What are you looking for?

I have in my possession something I am willing to wager no one else reading these words has. My senior year of college, I spent a semester studying in Israel. My group of friends had a three day weekend and no plans, so we decided that we would go camping by the sea. We randomly picked a place along the Mediterranean coast on our travel map: the ancient Persian port city of Dor. We packed three days’ worth of supplies, hopped in a taxi, showed the driver the map, and set off. After three hours of driving on a highway, the driver turned off onto a sandy path (which hardly constituted a road), drove about two miles and stopped, saying, “Here you go.” All around us was deserted beach. No city, no vendors, no nothing. Just beach. We didn’t understand that the Old English typeface labeling Dor on the map meant that it was not an actual city with people in it and stuff, but a ruin. So there we stood, six American students alone on a deserted beach in the middle of Israel. It was awesome. That night we slept in sleeping bags on the beach under a starry sky I can’t even begin to describe. The next morning, a few of us decided to go for a run up the beach. As I was running, a glimmer of light by the water caught my eye. I stopped, and there, half-buried in the sand where the water lapped up on the shore, was a bottle, and in the bottle was a rolled up piece of paper. I had found a genuine message in a bottle! Here’s a picture of the actual one: What is written on a message in a bottle found like that? Maybe a distress call from shipwreck survivors, or a plea for help from a kidnapping victim being carried off by international terrorists. Maybe it contained the map to an otherwise lost treasure. It might have been some desperate person’s last ditch effort to reach the outside world hoping that they might be sought and found. Lives might have hung in the balance! What would you have done? What did I do? Well, I didn’t have a corkscrew, and I certainly didn’t want to ruin my find by shoving the cork into the bottle. So I waited. For two months, I waited. Does this frustrate you? My defense was, “Look, its complicated. I know the message could be important, but isn’t it also important that I get to preserve my souvenir?” The message could’ve changed my life or saved someone else’s, but as far as I was concerned, the sheer luck of finding the bottle itself was enough of a life-change for one day. So I stuffed it away in my pack. I believe that when it comes to worshiping the Lord, this is where many of us are. We’ve been given a “message in a bottle,” a declaration from Christ Himself that we were made for relationship with God, but we hesitate to engage Him because our situation is complicated. Maybe we learn along the way to appreciate, even treasure the outward trappings of worship, but don’t really engage the message contained in it. Maybe we even financially invest in acquiring worship music to listen to. But when it comes to really worshiping God, bowing our hearts and selves in reverence and adoration before Him, we seldom do. All the trappings of religion have complicated things. But Jesus seeks to uncomplicate things and engage our hearts with an invitation to quench a thirst we may not even know we have—thirst for life as it was meant to be. And we find this best in worship. Augustine said, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” We were created for the presence of God. And His word, like a message in a bottle, tells us of what is to come in the glory we await: “And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.” Revelation 21:22-25 In glory there will be no temple because the Lord God Himself will be the center of worship. If you are in Christ, you will be there for all eternity. This life is a vapor, and well over 99.999% of your existence as a believer will be in the glorious presence of God, the Lover of your soul. And your reputation will not precede you there. Everything will be as it was always meant to be, and you will know true worship, unfettered by the complications you feel even now. As glorious as that will be, the great news for today is that our God, right here and now, seeks worshipers who will worship Him in Spirit and in truth. To worship the Lord is the invitation to a foretaste of the Glory you will know forever. But it not enough to just possess this message. Engage the message.

Apart from faith it is impossible to please God. Without faith, we cannot please Him. Think of without in the older sense as the opposite of within rather than not having. If I am without my house, I’m outside it. If I’m within a house, I’m inside it. From within faith it is possible to please God. Outside of reliance, faith, trust, it’s impossible to please Him. Think of God as the power outlet, yourself as the machine, and faith as plugging in the power cord. Or faith as turning the key in the ignition. Many Christians spend all their time pushing their Porsche down the freeway. “What are you doing?” “Well, I’m tryin’ to be like Jesus. You should, too. You’re not pushing your Porsche hard enough. It’s not fair.” We need to get in and turn the key. Everything else in the Christian life flows from that. Pushing the Porsche doesn’t please God; it’s way too slow to effectively get where we need to go; we know that, deep down. Exerting that kind of fleshly effort on something that’s completely useless is…well…Hell. Talk about burnout! Turning the key starts the engine of Christ, and the fuel of the Spirit, and the Father says, “Let me show you what this thing can do.” That’s what pleases God – getting in and starting the engine. We can intellectually believe God’s promises and yet never appropriate them, never take hold of them in a personal way. The demons have that kind of belief. They believe God keeps his promises; that’s why they tremble, because He has promised them condos in the lake of fire. Think of our children. If they were afraid of us, and constantly putting on a show of deference and doing whatever we said (and only when we were watching), treating us like fearsome tyrants, it would annoy and sadden us. They would not be operating from within faith; within fear would be more like it. It might make some of their actions look good on the outside, but we’d see the heart of their actions was fear and not faith. From that attitude it would be impossible for them to please us, no matter what they did. What we really want is for them to trust us, to rely on us, to take us at our word. If they do so, their actions will spring from that faith in us. They will obey, not because they’re afraid of punishment, but because they trust us. God blesses us according to that trust attitude. “According to your faith, it shall be done unto you.” When our kids trust us and do as they are asked, we bless them, because we can trust them with blessing. If we rely on God to take care of our needs, we give obediently because we trust – and He blesses us back. God’s design, His plan for each of us, is to soak into all those hard pockets of unbelief in us, to bring us into total reliance on His Word, His power, His Spirit in us. And when we do that, when we walk in total reliance, He manifests Himself through us to others. That, right there, is the entire point of the Christian life. But to get from A to Z, faith is the way. It’s “by faith from first to last. ” The Christ-ian road begins with an act of faith that springs from a recognition of our need. I need a Savior. I make the leap: Jesus, you are my Savior. And so by faith He becomes Savior to me – I appropriate His Blood. The rest of the Christian life is the same. “Did you get the Spirit by works of the Law, or by the hearing of faith?” “As you began in the Spirit, so walk in Him.” Where I see need in myself, He is the supply, because “in Christ I have everything I need for life and godliness.” I appropriate the eternal reality here-and-now by faith, by reliance on God and His Word. He is my indwelling power, my love, my passion, my peace, my purity – right here, right now. All I need to do is rely on Him, to stand in faith that He cannot lie, and soon the muddied trickle of God’s life through me becomes a brook, then a stream, then a river of living water for others. Apart from reliance there can be no pleasing God. 1Cor 3 says that we have to take care to build properly on the foundation that was laid in us. Christ is the foundation, laid by faith – “Jesus, thank you that you are my Savior; forgive my sins and come to live in me.” That’s a faith act. Now, if we go on and build on that with works of our fleshly effort, striving to keep God’s approval by what we do and don’t do, we will make it into heaven, but only as refugees escaping through the flames. Building with works of human effort on top of that initial faith act is like building with wood, hay, and stubble. Those materials can’t withstand the Consuming Fire that is our God. Don’t get me wrong. If we trust God and rely on His Word, He’ll produce His good works through us. We will bear fruit – but it will not be our own fruit. It’ll be the fruit of the Spirit. We will have love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, humility, faith – and that fruit of the Spirit coming through us will refresh everyone we know who takes and eats of it. But we don’t focus on life change. We put our mind on trusting God. We are transformed by that mind renewal. We can think of the Ten Commandments this way: If I trust God as knowing what’s best and that He has only my good in mind, as a natural outcome of trusting Him I’ll have no other gods before Him. If I trust God as my All in all, that in Him I have everything I need for life and godliness, that reliance will keep me from making idols out of money, my job, my house, my possessions, my wife or kids, my intellect, my talents – or myself. As a natural outflow of trusting God I won’t misrepresent Him or use His name flippantly or in swearing; His name will be too precious to me to do that, because my life depends on His name. If I trust God, who said in Hebrews that I am to cease from my own works and enter into His Rest, then I will learn to rest – not merely on Sunday, but I will cease from all my flesh-effort striving, coping, and trying to make life “work.” I’ll enter into reliance on Him and cease from fleshly striving in an eternal Rest that begins here and now. If I trust God, who is sovereign, I’ll honor my father and mother because I’ll know that God placed me with them for good eternal reasons. If I trust God to be my indwelling Love, that trust will keep me from murder – from taking someone’s life in revenge or passion – because “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” It will protect me from hating anyone in my heart because I recognize the Holy Spirit’s Love for them as inside me and being my permanent possession, and I rely on that Love. If I’m trusting God to be my indwelling Purity, that reliance will keep me from committing adultery – even in my mind. Trusting Him as my indwelling Purity causes that Purity to flow into my thoughts and attitudes. If I trust God to be my Supply, that reliance will keep me from stealing for any reason whatsoever. If I’m really trusting God to provide all my needs, that reliance will keep me from lying – which includes fudging on my taxes and saying “I was sick” when I wasn’t. If I trust God, that trust will keep me from wishing I had other people’s stuff. I will trust that God has given me exactly everything I really need. It’s the devil’s way to flip all this around backwards. “Prove the reality of your trust by focusing on your behavior. Try to be more like Jesus” (When I say we’re to live by faith, I wish I had ten bucks for every time I’ve heard some variant of “You should at least be trying!”). We end up putting our attention on doing this and not doing that, rather than seeing our behavior as a symptom of what we’re putting our trust in. Change what we’re trusting in, and the doing follows the trust. We will manifest the life of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit in us when we trust that He is our wellspring, our Source of living water, our Life, our Love, our All in all.

