What are you looking for?

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

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

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

A Liturgy for the Wrapping of Christmas Gifts by Wayne Garvey and Douglas McKelvey O Great Giver of All Good Gifts, I sit amongst rolls of wrapping paper, tissue, bags, and bows—presents spread before me, ready to be concealed in shrouds of joyful mystery, and nestled for a time beneath the tree. This brief veiling of gifts from the wondering eyes of those who will receive them is an act intended to heighten excitement, and to kindle hopes—hopes that might find fulfillment when these festive secrets are finally revealed. There is always in us that which delights in surprise. And while these gifts might provide a passing happiness, I pray they would also stir the hearts of their recipients in some deeper way, as small echoes of a greater grace. For you first lavished upon us your astonishing love in the person of Jesus. You wrapped your gift, O God, in the form of a baby. And then, in that baby-become-man, you unveiled glory upon glory: Miracles. Marvelous words. Deeds of compassion and mercy. Strong promises. Death defeated. Life eternal. The revelation of yourself as a dear father, longing to adopt us orphans as daughters and sons! Indeed “We love, because God first loved us!” In our giving of Christmas gifts we but seek to imitate your generosity. So let our stumbling attempts to mirror the eternal charities of your own lavish heart, be undertaken in a spirit of glad celebration and as an act of worship. Christ, you are the gift of God who gave all, gives all, is all. So let these my small presents be offered in great love, and received as humble expressions of a holy hospitality, and reminders of a divine kindness. HERE THE READER MAY WISH TO PRAY SPECIFICALLY FOR EACH LOVED ONE AS THEIR GIFT IS WRAPPED. Now may the lives of all your children be ever more marked by a loving generosity manifest in daily acts of practical service to others, O Lord. And may my own heart in particular be kept less and less like a wrapped and sealed mystery, but be freely offered instead as an open gift through which the radiant love of Christ is made ever more visible. Amen. A Liturgy for Missing Someone (Advent Version) by Douglas McKelvey ALL STANDING AS ABLE, WITH EMPTY HANDS CUPPED. LEADER: We willingly carry this ache. PEOPLE: We carry it, O Father, to you. PARTICIPANTS NOW SIT OR KNEEL IN A CIRCLE. You created our hearts for unbroken fellowship. Yet the constraints of time and place, and the stuttering rhythms of life in a fallen world dictate that all fellowships in these days will at times be broken or incomplete. And so we find ourselves in this season, bearing the sorrow of our separation from ___________. S P E A K T H E N A M E O F T H E A B S E N T P E R S O N H E R E . F O R A DV E N T O B S E RVA N C E , S P E A K T H E NAME OF JESUS. We acknowledge, O Lord, that it is a right and a good thing to miss deeply those whom we love but with whom we cannot be physically present. Grant us, therefore, courage to love well even in this time of absence. Grant us courage to shrink neither from the aches nor from the joys that love brings, for each, willingly received, will accomplish the good works you have appointed them to do. Therefore we praise you even for our sadness, knowing that the sorrows we steward in this life will in time be redeemed. We praise you also knowing that these glad aches are a true measure of the bonds you have wrought between our hearts. Now use our sorrows as tools in your hand, O Lord, shaping our hearts into a truer imitation of the affections of Christ. Use even this sadness to carve out spaces in our souls where still greater repositories of holy affection might be held, unto the end that we might better love, in times of absence and in times of presence alike. We now entrust all to your keeping. May our reunion be joyous, whether in this life or in the life to come. How we look forward, O Lord, to the day when all our fellowships will be restored, eternal and unbroken. T H E F O L LOW I N G S EC T I O N M AY B E A D D E D D U R I N G THE FIRST & SECOND WEEKS OF ADVENT. O come, O come, Emmanuel! Christ our King, how we long for your return. O come, O come, Emmanuel! Christ our Shepherd, how we pine for your voice. O come, O come, Emmanuel! Christ our older brother, how we miss you. Make haste, O Lord. Return to us! Amen. T H E F O L LOW I N G S EC T I O N M AY B E A D D E D D U R I N G T H E T H I R D A N D F O U RT H W E E K S O F ADVENT. Remembering, O Christ, that you regarded our helpless estate and came to dwell among us as the promised fulfillment of all holy desires, we turn our hearts now to remembrance of your works. SILENCE IS KEPT. You came to us, O Lord, as a lantern in our darkness. Now illumine our way. You came to us as a song in the midst of our sorrow. Now kindle our hope. You came to us as a balm on the bed of our sufferings. Now be our healing. You came to us as a shelter amidst the violence of storms. Now grant us peace. You came to us as mercy in the place of our shame. Now be our righteousness. You came to us as a king upon the fields of our defeat. Now be our salvation. You came to us as a child in the midnight of our despair. Now be our God. Remembering these manifold joys and blessings of your first advent, how our hearts long to witness the glories of your promised return. Come quickly, Lord Jesus! O come, O come, Emmanuel. Amen. A Liturgy to Mark the Start of the Christmas Season by Douglas McKelvey LEADER: As we prepare our house for the coming Christmas season, we would also prepare our hearts for the returning Christ. PEOPLE: You came once for your people, O Lord, and you will come for us again. Though there was no room at the inn to receive you upon your first arrival, We would prepare you room here in our hearts and here in our home, Lord Christ. As we decorate and celebrate, we do so to mark the memory of your redemptive movement into our broken world, O God. Our glittering ornaments and Christmas trees, Our festive carols, our sumptuous feasts— By these small tokens we affirm that something amazing has happened in time and space— that God, on a particular night, in a particular place, so many years ago, was born to us, an infant King, our Prince of Peace. Our wreaths and ribbons and colored lights, our giving of gifts, our parties with friends— these have never been ends in themselves. They are but small ways in which we repeat that sounding joy first proclaimed by angels in the skies near Bethlehem. In view of such great tidings of love announced to us, and to all people, how can we not be moved to praise and celebration in this Christmas season? As we decorate our tree, and as we feast and laugh and sing together, we are rehearsing our coming joy! We are making ready to receive the one who has already, with open arms, received us! We would prepare you room here in our hearts and here in our home, Lord Christ. Now we celebrate your first coming, Immanuel, even as we long for your return. O Prince of Peace, our elder brother, return soon. We miss you so! Amen. A Liturgy for the Preparation of a Meal by Wayne Garvey and Douglas McKelvey LEADER: O Bread of Life, PEOPLE: Meet us in the making of this meal. As we perform the various tasks of washing, chopping, sifting, mixing, simmering, baking, and boiling, let those little acts coalesce into an embodied liturgy of service— an outworking of love offered for your purposes, that through us, your tender care might be translated into the comforting and cheery language of nurturing food and drink offered for the benefit of others. Let us invest in this preparation a lovingkindness toward those who will partake. Let us craft this meal with a care as would befit any endeavor touching eternity. Meet us in the making of this meal, O Lord, and make of it something more than a mere nourishment for the body. Make it the center of a sheltered space where grace freely flows. Let the slow savoring of these foods give pause to those who will soon partake, prompting them to linger long at table, taking rest from the labors of the day, engaging in good conversation. Let the comforting qualities of the dishes we prepare, become catalysts for a rich fellowship, a warm consolation, and a fruitful increase of holy affections. May this meal serve to remind those who share its pleasures of the goodness and the hope that infuses all creation. Unto that end, let us labor creatively, with imaginations engaged, knowing that we are cooks in the kitchen—yes— but we are also agents of a deep eternity, whose prepared meals might feed more than the body, nourishing also the hearts and hopes of those sometimes-weary souls who are well-served by our labors. Amen. A Liturgy for Feasting With Friends by Douglas McKelvey CELEBRANT:  To gather joyfully is indeed a serious affair, for feasting and all enjoyments gratefully taken are, at their heart, acts of war. PEOPLE: In celebrating this feast we declare that evil and death, suffering and loss, sorrow and tears, will not have the final word. But the joy of fellowship, and the welcome and comfort of friends new and old, and the celebration of these blessings of food and drink and conversation and laughter are the true evidences of things eternal, and are the first fruits of that great glad joy that is to come and that will be unending. So let our feast this day be joined to those sure victories secured by Christ, Let it be to us now a delight, and a glad foretaste of his eternal kingdom. Bless us, O Lord, in this feast. Bless us, O Lord, as we linger over our cups, and over this table laden with good things, as we relish the delights of varied texture and flavor, of aromas and savory spices, of dishes prepared as acts of love and blessing, of sweet delights made sweeter by the communion of saints. May this shared meal, and our pleasure in it, bear witness against the artifice and deceptions of the prince of the darkness that would blind this world to hope. May it strike at the root of the lie that would drain life of meaning, and the world of joy, and suffering of redemption. May this our feast fall like a great hammer blow against that brittle night, shattering the gloom, reawakening our hearts, stirring our imaginations, focusing our vision on the kingdom of heaven that is to come, on the kingdom that is promised, on the kingdom that is already, indeed, among us, For the resurrection of all good things has already joyfully begun. ALL PARTICIPANTS NOW LIFT THEIR GLASSES OR CUPS May this feast be an echo of that great Supper of the Lamb, a foreshadowing of the great celebration that awaits the children of God. Where two or more of us are gathered, O Lord, there you have promised to be. And here we are. And so, here are you. Take joy, O King, in this our feast. Take joy, O King! GLASSES ARE CLINKED WITH CELEBRATORY CHIME, AND PARTICIPANTS IN THE FEAST SAVOR A DRINK, ADMONISHING ONE ANOTHER HEARTILY WITH THESE SINCERE WORDS: Take joy! CELEBRANT: All will be well! PARTICIPANTS TAKE UP THE CRY: All will be well! Nothing good and right and true will be lost forever. All good things will be restored. Feast and be reminded! Take joy, little flock. Take joy! Let battle be joined! Let battle be joined! Now you who are loved by the Father, prepare your hearts and give yourself wholly to this celebration of joy, to the glad company of saints, to the comforting fellowship of the Spirit, and to the abiding presence of Christ who is seated among us both as our host and as our honored guest, and still yet as our conquering king. Amen. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, take seat, take feast, take delight!

by Jonathan Rogers In twenty-plus years of writing for a living, I have learned two things: When I need to jump-start a project or get big chunks written, it's really helpful to get away and get significant time alone.  Significant time alone can pull me into a whirl-hole of self-absorption that makes it nearly impossible to jump-start a project or get big chunks written. For me, it is the great paradox of the writing life, the need to be alone competing with the truth that the inside of your brain can be a neighborhood you don't want to be alone in.  You're there at your desk, trying to work out the next sentence, and before you know it, you're thinking about yourself instead: your failures, your ego, your word-count goal. You speculate on how you're going to feel when you make your goal. You get a jump-start on the self-loathing you'll feel if you fall short. You wonder what people are going to think when they read what you've written. You wonder if anybody will even read it. You question whether anything you've ever written was actually good. You buck yourself up, remembering that, yes, you've written plenty of good pieces–a few brilliant ones, in fact. Which makes you suspect that you've already used up all your brilliance. Then you ponder Edgar Allen Poe, who died penniless and alone in a Baltimore gutter. You'll never write as well as Edgar Allen Poe. In short, it takes about forty-five seconds to decide that you're the piece of garbage that the universe revolves around.  If you're going to be a writer, you need alone time. I think of it as going into a cave. I know I have to go into the cave. But I can only go there because I know there are people just outside the cave who are pulling for me, people who need the work that I can only do in the cave. Over at The Habit Membership, the online writers' community that I host, we talk a lot about giving one another a little more courage. Even if writing requires that you get alone, it's not really something you can do alone. With all that in mind, we're putting together a writing getaway that is quite different from the twice-yearly "Habit Writers' Weekends" that we have hosted at the Rabbit Room's North Wind Manor. The Focus Retreat, presented by The Habit, will convene at the beautiful Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville, Tennessee, March 16-20, 2025 (that’s Sunday afternoon through Thursday afternoon). The idea of this retreat is simple: you’ll have four days dedicated to focused work on your current work-in-progress, whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. You'll have big chunks of time to write, punctuated by three check-ins a day (at breakfast, lunch, and dinner) plus evening events designed to keep the fountain of creativity flowing. Four days away from your day-to-day responsibilities. Your only responsibility is to write. We’ll provide: A comfortable, modest single room with a bed and desk (you’ll share a bathroom with the writer next door). Three meals daily in Scarritt-Bennett’s paneled dining room (except for two special dinners out.) Evening events with Nashville writers and songwriters to spark your creativity. Daily group activities to inspire and energize you. A supportive community of writers sharing this creative journey. Daily Schedule  Morning: Inspiration and Preparation 7:30 AM – Breakfast Together: Start the day with coffee, conversation, and camaraderie in the dining hall. 8:30 AM – Morning Group Check-In: After a few words of challenge and encouragement from me, you’ll share your writing goals for the day with your small group and draw inspiration from your fellow writers. 9:00 AM – Focused Writing Time: Settle into your dorm room or one of the beautiful Scarritt-Bennett campus spaces to dive deep into your work. Afternoon: Quiet Progress 12:30 PM – Lunch Together: Take a break to recharge with a shared meal. 1:30 PM – Writing Workshops (Optional): Attend a brief teaching session or writing exercise led by me. 2:30 PM – Continued Writing Time: Spend the rest of the afternoon making progress on your project. Evening: Connection and Reflection  6:00 PM – Dinner Together: Enjoy a delicious meal and connect with your fellow writers over the day’s progress, discussing the day’s challenges and victories. 7:30 PM – Evening Group Activity: Our evening activities will be designed to spur your creativity by connecting you to Nashville’s unique creative culture.  I’ll bring in local writer friends for conversation and a workshop or two (Katy Hutson Bowser, for instance, has already agreed to come share insights from a book she’s writing about play and creativity). One night we’ll attend an in-the-round performance by Nashville songwriters. Our last night together will be devoted to a read-aloud in which you’ll have the opportunity to share an excerpt from the piece you’ve been working on all week. (This is completely voluntary, of course; nobody will be required to read their work aloud!) Special Highlights An evening at North Wind Manor: One of our evenings will be spent by the fire(s) at the Rabbit Room's North Wind Manor. Optional One-on-One Meetings: Throughout the retreat, you’ll have the opportunity to meet privately with me to discuss struggles, brainstorm ideas, or get some direction for your work. The Community You won’t be alone on this journey. You’ll be part of a supportive small group of like-minded writers who will check in with you throughout the day, offering accountability and encouragement. This retreat is perfect for writers looking to: Escape distractions and immerse themselves in their craft. Find a balance between solitude and meaningful connection with other writers. Reignite their passion for writing in a serene, supportive setting. The price of the Focus Retreat is $1650, but if you register by December 9, the price is $1499. Half the payment is due at registration, and the remainder is due by February 1. If you have questions about whether the Focus Retreat is a good fit for you, don’t hesitate to send me an email ( jr@thehabit.co ). If it’s helpful, I’d be glad to set up a short Zoom call to discuss. Registration for the Focus Retreat is limited to 20 writers, so register early to secure your spot! [Registration link]:  https://thehabit.co/register/the-habit-focus-retreat-2025/

