What are you looking for?

by Daniel Jung We love seeing ourselves on TV.  Particularly when glimpses of our Christian lives appear on the big screen in ways that connect our spirituality to everyday existence. It helps us bridge the sacred to the secular. The fifth and latest season of the TV show, Fargo , is a ten-episode series that bridges this chasm in an altogether unexpected way. The show is not made with an explicitly Christian framework in mind but I believe it is among the best representations of “sacred” television we have today. For readers who are unfamiliar with the show, Fargo is a television anthology series on the FX Network that is loosely adapted from the 1996 Coen Brothers’ movie of the same name. Each season is a self-contained narrative that needs no prior knowledge of the previous seasons to be enjoyed. The common thread between each iteration is that all the storylines are set in and around the North Dakota-Minnesota border.  For Season 5, two questions must be answered to prime your viewing experience. Do the storylines revolve around murders, kidnappings, bigotry, and domestic violence—the utter depravities of the human heart on full display? Yes. Do these same storylines highlight the redemptive nature of the gospel message in ways that are artful, inspirational, and entertaining? Oh, you betcha.  When I was just beginning to learn how to craft a sermon in seminary, my preaching professor seared this mantra into our minds: Show, don’t tell. The Bible is full of both “show” moments and “tell” moments, but it’s the showing  that often makes for a more lasting impact. Instead of God merely rebuking the Israelites for their repeated infidelities in the wilderness (telling), the Exodus author vividly writes that God will force-feed them quail until it comes out of their nostrils (showing). Instead of telling us to reconcile with our fellow brothers and sisters, Jesus paints a word picture of turning the other cheek. Instead of telling us that his grace will always abound to us, he breaks a loaf of bread and raises a cup of wine.  Showing, not just telling, is the basis of my claim that Fargo  season five is among the most modern gospel presentations on television. With an ensemble cast filled with Emmy-worthy performances, the undoubted star of the show is Juno Temple, who plays Dorothy “Dot” Lyon. Dot is a traditional Midwestern homemaker. She is married to Wayne Lyon (David Rhysdahl), and together they raise their tween daughter, Scotty (Sienna King). Wayne owns and operates a successful Kia dealership. Dot’s day is filled with cooking, cleaning, and attending Scotty’s PTA meetings. In many ways, the Lyons are a stereotypical Midwestern family. But we also discover Dot is concealing an atypical past.  Dot has gone to great lengths to create a new persona and hide the trauma of her previous life. She is a survivor of domestic abuse, formerly married to Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm). Tillman is the elected sheriff of Minnesota and is the worst kind of authority figure; one whose ruthlessness and bigotry are scaffolded by a deluded brand of religion. The only thing more rigid than his cowboy hat is his view of male authority. The caricature is a bit heavy-handed but Hamm is brilliantly evil in his portrayal. He reaches Joffrey-esque levels   of evil in his hatred-inducing scenes. We learn that Dot’s previous name was Nadine Bump, and that she assumed the Dorothy/Dot alias after she escaped from Tillman’s violent subjugation. Tillman learns of her whereabouts and enlists a brooding juggernaut named Ole Munch, pronounced Oola Moonk  (Sam Spruell), to kidnap Dot and bring her back to the Tillman Ranch, where retributive death certainly awaits. Dot fights back and takes off Munch’s ear in the process. She is more than a survivor; she’s “tiger,” as Ole calls her.   Ole Munch is a man fueled by a code: all debts must be paid. Because of this, Dot must also pay her debt. A pound of flesh for a pound of flesh , Munch reasons. It’s a personal code that persists due to a seemingly unquenchable need for penance in the form of perpetual self-reproach. The nature of his character is a bit of a mystery . He is shrouded in ageless ambiguity and supernatural underpinnings. In a former life, he had literally eaten the sins of the wealthy and is both an embodiment of debt and a stand-in representative of moral licentiousness and wanton chaos. Though his exact mortality is always in question, the thrust of his narrative arc is anything but ambiguous. He is a placeholder for humanity’s need for forgiveness and redemption.  (WARNING: Spoilers from this point on) Munch’s mission in this show is to complete his given task and exact a reckoning on Dot. But in the season finale, Munch’s vendetta is all but forgotten as the main conflict between Dot and Tillman takes center stage. Dot and Tillman square off at his compound, ending in a bloody climactic firefight and with Tillman in handcuffs. With the apparent conflict of the season resolved, and the episode winding down, we settle in with the Lyons at their home. It’s dinnertime. Wayne’s making chili. Dot and Scotty are in charge of the biscuits. With Tillman in prison and the Lyon family reunited, we expect to see a happily-ever-after end scene. We are jolted, however, when we see Munch in the Lyon residence, ready to fulfill his sworn duty to collect on Dot’s debt.  “Every debt must be paid.” Munch declares in his enunciated tone. His words are slow, measured, and methodical. “Why?” questions Dot. “Why must debt be paid?... Isn’t the better thing, the more humane thing, to say that debt should be forgiven? Isn't that who we should be?” Dot then presents Munch with a flippant ultimatum. “Whatever it is you think you came here for, we’re halfway to supper…and it’s a school night. So either you wash your hands and help, or we do this another time.”  Because, of course, it’s chili night. Caught off guard and swept away by the Lyons’ Minnesotan dinner routine, Munch acquiesces and begins to wash his hands. Amid the hustle and bustle of dinner prep, he attempts to explain his code.  “A man…”  Wayne interrupts mid-sentence, “You know I was thinking, I might have a beer. What do you think?” Munch furrows his eyebrows and lumbers ahead, “...has a code. He has a code, and the code…”  This time Scotty interrupts him with a tap on the shoulder. “You’re in the way.” Munch, interrupted once again, moves out of Scotty’s way and continues, “...the code is ev-”But before he could say “everything,” Wayne hands him a beer. “Here you go.” Dot continues to interrupt. “I’m gonna tell you a secret,” pointing to the box of Bisquick. “It says to use water, but I use milk. Even better, buttermilk.” She pulls out a measuring cup and hands it to Munch, while Scotty shows him the “1-cup” marking on the measuring cup. “So go ahead and measure out a cup.” This is a magical scene. For those who have spent any amount of time in Minnesota, this is the quintessential Minnesota-nice  at its hospitable finest. Munch is profoundly confused as he kneads the Bisquick dough. Each time he attempts to explain his process of reckoning, he is interrupted by the Lyon family, and with each little interruption a transformation takes place. Hate and stoic coldness begin to give way under the warmth of the Lyon family who have kneaded him into their dinner liturgy. When the preparations are completed, they all sit together and Dot presents Munch with a drop biscuit that he made, “You wanna know the cure [to your sin]? You gotta eat something made with love, and joy, and be forgiven.” Munch eats.  Bread is broken.  An overwhelming smile appears on Munch’s face as the final scene cuts to credits and, for the viewers, there isn’t a dry eye in the house. Fargo season 5 tells a violent story but violence is not the end. Rather, it ends with the Eucharist. Where many of us have been programmed to expect the worst, portraying this very familiar means of grace leaves us surprised and humbled because it’s the way grace usually meets us in real life. Unexpectedly. And often around a table. As the credits roll, the conscientious viewer recognizes the embedded gospel message that Season 5 of Fargo  has shown us: rebellion, abandonment, penance, redemption, and forgiveness are all there for us if we can stomach the graphic nature of the show—and of our own lives too. In the end, this show makes us scream “Hallelujah!” In part because its artistic quality is top-notch, partly because they didn't tell us the gospel, they showed us,  and partly because, well, we love seeing ourselves on TV. Daniel Jung is a graduate of Calvin Theological Seminary and a teaching elder in the Korean Northwest Presbytery. He lives in Northern California, where he serves as an associate pastor at  Home of Christ in Cupertino . In his spare time, Daniel loves the 49ers, good coffee, and writing media reviews for Think Christian. You can find more of his work  here . 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By Heidi Johnston This liturgy is taken from Every Moment Holy Volume 3  from Rabbit Room Press . You can find more liturgies like these at EveryMomentHoly.com . Jehovah Shalom, God of our peace,  You promised that your burden  would be light.  Yet here I am, shoulders bent  under the weight   of a silence that is long and heavy.  I call to you, and wait, and hear no answer.  I cry to you, but do not hear your voice.  I am as one overtaken on a mountain path  by thick mist and fog. I cannot see my way.  Untethered, I feel the loss, not of you alone,  but also of myself and who I am in you.  I recall with longing days when   the waters parted at your command  and you carried me, fatherlike,  into your presence;  when your lovingkindness was   the whisper that revived my weary soul;  when your presence was the pillar  that marked my path by day,  and your voice the flame  that banished darkness  and kindled my song in the night.  Oh God, my God,  where is your comfort now?  Why has your voice stilled?  A MOMENT OF PRAYERFUL SILENCE IS KEPT.   Have I wavered or wandered from your path? Has my heart been drawn away?  Search me, O God, and find within me any pride that causes me to stand at a distance even as I mourn your absence,  any sin that brings dishonor  to your name, grieving your Spirit  and robbing me of the intimacy I so crave, or so long to crave.  If my gaze has drifted,  help me trust your grace,  and look you in the eye once more.  Or, if this distance is instead   a hidden blessing—then let me   be found faithful. If in this season   of loneliness your silence simply   offers me a chance to do what will never be asked of me again  in all of eternity to come;  to trust without sight,  believing that time will vindicate my hope and prove you ever constant,  then give me the courage to stand,  trusting that these lines I throw out are not cast into emptiness but, passing through the veil,  have taken hold of things eternal.  Give me boldness now,  even as doubt crouches at my door,  that I may choose to anchor my heart not in the ebb and flow of feelings  but in what I know to be true.  That your word can be trusted.  That your promises, unbroken   in all of history, remain constant   for me. That you are still who you   have shown yourself to be:  unchanging in holiness,  extravagant in grace,  relentless in love.   If you are both the beginning and the end, the first and the last,  then what was true  when light first illuminated the horizon remains true even in my disenchantment.  If you are outside of time,  seeing all of history in a single glance, then this moment of doubt is simply that: one point in an eternal story  which at its consummation  will prove you were always steadfast.  Could it be that even now, within this darkness, you are shaping and preparing me, deepening my trust and forming  within me a richness of love  or a truer humility  which will one day be used in your kingdom or for your glory, in ways  I cannot yet understand?  If so, then fix my eyes on what  for now is hidden from my view.  Hold my soul fast,  O God of my salvation,  that I may praise you even here  within the silence.  For you are my Rock and my Redeemer, my Stronghold,  and the Sustainer of my Faith.   Amen.  Heidi Johnston is the author of Choosing Love in a Broken World and Life in the Big Story . She lives in Newtownards, Northern Ireland, with her husband, Glenn, and their two teenage daughters, Ellie and Lara. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

