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by Jonny Jimison Note: The latest volume in The Dragon Lord Saga , “Dragons and Desperados,” releases March 31, 2025 . You can preorder your copy today from Rabbit Room Press. Everyone should read The Arrival  at least once. It looks like a lushly-illustrated picture book, it reads like a graphic novel, and there are no words, only pictures. Granted, no words means that there’s no telling what the protagonist’s name is, so I’ll simply refer to him as “the man.” The Arrival  begins with the man reluctantly leaving his wife and his little girl to seek a new future for them in a faraway country. While searching for work and food in a bewildering and unfamiliar setting, he slowly makes his way with the help of strangers who take a moment to help him understand a new setting, a new food, or a new job. Each one of these strangers has their own  story of their own  arrival, and each time they lend a hand, they move the man forward on his journey toward belonging in his new home. The man has to work hard to understand his new surroundings, much less find a home in them. Similarly, The Arrival  invites you to engage personally, to search a little deeper to understand. This is not a journey that you read—it’s a journey that you experience . One of the biggest ways that author Shaun Tan achieves this is by abstracting the entire story. There’s no dialogue, so you have to imagine what the characters are saying based on context clues and body language. The written language on signs is a made-up series of glyphs, so you have to make your best guess, even as the man does the same. The language of this land is foreign to the man, so it’s foreign to the reader as well. This ambiguity extends beyond language, though—the architecture, the animals, the customs, everything  in this land is weird and different. It’s deliberately and delightfully surreal, with just enough context to say “I think  I might have some idea of what that thing is, but …” Despite all that has been abstracted, it’s the super-specific details that tell the story. For example: At the beginning of the story, as he prepares to leave his family, the man carefully wraps and packs a family photograph. Then he makes a little origami bird as a parting gift for his daughter. That origami bird becomes part of the language of the book, representing the man’s connection to his daughter and one of the few methods he has of communicating in a strange land. And the family photograph almost becomes like a character itself—we return to that framed photo over and over again, just like the man returns to it, homesick and lonely and clinging to his purpose: a better future for his family. Tan is an artist with a lot to say, and he uses every trick in the book to say it without words. But my favorite trick of all is how he zooms in and out. Close up of the family photograph. Zoom out.  The man is looking at the photo as he sits in his ship cabin. Zoom out.  We’re outside the ship, seeing him through his porthole. Zoom out.  His porthole is one of dozens, all housing a similar story. Turn the page —and we’ve zoomed out again. The ship is one small ship on a huge sea in a big world. The same thing happens again when the man moves into his apartment in the new land. This time, instead of the outside of a ship, we zoom out to the outside of a building, where his window is one of dozens, and there’s just  enough detail that we can make out which window is his. But as we continue to zoom out, his window becomes harder to spot. Then we flip the page to a wide shot of the whole city, and … who knows which building  is his, much less which window ? Tan uses this device over and over, sometimes zooming out, sometimes zooming in. The message is clear: Zoom into just one life, and you’ll find a story of depth and detail. Zoom out to thousands of lives, and you have a land teeming with thousands of untold stories. How can one man belong in such a huge, immersive, disorienting environment? By zooming in. Which is what some of the other characters choose to do. Again and again, the man is assisted in his journey by strangers who choose to pause and give him directions, or show him the ropes of a new job, or introduce him to friends. Each time, the stranger begins as a face in the crowd, but then we start to see more—their face, their posture, their attitude. Despite the lack of language, we get to know them as the man gets to know them. Then something incredible happens: We get a handful of pages sharing the story of their  arrival, each one a harrowing, unsettling story of the circumstances that led them to this wild, intimidating immigration experience. These mini-stories are incredibly powerful for a couple of reasons. For one, when the flashback ends, we return to the present day. Here is the person who lived that difficult story, and they have survived. Some are thriving and some aren’t, but all of them show evidence of having made this new land their home. This is where they work, rest, and play, where they share meals with loved ones and play games with friends. The man is living the hardest days now, but there is hope. The flashbacks are also powerful for us, the reader. After pages of working to understand this strange land and living the man’s confusing journey in it, there’s something cathartic about getting a real, concrete story about this new stranger, almost as if the story is reaching back out to us in return. Yes, the flashbacks are surreal, silent, and often heartbreaking … but here, where there was once a sea of strangers, is real human connection. We finally started to understand something, and it was the most important thing: another human life. That is the hopeful message of The Arrival . In the author’s own words: One of the great powers of storytelling is that it invites us to walk in other people’s shoes for a while, but perhaps even more importantly, it invites us to contemplate our own shoes also. We might do well to think of ourselves as possible strangers in our own strange land. What conclusions we draw from this are unlikely to be easily summarized, all the more reason to think further on the connections between people and places, and what we might mean when we talk about ‘belonging.’ Oh, and I’ll risk a spoiler here: The man reunites with his wife and child by the end of the book. This migrant story has a happy ending. May it always be so. Want to explore a little deeper? The quote from Shaun Tan is taken from an article on his website.  Read the entire article —it’s well worth it. Now that we’ve explored the themes and ideas of The Arrival , read my accompanying post  that explores the artwork in more depth. Jonny Jimison  is a cartoonist, writer and illustrator. In addition to his graphic novel series The Dragon Lord Saga , he is the illustrator of When Going on a Dragon Hunt  for Bandersnatch Books and creator of the webcomic Rabbit Trails  for the Rabbit Room. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo from The Arrival  by Shaun Tan

The Bible is a literary book. If we can’t read the literary dimension of the Bible, we’re missing a lot of it because so much of the meaning happens on the literary level. This means that if we are going to take the Bible on its own terms, we need to learn to read it artistically. What Does It Mean to Read the Bible Artistically? The Bible is a work of art and, just like every work of art, there are meanings on the surface and meanings waiting at greater depths. The deeper meanings only yield themselves over time and only according to their own rules. It follows that part of being a good reader of the Bible, then, is to learn its rules. I’m suggesting that some of those rules (and the meanings they unlock) can only be accessed with an artist’s eye and an artist’s mind. As an aside before going any further, separating the meanings in the Bible into “surface” and “deeper” is a bit of a false dichotomy. I’m not saying that meanings that stand out clearly are less important than meanings that take more time to reveal themselves or are communicated literarily. Nor am I saying that the “deeper” meanings are the “real” meanings. God has scattered his truth over creation and across the pages of the Bible with a broad hand. His revelation is not limited by the level of literary sophistication (or even literacy) on the part of those who approach his word. In saying there are surface meanings and deeper meanings in the Bible, I’m trying to make a point that there are deeper meanings. The Bible is not a set of IKEA instructions, designed to be completely understood by anyone at a glance. There are meanings in the Bible that reward long discipleship to the genres and books at hand. In other words, it is literature. Saying That the Bible Is Literature Is Different Than Saying the Bible Is Only Literature In the past, some have said that the Bible is literature in order to say that it is only literature. Used this way, the word “literature” means it is not sacred scripture, not authoritative, not divinely inspired, or not historically accurate. It is just, you know, literature. Like the Homer’s Odyssey or Dante’s Inferno. Modern biblical scholarship has often sought to draw a distinction between the Bible as scripture and the Bible as literature as if the literary dimension of the Bible can be isolated from its nature as the word of God. Some scholars have set the human and divine elements of Scripture against one another as if the former could nullify the latter. That isn’t what I’m saying. My point is that God communicated his truth through the medium of cultural writing conventions, limitations imposed by the evolution of writing technology (oral tradition letter writing, proverbs, vellum, etc.), the boundaries of genre, and a thousand little surprising and profound applications of literary devices on the part of the authors of the Bible. To the One With the Hammer of Modernity, Everything Looks Like a Rationalistic Nail Modern people sometimes to have a problem with reading the Bible artistically. It is not automatically the case that just because you believe the Bible is the word of God and that you read it with the best of intentions, you will be able to understand what it is saying. Rather, the opposite is true all too often. We read the Bible with modern eyes and that often means that we misread the Bible because of those same eyes. The thing about human beings is that we apply our paradigms to everything we interact with by default, often without being aware of it. We see through a glass darkly and that smoky glass is made of our preconceptions, biases, cultural dispositions, upbringing, experiences, and a whole mess of other things. The things that make us who we are both illuminate and obscure reality. That is even true when it comes to the Bible. To read the Bible as a modern Western person is to grapple continuously (though often unconsciously) with the way we’ve been taught to read and think. That is, we try to break things down into their constituent pieces so that we can categorize and understand them. Only once we have systematized their essential pieces can we distill their meanings and assign them their places in a larger, rationalistic framework. However, meaning also lies in the relationships between things, not only in their discrete components. The words, paragraphs, passages, and books of the Bible are too carefully arranged to be able to break them apart without marring much of the meaning they contain. To preserve that meaning, we have to read them in context and so much of that context is operating on the literary level. So we are back to reading the Bible with the eyes of an artist, not only the eyes of an analyst. Can’t I Just Read the Bible Literally instead of Literarily ? Yes and no. “Literal” is a tricky word when it comes to the Bible. When people throw the L-word in, they are sometimes trying to talk about taking the Bible seriously or whether it is inerrant or the authoritative word of God or if it happened in real history . The word “literal” can be a stand-in for those other words and can act as a tribal marker or ID badge that can be waived around for identification purposes. “Do you believe the Bible is true?” “Yes, I take it literally. Every word.” The problem with taking everything in the Bible literally is that it isn’t all meant to be taken that way. The Bible is a book of books and the individual books that comprise the one, greater Book belong to different genres, are written in different styles, employ different literary techniques, achieve different aims, and often belong to different centuries. Each genre has its own rules, each section of the Bible has its own rhythms, and each book has its own ways it needs to be read. But to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if the only tool in your literary toolbox is labeled “literal,” you are going to smash all that other stuff to bits. So to begin to answer the question, “Should we read the Bible literally?” I would start with another question: “Which part of the Bible?” Let’s start with genre. The Bible has at least eight major genres: law, history, wisdom, poetry, gospel, epistles, prophecy, and apocalyptic. And several of these break down into further categories when applied to the various books of the Bible. Some books even contain multiple genres inside themselves. Some genres should be read more literally than others. As historical biography and eyewitness accounts , the Gospels have many passages that should be read literally, but even the historical aspects are full of symbol-laden language, literary devices, and organization that is the result of internal structure. For instance, did the cleansing of the temple happen at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry (as in John’s gospel) or at the end of his ministry (as in Matthew’s gospel)? Is that even the right question to ask about that event? Should we rather be asking why John and Matthew put their accounts of the cleansing of the temple where they did according to the other unfolding themes of their gospels? Or take the example of the book of Proverbs. Reading it takes a bit of sophistication. It is an inspired book, like all of the Bible, but that doesn’t mean that if you do what a proverb says, the result the proverb predicts is guaranteed to happen to you. They are wisdom sayings that are generally true. This is especially the case when you have two proverbs next to each other that say opposite things. How do you take that literally? I know a man who nearly broke his faith because he kept doing what the proverbs said but not getting the promised result. Was God lying to him? Was the Bible a farce? Or was he bringing expectations to the book that didn’t fit what the book of Proverbs is? Apocalyptic literature, like the book of Revelation and parts of the book of Daniel, turn into mushy nonsense when you try to read them literally because they are usually a kaleidoscopic mashup of images from elsewhere in the Bible. Instead of trying to figure out if, say, the locusts in Revelation literally correspond to modern attack helicopters. You should instead build up your understanding of the image of locusts in the Bible and then bring that understanding back into the context of Revelation to begin to wonder what it is communicating because that is one of the rules of that specific genre of literature in the Bible. You Have to Read the Bible Artistically Because It Is Full of Literary Elements The Bible often uses propositional statements to convey its meanings (“Thou shalt not murder”), but it also uses literary elements to get its points across. A “literary element” is a meaning-laden convention of writing or storytelling that conforms to the rules of a certain style or genre. Rhyme and meter are literary elements in the medium of poetry, for example, or the way young adult fiction uses cliffhangers, or how mystery novels build toward the big whodunnit reveal at the end. Every culture produces and employs literary elements—often so naturally that natives of a language don’t even notice them. When someone says, “It’s raining cats and dogs outside” (literary element: idiom), we don’t wonder why animals are falling from the sky. We know that it is just raining hard. The Bible is no different. If were to list the literary elements in Scripture, the list would be long indeed. If we were to list the moments those elements combined to create deeper meanings on the literary level, the list would need several volumes. If we were to list the deeper meanings themselves, the items on the list would outnumber the stars and the list would remain mostly incomplete. Nevertheless, I do not want to end this essay without at least giving some concrete examples of what I’m talking about. Consider this brief list of literary elements that the writers of the Bible use to get their meanings across: Character : Yes, the Bible has lots of abstract concepts in it, but it is also full of characters, people making choices that have consequences for themselves and others. Many of these characters take on meanings beyond themselves that echo through the rest of the Bible (think of Abraham as the archetype of faith or Job as the archetype of suffering). Setting : The important settings in the Bible are almost characters themselves and take on a significance greater than just the backdrop of the stories. By way of examples, think of the meanings attached to all the things that happen in the wilderness, or the sea , or on mountaintops , or in gardens . Plot : Plot is the careful arrangement of events in a narrative. The Bible has micro-plots and macro-plots. For instance, you have many micro-stories of various kings that all exist on a larger narrative arc of the failure of Israel’s kings and the appearance of Jesus, the true and ultimate king, who is given a crown of thorns, a bloody purple robe, and who is enthroned on a cross beneath the words, “King of Israel.” The macro-plot of the theme of kingship is built of a hundred kingly micro-dramas. Symbolism : Symbolism is the figurative use of one thing to represent another thing. For instance, here are two examples: “God is my rock” or “I am like those who go down to the pit.” We understand that God is not a rock and death is not really a pit, but there are things about God and about death that are like a rock or a pit. Repetition : In the Bible, repeated is related. The texts of the Bible are in constant conversation with one another. Later texts hearken back to and draw meaning from previous texts. Later writers build upon and expand meanings found in the very texts that have shaped their own imaginations. Biblical writers constantly repeat themselves to create the dense web of literary allusions we call Scripture. Design patterns: See this and this and this . Themes : Certain big ideas unfold throughout the course of the entire Bible, such as kingship, sonship, sacrifice, priesthood, anointing, messiah, the temple, the tree of life, sabbath, exile, holiness, the law, and on and on. These themes interweave the books of the Bible and build to a double crescendo in the Gospels and Revelation. Brevity : The Bible (and especially Genesis) packs dense layers of meaning into a small amount of text. For instance, the story of Melchizedek is 58 words in English, but the writer of Hebrews uses it to overthrow the entire Old Testament priestly system. Nuff said. Symbolic numbers: Have you ever wondered why there are so many sets of three (the Trinity, days Jonah was in the whale), seven (days of creation and many others ), twelve (tribes, apostles), and forty (years in the wilderness, days of Christ’s fasting) in the Bible? When we approach these numbers with our literary lenses on we can both notice them and become equipped to ask the next question, “What do the numbers mean?” Jesus was an Artist There is a curious moment in Matthew’s gospel: “And the disciples came up and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” And Jesus answered them, “To you, it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them, it has not been granted. For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.” (Matthew 13:10-12) and then the narrator adds the comment “All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables, and He did not speak anything to them without a parable.” (v. 34) Why did God incarnate spend so much of his time telling stories? Why did the gospel writers think it was so crucial to his method of teaching that they devoted so much space to Jesus’ parables their own (carefully curated) works of art? You would think that if Jesus wanted to get his point across, he would have just stated things plainly. After all, he had a lot to cram into those three years with his disciples, shouldn’t he have chosen to communicate in the most clear, concise way possible, i. e. propositional statements instead of stories? Or is that our modern, rationalistic bias showing again? Let’s give Jesus credit where credit is due. He was smart. He was the perfect teacher, infinitely wise, patient, and creative. If there was a better way to get his message across, Jesus would have found it. We can assume, then, that Jesus taught in parables for a reason. Toward the end of his time with his disciples, he also said to them, “I have more to teach you, but you can’t bear it yet.” (John 16:12) This implies that he knew what they could handle and he was shaping and pacing his teaching accordingly. Perhaps his parables were like “time-release truth capsules” that would enlarge inside his hearers as they remembered them again and again across the span of their whole lives. And let’s give the gospel writers the benefit of the doubt too. It might be that they thought conveying Jesus’ teaching by preserving his stories and parables was the best way to present the life-transforming message of the gospel. Perhaps they wanted to give future believers the same opportunity that was given to them, namely, to approach God’s truth with an artist’s eye, with patience, curiosity, and wonder. What if the whole Bible is like that? What if it is meant to be stood under and watched rather than mined for nuggets of truth that can be applied to one’s life? What if we were meant to learn to read it with an artist’s eyes? 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). Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

by Jez Carr In one of his happier moments, poet William Cowper wrote the poem from which we get the immortal line, “God moves in a mysterious way.” The poem continues: . . . His wonders to perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm. When life seems like chaos and storm, we are to remember that God is bigger: He rides upon the storm. But Cowper didn’t always experience God this way. Not long after writing this poem, he became severely depressed. When he read Commodore Anson’s account of one of his sailors falling off the ship in the middle of a storm at sea, Cowper heard a profound resonance with his interior experience. The end of the account goes like this, “ . . . we lost sight of him struggling with the waves, and conceived from the manner in which he swam, that he might continue sensible for a considerable time longer, of the horror attending his irretrievable situation.” Cowper’s final poem, “The Castaway,” reflects on the account and his own experience: No voice divine the storm allay’d, No light propitious shone; When snatched from all effectual aid, We perish’d, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he. Cowper captures something of the power of the imagery around stormy seas. It is uniquely able to connect with the fears and anxieties with which we process our experience of this world, as well as with the feeling of the “voice divine” disappearing in the midst of the roar. Where is the God who rides upon the storm, who answers from “the secret place of thunder?” (Ps. 81:7 [English Standard Version]) Over three reflections, we’re going to explore this imagery as a way to engage faithfully with life’s struggles. This first reflection focuses on how these struggles fit within a healthy Christian worldview, even—or especially—when we ask the “where” question and can’t find tidy answers. In fact, you’ll get a little sick of me asking the question. The second reflection examines how we understand Jesus within this imagery, and how we see him as the primary answer to the “where” question. (Finally!) The final reflection explores what it means to live all this out within the life of faith. Watery imagery flows through the whole Bible: creation out of water; the flood; the sea that parts in the exodus; Jonah and his huge fish; Jesus walking on water, stilling storms, and warning that storms will beat against your house; the dragon and the sea in Revelation, etc. I’ll leave you to expand the list. Oh yes, and the whole baptism thing. But the imagery finds its deepest emotional expression in the Psalms. Sometimes they celebrate the God who rides upon the storm: Mightier than the thunder of the great waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea— the LORD on high is mighty. (Ps. 93:4 [ESV]) Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. (Ps. 46:2-3 [New International Version]) . . . And sometimes they ask in bemusement, “Where is the voice divine?” Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me. I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God. (Ps. 69:1-3 [NIV]) To understand passages like these, we need to understand how water functioned within the world of their authors. In fact, the Bible is drawing on a theme that was prevalent in worldviews across the ancient Near East. The deep waters were chaotic, and chaos was deadly. The deeper you went, the further you were from God’s presence. And then there’s the petulant gods, ferocious dragons, and their violent battles. All the great ancient mythologies of this region describe storm gods battling sea gods (generally depicted as sea dragons). In Enuma Elish  (Babylonian), Marduk (storm god) gathers his cronies and defeats Tiamat (sea god): Then the lord raised up the flood-storm, his mighty weapon. He mounted the storm-chariot irresistible and terrifying. He harnessed and yoked to it a team-of-four, The Killer, the Relentless, the Trampler, the Swift. Sharp were their poison-bearing teeth. They were versed in ravage, skilled in destruction. On his right he posted the Smiter, fearsome in battle, On the left the Combat, which repels all the zealous. His cloak was an armor of terror, His head was turbaned with his fearsome halo. The lord went forth and followed his course, He set his face towards the raging Tiamat. Marduk goes on to “split Tiamat like a shellfish” and is ultimately crowned king of the pantheon of gods. Baal is the Philistine (Assyrian) version of Marduk, and there is also significant overlap with the Greek god Zeus and Roman god Jupiter. War in the waters and beasts of the deep were central to how surrounding cultures understood, well, everything: the natural, political, and spiritual worlds, as well as the inner life of everyone who experiences them. And they were profoundly fearful images. The Bible engages these stories to help us understand Yahweh, the God of Israel, and show how much comfort there is in him being the one who rides upon the storm. Like the “other” storm gods, Yahweh’s power over the storm is central to his nature. He is the one who will “slay the monster of the sea” (Isa. 27:1 [NIV]). But whereas it’s a close call for the “other” gods, there is no contest with him. And more than that: Whereas the others use their power for themselves, Yahweh uses it to rescue his beloved people. Listen to how Yahweh compares to Marduk (above) when King David cries out to him: He parted the heavens and came down; dark clouds were under his feet. He mounted the cherubim and flew; he soared on the wings of the wind. He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him— the dark rain clouds of the sky. Out of the brightness of his presence clouds advanced, with hailstones and bolts of lightning. The Lord thundered from heaven; the voice of the Most High resounded. He shot his arrows and scattered the enemy, with great bolts of lightning he routed them. The valleys of the sea were exposed and the foundations of the earth laid bare at your rebuke, Lord, at the blast of breath from your nostrils. He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters. (Ps. 18:9-16 [NIV]) Or look at how, in the story of Noah in Genesis 6-9, Yahweh compares to the gods described in other versions. In Atrahasis , humans are multiplying too fast and their noisiness is disturbing the sleep of the gods, so they decide to cull humanity. In the story of Noah, God is grieved at humanity’s corrupt rejection of him and decides to put an end to it. In The Epic of Gilgamesh , the flood is so terrible that the gods “cowered like dogs” at what they had created, while in the biblical account, God remains in complete control, the constant initiator of the story. Finally, at the end of the Gilgamesh flood account, the gods are starving because there has been no one to offer sacrifices (their only source of food), so when “Noah” (here called “Utnapishtim” [here, have a tissue]) offers sacrifices, it says the gods “crowded like flies around the sacrificer,” while when Noah offers sacrifices, God renews his promises with Noah. In contrast to the cavalier, needy, petulant selfishness of the gods of these other stories, the God of Israel is absolute in his power and unique in his love. So again we ask, where is he? Repeat warning: No tidy answers lie ahead. But it may help to start at the beginning: As the Bible story opens, uninhabitable watery chaos is all there is. God spends three days creating order before the world can be filled with life, then he appoints his image bearers (us) to keep filling the order and subduing the chaos. But as soon as we meet a beast who has crawled out of the chaos (a serpent—related to sea dragons in ancient taxonomy), rather than subdue it, we embrace it (Gen. 3). The portal has been opened for watery chaos to creep back into God’s flourishing creation and into the hearts of his image bearers. The rest of the Bible is spent defeating it, both in our hearts and in the world around us. But God promises that his power over the waters remains throughout. The defining story of God for the people of Israel was the exodus (with imagery of parting waters in the midst of chaos reminiscent of the creation story). As the escaped Hebrew slaves find themselves trapped between the watery chaos of the Red Sea and the dust storms of the avenging Egyptians, the chaos enters their very souls: We’re going to die!! (Exod. 14:11) Moses reassures them: “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still” (Exod. 14:14 [NIV]). Not “be still" as in “don’t move” (they still have to walk God’s path of deliverance), but as in “trust; be still in your spirit.” And sure enough, the waters separate, just like in creation, and the escapees walk through to freedom, reborn into new life as the people of God. Every time they hear God’s name, Yahweh, they are to remember his power over the waters, exerted to bring them new life, to rescue them from all that seeks to drown them. Fast-forward: As the Bible comes to a close, we hear that the dragon is dead, and his sea is gone forever (Rev. 21). However, again, experience tells us we’re not there yet; the dragon still roams. Yet again we ask, where is the God who rides upon the storm? The Psalms survey the possibilities: Maybe he has fallen asleep, or worse, forgotten us? Or maybe he’s lost his power? Maybe what we’re experiencing is his anger? Something must have happened because we certainly don’t experience THAT Yahweh in the midst of OUR storms. The prophets chime in too: Awake, awake, arm of the LORD, clothe yourself with strength! Awake, as in days gone by, as in generations of old. Was it not you who cut Rahab to pieces, who pierced that monster through? Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made a road in the depths of the sea so that the redeemed might cross over? (Isa. 51:9-10) Maybe the lack of tidy conclusions is because Jesus is the true answer, and he (from the perspective of the Old Testament) is yet to come, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The imagery of floods and storms allows our imaginations to run riot, to interpret what is happening to us in all sorts of ways: When we’re beyond our ability to cope, we feel “overwhelmed” like a boat sinking in a storm. We may wonder what fearful floods lie ahead. God asks us to choose carefully where we fix our eyes. Like the apostle Peter taking his precarious walk on the water, we’re prone to fix our eyes on the waves rather than on the One who quiets them. But he waits for us to invite his hope into our rioting imaginations, despite the questions. But again, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now, what we need to hear is this: Feeling overwhelmed and wondering where God is in the midst of it may not be as spiritually unhealthy as it feels. Whatever storms each of us may be facing, I hope it is a comfort to be reminded that you are not alone. What you are experiencing comes straight out of the Bible’s overarching story. You are not alone; the characters—and authors—of the Bible keep company with you in the midst of the storms. Jez Carr divides his time between leading the Hutchmoot UK team and pastoring a small Anglican church in Seer Green (a village in Buckinghamshire, UK). He has held a variety of roles in music (mainly jazz) and mission, and has graduate degrees in theology from Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the University of Oxford. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Torsten Dederichs  on Unsplash

