Burning in my bones Quotes
Paul
Evdokimov “the immanence of God at work in creation.
Even
after retirement, Don (Eugene’s father) worked real estate part time from a
small office downtown. He was always tending to clients, always working the
deal. Decades later, Eugene would experience this same compulsion to achieve,
would recognize the menace this demand for accomplishment could cast over a
life. Like his father, he wanted to win, to accomplish, to be respected as
competent and successful - in the center of things. But Eugene, thinking back
to the hole where a father's love was supposed to rest, would come to resist
with fierceness the depersonalizing, relationship-killing effect that the
American business model brought to his soul and to the church. Work and achievement
could be a seductive addiction, as burning and deep as a bottle of Thunderbird.
21
That
was Eugene the brother, naturally drawn to act in the presence of suffering. 27
"At
one point in my life I realized that for some time (maybe halfway through high
school and into university), she (mother) treated me more like a husband than a son:
confiding in me, leaning on me for emotional support. I just thought it was
natural, what mothers did." 27
The
tragedy revealed shadier parts of Eugene's family history, providing him one of
his first close encounters with human complexity: We can be both good and
violent at the same time. One person can bring both joy and sadness into the
world. In high school, dreaming of becoming a novelist, Eugene thought Sven's
story provided the material for an explosive book. While he never wrote a
novel, eventually Sven's sad tale did make its way into his work. 29
Eugene's
care extended beyond his biological family. When he was a teenager, Eugene's
mother drafted him into visiting the elderly Sister Lydron from their church…Evelyn
sent her son to check on the old woman, always with a casserole or cookies in
hand. Eugene recounted, Once as I sat in her rocking chair, making small talk
which I was never very good at ... she asked me to pray for her. I remember
still the sense of "fit"-that this was what I was made
for--that this is who I was at my core being. This intimate, unhurried
relationship. This ease of prayer and presence. At a young age, Eugene
felt these early stirrings of who he truly was long before he had any
vocabulary to explain it. 30
Eugene
dislikes school but loved books, and his curiosity was insatiable. 33
On
one of these evenings, one of the seminarians asked him (Buttrick was a preacher
who greatly influenced Peterson and Buechner) something to the effect of What's
the most important thing you do for your sermon preparation each week?"
Without hesitation, Buttrick responded, “For two hours every Tuesday and
Thursday afternoon, I walk through the neighborhood and make home visits. There
is no way that I can preach the gospel to these people if I don't know how they
are living, what they are thinking and talking about. Preaching is
proclamation, God's word revealed in Jesus, but only when it gets embedded in
conversation, in a listening ear and responding tongue, does it become gospel.”
74
Eugene
needed a revolution. The place, as much as anything else, was a drain on the
young seminarian's spirit. As stimulating and invigorating as his friendships,
work, and classes were, Eugene longed for Montana's contours and natural
beauty. New York did not speak the language of his soul. 90
The
class sat spellbound. Impossible - one of their own disagreeing with the
master. But Albright listened, stone still and pondering as Prescott politely
walked through his objections to the argument. Then the room fell silent. The
professor picked up his eraser and slowly wiped vast swaths across the
blackboard "Forget everything I said," he stated simply. “Prescott is
right." Eugene never forgot it. "The people who stand out in my
life; he reflected, "are the people who don't flaunt what they are doing
and aren't stuck on who they are." A man who could wipe away a little of
his ego along with the chalk was a man to be respected.” Years later,
Prescott Williams, an expert in biblical languages himself (and also someone
Eugene admired for using his intellect with immense humility), would serve as
an exegetical consultant on The Message. 96
And
yet in response to these real enemies (people were obsessed with safety because
of panic to nuclear attack) in their midst, the red binder (input from a church
growth “expert” who said you should give people what they want and to run the
church like a corporation) offered only vanity and emptiness. The community did
not need a church to craft little programs to assuage their consciences or perceived
needs for safety. It needed the church to invite people into a new reality
ruled by the kingdom of God. Christ Our King needed to worship. With all
this in mind, Eugene saw with a growing sense of both joy and desolation that
what was most essential in all his work was the opening invitation he offered
each Sunday- Let us worship God. 125
It
was a time when pastors all over the country were abandoning their vocation to
take up counseling. ”I could have ended up among them," he remembered long
after. But his pastoral instincts led him to read deeply and widely in search
of relevant perspectives for how to shepherd the whole human person. Eugene devoured
the writings of Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, and Viktor Frankl,
among many others. But there were two sides to this. All this knowledge
played into the temptation Eugene
faced
to be an expert, to be successful in his work. He began to notice a “latent
messianic complex," where he was drawn to locate the emotional problems
among those in his congregation and
then
fix them, efficiently. These experiences taught Eugene to value psychiatry and
therapy (an appreciation he never lost), but he did have to wrestle, coming to
the realization that he was a pastor, not a therapist. 131
It
had hurled him (Scottish pastor, Wilson) into a rocky ravine. “Those mountains
are magnificent," he said, "but they have twenty different ways to
kill you. Just like the church.”