By Matthew Dickerson "A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it." Thus begins the creation of Narnia, told in C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew . I was thinking about this creation passage recently as I was finishing up my own book, Aslan’s Breath ,  about Lewis’s portrayal of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, in his Narnia stories. There are, I believe already trinitarian hints in the opening of this creation narrative. Aslan will soon appear in his incarnate form as a lion—a particular physical creature existing within his created world—but at this moment the creative presence is omnipresent, seeming “to come from all directions at once.” And when I read the imagery of a deep voice speaking without words, I think also of Paul’s description in Romans 8:26 of the Spirit interceding for God’s people with “groanings too deep for words” as the NAS translates the passage. Note that ruach , the Hebrew word used for “spirit”, can also mean “wind” or “breath”. The Biblical creation account in Genesis 1:2 speaks of the ruach elohim , usually translated as the Spirt of God, as with the NIV translation which tells us that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the deep.” But that phrase can also be translated as the wind of God, and thus the CEB renders the passage: “God’s wind swept over the waters.”  Similarly, the New Testament word pneuma  can also be translated as spirit, breath, or wind. Thus it isn’t surprising that Jesus uses wind as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit in his famous dialogue with Nicodemus (John 3:8), and when he imparts the Holy Spirit to his disciples (John 20:21-22) he breathes upon them.  As the account of the creation of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew continues, we find the imagery of both wind and breath, which also seems to point us to the Holy Spirit. Indeed, throughout the scene, the narrator twice describes the wind moving over the newly created world as Aslan continues to sing that world and its creatures into existence. ?Far away, and down near the horizon, the sky began to turn grey. A light wind, very fresh, began to stir. The sky, in that one place, grew slowly and steadily paler. You could see shapes of hills standing up dark against it. All the time the Voice went on singing. . . . And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave. In a few minutes it was creeping up the lower slopes of the distant mountains, making that young world every moment softer. The light wind could now be heard ruffling the grass.?  If we keep Genesis 1:2 in mind, the imagery here seems to point both to God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity (in the imagery of the Lion), and also to the Holy Spirit present both in the fresh wind of God, and perhaps even earlier in the voice speaking in utterances too deep for words.  And then, when we come to Aslan giving to creatures the gift of speech and—I believe—of spirituality and the ability to love, in addition to the imagery of wind we get also the breath of Aslan himself and the imagery of fire, which is yet another symbol associated with the Holy Spirit in the New Testament (Matthew 3:11, Acts 2:3). "At last [Aslan] stood still and all the creatures whom he had touched came and stood in a wide circle around him . . . . The Lion opened his mouth, but no sound came from it; he was breathing out, a long, warm breath; it seemed to sway all the beasts as the wind sways a line of trees. . . . Then there came a swift flash like fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself, and every drop of blood tingled in the children’s bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: 'Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.'"  Moving past the imagery to the implications, I think we could make at least three important points about Lewis’s narrative—which, indeed, reflects the Biblical creation narrative of the first two chapters of Genesis and the first chapter of John’s gospel. First, the universe is not a purposeless result of random causes; it is the result of a creative act; it is intentional, meaningful, teleological. Second, it is an act of love. Indeed, the first command Aslan gives his creatures after awaking them is the command to love; they are to love in imitation of their creator who made them and the world in which they live as an act of love. And a third thing we see is that the Spirit is here, present throughout creation, and throughout history. Perhaps the most simple way to phrase this is that the created physical world has spiritual significance: the significance of the Holy Spirit. The way Lewis suggests we ought to respond to this knowledge may be most clearly seen in the contrast between Frank, who becomes the first king of Narnia, and the characters of Uncle Andrew and Jadis. When Digory first meets Jadis, Jadis recounts her story of destroying her own world of Charn rather than let her sister rule it. Digory replies by asking, “But the people? All the ordinary people who’d never done you any harm. And the women, and the children, and animals.” Jadis replies,   “Don’t you understand? I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?”  Jadis doesn’t see the world as having any spiritual significance. To her the world—including even its creatures—is just a collection of resources to be used, consumed, exploited as she wishes, in order to bring her pleasure and power.   Of course, earlier in the story we’d already seen the same attitude in Andrew who thinks nothing of being cruel to his guinea pigs since he bought them himself. The attitude really comes out later when coins fall out of Andrew’s pocket and grow into a coin tree, and the broken bar from the English lamppost thrown by Jadis grows into a lamppost after landing in the living soil of Narnia. “I have discovered a world where everything is bursting with life and growth,” he proclaims. “The commercial possibilities of this country are unbounded. . . . I shall be a millionaire . . . the first thing is to get that brute shot.” He has no recognition of the world as having been created, or of having spiritual meaning. He perceives himself as having discovered it, and thinks of it only in terms of exploitation.  These examples make the character of Frank, the cabby who will become king, even more exceptional. When the cast of characters first arrive in the empty world, and they are wondering whether they have died, the narrator describes Frank’s response.  "'And if we’re dead—which I don’t deny it might be—well, you got to remember that worse things ‘appen at sea and a chap’s got to die sometime. And there ain’t nothing to be afraid of if a chap’s led a decent life. And if you ask me, I think the best thing we could do to pass the time would be to sing a ‘hymn.'" And he did. He struck up at once a harvest thanksgiving hymn, all about crops being 'safely gathered in.'" I could easily fill a whole other blog with the significance of how Jadis fears death, but Frank does not; Frank accepts his own creatureliness and finitude. But a more immediate observation is simply that Frank’s first thought is to sing a hymn of thanksgiving. It is true that he does this before Aslan actually begins to sing the world into existence, and thus it isn’t (yet) a response to creation in Narnia. Yet it does reveal Frank’s character. His practice from his own world (which is to say, our world) is to see the goodness of creation and of God’s provision, and to give thanks for that, even in a situation that could easily be seen as dire. This, indeed, should be our own response to this doctrine of creation.  A little later, when the voice begins to sing Narnia into being, Frank says, “Gawd! Ain’t it lovely? . . . Glory be! I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.”  He moves from thanksgiving to joyous praise and awe. As “Gawd” is cockney slang for God, we see that this praise is addressed to the creator!  We might even use the word wonder to describe Frank’s response. I suspect that much of the common human response of exploiting God’s creation (and one another) comes from a lack of wonder. I think a great gift of Lewis’s stories (if we allow it) is that they open our own eyes to the wonder of creation, seeing it’s glory, as Frank does. What if we were all able to recognize the Holy Spirit moving over the land?  Frank’s wisdom—and his contrast with Uncle Andrew—continues when Andrew goes into a long angry diatribe, and Frank tells him to “Stow it” (meaning “be quiet”) and then makes the very wise proclamation: “Watchin’ and listenin’s the thing at present; not talk.” The importance of this observation could also fill several blogs. One of the best and most important responses to seeing the world as creation is just to pay attention to it; to be still, and listen, and look, and watch; to marvel and wonder at what God has made. Consider the lilies. Consider the birds. Note how the heavens declare God’s glory. Cease striving, and now that the Creator is God. Watching and listening is, indeed, the thing to do.  Matthew Dickerson has published several books about the writings of C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien, most recently Aslan’s Breath: Seeing the Holy Spirit in Narnia and (with his friend David O’Hara) Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: the Environmental Vision of C.S.Lewis . He has also published two novels of medieval historical fiction (The Finnsburg Encounter and The Rood and the Torc: the Song of Kristinge, Son of Finn ), a three-volume fantasy novel, several works of narrative non-fiction nature and environmental writing, some philosophy and spiritual theology ( Disciple Making in a Culture of Power, Comfort and Fear ). He lives in Vermont with his wife on a wooded hillside, within a short drive of three adult sons, three daughters-in-law, and a quiver of grandchildren, and is a member of the Chrysostom Society. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. 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by Andy Patton Everyone needs some form of community. It is also one of the greatest sources of regular stress and conflict many will experience in life. During some seasons of life together, we can all "go along to get along." But there are other times when old wounds rise to the surface, when a stray remark or careless word sparks a banked fire, or when we learn difficult things about how hard it is to live together. These times of conflict are both a challenge and an opportunity. They can be the doorway into greater intimacy and understanding for a community of any size—if handled well. Similarity and Difference Are Both Important to a Community Birds of a feather flock together and communities tend to form around similarities. When two people are like one another, there is a common language, an ease of both expression and of reception. As C. S. Lewis said, “Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .” St. Augustine put it this way: “The greatest source of repair and restoration was the solace of friends… to make conversation, to share a joke, to perform mutual acts of kindness, to read together well-written books, to disagree without animosity, to teach each other something or to learn from one another, to long with impatience for those absent, to welcome them with gladness on their arrival. These and other things come through the heart of those who love and are loved…” The recognition and enjoyment of similarities with those we love and live with is responsible for a good part of the joy available to us humans in this life. But, despite its pleasure, enjoying our similarities with others is not the highest form of human community. To pursue that end, we must go far beyond similarity into rougher terrain. If similarity is the wine of life together, difference can be its bread and water. The similarities we enjoy so much are often only the  threshold  of relationship. No matter how alike a group is, differences will eventually rise to the surface. Any community, if it is to thrive, must find a way to metabolize those differences, to process them and contain them. A community must be able to affirm and uphold the uniqueness of the people who make it up  and  also to ask one another to bend, to change, and to grow. Differences can become opportunities to deepen the mutual knowledge, respect, and support that communities thrive on. I’ve found it helpful to see both similarities and differences in a community through the lens of the “Three Layers.” The Three Layers It has been said  that there are three layers to community: civility, conflict, and accord. The layers come with an accompanying axiom: In order to get to the accord of the third layer, you have to pass through the discord of the second layer. The First Layer The first layer is about similarity, innocence, civility, infatuation, common grace. It is the way you treat the man at the grocery store, your new neighbor, the cute girl in class, your future in-laws. It is holding the door open for someone, waving someone past you at an intersection, making eye contact and shaking hands. It is the grease on the wheels of a civil society. It is easy because it is superficial. It is a beginning. The first layer is about uniformity because everyone looks the same at a distance. It is the threshold to relationships that  could  become deeper. All of us have to live in the first layer every day, but if we want true community none of us can live there exclusively. In the course of life together, doors to the second layer will begin to open, inviting the community to face the differences and tensions among its members. If a community cannot enter those doors, things begin to go wrong. The path of least (short-term) resistance in a community is always to sweep things under the rug, to stay on the first layer. The (long-term) problem is that you end up with an elephant-sized pile of undiscussable memories, thoughts, and feelings in the middle of the room—which is no way to live. If differences and tensions are not dealt with, they metastasize. The pile of things under the rug shoots tendrils out and causes enmity as the community searches for  indirect  ways of discussing the undiscussable. It comes out in gossip and bitter memories nursed well beyond their term, locked away from the kind of reconciliation that might put them to rest. It comes out in ungainly community behaviors as everyone tries  not to touch  their thorniest issues. As the issues grow, the act of dancing around them must become increasingly acrobatic. The journey into the second layer invites us into the very tension we would most like to avoid, which can be frightening. However, the hope of the second layer is that something lies  beyond  the conflict that can only be accessed  through  it. The Second Layer Then comes the second layer, the layer of difference. It is the place of unpleasant discoveries, of slowly appearing bruises, of resentments and things regretted, of honest words, of reckoning with how downright nasty the world can be. The second layer isn’t about generalities, but particularities as people reckon with the whole of one another’s personalities. It is about getting things straight. It is about revisiting the difficult issues again and again because you find, to your great surprise, that the thread must pass through the tangle many times before the knot is loosed. When a community has been avoiding the second layer, it is evident to anyone with eyes to see. The things that got swept under the rug in the first layer begin to pile up until they trip everyone who comes into the room. If a community is unable to address, acknowledge, and hold its differences, it will lose its ability to offer hospitality to anyone else. At this point, one of two things happens: either new people are put off by the festering conflicts and steer clear or they are drafted one side or another and the problems in the community only grow deeper. The second layer is the layer all relationships find their way to eventually if they are going to grow. It invites us to dispense with dissembling. It poses a choice to any relationship or community: lean in or step back? Change or fly apart? Deepen or scatter? The Third Layer The third layer is blessed community. It is rugged and weather-beaten and sweet as birdsong. It is innocent again, but has become rich with wisdom. It holds memory but has also learned the regular practice of forgiveness and release. It has learned again how to laugh. It has let go the poison of the second layer’s pains, but retains the gift of truths discovered there. In the third layer, the hurts and anxieties that life in community draws to the surface can become doorways to healing and transformation. The third layer is about acceptance of distinctiveness where one another’s uniqueness is celebrated, smiled at, forgiven. Here you discover again and again the same lesson: that it is  through  weakness, service, suffering, and graciousness that love is most nearly itself. And that love taken and given in the bonds of gift and debt can knit a community together. However, that is not a lesson that can be learned second-hand; it is an answer that must be experienced. And it must be experienced again and again if the blessed community is to prove to be something more than just a passing brush with the deeper unity beyond conflict. Braving the Second Layer Together We all have tender places we protect and they can go very deep indeed. In the glorious mess of human relationships, we often unwittingly step into one another’s sensitivities and pains and can cause damage there. The truth is that if you live long enough with people (and care for them well enough), you will see that we all wear our wounds on our sleeves. They are there in our body language, in the way we deflect conversations away from certain topics, in the way we make jokes, in the way we fall silent. These are all doorways into the second layer, the opportunities inside our differences. If a community—a marriage, a work team, a family, a church, or any group of people—is to continue to grow, it must take the journey into its differences. You have to find a way to turn the dark jungle of animosity into a well-known and well-worn web of relational pathways through the trees. But the journey is fraught. Many find they can’t make it. They eventually turn around and go back to the first layer. They continue to live together, but decide that there are places they won’t go relationally, topics and wounds that must not be broached, a distance that must be kept. And they aren’t always wrong. Others find they become people they do not want to be as they wander under the sunless trees of the second layer with their community. They become angry and bitter and biting. Things emerge they never thought were there and which they do not want to feel. They find words rise up from within that need to be spoken, but they can’t find a way to speak them without hurting themselves and everyone else. Damage is done and the community finds that its center cannot hold. Each person walks away nursing wounds, shame, and blame. Still others cross and re-cross through the second layer until it is familiar terrain. It is these people who find that they are eventually able to surpass their own learned patterns of conflict. Most of the time those patterns happen automatically, instantaneously, and below the level of our awareness. When we register an interpersonal threat in our community, we simply avoid it, or get angry, or pretend like it isn’t there. Part of the work of metabolizing the differences we encounter in conflict is bringing those instinctive patterns to the surface, slowing them down, and intentionally trying to behave differently together. And that is what a successful passage through the second layer is all about. The Catch The catch to all of this is that you can only access the third layer by crossing through the second layer. There is no pass to the front of the line. The third layer can only be earned over and over again. The discovery of the third layer doesn’t last (though it does accrue). There is always another conflict, other differences. But seasoned travelers of the second layer learn not to fear them, but to welcome them for what they are, the only way to go deeper because the problems in a community are not the differences themselves. The problems are the things that keep you from dealing with the differences well. The journey through the second layer isn’t safe and it isn’t pleasant, but it is real. So, in the words of T. S. Eliot, “Fare forward, traveler.” Andy Patton is on staff with the Rabbit Room and is a former staff member of L'Abri Fellowship in England. He holds an M.A. in theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He writes at The Darking Psalter  (creative rewordings of the Psalms paired with new poetry), Three Things  (a monthly digest of resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God), and Pattern Bible  (reflections on biblical images in the Bible). If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. 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by Pete Peterson For 150 years, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol , has captivated readers and audiences. It’s one of the most adapted stories in the English language, and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t know at least the bare outlines of the tale. So why tell it again? Isn’t Dickens’ original already a masterpiece? Why adapt it again when there are so many other versions already out there? Why do we need another? That’s a solid pragmatic question, and it probably deserves a direct pragmatic answer. Sadly, I’m a writer, so you’re going to get a roundabout idealistic answer instead. My penname is “A. S. Peterson,” which has caused no end of confusion for readers of my brother Andrew Peterson’s books, and plenty of confusion for people who know me as Pete, and even further confusion for people who called me Sherman when I was a child. But the one thing no one who knows me has ever called me is my first name, Arthur, which is kind of sad because of all those names, Arthur is the one that I secretly liked the best, and for one reason: it’s the name of a King. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with Arthurian legend, and I’ve always had a hidden sense of pride in sharing a name with such a venerable figure. I can trace that love of knights and errantry all the way back to childhood. I know by heart every image and beat of the glorious ending of Excalibur  (set to Wagner’s “Seigfried’s Death” ). And I can trace my love of theatre back to Richard Harris shouting, “Run, boy!” at the end of Camelot , my favorite musical. (I’m also delighted that my wife’s name is Jennifer, a modern version of Guinevere.) So with that love of the Arthurian legendarium, it’s been one of the joys of my life to have the opportunity to work with Malcolm Guite on his forthcoming epic poem, Merlin’s Isle , his four-volume telling of the complete Arthuriad. (Volume 1 coming in 2026 from Rabbit Room Press!). It’s everything I’ve always loved about tales of Arthur and his knights, and it’s accessible and epic and relevant and thrilling and magical and, literally,  all the things . And in talking with Malcolm about all of this, we discussed at length the nature of stories and why we retell them. Why does the world need a new Arthurian epic? Why do we feel the call to participate in the generational renewal of certain tales? Malcolm addresses the question in the Prelude of his epic, saying (in part): This tale is not for us alone But for our children too So take the tale up if you can And pass it on to maid and man That it may grow like living grain Both beautiful and true.’ And so the tale came down the years In every land and tongue. And old folk told it through their tears And gave it to the young. And even I, in these dark days, Have heard and found it true. So I have taken up the tale And passed it on to you. This idea of the inheritance of tales is, I believe, the essence of Story itself. Stories don’t merely exist in one form. They are meant to be lived in, to be rehearsed, adapted, reshaped, mined, and passed down. We tell them again and again for joy and for wisdom. We honor them with our retellings. And each time we pass them along, they grow and mean themselves in fresh new ways as each teller takes up the tale. In Fiddler’s Green (Rabbit Room Press 2010), Jeannot, a knight of Saint John, has the following exchange with Fin Button, the protagonist of the story:  “What do you know of the Knights?” he asked. Fin shrugged. “I thought knights were only in children’s stories until a few days ago.” Jeannot smiled. “A man could do worse than to live in the stories of a child. There is, perhaps, no better remembrance.” “Until the child grows up and finds out the stories aren’t true. You might be knights, but I don’t see any shining armor,” Fin said. Jeannot stopped near the gate of the auberge and faced her. “Each time a story is told, the details and accuracies and facts are winnowed away until all that remains is the heart of the tale. If there is truth at the heart of it, a tale may live forever. As a knight, there is no dragon to slay, no maiden to rescue, and no miraculous grail to uncover. A knight seeks the truth beneath these things, seeks the heart. We call this the corso . The path set before us. The race we must run.” We’re in rehearsals for A Christmas Carol   right now, and director Matt Logan just told the cast that no matter how often a play has been interpreted, when we take it up, it’s “ our turn .” He means that it’s “our turn,” not in the sense of waiting in line at the DMV, but in the sense that this is our moment to step into and participate in an ongoing tradition of human interaction with the past, the present, and the future. We get to inhabit this moment with all of our experiences and perspectives, our wounds, our insights. Telling tales to one another in the dark is one of the things that makes us human. It’s a primal way in which we learn to know each other and the world around us. It’s how God reveals himself to us. It’s how we reveal ourselves to one another. It’s who we are. We tell stories. If the stories are true, we retell them, and retell them, and retell them. Over and over again. Each time bringing something new to the campfire, or, as Tolkien describes it, adding something new to the “Cauldron of Story.” So yes, this is a new adaptation of A Christmas Carol . Through the creative process of writing and workshopping, we get to bring our own lenses and experiences to this beloved story. It’s our turn. We’ve taken up the tale. Writer, actor, director, composer, designer, producer, production assistant, crew member, technician: we add our voices to Dickens’ voice and body forth something new, something old. We participate in the grand tradition of the telling of tales. And as Chip Arnold, who plays Scrooge in the show points out, Dickens was only retelling the Great Story after all–the Nativity. For in the end, what is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge if not an account of God coming down to humankind to rescue us from ourselves. If any story is worth retelling, it’s that one. Get tickets to A Christmas Carol here.