“Have you seen any good movies lately?” I get that a lot. It seems that people somehow know that film is one of my passions. How about you–have you seen any good movies this year? As 2007 draws to a close, I thought it would be fun to start a Rabbit Room dialog about movies that inspired our respective lives in 2007. Like finding and raising the Titanic, great art must be tenaciously pursued. Finding the great ones doesn’t usually happen without some advance thought. A random appearance at the local multi-screen cinemaplex doesn’t always yield the goods either. With eighteen choices, one might think otherwise. If I’m staying home, I like Netflix. Their selection is without peer and they don’t charge for late returns. The theater is great, but the convenience of home, a big screen, and a pause button if somebody gets chatty–hey, that’s not all bad. More than once I’ve reflexively tried to pause the theater projector. I’m also fortunate that in Omaha we have a couple of theaters that specialize in running indie, foreign, documentary and classic motion pictures; the Dundee, anachronistically sporting only one screen, and the newly opened and constructed Ruth Sokolof Theater, a nonprofit organization featuring presentation and discussion of film as an art form. In July of this year, the two-screen theater was opened. It’s located within the world famous Saddle Creek Records development in downtown Omaha. It’s concurrently serves the passionate cineaste and casual filmgoer . It’s a classic partnership of the public and private sector, including donations and support from famous director Alexander Payne, who’s hometown is Omaha. Several years ago on a test marketing basis, AMC offered a mind boggling deal: All the movies one customer can view for a monthly fee of $18.95. The deal lasted for about one year. It was pretty great. As a consumer, I’m always looking for superb value, and this was surely one of the best I’ve encountered. Honestly–in my case–AMC probably made up their lost movie revenue in buttered popcorn and Diet Coke sales (I know, I know, there is something incongruent about a menu of Diet Coke and buttered popcorn–leave me alone), but I never had to concern myself with getting enough value. After the first two movies, the rest were, uh, popcorn butter. With all of it’s benefits, the deal did have at least one disadvantage. I saw far more clinkers than I ever had before. With such a flat fee arrangement, I didn’t hesitate to venture into movies I otherwise would avoid. And yes, I could always walk out, and did a few times. Still, more often than not, I unconsciously endured the mind numbing flicker of more duds than I should have. Besides, there’s something not quite right about eating buttered popcorn outside of the theater, you see. Having spent what I thought was so much wasted time on innumerable movie miscues, I finally realized that the junk had a purpose: they made me appreciate the great ones all the more. Through the years, I’ve developed a sixth movie selection sense involving a weird mishmash of intuition and cinematic elbow grease to lead me to the great ones. No doubt, you have a method for separating the wheat from the chaff yourself. So without further dawdling, let’s take advantage of our respective perspectives–however developed and wherever utilized–and discuss what we’ve seen in 2007. 1. The Illusionist – Man, this one was fun. It features unbelievably compelling performances from Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. Giamatti deserves an Oscar for his performance. That guy rocks the freakin’ Casbah. The rest of the cast is solid. Pure and simple, this is just a great story, told really well. The end twist is the best I can recall since The Sixth Sense. You will see one hundred movies before you notice cinematography this good. The textures and colors are stunning. It’s the kind of movie that you’ll want to pause the movement just to admire the still frame. 2. Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno) – See it! It’s insanely good. It is rated “R” for significant violence and a few cuss words, so if your conscience forbids seeing a movie in that category, please take note. The violence is significant, but I thought was germane to the story. Also note that it’s a Spanish movie with subtitles. If your cinematic tendencies don’t run down that road, beware. But for those that like movies as art and beauty, this one is not likely to disappoint. The movie is faithful to the genre from which it borrows. Fantasy and reality are blended in in a most compelling and unique way. 3. Bridge to Terabithia – It was far better than I expected it to be. The trailers sold the movie as a special effects collage and there is some of that, but I appreciated the way in which the human aspect of the film blended so seamlessly with fantasy elements. Kids’ movies are often filled with things kids would never say or do. This is ostensibly a kids’ movie but will capture the hearts of adults who appreciate beauty, narrative, drama, and imagination. And the dialog is so well-written, you won’t have to roll your eyes when the young actors talk. One of the really great characteristics of the way this movie was made, is the way imagination and fantasy are fused with the tangible events of any given day. As occurs in the hearts and minds of real people, the fantasy elements are often mingled into the nooks and crannies of their real world. When I was a little boy, I was afraid of the devil. I saw and heard him several times. I know I did. I used to conjure up some unbelievably beautiful worlds by something as simple as roughly rubbing my eyes with my fists. Once when I was sick, I dreamed that there were strings attached to my body, reaching out all over the world to others that could make me well. These kinds of things were palpable parts of my childhood. Whether scary or sublime, the fantasy elements of this movie are real without being cartoonish–just like fantasy weaves its way into the lives of real children/people. I have not read the book on which the movie is based, so though I expected a twist, because it is telegraphed in kind of a general way, I was still caught by surprise when what happened, happened. It’s a triple–maybe quad cry movie. Pain, disappointment, fear, sadness, ache, embarrassment are balanced with friendship, love, kindness, forgiveness, and redemption. 4. Amazing Grace – It isn’t as stark and explicit as Amistad which also depicts slavery, but is an unbelievable story of persistence and courage. There were some truly excellent dramatic performances from the actors involved. The standout performance was that of Albert Finney, the same guy that played older Ed Bloom in Big Fish, another great movie. Finney plays John Newton, the one time slave ship master who converted to Christianity, became an Anglican minister, and of course wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.” In trying to recall, I think Amistad is the better of the two by a fair margin, but both projects are good. Amistad was the more obscure story of the two and probably more historically accurate in terms of the story, as I understand it. While Amazing Grace graphically describes the slave trade inhumanity, Amistad graphically shows it. By the way, after seeing Amazing Grace and reading a few reviews, I learned that one of the producers of this film is actress Patricia Heaton, better known for her role on Everybody Loves Raymond, one of my favorite sitcoms. Like another actor who’s work I appreciate, Jim Caviezel, she has been involved in a variety of projects–in entertainment and otherwise–supportive of causes that benefit children, the poor, and other causes often endorsed by believers. Heaton says, “I was raised Catholic and I’m Presbyterian now, but I’ve always been a Christian regardless of denomination. I believe that Jesus is the way.” 5. Blood Diamond – Leo D. is no Harrison Ford, but he continues to surprise me with his ability to play prototypically macho characters believably. There are good performances all around. I appreciate Leo’s talent in spite of myself. It’s a little embarrassing to say that I admire his work, but I do. In a movie that purposes to expose the atrocities of exploitation, it sure seems like the extras providing the movie violence were being, uh, exploited. Certainly not to the extent of the blood diamond buyers, but exploited nonetheless. Good narrative, redemptive plot, a little too neat and tidy for my taste, but a blockbuster is not an indie film, so we take what we would expect from a blockbuster and be thankful for the little surprises that one wouldn’t expect to observe in a blockbuster. 6. Opal Dream – I loved this movie. I was hard-pressed to find a reviewer that agreed with me because most of them were uncomplimentary, but unfairly, I thought. Yes, the director was a bit literal in his interpretation of the material. It was a narrative that was told in a pretty straightforward way without ambiguity or allusion. I have no problem with that. If there’s a great story to be told, sometimes that’s all that’s necessary. Faith and hope were highlighted, but I was particularly moved–whether it was intended or not–by the implication that we all have an intense need to have those we love believe in us, despite our sometimes outlandish and unusual quirks. And when one has the compassion to have faith (like the brother, for one) in another, even when it isn’t warranted or deserved–it can be profoundly moving (talk about a wonderful human reflection of divine grace). My tear ducts were opened three times during this film. 7. Copying Beethoven – This movie is probably closer to fiction than the truth, but I loved it anyway. Ed Harris was great as was Diane Kruger. And though the director may have mixed up historical fact, I’d like to believe that Ed Harris nailed Beethoven’s twisted, passionate personality dead-on. Some of Beethoven’s dialogue nearly made we want to stand and cheer: The vibrations on the air are the breath of God speaking to man’s soul. Music is the language of God. We musicians are as close to God as man can be. We hear his voice, we read his lips, we give birth to the children of God, who sing his praise. That’s what musicians are. I appreciated and identified with Beethoven as a God-loving and God-fearing man–a man that wanted to please God, but often failed and understood the beauty of grace. 8. Once – I categorize this one as an Irish folk musical. It was filmed in Dublin and received rave reviews at Sundance. It plays as a low-budget indie effort (which it is) and feels more like a movie with good narrative and dialogue than a musical, per se. The music is pretty good. There are some nice tunes, excellent harmony, and decent playing. The movie depicts a struggling singer/songwriter who is given inspiration and courage from a new acquaintance that he meets on the street. Rather than providing a conventional outcome, we are treated to something more bittersweet, which is all the more reason to love indie films–their lack of convention. My only criticism is that I had a hard time understanding all of the words spoken in the Irish brogue dialect. If you pick it up on DVD, I recommend you consider viewing it with English subtitles. 9. The Spirit of the Beehive – It’s a Spanish film from the 70s, some say the best one of that era. It’s an allegory which is filmed beautifully. Though the landscape and architecture of the buildings are stark and old, somehow it is framed in a way that makes it beautiful. Some of the shots last so long, it’s as if the director is lost in the beauty of the moment and wants us, the audience, to see it for just one moment more, so we might linger in the moment of beauty. There’s something almost romantic with the way the director allows the camera to linger rather than rushing headlong into the next shot. 10. My Best Friend – It’s a sad, but warm French movie about a man who discovers that he doesn’t have any friends. Quite unexpectedly–though he is surrounded by many people–he realizes that he is lonely. There’s some goofy, but fun popular culture in this one. I saw this one at the Dundee Theater. 11. 10 Items or Less – This film is another prime example of why I prefer indie films over studio releases. It’s a relationship film without the element of romance per se. I am intrigued, as I think is director/screenwriter Brad Silberling, with the way in which random people connect. I travel some and my lifestyle and job require that I spend time in diverse places meeting diverse people. It can be quite a lonely, solitary life if one doesn’t reach out. On a good day, that’s what I do–I reach out to other folks, which can be a source of great joy, fascination, and serendipity. People, their motivations, ideas, joys and pain provide significant fulfillment. It takes some courage and a little skill to forge a relationship that doesn’t come across as intrusive, yet is sensitive, thoughtful, and meaningful. It’s a challenge to attempt to convert small talk into real talk in what is often such limited time, waiting for a flight at the airport, sitting in the waiting room at the dentist’s office, or standing in a check-out line. Morgan Freeman essentially plays an actor, not unlike himself, though significantly less successful. The plot revolves around his character entertaining the idea of starring in, interestingly enough, an indie movie. In considering this role, Freeman’s character visits an obscure, ethnic grocery store, ostensibly to do character studies and research. In the way indie films usually go, something different happens: He meets Paz Vega’s character, a cashier in a ten-items-or-less line, and forges an intriguing, spontaneous, charming relationship with her. The two end up spending the afternoon together, though not in a romantic or sexual way. A lot happens and nothing happens. The events of the day are somewhat routine, not what I would expect as big screen fodder. Nevertheless, the transformation of the respective main characters’ personas (in the here and now) and lives (down the road) is that which lends spice, vigor, and charm to these otherwise forgettable daily events. Humans sometimes behave in utterly horrible ways in an effort to rebuff the very thing that deep down they crave the most; to be touched by another human being. 12. Into the Wild – Please note The Rabbit Room review. 13. Lars and the Real Girl – Don’t let the fact that this is a movie involving a sex doll scare you away. Crude humor, mean-spirited insults, cheap double-entendres or otherwise ugly human behavior is nowhere to be found in this thoughtful gem of a film. Ryan Gosling stars and it’s not anything like one might expect, despite the doll prop. It’s a decent, sweet, kind-hearted movie with a lot to say. If you aren’t the cynical type or you are willing to put your cynicism on hold for a couple of hours, I highly recommend it. I’m shocked that those involved pulled this difficult concept off with such style and grace. 14. No Country for Old Men – Highly recommended. I’m not usually a fan of movies tinged with western settings, but this one was awesome, a simple but great narrative–and plenty to ponder afterwards. The day after I saw the movie, I bought the book on which the movie was based. Contrary to most successful films made from books, much of the film’s action is taken word for word from Cormac McCarthy’s novel. Further, it occurs in the same order of events. And it works. The dramatic tension in this movie is not to be missed. Jason Gray also enjoyed this film and wrote a review for the Rabbit Room here. 15. The Kid – Charlie Chaplin from 1921–heartbreaking and unbelievably hilarious. At times, I had a hard time catching my breath because I was laughing so hard. I was reminded–once again–why Chaplin has been so esteemed as a classic filmmaker. Great pathos and wonderful belly laughs. 16. Vernon, Florida – I was led to this one by Richard and Gaines from the Andrew Peterson Message Board. At first, I had a hard time locating it. None of my local video stores carried it. So, Netflix to the rescue. It was at my house in a matter of one day. It’s a documentary film that is fun and funny. I’m still laughing at the segment from the couple that thought the sand they collected from White Sands Monument in New Mexico was growing, and the turkey hunter–wow–hilarious stuff. These are ordinary (extraordinary) people living in the sleepy little southern town of Vernon, Florida. I feel somewhat of a kinship with the Director Errol Morris. He is fascinated with people and their stories. In this movie as in most of his others, he proves that “ordinary” people reveal some very bizarre stories when left on camera long enough. The guy is, at best, obsessive. Vernon, Florida was one of his early works (1982). He probably goes a little over the line–sort of like the National Enquirer of film directors–but his work is intriguing nonetheless. Vernon, Florida is ostensibly a documentary and is gently funny. I laughed at its real life characters, not so much because they aren’t very smart (they aren’t), but because they are fully human. In our real lives, we see people like those profiled in this documentary routinely but rarely see them on screen. 17. Everything is Illuminated – It’s offbeat and took me a little time to get into its flow, but I loved it. It’s an unusual film about a young man’s journey into unknown territory in search of a connection to his past. It’s poignant and thoughtful, but also funny at times. Elijah Wood plays shy young man, who travels to the Ukraine to tie some loose ends of his lineage together, and contracts with a twenty something Ukrainian man and his grandfather to serve as his drivers and tour guides. Blending language and culture serves as most of the comedy. Eugene Hutz narrates and plays the interpreter between Wood’s character and his grandfather and he largely steals the show. His Ukranian accented, fractured English is wonderful and too funny. Grandfather says he is blind, but he really isn’t. He wears sunglasses and has a guide dog which he named Sammy Davis, Jr. Jr. Absurd circumstantial dialogue and crazy characters, namely the Ukrainians, make this a very funny movie. I identified with Jonathan (Elijah Wood). He collects things–things to the outside observer that might seem innocuous or meaningless. But to him, they are important because they remind him of life and times that he wishes to remember. I don’t think we should necessarily live in the past, but we often behave as if the past is irrelevant–that places and things that went before don’t matter. To some, maybe they don’t. To me, life’s moments–even those that on the surface might seem innocuous–are often sublime and not to be forgotten. When I was a teenager, I wrote a book which was nothing more than a listing of memories, because I didn’t want to forget. And yes, I still have it. As I’m writing this, I’m suddenly realizing that Grandpa’s “blindness” is a metaphor for the blindness of his own life, which he repressed, until it was forced to the forefront on the road trip he took with his grandson and Jonathan. Wow, now I want to see the movie again to find out what else I missed. It’s a remarkable accomplishment of the film that Grandfather’s epiphany comes completely outside the bounds of dialogue. It’s very clear what is happening but it’s never articulated with words. I feel like I’m groping to try and explain why I like this movie. I guess it’s one that has to be seen to appreciated. It does bog down towards the end and becomes a little muddled and maybe even lasts a little too long. But it’s worth a rental, for sure. Agree or disagree with these choices, I’d love to read your comments. Most of my choices were shown in theaters in 2007, but some are retro, movies I saw after research or recommendation. Feel free to be governed by by the same criteria, that regardless of when the movie was released, if you viewed it this year, it’s a candidate to be discussed. Have you seen any good movies this year? Let the discussion begin.

