What are you looking for?

From the Proprietor: I didn’t ask Russ to write this. We spoke on the phone several weeks ago about this issue and I expressed the awkwardness I felt about the age-old conversation. He responded with this post. Andrew Peterson has a problem. He’s not alone in what I’m about to describe, but since he is the proprietor of this fine Rabbit Room, he’ll be my exhibit A. See, here’s his problem: his hope is that this site will serve to promote books, music, art and ideas he and his contributors think are worth your time. The problem is that his own works would be counted among them by his contributors. But Andrew doesn’t want to appear narcissistic, and worries he’ll appear to be promoting himself if his works are reviewed and recommended here. What to do, what to do? Luckily for Andrew, I have a solution. Lean into it, Andrew. Lean into it. This site was your idea and it does exist to promote your music and books. And I for one, hope you become filthy stinking rich as a result. I hope your grandchildren–may they be many, smart and ruddy–can go to the college of their choosing, twice, as the result of Rabbit Room. I pick on Andrew here, but this whole “online community” thing has me thinking a lot about how things are changing for artists today. In particular, I’m thinking of how artist promotion takes place– and I really like what I’m seeing. The Rabbit Room is just one example, but since you’re here, lets go with it. Here’s how I see it. Of course there’s a place for critical reviews. You should be able to go places to find, for example, that So-and-so’s new album is generally being met with a collective yawn. Such places (Billboard, Paste and Relevant, etc.) do exist. If people are looking for a webzine to objectively cover the media coming out in today’s market, there are places they can go–professional establishments. This site, as I understand it, is not that. The Rabbit Room exists to introduce visitors to thoughtful art and engaging discussions. And because it does, most if not all you find here will be written about in a positive light. And that’s okay. In fact, its good. When Andrew roped his contributors into this venture, he said “With reviews, I imagine them reading as if you were telling a buddy about this book that you experienced and that you just love. Or film, or record.” So, dear reader, that’s what we’re up to here. Now for a word on the artist promotion aspect of this website. Andrew’s contributors are here because we like Andrew Peterson, and most of us like him because we’ve gotten to know him through his music. And Andrew, along with the other Square Pegs, have many times come to a professional fork in the road, faced with the choice of taking the industry’s highway to contractual obligations in return for corporate promotion or going it alone on the grass roots level, hoping and praying it all works out. Andrew, and many like him have chosen the road less traveled. But for this to work out, one must promote oneself often, shamelessly and with an eye toward turning that self-promotion into cold, hard frozen pizzas, electric bills and mortgage payments (not to mention all the other strange things one has to buy that the rest of the world doesn’t even think about, like 15 passenger vans, t-shirts with your own name on them and Stuart Duncan’s time.) So Andrew Peterson bears a responsibility to promote Andrew Peterson. He’s one of THOSE grassroots guys! Hence, his problem. At least it would be a problem if his music was bad. But its not. And we don’t need Andrew to tell us its good to know its good. Same goes for Peters, Phillips, Gullahorn, Goodgame, Osenga and the rest of the Square Pegs. What we do need, however, is to find our way to their music. And that takes promotion. Shameless self-promotion? Yes, in part. But it also takes something more. It takes rabbit rooms, blogs, virbs, street teams, iTunes, artistic alliances, online stores, myspace, youtube, noisetrade and a million other inter-related, cross-referenced, just-a-click-away opportunities for fans to add to their collections and future fans to discover folks like the Square Pegs for the first time. For those “grassroots” artists who have elected to depend upon word of mouth, street teams for local shows, those shows themselves and the world wide interweb to draw and retain their audience, they are, in effect, relying on their “paying customers” to also be their PR department. And it follows that the “Paying Customer Public Relations Department” would want to do their job well so that there might be more product for them to both purchase and promote in the future. It is really backward from what used to be, if you think about it. It used to be the PR people were employed by the label to accumulate from the audience as much money for the label as possible, which would in turn bring greater revenue to the artist. But in the grassroots paradigm, the PR people are the audience, essentially handing over their own money directly to the artist, buying recorded music, attending concerts and sometimes even outright “underwriting” future releases so they can be imagined, written, recorded, packaged and purchased by the very same people who promoted the previous records and underwrote the newer projects in the first place. (Read this paragraph again. Its awesome!) So if the Rabbit Room is meant to draw our attention to art worth having (which it is), and if Andrew’s art can be counted among that (which it can), and if this site was his idea (which it was), and if he has bills to pay (which he does), and if you, dear reader, are here because you’ve already ponied up some cash to buy an AP record (which you may have done, or maybe you’re a pirate) or see a concert or get an “I Like Cheese” t-shirt, can’t we all just live at ease with the fact that if Andrew sells some units through this site, we should count that as a success and say, “Good for you, Andrew. Here’s another $15”? It didn’t used to be this way, but I, for one, am glad it is, because what we all get out of this new deal is the confidence of knowing that what makes it to our iPod is what the artist meant to deliver–not some guy in a corner office trying to figure out the best way to make the most money out of a musician who started writing and singing for love of the song. So with this, dear reader, are you aware that Rabbit Room has a lovely store? The holidays are approaching fast.

Most of my thoughts today find themselves in orbit around a concept seen throughout the Bible. Unfortunately, it’s leapt out of the pages and into my own life as well. It started when studying Paul’s words in his letter to the Philippians, urging them to focus on eternity and not to be distracted by the temporary things that can dissuade and distract. It’s a beautiful piece (and a familiar one) where Paul resolves that the once profitable things in life he now considers “loss for the sake of Christ.” Of course, that’s easier said than done. The issue is that the things that “dissuade and distract” seem so nice. And they do, in fact, satisfy us for a bit. We know they will feel good, quench the thirst and appease the hunger in that moment. And when we are desperate or undisciplined, it’s the quick and easy choice. Esau needed to eat. And in a moment of poverty, a birthright wasn’t going to satisfy the need. The Israelites were in a similar position when entering the Promised Land. The book of Numbers details a story where two (and a half) of the famous twelve tribes decided that the land on the wrong side of the Jordan River was suitable for their livestock. Lush with grass, waterfront property so to speak, and a noticeable lack of Canaanites to fight made for a spot even Baby Bear could love (it was just right). I’m sure it was just fine. I’m sure it looked great. And it was probably was okay. But it wasn’t the Promised Land. It wasn’t the place that God had called them to inhabit. It was a good, temporarily satisfying place on the way to what God had intended and that was just fine for them. And sometimes that’s just fine for me as well. I’m tempted all the time to turn the stones around me into bread – to use my own power or abilities to make my own way and feed my own hunger for various things. Waiting on God to provide or doing the diligent work to get to my final destination are things that don’t come naturally to me. My own inclination, as an only child (and human), is toward the immediate solution. I’m drawn toward this, I think, because not only do I have the tendency to settle, but I’m watching this tendency all around me. Husbands and wives settling on the wrong side of their marriage and choosing the easy way to satisfy their frustrations in the arms of another. Leaders settling on the wrong side of their calling and giving up because the river seems too wide. All of us are so grateful for any “Get Out of Jail Free” card that we’ll snatch it the moment the “chance” comes. But that’s not the calling. And we know it. We know that even as artists there is a deep work to be done to pursue excellence. We all have rivers to cross and lands to inhabit. And part of me wishes I still had my birthright.

