All in Truth

A Month of Autumn

Kierstin Casella
Truth
At home, I sifted through condolence cards and made half-hearted attempts to focus on good things. I wrote and I cooked; I brought flowers into the house. On seventy-degree days, I wandered around our Nashville neighborhood like someone’s lost pet, trying to convince my skin to absorb the beauty of my favorite season. I bought smooth white pumpkins and sugar-dusted loaves of banana bread, anything to bring my senses back to life. For weeks, all I could seem to see was the horrible beige of those hospital walls.

Art House Local: Searching for Wildflowers

Heather A. Goodman
Bookish, Hospitality, Truth

In essence, this was why we met that day in my living room: because beauty matters to God and because, as the body of Christ, we testify to one another that God sees us, that our work matters.

There was some venting, yes; there was philosophy; but above all, there was connection. In the sprawling Dallas metroplex lined with suburban brick homes, school zones, and shopping centers, visual artists, musicians, and writers assembled. We peeked into the crevices of our landscaped society and found wildflowers.

At Home in God’s Kingdom

Tala Azar
Hospitality, Justice, Truth
One of the places I felt most welcome in Canada was church. After leaving our first church in Ontario, we attended four different churches over seven years, but I felt at home in all of them in different ways. In all of those churches, worship included singing songs from all over the world, and we often sung in different languages. I heard the story of a world promised to us, where all people have a home and family.
On Songs and Stories: Tokens of Knowledge in Another, Deeper, Rarer Form

On Songs and Stories: Tokens of Knowledge in Another, Deeper, Rarer Form

Steven Garber
Bookish, Truth

Each of these authors tell the truth about the human condition, so their books are “good” in the deepest and truest sense. Not ever moralizing, so that we feel the authors are cheating, insisting on a “Christian” voice that does not belong in the story, or even worse perhaps, a revising of honest faith that does not allow for the breadth and depth of human existence, glories and shames that we are.

Voices

Eric Peters
Truth
They are with me from the moment I awake: as I brew a pot of coffee, each time I lose patience with my kids, when I see my stubbled face in the mirror, when I peek at my bank account balance, when I scrape my knuckle working on a project, when I am unable to make eye contact with another human in my perceived inferiority, until the moment I finally lay my head on the pillow at day’s end. Sadly, they are loudest when I write, when I seek to string together words and bring something beautiful into the world.
Of Silence, Wildness, and Saint Ignatius

Of Silence, Wildness, and Saint Ignatius

Mary Van Denend
Truth

To get there you must first drive an hour and a half northwest toward the ocean, then meander through a national wildlife sanctuary (with a band of donkeys wandering the hillsides) until you can’t go any farther. All along the way, you’re slowly enveloped by a web of forest and fog, mist and mystery. You must trust that the circuitous gravel road does indeed lead somewhere . . .

Namemaking, Weary Work for Whales and Men

Namemaking, Weary Work for Whales and Men

Charlie Peacock
Truth

When someone’s name is that pervasive you’ve got to ask, “Why?” What makes some personal fame timeless? What kind of spirit embeds itself in words and names to give them oomph? I’ve come to believe famous people come in two varieties: famous for all the right reasons like Jesus and Johnny Cash, and famous for all the wrong reasons like Joe the Plumber and John Sutter.

Exchanging the Lie for Truth

Jessica Eddings-Roeser
Truth
Out of their poverty, they substitute the truth for a lie, because the lie is all they know, yet they search for truth where they can. They glory at the honesty of bloody fingerprints on otherwise radiant skin; they revel at locks of hair torn and then thrown to the grimy ground. They rejoice in meaning, even when it’s ugly. They acknowledge desire, fear, passion, angst, and ache to see it with their own eyes.
Full of Beans

Full of Beans

Andi Ashworth
Truth

Play is an essential, but often forgotten aspect of life. We leave it behind when we enter the serious business of adulthood and too often forget to pick it up again. We go for long stretches of time, working hard and persevering with one thing and another — projects and people. In particularly weary and anxious seasons, I often recognize in myself a longing to experience something completely other. It begins to well up inside until I feel I could burst from the need for a change.

Writing to Remember

Writing to Remember

Andi Ashworth
Bookish, Truth

I’ve been possessed by the archiving bug for most of my life. I’m terrible at throwing away anything that represents a piece of personal or family history. Mementos from my children and grandchildren, old negatives from the days before digital photos, desk calendars with a year of life scheduled in the pages, cards and letters — basically anything that has significance for me or my family story must be kept. That inclination, along with the urge to write, led me to the pages of diaries and journals.

