Walter Martin’s Song, Niggle’s Leaf, and The God Who Makes All Things New

Walter Martin’s 2022 albums Bear It slows down the world and forces the listener to pay attention to the little things, like “the hole the blind mole blinks through,” the mixing of paint, or the trajectory of a baseball ball between pitcher and catcher. This attention to detail, combined with Martin’s voice (which is never “fake”), makes this album so compelling, and listeners will find Martin always stumbling upon something profound. After all, it’s the little things that add up to something big.

This is especially true forThe song never endsIn “The Perfect Song,” Martin sings about wanting to write “the perfect song.” But then he (jokingly) points out, “This one’s not, this is a different song.” This different song will be his best work, and it will be different from the others, because Martin (in what sounds like a rushed, rambling footnote to the song)

[E]A perfect description of what it’s like and why it’s so scary
And what does my life really mean, and how do I find meaning in what I see?
And what I understand about eternity and how I want my children to remember me.
And I want to say it all eloquently and get all the rhymes nice and tight.

Martin hopes that once completed, the song will make him “totally famous” and “not so lonely,” and indeed, his masterpiece is “a lot of work, but it’s well underway.”

Martin’s desire to leave his mark on the world is reminiscent of the character Niggle in J.R.R. Tolkien’s short story “Niggle’s Leaf.” Niggle is a mediocre painter working monotonously on what he thinks is his masterpiece. Like Martin, Niggle focuses on painting small things, primarily leaves. However, what begins as a single leaf grows into an increasingly elaborately detailed leaf. Niggle struggles to “see the tree through the leaf.” In addition to Niggle’s unusual attention to detail, his project is constantly interrupted by the necessities of life, especially the physical demands of his neighbors, which ultimately puts an end to Niggle’s life and his beloved painting in progress. The painting is never completed.

But on the other side of death, Niggle is astonished to see his tree complete, transformed from art into reality. “All the leaves he had labored over were not of his making, but were there just as he had imagined them; many more that had only sprouted in his mind, and many more that might have sprouted if only time had been given,” Tolkien writes. The branches from which the leaves came “had grown and bent in the winds that Niggle had so often felt and guessed, and so often failed to catch,” Tolkien writes. When Niggle sees his tree alive and beautifying the landscape, he cannot help exclaiming, “This is a gift!”

Tolkien’s story and Martin’s song touch on something that comes with any creative endeavor: the desire to make something of lasting value, to leave a mark on the world. These creative works are often stalled or delayed somewhere between our imaginations and the limitations of the real world (time, ability, health). Niggle’s tedious painting was periodically interrupted. Martin was singing about different That he excels the song over the process of creating a masterpiece underscores the point that our creative imaginations often exist more in our imagination than in reality, and forcing creative aspirations out of our heads and into the real world is often a Sisyphean feat.

There’s a tension that Martin and Niggle (and Tolkien?) face in the creative process: what exists as a masterpiece in the creator’s mind is likely to be damaged, nicked, torn, even mangled, as it makes its way out into the world.

Tolkien resolves this tension for Niggle in the afterlife, or as Martin calls it, “the other world.”

Tolkien’s instincts seem to me to be in line with the broader eschatological hopes of the Bible. Take, for example, the wounds of our Lord. The soldiers who crucified Jesus were doing their job. They woke up that day, perhaps with some knowledge that a more controversial job awaited them, or perhaps not. In any case, they had a job to do, and it was not a creative (i.e., creating) job, but a destructive job. But Darrell Cosden points outThe results of this work are “guaranteed to be passed on to God’s future and our own eternal reality.” The hymn sings:“Behold his hands and his side, deep wounds visible from above, with a glorious beauty.” The soldiers’ destructive acts, although beautiful and glorious, will continue forever.

Soldier Destructive Does work continue beyond this world? Creative Could it be the accumulation of countless human energies throughout human history? Could Jesus’ tiny scars (an inch or so) signal the possibility of something bigger to come? I think so. Jesus is described as the “firstfruits” of a resurrected world order, which suggests that Jesus’ scars do indeed speak to a broader resurrection reality. Small things add up to bigger things.

The flow of the biblical story, moving from garden to garden city, or the New Jerusalem, suggests that humanity’s accumulated creative labor will somehow spill over (albeit gloriously transformed) into the new creation. The book of Revelation suggests this by describing the glory of the kings of the earth being ushered into the new creation (Revelation 21:24).

Martin’s song ends with the realization that “the song never ends.” He sings, “The song wants answers, but I don’t have any.” But the song ends on a note of hope: “But then the light of the morning sun filtered into the studio, filling the room, and a new day began.” In other words, even as Martin recognizes the continuing difficulties of crafting the perfect song, he finds solace in the Creator’s work that is evident all around him, giving us not just a new day, but a glorious day. For those involved in creative labor, Martin points us in the right direction, but I don’t think it’s enough. The real hope lies not in the dawning of a new day, but in the dawning of a new era — a new heaven and a new earth. If the destructive work of the Roman soldier can be glorified in a new creation, imagine what the God who makes all things new can do with the humble creative labor of humanity.