Well my friends, my new book, This Is The Main Event, is out in the world. It’s been quite a surreal week. I’ve traveled over 1,000 miles, up and down the country, getting to spend time in different cities and meet many of you who have encouraged me so deeply it’ll take me some time to find the words to thank you.
The London stop of the tour (pictured below) was held at St James’s Church in Piccadilly. A few weeks prior, my mum informed me that it was the very church where we held my grandfather’s funeral over twenty years ago. That was also the very first time I stood in front of people and shared a poem. I’m going to struggle to find the words for that one as well.
The tour continues across the pond. I’ll be in the following cities next week and would love to see you!
Portland, USA - 8th August
Seattle, USA - 9th August
Vancouver, CA - 11th August (Sold out)
And now for some words I do have…
Sundays in Prison
There’s no worship service like that in a prison chapel. You haven’t heard a choir quite as beautiful as one hundred men, in gray tracksuits, reaching for high notes with their raspy, weathered voices, fumbling through words and straining to stay in time. They belt out “How Great Is Our God” like the fans of a football team, a blending of song and chant, a sound bound to antagonize their rivals.
When the services end, the guards will collect them, and they’ll spend the rest of their day back in their cells, locked behind bars with nowhere to run from the hum of shame, regret, and the many questions that plague them.
I’ve come to think of that hour in the chapel as an outward expression of an internal reality; we are all experiencing a life we did not anticipate living, to put it mildly, we all have lives that have not panned out as we once hoped. No one dreams about getting heartbroken, hurtling into debt, or receiving the diagnosis that, when you heard it, took your breath away. So this simple expression of singing songs and announcing our gratitude amid the rest of all of life speaks of a far deeper spiritual pursuit, available to us all. It is the practice of being lifted beyond circumstance and situation, hoping to be caught up, albeit for a moment, in the beauty of God’s faithfulness and the story of his grace that is, within the chaos and unpredictability of it all, shaping us.
I would name it the posture of adoration.
Those prison services are so moving because I believe the men who are singing. I believe their adoration is genuine; they haven’t gotten over or grown indifferent to the message of salvation, they rejoice in the assured victory over death that Christ secured, as if it is their own, because it is. Adoration is when one beholds the face of God above us, the face that loves us, and in seeing him, sees the sun that enlightens and uncovers the entirety of our lives.
I study the freckles on my daughter’s right arm as if admiring constellations. I behold my son, puttering around his room, as if made of watercolor strokes on the finest painting. In a café last week, I overheard a conversation between a husband and wife. She fed him scrambled eggs and bacon as he sat there shaking, Parkinson’s overtaking the frame that once held her in his embrace, when they were younger, when he was stronger. I can see it all in her eyes as she smiles and lifts the food a little higher to meet his hunger.
It occurs to me, in all these moments of fleeting wonder, of slowly falling back in love with my life and the world around me, that if I were Solomon and God asked what I wanted, I would have asked for adoration. Not that I don’t value wisdom, but everything worth remembering has come to me when I abandoned the frustration of feeling like I should be somewhere else, doing something different, in someone else’s skin. And wasn’t it the prose of that same king that spoke of wisdom being born from reverence?
I am a selfish man. I want all good things to last a little longer. And perhaps that is why my fickle soul leans toward adoration—because adoration is the foil to selfishness. It is that strange moment when I am pulled outside of myself, when I finally see who I am with unclouded clarity. Time seems to slow, and I can taste and savor the reality of the world around me, taking it in from a vantage point that does not place me at the center.
The soul looks for something to adore, like our eyes scan the evening sky, searching for stars, evidence that there is something above us, something more. Something higher, something wider. Something we can see to understand ourselves. Perhaps, in part, our anger, our brittle hearts, prone to angst and suspicion, have been shaped by the feeling that we stand under a sky of absence rather than meaning.
