What are you looking for?

Some twelve feet above the ground, in a gutter attached to my neighbor’s roof, a maple tree struggles to grow. In early spring, I first notice the green of the sapling peeking above the gutter’s metal confines. Its single verdant leaf is in stark contrast to the shallow metal container from which it springs so high above earth, its roots never contacting a single gram of the soil below. The gutter, having not been cleaned for many years, moonlights as a lofted planter, a trough, a wholly unintentional vessel holding rich, alluvial soil in which life manages to flourish. Mere inches from the sapling, the downspout, clogged long ago, acts as a dam, collecting every leaf, nut, or branch the sloping roof above can tender, until the decomposed material creates a phony and shallow habitat. I watch throughout spring as the maple slowly inches above the walls of its unlikely vessel, spreading forth new branches and leaves. It reaches up, despite its unforgiving environment. The maple eventually achieves a height of two feet before the gentleness of spring is replaced by summer’s heat and intolerance. It wreaks havoc on the plant. This is survival of the fittest. The soil in which it grows is no more than three inches deep. Yet, here, a few short months ago, a seed first fell, or was washed down from the roof, thus establishing contact with enough dirt to send forth a root. Here, in that shallow depth, with nothing substantive to reach into, the nesting tree begins to succumb to summer’s drought and the direct baking of the gutter and the soil within it. The gutter’s gentle inhabitant withers to the brink of death. The brown curling along the leaves’ outer fringes is the first hint that things are not well. Leaves droop, wither completely, and eventually fall. All that is left is a vertical twig, a skeleton of a young hope that, had it found its place in living, breathing earth, might have grown to be a monolith, bountiful in color, a merciful shade-giver, legendary. Annually, this same maple tries to recreate its life in the very same gutter. Every year it fails. The rain comes too little, too late, causing it to die yet another small death. Every year I watch the tree’s straining, hoping for its survival and success, knowing that its improbable setting will eventually stunt its growth, inhibit its wild nature, and exact again destruction. The small deaths keep coming. But, blessedly, so too does the spring, and though every life may not be saved, the living and the dead are the skeletal reminders of frailty, abundance, and hope as we peek above the temporary confines of this shallow earth.

“We will rock the hell out of you.” –Stryper Last weekend when I heard about a certain concert happening in my city that night, I sent out a tweet that has been bugging me ever since. I twote: “I may or may not be taking myself from 25 years ago to see Stryper at the Wildhorse Saloon tonight. ‪#dontjudgeme ‪#weallcomefromsomewhere What bugs me most about that tweet is how much effort I spent qualifying something I genuinely wanted to do. “I may or may not…,” “Don’t Judge Me…” Insinuating that if I go, it’s for nostalgia. Why did I feel the need to distance myself from going to see the one band who has probably received more of my money and bedroom wall space than any other in the history of the whammy bar? For those unfamiliar with Stryper, a little history might be in order. They formed in the early 80’s, appearing on LA’s Sunset Strip music scene with other big-hair metal bands like Motley Crue, Cinderella, Poison, and Ratt. If you know these bands, you get the picture—long hair, spandex, ear rings, make-up, lots of promises to rock people—no matter where they’re from—and to rock them for seemingly unending periods of time. Stryper, from the beginning, occupied rarified air. If you were going to make it in that industry, there had to be something about you that 1) made you stand out, and 2) made people like you. With their yellow and black attire and their commitment to singing plainly about their faith in Jesus and the free offer of the Gospel, they certainly stood out. However, I expect both of those characteristics made the “make people like you” objective a little more of a battle. Why? Because lyrically and morally, they were swimming against the current of their competing colleagues’ core values. Thematically, the bands of that genre and era devoted 90% of their lyrical capital to weird euphemisms about women, the anticipation of drinking, and doing whatever they wanted to do, no matter what their parents thought. The remaining 10% of their lyrics went to space travel, rainbows in the dark, the travail of the early native Americans. (I’m looking at you, Europe, for two out of three here.) Stryper never tried to philosophize about the druids or sing about fighting super-natural serial killers while in a dream state. They kept things pretty straightforward. They sang mainly for and about Jesus. But if they were going to make this their play and earn a living doing it, they needed to be a great band. So what did Stryper do? They worked hard. They worked hard at defining a certain sound built around both vocal and instrumental harmony and precision. They worked hard to create a live show that people wanted to come see and then talked about long after. They worked hard to promote themselves—gut-wrenching work because it often carries more rejection than acceptance. And all this work paid off, establishing them as one of the most visually and musically entertaining live acts of that genre, and with some pretty magical records to build those tours around. Then came the ’90s. I assume Stryper, like most of their peers from that era, faced a commercial decline when some kid called Slacker Angst rolled out of bed (at the crack of noon), put on his flannel shirt and handed Eddie Vedder a microphone to tell the Sunset Strip that the party was over. (Was that sentence too much? It felt good.) When grunge took over, a lot of those 80’s metal bands just put down their B.C. Rich Warlocks and walked away. Some became tribute bands to themselves, earning their living by playing old hits. Some found gainful employment in reality TV. But several weathered the storm, kept working, and have resurfaced in recent years as a new form of “classic rock.” (Case in point: in the past year alone, Nashville has hosted concerts for Van Halen, Def Leppard, Poison, Cinderella, Lita Ford, Kiss, Motley Crue, Iron Maiden, Ozzy Osbourne, and Judas Priest, just to name a few.) When I went to see Stryper a week ago, here’s what I saw. I saw four guys, who have been playing music together for the better part of 30 years, put on a great show. Musically speaking, they were amazingly tight. They didn’t play a single ballad. They started loud, stayed loud, and finished loud. Each member filled their respective roles with graceful control that reminded me how rare it is to see a true band—folks who have logged countless shows honing their craft in such a way that they come across as a single, seamless unit. They came to play. They played songs I hadn’t heard in 20 years, and they made me love them all over again. They were obviously happy to be there—without a hint of entitlement or cynicism. They were generous with the audience—including some “above the call of duty” graciousness with a guy who rushed the stage to try to sing lead on his favorite song. And they were still as committed as ever to their singular purpose—to tell of the faith they had built their lives and careers around. This was illustrated well in what was, for me, a moment of humble poignancy. Back in the day, Stryper was known for throwing bibles out into the audience, and I wondered if this was something they still practiced. Sure enough, near the midpoint of the show, Michael Sweet, the lead vocalist and guitarist, grabbed a stack of New Testaments from the top of his amp, and the other guys did the same. What he said as he tossed them into the crowd made me not just appreciate them as a band, but really respect them as men. I’m paraphrasing, but here’s the gist of what he said: “Back when we first started out on the Sunset Strip, the scene was all about sex, drugs, and partying. So many people just bought into this way of looking at life. We were asking ourselves, how can Stryper stand out and tell people that we believe there is a better way? How can we tell people that our relationship with God is broken, but that there is a way to be right with Him by believing in His Son Jesus? One idea was to actually put God’s word in their hands. So we started tossing out Bibles at our shows. Over the years we’ve kept doing it, because this is still ultimately what we care about as a band. We believe God loves you and we want you to know that. That’s what matters to us. So that’s why we throw these out.” Sweet’s humility and candor about how they’ve come to be who they are over the years, with his unapologetic winsomeness in a culture he knows is cynical and jaded, was really refreshing. We all come from somewhere, and where we’re from never completely leaves us. I discovered Stryper more than half my life ago. I come from a bedroom in central Indiana with dozens of Stryper posters on the walls. And I come from a boyhood where one of my biggest fears was how to live out my faith with conviction and at the risk of being made fun of. Stryper helped me find some courage there. My story is joined, in a small but still real way, to those four guys from southern California—four guys who happen to rock. I would be lying if I told you I went to that show for purely nostalgic reasons, as my tweet suggested. I went as a fan.

I’ve been playing guitar for 20 years without really knowing how. I’ve written songs—lots of them. I’ve played in bands. I’ve just started a new one, actually. But I’ve mostly just hammered away on an acoustic six-string with bad thin picks for 20 years. It all started with a very cheap acoustic guitar and a Bob Dylan songbook. I learned to read the big chord diagrams over the music, and I just started strumming songs I already knew. Then I wrote about 30 teenage-angst songs strumming those same simple chords, a bad recording of which has mercifully been lost. Then I wrote some decent songs in my early 20s, but the band I played them with doesn’t exist anymore. (Though I can still dig up copies of our 4-song record, I wouldn’t want to do that on purpose.) I was the unofficial “leader” of that band, calling most of the musical shots and being the key “presence” on the stage. Twenty years after picking up a guitar, I’m finally learning how to play for real. I decided to take lessons, unlearn bad habits, and do it right. It’s an incredibly frustrating process. Up until now, I could pick up a guitar and play hundreds of songs, make it sound pretty good, and my kids could dance around the living room. I could lead music at church or play along with other musicians. Now my instructor is assigning me a bunch of songs to learn and critiquing what I do, and I’m sitting and embarrassingly plunking through the notes like it’s my first time touching the instrument. There’s a spiritual metaphor in there somewhere. I’m convinced that, some day, when I’ve got maybe a week or a month left to live, I’ll finally realize that I’ve been doing something wrong for decades, and I’ll be right back to square one. I remember a time in my life when I ran Bible studies, led youth group, was a pastor, was looked to for spiritual advice, gave gospel messages on college campuses, and was an overall spiritual superhero in my own mind. Just like I was the leader of a Christian band, but had no idea how to play the guitar correctly. I think life is full of these kinds of epiphanies that we’ve been doing it wrong and need to start over. And it’s a good thing we rest in grace, or we’d go crazy with frustration at ourselves. My kids aren’t judging me because I’m suddenly plunking away at notes. They don’t even notice how often I miss. The 15-month old thinks my slow picking through “Wildwood Flower,” “Soldier’s Joy,” and other old tunes is just fantastic, and it makes his eyes light up and his feet start moving. And I’m writing new songs and still playing the old ones. It’s difficult to pick up the guitar and suddenly feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s difficult to do the same so often with how I approach God in prayer or how I approach the reading and understanding of Scripture. Or church life or interaction with neighbors or any other vital part of life that I’ve been practicing for decades without really knowing what I’m doing. On our way out of church Sunday morning, our pastor let us know there’d be confirmation classes coming up, that the bishop is visiting in September, and would we like to become voting members. A million conflicting thoughts raced through my mind when he asked. We’ve been overcommitted and burned out before and have trouble finding a balance. We’ve not been extremely involved in a church family since the burnout. We’ve been going to church for as long as I’ve been playing guitar and longer, but the time has come for some relearning. Despite conflicting thoughts in my heard, I heard my own voice saying, “Yes, we’d like to do that.” It’s scary. But the kids still dance when I play guitar. And I think the angels still rejoice when we repent and restart.

