews or critiques (the One Minute Reviews being an exception, mainly because it’s so funny to watch Thomas get riled up over a bad movie); if we don’t like a book or an album, we just keep silent. Silence can be good. Even on a glorified blog. This list isn’t absolute. We may still delete a comment we deem inappropriate or unhelpful (or out of line with the above list in some way), and you may get mad or hurt. You may disagree with our judgment. Please know we’re not trying to be malicious. We’re doing the best we can to guard the magic of this place and follow the lead of the Holy Spirit. Hopefully no moderation will be needed, but we’re willing to if things get weird. Okay. I’m glad that’s over. Now we can get on with the poetry and videos and essays and stories and songs this place was created to foster. Dear Readers, I’m grateful for your kindness, enthusiasm, and support of this experiment in the celebration of beauty, truth, and goodness. Enjoy the Rabbit Room 2.0, The Proprietor

It’s 2:15 a.m. Tomorrow morning I’m getting on a plane and flying to Sweden, the land of my forefathers, with Ben Shive and Andy Gullahorn. This will be our sixth (seventh?) tour in Sweden, where the coffee is black, the ice cream is plentiful, the engineering is sleek and tasteful, the breakfasts are delicious, and the people talk nothing like the Swedish chef on the Muppet Show. Really. Another reason I’m excited about the trip is that just this morning I sent my final, FINAL edits for The Monster in the Hollows off to the press. That, ladies and germs, frees up a lot of mental RAM. And emotional hard drive space. And time. And that means I’m going to read, oh, nine books or so on the flight across the Atlantic, guilt-free. (The Passage by Justin Cronin, The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life by Alan Jacobs, and Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King.) This is what my brother and Stephen King call “feeding the gnome”. After pouring so much into the writing of The Monster in the Hollows, it’ll be nice to take a long, cool drink of some good writing. If you live in Sweden, we’ll see you in a few hours. If you live in the States, we’ll be back soon. Thanks for reading!

My good friend, the able Doug McKelvey (who, you may recall, also had a hand in making the music video for Remind Me Who I Am), came to my house in Minnesota for a weekend to talk with me about my new record, my life, and…baby squirrels, among other things, in order to bring you a series of song diaries that offer stories behind the songs as well as a peek into the life of the Gray family. The first one is for the song, “Good To Be Alive” and is less a video about the song specifically than it is a peek into my world. Doug also pitched an idea to our label several months ago about a series of webisodes featuring Centricity artists as a memorable way to promote the new singles to radio music directors. Each webisode was written and directed by Doug and stars John Mays, the head of A&R at Centricity, as well as the featured artists in five minute situational comedies. I have said it many times and I’ll say again how grateful I am to be a part of Centricity – these webisodes are a great example of the outside of the box kind of thinking that is establishing this label and their artists as unique and memorable. And who knew that John Mays was such a comedic force!? If you like my episode, you may want to check out the others (and rumor has it that there may be a webisode featuring our own Andrew Peterson in the works.) I hope you enjoy these! And I’d be irresponsible if I didn’t remind you that you can pre-order my new record, A Way to See in the Dark here (and get an instant download of “Remind Me Who I Am”) Thanks for watching. Grateful. Song Diaries – Good To Be Alive Jason Gray Centricity U Webisode