by Kate Gaston Note: On Thursday, March 20, Kate is hosting a lunch discussion titled Questions as Creativity: Faith, Loneliness, and the Hospitality of Conversation  via Zoom, exclusively for Rabbit Room members. Support our work and join this event. You can also connect with Kate and the Rabbit Room at the upcoming Inkwell Evening in Nashville at Belmont University for a night of arts and ideas on Friday, March 21. It’s Sunday morning. You slip through the double doors of the sanctuary just as they are closing, bulletin in hand. You beeline to your spot. The second-to-last row, three seats in. No one notices your arrival except the guy sitting on the opposite end of your row. The two of you share a nod, acknowledging your back-of-the-sanctuary-solidarity. You like it this way. The not-being-noticed. It’s the reason you arrive late, skirting around the crowd gathered for the pre-worship coffee hour, dodging the handshakes, and the wide, bright-eyed smiles of the church ladies. You know from experience that you won’t escape the morning unscathed. The handshakes and smiles are inevitable. You know it’s coming: the passing of the peace. As the service lurches forward and the moment approaches, you decide today is the day for a conveniently timed dash to the restroom. By trial and error, you’ve found if you time it right you can avoid the whole ordeal, returning to your seat for the doxology, the conclusion of the whole awkward business. You prepare to stand and make your getaway. But then, in the split second before you rise from your seat, the guy sitting on the opposite end of the row, the one with whom you’d shared the comradely head nod, stands and slips toward the exit. You can’t believe it. He stole your move. Flummoxed, you remain seated. You can’t very well stand up and follow him out now. It would look too obvious. The feelings of camaraderie melt away as you realize, with a deep sense of foreboding, that you’re about to pass that peace whether you want to or not. The moment arrives, and the congregation stands as one. You notice, not for the first time, that for some members of the congregation, the invitation to pass the peace is received with the alacrity of a starting pistol. Within seconds, these people are on the move, shaking hands, giving hugs, slapping backs. There’s a certain gleam in their eye as they make the circuit of the sanctuary, peace-passing like it’s an Olympic sport. You know, rationally, that this span of time lasts less than five minutes. You know, too, that all that’s required of you is to stand, shake a few hands, and act normal, to blend in by mimicking the social behaviors of the other humans. So with resignation, that’s precisely what you do. You stand and greet the couple in front of you. You shake their hands. You ask how they’re doing. They’re fine, they say. And you? Oh, you’re fine, yes, just fine, thanks. Silence descends. The three of you form an awkward hypotenuse. The ol’ Sunday morning standoff. Thankfully, at that precise moment, one of the predatorial glad-handers interrupts, and the mantle of conversation passes effortlessly to his shoulders. Entirely unprovoked, he tells you about the shrimp scampi he ate for dinner last night, and before you can formulate any sort of quippy pasta rejoinder, he gives you a hearty slap on the shoulder and glides toward the next row of church-goers. “Peace of Christ,” you murmur, a moment too late. I’ll confess: the passing of the peace has always seemed a bit of a mystery, plunked down in the middle of the service for no discernible reason except to dissect, with surgeon-like precision, the introverts from the extroverts. It’s a moment when that particular division of temperaments seems a particularly large one. It is, historically, a divide full of barbed misunderstandings, a chasm into which tumbles our compassion, our empathy, and our embrace of each person’s Imago Dei. Into this chasm, too, topples our wide-eyed wonder at the breadth and depth of God’s creativity. He’s made us each in his image, and each of us possess such mind-bogglingly different callings, strengths, and temperaments. If we accept the premise that each of us reflects some aspect of God’s creative glory, it follows we should embrace these varied reflections rather than giving them the stiff arm. We should welcome the uniqueness we each bring to the table rather than eying each other with mistrust and dismissal. Though Sunday morning is prime time for evangelical posturing, the assumptions we make about good Christians—how they look, how they sound, how they act—follow us, specter-like, through the week. These assumptions lurk behind our preconceived ideas about how we should be offering hospitality. They skulk around our psyches, kicking up guilt and shame, convincing us we can never offer hospitality like we think we should. These assumptions hamstring our ability to love people from the strength of our own giftings. We often believe—even if it’s a subconscious assumption—that there is only one right way to love people. And that one right way to love people requires an awful lot of gregarious small talk. We assume, somewhere deep down in our social substratum, in order to love people well we must be extroverts. Or at least pretend to be extroverts. As Susan Cain writes in her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,  we all suffer from a biased belief that sociability is next to godliness. It’s time to broaden the boundaries we’ve so meticulously built, to pull up the stakes we’ve planted. We must exercise a broader imagination toward how, exactly, the Body of Christ works. We are his hands and feet, yes, but we must also accept we are his kneecaps, liver, elbows, and toenails. There are many pieces that make up the whole body, pieces we’d desperately miss if we found them missing. God made parasitic worms, puppies, and slime mold; he made aardvarks and kangaroos. He made extroverts and introverts. Why, exactly, did he make these things? Because it pleased him to do so. We take our kids to zoos and aquariums to gape at the creatures in all their bewildering uniqueness. The world would be a changed place if we applied the same sense of wonder toward the specimen sitting next to us in church. That human is a whole mixed bag of mysteries, of thought and feeling, of fear and wisdom. As much as I like to pretend otherwise, I am a finite creature. There are strengths I don’t possess. There are gifts I can’t give because I don’t have them. But hallelujah and thanks be to God, those glorious refractions of glory go humming out into the world with your gifts, your words, your thoughts, your hands. This admission that I’m limited is a hard pill to swallow. It’s hard to swallow because I believe I’m a unique, beautiful flower. This isn’t wrong. I am  a unique, beautiful flower. The trick is remembering I’m only one of roughly 8 billion unique, beautiful flowers. I, like most humans, tend to take my specialness a hop, skip, and a jump too far. We are inclined toward navel-gazing, and we become quite pleased with ourselves in the process. We are naturally predisposed to believe the way we see the world is the right way—perhaps the only way—to see the world. The dynamic between introverts and extroverts is one of the many places this tension arises. We allow the differences between us to represent moral failings rather than simply being what they are: differences. Here’s a hard truth, applicable to all of us: Whether we’re an introvert or extrovert, we will always experience tension extending ourselves beyond our comfort zones for our neighbor’s sake. But extend ourselves we must. Adam McHugh, in his book Introverts in the Church, wrote, “Jesus said go make disciples. He didn’t tell us how to do it. He just said to do it. Do it however it works best for you, however you’re gifted to do it.” At the heart of the matter is this simple fact: No one gets a pass on making disciples. You don’t have a choice about whether or not you are a “people person.” By your very nature as a follower of Christ, you are a people person. Again, McHugh writes, “We who follow a crucified Messiah know that love will sometimes compel us to willingly choose things that make us uncomfortable, to surrender our rights for the blessing of others.” Love must often be sacrificial in nature. It will require something of us. That cost will be different for you than it will be for me. When it comes to obeying the command to go make disciples, your personality preferences don’t matter. They matter tremendously, however, in the specifics of how  you obey this command. Remember that we all, whether we like it or not, hold a bias toward how we think a good Christian acts. Take a moment to observe your own biases. Push against them, and test them for weaknesses. In your heart of hearts, you probably don’t believe Jesus loves outgoing people more than others. But do you still find yourself acting like he does? Or perhaps your bias swings in the opposite direction. Do you assume someone is spiritually shallow because they talk more than you? Do you subconsciously believe that true holiness must always be hushed and internal? Or is it possible that an anecdote about shrimp scampi can be precisely what a stranger needs to feel he has a place among the people of God? If you see someone sitting alone, do you assume they are standoffish? Selfish? Rude? If a person is not involved in outwardly industrious forms of hospitality, do you assume that person is failing in their Christian duties to love their neighbor? Or do we make space for the possibility that the gift they bring to the Body of Christ might be, say, intercessory prayer and that their silence is a sacred one? When we live with people in community, week after week, year after year, but don’t make time to know them, we begin to make assumptions. Believing these assumptions are true, we assign these people their boxes. And once we place someone in their box, it takes intentional work and curiosity on our part to release them. One of our primary means of resistance toward assumption-building is the same tool we use to spring people from the boxes we put them in. We ask questions. Specifically, questions to which we don’t already know the answers. Curiosity is difficult to maintain in the context of community. But we must trust that the person we’re tempted to write off as a “lesser Christian” is experiencing communion with the Holy Spirit just like we are. Communion that is no less real simply because we aren’t privy to it. Allow for the possibility that God is working in ways beyond your comprehension, and beyond what’s true to your experience. Accept the reality that your experience—your singular data point of human experience—doesn’t prove the rule across the vast expanse of mankind’s existence. Let’s return to the concept of sacrificial love. Love will require something different from an introvert than it will require from an extrovert. For some of us, words come quickly and easily. It doesn’t necessarily follow, however, that those words are always the right words. It might behoove us to stop talking. To consider that maybe, just maybe, we should choose silence as our act of hospitality toward the person who might not be willing to speak over us. Further—and this stings, doesn’t it?—we must be willing to consider that the other person might have a more nuanced viewpoint than we do. For those who tend to verbally process their thoughts and emotions, pay attention to the level of energy you’re bringing to the conversation. The bounding, Labrador-like enthusiasm of unbridled extroversion can overpower a social situation. Notice the faces of the people you’re talking to. Are their eyes widening and pupils dilating in mild panic at your frenetic verbalization? If so, that’s your cue to pipe down. When in conversation with someone quieter than you, you will feel the conversational void yawning open, screaming to be filled. But when you feel the compulsion to fill the void with words, resist. Here’s a fun experiment. In your next conversation with a quiet friend, allow space. Literally, count to ten before you say anything. See what happens. Maybe it’ll be awkward. Okay, it will definitely be awkward. But you might be surprised by what happens when you don’t glean all the way to the edges of the conversational barley field, when you leave silence as a margin. Silence can be a powerful means of communicating welcome. It can be restorative. But it requires courage to relinquish our stranglehold on the first word. And the last word. And all the words in between. Exercising silence as a form of hospitality will require, for many of us, a lifelong practice of discernment. In the same way a thoughtless extrovert can siphon all the social energy from a room, an introvert's unwillingness to lean into a relationship sends a palpable message, too. Whether you intend to communicate it or not, refusing to spend a measure of your energy broadcasts the message that the person in front of you isn't worth your investment. Just as it takes courage on behalf of extroverts to intentionally create conversational margin, it will take courage for introverts to step forward and offer the gift of their thoughts. When you, as an introvert, welcome the outsider into your internal landscape, when you trust them with your perception of the world, this is a gift of hospitality. Yours is a topography of nuance, of complexity. It is a place of finely-tuned attention and thoughtfulness which I, as your neighbor, might desperately need. Introverts, recognize there is power in your quiet, focused greeting. You aren’t required to chat with everyone in the building. Your gift is in attending to the person in front of you. Let that be enough. Because it is. Whether we’re inviting someone into our homes or into a conversation, many of us believe that the more people we gather, the more magic happens. For people who are energized by people, squeezing another body into the mix can feel like social steroids. This arms-wide-open approach presupposes that the gift of hospitality is simply in the invitation. Have you ever had the experience of repeatedly inviting a friend to your 90’s-themed dance party—the party you throw every Friday night, complete with costumes and karaoke—only to have them just-as-repeatedly reject your invitation? While it would be easy to write them off as a stodgy troglodyte who doesn’t know how to have fun, consider that your invitation might not be expressing what you think it’s expressing. Walking into a crowded room full of noisy, talkative strangers in costume doesn’t feel welcoming to, oh, half the population of the world. Quite the opposite. It can feel downright unwelcoming. Perhaps you intended for your invitation to be received as love. But forget for a moment what you meant  your invitation to convey. Ponder instead how your friend receives hospitality. You think your open invitation is hospitality, but your friend experiences it as an absence of personal welcome. Granted, you can’t tailor every social event to every person in your life. Nor should you. Keep having those 90’s dance parties. But take note of the friend who sends her regrets week after week. Karaoke won’t do, but an invitation to coffee or a walk at the park might be just the ticket. If you’re questioning how to use your gifts and temperament effectively, consider ways you’ve struggled to be engaged in community in the past. These struggles don’t have to be for naught. When we feel unseen or misunderstood, when we feel the ache of loneliness, the struggle represents a net gain in experiential knowledge. We could simply chalk this up to “you live, you learn.” But it’s more than that. You learned something about yourself, yes, but you’ve also been shown something about the culture you’re inhabiting. The lack of engagement you suffered signifies a dropped stitch in the social fabric, a gap between what is  and what could be . When you notice the absence of that thing, whatever shape it takes, you have a choice. You can accept the absence as a part of life and move on. That’s not the wrong choice, necessarily. You’ll encounter many such gaps in your life. The alternative is, of course, to do something. Frederick Buechner’s iconic quote is right on the money: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” In the past, I’m guilty of reading these words with an eye peeled for my calling—that unicorn of a thing. What is it? Will I know it when I see it? What if I miss it? What I overlooked in my fervor to discover my calling is the reality that my deep gladness exists before the calling. My deep gladness is already part of me, just as it is for you. It abides within us, singing through our bones and marrow. We can’t miss it because it’s humming through all those eccentricities that make us who we are. What is that thing that brings you deep gladness? Is it your conversation, your ability to ask questions, your ability to see the big picture, your ability to use intuition, your ability to empathize, your ability to problem solve, your ability to organize data, your ability to spelunk into the deep emotions without getting lost in them, or your ability to think analytically? These are gifts, first and foremost, to you. The way the neurons fire in your brain is not a mistake. The way you engage the world is not a character flaw. Your temperament is not a social failing you must endeavor to overcome in order to assimilate into a vanilla-pudding world. Be spicy carrot cake. We need spicy carrot cake. What might this look like for you, exactly? I have no idea. The best I can offer is this: pay attention. Notice your energy rising or falling. Notice that thing you’re longing for. Notice the ideas pinging around your heart and mind. Pay attention to your own unmet needs, and then, if rectifying that rift in the social fabric is worth it to you, get to work. Are you a bullet-point person? This one’s for you: Identify a need. Is the need strong enough to warrant an expenditure of social energy? If yes, proceed to question 3. If not, carry on with life as usual. If the need is strong enough to warrant an expenditure of social energy, do you have social energy to spare for it? If yes, proceed to question 4. If not, ask yourself if social energy is being wasted in other areas of life. If social energy is being wasted elsewhere, just stop it. If the need is strong enough to warrant an expenditure of social energy and you have the social energy to spare for it, make a move: Invite the friend to your aquatic Zumba class on Tuesday afternoon. Play the piano at the nursing home for an hour this week. Initiate the coffee date. Join the prayer ministry at church. If there’s not one yet, create one. Buy the beautiful stationery and write the letter. Pick the book for the first Whiskey and Dead Philosophers discussion night. Write the haiku for the poetry open mic. Realize you are terrible at haikus and write something else. Schedule the D&D campaign. Polish your broadsword. Let your passion be a catalyst for creating that thing that currently doesn’t exist. Utilizing your creative energy to reweave the fabric of our communities? This is the closest we mortals will ever get to creating ex nihilo . A word on social energy, if I may. Repairing a rift in the fabric of society is not easy work. Remember, the place of calling is where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. And hunger represents an emptiness, an urge to consume. There will be a net loss as calling requires something of us. But be of good cheer; the energy will be there for the taking when you need it. Perhaps not always when you want it. But certainly when you need it. People are time-consuming, irrational, emotional messes. You will occasionally feel tapped out by their needs. Again, you’ll be required to pay attention. Notice your energy dwindling. Recognize and acknowledge your finite, limited, creatureliness. Honor your need for solitude. It’s good and right, sometimes, to step away. Preferably before you feel resentment tapping on your shoulder. Determining your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger will be a lifelong dance. Sometimes it’ll jive along beautifully. Sometimes it’ll be an awkward, left-footed affair. It is worth it, though, to be the hands and feet of Christ. Let people be the thing on which you’re willing to spend energy. Then go home and take a nap. I’m embarrassed to admit how many years I’ve been passing the peace without knowing what it’s all about. Theologians and seminarians alike have made it their life’s work to parse each wrinkle of the liturgical service. I’m not about to swerve into their lane, but I am going to share the thing which catalyzed, for me, that lightbulb moment. Passing the peace is not a chance to fill your coffee cup or have a quick catch-up with your friends. The key to understanding it is in paying attention to what comes just before it: the assurance of grace. Sunday after Sunday, an assurance of God’s grace is pronounced over a roomful of lucky sinners. The message is, on its surface, simple. It’s this: In Christ, we have peace. When we receive that peace—extrovert and introvert alike—we then, mysteriously, bizarrely, embody that peace. As we shake our neighbors’s hands, we speak that peace into their hearts. As a congregation, we speak good tidings of great joy; we speak a cavorting chaos of peace. And then, just as quickly as we diverged, our cacophony is gathered back into one unified voice as we sing the doxology. Whether we shake all the hands and slap all the backs, or whether we slip quietly out the double doors, we remain this embodiment of peace for our neighbors. As Sunday rolls into Monday, each of us, with our wildly differing gifts and temperaments, welcomes the stranger. We offer hospitality, and in doing so continue to offer the ongoing, mysterious embodiment of Christ’s peace. It is, perhaps, the only means of peace some of our neighbors will ever know. More often than we’d likely care to know, we are God’s best plan for each other. So smile and shake a hand if that’s your thing. If it’s not your thing, find your thing. And once you do, pass that peace like you were created for it. Because, my friend, you were. For your further reading pleasure: Susan Cain: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking Adam McHugh: Introverts in the Church Frederick Buechner: Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC Find yourself wasting social energy or experiencing bondage of the will? Stop it. Need inspiration for your next campaign? D&D Beyond An Alabama native, Kate Gaston was homeschooled before it was even remotely considered normal. She completed her undergraduate degree at Bryan College and went on to graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For eight years, Kate worked as a PA in a trauma and burn ICU before ping-ponging across the nation for her husband’s medical training. She and her family are currently putting down roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kate enjoys homeschooling her daughter and tutoring in her local classical homeschool community. She also finds deep satisfaction in long, meandering conversations at coffee shops, oil painting, writing, and gazing pensively into the middle distance. You can read more of her work at her Substack: That Middle Distance . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Karl Fredrickson  on Unsplash