Tim Filston asked a great question regarding Flannery O’Connor, and I hated to let it languish in the comments (at Jonathan-Rogers.com), so I’ll address it in a post. He wrote: I’m looking forward to your insights about her. Her willingness to face off with the dark, ugly side of human nature seems courageous to me, and not just in a thrill-seeking way. When a writer depicts the human heart as only a bruised thing, then the reader can only expect “there-there” assurance that everything will be alright. But, O’Connor calls the reader down into corruption (it seems to me) so that we might have a shot at being called up–higher up than we started. What do you think–am I in the ballpark with this, or is this a stretch? Tim, I think you’re more than in the ballpark. I think you’re somewhere around the pitcher’s mound. I wrote this biography for all those people who have heard they’re supposed to be getting some spiritual meaning out of O’Connor’s stories but just can’t get there. Your remarks get close to the heart of what O’Connor is doing in these awful stories (awful, you’ll remember, meant ‘filled with awe’ or ‘awe-inspiring’ before it meant ‘terrible’; I’m drawing on all those meanings here). Here’s a relevant tidbit from the introduction to The Terrible Speed of Mercy: Blessed are the freaks and the lunatics, who at least have sense enough not to put any faith in their own respectability or virtue or talents. The freaks in O’Connor’s stories stand for all of us, deformed in so many ways by Original Sin. All of us, as the old hymn says, are “weak and wounded, sick and sore…lost and ruined by the Fall.” The freakishness and violence in O’Connor’s stories, so often mistaken for a kind of misanthropy, turn out to be a call to mercy. In O’Connor’s unique vision, the physical world, even at its seediest and ugliest, is a place where grace still does its work. In fact, it is exactly the place where grace does its work. Truth tells itself here, no matter how loud it has to shout. People are offended by Flannery O’Connor’s stories, and they ought to be. They’re offensive. I’m reminded of what Peter said about Jesus: he was “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.” Jesus’s parables would offend us if we hadn’t heard them so many times–or if we were paying better attention. After acting like a complete jerk, the Prodigal Son comes home, welcomed into his father’s arms. The older brother, who has been behaving himself, keeping his nose clean, takes offense, and we can all understand why. It’s a little shocking to realize that Jesus presents the older brother as just as big a jerk as the younger brother–much more shocking for Jesus’s original audience than for those of us who know what we’re supposed to think about the story. The parables, in my understanding, are driven by that dissonance between the truth and the way we feel about the truth. Jesus shows us what the kingdom of God looks like; if we allow ourselves to be offended by that vision, we begin to see what needs to happen in our hearts. I claim to love grace, but I’m bothered by the fact that the vineyard workers who showed up an hour before dark get paid the same amount as the workers who started at daybreak. I can either reject that parable altogether, or I can think about why my heart doesn’t line up with the things I say I believe. But it would be a big mistake to explain away the offense–to say it’s not really that offensive. O’Connor’s stories are offensive and shocking in a different way; they were, to borrow her imagery, startling figures drawn for the almost-blind. But I do believe she was working from Jesus’s storytelling playbook, using shock and offense to show us something about our hearts. To quote again from the introduction to my book: If the stories offend conventional morality, it is because the gospel itself is an offense to conventional morality. Grace is a scandal; it always has been. Jesus put out the glad hand to lepers and cripples and prostitutes and losers of every stripe even as he called the self-righteous a brood of vipers. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” it is painful to see a mostly harmless old grandmother come to terms with God and herself only at gunpoint. It is even more painful to see her get shot anyway. In a more properly moral story, she would be rewarded for her late-breaking insight and her life would be spared. But the story only enacts what Christians say they believe already: that to lose one’s body for the sake of one’s soul is a good trade indeed. It’s a mystery, and no small part of the mystery is the reader’s visceral reaction to truths he claims to believe already. O’Connor invites us to step into such mysteries, but she never resolves them. She never reduces them to something manageable. O’Connor speaks with the ardor of an Old Testament prophet in her stories. She’s like an Isaiah who never quite gets around to “Comfort ye my people.” Except for this: there is a kind of comfort in finally facing the truth about oneself. That’s what happens in every one of Flannery O’Connor’s stories: in a moment of extremity, a character—usually a self-satisfied, self-sufficient character—finally comes to see the truth of his or her situation. He is accountable to a great God who is the source of all. He inhabits mysteries that are too great for him. And for the first time there is hope, even if he doesn’t understand it yet. If you keep asking questions, Tim, I might end up cutting and pasting the whole book into blog posts. Thanks for asking.

Alan Paton (1903–1988) is a South African writer who saw himself as a poet who wrote novels. He is best known for Cry, The Beloved Country (1948). It is the story of a Zulu pastor’s search for his missing son, in a land where racial injustice had become the norm. As the principal of Diepkloof Reformatory for young black offenders, from 1935 to 1949, Alan Paton was able to introduce significant reforms–enabling inmates, who had proven themselves responsible, freedom to work and often live away from the reformatory. He was so opposed to his country’s apartheid policy, that in 1953 he founded the Liberal Party of South Africa. The international success of Cry, The Beloved Country, kept him financially independent and protected him from government prosecution, although his passport was confiscated in 1960 for about ten years. The following poems are from his collected poems, Songs of Africa. My Lord has a great attraction… My Lord has a great attraction for the humble and simple, they delight in his conversation, The insane stop their frenzies and look at him unsurely, then they crowd round him and finger him gently, Their wistful eyes capture something that was lost, they are healed for a moment of the hurts of great institutions. The half-witted press their simple thoughts upon him, and he listens with attention to the babbling of imbeciles. He knows their meanings, and they observe him trustfully. He passes through the great gates of Alcatraz, and there is no searching machine that can prevent him, He goes into the cells that have the iron doors, where the wild men are shut in completely, They put their wild teeth on his hands, but take them away again from his wounds with wonder. Oh Lord teach us your wisdom, and incline our hearts to receive your instructions. Then the maniac would stay his hands from the small girl, and the drunken man from the throat of the woman, And the father from the growing son, and the son his hands from the father. And the wild boys could be brought out from the cages, and the wild men from behind the unutterable doors. No Place for Adoration I saw the famous gust of wind in Eloff Street It came without notice, shaking the blinds and awnings Ten thousand people backed to the wall to let it pass And all Johannesburg was awed and silent, Save for an old prostitute woman, her body long past pleasure Who ran into the halted traffic, holding up hands to heaven And crying my Lord and my God, so the whole city laughed This being no place for adoration.

When my father was growing up, he knew a fellow called Deafy (pronounced “Deefy”). They called him this because he was deaf. When Deafy wanted to get somewhere, he walked right down the middle of the road. When the occasional car chuggered up behind him, he swerved nary an inch. When the driver honked his horn, he never startled. When the driver cussed him, Deafy never heard that either. The practice of nicknaming people by their infirmities seems to be on the wane. I get the impression that there used to be more Deafys and Stumpys and Shortys than there are now. I thought of Deafy as I was going through Russ Ramsey’s Easter Week in Real Time readings. Jesus’  last supper before the Last Supper was hosted by a man known as Simon the Leper. As insensitive nicknames go, Simon the Leper has Deafy and Stumpy beat all to flinders. But there Jesus sat, eating in the home of a man whose very name was his shame. Simon the Leper. Simon the Unclean. Simon the Outcast. To the very end, Jesus was pouring his life into misfits and losers, refusing to leverage the influence of the powerful and well-connected but insisting on doing things his way–a perfectly backwards way, by the world’s lights. This was the Savior from Nazareth, after all. The village wasn’t just podunk, but so mean that one of the disciples asked, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” When Jesus came home for a visit, the locals tried to throw him off a cliff. I picture Nazareth as a place with more than its share of three-legged dogs. Whatever was the first-century equivalent of a speed-trap, I suspect Nazareth had one. And a Deafy and a Gimpy and a Shorty. Jesus, no doubt, felt right at home at the house of Simon the Leper. And Jesus, of course, was readier than anybody else for the spectacle that would interrupt his next-to-last supper. A woman with an alabaster flask of perfumed oil busted the thing and poured the oil all over Jesus’ head and feet. In so many ways, it was an act of beautiful extravagance. The oil was worth a year’s wages, yet down it dripped, running and pooling all over the floor. The fragrance filled the room like a kind of grace, a beauty that nobody besides Jesus had earned. Yet there were those in the room who made themselves impervious to that beauty, who chose to judge and criticize and quantify the woman’s acFt rather than let themselves smell the sweet savor of what she had done. “She could have sold that perfume and given the money to the poor,” they said (and Judas–not just a traitor but a moneygrubber and a thief–was one of them). But Jesus smelled the perfume, and he knew the hearts of the critics. He defended the woman’s act of prodigality. “Why do you trouble the woman?” he asked. “For she has done a good work for me. For you have the poor with you always,” (though, he might have added, you’ve never seemed too worried about them before), “but me you do not have always. For in pouring this fragrant oil on my body, she did it for my burial.” I’ve been trying to picture the scene, and if I’m being honest, I’m pretty sure I would have come down on Judas’s side and suffered the rebuke of Jesus. Like Judas, I might have put my objection in practical terms, but I’m afraid that for me the real issue would have been the fact that the woman was creating a most uncomfortable scene. She showed no reserve whatsoever–no self-respect. John describes her as wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair. With her hair! I don’t suppose I’ve ever heard anybody say this before, but there was something tacky about the whole scene. I don’t mean any irreverence here. I mean only to say that according to the world’s ideas of what is acceptable and tasteful and what is tacky, the spectacle at Simon the Leper’s house comes down on the tacky side of the ledger. And yet Jesus was very clear: we should honor this woman’s devotion.  To an upside-down world, Jesus came with upside-down solutions. The lame shall enter first, he said. And the deaf and the leprous and the tacky and the not-quite respectable–those, like Deafy and Simon, who are the butt of the joke rather than those who joke at their expense. As Frederich Buechner wrote, Blessed are those who see that, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, [Jesus] is who he says he is and does what he says he does if they will only, at admittedly great cost to their pride, their common sense, their sad vision of what is and is not possible in the stormy world, let him do it. Blessed is he, in other words, who gets the joke.

Back when The Rabbit Room first went live, part of our mission was to indulge in the pleasure of good and beautiful art. We launched with the understanding that there would always be plenty of sites online where readers could form a community around picking apart and criticizing what they didn’t like about certain music, books and film, but that this wouldn’t be that sort of place. Here at the Rabbit Room, we would focus our energy on the books, music, film and ideas that made us want to gather our friends, sit them down and oblige them to discover the Josh Ritters, Hurt Lockers, and Peace Like A Rivers of the world. Another unspoken, but pretty obvious reality concerning our DNA can be summarized by slightly modifying that wonderful Buechner quote Eric Peters likes to put before us—“the story of any one of us [here at the Rabbit Room] is in some measure the story of us all—[we’re nerds of varying degrees].” So I don’t need to draw anyone’s attention to the fact that in one year Peter Jackson is giving the world the first installment of his two film cinematic version of The Hobbit. He just released the first trailer, and friends, it took the interweb less than two puffs of pipe-weed to start complaining about the suspected inconsistencies, apparent mangling of the book’s storyline, and unnecessary inclusions of characters who don’t belong in The Hobbit. I presume the majority of these criticisms spring from a genuine love of Tolkien’s book and a reverence for not just the truth and beauty found in its pages, but also for the nostalgia it awakens in us. And I respect that. So it is to that love that I will direct this humble appeal. I remember, like it was yesterday, sitting in the theater watching The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time and being struck by this thought: “I have never seen anything like this before! How in the world did what’s his name who made this film create such a realistic and dangerous world?” I had no idea I was entering in to what would become far and away one of the best movie-going experiences of my life. I had no idea this Peter Jackson guy was about to make 90% of the movies I would see afterward so, how should I say this, average looking. I had no idea that a Hobbit could make me cry or a rising king could make me examine my own attitudes about adulthood. Did Jackson change some things up in those first three films? He sure did. Were all those changes necessary? Probably not. I don’t know. But can anyone accuse Peter Jackson of being careless with Tolkien’s masterpiece? I think not. And can anyone say those movies are anything less than a labor of love from an exceptionally gifted filmmaker? Come on. To me, The Lord of the Rings films are, in themselves, amazing works of art. And they are the fruit of countless hours invested by hundreds of people each working in the areas of their skill and talent. For me, Peter Jackson has more than earned the right to tell the story of The Hobbit in the way he wants to as a filmmaker. I don’t presume to know much about what it takes to turn a book into a film—not to mention doing so more than half a century after the books were written. But I imagine that since Jackson is working in such a different format that he has to make certain adjustments to tell the story the best he can. As an artist, he has to trust his visual instincts. And I give Peter Jackson the benefit of the doubt that whatever editorial decisions he made in the first three films that deviated from the book were because he wanted to strengthen (not weaken) the cinematic version of the story he so obviously loves. So Peter Jackson, I know you don’t need me to say this, but still I want you to know one thing: I’ve got your back. Thanks in advance for making The Hobbit, for taking your sweet time doing it, for loving Tolkien’s books so much and for being such a good steward of the story of Middle Earth. But so help me, if you fabricate a tawdry love affair between Gandalf and Galadriel, I take back every word.