Last night I saw the movie “No Country For Old Men”, the latest offering from the Coen Brothers, the guys who brought us “O Brother Where Art Thou,” “Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski” and other one of a kind movies. Being a big fan of the Coens, I’ve been waiting with great anticipation to see this, their newest film. I don’t know if I like it as a story (the way I like “Shawshank Redemption” or even a Coen film like “O Brother Where Art Thou”) – I barely cared about any of the characters and the story is pretty dark and unredemptive. And yet, like the wide open spaces of the stark Texan landscape, I found a film I could get lost in. In the end, I think “No Country…” is less interested in telling a story as it is exploring what drives the characters to do what they do. As a story it’s not very satisfying, but as a study of human nature I found it completely engrossing. Before I go much further, let me make clear that this movie is NOT for everyone. It’s violent, it’s dark, and there’s little redemption to be found. But it still feels true. I’m not a movie critic, so I’m reluctant to go into great critical detail of the movie as a whole – plus there’s so much I could talk about it would be hard to know where to begin. Take for instance the nuanced performances that were delicious to watch – every character pitch perfect and delivering rich dialogue at once gritty and romantic. I hung on every word. Josh Brolin’s performance is a revelation and Javier Bardem is a mesmerizing baddie. Tommy Lee Jones, the biggest star, is subtle and authentic. His performance is surprisingly fragile to me. I could talk about the look of the film. Roger Deakins is my favorite cinematographer (yep, I’m one of those film geeks who cares about who the cinematographer is) and his work in this film is poetry for the eyes. The lonesome sweeping landscape of Texas and the way Deakins renders it makes it as much a character as anyone else. Or I could talk about the music. Or lack of it. As far as I can recall, there was a little music at the very beginning and then no more until the credits rolled, leaving you to deal with a tension that builds throughout the film and finds no relief in the amplified quietness. There’s no music to tell you how to feel. You have to feel it for yourself. I could go into great detail about any of those things, but what I’m most interested in sharing is what the movie is getting at. Or at least what I think part of it is getting at. Many people will take “No Country For Old Man” at face value as a linear story of a man on the run with $2,000,000 (that he found when he stumbled upon the grisly scene of a drug deal gone bad) and the villain who is chasing him. But the way it plays out would make it a very disappointing story (in fact, many have complained that they didn’t like the ending). In fact, that storyline wraps up about three quarters in, leaving that last quarter of the movie to make us wonder what the story is really about. I was talking with some friends afterward and we think that the film is about, at least in part, the root of all evil: money. Everywhere money shows up, trouble is hot on it’s heels. This is most obvious in the storyline of Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), the character on the run with the money he recovered from the Texas desert, but it also plays out in more subtle ways throughout. I’m thinking of the villain Anton Chigurh (Bardem) who decides whether or not he will kill someone by the flip of a coin. Those who he is about to kill always tell him, “you don’t have to do this…”, and in a climactic scene towards the end you get the sense almost that he doesn’t necessarily want to kill a certain character, and so he tells them to call the coin: heads or tails. The character refuses to call it, saying that the coin doesn’t make the decision, he does. “You cannot love both God and money,” Jesus says. “You’ll end up hating one and loving the other.” I believe that money is the most seductive idol, a god with a stranglehold on most of us and who demands to call all the shots in our lives.  If God moves on our hearts to do something or to give, how often do we consult our checkbooks first? Money wants to be lord over us, and wants our worship. In Chigurh we have a character who lets a coin, a piece of money, tell him whether he will kill or grant a stay of execution. How many of us let money determine whether we live or die, whether we live out of the reality of the abundant life or whether we live in the smothering death grip of the fear that “maybe God can’t be trusted to meet my needs”? In an even subtler scene at the end of the film, a couple of kids on their bike come upon Chigurh. He’s hurt and gives a kid $100 for his shirt so he can make a sling for his arm. As he walks away, we hear the two kids begin to argue over the money. And so the cycle continues, as though money were possessed. I think it’s truer to say that money wants to possess us. I’m not entirely sure if that’s what the Coens intended to get at, but I think it’s in there. But regardless of whether it is or isn’t, or whether you find anything at all worthwhile in this film, the Coen brothers are two of the most singular and original moviemakers out there and they are at the top of their game. “No Country For Old Men” is one of the most well crafted movies you’re likely to see in a long time – whether you like it or not.

A Randall Goodgame song is like a great independent movie. Characters deliver lines like they were lifted from a break room, a truck stop, or a downtown diner. Seemingly incongruent scenes are juxtaposed and plot isn’t obvious; in fact, narrative–a good story–is often more evident than linear plot lines. An indie movie, like a Randall Goodgame song, seems to tell itself. Rather than being rudely yanked by a chain through a sequence of contrived events, with a Randall Goodgame song, I have the sense that I’m being allowed a willing, but vicarious sneak peak into the real lives of his real characters. Hey, the last thing I want is for these comments to sound negative, elitist, or to spark yet another debate about radio or CCM music. Honest. I hope readers and artists associated with The Rabbit Room continue to shun the idea that this web hangout is some esoteric musical cult, where only the select few are allowed. It’s not. But let me go out on a limb; one of the reasons you left-click into our humble abode might be because your spirit thirsts for something deeper; deeper than cliche, deeper than a formula, and deeper than paint-by-number worship. Simple, obtuse, repetitive nursery rhymes might be true, but they also might be truly boring. Hopefully and prayerfully, The Rabbit Room is a place in which you will find recommendations on art that rise above the “truly boring.” Randall Goodgame doesn’t write of generic people, places, and things. His lyrics are peppered with authentic props like Cherry Chapstick, harvest moon, marmalade, and potpourri. His characters are as random as the telephone directory: crazy Gene, Sylvester’s ex-wife (we don’t learn her name), Sweet Aileen, Charlie Robin, and Jesus (another one). These characters frequent the laundromat on Arkadelphia Road, Ruby’s Bar, San Pedro, and a plane headed for Nashville. With unfathomable skill, Goodgame shuffles these random songwriting cards–and like a clever magician–lays the cards down as if they had always been that way. Check that; he lays the cards down like they are supposed to be that way. And because the songwriting trick is performed with nuance and style, we can revisit the songs with fresh wonder and significance upon each new listen. “Sylvester” is my favorite song on this collection. Of all the insightful stories and sentiment contained in this album, this song delivers the most poignancy. It will shred your guts like a vortex of rotating machetes. Without judgment, the narrator shares the story of a sad lady he met on a commercial flight headed to Nashville. Quickly, because it’s related with such warmth and empathy, the song becomes hers and she tells it as if she had written the song herself. Sitting in her seat like “a cat caught up in a tree,” as the narrator gently probes, she begins to describe the story of her ex-husband, crippled by a drunk driver. And rather than fight the good fight, she abandons her husband and child. Since then, “like a worn out piece of tape,” all the men she dates, “never stick around.” The children have long since accepted a new mother and the father a new wife, but despite that, the sad lady is invited to Christmas every year. As she makes good on finally accepting her former family’s holiday invitation–that’s when she she sits down next to the narrator on the plane, who ends up writing her story.  Without explicit references and dronish moralizing, this songwriting showpiece communicates indelibly–about regret, pride, empathy, kindness, tragedy, redemption, humanity, and forgiveness. There isn’t a Randall Goodgame release that isn’t part of my own personal collection. I own them all and I treasure them all. Each one, Randall Goodgame, Arkadelphia, The Hymnal, and War and Peace are filled with compelling, original writing (though it must be noted that The Hymnal, as we might expect, contains some traditional songs). I deliberately avoid using the term “songwriting” because one has the sense that whatever context Goodgame might offer his work–the stage, a book, or yes, on the big screen–that his words would resonate with the refrain of truth. With artistic abandon, Randall Goodgame takes chances with wide ranging musical forays and unresolved narratives, drawing us to the truth–not with didactic exhortations or mind numbing repetition–but with moving pictures, like music in motion.