by Daniel R. Spanjer All people know that they need salvation, even if the salvation for which they hope is that of a meal when they are hungry. Human beings are vulnerable creatures who need sustenance and protection in order to survive. We fear deprivation, which ultimately leads to our greatest fear—death. The solution we seek is salvation. The world knows to look for salvation from the powerful. Men of strong families who possess physical might have in their hands the ability necessary to save people. In the ancient period, the strength of a person was indicated largely by his or her birth. The firstborn son of a family became the family’s leader. In addition, tribes with the longest lineage and noblest heritage were naturally considered the most capable. National strength was squarely founded on the strength and loyalty of family members. This principle was best exemplified in the dynasties that served as political backbones for most ancient societies. Each king rested on his relationship to a great ancestor who established the family line. The authoritative power of family lines and male birth was not the recourse of an ignorant people. In a time when military strength relied on pure manpower, the loyalty of kin and the backs of men determined the fate of nations. People considered that the gods determined birth order and ancestry, but the influence of a god only confirmed what was then common sense. Yahweh shattered the world’s political expectations. He claimed to be the king without heritage, the king who did not need the strength of men. He owned the cattle on a thousand hills, despite the human beings who claimed to possess them. Yahweh’s power did not rest on any heritage or lineage; Yahweh’s reign was not contingent on human strength. His royal position and almighty power came from his nature alone.  Not only did Yahweh reign in a way that seemed foreign to pagans of the ancient world, but it also appeared strange to his own people. He cared for his people in ways that seemed counterintuitive by ancient, as well as modern, standards. The world perceives the ability to rule as contingent upon power, fame, and heritage. God asserted his right to rule by caring for the poor and protecting bruised reeds. Yahweh does not need powerful men to protect his rule. Rather, Yahweh called his people to love him first, then to pursue justice for the weak. While the reign of all other kings is confirmed by the strength of family and the subservience of the outsider and the foreigner, Yahweh confirms his power by calling his family to become servants to the outsider.  In keeping with worldly views of power, cultures tell stories of great heroes who serve as examples for the people. But the people whom the Scripture set forward as examples were the lowest, not the greatest. God called leaders like David, the youngest and least-respected son of Jesse. He exalted Joseph, Jacob’s youngest and least-respected son, who suffered rejection and even imprisonment.  It may be that the greatest hero of the Bible is Job, who refused to be disloyal to Yahweh even though Satan reduced Job to a childless, disease-ridden heap of a person. With Yahweh’s permission, Satan stole Job’s strength, his wealth, and, most cruelly of all, his own children. Job’s sons had made him important as they promised to continue his family line forward. Despite losing everything and becoming the most pitiable of all people in his day, Job did not turn from God. Job is the Bible’s hero, the model citizen of Yahweh’s kingdom, despite his human flaws. The Bible reverses every worldly expectation by reimagining power as weakness and justice as mercy. For God, the virgin of no social influence or power, from a poor family, served as the lineage of his great King. Mary was the virgin fiancée to a poor member of the tribe of Judah. While the pattern of God’s plan to save his people is consistent in the selection of Mary, his work was once again a surprise. By every measure, she was the bottom of society. Yet her womb became the very seat of the universe’s king. The birth of the king through Joseph’s poor, virgin fiancée reconfigured the hope of God’s people. Their king would not come with the trappings of worldly kings. With all their armies, chariots, and men, these kings are petty. They seek the world’s acclaim as they follow its rules for power. In the unlikely birth of Jesus, Yahweh remade creation according to its original design—a world under the reign of the good King. Christ’s birth turned history back on itself. All human history had moved the world back to the disorder of Genesis 1:1. Jesus, however, began bringing the ruined world once again under his good reign. Sin ruined human relationships, which then devolved into injustice. Yahweh’s king would establish justice between people. He would restore love between his people, who would then abhor the injustices of broken societies. The fall unleashed disease and evil that worked all life towards death. Jesus would turn the disorder of illness into the order of health, and the disunion of death into eternal life. Jesus’ reign would not be evident by the standards of normal human expectations, rather it would. His reign would in fact issue from the life of one who had no influence or power in society.  He exalted the virgin’s womb. In Luke I, it is written: In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”  In choosing to come to his people through the humble station of a poor couple, who belonged to the poorest tribe of Israel and lived in one of the meanest of Israel’s small towns, Yahweh bankrupted the world’s expectations. But he also thwarted his own people’s expectations as well. Some families of Israel had remained loyal to the temple despite Roman oppression. Their proud heritage of loyalty to the Jewish way of life granted them great social influence in Palestine. Yahweh could have chosen to bring his king through any number of strong and noble families. It stands to reason that so many leading families of the Sanhedrin rejected Jesus on the grounds of his lineage.  Jesus’ lineage was more than a strange coincidence. Jesus preached mercy to sinners, touched lepers, and spoke to prostitutes. At the same time, Jesus castigated Israel’s influential leaders, who wanted a king like every other nation—a man of strength with a powerful lineage. Jesus, however, humbled himself to the social reputation of being Mary and Joseph’s son. He loved the poor and died a criminal’s death. Jesus upended the world’s false claims to power when he rose from the dead and confirmed that his kingdom of love, mercy, and justice stands over and against every human claim to power. Excerpted from  Advent is the Story: Seeing the Nativity throughout Scripture —a collection of readings for the Advent season by Daniel R. Spanjer and published by Square Halo Books. Daniel is currently the principal at Veritas Academy. He has a B.A. in History from Nyack College, a M.A. in theology from Reformed Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in history from the University at Albany, SUNY.

Before becoming a parent myself, someone shared the oh-so-helpful statistic that surveys show that most couples report that the happiest days of their marriage were before having children. It was not a heartening statistic to hear as a newly-married-but-as-yet-childless person. Now six years into parenting three children, I can attest that the reality of navigating the ups and downs of parenting is so much more complicated than that statistic made it seem. We waited eight years before having children and, yes, those years held many joys to which we have since waved bye-bye. Joys like choosing when you want to wake up, jauntily walking out the door when it is time to leave the house, or not needing to check your sweaters each time you wear them to make sure they haven't picked up any new stains from food or... other things. As with most things, Michael McIntyre sums it up nicely. This season of life has held new joys of its own though—and new sorrows. It has been harder than I could have imagined, but I can also see that in the difficulty, the best parts of me have grown and the worst parts of me have been revealed and peeled away. Sometimes when I walk through the door, three little beings scream my name and walk/crawl over to me for a hug. Other times, however, I walk in while two or more of these little angels are screaming at, hitting, stealing from, or otherwise menacing one another. Sometimes I feel that I should read Ellie Holcomb and Douglas McKelvey's "Liturgy for After a Fight Among Siblings" before coming home and have Andrew Roycroft's "Liturgy for After a Child's Meltdown" or Hannah Greer's "A Liturgy for Responding to a Child's Needs" at the ready for soon after arrival. My oldest son started kindergarten this year and watching him ride his bike to school on his first day brought on a peculiar melange of feelings that I hardly have words for. It was a bright sadness, to say the least. Yet I know it is but a foretaste of what is in store when my children grow up and leave the house. I imagine that I will return to this post to read Heidi Johnston's "Liturgy for Contemplating the Empty Bedroom of a Child Who Has Left Home" on that day. On the whole, parenting is a delightful, strange, and maddening mixed bag. But did I leave my happiest days behind me when we had our first child? Definitely not. Has there been a trade-off of one kind of joy and one kind of suffering for another? Certainly. One thing is beyond doubt, parents need all the support they can get. So parents, to that end, we offer these liturgies gratis and with our blessing to help you through all the many ups and downs you will encounter on the way. Each of these liturgies is taken from Every Moment Holy Volume 3 from Rabbit Room Press . You can find more liturgies like these at EveryMomentHoly.com . Liturgy for After a Child's Meltdown by Andrew Roycroft Lord, as this present storm subsides, as we process our own agitated emotions, even our exasperation at this meltdown, help us to breathe out again. Soften this wounded hush into readiness to hear your voice, to show your mercy, to offer your grace, to model your love. All-seeing God, the hurt we feel is not unknown to you. Jesus, great High Priest, you are not unsympathetic to our distress. Blessed Holy Spirit, who brooded over formless ruin, come to us with your creative peace. We bring our child to you now overtaken by emotion, overwhelmed with frustration. Calm them, we pray. Root them ever more deeply in our unconditional love. Steady their ragged breathing and raging thoughts. Blossom their budded fists into opened hands. Where gospel conviction would lead them to your grace—our grace—let it do its work. Where harmful guilt would drive them to the brink, draw them back. Let your love shown through us become their safe place, their nearest shore. Thank you for the gift of our relationship with [child's name]. Thank you that our love gives them a sheltered space in which they can express their heart, their fears, their hurts and confusion, rather than choking those emotions down till they become a quiet poison in their veins. Help us to be steady for them in such moments, not reacting abruptly or unpredictably from our own old wounds—even when we feel overwhelmed by this child’s outburst. We bring ourselves to you, O Christ. We are sinners. We have raged against others in the past. We have raged against you. Forgive us. O Lord, we confess our failure in our handling of these circumstances. A MOMENT OF QUIET REFLECTION AND REPENTANCE MAY BE OBSERVED. Where we have spoken to our child with unbridled tongue, cleanse us, and re-season our speech with grace. Lord give us the courage to confess our sin to our child without justification or reservation. Help us to mean our repentance; help us to model it for them. In the present chaos of these emotions, remind us of your covenant, and help us to embody that same love to our child today. O Lord, as our child will come to us conscious of what they have done, cautious of our response, enable us to stand with open arms in the path that our child takes home, to welcome them, help them, teach them, and guide them. Take us beyond the symptoms of this meltdown and lead us to what is really the matter. May this present stress serve over time to strengthen our bonds of love. Help us to walk in the way of the cross and let your reconciling power be at work here. O Lord, help us! Work your gospel into this moment. Grant that I and my child would not only experience recovery through these hours, but that together we would discover your redemptive grace in new and healing ways, knitting our hearts even more closely than they were before this flare of emotion. Amen. A Liturgy for Contemplating the Empty Bedroom of a Child Who Has Left Home by Heidi Johnston Eternal, unchanging God, meet me here in this moment as my spirit hovers over the bittersweet emptiness of this place that once echoed with noise and life and laughter and possibility. Help me see the space before me as the next proper stage in this, the story of my child, and of my child within our family, and of our family within your greater story— the end of which will not be changed by circumstance or undone by the passing of time. Give me grace to look back with gratitude and not regret, treasuring the memories that come so easily to mind. ONE MIGHT PAUSE HERE TO REFLECT AND GIVE THANKS. Thank you, Father God, for the privilege of loving and nurturing this child over so many years. Forgive my countless failings. Use them only as reminders of your grace. If, in our home, there has been any delight in you, any hunger for your Word, any love for your people, may such things take root even now, growing ever deeper and spreading farther for the extension of your kingdom. As we move into this new season, teach me to accept with gladness the independence that has always been the end goal of parenting—in the knowledge that the bond between parent and child will not end with this letting go. Even as I acknowledge my changing role, help me to be a faithful supporter, always offering an open door and a listening ear, and, above all, remaining fervent in prayer. Thank you that my love for this child, although at times I imagine it unmatched in all of humanity, is but a shadow of your own never-ending love which follows them now where I cannot, and knows all that now remains hidden from me. Give me the courage to entrust to your care that which was never mine to keep. Bless and protect your child through all that is to come, captivating their heart and sustaining them with hope. Grant them wisdom and discernment and the courage to live well in the light of all that is eternally true. ONE MIGHT PAUSE TO PRAY FOR ANY SPECIFIC CHALLENGES NOW FACING THEIR CHILD Just as this child was always yours, so also is this empty space, to do with as you will. Breathe now into this void, showing me how to best use it for your glory. Are there others in need of nurture and care, who, for even a short season, may find refuge in this space? Or perhaps it will become a sanctuary, dedicated to your service in other ways. A place where I, or others, may use or hone or explore whatever gifts and talents you have entrusted to us for the building of your kingdom. ONE MIGHT PAUSE HERE TO PRAY FOR GUIDANCE AND WISDOM And now, with fondness for all that is past and anticipation of all that is yet to come, help me embrace this new season without fear, looking always ahead to that day when we will see that no ending was what it seemed; when all our stories finally merge into one epic tale of your relentless faithfulness, and we find that we are forever home, delighting to dwell in the rooms you have prepared for us. Amen. A Liturgy for Long Hours Caring for an Infant by Leslie Eiler Thompson I am so tired, Lord. This young life requires such constant expenditure of my energies and affections, till I feel drained of both. But you, O Jesus, knew in your own flesh the constraints of the human condition, for you also experienced the weariness of long hours tending endless needs. I beg now your provision of grace as I face the coming hours. I long for the moment when sleep finds me, but till then, I pray your strength would be at work even in my weakness. Now fill my empty cup again, with patience and with peace, that I might pour it out for my child, in joy. Amen. A Liturgy for Responding to a Child's Needs by Hannah Greer O Father, I abide in the beautiful truth that I can come to you expectantly, knowing you will hear me and answer me. You bend to listen to my pleas for help and comfort and guidance and strength. You carry me always. You never tire of it, and I depend upon your dependability to comfort and hold me. And yet, sometimes the voices of my own children become so continuous and exhausting and overwhelming. I am so easily put out and wearied by the whining, tugging, grabbing, and crying to be continually held and attended to. In my humanity, I am confronted with my many limitations. I am so easily given to selfishness, exhaustion, tedium, frustration, and irritation. My back aches and my neck and shoulders are aflame from hoisting small children up again and again and again and balancing them on my hip while trying to accomplish my tasks for the day. How easily my sin can twist the joyful blessing of holding a child into drudgery and a wearisome task. Is this not what I prayed for, Lord, when I asked you to fill my arms with children? I am so like the Israelites, who complained though you rescued them from their enemies, who complained though you rained manna from heaven and provided water from a rock. Yet you never tire of coming to the aid of your children. Father, give me the capacity I need to respond lovingly to my children who cry out to be picked up and held again and again. Remind me of the blessed truth that while I hold my little ones, you hold me. Let me display to them what it looks like to joyfully lay down one’s life for another. Help me to show them that while I will fail them at times, you will never fail them, and you will always hold us fast. Amen. A Liturgy for Giving Your Child Bad News by Janel Davis O Lord, in a few moments I have to tell my kids one of the worst things I hope they will ever hear. Have mercy on us, O Lord. I know you love them more than I could ever love them. Help me remember that truth as I watch the pain cross their faces, and also in the coming months as I shepherd them through the grief that is sure to follow. May this moment of awful revelation not become a memory that might uproot their budding faith, but rather one that plants it deeper within them, turning their young hearts to you in the midst of their dismay and giving those gospel seeds the resiliency they need to flourish for a lifetime, no matter the suffering or the circumstances they experience in their lives. Help me not to fall apart as I tell them, Lord. Help me hold my emotions together so that I don’t scare them, but also let me open enough of a window into my own sorrow that they might see that it is okay and good to grieve, to weep, and to express their feelings. Sovereign Lord, this news is so awful my children likely won’t even understand some parts of it. And I’m not sure quite how to explain it. Grant me wisdom, insight, and understanding to communicate just enough that they might comprehend this heartbreak in an age-appropriate way, but also such that no horrid, graphic details would lodge in their dreams and imaginations. I rely on you, Holy Spirit, to be my counselor, nudging me toward what to tell and what to hold back. Let me be sensitive and responsive to your voice that I might in this moment become a conduit of your wisdom and your love for my children. There will almost certainly be a loss of innocence in learning of this news. My children will begin to understand hard truths about life and humanity. Till now I’ve tried to guard their hearts from things too dark for them to deal with. I’ve tried to show them the flourishing and the beauty of your good creation. Now they will also hear of the horrors that followed on the heels of the fall. Lord, may they know that you are still good. May they better see why the news of your coming kingdom is such a great hope. May they begin to learn how you will subvert even this evil, somehow using it for the good of your people and for your glory. I entrust their innocence to your hands. Lord, our great Healer— redeem the trauma this brings to our lives. Let your redemption be active in ways we cannot even imagine. Redeem the shock and the wounds we will feel. And redeem the wreckage in the lives of those affected most directly. Do not let this trauma lodge for long in our bodies, spirits, or minds, O Lord. Make us resilient. Let our faith become more rooted and fierce in the face of storm and darkness. Give us a grit that would glorify you, using even this experience to make our lives more sheltering for others in their sorrows. Hold us, heal us, and comfort us, Lord Jesus. We entrust you with all that is good and all that is awful in our lives. Be near us in the hard conversation soon to happen. Be our balm and our guide, our counselor and our shepherd, in the hours and days and months that follow. Amen. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

We like to keep things fun here at ye ol' Rabbit Room. For instance, a few years ago at Hutchmoot , the Rabbit Room's annual conference in Franklin, TN, we decided to make a deck of cards with puzzles on them (and adorable rabbits). We hid the puzzle cards around the conference and everyone worked together to find them and solve the puzzles. Now it is time to share the love. Call it an early Christmas gift from your friends at the Rabbit Room. Here Is How the Game Works: Print the puzzles out. Hide them around your house. Call a bunch of friends/family members over. Find them. Solve them. Make merry. Word to the Wise the First : You can play the game collaboratively or break into teams to see who can find and solve the most. Beyond that, just make up the rest of the rules as you go! Word to the Wise the Second : The difficulty level of these puzzles ranges from "My kid could solve that!" to "Are you kidding me? I'm not an AI." We recommend teaming up for the stumpers. Have Tylenol at the ready for any brain cramps. Without further ado, you can download all the QR codes that lead to the puzzles here . Or if you want to skip the QRs and go straight to the puzzles, here are the files. And if you really want to skip ahead... here is the answer key . And just so you don't have to go to the effort of clicking in order to see what you're getting into, here are a few sample puzzles. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