I’m currently engaged in a discussion, called Perfection vs Communication, on another site, where there are some with an extreme view who say that what’s important in music is feeling, raw emotion, that communication is the point. Others stress the significance of disciplined study (especially me at times), though none of us say expressing emotion isn’t the point of all the study. For my part, I’m continually stressing the balance of the paradox. Learning to play banjo, guitar, or any other instrument involves work. Enjoyable work, much of the time, but work nonetheless, requiring focus, determination and patience. It take study to really play a banjo; I mean it takes years of digging into the masters, especially Earl Scruggs, to build a good foundation of technique, to develop a solid right hand, to get the timing very even and regular. Bluegrass is a precision music, and has been for the most part from the time its radical innovations exploded onto the American music scene back in the 1940’s. As banjo players, we build precision. Timing. Tone. Making sure the space between our notes is very even and regular, insuring our right hand has power in reserve and can sustain a seamless sequence of notes through song after song. I’ve used drum machines and metronomes since around 1980; I have Reason on my laptop so I can use it as a drum machine. I’ve played with records with good timing for years; Flatt & Scruggs and Jimmy Martin recordings especially. There’s one record in particular, called The Bluegrass Album, with Tony Rice (guitar), J.D. Crowe (banjo), Doyle Lawson (mandolin), Bobby Hicks (fiddle), and Todd Phillips (acoustic bass) that I have played with thousands of times. I wore out one LP, bought another one, and then cds came out. I have two copies on cd, and now of course it’s in my iTunes. But really, inside all this technical mastery and study, what is the banjo all about? Passion. Convictions. Anger. Beauty. Excitement. Strength. Power. The banjo is to the bluegrass band what the electric guitar is for rock. It’s a passionate instrument, with a strong attack and not a lot of sustain. Explosive. That passionate part, that raw emotion, that human experience coming through metal strings, wooden bridge, and banjo head, is the mystery of banjo playing. Then why all the focus on timing, drum machines, and technique? Can’t we just play with raw emotion right off the bat? Why bother with years of study? Why not just pick one up and flail away with passion? The timing, tone, and study part is about the Mastery of banjo so that the Mystery can come through it. Dorothy Sayers compared the creative act of the artist in The Mind of the Maker as a mirror of the creativity of the Trinity. The infinite mind and purpose of the Father; the Son, working out His incarnation in sweat and blood; the Spirit, manifesting God through human experience, and in that manifestation causing a response in others. Music can be studied forever and still not be fully explored or mapped; that’s God, infinite in His knowledge. That’s partly why we study the Bible, to gain a deeper knowledge of who God is and how He thinks, and ultimately, if we’re thinking rightly, to be led on into working out deeper expression of God Himself – which is the Son and Spirit part of the process. We “work out our own salvation,” which is the sweat and blood of the faith choices we have to make daily, “for it is God in you who works to will and to act according to His good pleasure.” The Father in us, working by the Son to express the Spirit. We study music for the same reason – to gain a deeper knowledge of what music is (Father) and to be led on into working out a deeper here-and-now experience (Son) and expression (Spirit) of what it really means to be a musician. Study of musical fundamentals can help us express Mystery in a deeper way. Now, there are people who study the Bible and use it primarily as fodder for reminding themselves that they are so much better than ordinary, common rabble. Their desire is mastery, yes, though not in order to incarnate; it is a means to dominate. Likewise, there are people who study music, have notebooks full of scores and theory and lines and charts and graphs on music, and never use all that as a means of incarnation; they never take it to an instrument, or if they do, they’re more concerned with what and how much they know than with how they use what they know. Technical mastery of an instrument can become the End for some. But, as always, wrong use of something does not make the thing bad in and of itself. Perfectly good doctrine, like anything else, is something neutral that can be used rightly or wrongly. I’d rather talk with a grandmother who has no schooling but years of practical Christian life experience than someone who can quote the Bible, read Greek and Hebrew, and knows everything Calvin ever wrote but has not worked what he knows out into expression – into reliance on Christ working itself out in “Love God and love your neighbor.” With mystery and mastery we have some quantifiable elements, absolutes. Timing: a drum machine is a direct line to Timing Headquarters. Pitch: if the band is tuned to A440, and we’re singing in A336, that’s flat. It may be only ‘relatively flat’, but it still sounds like Hell. And then there’s the Mysterious. The way a particular line of melody makes us feel. How the chordal context of a note changes what the note means and how it feels. What pictures music produces in our heads! I remember first getting Fernando Ortega’s Shadow of Your Wings and listening to it driving to Nashville up I-65. One song started with Fernando’s piano, and the record’s engineer Gary Paczosa had captured it it so perfectly that for two seconds, rather than windshield and cars and road, I literally saw, like a vision, those soft felt hammers hitting the steel-wound, vibrating strings inside the piano. The passion, the welling up of emotion, the deep thought and hope that great music engenders in our minds. That’s Mystery. In Mastery, we have the knowable, the learnable, consisting of this scale, that scale, this exercise, transcribing this Earl Scruggs solo or that one. And we have the unknowable, the unteachable: Mystery. When I practice, I think about the knowable and learn what I can of what is knowable. Instructional videos. My drum machine. Slow-down software that makes learning other people’s solos a lot easier than slowing 33 rpm LP’s down to 16rpm on an old record player, like I did as a teenager. In technical practicing I focus on mastery. When I perform or record or just sit around doodling on the guitar or banjo, I forget about mastery. I listen, I feel the song, and I then just play whatever comes to me in that feeling. I don’t think, not a lot, anyway, about what notes I’m going to play in a solo; the first order of business is to listen, feel what the song makes me feel, to hear what the melody does, and play. Sometimes, many times, I come up with a moving solo this way. There aren’t many people who would accuse me of being too heady and soulless in my guitar or banjo playing; when I play on a recording or on stage, I’m interested in giving the listener an emotive moment or experience. But in practice I like learning new techniques, focusing on timing, and other mastery aspects of playing music. We can learn about God. That’s good. It’s not only necessary; it’s commanded. There is much about God that we can know and understand and quantify to a certain extent (for instance, I can know “God cannot lie” is an absolute, knowable, Biblical fact). But we can’t stop there, at mere intellectual knowledge, like an overzealous type who likes to insult and beat other people down in Bible arguments and congratulate himself on what a great job he’s doing for Jesus (Gunfyter4God@ImSoGreat.com). It’s only a means to an end. We’ve got to know God Himself, to experience Him. And in knowing Him as He means to be known, He incarnates Himself in and through us and gives the people in our lives an experience of Him. We are the instruments that He plays. His technical mastery is perfect. But, unlike my banjo, as instruments we are sentient, have a will of our own, and have a choice – will I allow Him through faith to express Himself through me, or will I follow lies and deceit and let the Devil play crappy, lame, out-of-tune, and badly distorted songs on me? But I’m wandering into another subject, and we were talking about music. For me, mastery and mystery capture what it means to be a musician – human and divine, flesh and Spirit, the meeting together of two seemingly contrary things, the one being used as a container or manifestation of the other. The two are not contrary; as our human flesh becomes the means of Divine manifestation, so I focus on mastery in practice, and look to use that mastery as a means to expressing mystery. I’m not always successful at it, but the heart is there, the part that can’t be taught or learned, the mysterious part, and it comes through most of the time in performance or recording when I let go of everything I’ve learned and just fly by the seat of my pants in faith. The Christian life is the same. We study, gain knowledge of the Person who lives inside us, work that knowledge and that Person deep into our consciousness, and then let go and just be by faith, by inner reliance on Him. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for.” One of my old pastors put it this way: “Faith is the concretization of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith reaches into what is hidden and brings it down into concrete expression; it reveals a Mystery. That’s what Mastery of knowledge, whether Bible study or musical improvement, is really for – not to puff us up and make us feel “greater than other men, sinners,” but to make us better conduits and communicators of Mystery.

As we get closer to Thanksgiving, I couldn’t resist writing about a family movie that features food and offers a lot to be thankful for. Two of the things that my wife Taya and I enjoy the most are good stories and good food. In Ratatouille we got to enjoy both – and with our kids, too! I’ve been a big fan of Brad Bird since I reluctantly watched The Iron Giant to be a good dad. I both laughed (and even cried) harder than either of my boys at the time and it’s become a movie we’ve returned to again and again. Then of course came The Incredibles, which is arguably one of the best superhero movies ever. When we started seeing ads for Ratatouille, I’ll confess I wasn’t that excited to see it, but my interest was piqued when I found out that Brad Bird was the wizard behind the curtain for the latest Pixar film. So we went to see it, and we weren’t disappointed. What I love about Brad Bird is that he is able to make films that are both really “cool” and vulnerable at the same time. There is real heart to his stories, yet they never rely on sentimentality to play our emotions. The scenes from The Incredibles when Helen Parr suspects that her husband might be having an affair in his mid-life crisis were surprisingly tense and poignant. Even though the story was obviously fantastical, it all felt very rooted in reality to me. I didn’t expect an animated film to be this grown up. I think the same is even truer of Ratatouille. The movie is an amorous love affair with fine food made for an audience who is more likely to ask for mac and cheese than they would baked brie with mango chutney. It’s the story of a rat with a penchant for gourmet food and dreams of being a great chef. He’s got the gift, but as a rodent lacks, well, a certain quality of homo sapien-ness. He finds an unlikely ally in the kitchen of a once-vaunted restaurant in Paris. Perched under the hat of his human friend Linguini, Remy’s knack for cooking up delectable dishes reinvigorates the restaurant’s reputation – but what would Paris think if they knew a rat was calling the shots? The script is obviously clever and the animation is state of the art, so rather than comment on the story and style, I’d like to relate a couple scenes that I loved. Every time the rat Remy would taste a certain food, the background would fade to black and there would be a play of color bursts behind him to visually represent Remy’s experience of taste. When he would combine that certain food with another the play of light and shapes would deepen in complexity, whirring and spinning and going off like a fireworks display. We laughed out loud with delight thinking, “yeah, that’s what that flavor looks like!” That Bird could so effectively communicate the sense of taste through visuals is a testament to his gift, and it’s one of my favorite things about Ratatouille. But it was a scene towards the end of the movie that stole the whole show for me. When Anton Ego – the bitter, arrogant, and curmudgeonly food critic whose jaded reviews make or break restaurants – walks in, we know we’re in for Ratatouille’s equivalent of a showdown at high noon (only it’s dinner time, and instead of guns it’s a critic’s pen and a rat’s whisker – not that kind of whisker, but, y’know, the kind you whisk with ;-). Remy puts together a simple serving of ratatouille, a traditional French Provençal stewed vegetable dish, and serves it to Anton Ego. With one taste, his eyes open wide in wonder-filled bewilderment as the camera zooms into his pupils and takes us deep into Ego’s past where we see him as a little child in a fond memory of his mother serving him ratatouille. The scene is genuinely tender, and when the camera zooms back out we see that the dish has awakened more than just a kindly childhood memory, but also the child himself long buried in Anton Ego. I didn’t see this coming, and this scene did for me something similar to what the ratatouille did for Ego. I was unexpectedly moved to tears and a real sense of wonder and joy came over me. This is why: I know this isn’t necessarily what the movie is about, but in this moment Ratatouille reminded me of what the best art can do in us – art done with devotion, care, and great love. It restores us and reminds us of the promise of a more beautiful time, both a time passed and a time to come. It names us and gives us back to ourselves. It makes us children again in that it makes us feel wonder. It awakens the possibility of love, redemption, forgiveness, and rebirth. And that’s of course what happened when cynical food critic Anton Ego, a heartless shell of a man, tasted a dish that was made with great love by an unlikely chef – a rat! The cynicism melted in a moment and he was born again, or baptized, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t want to spoil the end for you, but suffice it to say that Anton Ego passed from the walking dead into the land of the living again and became a large hearted man who rediscovered his love of food and even life. The movie also offered a wholesome message for kids that anyone can pursue what they love, and that they should do so even in the face of critics and seemingly insurmountable odds. It had the added pleasant aftertaste of making our kids interested in more adventurous foods! Most importantly for me is that it reminded me that anything we do with great love has the potential to transform the world around us. If you love movies about food, check out: Tortilla Soup, Chocolat