It is a good thing to wake up feeling healthy after having been ill. I am crawling out from under the terrible anvil of what amounts to either a massive cold, or the flu. Whatever official title the bug wishes to be dubbed, it was no picnic and it managed to cost me, and no doubt my wife, some comfort and income. I canceled the first show I’ve ever had to cancel because of it. For me, occupationally, this time of year is typically as barren as the leafless trees, so to cancel a show is almost like turning down a million bucks (don’t worry, I wasn’t getting paid 1/1,000,000 of a million bucks, I just needed a melodramatic analogy). I am, as they say, living the dream: a dream that consists very little in the way of actually making live music, mostly spent scampering here and there for the nibbles of odds-and-ends work and necessary supplemental income. During this portion of the calendar year, it is foolish to turn down any kind of work, white- or blue-collar; I’ve dabbled in both over the years. As a singer-songwriter whose head may not always sit squarely upon my chipped shoulders, I find myself facing this reality each year: figure out how to survive and pay for the season’s fiduciary demands, strive to live and love for family and other selves, and if I can summon the humility, figure out how to die just a little bit to my own bloated egocentric self. All for the triumph of the Great Emancipation. All for the sake of the muse. All for the sake of having – or finding – something to say under the gray skies of winter. I am a quiet, shy person; painfully and awkwardly so at times (Is there a good sort of shyness?). There are days when I find words to be a burden, an albatross, while others I simply am unable to procure any, even though I wish I could. Even when I want my mind and lips moistened by their horizon-less presence, words rarely come easy. Instead, they hang there so luminous and well-written on the pages – albeit from someone else’s pen. Every so often I revisit some of my own meager word collections, and the humbling experience evinces in me a desire to to take my own hand and slap my own freckled face. I see an amalgam of gross overstatements, mere wanna-be grandeur, and petty, presumptuous thoughts that are so over-the-top narcissistic that I can’t believe anyone else would bother finish reading one sentence, let alone several of them. How regrettably often I manage to neglect the innocent purity of observational thought for the foul stool of complaint, for the ignorant assumption that I am all alone in my “suffering”, that language is my dominion alone. It is an easy train to hitch a ride upon, this self-centeredness. I suppose to an extent we all like hanging our dirty laundry out for others to see so they might take pity on us, express their sympathy in so many ways, and, yes, in my case even procure a few “Oh, that poor guy” CD sales. Oh, good grief, it’s wretched. But it’s the truth. Dirty laundry rarely looks good and it almost certainly never smells so. The ugly truth is better than a clean lie. In looking back, I have, however, managed to utter a few thoughts, either in song or prose, that have left me scratching my own head, not out of confusion, but in astonishment that such a series of solid, relatable, realistic words surely must have originated from somewhere other than my own shallow-as-a-thimble wisdom. They came from Someone much greater than myself because they speak something real, yes even to me. In those moments, though I wish I naturally possessed such indiscriminate Saul-like wisdom, I know full well who bears the brains in the family and I remember who has earned the title of Author and Perfector. I must kneel and praise all small, forgotten miracles. I consider myself somewhat of a rarity in that it is not often that I enter the process knowing ahead of time what I am going to say in a song or an essay. Thoughts, like meandering brambles, creep out and form their own hedge. Sometimes, in effect, they guard the Truth, while others they cling to it so tightly that it’s a wonder the Truth survives at all. So, I ask all you writer-types (as opposed to typewriters): How does one know what to say? Better, if silence is golden, and less is more, then how does one know what to say and when not to say it? From my own experience, I usually sit staring for a few moments at an empty piece of paper or at a blank computer screen. That’s about the time it takes for the voices in the back of my mind to begin their disdainful jeering and proverbial tomato-tossing, “Don’t even kid yourself into thinking you can write something worthwhile”, “You’re a fraud, a poser, and a loser, and you know it.” So, to silence – or at least temporarily muzzle – these doomsday voices, I write. Anything. Anything to put a word, any word, down on the page. A penny for a thought. It may be total bunk, but at least it is a word. The word becomes flesh. Something is nearly always better than nothing when it comes to writing. Even a “shitty first draft” – as writer/memoirist, Anne Lamott, describes the process – is progress on the whole and is a step, however small or cosmic, in a direction away from the inner-wrecking voices. Most times I have no real idea what I have to say until I start hacking away at it and actually start saying it. I guess in many ways, it is a cart before the horse approach, but it is the only way I know to make progress miring along in the knee-deep mud path. You just have to wade hip-high through it and look for the green grass on the other side. This quote by novelist E. M. Forster gives me some hope and fairly sums it up: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” The word became flesh. And dwelt among us. Maybe that’s just it — writing becomes the substance of thought, the coup of grace, the good treasure of the heart. I don’t always know what is tangled up in my convoluted heart and mind until I, for better or worse, put pen to paper or, in this case, fingers to keyboard. And once I find what is in my heart, there too shall my treasure be discovered. It is, like all things spiritual, hope in the Word made flesh, the fleshing out of good, the rooting out of bad, and the making sense of it all, however slow, dry, humorous, melancholic, exuberant, wise or even foolish. It is the digging away at the sand of our thoughts in hopes of excavating the power of Word that is all ours, and it is all God’s. And it is good.

Drive three hours. Arrive at monastery. Check in. Unpack duffle bag consisting of proper amounts of toiletries, clothes, choice books and journal. Read for ninety minutes. Pack up bag. Drive three hours home. The moment was rather embarrassing although it’s definitely advantageous for my job. As a pastor, part of my weekly duties is to develop some sort of interesting story or analogy to illustrate whatever point is necessary. Therefore it was easy to take my inability to take a sabbatical and turn it into an amusing anecdote. The reality was that I was absolutely ecstatic to have several days to myself to read, write, study, pray and immerse myself into the spiritual world I so easily dismiss with my busy schedule. A concept like Sabbath is so easy to forget about, considering I’m so busy doing God’s work. Pulling into the driveway at the monastery and its campus seemed to be a spiritual dream come true. After all, endless paths through peaceful woods next to an equally placid lake…it’s perfect for such a time as that. But I couldn’t do it. I nervously stood in my window and looked out and realized how much time I had ahead of me. I read for a half hour and journaled for another twenty minutes. Glancing to and fro completed my first hour there and I was already mentally panicking. No internet. No access to the outside world. Just me, a few gathered belongings and my Creator. And I learned it sounds much better than it really is. I got home and made a joke of it. While at the monastery I developed many reasons why this was poor stewardship of my time and how I needed to be present at home. There were articles I needed to write. There were people I needed to meet with. I can’t deny doing God’s work and just relaxing like I am living in my parents’ basement. The moment I got home, I realized what I’d done – wasting this planned moment and coming home to the hustle and bustle that made me want to leave in the first place. So I used it as a story that Sunday morning. People nodded their heads as they understood and it was a nice moment where we all realized that we are just busy and it’s hard to unplug. I felt okay with my illustration – “Ha! That funny Matt. He’s just like me.” And I was going to be fine and forget the whole episode until one friend chastised me. “You failed. And don’t paint it any other way. You were afraid. It’s not a joke and it’s not something to pass off lightly. I’m disappointed in you because I know that you needed this. But you’re afraid of being alone and you left out of fear.” He was right. I’m afraid of what I look like when there’s nobody to impress. I’m afraid of what God might say to me or ask of me when I give him all the time in the world. I’m afraid of being, well, naked and ashamed as humans can tend to be. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I look around and it’s hard to find anyone willing to endure the silence. I am surrounded by a culture refusing to allow stillness to find their soul, to allow themselves to be re-created. Wendell Berry says it best, I believe: “There is indeed a potential terror of [silence]. It asks a man what is the use and what is the worth of his life. It asks him who he thinks he is, and what he thinks he’s doing, and where he thinks he’s going. In it the world and its places and aspects are apt to become present to him, the lives of water and trees and stars surround his life and press their obscure demands. Once it is attended to, admitted into the head one must bear a greater burden of consciousness and knowledge – one must change one’s life. If one has nothing within oneself with which to respond, it would be unbearable. If the silence within the man should be touched by the impenetrable silence that ultimately surrounds him, what might happen to the thin partition of flesh and possessions? “In the face of that silence…no wonder he turns on the radio. No wonder he goes as fast as he can. Pursued into the wilderness by questions he is afraid even to ask, no wonder he finds his comfort – to his bewilderment, surely – in what he thought he wanted to be free of: crowdedness and commotion and hurry and mess.” My thoughts exactly.

At the Florida Sheriffs Boys Ranch we’ve been working hard for the past month to get our float ready for the Christmas parade. To be honest, float-building isn’t something I look forward to but it has been a joy for me to labor through it with the group of boys I work with and to see them in turn take joy from the showing of their hard work. After spending so much time on something that I barely wanted to be involved in to begin with, it feels great to finally be finished. But as always, the something I didn’t really want turned into something I really needed. The night of the Christmas parade I sat in the cab of the truck, the float lit up behind me, idling forward inch by inch as my community, thousands of faces, gathered in the dark to see the procession of light. I heard “Merry Christmas” called out from a hundred voices devoid of self-consciousness, voices of simple joy. I watched children’s faces lift up as parade lights splendored in their eyes and they cried out for treats. I sat in the midst of it and was moved to see this swell of joy in the world and what’s more–what’s most–was that it was Christ that called the hour. Whether they believed or not, whether they meant it or not didn’t matter, they were here and the world was put on hold for an hour in the name of the One. As I towed the float down the road with misty eyes, happy to be a part of the rising, I began to notice a strange thing. People saw our float and recognized our name and they leaped to their feet and cheered. They clapped and smiled and waved at us. As we’d approach I could hear whispers running in the crowd, “It’s the Ranch,” “Here comes the Boys’ Ranch!”, and they’d yell to me “We love you! Keep up the great work!”, “Thanks for all you do!”, or “You guys are doing great things!” I’d smile and wave and be gracious, and I meant it every time. But the thing that left me uneasy was that I don’t once recall being at a parade and seeing any sort of similar reaction to a church float as it passed. There might be an eruption of cheering when the Baptist float passed a large gathering of its members but then those same members would be silent as they watched the Methodist float roll by. No whispers ran of the coming of Christians. No praise for their work well done. That bothered me then, and it bothers me still while I write this. Isn’t the church doing great things in the community? Shouldn’t people stand up and cheer to know that the followers of Christ are on the move? The only conclusion I’ve been able to come to is that when people think of an organization like the Boys Ranch they instantly connect us with service to children and communities but when people think of a church they think of service, not to the community as a whole, but to the church itself. I don’t think this perception is entirely wrong. The church as a whole (I know I’m talking in generalities here) is concerned with bettering itself and its members, not bettering the community it’s a part of. I know that isn’t our intent as Christians but I wonder if that isn’t what is happening. How good would it be if people associated the Church (instantly) with community service, with family services, with helping make the world brighter. Are we doing these things? Yes, I think we are, but I’m not sure it’s high enough on the priority list. I feel at times like the Church is a last resort for people. That’s backwards. We ought to be at the top of the list. I don’t know what the answer is and whatever is at the root of the problem, I’m sure I’m just as much at fault as anyone else. But I do know that a long time ago whispers ran through crowds and cheers filled the air when Jesus came to town. People gathered out of the darkness to see the true Light parade down the street on a donkey. I suspect that in part this was because people, believers and non-believers alike, heard that he cared more about them than he did about himself. They knew that it wasn’t about what he could get, but about what he could give. These days it seems the parades are not so brightly lit, and I’m afraid it’s us blocking out the light.