by Houston Coley Shockingly enough, the word on everyone’s lips throughout this awards season has been a devoutly religious one: “Conclave.” I would’ve never expected a movie about the election of a new pope to be the one that grabbed the attention of both audiences and awards voters this year, but whenever the broader culture engages a movie that touches on subjects of faith, I’ll always find myself leaning in. I knew that I would probably enjoy Conclave  as soon as I heard the line in the trailer about the importance of mystery in the experience of faith. As a sincerely religious person, I’m often disappointed and appalled by the didacticism and underwhelming moralizing of so many depictions of faith in cinema. It’s so rare to find a film about spirituality that asks honest questions rather than providing formulated answers and paints religious characters who feel real and flawed and complicated just like anybody else. So I liked the speech in the trailer. Simply agreeing with what a film is saying, however, is not the same as genuinely communing with it as a work of art. I didn’t know how much I would actually resonate with the movie until I finally saw it. By my count, it’s been a fairly fruitful year for authentic depictions of faith being represented in film. On my birthday back in May, I got to see Ethan Hawke in-person premiering his film Wildcat  about the life of Flannery O’Connor—and I felt deeply seen by the way that it embraced the offbeat Southern Gothic strangeness of Flannery’s stories and the honesty of her struggle with reconciling her identity as both an artist and a faithful Catholic. Nobody saw it, but The Book of Clarence  was actually pretty provocative and sincere in its depiction of Christ through the eyes of a swindler. And even Furiosa  felt like a quasi-Biblical epic about the firstfruits of a righteous kingdom. By the same token, I wasn’t certain exactly how much Conclave  would touch on subjects of faith with any degree of real contemplation; despite the compelling trailer, the film could’ve easily turned out to be a typical Agatha Christie whodunit with an incidental backdrop of The Vatican. Many of the reviews I’ve read have painted the movie as a sort of “Real Housewives of The Papacy” melodrama caper about priests gossiping behind closed doors. Without a doubt, the film has its share of subtle tongue-in-cheek humor—a sardonic curtsy and an evil vape pen steal the show. Even so, I’m increasingly convinced that the reason people are playing up this camp/comedy interpretation is because they don’t quite know how to engage with the film’s actual setting and subject matter in a sincere way. Excitingly, the setting and subject are not incidental. Conclave  is not a by-the-numbers murder mystery with faith sprinkled in to spice things up, nor is it just a campy “priests gossiping” melodrama or an entirely politically motivated allegory for the 2024 election; it is a movie whose text is quite deliberately interested in exploring the relationship between God’s will, man’s agency, and the church’s institutional identity. From the opening minutes, it is clear that the film has no interest in obsessing over the mere existence or nonexistence of God. Other movies have explored this well, but this one takes the piety of its protagonist as a given part of the world. Near the start, Stanley Tucci’s Cardinal Bellini says the late Holy Father never had any doubts about God. Instead, Bellini remarks, “what he had lost faith in was the Church.” This is what Conclave  is truly about. Conclave asks prescient questions about the purpose of the Church in the world—and about how its identity has shifted over 2,000 years. Robert Harris, the author of the original novel, said in an interview: “My preparation began by reading the Gospels, which are revolutionary. And the contrast between that and this great edifice of ritual and pomp and power and wealth of the Church is striking.”   Harris’s narrative takes seriously the reality of the supernatural but interrogates how humans often close ourselves off to that reality in the institutions we construct. One of the central conceits of this story is the idea of “sequestering.” In a captivating montage near the start of the film, cardinals arrive from all over the world with the singular intention of shutting themselves away from the outside. The windows are covered with mechanical (almost militaristic) shutters, devices that might communicate with outsiders are confiscated, large swathes of police stand guard outside, and everyone speaks in hushed voices for fear of others listening in. I was not raised Catholic, but growing up in the Bible Belt, this divide between the “outside” and the “inside”—or “secular” and “sacred”—felt palpably familiar. It’s part of a broader notion that true spirituality is primarily found in the absence of “the world,” which is known to be sinful and corrupt. But as Conclave shows us, even within these sacred and sequestered walls, sin and corruption persist. Perhaps they are even more  present when the egos of men are forced into close quarters, and the neighbors they are meant to love become an abstract point of rhetorical debate. Indeed, witnessing the sheer sterility of the Casa Santa Marta  and the people locked inside, it may seem like God is absent from the space within these walls. All natural light—the first good thing God ever created—has been locked out. The colors green and blue—those two colors that God so favored when he crafted the earth among the heavens—are nowhere to be found. Even birds are locked in cages, chirping away aimlessly without attention given. Like the birds, music has been confined as well—to the Sunday Mass only. The church has attempted to create a box where it can encounter God and reach an important decision without the influence of anything outside its walls, but in doing so, it has effectively shut out God himself. It’s always perplexing to me that anyone would think God should be encountered without engaging the people and the beauty of the world he created. The Bible itself is a book that is far from sterile or sequestered, rich with the five senses of earthy human experience. Bread and wine, birds and fish, farmers and shepherds, weddings and births, blood and water, trees and flowers—all play key roles in the metaphors Christ uses to describe the kingdom of God. If anything, the ministry of Jesus is a picture of a scruffy prophet taking the word of God from within the walls of a religious institution out into the mountains, seashores, and countryside for the poor and unclean. The writer Wendell Berry said, “I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is . . . a book open to the sky. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural.”   If I was attempting to discern the will of God, I think it would involve deliberately engaging with the world he spoke into being: taking long silent hikes with my friends, observing the lilies and sparrows, making music and art, reading both scripture and literature, speaking with strangers young and old, and journeying to a decision not shielded from the world but shaped by it. This kind of embodied meditation is not completely foreign even to the Catholic Church; many have found it on the Camino De Santiago , the ancient pilgrimage stretching across Europe and ending in Spain. The Bible has a rich and compelling throughline of people attempting to fit the divine into a manageable box, both physical and spiritual. The narrative is rife with men demanding systems and sacrifices, temples and tyrants, strife and scarcity—and God warning them against it every time. Despite all this, he never abandons them. He continues to work within the systems they erect, however broken and unjust, to bring about gradual justice and redemption. In the same way, despite all the dehumanizing darkness and claustrophobia of the conclave, one thing is still clear: God is not wholly absent. Regardless of man’s distancing from God’s world and voice, he is working regardless to turn the tables, make small the mighty, and lift up the humble. The presence of God is glimpsed in a myriad of ways throughout the film: the sincere and purehearted prayer Cardinal Benitez offers before dinner, inviting his colleagues to remember “the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, and the sisters who prepared this food for us”; the Holy Father’s pet turtles, impossible to fully domesticate or keep in their neat and tidy enclosures; Cardinal Lawrence’s impassioned homily about faith and mystery, which seems to suddenly flow from his lips in a moment of divine clarity and synthesis; the genuine apology and forgiveness between Lawrence and Bellini after their ambitions get the better of them; and of course, the eyes and ears of Sister Agnes, watchful and perceptive of every ego and injustice. Sister Agnes, it may be noted, is the only character with plants (and birds) in her personal office. When she shares the truth about Cardinal Tremblay’s betrayal, we even hear the sound of a raven cawing outside as she leaves the frame. Of course, there’s one moment when the presence of God feels all but undeniable. It’s the moment where the ceiling itself falls in, filling the air with the two earliest elements of creation: dust and light. The aftermath of this divine intervention feels undeniably powerful; some, like Tedesco, argue for an even more militaristic defense against the “outside.” Others, like Benitez, see the moment as one to ponder the church’s relationship to the world. When the cardinals gather to vote one last time, the windows above the room remain blown open by the blast. As they sit in a contemplative daze, something changes. The air begins to move and stir, reaching deep into their hearts. Rarely have I witnessed such a perfect cinematic distillation of the ancient understanding of the Holy Spirit as “breath” or “wind.” And not just wind, but song.  The birds, free from their cages just like the nuns soon to return to the world, begin to sing again through the open windows. The cardinals cast their vote accordingly, with renewed relationship to the space beyond the walls. In an act of providence, a kind and humble man is elected—a man who, much like the trinity itself, exists outside the easy boxes we might try to fit him inside. And then the windows and doors finally open, letting the light stream in, and sending God’s people back out into his wide world once more. Houston Coley is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and self-described “theme park theologian” currently living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is the artistic director of a nonprofit called Art Within. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Chad Greiter  on Unsplash

by Philip Yancey   A Lenten Reading Group ​We are re-releasing the recordings of a special Lenten conversation. Last year, the Rabbit Room hosted a five-week Lenten reading group. The group discussed Lenten themes, including suffering, illness, and mortality through the lens of Philip Yancey’s Undone: A Modern Rendering of John Donne’s Devotions . Special guests included Jonathan Rogers, Pete Peterson, and Doug McKelvey. Download the Companion Guide Download the pdf companion guide, which includes excerpts from the book, discussion questions, and an appendix with additional reading suggestions. Week 1—Preface to Chapter 6 Reading: Preface - Chapter 6 Resources: Read the complete text of John Donne's original Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions . Zoom Discussion: Watch the conversation on Zoom Week 2—Chapters 7-12 Reading: Chapters 7-12 Resources: Read a brief account of John Donne's life and historical context. Zoom Discussion: Watch the conversation on Zoom Week 3: Chapters 13-18 Reading: Chapters 13-18 Resources: Watch the film of Rabbit Room Theatre's 2023 production of The Hiding Place . (To watch, select “Rent for $5.99” at checkout and enter the promo code UNDONE ) Host your own watch party using the PDF film discussion guide. Zoom Discussion: Watch the conversation on Zoom Week 4: Chapters 19-25 Reading: Chapters 19-25 Resources: Liturgies based on Undone  from Every Moment Holy vol. 3 Free download: “For Relapse” Free download: “For the Tolling of the Passing Bell” Free download: “On a Day of Recovery from Sickness” Video of the Liturgy “A Prayer of Intercession Against the Kingdom of Death”  (from Every Moment Holy vol. 2  read by Joshua Luke Smith.) Zoom Discussion: Watch the conversation on Zoom Week 5 Reading: Chapters 26-30 Resources: Listen to interviews with Philip on: The Habit podcast. The Wade Center podcast. The Trinity Forum The Living Church podcast No Small Endeavor Read Philip’s blog on Undone . Zoom Discussion: Watch the conversation on Zoom For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

by Jonny Jimison The stories I create are inspired by the art that I consume, and I consume what I like. So you’d think that a swords-and-dragons story like The Dragon Lord Saga  was built on the back of some pretty heavy fantasy. For better or worse, that’s only partly true. In all the realms of elves, dwarves, and men, it is often said that modern fantasy stories are, on some level, Lord of the Rings fan-fiction. Tolkien’s shadow looms large over books, films, games, and the Renaissance fairs where I nom turkey legs every summer. Even if you received it second- or third-hand, you probably got a heaping helping of Hobbit with your favorite fantasy. It’s probably not fair to say that all  fantasy stories are a Tolkien tribute … but mine certainly was. The story of the Dragon Lord came to life in my mind as a prose novel, and a pretty derivative one at that—Tolkien’s writings were the inspiration, and not just The Hobbit  and The Lord of the Rings . There was an especially heavy Silmarillion influence, florid language and all. Yes, there were notebooks full of gibberish as I tried to invent my own language. It took a few years to loosen up and let the story become its own thing, but it eventually evolved into an all-ages graphic novel series. A funny thing happened along the way, though. What started as a slavish Tolkien tribute took on a flavor of its own. For those unfamiliar with the story (and a hearty welcome to you), The Dragon Lord Saga  is an adventure story of two brothers—Martin, a knight for the King’s Guard, and Marco, a young stableboy. Martin’s enthusiasm and wanderlust leads him to charge headlong into adventure, but he turns out to be wildly out of his depth. Marco desperately wants to stay home where everything is safe, but despite himself, he ends up on his own hero’s journey. It’s easy to get their names mixed up—they’re used to that. Two volumes of the series have been published by Rabbit Room Press— Martin and Marco  and  The River Fox — with a third volume now available for preorder ! I’m not gonna mince words, friends—volume three is really good. You’re going to want to preorder this one. Anyway. An obvious transformation has occurred: My fantasy novel is a comic book now, and visual story has replaced verbal prose. But that’s just the beginning. As I told the story, little by little, the tale began to find itself, and things began to change. My love for Tolkien is still present in the pages, but I found other favorites flavoring the story as well. Elements of The Wizard of Oz  began popping up as my characters went on far-flung journeys as unlikely as Dorothy’s. The Legend of Zelda  series made itself known in many ways, none more blatant than Marco’s green tunic. And say what you will about Star Wars  as a franchise, but the original 1977 film had a chemistry between its main characters that’s always on my mind when writing character interactions. But let’s take one specific example in a little more detail. Because me, I like cartoons. It’s probably inevitable that Looney Tunes  was an influence on The Dragon Lord Saga . I’ve absorbed so much classic cartoon comedy that it was bound to take my comic book series in a cartoony, slapstick direction. But I never  expected my Silmarillion-fueled fantasy epic to include so much Daffy Duck. For a brief period in the 1950s, Daffy starred in some of my favorite cartoons of all time, all directed by Chuck Jones. In cartoons like “Drip-Along Daffy,” “Robin Hood Daffy,” and “Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century,” Daffy is paired with Porky Pig in a series of genre parodies. Daffy, cast as the epic hero of these scenarios, launches into his role with gusto—only to have his overeager impulses backfire again and again. Porky, meanwhile, plays the simple-minded sidekick (and Greek chorus to Daffy’s antics), whose actions end up saving the day in the end. And then there’s “Duck Amuck.” In this masterpiece of cartoon chaos, Daffy just wants to star in his own cartoon … but an unseen animator foils him at every turn, seemingly just to troll him. In a brilliant deconstruction of the cartoon medium, the animator’s paintbrush erases and redraws the image, the music and sound effects malfunction, and the film frame goes haywire. Over the course of seven minutes, Daffy exhibits confusion, frustration, bargaining, bitter resolve, and finally, a frantic, desperate plea to know who the sadistic animator is that has it out for him. Daffy never discovers the animator’s identity, but we do—it’s a mischievous rabbit in a last-moment cameo. Back to The Dragon Lord Saga . Remember Martin, the knight with a thirst for adventure? I never set out to make Martin a Daffy-Duck-alike, but the Chuck Jones influences just fit him like a cartoon glove. I love how enthusiastic and full-hearted Martin is … but his overeager impulses to launch into heroic adventure only get him in over his head. That’s so Daffy. He even has his own Porky Pig—Martin’s best friend Lingo is the simple-minded sidekick who balances Martin’s fervor with laid-back common sense. The thing is, I never tried to write a Daffy Duck story. I tried to write Tolkien—Daffy just elbowed his way in, by way of all those cartoon viewings that imprinted Daffy into my brain. I also never intended to steer The Dragon Lord Saga  in a Wizard of Oz or Legend of Zelda or Star Wars direction … they just showed up, because my imagination works with what I fueled my imagination with. Seems like a foregone conclusion, but it took me by surprise. It all happened so fast! I reckon this is the way of all storytelling. Why is most modern fiction transparently Tolkienesque? It’s because Tolkien wrote stories that mattered to us, so we read them again and again. They fueled our imaginations and became part of us. The same thing happened to Tolkien—his love for classic mythology fueled his imagination so much that the stories he created uncannily recall Norse tales of magic rings and reforged swords. Influences can be deliberate, but they can also take you by surprise. The deliberate ones are aspirational. The ones that take me by surprise? Those are just truthfully sharing who I am. Watching my unintentional inspirations color and shape The Dragon Lord Saga  is reshaping the way I think about imagination in general: Everything I observe and explore and consume fuels the part of me that creates something new. The world looks different with that lens. Books and paintings and meals and movies aren’t just a way to pass the time—they’re fuel for who I am and what I have to say. Jonny Jimison is a freelance cartoonist and illustrator from North Florida with over a decade of experience in visual storytelling via comics, book illustration, and design. He is inspired by the playful humor of classic comics and the wide-eyed exploration of classic adventure stories. In addition to his all-ages graphic novel series The Dragon Lord Saga , he is the creator of the webcomic Rabbit Trails  for The Rabbit Room, as well as his own webcomics Getting Ethan and Lili and Leon. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Andres Perez  on Unsplash

by Rachel Donahue A quick web search of the word “generative” brings a host of returns about artificial intelligence, as though all that were required to generate in this day and age were a set of data and a prompt, and voila! a machine spits out your result like a dot matrix printer. [Cue sound.] What a sad diminishment of a green and lively word. Generative  comes from the Latin generare (“to beget”) and more fully means “having the power or function of generating, originating, producing, or reproducing.” Think of the multiplication of rabbits: the word generations  comes from the same root. Try to forget for a minute any paltry associations with AI, and consider the word generative  in the context of human flourishing and creativity. Have you ever had a big, exciting, scary, delightful idea? An idea bigger than you are? One that sparked more   ideas in both you and other people? Generative ideas  are exactly these: the ones that grow, beget, and multiply. Like rabbits; like rhizomes under the earth; like a current of electricity lighting up a house, a street, a whole neighborhood. What do you do with such an idea? If you’re like me, you daydream and worry and fret about it. You tell God it’s too big, that someone else should do it (knowing full well how it went for Moses when he said this). You daydream some more, and pray, and pluck up the courage to finally tell someone else about it. And you keep daydreaming and telling people until you see that spark—when someone else starts daydreaming about it with you. Isn’t it a wonderful feeling to have someone enter into an idea with you? To imagine together the possibilities of what this idea might become? It makes you feel sane and seen. It gives you hope that maybe one day, this idea that’s been living in your head just might make it out into the world somehow. And it gives you the courage to take a step toward making that idea a reality. But letting an idea out into the world can be a scary prospect. The thing can take on a life of its own and quickly grow beyond your capacity and your control. Humans have limitations, and big ideas can’t come to life through a single person. It would take a whole team of people… And here, right here, is where you must take a huge step of faith to set things in motion that cannot be reversed. It’s the point of no return. Makoto Fujimura, in this interview with the Trinity Forum , says that generative ideas are born out of love, reflecting the generative creativity of God, who is Love . This is the language of begetting: born out of love. Generative ideas are the overflow of love. Just as fathers and mothers beget children, poets beget poems; gardeners beget gardens; artists beget art. Through a labor born out of love, these poems and gardens and pieces of art take on a life of their own. Their existence in the world spreads love and vision, and these in turn beget new ideas in the people who experience them. Can artists or gardeners or poets boast in a successfully generative idea or piece of work? Not any more than parents can boast in the success of a child—which is to say (if they are being honest) that they had a hand in it, but that much of the process is simply the grace of God. In both parenting and good art-making, you have to die to yourself over and over in the process—so much death and sacrifice!—but the love of Christ compels us. Love first set the example, and love draws us onward. A generative idea, then, is not something to be produced or spit out of a cold, calculating machine—it’s something to be stewarded, cultivated, tended, nurtured. A generative idea is a gift; a generative idea is a responsibility. And to properly steward such an idea, we require community. Just as in parenting I need the body of Christ speaking into my children’s lives to help love them and guide them as they grow, as a poet (or artist or gardener), I need the voices of others speaking into my work, helping me to love it well and make it the best it can be. Generative work springs from humility and vulnerability and connection. It grows from the soil of friendship, conversation, and shared loves. I’d like to take a moment to share my own personal adventure with a generative idea, which just happens to be the next big project for Bandersnatch Books . A few years ago, inspired by the poetry tea during Hutchmoot Homebound, my children and I began participating in a weekly poetry tea time with other families over Zoom. Our children would read poems to each other from beloved names like Robert Louis Stevenson and Shel Silverstein, spanning from the beautiful to the ridiculous. I loved watching these children delight in rhymes, puns, and other wordplay. In that same season, I was actively participating in a couple online groups of poets (namely The Habit  and The Poetry Pub ), where I was regularly hearing and seeing delightful poems being workshopped by talented writers. I loved getting to see other poets’ strengths in an internal rhyme or the turn of a line and the way they celebrated one another’s work. It was the marriage of these two loves that birthed a new idea: what if I could introduce these two wonderful groups of people to each other? Wouldn’t that be fun? We happened to own a publishing company, so I thought—what if we made a new, fully illustrated anthology of poetry for children written by my many talented poet friends? It was both a delightful and terrifying prospect. Thankfully, my colleagues at Bandersnatch Books  were immediately on board with the idea. But the question remained: how on earth to begin executing a project of such magnitude? I asked friends in the publishing world for advice and began taking notes. Then at the Square Halo conference  in 2023, I shared my dream with Emily J. Person  and Théa Rosenburg  over breakfast, and that opened the door. Emily had just received her B.F.A. in illustration, and Théa was a fellow writer and a lover of books. Their combined enthusiasm for my idea breathed life into it. I began to hope that it just might come to pass. For more than a year, Emily and I would check in periodically to daydream about what this project could be. It grew a name— I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry —and a structure: six broad categories of poems, including Flora & Fauna, Dreams & Whimsy, Unexplorable Depths, Cautionary Tales, Vittles, and Humans. When I told my poet friends about the idea, they got excited, too. They started playing with words and inviting other poet friends to play with them. I’m still astonished at the way one little idea sparked such contagious joy and creativity. If I ever feared that we might not have enough poems to fill a book, I was a fool. Turns out, these poets love wordplay and childlikeness as much as I do. They each brought the powers of the adult into the playfulness of the child and crafted wonderful, delightful, beautiful things. Sixty-something poets submitted more than 230 poems  for consideration. You should have seen the piles of words as I began to sort them all! After many, many hours of work, an actual book has taken shape, and I’m astonished again at how wonderfully the pieces are fitting together. This project is going to be so much bigger than I had originally imagined. The book will contain 170 poems by 62 poets, with every spread fully illustrated with Emily’s beautiful, whimsical, meticulous work. A love of children inspired the producers of Hutchmoot: Homebound to include a poetry tea time in the offerings. That poetry tea time furthered a love of poetry in our children. Our children’s delight and the good work of fellow poets inspired the idea for this anthology, and the idea for this project sparked play and joy and more new poems, which will in turn spark joy and delight in more children. The generous, generative, creative overflow keeps spreading—all born out of love! As with any generative work, it’ll take a community to make this project happen. We’re Kickstarting   I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry so we can make it big and beautiful and chock full of colorful illustrations. If we reach the stretch goals, we’ll get to add features that improve the book for everyone, like a ribbon, printed endpapers, and foil and emboss on the cover. This book is going to be something special, entirely made by humans, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it. The idea for this project hasn’t ceased to be exciting, delightful, and scary to me, but the farther we get into the making of it, the more I’m learning to lean back and trust the Love that has generated such creativity. People are making good, true, and beautiful things to the glory of the One who made them. Together, we get to spread that love to a new generation with a prayer that it will spark something in them, too. Rachel S. Donahue holds a B.A. in English and Bible from Welch College and enjoys travel, housewifery, and homeschooling while fulfilling her role as Chief Creative Officer of Bandersnatch Books . She's published two poetry collections: Beyond Chittering Cottage: Poems of Place, and Real Poems for Real Moms: from a Mother in the Trenches to Another. She's also the editor of the forthcoming anthology I've Got a Bad Case of Poetry, currently live on Kickstarter . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