Todd and Christie Bragg gave me a gift, and I’m going to attempt to regift some of what they gave me with these words. Todd turned 40 the other day. It was Sunday, December 18—the day of the Behold the Lamb of God concert at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. Christie put together a huge after party for Todd in the upper balcony of the Ryman. She invited what looked like at least a hundred friends. But it wasn’t just a party. It was a surprise party. Todd is a drummer in Nashville and he’s worked with countless musicians in this town over the years, so he knows a lot of people. But Todd is not just a drummer with a lot of connections. He’s a very kind and generous friend who, when you’re talking with him, treats you like you’re the only person in the world. So this party wasn’t just a room full of business associates. I imagine most all of them would call Todd not just a friend, but a dear friend. Christie is cut from the same cloth as her husband in this respect. These two serve others in the most beautiful way. After the concert I found myself up in that balcony with all those people, but because I hadn’t brought my pass to actually get in to the party, the Ryman security guards made me stand over by the stairs, apart from the gathering of friends. At first, I was irked by the security staff’s unwillingness to let me stand with the rest of the folks only 30 feet away, but when I began to assess my position, I realized I had a unique vantage point for what was about to happen—I stood in a place where I could watch Todd come up the stairs, see this throng of people for the first time and then react. It was beautiful. There’s almost no way to make a crowd that big stay quiet, but when they got the signal that Todd and Christie were on their way up, they went silent as a stone. They ascended the stairs, and then it happened—everyone yelled “Surprise!” People were laughing, waving, and eventually someone yelled, “Speech!” Todd tried, God bless him. He tried. But Todd had lost the ability to speak. Then Christie revealed a grace and strength that took this from being a surprise birthday party to a holy moment. She addressed her husband of 20 years in front of us. She spoke words of life and grace and affirmation and affection for him. She spoke these words to Todd, and also to the rest of us looking on. Strong. Todd looked at his wife and said, “You got me. Wow. Look at all these faces of the people I love. Wow!” I figure that given the best scenarios and the most closely kept secrets, most individuals will only step into one, maybe two properly executed surprise parties in their lives. If that. Either we’ll never have one thrown for us, or we’ll sniff it out and then just play along. I spent that morning preaching about how the angels visited the shepherds in the fields outside Bethlehem, and how it started with one angel appearing to the shepherds, but then as soon as he had told them that in the city of David a Savior—Christ, the Lord—had been born unto them, suddenly a great multitude of the heavenly host appeared praising God, singing, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to those on whom his favor rests!” It was as if one angel had been chosen to bring the news of Jesus’ coming to the shepherds, so the others said, “Alright, but as soon as you spit it out, we’re bursting in—because this is the greatest news ever!” It was as though they were waiting behind the celestial corner of heaven’s door, and as soon as they were able they rushed in to celebrate what God was doing. Seeing Todd take in that celebration made me think of those shepherds and what it must have been like to have the host of heaven throw a surprise party for them. “This gift is for you!” the angels told them. There’s so much I think I know about what God is doing in this world. So much I think I have figured out. Todd’s party awakened in me a longing to be surprised by the joy of what I never suspected, much less understood. Advent invites us to consider our lives in light of God’s salvation. And one thing it awakened in me, thanks to Todd and Christie, is that in this life I am being led by the hand of God through the concert hall that is this world, and one day he will lead me to the stairs, and together we will ascend. God only knows what I will find there, but I’m certain my reaction will be something like, “You got me. Wow. Look at all these faces of the people I love. Wow!”

In part one, I talked about the outset of the journey. Part two was a look back at the lack of pattern over the years, which explains the appropriate lack of readiness, which, while uncomfortable, can be very good thing. In this post, thanks to your excellent feedback, I’m going to try and get more specific about the process and try to answer some of your questions. Right off the bat, let me address this question a few of you asked: Which comes first, the lyrics or the music? This question has been asked of songwriters for as long as there has been songwriting, I imagine. The answer isn’t very satisfying, I’m afraid, which may be why it keeps coming up. The answer is “Yes.” Or, if you prefer, “D) All the above.” Sometimes the lyric comes first, sometimes the music comes first, and sometimes they come all at once, like the doorbell and the phone ringing at the same time. When someone claims to have discovered a foolproof method for creating art—other than a willingness to work very hard at it—I doubt either their honesty or their skill. I’d dig into that more, but I want to get us back to the studio. Reading through your questions, I realized the best way to approach this may be to choose a song from the new record and give you a play-by-play of what we ended up doing. On the Steven Curtis Chapman tour last fall, I was desperate to write songs. I knew we would be hitting the studio in a matter of weeks, and I didn’t have a single new song written. Being the opener on a tour is a great opportunity to write because of the abundance of free time. Not only that, it’s inspiring to be rubbing elbows with other songwriters and musicians. I remember hearing Billy Joel say once that when he faces writer’s block he puts on a tweed jacket, brings a notebook to a smoky bar in New York, sits in a corner and pretends like he’s a songwriter; sometimes it’s enough to convince himself. There’s something to be said for that, especially when you’re susceptible to certain voices in your head. It reminds me of George MacDonald’s admonition to know God by obeying him. If you want to know the mind of God, do what he says. Jesus, who knew the Father completely, also obeyed the Father completely. Similarly (though I know it’s a stretch), if you want to know what it’s like to be a songwriter, put on your tweed and write a song. It’s as simple and as difficult as that. Back to the tour. Every time I found a few hours of free time I ducked into a choir room or Sunday School classroom with my guitar and tried to find a song. By the middle of the tour I had written one and started about seven, but I was on the hunt for more. Then one day in soundcheck, one dropped out of the sky. Ben Shive started playing this really cool piano part, then Ken Lewis started drumming to it, and in moments everyone in the room stopped what they were doing. Everyone in the band hurried over to their instruments and without a word started playing along. Brent Milligan put on his bass. Josh Wilson and I started strumming. Harold Rubens at the soundboard stopped tweaking and started listening. Something cool was happening. If you’re a musician or a songwriter, chances are you know what I’m talking about. I’m not usually one for jamming, but sometimes someone discovers a chord progression or a melody or a rhythm that’s like a magic key. It opens an invisible door to a wide field of inspiration and beauty. It’s a rare occurrence, and I imagine it feels quite a bit like the Holy Spirit descending on the house, and we’re suddenly speaking the tongues of men and angels. Lest you think I’m claiming that something I’ve written is that kind of inspired, let me make a disclaimer. First of all, who knows? God can do what he wants, with whomever he wants. But the song as it’s written is never as beautiful as it was in that fleeting, exhilarating moment of inspiration. The song’s potential is shimmering beyond the veil somewhere, while the song that you finally write is almost always haunted by a feeling of disappointment. When people talk about a book or a song being not so much finished as abandoned, that’s what they mean. They had a picture in their minds or a feeling in their heart that they’re trying to bring into space and time, and there’s just no way (yet) to deliver it in fulness. The song in reality is as different from what you imagined as a portrait is from the painter’s subject. At some point (usually thanks to the mercy of a deadline), you have to put down the brush and give thanks for the chance to have made an attempt. This has caused me some grief, and a lot of frustration. There are songs on my older albums (I won’t tell you which) that I had dreams about, but even as we recorded them I could feel the magic fading. It was like trying to shave as the battery in my Norelco died a slow death and left me half-whiskery. (I thought of that analogy because it happened to me about an hour ago.) The songwriting process for me is about trying to find the words and melodies that will get me as close as possible to the summit of the mountain I first glimpsed through the clouds. Most often, I’m nowhere close. I end up in the desert somewhere, turning the map this way and that. But sometimes I end up at least in the foothills, and I go to bed happy; I haven’t summited, but I can at least see the peak and imagine what it would be like to stand there. Those are a few of the thoughts that went through my noggin as we vamped Ben’s chord progression. Over the mic I asked Harold at the soundboard to record what we were doing, and he gave me a thumbs up; he didn’t say a word because he didn’t want to break the spell. Right away, for reasons I don’t know, I thought of Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road. It’s an amazing (and amazingly dark) book about a father and son trying to survive the apocalypse. They’re traversing the wasteland of America with hunger at their heels and man-eating wretches on their heels, too, trying to reach the ocean where the father believes they’ll find help. Along the way, he tells his little boy again and again that they have to “carry the fire”. It’s a simple, beautiful metaphor that can mean quite a few things. I started singing that phrase during soundcheck, and pretty quickly staked my claim on Ben’s piano part by asking if I could write something to it. Here’s the recording from that day. Listening to it, you may wonder, “Why all the fuss?” It may not hit you at all. All I know is, it led me to a song. (That’s Josh Wilson playing the pretty acoustic guitar stuff.)https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/CarrytheFireSoundcheck.mp3 It was about a month later that I finally managed to write the verses. They came after a long, hard conversation with a dear friend whose marriage was foundering. He wept, and I ran out of words. I finally tried to put down in a song what I wanted to say to encourage him, and came up with this: Carry the Fire I will hold your hand, love As long as I can, love Though the powers rise against us Though your fears assail you And your body may fail you There’s a fire that burns within us And we dream in the night Of a city descending With the sun in the center And a peace unending I will, I will carry the fire I will, I will carry the fire Carry the fire for you And we kneel in the water The sons and the daughters And we hold our hearts before us And we look to the distance And raise our resistance In the face of the forces Gathered against us And we dream in the night Of a King and a kingdom Where joy writes the songs And the innocent sing them I will carry the fire for you Oh, sing on, sing on (Light up the darkness) When your hope is gone, sing on And we dream in the night Of a feast and a wedding And the Groom in his glory When the bride is made ready I will carry the fire for you A few words might be tweaked here and there before all is said and done, but that’s more or less the lyric. Caitlin asked about getting too comfortable with formulae or song structures, as opposed to (I assume) pushing yourself into unfamiliar territory. I think this is where exercising good old fashioned discernment is the thing. If you’re a lover of good songs, and a student of good songwriting, you’ll eventually learn how and when to break the rules. There are conventions we all recognize (i.e., verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus, or if you rewind to 1989, verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/ELECTRIC GUITAR SOLO/chorus), and most popular songs these days fall into some version of that. It’s not a bad place to start, and it’s a tried-and-true way to structure a song. But you also have to be willing to follow your nose. You have to be willing to let the song go where it wants. I think that’s the best question to ask, when you come to a writing crossroads: “Where does the story want to go?” I got home from a weekend of touring yesterday and my daughter Skye (9) had written me a song. It was a sweet, sad song about how she misses me when I’m gone, complete with a verse, a chorus, another verse, a chorus, and a pretty hook of a la-la-la melody. She’s pretty brilliant, and is already saying things like, “I was going to do another chorus, but the la-la-la felt better there.” She’s too young to care too much about song structures, or to feel pressure to conform to the confines of a radio single, or to get hung up on the coherence of an idea. She just sits down at the piano with an emotion and tries to fashion it into a song, without self-consciousness or hubris—just freedom.  It’s a great reminder to me of how best to approach the process. The Kingdom belongs to such as these. This new song, “Carry the Fire” isn’t much like anything I’ve ever written. I’m fine with that. Actually, I’m excited about it. To answer Caitlyn’s question another way, the way to push yourself into new territory isn’t about pushing yourself as much as it is allowing yourself to be pulled along. I was talking with Sally Lloyd-Jones last week, and she described the way she felt going into her new project: “I feel like I’m following clues.” Exactly. Here’s a snippet of the song as it its early stages in the studio. This is a scratch vocal, scratch guitars, and no bass—so there’s a lot more that has to happen before I even start singing the keeper vocal. Then comes background vocals, guitars, mixing and mastering. So don’t judge too harshly. (Pretty please.)https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/CarrytheFireSoundcheck.mp3 ————————— Well, I’ve run out of room here. I guess there’s going to have to be a part four, and I’ll try and get to the rest of your questions there. Thanks for reading, folks!

