‘On June 5, 2001, Eugene scratched the final sentence…’ (242).
On this very day, twenty years ago, Peterson’s ten year project, The Message, was completed. So I thought I’d engage with the recent authorized biography of Peterson — Winn Collier’s A Burning in My Bones — on this day. I love The Message. Although I may never read my Bible passage publically from it prior to preaching and although it is full of colloquialisms that do not always travel well across cultures, it must be at least ten years since I preached a sermon without consulting it. If literal translations help me be accurate with the passage and dynamic equivalent translations help me explain the passage — then paraphrases, like The Message, help me be imaginative with the passage. As one who preaches, I value all three approaches.
The biography presses into many of the topics you’d expect to be covered…
The Metaphors
The Poet-Peterson created his share of metaphors. I love this part of his writing. The journey through life is more like ‘tracing a scent than following a map’ (60). At one point, ‘that scent he’d been following was growing stronger, that burning in his bones generating more heat’ (77). It is consistent with the theme of walking with Jesus, one step at a time, learning to trust and obey all the way home.
I remember Peterson’s use of the ‘badlands‘ metaphor in his own memoir, The Pastor. Every summer the family would drive the thousands of miles from Baltimore back home to Montana ‘to recover our breath’ (136), passing through South Dakota’s ‘badlands’, ‘where nothing is green or growing’ (136). Hour after hour there is barrenness, only to be ‘grateful for green again’ (136). It became a metaphor for the tough times in his life as a pastor. The chapter, “Staying Put” finishes with this paragraph: The badlands shaped, perhaps as much as any other voice or experience, Eugene’s convictions about what it meant to be a pastor. He possessed a dogged commitment to his immediate place, to his holy charge to pastor this one community of ordinary people. And he exhibited a resolute determination to resist the siren songs insisting he must push to make something of himself and build something “significant” at Christ the King (the church he pastored in Baltimore). These convictions were forged in the long stretch of desert years when his commitments were severely tested. Through frustration and boredom and dark nights of the soul, Eugene determined he would be patient. He would plod forward. He would stay put. Even as he slogged farther into this barren country (146-147).
He bears witness to the fact that it was during the badlands that his convictions about pastoral life were shaped: being ‘slow, personal, attuned to God and to the lives of those in his parish’ (142); being transformed from a competitive pastor into a contemplative pastor; gathering and sustaining ‘a company of pastors’ with whom to journey; and sitting under his ‘Scottish pastor’ (146), Alexander Whyte, reading his sermons for 20 years, decades after Whyte had died.
Two more metaphors… Of Peterson it was said that ‘he never gave advice’ (155), preferring to sit, to be still and then, slowly, ‘he’d convert my story into a biblical story’ (156). He’d quietly, gently, switch the lens through which people looked at life. When Peterson did finally finish at the Christ the King church, he felt like ‘a well, drained of water‘ (207).
Yep, I love the metaphors in his writing. My first impression of this book, in the opening chapters, was “How cool is this? The biographer is writing with a similar literary quality as Peterson himself.” So much to read aloud and to read slowly. However, sadly, the book peters out a bit, in my view. Maybe that is what happens in trying to write more recent history. In musical terms, the flowing largo becomes a more choppy staccato towards the end, without the same insight — especially as the author covers the controversies and criticisms of Peterson’s final years, which were anguished in so many ways.
The Writer
22 million copies of 38 books! Yikes. But A Long Obedience in the Same Direction went to 23 publishers and received 23 rejections. The Message itself started in a yearlong adult Sunday School class through Galatians. He found people so soaked in the ‘American story’ that ‘their conversation flat-lined. Galatians was electric, but the class had all the inspiration of a wet marshmellow’ (214). He decided to provide his own translations and as ‘people leaned in … discussion was ignited’ (214). One thing led to another — and here is Peterson telling the back-story of The Message in 96 seconds…
At one point, his journal concludes that
‘I want to shape sentences and words out of my soul, not just my mind’ (213). It took awhile for these words to catch on, but eventually they did:
Months passed, then a couple of years. At times it felt as if nothing were happening. But unseen to Eugene … people around the country were picking up books with his name on them — picking them up and sensing they’d found a voice that spoke their true language. Vast numbers of readers recognized in Eugene’s words a hunger they’d forgotten, a craving for an authentic encounter with God. They were hungry for a vision calling them into the wondrous expanse of a life that honored what it meant to be a beloved human living under the mercy of a magnificent, generous, infinite God. They found all this in the words of a pastor from Maryland, and they couldn’t get enough (175).
The Vulnerability
There is a lot of honesty in the story. A delightful chapter on his mother — a Pentecostal preacher who ‘vividly recounted Bible stories as if she’d witnessed them herself’ (9) — is followed by one on his father from whom he received no hugs or “I love you”s. He discovered, in later life, that his own chidlren expressed similar things about him as a father. There is his battle with alcohol. There is an openness about the tension in his marriage with Jan, the woman he loved — and a woman from whom he learned ‘the hospitality of unhurried conversation’ (104).
