Good Thursday to you all,
It was very nice to get a few concerned messages last week, asking about the lack of a newsletter. I appreciate that we’ve become Thursday morning buddies. As it was, I was driving out of town for a family event in Indiana over the weekend. I was going to send an “out of office” newsletter, but when it came to it — I ran out of time.
It’s a difficult discipline for all of us writer types to just be quiet sometimes. And yet it’s so very healthy.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: A Brief History of Feasting as an Act of War
Occasionally my children will remind me that I have “peaked;” I’ve reached my full potential. There is nothing left. They say this -- partly in jest, I hope -- because a few years back, I wrote an essay that blew up a bit in my corner of the internet. I read it out loud at the closing session of Hutchmoot in 2015. Later on, Andrew Peterson used it to welcome the next year’s group and even later on, put it in a song. It became the root of a prayer that lots of people use at big tables and occasions.
And it’s lovely, it really is. There are few things I’d love to be associated with more than what I believe to be the real, sacred power of tables, food, and joyful hospitality. But even as I’m thankful to see people taking root in the idea, the story of how the essay came to be is always with me, because it’s proof positive that it was never my idea -- it was always the Lord’s -- and it will never really belong to me.
Spoiler: this is not a plagiarism confession. This is a reminder of how all ideas come from somewhere, and nothing is original. This is a story of how I, in the words of Mr. Peterson himself when I related this story to him, stole like an artist....or, er, a songwriter.
The week before we headed to Hutchmoot that year, I had what I could only describe as a niggling thought in my mind. It was from something I’d read in my history on Twitter -- something about feasts being acts of war. There was no context surrounding it. I couldn’t shake the concept, and I kept rolling it over as we drove west.
As we sat on the couches in my friend Helena’s home that Thursday afternoon, I mentioned the idea to my friends Helena and Jade. Jade chimed it, “oh, yeah! Remember the centaurs in Narnia?” I didn’t, but her comment drove me to the book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, wherein I found the scene with the dogfox sounding off in the witch’s face. I made a mental note.
(I never discovered which centaurs Jade was referring to. Another thread carelessly left loose to dangle in the wind.)
Again and again that weekend, the theme of feasting popped up in front of me. There is no greater “feast” for the Christian who feels a bit backwards in their church community due to their creative bent than Hutchmoot, and there were examples of the battle for joyful hospitality being fought everywhere.
Sunday morning, feeling burdened in the best way, I finally sat down at Helena and Jon’s kitchen table to write it all down. Sunday afternoon, I read it to the group without many edits. As the next year progressed, I learned that there could have been quite a few edits.
For starters, the quote I read, of unknown origin when I read it, was from the Desiring God pastor’s conference. I couldn't remember who had said it. It turns out, as I found out a year later when my Twitter history reminded me, it was Doug Wilson. There’s an unpopular choice nowadays, eh?
Only, Doug didn’t say it about Narnia. He said it about Rivendell.
That’s right. Wrong author, wrong location, wrong fictional universe. All those wrong things were stuck in my brain, stubbornly refusing to be unstuck. When Doug said it, he probably had in mind elves, hobbits, and battles against ancient evils. When I wrote it, I had in mind dogfoxes, Father Christmas, and turkish delight. Yet both settings and stories sing the same tune: joyful feasting pushes back against the dark lies; a meal shared amongst truth-lovers shames evil.
(Would someone else like to write the essay about how feasts are acts of war in Rivendell? Maybe it already exists somewhere. To be honest, I am afraid to look.)
The gradual unfolding of this little drama is proof positive that if an idea is true, it does not belong to a person. It belongs to God. It unfurls at His bidding, on his timeline, sometimes in a way that confuses and amuses us. The truth of it rings out like a bell, sounding true with the truth in our hearts. But it is not an original; it is only an echo.
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited. -CS Lewis
For the Anglophiles
Child behaves like child; mother behaves like mother:
Royals. They’re just like us.
Reads & Listens of the Week
Samuel James has it right here: the world is not secular. The world is worshipping. “The soul-cries of those who live haunted by the specter of transcendent truth could scarcely be louder. They are waiting for someone to explain how they already live. They need the church of Jesus to stand and say, ‘What you worship as unknown, this we proclaim to you.’”
Well worth your time, this beautiful longform article from The Atlantic won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize: “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind.” It’s about one family’s attempt to deal with a 9/11 loss: grief, conspiracy theories, and memories.
Trevin Wax has been doing an exploration of the Culture War mentality in the church. “I see the resurgence of a neo–Religious Right—a return of the culture war mentality among many younger evangelicals who believe the need of the hour is for the church to jump into the fray of hardball politics and be bolder and louder in opposing leftward trends that are harmful for society.”
Gandalf the White: Here’s some pondering about what Christian optimism is and isn’t, through the lens of Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. “He does not flatter his listeners with a story of their inevitable success or promise them that they will be unhurt. He does not promise that the darkness of Mordor will not spread or that the innocence of the Shire will be returned. Darkness may still remain.”
“To lose something you never had can be just as painful—because it is the hope of having it that you lose.” — Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad is Untrue