Eugene
couldn't shake that line. Weeks later, he called Wilson and explained his vague
sense of the kind of pastor he wanted to be: slow, personal, attuned to God and
to the lives of those in his parish. Eugene wondered if it was possible
to transform from a competitive pastor to a contemplative pastor-
-a
pastor who was able to be with people without having an agenda for them, a pastor
who was able to accept people just as they were and guide them gently and
patiently into a mature life in Christ but not get in the way. 142-143
Tom
introduced Eugene to their waitress, Vanessa, a tired woman with sad eyes. As
they rose to pay the check, Eugene stepped away to the bathroom. When he
returned, he found Tom and Vanessa in an energetic discussion. Eugene grabbed a
newspaper and a seat at the counter. As Tom and Eugene exited
the
diner, Tom exuded vigor. "Eugene, did you see us talking, the way she was
talking. that intensity? I wish I could do that kind of thing all day long,
every day. Every time I come in here and there are no customers, she wants
to talk about prayer and her life." "So, why don't you do it, have conversations
like that?" Eugene asked. "Because, " Tom answered, with an
edge, "I have to run this damn church."
Eugene
shared Tom's story from the diner with his pastors' group and everyone immediately
resonated with the suffocation of “running a damn church.” Together they
determined that whatever else they might do, they would learn how to be
pastors. 144-145
“[Dostoyevsky]
wrote about the whole of human experience with such seriousness. There's no
moralizing in Dostoyevsky, no preaching. He really does understand how faith
works, how prayer works, how deceit works, how sin works. Perhaps the best thing
about him is that he doesn't make it easy. You have to enter his imagination.
In the world of spirituality and religion, reduction and oversimplification are
just endemic, and the minute that happens, we lose our participation. We stand
off at a distance and criticize and evaluate the options. Dostoyevsky doesn't
much do that. He's not an analyzer. 172
Once,
when a pastor asked him what he would say to evangelical pastors, Eugene's
discomfort surfaced:
“I
think the primary thing that I want them to hear is that they simply must quit
taking themselves so seriously. Not taking the Lord seriously, and not taking
their vocations seriously, but themselves. Evangelical pastors take themselves seriously,
but they don't by and large take theology seriously, they don't take the Bible
seriously, they don't take congregations seriously: theology is a means to an
end, the Bible is a tool for teaching/ preaching, congregation is a raw material
for programs and causes. But all of that destroys growth in the Spirit, growing
up in Christ. We keep trying to do the work of the Trinity ourselves. And we
are not the Trinity. I would want to tell pastors to quit being so busy and
learn quiet, to quit talking so much and learn silence, to quit treating the
congregation as customers and treat them with dignity as souls-in-formation.
The primary thing that we are dealing with as pastors is the Word of God. And
the primary stance we must learn both as pastors and congregations is to
listen. There can be no language that works at all if someone is not
listening. And since God is the primary voice in this gospel world, we pastors
have to lead the way in listening, doing it ourselves and encouraging others to
do it. By and large evangelical pastors are not deficient in energy or
motivation or knowledge. But they are not conspicuously attentive, reverently
listening to the voice/word of God and in being totally and personally present
with the people we meet and serve. "Holy'" requires reverence, the "fear
of the Lord" is the biblical phrase. A holy Bible requires reverent
listening; and a holy church/congregation requires a reverent being present.”
238-239
“The
controversy swirling around Rob Bell's book Love Wins is fresh evidence
on how cantankerous the American church is. Because of the endorsement I gave
to the book, people keep trying to draw me into the fracas. And a fracas it certainly
is. How the so-called Christian community can generate so much hate is
appalling. Haven't we learned anything about civil discourse? Will we ever? And
it is so debilitating-we have this glorious gospel to proclaim and give away
and we gang up against one another and throw dogma-rocks. 278
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