On a spring walk with my daughter a few years back, she stopped at someone’s garden and watched the honeybees, flying to and fro the flowers. She asked me why the bees fly toward the roses. I replied quickly, impatiently, pulling her along, that bees need the flowers’ nectar to survive. It’s like their food, I tell her, but she isn’t satisfied. She asks again, “Why do they fly to the flowers?” I reiterate that they need the nectar and pollen produced by the flowers and that the pollen dropped by the bee creates more flowers, which in turn produce more nectar, feeding them. Still, it isn’t enough; she asks again, “Why do the bees fly to the flowers?” and it is only then, the third time she asks, that I hear her question. I pause (finally) and reply, because they are beautiful, and she smiles because she knew the answer the whole time.
The bees are drawn to beauty, and, yes, the fruit of that pursuit produces many things, but the beauty of the flowers is what draws them in, intricate patterns and colors compelling them to fly closer to the source of all their needs. We are not so different; we are obliged to seek beauty, and, depending on where we direct the pursuit of that need, it defines the satisfaction we feel.
One morning, in a garden, weeping beneath a fig tree, wrestling with guilt, the dissatisfaction of his hedonistic pursuits, and a desperate longing to know God, Aurelius Augustinus heard the mysterious voice of a child saying, “Take and read, take and read.” He knew what it meant. Rushing to where his friend Alypius was sitting, he picked up a book of Saint Paul’s letters that lay nearby and opened it to Romans 13. The words struck him like lightning. He was convinced and convicted by the truth he found there and later, in his monumental spiritual autobiography Confessions, would write:
I had no wish to read further, and no need. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty, and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.¹
Saint Augustine of Hippo, as he would come to be known, later penned these aching words of adoration:
Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within me, and I was outside, and there I searched for you . . .
Augustine confesses the beauty of God as eternal and ageless, but as new as the morning we wake to, waiting to be seen, drawing us toward himself like wild flowers beckoning the bees. “Late have I loved you,” I hear the grief in his voice, born not of shame but a longing to have arrived at that place sooner.
And behold, you were within me.
Beholding the beauty of God is not an aesthetic experience, like observing a painting; but it’s more akin to the baby emerging from the womb, bewildered and already searching, scanning the room for a face but not just any, the face of the one whose lullaby hummed beneath their skin, whose life has given life to them and in whose presence they find refuge. They say that the gaze of an infant upon their parent is essential for development, affirming their place in creation, and so it is for us to glimpse the face of God. In looking to Him, we find ourselves. Our very yearning and capacity to adore Him is the evidence of His presence, our internal compass searching for its true North; as the German mystic Meister Eckhart said, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”³
We do not initiate adoration; we return it. Our facility for affection is born from the fire of God’s love already burning within us. We love because he first loved us, as the apostle John wrote so perfectly. So often we do not find the life we long for because we have not given ourselves to the God who longs for us.
Recently, we wrote psalms of adoration in the prison. It wasn’t lost on me that as a child I was fascinated by the story of Paul and Silas, locked behind bars after being beaten and prosecuted on false charges, but there, chained to the floor, their backs pressed against the cruel walls, they lifted hymns from the psalter. Those songs shook the earth, and the prison walls were broken, but in the morning, with the jail doors open, they didn’t flee; they chose instead to tell their captors to trust in the name of Jesus and find freedom. I told the men in our small gathering in the chapel that this is what happens when we call our souls to attention in songs of adoration:
Our circumstances might not change, but our spirits are strengthened, our eyes are lifted, and we witness our internal, imprisoned selves taste freedom.
Here, among the convicted, the spirit has drenched the walls of the chapel and I bear witness to His presence. I think of all the reasons we have to remain muted, unwilling to sing melodies of praise and deification, as if foolish, inconsiderate of the suffering, and, yet, here in the chapel it seems to make sense, like David who strengthens himself with a psalm when he had nothing left, we return to the simple songs of salvation. For if it were only for the cross and resurrection we would have enough words of adoration to carry us from these shores toward heaven.
When you said you were selfish, I wondered if adoration has an addictive quality. Then I realised like you that it's a movement of response so it can never lead back to our desire and always to God.
Bless you brother. Amen. Love your thoughts.