A bird in flight is a beautiful thing. We watch and are captivated by its elegant cooperation with the wind, its effortless sailing set off by broad, beating wings. Reversing the fate of the living room canary, we are caught, if only for a moment, by the wild grace of its art. Would it draw us further in to know where it began its flight? What if the tree had been in flames and it only just got out alive? What if every cheerful chirrup was a thanksgiving hymn? Eric Peters has crafted his greatest album to date. I am almost confident enough to say “by far.” That would be saying an awful lot and only time will tell. The story Eric tells on Birds of Relocation is his own escape story. It’s the airborne travelogue of a grateful, singed survivor, the record of one songbird whose shining eyes are turned suddenly skyward. It begins with “The Old Year,” the proverbial bough from which this bird has flown. And he has two words for that past, that burning bough, that old year of denial: “Ha ha.” “Ha ha to the old year, goodbye to the cold fear, Gonna cry when I need it, smile when I need it, Goodbye, denial.” “The Old Year” is not quite anthemic, but it’s close. It’s artful affirmation is a theme threaded throughout the record: “I’m gonna live like a living soul, I’m gonna write it on my wretched bones, And stop waiting for happily ever after.” And we’re off. Eric’s faithful fans won’t be disappointed with either the sound or the substance of the record. Bird of Relocation features the best weapons in Eric’s arsenal: that voice, those words, and their melodic marriage. That voice, migrating a wider range than ever before, is the central pillar. The words are made in the image of their maker, a pilgrim poet who seems surprised that he’s made something beautiful. The melodic issue is musical magic. The second song is fun. “Lost and Found” might cite Paul Simon and The Chieftains as sources, 80s pop and Irish echoes. It’s likely the most catchy song on the record–and that’s saying a lot. Eric’s brand of folk-pop, where often desperate sadness will dress up in the happy clothes of a catchy tune, is best observed here–only the theme isn’t a bit sad. It’s a celebration of turning away from the darkness and embracing the bright sunshine of a resurrected reality. “This is the world turning upside down,         When the light that was lost is found.                 Come see the dawn with the darkness refused,         Today is yesterday made new.” “Don’t Hold Your Breath” is another catchy song that you’ll be singing for weeks. It’s been widely shared as a music video (here). No doubt many of you have already heard it and experienced the happy impossibility of getting it out of your head. “Where Would I Go” is the first love song on the album. Eric always has a song for his wife, Danielle, on each record. These tend to be some of my favorites in the EP catalog. I’ve seen Eric play many concerts and he always plays at least one of them, singing about the love he’s left behind at home. But she can never really be left behind while he carries her with him in these songs. “Where Would I Go,” is Eric at his catchiest and most caught. Anyone who has been through the minefield of matrimony will appreciate this heartfelt, happy homage to his true love. “Voices” relocates Eric back on the burning bough, battling with the darkness and doubt that he had hoped to fly away from. It’s a war we understand if we are awake enough to see, alive enough to feel, frail enough to fear, and weak enough to sometimes doubt–especially ourselves. When we listen to the voices that tell us we are worthless, we recapitulate the Fall. In an aching verse, we travel back: “In the garden when we lived inside the garden, Creatures bright and shining, we were dust brought to life. In the silence when we lean into the silence, We choose the things that hates us most and rest upon its lies.” We follow him in and–very importantly–out, as he emerges listening, not to the voices of condemnation, but instead to the saints’ and angels’ song. Here is an apt allusion to that great refrain of hymnody. “Oh love of God, how rich and pure, how measureless and strong. It shall forever more endure, the saints’ and angels’ song.” “Today Dream” is another occasion to meet domestic Eric, a funny and poignant picture of a present-absent father. This is the Eric of escaping daydreams. In the song, he takes his wife’s side in an argument against himself, against his tendency to disappear and disengage. Never one to shy from self-examination, it’s a mirror he holds up to his own face, but many of us will see ourselves and be moved to move on, more awake than before. It’s a call to being present everywhere you are, especially at home. “Soul and Flesh” is another lovely tribute to Danielle, one of my favorites. It echoes Johnny Cash’s “Flesh and Blood” with its premise and features a wonderfully simple chorus. “She loves me for my smile,             And for the crow’s feet on my eyes.             She loves the song deep inside my chest, She loves me soul and flesh.” “Different, Separate Lives.” This is a rollicking, Americana exploration of how separate and together we all are. If you are the dancing type and the cowboy hat-wearing type, then this is your moment. I neither dance nor cowboy, but this song is just plain fun. “No Stone Unturned.” I got a sneak peek on this one a few weeks back and it’s been sliding around inside my head and heart for that entire time. Like so much of Eric’s music, it grows on and in you. This is another love song, only this one is aimed heavenward, a touching tribute to God’s power to name us, claim us, and never give up on us. It’s one of Eric’s most spiritually searching, deeply truthful songs about God’s character, revealed in fitting metaphors with a stirred voice. Like so much of this record, there’s a thankfulness underlying every note. “We are rough and ready, We’re primed to steal the show, And though we’re prone to doubt it We’re selves of our former shadows. I was listing and listening in the wind It was not that God was enemy But that I had not been friend. I am ashamed (of my less-wild lovers),                 Deserted was my name (until you gave me another).     But you pursued (all the torches left to burn),         In the midnight searching you leave no stone unturned.” “The New Year.” Again, many have heard this excellent song from the preview posted recently. If “The Old Year” looked back, this song, appropriately enough, looks forward to a brighter horizon. The lyrics say it best. Here is a small section: “This is the year when laughter douses charred and burnt-out dreams, This is the year when wrens return to nest in storm-blown trees. Is this the year of relocation from boughs of old despair? This is the year to perch on hope’s repair. Oh, oh, oh it’s a new year.                     Oh, oh, oh it’s a brand new light.                 Oh, oh, oh can you believe it?                     It’s the skies that we dream of. “Fighting for Life” is a perfect ending for this record. For a moment the music makes you believe you have literally ended on a sad note. But it’s a song that gathers momentum to become a final broadside against the darkness, a declaration of interdependence. Here is an acknowledgment of the realities of pain, of the sometimes unsettled, unsettling future. But in the face of this inevitable struggle, Eric Peters is finally defiant. “I go into the darkness carrying a light, I will have no fear because I’m not alone, I got angels’ voices and friends who love me for who I am. So when the waters come, I fly above this flooded earth looking for a sign of life, And I relocate on boughs of hope, Like a living soul, remembering: In a little while, in a little while, The ghosts return to noise. Oh, but not right now, not right now, The sky must be enjoyed.” This song, and the record, resonate deeply with me. I don’t have a life verse, but if I did, it would be this passage from Ecclesiastes. Maybe that’s why Eric has always felt like a kindred spirit. I suspect you might be one too. “Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun.     So if a person lives many years, let him rejoice in them all; but let him remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity.     Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.     Remove vexation from your heart, and put away pain from your body, for youth and the dawn of life are vanity.” (Ecclesiastes 11:7-10 ESV) Just in time for spring, this songbird is loose and eying bright blue skies. For Eric Peters, it’s the flight of his life, but you’re invited to come along. There is so much to see, hear, and appreciate if you do. There are predators lurking, a darkness along the corners of our eyes. We may be troubled where we perch, but this is the year for relocation. It’s finally plain:  “The sky must be enjoyed.”

I am fickle. I am also dramatic. The combination of the two often leads me to make inane decisions and impulsive choices. That’s the reason I took four full months to make the decision to leave the church that I founded eight years ago. The Mercy House has provided my identity for almost a full decade now: serving and shepherding and living life alongside the most creative, missional, loving community of people I could ever hope for. The Sunday morning gathering was often the last thing we worried about in leadership meetings because everyone was so busy with ministry throughout the rest of the week. In short, I had the easiest job any pastor could hope for. But my time had been coming. For the last couple of years, I’ve journaled about a longing to write full-time. Book ideas were written down but never spoken aloud. New endeavors were silently hoped for as an introverted side began to emerge–much to the surprise of my extroverted, church-planting, social butterfly self of old. Those thoughts were always deemed foolish, selfish, childish or, at the very least, something to get to later. But for the last four months, I’ve considered the leaving that just happened this last Sunday. “More than a season” is what I knew I needed if I were going to be able to trust my instincts. And for four full months, I wrestled silently and maintained a steady resolve that it was time for me to go. The church was in great shape, new leadership was ready (and desiring) to take over. The exit would be seamless. Then came the last two months of notice I gave the church. The date that I would leave my post, March 4, was coming up. From the outset, everyone was so supportive. “We’re so excited for you. We love you. We support you. Can’t wait to see what God has for you in this new phase of life.” Those were the statements from all corners of the church community coming in the form of cards, e-mails, phone calls, and meals together. It was echoed this last Sunday when I felt the love and support of a community telling me it was my turn to step out and follow a calling that God had for me, even if it took me away. Then came the fear. Yes, the fear. I knew it would come. I told those closest to me to expect it. They would ask, “How are you doing with everything?” I would respond, “I’m excited about this new step, but I know I won’t always feel that way.” Why? Because the fear always comes. Forty-eight hours ago, I was giddy with excitement to finally be able to write about long-held ideas. In fact, I recently read through an old journal from five years ago. On a trip to Ireland, I’d marked the exact same “Write This Someday” list that I still have today. But now everything feels different. It’s hard not to cave to the fear. I’m sure you know the questions: What have I done? Did I make the right move? Even worse are the statements: No one will care what you do next. Nice job. You just abandoned any platform or influence you have. It was all enough to make me wonder if I could secretly run in on my last Sunday and declare, “Just joking!” Could I get my job back? Can I take a mulligan? While I knew that was silly, I also wondered whether I should start looking for another ministry job or even a “regular job.” Never mind that I had built up enough freelance work to write full-time in the first place (so it’s not a total faith-filled leap with me at a desk in a cabin in some woodlands wondering where I’ll find my next meal), I just know that I am scared of it all. Quick aside: This is nothing new for me. I once went away for a four day monastic retreat to pray, write, and create some space in my life. I fled after ninety minutes. (I wrote about it here at the RR about four years ago.) For the first time since I can remember, I now have space. For the first time, I will have the room to chase all of the goals I say that I’ve held. For the first time, I have to follow through. I am always so inspired when the rest of you follow through. I read posts about a man writing songs about being an astronaut and know that I have my own ship waiting for me to board. The songwriters, poets, authors and creators here of all types have been a source of inspiration for me since the outset of the Rabbit Room, but only to the point where I nodded my head and thought, “Someday.” Now that I’m past the point of excuse, I find that I don’t want to do this after all. Only I know that I do. Today is the first day of my new life, and here I sit: coffee in my Rabbit Room mug, The Murph is in the printer (my weird cat who oddly sleeps inside the printer tray anytime I write), laptop ready. Suddenly I don’t want to be here. I know enough to know that we often don’t want to be in the place where obedience becomes necessary. I also know this is where I am supposed to be. At this point all I can do is trust and hope the things that I write find their own platform. And even if they don’t, I have a feeling that it wouldn’t be the worst thing if they end up as text files on a hard drive on some old computer. The point here is about the journey and I suppose it’s time I start my next one.

