Essaying

For some months now, i have been grieving Peet the Sock Man. His brokenness. His need. His glory. His inability to hold onto his glory when his failures rise up and name him again and again. His desperation. His aloneness. His unwillingness to let his sin define him, even as he has lost all sense of himself.

Peet says to me things i have not yet begun to understand. Glorious, broken, beautiful Peet.

Themes of brokenness and redemption crack my heart open and hollow me out.

Because my heart is so raw when i read his story, because i know beyond a shadow of a doubt that his story is my own, i have been struggling to put into words what Peet means to me. But i want to know what he means. i need to, because i have a deep sense that what he says, in his sweet gibbering way, is about hope. Hope amidst despair. Hope that shines like the dawn.

The last two weeks i have been reading and rereading things that speak Peetness to me in the hopes that they will help me wrap my brain around my heart and give it words. Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher, was recommended to me as a starting place for thinking about redemption in a pre-Christian world, and i ought not to have been surprised to find Peet there. Darren Aronofsky’s Noah paralleled some of Agamben’s imagery. Hutchmoot addresses by Jennifer Trafton and Travis Prinzi spoke volumes to me; Jennifer’s in particular set my heart ablaze and made new thoughts come out of my ears—thoughts about what Peet, and we, are perhaps becoming. What if the stories are true? In studying Scripture, i was suddenly thrust back into memories of George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie, and found such a parallel between Peet and Lina that i wondered how i had not seen it before.

i still don’t know how to say what Peet says to me. But my heart is leaping in holy breathlessness as these thoughts and hopes pour through me.

The fourth and final Wingfeather book is on its way. The public release date is July 22, but Kickstarter supporters—over 2100 of us—will be receiving our copies in early May. My hope was, and is, to make a stumbling attempt to express the hope that Peet gives me before i find out how Andrew would answer the question of what he (and we?) are becoming. But my heart is tangly, and my words so inadequate. i must write; i must—but can i?

i know that Peet must die. But that is not why i grieve him.