by Heather Cadenhead When I was pregnant with my older son, I purchased a hardcover journal that I began to fill with letters to him: I took my first look at you. I remember it in perfect detail—they set you on the warmer and you opened up your beautiful eyes and looked at me. I wonder what your personality will be like. I hope, one day, you will marry and have lots of babies of your own. I’ve not known how to write this, but Milo, you were diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in January of this year. My Milo. How I’ve avoided this journal. The pain of knowing that you may never be able to read the words I’ve been writing for you since before you were born has been too strong for me to face. It’s been almost two years since my last letter. I decided, then, that there would be no more room for creativity. I would repurpose my itch to build new worlds on the page into unceasing efforts to help my son. I read stories of stubborn mothers finding the right therapies and interventions for their children. I would be one of those mothers. I was determined to sacrifice whatever I needed to sacrifice, including my writing, my friendships, my health—whatever was required of me, really—in order to be an active and engaged mother to my child with non-speaking autism. I quit my local writing group. I stopped submitting poems to literary magazines. It all felt like a waste of time–and I didn’t have much time. Research indicated that, if my son wasn’t talking by the age of five, he never would. When a friend recommended a specific preschool, we requested to be added to the waitlist. When another friend labeled a specific therapist a “miracle worker,” we immediately set up services. When my mother-in-law sent autism-related books in the mail, my husband and I read them. We wouldn’t be a statistic. Of this, I was certain. I renounced the blank page and went about the business of helping my child. I read a book in which a mother set up an in-home daycare. It was in this daycare environment that her autistic son learned to speak. Newborn in tow, I started a preschool homeschool co-op that met in my home two mornings per week. My husband and I were deep-cleaning our home every Monday and Wednesday night, for months on end, dragging the same classroom supplies out of the broom closet and re-hanging the same educational decor, week after week. It was important to me that our home felt like a home on days that we weren’t functioning as a preschool co-op, but the constant building, breaking down, and re-building admittedly wore on both my husband and myself. Meanwhile, the people I loved most seemed to be wrinkling their noses at every move I made. I recall a whispered phone call in the bonus room of our first house while my colicky son, yet to be diagnosed with autism, slept fitfully. “I used to think you were ambitious,” a friend chuckled, like my life was just a big joke now. I pulled the phone away from my ear to stare at the caller’s name in disbelief. I didn’t say anything back. Sometimes I felt that I’d absorbed so much of Milo’s silence that it was gradually becoming my silence, too. In a recent haze of sleep deprivation, I tripped over a parking lot divider. I managed to stretch my hands out just before impact. However, I was still picking tiny pieces of sharp gravel from the grooves of my palms hours later. One week later, my legs are still bandaged from knee to ankle. I’m fine—but I’m also throwing back a cup of cheap coffee in the hope that I don’t trip over that same divider in just a moment. It is nobody’s fault. It isn’t my son’s fault. It isn’t my fault. It just is. Sleep deprivation is part of the territory when caring for some children and adults with disabilities.  Prior to my journey as the mother of a child with non-speaking autism, I worked in the fiction department for a leading trade publisher. I published poetry in literary magazines and released two chapbooks with a small press. I was accustomed to putting in effort and seeing results from said effort. I assumed, wrongly, that I could follow this same blueprint in parenting my child with autism. Instead, my efforts were like withered dandelions, blowing away in the wind. Occasionally, my labors resulted in measurable outcomes—but, more often, they didn’t.  Last year marked a decade since my son’s Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis. That mile marker was significant for me. In speech therapy for the last decade, Milo was still considered non-speaking. Had I been in denial for a decade—hoping things would get better, missing years of opportunities to nurture my art? It was a sobering question, but I ultimately decided the answer was no. After all, my motto was, is, and always will be: “I’m never giving up on Milo. If Milo isn’t talking at the age of thirty, I’ll pray for words at forty.” When my body at last flutters toward the ground like a spent autumn leaf, merging with earth and rain, I will have one more mile marker to anticipate: the New Heaven and the New Earth. I’d been labeled “unambitious” by someone whose opinion mattered to me—but that person wasn’t holding my twelve-year-old son’s wind-chapped hand, clambering over snowbanks, as we ran the two miles home from the sledding hill in our neighborhood. That person didn’t know that my son refused to wear gloves, scarves, or hats, even in below-freezing temperatures. That person didn’t watch my son cry until he could no longer produce tears due to the bitter cold. I’d wanted to include both my boys in sledding that day. I’d forgotten, from the previous winter, that Milo rarely tolerated gloves, scarves, or hats—and so, we’d blissfully set out, leaving a trail of boot prints in the fresh snow behind us. Halfway to the hill, Milo began discarding items—a hat here, a mitten there. I tried to catch each item before it landed in the wet snow, no longer wearable. Soon enough, he’d thrown his hat, both mittens, and his scarf into the fresh powder. I stuffed the items in my pockets and gave him my mittens and hat. Those, too, were thrown into the snow. Finally, Milo had had enough. We’d reached the sledding hill, but Milo could not tolerate the cold for one more second. Linus’ lip quivered as he watched Milo; he was afraid we’d all need to head home immediately. He was terrified he wouldn’t get to sled this winter. My husband stayed behind to sled with Linus; Milo and I ran all the way home. When I finally turned the key in the front door and stepped inside our warm living room, I immediately set about helping my son. I helped him change into dry, warm PJs, plugged in two space heaters and aimed them at either side of his body, and started making hot chocolate. Internally, I berated myself as I stirred a hot-chocolate packet into almond milk on the stovetop. I felt guilty for taking him out in the first place. Ambition was the furthest thing from my mind. All that mattered was protecting my child. It seemed practically indecent to think of writing a book. I had no business even contemplating it. For years, I thought about my creative efforts in this way. Time and again, I’d start a new project with high hopes—only to watch that project inevitably gather dust in my computer files as I dealt with the more pressing matters of parenting and caregiving. Last winter, I was nearly swallowed up by my own anxiety. And, in the midst of that darkness, I wrote poetry. That poetry was like a headlamp, guiding me out of the night. In the spring, I began to realize that I had enough material for a full-length collection. It didn’t happen by accident. It happened while I boiled noodles for dinner, my laptop on the kitchen counter. It happened on the couch, in semi-darkness, while my family slept. It happened in the car, waiting for my son to finish another occupational therapy session. By no means was it easy, but, in the end, I was a better parent and caregiver for having gone through the process. And, in a surprising turn of events, it seemed to give my family permission to pursue their own creative goals as well. The morning I announced that the nightmare was finally over—that my book was finally finished—my younger son, Linus, started writing a story of his own. My husband began work on a comic series. In his book, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, Lewis Hyde describes the specific way that most artists are born: “Most artists,” Hyde writes, “are converted to art by art itself.” I hadn’t thought I looked particularly inspiring to anybody in my household, scrambling eggs and scribbling ideas for poems in my day planner (Example: “Occupational therapy @ 10:15, earthen, scarlet thread, pine root, shadow, wedlock, sea legs, riddle, START POT ROAST BEFORE LEAVING!!!”). I thought I looked like a mess, and I was objectively right, as the elastic in my daily ponytail lost its strength over the course of any given day, finally surrendering itself to the chaos of the unknown. In spite of this (or was it because of this?) Tyson and Linus found reason to believe that they could be makers, too. To quote Hyde once more: “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.” As I add a new set of ponytail elastics to my cart: I couldn’t agree more. Poet and essayist Heather Cadenhead publishes a monthly newsletter  about her life as a writer and mother of two sons, one of whom is diagnosed with non-speaking autism.