I could tell by the tone of my mother’s voice that something had happened–-even over the phone I sensed the gentle sadness–-and I knew with a pang of kindred sorrow what it was. Aunt Ruth had died. Quietly, my mother told me, in her sleep. 104 years old and the last of my grandmother’s sisters. The last of a generation that was mighty upon the earth. I never thought the Aunts would die. It never seriously occurred to me to fear it–they were too foundational to the proper functioning of the world in general and my life in particular: like Corinthian columns fluted and lovely and made to bear the enormous weight of life with seemingly effortless grace, especially in such a precision of placement as these five sisters had aligned themselves. Even frail little Aunt Ruth, an invalid these forty years, had borne her load manfully, with a core of iron and steel beneath her thin housecoat. Out of all these mighty pillars only she had remained, her faded, almost transparent little body but thinly veiling the light and fire of a still-vibrant mind within. And now she was gone, too. The last time I saw her was on a broiling day in late August, nearly as stifling indoors as out in typical Deep South fashion. But it was a warmth that enveloped me like an embrace and distilled with it the essence of summer days long-ago but not lost. We came in through the kitchen and the scent assailed me even more potently than the heat had done, for it was precisely the smell of every other Aunt’s kitchen, a kind-of incense of sausage and cornmeal and Wesson oil, with simmering field peas thrown into the mix. (Grandma’s kitchen always seemed heavier on the sausage-side for some reason, and Aunt Tiny’s, of course, was imbued with the perfume of caramel icing.) Though there were no field peas simmering that day, nor any other indication of domestic activity, there had been enough over the years, I imagine, to steep the very walls with nourishing aromas so that they exuded a collective memorial of the sovereigns in print aprons that had presided there for so long. Aunt Ruth was lost in a recliner and a pale green afghan and her eyes wandered listlessly while the conversation went on because she could hear so little of it and see nothing at all. But the minute my mother asked for a tale or a reminiscence from the past those eyes came to life. They sparkled; they shone like a girl’s in the first headiness of youth. The little hands worked excitedly and the honey-sweet voice droned on and on about the old days with a lilting that was like music. She told us about the first automobiles that they saw down on the river roads, and how every time a car went past their old farmhouse it would honk for sheer neighborliness and all the children would come running out to see it and wave. How the first time she drove a car herself she was twelve years old and her mother was sick and she had to go and get her daddy. How on her honeymoon in ’29, she and Uncle Bugg drove to Washington D.C. in a red Ford Roadster and went up for a tour in an airplane. She spun a magic that afternoon in her simple words so fraught with happy remembrance, so that the steamboats on the Altamaha wavered into existence once more and plied their course through the murky waters. And the live oaks that arched over the deep tram road down in the swamp rang with the voices of children long-since departed, swinging across the chasm like so many monkeys. Even the terror of the stunt flier that crashed into the Number One bridge before their very eyes when they were picnicking on the river as a family had a certain conjuring of grotesquerie about it, like something one might encounter within the pages of Flannery O’Connor. Her manner changed with the telling of that tale; her voice dropped low and the bright eyes were hooded with an unforgotten horror. A dark thread amid the brighter ones, throwing color and joy and light and goodness into sharp relief. Philip fed her just the right sort of questions, shouting politely across the room, and the glances he and I exchanged expressed our mutual enjoyment. How often, after all, does one have the opportunity to spend the afternoon with someone who can boast of over 100 years’ worth of experience in this world? And yet, as we sat in Aunt Ruth’s parlor that day we could have been in the ‘Front Room’ of any of the Aunts. There were the same 1950’s-era portraits of long-since grown children on the wall, the same best furniture, the same aura of gentility and dignity. Each of the sisters’ homes had their own unique stamp, but some indefinable likeness in Aunt Ruth’s parlor invoked all of them at once. From this distance they all seem to have been painted the same pale, limey green, though I know they were not: Aunt Tiny’s was splashed with the color of her bold and vivid oil paintings, and Aunt Babe’s had pale carpet which was stiff on bare legs and religiously unsoiled. Grandma’s had marble-topped tables and a beautiful antique lamp dangling with crystal prisms which was the absolute only thing in her house she ever worried about us breaking. Nevertheless a uniform impression of coolness reigned on those sultry afternoons when we’d sit in state in one or another of them and give an account for ourselves: our grades–first in preeminence–and then our music and perhaps our ballet recitals or tennis matches. (Too many ‘extra-curriculars’ were somewhat suspect, the general consensus being summed up in my grandmother’s fear that we might be ‘jack of all trades; master of none’.) And they wanted to know about our friends, which says the world of their genuine interest in our lives. My grandmother knew every one of my friends by name, though she’d never met most of them, and she kept such a detailed mental account of them that whenever we talked she could ask me if Jenifer was still in the marching band or where Ann was going to school or if Amanda and her new husband had bought a house, a fact which, naturally, I took for granted at the time, as we do some of the most precious and genuine things in life, but which strikes me now with a sweet stab of belated gratitude. (We didn’t always sit in the Front Room, of course. Only on such calls of ceremonial reckoning. On other occasions we’d settle comfortably in rockers and recliners under the ceiling fan in the den, or in aluminum folding chairs out in the back yard. But no matter where you ended up, you always came in through the kitchen. No one ever entered an Aunt’s house any other way. And no one ever knocked–a bang of the screened door and a trilling “Yoo-hoo!” was the only announcement that was required.) I was in a state of resolute bliss that August afternoon at Aunt Ruth’s, overwhelmed alike with her memories and my own, and every sense sated with time-erasing impressions. I clung to the moments almost desperately, dreading the time when we had to go, back on the highway, back to the city and the present age and the noise and confusion and hurry. I wanted to be a little girl again with a new piece to perform on Aunt Ruth’s piano–always a bit trying as I was constantly reminded that Aunt Ruth had done the very elegant and appropriate thing of going to Conservatory. (Though I really think as a child that I had some nebulous notion of Aunt Ruth sitting in a starched white dress in a room of potted palms and tall windows.) It would have been wildly inappropriate for any of her sisters to have done something so purely ornamental; but for Aunt Ruth it fit her personality like a fine, kid-leather glove. The whole afternoon was a gift, a window opened mercifully, if briefly, upon my past, granting me glimpses of things I thought vanished forever. Aunt Ruth was enough like my grandmother, in voice, in appearance, even–though so shrunken and tiny–to make me believe for one sweet moment that a beneficent Providence had brought her before me once more. I wanted to throw my arms around Aunt Ruth’s neck that afternoon, and kiss her wrinkled cheek in tearful greeting, for Grandma’s sake, and for her own self-effacement in looking so much like her to me. That’s what I was doing inside as I knelt beside her chair and pressed the beautiful claw-like hands that were once so proficient in Chopin and Schubert in my own young ones. For even now, so many years after Grandma’s death, it’s only the irrefutable sight of her tombstone that makes me realize she’s really gone. And Aunt Babe laid to rest just down the way. Aunt Mary Mac nearby and Aunt Tiny over the hill. And now, at the last, little Aunt Ruth, sleeping beside her parents till that trumpet of the Lord rouses them all together. It just cannot be. These were the Immortals. These were the Amazons: diminutive ladies with their cool, fresh front parlors and their very decided opinions on the cut of a roast and the year’s crop of mustard greens and the latest Washington politics and the dispensations of the young lives in their charges–lives loved better than their own. They are the stuff of legend, and fittingly so. For the world will not see their like again.

Although we may believe Jesus died for our sins, and has given us Heaven, we often carry the weight of a lie within our hearts, thinking the commands are there to obey by exerting the power of our will; we attempt to find our identity in obedience. We think success in obeying means we are “good,” and failure means we are “bad.” This is the living death of which Paul wrote in Romans 7. It is the wretched-man existence, not the new creation life of union with Christ. It is a Christian saved from Hell in eternity by grace but trying to get free from the hell of his present sins by the exertion of his own will power. This is the backwards Christian life. To oversimplify, we think erroneously that we’re saved from Hell so we’re to try by our will power to show God how grateful we are in return by being good, by trying to keep his commands. This must be reversed. The commands are there to reveal when we’re not abiding, not living from our present-tense, God-given identity. They shine the light when we have tripped up in our trust and have started again to try being righteous by our own steam. Failure to abide, to rest, to remain, to faithe, to rely, leads to the frustrating life of Romans 7; we do what we hate, and don’t do what we love. We self-condemn, see ourselves as wretched sinners, and start again into trying to overcome the mess. 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. How do we do that? In Christ there is now no condemnation. Now. We recognize our identity no longer comes from performance. We have been given a gift of sonship. It is something bestowed by God; we had nothing to do with it. We have been washed, and cleansed, and filled by the Holy Spirit. That is given to us by grace. We are partakers of the divine nature. That gift doesn’t diminish or disappear based on performance. We recognize that even when we sin, there is no “I have to get back to God.” He is there, in us, present, available, even though we have not recognized him as such, haven’t drawn on his resources; instead, we have lived from a false idea of our own independent, fleshly ability to be good. Exerting such ability ends either in Pharisaic pride or self-condemnation, because we are attempting to live from a mentality which thinks it can be good independently from God’s power within. Our real identity simply is. It is a non-negotiable gift from God by his grace. When we step out of it, we thank God for the Blood, make necessary  apology or reparation to others, and move back into reliance on our real identity of being partakers of the divine nature. Of course, we want to be good. How, then, to be who we are? Playing music at a high level involves a lot of background knowledge and practice, years of it. Undergirding that, though, is an attitude of faith that drives perseverance in learning and growth. If a person doesn’t have that, much of his work will come to nothing. “If you are going to be a Christian, it is going to take the whole of you, brains and all,” wrote C.S. Lewis. Also, an old pastor of mine often said, “You don’t have to park your brain at the door to be a Christian.” So, knowledge is involved. But undergirding our growth in knowledge of “What is a truly Christian life? Who is God? Who am I? Why am I here?” is a faith which continually goes to God for the necessary resources – the God who claims to live inside us, in Christ, by the Holy Spirit. From God and God alone proceeds all necessary virtue: love, joy, peace, patient endurance, gentleness, goodness, faith, humility, moderation. The varied fruits of the Spirit are just that – fruits proceeding from the Holy Spirit into and through the abiding branch. Without this reliance, much of our Christian life will turn to dust and ashes on that Day. We have to begin to know who we are, and that means a Biblical definition. Not what the world says, not what the flesh says, not what the devil says. Not even what our friends say, or what our pastor says. Who does God say I am? The New Testament epistles are a litany of our real identity, and a word-picture of what that identity will look like when expressed. How to live from our real identity? How to be what we are meant to be? Dig. The Word is full of it, and the Word spoken in faith causes the invisible to become the visible. Seeking, and the subsequent right seeing, will bring the goodness we desire. Knowing our identity, not just theoretically but in practical experience, brings a love-life through us, as 1John 4:12-13 says: “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. 13 Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit.” We know that we are dwelling, abiding, relying if our life is showing forth love. If our eye is single to our real identity in Christ, that Christ within us is the source and ground of our being, our body will be full of light. If we are doubleminded, seeing our identity half from God’s Facts and half from the world’s definitions, we will be full of darkness, and manifesting that darkness. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these will be given to you as well.” We will gain energy from the sustenance of the Spirit, and be walking clothed in his righteousness and not our own striving. So, we must ask ourselves this question. “Do I see myself as God sees me? When the Word says I am dead to sin (Rom 6:2), do I agree with it, or hedge it about with all sorts of mental reservations? When God says I am a new creation, that the old man was crucified (Rom 6:6), do I eat that and say it is true, within myself? When the Word says I was buried with Christ through immersion into death, and raised to walk in newness of life (more Romans 6), do I faithe that as true, count it as fact, regardless of how I feel? Faith is conquered doubt. Do we doubt God and his Word? Then something has to give.