[This discussion is continued from yesterday’s post by Russ, “Creative Intent: What Are You Thinking?”] …your thoughts about the questions Russ raises are fascinating. I’d love to add something equally fascinating to the discussion but I don’t think I can. I don’t think. Here’s what I do think. Art, like the artist, and like the Artist (capital A), is mysterious. There are a few ways to look at it. Maybe art is meant to be appreciated and interpreted privately, in the confines of your soul, where its work is most potent. Trying to nail the meaning of a piece of art down can be, frankly, like driving a nail into a piece of fine art. It’s like handling fine china: the more you turn it this way and that, the more chance there is that you’ll chip it. We can get so carried away looking for the meaning of the dandelion that we have forgotten to delight the simple, unpretentious, serendipitous beauty of the flower itself. There is a kind of art whose beauty is in its plenteousness. It pervades our days and makes them brighter and more bearable. Ron, you mentioned elevator music in an appropriately pejorative sense. In another way, though, God’s beauty is also littered all about, and it makes splendid what would otherwise be mundane. There are songwriters (Katy Bowser for some reason comes to mind) whose music isn’t meant to be disseminated but enjoyed. Some of Alison Krauss and Union Station’s music (the jamming bluegrass songs like “Little Liza Jane”, for example) don’t mean something in the heady, beatnik, pipe-smoking way. They’re just beautiful splashes of light in the world, made by sub-creators who were compelled to make the musical equivalent of God’s dandelion or waterfall or gazelle. (I think contemporary Christian music is sorely lacking in this department. We’re so burdened with wanting every song to change the world that we’re not bothering to try and change the sad guy on the eighth row’s countenance. It’s hard not to smile when you listen to Chet Atkins play “Centipede Boogie”.) But there’s another way to look at art, and I’m mainly going to be thinking of it from a singer/songwriter standpoint. I want my music to communicate. What drives me to make music is that I’m lonely. I’m (very) happily married, I have three (very) amazing kids, a good church, great friends, and yet I sometimes feel as lonely as a bone on a sand dune. I have Christ’s spirit in me, I believe (deeply) that there is a God and that he knows and loves me. But I’m hammered with doubt, sin that shocks even me, inconsistency, and the deep ache in my belly that reminds me that this world has yet to be made new. When I write songs (not the kid’s songs or the funny songs; those are to me like those simple, pretty dandelions) I want those songs to call out into the darkness and be heard by someone. I’m crying out in the hopes that someone will hear, and answer, and that that someone who also feels alone will be comforted. I’m looking for a connection between me and the audience. When they respond, when they applaud or feed me with that intangible sense of graciousness that tells me that they see who I am and that they like me anyway, I feel joy. I feel satisfaction. I feel God’s pleasure. When I first started playing concerts, I felt a sense of urgency with my songs. I knew that I didn’t have a CD for them to take home and live with, so I only had one shot to communicate what I wanted to say. I worked to make sure that the point of the song was understandable on the first listen. Having a record takes some of that pressure off because you know (hope) the folks will listen to the CD again and again and what may not have been clear the first few times will snap into place finally and the listener will experience that “Aha!” moment that I so love in my favorite songs by Rich Mullins, Andy Gullahorn, Randall Goodgame, or the Weepies. For that moment to happen, though, there has to be an idea that the songwriter is trying to communicate. There are so many different kinds of art. Some art communicates beauty. It doesn’t aspire to anything more, and that’s perfectly fine. Other art strives to communicate ideas, beautifully. (Some art doesn’t really try to communicate anything, and is called self-expression. This to me is self-important and vain. To create something for public consumption without a thought for the listener, without meeting him halfway, is like babbling in a nonsense language about how no one pays you any attention.) I don’t want to beat the dandelion analogy into the ground (though it’s not really an analogy), but I think that God communicates to us in artistically diverse ways, too. He communicates beauty to us for its own sake in nature. His goodness is expressed in this, his eternal power and divine nature, as Kevin pointed out from Romans. We can look at the things God has made and infer that he is good. Rich Mullins: “The thing that’s cool about music is how unnecessary it is. Of all things, music is the most frivolous and the most useless. You can’t eat it, you can’t drive it, you can’t live in it, you can’t wear it. But your life wouldn’t be worth much without it.” But then, God also communicates ideas, beautifully. Communion. Baptism. Marriage. There is a poetry in his sacraments that communicates a specific revelation that a dandelion could not. God knows that we are a hard-headed, forgetful people, so he pares down the analogy of the seed descending and rising again and gives us baptism. We are lowered into the water and are raised again in a perfect picture of both our death to our old life and our rebirth to a new one and the promise of our resurrection to come. He knows that it is hard for us to believe that the story that happened two millennia ago is true so God gives us communion so that we might remember that it was real, palpable flesh and blood that Jesus sacrificed. He knows that we are hungry and need to be filled, that we need to be reminded in communion both that he is the king and that his outrageous love invites us to feast with him at his table. His love for us is a sacrificial love, and we were made to be lifted up only when we lay ourselves down, so he gives us marriage. He invites us to be bound to him, and him to us, he teaches us about covenant and dying to self and abiding love and deep affection. These two kinds of art–the flowers and the sacraments–communicate and express and create; they remind us that we are not abandoned; they can evoke sadness or gratitude or joy or sorrow; they enrich our days; they summon our thoughts to higher things, deeper things, holy things. This is what art can do. What it should do. The finest artists the earth has ever known have failed to come close to creating something as remarkable as a dandelion. Still, we fumble along, making because we have been made, tethering the worlds of our imaginations to earth in stories and pictures and songs, and our father in heaven is glad. I don’t know if this answers any of the original questions, but there’s my left-handed, non-mathematical brain’s answer.

This post is a bit of an experiment in attempting an open discussion about the creative process between any and all reading these words. So if you’re up for it, please weigh in with a response at the end. Odds are you’ve seen a version of Rodin’s “The Thinker.” Have you ever wondered what he’s thinking about? Rodin’s The Thinker (1880, bronze), has been portrayed in a host of ways, ranging from listening to headphones to sitting on a toilet to contemplating his pint of beer. I’m a pastor. Sometimes when I’m teaching on the authority of Scripture in the believer’s life, we talk about the Thinker. Is there authorial intent or can I interpret what I see in that sculpture any way I wish? Am I free to decide what’s on The Thinker’s mind? Who’s to say what he is thinking about anyway? Well, Auguste’ Rodin, actually. It came as a surprise to me that “The Thinker” is an historical figure. He is Dante’. And The Thinker was sculpted to sit atop a larger sculpture called “The Gates of Hell.” (Here it is.) Rodin wanted to capture the thought process Dante’ must have had to subject himself to in writing “The Inferno.” On close inspection of the Thinker, you’ll see a great burden on the countenance of Dante’ as he contemplates the loss of souls into eternal punishment! And Rodin was captivated enough by the weight of such thoughts that he wanted to try and capture it. So the Thinker is not just some guy thinking about nothing in particular. He is Dante’ thinking about souls being lost in hell. And regardless of what anyone believes about the afterlife, Rodin is the authority over what’s on the Thinker’s mind because he cast the sculpture. To put him on the commode cheapens Rodin’s authorial intent and, it seems to me, makes it so the beholder will never really be able to comprehend what Rodin meant to say. Some non-objective and abstract artists today leave the interpretation of their work completely up to the beholder. But if we mean to communicate truth through our art, can we create without intent? What do you think? I’d love to hear from all kinds of artists on this. Here are my questions, and I’ll number them in to basic categories for the sake of discussion. If you have a particular artistic focus (songwriter, painter, writer, instrumentalist, etc.), do tell, and perhaps we can see how the responses vary according to genre. 1. Regarding the creative process; Is communication an inherently necessary part of the creative process, or can we create good art without intending it to “mean” anything by it? 2. Regarding the presentation of what’s been created; What, if anything, do artists owe their audience? And conversely, is that audience obligated to try to understand the artist’s intent, regardless of whether they agree or disagree? Or, how important is it that when people engage the arts, they’re “picking up what the artist is putting down”?

Pickle – n. Bitter, semi-crunchy, mysteriously preserved, zombie-like remnant of a once innocent and delicious cucumber. Awful, unnatural, and quite possibly blasphemous. Mondays are my days off and every week I look forward to having lunch at the little ‘mom and pop’ sandwich shop here in town, Live Oak Subs. These folks know how to unleash the true power of Sandwich (that’s right, capital ‘S’). Every sub is made with love. The meat is sliced thin and laid on with care, positioned just so. The tomatoes are always ripe and placed perfectly centered just where they belong. Red Onions are properly sliced and arranged and never substituted with onions of lesser pedigree. All these and more lay between two pieces of soft homemade wheat bread that is never too thick nor the crust ever too hard and it’s all wrapped up with care so that when I sit at my table and unfold the wax paper, I’m greeted with a perfectly neat, unmangled, kaleidoscopic vision of colorful, sandwichy goodness. Oh, be still my rumbling tummy. But what’s this? Wrapped up alongside this bit of lunchtime glory is a long spear of a sickly-green dill pickle and it’s bleeding its drippings all over my sandwich. I wrinkle up my nose at first and pick it up carefully between two fingers like a dangerous bit of biohazard but since I’m trying to eat healthier lately I decide it can’t be that bad and what the heck. Crunch. I eat it. And it is just as awful as I thought it would be. Thank goodness it’s gone. I giddily catch up my sandwich and find that an amazing thing has happened. The pickle has bittered my mouth and left all my tastebuds parched and agonzing for something sweet. When I bite into the sandwich its glory flows into the depths of my being in ways I never imagined possible. Praise the sandwich. I sit there eating and the people in the booths next to me eye me with with suspicion as I moan in pleasure and possibly even cry a little for joy. When the last morsel of sub was gone I sat and considered the fact that it was the pickle that made the difference. Oh, the sandwich would have been good without it, but I certainly would not have appreciated it as much. But it was even more than that, the pickle actually prepared the way for the goodness to come. The pickle exposed the full glory of the sandwich I had previously taken for granted. It left my mouth soured and puckered and ready to welcome the nature of the feast that would follow. I always eat my pickles now and I don’t complain. Thank God for pickles.

The church I grew up in was one which operated on a liturgical calendar—a schedule of worship which ensured that the “big events” of the faith were observed and celebrated. The colors of the vestments in the sanctuary would change during the different seasons of the liturgical year. During Advent it was dark blue. Lent and Easter were purple and those days between Easter and Pentecost (usually April and May) were gold and white, while Pentecost itself (in late May) was red. So from November until May, the colors were always changing with the liturgical seasons of the church, heralding Christianity’s high points (like the birth of Jesus and His resurrection from the grave) and low points (like His suffering and crucifixion). But from May until the beginning of Advent in November, there was basically one six-month long season. Its color was dark green and its name was “ordinary time.” This name always used to strike me as a bit disappointing—as if it was expressing some notion that during those months, nothing much was happening between God and His people. It didn’t focus on the highs or the lows of the faith like Christmas or Good Friday. There wasn’t a lot of unfolding drama—no advent wreath candles to be lit, no dried palm branches to tie in knots, no midnight singings of Silent Night. Its focus was on the “other stuff” believers needed to know. It was ordinary time. I came to learn later that “ordinary time” was not a way of calling that time mundane or common, but rather came from the word “ordinal”—which means “counted time.” It was time to be counted, weighed, used and invested. Ordinary time, as time to be counted and invested, is not exclusive to liturgical calendars. Ordinary time is a common experience for every single person. We live mostly between the extreme highs and lows of our lives. I’d venture over 95% of our lives are spent in “ordinary time.” Its walking with one foot in front of the other, every day, slowly, steadily, devoted. We’re tempted to think of this time, as I did with the liturgical calendar, as somehow less “spiritual” than the highs or even the lows of life. But ordinary time is not only spiritual, it is essential for the Christian life. How do I know this? Because the Christian life is grounded upon relationships, and relationships require time, lots of time, lots of ordinary time doing ordinary things which add up to what we know as friendship and faith.