by Heather Cadenhead I shut down my public Instagram account a little over a year ago. Prior to that, I took a break for nearly an entire year—deactivating at the end of October 2020. I couldn’t handle another election cycle on social media: the arguments, unfriendings, and inevitable alliances forming again—the ones I’d worked so hard to forget about. It felt like people had barely started being civil to each other again.  I reactivated at the end of summer 2021, having successfully skipped the entire thing like Rip van Winkle. Still, I’d tasted freedom that year and it was hard to go back to that shackled existence: strangers asking if I was “fine” if I went 24 hours without posting a story, the sinking feeling in my chest when a post didn’t “perform” similarly to prior posts, appeasing the comments section like a nine-year-old explaining a broken Venetian vase to her mother. In those first days back, I started to mull a permanent exit.  I’d been dissatisfied with social media for many years, but I kept coming back because the conventional wisdom was that, as a writer, I needed social media to grow my readership. As such, I spent an inordinate amount of time, well, not writing. Instead, I “engaged” on social media: I watched stories, liked posts, left comments, and developed my own content. Instagram began to feel uncomfortable and icky—especially when the Instagram algorithm started pushing video reels over still images. I’d reluctantly learned to snap images to accompany my writing. Now, in order to attract a wider audience, I had to produce an entire video to accompany a simple block of text.  With time, the goalposts moved again: Instagram creators could no longer simply produce video reels—we also needed to research trending audio clips and pair video content with those clips. Conventional wisdom also stated that I needed to contribute multiple stories to the app each day in order to stay relevant. I also needed to reply to messages and engage with other people’s content—and continue, somehow, to homeschool my kids, keep my house relatively clean, keep food on the table, and what about my writing? Somehow, in the thick of the social media algorithm, I’d forgotten about the thing that mattered most to me. I began to recognize that the key to social media success was a willingness to do, say, and be whatever the algorithm wanted (which was never one static thing). I longed for the halcyon days of publishing: submitting a book proposal, follower count unseen—writers judged solely on the quality of their writing (by, of course, portly men in suspenders who smoked imported cigars). That said, I certainly wasn’t too good to hustle. If this is what social media required of me, I would do it. I’d do it all. What I didn’t anticipate was the soul-curdling effect of such efforts. Every trade has a price. I decided to open up to a few trusted friends about the meat of the issue: social media was negatively impacting my mental and spiritual health. I felt ashamed to confess this truth but, the more I confessed, the more I heard: Me, too. I struggle with all the same things. These friends inspired me to share my struggles a little more publicly.  I often experienced envy when I logged onto Instagram. I felt like an out-of-place ragamuffin amidst women who were prettier, thinner, and more successful than I was. The more I tried to compete, the more I fell short. They’re doing it, a sinister voice whispered. Why can’t you? In time, I understood that I would never satiate that voice of condemnation. I had to overpower it, bend its will to mine. I needed to preach to myself, rather than listen to myself: I’m not called to that. I’m called to something else. Often, Instagram produced a depression that haunted me long after I logged off. I explained mood swings to my family by detailing situations that, outside the app, did not matter and often made little sense. With enough real-life stress to fill a book, I could no longer tolerate inscrutable trouble—mysterious usernames that boiled with anger over things I did or didn’t do correctly. It was not unusual for me to feel physically fatigued after an uncomfortable interaction in DMs or comments—but it wasn’t an Instagram follower who witnessed my tears. It was my children.  I often logged onto social media in an upbeat mood. I’d finish reading the Bible with my kids, pour a second cup of coffee, stop to admire a cardinal at the bird feeder—and absentmindedly tap Instagram. Soon, I’d find myself stressed. Occasionally, I’d find myself frantic. What am I doing with my life? I’d panic. So-and-So just shared her second reel in two days and I haven’t contributed anything in two weeks. I’m falling behind. I’ll never catch up. Scroll, scroll. Oh, wow. And So-and-So already did her workout for the day. I need to post a new reel and get a workout in. Scroll, scroll. Oh, wow. This mom is already reading Dickens with her kids? We haven’t gotten around to Dickens yet. I need to post a new reel, get a workout in, and start Dickens’ complete bibliography.  In time, I recognized that, in fact, I’d felt no urgency about posting content, working out, or reading Dickens until I opened social media. I’d been quite satisfied to watch the birds and enjoy my coffee. I’m obviously not writing any of this to suggest that ambition is a bad thing. I consider myself to be a highly ambitious person. However, my ambitions are very specific—and I don’t need the Internet to remind me of my own goals. Those hopes live within me, rent-free—taking up space in the still places of my soul.  We can’t be all things to all people. We are finite beings with limited resources. God’s wisdom is a balm for a harried state of mental health. Scripture points out that the approval of others isn’t enough and never will be enough. If it were, no author would ever write a second book. No musician would ever record a second album. While a completed task may satisfy for a season, the urge to strive and compete will return, and, with it, the emptiness of everything we do. When we seek God, He creates meaning in even the midnight cry of a sleepless child. The writing of Heather Cadenhead has been featured in  Wild + Free, Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, Literary Mama,  and other publications. She publishes  a monthly newsletter  about mothering her non-speaking son through the lens of the Christian gospel. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Timothy Jones I do not write as a Swiftie (as Taylor Swift's fans are called). My demographic as a boomer may have something to do with that. While I admire her output and can appreciate her melodic hooks, I wouldn’t say I’m routinely floored. I found the Folklore album and documentary to be a source of encouragement during the pandemic. I appreciate how her songwriting sometimes verges on vivid poetry, a way with words given a nod in her recent release, The Tortured Poets Department. And she doesn’t flinch at admitting her heartbreaks to the wider world. Whatever your take on her prolific (some have said lately her self-indulgent ) releases, she knows how to hold an audience. The so-called Taylor Swift effect, where anything she taps goes off-the-charts viral, has become a cultural fixture. I want to take notice when something shakes or shapes our popular culture. Becomes a subterranean rumble.  I mean that latter phrase literally. Taylor Swift’s twin concerts at Seattle’s Lumen Field measured on a seismograph; fans’ cheering, dancing, and singing combined with her massive sound system to generate seismic activity of 2.3.  When she sang the earth shook. Why the intense following? How to account for what one commentator called her ravenous fan base? The why is many-faceted. Who can trace the reasons for every cultural “tipping point”? But one thing is clear: Swift has found a way to draw people in, disarmed by her vulnerability. “Swift’s lyrics,” cultural observer Rina Rafael observes, “are chockfull of insecurities, loss, and self-doubt.” Her “tortured” verses capture frustration and worry and her wondering why her romances haven’t exactly led to fairy tales. (Even if an early song like “Love Story” suggests she expects as much: “Romeo, save me, I’ve been feeling so alone.”) All that reflection and cultural fascination was before her latest dual release, where song after song continues in the autobiographical vein. Now she sorts through healing from pained break-ups and promises her trademark feisty pay-back, giving fans lots to decode. “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” bares her tumult and emotional turmoil, as all the while she puts up the front of a musician’s dream of commercial “arrival.” The megacelebrity and phenomenon becomes a vulnerable human person—a tension that never quite will (nor can) find full resolution. And she admits, reaching out to every person who’s felt gas-lit or disrespected in a strained, walk-on-eggshells relationship, “ I know my love should be celebrated, but you tolerate it.” Poignant.  So, says Rafael, enthusiasts “feel like they could grab a drink and commiserate with Swift. As if she’s already a friend they could confide in.” They are invited into a life, a world, her storied success and glamor but also the dogging drama. So they say, “She’s so relatable.” And I’m drawn to that word relatable. To a simple picture of a companionable friend. I think of the universal human need amid our aching to be noticed and known. Amid our time’s bleeding longings and loneliness, millions find themselves validated by Swift’s trip-ups. I think of the all-too-common disappointments, the outcomes of our attempts to connect with one another, with friends and communities, and those we love and whom we want to love us. We need companioning here. More than we may admit. All of us. We sometimes see ourselves as a universe unto ourselves—cramping and crimping the dimensions of life and our flourishing. We are not ourselves by ourselves, but only with relating to others, relational failures and all. We are persons made to flourish through the affection and presence of others. “We are born into relationships,” as David Brooks put it. “We precedes me.”  And when those ties bind too tightly or frustrate our thriving, we need support. We look for reassurance that in our relational struggles, we are far from alone. If such help comes from a singer-songwriter of legendary influence, it may get through. I have become more aware of the heartache and brokenness my own family of origin has caused. Love can seem fragile or turn fickle, I learned as a young adult, when practically written out of the family. What do you do with a parent who threatens to disown you and cut off contact when you are a young adult? Swift navigates the terrain of tricky relating to parents, too. The tensions and minefields and brokenness. And we don’t really think, at least in our best moments, that we can repair our broken selves and hurting world solo. In “Anti-hero,” Swift reassures here: I should not be left to my own devices They come with prices and vices I end up in crisis (tale as old as time) And when it comes to romantic love, even amid the ecstasies and exhilaration, no one escapes humanity’s fallenness, a predilection and bent that turns the joy into pain and sometimes disenchantment. We limp some days from the sting of another’s spite. Swift seems to get this. She mines relationships for every shred of meaning and redemption. The love we find and seek forms our deepest question and our most nagging quest. And sometimes the heart flails, the hope fails.  “I can read your mind: ‘She’s having the time of her life,’” Swift sings on  “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,”  a (sonically ironic) perky track that cries out, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘more.’”  But I’m sensing something even deeper in that “more.” Is Taylor fumbling after something she sees or senses only faintly? As our hurt or our loneliness compounds it can begin to assume cosmic dimensions, divine proportions. I think of what someone called Swift’s “break up with the church” song, “But Daddy I Love Him,”  from her latest album. Swift captures the angst and deflated hopes there, too. The  “religious” people in the song distinguish themselves by their judgmentalism: I just learned these people only raise you to cage you Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best Clutching their pearls, sighing “What a mess” I just learned these people try and save you ...cause they hate you And might there also be a sense that a relatable God and humbler faith is the way it could be? Swift has, I’d argue, not fully realized that grounding source for love’s meaning. But in the riveted focus on romance and its joys and setbacks, she is already pointing to larger realities.  Charles Williams, one of the twentieth century’s Inklings, spoke of what he provocatively called a “romantic theology.” He argues, as James K.A. Smith interprets him, “that the human experience of romantic love and sexual desire is itself a testimony to the desire for God.” In human love, we experience traces or gulps, trickles, or streams of the God who is love. The person who loves me may only achieve a pale copy, the one I try to love may get from me only a vaguely dissatisfying fragment. But here also we can find a foretaste, a daily reminder. I’m listening to what Swift is exploring, grateful for the way she honors botched efforts at love, our missed potential. I encourage readers to pay attention, even if it’s not a favorite genre. It’s good to know how another struggles. I’m reminded how awareness of such longing to connect might just point the watching (and listening) world to greater things, to a highly relatable God.  Timothy Jones is a writer and Episcopal priest who lives near Nashville. He once worked as an associate editor at Christianity Today magazine. Over the years he has written almost a dozen noted books on prayer and spirituality. More recently he's written for Ekstasis magazine, Fathom magazine, and The Christian Century. He blogs at  revtimothyjones.com  and is working a book exploring the doctrine of the Trinity in ways normal people can relate to. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by L. M. Sacasas “I didn’t realize, I didn’t articulate at the time, that I had this reverence for trees,” Suzanne Simard explained in a interview with  Emergent Magazine . Simard, who was recollecting her childhood experience in familiar forests, went on to become a professor of forestry at the University of British Columbia. Her pioneering research showed that forest trees are connected by "vast underground mycorrhizal networks.“ "They were a cathedral that was one, with all of its disciples and pews,” Simard went on to say of the forests she knew as a child: “and to me it was just this integrated place.” But, she added, “when I went to university, the professors had picked apart the forest. There were the trees, there was the soil, there were the plants, so it was a reductionist way of seeing this place that I had already grown up knowing was whole.” Out of college, Simard began working as a silviculturist in the forest industry. “Take the trees and clear-cut them and sell them on the market and then plant trees again”—this was standard operating procedure for the industry as she knew it. “I became part of that machine,” she acknowledges, “that clear-cutting, planting machine.” The main problem as she came to see it was that “the forest that was clear-cut was not at all what was put back.”“We were creating forests that were not connected and entwined,” Simard explained, “that we were creating forests that put the parts back, but didn’t actually meld together as a whole, as I knew it should.” In time, Simard realized that many of the replanted trees were getting sick. This prompted her research, based on intuitions derived from her early experience of forests, which demonstrated that forest trees are connected by elaborate networks of fungi and roots through which they communicate and support one another. You could replant the trees you cut down, but you couldn’t recreate the unseen network that kept them healthy. As I read, Simard describe her experience with trees, and I came to see the story she was telling as an apt allegory for social life in the digital age.  The story of modernity is the story of disintegration. Across a number of fields, the modern world learned to take things apart. Some of this was done in the interest of an ostensibly better understanding of the natural world, some of it was driven by the desire for greater degrees of technical precision or economic efficiency. In other cases, the separations were philosophical in nature, or they reflected changing social realities. Specialization was the order of the day. Nature was dissected. Church and state went their separate ways. Science and philosophy parted. Work was detached from the home and family life. Fact and value, human and non-human, individual and community, body and mind, object and subject—what was once whole was now separate.  Of course, such differentiations were never total or complete. The anthropologist Bruno Latour famously argued that we have never been modern precisely because we never really achieved the strict separations (he calls them purifications) we imagined to be the defining features of the modern world. Religion and politics, science and belief, nature and culture have always blended and intermingled. Nonetheless, to be modern was to believe that such separations were necessary and good, and, while never complete, some ruptures were real and consequential. I have the rise of the individual chiefly in mind. Under the guise of freedom and liberation, the individual was unencumbered and disembedded. Ties to family, tradition, and community were gradually loosened, and the self was ostensibly freed to fashion itself at whim. The result, through much of the 20th century, was widespread angst about alienation, anxiety, and loneliness. The faceless person lost in the crowd became a recurring trope.  If we live in a postmodern world, it is not because we have become relativists with regards to truth but because the old separations that constituted the modern world are no longer tenable. It is increasingly evident that the philosophical differentiations were never complete, and individuals find themselves increasingly re-connected. In both cases, it is possible to draw a line between the advent of digital communication technologies and inability to sustain the separations that were so critical to modernity’s self-understanding. While modernity isolated the individual, the digital world promised to re-forge communities and reconnect us. But the total effect has been something akin to the replanted forests Simard described. What was torn down into its constituent parts has been reassembled, but it has not been made whole. Communities, like old forests, cannot simply be re-fabricated.  Digital tools have brought us closer together in some respects, and they have connected us to many people we never would have known otherwise. And they have provided genuine solace and consolation to many, who, apart from them, might have found themselves alone and unheard. But it would be a mistake to imagine that these new forms of social life will function in the same manner as older communities, which had disintegrated under the economic, technological, and ideological forces of the modern world. They are, most obviously, indifferent to place, unlike the older forms of communal life, which were almost always locally rooted. They make different, perhaps less stringent demands of us. They tend to be communities of affinity and antagonism. They do not tend to foster the virtues required to live well and peaceably with those who are unlike us. And this is to say nothing of the power these new networks posses to unsettle, confuse, and overwhelm by virtue of their design and architecture. Their scale and temporal rhythms are inhospitable to the often, slow deliberate work that truth and trust require.  Just like the engineered forests with which we began, something is amiss with the engineered re-integrations that digital media makes possible. Networks built on metrics and data cannot account for the often intangible forces that bind people together, not unlike the mycorrhizal networks Simard identified. It may be best for us to appreciate our digital forms of connection for what they are, while recognizing that they are ultimately an inadequate substitute for the more robust forms of membership and belonging that we naturally crave. Ultimately, there will be no technological shortcuts for the time and virtue required to build new and life-giving forms of community.  Michael Sacasas is the associate director of the Christian Study Center in Gainesville, Florida, and author of  The Convivial Society , a newsletter exploring the intersection of technology, culture, and the moral life. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Rebecca J. Gomez I often say that my mother is the voice of poetry in my mind. My mother read lots of poems and rhyming texts aloud to me and my siblings. Silverstein, Seuss, and others that I can’t remember now. The one that stands out to me the most is The Cremation of Sam McGee  by Robert Service. That poem put her voice into all poetry for me. Not just the poem itself, but the way she read it. She delighted in it. In the language, the imagery, the strange spookiness of the story. I did too. There was something about it that little me couldn’t understand or appreciate, but I knew it was there. When I re-read it now, I know what it is. It’s the way the verses flow so smoothly, the internal rhymes and alliteration that delight the ears, the word play, the humor, the atmosphere, the imagery that draws you in and almost makes you feel  the cold, like magic: "On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail. Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail. If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see; It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee." I remember trying to capture a bit of that magic in my bumbling attempts at rhymes as a first grader and throughout my childhood and teen years. Though my early attempts were far from anything I would now consider “good” poetry, those awkward verses about horses, trees, faith, and heartbreak were helping me to find my voice. I didn’t have access to a large poetry library as a kid, and I was never fortunate enough to study poetry in any significant way in school. So I learned what I could from Shel Silverstein’s silly poems, the rhythm and wordplay in Dr. Seuss’s rhyming stories, and the songs within the pages of The Hobbit . Those were my earliest poetry teachers, so naturally, they influenced my poetic voice significantly. Like my mother before me, I read aloud often to my children. I loved reading old favorites and discovering new ones. We shared the rhythmic, rhyming poetry of Robert Frost, Jack Prelutsky, and Joyce Sidman, to name a few. But my love of poetry kept expanding. What began in childhood as a fondness for rhythmic rhyme that was such a delight to read aloud eventually branched into a love for poetry in all its forms as I discovered poets like Ted Kooser, Billy Collins, and Mary Oliver. The poetry of Kooser, Collins, and Oliver isn’t exactly  like that of Silverstein or Prelutsky. And yet, it is. Their poetry may not be rhyming, silly, or child-like, but all of these favorite poets of mine do one thing really well: capture a little bit of magic and share it with their readers. The very thing I have been trying to do since I was old enough to write my first rhyming verse. All of these poets, and many others, have helped me develop a voice that is uniquely my own. These days I spend my time writing stories and poems primarily for children, hoping to capture the imaginations of young readers the way Robert Service and all those other poets captured mine. In truth, my attempts often still feel bumbling. It's funny that after all these years, with five rhyming picture books, twenty published poems, and a novel in verse soon to be published with Bandersnatch Books, I still feel like that first-grade girl, eager to emulate my favorite poets, but not really sure how. That is the part of me that I poured into the writing of Mari in the Margins ,  a story about a girl who’s struggling to figure out what, if anything, she has to offer—as a daughter, a sister, a friend, and especially a poet. As the middle child of nine, Mari feels overlooked by her family, and with a new girl in town threatening Mari’s one stable friendship, she’s left alone with her thoughts—and her poetry journal. Writing her story forced me to tap into that bumbling, uncertain part of myself in order to express Mari’s feelings about writing and sharing her poems, and how to navigate life from what she sees as the margins of her family: Maybe if I win a poetry contest I’ll be noticed no longer in the margins, moved from the side to the CENTER like I’m a small but important part of something BIG. My journey from eager listener to published verse novelist still feels incredible to me. As a child, I never imagined writing as a profession. I simply wanted to share in the magic of poetry any way I could. But even more magical than the words on the page was my mother’s reading  of the poetry. I might have discovered my love for poetry on my own eventually, but it was my mother’s voice—forever the voice of poetry in my mind—that made it personal to me as a child and encouraged me to find my own voice as a poet. In a way, writing this novel in verse felt almost autobiographical. Mari and I side by side, growing together as poets and artists and human beings. Sharing this story is vulnerable! But it’s also an encouragement to anyone out there who doesn’t know if their art is worth sharing: go, find your voice, and use it to bring a little magic to someone’s life. Why not start by reading some poetry aloud to a child? You could even try The Cremation of Sam McGee ! Rebecca J. Gomez is a poet, artist, and author of children’s books. When she’s not writing or drawing, you can often find her reading aloud to her husband or grandchildren and going for walks in the woods. Her middle grade novel in verse, Mari in the Margins , releases May 14, 2024 through Bandersnatch Books . Learn more about her and her work at gomezwrites.substack.com .