[Editor's Note: Ryan Whitaker has been reading the work of G. K. Chesterton, one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers and a canonical Rabbit Room writer, for most of his life. Now he has collected 30 passages from Chesterton's copious oeuvre and paired them with his own reflections and discussion questions in an "Advent devotional" called Winter Fire . We asked Ryan if we could share his introduction to Winter Fire and the first two of his Advent devotions. He gave us his blessing and we hope they are a blessing to you.] G. K. Chesterton, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, wrote more in his lifetime than most people get around to reading in theirs. He wrote so broadly, in so many contexts and genres, that it seems as if, at some point or other, he touched on virtually every subject one could possibly think to write about. He was a novelist, a journalist, a historian, a playwright, a lay theologian, a Christian apologist. He published nearly a hundred books, thousands of essays, a handful of plays, and several hundred poems. A staple of the literary scene in London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he was a larger-than-life figure in more ways than one: his intelligence was formidable. His wit, inimitable. His girth, remarkable. I first encountered Chesterton’s writing as a teenager, when his novel The Man Who Was Thursday was assigned as required reading for an English class. I don’t recall it having much of an impact on me at the time, if I did indeed read it in its entirety. A few years later, by what I now consider to be a stroke of divine providence, I stumbled upon a volume of Chesterton’s Father Brown stories collecting dust on my shelf and decided, for whatever reason, to give them a go (I have a habit of buying books on impulse, with the sincere intention of one day getting around to reading them. Results vary, but my library continues to grow). I was struck not just by the lucidity of the prose, or its witty inventiveness, but by something latent beneath the surface of those cleverly constructed stories featuring Chesterton’s bumbling-but-brilliant detective priest: they were beautifully written and utterly delightful, but they were also wise and good—not merely entertaining, but somehow formative. It would be disingenuous to say that I found Father Brown that day; it was more like he found me. In short order, I went on to consume Orthodoxy , The Everlasting Man , The Napoleon of Notting Hill , The Flying Inn , The Ball and the Cross , The Ballad of the White Horse , a fresh read of The Man Who Was Thursday , as well as several others. I’ve now been journeying with Chesterton for fifteen years or so, and I’m still making my way through his astonishing body of work. Because of his extraordinary prolificacy, he is a gift that keeps on giving. Nearly a hundred years after his passing, his words continue to resonate with brilliance, wisdom, and wit. His pseudo-theological works like Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man (which, in C. S. Lewis’s words, “baptized his intellect”) have influenced Christians around the world. In Winter Fire , excerpts of Chesterton’s writing are presented in a devotional format as daily readings, alongside my commentary, Scripture passages, and reflection questions. The devotional readings make up roughly the first half of Winter Fire , while the second half is a compendium of poems, essays, short stories, recipes, and more. In addition to the quotes that are the basis of the devotions, there are many more scattered throughout the book and embedded within my commentary. Chesterton has something important to say about Christmas. With his virtuosic flair, he eloquently (and often humorously) points us back to the true meaning of Christmas. He revels in the festive traditions of Christmas. He challenges the modern opposition to Christmas. At a time when Christmas is becoming increasingly commercialized and detached from its Christian origins, Chesterton’s words seem more relevant than ever before. Now on to the devotions. Day One: An Invitation to Walk Backwards Through History It was in the season of Christmas that I came out of my little garden in that “field of the beeches” between the Chilterns and the Thames, and began to walk backwards through history to the place from which Christmas came. — The New Jerusalem (1920) So begins The New Jerusalem , G. K. Chesterton’s travelogue chronicling his journey to the Holy Land. But before the destination, there is the journey. For Chesterton, it begins in a backyard in Beaconsfield, England, as the large, mustached man unlatches the garden gate and sets off on his adventure. Perhaps yours begins in a kitchen, with a strong cup of black coffee, or in a comfortable corner of the living room, the windows limned with frost. For me, it begins in a home office I affectionately call “the library,” as the fields around my house are blanketed with early morning fog. Regardless of our various points of departure, this book is an invitation to link arms and set off together, as we “walk backwards through history to the place from which Christmas came.” Is our celebration of Christmas not an attempt to do this very thing? Is the memorializing of an event not an effort, at some level, to relive it? Our traditions and ceremonies, rituals and feast days, are the inner workings of a psychological and emotional time machine. To sing “while shepherds watched their flocks at night” is to hum an incantation that might, if we allow it, transport us to a grassy hillside in Judea two thousand years ago, when celestial choirs filled the sky and proclaimed good news for all mankind. A box swathed in paper and ribbon is a talisman with the power to spirit us away to a humble home in first-century Palestine, at the moment when visitors from the East arrive, arms laden with gifts, eyes wide with wonder. In celebrating Christmas, we long, in some sense, to be one with it—to enter the story ourselves. It would behoove us to remember that, as the journey precedes the destination, the season of Advent precedes Christmas. Advent, as observed by Christians for millennia, is a time of expectant waiting, an observance of a time when Israel’s prophets were as silent as their God and their people yearned for a promised (and much delayed) deliverer. As the famous hymn pleads, “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel . . .” Advent is a desire in the Now for the Not Yet. In the coming days, we will further explore the traditional observance of Advent and Christmas and how we might recover those customs in our modern, distracted age. Think of this book as a travelogue into the heart of Christmas, with the tall, heavyset man as our trusted guide. Let us keep our ears (and hearts) open, for I believe he has much to say to us along the way (he’s loquacious, six feet four inches tall, and nearly three hundred pounds, so he’s somewhat difficult to ignore). In speaking of travel, Chesterton once wrote, I cannot see any Battersea here; I cannot see any London or any England. I cannot see that door. I cannot see that chair: because a cloud of sleep and custom has come across my eyes. The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany? I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking. I am seeking Battersea. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. The purpose of our journey is not so much to dwell in “the place from which Christmas came,” but to allow that place to dwell in us , to return to our own country with christened eyes, to look upon our everyday surroundings with a baptized imagination. As we exit the garden and turn the corner, the large man’s cane clinking along the cobblestones, he mutters under his breath, “Christmas belongs to an order of ideas which never really perished, and which is now less likely to perish than ever.” Just then, he is momentarily stunned into silence by the image of a sparrowcock perched upon the branch of a tall, barren tree, silhouetted against the darkening sky. “It had from the first a sort of glamour of a lost cause,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. “It was like an everlasting sunset. It is only the things that never die that get the reputation of dying.” With that, he turns and continues down the street. We hasten to follow, as the first flurries of snow begin to fall . . . Scripture Reading and Reflection Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell securely. And this is the name by which it will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.” —Jeremiah 33:14-16 How might you prepare space in your heart for Christ during this season? How can you make time for silence and contemplation in the midst of an increasingly busy time of year? Meditate on some long journeys in your life, when the promise of deliverance seemed far away. Reflect on the mercies of God that were with you in the midst of your “expectant waiting.” Day Two: A Warning to Those in Danger of Celebrating Prematurely All the old wholesome customs in connection with Christmas were to the effect that one should not touch or see or know or speak of something before the actual coming of Christmas Day. Thus, for instance, children were never given their presents until the actual coming of the appointed hour. The presents were kept tied up in brown-paper parcels, out of which an arm of a doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes accidentally stuck. I wish this principle were adopted in respect of modern Christmas ceremonies and publications. The editors of the magazines bring out their Christmas numbers so long before the time that the reader is more likely to be lamenting for the turkey of last year than to have seriously settled down to a solid anticipation of the turkey which is to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought to be tied up in brown paper and kept for Christmas Day. On consideration, I should favor the editors being tied up in brown paper. Whether the leg or arm of an editor should ever be allowed to protrude I leave to individual choice. —The Illustrated London News (1906) The celebration of Christmas, as traditionally observed by the church, does not, in fact, conclude on December 25. Christmas Day is but the beginning of twelve days of festive celebration (as expressed in the well-known carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas”). That certain ceremonies and publications in Chesterton’s day were rushing to celebrate Christmas prematurely betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the Advent and Christmas traditions. As he says elsewhere, Modern men have a vague feeling that when they have come to the feast, they have come to the finish. By modern commercial customs, the preparations for it have been so very long and the practice of it seems so very short. If this sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because we tend to observe Christmas in the following fashion: Immediately after Thanksgiving in America, radio stations begin playing Christmas music. TV networks begin airing Christmas movies. Families begin stringing up decorations. The so-called Christmas season (a somewhat vague designation) is officially initiated. Festivities continue through December 25 (the day when families gather and gifts are exchanged), after which decorations are unceremoniously stripped away, trees are dragged to the curb to be hauled off with the trash, news anchors recap the holiday in past-tense language, talking about how Christmas was , how it went , what happened . In the days following Christmas Day, a general malaise hangs in the air, like dissipating smoke from a fireworks display. Christmas came and went, in grand but short-lived fashion. Whatever it was, whatever it was for, it is now definitively and categorically over. “This is, of course, in sharp contrast to the older traditional customs, in the days when it was a sacred festival for a simpler people,” Chesterton reminds us. “Then the preparation took the form of the more austere season of Advent and the fast of Christmas Eve. But when men passed on to the feast of Christmas, it went on for a long time after the feast of Christmas Day.” The “austere” season of Advent, as we have established, is a time of expectant waiting. Christmas, fittingly, is its own season—a prolonged feast sustained for nearly two weeks. Chesterton reminds us that in the “old wholesome customs” Christmas would not be spoken of throughout the season of Advent. Gifts were kept wrapped until Christmas Day, when they would be opened at last—not all at once in a dizzying blur—but one at a time, over the course of twelve days (I would venture to say most people today lack the patience for such a thing). If this all sounds rather foreign to us, it’s only further proof that the modern Westernized approach to Christmas has been ingrained in us from an early age. Thankfully, we serve a God who invites us to become like children, so there’s always time to unlearn a few things. The challenge I present to you is this: resist the urge to celebrate Christmas prematurely. Give Advent its proper due, armed with reverent patience and an expectant heart. When Christmas comes, celebrate with prolonged joy “in a crescendo of festivity until Twelfth Night” (I’ll leave the means of gift distribution up to you). Rebel against our modern culture by joining the ranks of the church, which outlasts all cultures. Or shall Chesterton tie you up in brown paper as well? Scripture Reading and Reflection So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter. — 2 Thessalonians 2:15 Consider how you might allow the traditions of the church to influence your celebration of Christmas this year. Consider how you might “unlearn” some modern holiday traditions in favor of a more traditional observance of Advent and Christmas. What would it take for you to sustain a “crescendo of festivity until Twelfth Night”? Ryan Whitaker Smith is an author and filmmaker from Nashville, Tennessee. His film projects include the romantic drama Surprised by Oxford, based on the award-winning memoir by Carolyn Weber, the Lionsgate documentary The Jesus Music, and a forthcoming adaptation of G. K. Chesterton's comic adventure The Ball and the Cross. He is coauthor, with Dan Wilt, of Sheltering Mercy and Endless Grace, two collections of prayers inspired by the Psalms. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

This liturgy is taken from Every Moment Holy Volume 3 from Rabbit Room Press . You can find more liturgies like these at EveryMomentHoly.com . A Liturgy for the Wrapping of Christmas Gifts by Wayne Garvey and Douglas McKelvey O Great Giver of All Good Gifts, I sit amongst rolls of wrapping paper, tissue, bags, and bows—presents spread before me, ready to be concealed in shrouds of joyful mystery, and nestled for a time beneath the tree. This brief veiling of gifts from the wondering eyes of those who will receive them is an act intended to heighten excitement, and to kindle hopes—hopes that might find fulfillment when these festive secrets are finally revealed. There is always in us that which delights in surprise. And while these gifts might provide a passing happiness, I pray they would also stir the hearts of their recipients in some deeper way, as small echoes of a greater grace. For you first lavished upon us your astonishing love in the person of Jesus. You wrapped your gift, O God, in the form of a baby. And then, in that baby-become-man, you unveiled glory upon glory: Miracles. Marvelous words. Deeds of compassion and mercy. Strong promises. Death defeated. Life eternal. The revelation of yourself as a dear father, longing to adopt us orphans as daughters and sons! Indeed “We love, because God first loved us!” In our giving of Christmas gifts we but seek to imitate your generosity. So let our stumbling attempts to mirror the eternal charities of your own lavish heart, be undertaken in a spirit of glad celebration and as an act of worship. Christ, you are the gift of God who gave all, gives all, is all. So let these my small presents be offered in great love, and received as humble expressions of a holy hospitality, and reminders of a divine kindness. HERE THE READER MAY WISH TO PRAY SPECIFICALLY FOR EACH LOVED ONE AS THEIR GIFT IS WRAPPED. Now may the lives of all your children be ever more marked by a loving generosity manifest in daily acts of practical service to others, O Lord. And may my own heart in particular be kept less and less like a wrapped and sealed mystery, but be freely offered instead as an open gift through which the radiant love of Christ is made ever more visible. Amen. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