Andy Gullahorn is funny, but he’s also one of the more serious lyricists I’ve come to enjoy in a while. Listening to Reinventing the Wheel, you come to understand that he is more than a good songwriter. He is a craftsman. He knows what he’s doing, where he’s going, and where he’s taking his hearers.But as I said, people say Andy Gullahorn is funny. They say that, I think, because he makes them laugh. But as for me, I’m calling it nervous laughter. The Holy Flakes sold so well, they couldn’t keep them on the shelfSo they diversifiedSoon there were sacred chips, and Virgin Mary chicken stripsAnd Prince of Peace apple pieIt don’t matter if it has no taste, cause it’s all in the nameSoon they had a one brand town with pantries all the sameAnd it left them with no appetite for stuff that broke the moldAnd a faith that was as shallow as the milk left in the bowl Of Holy Flakes So naturally I felt a bit sorry for the guy behind me hearing it for the first time, laughing along. I thought to myself, “Laugh it up, Chuckles, but this is about to get unfunny in a hurry.”Well, I just acquired Andy’s new CD, Reinventing the Wheel, and there’s a track called “More of a Man”, where he talks about how he killed a deer and rubbed its blood on his face when he was in second grade, but now he watches Dora the Explorer in the morning, and he wonders if he was more of a man back then. And I think to myself, “No way I’m falling for it. This ain’t my first rodeo.”Then he talks of how he used to watch Jean Claude Van Damme on th silver screen, but now he watches Gilmore Girls on DVD. Still, I’m holding my ground, not laughing. See, I’ve been down this road before. He’s going to pull the rug out from under us all and get serious. And guess what? I was so right. He ends this way: So I suck in my protruding gut On our monthly dinner nightYou’re saying something about the kids As I watch these young men pass me byI remember I was just like themI was lonely but I called it independentAnd if lonesome is what manly isBaby, I was more of a man back then Reinventing the Wheel is a rich record. One song that took my breath away is called “How Precious Life Is.” I don’t know the story behind it, buy I take it to include either a miscarriage or something like it. He sings: I thought I knew what pain was, but I really had no proofUntil the hope was disappearingThere was nothing we could doI was too tired to shout in anger, too scared to run and hideI just stared there at your motherThanked God she was aliveWe couldn’t see it til now, you were teaching us then How precious life is. And as sober as this is, he also sings a brilliant and hilarious ode to Andrew Osenga’s toe, which he lost to a lawn mower a couple years back. It’s called “Roast Beef,” and if you think about it, you’ll not only figure out what that title has to do with Andy’s toe, you’ll also figure out which toe it was that he lost. (And especially funny is that Osenga provides percussion for the track by tapping his foot.) I am glad, truly glad, to have come upon the fine work of Andy Gullahorn this year.

Even if you haven’t read Phillip Pullman’s book, The Golden Compass, you probably have heard some of the controversy surrounding it. So with the release of the film I thought I’d provide a few of my own thoughts on the matter. Although I had never heard of the book before, I saw the previews for the film version some months ago and my interest was piqued enough that I decided I wanted to read it before seeing the film. At this point I knew nothing at all about the controversy around it. I was able to read it without any preconceived ideas about its take on religion, Christianity or anything else. So what was my initial reaction to it? I loved it. The book is fabulous…mostly. It follows a young girl named Lyra on her adventure to rescue her friend from the mysterious Gobblers who along with her uncle are wrapped up in a search for a strange sort of Dust that links all human beings together. Those are the basics, but what’s to love is Pullman’s world. It is set in an alternate version of our own world in which technology and culture seem to have halted sometime during the early 19th century. There are zeppelins, and cowboys in hot air balloons, and gypsies (called gyptians) and all sorts of other wonderful flavors. Science calls itself ‘experimental theology’ and Lyra’s uncle happens to be a experimental theologian that’s off to explore the wild north. One of Pullman’s most original and interesting ideas is that in this world, a person’s soul lives outside their body. A person’s daemon, as it is called, is their closest companion and is able to shape-shift into any animal form until adulthood when it settles on a final shape that will reveal the person’s nature. A subservient person might have a dog for a daemon, while soldiers have ravenous wolves. Great stuff. So why do I say it was “almost” fabulous? To begin with, Pullman doesn’t provide any answers, which is odd because a key part of the story is Lyra’s Alethiometer, the Golden Compass, an arcane gadget that is somehow able to tell only the truth—if a person knows how to read it. So here we have a adventure centered around an object that is able to tell the truth and yet the author doesn’t seem to be able to read it himself. Don’t take that to mean that he’s down on religious truth, that’s not what I’m talking about—yet. I mean the story lacks a resolution. None of the questions raised about a person’s soul and what it means to be separated from it, or what it means to possess the knowledge of objective truth are given any answers. The book does have some dramatic closure to it but it’s thematically open-ended, which, while somewhat unsatisfying, left me eager to move on to the final two books in the series. That’s where the trouble starts. The first book, while imperfectly ended, is wonderful, exciting, and fresh to read. I loved every page, right up until the end. The final books in the story though are a meandering mess that are neither exciting, dramatic, nor even very coherent. And what is worse, what began as a magical adventure in “The Golden Compass” is quickly revealed in the following book, “The Subtle Knife”, to be a quest to kill God. Say what? Where did that come from? That’s right, almost out of nowhere Pullman decides that the rest of his trilogy is going to be an essay on his dislike of the Catholic Church, Christianity, and God in general. Great reading material for kids right? What bothered me the most was the deceptive way that he tries to draw readers (kids) into accepting these ideas. As I said, the first book was wonderful, just the kind of book young people would love. It gives them a great character and a fascinating world, it lures them in with what seem to be promising images like an ephemeral city in the sky that may hold the promise of mankind’s future and engaging spiritual themes like the nature of the soul and the importance of innocence and wonder, and then, once that young reader is taken in, they are suddenly led to believe that the Church is the cause of all suffering and men can only be free when they are liberated from the hand of its Authority (the title he often uses for God). And make no mistake, Pullman’s railing against the Church is not merely between the lines, it’s explicit. Here’s a quote from the final book, The Amber Spyglass: “…all the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity…the rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed.” Despite what I think about Pullman’s views though, I might have respected his work had he presented his ideas well, but he doesn’t. In the end he doesn’t even have the guts to do what he’s been aiming to for three entire books; instead of actually killing God, he lets him off easy and allows him to “become one with the universe” on his own. Then of course when all is said and done Pullman apparently realizes that in the absence of God there must be some other source of the Alethiometer’s objective truth and he has to explain that away in addition to dancing around the fact that there might be some other God-like being out there that was the original creator. I can’t even begin to explain the bizarre way he deals with death and the afterlife throughout most of the final book. Truly, the last two books of his trilogy are a complete mess, whether or not you agree with his worldview. In the end Pullman comes off almost like an angry child, yelling at a parent that won’t give him exactly want he wants, in complete denial about what he actually needs. Here’s another quote from The Amber Spyglass: “…it was the sense that the whole universe was alive, and that everything was connected to everything else by threads of meaning. When she’d been a Christian, she had felt connected, too; but when she left the Church, she felt loose and free and light, in a universe without purpose. And then had come the discovery of the Shadows and her journey into another world, and now this vivid night, and it was plain that everything was throbbing with purpose and meaning, but she was cut off from it. And it was impossible to find a connection, because there was no God.” This longing and emptiness the character feels isn’t something Pullman is able to answer to. Reading the book I often had the impression that indeed he knows the truth but refuses to admit it. How ironic. When I finally finished the series I was left feeling almost heartbroken for an author who seems completely unconvinced of his own beliefs. Pullman has said in interviews that he considers this series of books to be an answer to the worldview presented in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. He is more right than he knows, I think, and that is to his own detriment artistically and spiritually. So what of the movie? I’m looking forward to seeing it. The first book was very well written and should translate wonderfully to the screen (although early reviews say otherwise). I cannot even imagine, however, how the rest of the series could translate to the screen, it lacks almost any dramatic structure, and once again, the truly troubling thing about it is that if the first film is good, it will entice people to watch the second, which is where it really gets into troubled water. Would I recommend the books or movies to kids? Definitely not. I would recommend them to discerning adults though on the basis of being well-informed during the coming weeks when there are sure to be at least a few picket lines seen on the news. Frankly though, the books aren’t worth the time or energy of the people that are making a stink about them. Good art will rise to the top and it won’t take long for this body of work to settle on the bottom.

Theologian/Oregon State Professor Marcus Borg has written a fascinating, insightful and challenging book titled “Jesus.” It has taken me weeks to write these few paragraphs for the Rabbit Room, possibly because of the uniqueness of the whole experience. Maybe I need to read more books, or maybe I need more friends like the one who sent this book to me. As a whole, reading this book was a joy. I found myself at times comforted, challenged, educated, shocked and disappointed, in total disagreement, and in total agreement with the author. Borg seriously doubts many of Jesus’ miracles. He attributes much of Jesus’ language in the Gospel of John to people other than Jesus. He calls Jesus ignorant of his transcendent role as Son of God. But, Borg’s insightful commentary on Jesus’ experience of his Father brought tears to my eyes. He smartly captures the experiential nature of Spiritual relationship, and for those unfamiliar with that kind of language, those passages may be worth the whole read. His call to political reform is fascinating for both its potency and its vast overreaches. And he consistently regards many of his most controversial assertions as from the “mainline” stream of thought. As you can imagine, this has been a difficult book to review. Marcus Borg has written a book that will make many Christ-followers very nervous, and possibly very angry. And, I expect that most families are well acquainted with those emotions, especially around the holidays. However, I know from my own family experience that the only way to truly experience community together is to pray. We plead with Jesus for abundant measures of His grace so that we may live together, teach and learn together and be the love of Christ for one another. We must agree to disagree, and hold righteousness at a value greater than rightness. As a theological primer, I would not recommend this book. But as a testimony to the breadth and depth of the family of God, I could not recommend it more.

I often hear people talk about how the act of writing helps you understand the thing you’re writing about. That’s true as far as it goes. Sometimes, however, writing isn’t about mastering subject matter, but entering into a mystery that neither the writer nor the reader understands. Wendell Berry speaks of “the storyteller’s need to speak wholeheartedly however partial his understanding.” That’s a remarkable thing to think about: how do you tell the truth about a thing you don’t fully understand? In an essay called “Style and Grace” (it’s in the collection What are People For?) Berry contrasts two fishing stories–Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” and Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. Berry describes Hemingway’s story as “a triumph of style in its pure or purifying sense: the ability to isolate those parts of experience of which one can confidently take charge.” Hemingway’s descriptions of the open river are truly beautiful. The story mentions that the open river gives way to a dark swamp a few miles downstream; but Hemingway never goes there. According to Berry, it is a “craftsmanly fastidiousness” that keeps the story from going into the swamp. The story “will not relinquish the clarity of its realization of the light and the river and the open-water fishing. It is a fine story, on its terms, but its terms are strait and limiting.” Berry goes on to say, “It deals with what it cannot understand by leaving it out.” A River Runs Through It, on the other hand, is “not so neat and self-contained” as Hemingway’s story. Maclean’s style, as Berry argues, “is a style vulnerable to bewilderment, mystery, and tragedy–and a style, therefore, that is open to grace.” As beautiful as Hemingway’s story is, it represents an attempt to create a world where grace isn’t necessary. It only asks questions to which it has the answers. Maclean’s story is comparatively messy; the narrator doesn’t claim to understand the other characters, or what happens to them. He leaves room for grace to exert itself. To quote Berry again, The story’s fierce triumph of grace over tragedy is possible, the story “springs and sings,” because of what I earlier called its vulnerability. Another way of saying this is that it does not achieve–because it does not attempt–literary purity. Nor does one feel, as one reads, that Mr. Maclean is telling the story out of literary ambition; he tells it, rather, because he takes an unutterable joy in telling it and therefore has to tell it. The story admits grace because it admits mystery. It admits mystery by admitting the artistically unaccountable. It could not have been written if it had demanded to consist only of what was understood or understandable, or what was entirely comprehensible in its terms. There is little room for grace in a story–or a life–that is devoted to mastering the subject matter. Especially when you consider the fact that “mastery,” in our lived experience, is largely a matter of simply leaving out those things we don’t understand. Or to put it in other terms, “mastery” mostly means simplifying the complexities of our experience down to something we can master–but which may not look very much like the world we actually experience. I have always understood writing as a kind of distillation–boiling experience down, simplifying it to something that can be grasped. As I said before, that’s true as far as it goes. But as we create, we’d better not lose touch with the value of the mysterious, the unaccountable.