My daughter is having a hard morning. It began with the moderate joy of feeding her new betta fish, “Rainbow,” all by herself. Rainbow is beautiful, but not as much fun to watch as Goldi, Goldy, or Silver – Livi’s first three goldfish. Goldi came from Wal-Mart, and never even made it out of the plastic bag. We rescued Goldy from Petsmart, and she was a joyful, bubbly goldfish until she wasn’t, and we brought her back to Petsmart for a more alive version. Enter the goldfish named Silver. Silver did great, until my son’s goldfish “Rocket” tasted her pretty little fan tail and developed a cannibalistic tendency that led to her ultimate demise. So, this morning, I should have expected a troubled mind from my grieving first-born. She fed Rainbow, and then started whining about her morning list. “I don’t want to do my stuff!” Whining gave way to stomping, then crying, and this is a job for SuperDaddy. I go in, I invite her onto my lap, I direct my nappy sock and garbage breath away from the tormented child, asking probing and thoughtful questions, affirming her and listening more than talking. While massaging her little hands, I talk to her about prayer, and she spits exasperation with not seeing God and not hearing him. I agree that it is hard to understand, and ask her to trust me for the time being, that God hears her and loves her. Things seem to be going well, until it is time to leave my lap and get back to the stuff she was avoiding. Teeth, hair, shoes, etc… Crying resumes. I escort her to the bathroom and close her inside, and crying turns to wailing and hyperventilating. This is a hard business. Time for Mom. Mom says,”Livi, we’re leaving in 10 minutes.” And though the wailing increases, the stuff is now getting done. I’ve been played like a cheap harmonica. Miraculously soon, my daughter meets me in my office and is dressed and ready for her piano lesson (the last of the stuff). I suggest an easy song. She wants to play the hardest one (a song called “Donkey”). We finish up with a melody game and a kiss on the head, she pulls on her backpack and slips out the door with my wife. “Bye Daddy! I love you!” Whew.

Boy, that title sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? Like the title to a P.D. James murder mystery or something. It’s easy to imagine that title being about Satan, or about Terrorism, or about Greed, or any number of shadowy, forked-tongue devils that creep in the corners of our lives. Today, I had an encounter with a Restless Evil, and it happened right here in Nashville. On Music Row, no less. Was it a record label executive, you ask? (That was a cheap shot.) Nope. Was it Lust? Was I tempted by the siren call of one of the many strip clubs and adult bookstores that litter the downtown area? Not today. Here’s what happened: I had a radio interview. It was for a show called “The Word in Worship” or something like that. I’m not familiar with it, but it seems like a quality show. The interviewer asked some really good questions, and they seem to know what they’re doing. I have a confession to make. Every time I do a radio or television interview I’m scared stiff. If the folks at home could look into the landscape of my brain in the minutes before an interview starts they’d see an epic battle being waged–one part of me is boastful about the fact that anyone cares what I think, the other ashamed of myself for presuming to answer questions as if I know what I’m talking about; meanwhile another part of my psyche is cowering beneath the table sucking his thumb for fear of being found out for the charlatan that he is, that I must be. I start to organize the opinions I’ve bandied in the car with the Captains Courageous, choosing some for potential answer-fodder and discarding others. Sometimes I remember to pray, and when I do it’s the sanest part of me asking God to shut up the parts that are displeasing to him; sometimes I pray, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” Sometimes I mean it. When the pendulum swings from my arrogance to my shame I then start to belittle myself and curse the way that God made me–why can’t I be well-spoken and smart as a fox? Why can’t I call to mind quotes from books I’ve read, or wow the audience with a too-perfect analogy? Why oh why am I me? If I were walking down some cobbled street and saw myself I’d be tempted to spit. Just who do I think I am? I have no business answering any question about anything, let alone questions about God and worship on a syndicated radio show. I have nothing to offer. God couldn’t possibly speak through a fool like me. The pendulum swings again and I’m congratulating myself for this or that accomplishment as if I had anything to do with it. Like I said, a battle rages. All that in the time it takes to shake the interviewer’s hand and introduce myself. He told me that we’d be talking about the current worship movement and at first I got excited. This is something I have Opinions about. Then I remembered Jason Gray’s post about Sara Groves’s new album, and I wanted to quote the verse from Isaiah that he referenced. I reasoned that if I fumbled too much with figuring out what I wanted to say I could always resort to reading some Scripture. This would be a fine example of the cart being placed firmly before the horse. But I couldn’t find the verse Jason referred to, and his cell phone was off. I was on my own. So the guy asked me a lot of questions. I gave him a lot of answers. I’m certain that about half of what I told him was off-the-cuff, ad libbed, specious and lame. I opined about the state of Worship Music. I stated that it’s a fad, and that I’ll be glad when it runs its course so that people will remember that it’s okay to listen to a song that’s just a song again. But then I realized that that’s a cocky declaration at best. Just because I don’t like a lot of what we call Worship Music doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable, doesn’t meant that throngs of people aren’t blessed by it. So I backpedaled, trying to lessen the blow I had laid on my own jaw. What was that Bible verse again? Oh, that’s right, I don’t know it. I had my shot at answering a question about the Christian music biz, and once again, I blew it. I could’ve answered graciously, with humor, without guile, could’ve said something instructive or wise, but I couldn’t manage it. I told him something that was so meaningless that right now I have no recollection of what I said. When I tried to dig myself out of the first answer, I hemmed and hawed and said basically–nothing. The interview ended about five minutes before I realized that the Restless Evil had gotten the better of me again. James 3 says, “The tongue is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.” I know, I know. I’m being too hard on myself. The interview will be spliced and diced and made into something they can hopefully use, and when it’s all said and done it may be that the opinions I shoveled out weren’t so far off the mark. But I know I was walking a tightrope. It is a precarious business peddling words, and the more you sell them the greater your chance of exposing yourself as a con-artist. As soon as the elevator doors closed and I descended to the parking garage, my spirit descended into a cloud of repentance. If I didn’t have a good answer, I should have said so. If my words came from a place of arrogance, I should have never said them. Lord, let me be the kind of man who is brave enough to be silent when he ought. When you don’t know what you’re talking about, to speak out can be the easiest thing of all; it is shutting up that takes work. AP

W. H. Auden wrote in his introduction to the 1954 reprint of Lilith, “George MacDonald is pre-eminently a mythopoeic writer…In his power…to project his inner life into images, beings, landscapes which are valid for all, he is one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century.” I’ve decided that my two favorite George MacDonald books, Lilith and Phantastes, are a safe and stimulating way for Christians to experience a godly version of a hallucinogenic drug trip. Lilith is a tribute to the power of truth encased in story. It’s the tale of Mr. Vane, a man at first unaware he has no real sense of identity. Awakened to his true condition by the question, “Who are you?” Mr. Vane contemplates, “I could give him no notion of who I was. Indeed, who was I? It would be no answer to say I was who! Then I understood I did not know myself.” The questioner tells him, “No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he is, and then what himself is.” Another great bit of identity truth happens when Mr. Vane says, “Tell me how to recognize the nearest way home.” “I cannot,” answered the raven. “You and I use the same words with different meanings. We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said.” The truth of identity in Christ is unintelligible to those who have not yet finished with world-identity. They still think the solution is to be found outside, in the world, in doings, in performance-based acceptance, and no amount of words will convince them otherwise. The only solution is found in the eventual, inevitable disillusionment with world-identity. The raven continues: “Home is ever so far away in the palm of your hand, and how to get there it is of no use to tell you. But you will get there; you must get there; you have to get there. Everybody who is not at home, has to go home. You thought you were at home where I found you: if that had been your home, you could not have left it. Nobody can leave home. And nobody ever was or ever will be at home without having gone there.” “Enigma treading on enigma!” I exclaimed. “I did not come here to be asked riddles.” “No, but you came, and found the riddles waiting for you! Indeed, you are yourself the only riddle. What you call riddles are truths, and seem riddles because you are not true.” “Worse and worse!” I cried. “And you must answer the riddles!” he continued. “They will go on asking themselves until you understand yourself. The universe is a riddle trying to get out, and you are holding your door hard against it.” I recognized this riddle of identity as the same I’d been asking my whole life. Truth is paradoxical and seems riddle until we are living in it. We live by dying. We are exalted when we are humbled. We find true strength by coming to a deep, settled awareness of our total weakness and inability to “be like Christ.” Each of us is on a journey to find our true Home – not the home of “pie-in-the-sky”, but of meaning, purpose, security, worth, identity down here on planet Earth. We look in the most ridiculous places until we come home inside ourselves and find that our true home is inner, where Christ lives in our hearts by faith, the fountain of everything that we are looking for. When we finally come to our inner home, we know we can never truly leave it. Mr. Vane then sets out on a journey to discover who he is, a gradual revelatory process that comes through various circumstances and his own inner and outer responses to them. By these he learns his weaknesses, and in his weakness he finds true strength – the strength to lay his life down for others, not in self-effort and presumption but in true love. Beyond Vane and his journey of identity, MacDonald’s Lilith, like his other great fantasy Phantastes, opens a window into the ultimate purpose and nature of evil. I first read Lilith a decade ago after I’d gone through several years of a deep and dark night of the soul, and through the dark night had learned a great deal about who I am in Christ. Through the Word, Mr. Vane, and personal experience I learned that the Devil most often speaks to us in first person, seeking a foothold in us in order to use us for his purposes. Casting great light on this dark truth, Lilith‘s character Odu says, “‘He was a shadow; he had no thick to him…He came down the hill, very black…He was nothing but blackness…He came on as if he would walk over us. But before he reached us, he began to spread and spread, and grew bigger and bigger, till at last he was so big that he went out of our sight, and we saw him no more, and then he was upon us!’ ‘What do you mean by that?’ ‘He was all black through between us, and we could not see one another, and then he was inside us.’ ‘How did you know he was inside you?’ ‘He did me quite different. I felt like bad. I was not Odu any more – not the Odu I knew. I wanted to tear Sozo to pieces – not really, but like!’ He turned and hugged Sozo. ‘It wasn’t me, Sozo,’ he sobbed. “Really, deep down, it was Odu, loving you always! And Odu came up, and knocked Naughty away. I grew sick, and thought I must kill myself to get out of the black. Then came a horrible laugh that had heard my think, and it set the air trembling about me. And then I suppose I ran away, but I did not know I had run away until I found myself running, fast as I could…I would have stopped but never thought of it…Then I knew that I had run away from a shadow that wanted to be me and wasn’t, and that I was the Odu that loved Sozo. It was the shadow that got into me, and hated him from inside me; it was not my own self me!'” “…a shadow that wanted to me and wasn’t, and that I was the Odu that loved Sozo.” Odu recognizes his real identity as love for others, and sees the Shadow truly as not-me. The identity of the Shadow, the spirit of Ephesians 2:2, is that of me-for-me, as opposed to God’s Spirit of me-for-others. Our primary battle is not to fight our self, but to fight the lies of the Devil that gain him a foothold in our thought life; that fighting is simply to stand in what God says about us. Beloved. Accepted. One spirit with the Lord. Light in the Lord. Overcomer. Indwelt by Love Himself. “It was the shadow that got into me, and hated him from inside me; it was not my own self me!” As the apostle Paul put the same thought in Romans 7, “Therefore, when I sin, it is no longer I that sins, but sin which dwelleth in me.” In such times, the arrows of the Shadow have gotten past our shield of faith and hit a spot we’ve left unprotected by the armor of Christ. The Shadow’s lies have struck home, and we’ve swallowed them, and soon we act out of the lies to live in Romans 7 temporarily until we wake up again, like Odu, to our true nature in Christ. I’ve never found a book more illuminating, imaginative, uncanny, or thought-provoking than Lilith. Deep, deep writing worth real digging.