by Abram Van Engen Most people do not read poetry. According to a 2018 survey , only 12 percent of adults in the United States (nearly 28 million people) had read poetry in the past year. That’s not bad, to be sure (and it’s twice what it was in 2012), but it’s nothing like other genres. Non-fiction always has an audience. Memoirs make for bestsellers. Novels find their way to the beach. But only occasionally, as with Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem , does poetry spill over its borders in a massively popular way. Looked at inversely, the 2018 survey suggests that in the prior year 88% of American adults had not found a moment—or a reason—to read a poem. I read poetry. I teach poetry. And, in a podcast I co-host called Poetry For All , I talk about poems all the time. I cover religious and non-religious poetry for religious and non-religious audiences, but I believe that poetry has a particular place in the church. I think it responds directly to the call and the invitation of God to “sing a new song.” And in the singing of poetry, the faithful can begin to understand and experience and engage God’s world afresh. Let me illustrate with a poem. Whenever I teach poetry at church, I begin with “ Praise in Summer ” by Richard Wilbur. Here’s the gist of the poem: the poet, stunned by the beauty of a summer’s day, feels “called to praise” whoever created it. It’s a normal sort of feeling. A grand summer day can do that to anyone. But then, to the poet’s surprise, he does something strange. He flips the world upside down. We can almost see him lying on his back and imagining the sky beneath his feet and the ground above his head. In such a world, branches become roots, and roots become branches. Moles soar through the dirt above while sparrows tunnel through the air below. The world turned upside-down is mysterious and wonderful and strange. And that’s how the poem begins: Obscurely yet most surely called to praise, As sometimes summer calls us all, I said The hills are heavens full of branching ways Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead; I said the trees are mines in air, I said See how the sparrow burrows in the sky! That exclamation mark at the end of line 6 ends this vision of an upside-down world. And in the next line, the poet starts to question himself. What is he doing? If he feels called to praise on a stunning day, why is he turning the world on its head? It is an act of madness—a “mad instead,” he admits. In his imagination, he commits an almost perverse “uncreation” of the created world and revels in wrenching things awry. Look at the questions Wilbur asks himself: And then I wondered why this mad instead Perverts our praise to uncreation, why Such savors in this wrenching things awry. The wondering leads to a question: Does sense so stale that it must needs derange The world to know it? To a praiseful eye Should it not be enough of fresh and strange That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay, And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day? What the poet realizes is that our delight is infirm . There is something wrong with us. Our senses stale at the same sights, however glorious they may be. And so he changes what we see. What if the sky were soil and the soil were sky? What if we could see roots like branches? What if we could imagine moles chasing stars beneath the graves? What if the sparrow made burrows in the air? Such strange sights cause us to wonder, and, in wondering, they renew and re-engage creation as it actually is. Imagining the world upside-down allows us to return to the world right-side-up. Isn’t it amazing that “trees grow green, and moles can course in clay, / And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?” What a world. What a wonder. What an extraordinary summer’s day. Whenever I read Wilbur’s poem, I’m reminded of a great passage from G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy , where he talks about precisely the same problem of our stale senses. Nature repeats itself, but something there is that doesn’t like a repetition. “Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase,” Chesterton writes: "It might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."  Chesterton and Wilbur were both Christians, and both were trying to figure out why our praise so often sours and sticks in our throat. How is it that we lose the capacity to wonder? And conversely, how is it that grief and guilt and sin and injustice in this world no longer touch or move us as they ought? These are questions poets ask often, whether Christian or not, and their answer frequently turns to what Wilbur calls “this mad instead.” Poets “pervert to uncreation” so that they and we and whoever encounters their poem can see with fresh eyes the world as it is made. They renovate the senses by wrenching things awry.     Wilbur’s poem is a classic ars poetica —a poem about the writing of poetry itself. In offering his defense and explanation of poetry, Wilbur offers us two solid reasons for writing and reading poems. Most subtly, he suggests that we simply can’t help ourselves. We do it already, whether we recognize it or not. Look at how he winks at the reader in the last line of the poem: sparrows “sweep the ceiling of our day.” The ceiling of our day ? He just said that we shouldn’t need to wrench things awry, and then he falls into metaphor. The sky becomes a ceiling. More than that, Wilbur flips the world again. What are the sparrows doing? They are sweeping the ceiling. But wait a second: we don’t sweep ceilings. We sweep floors . Not only has the sky become a ceiling; the ceiling is acting like a floor. What is happening here? What’s happening is what we can’t stop from happening: the simplest speech acts fall again and again into metaphor. Poetry is a regular part of speech. As the classic book Metaphors We Live By demonstrated so forcefully, we rely on metaphors in myriad ways throughout the day. To give just one example, we speak as though time is money . We talk about saving time or how we spend it, and when we talk that way, we don’t think of ourselves as entering into metaphor. We think of ourselves as speaking plainly. Poetry reminds us that even in plain speech, metaphors abound. Living in language, poets help us pay attention to the language that we use. But secondly, and more obviously, Wilbur makes his case for poetry through a particular device called defamiliarization . Defamiliarization is the technical term for wrenching things awry . It means taking what is familiar and making it unfamiliar so that we can see it with fresh eyes—so that we can do as scripture calls us to do and “sing a new song.” The word “defamiliarization” comes from a Russian formalist critic named Viktor Schklovsky, and this is what Schklovsky said: “Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war … And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” To make the stone stony. To see that the tree is green—and to be reminded that a green tree is amazing. To notice the birds flying or the moles burrowing beneath our feet. The simplest things we no longer see are the marvelous deeds of the Lord as much as manna from heaven and miracles of healing. We need the poets to “sing a new song” because our senses so often stale. In Psalm 96, the Hebrew word for “new” can also be translated “fresh.” Poets make things fresh. By taking the all-too-familiar and making it unfamiliar, they help us to see the world anew. The more we know about poetry, the more we can see how many devices and inventions a poet deploys to sing a fresh song. And here, the reader’s task can become a delight. What we know of Wilbur’s poem to this point is plenty enough. We’ve got the sense of the thing, and that’s fine. But if we want to enter more deeply, we can. And what we find when we do is that Wilbur is being winsome throughout. “Praise In Summer” is a sonnet, a kind of poem that dates back seven centuries to Petrarch and the Italian Renaissance. A sonnet is always fourteen lines, and it generally requires a specific rhyme scheme that breaks the poem into different parts. Traditionally, a sonnet has two main parts: an eight-line opening (called the octet) and a six-line closing (called the sestet). Usually, these parts pose a question and then an answer, or a sight and then an insight. Between those parts lies a turn, called a volta (from the Italian), which comes at the start of the ninth line. That is the classic sonnet, inherited from Petrarch, transformed by Shakespeare, and passed on to each new generation through countless reinventions. These days, whenever readers of poetry find a poem of fourteen lines, they immediately think sonnet , and they start to look for the poem’s parts, trying to locate how the writer might be messing with tradition. For that is the real secret of sonnets : precisely because they come laden with history and loaded with rules, every new break in rhyme or structure is weighted with significance. Wilbur does not disappoint. The first six lines sketch the world upside down (giving us the sight ) and the last eight lines ask what that means (the insight ). In other words, in a poem about flipping the world upside down, Wilbur flips the sonnet on its head, starting with a sestet and ending with an octet, intertwining his rhyme scheme so that the poem could stand on either end—before a final couplet sets it right. As poets often revel in doing, Wilbur performs in his poem the point of the poem itself. He makes the language do what he says. This is part of the fun of poetry. The fun of poetry is not always necessary to the insight and awareness it offers. It’s true that the more we know of poetry, the more we will see in a poem. That is true of any human activity. But poems, like pools, can be entered and enjoyed at any depth. They sit open to all, waiting for any reader to take the plunge. Wilbur’s poem reminds us why the plunge is worth it. Poetry makes language work fresh thoughts and new perspectives. It sings a new song as it seeks and finds “ what will suffice .” It makes the stone stony. And if we want to know God and our world and our place in the world, we need poetry to make things fresh. In taking up that task, poets often invite us to practice thinking and noticing at a different pace. It is only at a slower speed of processing that we can begin to observe what we have too often missed or ignored. Think, for example, of all the sounds we hear but never hear. Trains on a nearby track and airplanes overhead. Birds and dogs. The wind in the trees or the breeze in our ears. Children a few houses over. Neighbors in the yard. The rumble of traffic or the passing of a single car. HVAC systems and dishwashers and the hum of the fridge. Our world is never silent. At the same time, most sounds have no good use. And so, quite rightly, we ignore them. Our brains efficiently block out the pointless in order to pay attention to what matters. That is as it should be. But consider the perspective of my two-year-old son. He has not yet learned to distinguish all the important sounds (me, telling him to eat his broccoli) from the unimportant sounds (the MetroLink passing behind our house). I never hear the train anymore, but he notices it every time. “Train!” he shouts. “Plane,” he’ll say and point at the sky. Right now, before being guided into what matters, he sees and hears everything. It is terribly inefficient, but it is also, in a way, inspiring. For a moment, he enables me to notice how much I fail to notice. I don’t think people should go about their lives like two-year-olds, stopping at every sound. And I don’t want to say that poets are like children. Paying attention means focusing, and focusing means blocking our distractions. Poets, too, block out distractions. It’s just that, quite often, what a poet finds worthy of attention—like moles and sparrows and the branches of a green tree and the roots beneath our feet—is something I might have previously blocked out. In this sense, poetry keeps us light on our toes. It is a way of paying attention that means a constant shift of focus, noticing intensely—even if for a moment—what we had previously ignored. God alone can notice all things at once. Our attention is limited and needs to be pointed in different directions. Poets are people who point. In the way that they point, in the devices they use—through defamiliarization and rhythm and rhyme schemes and meter and stanzas and free verse and metaphor and figures of speech—poets time and again sing new songs. We have a Creator who calls on the creation to create. We have a God who calls us to praise God’s marvelous deeds and summons us to sorrow over the sins of this world. Poets draw us into praise and sorrow through the songs they sing. They reconnect us with God’s world by wrenching this world awry. Their “mad instead” nourishes the faith of the faithful by making the familiar fresh. And for this reason, among countless others, I’d say to those followers of Christ (and anyone else) in the 88 percent: it may be time to take a dip. Originally published in Reformed Journal. Abram Van Engen is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and Executive Director of The Carver Project . He is the author of two books on early American religion and literature, and he also serves as co-host of the podcast Poetry For All . You can read more of Abram's thoughts on poetry in his book Word Made Fresh . If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

This liturgy is taken from Every Moment Holy Volume 3  from Rabbit Room Press . You can find more liturgies like these at EveryMomentHoly.com . by Douglas McKelvey O God Who Planted a Garden and gave it into the care of our first father and mother, Let me now tend these grounds, this yard, this plot of land ’round my dwelling—not as an endless, thankless annoyance, but as a glad and faithful stewarding. Let me find delight in the shaping of this landscape into a more ordered and beautiful place. Let my labors cultivate a space wherein friends and family might meet, or play, or simply pause and take delight. Indeed, Lord, let me consciously love my neighbors through this act, by laboring to bring order and beauty to their neighborhood, passively affirming their dignity through diligence in my own stewardship of lands their eyes must daily dwell upon. Through my tending of living, growing things, let me offer those who dwell nearby refreshing glimpses of beauty rather than of clutter and decay, of harmony rather than disorder, and of attentive care rather than long neglect. As you commissioned Adam and Eve to cultivate and expand the borders of that first garden, so would I express your deep care of all creation in my own endeavors today. I would invest my sweat to nurture and enhance the graceful lay of these grounds, that they might be better liberated to speak a truer word. And though I must toil now, hindered by the limitations of a broken world, still let my labors lean into that truer vision of this lawn—and of all nature—liberated at last from the great groaning of creation, no longer fraught with drought and thorn and weed, and need of constant moil merely to make it something other than unruly. Indeed, let me glimpse in the fruits of this struggle some hint of what it might mean, O Christ, to cultivate this corner of creation in a time after you have fashioned all things anew. What might it mean to co-labor then with these redeemed and willing lands, shaping them into artful places—lush and beautiful and bursting with unexpected delights, bringing joy to hearts and pleasure to eyes; to craft a complex harmony of fragrance, form, and hue, that those robed in renewed bodies might one day wander through, and be moved to wonder and to worship? What might it mean to meet no more resistance in the nature of things, but instead to enjoy a ready partnership with tree and soil and hedge and budding flower, all responding—with the right delight of leafy things—to my every tender tending, as I shepherd their shapes to a more exquisite beauty and a more sublime expression of grace? As I tease out the quiet depths of each of these living, radiant displays of your glory and your joy? Ah Lord, let me approach my labors even now, this day, in anticipation of that coming day when blight will be no more; when the glory of the Lord will rest gentle upon these lands, ever blessing these works of our hands; when the order and beauty of our gardens will emerge as ceaseless songs of praise. Let me lift that veil in some small way even by my labors today, O Lord. Let me glimpse in growing things, some hint of your unseen kingdom. Let me shape here a living poetry that whispers words of grace to all who pause to listen. Amen. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Gracy Olmstead When we moved to Oxford, we committed to 10 months without a car. We have three children aged six and under, so we knew it wouldn’t always be easy. But we also hoped our carless state would help us to 1) save money, 2) encourage us to enjoy and explore Oxford on foot. That means we’ve had 10 months of no car seats, no road trips, no errand runs via car. We’ve had to teach our children to use public transportation, to walk farther than they want to, and to be smart and savvy while crossing streets. I'm writing this in hopes that it will be helpful to tease out some of the things we’ve learned over this year without a car. Walking As I proceeded to and from school, I found there were excellent walking and biking paths toward town I could use, and multiple bus routes that were easy and safe to access. The time cost was largest with walking (it would take me 30 to 45 minutes to get to my nearest school building), but the benefits of walking were also huge. It gave me opportunities to exercise, to pause mentally and emotionally, and to enjoy the beautiful scenery and architecture around Oxford. Walking my commute, especially when the weather was nice, also provided opportunities for the sorts of serendipitous encounters that build friendship and community: I constantly ran into people I knew, and have found this one of the most important factors in cultivating a sense of belonging in a given place. When we haphazardly encounter people we know, we realize that we are part of a communal fabric that is large, complex, and fluid: it helps us to connect specific streets, parks, and buildings with ideas of commitment, accountability, and care. The street grid and the relational networks we depend on become layered, part of each other in an inextricable fashion. And this is the sort of process, I would argue, that builds our deeper love for a place. As long as our networks of community and built environment remain separate, we grow a more detached admiration. We will likely appreciate the place where we live, but we may not feel part of it in the same way we do when we realize, “Around that corner, or the next, I might see someone I know.” For me, at least, the process of serendipitous encounter shapes a strikingly different experience of the city. It changes the way I perceive a place, as well as the way I explore it. For our children, walking has been both their favorite thing and the most annoying chore we asked of them. They love walking to the nearby woods and exploring, strolling along the Thames, or venturing up to the Ashmolean museum or the Natural Science museum. On these trips, we’ve always had either a stroller or a baby carrier, and have given our 4-year-old shoulder rides as needed. Our 6-year-old has had to finish these walks, since she’s too big to carry, and has thus learned to think about how far she wants to go with this knowledge in mind. She’s grown stronger and more resilient, both mentally and physically, as a result. The mental endurance is important to emphasize here, I think, because (as long as you aren’t asking them to go too far) walking is not difficult for a child. It’s the mental hurdle of embracing the tedium of walking, the slow process of getting from point A to point B, that is often harder. Walking teaches a child patience. Let’s be honest—it teaches adults patience! We’ve all grown accustomed to instant gratification when it comes to transportation. Tiny Perfect Things is one of my favorite books for teaching the skills of mental resilience while walking. It beautifully portrays the imaginative vision and habits of attention that walking can cultivate and teaches children and adults to look closely as they journey on walks. Walking becomes a formative habit of delight, one that can be enjoyed for its own sake, and not just for its destination. When we are walking together, my children and I play “I Spy,” or try and find all the colors of the rainbow. We look for tiny rocks, shells, or wildflowers. We use phone apps to identify plants, trees, and birds. And I try to use the time to ask them questions about their favorite things, about their hopes and plans for the weeks, and about the things they’re grateful for. Taking the bus We’ve also found the bus to be an excellent and important means of transportation. It’s way cheaper than a car, and more environmentally friendly. It’s also a space in which we can try to cultivate the sorts of behaviors and habits that support community. On the bus, or at the bus stop, we build up “little debts” and courtesies that encourage us to be neighborly. Some bus drivers wave people on board when they don’t have the right coins, others recognize our routines and know our stops. I’ve met little old ladies who play games with my tired toddlers, helping me avoid a tantrum (or two) as we wait to get home. And then there are the random conversations I’ve had with friendly people at the bus stop: an AI scientist, a clarinetist, an Oxford native who knows all the streets and buildings that have changed over time. Riding the bus can be taxing, exhausting, annoying. Sometimes I—or my children—just wanted to get home. But the bus has also given me opportunities to think through the ideas of membership and courtesy as they play out in our daily lives. As David Sax recently wrote for The New York Times , “Engagement with strangers is at the core of our social contract. … Far from random human inconveniences, strangers are actually one of the richest and most important resources we have. They connect us to the community, teach us empathy, build civility, and are full of surprise and potentially wonder.” I do not know how much my four-year-old will remember from our time in Oxford, but I do know she’ll remember and love the double-decker buses. Other Travel We honestly did not leave Oxford much. We’ve been to London a couple times, and got to see Tewkesbury and Gloucester in March. (Tewkesbury Abbey is beautiful!) We also did one longer trip to Cornwall for a few days, and our girls loved searching for shells and walking along the shore. But as my husband noted in conversation, life without a car has prompted us to simply enjoy where we are to a greater degree. We’ve spent almost the entire last 10 months in the same five-mile radius. And we don’t regret that. We’ve received the opportunity to really enjoy Oxford, and to develop daily habits and haunts in this lovely place. There are other places in the UK and in Europe that we’d love to see someday. But I think we’ll have sweeter memories of Oxford because we savored our time here. I will admit that I have missed having a car with kids. Sometimes it would just be nice to have the option to drive. Sometimes I just don’t want to make my tired kids walk the last half mile back to the house. Some days my shoulders are sore from the previous day of holding a weary baby or toddler while walking back home. And there can be something really sweet about the process of driving somewhere as a family. We’ve done some road trips together, and have really enjoyed them. But walking is also special, and I think if our family did it more often in the future, it would be good for all of us. It’s building habits of love and attentiveness and resilience that will stick with us, I hope, as we all get older. Back in 2018, I wrote a piece titled “ The Art of the Stroll ,” which sought to unpack some of these ideas a bit. I wrote about my grandfather, who lived in one town for 50 years and walked the same routes daily throughout those years. I’m sharing an excerpt here, because it helps explain how I’ve grown to feel about walking over time: "There’s a vast difference between getting to know a place with your two feet, and knowing it via car. As a runner, I’ve noticed that my speed greatly influences my ability to take in passing geography; even at a jog, I miss details. Experiencing a street at 25 miles per hour cuts out huge chunks of detail and color, desperation and beauty. Our gaze is limited by the necessary act of keeping our eyes on the road, as well as by the detachment the car offers via insulated windows, air conditioning, stereo speakers, children talking or crying, or companions laughing. As Rebecca Solnit notes in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking , cars are necessarily insular spaces—and as we travel in them, we disconnect from the world around us. “Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors—home, car, gym, office, shops—disconnected from each other,” she writes. “On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.” Walking is a slow and porous experience. The words we use to describe it—meandering, sauntering, strolling—have their own leisurely and gentle cadence and suggest a sort of unhurried enjoyment. But to walk is also to be vulnerable: it forces us into physical interaction with surrounding streets, homes, and people. This can delay us, annoy us, even put us in danger. But it connects us to community in a way that cars never can. In You Are What You Love , James K.A. Smith writes that love is a habit: a daily training of our souls. By immersing ourselves in specific “liturgies”—daily rhythms, habits, and stories—we shape or tune our hearts to specific loves. This training is “more like practicing scales on the piano than learning music theory,” writes Smith. “The goal is, in a sense, for your fingers to learn the scales so they can then play ‘naturally,’ as it were. Learning here isn’t just information acquisition; it’s more like inscribing something into the very fiber of your being.” While Smith’s book is focused on ecclesiastical worship and love for God, his theory of the human heart and the importance of liturgy applies to every area of human life. After all, if we are ruled by our hearts and not just our heads, then every practice we engage in is important in the formation of our desires and our character. Every ritual and rhythm is ingraining something into the fabric of our being. My grandfather’s walks were—or at least, with time, became—a ritual of love, a daily recitation of devotion to Moscow, one block at a time. And as he spent time out loving his city, it comforted and loved him in return. “When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back,” Solnit writes in Wanderlust. “The more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back.” Gracy Olmstead is a journalist who focuses on farming, localism, and family. She is the author of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind . Her writing has been published in The American Conservative, The Week, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Christianity Today, among others. Read more of Gracy's writing on her Substack, Granola . If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Rebecca Reynolds and Kyra Hinton [Recently, author Rebecca Reynolds sat down with Kyra Hinton to discuss Kyra's new book, A Mist Sprite's Study of Being Human. Pledge on Kickstarter to support the book. ] Watch the interview Below Support the book on Kickstarter: Kyra Hinton has been a visual artist in the Rabbit Room community for many years. She is also an author, with her debut novel published in 2024. She is based in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia, where she raises her children and pets. Through her work in both art and word, Kyra hopes to invoke wonder in the places we call home and the joy of being human in those spaces.