From the Proprietor: This is an album review from my good friend Ben Shive, whose musical opinion holds a lot of water in my book (a mixed metaphor that is so strange a picture I decided to leave it). I have The Innocence Mission’s hymns record, and it’s in regular rotation on Sunday mornings at the Warren. I haven’t heard this record yet, but Ben makes a compelling case for how I should spend my next ten bucks. All day, since your haircut in the morning You have looked like a painting, even more than usual We are in the wind, planting the maples We meet an older man who seems to know I miss my dad And he smiles through the limbs We talk easily with him Until the rain begins This is the brotherhood of man Waiting at the airport on my suitcase A girl traveling from Spain became my sudden friend Though I did not learn her name And when the subway dimmed a stranger lit my way This is the brotherhood of man I never can say what I mean But you will understand Coming through clouds on the way This is the brotherhood of man It’s all I can do not to print the entire sleeve of the record here*. We Walked In Song is so lyrically picturesque it’s almost a photo album. A treatise on brotherly love, these songs collectively speak a blessing on humanity. As Karen Peris, the band’s front-woman and writer, sings benediction after benediction–to her children, to loved-ones lost, to the brotherhood of man–her voice is the sound of love sweetly bearing grief. All this is couched in melodies and harmonies that radiate warmth, with generally sparse and understated accompaniment. Guitars, piano, harmonium, and touches of percussion are usually all that adorn the lyric. There’s very little drum set on the record, and it’s frequently saved for the end of a song. When the drums finally kick in, however, The Innocence Mission sounds like The Sundays in a rainy-day mood, and that’s a very good thing. This band has been making music for a number of years and I have sadly been unaware of them until now. But from the opening bars of We Walked In Song, I knew that The Innocence mission and I were old friends just meeting. *Here’s a link: http://www.theinnocencemission.com/walked_lyrics.htm

I’m sitting behind the merchandise table backdrop in a gigantic church building, nursing a cold. We just finished soundcheck a few minutes ago, and I have a little pocket of time before I have to go shower and eat dinner before tonight’s concert, so I thought I’d fill you in on what the Christmas tour has been like so far. Let’s see. We have Sara Groves and her husband Troy, along with their three sweet kids, Jamie Rau (road manager and nanny), Jill Phillips and Andy Gullahorn, along with their youngest son Tyler, Dan Brown (sound guy and author of the Da Vinci Code), Andrew Osenga, Marcus Myers, Gabe Scott, Bebo Norman, Cason Cooley, Garett Buell, and Ben Shive. Seventeen people! The rehearsal in Nashville before we left was a sweet (if stressful) time, where we played through the songs at at rehearsal studio while wives chatted over pizza and our many kids ran around jumping over gear cases. Music is a fine thing, partly because it’s a community effort. I remember emailing with a guy named Jef Mallet who writes the comic strip Frazz, which I like. He’s a music fan and we’ve exchanged emails a few times, partly because in my first email to him I asked if he was Bill Watterson in disguise, which would be like him asking me if I was really James Taylor or something; he took it as a high compliment. Anyway, one of his strips joked about how books are usually dedicated to just one person while CDs have paragraphs of thank-you’s in the liner notes. The joke, if I remember correctly, was that musicians are long-winded or something. Can’t remember. The point is, I felt compelled to write him to let him know that (now that I’ve made records and written a book) there’s a huge difference between the two. Book writing, for the most part, is a solitary occupation. You only really get any work done at the expense of social interaction. Sure, you’ll need your manuscript read by people you trust, and their input is invaluable, but the bulk of the work is done alone. Music, on the other hand, is by nature a community effort, and anyone who’s put a record out or played professionally for any amount of time realizes early on that there’s just no way to make this kind of art on your own. (I guess there are exceptions when it comes to solo musicians and folky stuff–Bruce Springsteen did it with Nebraska, but you know what I mean.) I have the feeling that in forty years I’ll look back on these times fondly. I count myself blessed beyond measure to share the stage with songwriters like Osenga, Gullahorn, Groves, Phillips, singers and players like Shive, Norman, Scott, Buell, Cooley, Myers (I had to write each name down in case one of them reads this and thinks I left them out on purpose; we musicians are a fragile lot). I love the way music pulls us together toward a common purpose. I love the way we prepare in an empty auditorium, hoping that each seat in the house is filled, and that each heart who attends will be filled too. We eat together, laugh together (or play Boggle together, which is what they’re probably all doing right now), and then, just before the show, we pray together. The thrill of walking out on a stage to share your gifts with a good audience is like nothing else I know. I went to an artist’s retreat last week at Charlie Peacock’s Art House. The room was filled with musicians and writers of an intimidating caliber, and during the question and answer time I was too sheepish to speak up, though I had definite opinions about what we were talking about. But at some point in the retreat the conversations were sometimes tinged with frustration or discontent. It seemed like many of the artists were wanting the Answer to the question of how to succeed in the music business. I admit that I’ve gone through long periods of frustration, looking for that same Answer. But the Lord has shown me that there is no Answer apart from him. He’s the only place we’ll ever find satisfaction or joy. I don’t know why God has blessed me with being able to play music for a living. He knows I don’t deserve it– —- Just after I wrote that last sentence, I got interrupted. It’s now 11:03 PM, and the show is over. We’ve packed up and are sitting on the bus, about to head to Taco Cabana for a midnight snack (when you’re in Texas, you just have to stop at the Cabana). I re-read what I was writing earlier, and I’m not sure how to wrap it up. I’ll say that the show was a delight. The musicians assembled on this tour are humble, gentle, joyful, and I’m thankful for each of them. It would be easy to idealize this group of people. It’s important that you know that we’re sinful. We talk frankly about the nature of our sins here on the “Guy Bus”. I’ve spoken with the Groves fam and the Gullahorns on the “Family Bus” and I know that the same is true over there. We’re a community of people who have doubts and insecurities, people who are lustful, selfish, greedy. The tour’s been going for not even a week and I’ve probably had to apologize four times already for saying something I shouldn’t have. That sinfulness (and I know this confounds Satan) allows us to love one another better. We can hold one another up only because we are bent low with our own weakness. What a beautiful mystery we find ourselves in. I keep wondering why God allows us to sing these songs, why he fills my life with such goodness. I will keep asking that question, because the answer is so good I love to hear it over and over again. AP

G.K. Chesterton said, “If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer… I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts.” These small but unanimous facts are those moments in your life which come by and show you glimpses of what is going on beneath the surface of your life, when all of the sudden life becomes infused with great meaning, and you believe you have encountered a truth that you feel was meant to change you. Have you ever experienced a “moment of truth” in your life which just seemed to scream above the noise, telling you that life is just absolutely filled with meaning? The burglars had more or less trashed my dad’s office. I remember sitting in the old one room school house which stood at the end of the gravel road I grew up on, which my dad had recently begun leasing as office space for his struggling computer business. That school house was something of a southern bookend on the boundaries of my childhood—my grandpa’s house being the northern limit. Between that school house and my grandpa’s house, my childhood took place. My grandpa lived like a farmer, though he had made his living selling cars. His property surrounded ours, and his hay mow, woods and creek were more than enough to fill summer after summer with adventure. He was a quirky man, set in patterns which included keeping hens, growing bamboo, eating at the same diner for lunch and every so often giving my parents a sum of money so that they could purchase “funeral clothes” for my brother and me—which usually constituted twill pants, a sport coat and a clip-on tie. These were the clothes we were to wear to Grandpa’s upcoming funeral, whenever that would be. Mom and dad would dress us up in our “funeral clothes,” get a Polaroid of us with our dog Zombie, whom my grandpa loved dearly, and take the picture to over to grandpa. He would regard it for a while as a look of pride spread across his weathered face, and he’d say something like, “Those are fine looking boys.” A year or two would pass and we’d do it all over again. New clothes, new Polaroid, same expression. The burglary took place during the Christmas break of my senior year in college. I had just returned from a semester of study in Jerusalem. Lisa and I were engaged to be married later that summer. Dad and I stood among a mess of scattered papers, jumbled wires and up-ended furniture—all of which seemed to have a light covering of the dusting powder the police had used to try to recover fingerprints. The mood was light, really, especially since dad was in the process of closing the business down. So we were doing more talking than anything else. I had just a few minutes before I needed to head home to clean up for my shift delivering pizza. As I was getting ready to leave, the phone rang. It was the nursing home at the hospital where my grandpa had been living for the past year or so. They told dad that grandpa was ailing, and he had better come on out. I told dad I’d meet him there after I changed my clothes. I arrived no more than five minutes after dad, and found my dad standing beside my grandpa, holding his hand. Dad looked at me and said it wasn’t more than a minute earlier that Grandpa had breathed his last breath. There we were. It was all at once more than a hospital room on the nursing home wing. It was a room of fathers and sons. Three generations of Ramsey men gathered in one room, two seeing the third off. And it was a room drenched with meaning. Busy lives had ground to a halt. I remember how that moment carried for me so much meaning. It was a moment of truth. Three generations, each gathered there shaping the life of the others in lasting and powerful ways. One last time we would set out to buy new “funeral clothes.” This was a huge moments of truth for me, because I was given an intense picture of where I had come from, as my dad and I stood there at Grandpa’s bedside. I was part of a family—a line of men known for respectable successes and sometimes pretty definitive failures. I had a heritage. I had a history. I had come from somewhere. And a big part of that had just died. It was one of the first times I really recognized that I was no longer a kid—but a man, a Ramsey. And life was moving along quickly. Winston Churchill once said “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing has happened.” Somewhere between birth and death we hurry off as if nothing has happened and get ever so busy or self-important that we forget certain truths we once stumbled over as we reduce the significance of our lives down to such unimportant things as productivity, revenue and prestige. But sometimes the truth won’t let us hurry off. Sometimes the truth reaches up and stops us dead in our tracks. It holds up a mirror and we catch a glimpse of our reflection. Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever seen yourself making the same parenting mistakes your parents made—mistakes you just knew, when you were younger, you would never replicate. Such mistakes were so obvious to you then, yet so natural to you now. Or maybe you catch a glimpse of a look in your spouse’s eye who is regarding you as something of a stranger who has gotten too consumed with your professional life to have much of a personal one. Or maybe there is this “one thing” you have hungered for all your life, swearing to yourself that if you could just have that “one thing” you would be happy, but you realize, even if just for a fleeting moment, that there is no way that thing you want so desperately could really satisfy you. No, you’re much too complex for that. I believe God has fashioned truth to be something we stumble over and stumble onto. Truth is a divine corrective, a force to be reckoned with—showing us the wonder and terror of our fragile lives, awakening in us an insatiable hunger to know why we are here and what we are worth. Moments of truth constantly testify to the wildness of life. C.S. Lewis wrote, “It seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.” (Letters of C.S. Lewis) Moments of truth can overcome us with fear—like when a father stands in the delivery room as the urgent, focused faces of medical staff attend to the woman and baby he’d give his very life to protect. They can overwhelm us with joy—like when a young woman leaves her wedding reception, gets in the car covered in shoe polish exclamations and realizes for the first time that the wedding planning is over and the marriage has begun—that he is her husband and she is his wife. We don’t ask for these moments of truth to shape us into the people we are becoming. They just do. Why do we regard these moments of truth with such reverence? Because as people made in the image of God we understand, no matter how subdued and repressed the truth may be to us, that if something is true, it is like an anchor holding our lives in place in the cosmos. Truth beckon us: “Come and see that life has meaning and that it is of enormous importance.”