Each week on the Poetry Substack , the Rabbit Room publishes work from poets in the community. The poems are chosen from hundreds of submissions that come through the submissions page . From there, we compile them into one anonymized document and then they land on the desks of the Poetry Group, a team of 30+ poets who do the work of choosing what poems to share on the Substack newsletter. Many of the people in the Poetry Group are poets themselves. Recently, I asked them how they find time to write in the midst of their busy lives. This question was not without irony - I was asking busy people to write me something about how they find time to write during their busy lives. But they responded with clarity, humility, and wisdom. I hope these brief reflections comfort, inspire, and challenge you in your own creative pursuits. Rachel Donahue As a mother of four who homeschools, I have to look for pockets of quiet in the margins. I have been known to hide from my children in the bathroom, but I usually get up early to write before everyone else wakes up. Sometimes when I'm wide awake at 3 AM, I'll just give in and slip downstairs for an hour or two while my mind is working. During November's intensive poem-a-day challenge I'll check the day's prompt first thing in the morning and think about it as I get dressed, do laundry, carpool, etc. When I finally have words, I type them into the Notes app on my phone—which is how I write most of my poetry anyway! J. J. Brinski While I have set myself to writing every day, I do give my brain and body the freedom for that to be a little or a lot. With that said, I like to put in 30 minutes to an hour and a half per day. The kicker: that is sometimes split up into five to 15-minute increments throughout the day. In a perfect morning, I get 30-45 minutes. On wacky days where plans go up in smoke, I make poetry thoughts or poetry line voice memos on my phone while bike commuting. Or, I write for 15-20 minutes on a break at work or when things get slow, like how I’m writing this right now. The name of my game is regularity, working poetry and writing like a muscle, and writing everything down: phrases I hear, words I like, a quote, a story idea. Rinse. Repeat. Reagan Dregge Seasonal practices work well for me, such as a 30-day challenge once per year or setting aside a few hours on Fridays during Lent. I put the allotted hours on my calendar and treat them as I would any other appointment or ministry. Finding a friend or two to join with me enriches the process. We give each other permission to be messy and playful. When we feel stuck, we name our stuckness aloud, which helps us push through. Sometimes resonators will see glints I was blind to, or ask different kinds of questions that I wouldn't have thought of. We pray for each other, especially when one of us is laid low. I intentionally set aside reading goals and at least one other focus as I prune my momentum toward a small faithfulness. Perhaps much of what is generated becomes compost, but it is a wealth of leaf-mould nourishment. It is the writing practice itself that is my path to flourishing as a human. Lee Kohman “Making time to write…” Trying to write about how I find time to write, I had managed these four warm-up words when my 6-year-old offered me colored pencils and respite: “If you want a break you can help me color!” She’s darling and persistent, so I traded the memo pad for a lemur mandala, my WIP for hers. As a homeschool mom of three young girls, these “invitations” into the ongoing narrative of life together come more often than the pockets of quiet I desire. So, I write in the nooks and crannies, learning not to despise time that measures in the teaspoons, while also working to design full cups — relying on the help of my husband and church family. I jot down lines and ideas as they come with hopes of returning to develop them, but many works dangle undone. The lemur picture though? It’s complete. And wouldn’t what’s done in love find a way to spill itself onto my humble page? Tyler Rogness How do I make time for writing? Haltingly. Falteringly. This isn’t to say I don’t set the time aside, but even the time I do make can be eaten up by other good things: reading, volunteering at church, engaging with a writing community; laundry, dishes, sweeping; just enough exercise to ensure I won’t permanently freeze up into the shape of a deskbound day-jobber. The list goes on. Always on. But I continue to get up early, I continue to sit down for an hour on an evening to try to live the poetry I want to write, which is to say, to make space for seeing and appreciating and questioning and considering what this life brings my way. I continue to put myself to the task. I’m not sure our busy lives are in the way of our writing as much as we are. That list of good things is the soil of our gardens, and at some point it comes time to start tilling. How do I make time for writing? Haltingly. Falteringly. Continually. Liz Snell I've always found it hard to prioritize writing time, but recently I've realized it's about three times harder than I thought. Writing requires not only the space to put down words, but also the space to process beforehand and refine afterward. If I make no time to notice what's around me or be thoughtful about it, the muse will have nothing to work with when she appears. Ours is a culture of endless demands on attention: we spend most of our time producing or consuming and very little processing. When I'm constantly texting, reading articles, listening to music, or watching historical clothing videos on YouTube (we all do that, right?), I have no space for my mind to wander. Silence and stillness can feel deafening, but I'm trying to push into that discomfort. This can be as simple as a commute to work with no radio on or a slow Sabbath afternoon spent journaling at my favourite wifi-less cafe. Making time for writing is hard because it also requires making time to reflect. But an unexamined life isn't worth writing about. Chris Slaten Acknowledging limitations is key. About 3% of my day or less can be dedicated to sitting down to write, but this time is a small basket of fish and loaves I can be faithful to surrendering. When my habits are healthiest, I commit to a small amount of timed writing each day usually before I wake up the kids at 6 am. Even 10 or 15 minutes is worth it because it is never satisfying, so it helps to jumpstart the desire to write in the tiny margins of my life the rest of the day. If my mind is a web browser, the writing tab is rarely closed on those days, which means if you look at me closely when I am walking anywhere, I am mumbling lines to myself. It is the most portable kind of puzzle; you can be literally anywhere and be chewing on rhythm, diction, and rhyme, rearranging phrases until they start to glow. The richest place for this is the shower. The second richest is a tie between driving alone and the walk to the faculty bathroom from my classroom. If a line is finally good, I write it down on my phone or pocket notebook. Forgetfulness is an efficient natural editor. If I have a lot of raw brainstorming from the early morning writing plus one good line at the end of the day I am happy, though often a good line is several days work. While it helps to do all of this from joy instead of guilt, sometimes the joy isn’t awake yet and it just helps to do it. As internal as all of this is, prayer is essential to never writing alone. Amelia Freidline As far as finding time to write goes, I'm not the most organized or disciplined of people. Generally I find it to be easier later in the day, both in terms of my schedule and my creative genius (it's a lazy beast). If I'm on a poem-a-day writing project, this often looks like telling myself I can't go to bed until I write something. Other times, it looks like writing a poem in the notes app on my phone when I've arrived too early to a dinner party, or repeating lines over and over to myself until I can get out of the shower and get them down on paper, or (a somewhat rare scenario) being attacked by a poem before I get out of bed in the morning and grabbing the closest writing implement and paper to hand before I forget the whole thing. Andrew Roycroft Life is hectic for most of us, in so many ways. In my own context, pastoral ministry and parenting dominate most of my waking hours with their invited and uninvited responsibilities and joys. At times, WB Yeats’ words feel like my life motto: ‘all things can tempt me from this craft of verse’, and weeks can go by where I simply cannot reach the writing projects that I have on the boil, or significantly develop the ideas that rattle around in my head. This can create a sense of conflict and painful tension for me which is difficult to live with at times, but I am grateful for a sustained sense of compulsion that draws me back to my writing space over and over again. Writing insinuates its way into my mind, knocks patiently on the door of my schedule, and does not seem to be put off by my neglect and poor hospitality. Creative inspiration is an excellent and unassuming guest, while I can be a terrible host. This muted insistence (call it a creative impulse, the ministry of the Muse or any other name you prefer) is a sweet grace, which means that I keep writing - sporadically, erratically, at times unwillingly, often in spite of myself. I have come to the persuasion that this is providence at work and is part of the process of how my writing works. The time could come in the future where the clutter in my mental hallway is cleared and I can give writing a more comfortable home, but for now I continue to allow it come for weekends in spite of the mess of its surroundings! My advice to fellow writers is to keep opening the door to your own work, even when you are embarrassed by how little you manage to apply yourself to the blessing and labour of writing. Doing what we can in our allotted time is always a better plan than giving up because of a lack of time! Charissa Sylvia When it comes to writing it’s a fact that seconds matter as much as hours. It’s also a fact that the notes app is God’s gift to poets. Art is made in many ways but moment by moment, like by line in the minuscule margins of each day, of each hour, is certainly one of them. I’ve also had to learn (and am ever learning) the persistence it takes to stare a rough draft right in the face and ask her what she has to say. To not only start but to start again. To keep returning. Finally, always keep a pen and paper by the bed, it’s also a fact that all the good ideas come out at night and no, you won’t remember them come morning. Carly Marlys My problem is not so much finding the time to write, although that is certainly a factor, but rather taking the few moments I have and finding the determination to pull my dusty notebook out from under my bed or comb through my computer files for that one story I started ages ago. The pockets of my day where I might actually have time to write are often the most difficult to navigate. The voices of a thousand distractions roar louder the moment there is quiet. Writer Steven Pressfield calls this “The Resistance”-- the disembodied force that fights tooth and nail against any act of creativity. The only way I actually use my tiny pockets of writing time is by adopting a “come at me” attitude. Unless I dig my heels in and put my fist up, the Resistance wins and I lose whatever precious time I’ve managed to scrounge up. So, dig your heels in. Make it a game. Set up a reward system. Sit at your desk and yell at the Resistance until it shuts up. Even if it’s just three minutes at a time, take back a little territory, and the thing fighting you will start to weaken. Whenever you find yourself with five empty minutes, remember that every word you write is a war against the darkness. It might feel like you’re struggling uphill in waist-high mud, but do it anyway. Kick the distractions out the door, give your insecurities a good punch in the face, take up your pen and try something. Matt Wheeler As a husband, special-needs parent, full-time college employee, & part-time songwriter/writer, I find that the focus of having a writing prompt or concept in mind to start to be really helpful. Whether a piece is based on Scripture, inspired by a great story, or part of a themed suite, I find the limitations of that approach to be focusing - and freeing. That way, when I have a bit of time I can set aside to write, I have a clear idea of what I'm writing about, rather than just sitting in front of a blank page & hoping for the best. Sarah Spradlin How does anyone find time to write? I might jokingly say take more bus rides — some of my best poems happen while I’m on public transportation. If I look at that fact more closely, though, I think I find time to write by first paying attention to my margins — the time between things. Not all marginal time is good writing time: I need to be able to focus completely on writing, so probably not if I’m anxious before a meeting or waiting for company to arrive. Waiting for my laundry to finish or the second half of my lunch hour, though — that’s prime time. I’m a graduate student and work in cross-cultural ministry full time, so my margins are constantly in flux. I give myself grace as they shift and change, and I try to notice creative cycles, too. When do I feel most inspired to write? How can I create margins around those times? And when I feel myself pulled toward quiet — to read, to listen, to rest, I honor that, too. Anna Friedrich I have recently realized that while I am a morning person, my best writing is mid-day. I’m in a season of life where I can do that, so for the past few months I’ve been writing from 10 am to 2 pm, with a short lunch break, and it’s been my most fruitful schedule ever. This gives me time in the morning for school drop-off and a few chores or coffee with a friend, and then in the afternoon I still have time for my other vocations (homemaker, clergy person, small business owner) not forgetting school pick-up, followed by our family evening routines. I realize this is not a doable schedule for many, but it has marked a shift in my life, from writing when I feel like it, or when I can squeeze it in, to writing as my primary work. I think turning 40 this year prodded me into such a shift— I’ve spent enough time dreaming of being a “real” writer. Now, I’m simply doing it (having journeyed through the painful and real budget changes needed in our lives for me to do so much unpaid work!). And as a special bonus, here is poet Scott Cairns' answer to the question . Andy Patton: How do you live the writing life in the real world? Scott Cairns: We have to learn not to say things like that. I don’t believe I have ever left the real world. I’ve been an academic for a while, but it feels pretty real to me. I have children and dogs, a mortgage. What’s not real about that? A: I guess the question is how do you make time for writing? S: How do you make time for writing now? A: It gets drown out too often. S: Do you have a prayer life? A: Yes S: How do you make time for that? A: I suppose you just make time for it. S: So you have a discipline? Well, maybe that could be the answer. You could develop a discipline for writing that is like your discipline for prayer. The reason I resist the phrase “real world” is that it is so commonplace. I think in many ways a scattered, distracted business world is a lot less real than one in which you are paying attention to your heart and your soul and your mind, and nurturing those things. A: Your advice to the writer who wants to write but doesn’t know how to begin to go about doing it is to be disciplined and write? S: To be disciplined and read with your yellow legal pad handy to write down whatever provokes you. It is sort of like writing poems. When it is time to work on writing a poem I always begin with my legal pad and my pencils and I read until something provokes a response. Then I chase that on the page until I run out of gas there and then turn back to reading. It really is a dialogue and conversation which you establish with the text. It is not like you are going to get through his text some ossified meaning; it is rather that you honor the text in front of you as vital and as having agency and power. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

Music has always been at the heart of the Rabbit Room, and as we enter the final weeks of Advent, we wanted to share this Advent playlist with you. You will hear a few new artists and a few old, familiar voices. The collection ranges from the haunting strains of " Let All Mortal Flesh ", to the blues prayer of Over the Rhine's " The Trumpet Child ", to Ordinary Time's folk re-imagining of " Of the Father's Love Begotten ", and a slew of other artists. We hope this humble collection of songs helps fill your home with a bit more joy as we all prepare to remember the night God took on flesh to bring light to a darkened world. May it all rise and mingle into a prayer of hope and expectation this Christmas season. [Special thanks to Phillip Johnston for helping to put this playlist together. For the rest of Phillip's playlist choices and a bevy of other thoughtful Advent resources, read his recent post on Three Things Newsletter .]

[Editor's Note: Read more Gracy Olmstead's writing on her Substack, Granola . It is one of those rare places in the internet where, after I visit it, I feel calmer, wiser, and more sane. Go subscribe to it today; it is full of gems. Gracy has also written a very good "autobiography of place" called Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind . A few months ago, several friends gathered at our house at 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning. They surprised my husband with a simple, yet powerful gift: they were here to help with a house project we had been unable to tackle on our own. Some brought quiche, cinnamon rolls, and coffee. Others offered to watch the kids while the rest of us worked. We managed to finish in two hours what would have otherwise taken my husband and me several weeks. Only a few weeks later, a friend texted me. Her family owns a beautiful vineyard and winery; they needed help pruning the vines that weekend. Would we be interested in helping? We packed our girls into the car, and drove out to Maryland for the day. The format was remarkably similar to our earlier project: some adults offered to watch the kids, others prepared food, while the rest of us rolled up our sleeves and began pruning the vines. Again, we managed to finish in a few hours what would have otherwise taken my friend much longer to accomplish alone. These days of work amidst friends revealed much; I discovered which friends sing, hum, or tell jokes while they work. I saw the hidden skills of the organizers, the delegators, the quick, the thorough. After the work was finished, we laughed and talked and feasted together. We watched our children play together, and noted (several times on both days) that this was what life together should look like. The work itself became a vehicle of blessing and love: we forged stronger ties with each other through this time, and in each case, walked away with a sense of excitement for the next opportunity. We were eager to sweat and work together—brainstorming ideas for fence-building, house-painting, garage-cleaning, and more. "There is something important and vulnerable about asking for help—about admitting that we need something from our friends." A lot of societies used to build friendship and community through shared work. Barn raising and hay making were common in agrarian communities, as were quilting bees and canning days. Communities worked together to accomplish large projects, because they knew the work was almost impossible in isolation—but also because they knew (better than us perhaps) that shared work would forge strong community bonds. But today, it’s rather rare for us to work regularly with our friends. This is in part because we no longer have home economies, which tied our work to place and community. Knowledge economy work is much harder to share or trade than the older, more traditional sorts of manual, craft labor. But many of these manual jobs are also increasingly passed off to machines, or to paid workers who might complete the task for us. We don’t have barn raisings anymore. Many people are more than happy to hire a crew to reroof their home, rather than doing it themselves. This is in many ways advantageous to the average American. But it means that many of our friendships start and end in the realm of the fun. We struggle to guide our friendships toward more difficult disciplines and practices. Movie and game nights, dinner parties, book clubs, and happy hours might be the primary practices of our relational existence. There is something important and vulnerable, in contrast, about asking for help—about admitting that we need something from our friends. Our American bent toward independence and self-sufficiency makes us reluctant to ever admit our needs. But if you’ve ever babysat a friends’ kids when they needed a date night, cried with them over a lost loved one, or walked with them through seasons of depression or anxiety, then you know. It is this combined service and vulnerability that turn lighthearted acquaintanceships into real friendships. I don’t think we work with our friends nearly enough. I’m not talking here of meeting at a coffee shop to work on our computers together. This, while fun, is another form of socialization. There’s something very different about actually working with each other: showing our friends and neighbors that we are willing to sweat and toil for them, willing even to get a few splinters or sore muscles for them. It is a tangible means to display love and support. It is also a matter of practical utility: working together allows us to accomplish difficult tasks cheaply, to spread a hard work across multiple backs. It helps us to forge strong memories, share hard-earned expertise, and even teach our children some important lessons about givenness, determination, and diligence. Working together also helps us display the joy to be found in hard work. We are used to separating our “fun” time, our socializing time, from our labor. Much of modern life is thus segregated in various geographic and vocational ways. Working together serves to weave the whole tapestry back together—connecting humans to their bodies, their place, their community, and their food (or wine, in the case of our vineyard pruning). Some of my friends have created a spreadsheet for 2020. In it, each of us has listed a project that needs doing, and the dates we’re available to work. Each month, one family will host the rest of us, and we aim to get their project finished. We will show up with food and drink, tools and working gloves, eager either to hold babies and watch toddlers, or to get our hands dirty working on a needed project. Our hope is that by the end of this year, each of the families in our little group will have been blessed—and that all of us would have learned new skills and grown closer together through the process. In the future, I hope we might extend our labors to others in our community who need help—elderly neighbors in need of house improvements, for instance. As we build a habit of working together, I hope our eyes will be opened to see the needs around us. We will work together and feast together, joining the labor with laughter. I can't wait. Read more from Gracy Olmstead on her Substack, Granola . Gracy Olmstead is a journalist who focuses on farming, localism, and family. She is the author of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind. Her writing has been published in The American Conservative, The Week, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Christianity Today, among others. A native of rural Idaho, she now lives outside of Washington, DC, with her husband and three children. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here. Photo by K Adams on Unsplash

Christmas is nearly here. Find some time this week to make a cup of tea, put on the Advent playlist , and read these two classic poems from canonical Rabbit Room writers. House of Christmas By G. K. Chesterton There fared a mother driven forth Out of an inn to roam; In the place where she was homeless All men are at home. The crazy stable close at hand, With shaking timber and shifting sand, Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand Than the square stones of Rome. For men are homesick in their homes, And strangers under the sun, And they lay their heads in a foreign land Whenever the day is done. Here we have battle and blazing eyes, And chance and honor and high surprise, But our homes are under miraculous skies Where the yule tale was begun. A Child in a foul stable, Where the beasts feed and foam, Only where He was homeless Are you and I at home; We have hands that fashion and heads that know, But our hearts we lost – how long ago! In a place no chart nor ship can show Under the sky’s dome. This world is wild as an old wives’ tale, And strange the plain things are, The earth is enough and the air is enough For our wonder and our war; But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings And our peace is put in impossible things Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings Round an incredible star. To an open house in the evening Home shall men come, To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome. To the end of the way of the wandering star, To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless And all men are at home. Journey of the Magi by T. S. Eliot A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.' And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky, And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. But there was no information, and so we continued And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory. All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