Fragility emerged with the unwanted attention that the success of his books created, just at a time when he was wanting to withdraw to Montana. ‘The insidious pedestal’ on which people placed him… But it is his honesty around the badlands-experience that will remain with me. I’ve known the badlands in every job to which Jesus has called me. Like with Peterson, this is where and when we are truly shaped. From what I can make out, there is probably depression, burn-out, stress for him (as it is for so many of us) — but he also uses words like monotony, desolation, and boredom. Recently, I’ve been playing with the sporting metaphor of being ‘out of form’ to capture some of my own challenges. And one of the ways to get back into ‘form’ is to be like Peterson — to keep on walking with Jesus, maintaining life’s rhythms under God’s unseen hand, right through the badlands. One day God will lead us on to ‘green growth’…
The Bible
Peterson was very much the scholar. I didn’t fully realise this fact. He walked away from an opportunity to do a PhD with Brevard Childs at Yale because ‘the scent’ was taking him into pastoral life, ‘the church was his home’ (98). [NB: I wish I saw more people following this same scent, because in both New Zealand and in India I’ve witnessed the easy seduction by the academy far too often]. Earlier, in seminary, the Bible came alive for him in classes with Robert Traina (well known for his book, Methodical Bible Study). His Pentecostal roots had a Bible that ‘offered principles for moral living, artillery for theological skirmishes, and cliches providing therapeutic salve. His church had implicitly used it as a textbook, or occasionally even a weapon, but no one had ever guided him into the wonder, the beauty, the artistry of the ancient pages’ (68). Traina — as well as George Buttrick and Frederick Buechner — led him down those paths.
The Church
While at university/college in Seattle he was elected president of the student body. As a leader he learned ‘the name of every student on campus — all eight hundred of them’ (54). Later, this approach helped shaped his convictions as a pastor. ‘The church was healthiest if it could maintain a manageable size … the size where a pastor could still memorize everyone’s name’ (54). Although I’ve seen some healthy larger churches over the years, I am still partial to this Peterson perspective. If ever I was a pastor again, it would be to this smaller-sized church, for this reason, that I’d love God to lead me…
This son of a butcher, with mountains in his soul, and the wide sky in his squinting smile, had always been looking for his place of belonging. The academy, with its serious ideas and search for truth, had an irresistible allure, but he also eschewed the pretense, the inflated egos, the shallow woodenness. The church was his home, but he often felt at odds there too, with its stale formality and its too-easy disconnect from the grit of life’ (98).
While his first foray into pastoral ministry lasted just eighteen hours (back in Montana), his second experience wasn’t much better. He found himself caught up in an approach to church life that ‘de-centered God’ (124), as he got lost in the shuffle of expectations around reports and graphs and plans, all of which were contained in ‘the red binder’ (124). It became the real bane of his life. He ‘found himself in the center of a great war’ (124). ‘The professionalizing of the call’, as he was to call it elsewhere. It is syncretism, pure and simple. So he started preaching from the book Acts, ‘a text for cleansing our perceptions from the blurring and distorting American stereotypes’ (126). Then in the part of the book that will become the stuff of legend, Peterson begins to sense that his supervisors are not engaged with him. So he starts to have some fun with them — as well as to subvert their approach to church. In his written reports he starts confessing to addictions, to affairs, even to ‘using hallucinogens in the Eucharist’ (128) just to see if he could get a response. There was none. ‘No one was looking out for him’ (129).
My favourite story is the one about Reuben (49-51). Read it aloud sometime. At college, ‘(Eugene’s) soul withered’ (49). He returned home to seek advice from his pastor. He was hopeless. His mother’s suggestion of Brother Ned wasn’t much better. But then there was Reuben, a coarse man with a ‘wild red beard’ (50). Reuben was ‘not a man you went to with an aching heart’ (50), but Eugene did — and those Thursday nights through that summer changed Eugene’s life. Like I say, you need to read it aloud.
nice chatting
Paul
PS. Eugene Peterson and U2’s Bono became good friends. If you haven’t seen this video of Bono coming to visit Jan and Eugene in Montana, to share their mutual love for the Psalms, it is well worth it…
Thanks Paul for this blog. I was personally encouraged to know that some of my heart struggles are not my own and that even the likes EP have experienced it. Further the use of the ‘scent trail’ and ‘out of form’ are great ways to state our experience in Christ and also the time when it seems we have lost a sense of smell. Just keep smelling!
Bill McGregor comments
Brilliant insights into a man I greatly admire – honest and compelling. You have reflected the 'badlands' and 'green pastures' of the pastoral heart not only of Petersen but of yourself and all of us as pastors. Thanks so much, Paul.
Yes, Benji, I am glad that you've found those metaphors helpful, as you wear your many hats!
It is so empowering when people we admire let us into their lives to glimpse their vulnerability and humanity.
blessings
Paul
Thanks, Bill.
Lovely to hear from you in this space 🙂
So true. Eugene Peterson has been such an important voice in the conversations around what it means to be a pastor — oftentimes a bit of a prophet, a conscience for us all.
[For other readers, Bill was my pastor when I was in my late-teens, 40+ years ago … and a huge part of my journey towards becoming a pastor. When I went to the USA to do my theological study, I appreciated the way he stayed connected to me — and then he did so much on my behalf to open doors into pastoral ministry back in NZ on our return].
best wishes
Paul