Malcolm Guite may be the closest thing to Bilbo Baggins that Christian poetry offers. He has numerous volumes of poetry and spiritual writing on offer, including Sounding the Seasons , Heaven in Ordinary , and The Word in the Wilderness . Last month, we announced that Guite's long-awaited Arthuriad, Merlin's Isle will be published by Rabbit Room Press in several volumes over the coming years. Guite also has a thriving YouTube channel in which he invites guests to step into his study to share a pipe and thoughts from his latest projects. In the video above, Guite pulls back the curtain on Merlin's Isle with characteristic Hobbit-y charm. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Chris & Jenna Badeker I recently attended a music industry seminar in Nashville where a presenter said, “Artists are now living in the age of the slash.” They went on to say that for the vast majority of working artists, adding skills to our repertoire and titles to our resume has become a necessity. A way of life. Singer-songwriters are becoming producers/podcast hosts. Podcast hosts are becoming videographers/audio engineers. This isn’t to say there aren’t exceptions; monoliths of singular talent still walk among us. However, fewer of us can reliably count on having a voice or song that is “too good to ignore” to be the basis for a sustainable career in the arts. In an era defined by insatiable appetites for new content, shrinking attention spans, and a general devaluation (monetarily speaking) of music, many artists have been forced to get a little more creative and a lot more flexible. My husband, Chris, and I are independent musicians who perform in the band Wild Harbors. Upon arriving in Nashville we felt immense pressure to make good on our decision to leave our full-time jobs and pursue a career in music. In trying to do so, we spent time with some amazing artists, received wise and gracious counsel, and began the slow and arduous process of assimilating who we were to match a perceived ideal. Sure, we were writing and performing original music, but in every other sense of the term, we were a “cover band”. We dressed like The Civil Wars, posed like Johhnyswim, and belted out songs like The Swell Season. We held ourselves up against the industry’s standards of success, tried in vain to replicate them, and felt crushed when nothing we did seemed to move the needle.  The well-intentioned process of trying to look, sound, and act like “real” artists left us feeling like anything but. We had watched our favorite singer-songwriters find meaningful connections with their audiences through self-expression and vulnerability, yet somehow the lesson we took from it was, “If I could be like that, people would like me”. The problem with posturing for acceptance is that when something you do finds success, it reinforces the idea that the only reason the work connected was because people associated it with something other than you. To put it another way, we had painted ourselves into a corner where our failures felt deeply personal and our success felt unearned and insincere. We couldn’t have told you, but we were burning out and we weren’t sure why. Around the same time, some of our close friends began lovingly pestering Chris to sign up for the social media platform, TikTok. When Chris finally relented and created an account for our band, things started to gradually shift. Being new to the platform, it truly felt like stepping into the Wild West. There was no brand to manage, no expectation of what to post, and best of all, no audience! Left with a completely blank slate, Chris started doing something he hadn’t done in a long time. TikTok is primarily a video-sharing platform, so Chris began filming anything that popped into his head and posting it. It was silly and slapdash and a way to try out any idea we wanted with relative anonymity.  Best of all, making these videos felt like an act of remembrance. In the first years of our relationship, we would visit roadside oddities and film goofy travel guide videos highlighting their various quirks and charm. By making new videos, we weren’t putting on a new hat so much as we were finding an old one and dusting it off. Before long, the notebook for “Video Ideas” became just as big as the notebook for “Song Ideas”.  Like any ongoing creative endeavor, recurring themes started to emerge and the scope and vision for our videos became clearer. Where we had once made silly videos about everything and anything, we now made silly videos about how it felt to be independent musicians trying to navigate the ups and downs of a creative life. We no longer needed to sit down and brainstorm funny ideas. As it turns out, there’s plenty to laugh about in the day to day life of a musician, so we gave ourselves permission to laugh about it. As we grew more confident in their purpose and value, we started sharing them outside of the relative obscurity of our TikTok account. I’m sure for a lot of our friends, it looked like two musicians had decided on a whim to start acting. In reality, it’s more accurate to say that we decided to stop acting. We stopped acting like serious artists. We stopped acting like professional musicians. We started being ourselves. In sharing her own story with me, my friend Leslie E. Thompson wrote, “I’ve finally, FINALLY, lost the desire to adapt my God-given personality to fit an aesthetic or construct and instead embrace it.”  How can I put it better than that?  What if living in “The Age of the Slash” isn’t a mandate to wear all the hats and do all the things? What if it’s an invitation to pick up the parts of our God-given personality that we jettisoned in our hurry to launch faster and climb higher? Who decided that knowing how to cook a Classic French Omelette isn’t a useful skill when writing a novel? Why shouldn’t crochet hooks, when skillfully employed by the poet, be just as helpful to the process as a pen? When children say things like “I’m going to be a Writer / Veterinarian / Painter / Singer / Fashion Designer when I grow up” it’s not because they don’t understand how the world works, it’s because they haven’t unlearned how creativity works.  Outside of self-imposed categories like “Actor”, “Singer”, “Podcast Host”, or “Illustrator”, I believe our brains are all too happy to lump the sum of our creative endeavors, no matter the discipline or medium, into a big bucket labeled “Play”. In this bucket, there’s no untangling which words belong in a song and which belong in a children’s picture book. There’re no walls keeping our ideas for a comic strip out of our ideas for a board game. If you’ve ever eaten baked beans, coleslaw, and potato salad on a plate with no dividers, that should give you a pretty good idea. Time spent playing with anything in this bucket creates unfelt, often unseeable, ripples throughout everything else in the bucket. The more time I spend writing throwaway jokes and corny one-liners, the less I tend to second-guess my intuition when writing a lyric for a chorus. The less I second-guess my lyrics, the less tentative I am when using watercolors. As it turns out, embracing the idea of having an ever-expanding job title has meant paying a lot less attention to what those titles are and paying more attention to the kinds of work that feel satisfying, meaningful, and valuable to us, our band, and our community. It’s hard work to look at yourself and find candid answers to honest questions. Questions like, “What parts of who God made me to be might be longing to find a home in my art? , “Which aspects of my God-given personality have I abandoned out of fear of being rejected or humiliated?”, or “Who might be waiting, unknowingly, for me to make the kind of art that can only be made through embracing the entirety of my being with sober self-confidence, reckless abandon, and a generous spirit?”  Wild Harbors is currently running a Kickstarter campaign  to fund the release of their new music, the continued production of their videos, and the recording of a new album. Pledging today will move the band one step closer to their goal of being an artistic presence that continues to draw bigger, more encompassing circles around terms like “Songwriter”, “Artist”, and “Band”.

by Andy Patton Here is a Halloween lecture from the archives on the question of whether there can be any agreement between Christianity and the horror genre. Andy approaches the question through the lens of the work of Stephen King, one of the masters of the genre. Andy Patton is the creator of the Darkling Psalter , a collection of creative renditions of the Psalms paired with new poems. He writes about biblical theology at Pattern Bible . He holds an M.A. in theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He works for the Rabbit Room and is a former staff member at L'Abri Fellowship in England.

And so the tale came down the years In every land and tongue. And old folk told it through their tears And gave it to the young. And even I, in these dark days, Have heard and found it true. So I have taken up the tale And passed it on to you. -Galahad and the Grail Rabbit Room Press has long made camp at the crossroads of the fantastic and the literary. We are, we like to claim, descended from the literary traditions of MacDonald and Grahame, of Lewis and Tolkien, of Wangerin and L’Engle. And they are, in turn, descended from a litany of writers and poets down through the centuries. It seems right, then, that in the 21st century Rabbit Room Press has arrived upon the literary and literal doorstop of Malcolm Guite . In fact, we’ve been admirers and champions of Guite’s work for years. His fluency with the poetic traditions and stories of the past, along with his theological bent for illuminating the deep mysteries of faith, and his rare gift of making poetry approachable for the modern reader, have all endeared him to us as a kindred spirit and a fellow traveler.  In 2022, Rabbit Room Press was thrilled to include an original ballad of Guite’s writing in our story collection entitled   The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad , but little did we know that the inclusion of that ballad would be as the first pebbles of an avalanche. Malcolm Guite, you see, has been in a life-long love affair with the stories of King Arthur and his knights, and on the heels of his Galahadic ballad, that romance with the “matter of Britain” has grown into a full-fledged epic poem in the tradition of Homer, Virgil, Milton, Tennyson. Guite’s work now encompasses a four-volume epic in verse called Merlin’s Isle: An Arthuriad . And despite its daunting scope, its four volumes retain all of Guite’s seemingly effortless approachability and readability, his exuberant affinity for the tales of Arthur and Britain, and his penchant for capturing the numinous and calling the reader deeper into it. Indeed, here is an epic poem, not constrained to the shelves of academia, but bound as well for the young reader enraptured by tales of chivalric deed, or the light reader in search of the lyrical, or even the family reading aloud at day’s end. Guite embarks upon the millennia-spanning tradition of the Epic with the joy of a child at play and the sure precision of a master with a twinkle in his eye. It’s with great joy that Rabbit Room Press enters on this 4-part quest of the Grail, of Camelot and Avalon and all things Arthurian, with Malcolm Guite leading us into the storied wilds, and with acclaimed illustrator Stephen Crotts adorning Guite’s words with images all along the way. The first volume of Merlin’s Isle, titled  Galahad and the Grail , will be released in spring of 2026, followed by volumes 2-4 in 2027 and 2028. We invite you to take up the tale.  Join us. It’s going to be epic. From  Merlin’s Isle: An Arthuriad: As I walked out one morning All in the soft fine rain It seemed as though a silver veil Was shining over hill and vale As though some lovely long-lost spell Had made all new again. And through that shimmer in the air I seemed to hear a sound As though a distant horn were blown In some lost land that I had known That seemed to speak from tree and stone And echo all around. And with the music came these words: “Poet, take up the tale! Take up the tale this land still keeps In earth and water magic sleeps The dryad sighs, the naiad weeps But you can lift the veil. From where the waves wash Cornwall’s caves Out to the white horse vale The lands still hold the tale of old Like hidden treasure, buried gold Once more the story must be told Poet, take up the tale. Tell of the king who will return Tell of the Holy Grail Tell of old knights and chivalry Tell of the pristine mystery Of Merlin’s Isle of gramarye Poet, take up the tale. Take up the tale of courtesy Take up the tale of grace Revive the lands’ long memory Summon the fair folk, let them be,  Something of faery, wild and free Still lingers in this place. Lift up your eyes to see the light On Glastonbury Tor Then come down from that far green hill To where the sacred waters spill And shine within the chalice well And listen to their lore. Yea, listen well before you start, Be still ere you begin See through the surface round about The noise, the rush, the fear, the doubt Though Modern Britain lies without Fair Logres lives within. You may yet walk through Merlin’s isle By oak and ash and thorn The ancient hills do not forget And you might wake their wisdom yet Who knows what wonders might be met On this midsummer morn.” So I have taken up the tale To tell it full and free The tale that makes my heart rejoice I tell it, for I have no choice I tell it till another voice Takes up the tale from me.

by Janna Barber Last week, a therapist friend of mine was giving a talk at the Tuesday Chapel for our Young Adults Ministry and she told everyone she has a lot of sayings that may sound a bit cheesy, but she still likes to use them because they’re memorable. The title of her talk was “When Life Disappoints” and during the Q&A time at the end, she said a phrase that’s not only stuck with me, it’s been ringing in my head for days. She’d already explained how we tend to do all manner of things with our grief when life gets hard: like minimize it, ignore it, numb it, and invalidate it. But the thing we don’t usually do, she said, is tend to it, and take care of it. “In other words,” she finally emphasized, “suffering needs to be soothed.” I think it was the word soothed that caught my attention because it reminded me of caring for an infant. As a mother of three, a former preschool teacher, and a frequent nursery worker, I’m very familiar with soothing small humans. For instance, I know that some of them like to be cuddled and patted, while others prefer bouncing and singing, and some of them actually just want to be left alone so they can sleep. Larger humans, however, can be trickier when it comes to this idea of soothing, which is why I’m thankful that God has fashioned so many people into artists, writers, therapists, and other kinds of caregivers. These gifts to humanity reflect God’s divine love by teaching us that feelings are nothing to be afraid of, and such is the case with my friend, singer-songwriter Emily McCoy. I first met Emily when her oldest daughter was three. Lily was one of my students in the Parent’s Day Out program at Fellowship Church in Knoxville. Lily was not your typical preschool girl and she provided many moments of laughter for me and my co-teacher with her silly antics and creative choices during the day. That year, Emily’s husband was dealing with some health issues and we had several talks about how he was doing and the latest updates on his treatment. I knew Emily worked as a worship leader at this church and I tried to encourage her as she attempted to juggle so many roles during that time of life. Years later, we reconnected at a concert at another church, where Emily performed some of her own original music, and I’ve been a fan ever since. I’d heard Emily sing a time or two when attending service with a friend, and at a women’s event held at Fellowship, so I’d already experienced the power of her voice and the beauty of her skillful piano playing. But hearing Emily tell the stories behind some of her songs endeared me to her talents even more, so I bought a CD and went home and followed her on all the socials later that night. The fourth track of Emily’s new album, Longing for the Garden, is entitled “Hide in Thee,” and it ends with two simple questions: How can beauty come from pain? Will tomorrow be the same? The final word lasts as long as the note being sung along with it, and then the song is over. There’s no musical resolution, no answer to these final questions. They simply stand alone as the listener contemplates what it means to “hide in thee.” This song paints a rich picture of what it looks like to befriend your grief, to sit in stillness and silence and share your pain with Christ. This is the example we’re given over and over in the Bible, for how to soothe life’s many hurts, in books like Job, Psalms, Lamentations, Jeremiah, and even several letters from the New Testament.  “Cast all your anxiety on him for he cares for you” Peter instructs the early church, and Emily does just that in songs like “Even in Your Silence” which begins with the honest lines: God this grief is overwhelming It’s gotten hard to trust your plan Though we tend to prefer solutions to our pain and hurt, Emily’s music encourages what we really need, which is to be held and comforted during times of grief. In songs like “Nothing Ill-Fitting,” she takes on the voice of the Lord, who responds to our fear and sadness with words of peace and calm. Weary beloved, listen to me You've tried to hold on and get by But you're tired, struggling to breathe Time now to loosen your grip on these things Control is a farce and you've got to let go now And take hold of me I am gentle, I am humble, I am kind Come to me now, trade your burden now for mine I was carrying some pretty heavy burdens earlier this year when Emily gave a popup concert to celebrate the recording of this album with her band here in Knoxville and what I appreciated most about that show, besides the blessing of live music, was the evidence I saw of the collaborative process between Emily and her bandmates. These local players, already known in town as songwriters and performers in their own right, lend their unique skills to this project, creating a jazzy chamber feel to the piano-driven melodies. The effect was the healing balm I needed that night as the music gave me time and space for all  my feelings–an experience that’s often neglected in modern worship services. A few weeks ago, Emily shared a post on Instagram to promote this new album, saying “I don’t create great ‘content,’ but I have a story to tell.” As I looked at the artwork and thought about the themes present in her songs, I realized the story Emily tells is one filled with hope. For after God meets us in our grief, we can’t help but feel hopeful in response, as Emily sings in “Gentle Gardener”  You are catching all the foxes in the vineyard As you clear new pathways through the burned-out wood Where the trees that fell in all the desolation Display new growth I never dreamed they could It’s been said that we live our lives between two gardens, longing for the beauty that was lost in Eden as well as the full redemption that awaits us in the new heaven and earth. But in the meantime, I’m thankful for an album like this one to soothe us as we sojourn. Janna Barber is a blogger, poet, and memoirist. Her most recent book is  Hidden in Shadow: Tales of Grief, Lamentation, and Faith . This memoir is one woman’s honest reckoning with the truth that even as our faith waxes and wanes, God is constant, and he loves his children even when they don’t know what he’s up to.