Editor's Note: Part of  Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music . Taking a different theme each post, the 5&1 series offers five short pieces (or extracts) followed by one more substantial work. by Mark Meynell Fairy tales are a serious business. In fact, they're almost too serious for children, which is probably why children of all ages adore them. click for playlists Tolkien accepted the point made by the great fairy tale anthologist Andrew Lang: "He who would enter into the Kingdom of Faërie should have the heart of a little child." However, he was adamant that while this entailed some aspects of childhood (like innocence or wonder), it should never imply childishness. "It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality." (From On Fairy-stories) With such potential for drama and danger, it is then no surprise that fairy tales have inspired composers. To get us in the mood, here's a little Humperdinck (no, not the British crooner who stole his name). Stop, Hocus pocus (Act III, Hansel & Gretel, 1893) Engelbert Humperdinck (1853-1921, German) Jane Henschel (Witch), Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Charles Mackerras (cond.) Hansel & Gretel is one of better known of the mediaeval stories collected by the German Brothers Grimm. It contains so many of the archetypes we love: abandoned children impoverished by famine, brooding forests, cannibalistic witches, spells, and treasure. So here is a tiny clip from Humperdinck's beloved Christmas opera. Be afraid... Fun fact: the composer Richard Strauss conducted the première in 1893! 1. The Procession of the Fairy Tales (#22 Sleeping Beauty, 1889, Op. 66) Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, (1840-1893, Russian) Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Mark Ermler (cond.) The roots of the Sleeping Beauty stories are probably French, and they clearly chime with the mediaeval tradition of chivalry and courtly love. Various French writers retold the story (like Charles Perrault in the 17th century), as, of course, did the Brothers Grimm. So when Tchaikovsky was commissioned by the St Petersburg Theatres to write another ballet (after his first, Swan Lake , in 1875), he jumped at the chance to set it. These ballets are now two of the most popular in the repertoire (despite Sleeping Beauty lasting nearly 4 hours!) Forces of good and evil compete throughout the story, the evil fairy Carabosse casting a spell on Princess Aurora as a result of not receiving an invitation to her christening. She will prick her finger while spinning thread at 16 and die. The good Lilac Fairy tries to reverse it, but manages only to make her sleep for 100 years. After which a handsome prince will kiss her... By this section, the tensions have more or less resolved and we are heading to the grandeur of the royal wedding of Aurora to her Prince. Here, various fairy tale characters assemble in a grand march to play their part in the celebrations. 2. Le jardin féerique (from Ma mère l'oye) Maurice Ravel (1875-1937, French) Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis (piano duet) A very different mood now. The sharp-eyed will have spotted that this piece has appeared before (in the Calls of the Birds ). However, in my defence, this is the first repeat of the entire 5&1 series, and this is a very different arrangement. Ma Mère L'Oye (Mother Goose) was in fact originally conceived by Ravel as a piano duet; it is scored for 'four hands' meaning two performers at one piano rather than on a piano each. This is the last of five movements, translated 'The Fairy Garden', but unlike the previous ones, its origins are unknown. It opens with slow, measured paces, as if we have just set foot in the garden and begin to explore. It gradually gains colour and detail, although the pace is unwavering. About half way through, the harmonies start shifting and it builds up into the most glorious climax, with glissandos (rapid slides) at the top, as if we're now surrounded by butterfly-like fairies. 3. Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (Op. 28, 1894/5) Richard Strauss (1864-1949, German) Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Riccardo Chailly (cond.) We're back in medieval Germany now and follow the exploits of that classic prankster and all-round cheeky-chappie, Till Eulenspiegel. His surname literally means Owl-mirror, but in certain dialects it has rather more dubious connotations. Put it this way: a fair number of his pranks concern ... er ... excrement. Strauss composed this tone poem (a short orchestral piece intentionally depicting a painting or narrative) only a year after conducting the Humperdinck première, so perhaps that inspired him to mine fairy tales too. In only 15 action-packed and joyful minutes, we accompany Till's adventures as he rides from fields to towns, upsetting market stalls, jeering at pompous clergy and academics, flirting with adoring girls. He is given his own motifs that are repeated at various points, the first one on the horns conveying his winking humour. However, he cannot be allowed to get away with this mayhem indefinitely, poor chap, and so he has his eventual comeuppance. He is tried and hanged for his crimes, all of which is depicted in the score. But his spirit lives on because, after all, Till's demise hardly resulted in the cessation once and for all of such prankery! 4. 'Auf Einer Burg' (#7, Liederkreis, Op. 39) Robert Schumann (1810-1856, German) Matthias Goerne (baritone.) & Eric Schneider (piano) Schumann was a troubled and broken soul, sustained above all by the devotion of his truly remarkable wife Clara (herself a brilliant composer in her own right). He suffered from bouts of dark mental anguish, but out of this he could still create music of the most sublime depths and simplicity. 1840 became what he termed 'his year of song' and this number comes from a song cycle (the literal translation of Liederkreis ) of poetry settings depicting the landscape, in true Romantic fashion. In a Castle was written by a contemporary, aristocratic man of letters, Joseph von Eichendorff. The song is sedate, offering ample space to conjure up the scene in our minds. The piano accompaniment is sparse while the melody is almost childishly simple. It's not going to fire up the adrenaline; this is a slow burn. But for those with ears to hear, there are startling subtleties to send shivers down any spine. The original poem had four stanzas, but Schumann sets them in pairs. On occasion, the piano seems marginally out of harmonic sync with the singer, but listen out for the steady development of intensity from lines 5 and 13. Then, on the words Jahre (years) and munter (merrily) he sets a deliberate, if muted, dissonance (the singer's top C clashes with the piano's left-hand D). For we certainly don't expect the the knight to be centuries-old, while the musicians' merriment is enitrely out of keeping with the devastating final word. Not all fairy tales get a 'happy ever after'. 5. Hello, Little Girl  (from Into the Woods) Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021, American) Robert Westenberg (Wolf) & Danielle Ferland (Red Riding Hood), Original Cast NB clip is from the 2017 movie with Johnny Depp as the Wolf (whereas the playlist is of original cast) Chesterton wrote, "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed." Tolkien once said "A safe fairy tale is untrue to all worlds." For the fairy tale to work, the dangers must be real. Stephen Sondheim was clearly enjoying himself when combined a medley of Grimms' fairy tales in his 1987 musical Into the Woods . In this clip, Little Red Riding Hood comes face-to-face with her terrifying antagonist. It's unnerving how many child-eating horrors live in German forests! But it does permit Sondheim to relish the salivating, predatory wolf and contrast it with the bright yet canny innocence of the little girl. Brilliant! The Firebird  (1910) Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971, Russian/American) Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, Charles Dutoit (cond.) In folklore common to many Slavic countries, heroes are often given the almost impossible quest to retrieve a Firebird's feather. No it's neithert r a car, nor a browser, but a magnificent creature whose stunning plumage has the brightness and intensity of flames. A single feather emits sufficient light to fill a great hall (obviously). Prince Ivan catches the Firebird's feather (by Russian artist Ivan Bilibin, 1899) The version that the Russian emigré composer Stravinsky used for Diaghilev's commission (for his Parisian-founded company Les Ballets Russes) , imagines the Firebird as a female human/bird hybrid. Prince Ivan captures her, but to reward his willingness to release her, she grants him a feather. This is just as well because he subsequently encounters the dastardly but immortal Kaschei who has kidnapped thirteen princesses, no less. What a complete rotter! But because Prince Ivan possesses the feather (and obviously knows how to use it), he defeats Kaschei without killing him. Thus the princesses are liberated! Hurrah! Thank goodness there was. a dashing prince on hand (plus feather). Naturally, Ivan marries the most beautiful and this is something about which she was undoubtedly delighted. The ballet lasts around 45 minutes and contains gorgeous melodies with swooping strings and romantic tension. Until Kaschei appears in the 11th movement, it feels much more like the great Russian works of the Nineteenth Century than other, modernist works for which Stravinsky is famous. But the music builds to bring the archetypal battle of good and evil to its thrilling conclusion. Epic! Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor and teacher based in the UK and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net . 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 is the first in a weekly series that will seek to break down the mists and myths that put people off the vast treasure house that is classical music. Each time, I’ll take a theme and choose 5 pieces or excerpts (from over 600 years’ worth of music) and then round it all off with one larger work. Hence 5&1 from 600! You can take photos or paint en plein air to capture the experience; and I suppose the seriously committed might take out a drone with iMax cameras to make it fully immersive. But music is uniquely able to evoke being out in the natural world, which is why composers have been obsessed with it since time immemorial. 1. Cheerful Feelings On Arriving In The Country (from Symphony No. 6 “The Pastoral”; Op. 68, 1808) Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827, German) The Orchestra of the 18th Century, Frans Brüggen (cond.) Who better to start with than the one whose 250th anniversary is this year? Beethoven’s 6th is much loved for good reason. Unlike most of his works, he actually provides narrative descriptions for each movement. So this is not abstract or “pure” music but is what is technically called “programme music.” That means the composer has particular images or experiences in mind with each musical development. This first movement then captures the sheer relief of escaping from urban bustle into the countryside; we can feel his sense of being able to breathe again and the warmth of the early summer sun as we wander through land bursting with life. The Lark Ascending (1914) Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958, English) Iona Brown (violin) , Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner (cond.) Inspired by George Meredith’s poem of the same name, Vaughan-Williams’ standalone piece for violin and orchestra is sublime. He was renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge of old English and other folk-songs, and the orchestra transports us back into a rustic (dare I say, Shire-like?!) world that would have sung them. But our focus is on the skylark, portrayed by the violin circling and rising high into the atmosphere. Here are the opening lines of Meredith’s poem to give an idea of what the composer was getting at: He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound, Of many links without a break, In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake. Im Frühling / In Spring (D.882; poem by Ernst Schulze, 1826) Franz Schubert (1797-1828, Austrian) Matthias Goerne (baritone) , Helmut Deutsch (piano) Schubert is one of the finest song-writers in musical history, certainly when it comes to settings of poetry. He wrote hundreds of songs and this is one of his most loved. As he goes on his solitary meander, the singer in this deceptively simple song (with its gorgeous piano accompaniment) gets all nostalgic in the places he and his lost love would linger in. Everything is as lovely and beautiful as he remembered. . . but nothing can ever be the same now that she is no longer with him. Follow along with the translation here . Swans Migrating from Cantus Arcticus (a Concerto For Birds And Orchestra, Op. 61, 1972) Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016, Finnish) Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Hannu Lintu (cond.) The arrival of music technology opened up possibilities for all kinds of composers, not just for prog rock or DJ mixing. Now you didn’t need to settle for merely evoking the natural world; you could bring it right into the concert hall. So like many great Scandinavian composers, Rautavaara’s piece brilliantly captures the experience of the frigid north. This piece, from nearly fifty years ago, is spell-binding. The third movement is particularly special, whisking us to a land familiar to few people but a magnet for vast multitudes of migrating birds. Duo for the Bride and her Intended, and Coda (from Appalachian Spring, 1944) Aaron Copland (1900-1990, American) New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein (cond.) While perhaps best known for his Fanfare for the Common Man (which he then brilliantly incorporated into his 3rd Symphony), Copland is credited with crafting the archetypal sound of the American West, copied and emulated in countless movie and TV soundtracks. But he was far more versatile than that. This is from a ballet suite (in 8 parts) about a very simple story of a young couple getting married and building a homestead in the middle of nowhere. It thus becomes a classic parable of the American dream. The 7th part is built around variations of the old Shaker tune, “The Gift to be Simple.” But this movement has a wide range of emotions, capturing both the excitement and nervousness of young marrieds as they start out in uncharted land. An Alpine Symphony—an orchestral tone poem (Op. 64, 1915) Richard Strauss (1864-1949, German) Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan (cond.) This is a big one! You’ll need 50 minutes of time to get the whole thing and an orchestra of 125 players to perform it. But I guarantee it is time well-spent! This is one of the greatest examples of programme music ever written, but I suggest you don’t follow Strauss’s description of each of the 22 sections. Instead, with the knowledge that it depicts a whole day’s hike in the Bavarian Alps starting before dawn, listen and picture it for yourself. You can then compare it afterwards with what Strauss thought he was doing listed here . For music tech nerds, this recording was the first commercial CD ever made!

Editor's Note: Part of  Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music . Taking a different theme for each post, the 5&1 series offers five short pieces followed by one more substantial work. The playlist choices are occasionally not found on YouTube, so alternatives are provided here. by Mark Meynell From a sports perspective, this has been Spain's year. On the very same day (14th July), Carlos Alcaraz successfully defended his first Wimbledon singles title, and Spain won the soccer UEFA Cup for an astonishing fourth time. click for playlists So let's indulge in aural armchair adventures once again. Having dipped our toes in the sound worlds of Latin America and France in the summertime , let's enjoy a brief immersion into some of the cultural treasures of the Iberian Peninsula. 1. Asturias: No 1, Prélude Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909, Spanish) Romain Nosbaum (piano) Our first entry was not given its title by the composer (he called it Prelude), nor does it have anything to do with The Principality of Asturias (one of the seventeen semi-autonomous regions in modern Spain, which lies on the country's northern, Atlantic coast)! Furthermore, the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz did compose a suite for piano to depict several parts of the country, but this piece was not one of them. Still, it has often been included in the suite and given the name Asturias in order to fit in. Whatever its origins, it was written to evoke the flamenco guitar style on the piano. It opens with a riveting example of pianistic dexterity: machine-guy like repetitions requiring both hands to work feverishly on a single note. Interestingly, it has been frequently arranged for guitar, despite being too complex for completely faithful transcription. It feels wildly dramatic and gives the perfect musical thrill to get us going. 2. Rapsodie Espagnole: 2. Malagueña (1907) Maurice Ravel  (1875-1937, French) Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa (cond.) Maurice Ravel has been heralded as one of France's greatest composers, but he was born close to the Spanish border to a French father and Basque mother brought up in Madrid. As a result, he was deeply conscious of his Spanish and Basque heritage, and this was expressed in various compositions. Perhaps his best known work outside the classical world is his Bolero (of hypnotically repeated theme-fame, guaranteed to drive the mildest of temperaments into the abyss). But his true Iberian colors are on display in his Rapsodie Espagnole, one of his earliest pieces for orchestra, composed in 4 sections. A Malagueña was a Flamenco dance associated with the city of Malaga. This movement is highly evocative of the southern region (albeit in quite an idealized way) and is full of vitality and joyful excitement. I just love it. 3. Concierto de Aranjuez: I. Allegro con spiritu (1939) Joaquín Rodrigo Vidre (1901-1997, Spanish) Pepe Romero (guitar) , FM-Classic Radio Symphony Orchestra, Luciano Di Martino (cond.) If there was one instrument that embodied the spirit of Spain it must surely be the guitar. Rodrigo is perhaps not so widely-known outside his native Spain, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the big tunes from his guitar concerto, or the Concierto de Aranjuez to give its formal title, were not familiar in some way. Aranjuez is the location of King Philip II's glorious palace and gardens, later improved by Ferdinand IV in the eighteenth century, and so is one of the country's great treasures. Yet Rodrigo had been almost blind since he was three and composed in Braille. Somehow, he is able brilliantly to evoke the breathtaking sights and sounds of the place, capturing both its grandeur and charm in his utterly beguiling music. He composed it in Paris in 1939 as the likelihood of the outbreak of war grew ever greater, but it seems to evoke a more idyllic, romanticized Spanish past. The challenge for any performance is to sustain the (unplugged) solo guitar's audibility over a full orchestra, but Rodrigo's writing allows it to soar. The overall effect is sublime. 4. Cançó de Bressol de la Mar Arianna Savall (1972- , Swiss-Catalan) Arianna Savall, Petter Udland Johansen & Hirundo Maris Catalonia is the region around Barcelona and like the Basque region further to its west, it has long asserted its own unique historical and political identity through its unique language and culture. Arianna Savall is the daughter of renowned Catalan Baroque musician, Jordi Savall, but she has made a reputation as a great musician (as harpist, singer, composer) in her own right. For the last fifteen years, she has co-led a medieval/baroque fusion ensemble with her Norwegian partner Petter Udland Johansen called Hirundo Maris (meaning sea swallow ). This is a gorgeous contemporary song whose Catalan lyrics and music were both written by Savall. She sings a lullaby to an unnamed prisoner, whose cell perhaps overlooks the sea, to distract him from his predicament. She comforts him with the beauties and serenity of the moonlit ocean, to encourage dreams of a different reality. Every time I hear it, the sheer gorgeousness of Savall's effortless upward leap when the word Dorm (sleep) is repeated makes my heart skip a beat. 5. Carmen, Act II: Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre... Toréador, en garde! Georges Bizet (1838-1875, French) Thomas Hampson (baritone) , Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, Michel Plasson (cond.) Crowds gather for a bull-fight, macho toreadors strut their stuff, beautiful señoritas swoon over rival infatuations—so far so clichéd! It's all there in Georges Bizet's 2nd and final opera, Carmen . Yet all is not as it seems. Bizet, like Ravel, was French, but unlike Ravel, he had no family connection to Spain, which is perhaps why Spaniards dismiss the opera as a French caricature rather than a fair representation. Indeed, he himself felt the opera was a complete failure and died only months after its premiere from a heart attack, aged just 37. He had no sense it would become one of the most frequently performed operas in musical history, not to mention the various adaptations, movies and spinoffs (such as the musical Carmen Jones ). The plot was deemed scandalous at the time, since it revolved around José, a naive soldier seduced by the fiery femme fatale Carmen. In true melodramatic fashion, Jose later kills her in a jealous rage when she goes off with the glamorous toreador Escamillo. In this track, we hear Escamillo seriously burnishing his machismo credentials and Jose discovers what he's really up against. Noches in los Jardines de España Manuel de Falla (1876-1946, Spanish) Javier Perianes (piano) , BBC Symphony Orchestra, Josep Pons (cond.) I. En el Generalife. Allegretto tranquillo e misterioso II. Danza Lejana. Allegretto giusto III. En los Jardines de la Sierra de Cordoba. Vivo Those unfamiliar with Spanish history are often unaware of its mediaeval Islamic past, a time when much of the country was ruled by Arab dynasties. That legacy is still felt in Spain, both in terms of the linguistic residue in Spanish as well as their architectural masterpieces, such as Granada's Alhambra Palace or the city of Córdoba, south-east of Granada. Dawn on the Charles V Palace, Alhambra, Grenada (by Jebulon) Manuel de Falla was a near contemporary of Isaac Albéniz, born in the deep south in Cadiz but later grew up and was educated in Madrid. The lure of Paris was strong, however, and like so many of his fellow-countrymen, he was drawn by its creative energy and stayed for seven years. He returned home shortly after the First World War began in 1914 and completed this suite for piano and orchestra soon after. His aim was to evoke the exoticism and beauty of Arabic Spain, drawing on typical rhythms and harmonies from the south. The Generalife scented gardens are those of the Alhambra and its Islamic origins are suggested by repeated musical patterns which resemble the geometric designs so common in Islamic buildings. The second movement throws us into the world of traditional dance, while the third whisks us away to Córdoba. Having a piano soloist combined with orchestra might suggest de Falla was writing a concerto; however he is aiming to craft 'symphonic impressions' with his instruments, and when we listen with eyes closed, it is not hard to be transported both in place and in time. From the opening bars, there is an air of mystery and foreignness, but I for one cannot help but be lured in to soak it all up. Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor and teacher based in the UK and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net . 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.

Editor's Note: Part of  Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music . Taking a different theme for each post, the 5&1 series offers five short pieces followed by one more substantial work. The playlist choices are occasionally not found on YouTube, so alternatives are provided here. To listen to the playlist for this post, follow these links to Apple Music , Spotify , or YouTube . The 23-year old poet John Keats described the fall, or as we say in these parts, the autumn, as a "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" in his masterpiece To Autumn . His wander through the countryside south-west of London inspired him; the poem bursts with nature's harvest-time profligacy and appeals to all five senses. But there is an inherent melancholy: nothing lasts, as the leaves turn, temperatures drop and nights lengthen. The fourth and final verse opens: "Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? / Think not of them, thou hast thy music too..." Of course, by telling us not to think of spring's songs we can't help but do so. He insists, however, that autumn has its own—the sound of 'mourning' gnats, bleating lambs and birds chirping in gardens. This is the true symphony of autumn. Then, as if in sympathetic step with the season itself, Keats would die of tuberculosis in Rome only 18 months after writing the poem. But the season's bitter-sweet abundance, colors and pathos have inspired musicians for centuries, with the result that there is more than enough to choose from this month. 1. Prelude and Song: See My Many Colour'd Field (from The Fairy-Queen, 1692) Henry Purcell (1659-1695, English) Roderick Williams (baritone) , Gabrieli Consort, Paul McCreesh (cond.) Purcell was a musical genius, his death a tragic loss at only 35. He created this semi-staged operatic drama not from Edmund Spenser's epic of the same name (known to Rabbit Room regulars from Rebecca Reynolds' mammoth undertaking ) but Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream . Instead of setting the play to music, he composed 'masques' for each act. These were very popular in the seventeenth century and involved ornate if mannered music, song and dance. So here, in the 4th Act, the classical sun-god, Phoebus (often identified with Apollo) introduces the four seasons, each of whom has a moment in the spotlight. Autumn is clearly quite pleased about the varieties of color and fruit he brings. 2. 'Otoño porteño' (Autumn in Buenos Aires, 1969) Astor Pantaléon Piazzola (1921-1992, Argentinian) Jonathan Morton (violin & cond.) , Scottish Ensemble The season remains unchanged, but we have flown 7000 miles to the other side of the world: Argentina. Piazzola was a performer (of the concertina-like bandoneon ), musical arranger and composer in his own right, renowned for transforming the traditional tango almost beyond recognition. His Four Seasons of Buenos Aires is a case in point: despite owing some inspiration from Vivaldi, each is a tango and is scored for a cabaret band. But of course, because he lived in a different hemisphere, he gives a nod or two to Vivaldi's Winter, but includes it in his Summer! In Autumn, there is a riot of activity, color and intrigue. If you're new to Piazzola, I suspect you will never never have encountered anything quite like it before; it is certainly hard to categorise. But you will hopefully find its joie de vivre is irresistible. 3. Approach of Autumn (from Adam Zero: a one-act ballet, 1946) Sir Arthur Bliss (1891-1975, English) English Northern Philharmonia, David Lloyd-Jones (cond.) Back into the northern hemisphere and to England again, but a generation before Piazzola. Arthur Bliss was a Londoner with an American father and English mother. He served in the First World War with distinction and spent some time in the States until the war broke out once more. The rest of his life was spent in Britain and he was prolific, in all forms of music, not least for the stage. Adam Zero was a one-act ballet premiered in April 1946 in a bombed out London. It all gets quite 'meta', retelling the cycle of human life by means of a company of dancers creating a ballet. Adam is the principle dancer who experiences the seasons of life, only to be replaced at the end by his understudy before he dies. Autumn, as you'd expect, comes towards the end. The music evokes the mists and murk of shortening days, but the season is obviously functioning metaphorically: hence the undercurrent of foreboding at what will inevitably come to us all. 4. The Fall of the Leaf: Theme and Variations (1963) Imogen Holst (1907-1984, English) Steven Isserlis (cello) We've not had much solo instrumental stuff on the 5&1 playlists so far, apart from keyboard music. So this may come as something of a challenge, but please give it a go. Bach was the great master of works for unaccompanied instruments, and there are moments in this that hint at his legacy. Imogen Holst was the only child of Gustav Holst, of The Planets fame which we have already encountered , and a musical all-rounder. She composed this for her friend Pamela Hind O'Malley, describing it as a set of 'three short studies for solo cello on a sixteenth-century tune'. In the variations, we can at times hear the wind prising autumnal leaves free from their branches. But the key is the central movement, tinged with an aching sadness. Despite having 5 distinct sections, the whole lasts only around 9 minutes, and while strings tend to play only one line, there are all kinds of ways to add, or hint at, harmonies. This is a beautiful evocation of the season composed with astonishing economy. 5. Autumn Ola Gjeilo (1978- , Norwegian) The Choir of Royal Holloway, Rupert Gough (cond.) It's about time we had some more singing. Ola Gjeilo has become highly-regarded in choral music circles far beyond his native Norway. Based now in Manhattan, Gjeilo particularly excels in writing for voice and for solo piano, relishing gorgeously scrunchy chords and atmospheric wistfulness. But then, if you lived close to the Arctic Circle, the thought of Autumn carries particular poignancy, if not heaviness. Yes, the season brings great beauty, but the further north you go, the shorter the season becomes and you are led inexorably towards permanent night. The text here is a poem Gjeilo commissioned from his frequent collaborator, the American poet Charles Anthony Silvestri. To prompt him, he sent images of Vestmarka, a Norwegian national park close to where he grew up and in which he would go on long treks. It's a beautiful setting of a poem that even has the faintest of echoes of Keats. Autumn Gardens Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016, Finnish) Helsinki Philharmonic, Vladimir Ashkenazy (cond.) It's no surprise that other Scandinavians treasure the autumn while it lasts. Rautavaara was a Finnish composer whose music was profoundly influenced by his environment; we've met him before in his Cantus Arcticus , right back in the very first 5&1 playlist of nature-inspired music . In this 3-movement work for orchestra, his lens is focused on a garden, which becomes a microcosm for the season's impact. Poetico : there are still traces of summer's beauty as this first movement opens. It is crafted around a theme he used in an opera to set the words ' like a butterfly in the garden of black autumn' . The music gradually gets denser before drifting without a break into... Tranquillo : as it's title suggests, this is calmer and more atmospheric, perhaps suggesting the fading light of the high north. Giocoso e Leggiero ('Playful and light'): those are not words traditionally associated with this time of year, but the composer seems to be making a determined effort to enjoy the moment. Shimmering strings suggest floating leaves and dappled sunlight, leading to a resounding conclusion, in what is perhaps a solemn dance to see off the last of the summer. However, rather than trying to trace some kind of narrative or 'program' for the whole piece, allow yourself to be swept up in its arctic atmosphere. Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor and teacher based in the UK and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net .