A terror-inducing darling of a storm blew through Nashville last night. As I sat in what I like to call my “outdoor living room” (carport-turned-porch) with my November issue of Gourmet and as a calm instrumental played, I commenced to enjoy one of the last warm evenings of the season. The rainfall soon began with a gentle patter on the dead leaves that covered the ground. Just a lovely addition to my soundtrack, I thought. Then the rain decided to come in sideways. This annoyed me greatly and I resolutely hunched my shoulders against it. You will not force me inside, I muttered under my breath in the face of the horizontal shower. The pesky little drops persisted, became much larger than little, and within moments my magazine and I were drenched. I ran for the back door, which I could barely pull closed for the gale-force wind. I felt a good deal like Dorothy when she struggled to pull the storm door shut in those dark beginning frames of The Wizard of Oz. All of this to say, along with the rain came some dreadful cold. The dreadful kind is my favorite. It must be the staunch, stubborn Swedish blood that runs in my veins. I dressed accordingly as I got ready for my jog this evening and pulled my green woolen hat as far down over my ears as possible. The jog itself is of almost no consequence but the return home in the dark, starry night — quite strange and wonderful. There’s a song called “Dirty Knife” from Neko Case’s newest record, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. It played on my iPod as I struggled to put one foot in front of the other, breathed the sharp, cold air deep into my chest and rounded the corner of Wyoming Avenue. This song has a macabre tone, haunting chords, and tells a story that one might not instantly understand and, furthermore, might not want to. (Turns out it’s based on a story she heard from her grandmother as a girl about some of their ancestors who went insane, but it sounds oh-so-much more marvelously murderous than that.) I came to the intersection at 44th and passed the place where the neighborhood Cat Lady lives. In the warm summer months, when one passes this house, one can smell…cats. Lots of cats. Tonight there were three huddled on the hood of the packed-with-trash pick-up that sits in the drive, four in shadow underneath it, and one beside the mailbox, trying desperately to derive some heat from the wooden post. Poor delusional cat. The very moment I passed the house (and the excessive number of felines), the following lyric floated through my earbuds: Cascading letters pool on the stairs / The grass is high, the cats are wild / You can’t even touch the tip of their tails / And the blood runs crazy with giant strides. Not even a block further in the dim street, closer to 43rd, there was a white shape in the middle of the road, lit from above with an eerie orange glow coming from the only functioning street lamp. As I came closer I noticed it was a creamy white dog (which looked a terrible lot like a wolf), lying low but eyeing me carefully. I was only slightly spooked, until the moment I came up on him and heard the following lyric: He sang nursery rhymes to paralyze the wolves that eddy out the corner of his eyes / But they squared him frozen where he stood in the glow of the furniture piled high for firewood / And the blood runs crazy with giant strides. Does this happen to anyone else? Is anyone else served these little slices of happenstance? And are they really just happenstance? My thinking is that it’s one more area in our earthly existence where God can sneak in some magic. To me, it’s another sign, a more innovative one, that He concerns Himself with things that may seem trivial, unimportant or unholy to his children. Tonight in the dark street as I stood and watched that white animal (from a distance) I knew that Someone was paying attention and smiling knowingly. I did a double-take and exclaimed in my heart, “Did you see/hear that??” Of course He did. He created that thirty-second episode just for me. He is with us, in everything. Everything. In a world so bedraggled with general unrest, does He really care about providing us with these small trinkets of enchantment? I say, as my breath forms a white vapor in the cold, Oh yes. He does. Here are the lyrics in their entirety, but please promise me that you’ll head to iTunes and search for a snippet of the audio. Her voice is such an important part of the story. So suddenly the madness came With its whiskered, wolven, ether pangs He locked the door And shut the blinds He laid down on the floor and he slept like iron While the dirty knife worked deep Into his spine The blood runs crazy The blood runs crazy Cascading letters pool on the stairs The grass is high, the cats are wild You can’t even touch the tip of their tails And the blood runs crazy with giant strides He sang nursery rhymes to paralyze The wolves that eddy out the corner of his eyes But they squared him frozen where he stood In the glow of the furniture piled high for firewood And the blood runs crazy with giant strides And the woodsman failed to breech those fangs in time So they dragged him through the underbrush Wearing three winter coats and a dirty knife (Ukranian) Krichit shaleno, strekoche zubami (He shouts very loudly, grinding his teeth)

Sources estimate that World War II veterans are dying at the rate of about 1,000 per day. Valiant attempts have been made to capture something of that war and the people who fought it, and it seems that the good attempts- the really good ones- involve Stephen Ambrose one way or another. My grandfather, George F. Aspinwall, or Pop Pop, was a glider pilot in WWII. To have heard him describe it, for most guys the choice to fly gliders was as simple as the pay raise that came with it. But they had all heard that the life expectancy of a glider pilot in combat was 17 seconds (as compared to the 19 minutes fighter pilots were given or the luxurious 1 hour and 46 minutes the bombers had.) The gliders of WWII were a fascinating idea- designed to silently fly into tight places delivering men, guns and even jeeps. But they were also sitting ducks, constructed mainly of canvas and pipe or wood. They were built to be “one mission crafts” and Pop Pop said every landing was essentially a crash landing. My grandfather participated in Operation Market Garden, an allied mission to secure a series of bridges in German occupied Holland. It was one of the few missions the allies undertook that failed. Before he died, I asked him to tell me about his experiences, which he did. I was 30, and it was the first time I had even thought to ask about it. And the reason I wanted to know now was because I had read and then watched the HBO mini-series “Band of Brothers” by Stephen E. Ambrose. What strikes me about the men who fought in that war is that they themselves were reticent to be known as heroes, yet considered the men they served alongside to be just that. And they remember well what they experienced there. To hear Pop Pop talk about anti-aircraft fire coming up through the canvas between his legs as he flew over enemy lines was like hearing him talk about something that happened only last week. Which brings me back to Stephen Ambrose. Band of Brothers has little, if anything, to do with gliders. But it is the story of men from the same generation fighting in the same war. It is the epic account of Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army- a company that took 150% casualties during their tenure in the European theater. Ambrose leads us through their beginnings in basic training (July 1942), through D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, all the way to the taking of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest in May of 1945. What Ambrose give us with his accounting of World War II is a gift–a very thoughtful and irreplaceable one. What he gives is oral tradition, the stories and descriptions of that war in the words of those who died in it or lived through it. He generously saturates his writing with the actual words of the people he’s interviewed or the letters he’s examined or the journals he’s pored over–from both sides of the trenches. It seems men of that generation didn’t like to talk about themselves as much as my generation does. So if I wanted to know Pop Pop’s stories, I’d have to ask. Ambrose lit a fire under me to do just that, and just in time. I feel indebted to him for this precious gift of knowing some of Pop Pop’s stories. And I wanted to know Pop Pop’s stories because Ambrose had already told me so many others in Band of Brothers. That’s what his World War II books do. In them, Ambrose gathers and arranges the words of a generation that is passing away quickly so that he might tell their story and in so doing help teach us a bit of our own. (The HBO mini-series by the same name is excellent as well. You can also pick up other Ambrose World War II titles like The Wild Blue, D-Day, Pegasus Bridge and Citizen Soldiers.)

Sara Groves irritates me just a little bit. With each album she makes, she moves from strength to strength and is always raising the bar with the quality, depth, and lyrical ambition of her work. And as a fellow artist, that’s just a little irritating since it means the rest of us are going to have to work harder if we hope to keep up. Sara’s husband Troy gave me a copy of “Tell Me What You Know” back in August, and I’ve been living with it since then, awaiting with great anticipation for the rest of the world to be able to hear it. And now that it releases this week, I thought I’d say a few words about it. Sara’s best songs have a real way of getting beneath my skin and messing with my junk. She’s always trying to talk about the real stuff of life, love, faith, and even doubt, and always in a way that nobody else has before. (I’ve been blessed to write with her before, and am always challenged by how hard she works to be both very accessible to her audience but without falling back on language and imagery that we’ve all heard before.) When she told me she was working on a record that would center on themes of social justice, I was both excited and worried. The words “social justice” have almost reached cliché status, especially now with celebrities like Paris Hilton involving themselves in social causes in hopes of re-inventing themselves. And here lies one of the challenges that the social justice movement faces – people who want to help the needy because of how good it makes them feel about themselves. (honestly, I really don’t care all that much as long as the needy are truly being helped) But Sara sings of a different kind of service to the poor, the kind that casts us (the benefactor) less as heroes who save the day and more like determined soldiers who march on in the face of a battle that we may not win and where there is little promise of glory, a battle that she calls the Long Defeat. Sara names the challenge, but she also names the deep joy that comes from knowing you are spending your life and heart on something that truly brings God pleasure. It’s SO hard to write songs about serving the poor and changing the world that don’t degrade into either preachiness or Michael Jackson singing “I’m looking at the man in the mirror…” Now, don’t get me wrong, I like MJ as much as the next person (pre-scary MJ days), but I’ve been there and done that (and besides, I liked “We Are The World” better). So how would Sara frame this story? Of course I shouldn’t have worried. The girl who brought us “we’re taking our church to the moon” would surely offer us a fresh and compelling vision of Social Justice. Check out the lyric of hope in a song Inspired by the story of a girl Sara met who had been abducted and forced to work in a Brothel in Thailand. in the girl there’s a room in the room there’s a table on the table there’s a candle and it won’t burn out in the woman there’s a song in the song there is hope in the hope revolution in the boy there’s a voice in the voice there’s a calling in the call there’s a promise and it won’t quiet down in the man there’s vision in the vision is a road it’s the road to his freedom… oh, tell me what you know about God and the world and the human soul how so much can go wrong and still there are songs… Another song, “When The Saints”, moves me to tears every time I hear it. The song “Abstraction” is an ambitious reiteration of a line from a Mark Helprin book that wonders how we can know the meaning of one life. I remember listening to this song and thinking Sara is maybe the closest to the depth and poetic versatility of Suzanne Vega that Christian music is likely to have. But my personal favorite is the song “The Long Defeat” that offers a perspective that we don’t often hear in the American church on why we spend ourselves on behalf of the victimized and marginalized. It’s a quiet call to a war of attrition with no guarantee of a win. I have joined the long defeat that falling set in motion and all my strength and energy are raindrops in the ocean so conditioned for the win to share in victor’s stories but in the place of ambition’s din i have heard of other glories and i pray for an idea and a way i cannot see it’s too heavy to carry and impossible to leave i can’t just fight when i think i’ll win that’s the end of all belief and nothing has provoked it more than a possible defeat… I’m weary of our church culture’s love affair with worship music.There are of course wonderful artists making meaningful songs of worship, but much of the rest of it seems so disposable and consumer oriented.This record calls me to what I believe is a more significant worship, the kind that truly brings God pleasure. The kind of worship that ministers to him. When I was in Africa working with AIDS orphans last year, I was startlingly aware that when I would make them laugh, that it was Christ who was laughing; that when I would bring them comfort, it was Christ who was comforted; the one who tells us that he hides among the least of these is well served when we serve the poor – in whatever kind of poverty we find them. This is what Sara’s record reminds me of and inspires me to.