“Flying used to be fun, until I started doing it for a living,” muses 13-year-old Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service, my personal favorite Studio Ghibli movie. Kiki’s Delivery Service has often been viewed as a metaphor for creative burnout; the protagonist is a young witch in training who must move to a new town on her own and start using her magic to somehow serve the community. Since flying on her broomstick is the thing she enjoys doing most, Kiki starts a flying delivery service to deliver things for people in town. It’s a story fraught with metaphor for the life of an artist in general, as many have noted since the film released in 1989. Kiki’s ability to fly is sometimes called her “gift,” and as her gift becomes her way of making a living, complicated feelings arise similar to that of a creative who turns their art into their job. At one point in the film after an intense series of unforgiving delivery days, Kiki loses her magic and must rest and contemplate before she’s able to use it again—not unlike an author with writer’s block or a painter who has lost their inspiration. There’s a particular shot of Kiki collapsing on her bed that has radiated through my soul with its relatability for years now. That element of the story, though, has been talked about quite eagerly by many; the thing that dawned on me recently was a little more specific and surprising. Kiki’s Delivery Service works as a parable about the creative life, yes, but it also functions in tandem as a story highlighting the beauty and complexity of the “gift economy” even in a world driven by the market. The “gift economy” is an elusive idea, and my obsession with it recently culminated in an episode of my podcast covering the topic in depth . Just as many other words can be affixed before “economy” to evoke a world of trade or connections rooted in that particular source of value—gig economy or velvet rope economy among them—the gift economy imagines a world where gifts are central to human relationship. Wikipedia defines the concept as “a system of exchange where valuables are not sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards.” I fear, however, that this definition limits the “gift” to material things; the broader idea of the gift economy can also include offerings of hospitality, time, relational ties, and physical presence. In the life of someone aware of the gift economy—whether or not they call it by that name—these offerings of generosity (both given and received) are central to relationship, community, and connection. There are scant few movies that meaningfully engage with the idea of the gift economy in the first place, and even fewer made in America. For what it is, I don’t think Kiki’s Delivery Service is even being entirely intentional about its depiction of the concept, but perhaps the notions of reciprocal gifts and hospitality are marginally more baked into the culture of Japan than much of the west. Kiki is a character who survives and thrives on gifts—gifts which draw her further into relationship with others. The opening 10 minutes of the film feature two major gifts: Kiki’s iconic flying broomstick, which belonged to her mother and is said to “never lose its way, even in a storm,” and Kiki’s bright red portable radio, which is gifted by her father. As Kiki sets off into the brave world, broomstick coasting on the breeze and radio blasting ‘Rouge no Dengon’ by Yumi Matsutoya, she is already resting on the bed of generosity from her parents. Many other gifts follow. When it begins to thunderstorm in the middle of the night, Kiki drops down into an empty boxcar and sleeps in the hay, serendipitously carried by the train to her next destination. When she arrives in the seaside town of Koriko, after wandering around aimlessly for an afternoon and being refused housing at various hotels because she’s not an adult, Kiki happens to meet the pregnant baker Osono. Osono is running out of her bakery holding a pacifier belonging to a woman and her baby who left moments ago—and in Kiki’s first act of generosity with her magic, she offers to fly the pacifier down to them at the bottom of the hill, leaving Osono gaping with wonder at her abilities. Kiki’s singular gift—using her flying broomstick to deliver a small object to a woman who needs it—prompts Osono to invite her inside and offer her the hospitality of a cup of coffee…along with a bowl of milk for Kiki’s black cat Jiji. After hearing Kiki’s situation, she also generously extends the first major gift Kiki receives in Koriko: she offers to let her have the spare bedroom next to her bakery to stay for free, even if it’s caked in baking flour. Kiki, in turn, offers on numerous occasions to help out around the bakery. Kiki’s ability to use her gift to give is what prompts her to consider a delivery service in the first place, reasoning that “I have one skill—flying—so I thought a delivery service was a good idea.” Kiki suggests using the money she’s saved up to pay for a phone for the delivery service, but Osono subsequently (and generously) says she’ll allow Kiki to use her phone and her bakery as the headquarters instead…and even spreads the word to her friends about what Kiki is doing. As Kiki’s delivery service gains popularity, the concept of gifts becomes central to her life. The first thing Kiki delivers is a birthday gift, and when she returns from the delivery, Osono’s husband has kindly crafted her own “delivery service” signage for her from wood. If you haven’t clued into it already, many of the characters in Kiki’s Delivery Service are just all-around lovely. I remember the first time I watched the movie, I was anxiously waiting for the moment when the “twist villain” would show up, more in line with western animation, and introduce the necessity of contrived conflict into the story. But the delightful thing about Kiki’s Delivery Service is that there are no real villains; just people being kind and generous to each other, and sometimes misunderstanding or getting burned out and nervous. It’s one of the reasons the movie is a comfort watch, and one of the reasons it’s a touching example of gift economy. That’s not to say the movie doesn’t depict the struggles and hardship of generosity, though. On a busy day when Kiki has already been invited to a party and hopes to make it back in time, she arrives at the house of an old woman who is hoping to deliver a pie for her granddaughter’s birthday. The old woman can’t get her electric oven started, and so she tells Kiki she’ll pay her in full even though she has nothing to deliver. Kiki, with the generous heart that she has, offers to help the old woman get her wood-burning oven started—and then makes use of herself by helping her install lightbulbs and clean her kitchen while they wait. By the time she’s finished, Kiki sets off on her broom with the pie later than expected, going straight into a soaking wet thunderstorm. I’ve always resonated deeply with what happens next. A dripping-wet Kiki finally arrives at the door of the granddaughter holding the hot, freshly-baked pie under her shirt to protect it from the rain. A prissy-looking teenage girl opens the door. “Yes?” she says. “I have a delivery!” Kiki responds eagerly. “But it’s completely wet,” the teenage girl says flatly. “I’m sorry. It began to rain on our way. But the food came through all right!” The girl takes the pie. “I told grandma I didn’t want that.” Kiki feels awkward. There’s a beat of silence, and then she asks the girl to sign a receipt for the delivery. “I hate grandma’s stupid pies,” the girl groans, promptly shutting the door in Kiki’s face. Kiki stands in the wet, dejectedly staring into space for a moment as a single raindrop rolls down her brow. “She can’t possibly have been her granddaughter!” jokes Kiki’s cat Jiji. The two of them fly home in the rain. Kiki has missed the party she was supposed to attend. She doesn’t even make an effort to stay dry anymore. When she wakes the next morning, she’s sick—and the next time she tries to ride her broom, her magic has strangely faded. There are a lot of things about this sequence that have always resonated with me strongly. As an artist, sharing something you’ve made is a sensitive and delicate thing, almost like a gift at the audience’s front door. Having someone reject that artistic generosity, especially when you’ve poured out your magic and flown all the way through the thunderstorm, is its own form of defeat. The action of giving a gift inherently carries a level of vulnerability and risk—and especially with a gift of personal art, it can feel like a gift of your soul, too. Kiki’s greatest fear upon arriving in the town of Koriko is rejection, and indeed, she meets some people who are in awe of her magical abilities and others who find them altogether strange or uncivil. When the door is shut in Kiki’s face, it’s a door shut in the face of her work, her heart, and her magic. It’s interesting how this happens even in the midst of a world of commerce. One of the things that makes Kiki’s Delivery Service complex is the fact that Kiki’s magic (subtextually, her artistic gift) is a passion but it is also a job she takes to make money and survive, like many artists in the real world. The gift economy (the art, the magic, the generous hospitality) is inherently intertwined with the market economy—and even though technically Kiki’s pie delivery should have been “just a job,” the rejection still feels personal. Even though it exists in a market economy, the act of the delivery during a thunderstorm is still, in some sense, a gift. Lewis Hyde’s seminal work, The Gift: How The Creative Spirit Transforms The World , explores the multifaceted relationship between market economy and gift economy in fascinating and scholarly detail. “Just as treating nature's [resources] as a gift ensures the fertility of nature,” says Hyde, “so to treat the products of the imagination as gifts ensures the fertility of the imagination.” In early chapters, Hyde says, “it is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity… a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art.” Art can exist outside of a traditional commerce equation. But it cannot hold its status as art without remaining, in some sense, a gift. The first time I was recommended The Gift, I was living and studying at my oft-mentioned place of refuge called L’Abri Fellowship in England, a Christian “monastery hostel” community where hospitality and generosity are core values. The organization exists on a foundation of prayer and donations, but L’Abri never advertises, recruits students, or comes anywhere close to “fundraising,” under the belief that God will supply the financial and material provision if the place is meant to continue existing. It’s an intentional vulnerability that makes the enduring survival of L’Abri itself into a testament to God’s continued faithfulness…and makes it an even more precious gift. There is a cost to attend L’Abri; at the English branch, it’s about £22 per night. This includes a bed, bathrooms and showers, a library, 3 meals per day, a personal tutor who meets with you once a week to talk about your life, and participation in the community during the term. Needless to say, in comparison to the cost of ordinary living, a term as a student at L’Abri is cheap. I’ve heard from various workers that the price students pay is roughly one half of what it actually costs to have them. The rest comes from unprompted donations and gifts. One of the funniest things I’ve ever read about L’Abri was a review on TripAdvisor that said something like “nice people. okay food. drafty house. left early.” I haven’t been able to find that review since, but I distinctly remember seeing it back when I was considering going. During my term there, I mused to a friend that it felt strange and almost wrong to leave a “review” for L’Abri on a website like TripAdvisor in the first place. At the time, I couldn’t figure out why exactly it felt that way. Now, I can pinpoint that it was because the action itself of writing a review took an experience of generosity and hospitality and pulled it into the world of commerce and transaction. Make no mistake, we live in a market economy and I don’t begrudge anyone of reading reviews for L’Abri to figure out what they’re getting themselves into; you’ll find that the reviews are often glowing. But if you’ve ever been to L’Abri, you know that it feels almost like reading reviews for the experience of being invited over to your friend’s house. Nobody lucky enough to have a friend to invite them over in the first place would be interested in listing pros and cons on a review website. It would be like Kiki trying to evaluate the spare room she was gifted by Osono and rate it out of ten. Andrew Fellows, the former director of English L’Abri, has a solid lecture about the concept of the gift economy. One of his key points, a point shared by Lewis Hyde in his book, is that the participation in the gift economy (and the intentional vulnerability required to do so) generates relationship and trust in ways that the market economy doesn’t. In commerce, the relationship is cut off as soon as the transaction is complete. In gift economies, the relationship continues far beyond, particularly when there’s no way (or requirement) to repay the debt of a gift. That's certainly been true of the people I met and received care from at L'Abri. It's meaningful just to continue being in each other's lives, and pass on (or gift) something of the same hospitality and care to others if I can. At the behest of some L’Abri friends, I recently tried out CouchSurfing while visiting Pennsylvania for a funeral. CouchSurfing is an app and website that connects people who are interested in offering their space (usually a pull-out couch, or a guest room) to strangers who need somewhere to stay short term, completely free of charge. It’s very popular across Europe, but it’s got lots of participants in America, too. Most CouchSurfing users list their expectations of guests on their profile; some will note that they’d appreciate help with some kind of small task or chore while the person stays, but the vast majority just say that they’d like to share a meal or a good conversation with their guest while they’re staying in their home. That’s the only payment they expect. My CouchSurfing host in Pennsylvania, Sam, had a pullout couch in the middle of his living room—which, after I arrived, surprised me with a gigantic and beautiful mural of The Polar Express that Sam said his friend painted while he was “in the Christmas spirit.” Because of the funeral, I didn’t get to see Sam much while I was in town, but I did wake up early the first morning I was staying at his place and had a 2 hour chat with him about community, God, and traveling. He was a really thoughtful guy. The night beforehand, Sam had texted me the keycode to his apartment so that I could let myself in while he was out for a late night movie with friends. Ironically, at the time, I was feeling nervous about arriving in a stranger’s apartment alone, going to bed and not knowing when he’d be back late at night. Sam told me the next day that around the same time I was getting settled in, his friends had all been asking him how he could possibly feel safe knowing that a total stranger was in his apartment while he was away. Sam said he told them, “I’ve done this so many times, and nobody has ever let me down. When you give someone the gift of trust, they usually give the same gift back.” Before leaving early on the final morning, I walked to a donut shop nearby and brought back a box to leave on Sam’s counter. A few hours later, he texted me and said “thanks for the donuts! I hope you had a nice visit to the city despite the circumstances. You and your wife are both welcome anytime you find yourselves around here in the future!” My experience staying in Sam’s apartment opened my eyes to all the intertwined intricacies of life in a gift economy. I put myself into a vulnerable place by staying in a stranger’s house. Sam put himself into an arguably even more vulnerable place by inviting a stranger in. In a world of market and commerce where it would have been safer and less intimidating to just pay for a hotel, the action of trying CouchSurfing was a risk. But Sam’s gift of trust was reciprocated with my trust, and now we have a relationship that may even last beyond that brief 3-night stay. I’m sure if I ever go back to Pennsylvania, we’ll hang out again. This piece was originally supposed to be about Kiki’s Delivery Service, wasn’t it? As Kiki’s eventually soars toward its ending, the external climax involves Kiki receiving a gift of a stranger’s broom (after her own broom was broken) and igniting her magical ability again to go and save her friend Tombo, who is about to fall from a great height. The true internal climax for Kiki’s character, though, happens in the scene prior to all of this commotion. The old woman who baked the pie that Kiki delivered in the rain has invited her over to her house again, supposedly to make another delivery. Kiki tries to explain that she hasn’t been flying so much recently, but the old woman says that should be okay, because this gift doesn’t have to go far. She tells Kiki to open a box on the table on front of her, revealing a lovingly-baked chocolate cake with her name (and a picture of Kiki riding her broom) in icing on top. “Would you please deliver it to a girl named Kiki?” says the old woman softly. “She was kind, and a tremendous help. It is my ‘thank you.’ And would you find out when her next birthday might be? Then I’ll be able to bake her another one.” Kiki’s eyes glisten with affection and appreciation, and watching the scene again, my eyes do as well. Finally, she wipes the tears away and says, "I will. And I’m sure Kiki will want to know the lady’s birthday so that she’ll be able to give her a gift too!” “You’ve got a deal!” the old woman chuckles. Art. Vulnerability. Relationship. Trust. To me, that’s a picture of what life in a gift economy can look like. And it’s beautiful. Houston Coley and his wife Debbie are missional documentary filmmakers from Atlanta and Czech Republic. Houston is a YouTube video essayist, self-described 'theme park theologian', and the artistic director of a nonprofit called Art Within. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