Editor's Note: Part of  Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music . Taking a different theme for each post, the 5&1 series offers five short pieces followed by one more substantial work. The playlist choices are occasionally not found on YouTube, so alternatives are provided here. To be honest, I've felt quite ambivalent about nightfall for years. Most of the time, it brings much needed relief and rest from the rigors of daytime; a chance to catch one's breath and reflect, perhaps to enjoy the company of a few close friends, then eventually, of course, to sleep. However, there are seasons when the hours of darkness represent everything but those joys. On occasion, I have even come to dread them. It is no accident that many of the psalmist's most plangent or urgent cries took place in the early hours. So my fellow insomniacs, Cranmer's weighty prayer for light towards the end of the service of Evening Prayer is therefore precious. For the night's perils and dangers are as likely to be psychological as physical. As we might expect, then, that ambivalence is richly reflected in music. To listen to the playlist for this post, follow these links to Apple Music , Spotify , or YouTube . 1. There Will Be Rest (2008) Frank Ticheli (1958- , American) Voces8 Voces8 is a British a cappella group, made up of—yep, you guessed it—eight singers. They are internationally celebrated for their diverse repertoire, crystal clear diction, and above all, superhumanly precise harmonization. In this track, they sing a scrumptious setting of a poem by American poet Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) which powerfully articulates everything we might hope for after an exhausting day. (We first encountered her in playlist #10 ) Frank Ticheli creates a wonderful sense of serenity out of an opening that seems very slight: essentially a cluster of notes ascending a scale. But it quickly unfurls into a glorious dream, a longing for cosmic stillness to counteract 'my lonely mind.' Ticheli manages to create in sound what Teasdale was desperate for in words. So beautiful. 2. Nocturne No. 10 in Eb (1816) John Field (1782-1837, Irish) John O'Conor (piano) Nocturne No. 20 in C# min (1830, KK IVa/16) Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849, Polish) Stephen Hough (piano) The French word 'nocturne' simply means 'nocturnal' or 'at night'. It was Frédéric Chopin who is most associated with compositions given that name, but he was not in fact the pioneer of the form. That accolade goes to the much lesser known Irishman, John Field, who lived a generation earlier. So it seemed a good idea to place one from each side-by-side. Both wrote compositions for solo piano and both crafted them as deeply private meditative expressions. They both evoke and create an atmosphere of mellow intimacy, often with a little melancholy. It is easy to imagine a candlelit nineteenth-century living room with the meandering, seemingly improvised, melodies echoing from the piano around a darkened home. Field's nocturnes are gentler and simpler than his musical heir's, but still affecting. Chopin discloses far deeper emotional turmoil in his pieces, but the effect is to ratchet up the poignancy of his aching melodies. 3. La Noche de Los Mayas I Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940, Mexican) Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Gustavo Dudamel (cond.) For many, night-time is no more peaceful than day-time, especially if they must work shifts or find themselves embroiled in some emergency. We travel to Mexico now to the score by violinist and composer Silvestre Revueltas for the 1939 historical movie of the same name, about the fall of the Mayan civilisation. Like much cinematic music today, it was later arranged into a suite for concert performance. This is the first movement. As we might expect, the music captures the mood of film noir melodrama, although I for one would never have guessed its subject matter from listening. But Revueltas does establish the foreboding and anxiety indigenous people felt as the Conquistadors arrived on the continent. Their own perils and dangers in the sixteenth century were all too real. 4. Peace Piece Bill Evans (1929-1980, American) Bill Evans (piano) We're on to jazz now, but here for very good reason. This is a legendary track by a remarkable pianist. Bill Evans played with scores of great musicians, including Miles Davis's band when they recorded the sublime A Kind of Blue . But the origins of this piece are disputed, despite Evans's claim to have completely improvised it in performance. It doesn't really matter how it came to exist because it is glorious. It is clearly jazz, but in form and mood it has barely left the drawing rooms of Field and Chopin. Musically it is very simple: constant repetitions of the briefest of chord sequences in the left hand, over which the right hand wanders and meanders in ever-evolving ways. And that's it! But there is musical alchemy here; it is so much greater than the sum of its harmonic parts. 5. Still, Glowing (2008) Judith Weir (1954- , British) BBC Symphony Orchestra, Dalia Stasevska (cond,) Dame Judith Weir, to use her full title, became the first woman to be appointed Master of the Queen's/King's Music in 2014. It brings no official duties these days, nor even a salary, only an expectation that you (might) compose something for the odd big event. Perhaps. It's music's equivalent to being made Poet Laureate. Judith Weir is a prolific composer who has written 11 operas, many orchestral and choral works, as well as all kinds of miniatures for individual instruments. This piece is based on a sequence in one of those operas The Vanishing Bridegroom , and in her own words, her "one and (so far) only attempt writing 'ambient music'." In that respect, it is not representative of her style, but it works partly because of its startling economy. This piece is scored for a reduced orchestra—no brass and only a few keyboard percussion instruments—this creates the feeling of being suspended in time and space. I love the title too. It suggests the still warm embers left from an evening round a fire pit and perhaps alludes to the music's slowly undulating, warming and cooling pulse. Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899) Arnold Schoenberg  (1874-1951, Austrian/American) Isabel Faust  (violin) , Swedish Radio Symphony, Daniel Harding (cond.) If you know anything about Arnold Schoenberg then you are almost certainly alarmed by his inclusion in this playlist. He is notorious for being an uncompromising musical theorist early in the twentieth century, pioneering so-called 'atonal' expressionist music. It certainly takes a lot of getting used to, and by general consensus, was quite the musical dead end. However, this string sextet is one of his earliest works and barely hints at the style he subsequently developed. It is inspired by Richard Dehmel's poem of the same name (meaning 'Transfigured Night'). This describes the forest walk on a moonlit night by a young couple. She comes with a dark secret which she eventually has the courage to share: she carries another man's child. After an agonising wait, the man finally forgives and accepts his lover, and the piece ends in a spirit of exultant but delicate restoration. As you listen to the five m ovements, try to trace the emotional journey as it unfolds. BONUS!! Sleep (2000) Eric Whitacre (1970- , American) Eric Whitacre Singers, Eric Whitacre (cond.) After all that turmoil, it's vital to calm nerves and lower heart rates. Otherwise, sleep will forever remain elusive. So we return to the choral world by means of a piece with rather an awkward history. It was originally commissioned as a setting of a Robert Frost poem. But because it was still in copyright and the Frost estate refused to grant publication rights, Whitacre asked his friend, the poet Charles Anthony Silvestri to write an alternative text. He has said that he far prefers this version anyway now, and has no plans to reissue it with Frost's words (now that they have fallen out of copyright). Here is the perfect vehicle for wafting the listener off to the Land of Nod. One final note about our starting point. We can't leave Sara Teasdale's gentle but affecting poem without mentioning the fact that, a few years after writing it, she would end up taking her own life. The depression and loneliness that dogged her for years finally became overwhelming. The poem's yearning, therefore, has a darker, more agonising resonance. But the very fact that Ticheli (as well as several other composers) set it so affectingly for choir, itself the very expression of shared human experience, is a hopeful thing. Someone suffering the worst mental torment might now listen to this and know both that there is beauty in the world and they are not alone. Even in the loneliness of a dark night. Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor and teacher based in the UK and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net .

by Kate Gaston "Right now, at this very moment, in the exact place you happen to be, you’re surrounded by real people. You live where you live. This is your superpower." After almost a decade of cross-country moves—with all that tearing up of tender roots and transplanting every two to three years—by the time my family landed in Nashville, I was jonesing for a home of our own. A house with a yard. A neighborhood with sidewalks. And neighbors walking on those sidewalks who’d know my name and stop to say hello. In the fullness of time, we did indeed buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with sidewalks. And yes, our neighbors do walk on those sidewalks. And, occasionally, they stop to say hello. But mostly, they stop to let their dogs pee on my zinnias. Our house has a small front porch, and in the afternoons, I enjoy sitting outside, sipping coffee and reading. On one such afternoon, not long after we moved into our new home, I was in my usual spot when I heard a noise. It seemed to be coming from the house next door. It was my neighbor’s front door knob, wiggling back and forth ineffectively, being turned from the inside. After much jiggling, the doorknob finally caught, and the door creaked open. Out shuffled an old man leaning on a walker. A frizzy nimbus of sparse white hair sprouted from his head. This, as I was just about to find out, was Joe. I turned, waved, and said hello to the man. He didn't appear to hear me, intent as he was on checking his mailbox. It was empty. I’d also come to find out that Joe’s mailbox would almost always be empty. That fact didn’t deter him from making the arduous journey every day. Giving a little huff of disappointment, the man turned his walker back toward the front door for his return voyage. This was the moment he spotted me on my porch, and his eyes lit with delight. He crooned—yes, literally crooned—“HellooOOoooo!” I waved and said hello a second time. He stopped and turned toward me with a half-expectant, half-vacant gaze. My parents raised me right, so I couldn’t just turn back to my reading. Not with this little man chirping and crooning at me as he shuffled along. So, I put my book and coffee down and walked across my driveway, stopping below his front stoop. Here, I’d make yet another discovery: even from this meager distance, and with me bellowing at him at a volume flirting dangerously close to disturbance-of-the-peace levels, Joe still couldn’t hear a thing. He nodded agreeably as he pretended that he could hear me, then volleyed back a string of questions that were only marginally related to anything I’d said. These were not your garden variety questions, easily answered with a head shake or nod. They were not the sort of questions that could be answered at all when one member of the conversation is mostly deaf but pretending not to be. It would go a little something like this: Joe: Do your parents root for Bear Bryant? Me: No, not really. Joe: What? Me, screaming: No, not really! Joe: Do you know where Mike Pence is from? Me, still screaming: Not the first clue! Joe: Do you like Cracker Barrel? Me: Good biscuits. I’d give it a 4 on a 10 scale. Joe: What? Me, cranking the volume up another notch: Good biscuits!!! Joe: What? Me: GOOOOOD!!!! *deep breath* BISCUITS!!!!! Joe: *Nods vaguely* At last, Joe reached the end of what I’d come to find out was his repertoire of questions. Then, without missing a beat, he concluded our first meeting by asking if I’d run over to Burger King for him. He’d take a Whopper, fries, and a sweet tea. With that, he shuffled back inside his house. I cast a wistful glance back at my coffee, my book, my peaceful porch. Then, I drove down the street to Burger King and got the man his food. Though Joe can’t hear much, he possesses a super-sensory ability for catching me on my front porch. Every time he does—and I mean every time—our visits follow a familiar pattern. His front doorknob starts jiggling from the inside, and Joe makes his way, slowly, treacherously, out onto his front stoop. He sees me and croons hello. I wave a friendly greeting from my porch, then turn back to my book, hoping against hope that he’ll read the social cues and let me read in peace. No dice. Our Liturgy For the Imposition of Neighborliness continues to play out, with Joe squawking a question about vice presidential trivia at me and me screaming an answer back at him. Of course, Joe can’t hear me, so I’m obliged to put my book and coffee down, walk over to his porch, and have a high-volume conversation about Mike Pence’s hometown. (It’s Columbus, Indiana, in case you’re wondering.) Usually, our exchanges end with Joe asking what I’m cooking for dinner and if I’d bring him a plate. Here’s something I’m not proud to admit. One afternoon, a few weeks into our relationship, I heard the telltale sound of Joe’s front door knob jiggling. In those precious seconds before he could get his door open, I grabbed my phone, held it up to my face in a way he couldn’t fail to notice, and—heaven help me— pretended to be having a conversation. He waved, gazed forlornly in my direction for a few moments, then shuffled back into his house. I understand this behavior disqualifies me from heaven. It’s just that, sometimes, I want to be able to read on my front porch in peace without having to think about Mike Pence. It’s not that I don’t like Mike Pence. It’s not that I don’t like Joe. However, interacting with Joe is uncomfortable and highly inefficient. Here’s the rub. Joe is my neighbor. Not just in the vague, hand-wavy, New Testament sense of the word. Joe is my neighbor in the sense that he literally lives next door. Though Joe tells me he has kinfolk, they live far away and don’t visit very often. Joe can’t leave his house because he can’t navigate the steps on his walker. Joe orders pizza delivery every couple of days, which is, I think, how he gets through the week. I’ve taken dinner over to him a handful of times, and once, when I opened his refrigerator, its emptiness broke through the thick layer of apathy that had iced over my heart. Joe, my neighbor, is hungry and alone. Why am I telling you this sad story? Because this story illustrates something about the reality we exist within. Welcome, dear reader, to modernity. Modernity is the period of human existence we currently inhabit, yes, but it’s more than that. It’s come to be characterized by mankind’s giant strides forward in rational thought, individualism, and industrialization. Modernity is, as David Foster Wallace so aptly put it, the water we’re swimming in . Great minds have spilled seas of ink on the colossal woes of modernity. Charles Taylor has traced modernity from its genesis and written the whole sordid tale within his book, A Secular Age . If you’ve got a month or two of spare time, it’s a profound read. Or, if you only have an hour, Andrew Fellows boils down the dark magic of modernity in this lecture . It’s all well and good for philosophers to wax eloquent on the subject of modernity; that’s what they’re paid to do. It is enough for you and I to simply recognize its fruit. Modernity is a cultural juggernaut that causes us, among other things, to lean away from people who desperately need us to lean in. It is a subtle force that conspires to isolate and alienate us from our neighbors. It moves us away from shared meals, away from conversations. It builds walls between us and the sights, smells, and needs of our neighbors, insulating us from the inefficiencies and discomforts of interacting with them. I’m not saying modernity is all bad. People used to die from infected toenails, for crying out loud. Give me those sweet, sweet antibiotics, baby. And life before anesthesia? Before Tylenol? No, thank you. How about deodorant? GPS? Insta-Pots? All good things. But despite all its advances, there’s rot in the golden apple of modernity. This isn’t a surprise. We’re all familiar with its darker elements. Rip-roaring loneliness. Debilitating anxiety. Neighbors who don’t know each other’s names. Kids who have forgotten the way to Neverland. Siloed political parties, social media echo chambers, and, worst of all, cyber trucks. The problems are so big, so far-reaching, most of us can’t really even grasp how we got here. Perhaps you’re like me, and the overwhelming problems feel, well, overwhelming. Perhaps, also like me, you feel your efforts are so meager, so paltry, that you’re tempted just to close your eyes and let modernity do whatever terrible and soulless thing it's going to do. It would be easy to roll over. It would be simple to put our heads down, to allow the alienation and isolation of our cultural moment to continue unchecked, to dash into our homes as soon as we hear our neighbor’s door knob jiggling. Robert Farrar Capon, in his pithy little book The Third Peacock: the Problem of God and Evil , said: “Man is…just one more insignificant piece of stuff lost in a crowd of vastly bigger but equally insignificant pieces…he cowers like a skid row bum on the doorstep of an indifferent creation. He longs for a square meal and a kind word, but he’s afraid to believe it when he hears it.” Here, then, is the gift you and I have to give. It’s the ability to offer that square meal and a kind word to the person standing in front of us. We can swing wide our doors and welcome whoever happens to be standing nearby. We can invite people in. Why? Because our neighbors need us. They are hungry, and they are alone. Inviting people into the raw, unfiltered truth of our lives is not easy. It’s actually really, really hard. For one thing, it forces us to kiss efficiency goodbye. Efficiency is a lovely thing. But when it comes to building relationships, it’s not a helpful metric. Sometimes, it can actually hurt the process and the people involved. Let’s get real for a minute, shall we? We get impatient when the wifi is slow. When Netflix buffers, our blood pressure spikes. We get huffy when people don't respond in a timely manner to the text we’ve sent them. And by “timely manner,” I mean, like, right now. Such is our need, our addiction, to immediate gratification. Waiting makes us twitchy. Building relationships with other humans is the equivalent of old-school dial-up. It requires us to be in close proximity. We emit weird, unnecessary noises as our social modems attempt to connect. Our communication is slow, ponderous. It is fraught with misunderstanding and often unstable. When interacting with other humans, we are forced to wait, to slow down, to move at what feels like a glacial pace. Meeting people can be rough, can’t it? Introducing yourself. Deciding whether you should offer a handshake or a hug. If it’s a hug, should it be a side hug? Or full frontal? Or maybe just a fist bump? Immediately realizing the fist bump was a terrible choice. Forgetting the other person’s name the instant after they’ve said it. Trying to make intelligent conversation while wondering if your face looks weird. Wondering if you are smiling enough. Or smiling too much? And what should you do with your arms? Just let them, what, dangle there? The whole process is fraught with danger. Yes, meeting people and actually talking to them is inefficient and uncomfortable. But despite the social anxiety inherent in those moments, it’s worth it. Why? Because you can’t possibly know what’s going on under the surface until you ask. You won’t ever know if that person is suffering from debilitating loneliness or barely concealing the fact they’re on the brink of crisis until you pause, lean in, and ask the first question. If you find yourself succumbing to a dull apathy—modernity’s trademark move—toward the soul standing in front of you, pause. Yes, pause, and consider, for a holy beat, that perhaps it’s no coincidence you’re standing where you’re standing, and that person is standing where they’re standing. A pause might suddenly inspire you with a question that leads to those deeper, more vulnerable waters. A pause might open a much-needed door; it might be the gateway for a wary, care-worn soul to know they are safe in your company. Pausing, for some of us, makes us uncomfortable. A pause makes us feel inefficient. A pause can feel like a sucking, social vacuum which begs, screams, bellows to be filled because the milliseconds of conversational silence feel like pain. Some of us are on the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s the action of initiating and leaning into the conversation that feels uncomfortable. Especially with strangers. Beginning a conversation with someone we don’t know? Excruciating. But let’s talk about that discomfort, shall we? Discomfort feels bad, so we try to avoid it at all costs. But does social discomfort actually hurt us? Nah. It doesn’t. I’m sorry to be the person to whip this particular Band-Aid off, but sometimes discomfort is required for growth. We can tell our skittish amygdalas to chill out. We can remind ourselves that even though it feels like we might die if we say hello to a stranger, we actually won’t. Why all this talk of inefficiency and discomfort? Because we’re about to veer into some granular realities about welcoming other humans into your mess. To proceed down this path, you will sometimes be required to take many holy pauses and let the silence stretch a few beats longer than you’d prefer. Sometimes, you might be required to speak up, to be the first to ask a question. Regardless of which direction relationship-building takes you, you will be required, sometimes, to turn your back on efficiency and embrace some awkward, hard stuff. What kind of awkward, hard stuff? We don’t have time for anything like that. We have jobs. We have spouses. We have kids. We are in bowling leagues. We own chinchillas. We bring donuts to work on Monday. We have people relying on us to show up. We’re just too busy to offer much else in the way of relational capital. Right now, at this very moment, in the exact place you happen to be, you’re surrounded by real people. You live where you live. This is your superpower. You know the people you know. Some of us know many people. Some of us move in smaller circles. Expanding the breadth of your social circle isn’t what I’m getting at here, so introverts, take a breath. What I’m highlighting is the reality that all of us already exist in a specific social context. Sometimes, the places seem boring, and the people are annoying. Even so, choose to belong to those people. Know their names and faces, their histories. Belong to that place. It is precisely when we belong to real people and real places that our fragmented souls are mended and our wounds of isolation are bound. As we engage with others, in all their humdrum, inefficient, awkwardness, the seeds of human flourishing take root. Perhaps it would help you to spend a moment thinking about those circles you move in. If you’re the type of person who likes creative interaction with what you’re reading, grab a pencil and a sheet of paper. If you’re the type of person who finds instructions like this annoying, feel free to roll your eyes and skip down a few paragraphs. Okay, got your paper and pencil? Draw a circle in the middle of the page, and write your name in it. This will be the hub of the wheel, so to speak. Now, elsewhere on the page, draw another circle, and label it with the location you spend the majority of your time. Connect this circle back to the first circle with a straight line. Continue drawing circles and connecting them back to the original circle, labeling them with each place you spend time in a day, week, month, or year. Get specific. Make a circle for your favorite coffee shop, your local library, the yoga class at the Y, the grocery store, your favorite roller rink, your bike route. These places, these circles, are where God has placed you. You might wish you were somewhere sexier. Maybe you’re desperately praying for God to lead you elsewhere, anywhere, other than where you are. That’s fine. Pray away. But right now, recognize he’s put you exactly where you are. Belong to that place. Be loyal to it. Treat the people you see in that place with curiosity and kindness because of all the other places you could both be on Earth, you are where you are. As you drew your circles, did you notice some familiar faces springing to mind? The barista with the cool tattoo who makes your latte? The librarian who knows your taste in books better than you do? As those faces pop up, ask yourself, do I know that person’s name? If you’re anything like me, you probably feel it’s intrusive to ask people their names or to strike up a conversation. In those moments of social anxiety, remember this little humdinger of truth and take courage: deep within each of us (including that barista with cool tattoos), we all still carry around our inner middle schooler, complete with our braces, acne, and insecurities. And we are all of us just waiting, praying, to be asked to dance. Granted, we might not actually get on the dance floor. But it’s nice to be noticed. Okay, so you’ve thought about your circles. You’ve visualized the faces. Now, identify the barriers. The barriers will be hard to spot. Why? Because they usually blend into the wallpaper of our lives. What are the things we place between us and other people that protect us from having to belong to those people? Our houses? Do we welcome people into our homes, or do we use our homes as fortresses of solitude? What about our privacy-fenced yards? Our cars? Do we opt for the automated check-out? Or return library books in the dropbox instead of at the front desk? Oh, here’s a good one: Do we pick up our phone hundreds of times a day? Do we reach for them at red lights, in waiting rooms, in line at the grocery store, and at the dinner table? Do we look at them while our children are sitting next to us, asking us questions, trying to get our attention? Yes, our screens are delightful, intoxicating little barriers, aren’t they? Noticing the barriers is a nice place to start. You can’t begin to dismantle them until you know what they are. Go ahead, give it a good, long think. Now, let's start tearing the barriers down. This step will look different for all of us, depending on our temperaments. Here’s a suggestion for your consideration: Go out of your way to run into people. Build in time for relational collisions. Daniel Coyle, in his book  The Culture Code , defines collisions as “serendipitous personal encounters.” In the context of group cultures, these collisions are “the key driver of creativity, community, and cohesion.” Could you make small, intentional changes to increase the number of collisions with the people in your circles? Could you walk the same route in your neighborhood, increasing the chance that you’ll meet the neighbors who live along that route? Or go to the same coffee shop and force yourself to finally ask the barista’s name. Then, greet him by name the next time you see him. Or, if you forget his name, be honest about having the short-term memory of a goldfish. Laugh, and let that small act of vulnerability set the stage for more interactions in the future. Sit on your front porch instead of the back porch. Wave hello when people walk past. Better yet, plant a garden in your front yard. Gardens are like catnip for neighbors. People will come out of the woodwork. They’ll volunteer advice, make fun of your weird sunhat, offer you plants and seeds from their own gardens, and share equipment with you. Use this momentum to start a neighborhood Borrowers Club where people can share resources with each other, be it rototillers, snow skis, or pickleball rackets. If eating food is something you enjoy, host a Taco Tuesday and invite a couple of folks to join you. If others catch the vision, perhaps they’d even be willing to bring a dish to share or even help host the dinner. It doesn’t have to be a large gathering or especially elaborate. Get creative. Go ahead and live that fascinating life you’re already living. Eat good food. Drink good wine. Take unnecessarily meandering walks. Tell cringy jokes. Light candles. Be quiet sometimes. Pour the coffee, brew the tea, and uncork the whiskey. That’s one of the beautiful parts of being made in the image of God; each of us possesses a unique approach and boundless creativity when it comes to figuring out ways to enjoy life. You’re already doing it in all its messy, chaotic glory. Capon, again from The Third Peacock , underscores the fact that our messy lives and chaotic means are our most powerful, potent tools. He wrote, “The whole mixed bag of clever schemes, bright ideas, and gross stupidities is all we have. To be the body of the mystery is to be the body of something you cannot take in hand as such. Accordingly, you take in hand what you can and then relax and trust the mystery to work through you.” Martin Luther agreed: “God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbor does.” When you sense the stirring of that subtle cultural force enticing you, luring you, lulling you into leaning away from those who desperately need you to lean in, take note. Allow yourself, occasionally, to pause and to be inconvenienced for the sake of your neighbor. Within these holy collisions, consider the inefficiency and occasional discomfort as part of the high calling of our existence as salt and light. Within the colliding, beauty hides. It’s there as we greet someone when we’d rather remain silent. It’s in the struggle as we commit a name to memory. It’s in each conversation we choose to enter when we’d rather not be bothered. These small, hospitable acts are hard. They are awkward. They take time. And let’s be real, we’ll mess it up sometimes. I don’t always love Joe perfectly. Sometimes, as you know, I don’t love him very well at all. But relationships are a continual act of creation. Show me any creative endeavor that can be mastered without struggle. Creation is a cyclical path, encompassing both ebb and flow, failures and successes. Embrace the slower path, then. Lean in, friend, and put your elbows on the table. It’s within those meandering, messy moments of life together that we experience true flourishing. For your further reading and listening pleasure: David Foster Wallace: This is Water Charles Taylor: A Secular Age Andrew Fellows’ lecture: Community As a Subversion of Modernity Robert Farrar Capon: The Third Peacock: The Problem of God and Evil Daniel Coyle: The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups If you were born after 2000, this is for you: The sound of dial-up internet.  (Yes, we used to have to listen to that whole thing every time we wanted to check our email.) Need some conversational ideas or inspiration? I can’t promise you either of those things, but I give it a go in these articles: Is Zeus Dead Yet?: A Guide to Having Better Conversations  and Let’s Get Coffee: Navigating the Angst of Existential Loneliness. An Alabama native, Kate was homeschooled before it was even remotely considered normal. She completed her undergraduate degree at Bryan College and went on to graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For eight years, Kate worked as a PA in a trauma and burn ICU before ping-ponging across the nation for her husband’s medical training. She and her family are currently putting down roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kate enjoys homeschooling her daughter and tutoring in her local classical homeschool community. She also finds deep satisfaction in long, meandering conversations at coffee shops, oil painting, writing, and gazing pensively into the middle distance. You can read more of her work at her Substack: That Middle Distance . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books  to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership  is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