Someone pointed me to this letter the other day, and the author (James K. A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College) gave us permission to re-post it here. As someone who has been in hundreds of churches over the years, I resonate with much of what Smith says. I’ve wanted to write something similar before, but didn’t because I didn’t want it to be seen as some veiled critique of my own church—a church I love. This is a touchy subject, and it’s easy to get opinionated without affording much grace toward the music leaders. I agreed to lead the songs one Sunday at our church a few years ago, and by the time I had chosen the songs, learned the songs, chosen the keys, prepared the slides, called the band, rehearsed with the band, soundchecked with the band, and played in the service I was exhausted. My week was shot. I learned two things: 1) music leaders at churches work harder than most people realize, and 2) never agree to lead songs at church again if you hope to get anything else done that week. However, it doesn’t do to keep silent if something’s really detrimental to the spiritual nourishment of the church. I’ll just come right out and say that I happen to agree with all three of his main points. What do you think? An Open Letter to Praise Bands, by James K. A. Smith Dear Praise Band, I so appreciate your willingness and desire to offer up your gifts to God in worship. I appreciate your devotion and celebrate your faithfulness–schlepping to church early, Sunday after Sunday, making time for practice mid-week, learning and writing new songs, and so much more. Like those skilled artists and artisans that God used to create the tabernacle (Exodus 36), you are willing to put your artistic gifts in service to God. So please receive this little missive in the spirit it is meant: as an encouragement to reflect on the practice of “leading worship.” It seems to me that you are often simply co-opted into a practice without being encouraged to reflect on its rationale, its “reason why.” In other words, it seems to me that you are often recruited to “lead worship” without much opportunity to pause and reflect on the nature of “worship” and what it would mean to “lead.” In particular, my concern is that we, the church, have unwittingly encouraged you to simply import musical practices into Christian worship that–while they might be appropriate elsewhere–are detrimental to congregational worship. More pointedly, using language I first employed in Desiring the Kingdom, I sometimes worry that we’ve unwittingly encouraged you to import certain forms of performance that are, in effect, “secular liturgies” and not just neutral “methods.” Without us realizing it, the dominant practices of performance train us to relate to music (and musicians) in a certain way: as something for our pleasure, as entertainment, as a largely passive experience. The function and goal of music in these “secular liturgies” is quite different from the function and goal of music in Christian worship. So let me offer just a few brief axioms with the hope of encouraging new reflection on the practice of “leading worship”: 1. If we, the congregation, can’t hear ourselves, it’s not worship. Christian worship is not a concert. In a concert (a particular “form of performance”), we often expect to be overwhelmed by sound, particularly in certain styles of music. In a concert, we come to expect that weird sort of sensory deprivation that happens from sensory overload, when the pounding of the bass on our chest and the wash of music over the crowd leaves us with the rush of a certain aural vertigo. And there’s nothing wrong with concerts! It’s just that Christian worship is not a concert. Christian worship is a collective, communal, congregational practice–and the gathered sound and harmony of a congregation singing as one is integral to the practice of worship. It is a way of “performing” the reality that, in Christ, we are one body. But that requires that we actually be able to hear ourselves, and hear our sisters and brothers singing alongside us. When the amped sound of the praise band overwhelms congregational voices, we can’t hear ourselves sing–so we lose that communal aspect of the congregation and are encouraged to effectively become “private,” passive worshipers. 2. If we, the congregation, can’t sing along, it’s not worship. In other forms of musical performance, musicians and bands will want to improvise and “be creative,” offering new renditions and exhibiting their virtuosity with all sorts of different trills and pauses and improvisations on the received tune. Again, that can be a delightful aspect of a concert, but in Christian worship it just means that we, the congregation, can’t sing along. And so your virtuosity gives rise to our passivity; your creativity simply encourages our silence. And while you may be worshiping with your creativity, the same creativity actually shuts down congregational song. 3. If you, the praise band, are the center of attention, it’s not worship. I know it’s generally not your fault that we’ve put you at the front of the church. And I know you want to model worship for us to imitate. But because we’ve encouraged you to basically import forms of performance from the concert venue into the sanctuary, we might not realize that we’ve also unwittingly encouraged a sense that you are the center of attention. And when your performance becomes a display of your virtuosity–even with the best of intentions–it’s difficult to counter the temptation to make the praise band the focus of our attention. When the praise band goes into long riffs that you might intend as “offerings to God,” we the congregation become utterly passive, and because we’ve adopted habits of relating to music from the Grammys and the concert venue, we unwittingly make you the center of attention. I wonder if there might be some intentional reflection on placement (to the side? leading from behind?) and performance that might help us counter these habits we bring with us to worship. Please consider these points carefully and recognize what I am not saying. This isn’t just some plea for “traditional” worship and a critique of “contemporary” worship. Don’t mistake this as a defense of pipe organs and a critique of guitars and drums (or banjos and mandolins). My concern isn’t with style, but with form: What are we trying to do when we “lead worship?” If we are intentional about worship as a communal, congregational practice that brings us into a dialogical encounter with the living God–that worship is not merely expressive but also formative–then we can do that with cellos or steel guitars, pipe organs or African drums. Much, much more could be said. But let me stop here, and please receive this as the encouragement it’s meant to be. I would love to see you continue to offer your artistic gifts in worship to God who is teaching us a new song. Most sincerely, Jamie You can read more from the author at his blog. Many thanks to James for allowing us to re-post his letter.

According to C.S. Lewis, a scholar faces three enemies during a time of war. As I was reading through those tonight, I realized they are also the three enemies most of us face in the “war” of our day-to-day lives. I’ve selected a few quotes for your perusal. If you want to read the rest, check out his essay “Learning in War-Time” collected in The Weight of Glory. The first enemy is excitement–the tendency to think and feel about the war when we had intended to think about our work. The best defence is a recognition that in this, as in everything else, the war has not really raised up a new enemy but only aggravated an old one. There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come. … The second enemy is frustration–the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of leaning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether, of how many things, even in the middle of life, we have to say ‘No time for that,’ ‘Too late now,’ and ‘Not for me.’ But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more Christian attitude which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God’s hands. … The third enemy is fear. War threatens us with death and pain. No man– and specially no Christian who remembers Gethsemane — need try to attain a stoic indifference about these things, but we can guard against the illusions of the imagination. We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or of that — of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war to do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. [This post originally appeared on Rebecca’s excellent blog, Little Boots Liturgies.]

I wrote this a few months back, but it came to mind today because I spent hours this week wrestling with a song. Knowing that I’m recording it in a matter of days ramps up the pressure to get it right–or, as right as I can get it. It’s a relief sometimes to remember that, as hard as I try to say what I mean to the listener, in the end, the song (or poem) is going to do whatever it wants. DISTILLATION It’s hard to choose, Among all that is And all that is not, One small thing To make much of: One cell, One star, One wind, One wound, One old broken truck, One undeniable infatuation With one untouchable soul; To pen a span of words With myriad meanings, Arranged just so, in order That they might mean That one single thing Which can mean A million things– Depending on The reader, And the hour He or she reads it, And the angle of light, And the heart’s condition, And the temperature of the air, And the presence (Or absence) Of demons Or angels, Personal Or impersonal, And the song that played In the bakery and mingled Perfectly with the aroma and Aerated the anger, just enough That the poem might seed the soul With a fleeting, sacred silence– Just enough to plant the secret God is telling–the one thing We’re all dying to discover– Even if we have to find it In a poem.

Sydney Lea is the author of ten collections of poetry including Pursuit Of A Wound (2001) which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has also published a novel, A Place In Mind (1989), and two collections of essays. Lea is the founding editor of New England Review, where he served from 1977 until 1989. He has taught at several colleges, in Europe and the United States, including Yale, Wesleyan, and Dartmouth. He is the new poet laureate of Vermont. Jeanne Murray Walker wrote of his new collection, Six Sundays Toward a Seventh, “In this book Sydney Lea invites us to take a spiritual journey . . . By the end of Six Sundays, the narrator and the reader step together into radiant light. What is so moving about Six Sundays is not only its wrestling with spiritual questions, but also Lea’s affirmation that life is a spiritual journey and that this journey is of paramount importance.” I was given the privilege of assisting him as editor for his new poetry collection Six Sundays Toward a Seventh – which is the first book in Wipf & Stock’s new Poiema Poetry Series – released the first of January 2012. It is available from Wipf & Stock. The following poem is included in this new book. Barnet Hill Brook Here’s what to read in mud by the brook after last night’s storm, Which inscribed itself on sky as light, now here, now gone- And matchless. I kneel in the mud, by scrimshaw of rodents, by twinned Neat stabs of weasel. I won’t speak of those flashes. Here by my hand, The lissome trail of a worm that lies nearby under brush, Carnal pink tail showing out. Gnats have thronged my face. I choose not to fend them off. Except for my chest in its slight Lifting and sinking, the place’s stillness feels complete. Its fullness too: in the pool above the dead grass dam, The water striders are water striders up and down: They stand on themselves, feet balanced on feet in mirroring water. How many grains of sand in the world? So one of my daughters Wanted to know in her little girlhood. “Trillions,” I said. “I love you,” she answered back. “I love you more than that.” Lord knows I’m not a man who deserves to be so blessed. I choose to believe that there’s grace, that the splendid universe Lies not in my sight but subsumes my seeing, my small drab witness. Tonight my eye may look on cavalcades of brightness, Of star and planet. Or cloud again. And when I consider, O, what is man, That thou art mindful of him, it’s proper For me to have knelt, if only by habit. Pine needles let go, And drop, and sink to this rillet’s bright white bottomstones. To tally them up would take me a lifetime. And more would keep coming. A lifetime at least. And more would keep coming, please God, keep coming. Posted with permission of the poet. Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