Dancing in Fields of Wheat and Chaff

Daniel Bowman Jr.
Truth
The distraction helps me forget the silver eyebrow, wayward twin of Normal. But I return to my departing gate and the young man remains where I left him. I cannot shake his innocuous but jarring irregularity, a feature allowing his face to hold the paradox of innocence and experience together in tension. Somehow he stands between the woman with the cane for whom the airport is a veritable gauntlet, and the young couple who could circumnavigate it all day and get up tomorrow to do it again. He wears on the outside what we get to hide from, put off, or ignore: our own slow march toward greater imperfection, and then, the end. It’s not about age; it’s about control.
On Learning to Hear

On Learning to Hear

Denis Haack
Truth

Learning to hear has been a lifelong process for me, and the better I think I get, the more I know I miss. Part of it is like sorting one’s way through a blanket of static, desperately trying to pick out words of life in a cacophony of noise that seems designed to inflame rather than inform, to distract instead of clarify. But most of my problem is hubris, a deep-seated confidence that in something so ordinary and easy as hearing I have little to learn.

More of This, Less of That

Barbara Lane
Truth
Early on a Thursday morning two weeks ago, I gathered my bags and hit the road for Laity Lodge's annual artist retreat, including Art House America founders and friends. Eight hours and a triple-shot latte later, I turned off Highway 83 and eased the car down a gravel road. Hand-carved signs punctuated the progression of slopes and curves leading down into the canyon, asking me to slow down. At the bottom of the canyon, the road disappeared into a river. I stopped to double-check the driving directions. “Turn left into the river . . . ”

Church History and Our ABCs

Katy Bowser
Artful Kids, Bookish, Truth
I’m six months pregnant with my first child and nesting like there’s no tomorrow. Nesting takes many forms for me: cleaning, painting, sorting, shredding, and acquiring. A substantial portion of the process involves acquiring books — books about pregnancy, nutrition, labor and birth, baby development, philosophies of child-raising, and how to love a child as part of our family, our church, our neighborhood, and the world.

Full Circle: Back to Dallas

Jenny White
Truth
Almost two years ago exactly, I entered the Art House for the first time. Like someone who had been there a hundred times before, I came in through the kitchen door and sat down at the Great White Table (the best place in the house). I had recently made the career transition from politics to entertainment through my job with the Wedgwood Circle and our team was in Nashville to help co-host a musician retreat at the Art House.
A Walking Contradiction, Part Two

A Walking Contradiction, Part Two

Charlie Peacock
Truth

I have a friend who wryly describes herself as a bad Buddhist. This makes me smile. I think of Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Little Big Man and the many vocations he pursued over a lifetime: Caucasian Cherokee, drunk, gunslinger, muleskinner, liar, and more. With each one he describes his performance as horribly lacking. Can you hear the actor’s voice? I was a horrible drunk. I was a horrible liar. Well, I was a horrible Zen Buddhist.

The Epistemology of Love

The Epistemology of Love

Steven Garber
Truth

The dreams and debates of modernity, cascading as they are into postmodernity, are always at the heart of the human condition. It cannot be otherwise, as we are never more and never less than sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. So we take our place as folks who long to love and to be loved. Percy understood that with an unusual eye: historically, philosophically, psychologically, politically, and, yes, theologically, seeing the complexity for Everyman and Everywoman. We want love, yet we also know how hard it is to love and to be loved.

A Walking Contradiction, Part One

A Walking Contradiction, Part One

Charlie Peacock
Bookish, Truth

My parents raised me for fourteen years. No more, no less. That may seem like an odd thing to say but it’s true. Some kids don’t get that much time. All you have to do is go to the grocery store or a fast food place to find out what I mean. Shifty eyes, mumbled grunts, manners in retreat, unclean hands, inability to count change. I’m grateful for the fourteen good years of proper parenting I had. Then Jack Kerouac took over. He was a lousy parent. As suburban shamans go, you couldn’t do better. Jack Kerouac, writer and former football star, was a game-changer.

Creative Community for the Common Good

Creative Community for the Common Good

Charlie Peacock
Hospitality, Place, Truth

A few weeks back I was privileged to sit with trustworthy friends and wrestle, yet again, to find the smallest, most potent words to describe what Art House means. This kind of exercise has played out many times in the last twenty years. We’ve been trying to put our vision into words since we first imagined the place and purpose that became The Art House home in Nashville, and our non-profit, Art House America. As we like to say, the name Art House designates place, while Art House America is an organizational title.