A Roundup of Interesting, Useful, and Beautiful
A Roundup of Interesting, Useful, and Beautiful
October 2023: A letter for people who share at least one of my varied interests.
Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
There have been many times since I started this Substack that a single topic enticed my attention steadily for weeks, culminating in a long and focused letter. This month is not like that.
I’ve been busy with a lot of seemingly unrelated things for the past few weeks, including helping create a prayer walk through our church for a prayer conference, hosting family from out of town with Ed (and enjoying lots of local food and activities), watching lectures on Tolkien, attending the aforementioned prayer conference, catching up with various friends, beginning to set up a visual arts section on my website, and working on a piece of art. And, yes, some normal writing and editing.
My thoughts have been colorful and various, too, not focused on any particular intellectual object or existential crisis. So October 2023’s letter is a smorgasbord of what I found useful, interesting, and/or beautiful this month.
I think a handful of my current subscribers are not Christians. For you, I’ll note that this is another very Christian letter. It’s becoming impossible for me to do otherwise, for various reasons. Surely, the more God is my life, not simply a part relegated to the sides, the more He’s going to make substantial appearances in all I do. (In fact, the Tolkien-focused lectures below are related to this reality.) I truly hope you find something valuable here—interesting, useful, or beautiful—anyway.
Two lectures on J.R.R. Tolkien’s faith and spiritual life
I’m deeply grateful that the Marion E. Wade Center has been live-streaming some of their content, because they’re up near Chicago and I can’t justify traveling every time I’m interested in a lecture. The Wade Center is part of Wheaton College and focuses on collecting and sharing resources related to seven specific British, Christian authors, including C.S. Lewis, writer of Mere Christianity and The Chronicles of Narnia, and J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
At the end of September, thanks to their live-streaming, I got to enjoy two amazing lectures by Dr. Holly Ordway. The first was on the spiritual life of Tolkien, and the second on how his faith affected the fictional realm of Middle-Earth.
If you’re interested, great! You can see both on the Wade’s YouTube channel:
“‘A Hard-Won Faith: Tolkien’s Spiritual Journey’ with Holly Ordway”, posted 27 Sept 2023.
“‘Tolkien’s Faith and the Formation of Middle-earth’ with Holly Ordway”, posted 27 Sept 2023.
These lectures were tied to the launch of Dr. Ordway’s latest book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography. I don’t have any affiliate links to share; that link goes to her website, which has more info on the book and on her. Find it and other books on Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, Amazon, or, probably, at your local library. (I buy books used whenever I can, but since this one just came out, it may be a long wait for a used copy to appear.)
The discipleship model of Andrew the Apostle
A couple months ago, my friend Tina Marie Cox launched a new blog specifically aimed at Christians called Let’s Be Real, with a focus on “honest, thoughtful discussions about how real faith intersects with real life.” She aims to share “Biblical teaching that is designed to challenge and encourage” those of us who are following Christ. (And if you aren’t a Christian, you’re allowed to look anyway.)
She’s blogging twice a week right now, and if you subscribe, she’ll send you a digest of recent posts every other week.
She’s also working on two books! If you love what she has to say, you’ll be pleased to get updates about those.
One of her very first posts stood out as particularly worth sharing: “Whatever You Do, Don’t Follow Me”, Let’s Be Real, 4 Sept 2023.
It’s a resounding reminder of the fact that discipleship isn’t about following the cool or wise-sounding people who present Biblical knowledge to you, and it’s not about gaining followers for yourself. The goal is to point other people to Christ and to follow Christ yourself.
When I write about Christian topics, I also want readers to hear what Tina Marie says at the end of her post: “I don’t want you to follow me—I want you to come with me, so that, together, we can follow Him.”
We help one another, but the One we are to follow is only Jesus Himself.
Visual Arts: Live Art, “A People of Prayer”
The church Ed and I attend has an unusual abundance of both artists and support for the arts. One ministry related to these things is live art, where an artist paints live on stage during worship, and often continuing during the sermon. (I seem to be one of the church’s slower artists, so I generally continue through the sermon.)
This past Sunday, the sermon title was “A People of Prayer”, and our pastor asked me to do some art live alongside this.
Normally, most of us paint live, and that’s what I usually do, too. This time, as I prayed about what to paint, I had an idea for something else: a mixed-media piece that used ephemera (paper leftovers from events, essentially) that shows that we at Indy Vineyard Church are indeed a people of prayer.
I attached various papers to the canvas in advance, experimenting with gesso and watered-down Elmer’s glue. I gessoed over pretty much everything, which made a semi-transparent white layer, to give it a more cohesive feel. I got that idea from a post by scrapbook artist and blogger Erin Blegin: “PaperHaus: Collaging on Canvas”, 21 Aug 2013.
(Side note: This is an example of “steal like an artist”, a concept I discussed briefly in June.)
Our church has had an annual installation during the last few Advent seasons that invites people from the congregation to write their prayers on paper strips, each related to one of the main Advent themes of hope, peace, joy, love, or Christ, and in approximately the colors of the Advent candles. One of the other art leaders insists we save all of these paper prayers every year, “just in case” we can find a use for them.
I used some of them!
On Sunday morning, I glued many of these written prayers to the canvas (writing side toward the canvas for privacy’s sake), building them in the general shape of a church building. I glued one of our church’s postcards to the middle of that, a card that bears our church’s mission statement.
In short, every piece of paper on this canvas is directly tied to Indy Vineyard Church and its culture of prayer. The church, on this canvas as in reality, is built, in a sense, on the prayers of its congregation.
I painted the open doorway of the church, glowing with the light of Christ, and used more acrylic paint to soften edges and improve the overall aesthetic. This is the end result:
I had a ton of fun doing this and I learned a little about collage techniques.
I’m now interested to try more collage-based art. I rarely set aside time to do visual art without a specific reason for it, so we shall see. I’m happy this reason came up.
Looking forward to more live art from other artists!
Writing Updates
I worked a little on my novel this month, between all the other tasks. I don’t have much to report this month, though I have higher hopes for next time.
Media I Enjoyed This Month
Video game: Final Fantasy IX
Ed and I finished going through Final Fantasy IX, the one game in the franchise I actually beat before my recent run through FFVII (the game I mentioned in my August letter), and IX was also the first Final Fantasy game I ever played. I wanted to understand why I loved it, to see if I can try to capture that feeling in my own fiction. And Ed had never played it, so he played and I watched the story. It definitely holds up.
TV Show: Extraordinary Attorney Woo
It’s a Korean drama on Netflix about an autistic attorney, and I really liked it.
Novel: Silence by Shūsaku Endō
Yes, two months later I’m still slowly reading this. It’s heavy. I keep returning to lighter things, like news about international wars and how AI is going to destroy our humanity, one way or another.
But it’s good, and worth it so far. I’m most of the way through it. There’s one scene from the movie that I haven’t yet reached in the book and it’s contributing to my reluctance to move forward…but I intend to see this through.
Why persist? Why read it, if the movie itself was so hard to watch? I didn’t quite have words for why, until I was watching season 3, episode 7 of The Chosen. The character Matthew, a fictionalized version of Matthew the Apostle, is trying to explain to another character why he’d kept a set of prayer tassels that a stranger had gifted him under surprising circumstances.
He says, “I want to understand things, especially inscrutable things that unsettle me.”
That’s why—I want to understand things, too, especially inscrutable things that unsettle me. That’s why I bought Silence and why I’m intent on finishing it.
That’s it for October! I intend to write a focused letter for November. If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
Onward to truth, love, and adventure,
Rae
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