What Is Love? Part I – Definitions No discussion of love can be complete without regarding Gethsemane. In this second Garden, the divine love of the Father in the spirit of Jesus wrestled with the soul of Jesus, a war inside one body. This Man who had gone around saying “I and the Father are one” and “When you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father” saw a separate will within himself, self-preservation rising up, self-love. “If there is any other way, let this cup pass from me.” I don’t want to die by execution, have my soul be despised, rejected, and to become sin and have my spirit separated from my Father. Anything but that. Was it wrong to feel this way, wrong to desire a way less painful? Obviously not. Temptation is not sin. “Let this cup pass from me.” He wrestled, like Jacob with the angel, but Jesus wasn’t saying, “I won’t let you go until you bless me.” It was, “Please, if there’s any other way, get me out of this.” The Father wouldn’t let him off, because Jesus was born to be a blessing for others, broken bread and outpoured wine. In the end Jesus took the sword of the Spirit and ran it through his own desire to be happy, pain-free, and comfortable. “Neverthless, not my will, but Thine be done.” “Who, for the joy set before him, endured the Cross, despising the shame,” the joy of seeing others freed, renewed, made alive, made fit for the company of Heaven. What choice happened in Gethsemane? All we have are the words of Jesus: “Not My will, but Thine be done.” But we also have the witness of James, who delineates the exact nature of temptation. “Every man is tempted” (including the Man, Jesus) “when he is drawn away by his own strong desire, and enticed.” If there is temptation, there is a Tempter, exciting those desires and pulling on them, stirring us up. To be enticed is to want to do something, to feel the pull of desire, of want. Jesus was enticed to want something other than God’s will for him. He wanted to escape the spirit, soul, and body suffering of the Cross. This was not sin. To want something, and be enticed toward it, is not sin. James continues. “Then, when strong desire has conceived, it brings forth sin…” Strong desire has to be married to something in order to conceive – a choice of the will to have the desired thing, to turn from faith in the sovereign, loving God and instead to reach for what we think is best. It is the choice of Eve in Eden. God hath said, but I am choosing otherwise. We trust our own temporary tunnel vision rather than God’s perfect and all-encompassing sight. In Gethsemane, this second Garden, Jesus made the opposite choice. He gave up the soulish desire for self-protection, for comfort, ease, and gave in to the divine nature within himself: “I can do nothing of myself” (that is, of his own human power). “The Father in me does the works.” In temptation, Jesus always gave in to the divine nature as the Source and Ground of his being, as the sovereign Director who ordered his footsteps. When Jesus meets up with Judas and the guards, we see a completely different man than in the preceding hours – human still, potent with passion and feeling, but his humanity subjugated to the eternal plan and purpose of the Father within him. The divine nature within Jesus won out, as always, even in the most intense situations. The essential questions, “Who am I” and “Why am I here?” were answered in a very definite and final victory as he laid down his soul and body life, allowing Jesus to walk as a King through the torture and death of the Cross. To be continued.

[Editor’s Note: We want to take a moment to celebrate the release of Russ Ramsey’s first book. He’s worked long and hard on it we’re anxious for each of you to enjoy the fruits of his labor. So congratulations, Russ. I’m happy to add the title of “Author” next to your name on the masthead.] Here’s the first chapter of Behold the Lamb of God: An Advent Narrative. If you’d like to download a sample and see what the actual book looks like inside, you can do so here. –Pete Peterson.] He did not have a home. People said he survived on little more than wild honey and locusts, and by the look of him, it couldn’t have been much more. He wore a coat of camel hair he cinched together with a leather belt, just like the prophet Elijah had done. Normally he was the one people stopped to behold, but at this particular moment, as he stood waist-deep in the Jordan, anyone looking at him saw that his attention was fixed on the man from Galilee headed his way. His face wore a mix of astonishment and joy as the man approached. “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!” His voice trembled as water dripped from his outstretched finger and scraggly beard into the river where he stood. People might have dismissed this wild man as they would have any other tortured soul driven to live in the caves and wadis of the Judean wilderness—were it not for the fact that people knew his story. Or rather, they knew his parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth. These were honorable people. Zechariah had served many years as a priest in the temple, Elizabeth faithfully at his side in spite of the fact that, well into their old age, they had been unable to conceive any children. Being a priest, Zechariah knew the old stories of the barren women God had worked through to deliver impossible promises to an unbelieving people—to their people. When Zechariah and his wife were young, these tales gave them hope. God could break through her barrenness if he wanted. He had done it before. But that was a long time ago, and the stories were about people whose lives were central to Israel’s identity. Zechariah and his wife hardly regarded themselves as that important. Eventually they accepted that they would be childless, though they wondered why the God they loved and served had determined, in his infinite wisdom, that they wouldn’t know the blessing of children. Then one day the Lord sent his angel down with a message. The Author of Life was going to open Elizabeth’s womb and give Zechariah a son. But this son wasn’t given merely for his father’s legacy. This boy would have a specific function in the unfolding story the people of Israel had been living and telling as far back as anyone could remember. The angel told them, “He will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just. He will make ready for the Lord a people prepared.” And they were to give him the name John. As a boy, John grew and became strong in the Spirit. His little mind was filled with wonder as he turned over the stories his parents told him about his birth. Angels were involved, and miracles. He was their miracle, a gift given by God himself not only to his grateful parents, but to the world. Everyone knew John as the boy with an intensity beyond his years—as though his entire boyhood was a time of preparation and he knew it. Not long after the boy became a man, he moved out into the wilderness of Judea. It was an inhospitable place— windy, craggy, and hot. It was also the sort of place where God had dwelled with his ancestors during the Exodus. There, without the simplest of creature comforts, John was left to find solace and companionship with God alone. Though his days in the desert could be lonesome to the point of pain, wilderness life suited him. It was a contemplative way to live, but one that strengthened him. He had no basic needs that he could not meet. Many of his days were filled with simple tasks such as finding water, scrounging food, staying out of the heat of the sun, and gathering wood for fires at night. Living off the land meant he needed to travel light. He needed to be able to go where the resources were and move on when they were spent. But it wasn’t just minimalist living that brought John to the desert; it was his call from the Lord to proclaim the message he had been born to tell. John didn’t move to the desert to withdraw from his people. He went to prepare for his role among them. Soon he emerged as a man with a voice and a clear con- science about how to use it. Wild and fearless, looking like he had grown out of the banks on which he stood, he called to all who passed, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” And he did it as one who seemed to possess the authority to demand such a response. He was, as the prophet Isaiah had said, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight.’” Prepare for what? A collision of worlds. Like a meteor falling to the earth, heaven was bearing down on the land of his forefathers. An old promise, so old that it had become little more than a legend, was about to be fulfilled—and nothing would ever be the same. The Messiah was coming. The very fact that so many people considered the Messiah’s coming more of a fairy tale than a future event was, in itself, a cause for repentance. It wasn’t just that God had promised to do it. It was that the reason he promised to do it was like an intimate promise between lovers. God’s promised Messiah was a merciful gift of love to a people who needed both mercy and love. He would come to them in all their pain, brokenness, and struggle, and make everything new. They were desperate for this, and the proof of their desperation was perhaps most evident in the fact that they couldn’t bring themselves to live as though this promise was real. Repent! The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand! There was something magnetic about John, something in the way he suspended those he attracted between the poles of preparation and perdition until they understood that without repentance, there they would hover—not necessarily feeling lost perhaps, but not assured that they were found either. Hope began to rise in the hearts of the hopeless. Even in the call to repent, they heard the promise that if they confessed their sins, admitted their doubts, and acknowledged how their hearts had become cynical and jaded, God would hear them. God would hear them. People came from all over to the Jordan to step into that water with John the Baptizer. They confessed their failures, their lust, their greed, their pride. They admitted to him things they swore they would never tell a soul. But why? Who was he? Israel’s religious leaders had no answer, so they sent priests to investigate. Did this man think he was the Messiah? Or Elijah come back from his celestial chariot ride? John was clear in his answer. He was neither Elijah nor the Messiah. So the priests asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” John told them, “I baptize with water because there is a man, one who stands among you, and the strap of his sandal I’m not worthy to untie. Though you do not know him, he lives among us even now, and he is the Messiah!” Should they have known him? Or, if nothing else, should they not have been surprised at John’s rebuke? These were the priests of Israel, experts in the law and lore of God’s chosen people. Israel was a nation with a story, a well-rehearsed narrative these priests were sworn to preserve and pass down. John himself was a part of that tale, and so were they. And yet, like so many of their countrymen, they had begun to forget the story of God’s promises to them. But it was such a beautiful story. It was the story of how their holy God had cut a covenant promise in blood to redeem and restore the children who had rebelled against him. It was the story of how Jacob’s line came to be a nation—sometimes mighty, sometimes fragile, but always prone to wander and forget their God. It was the story of generations of war, infighting, and exile that should have wiped them off the face of the earth. The fact that they survived all this and so much more testified to God’s fidelity to his promise never to leave them or forsake them. That alone proved God was not through with the story he was writing. And if that was true, it meant he wasn’t through with them either. Even though it was still unfolding, it was already quite a story to tell, and it was the priests’ job to tell it. But in order to tell it, they had to know it. And to know it, they had to listen—which was why, since their earliest recorded history, every time the people of Israel gathered before the Lord for worship, the first word spoken to them was a command: “Hear!”

[Editor’s Note: Earlier this year we selected two reader-submitted essays and read them to the assembled masses at Hutchmoot. We got a lot of great submissions and this was one of our favorites. Thanks to Alyssa for letting us read it. Keep up the good work! -Pete] Two trees stood side by side, and both were doomed. Around them, trees had been falling for hours. I watched out of the kitchen window as each sassafras giant plunged out of sight behind our privacy fence. With every mighty crash, I felt the ground shake. Now just two remained, waiting amidst the rubble of their generation, exposed and without hope. The trees were dead already. Rooted in the neighboring yard, their rotting skeletons had been dropping limbs onto our lawn for two years. One even broke our bedroom window during a storm. The trees were no longer a shelter, but a danger. They had to go. But these last two were tricky. One leaned toward our house, hunched with the heaviness of its fruitful days. A guide rope would have to steer it to the ground to avoid damaging our property. The straighter tree, itself hollowed and weak, would have to bear the weight of its stooped companion. The strength it had possessed in life would be called upon even in death. A workman first tried to climb up and remove some high branches. But the trees gave no foothold. They were so far gone that each limb he tested broke under his foot. He finally had to shimmy up between the trunks like a kid climbing the inside of a doorframe. At last he found a perch and sawed off some upper limbs. Then he tethered the trees together, the weaker to the stronger, and bound them up in a shared end. *** Two little ladies lay in their nursing home beds. Miss Frances, with her long braided pigtails, and my mamaw, her new roommate. Both were widows, and both had laid a child in the grave. Together they brought nearly two centuries of life into one small, curtain-divided room. Miss Frances couldn’t hear. If you had a conversation with her, the whole hall would know it. But she had a hearty spirit and a sharp mind. She had decorated her walls with stick-on dragonflies and flowers. A photo on a bulletin board showed her smiling with her former roommate. They had been good friends, but now only Miss Frances remained. She was eager to spend her days in Mamaw’s company. “Do you know the song ‘How Beautiful Heaven Must Be’?” she asked, and Mamaw said she did. Off they went, cutting through a million cloudy memories, singing every verse of a hymn learned in years long past. My dad visited Mamaw most every day, and he grew fond of Miss Frances as the weeks passed. He started bringing treats for both of them. When he showed up with a chocolate milkshake, Miss Frances swore she’d never had one before. She wasn’t big on sweets, but she decided the milkshake was quite tolerable. I’m not sure how they communicated during that month together – Miss Frances with her failing ears, and Mamaw with her soft voice. Perhaps they just shared the silence, glad for the warmth of each other’s presence across the room. My mamaw’s mind faltered as she neared the end, and she quickly declined. But Miss Frances wrestled for her in prayer. With my dad there, she once launched into a fervent petition before the Lord. Even if Mamaw didn’t understand it, my dad’s heart was cheered. Mamaw grew weaker until her days were spent mostly in sleep. When family members came to visit, Miss Frances was their company. She would sit up and swing her feet off the side of her bed, ready for a chat. Her words came with warmth and eagerness, but she never forced words upon an agreeable silence. Her cheery disposition was medicine for each aching heart who watched my mamaw fade away. I wondered if Miss Frances ever felt that she had outlived her usefulness. The nursing home is filled with people just biding their time, wondering why they’re still on the earth. Many are forgotten. They need help with even the most basic functions. What purpose could their existence possibly serve? *** The workman slid down the tree trunk and disappeared behind the fence. A stillness followed. It occurred to me that my landscape was about to change forever. At last I heard the sounds of the felling – the sounds that all day had preceded a deafening crash. The leaning tree began to quiver, too broken to stand any longer. But it did not fall. Instead, cradled by the last strength of its sister, it gently lay down to rest.