I am outside on my front porch. The yellowed leaves are methodically falling from the black walnut in the yard, my breath is chalky visible in the recent cold snap, and lately I have been exploring the unpleasant nuances of the dark night of a soul – my own, to be exact. It is a strange passion we live out on this over-glorified orb of rock hurtling through space at some rate that I’m sure would astound me were I to know what it was. It is an odd series of days, I am realizing, when you question your own faith more than you question your own doubt. And, indeed, it is these nagging questions which have prompted me to share my thoughts on Andrew Peterson’s 2003 album, Love and Thunder. So, why did Eric title this post, “Andrew Peterson: Love and Thunder”, when all he’s done so far is talk about himself? Because I want you to know, dear reader, why I like this album so much: I am richer for having been physically present when some of these songs were born “from the void of the wire and the wood”. I am humbled – sometimes a good thing, eh? – by the sheer grace and honesty of his words. I resonate with the album’s starkness and revel in its hope. I remember Andrew playing “Family Man” for us, his band, in a Wichita hotel room. I remember hearing “Silence of God” for the first time during a soundcheck. Andrew might remember things otherwise, but I have vividly fond memories from the tour all of which aided me in thinking and seeing better. L&T is an album that is delicate in its haunting, beautiful in its sorrow, rich in questions, fertile in its proclamation of faith and doubt, and painstakingly glorious in its production. It is an album of songs that, no doubt, came from a dark night of Andrew’s own soul. And that, I suppose, is why I am drawn to write about it now. Misery enjoys company. No man or woman escapes this hurtling orb without suffering at the gates of pain, whether it is intense or minute, emotional or physical, faced head-on or avoided altogether. It is the condition of things as they are, but not as they one day shall be. I am grateful for the wisdom and insight of Andrew Peterson, as a friend, a songwriter and as a person who has possibly passed through the depths of earth (or hell) and returned a scarred, bruised and battered man, but all the more holy in his humanity. *Of course, this very splendid album is available for purchase here in the Rabbit Room.*

The other day I was on Andrew Osenga’s blog, where the topic lately has been “Top Five” lists. Several years ago, I made a top five “Christian Albums of all Time” list. (For more on what an “album” is, go here.) My list has been revised over the years some, but not much. And it has always retained Rich Mullins’s Liturgy, Legacy and a Ragamuffin Band and Phil Keaggy’s Beyond Nature. Both albums hold their immovable place on my list for the same reason—from the first track to the last, they are perfect. If I were speaking in hyperbole here, I would tell you. I am not. They are perfect. This opinion, I recognize, requires a defense. For Beyond Nature, here goes. Since this is an acoustic, instrumental record, some words on Phil as a guitarist are in order. If you’re familiar at all with Phil Keaggy, I don’t really need to mention that he’s a great guitar player. What does bear mentioning here, however, is that the acoustic guitar tells the truth about the one playing it. You cannot hide your imprecision or bad timing or flubbed notes. The acoustic guitar plays you as much as you play it. So to hear Phil alone with his acoustic is something rare. And I mean that. If you are someone who enjoys being around to witness history unfolding before your eyes, do whatever you can to be in the same room with Phil Keaggy and his acoustic guitar, because his talent comes by maybe once a century…maybe. Beyond Nature is Keaggy’s musical tribute to C.S. Lewis (which is why I thought it would find a friendly home here in Rabbit Room). The songs musically tramp you through Lewis’s Oxford England. You can almost feel the autumn wind on your face and smell the musty old earth beneath the fallen leaves as you walk through the dales. Every note is played with a deliberate, knowing sense of what each song needs. It is a very mature work, and rounding out the soundscape with his guitar is a collection of strings, woodwinds and, when called for, even some triumphant brass. Stuart Duncan’s fiddle on “County Down” is especially brilliant. I imagine this album is the kind of recording musicians rarely achieve more than once a career because it has an intangible quality that seems almost impossible to manufacture at will: seamless continuity from beginning to end. This seamlessness seems to “happen to” some records, but usually even the artist is surprised when it does. Well, it happened to Beyond Nature. And for this reason, it remains inspired and untouchable on my top five. I mean absolutely no disrespect to the other fine works Keaggy has produced. Its just that for me, this record holds together in a way that doesn’t come along very often. I have never bothered to remember the names of the individual tracks which make up “Beyond Nature” because the thing holds together so well as a complete work that I’ve never really favored one track over another. This record feels more like a symphony than a collection of songs. Beyond Nature washes over you. It is the sound of a virtuoso playing his best work, and keeping it up for a full 60 minutes. And sadly, it is running out of print in a hurry. But I believe you can still get a hold of it at philkeaggy.com. Thanks, Phil. It’s perfect.

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.” –Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. I just deleted four or five paragraphs of my own ruminations on this quote. After writing them, I went back and read the quote again, realizing that I’m ruining the beauty – like a curator overexplaining a painting, draining it of any personal meaning. So I hate to even try to expound on the beauty of this quote and will just let it stand on its own beautiful merit.

Into the Wild accents a tension between the value of relationships and freedom. There is little doubt on which side the main character in this movie comes down. Chris McCandless’s apparent creed is that freedom is most supremely manifest in nature. It’s not that he is necessarily opposed to relationships. In fact, he is a social young man with plenty of personal mangnetism. People are drawn to him like bees to honey and he seems to like them. Still, McCandless–played with skillful realism by Emile Hirsch–eagerly seeks fulfillment and joy in the great outdoors, even if it means divorcing himself from meaningful relationships. With focused intensity, McCandless pursues new experiences. He is intrigued by people–as long as they don’t become too familiar and as long as they don’t tie him down. McCandless has seen all he wants to see of the upper middle class lifestyle in which he was raised. He donates his law school nest egg to charity and leaves the values of his family behind, literally. Through the course of this movie, I wondered if he was motivated more by that which he left behind or that which he was seeking. In other words, was he running “from” or running “to”? It’s a difficult question, though he was no doubt a wise and thoughtful young man. On the other hand, how much wisdom should we expect to find in a twenty year-old brain? One of the first pillars of wisdom has something to do with humility; the more one knows, the more he realizes he doesn’t know. Something akin to that line of thinking would have led to different outcomes than that which McCandless ultimately found. After obtaining his undergraduate degree from Emory University, McCandless–who takes on the assumed name of Alexander Supertramp–heads west. Along the way, he encounters an interesting, eclectic range of characters including a grain dealer in South Dakota, (Vince Vaughn with his usual quirky character spin), a hippie couple in Arizona, and a wise old retired military man in California. He engages in these relationships just long enough to see the dawn of meaning and fulfillment. But as soon as something like love rears its head–with cool, dispassionate fury–Chris exits stage left. This movie is produced (in part), written, and superbly directed by Sean Penn. I can and do ignore movies by other Hollywood types who wear their political heart on their sleeve: Tim Robbins, Janeane Garofalo, Alec Baldwin, and Susan Sarandon come immediately to mind. But Sean Penn’s skills as an actor and director are too significant to ignore. While I largely disagree with Penn’s political platform, his latter-day work seems driven by truth and humanity more than an aggressive political agenda. In this film, I felt as if the story was being shared as it really happened, not as if it was being framed to promote some progressive political theme. Into the Wild is based upon a true story which has been adapted for the big screen. Jon Krakauer wrote this best seller which chronicles the young adulthood adventures of the late Christopher Johnson McCandless, who leaves life as he knows it to seek unlimited elbowroom in the wild wilderness of Alaska. And yes, I let a spoiler slip without warning. The thing is, that McCandless dies is a foregone conclusion for anyone that is even half-way engaged in domestic pop culture. And more to the point, the drama in this movie comes not from this young man’s death, but from the way in which he lived his life. Penn uses the editing style in which the near-ending is the first thing we see. Scenes are shuffled like a deck of cards which then circle back around to the beginning. But rather than confusion, this approach brings clarity. The mystery and suspense come not from the stark destination, but in the discovery and magic of the journey. Watching the film, I pondered the question, “Is this twenty year-old man a visionary, an idealistic poet with insight, courage, and intelligence, or a reckless vagabond, foolishly self-indulging his life away?” By the end of the movie, I realized that in my attempt to lasso tidy understanding from my theater seat, I was engaging in the very technique I shun in blockbuster filmmakers. Yes, the film characterizes McCandless as a bit arrogant and–at times–more than a little reckless. Still, it’s hard and maybe unfair to arbitrarily pigeonhole the man. He was a complex person. I appreciated the way in which Mr. Penn refrained from leading me around by a chain, jerking me here and there to force feed some overly simplistic thesis. It’s rare to discover a mainstream release that allows ambiguity and complexity to be what they are. Mr. Penn allowed the story to tell itself with little hint of directorial interference. Rabbit Room readers will appreciate the literate, poetic nature of this effort. The movie brims with quotes from the likes of Henry David Thoreau (“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth”), Leo Tolstoy, and Jack London. My mind wandered a few times as I pondered the aphorisms from McCandless’s journal or dialogue. Passages of McCandless’s personal journal and clips of letters he sent to friends intermittently scroll across the screen. Beauty will also be found in the gorgeous cinematography which captured some of the most beautiful locations in the U.S., Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California, Denali National Park in Alaska, Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, and many more. McCandless and retired military man Ron Franz, played perceptively by Hal Holbrook, share a most compelling and moving relationship. Holbrook’s character wisely indulges Chris McCandless, intuitively realizing that McCandless has built sturdy walls of philosophy what are not likely to be scaled by just anybody. In fact, it’s McCandless that dispenses most of the advice in their dialogue. Like most wise men, Franz mostly listens. Nevertheless, the grizzled old man casually releases what turns out to be one of the most memorable lines in the movie: “When you forgive, you love … and when you love, God’s light shines on you.” Setting aside any dispute as to the explicit theological truth contained in these words, please remember them as you view the final scene of the movie. Like me, odds are that you will find it profoundly moving when you link the final scene to the casually delivered, but penetrating words of the old man. As an aside, the departure scene between Ron Franz and McCandless is one of the best of the entire movie. Failed relationships leave gaping wounds, some more, some less. Its more obvious victims bleed incessantly, are asleep in the back alley, waiting for delivery at the crack house, lounging at the open door mission, or staring blankly at the big screen down at O’Malley’s. Perhaps unintentionally, McCandless offers the closest thing to explaining his unique path when he says, “Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.” Sometimes, the walking wounded bleed in public. For others, it’s a lonely and private experience. When I first learned of Jon Krakauer’s book and the basic story of Christopher McCandless, I thought he must be an idiot. And on some level, maybe he was. Despite his cock-sure, single-minded assurance, McCandless was ill-equipped to survive in the Alaskan wilderness. Simply put, he was unprepared. Many Alaskans familiar with his story have been even more critical. But similar to real life, labels and rash conclusions rarely provide real understanding. I haven’t read the entire book, but the movie does seem to be fair-minded, offering insight without explicit judgment; questions without concrete answers. That this excellent movie evokes a passionately divided response isn’t really surprising; that the passionate response comes from the same viewer is not only surprising, but it is also an indication that it is a serious, nuanced movie that is beholden to nothing but the cause of telling a good story. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Please note that our own Eric Peters wrote and recorded an impressive song about this event. It’s called “Bus 152” (not 142, like in the movie) and it’s one of the awesome tracks on Land of the Living. Miracle of Forgetting and Scarce, other Eric Peters projects, can be purchased in The Rabbit Room. Eric’s song was a natural fit for the soundtrack and may have been in the running, but despite a public relations push, was somehow not chosen.