by Cindy Anderson Whether you have had weeks of snow with temperatures in the teens or are beginning to see hints of spring, most of us are still experiencing shorter days, which can feel long and dreary. This winter-themed list is the perfect remedy for the winter blues. The titles center on the cold months and celebrate family, community, nature, and time together. They are the perfect reads to gather your kids and enjoy with a cup of tea or some hot cocoa. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," is brought to life by Susan Jeffers's delicate line illustrations. She adds the perfect amount of color throughout the pages, drawing our attention to every detail of the forest and its wildlife. Recommended for ages 4-9 Owl Moon by Jane Yolen Late one evening, a girl and her father go for a silent walk through the forest, hoping to spot an owl. With simple beauty and poetic words, this book shows the special relationship between a daughter and her father as they experience the forest on a winter night. Recommended for ages 2-8 Snow by Cynthia Rylant Cynthia Rylant creates a lyrical winter world by describing the types of snow seen throughout the day. This book celebrates winter, family, and friendship—a perfect cozy read. Recommended for ages 3-8 Snow Horses by Patricia MacLachlan I have mentioned this book on previous lists, but I am adding it here because the pages are awash with snowy detail, making it the perfect winter read. I love the celebration of family, community, youth, and long-time friends remembering their childhoods. It is a favorite book by a much-loved author. Recommended for ages 4-9 A Long Road on a Short Day by Gary Schmidt This is a short chapter book with an old-fashioned feel. Mama wants a brown-eyed cow to have milk for the baby. So, on a cold, snowy day, Papa and Samuel travel throughout the countryside to barter with neighbors to get what they need. Recommended for ages 6-10 A Toad for Tuesday by Russell Erickson Reading this 50th-anniversary edition of A Toad for Tuesday is a delight. Warton, a toad, ventures outside his winter burrow to visit his Aunt Toolia. During his travels, he is captured by an owl who saves him until Tuesday to become his special meal. During the days of waiting, the owl and toad become genuine friends—a charming winter adventure. Recommended ages 6-10 Stories of the Saints: Bold and Inspiring Tales of Adventure, Grace, and Courage by Carey Wallace Since Saint Valentine’s Day and Saint Patrick’s Day are soon upon us, I recommend this beautiful book. Although not all churches celebrate saints in the same way, their stories are valuable. “These stories have been told for generations, some for thousands of years. In this book, they’ve been dramatized but always based on tradition or history. They come from many sources, but they are among the best loved and most endearing stories in the world because of the truth they contain.” The illustrations are bold and stunning; my favorites are Saint Francis, Margaret of Scotland, and Saint Jerome. Recommended for ages 8-all ages 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. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Miriam Przybylo on Unsplash A Winter Book List For Kids

by Randall Goodgame It was unseasonably warm in Nashville this week. Inspired by the prospect of spring, I sowed a tray of candelabra primrose seeds. They make a gorgeous flower, both delicate and showy, with whirling white blooms that tier upward. This is my third year to plant candelabra primrose. And – you’d never know it from my garden. Thankfully, failure sows many crops: knowledge, skill, experience, patience. And for gardeners, success has quite the upside. We bear witness to tiny, slow-motion explosions of God’s most colorful creations. This is not a gardening article, but flower gardening is a lot like scripture song writing, which may be why I love them both so much. Last fall, The Rabbit Room published the Scripture Hymnal , a collection of 106 word-for-word scripture songs written specifically for congregational singing – by myself and a dozen other writers. For over a decade, I’ve witnessed the transformational power of singing scripture through Slugs & Bugs – the children and family music ministry I’ve been running since 2010. And now, the Scripture Hymnal brings that opportunity to the corporate Church. Of course, singing scripture is an ancient practice. Thousands of years ago, the psalms were simply David’s songs. Those scriptures were born as music, and psalm singing remains standard practice in most liturgical churches from Nashville to Nepal. And yet, what the Scripture Hymnal offers is decidedly new. These songs span the whole Bible, including many passages that were not originally written as lyrics. They are stylistically diverse, indexed as traditional, contemporary, or children-and-family worship. And most importantly, they are beautifully singable. This whole project would die on the vine if the songs didn’t work, so in 2023 we gathered a group of thirty-odd worship leaders from in and out of Nashville to pick apart every song. Those worship leaders provided feedback that lifted the whole project. They affirmed songs that were already working, but they also inspired changes as small as a half-step key change, and as large as entire sections re-written to ensure congregational singability. All of that rigor was right and proper. Because if these songs are truly congregational, truly beautiful, and useful and singable, then the Scripture Hymnal is nothing less than a dangerous weapon for spiritual warfare, new and ancient, “with divine power to destroy strongholds.” It makes me want to sing: Hey devil! Get behind me!You’re gonna get under my feet! - CeCe Winans “Hey Devil” Think of how you learned all the song lyrics you know by heart. Your brain doesn’t care if it’s learning Ecclesiastes or Eminem. Memorable music makes the words stay put. And the more of God’s word that we have stored away, the more the Holy Spirit can bring it to mind when we need it. According to a 2019 Lifeway survey, more than half of church-going Christians don’t read the Bible even once a week. A church that uses the Scripture Hymnal provides a significant onramp for getting the Bible inside the biblically illiterate. And for the daily Bible reader, these songs offer a source of refreshment and renewal into the gospel they already know so well. In addition to its biblical engagement/memorization value, the Scripture Hymnal offers an alternative to the disappointing transience of the modern worship song. For so many churches, worship songs that were exciting and new four years ago have vanished today. Likewise, most new songs we are singing today will cycle out within a few years. There are wonderful exceptions, like Sandra McCracken’s We Will Feast In The House of Zion . But in general, the lack of a consistent canon of songs has crippled the modern church like lazy sins of omission. Familiar songs, when they find their power in truth and beauty, connect churchgoers from generation to generation. They root in the mind of the wayward wanderer, and her own tears welcome her back when she finds the courage to return to church and hears a familiar refrain. And finally, these kinds of songs inspire true singing . Have you ever been in a worship service where the congregation all of a sudden sings twice as loud? It’s always because the leader finally added a song like “Come Thou Fount” or “Crown Him With Many Crowns” or “We Will Feast In The House Of Zion” to the worship order. Those songs arouse our passions because They are easy to sing They brilliantly articulate a strain of thought that we long to express They are artistically beautiful And that is the bar we’ve set for the Scripture Hymnal . Every song won’t work for every congregation, but every congregation can find multiple songs that will fit their aesthetic. Of course, all art is personal. Preferences are subjective. But beauty also has a standard, and humans as a group know it when we experience it. Which brings me back to the garden and writing scripture songs. In 2022/2023, I was writing a scripture song every week. And my little family was going through the most difficult time in our history. What started as weeks and months of pain and hardship eventually became years and felt like an eternity. Whenever I got overwhelmed or hit a writer’s block, I took a break and pulled weeds in the garden, still muttering the scripture through the materializing melody. Many times, I realized I had found the melody when I started to cry. The words of scripture would score my soul like a hard rake on dry soil, and when the right melody appeared, it felt like fresh rain. And I wept. Of course, in any scripture passage, all the meaning is already there in the words. Singing doesn’t create more meaning, but it does add something. For me, it brings the meaning inside me in a way that reading doesn’t achieve. It brings the understanding down into my body, into my heart. Sort of like the difference between seeing a picture of a hand and holding a hand. Writing scripture songs feels like flower gardening because the beauty feels revealed rather than created. I don’t make anything in the garden, but I participate – by sowing seed and keeping the soil moist and carefully transplanting and keeping the weeds down. Eventually something beautiful emerges. And I feel the same way about writing scripture songs. The words are already there, and deep down I think the melodies are too. So, why a Scripture Hymnal? Because the most important word in a life of faith is remember. And scripture songs help me remember the gospel like nothing else. So folks that don’t read music can enjoy it too, we’ve recorded every song in the hymnal, and there’s a QR code inside that connects you to the recordings. We’re also releasing the songs in albums of 10-12 songs at a time. And last week, we released Scripture Hymnal Vol 3. All the songs are produced by Kyle Schonewill, and you will recognize many friends of the Rabbit Room among the singers and players. Vol 1 Apple Music Vol 2 Apple Music Vol 3 Apple Music Randall Goodgame is a songwriter, TV show host, and leader of the Slugs & Bugs universe. The Scripture Hymnal is available via Rabbit Room Press, for more information, visit www.scripturehymnal.com . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

Editor’s note: today’s guest post is a poem (and its introduction), inspired by a passage in Isaiah, that weaves together water imagery found in Scripture and includes a sea monster. What more do you need to know? by Isabel Chenot In that day, Yahweh will visit, with his sword, fierce and great and strong, Leviathan, the swift serpent, and Leviathan, the wriggling serpent, and he will kill the Monster which is in the sea. —Isaiah 27:1, translated by Alec Motyer, Isaiah by the Day The dark, chaotic flood was the first thing to be subdued when the Spirit of God moved on the face of the deep. The first subduing word was “Light” (Genesis 1:2,3). But the flood was unleashed again to destroy the morally devastated creation (Genesis 7). After that God promised never again to abandon his floating world to the forces of chaos (Genesis 9:11-17). Water continued to play an important role in the story of redemption. As in the creation narrative when the first dry land appeared, the sea was subdued when God led Israel out of Egypt. They walked dryshod through the depths of the Red Sea, as through the wilderness (Exodus 14, Psalm 106:9). “Many waters cannot quench love,” a wise man wrote, “neither can the floods drown it” (Song of Solomon 8:7, KJV). Concurrent with this theme of water as the element of chaos runs the theme of monsters, from the first chapters of Genesis. Unsurprisingly, after sin and death corrupt the “multi-colored, multi-form” (Edna St. Vincent Millay) creation, the sea becomes the home of terrifying creatures. The prophecy of Isaiah uses these symbols in a section that draws on a historical present to penetrate into the future. In a series of cyclical visions (chapters 13-27), the work speaks about chaotic powers that seek to shape human history, about God’s great victory over them in the prophesied Christ, and about the individual believer’s experience: the life of faith in an unstable, often violent world. In places, Isaiah’s world history achieves almost an aspect of fairy tale: as above, when a sea dragon is slain with a magic sword. Unsurprisingly, the cyclical vision of history in Revelation draws heavily on this section of Isaiah. Revelation too speaks in what we conceive as fairy tales: a princess and a dragon, a monster rising out of the sea, a rider on a white horse, a magic sword. The monster vomits a sea that tries to swallow the princess and her child, but the earth helps her (Revelation 12:15-16): “Many waters cannot quench love.” “He will kill the Monster which is in the sea”—it speaks of a created world that holds no threat to the heir. Over the summer, my husband took me to a few parks by Lake Michigan. One afternoon, we wandered, winding up at a nearly deserted stretch of the clear, gentle water, visible to its sandy bed. When the sun came out, the whole transparent vision (as far out as my eyes could translate) became a mass of shifting gold lines over sand ridges, a net thrown every instant by light. My husband snapped a cell phone image. I cried. Later I wrote a poem—my own sort of inadequate photograph. I wanted to have it for the same sort of keepsake. I understood something of that first word spoken again—not just over the world’s dark flood but over the individual. “Let there be light”—and there was light. As it filigreed the lake around me, a net drawing every shifting instant to awe, I felt almost fearless with vision of what will be. No more mental illness, no more torment of memory, no impure thoughts, no obsessions, rage, dishonesty, pride, despair. Then You will kill the monster in the sea: the bitter sea will feel land gently— a trustful child turning in long fought sleep. So in eventual eased breathing, all of sky’s hues will come to rest: each ridge of sand perfectly visible through fathoms, each little fish around wading feet. I will wade out of my depth— to see colored stones and creatures, glittering, sunken leaves— no fear of monsters, or of nightmare, or of drowning. For this I know, the sea will be pure light around me. What further could be emblemed from what is known for sheer tremoring clarity— pellucid green, wavering winged pink, shattered glass rainbows under every ripple’s corrugated seams? Of the last margin’s infant gold and blue— when illumined sea touches dim land, tracing from memory— a trustful child fingering bedclothes, turning again to dreams.

A year and a half ago, the Rabbit Room started a poetry newsletter on a relatively new platform called Substack and it has been a smashing success. In the 18 months since the poetry newsletter launched, 7,000 people have signed up to join the newsletter. We’ve published more than 100 poems that were read over one million times—including dozens of newly commissioned poems new and familiar poets. Ben Palpant interviewed a score of the most important contemporary poets of faith for the newsletter and next month, those excellent interviews are becoming a book called An Axe For the Frozen Sea, published by Rabbit Room Press. It is one of the many Rabbit Room projects quietly generating a lot of fruit, and it has been a joy to watch the community tell us over and over that they are reading more poetry than ever before. Last month, we launched two more newsletters on Substack, one dedicated to finding, sharing, and continuing to build a community around music and the other dedicated to thought-provoking nonfiction articles . Here they are: Music Newsletter | Articles Newsletter “Culture is not a field that Christians are free to leave fallow, trusting that the soil will bear good fruit and remain free of weeds. We have to go out and till the soil, plant the seeds of better stories, and gather our communities around the fruit that grows.” Why Substack? People do not use the web in the way they did in 2007 when the Rabbit Room blog was launched. Today, we expect the best of the internet to come to us, not the other way around. Yet, more and more, algorithms drive what we see, what we read, and (to a greater degree than we like to admit) what we think. We have more choices than ever when it comes to what we read, yet less choice. The web has become a very noisy place. Substack isn’t a miracle solution that will erase the negative aspects of those changes, but it does provide a way to outflank the algorithms and cut through a lot of the noise by putting the agency back into the hands of the reader, the listener, and the community. Substack combines two things: a blog and a newsletter. Each time we post a poem to the poetry newsletter , everyone who has signed up gets that poem in their email inbox immediately. That simple function lets readers select the voices they want to hear and lets creators of every stripe connect directly with the people who want to hear from them without needing to cater to the ever-changing whims of algorithms. Platforms Come and Go, Vision Remains Platforms come and go because technology and culture are constantly reshaping one another. The Rabbit Room is not married to any single platform. We’re married to a vision. We are going to use whatever platforms and tech tools will help us cultivate and curate story, music, and art to nourish communities for the life of the world. Why? Because The stories we tell one another and ourselves matter. Culture is not a field that Christians are free to leave fallow, trusting that the soil will bear good fruit and remain free of weeds. We have to go out and till the soil, plant the seeds of better stories, and gather our communities around the fruit that grows. And that is what the Rabbit Room is all about. Andy Patton is the creator of the Darkling Psalter , a collection of creative renditions of the Psalms paired with new poems. 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. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more . Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