The “Plays” category of my iTunes and Spotify lists fails to adequately represent my musical tastes. While I would claim Radiohead (circa ’97-07) as my there’s-a-gun-to-your-head-so-pick-one-now musical favorite, it’s not even a fair fight between the most-played artist among my list of albums. That title belongs to Ólafur Arnalds. Sometimes I might listen to Arvo Pärt. Other times, Sigur Rós hits the spot. Mostly, however, Arnalds fits the bill. Any time I write, which these days is most of the time, Arnalds is the background music of choice, the lingering arrangements perfectly framing thoughts and phrases as they come or soothing me when they fail to arrive. For those who are unaware, Arnalds is a mid-20s Icelandic composer and I wanted to pass this along to you as a gift from my background to yours. I’ve a near-borderline obsession with anything Scandinavian/Icelandic when it comes music, but I believe anyone will appreciate the mood created by the simple recordings of Living Room Songs. All of the tracks are free downloads offering snapshots of the quick takes he put together in his tiny Icelandic apartment. But this is not just a post about free music. Instead, since this is a community made up of so many artists and appreciators, I’m assuming that we all have our favorite background music. To that end, I’d love to hear your favorites. For such a prominent aspect of our creative lives, it’s something rarely discussed. Do you have a favorite way to fill the silence or do you prefer to avoid any unnecessary noise? “Þú ert sólin” by Ólafur Arnalds from …and they have escaped the weight of darknesshttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/thu-ert-solin.mp3 #OlafurArnalds

Luci Shaw is one of the most significant Christian poets of our time. She takes on topics of significance to people of faith, yet refuses to undermine her art with preconceived, didactic ways of thinking, or sentimentality. One important topic for Shaw is the incarnation. Since childhood, Luci Shaw has annually written Christmas poems; originally the practice was simply for inclusion with her Christmas correspondence. As her poetic skills grew, so did the quality and quantity of these poems. In 1996, she and her friend Madeleine L’Engle released the book Wintersong — a joint collection of Christmas readings. Ten years later Eerdmans published Accompanied By Angels, a book of Shaw’s incarnation poems, many of which had appeared in her earlier books. Since then, this tradition continues to result in fine Christmas poetry. In 2004 Luci Shaw sent me an early version of the following poem — followed by a revised version in 2005. The poem was further revised (as reproduced below) for inclusion in her 2006 collection What The Light Was Like (Wordfarm). Knowing how she continually returns to fine-tune her work, I would not be surprised to find she has since revised it further. Breath When in the cavern darkness, the child first opened his mouth (even before his eyes widened to see the supple world his lungs had breathed into being), could he have known that breathing trumps seeing? Did he love the way air sighs as it brushes in and out through flesh to sustain the tiny heart’s iambic beating, tramping the crossroads of the brain like donkey tracks, the blood dazzling and invisible, the corpuscles skittering to the earlobes and toenails? Did he have any idea it would take all his breath to speak in stories that would change the world? Posted with permission of the poet. *This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Luci Shaw. Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

It’s grey and wintry here in Nashville. What rightfully ought to be snow has been showing up as plain old rain for the last few days. I’m riding out the winter with Buddy Greene and his harmonica and some musical dogs (not to mention my blankets and my cornbread). “Riding Out The Winter” by Buddy Greene

Christian Storytelling: Part I Christian Storytelling: Part II Christian Storytelling: Part III In Part III, I proposed N.T. Wright’s view of the Scriptures as the first four acts of an unfinished drama as a potentially profitable alternative hermeneutic to the normal ways evangelicals handle the biblical texts. Since I only included a brief paragraph from Wright’s thought on this method, I’ll take some time today to put some skin and muscle on the skeleton.  I’ll note some of his own remarks and push them a bit further myself. Wright quotes will come from his lecture, How Can the Bible be Authoritative? (or PDF, if you’d like). First, let’s allow Wright himself to explain a bit more: Consider the result. The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted authority for the task in hand. That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had not reached its proper resolution. This authority of the first four acts would not consist in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier pans of the play over and over again. It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency. The next obvious question is, “Where does the Bible stop and where do we pick up?” Let’s lay out the four acts given to us: Act I: Creation Act II: Fall Act III: Israel Act IV: Jesus Wright continues: The New Testament would then form the first scene in the fifth act, giving hints as well (Rom 8; 1 Car 15; parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end. The church would then live under the authority of the extant story, being required to offer something between an improvisation and an actual performance of the final act. Appeal could always be made to the inconsistency of what was being offered with a major theme or characterization in the earlier material. So the Bible takes us as far as Act V, Scene 1, but there is much story ahead.  There is no question that this is more difficult than extracting principles and applying them. Wright notes the difficulty well: How can an ancient narrative text be authoritative? How, for instance, can the book of Judges, or the book of Acts, be authoritative? It is one thing to go to your commanding officer first thing in the morning and have a string of commands barked at you. But what would you do if, instead, he began “Once upon a time . . .?” But the difficulty of the approach is not what matters. What approach is most faithful to Scripture? Here’s the biggest advantage to this way of thinking about Scripture: It puts us in our proper place in the story. It invites us into the story. The story of Scripture is the story of the world, and therefore the story of every person who ever lived. Think of the film Stranger Than Fiction. Harold Crick has no idea he’s a character in a story. But how much does everything change when he becomes aware of it? When we recognize that the story of Jesus is our own story, that there’s a writer, and that this writer is good, merciful, and loving and can identify with our weaknesses, struggles, and temptations, everything changes. When we understand that we’re part of a story with a happy ending, an irreversible, unchangeable happy ending that no amount of danger or evil can thwart, it makes all the difference. Who wants a set of instructions from a commanding officer, when your day can begin with “Once upon a time…?” Especially when you have direct access to the story’s author. In Part V, we’ll explore the concept of “Faithful Improvisation.”

Every music minister knows the weekly anxiety of searching for the right songs for the upcoming Sunday service. The criteria may differ from church to church, but hopefully, the goal is to find songs that tie in thematically with the sermon or the weekly scripture reading. However, I know of a pastor on the west coast who directed his music minister to follow a grid when planning the music service—a large W—meaning that the service starts with upbeat songs that slowly give way to medium ballads, then go up again, then back down, before sending the congregation off with a happy bang. Never mind the content. The music becomes a space filler and provides the congregation with a reason to stand up and clap, or to settle down and get ready to dish out an offering, or listen to a sermon. I used to serve in a church that followed a similar grid. It was always those dang happy songs that gave me the hardest time. Not that there wasn’t a plethora to choose from, but the upbeat songs were always so corny and forgettable. These days, no one sings the ones we used back then and I imagine the same fate will follow many of today’s happy slappy modern worship songs. Now that I’m in an Anglican church the weekly song search is much more complicated than the W model. There’s the lectionary to deal with—scripture passages that are appointed for every week of the year: an Old Testament reading, a Psalm, an Epistle reading (or one from Acts), and finally the Gospel reading. These readings are arranged according to the narrative of the Christian calendar: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time (the season after Pentecost). More often than not, there’s an obvious theme that ties all the readings together such as contrition, service, God’s faithfulness, baptism, etc. I’ve learned to love the challenge of discovering that theme and finding the perfect songs to underscore and enhance the various portions of the Anglican mass. This process in the last year and a half has opened the door for me to many rich and beautiful hymns that I’d never heard before. It’s how I stumbled upon the stunning hymn “Come Down, O Love Divine” (lyrics: Bianco De Siena; Music: Ralph Vaugh Williams) in the weeks before Pentecost Sunday last year. Here are the verses as we sing them at our church: [audio:ComeDownOLoveDivine.mp3] Come down, O love divine, seek Thou this soul of mine, And visit it with Thine own ardor glowing. O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear, And kindle it, Thy holy flame bestowing. O let it freely burn, till earthly passions turn To dust and ashes in its heat consuming; And let Thy glorious light shine ever on my sight, And clothe me round, the while my path illuming. Let holy charity mine outward vesture be, And lowliness become mine inner clothing; True lowliness of heart, which takes the humbler part, And o’er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing. And so the yearning strong, with which the soul will long, Shall far out-pass the power of human telling; For none can guess its grace, till he become the place Wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling. I’m drawn to the specificity of this hymn. It’s about something. It’s about a specific event in the Christian narrative. The humble stance, the plaintive tone; it’s a perfect hymn about God pouring out his Holy Spirit on a contrite heart that’s found redemption through Jesus Christ. Let this be an encouragement to modern hymn writers—a cause for inspiration to those who are suffering from writer’s block. There are so many Biblical scenes to choose from that would make for beautiful songs: the transfiguration of Christ, the feeding of the five thousand, the woman at the well, the stoning of Stephen, water baptism, washing of the disciple’s feet, the betrayal of Judas. If just a few good modern hymn writers tackled some of these subjects, the anguish that untold thousands of music ministers suffer weekly could be greatly diminished. It’s easy to write a chorus that says: God, you are a Holy God I need your grace to see me through I need your mercy to make me new Let me live each day for you. I just made that up in two minutes and there’s nothing wrong with it. It might fit easily and competitively among the hundreds of worship songs that are available to choose from. But compare those lines to the third stanza from the above hymn: Let holy charity mine outward vesture be, And lowliness become mine inner clothing; True lowliness of heart, which takes the humbler part, And o’er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing. It took some real thought to craft those lines. They’re timeless. They set a standard for all of us who write music for the church. I didn’t set out to write a didactic piece. I’m reminding myself, too. Be specific when you write songs about God. Avoid cliché. Avoid convenience. Avoid an obsession with the consumer. Avoid the temptation to make commercial success your central goal. Write with intelligence, employing all the craft, skill, and experience with which God has endowed you. ————————————————————– Fernando Ortega is a singer/songwriter and song leader at a church in Albequerque, New Mexico. He and I toured together about ten years ago and have been friends ever since. I’d rather hear him sing a hymn than anyone else on earth. His new album Come Down, O Love, Divine is available here and at iTunes. –The Proprietor