eugene peterson

And We are Worse

~ P. Jason

Take & Read
Eugene Peterson

For the last hundred years and more, those who have set themselves up as our authorities in how to live have been taking us on thrilling roller-coaster prospects of either social utopianism or psychological fulfillment – or both. And we are worse. The only things that have improved, if that is the word for it, are our capacities to move faster and spend more. 

Read It Again

~ P. Jason

Take & Read
Eugene Peterson

In prose we are after something, getting information, acquiring knowledge. We read as fast as we can to get what we want so that we can put it to good use. If the writer is not writing well–that is, if we cannot understand her quickly–we get impatient, shut the book, and wonder why someone does not teach her to write a plain sentence. But in poetry we take a different stance. We are prepared to be puzzled, to go back, to wait, to ponder, to listen. This attending, this waiting, this reverential posture, is at the core of the life of faith, the life of prayer, the life of worship, the life of witness.  If we are in too much of a hurry to speak, we commit sacrilege. Poets slow us down, poets make us stop. Read it again, read it again, read it again.

A Call into the Real World

~ P. Jason

Take & Read
Eugene Peterson

Every call to worship is a call into the Real World. You’d think that by this time in my life I wouldn’t need to be called anymore. But I do. I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I’m always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior.  The reality is that my prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am. Very often when I leave a place of worship, the first impression I have of the so-called “outside world” is how small it is–how puny its politics, paltry its appetites, squint-eyed its interests. I have just spent an hour or so with friends reorienting myself in the realities of the world–the huge sweep of salvation and the minute particularities of holiness–and I blink my eyes in disbelief that so many are willing to live in such reduced and cramped conditions. But after a few hours or days, I find myself getting used to it and going along with its assumptions, since most of the politicians and journalists, artists and entertainers, stockbrokers and shoppers seem to assume that it’s the real world. And then some pastor or priest calls me back to reality with “Let us worship God,” and I get it straight again, see it whole.

Back Out in the Open Country

~ P. Jason

Take & Read
Eugene Peterson

I was reared in a tradition that scorned written and read prayers. Book prayers. Dead prayers. Reading a prayer would have been like meeting an old friend on the street, quickly leafing through a book to find an appropriate greeting suitable for the meeting and then reading, “Hello, old friend; it is good to see you again. How have you been? Remember me to your family. Well, I must be on my way now.  Goodbye.”  And then closing the book and going on down the street without once looking my friend in the eye. Ludicrous. The very nature of prayer required that it be spontaneous and from the heart.

But along the way, I began to come across books of prayers that gave me words to pray when I didn’t seem to have any of my own.  I found that books of prayers sometimes primed the pump of prayer when I didn’t feel like praying. And I found that, left to myself, I often prayed in a circle, too wrapped up in myself, too much confined to my immediate circumstances and feelings, and that a prayerbook was just the thing to get out of the brambles and underbrush of my ego, back out in the open country of the Kingdom, under the open skies of God.

Adolescent Gullibility

Quote ~ ~ P. Jason

The Contemplative Pastor
Eugene Peterson

Another characteristic of the adolescent that has spread into the larger population is the absence of historical sense.  The adolescent, of course, has no history.  He or she has a childhood, but no accumulation of experience that transcends personal details and produces a sense of history.  His world is highly personal and extremely empirical.

As a consequence, the teenager is incredibly gullible.  We suppose that a person educated in fine schools by well-trained teachers would not be in any danger of superstition.  We further suppose that the fact-demanding, scientific-oriented education that prevails in our schools would have sharpened the mind of the young to be perceptive in matters of evidence and logic.  It doesn’t happen.  The reason it doesn’t happen is that they have no feeling for the past, for precedents and traditions, and so have no perspective in making judgments or discerning values.  They may know the facts of history and read historical novels by the dozen, but they don’t feel history in their bones.  It is not their history.  The result is that they begin every problem from scratch.  There is no feeling of being part of a living tradition that already has some answers worked out and some procedures worth repeating.

Such people are subject to consistent trivialization.  They find it impossible to tell what may be important.  They buy things, both material and spiritual, that they will never use.  They hear the same lies over and over again without ever becoming angry.  They are led to entertain, and for brief times practice, all kinds of religious commitment from magazine moralisms to occultic séances.  In none of it do they show any particular perseverance.  But neither do they show much sign of wising up – of developing a historical sense, of becoming conscious that they are part of a continuing people of God and growing beyond the adolescent susceptibilities to novelty and fantasy.

Adolescent Insecurity

Quote ~ ~ P. Jason

The Contemplative Pastor
Eugene Peterson

A feeling of inadequacy is characteristic of adolescent life.  When a person is growing rapidly on all fronts – physical, emotional, and mental – he or she is left without competence in anything.  Life doesn’t slow down long enough for him to gain a sense of mastery.  The teenager has a variety of devices to disguise this feeling: he can mask it with braggadocio, submerge it in a crowd of peers, or develop a subcult of language and dress in which he maintains superiority by excluding the larger world from his special competence.  The variations are endless; but the situation is the same: the adolescent is immature, and therefore inadequate.  And he is acutely self-conscious about this inadequacy…

If the pastor sees inadequacy as an unfortunate feeling, he or she will use psychological and moral means to remove it.  If he sees it as a sign of sin – an avoidance of personal responsibility in the awesome task of facing God in Christ – he will respond by kindly and gently presenting the living God, pointing out the ways in which God is alive in the community.  The instances of courage and grace that occur every week in any congregation are staggering.  Pastoral discernment that sees grace operating in a person keeps that person in touch with the living God.

Adolescent Self-Expression

Quote ~ ~ P. Jason

The Contemplative Pastor
Eugene Peterson

Adolescents are workers bent on self-expression.  The results are maudlin.  Simpering songs.  Sprawling poems.  Banal letters.  Bombastic reforms.  Burst of energy that run out of gas (the self tank doesn’t hold that much fuel) and litter house and neighborhood with unfinished models, friendships, and projects.  The adolescent, excited at finding the wonderful Self, supposes that life now consists in expressing it for the edification of all others.  Most of us are bored.

Real work, whether it involves making babies or poems, hamburger or holiness, is not self-expression, but its very opposite.  Real workers, skilled workers, practice negative capability – the suppression of self so that the work can take place on its own.