Eleven-year old Reuben Land, a character in the 2001 book Peace Like a River, provides narration that is clear-eyed and insightful, yet retains the magic, wonder, and innocence of youth. I found it easy to entrust my imagination to the author’s clever method of telling the story through the sensibilities of a pre-teen boy. An author with lesser skill would have either made the boy too smart-alecky for his own good or impossibly cute. As it is written, the character is believable and real. The novel employs the wide open spaces of the Minnesota countryside and rugged terrain of the North Dakota Badlands as a backdrop for its colorful tapestry. Set in the early 1960s, author Leif Enger uses diverse elements including Old Testament and Old West allusions and literary/historical references—often accented by miracles—to tell a tale which highlights eternal truth. As with many stories that contain elements of fantasy, it’s easy to find unmitigated joy in the unexpected mining of tiny truth nuggets hidden in the rubble of the narrative. When I happen upon a vivid and compelling truth—whether or not actually intended by the author—like the power of an atom bomb which belies its size, it detonates waves of pleasure which resonate like massive ripples in a small mountain stream. You will discover many such moments in Peace Like a River. Without succumbing to cartoonish hyperbole or explicit moralizing, Enger uses compelling characters and masterful prose to craft a story which is both familiar and mysterious. Like a well worn path, I found values that were inspirational, comfortable, and warm as my favorite pair of gloves. And yet, despite moments of recognition, I was also intrigued and jarred by so many strange twists and turns. Like a fountain drink of living water, this story refreshed and fulfilled a deep hole, but left me craving more. Of this great novel, it’s equally true to say that I’ve seen it before and I’ve never seen it before. Peace Like a River is a novel which contains deep sadness, pain, and lost innocence. Despite that, I found it dripping with loyalty, peace, faith, joy, and extraordinary love. As the novel ebbs and flows—I was vividly reminded once again that good is better than evil, the truth is better than a lie, and that life is better than death.

Here’s a quick look at the string session. The song they’re working on here is “Hosanna”, and I have to say that I believe that Ben Shive has outdone himself. You should’ve heard these string players going on about how great the arrangements were, all the more amazed because Ben isn’t a string player. Hope you like it. AP —————- Listening to: Randy Travis – Labor of Love via FoxyTunes

A name is more than a convenient handle; it’s an identity. My family names, the lineage of my father and mother, contain both good and evil – remnants of the Fall. For most of my life I’ve identified with those names, and have felt the push and pull of the good and evil of my forebears. In this struggle of life, our name determines and dictates much of our experience. I have relatives who struggle with various forms of addiction and the revolving door of prison; their circumstances are the natural outcome of the identities they are believing in and relying on. But for Christ, we would be doomed to more or less struggle in our various earthly names forever. In Jesus Christ a way has opened for humans to receive a new name; we have been offered a place – and a name – in the Royal Family. Ephesians 3 says that the whole family in heaven and earth is named by the name of the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is our new lineage, our pedigree, our genealogy. We have been put in Christ, have died to the old name and the old false identities built on our human ancestors and our mothers and fathers, and now, even now, we are named with this new name, the name of this Father of the Lord. The old names, the names of our earthly lineage, no longer apply. What names are in our lineage? Alcoholic. Loser. Adulterer. Murderer. Abuser. Blasphemer. Suicide. Worrier. Rich Man. Poor Man. Good Man. Bad Man. We can check all these off the list, and in fact throw the list in the trash, because we have a new name: Christ-Man. Christ-Woman. Indwelt son and daughter of God. One Spirit with the Lord. King. Priest. Holy. Beloved. Overcomer. The name Block, with all its attendant history, lineage, pedigree, no longer applies for me. Don’t get me wrong; I love my Dad, my Mom, brothers, sisters. But something fundamental has happened to me in Christ. That old name has been cut off, circumcised in him; the old-man Adamic lineage, with its attendant tag “Sinner,” was cut off. Circumcision is a symbolic act that foreshadowed the future, the Redeemer cutting away from God’s people their old-man identity. Colossians 3 says we “have put off the old man with his deeds,” and “have put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” Colossians 2 says, “In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ” Romans 6:4 says we are “buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” Baptism is the New Testament equivalent of circumcision, a cutting off of the old life and entering into the new. Let’s get a little graphic here to see what God is getting at. When a person in the Old Testament was circumcised, what did he do with his cut-off foreskin? Did he carry it around in a baggie as a treasured memento of the old life, or keep it in a jar on his shelf? Did the thing try to sew itself back on later? None of the above; it was thrown out on the dunghill. Why? It was dunghill trash because it was dead and no longer part of him. It was nothing but a dead, rotting piece of flesh, no longer part of his identity, in fact no longer related to him in any way. The rite of circumcision meant a complete break with the old life and a wholehearted entrance into the new. Now, if we are circumcised in Christ with the circumcision made without hands, buried with him through baptism into death, what has been cut off? The old identity. The old name. The old lineage, with every bad and good name in the book that was part of our earthly family line, Adam’s race, infected with “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in (get that, in) the children of disobedience.” (disobedience in the Greek is apeithia, literally “the unconvinced”). That false indwelling lord is now cut off in Christ. That old union with him is the very essence of the old man. It is circumcised, cut away from us, and thrown on the dunghill. Good riddance. I’ve heard people say “Well, the old man comes down off the Cross sometimes.” “We’ve got to crucify the old man.” But get this: He’s dead, and we are cut off from all that, here, now, forever. He can’t come down from the Cross, because his life is over. That’s what circumcision in Christ is. The devil schemes constantly to deceive us out of living from our new name and rightful lineage. He works tirelessly to prevent God’s people from accessing our limitless riches in Christ; George MacDonald wrote in Phantastes, “‘Shadow of me…which art not me, but which representest thyself to me as me; here I may find a shadow of light which will devour thee, the shadow of darkness!'” That’s Satan’s game; to masquerade and parade his lying thoughts as our own, getting us to live from that old, dead, cut-off, old man foreskin which doesn’t even exist anymore except as rot in a pile of dung. The old man, that false union of Ephesians 2:2, died with Christ; if Christ died, the old man died. Back when we were the old man, we were put in Christ on the Cross. He “became sin for us” not only by taking the penalty due our sins, but by taking into himself all those thousands and millions of old man identities throughout history. This wasn’t just “paying our sin debt.” In his love he had to separate us from that old name, that old identity of “vessel of wrath, child of the devil, prince-of-the-power-of-the-air-indwelt humanity.” And so we as the old man were put into him; that false union of Ephesians 2:2 that we all had entered into the center of Jesus Christ. It literally burst that pure, beautiful heart to have such muck and filth put inside him after an entire lifetime and a pre-existent eternity as a unity with the pure, beautiful Father. His love-act killed him; when the centurion went back to the Cross, he found Jesus hanging there dead, way ahead of the normal crucifixion death-schedule. When Jesus Christ died, the old “I” in Adam which had been placed in him died. The old man identity of a believer is as dead as a road-kill; we’ve got to fully get that before we can move on and be who we really are. The Mack truck of Justice and Mercy ran the old man clean over. That’s why we’re to put off the deeds of the old man – not because he’s alive and we’re to fight him, but because he’s dead and he is no longer “I”. “When I sin it is no longer I that sins, but sin which dwelleth in me,” says Paul in Romans 7. This is how Paul can say, “For you were once darkness; now you are light in the Lord. Live, then, as children of light.” You were darkness. Old man. Sinner. Enemy of God. Child of the devil. Now you are light in the Lord. New man. Righteous. Friend of God. Child of God. And Paul says, in effect, “Now be that. Live in it. Manifest your real identity.” That’s also his argument in 1Cor 6 and many other places: “Don’t you know your body is the temple of the Lord? He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit. Are you going to take your body and join it with a prostitute? Flee fornication.” The Pauline pattern is always identity, then behavior, because reliance upon our real identity, trusting in Christ himself at the root of our being, produces the righteous life that God desires. “You were once darkness (old man identity); now you are light in the Lord (new man identity). Live, then, as children of light (be who you really are).” Read Paul’s letters and you’ll see that he rarely talks about behavior before extensive reiteration of our new identity. He does this especially in Ephesians and Colossians; if you read them with this in mind you’ll see the distinction: Eph 1-3: Identity – Eph 4-6: Behavior. Col 1-2: Identity – Col 3-4 Behavior. We have a new name, the name of our indwelling God. A totally new identity and lineage, with absolute power to overcome all the unbelief the devil has built up in our psyches, all the ruts of false self-coping mechanisms built in a lifetime of human interaction. And now, the only thing left for us is to be transformed in our actions on a daily basis. How? It all happens by renewing our minds to the real truth, in a Christ-directed life which uses the devil as resistance training. We’ve got to internally recognize and rely upon the eternal truth of our circumcision, the cutting-off of the old man which Jesus did once for all time. “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation.” Period. And now the prince of the power of the air is no longer part of our identity; he is merely part of our training; his opposition makes our faith-choice possible. What’s in a name? Well, in the new name, our true name, power. Completeness. Holiness. Life-change. Purpose. Meaning. Everything we’ve been looking for. In the old name? Sin. The hamster wheel of self-effort: try-sin-repent-try-sin-repent, ad nauseum (believe me, it’ll go on forever until we jump off in faith). Striving, lacking, incompleteness, unholiness. Frustration. “I keep doing what I don’t want to do! I’m not doing the good things I want to do!” Life under the Law and so under the Curse. That’s what Paul describes in Romans 7. But we’re not meant to stay in Romans 7; we’re meant to move on and live in 8 and even 9, where we willingly give our lives – and if it were possible even our salvation – for others. As believers, we choose daily. The Christian life is not a pie-in-the-sky concept; it is a here-and-now commitment to taking God at his written Word, and through faith watching the Living Word flow through us in our experience. It’s our choice: Am I defined by my heavenly Father? Or does my earthly Adam-lineage determine my identity? Our actions will flow spontaneously as a result of the inner choice.