by Timothy Jones Once I was struggling to discern next steps in what God was calling me to do. (Well, there’s been way more than one time.) Over the years I’ve woven in and out of writing, editing, and pastoring, in ways that have felt both exhilarating and risky, even scary. At this juncture I wrote in my journal, “All I can do, Lord, is wait and allow you to fit all the pieces together. Help me to know that you are working everything out according to your will. Use today to allow me to believe again in your goodness.” During that time I often came to God with my hands figuratively clenched with worry. As I still do, I got antsy. I would mentally fidget. But that morning in prayer I was able to open my fist a bit, to hand over my worries and anxieties to God. Sometimes during that time I would pray a verse from Psalm 5: “In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation.” (Psalm 5:3) That helped. We can get smothered by the routine and the demands that cloud our view and don’t really give life. We can lose perspective and let a nonstop video reel run in our minds with all the possible downer outcomes. For me, at least, this happens especially in the “in-between” times, those spans when our plans have to wait--can only wait. I’m not very good at this. I’d rather see things happen, make things happen. But there’s more than one way to wait. Waiting is not doing nothing. It is not the same as being passive. It is readying ourselves for something more. Second only to suffering, someone has said, waiting may be the greatest teacher. So we listen. Which is how the season of Advent helps. The word Advent, when associated with the church calendar, means appearing or coming or arrival. Advent tells us to prepare—to make room for, paradoxically—the One who has already come. We get encouragement to pay attention to a larger view We get conditioned to a more hopeful outlook. These Sundays and weekdays leading to Christmas have us waiting for one who is yet to arrive in all his fullness, and maybe we forgot to look ahead to. How can we learn as we wait and prepare and watch? Advent reminds us that there is much already happening in God’s realm. Think of it that way, and we might feel more liable to watch while we wait. We can ask God to stand our hearts at attention. We cultivate in our souls an attitude of alertness to see the presence of Christ in our midst. “Life is just a bunch of stuff that happens,” says Homer Simpson. But not if we watch this drama of Jesus’s coming unfold across the stage of history in a little town in the Galilean countryside, in Jerusalem, and finally in history’s grand finale at the end of time. One problem, though, is how we get caught up in ways that make Jesus’s coming harder to see. We live in times, someone said, more characterized by “Blah” than “Ahh.” Our expectations get dulled by doomscrolling. We settle for just getting by or looking out for ourselves more than looking up and around for something Larger. But Annie Dillard, in an out-of-the-way magazine interview, once said, “If there is a God it is not an insignificant fact, but something that requires a radical re-thinking of every little thing.” Even the seemingly small matters: the prospect that attracts us or the fear that nags at us. This is a time to get ready for the infinite God of all things to become the God of everyday life, even the “every little thing” that stirs up our longing impatience. Companies of angels will announce and celebrate the coming birth, but before Jesus comes to us we may have to focus our eyes to catch the glimpses that keep us going. And when it comes to staying awake while we wait, sometimes we need help from others, too, other folks who are also waiting and watching. A body of fellow seekers and waiters. We need not wait and watch alone. We can’t, really. A church small group was discussing, “Why stay in the church?” as recounted by pastor Tom Long. The conversation took place some years ago, before scandals and abuses of power seemed only to intensify the question. But “I’ll tell you what keeps me coming to this church,” one man said, with everyone seeming to lean forward in their chairs to hear what he’d say. “It’s strange, I know,” he went on, “but I get the feeling here, like nowhere else, that something is about to happen.” Something good, he meant. That well describes the hope at the heart of Advent. At the heart of all of life. An unseen Reality is at work, about to happen again. Much of our waiting is, of course, filled with our preferences. Our “wish lists.” Our “I need, I need” moments, like the character in What about Bob? We have this clear idea of how we want things to work out: this job, that neighborhood to live in. We’d like one relationship to end in romance, another needy person to go away and stop bothering us. But our goal in prayer is not to make things happen on our timetable. At such times, we can tell ourselves, as the saying goes, “Don’t just do something; sit there.” Sit. “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him,” as Psalm 37:7 puts it. We do not tame or manipulate God by a spiritual practice or particular intercession. Being still in God’s presence is a way to recall that wider angle, a way to be ready. Prayer primes us to receive a gift we cannot do without. And those who faithfully wait “listen for the sounds and silences of God,” writes philosopher and author Cornelius Plantinga. They also, he might have also said, listen amid the times God seems absent or slow. “They quiet themselves into a kind of absorbency, a readiness to hear the word of God, and also the voice of God, and even some of the silences of God.” Even work at staying put during the apparent inactivity of God. There’s plenty of ways to be glib about all this. We can all supply our own stories when waiting was difficult. We usually see waiting as an inconvenience but sometimes it’s nothing less than a heartache. If waiting is, like suffering, one of our greatest teachers, it’s also one of our severest. I’m thinking of seemingly intractable situations. Moments of horror or panic or deep regret. Still, we keep watching. A woman I know wrote a book titled Graceful Waiting, dealing with her struggles to be patient with God when terrible things happened. “My waiting was anything but graceful,” she told me. “The grace was on God’s part.” That takes some pressure off. To wait means to stop trying always to steer precisely our little boat. Not that that’s easy. Not when we try again and again to put our hand back on the rudder. But God’s grace comes alongside. Waiting while relying on grace helps us see One whose outline of our lives chafes for a moment, who may not work out his plans on our lined-out schedule, but who still waits in the wings, eager nevertheless to hear our whispered longings. “Whenever you pray,” writes the late priest Henri Nouwen, “you profess that you are not God and that you wouldn’t want to be, that you haven’t reached your goal yet, and that you never will reach it in this life, that you must constantly stretch out your hands and wait again for the gift which gives new life.” We ask for grace, for a divine assist, for a gift to help our souls awake to an awareness that, while alert, is not agitated. And in Jesus something happens. Year after year. God, season after season, draws near. Advent reminds us how in Jesus God became a child born amid quiet surroundings. How this birth even carries sometimes hidden, sometimes extravagant effects. Born of Mary, he showed up on the premises to, most of all, make things new and better and more hopeful. Even with Advent’s sober side, even with life’s lengthy waits and the longings that characterize some seasons, we open ourselves to the possibilities of expectant joy. We cultivate a sense that something is about to happen. And we hear an encouragement to be willing to wait for it. 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 several noted books on prayer. He's written for Ekstasis magazine, Fathom magazine, and The Christian Century. He blogs at  revtimothyjones.com  and is writing a forthcoming book on the Trinity, This Question of Love. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

by Mark Meynell Douglas Adams has a unique place in literary history: he was the first to make science fiction funny. His breakout The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy started life as a BBC radio series in 1978 and it made his name. I remember borrowing a friend's set of the cassettes and almost wore out the tape. Adams remained consistently hilarious and provocative until his early death in 2001 at only 49. A Big Hand Please He went on to rewrite the scripts in novel form, which then inspired a further four novels to form A Trilogy in Five Parts . The second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe , transports us by means of a 'time bubble' to the viewing platform at Milliways restaurant. There, diners can enjoy the finest cuisine in the cosmos (while being serenaded by the likes of the band Disaster Area , whose performances are so loud they must perform from an orbiting ship) and observe the future collapse of the entire universe. This happens on a nightly basis. Now, Adams was a vocal atheist and religion was a regular target of his humour. In the book, Max Quordlepleen, the Milliways host, welcomes the various parties to the restaurant and he spots a party of twenty devotees of the Church of the Second Coming of the Great Prophet Zarquon. The spotlights turn to their table while Max goes on to say: "There they are, sitting there, patiently. He said he'd come again, and he's kept you waiting a long time, so let's hope he's hurrying, fellas, because he's only got eight minutes left!" They squirm; the multitudes guffaw. Then with faux-contrition, Max adds: "'No, but seriously though, folks, seriously though, no offense meant. No, I know we shouldn't make fun of deeply held beliefs, so a big hand please for the Great Prophet Zarquon...' The audience clapped respectfully. '... wherever he's got to!' He blew a kiss to the stony-faced party and returned to the centre of the stage." (Restaurant at the End of the Universe, p81) No prizes for guessing who that's aimed at. And after two millennia, who can blame him? What's the point of waiting? It's never going to happen now, surely? Which rather scuppers Advent, doesn't it, the season most characterized by waiting in the church year? The Cosmic Joke If there's one play to embody how much Western culture has been transformed over the twentieth century, a strong case can be made for Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot , which he first wrote in French 1948-9 and then in English for its London premiere in 1955. I've been thinking about it recently because it's enjoying a successful revival in the West End, with Ben Whishaw as Vladimir and Lucian Msamati as Estragon. It is such an ambiguous work: funny but cold, humane but despairing, intensely individualist but cosmic in significance. The two protagonists make resolutions but never move a muscle. Of course, the play's running gag is the reason Vladimir and Estragon are on stage at all. They're waiting for the mystery man of play's title (incidentally, it's unlikely Beckett was representing God since he first wrote in French whose word for God is Dieu). They can't remember if they've met Godot and so have to ask. And they don't know why they must wait for him, but still, they wait. And then, when he fails to arrive, they agree to come back tomorrow. Later, they discuss hanging themselves. After all, the only object on stage is a dead tree (although it somehow gains a few leaves for the second act). But they don't have rope. So they agree to return tomorrow with rope. Vladimir: We'll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes. Estragon: And if he comes? Vladimir: We'll be saved. But moments later, the curtain falls with them motionless. And we know that Godot will never come. Which means...? Out of the Gloom So far, so gloomy. I grant you that, so far, this is less than inspiring and certainly not standard Rabbit Room fare. But consider the Isaiah text that is so familiar at this time of year and so significant for its meaning: The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. ... For to us a child is bor n... (Isaiah 9:2, 6) Think of the context for these expectations: "darkness ... the land of deep darkness." But there will be a birth, a child unlike any other. It's easy to see why it's such a seasonal passage. But we skate too quickly over the darkness. Perhaps, this year of all years, when the world feels more turbulent than ever, we need to take care not to. We need to recognize the darkness for what it is. In the northern hemisphere, Advent means winter: low temperatures, little sunlight, long nights. It is a time of gloom, of greyness, of darkness. And it seems interminable. So we must wait. Waiting... It is no accident that life's darkest moments are often associated with the darkest hours. They are moments of confusion, lostness, despair even. And it's natural to wonder why it is like that. Must it be like that? As Bono cries out in Yahweh , "Always pain before a child is born... why the dark before the dawn?" Because sometimes, the dark feels like it will never end. We yearn for the light, like the night guards of Psalm 130: "I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning." Of course, nobody is going to bat an eyelid if someone longs for sunrise. We know it well enough. The sun always comes up. But what if you're waiting for something that has never happened? Like when you suddenly start building a huge boat in the middle of a desert because you're convinced that one day everything will be several feet underwater? Noah's friends assumed he was a few fries short of a Happy Meal. And they scoffed. Who wouldn't? What if you are determined to believe that because the Son entered time and space once, he will therefore do it again, but this time with glory on a global scale. What if you believe that this is as certain as the rising of the Sun? It sounds as ludicrous as the return of the Great Prophet Zarquon. But that is what the darkness does. It makes the light seem inconceivable and impossible. It even distorts our sense of time, making it feel as if everything has slowed down, perhaps because we cannot get a sense of our space. But the Sun will Rise. And the Son will Come. That is why I love the bridge to U2's " Yahweh " : Still waiting for the dawn The sun is coming up The sun is coming up on the ocean This love is like a drop in the ocean Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor and teacher based in the UK and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

Editor's Note: Part of  Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music . Taking a different theme for each post, the 5&1 series offers five short pieces followed by one more substantial work. The playlist choices are occasionally not found on YouTube, so alternatives are provided here. To listen to the playlist for this post, follow these links to Apple Music , Spotify , or YouTube . Early on in 5&1, we made a brief dip into the wonders of music written for Advent . So this time, we'll do something a little different. Strictly speaking, only one of these pieces is seasonal, but each reflects an aspect of Advent that I explored in a recent post , especially that sense of anticipation or yearning for light felt by those walking in darkness. 1. Eternal Source of Light Divine (Birthday Ode for Queen Anne, HWV 74) George Frederick Handel (1685-1759, German/British) Alison Balsom (trumpet) , Iestyn Davies (counter-tenor) , The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock (cond.) Handel was a German composer (born in the same year as J. S. Bach) who first visited London when around 25, little knowing that the city would be his home for the rest of his life. Queen Anne was on the throne when he arrived in 1711 and he quickly found himself swept up in the whirl of court politics and musical commissions. Two years later, he offered one of his most sublime early works for the Queen's birthday, although unfortunately there is no record of her actually listening to it! She apparently had little interest in music. The piece is a secular cantata (ie a work made up of several short sections, using different instruments, solo singers and choir). Queen Anne's opens with this gorgeous appeal to Sun's creator to ensure it was especially sunny ("to add lustre to this day") for her big celebration (rather necessary in an English February!). It is simple but magical as the two soloists gently cross-weave in between the slowly shifting harmonies. As a musical invitation to bask in sunlight, there is nothing to beat it. This arrangement has one singer, the counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, with the other part arranged and played by superstar trumpeter Alison Balsom. 2. Andante tranquillo (from Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Sz. 106) Béla Bartók (1881-1945, Hungarian) Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Susanna Mälkki (cond.) Of course, the people that Isaiah observed walking in darkness would not have necessarily enjoyed their predicament very much. Like the psalmist's night watchman longing for dawn, they would have been unsettled and yearning for light. So this next piece conveys something of that darkness-induced anxiety. Bartók was a Hungarian composer of particular genius, one who felt the political turmoil of the first half of the twentieth century acutely. He was fiercely opposed to Nazism and despaired at Hungary's incorporation in 1940 into the Tripartite Alliance (between Germany, Italy, and Japan) and fled that year with his wife to the USA. He never really settled, constantly preoccupied with homesickness and worry about his health. He would die in New York soon after the end of the war. Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta was written in 1937 (a celesta is 'bell-piano': instead of hitting wires, hammers controlled by a standard piano keyboard strike tuned metal plates). This opening movement is full of unease, if not dread, but it is more a lurking sensation than something fully fledged or rounded. In dark times, it can often be helpful to find articulations of that darkness as well as alternatives to it. 3. O Radiant Dawn (Strathclyde Motets, 2007) Sir James Macmillan (1959- , British) Apollo 5 Now for the one genuinely seasonal work, one of Macmillan's 14 Strathclyde motets, written between 2005 and 2010 for the Catholic chaplaincy at Glasgow's University of Strathclyde. Here he sets a mediaeval Advent liturgy for unaccompanied choir to music that might initially sound as ancient as its text. However, there are subtle harmonic hints early on that more going is on than first meets the ear. Think of this as a perfect miniature, structured as a kind of a bible sandwich. The central section is a setting of short Isaiah 9 passage for just the soprano and alto lines. Before and after it, the whole choir sings the mediaeval words, which are a prayer flowing out of the Isaiah imagery. Macmillan takes care to let every single word sound clearly throughout. But, the magic comes from small devices that draw our attention. Listen out for what he does with the words: death , light , shone , and especially come . It is a masterclass in expressing Advent yearning 4. Isoldes Liebestod (from "Tristan and Isolde", WWV90) Richard Wagner (1813-1883, German) Gewandhausorchester, Andris Nelsons (cond.) Some may find this inclusion incongruous, if not actually offensive. Wagner is controversial (his vicious antisemitism was part of his appeal for the Nazis) and his life and worldview almost as divergent from Christian orthodoxy as it is possible to be. And yet... It is indisputable that he was a musical phenomenon, one whose innovations uniquely paved the way for twentieth century music. We are actually still in the Middle Ages, however, because Tristan and Isolde is an operatic setting of a twelfth-century romance. It has it all: love, lust, potions, passionate yearning, murder and self-sacrifice. The crucial thing here is that Wagner employs unresolved harmonies that create a constant sense of tension, extending it through the entire opera (which usually lasts just under four hours!). You'll be relieved that this is just an excerpt from the very end, when the music resolves at last , as Isolde is finally united with her beloved Tristan by dying and collapsing onto his dead body. That melodramatic, harmonic consummation provides a profound foretaste of the ultimate consummation, which is of course what Advent is all about. 5. Aspiration, Lento, con risoluzione (Symphony No. 1, "Afro-American") William Grant Still (1895-1978, American) Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi (cond,) It has been a long-time in coming but at last there is growing recognition for the brilliance of African-American classical composers, such as Florence Price, William Dawson, and William Grant Still. All three were associated with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s. Still's 'Afro-American' symphony was the first to be written by an African-American and performed by a first-class orchestra in the USA. It uses many of the standard features of the western classical symphony but incorporates some classic blues harmonies and rhythms. This, the final movement, is titled 'Aspiration', and as such, expresses yet another form of yearning. Still avoids the more predictable chord progressions of western music, but instead weaves through various keys as a jazz musician might. We don't always know where we're going, but we are always carried by the kind of optimism that helps people to persevere through the toughest of circumstances. Lux Aeterna (1997) Morten Lauridsen  (1943- , American) Chamber Choir of Europe, I Virtuosi Italiani, Nicol Matt (cond.) The full-length work this month combines words from the Requiem mass with other liturgical texts inspired by light. Lauridsen was playing with various ideas on these lines but the final prompt to compose this work was the passing of his mother in 1995. It quickly became a firm favourite of choirs far beyond his native Pacific Northwest. Inspired by the great legacy of Renaissance choral music, each of the five movements flows seamlessly into the next one, creating a choral tapestry of sounds. The climactic Alleluias are just marvellous. Introitus In te, Domini, speravi O nata lux Veni, Sancte Spiritus Agnus Dei - Lux Aeterna The accumulative effect is one of serenity and security, inspiring the listener to find comfort in gospel hope, in the light that is promised to the people walking in darkness. Byron Adams, commenting on the piece's impact, sums it up: The ecstatic 'alleluias' that follow express a joyous sense of acceptance reminiscent of the final words of Thornton Wilder's novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey : 'All those impulses of love return to the love that made them ... there is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning? Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor and teacher based in the UK and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

Happy New Year, dear friends. Here is a liturgy for all the beautiful things you will bring into being this year—both works of art and works of living. by David O. Taylor O Holy Trinity, I offer to you all of my heart, mind, soul, and strength this day. In your mercy, hear my prayer, O Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A MOMENT OF SILENCE IS KEPT. O Father, you who are the Creator of all things: I praise you this day and I place myself before you in silence. Speak, for your servant is listening. A MOMENT OF SILENCE IS KEPT. I praise you, O God, for being the Source of Life, the Architect of Creation, the Originator of all good things in Heaven and on Earth. I praise you for making me in your image. I praise you for making me fearfully and wonderfully so. (GESTURING TO EACH PART OF YOUR BODY) Bless now my hands and my feet, my head and my heart, my eyes and my ears, my mouth and my nose. (WITH HANDS OPENED IN SUPPLICATION) Grant me fresh ideas, O God. Fill me with new vigor. Order my steps. Bless my work, so that you may fulfill your creative purposes in and through me. I pray this in the name of the Infinitely Imaginative One. Amen. A MOMENT OF SILENCE IS KEPT. O Son of God, you who are the Word made Flesh, I praise you this day. I praise you for sanctifying the earth in your Incarnation, confirming thereby the goodness of the physical world of wood and stone, wind and water, fire and flesh, metal and matter. (WITH HANDS OPENED IN A GESTURE OF SUPPLICATION) Deliver me from fear, O Christ. Save me from the hour of trial. Rescue me from the pride of life. Great Carpenter, teach me, guide me, aid me in my work today. I pray this so that I may become an agent of your gracious and recreative purposes for this world that you so love. I pray this in the name of the One who is the Icon and Beloved of God. Amen. A MOMENT OF SILENCE IS KEPT. O Holy Spirit, you who are the Lord and Giver of Life, I praise you this day. I praise you for sustaining all things in being, energizing them with vitality, and ushering them to their future and final state of glory. (WITH HANDS OPENED IN A GESTURE OF SUPPLICATION) Purify my soul, O Spirit. Scour my heart. Re-order my mind. Strengthen my body. I pray this so that I might be freed to be playful in my creative labors today as befits my status as a beloved child of God. I pray this in the name of the One who revives and restores me and will bring to completion the good work that he so lovingly began in me long ago. May it be so, O Holy Trinity. Amen. A FINAL MOMENT OF SILENCE IS KEPT BEFORE THE DAY’S CREATIVE LABORS ARE BEGUN. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