Walt Wangerin is a name I’ve seen in print many times. My dad had Ragman and Other Cries of Faith lying about at home for years and I remember thumbing through it at Christmas or Thanksgiving, reading bits here and there, and being intrigued by the style of writing; the words on the page had a canter to them, and a sparseness that gave them strength. When my buddy Jason Gray let me borrow his first edition copy of The Book of the Dun Cow I was appreciative. Jason has recommended and/or given several books to me (The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, The Father Brown Omnibus, Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War to name a few), and he hasn’t steered me wrong yet. When he told me that he and his family had read The Book of the Dun Cow aloud at Easter I was even more interested. I’d been working on songs with an Easter theme for a while, so I was curious to see how a novel about a boisterous rooster and his coop would tie in. Chauntecleer, the main character, is unforgettable and utterly unique. I’ve read a lot of books over the years and I’ve never come across a character quite like Chauntecleer: admirable, courageous, self-sacrificing, irritable, cranky, and loud. (He reminded me of certain members of my family, to be honest.) I’m sitting on the tour bus right now and it’s a little too distracting to dissect the book’s finer points. But I’ll tell you that the story is epic; the writing precise, colorful, masterful even; and while it’s no allegory for Christ’s death and resurrection (which I think is a good thing), it is a story of light overcoming a great darkness. I just might read it again next year, around Easter.

You’ve just got to love a good genealogy (see Genesis 10, 11 and 46, 1 Chronicles 1-9, Matthew 1 and Luke 3). A while back I took on the task of copying the Bible by hand. I am not very far along, but the reason I wanted to do it was so that I might have the disciplined exercise of pouring over every word contained in it, and also so that my children and grandchildren might know that the word of God was dear to me—that it might be dear to them too. In my writing, I have copied a few genealogies, and they always lead me to ask, “Why are these things here?” From them we should be amazed and humbled, because in them we learn that God keeps His words in ways no human plan could ever succeed in doing. See. Noah begat three sons—Shem, Ham and Japheth. Ham and Japheth disgraced their father, and so God’s blessing rested upon Shem. Shem’s line begat Abraham. Father Abraham had many sons. God promised Abraham would be the father of a great nation—the people God would bind Himself to in covenant, and from whom He would ultimately provide the “Lamb” who would bear the sins of the world and usher in reconciliation with God that will last forever. Abraham begat and begat and begat. And his sons did the same— and before you know it, Boaz (the guy who married Ruth) begat Obed who begat Jesse who begat David. David became the King of Israel, which took its name from Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel by God, and who was the son of Isaac, who was the son of Abraham—see how fun this is! And God expanded the details of His Covenant with His people to David by telling him that his throne would be established forever and that from David’s line the Messiah would come and reign at the right hand of God. While David’s descendants begat, the people of Israel summarily abandoned God altogether. And generations later, one of David’s line, King Hezekiah, discovered the word of God on a dusty old shelf in the temple (2 Ch. 29-31), and he began to read—and the people of God heard the word of God again—after years and years of disregard. But obedience would not last, and eventually the people of God were exiled to places all over the middle-eastern world—to the extent that the line of David had become almost unrecognizable. Until once upon a time, later, there was a girl named Mary, engaged to a boy named Joseph. They lived in an out of the way town called Nazareth. Joseph was descended from the great King David, though for his part, he was a carpenter—a blue collar man of no reputation. They were working hard toward a life they could live out together as husband and wife. All this was interrupted in a moment. Mary and Joseph would both suffer suspicious looks from friends and relatives, questioning their virtue because Mary did, you recall, conceive out of wedlock. And ultimately, as the prophet Simeon told them, a sword would pierce their very souls. How did Simeon know this? He knew the line from which the Messiah would come—and the prophecies concerning Him. In genealogies we are given a picture of an amazing thread that runs through redemptive history—a thread God has sewn through and for which no one can take any more credit than a man can take credit for his own birth. The thread that runs through redemptive history is God’s fidelity to His wayward people, preserving the line of blessing He promised to trace on through into eternity. The One in whom your righteousness rests, the One who represents you before the throne of God, the One who calls you His Bride comes precisely from where God said He would. So why does it matter that Obed begat Jesse? Because their lineage is part of the unbroken line from Adam to Christ. Christ came from the line God promised Abraham He would come from thousands of years before. And Abraham looked forward in faith. So you are called to look back in faith, and marvel at the precision and profound miracle of the unbroken line in God’s redeeming plan, and to understand that the genealogies of Scripture are telling you your story.

Nebraska football fans are passionate. I know this to be true because I am one and have been for most of my life. As a preteen boy, before most of the games were on T.V., I had a game day routine. My popcorn was strategically placed next to my pop, both far enough away that they wouldn’t get knocked over from an over zealous cheer, but close enough so I could indulge without stretching. The radio was tuned to 1110/KFAB. From pre-game prognostications to post-game interviews and scoreboard shows, I usually listened to the roughly twelve hours of game day programming from beginning to end. Like a psychological thermometer, one could gauge the temperature of my mood by how well the Huskers were doing. If they won, as was routine, I was happy as a pig in mud. When faced with a rare loss, I cried. A year or two ago, I finally outgrew the crying part. Yes, Nebraska fans are passionate. Though I’m exaggerating a bit on the duration of my tears, I can’t deny that even at my age, my mood rises and falls with the ups and downs of the Husker football team. When I began to follow the Huskers, our coach was the legendary Bob Devaney. Mr. Devaney was a jovial sort, hired in the early 60s to turn around an anemic football program. The Nebraska faithful and administration demanded some changes and got it when they hired the plain-talking coach away from Wyoming. Indeed, Mr. Devaney did turn the program around. With an assist from Tom Osborne, hired initially as a young graduate assistant, the football program started to soar. In 1970 and 1971, Nebraska won back to back National Championships. I don’t have to consult a reference book to make sure those dates are correct. I remember. I was twelve years-old, but I remember. Mr. Osborne was the Offensive Coordinator and was later promoted to Assistant Head Coach. And though the reserved Coach Osborne and socially effusive Devaney were as different as the sun and moon, Devaney trusted Osborne and sensed his superb intellect. Before cashing in his coaching chips and taking over as Athletic Director, Devaney hand-picked Osborne to succeed him as Head Football Coach. The year was 1973. And when Tom Osborne retired from coaching 25 years later, even those that didn’t follow college football knew his name. He was to become one of the most successful coaches in the history of college football, with a combined record of 255-49-3 through 1997, when he stepped down after winning another national championship. Osborne won thirteen conference titles, went to a bowl game for all 25 years that he was the head coach and won three national championships in his final four years. Needless to say, he is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame. I appreciate the wins. I really do. But the vagaries and trivia of wins and losses pale to the point of insignificance when laid beside the personal legacy that Tom Osborne left in his footsteps. Simply put, Tom is a man of God. On a very visible stage, Tom conducted himself with dignity, humility, honesty, honor, compassion, fairness, kindness, thoughtfulness, and peace. Like a paperback page-turner, the years have passed, yet Mr. Osborne hasn’t changed. Many books have been written about this man’s legacy which is in fact not his own legacy at all, but the testimony of that which happens when a man yields to the indwelling power of the One Living God. While Tom retired to the political arena and was elected to the House of Representatives, the drum beat of Cornhusker football marched on, though in far less capable hands than what preceded it. Frank Solich was fired by Athletic Director Steve Pederson. When Pederson announced the hiring of Bill Callahan in 2004, hopes for Callahan were high, but with the face of college football changing drastically, parity, reduction in scholarships, and who knows what else, Bill Callahan just didn’t get the job done. The 65-51 loss against Colorado was probably the last straw for many Husker fans, but the second losing season in four years and the Huskers’ second losing season in 45 years didn’t help matters. Callahan was 0-10 against teams ranked higher than 20th, 25-21 against Division I opponents and 15-18 against Big 12 opponents. Around here, that doesn’t fly. I am a passionate Nebraska fan and understand that these silly games sometimes make fans lose their collective heads, but the incessant outrage went too far, even for me. Husker Nation lost its way in the maze of perspective. Yes, I suppose when your team hasn’t had a losing season since the 50s there’s bound to be a certain level of hysteria, but the screeching sound was unbecoming. People were losing their minds. Listening to the tone of callers on sports talk shows, you would think Bill Callahan were a baby killer. He’s a coach that tried and failed. Fan’s tone of meanness and antipathy didn’t fit the crime. We’re not trying to cure brain cancer here. It’s just football. During the Missouri/Kansas game, a game that with important national championship implications, I saw a public service announcement about sportsmanship which was produced–I think–by the N.C.A.A. It showed regular people doing regular things, but getting heckled and booed by a hidden crowd. One scene showed a senior citizen clumsily trimming his hedge, while a rowdy voice screams sarcastically, “Trim bushes much, you jerk?” The announcers tag line is something like this: “You don’t behave this way in the rest of your life … why do it when you go to the game?” A few weeks ago, with the Husker football program in shambles, Steve Pederson was fired as Athletic Director and Osborne was hired as Interim Athletic Director. Largely due to the near unanimous respect that Osborne enjoys in Nebraska, much of the hysteria died down. On the day after Thanksgiving, Mr. Osborne announced that he had met with and fired Bill Callahan as Head Coach for Nebraska football. As in other times when he crossed troubled waters–critical losses, harsh criticism from national media for giving players too many second chances when they messed up, heart surgery, “can’t win the big one” talk from Husker fans, and on and on–Osborne managed this difficult situation with grace, dignity, and honor. As I listened to the now 70 something Osborne navigate the ensuing storm of reporters and questions with composure and dignity, I found myself with an unexpected surge of emotion. I’ve watched this man operate for nearly 40 years now with rare class. As Osborne extemporaneously explained his actions, I was once again amazed by his strong compassion, quiet ethic, and impeccable integrity. With humility, he fielded difficult questions with candor and serene authority. He was especially generous to Coach Callahan and his assistants, being careful to spare their dignity and to speak of them respectfully. Tom Osborne has had a profound influence on the way in which I live my life. His example is worthy of imitation and as I watched him speak again on Friday, I realized the many ways in which his beliefs and behaviors have become a part of me. I don’t mean to say that I have been worthy of his example, only that his life has been a significant inspiration. We are all on stage–some of us more, some less. This isn’t profound, but it is often overlooked. But whether our stage is large or small, big or tall, literal or metaphorical, it’s visible from where people sit; there is a sphere of influence of which we should be aware. To our children and those near us, we may play a starring role. To others, maybe only a bit part. To still others, maybe it’s a memorable supporting role. Sometimes, the person on which we might expect to have the least impact, ends up being one that we influence the most. These are windows of opportunity as we play a character that’s as real as life itself. And people are watching.