“He’s so…asymmetrical.” This was how a friend of mine once described his introduction to Lyle Lovett. My first introduction to Lyle was through the tabloids wondering how he managed to marry Julia Roberts. Then one day rummaging through the old Davis Kidd Bookstore in Green Hills, Tennessee, I found The Road to Ensenada in one of the listening stations. So I listened. I had no idea, honestly, what to expect. Half a song in, I grabbed a copy and bought it, thinking I was getting my hands on something witty. And I was, but as I listened, and then got more of his work, I realized not only that he was witty, he was also brooding, and whimsical, and serious…and very strange to look at. And the quality of his work is top shelf. I’ve described him as being to country music what Sting is to pop music–in there when he wants to be, but obviously capable of way more depth and substance than what you typically find on the radio. It hard to review just one Lyle Lovett record because they all seem to have a personality of their own, and Lyle achieves something very difficult–he can own whatever he records, whether he wrote it or not. One minute he’s folk, another straight up country. Then he’s gospel, then big band. Then American classic, then Latin. But he owns it all in such a convincing way that you never feel like he’s losing himself in this variety. It’s like some combination of all these IS his style. Asymmetrical. So since I want to limit this to just one disc, I’m going with the one that introduced me to Lyle, and served as, I think, the best preparation for whatever else you get your hands on by him. Oh, and one more thing. Lyle put a hidden track on this disc before hidden tracks were cool. And its not a throwaway song either. Free stuff!

I was further bombarded with “hello Miss Coates!”-es from all sides as I made the trek to my subterranean art cavern, and then again as I carried my cowboy mug to the teachers’ lounge. Even the middle-schoolers muttered some “HeyMissCoates”-es from beneath their shrouds of long hair that are forever hiding their bleary eyes. (Why does it feel as though pigs are flying somewhere when an adolescent boy speaks kindly to me?) As I swirled cream into my coffee, it occurred to me how these mutual recognitions and little greetings-in-passing had made my day’s beginning so very much more bearable, and that they were little gifts from God. “I like you hair, Miss Coates. It’s really pretty,” he said with a sheepish grin over my shoulder as I finished my sweet potato at the lunch table. “Your earrings are so sparkly!” he offered with an equally sparkly smile as he entered the classroom. As we settled into learning mode, I explained and demonstrated how thorough coloring would make the robot’s feet look sooo much more lively, I heard, “I just love you, Miss Coates,” and he patted my [lower] back sympathetically in a manner similar to that of a concerned aunt. His classmates erupted into laughter and those rollercoaster-y “oooooohhhh”s that I dislike so intensely. His face flushed berry red and his head lowered a bit. As soon as the taunting died down I said, “Cooper, I just love you, too.” “But you’re too old for him!” they cried, and we all laughed. I took a break from coloring my robot and launched into a mini-sermon on how important it is for us to love each other well, and that it’s one of the big reasons we were even put on this earth. These unsuspecting third graders’ faces were displaying blank stares for the most part, but I could recognize the light of understanding in a precious few pairs of wide eyes. Van Gogh strung the words together in the loveliest way: “I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” A friend of mine has posed this question to me a few times: “What do you want your legacy to be?” After thinking about it for a couple of years, my answer has formed into this: I want to be remembered for loving people well through offerings of my creative gifts. They are what God gave to me and I offer them, in turn, so gladly. I hope that when I am remembered, it is for the meals I make, the flowers I arrange, the home atmospheres I create, the music I share, the letters I write, and the art I offer. (And maybe for my curly hair…and my staggering sense of humor…then there’s my obvious knack for comedic timing….oh, and my spelling ability….ummmm, that’s it for now.) There are so many intricate, winding pathways that lead to loving artfully, and we all go about the business of love from different angles — we show it (and receive it) in various ways, but the emotion ultimately makes its way to the heart of the recipient, despite our bumbling and tripping ways. We hold its beautiful, quiet, but overwhelming power so timidly in our hands and extend it to one another. This is where the art happens. Being an artist of any kind requires equally heavy doses of vulnerability and bravery, as does this hugely complex and deep matter of love. The creative process is much like a relationship in that it is a journey, most times a long, laborious one. The idea or dream of something new grows and develops, then slowly turns into reality as we come to know and understand our subject matter, or our friend or lover. How good of our God to give us unending supplies and time enough, in both the worlds of art and love, to explore the possibilities.

I just finished a book that upon closing it, I felt like it finished me in a sense. A quiet meditative book that reached down and stirred the deep waters in me. It’s Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer prize winner Gilead, given to me by my friend Andrew Peterson. I was first of all amazed that a woman could author a book with such a convincing male voice! There’s never a moment that John Ames voice rings untrue. It’s also remarkable Marilynne Robinson captured the subtlest nuances of the father/son story. Furthermore, I’m not sure what her spirituality is, but she wrote convincingly of a very authentic and deeply rooted faith. I’m hard pressed to think of a more profoundly Christian book than Gilead, but in ways least expected. Mark Twain talks of a “religious man in the worst sense of the word”, and I would call this a religious book in the best sense of the word. I knew I wanted to write about this book here in the rabbit room, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of what to write and I was afraid I’d fail the book. It’s difficult to pull little quotes from it that are brilliant, because any brilliant quote would end up being three pages long. Entire passages are stunningly beautiful, but all in a quiet and unassuming way. It took me a long time to read the book because I had to savor every page – there was no filler. It’s one of the books that I feel changed me in the reading of it, or at the very least made me more present to my own life. That’s probably the best that I could say about it. Andrew and I were talking about the book a few weeks ago after I had finished it, and I talked about one of my favorite scenes where John Ames has a dream that his grandfather “stalked out of the trees in that furious way he had, scooped his hat full of water, and threw it, so a sheet of water came sailing toward us, billowing in the air like a veil, and fell down over us. Then he put his hat back on his head and stalked off into the trees again and left us standing there in that glistening river, amazed at ourselves and shining like the apostles. I mention this because it seems to me transformations just that abrupt do occur in this life, and they occur unsought and unawaited, and they beggar your hopes and your deserving….” That’s the way I feel this book came to me, like an unexpected, unsought, transformational gift.

Next to my name on the front page of the Rabbit Room it claims that I’m a boatwright. That’s a bit of a stretch in my mind; building boats is something I’ve done little enough of and something I do only as a small part of my larger job as an Arts and Crafts Instructor for teenagers. But it’s something I love, and something I really believe has worth beyond its obvious end product. I’ve completed two cedar canoes in the last two years and as my bio points out, I’m in the process of building a small sailboat. Each time I’ve delivered one of these boats out of my shop and loosed it into the world people congratulate me and tell me I’ve crafted a true work of art. That accusation, that a boat is a work of art, is one I struggle with. Part of my definition of art is that it has to convey meaning, however tenuously, and I don’t know how people can see meaning in my boats. But I have come to the conclusion that they are works of art after all, even if I don’t consider them ‘art’ when approached objectively. How’s that? Well, the best way I can answer that is to tell you how a boat is made. I begin with a form. A simple skeletal shape, upturned on a bench, and looking like a canoe to no one but me. Each piece of this temporary structure is painstakingly positioned, aligned left and right, up and down, plumb, fair, and true. If the underlying shape is not true, the final vessel will reflect those flaws. Then I go to the lumberyard. They hate me there. I pick through all their cedar boards, inspecting each one for knots, grain orientation, and color and set a precious perfect few aside. I buy the few I find and ask when the next shipment might be in so that I can inconvenience them once again. Back in the shop, I take these few chosen boards and break them down, cutting them into thin, brittle strips and then running each strip through a router jig to get them ready for their purpose. During this cutting and shaping, many break and find their way into the scrap pile, those that complete the process are sorted by color and laid aside to await their purpose. When enough strips are cut, they are one at a time bent to the form and glued together. Slowly, over a matter of days and weeks, the shape of a canoe begins to materialize from so many disparate parts. When the hull is complete, each piece has been planed, cut, and fitted by hand to serve the exact purpose for which it was designed. No strip is interchangeable with another, they are each unique and each supported by the one above and below it, each a small part of a greater form. Then with the entire form visible, it is easy to think the work nearly done. This is a deception. The hull is roughly shaped and must be faired. Every errant corner and imperfection must be planed and sanded away. There is no shortcut. This is when you come to know the thing you are building. You close your eyes and work by the feel of it beneath your hands. You run your fingers around its curves and flanks and cut away everything that doesn’t belong. You lay your cheek against it and smell her cedar perfume as you follow her sweeping lines from bow to stern. It is a singular and exalting experience to fair the hull of a wooden canoe. With the hull at last faired and perfected you sheath her in fiberglass to give strength. When you think the work is nearly done, you remove the hull from the form and she stands on her own, maintaining the shape you gave her, but you find that while she’s fair on the outside, she’s rough and empty on the interior. So you start again, feeling, cutting, sanding, making her fine and once again when you’ve done all you can do, you sheath her in glass to give strength. Then she’s solid, she’s seaworthy, she’ll float. But she’s not finished. She needs gunwales and decks, seats, and a thwart to keep her sound, steady, and comfortable. So your work goes on and little by little you watch her become what you saw in your mind so long ago when others looked at the form you made and scratched their heads. And in the end, your hands have bled for her, the sweat of your brow has dropped onto her and become part of her, you’ve held her and caressed her and been silent together a long time, and at last she’s beautiful. Time to give her away. You deliver her to strangers that haven’t known her, and they call it ‘Art’. But they don’t know what she means. I know. The boys that helped me build her know. She’s an art of work. The art is the blood and sweat. The silence. The ache in the bones, and finally the knowing that whomever she carries, she will bear them safe across dark waters.