by Kate Gaston On a muggy day in June, my husband and I schlepped our earthly belongings from a moving van into our new apartment. We’d rented a gingerbread-style Victorian house in the heart of a coastal New England town. Small towns in Connecticut know how to do charming, and our new home was off-the-scales. Which made it all the more ironic that this idyllic setting would serve as the backdrop for our lives to devolve into, well, a bit of a dumpster fire. Moving is hard. There’s no two ways to slice it. Moving cross-country to a place we’d never been, in which we knew not a soul? Harder still. We’d uprooted from a tightly-knit community for my husband, David, to begin an Infectious Disease fellowship at a fancy institution. We’d been warned the hours of fellowship would be brutal. But with blind optimism, perhaps the only means by which people pursue medical careers, we figured we’d be okay. We were not okay. Previously, we’d been that mildly insufferable family who sat down together around the dinner table each night. But with a husband working 90+ hour weeks, that tradition died a tormented, scrabbling death.  A month or so after arriving in our new city, I hurried my daughter through breakfast on a Sunday morning, and drove us to a local church she and I had been visiting. I’m no stranger to visiting churches, but this was the first time I’d done it without my husband by my side. This would mark the third week in a row I’d visited the same church, and as I pulled into the parking lot that morning, I promised my friendship-starved heart I wouldn’t leave without getting another woman’s contact info. A phone number would suffice, but if I could make a concrete plan to meet up with her for coffee? Even better.  I’m well aware the first few weeks of church visits are an unofficial sizing-up period. The visitor maintains the right to cut and run. The congregation will be polite, but noncommittal. However, when a visitor shows up for three weeks running like I was about to do, it sends a message. Commitment is in the air. It’s game on.  Clasping my daughter’s hand, we entered the sanctuary. I surveyed the room, weighing my seating options. There was a subtle strategy involved in my choice of pew. It was not random. Certainly not. Choosing a pew too far toward the back of the sanctuary would signal a desire for anonymity. Choosing a pew too close to the front might be perceived as too eager. I wanted the Goldilocks zone. I chose a pew on the righthand side of the room, midway toward the front. My choice, I told myself, expressed a level of commitment and intentionality but without any ambitious overtones. Presbyterian ministers are not known for their brevity, so I had ample time to survey the congregation, noting a few women in my vicinity who possessed potential for friendship. Finally, the service drew to a close. After the benediction was given, I slowly, oh so slowly, began to gather my Bible, pen, and notebook. This slowness, like the choice of pew, was intentional. If I moved too quickly, I’d be ready to walk out of the sanctuary before anyone had the chance to notice me, much less work up the courage to talk to me. My daughter, unencumbered by the colossal weight of social dynamics, scampered through the thicket of legs toward the refreshment table.  The organic moment I’d orchestrated was stretching, stagnating into an inert, airless space. There I was. Still sitting alone. Mortification bubbled through my bloodstream. My heart lurched into a rollicking gallop. Paralyzed by indecision in that moment—that critical, pivotal moment! —I prayed someone, anyone, would approach me.  I stood, glancing around. Those women I’d sized up as friendship potential? Gone. Vanished into mauve-carpeted oblivion. Everywhere I looked, clusters of smiling, happy church people turned in upon themselves, closing rank, forming impenetrable social barricades of pleated-front khaki pants and tasteful sundresses.  Panic streaked through my mind. Was there something repulsive about my appearance? Had the hem of my skirt hiked itself up during the sermon? Was it now, at this very moment, tucked into the waistband of my underpants? Be cool, Kate, I thought, and glanced down. Things looked fine from the front. I ran my hand quickly along my rear, performing that classic wedgie-check maneuver known to skirt-wearers everywhere. But no. All hemlines were accounted for. Nothing in my appearance warranted pariah status.  By this point, I’d been standing alone for two full-bodied minutes, grinning in the vacant manner of church ladies and lunatics. It occurred to me I had two options. I could boldly move into the crowd, and strike up a conversation with a stranger at random. Or I could grab my kid and hightail it for the exit. Before I go on, I need you to understand something about me. I am an extrovert, sprung from the loins of generations of extroverts. My forebears set the standard for church small-talk everywhere. In my childhood, seldom did a Sunday morning pass when ours wasn’t the last car in the church parking lot. Conversation is my birthright.  Conversation, my parents taught me, is like a game of tennis. One person serves the ball, the opening question, and the game begins. The other player receives the ball by answering the opening salvo, but then must return the ball back over the net with a question of their own. Each person continues offering this give-and-receive, and if both parties play effectively, the result is the sustained volley of a satisfying conversation. I chose option one. Squaring my shoulders, I marched into that crowded church foyer. If conversations are like tennis matches, I was Federer. I was Agassi. I was Venus and Serena. That foyer? My Wimbledon. I was firing shots over the net like my life depended on it.    I might as well have been serving tennis balls at a herd of antelope for all the good it did me.    My bucket of tennis balls—my conversational arsenal—was spent. I was looking down the barrel of another friendless, interminable Sunday afternoon. And that’s when I spotted her. Across the foyer, I recognized a woman I’d chatted with the previous week. She was my last chance, my only hope for that friendly coffee date I’d been longing for. But she was already moving toward the exit. I grabbed my daughter, elbowed my way through the milling crowd, and out the door. I spotted her climbing into her minivan. I dashed toward her car, and, like a woman unhinged, knocked on her window.  The woman’s eyebrows raised in baffled confusion as she powered down her window. With a self-deprecating chuckle which I hoped communicated I wasn’t trying to murder her, I said, “Hey! Sorry to be awkward! I’m Kate? We met last week? I’m new here? Could I get your phone number? Maybe we could grab coffee sometime?” The woman smiled tightly. She gave me her phone number. She was careful not to make eye contact as she rolled up her window.    I never called her. The whole interaction left me feeling like a big, needy weirdo.    In 2023, the Surgeon General released a 70-page advisory, citing loneliness as a public health crisis. He’s not wrong. Data has been piling up, pointing to a host of morbidities associated with loneliness. The definition of loneliness, according to the American Psychology Association is “a discrepancy between one’s desired and achieved levels of social relations.” This definition makes loneliness seem, well, not so terribly bad. But when you find yourself alone on that barren tundra of social isolation, and you encounter loneliness in the wild, it’s worse, so much worse, than any definition can convey. Loneliness is a mix tape of humanity’s least favorite emotions: sadness, isolation, emptiness, anxiety, longing, despair, boredom, and a sense of being overlooked or forgotten. Smush those emotions into a ball, toss them into the warm, dark, moist environment of the human psyche, and what grows will be loneliness. Loneliness makes you chase people down in parking lots. Loneliness is a steady drip, drip, dripping of psychic pain. Loneliness is a sad clown handing you a balloon filled with heartache.  It’s theorized that loneliness is a vestigial social organ, an evolutionary hanger-on. As humans climbed out of the primordial sludge, we found ourselves profoundly vulnerable, easily picked off by predators. No claws. No teeth. Just soft, squishy, defenseless morsels. The constant threat of being eaten drew humans together, forming a community based on mutual protection. To find oneself outside the protection of the tribe, alone in a perilous world, would have been catastrophic. Eventually, just as hunger makes us seek food, the pangs of loneliness would begin to act as a psychic flare, compelling us to seek the protection of relationships. Though there is less risk today of being devoured by wolves, it is hypothesized this fear of social alienation still haunts our DNA.  I would like to suggest there is something deeper at play, something more complex than an evolutionary trait. Consider with me, for a moment, the Trinity. It’s surprising to me that no license or registration is required to write about the Trinity. I mean, I need a license to catch fish, but not to write about one of the stickiest, most mysterious aspects of God. I’ll tread lightly here, hopefully staying on the happy side of heresy.  The Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—existed outside the confines of time. And within their infinite existence, the three enjoyed perfect oneness, perfect communion, perfect community. If humanity is made in the image of God, it would follow we reflect this same capacity for call-and-response, this same need, desire, and delight in relationship.  Paul F.M. Zahl, in his book Peace in the Last Third of Life: A Handbook of Hope for Boomers, riffs on this very idea. With wry wisdom, Zahl writes of that split between our true self and false self. The true self is that part of us that is eternal, the imago Dei, the soul. That eternal part of ourselves is born looking for connection with God. Though we spend a tremendous amount of money, energy, and time searching for fullness through any number of other distractions, Zahl writes, “…the star to which your true self was unendingly looking to tie its wagon…was actually God, is God, and will always henceforth be God.” No one from that church ever invited me out for a cup of coffee. However, the events of that fateful morning were not without benefit. They led me to create what I’d come to call Kate’s Rubric of Social Responsibility. Whenever I encounter another human, and I’m attempting to decide who is responsible for beginning the conversation, I ask myself this series of simple questions:    Have I been in this room/building/space before?  Do I know more people in this room than the other person appears to know?  If asked, could I direct someone to the bathrooms?  If asked, could I direct someone to the paper towels?  If asked, could I direct someone to the coffee?    If the answer to any of these questions is yes, the responsibility to begin the conversation with the other human is on me. If, however, the answer to any of these questions is no, I progress to a slightly more complicated rubric. Stay with me. It gets tricky here. I ask myself the following two questions:    Did I put on my own pants this morning?  Did I tie my own shoes today?   If the answer to either of these questions is yes, the responsibility to begin the conversation is still on me.  In short, dear reader, introduce yourself to the new person. You will be able to identify this person by the brittle grin on her face and her propensity toward obsessive wedgie-checking. That new person might still be using GPS to find her way home. That new person might be lonelier than she’s ever felt in her life. That new person might be in your church on a Sunday morning in a state of desperation. Whatever the case, it’s likely that new person doesn’t have the emotional margin to stage elaborate courtship rituals to win your friendship. Do the hard thing. Welcome that person. Yes, you’re busy. Yes, it will be uncomfortable. Yes, it will be awkward. But do it. It’s on you. Not the new person. You.  We aren’t required to be everyone’s best friend, but exercising some imagination and extending ourselves toward welcoming the outsider is on us.  Beware the numbing lure of social comfort. Rarely is a social barricade the result of malice. Your participation in the barricade will almost never be a conscious choice. Often the strongest social barriers are constructed out of nothing more than casual indifference, built upon a foundation of apathy.  If you’re reading this and you’re the new person, there are some concrete things you can do to combat loneliness. First, get yourself to a place where humans gather. Throw yourself into the path of other humans. Don’t wait around for people to notice you. If I’ve learned anything from moving across the country multiple times, people aren’t good at noticing the new person. Are you sporty? Join a kickball league. Do you play games? Find the local game cafe. Do you enjoy eating food? Reading books? Cross-stitching cats on pillows? Find other people doing these things and sit down with them. Eat with them. Read with them. Cross-stitch with them.  After you’ve thrown yourself in the path of other humans, go a step further. In his book The Gift,  Lewis Hyde writes, “Spatial proximity becomes social life through an exchange of gifts.” To that end, show up early and make the coffee. Volunteer to re-inflate the kickballs. Pass out the bulletins. Set up chairs before the meeting. Fold up the tables after the meeting. Bring a plate of cookies. Wash dishes after the meal. These acts of service are, in fact, gifts. And it’s true that the gifts of service you offer will transform spatial proximity into social life. Yes, you’re busy. Yes, it will be awkward. But do it, and do it consistently. Side-by-side labor is the golden ticket for building relationships.  This admonition cuts both ways, too. As hosts, we must pay attention to the warp and weave of the hospitality we offer. When we welcome lonely people into our space, of course, we want to communicate that we’ve considered their needs and comfort. However, if there’s no chink in the organizational armor, nowhere to allow a newcomer the chance to contribute, hospitality can actually be hindered. If every task is buttoned up tight, it gives newcomers nowhere to offer their own gifts of service. Frictionless spaces can cause guests to feel that literally nothing is required of them. But that might actually be an impediment to welcoming the stranger.  This will sound strange, but sometimes you must welcome the lonely by giving them something to do.  My family has moved twice more since our time in New England, finally coming to rest in Nashville, Tennessee. Though our first year was challenging in the ways all new places are challenging, it helped to remember that moment, years ago, standing alone in a church parking lot. Experiencing loneliness offered me a chance to grapple with my understanding of hospitality. And now, when I enjoy the richness of community, the fellowship is sweeter because I’ve experienced its absence.  I have been the stranger. Now I am called to welcome the stranger.  An Alabama native, Kate was homeschooled before it was even remotely considered normal. She completed her undergraduate degree at Bryan College and went on to graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For eight years, Kate worked as a PA in a trauma and burn ICU before ping-ponging across the nation for her husband’s medical training. She and her family are currently putting down roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kate enjoys homeschooling her daughter and tutoring in her local classical homeschool community. She also finds deep satisfaction in long, meandering conversations at coffee shops, oil painting, writing, and gazing pensively into the middle distance. You can read more of her work at her Substack: That Middle Distance . Footnotes   Surgeon General Advisory: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf      American Psychology Association definition of loneliness: https://dictionary.apa.org/loneliness   Contemporary Psychoanalysis quotes: Fromm-Reichmann, F. (1990). Loneliness. Contemporary Psychoanalysis , 26 (2), 305–330. https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.1990.10746661 ]   Dr. Freida Fromm-Reichman in an article for Contemporary Psychoanalysis states, “Loneliness seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it…”   Perlman, D., & Peplau, L. A. (1984). Loneliness research: A survey of empirical findings. In L. A. Peplau & S. E. Goldston (Eds.), Preventing the harmful consequences of severe and persistent loneliness  (pp. 13–46). National Institute of Mental Health. For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

by Matt Conner Skye Peterson was in search of an adventure. As a songwriter born to a songwriter and a family steeped in multiple artistic expressions and encouragement, Skye tapped into the wisdom of the trade rather quickly in her own journey. Near the top of the list was the emphasis on experience over education, at least when it came to songcraft. The songs would flow from there. All The Difference (2024) is the resulting recording, a body of work informed by an overseas adventure of living in a castle, immersing herself in the Scriptures, and committing herself to a community near Carnforth, England. Skye’s newest set of songs asks tough questions while dodging easy answers and wrestles with the faith she’s been handed. Just as in her previous work, Skye’s compositions feel like beautiful, honest companions for the sojourner committed to an authentic journey. We recently sat down with her to hear more about the experiences behind the album, the value of vulnerability, and the artists she’s into most these days. Matt Conner: Growing up in such a musical family and with friends and neighbors so much a part of the industry in Nashville, was it always clear you’d want to make music of your own? Did you ever kick against that idea? Skye Peterson: I knew that I've always loved writing songs and I've always loved to share them. I knew that would never stop happening regardless of whether or not it was my career path. I have always written to process and to pray—for other people, for my sake, and also for God. So there are lots of different reasons I would write. Over the course of the last couple of years of actually doing it for my job, I've seen these other kinds of motivations sneak in there—approval or attention or money. As a kid growing up, it was almost this selfish thing. Something bad or good has happened to me, so I'm going to sit down at the piano and write a song about it. I do think being surrounded by songwriters and musicians allowed it to never be a question in my mind that it was possible to follow it as my actual career path. Which is cool, because anywhere else in the world, I don't think it's a given that you could do it for work. I went to Bible school in England. I didn't go to music school on purpose, because the songwriters I loved most in the world didn't go to music school. They just wrote a bunch of songs and experienced a lot of life and wrote about that and got better the more they did it. That was the advice that was given to me by my dad and several others. They all said, ‘Don’t go learn how to write a song in a class. Go and experience some life, live somewhere else, and do a hard thing. Then that will be your teacher. It’ll teach you how to write songs.’ Also, it was a Bible school, so of course you’re hearing all sorts of Bible stories and having lots of really good yet hard conversations. You're meeting Jesus all over again and in all sorts of new and surprising ways. That’s a lot of material to work with. MC: By the way, where was the Bible school? SP: It was called Capernwray Hall and it was in Northwest England, kind of in the middle of nowhere. MC: That experience, that's still pretty recent for you. What did you expect that to do for you in advance and how much of that was true on the other side? SP: I expected to leave with more answers about God and how God works, and I think I left with more questions. Part of their philosophy, I think, is that they don't want to give you the answers. They want to teach you how to ask questions and how to actually think about things, instead of just teaching you the information. So that was surprising. I left with a clear understanding that I was loved, and also a bigger understanding of how broken I was. Both of those things got bigger simultaneously. You also read through the whole Bible while you're there, and there are only 60 students who are all in your same kind of life stage. Everyone's asking the same questions. It was so healthy for me to be able to actually ask those things and to learn how to have grace for myself and be brave enough to accept that God is a mystery, and maybe mystery is good for us. Maybe not knowing means there's more room for faith and trust and belief rather than certainty, knowledge, and assurance. MC: It feels like all those themes are wound through these songs. Does that make this set of songs like the proper unpacking of that whole year? SP: I think that year influenced a lot of these songs for sure. The album centers around God's consistency and God's kindness. One of the things I wrestled with over that year and the years following was the idea that God is either irrelevant to the world or unkind to the world and the people in it—and I didn't like either of those options. God's been slowly proving me wrong since I knew how to articulate those fears of mine. The album follows a steady theme of his consistency—that whenever I mess up or I don't understand, it doesn't mean that he's not here or close or kind. I had these big expectations of what God speaking to me would be like. We hear lots of those big stories—a burning bush, a pillar of fire, these very obvious, in-your-face, hard-to-ignore things. To be honest, most of the moments I feel God speaking to me have been as small as a daffodil in my front yard or a kiss on the cheek from my husband. These small, ordinary things I now attribute to God’s kindness rather than coincidence. And they're actually not small at all. Daffodils—time after time, year after year—keep coming up again and getting bigger and better and more beautiful. They’re these literal little miracles that come out of the ground. It doesn't make any sense, and that's why it's so good. So a lot of the album is about learning how to see him, how to view ordinary things as not ordinary. MC: There's a real willingness in these songs to frame yourself in a lesser way— you’re not the hero at all. It’s documenting a humble moment or admitting what you need to unlearn. Is there any way that you're uncomfortable with putting yourself out there for public consumption? Do you ever think about the way you’re framed in these things? SP: My dad always said, “If you're the hero of your own story, you're telling it wrong.” And that voice has been in my head for a long time, telling me how to be honest in my music and not in an uncomfortable way. This album might be that. What’s been on my mind a lot lately is how it's easy for Christian artists to be dishonest. Whenever you're a songwriter, you can sum up the three-and-a-half best versions of everything you've gone through and put it to beautiful music. You're not singing about the whole time. And so I've wanted to paint the whole picture of what my faith experience has been like, which doesn't have to be like everyone else's. The scariest song for me to put on that record was the song called “Calling You My Lord.” I mean, the first verse is, “I'm positive I need you / I'm pretty sure I want you / but I don't know if I can really say I trust you.” That’s just like straight-up scary to admit. Yet whenever I played that song live, I've seen a lot of people nodding along. MC: Are you surprised when that happens? SP: Yes, I am. It's easy to feel alone when you're doubting. I just don't think that's the case. I think it's easy to put on a brave Christian face and I think that can be good to do sometimes—to put your body in a posture like, “No, I'm going to believe this, even though deep down I have a hard time believing this. I'm going to say out loud that I believe this.” My goal is to lead these thoughts somewhere else. Ultimately, I hope that these songs point back to the cross, to what Christ has done and how he's redeemed those questions, and how he actually is the answer to every question I have. So that song kind of admits that I have a hard time believing in him and then it ends with, “But I'm still here and I'm still calling you my Lord and I'm not going anywhere.” I'm staying here. Regardless of all of my doubts over the years, there’s been the steady heartbeat of God's love that has been impossible to ignore. It's like my lifeline; it keeps me going and I don't know why. Why do I keep writing songs about him if I don't love him, if I don't really mean it? Do I really mean it? I think I do, because I keep writing songs about it. MC: What does the cutting room floor look like on this? Were there a lot of songs to choose from for this or do you pick a few and then really hone in on them? SP: I pick a few and hone in on them. This album was kind of slow to make because I wanted to choose the right songs. I waited until I wrote the next right song to record it. So the songs are probably written within like eight or nine months. We'd record them one at a time after I had written them, so there aren’t a lot of unfinished ideas lying around. MC: What do you want people to take away from listening to this album? SP: I want people to take away that God loves to give us gifts and that God is a lot more generous in his gift-giving than I think we often give him credit for. And so I hope that not only is this record one of those gifts from God, but I also hope that it will help them see that God is everywhere, regardless of whether or not we see it. I think that God's gifts are still given even if they aren't received at the moment. MC: We talk a lot about lyrics and themes and things like that when we're talking with artists in the Rabbit Room, but can you take me through some musical touchpoints for you? SP: I love Anais Mitchell. She's like my songwriting hero. MC: So have you seen Hadestown ? SP: I have. It’s really good. Well, sad but good. So Anais Mitchell is huge. I like Phoebe Bridgers, but I also love Sandra McCracken and Sara Groves and Jess Ray and Taylor Leonhardt. Those kinds of Christian artists I think are really great and are more in line with what I love to actually write. Listening-wise, I mainly listen to Anais Mitchell and Jon Foreman lately. MC: Anything else that you would want people to know about the album? SP: I would love to say Asher Peterson recorded or produced the record. He was a big part of choosing the songs and bringing them all to life. Also, Ben Shive produced a song and my friend Jon Guerra produced a song too. I would love people to know that it wasn't just me. It's a team effort. Listen to All The Difference Skye Peterson is a singer-songwriter based in Nashville, TN. All The Difference (2024) is her second full length album. Her new project “Fielder,” a duo with fellow sing-songwriter Addison Agen, is putting out its first single later this year. Matt Conner is a former pastor and church planter turned writer and editor. He’s the founder of Analogue Media and lives in Indianapolis. You can hear more from Matt on The Deepest Cut podcast and The Resistance . For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .

by the Rabbit Room Editor and Contributors We polled Rabbit Room friends and contributors and sourced a slew of recs for our annual “best-of” post. Here are the songs, shows, books, articles, poems, and movies that kept us turning pages late into the night, fired our imaginations, and took our breath away this year. Poetry Let’s start with poetry. If you subscribe to the Rabbit Room poetry Substack , you’re familiar with these poems already. These are some of the most-read and best-loved poetic gems we’ve shared this year: Anna A. Friedrich’s series of poems inspired by the lives of Elijah and Elisha Tania Runyan’s Advent poetry series Mischa Willett’s “Dream At Bethel” Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s poem “Flannery’s Writing Advice” Anna A. Friedrich’s “The Matrix of Tea Is Water” If you want even more poetry, Mischa Willet has more than enough poetry recommendations to fill your reading list for 2025, too. ( Or anthologies, if you prefer. ) Books I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger Why Everything That Doesn't Matter Matters So Much by Andi Ashworth and Charlie Peacock The Word Made Fresh by Abram Van Engen Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien by John Hendrix Lightfall: The Dark Times by Tim Probert It was a banner year for our very own Rabbit Room Press with Jonathan Roger’s 20-anniversary re-release of the Wilderking Series , Randall Goodgame’s Scripture Hymnal , Lanier Ivester’s Glad and Golden Hours , Every Moment Holy Vol. 3 pocket edition, and A. S. Peterson’s A Christmas Carol and The Hiding Place theatre scripts. Articles We had the honor of publishing the work of scores of writers and thinkers this year. Here are a few of our top posts from 2024. “Is Zeus Dead Yet: A Guide to Having Better Conversations” by Kate Gaston “On Caregiving and Creativity” by Heather Cadenhead “The Age of the Slash: How One Band Learned to Have Fun Wearing Lots of Hats” by Chris and Jenna Badeker “Lessons In Repurposing Trauma from The Bear, Season Three” by Daniel Jung “Poetry’s Mad Instead” by Abram Van Engen “The Three Layers of Conflict In Community” by Andy Patton` “‘What Was I Made For?’—Billie Eilish as Gen Z Icon” by Liz Snell “A Fellowship of Burning Stars: The Hidden Beauty of Creative Community” by Amy Baik Lee “A Conversation With Poet Scott Cairns” by Ben Palpant “The Consoling Alchemy of the Humble Winter Soup” by Lanier Ivester Songs Feast on these beautiful and profound songs from some of our favorite musicians. Hope Newman Kemp, “Keep on Going” Taylor Leonhardt, “Belly of a Whale” Zane Vickery, “Hydrangea” Wild Harbors, “Break My Heart” The Porter’s Gate, Jon Guerra, and Sandra McCracken, “The Kingdom of Jesus” Charlie Peacock, “Get Yourself Some” Kacey Musgraves, “The Architect” Skye Peterson, “God is in no hurry” Addison Agen, “What Would’ve Changed” Jon Foreman and Joy Oladokun, “In Bloom” Vampire Weekend, “Hope” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “As the Waters Cover the Sea” The Scripture Hymnal, “Those Who Trust In The Lord” Leon, “Ain’t Got Nothing On You” Jess Ray, “Deserve” Listen to these songs and the rest of the list on our “ Best of 2024 Playlist .” Shows The people we asked mentioned a handful of great shows, but these three kept coming up in the responses time and time again. The Bear season 3 ( read Daniel Jung’s article on trauma in season 3 ) Rings of Power season 2 All Creatures Great and Small season 5 Movies And last but not least, here are three blockbusters and one relatively unsung gem of a Flannery O’Conner bio-pic: Wildcat Inside Out 2 The Wild Robot Wicked part 1 For more resources on art and faith, sign up for our other newsletters: Poetry , Music , and Articles . To support the work of the Rabbit Room, join us by becoming a member. Your membership helps fund everything from publishing new books to new podcasts , events , poetry , articles , theatre productions , conferences , and more . Membership is vital to our flourishing, and we’d love for you to participate. Click here to join or learn more .