Friday, December 24, 2021

A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson

 


How lovely to take a break from reading a very long book about the power plays of three men at the top of the American Executive branch (The Kennedy's and Lyndon Johnson - see next review) to the humility of loveliness of the man, Eugene Peterson. It was so life-giving to read about this man's life compared to the other three men!

This was a quick read, and I read it for the Renovare Book Club which I have been a part of since 2015 (I think). 

He overlapped so wonderfully with people like Pat Robertson! I had always thought he was a Presbyterian his whole life, but he was a Pentecostal during his growing-up years. That was fascinating. I loved how much he admired his mother and longed for a relationship with his father. I underlined several quotes and will put them here. 

It was a great read!

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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