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

In The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry , Anthony Esolen notes that Berry’s longest Port William novel,  Jayber Crow , is in many ways a modern-day retelling of Dante. Berry’s own language throughout the book suggests the comparison, as his narrator, the novel’s subject and namesake, makes frequent mention of “the Dark Wood of Error.” What’s more, it’s hard not to note the similarities in Jayber’s relationship to Mattie and Dante’s to Beatrice–in both cases, the story’s narrator is drawn to God via the love he has toward a godly woman he will only know from a distance. To understand the broader argument, you should just buy the book. But here I want to focus on the particular question of what specifically brings about Jayber’s conversion and what exactly Jayber is converting to . The setting of the novel is mid-20th-century small town Kentucky, particularly the small town of Port William. The novel’s narrator and protagonist, Jayber Crow, is a seminary dropout and barber who is in his early 40s and has been back in the Port William area for about 20 years. In the opening scenes of the novel, we meet a character who embodies the independent spirit we often associate with Kentucky. In one scene he describes sitting in a classroom at the orphanage where he grew up, staring out the window, longing to be out in a field instead of sitting in a stuffy classroom going over boring lessons. In another scene, the young Crow actually makes a run for it and gets some distance from the school before the headmaster, who bears the wonderfully Dickensian name “Brother Whitespade,” sees him and chases him down, dragging him back to the school. Crow describes his deep-seated fear of sitting at the foot of a desk staring up at his superior and so “the man behind the desk” becomes a shorthand in the novel for all things modern, bureaucratic, and confining. It’s not an exaggeration to say that most of the decisions made by Jayber in the novel’s early days are built around resisting the man behind the desk and protecting his own independence and autonomy at any cost. Once Jayber settles down in Port William, he mostly maintains this same independence of spirit. He keeps flexible hours, often going off on long walks or trips into the woods. He leaves a sign in the window that indicates what time he’ll return, except the hands on the clock pictured on the sign are permanently stuck pointing at 6:30. At one point, Jayber reasons that this isn’t an altogether bad arrangement, as it doesn’t specify 6:30 am or pm, nor does it specify a certain day on which he’ll be back. The sign allows Jayber to be honest with his patrons, in a manner of speaking, without curbing his independence. That’s the fundamental tension of the book in many ways. Jayber recognizes the moral duties associated with living within a “membership,” yet he struggles under those duties, which he often experiences as burdens because they threaten his independence. The speech he gives in Berry’s much older novel A Place on Earth hints at this same independence–once Jayber gets a drink in him it becomes quite plain that he isn’t like the people in Port William and he doesn’t think much of their religious life. Jayber can make his criticisms of Port William and those criticisms can be precisely right. But the manner in which he makes them, the way in which he understands his connection to the place and the people, can be all wrong. And that brings us to the novel’s pivotal scene, which takes place in a bar near Hargrave, a larger town down the road from Port William. Jayber is there with a woman named Clydie, his on-again-off-again romantic partner who we frequently see him with throughout the first half of the book. It’s around Christmastime when they have the party. In order to get to events like this one, Jayber owns a small car–and he takes good care of it to avoid having to buy another one or entrust its care to a man who will demand money from him to fix it. That car is Jayber’s way of keeping one foot on the road, of protecting himself from laying down roots too deeply in Port William. His relationship with Clydie functions in largely the same way–they get a consumptive pleasure out of being together, yet there is no sacrificial love involved, no voluntary giving of the self wholly to the other, and no commitment, which implies a sacrifice of freedom or, more properly, autonomy or independence. They have no plans to marry and certainly no plans to have children. Clydie is simply a sexual partner for whom Jayber feels some measure of affection and devotion and is, conveniently, another tie to the world beyond Port William. She, like his car, is a means of saving himself from fully committing to the life of Port William. But then something happens at the bar that Jayber did not expect. A number of couples are dancing, including Jayber and Clydie. And as they dance, Jayber notices another Port William man across the hall, Troy Chatham. Chatham is the villain of the story, a vain, strutting peacock of a man who married a woman far too good for him, Mattie Keith. And the woman he is dancing with now at this tavern is  not Mattie. In a moment, Jayber and Troy make eye contact. Troy then hooks his fingers to signal “it’s OK” at Jayber and then winks at him, as if saying “hey, you have your fun, I have mine. And the thought that strikes Jayber like a thunderbolt is the horrifying fear that he and Troy are the same. Then Jayber thinks of Mattie, not Mattie at home with the children that evening, but Mattie on a previous day Jayber had seen her, delightedly playing with the children, sacrificially giving herself to them, yet not experiencing it as a sacrifice, but as a joy: I had thought many times of her as I had seen her then, with the children so completely admitted into her affection and her presence—as, I thought, a man might be if he wholly loved her, if she wholly trusted him, a man who would come to her as trustful and heart-whole as a little child. I had thought of a flower opening among dark foliage, and of a certain butterfly whose wings, closed, looked like brown leaves but, opened, were brilliant and lovely like nothing but themselves. From that day forward, several things changed in Jayber. He ended his relationship with Clydie. He sold his car. And he committed himself to the life of Port William. What Jayber recognized in the aftermath of that night is that in Mattie and Troy he saw two different ways of life embodied. Troy’s was the way of the dreamer, constantly chasing the next big thing, which was typically either the next big profit or the next big tool to enable him to chase the next big profit. He was restless, always moving frenetically from task to task, building up an empire built purely on money, which functionally meant an empire built up on debt, which, again, functionally meant an empire built on obligation and the coercive threats associated with fulfilling those obligations. There is no place left for affection or love in his empire because these are not efficient. There is no place for rest or contentment because they cost money in terms of lost opportunity and lost work. To borrow from  Tree of Life , Troy’s is the way of nature and “nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.” After seeing Troy look at him, grin and signal “OK” to him, Jayber realized he didn’t know that he  wasn’t just like Troy. At the very least, he was the sort of man Troy could comprehend, or at least thought he could comprehend–and that was enough to tell Jayber he had to change. And what did he need to become? He needed to become more like Mattie, Troy’s faithful wife–and faithful in more than just her relationship with Troy. Mattie is defined by one of the great themes of Berry’s fiction, that of fidelity. She is faithful to her husband, but also, as much as her fidelity to her husband allowed her to be, to her father and mother and her children and the land that her family owned and stewarded. Mattie’s tragedy is that these fidelities, which ought to have strengthened and reinforced one another were all too often thrown into conflict by Troy’s all-consuming ambition. Mattie’s is the way of grace. And so as Jayber reflects on who he is and what he must become, landing on the idea that he must become the faithful husband that Mattie has never had. That idea of being a husband to a woman who is not your wife can sound odd to readers. But it’s actually making a significant point: The world of grace, the world that Mattie lives in, is a world grounded in the imagery and reality of marriage. It is in mutual sacrifice and mutual giving that the mutual good is realized. The entire life of Port William is only possible within the bonds of marriage, the marriages between men and women but also between human beings and the place, through the unreserved, whole-hearted giving of the self to serve the object of one’s love and affection. The tragedy for Mattie–and for Port William–is that she is married to a person with no regard for (or understanding of) marriage. And so the life of the Chatham family, the Keith family, and of Port William is threatened and harmed by the greed and ambition of Troy, which literally divorces the community from its place and from each other. By committing himself to be Mattie’s “husband” Jayber is attempting to address that threat. He will never share a home with her, won’t comfort her in her sorrow or repair the damage done to the Keith place by her husband, but through his affection for the things Mattie loves and his fidelity to them, Jayber is able to repair some of the damage, beginning with the damage to himself. The striking thing about this movement toward healing is how pervasive it truly is. Berry is often dismissed by conservatives as a naive environmentalist crank, but those who read his novels have learned that he is a much deeper, more careful thinker than he is often given credit for. The problem that Jayber perceives is two-fold: First, he himself might be like Troy Chatham. Second, Troy Chatham is doing harm to the life of Port William. A less careful—or more stereotypically modern thinker—would look at this problem and likely adopt a few methods of addressing it. First, in seeking personal healing he would go down the road of self-help and therapeutic talk, seeking to diagnose the problem in medical terms. Second, he would seek to adopt some sort of blunt, direct (and almost certainly state-sanctioned) method of dealing with Troy. “There oughta be a law,” he would say. And so he would begin the work of writing to his congressman, calling his local representatives on the state level, and seeing a therapist, all in the hopes of being healed individually and seeing the destructive actions of Troy Chatham checked. But Berry is not taken in by such obvious (and useless) approaches to individual or social renewal. Jayber recognizes that there is a spiritual problem deep within himself. The problem is not even with his theology per se—10 years before the scene at the tavern in Jayber Crow  there is a scene in A Place on Earth  in which Jayber gives a speech that sums up Berry’s theology quite well. So the problem for Jayber isn’t really what he believes. The problem runs much deeper, down to his affections. He cherishes his independence more than anything else—which is why he owns the car, why he keeps a woman outside of Port William, why he refuses to open a bank account and instead keeps all his cash in various places in his small room above his barbershop—which he owns outright. An orphan from his earliest memories, Jayber is unaccustomed to seeing his neighbors as neighbors. The ones he trusts and loves leave—as with the elderly couple that took him in for a time after his parents died—and the other ones try to control him and lord it over him. Early in the novel he describes his revulsion at sitting before a man behind a desk who is able to control him. To some extent, this approach to life serves Jayber well. If he were easily impressed by the claims of authority or easily cowed into submission by every wingnut who claims to be a Very Important Person then he would never have returned to Port William, and would never have found the life that he did. It is a good thing to not be easily impressed by unknown authorities. And yet the dark side of this is that it has made Jayber so independent that he doesn’t fully know his place, doesn’t know the people in it, and doesn’t love them as he ought. What’s more, it has made him, like Troy, a danger to that place due to his refusal to give himself to it while taking a great deal from it. This  is why Jayber responds to the problem in the way that he does. He gets rid of his car and his casual sexual relationship he had with a woman that he did, to some degree, really love. He begins to live a quieter life, observing the rhythms of Port William more closely and giving himself to the town more fully, as he ends up doing multiple times for Mattie as the story continues. In this sense, Jayber Crow  is a story of how one man learned to love. That, of course, sounds syrupy and sentimental to us moderns who have grown up on hallmark cards and made-for-TV movies. But it is the manner of the learning that is important. The love Jayber learns to practice is an extremely physical love grounded in practical acts of devotion that sometimes by their very nature require that he not do things he deeply desires to do. Learning to love Port William and the people in it did not consist of an emotional attachment to it or in being authentic about his feelings toward it. It meant disciplining himself in such a way that promoted the health and life of Port William. That’s a valuable lesson for jaded millennials who have been burned by so many different types of communities—family, small towns, friends, or churches–and who have learned from that that they should keep to themselves and not give of themselves freely to any group or institution. There’s a moment in Jayber Crow where Jayber says that Port William will break your heart if you let it. Berry’s novel is in large part an explanation of how one man learned to do that and why it was so vital that he do so. Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. He is a 2010 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he studied English and History. He lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife Joie, their daughter Davy Joy, and sons Wendell, Austin, and Ambrose. Jake's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, Christianity Today, Fare Forward, the University Bookman, Books & Culture, First Things, National Review, Front Porch Republic, and The Run of Play and he has written or contributed to several books, including "In Search of the Common Good," "What Are Christians For?" (both with InterVarsity Press), "A Protestant Christendom?" (with Davenant Press), and "Telling the Stories Right" (with the Front Porch Republic Press). This piece was originally published at Mere Orthodoxy . Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

Each year, we ask Rabbit Room friends and contributors to share their favorite movies, music, and books of the year. It is a unique opportunity to see what cultural fare these painters, poets, musicians, and writers have enjoyed most. This week, we'll be sharing their responses with you, starting with movies. Here we go. Ned Bustard 2023 was the Year of BarbenHeimer —what else can you say? But two other movies I recommend that I watched in 2023 are The Banshees of Inisherin (not a happy film but a powerful one) and Jesus Revolution , a good reminder of messy movements in the history of the Church. My girls and I also found some twisted sense of comfort on hard days of hospitals and hospice in watching cult documentaries. My favorites were Shiny Happy People , The Way Down , The Vow , Heaven’s Gate , and Wild Wild Country . [Editor's note: Incidentally, our next contributor has written excellent articles about Oppenheimer and The Banshees of Inisherin on the Rabbit Room site this year.] Houston Coley The Holdovers is a true "they don't make 'em like this anymore" movie. It's crafted to look and feel like a good old-fashioned Breakfast Club -inspired comedy from the 1970s, and it might be the most I've felt like the characters onscreen are real people with real relationships all year. Godzilla: Minus One is straight from Japan and it was the biggest surprise of 2023 for me; it's the most you'll ever care about human characters in a kaiju movie, with a culturally poignant thematic center and some remarkable Spielbergian action to boot! John Barber The Boy and the Heron . Hayao Miyazaki's newest film is one of his best. With amazing visual majesty, a razor-sharp wit, and incisive societal commentary, The Boy and the Heron belongs next to Spirited Away in the conversation of the best Miyazaki films. Past Lives . Celine Song's cinematic directorial debut is a quiet film about people reconciling with each other, navigating relational minefields, and loving each other well. It's a powerful film. Amelia Freidline Film: Swallows and Amazons . “Swallows” is based on a British series of children’s adventure novels from the 1930s; this adaptation feels like a mashup of Narnia, Where the Wild Things Are , and a 1950s Cold War thriller. TV show: the final season of Endeavour . And as hard as it was to say goodbye to Morse and Thursday after all these years, that last episode was beautiful (as a somewhat melancholy murder series can be, that is). Alastair Gordon The Creator , directed by Gareth Edwards. Dave Trout Air was a lot of dialogue with little action, but it had me as riveted as a fade-away MJ buzzer beater! My favorite TV series of the year was The Bear (S2) - the best S1 to S2 improvement since The Office . Matt Conner May December Chris Wheeler Stutz and The Saint of Second Chances were both beautiful and uncommonly kind. Everything Everywhere All at Once is absolutely as good as people have been telling you. Caitlin Coats So many good movies this year! Killers of the Flower Moon , The Holdovers , RRR ! Barbenheimer !! The Hiding Place !!! It’s hard to pick one, but I think Women Talking (although it technically came out at the end of 2022) takes the cake for me. It’s the first movie I’ve seen to depict righteous anger in women who have sincere faith—like watching an imprecatory psalm come to life. Macy Laegeler I loved the Mario movie. The nostalgia and hidden nods to the old games helped me remember the simplicity and joy I had when playing on my Nintendo back in elementary school. I also thoroughly enjoyed Barbie . I felt it was a fun upbeat story and appreciated the silliness that partnered with both difficult and complex problems. Elly Anderson I’m late to the party on both my favs from the year, but they were too good not to mention: Marcel the Shell . Who knew this small little shell named Marcel and his shell grandma, Nana Connie, would wreck me? Hitting on the themes of friendship, family, grief, adventure, and connection- I mean I truly couldn’t get enough of this story. The clever bits about the shell community and how they go about life made it even more special...I mean, Marcel’s bed is a little piece of bread….bed….bread…that’s just a small taste of brilliance. Severance . I don’t know if I’ve ever audibly GASPED watching a show more than with Severance. If you love a dark comedy with mystery and thriller elements throughout, get this on your screen! This show will keep you on your toes until the very end. In terms of 2023 content, Oppenheimer and The Last of Us are easily the most impressive in terms of storytelling and visual elements. Michael J. Tinker Slow Horses. How drama-storytelling should be done! It assumes the audience doesn't need everything explained 10 times. It has witty dialogue, gripping drama, and not everything is neatly sewn up. Rachel Donahue I Heard the Bells . The story behind Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous poem/song. Beautifully done! But not for young/sensitive viewers. The Man Who Invented Christmas . This is the story of how Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol . Engaging and delightful. His characters follow him around, and the story has to do its work on him before he can write it for anyone else. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

We're continuing this"Best of 2023" mini-series with a few picks for favorite albums from Rabbit Room friends and contributors. Here are some noteworthy songs and albums that were playing in our earbuds last year. Ned Bustard The album I was most excited about this year was Switchfoot's new deluxe edition of The Beautiful Letdown —such a great album already, and then to have all those great covers, ahhh...! Besides that, I have three twenty-something daughters, so that might help explain why The Show by Niall Horan was the other record in main rotation for me in 2023, with "If You Leave Me," "Never Grow Up," and "Heaven" being particular faves. Houston Coley Across The Spider-Verse Original Score by Daniel Pemberton. Daniel Pemberton's work on the two Spider-Verse movies is some of the most creative I've heard in a film score in the last few years. Record scratches, a pen scribbling, spray cans, a goose clucking, bongo drums, synthesizer, electric guitar, and the slowed-down sound of an elephant—all of these make up the DNA of his sublime Spider-Verse score. Welcome by The Arcadian Wild. It is rich, beautiful, and deeply satisfying, and it was at the top of my Apple Music Recap this year. Mark Meynell Eric Whitacre's The Sacred Vei l. Vaughan Williams, Macmillan & Tavener: Choral Works - Westminster Abbey Choir , James O'Donnell. ESPECIALLY Macmillan's " Who Shall Separate Us "? John Barber John Mark McMillan - Deep Magic . JMM's newest record rekindles his passion for a God who loves us deeply and fiercely. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - Weathervanes . The new record from one of our greatest living songwriters is ambitious and potent. It's a collection of stories that are, by turns, dark and vibrant, but are always brilliant. Dave Bruno I grew up listening to Andrae Crouch in my childhood home. This year, I revisited him on Spotify and enjoyed it very much. My favorite new music was Jon Batiste's World Music Radio album. Couldn't get enough of Batiste this year...and cannot wait for his show at the Ryman! Amelia Freidline Matthew Clark’s album A Tale of Two Trees . Kristen Kopp & Reagan Dregge’s Postscript Podcast . Dave Trout UK-based Christian artist Tina Boonstra blew me away with her album Circle Back, Start Again . One of my favorite songs of the year is “ Death Defying Joy ” by Andy Squyres - musically hooky with deep and rich lyrics. Matt Conner Boygenius's The Recor d and Joy Oladokun's Proof of Life . Chris Wheeler Jon Guerra's Ordinary Ways is an incredible follow-up to his Keeper of Days album. We listened to Colony House's Cannonballers record nonstop this year. Caitlin Coats Javelin by Sufjan Stevens is a great record about loss and suffering. It’s loud and honest and gentle and encouraging. So many good songs on here. My favorite at the moment is “ Everything That Rises .” Macy Laegeler Stick Season by Noah Kahan. The folky sound mixed with the complex songwriting is fantastic and makes it a perfect album to listen to while driving past trees. Plus his deluxe album’s features are amazing. Good Riddance by Gracie Abrams is a refreshingly introspective album that is sonically cohesive and illustrates her capacity for depth in her songwriting. I enjoyed that even with the variability in the song concepts it felt like the album had a natural intermingling and flow. Matt Wheeler Take Me Back by Jonathan Ogden and Jon Guerra's Ordinary Ways . Ogden & Guerra each continue to turn out contemplative Christ-centered music that is deeply musically interesting. Leslie Thompson Worship for Workers (Porter's Gate) Jo Tinker The Lost Birds by Christopher Tin. A Choral Christmas by Voces8. Elly Anderson Proof of Life by Joy Oldaokun. It has been my new favorite record to spin whenever having friends for dinner or a game night. With authentic lyrics, and impressive collaborations with artists like Noah Kahan, Chris Stapleton, and Mount Joy, she truly knocks it out of the park. If you ask me, the best Tracks are "Keeping the Light On", "Taking Things For Granted", and "Somebody Like Me." The Sun by JOSEPH. The Sun is top tier. It feels like one big therapy session, emphasizing the importance of speaking kindness to ourselves and using bravery as a catalyst for new, healthier beginnings. Their harmonies will forever leave me under their spell. BEST TRACKS: Waves Crash", "Fireworks", and "Don’t Protect M." I would be remiss not to mention 1989 Taylor’s Version . I mean those four bonus tracks…COME ON! Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

