Habitat is important, isn’t it? There are certain conditions that make for flourishing; not just any old circumstance will do. For me, there’s a big difference between how I feel on a sunny day and how I feel at the end of a string of cold, rainy days. People exist in a fabric of interrelatedness, and usually we don’t even notice it – until something starts to wear us out like gloomy weather eroding our mood.  

I think about this a lot as a traveling singer/songwriter and storyteller. Certain kinds of music flourish in certain kinds of habitats. The kind of music I make, which comes from the kind of person God has made me, just withers in venues like bars and even coffee shops. Music, for me, is about finding coherence in the world; the songs are a way of weaving together the frayed fabric of life. Singing is a way of remembering what is true: that the life God is living is not fragmented and God is reattaching our splintered, broken existence into a holy beautiful wholeness. 

If that wholeness is ever going to come close enough to lay a hand on, whatever music God is making must have the right kind of habitat. If God’s is often a still, small voice as Elijah found to be true, then a habitat that is crafted specifically to engender smallness and stillness would make sense, if we’re to catch the strands of song that undergird what is most real and true.  

There’s a place for trumpet blasts that ring across the vastness of the cosmos, that’s for sure. That day will come. So, a couple of years ago I had a blast hearing U2 play a stadium concert in Louisville. It was big and loud and amazing. But that’s not where I live, and that’s not the habitat in which the music I make tends to flourish. Over the last ten years, I’ve found that my favorite habitat for music is the home. And if the term house concert is new to you, it’s just what it sounds like, a real concert in your house. A house concert is a still, small habitat for a kind of music that flourishes under conditions of smallness and stillness.  

In the Gospels there are certainly scenes of Jesus teaching big crowds, and there are amazing conversations where Jesus is sharing face to face with one or two people. I think of Jesus’ late-night meeting with Nicodemus, or the one-on-one midday chat with the woman at the well. These ordinary, small-time but life-changing encounters provide a very different way of understanding what’s important in life. They mess with our expectations, don’t they? Elijah’s encounter with God is right in line with this. You’d expect God to be in the whirlwind, the earthquake, or the firestorm. All that bombast and spectacle, but God wasn’t in it. After the crash of the waves had quieted and withdrawn, Elijah was surprised to find God’s voice in the lull. 

A house concert is a cultivated lull. It’s a time in a space crafted specifically to foster the quiet lull between the crashing of the waves where a quiet voice might have a chance to speak. 

This brings up another important theme: hospitality. Hospitals, of course, are places cultivated for healing; all the tools, expertise, and conditions are gathered in a hospital so that healing might take place. Or you might think of gardens, which are places hospitably crafted so that plants might have a chance to grow and bear fruit. A garden is a habitat that is hospitable toward hopeful little seeds. Or think about families. Families are little people gardens; we hope to practice hospitality in our homes, initially toward the people who actually live there full-time. After that, we hope that our very homes might become life-giving habitats for all kinds of pilgrims on the way. 

House Concerts are a way to practice hospitality. One of my favorite authors, Henri Nouwen, says that hospitality is when we make room in our stories for someone else’s story. If I am to meet you and hear you, I’ve got to make room and show you hospitality. This is true even with God. God won’t trespass against us; if we have ears to hear and eyes to see, he’s always available, but even God is asking us to practice hospitality towards him. I’ve often thought of the Incarnation as God’s ultimate act of practicing hospitality toward us – for making room in his story for our story. When God becomes a human, it is the ultimate act of compassionate listening and hospitable attentiveness – Jesus hears our story by putting himself right inside of it. The cross is the culmination of that listening – Jesus doesn’t stop his ears to the most devastating part; at the crucial moment of death, he’s right there listening with every bit of blood and bone and flesh, body and soul. Jesus reads all the way through the unhappy ending of humanity’s broken storyline, and then turns the page to write a new miraculous chapter.  

We are hungry for a few phrases from that living book. We get glimpses here and there. Most days we are braving the whirlwind looking for a cranny to hide in. Maybe a house concert can be a little cranny? I hope so. I hope the songs I sing can themselves each be a little cranny to duck into and hear something of God’s healing song. A house concert might become a little habitat where pilgrims step inside a home to hear a few lines of the book of life. My prayer is that these house concerts can foster real meeting between those gathered and Jesus himself. 

Now, that’s a little bit of how I think about the particular habitat of house concerts, why I love them so much, and why they fit the way I like to do music. But maybe all that sounds pretty lofty? Maybe that’s intimidating if you were to consider hosting one yourself or attending one. But here’s the other thing I love about house concerts – they’re like bread and wine, which are the most boring, ordinary things in the world, yet that’s what Jesus chose as his glorious means of meeting with us. In some sense, they work precisely because they’re not impressive or out of reach for ordinary people. He’s chosen the foolish things, the overlooked things. Anybody can get their hands on a piece of bread and some juice (fermented or not). The home is the same way. It’s the most mundane thing in a sense. Yet it can be consecrated so that it becomes a holy meeting place, a crafted habitat where God’s song has a chance to break through like a blade of grass through the asphalt.  

In the South, where I’m from, hospitality is too often confused with entertaining. Entertaining is about keeping up appearances. That puts a lot of pressure on the host, because it’s about getting everything right. House concerts are not about entertaining, they’re about hospitality, which is about making a space in a restless world where we have a chance to hear a story sung to us about God’s invitation to his house and his rest. 

Links: 

You can read the poem included in this podcast, among other awesome writings by the Cultivating Team here: 

https://thecultivatingproject.com/this/

Learn more about house concerts here: www.matthewclark.net/houseconcerts 

Follow my Fall tour schedule here: www.matthewclark.net/shows