by Cindy Anderson The holiday season is upon us, with its joyful celebrations, fun activities, festive parties, and its fair share of stresses. Knowing how to slow down can be challenging as we live in an over-productive, often distracted culture. Still, Advent time is about waiting, remembering gratitude, family, friendship, the hope of birth, and the angels' song. One of the best ways I know to slow down throughout the holidays is by creating time to read Christmas stories ourselves and with our families and friends.  Books and Christmas are deeply interlinked for me. I was about ten years old when my Grandmother gave me my first Christmas novel, her 1916 edition of The Romance of the Christmas Card by Kate Douglas Wiggins. When she placed that beautiful book into my hands, I knew my Christmas book collecting was about to begin. I bring this particular book down from my shelves every Christmas, and although it is beautiful, it is the gift of the book that is most precious to me. I remember my Grandmother handing me that book and the conversation we had. The giving of books is the loveliest of traditions.  There are many ways to celebrate books and reading throughout the Advent season. Families with young children wrap twenty-five Christmas-themed picture books and open and read one each night. Or, with older children, they read a Christmas chapter book or devotion each evening. We always gave our children a stack of books for Christmas morning next to their gifts, and I often see Christmas trees made from stacked books. Still, my favorite holiday book tradition comes from Iceland and is called Jólabókaflóðið, which translates to "Christmas book flood." It involves giving and receiving new books on Christmas Eve; Icelanders spend the rest of the night reading books, sipping hot chocolate, and eating treats. The tradition dates back to World War II when paper was one of the few items you could still find in abundance since there were strict restrictions on most other items. Icelanders made the best of the situation and started giving each other books. Every year since 1944, the Icelandic book trade has published a book catalog in mid-November and has delivered it to every household in the country. People read through the pages and choose books for friends and family. Close to 80% of Iceland's book sales occur during the holidays. Other Jólabókaflóðið celebrations include book readings at schools, bookshops, and coffee shops—lunchtime readings at workplaces, and social media events. The warmth of a hot chocolate, the comfort of a good book, and the joy of the holiday season make Jólabókaflóðið a unique and heartwarming tradition.  I hope this list of favorite Christmas books inspires you to create new Christmas reading traditions for yourself, your family, and your friends. Please consider supporting your independent bookstores and local businesses this holiday season. It's a simple way to affirm the beautiful work and community building that small businesses and non-profits do for us throughout the year. Merry Christmas, and God bless us, everyone.  Nativity Books Nativity   by Cynthia Rylant Cynthia Rylant uses excerpts from the King James Bible to tell the Nativity story and incorporates some of Jesus' teachings from the Sermon on the Mount. Her illustrations are simple, textured paintings that are perfect for little ones.  Recommended for ages 3-8 Sounding Joy by Ellie Holcomb Readers travel through the pages of this sweet board book to answer the question, "What does joy sound like?" Leading us to the joyful sound of angels singing that Jesus has been born. Recommended for ages 2-5 Holy Night and Little Star by Mitali Perkins Little Star likes to keep things as they are, but when Maker wants everything in the night sky to announce the savior's birth, she must decide if she is ready to shine with the other stars and planets. Recommended for ages 3-7 Wombat Divine  by Mem Fox Wombat is finally old enough to try out for the Nativity play, but everyone else seems to be getting all the parts. Will there be a role left for Wombat? The characters are Australian animals, and the story is adorable. It is a family favorite. Recommended ages 3-8 Other Nativity Recommendations S ilent Night by Lara Hawthorne Room for a Little One by Martin Waddell Song of the Star s by Sally Lloyd Jones  Christmas Books The Christmas Book Flood   by Emily Kilgore This picture book explains the story of Jólabókaflóðið, the Icelandic tradition of exchanging new books for Christmas Eve. This is a delightful book and a delightful celebration. Recommended for ages 4-8 Dasher  by Matt Travares Richly colored illustrations bring this book to life. Dasher has always wished for a better life than pulling wagons for a traveling circus. One day, she escapes, meets Santa in the woods, and helps him deliver his sack of toys. She can only find complete happiness when she returns to rescue her family. The illustrations and story feel like an old-time classic story. Recommended ages 4-8  Night Tree  by Eve Bunting On a moonlit night, we watch a family decorate their favorite Christmas tree in the woods with popcorn, apples, tangerines, and sunflower seeds for the wild animals to enjoy. This is an excellent story for families or classrooms, as it may inspire ideas for children to make treats for wildlife for the winter months. Recommended for ages 3-8 Winter Story (Brambly Hedge)  by Jill Barklem I cannot recommend the Brambley Hedge books enough. They are a delight to read, and children will pause to admire the stunning illustrations over and over again. I would suggest the anniversary edition, which contains 8 lovely Brambly stories in one large volume. The Rabbit Room has added a Brambly Hedge coloring book to their store, which would be the perfect Christmas gift. Recommended ages 3-6 Snow Horses: A First Night Story  by Patricia MacLachlan Snow Horses is a celebration of New Year's Eve. I am adding it to this list because it is the perfect winter read to begin right after Christmas. Vibrant brush strokes fill the pages, and everything is awash with wintery detail. I love the celebration of family, community, youth, and long-time friends remembering their childhoods.  Recommended for ages 4-9 Other Recommendations Pick a Pine Tree  by Patricia Toht The Night Before Christmas  by Roger Duvoisin The Night Before Christmas  by Jan Brett Christmas Books for Older Children Little Christmas Carol   by Joe Sutphin I read The Christmas Carol every December, and I always find something new and beautiful that I have never noticed before. Joe Sutphin has created a Christmas Carol treasure with his ever-so-slightly edited version. This is the perfect family read-aloud since everyone will hear Dicken's original work, and young children will be enthralled with the wintry woodland world that Joe has created. Recommended ages 5-10 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis Discover Narnia, where it is always winter and never Christmas until we see Aslan begin to move. This is the perfect Christmas gift or family read-aloud story. The original illustrations by Pauline Baynes are delightful. This book will always have the most special place in my heart. Recommended ages 7-12 The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street  by Karina Yan Glaser The first book in the Vandebeeker series begins 5 days before Christmas. The family has lived in their brownstone in Harlem all their lives, but the landlord is about to end their lease. The 5 Vanderbeeker children must work together to find a way to stay in their beloved home. The books in this series are a celebration of family, neighbors, and friends. Recommended ages 8-12  An Orange for Frankie by Patricia Polacco Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and Pa hasn't returned from his trip. He promised to bring back the oranges for each child's stockings. This year, terrible storms might keep Pa from being home for Christmas. Patricia Polacco's books are ideal for slightly older children as they often cover difficult subjects, sometimes have sad endings, and are lengthy for picture books. Recommended ages 5-11 Christmas Day in the Morning  by Pearl S. Buck Originally published in 1955, this classic story captures the true spirit of Christmas giving. What does a young son get for his hard-working father for Christmas? The gift creates a Christmas that no one will forget. Recommended ages 5-10 Other Options for Older Children Letters from Father Christmas  by J.R.R. Tolkien Shooting at the Stars by John Hendrix Cindy has been an educator for over 30 years, including work in environmental and nature education. She consistently uses stories and books, including picture books, with all of her students from elementary to high school. Most recently, she taught high school humanities, as well as creative writing and science classes for middle school. On any given Saturday, you can find her in her garden, the local farmers market, and her local library.

by Pete Peterson This morning I walked into a quiet theater in Franklin, Tennessee, where we’re about to begin the first day of production on A Christmas Carol . I’m the only one here. The room is cool and stark and full of echoes. Here’s what I see: A darkness. A void. The neutral tones of the auditorium and its walls all crowd around a yawning black emptiness, a space filled with nothing less than the hope of being called into life and light.  Here in the moment before , everything is possible. For years I’ve been ruminating on the idea that theater, as an artform, is inherently incarnational. More than prose or poetry or song or painting, theatre puts on flesh and becomes itself. It becomes more in its flesh than it is on the page. This is a profound mystery to me. When I sit down to write, I have a vision in mind that I’m writing toward–this is true, I think, of all writing. But when I write a book or a short story, I have the benefit (or burden) of being the final arbiter of that story’s reality. In other words, by the time Fiddler’s Green  (a book I wrote over a decade ago) finds itself in your hands, there have only been a couple of people involved in the crafting of it. Me, my editor, my early readers…that’s about it. The final realization of the story is mine to deliver to the reader and his or her imagination, and as a writer, I’m conscious of that proximity to the reader’s imagination, and so I try to paint my scenes and textures and emotions as vividly as I can in order to recreate as closely as possible in another’s imagination what I have in my own. The reader will have to judge for herself how effective I’ve been. But when I write a play, the creative process is wildly different. I’m aware, for instance, that none of the audience will read my stage directions, and therefore, they’ll never know whether or not a particular production even took heed of them. I’m also aware that I can’t control the visual design of the show or the interpretations that different actors will bring to their characters. Essentially, a playwright builds a scaffold onto which dozens of other artists will graft their own work. If the scaffold is well-built, it will support the work of others whether that work is threadbare or mastercraft. There’s a necessary humility inherent in the work of writing for the stage; a humility that reminds me I have to let go of control so that others can finish what I began. I’m just here to build the underlying scaffold. So when I say that the artform of theatre is incarnational, I mean that it lies flat on the page until a living, breathing, human form takes it up and gives it three dimensions; we can walk circles around it to see how it works from different angles. I don’t think you have to strain your eyes very hard to see that there’s a theological dimension to that. There’s a sense in which the law, as it was given to Moses, laid flat on the page (or the tablet) for generations before Christ enfleshed it and helped us see what it looked like fully embodied. And what’s fascinating to me is that when the Word took on flesh, it surprised people. It didn’t change, but it meant  itself in a whole new way, in a way that wasn’t apparent until it stood up  and walked among us. Again and again, this is my experience of theatre. I write. And then the words stand up in front of me, and when they do, they mean more than I meant, more than I even knew  to mean. Incarnation is a miracle. Over and over again. On the stage in microcosm, and in Christ–macrocosm. So today, as I look on the void of the stage here in middle Tennessee, I have a tickle of joy as I await the miracle of creation and incarnation. Matt is now sitting at his sewing machine on the stage and his “grand curtain” is taking shape piece by piece. Stephen is hanging lights. Mitch and Ace are busy hammering and welding and making magic out of everyday materials. Tony and Laura are editing and creating and breathing music and light into being. Caitlin and Becca are spinning threads of communication that tie us all together. Elyn is conjuring poetry out of movement and motion. Through all of these hands and minds, something is coming. Something is becoming. Out of the void: life.  In the beginning, A Christmas Carol , Act 1, Scene 1: [Stage directions] Darkness. Spirits hover over the face of the void, all silently undulating on the formless stage. And then, lights. Rabbit Room Theatre’s production of A Christmas Carol opens on December 7th. Tickets are now available at www.RabbitRoomTheatre.com.

In Flanders Fields by John Mccrae In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields. The Owl by Edward Thomas Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved; Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof. Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest, Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I. All of the night was quite barred out except An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry Shaken out long and clear upon the hill, No merry note, nor cause of merriment, But one telling me plain what I escaped And others could not, that night, as in I went. And salted was my food, and my repose, Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice Speaking for all who lay under the stars, Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice. Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?       — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.       Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;        Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,— The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;       And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all?       Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.       The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. Have you forgotten yet? by Siegfried Sassoon Have you forgotten yet?... For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days, Like traffic checked awhile at the crossing of city ways: And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man reprieved to go, Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare. But the past is just the same -- and War's a bloody game.... Have you forgotten yet?... Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget. Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz, -- The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets? Do you remember the rats; and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench -- And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?" Do you remember that hour of din before the attack -- And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men? Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back With dying eyes and lolling heads, those ashen-grey Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay? Have you forgotten yet?... Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget.

by Jonathan Rogers “Only boring people get bored.” I’m sure you’ve heard that old chestnut before. I’ve repeated it myself, many times. But in the era of the smart phone and social media, we need to rethink and refine our relationship to boredom. I started thinking about boredom and creativity when somebody posted a video of a TED talk by Manoush Zamorodi, a podcast host and author of the book,  Bored and Brilliant . Boredom is good, she argues, because it ignites a network in our brains called the “default mode network.” In short, when we daydream, when we stare blankly out the window, when we perform mindless tasks in which our bodies operate on auto-pilot, our minds start making unexpected connections and solving problems. Some of this kind of sub-conscious or semi-conscious thought happens in our sleep (yet another reason to get plenty of rest), but the default mode network operates during our waking hours, and it doesn’t kick in if our brains are being constantly bombarded by external stimuli. In that un-stimulated, un-entertained state that we commonly call boredom, our minds do some of their best work. Smartphones and the Internet keep us from having to endure the discomfort of “boredom,” but in so doing, they cut us off from some of the richest veins of creativity. The mind, it turns out, won’t stay un-stimulated for long. In the absence of external stimulation, it will create its own. This is the principle behind an exercise you may remember from an earlier issue of  The Habit : on days when I find it impossible to write, when no amount of self-cajoling seems to help, I turn off the Internet, turn off my phone, sit at my desk, and say to myself, “Write or don’t write. It doesn’t matter to me. But for the next hour you can’t do anything else.” If I stick to that and do nothing else, usually by the end of the hour I’ve written something. And by then, I’m usually ready to keep writing. That kind of cultivated “boredom,” unrelieved by electronic stimulation, can be very productive. I put the word  boredom  in quotation marks because I am using it in the colloquial sense of a lack of stimulation the we find unpleasant. And as long as that’s the definition we’re using, I entirely agree with Manoush Zomorodi: boredom is indeed the path to brilliance. If you look to a screen for relief at the first arrival of that kind of boredom, you can expect your creative output to dwindle accordingly. But since we’re on the subject, I feel I should distinguish between that colloquial use of the word boredom from a deeper boredom that philosophers and theologians call  acedia . At its heart, this kind of boredom is an ingratitude that expresses itself in a refusal to be present in the world where one finds oneself. If the other kind of boredom is helpful to creativity, acedia is fatal to creativity. Smartphones and the Internet medicated and so neutralize the salutary effects of the garden-variety boredom of the under-stimulated; at the same time, they deepen acedia by making it harder and harder to marvel at the world God made and to be present in it. This guy, for instance, is going to have to change his ways if he wants to be a writer: Robert Farrar Capon, a writer who has shaped my understanding of creativity as much as anybody, has this to say on the subject: "[This world] is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more often than it should be, boredom. And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral – it is the fertilizing principle of unloveliness." Here is Manoush Zomorodi's TED talk " How Boredom Can Lead to Your Most Brilliant Ideas. " Jonathan Rogers is the host of The Habit Membership and The Habit Podcast: Conversations with Writers About Writing . Every Tuesday he sends out The Habit Weekly , a letter for writers. (Find out more at TheHabit.co .) He is the author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor, as well as the Wilderking Trilogy, The Charlatan’s Boy, and other books. He has contributed to the Rabbit Room since its inception.