"There been times that I thought I couldn't last for long / But now I think I'm able to carry on / It's been a long, a long time coming / but I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will." The classic Sam Cooke song " A Change is Gonna Come " was released in February 1964, only six months after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the " I Have a Dream " speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Cooke was directly inspired by that speech in the writing of the song that became an anthem for the civil rights movement, and in 2021 was ranked #3 on Rolling Stone's  list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Sam Cooke shared that the original inspiration for the song was not Dr. King's speech. Rather, it was a song by a young, white musician from Minnesota that made Cooke stop in his tracks. Bob Dylan released " Blowin' in the Wind " in May 1963 and was reminded of the power that music can have in culture.  At that time, many civil rights leaders, including Cooke, had never heard a song that so effectively addressed the issue of racism. It challenged Cooke to take his songwriting to a new level as he was reminded of how songs are the seeds of change that can be embedded in our hearts and sprout a garden of good trouble. 60 years have passed. While Dr. King's dream is far from being fulfilled, we can see that the change that Cooke, Dylan, King, and so many believed in has not evaded us. We celebrate the positive growth in our society, while at the same time acknowledging the bitter truth that there is still a long road of hard work ahead. One of the pictures we are given of New Creation is the gathering of "every nation, tribe, people, and language."  Our commitment to racial unity is not just Dr. King's dream, but the  king’s dream, a mission we labor at until his “kingdom comes and his will is done on earth as it is in heaven.” If you are someone who labors at the work of justice, peace, and restoration, I applaud you for your intentionality. To inspire us in this good work, here are a half-dozen songs that mention Dr. King's dream or legacy. May these tunes be a companion to Galatians 6:9-10 (MSG) " So let’s not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time, we will harvest a good crop if we don’t give up, or quit. Right now, therefore, every time we get the chance, let us work for the benefit of all, starting with the people closest to us in the community of faith ." "MLK Song" by Mavis Staples This was released in 2016 by (now) 84-year-old Grammy award winner Mavis Staples. Fun fact: She, like Sam Cooke, was deeply inspired by the Bob Dylan song "Blowin' in the Wind." She was floored by the fact that a white midwesterner could so masterfully capture the plight of most African Americans. Years later, Dylan made a marriage proposal to Mavis, and she declined. "See The Day" by Liz Vice This is a prayer of hope that maybe today is the day to see justice and love flood our world. I'm reminded of the work of redemption that God has already initiated. He is indeed making all things new.  This song was released in April 2020, and has been one of the finest in recent years that deals with the theme of justice and racial reconciliation. "All My Heroes Are Underdogs" by Ross King With some masterful storytelling, veteran artist Ross King eloquently weaves through inspiring figures David, Jesus, and MLK.  Not only does the song pay homage, but it also takes an introspective turn to ask if we might sometimes find ourselves as the villain of the story.  Yet, this 2021 song reminds us: " All my favorite stories make me deal with the ways I've been wrong ." "Glory" by Common & John Legend This Acadamy Award-winning song was released in 2015, and I still get goosebumps every time I listen. One of my favorite lines is: " One Son died, His Spirit is revisiting us / True and living, living in us, resistance is us / That's why Rosa sat on the bus / That's why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up ." Powerful imagery! "Up To The Mountain" by Patty Griffin Obviously, Patty Griffin is a living legend, with 11 studio albums and a career that spans nearly 30 years.  One of her best songs was inspired by Dr. King's final speech he gave in Memphis in 1968. In that speech, MLK said these haunting words: "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land." The next day he was assassinated. "Side By Side" by Wilder Adkins This 2017 song by Birmingham-based Wilder Adkins shares the tension of living with Dr. King's dream presently, while looking for a day of redemption when " we will rise up singing truly we shall overcome ." This song points us forward and gives us hope. And it is so deliciously folky that it would make Bob Dylan proud.  Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here. Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel  on Unsplash

[Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from a much longer conversation between Jonathan Rogers, author and host of the Habit podcast, and Garret Taylor, the art Director of Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga television series . Listen to the full conversation on The Habit. ] Jonathan Rogers: Welcome to The Habit podcast . Garrett Taylor is the art director for The Wingfeather Saga  television series. The new Art of The Wingfeather Saga Season One book features beautiful work from Garrett and his team. I actually did some of the writing for that book and spent a lot of time talking with Garrett in the process, I was always struck by how thoughtful he was about things I'd never known to be thoughtful about. I was very glad to be able to sit down again with Garrett Taylor and reminisce about old times when we were working on the book together. Garrett Taylor, I'm so happy to have you on the Habit podcast today. Thanks for being here. Garrett Taylor: Yeah, I'm excited to do this. Thanks for having me. JR : You’re the Art Director for The Wingfeather Saga  TV series. You could have done photorealism for this series and you chose not to. Tell me about that choice. People have gotten pretty used to pretty realistic stuff in animation and you decided to do something else. GT : That's a great question. Think about the way animation has progressed over time. We remember the old Disney cartoons and they were very much like a drawing that was colored. The drawings came to life and had their own technical method of creating that flipbook style. But as technology progressed and we got into the days of Pixar and CG animation, everything got more and more photorealistic. We see that in some of the more recent Pixar/Disney shows where it's just like wow, this could be photographed. [But I think] There is an appetite right now to see things a little bit more hand-touched. Our whole team was hoping to capture a bit of that energy. To do that, we decided on a hand-painted storybook style with digitally painted backgrounds. There were some challenges in getting the characters to meld with the backgrounds and such, but overall it's been very successful. This approach also allowed us to be able to create a more quality-looking product for our scope and budget.  JR : Tell me more about the painted backgrounds. What is the difference between your painted background and the backgrounds in say, Toy Story or something like that? GT: In those old-style Disney days, they used hand-painted backgrounds as well. That was before we had Photoshop and computers that were powerful enough to paint in. Folks would get their illustration board out and their gouache paints and airbrush and draw over their scene and then paint it. Then with the advent of computer animation, they would basically build the whole world—the trees, the buildings, the hay piles, the streets, and the cars—in the computer. You could turn the camera around and see it all, and then they would just shoot the film within that. The background existed within the computers. You could even move the camera within the world. We are basically using the old style that Disney did with the one caveat that we are painting them in Photoshop, but it's technically the same skill. The artists draw what they want to be in the background, be it a building or a coastline. And we have these monitors that we can draw right onto—you choose a brush shape and literally just start drawing. It feels like you are painting but you don't have to get out the paints. JR : So you've got a background, a painted background the way you would in a play. And then your characters are 3D? GT : Exactly. We are just marrying digital technology with older modes of animation. We modeled all of our characters in the computer in three dimensions. I like to think of the whole thing as a puppet show. We build the puppets—the characters—in 3D and they act almost like they're hanging in front of a painted flat surface. And your brain just says, “Oh this must be a world that I'm in.” JR : That puppet show metaphor is helpful. GT : To add to that metaphor, after we model those characters in 3D, they're very much set up like you would an actual puppet. Figuring out where their elbows and their wrists and their finger joints would be. And adding pivots in those areas, even the way that the skin would transform. When the animator opens up that character file, they can lift an arm or they can move a finger and lift a leg. Then, frame by frame, they add motion very much like a puppeteer. I think of modern-day animators as really more puppeteers than anything. JR : Let’s talk about a phrase I've heard you use more than once: "Truth of materials." GT : Yeah, that is a phrase that we threw around a lot as we were starting to decide on what kind of world we were building. One thing that Andrew and Chris—Andrew Peterson, the author of The Wingfeather Saga, and J. Chris Wall, the showrunner—both wanted to convey a story that had the feeling of high stakes. In this world, characters get hurt and some of them actually die. Houses burn down. In a world like that it just didn't fit that we would go super cartoony with the art. You would end up feeling like it was all just make-believe. We wanted to give this story a sense of weight. So as the Art Director, it was my job to describe visually what this world was going to look like. So the "truth of materials" language came to refer to the way things were constructed. In a lot of the old Disney cartoons, things could get very wonky. There could be a board, say, that looked like it was bending in a way that boards just don't bend. Or a chair that looked like it was inflated instead of carved. So with the truth of materials concept means that we can design things that seem ramshackle and have a lot of character. It means that, if it's made out of wood, we are going to draw that wood in a way that wood is worked. Maybe it looks carved or sawed or chopped with an axe.  It's not inflated. It's not polished. Or take the example of a chimney. "Truth of materials" means that it is actually going to look like it is made out of bricks, whereas in those old wonky cartoons that chimney might just bend around like it's made out of rubber. I wanted to still be able to get those interesting shapes of something that is falling over and might have a bend to it, but it's from shifting bricks and not bending bricks. It all requires close observation of the real world to bring that into a make-believe world. JR : I want to talk about Peet's castle, the tree house. In the Art of Wingfeather book, you said you could have done that as an Ewok-y kind of treehouse but decided not to. You ended up making Peet’s castle out of salvaged materials from abandoned farmhouses around. However, nobody explains that in the story; we just see it for ourselves. GT : In live-action, you go shoot at a set and there's a lot that you get for free. In animation, everything that you see on screen has to be thought up and designed by artists. All of these locations start with a meeting with Andrew and Chris to talk about what is this area. Peet's tree house was a good example of that. When you see it, you have to think about his backstory. Is he out here all by himself just kind of building this tree fort for fun? Is he trying to make it look fancy because he liked his castle back when he was living in the Shining Isle? We imagined that Peet is there to keep an eye on the children in Glipwood and this is his home that he's built up in the trees, probably because he's trying to avoid getting eaten by all the creatures out there in Glipwood. And then we're thinking the history of that area is that since the creatures have kind of taken over, it's pushed people away from Glipwood Forest. So maybe there are some abandoned houses and he would just look around for boards that are already there rather than trying to mill his own wood in the forest. Hopefully, when you're watching it, you aren't thinking about that, but the subtle history is just there as an underlying feature of the story. JR : I love that. The materials tell the history of that area, of the abandonment, of the local places, but also the way that the disorder of the tree house reflects the disorder of Peet’s mind. GT : Exactly. JR : Was it challenging that so many people who already loved these stories and this world? I imagine that people feel like they already knew what this world looks like because everybody visualizes what they read a little bit differently. To what extent were you working hard to match up with how the books describe the visuals and to what extent were you pushing against that and trying something different from what was in the book? GT : We stuck with the descriptions from the book as much as possible. We wanted the fans to watch the show and be like, Oh yeah, there's Peet’s tree house!” In books, you don't need to describe things all that well, so you can give a brief setup, and then the reader's mind takes over. In animation, we have to figure it all out. We always start with the description. When I hand off an assignment to an environment designer or a character designer we literally cut and paste those sections out of the book as a prompt. If there's any illustrations in the books, we put those into the packet as well. The good thing is that we were animating things that Andrew put into the books because he thought they were cool. So we got to draw tree houses and old, abandoned manors that might be haunted, and giant live oaks in the woods. But Andrew did have the final say. We wanted to make sure to stay in his vision. JR : Well, Garrett, I just love what y'all have done. I love hearing the way you thought about things that fiction writers like Andrew or me don't have to think about. So thanks for the thought and the care and the love you put into this. You've done a great job and I love looking at that world. GT : I'm blessed to do it. So thanks for the time.  JR : Yeah, thanks for being here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

As a 90s teen, in a generation that was coming to equate edginess and irony with authenticity, I knew Mr. Rogers as an easy target for many jokes. But today, by the power of bumper stickers, documentary films, memes, podcasts, and social media, his image is more revered than ever. It seems like his recent rise has been a kind of countermeasure to the hostility of the social and political climate of the last five years, where edgy “truth” telling has looked more and more like meanness. We are hungry now for clear expressions of kindness and joy that appear to be painfully lacking in public discourse. What seemed cheesy and quaint in him then, now seems bold, essential, and refreshingly stable. It’s through a similar process I’ve come to love the songs of Wendell Kimbrough. I wouldn't go so far as to say that he is the Mr. Rogers of worship music, even though he has said that he tries to sing in a way that “feels like a hug,” but I do think the comparison is helpful. Like Mr. Rogers what he produces is kind, deceptively simple, unwavering, and acutely aimed at enriching the lives of the children of God. Also, many of the qualities I love in his music now, I would not have been able to appreciate as much ten years ago before the cultural stove was turned up to boiling. The gift of cultural chaos is that it can reveal what we really need, and I am learning that I am hungry for songs that are earnest, patiently crafted, communal, and timeless. I want songs that are rooted in something more ancient than these “unprecedented times” and more deeply emotional than the charisma of any particular band’s performance, even at the risk of sounding lame to more cynical ears. Each new Psalm-based collection from Kimbrough checks those boxes, including his newest You Belong . If you are new to his music, it helps to know he prioritizes congregational singing over dramatic compositions. The melodies are easy to pick up on the first go-round, while still having enough nuance to stand out and stick well into the workweek. He even has many of them ready for you to use through a free digital songbook  on his website. Almost every song on his 2016 album Psalms We Sing Together  has become a staple of my home church, giving us new ways to celebrate timeless Truth together.  Also, look at that name, Psalms We Sing Together . That title makes clear he is not going for clever and pioneering. There is nothing groundbreaking about his music because it is more concerned with gently guiding us down well-worn ancient paths. On You Belong , one of those paths is the fear of the Lord. In “Those Who Fear the Lord” Kimbrough’s voice sits atop an old school bobbing country baseline like he’s riding a horse well outside the safety of civilization as he looks far ahead and sings assuredly: "Storms will surely come; enemies will rage Those who fear the Lord will not be afraid Look into the future, far as you can see Those who fear the Lord will be flourishing" In a cultural climate shaped by voices that profit from fear, he helps us remember that true worship gives us rest by putting our lesser fears in their place. In the closing track “Bring God’s Children Home,” he reminds us again of the insubstantial nature of forces that seem so frightfully powerful: "God will rise up and hate will flee Like smoke before the wind And as the darkness breaks we’ll see God’s reign of peace begin" God’s fearful power isn’t just a narcissistic flex. It is the strength needed to be conclusively hospitable to His creation and to bring peace. And you can tell from the title track, “You Belong ,” that revolutionary hospitality is the centerpiece of the album. He leads us in singing: "To the ones who were once God’s sworn enemies From the West and the East and the land beyond the seas Oh come to the table, where God spreads a feast, 'You belong, you belong, you belong with me.'” Worship re-orients us to Reality. In this song, once we are re-oriented to our posture as former outcasts and enemies of God, we then turn to face those we have been unwilling to face, our own outcasts and enemies: "So turn to the ones you have reason to hate Lay down your weapons oh learn to be brave Let’s start with the words our Lord taught us to say: “'ou belong, you belong, you belong with me.'” The theme of this track runs throughout the album, as worshippers are reminded again and again of God’s transformative welcome into his unshakable home. The lilting melody of “We Rejoice (Psalm 65)” particularly embodies this kind of warmth and confidence while affirming God’s gentle, attentive qualities as our Host: "You hear every whisper of prayer. You open the doors of your home.  […] You soften the earth with your love. You shower the fields with your rain." When we sing these songs, we remind ourselves that God’s security and abundance are also available now, not only in their future fulfillment.  While the real test of a good Kimbrough hymn is how well it will work when it leaves your own voice in the company of others eager or struggling to believe, You Belong  also makes for a solid listen as a recording. Fans of the Porter’s Gate projects particularly will enjoy the same kind of energy and freshness of arrangements here because it is the same band. Kimbrough tracked it with them after recording it on their Worship for Workers  project. For vinyl lovers, there’s even a limited pressing of it available .  Whether they are listened to in this recording or lifted up in congregational singing, I believe the songs in this collection can help many fear gripped hearts to find a better home in the fear of the Lord and the joy of His welcome.