I once had a silly daydream. It was a vision–at least for one album–that Andrew Peterson went hip hop. In support of the project, I witnessed Ben Shive, then known as Jive Shive the DJ, laying down some scratch while Andy Gullahorn–pants sinking six inches below the top of his boxers–led the congregation in breakdancing. Behind the curtain, Andrew Peterson emerged to open the show with his new rap version of “Nothing To Say.” I admit that it’s a radical idea, but a great experiment, I must say. Having come to know many of Andy’s most loyal supporters, I have a strong hypothesis that there exist a large, loyal contingent of A.P. devotees that will invest in anything the man brings to market, even a rap or punk rock project. Why such loyalty? Well, like trying to craft a short list of desert island items, the answer to such a query is similarly faceted. Even so, I think I can consolidate it into three primary reasons: quality, candor, and truth. A.P. aficionados know, as much as they know their own name, that Andrew Peterson will fashion his work with precision and punctuality; almost like the painstaking focus of a tool and die maker building patterns for aerospace parts. Quality. The song, the lyrics, the music, the art–they will not fly until they are right. “Right” in this case means thoughtful, beautiful, insightful, layered, poetic … and true. This man won’t use a marginal word or phrase when another will communicate more clearly. Truth. It’s rare to find a passive A.P. supporter. When pressed, even casual observers of Andy’s music will often admit–at one point or another–to being assaulted by the truth. Once clobbered, a man is seldom ever the same. Unexpectedly, we are shaken by discovering truth (sometimes very fundamental truth) more clearly, more deeply, more explicitly, than what we knew before. Like a psychic mirror, we find reflections of feelings and deeply held beliefs we know to be true, but lack the emotional vocabulary to enunciate. Candor. In Derek Webb’s The House Show CD, one of his song introductions suggests the best thing that could happen to a believer is for his private sin to be displayed on a newscast for all to see. One of the most unfortunate things that happens in communities of believers is that in our human effort to become more like Jesus, we transmute into perverse plastic puppets, clumsy facsimiles with painted on smiles and artificial charity. It looks real, but it sometimes misses the mark of authenticity. An Andrew Peterson song isn’t a tell-all biography; nor do we want it to be. It’s not a movie; it’s a snapshot, a glimpse of reality through the keyhole. Lines such as “It’s the fear that I’ll fall / One too many times / It’s the fear that His love / Is no better than mine,” remind us that we are not alone in our spiritual walk, that other travelers walk similar roads. Andrew Peterson’s work assists us in confronting our own humanity. In seeking to become more like Christ, we must admit the truth of where and who we are. Not who we would like others to believe we are, but who we really are. Grounded in the truth that we are in Christ, we can begin to appropriate what that means. If we are inauthentic curmudgeons camouflaged as superstar Christians, we not only fool others–more tragically–we sometimes fool ourselves. A.P. has a history of laying it on the line. On stage and in our speakers, he tells us the truth about himself. That’s not to say that we know everything and it’s not to say that we are vicariously glorifying sin, but in learning of his struggles, we are reminded that he is a little like us. He’s human, not one of those scary puppets. In that, we may find the courage to understand our own darkness. Not that it’s okay, but that it’s okay to admit it. I am hopeless as a writer. The introduction to my review of Appendix M: Media / Music / Movies just took me eight paragraphs to write. The thing is, the introduction is really the review. You see, as much as any of Andrew Peterson’s more “polished” efforts, Appendix A and Appendix M are testament to the aforementioned themes of quality, candor, and truth. While it’s true that some of the musical performances on “M” lack the gloss of studio projects, that which we lose in studio sparkle is more than offset with enhancements and transparency. Take the opening song on M, “Further Proof” for example. It’s a song about writing a song. Oh yeah, and in the ostensible purpose of letting us in on the mechanics of songwriting, we–oh, by the way–just happen to stumble upon a clever primer on the nature of those things that last. It’s candid; who else offers commentary on the process in the process? It’s quality work because it’s good; in structure, in content (cerebral in a light-hearted way), and clarity. Finally, it conveys truth by contrasting the temporal with that which is eternal. As consumers, value is inextricably linked with quality. Are we getting our money’s worth? After all, Appendix M doesn’t have a jewel case and there’s only eight songs. “Pshaw,” is not too far from the response that a typical Andrew Peterson supporter might offer to that question. Here’s what we get: 1. Eight tracks featuring songs that we’ve never heard before, or at least never heard in quite the same way before. These are songs that for one reason or the other didn’t make it on to a standard project: they didn’t fit the theme, were only done live, or were sung by somebody else (Jill Phillips on “All the Way Home” in what–as we might expect–is an otherworldy performance). 2. A personal welcome and introduction from Andrew Peterson himself. 3. A play-by-play from Andy featuring a description of each track, how they came to be, and what they mean to him. 4. A variety of wallpaper for your computer desktop including shots from The Far Country; Behold the Lamb of God; Slugs, & Bugs & Lullabys; and, The Ballad of Matthew’s Begats. I just replaced The Far Country wallpaper with one of the Behold the Lamb of God versions. 5. Fifteen video clips. The video of Andy and his first (only?) skydiving experience is worth at least $13.00 by itself. Also catch live versions of old favorites such as “Rise and Shine,” “Venus,” “Loose Change,” and more. We are also treated to Andy’s cover of Rich Mullins’s “The Color Green.” One of my favorite videos is the electronic press kit, one of those continuous loop clips you see playing in your local Christian bookstore, selling the CD and offering the public an inside look at the recording artist “as a person.” Andy has the look of a little boy, ready to go to Sunday School, wearing clothes that give him a bad feeling. When wearing clothes that were mandated by Mom, my brother and I used to refer to this bad feeling as simply, “the feeling.” We still talk about the feeling in the way that only adults can when they have known each other since childhood. I would describe the feeling as an uncomfortable, eerie fashion sense that you look better to your mother than everyone else, including yourself. At the last funeral we attended together, grabbing his tie and pulling gently, I ask my brother if he had “the feeling.” He did. Andy looks “that” uncomfortable. And yet, though I smile to myself in places, like when I watch the shot of Andy in the button-down shirt with puffy sleeves, I am genuinely moved by pictures of his wife and kids, of the studio clips where and when “Family Man” was recorded, and Andy’s own extemporaneous words about the song. 6. 46 personal journal entries, some of which are fall-down hilarious, and most of which are moving and insightful. I’ve never mentioned or admitted this out loud or in print before, but I’ve always felt comfortable in the role of contrarian. As a kid, I would often reflexively take the opposite view. What I learned from that–besides having a lot of fun and annoying my friends–was that there was often more truth on the opposite side of conventional wisdom. So I wasn’t afraid to look. Maybe I’m wrong (but then again maybe I’m not!), but it seems to me Andrew Peterson often pursues a similar track when he writes. He’s unafraid to turn an idea on it’s head. That’s not to say contrarians don’t pay a price. We are often bruised and scorned (long time A.P. supporters may remember the controversy surrounding “Mohawks on the Scaffold”). On the other hand, there’s often beauty and truth where others fail to tread. As you read these journals, look for A.P.s tendency to view things differently than otherwise might be expected. 7. Chord charts for Love & Thunder; The Far Country; and, Appendix A, Bootlegs and B Sides. This guitar hacker, able to read and use tabs only v-e-r-y slowly, really appreciates the chords. That way, I can just hack away. I feel more in my element. Much of what I like about this project is its humor, variety, and serendipity. Even the title of this eclectic effort was encouraged by some rather low-brow bathroom humor at the Andrew Peterson message board. Those characteristics–humor, variety, and serendipity–not bathroom humor–are probably more intrinsic in the appendix projects than Andy’s studio albums. Still though, in an effort that is closer to a scrapbook than a bound and published hard cover book, we find quality, candor, and truth. After all, it is an Andrew Peterson project. And though we shouldn’t hold our collective breath for that rap version of “Nothing to Say,” Appendix M, Media / Music / Movies offers enough offbeat fun and unconventional surprise that you won’t need to bother yourself with the kind of startling daydream that started this review. Just buy the CD.

When it comes to wanting what’s real, There’s no such thing as greed. So sings Karin Bergquist in the first track of Over the Rhine’s 2007 CD, The Trumpet Child. She sings it in a voice so sultry it makes me blush a little just listening to her. The Trumpet Child is about desire, about longing. The title track is about the Second Coming, that event for which the whole creation waits with longing and desire. I’m trying to resist the temptation to quote the lyrics to the whole song here, but I hope you’ll at least indulge me in a long quotation: The Trumpet Child will banquet here Until the lost are truly found…The rich forget about their gold, The meek and mild are strangely bold. A lion lies beside a lamb And licks a murderer’s outstretched hand.The Trumpet Child will lift a glass, His Bride now leaning in at last. His final aim–to fill with joy The earth that man all but destroyed. That last, Chestertonian idea–that joy rather than judgment is the ultimate aim of Judgment Day–helped me make sense of the whole album. The rest of the songs on the CD concern themselves with desires and longings that are very much of this world rather than the next. The most persistent theme is sexual desire, usually unrequited. The desire for joy and the desire for pleasure aren’t the same thing; Bergquist and her husband Linford Detweiler (they wrote all the songs on the album) never conflate the two. But they do acknowledge that there is a place where genuine joy and earthly pleasure overlap. In groping around for that place, they’re willing to get it wrong; instead of saying, “Here’s what earthly desire ought to be like,” they seem to be saying, “Here’s what earthly desire is like…now what does that tell us about our truest desires?” When it comes to wanting what’s real, there’s no such thing as greed. But the truth is, we want a lot that isn’t real, and Detweiler and Bergquist are willing to wrestle around with that too. So in the song “Trouble,” we get the lyric, If you came to make trouble, Make me a double, Honey, I think it’s good. Or in “Who’m I Kidding but Me,” You smell like sweet magnolias And Pentecostal residue I’d like to get to know ya And shake the holy fire right out of you, But oh, who’m I kiddin’ but me. But then there’s “Let’s Spend the Day in Bed,” a sweet, quiet song about–well, staying in bed all day. It’s a picture of marital bliss that is more than a metaphor for the abundant life. The point, it seems to me, is that this is the abundant life that Jesus promised–or, rather, a little sliver of it. Obviously there’s more to the abundant life than earthly happiness. But where and how and why they’re connected–those are questions worth exploring. In Detweiler’s lyrics, the trumpet that will blow on the last day Is being fashioned out of fire. The mouthpiece is a glowing coal, The bell a burst of wild desire. I love that image. We’re each of us a swirl of desires, some noble, some petty, some seedy. This CD explores many of those desires, including the seedy. But poised above them all is that fiery trumpet. And when it blows, we won’t be relieved of desire, but swept up in a greater, wilder desire. The glowing coal will burn away the false desires and leave the true, and the Trumpet Child will fill the universe with the joy that was the point all along. p.s. It occurs to me that this isn’t really a music review. I guess it’s a poetry review. I’ll rely on the Rabbit Room’s more musically sophisticated readers and contributors to address the music itself, which is pretty fabulous.

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

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

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

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

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