by W. David O. Taylor In his book Worship in the Early Church , the New Testament scholar Ralph Martin asserts that the church was born in song. Proof of this is not hard to come by. Like characters in a musical theatre production, the protagonists of Luke’s Gospel find mere speech insufficient to the task of expressing the astonishing events they witness and proclaim. The Virgin Mary breaks out in song in response to Elizabeth’s benediction. Zechariah sings his way out of silence at the pronouncement of his son’s name. The angel choir sings of God’s fantastic glory, while Simeon erupts in verse at the sight of the Christ child, and the early church sings the Psalter, the songs of David, which become the songs of Christ himself, even as the church at the end of the age joins the everlasting chorus of heaven: “Holy, Holy, Holy.”  Yet while singing has always been welcomed into the life of the church, not any kind of song has been seen to satisfy the requirement of faithful music making. What  is sung, how  it is sung, and the character  that the practice of song produces has always been crucial. Singing that generates unity, for example, has been a longstanding concern of the church. “Almost from the beginning,” writes the musicologist Calvin Stapert, “music was an expression of, a metaphor for, and a means toward unity.”  For Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the second century, when Jesus Christ was sung rightly, it became a sign of the church’s “harmonious love.” Saint Ambrose, two centuries later, argued that the singing of a psalm in particular represented a “pledge of peace and harmony, which produces one song from various and sundry voices.” And there is no doubt that the Psalter, as the perennial worship book of the saints, has served to guide and to inspire God’s people in their practices of communal and liturgical song.  For the faithful Israelite, the Torah was not only to be learned, it was also to be sung; so too for Christians down through the ages, the Word of God was not only to be written upon one’s heart, it was also to be placed upon one’s lips in song, and, across the centuries, the psalms supplied both the text and the model for faithful song.  Christians have likewise taken continuous delight in singing the canticles of the gospels and the prophets. This includes the sung-speech of Mary’s Magnificat  (Lk. 1:46-55), Zachariah’s Benedictus  (Lk. 1:67-79), and Simeon’s  Nunc Dimittis  (Lk. 2:29-32). It includes the angels’ spectacular choral performance in the Gloria  of Luke 2:14. And it includes the songs of Moses (Exod. 15; Deut. 32), the Spirit-inspired prayer of Hannah (1 Sam. 2), and the glorious confession of Isaiah (Isa. 6), along with his prophetic announcement in Isaiah 9. Christians have chanted and caroled and belted out such texts, not simply because they have believed that God has commanded such song, nor only because they have discovered in such song the heart of faithful praise in the lives of faithful saints. They have done so, most fundamentally, because they have heard the voice of Christ in such songs; they have done so because they have encountered the living God in such songs; and they have done so because they have been powerfully transformed by the Spirit of God through such songs. And much like Randall Goodgame has experienced firsthand, they have done so because they have been profoundly shaped by the words and ways of God, which we discover supremely in Holy Scripture, that living testament to the God who meets us in the face of Jesus Christ and by the power of his Holy Spirit. Two things in particular stand out to me about the Scripture Hymnal project: one is Randall Goodgame’s desire that Christians re-discover the joy of singing together the life-giving words of God, and the other is his hope that, in doing so, Christians will discover the beauty of being transformed by the life-giving words of God. And there are two images that help to guide us, as singers, in this work of corporate song.  The first is the image of a dog gnawing away at a bone. This is how Eugene Peterson describes the term “meditate” which we encounter all throughout the psalms. In Psalm 1:2, for instance, the righteous person is described as one who meditates  on the law, or torah, of the Lord. In Psalm 77:12, the psalmist ponders the work of the Lord and meditates on his mighty deeds. And all throughout Psalm 119, the psalmist meditates  on the Lord’s precepts and promises.  But as Peterson points out, the language of “meditate,” or in the Hebrew, hagah , must not be confused for the work of intellectual scrutiny or the activity of “wolfing down” information that so often characterizes our experiences of reading in our modern, technological age. The language of “meditate” describes instead the act of rumination, participation, immersion, leisurely deliberation. It is, in other words, what a dog does when he gnaws on an especially tasty bone. As Peterson remarks in Eat This Book : "There is a certain kind of writing that invites this kind of reading, soft purrs and low growls as we taste and savor, anticipate and take in the sweet and spicy, mouth-watering and soul-energizing morsel words—'O taste and see that the Lord is good!'" (Psalm 34:8). A dog chewing ( hagah ) on a bone, using teeth and tongue, in order to enjoy his bone, Peterson believes, is what the Bible has in mind when it uses the language of “meditate.” When we meditate on the words of God, we seek to savor it, to feel it, and, ultimately, to eat it, or to borrow from the Book of Common Prayer, to “inwardly digest” it. And this is what hymns like the kind we find here allow us to do in spades. We get to take upon our lips the tasty words of God and to taste them not just once in the act of congregational song, but at all times of the day and night, when we find ourselves recalling or relishing a particular timely word. The second image that helps to guide our unified song is the image of “dwelling richly,” which we find in Colossians 3:16. When Saint Paul encourages the saints at Colossae to let the “word of Christ” dwell richly in them, he has two things in mind. He wants Christ himself  to dwell richly in them and he wants the words that Christ speaks to dwell richly in them; and it is the latter which ought ultimately to lead to the former: from word to Word.  The operative metaphor here is one of “home.” Not only are we invited to let Christ make his home in our hearts, we are also invited to become ambulatory homes of Christ where the words of Christ might bear rich fruit in all of our lives—whether we are at home or at work, at play or at worship.  As Christ inhabits our lives more fully, we also become lodging places for others to encounter Christ himself. We become mobile shrines that take “the triune God out and about in the world,” conveying God’s blessings to others, as the Lutheran theologian John Kleinig vividly puts it. The more wholly Christ takes up residence in our hearts, then, the more fully we become like Christ himself and thus also a place where others might find themselves more fully at home with Christ. And, in the context of Colossians 3, such a work is performed gloriously, and uniquely, through the act of communal singing.  This, then, is the gift of Goodgame’s hymnbook. It offers to us a collection of hymns that allow us to savor the words of God in order that we might become more fully at home with the words of God, which, in turn, will usher us into the personal presence of God.  For example: We get to sink our teeth into the hopeful words of Job 19, with its promise of a Redeemer who stands sovereign over all powers of death. We get to taste deeply the lament of Psalm 3 and the gracious forgiveness of Psalm 51. We get to delight in the fact that two are indeed better than one, as Ecclesiastes 4:9 reminds us. And we get to drink deeply of the virtues of justice, mercy, and humility that ought to characterize all of God’s people, as Micah 6:8 articulates the matter.  We also get to savor the sacramental words of Jesus in John 6. We get to luxuriate in the sure Anchor for our soul, Christ himself, the High Priest of Hebrews 4, and in the intercessory work of the Spirit, as Romans 8 describes the third Person of the Trinity. And we get to find ourselves sated by the Lord’s Prayer of Matthew 6 and the eschatological promise of Revelation 15, with its vision of a Lamb who sits enthroned as the King of the nations. In Eugene Peterson’s translation of Psalm 19:10b, God’s Word is described in gustatory terms: as “better than strawberries in spring, better than red, ripe strawberries.” This is, it seems to me, a perfect metaphor for Goodgame’s hymnbook and a marvelous way to imagine what occurs when we encounter the sweet presence of God in the honey-flavored revelation of God. As we sing these hymns congregationally, then, may we find ourselves bursting with satisfaction as we savor the delectable words of God. May we find ourselves bound more deeply not only to the Word made Flesh but also to one another, through the very words of a word-speaking God, in ways that might astonish us afresh. And, finally, may we find ourselves caught up in something bigger than ourselves, namely, the joyful acclamation of angels and archangels, along with all the company of heaven, which sings the everlasting song of the One who meets and remakes us by his Spirit through the very act of corporate song here on earth. W. David O. Taylor  (ThD, Duke Divinity School) is associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. An Anglican priest, he has lectured widely on the arts, from Thailand to South Africa. Taylor has written for the Washington Post, Image Journal, and Religion News Service, among others. He is the author of several books, including Glimpses of the New Creation: Worship and the Formative Power of the Arts and Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life. In 2016, he produced a short film on the psalms with Bono and Eugene Peterson. He lives in Austin, Texas.

by Randall Goodgame “Know ye what a hymn is? It is a song with praise of God.”  —Augustine of Hippo In the summer of 1984 , I hopped a few fences and walked along a sea wall to our pastor’s yard where “Brother Bill” taught me to throw his twelve-foot cast net into the canal. I remember his patience as I tangled the net around my skinny sixth-grade frame. I remember the taste of salt water and seaweed as I crunched the nylon rope between my teeth, and I remember his measured praise when I finally hauled in a few small bait fish. But I don’t remember any of his sermons.  I do, however, remember every word of “Because He Lives,” “Amazing Grace,” “Victory in Jesus,” “Great is Thy Faithfulness,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “How Great Thou Art,” “It Is Well with My Soul,” and “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” From youth group I remember “Great Is the Lord,” “He Has Made Me Glad,” “Seek Ye First,” and “Father, I Adore You.” And my college’s Methodist chapel taught me “Come Thou Fount,” “Rock of Ages,” and “Be Thou My Vision.” Because of my childhood pastor, I can toss a cast net into a pretty circle. But I know the Gospel because I remember the songs. Music helps people remember things. And music memories conjure much more than just information. Like “muscle memory,” music memories betray hidden workings of the human mind that we take for granted. Mysteriously, they can carry emotions and insight, scent and taste. In the time it takes to hear a melody, a whole world can flood our consciousness.  I wasn’t thinking so deeply when I first put scripture to music, however. The songs were simply problem solvers—helping our home-schooled kids memorize their weekly bible verses. But the practice helped me  remember them, too. I wrote more and more scripture songs for myself, and eventually recorded them for the families that participated in my children-and-family music ministry called Slugs & Bugs.  That’s when the stories started—stories from parents about scripture-inspired conversations with their children–in the car, at the dinner table, at bedtime. Often through tears of gratitude, parents spoke of God’s word becoming a constant, living, life-changing presence in their home. The power of singing scripture surprised them as it had surprised me, and I understood their passion.  What do we do with these lives that we’ve been given? What do we do with our dreams, our bodies, our children, our gifts? And why is this all so hard? By grace, God’s word sifts through these questions for us. The two testaments lift the curtain on the eternal realm and reveal the untouchable beauty of God. Through history, prophecy, and poetry, our own story diminishes into the bigger story of God’s creation, his holiness, his justice, and his passion for us. In the life and words of Jesus, through the testimony of the apostles, we learn that God’s love and mercy is available to everyone, and we learn how “he gave his life to free us from every kind of sin, to cleanse us and to make us his very own.” It’s all in the Bible. The words are thousands of years old, and we need them every hour. This is where those parents’ tears came from–a wellspring of gratitude for having gained familial intimacy with the immeasurably valuable word of God.   In the fall of 2021, I began to wonder, “What if this kind of revival—a revival of biblical literacy and spiritual growth through song–could happen in the church?”  By that time I had years of experience writing scripture songs, but a congregational scripture song is a bird of a different feather. Congregational songs require predictable rhythmic patterns and melodies that are simple enough to catch quickly–while still being interesting enough to inspire. And, they rhyme . Rhyming isn’t an option for scripture songs, so with only melody and rhythm to work with, a song could wind up as useful as a two-legged stool. Renowned twentieth-century hymnologist Erik Routley called hymns “songs for unmusical people to sing together,” but even unmusical people can tell a good song from a bad one.  Eventually, I felt called to create a hymnal of congregational scripture songs for the church. But like Eusebius, the early church historian, I felt “inadequate to do it justice.”  So I prayed for help–specifically for collaborative community–so that other voices could speak into the creative work of shaping bible verses into hymns. And truly, the Lord answered that prayer with blessings beyond measure, as the vision for the Scripture Hymnal  grew and became a wonderfully collective work. In all, twelve gifted songwriters joined the writing process—all devoted believers who love Jesus and the gospel. Other passionate souls worked on arrangements and copyright permissions and scripture readings and illustrations and book design. Dozens of churches from around the world participated in our pilot program, giving us crucial real-world feedback about using these hymns in worship services. And thirty-five worship leaders and pastors from Nashville and beyond contributed essential guidance and creative counsel on every song, eventually helping us shape 106 word-for-word scripture songs for the church. Those songs are now in your hands because of the effort, care, and enthusiasm of that earthly host—and I am so grateful.  Over the last few years, I’ve taken up flower gardening as a hobby. In my first attempt at growing perennials from seed, I almost lost two trays of creeping thyme. Under the grow-lamp in my garage, 144 seedlings sprang to life, then grew spindly and flopped flat–like a tangled spill of leftover rice noodles. In distress, I called my master-gardener friend, Julie. She surveyed my setup and told me not to worry. My tiny plants were thin and weak because the grow-light was too far away. Obediently, I lowered the light to just above the seedlings–and waited.  Three years later, the stone steps that lead down from the garage are girded in green with cascading clouds of creeping thyme–all from that first planting. The sight and scent are a delight, blanketing the descent into the garden with tiny pink blooms from June to September. People, like plants, need the right conditions to thrive. And as we grow in Christ, God’s word is our light, our food, and our weapon for battle against the enemy. We need it close, and when we sing scripture, it can get no closer. It joins our breath and vibrates inside our bodies with that mysterious engine of hidden powers: Music.  The truth found in scripture stays the same whether read or sung, but it’s the singing that often brings me to tears. It’s the singing that ignites my memory, creating a priceless storehouse of God’s holy word, always ready for the Spirit of the Lord to bring it to mind.  This is my hope and prayer for this hymnal–that, through song, God will weave his word into our minds and renew our hearts so that he might be glorified in the world. Like sunlight in the garden, God’s beautiful word makes us beautiful. We are set free to forget about ourselves–free to rest and rejoice in the wellspring of God’s love, energized by the compassion and wisdom of Jesus.  Music is a mysterious and powerful gift, given by the Great Mystery himself, and if scripture songs can help us dwell on him, grow in him, and bring him glory in the church, then “Come, let us sing unto the Lord!” Buy the Scripture Hymnal on the Rabbit Room store.