In the spring of my seventh-grade year at Calloway County Middle School, a new girl named Heidi came to town, and she was eyeing my spot on the cheerleading squad. You probably think that was cruel of her—to hope to steal such a precious position right out from under me—but you’ve probably also never seen my back handspring. I was, without question, the worst cheerleader on our squad of eight and Heidi was no fool. To make the team, she needed only to be better than one of us when eighth-grade tryouts rolled around. Her bar was low. I was weak and unathletic; I was afraid of heights; I was timid; I often did not understand what was happening on the field or on the court. If you are wondering how I made the squad in the first place, sources tell me that it had something to do with my grade point average.  But no matter how I snuck in, it was a coveted position and I did not want to lose it. What a novelty for me to be able to walk into Dennison-Hunt, the locally owned athletic store in Murray, KY, to purchase a t-shirt screen printed with “Cheerleader” in a little golden megaphone, and to then wear that t-shirt to school the next day! I guess any person off the street could buy a shirt with “Cheerleader” screen printed on it—who could stop you, really—but I could do it with a clear conscience. My fellow cheerleaders were all very sweet to me, but I know that I slowed everyone down. By nature of my being the smallest girl on the team, and with no account of my bravery, I was chosen as the flyer. This meant that Bridget and Laura would hoist me up to their chin’s height, one of my feet in each of their hands, while I held a sign that said “Go Lakers!” or wiggled spirit fingers in the air. But nearly every time we did this, the girls had to take time to convince me that I was not going to fall. (And if I did, that would have been, what—like four feet?) The first time we tried a build, my whole body rejected the notion and aborted the mission by doing a forward flip into Anne-Marie’s hands. That forward flip was the stuff of CMS cheerleading legends, and it was told and retold throughout the seventh-grade halls. The seven other girls could do their standing back handsprings beautifully, and I couldn’t do one at all. Not even an ugly one. Not even with a running start. I watched them like I would watch dolphins burst up from the water and make arches in mid-air; I watched amazed and I watched convinced that this was other-creaturely activity. I was sure that I was not like them in the same way that I was sure that I was not a dolphin. During football season, Janessa had an idea: What if, during halftime, we all stood in a row on the track and launched into back handsprings in succession—like a wave, she said. Well, that sounded like a wonderful idea for seven of us. But how to solve a problem like Elizabeth? I told them I didn’t mind standing off to the side during this display of athleticism, really I didn’t. I could gesture toward them and smile, as if to say, “Look at what my beautiful and talented friends can do.” They wouldn’t accept my polite refusal. But to me, it was more a statement of fact than a refusal, like saying, “I’m so sorry but I don’t think I can grow tail fins and learn how to breach water today.” At practice one day after school, we discovered that I could do something that resembled a back handspring If I stood on a grassy incline between the track and the football field. It turns out that jumping backward down a hill makes a person instinctively stick one’s hands out to protect one’s head, and then the sheer force of gravity pushes one back on their feet. And that looks something like a back handspring. The first time I tried this, the girls rushed toward me beaming with pride. “You did it, Elizabeth!” They cried. They made me believe that I had: that I had become the dolphin. But video evidence from a Friday night football game, where we attempted “the wave,” shows otherwise. The girls had all moved themselves from the track, which was the original plan, to the grassy incline beside me. I went first, perhaps strategically— so that the audience would be quickly distracted by beauty after whatever I was about to show them. What I showed them was likened to a frightened frog who jumps straight up into the air and then immediately loses all sense of up and down. I was still brushing the grass off my knees when the last cheerleader popped up from her perfect landing, but I did it. Or something resembling it.  When eighth-grade tryouts were announced, the rumor mill started churning: “Heidi is trying out for cheerleading, and Heidi can do a back handspring.” “I heard she can even do a back tuck.” ”I heard that Heidi was the captain of her cheerleading squad in Illinois.” ”I heard she was cheerleader of the year.” So Heidi was out to take my spot, and who could blame her? I thought she probably deserved it. My friends looked at me sympathetically—they all knew I was the weakest in the pack—but they weren’t going to let me go down without a fight. They made me stay after practice each week and work on my tumbling. And while I got better, I never could do a back handspring on my own without that grassy incline or one of those girls standing beside me, bracing my back. At tryouts, I brushed shoulders with Heidi, walking in with her older sister, at the entrance into the middle school gym. Heidi smiled at me and then turned to her sister and said, “That’s the one I told you about.” So the rumors were true, I thought, and then I took my seat on the cold wooden bleachers.  Heidi’s tryout was something to behold. She was composed, graceful, and loud. She tumbled beautifully—arched through the air in an effortless acrobatic display. Anne-Marie looked at me nervously; I knew she wasn’t nervous for her own self. I won’t keep you in suspense, dear Reader—I did end up making the eighth-grade squad, along with the seven other original girls. Of course, it makes sense to me now. The coaches would need a really compelling reason to break up a group of girls who had already been together for a year. But I was dumbfounded then, and even a little heartbroken for Heidi. I’m often still dumbfounded by the roles I’ve been given: in motherhood, in friendship, in ministry, in writing—rarely do I feel like I’ve earned my place in any given room. People talk about the reality of imposter syndrome, and most want to talk you out of it. Most want to convince you that you are blind to your own talent and that you do belong in the room. But I know what my own back handsprings look like. If being an imposter means that I don’t belong here, then yes, that is nearly always true in any of my roles. Do any of us? Can any of us say, unflinching and without any doubt, that we have arrived solely by merit to any of the positions that we hold dear, or does every good and perfect gift come from a generous Father? I knew in seventh-grade that Heidi could have done a better job with my spot on the cheerleading squad. But it wasn’t Heidi who ended up in that spot; It was me. And what was I to do with that?  It would not have done much good to try to convince me that I deserved to be a Calloway County middle school cheerleader. I was quite sure that I didn’t. But as far as I can remember, that didn’t matter a whole lot to me. It felt like a gift, and gifts aren’t something you are supposed to earn. And what’s more, I felt like the other girls wanted me there with them, which is another kind of gift. That sort of givenness made me relax. It made me a receiver. If I wasn’t there by merit, then what did I have to prove? I was freed up to give whatever it was that I had to offer. Sometimes that was a really crummy back handspring, but sometimes that was the gift of friendship. Both years on that cheerleading squad, I won the award of “Most Cooperative.” My husband Andrew and I both laughed until we couldn’t breathe when I told him this.  “That’s an athletic award?” He wheezed through laughs.“It is.” I said, “And I won it.” I had been a peacemaker on the squad when things got tense, as they often do amongst middle school girls. Peacemaking was the gift that I had to offer when I couldn’t offer courage or a back handspring.  But for some reason, as an adult, it’s harder for me to relax into the roles in which I’ve been placed. Imposter syndrome asks the question: “Why are you here?” And when I can’t find a satisfactory answer to that question, I tend to think that I only have two options as a response: to either fake it or to step aside.  Faking it looks like believing that I arrived at a position by luck, but now I’ll have to convince everyone around me that I got here by merit. This is exhausting, but who wants to be found out as a fraud? My second option, stepping aside, means excusing myself from the room. It looks a lot like gesturing toward others and saying, “Look at what all my beautiful and talented friends can do,” while I hide on the sidelines.  But a third way is to acknowledge that perhaps it wasn’t luck that got me here, but generosity.  And since I find myself in the room, how can I be generous in return? Imposter syndrome begs me to navel-gaze: How can I prove that I belong? How do I measure up to everyone else here? How do I keep this position? How can I appear more clever than I actually am? But the real antidote to imposter syndrome is to turn my gaze outward: Who are the people who are glad that I’m here, and what do I have that I can give them?  In this third and better response, we are able to acknowledge the givenness of it all: that all of the best gifts come into empty hands. Freely I have received, and freely I will give this humble heap of talents and weaknesses alike. Even as I’m trying to finish up this essay this morning, I’m keenly aware of its faults—of its frog legs in the face of the beautiful dolphin arches that I read in others’ words. But I’m going to give it to you anyway. I’m going to pull myself over to this grassy incline and give you what I’ve got. Maybe that will keep the gift moving—maybe that will make you go do the same. Elizabeth Harwell lives just north of Atlanta with her church-planting husband and her three kids. She’s the author of The Good Shepherd’s Pasture and The Good King’s Feast, two children’s books on the sacraments of baptism and communion. These days, you can find her telling stories on her biweekly Substack, The Things I Carry , where she writes about the sad and the beautiful things that have happened to her, and where she invites you to share your stories in return.

2023 was a year of motion for me - several moves, a lot of travel, finishing a year of graduate school, starting a new job, and last but certainly not least, getting married in the middle of it all. The whole year felt held together by two projects that lasted most of the year and followed me across states, presenting themselves again to me during slow mornings or plane flights or on borrowed library computers. The first was compiling the Every Moment Holy Prayer Journal  - selecting liturgy excerpts, providing accompanying Scripture passages, and writing response prompts for a project I hope lends a new liturgical space to Douglas McKelvey’s prayers. The second was slowly working my way through (and backward and forward and back through again) a 100-page book gifted to me by my now father-in-law: Presence in the Modern World  by Jacques Ellul.  Ellul (1912-94) has a prophetic voice. He’s no teacher or devotionalist, systematically laying out a journey of piety. He’s more of a John the Baptist poking, provoking, and crying out in the wilderness. Like the prophet Jeremiah, he’s the sort who will break a clay pot outside the gate, and after several chapters of examining each piece, lend you just one or two concepts for how it might fit it back together again - concepts guaranteed to shake up a few of your preconceived notions of Christian living.  He also has a rare knack for keeping the uncomfortable tensions Scripture insists upon when it comes to the work of the Lord and human responsibility. In other words, he somehow holds fast to the power and the glory without letting mankind off the hook. All his proddings and pokings lead to his thought in the final chapter that “we should not think that relations between God and human beings...are formed as though people do their part of the work and God does the rest (‘God helps those who help themselves’). In reality, human beings do their work and God supplies to that work his meaning, value, effectiveness, influence, truth, justice - his life." Our work and God’s life - as if he were the vine and we the branches, bearing fruit from the nutrient source. Our work and God’s meaning - so unified that you’d have an easier time separating yeast from flour once it’s been kneaded together.  Another one of those rare folks who keeps the tension is Doug McKelvey, who has spent the last decade or so putting words to the holy moments that present themselves to us amid our ordinary days. He’s given me the language to ask the Lord to supply His meaning to my everyday tasks, each liturgy a varied way of praying the same prayer: “Lord, bring your life to my work.”  The goal of the Every Moment Holy Prayer Journal  is to provide another space, one more personal and reflective, for us to keep praying the same thing, be it through liturgies like “For Blessing a Space” or “On Stewardship” or “On Uncomfortable Conversations” or “On Having Believed a Lie.” The journal consists of 52 entries, each including an excerpt from one of Doug McKelvey’s liturgies in  Every Moment Holy: Volume I , along with two passages of scripture – one prose, one poetry – and three journal response prompts. Each entry also provides space for us to write our own prayers or liturgies each week. We (that is, the folks lending their time and thought to this project - Doug McKelvey, Pete Peterson, Leslie Eiler Thompson, and myself) have sought to capture the varied seasons of the soul in these 52 entries. Like a map, this journal allows us to identify where we are in any given day or season and choose an entry or theme that fits. This is to serve two purposes: first, that we might know and shape the posture of our hearts now as we move forward, opening ourselves to the life of Christ in our daily work - every dusty spiritual corner and attic space. Then, keeping this journal for years to come, we might also be able to see where our hearts have been in the past. Someday we will look back to see the kindness of the Lord when we were there, bringing meaning and truth where we didn’t know to ask.  Jacques Ellul explains that to fail to invite the Lord into our work is to betray both our relationship with the Lord and our relationship with the world - for, as Spirit-bearers, we hold the responsibility to bring Life where we can: in “Small Things” and in “Mighty Things” and in “Seasons of Illness” and in the work of “Leading Others.” I hope this journal matches the centrifugal motion of the ministry of Christ, beautifying individual lives so that they might beautify the world.  Whether or not we invite the Lord into each area of our lives is, of course, a decision we make each day, a hundred times a day. Part of my excitement in shaping this journal came from discovering and rediscovering countless situations, relationships, or postures in my own life that I so often forget to pray over. Am I not, in this, betraying my own self as well? I who want to live a beautiful life so often forget to invite Beauty in.   Remember that moment in the Gospels when the disciples complained because they found Christ’s teachings confusing? And the Lord replied: “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables…Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?” (Mark 4:11-13) Is not the same true for us, surrounded by parables every day? How will we understand our own lives, if we don’t first ask the Lord to bring His meaning and  ask Him to help us see and know it when it comes? As Ellul explains, “We are tasked with understanding all of these parables in which the action of Jesus Christ is inscribed, in history and in our human lives. And it is only this understanding that can give them meaning. It is only in Jesus Christ that we can possibly understand this wild adventure into which we are thrown, because in the midst of these shadows, he is the person, in the midst of this maelstrom of facts, he is the event, in the midst of these religions, he is the author and finisher of faith.” The Every Moment Holy Prayer Journal  is one way to build this habit of entreating and discovering the meaning of the Lord in our lives - of trying to understand the adventure. It’s a habit of Scripture and writing, liturgy and prayer, kept alongside others in this community and elsewhere. But there are countless other ways. My gift (and challenge) to the Rabbit Room community in 2024 is that we each seek out some way to regularly invite the Lord to lend his life to our work, helping us understand the parables that surround us each day. If you’ve enjoyed this article or other content coming out of the Rabbit Room, you can help support the work by clicking here. Our weekly newsletter is the best way to learn about new books, staff recommendations, upcoming events, lectures, and more. Sign up here.

"How can I be sure that God is near? Because you woke me, friend, And brought m e here. .. Love is not a n abstraction in isolation   But a real inconvenient kind of invitation."    "House of Wonder" by Becca Jordan I was twenty-two before I knew that cranberries were a real fruit. My mom swears that this isn’t true, that she certainly made real cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving every year, but I dispute it. For years, cranberries were only that crimson-colored jelly, ribbed by its long stay in the aluminum can, swaying side to side before it is cut into patties. Whether it was the 90s or the fact that my family lived on one pastor’s salary, meals to us were about practicality. We were well fed but mealtimes were not about the pleasures of fine dining.    When I showed up at   L’Abri Fellowship  in the countryside of England in the fall of 2016 as a twenty-nine-year-old, my understanding of mealtimes had remained untouched since childhood. I was still eating to live. Of all the things I thought would be changed during my stay at a place of spiritual shelter, my philosophy of mealtime hospitality wasn't one of them. But it was.    This Song Came From a Visit To L'Abri Fellowship I heard about L’Abri Fellowship as a college sophomore when I read a magazine article about the Christian singer Rebecca St. James. There was only a passing sentence that referred to a place she went to for a sabbatical and its importance in her latest album. I was curious enough to stop reading. It was 2006, so I "asked Jeeves" about it. I wrote it in my journal as a place to go to someday. In 2015, shortly after I moved to Nashville and was unhappy at my job. I decided it was time for a sabbatical.   At L’Abri, there are workers, helpers, and students. Workers are couples, families, or single people who live and work at L’Abri. Their backgrounds are diverse: psychologists, doctors, stay-at-home moms, poets, writers, artists, theologians. They oversee the work of L’Abri. The helpers are a  small group of people who have visited L’Abri and have volunteered a term of their lives to remain at L'Abri to support the workers. They oversee daily chores and cooking meals, among other tasks.  Anyone else who shows up as a visitor or guest is a student. That Morning Lindsey Came Upstairs to Get Me Each week, different workers are responsible for hosting breakfast, where a small devotional thought is usually shared and the events and activities of the day are reviewed. One week, a worker named Lindsey was in charge of hosting breakfast. My friend Shona and I were lollygagging in the bathroom, brushing our teeth together, when Lindsey came into the bathroom and told us that we were late to breakfast and that she was not starting until we got down there. Shona and I glanced at each other and promised we’d be right there. I was miffed, so after breakfast, I asked to speak to Lindsey. I don’t recall our exact exchange, but I remember it being a very honest conversation: I asked why she had to run such a tight ship when it came to a place of refuge, and she explained her intentions and reasons why. We made our peace. I decided to respect her but saw no potential for a blossoming friendship. Man, was I wrong. In 2019 I flew back to England to sing at the first Hutchmoot UK conference . Lindsey drove to Oxford to participate in the conference. I found myself sitting next to her at a creative writing exercise under the leadership of Jennifer Trafton . Jennifer's exercise was called, “House of Wonder.” It followed a Mad Lib format of a short story complete with blanks to write in your own nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Our words, Jennifer instructed us, would come from a pile of words on the table she left for us. Lindsey and I had a delightful time deciding what the foundations of this "house" would be, what would be in the kitchen, etc. We both signed each other's copies and being the sentimental sap that I am, I saved it and placed it in a book.   A Kingdom of Tea and Strangers Years later, after Lindsey and her family left L'Abri, I was at her house and she asked if I heard about a documentary that two young filmmakers, Houston and Debbie Coley, were making about the English L'Abri called A Kingdom of Tea and Strangers . I had not. When I later met the Coleys, I told them that Lindsey and I didn’t exactly start off on the right foot. I recounted the story of being summoned to breakfast and how off-putting I found it. Only, with the perspective of years and having become friends with Lindsey, I found that the story had taken an entirely new shape. “It’s actually rather remarkable to be expected at  breakfast,” I said, “and for someone to come looking for you in order for you to join them.”   When Houston later asked if I would help contribute a song to the documentary’s accompanying album, he asked me to write about the breakfast story. I was nervous even though I had written about L’Abri in the past and had released one song already inspired by one experience there. (" Everywhere I Go ")   The Song Takes Shape During the time I was working on this song, I read The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrer Capon. In this unusual and beautifully written book, Capon, a chef and retired priest, weaves together reflections on food, theology , and poetry. I thought of L’Abri so much while reading. In particular, the last chapter, The Burning Heart, captured my attention: “The most splendid dinner, the most exquisite food, the most gratifying company, arouse more appetites than they satisfy. They do not slake man’s thirst for being; they whet it beyond all bounds. Dogs eat to give their bodies rest; man dines and sets his heart in motion. All tastes fade, of course, but not the taste for greatness they inspire; each love escapes us, but not the longing it provokes for a better convivium, a higher session. We embrace the world in all its glorious solidity, yet it struggles in our very arms, declares itself a pilgrim world, and, through the lattices and windows of its nature, discloses cities more desirable still.” Capon reminded me that the table is not only a place of hospitality but it is a place where our longings are also ‘provoked.’ Later on, Capon writes that all our love is “vast and inconvenient,” and I knew that I wanted to place this truth in the song. Lindsey taught me so much about love and all its inconveniences with her invitation to me that day and all her invitations to me since. This song is as much a love letter to Lindsey as well as the whole community of L’Abri.    Meals still are practical (even if the cranberries are real), but now I see mealtimes as the place where my hunger is satisfied and provoked all at once.  Do you remember when   in the darkest night?   I knocked on your door   and you turned on the light   You opened up   Your heart, your home   You welcomed me inside   So that I would know I belong   When the sun came up   I was still in bed   You came running in   To tell me there was bread   A nd tea and jam   you left your seat   You wanted me to join you   at the humble feast   I take my seat at the table   You’ve been waiting for me   In this house of wonder   where my hunger is a blessing   So we pass the peace   While I pass the toast   You read a poem   From the book of Job   How can I be sure?   That God is near—   Because you woke me, friend, A nd brought me here.   Where I take my seat at the table   You’ve been waiting for here me   In this house of wonder   where my hunger is a blessing   I come with a heart on fire   a ll that I am, all my desire   Love is not abstraction in isolation   But a real inconvenient kind of invitation   So I take my seat at the table   You’ve been waiting there for me  In this house of wonder   Where my hunger is a blessing  Becca Jordan is a singer/songwriter and worship leader in Nashville, TN. You can read more of her writing at The Poetry of Practical Living .