Eugene Peterson: Insights on Prayer, Poetry, and Spirituality

Eugene Peterson's profound insights on prayer emphasize listening as essential to spiritual growth and understanding.

### The Poetic Journey of Faith: Eugene Peterson's Spiritual Insights
* 📖 "Prayers are tools not for doing or getting but for **being and becoming**," reflects Eugene Peterson, a renowned pastor and biblical interpreter, whose works have influenced countless lives.
* ✍ Peterson's translation of the Bible, The Message, has sold millions of copies, showcasing his **commitment to making scripture accessible through poetic language**.
* 🌄 Growing up in a Pentecostal church in Montana, Peterson found adventure in faith, though he noted that his parents were more focused on **spiritual matters** than the **beauty of the world around them**.
* 📚 His love for language blossomed through high school teachers and a personal exploration of the Psalms, which introduced him to the **power of metaphor and poetry** in understanding God.
* 💬 Peterson emphasizes the importance of listening in prayer, stating that "**if we pray without listening, we pray out of context**," highlighting a profound shift in how one engages with spirituality.
* 🌌 He believes that the Psalms teach us to **bring every aspect of our humanity before God**, including our **darkest emotions**, allowing for a more **honest and redemptive relationship with the divine**.
* 💔 In his view, the act of **expressing emotions like anger and disappointment** is crucial for spiritual health, as it **prevents these feelings from festering within us**.
* 🕊 As Peterson reflects on his life, he finds hope in the **connections formed through shared struggles** and the **enduring power of language** to shape our understanding of **faith and community**.

prayers are tools not for doing or getting but for being and becoming. These are words of the beloved biblical interpreter, teacher, and pastor Eugene Peterson. He's the author of dozens of books like Answering God, About Praying with the Psalms, and Christ Plays in 10,000 Places. Jumping off a line of Gerard Manley Hopkins at the back of the churches Eugene Peterson pastored for nearly three decades, you'd be likely to find well-worn copies of books by Wallace Stegner or Denise Levertov. Frustrated with the unimaginative way he found his congregants treating their Bibles, Eugene Peterson translated the whole thing himself, and that translation has sold millions of copies around the world. His down-to-earth faith hinges on a love of metaphor and a commitment to the Bible's poetry as what keeps it alive to the world. All the prophets report, and if you don't know that, you try to literalize everything and make shambles out of it. You know, a metaphor is really a remarkable kind of formation.

because they're both means what it says and what it doesn't say, and so those two things come together, and it creates an imagination which is active. I'm not trying to figure things out; you're trying to enter into us there. I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. [Music] Eugene Peterson lives with his wife, Jan, at the home his father built in Lakeside, Montana, just outside Glacier National Park. I'd like to start by just asking you how you would start to describe the religious and spiritual background of your childhood. I grew up in a very sectarian church, Pentecostal church, and I was... it was a small little church in the center of town. I guess what I would say is it was exciting; there was just a lot of stuff going on, and going to church was an adventure. Anything to do with the gospel, but it was a good place to be for a young person, teenager. Hmm. So I had a positive relationship to the church, boys. I hadn't heard gross a good bit of it.

but it was easy to do. My parents were good parents and faithful, and no hypocrisy in them. Hmm, that's really where, and I didn't really get outside of that until I went to university. All right, like you've written, um, or at least I gather in your writing that, I think you wrote somewhere that the church I grew up in was less interested in this world than it was in spiritual matters, but it's true. But I sense that there's just the Montana landscape, for starters, kind of formed you, began to form you differently, your own spiritual imagination differently. Yeah, that's true. We lived in the middle of this magnificent world, but we didn't, my parents didn't do much with it. But when I was a young person, well, young, seven, eight, nine, ten years old, I was within walking distance of a range of mountains, and I, every Saturday, I used to boil a couple of eggs and get some bacon and ride my bike to the slope of these mountains and spend the day looking for Indians and looking for her.

arrowheads and mm-hmm never found any of that stuff, but it was. I didn't make any difference. I was well populated with an imagination, yeah. So I did never grow up with a sense of the beauty of this place and how unusual it was, hmm. But I did it pretty much on my own. As you just mentioned, my parents were more interested in heaven than earth, but it didn't seem to hurt me, yeah. I can't find in your writing, and perhaps I've missed it, but where were the roots of your love of language and the care you take with it, the reverence you have for its poetic possibilities? Where did that come in for you? I think I had a couple of teachers in high school who loved language, you know, who taught me how to write. And I think a lot of it was just kind of happenstance. I would find a poet and realize that I loved poets. I can't put my finger on one thing. We moved to Crosstown when I was about

Ah, maybe 10 years old, and I had no friends. I had a Bible that I purchased with my own money, and I started reading it because I had no friends. Mm-hmm. Somebody told me that the Psalms are a good thing to read, so I started reading the Psalms, and I couldn't understand them. God is a rock, what does that mean? My tears are in your bottle, what is going on here? I just kind of struggled with that, but people had told me it was important to read the Psalms. About a month into that, I realized what they were. I didn't know the nurture metaphor, but I realized what metaphors were. Yeah. And so then I was off, and the Psalms were my introduction to poetry. So you became a pastor. It doesn't sound like you were always destined for that. At one point early on, you thought you would be a professor, but you not only became a pastor, you became kind of a pastor's pastor, and in your writing.

has been so important to people's formation, and in your most recent book, you the pastor, you write that you can't imagine now not having become that. But even that, the resonance of that word in the world reading you now, as well as the world of church, is so radically shifted, changed. And so that's kind of what I want it. I want to talk to you about. I want to kind of draw out your spiritual imagination and your scriptural imagination, and I want to kind of, I want to kind of draw you out as a public theologian because I think that all of that speaks to the world we inhabit today, even a world in which a lot of the context in which you grew up and in which you formulated your ideas and your is very different. Oh, that's true. Hi. I think I became a pastor when I was in graduate school, studying to be a professor, and I was gonna be a Hebrew and Greek professor, basically. And then I got married, and I went, no, we moved.

to White Plains, and they didn't pay me very much at the seminary. And so, I had to have another job, so I got a job with a pastor who I respected. I really never had a very high opinion of pastors, to tell you the truth. They'd come into our town and finish for a couple of years and go for a better place. And so, they were, you know, I liked them. They were fun, told good stories, but there was nothing about God that had any kind of connection with my life. And then I was teaching, and the first course I taught was the book of Revelation. It was a great place to start. Yeah, well, it was. And you know, I struggled through that, and then I started reading the Revelation in a totally new way. I had help from one professor. Well, he wasn't a professor; he was dead, actually. But it was, he wrote a book on the Revelation, which just transformed my imagination when I realized that John was a poet. This was the first great poetry in the Christian

faith and I realized that then all that well the images, the symbols, and everything started to fit, and I quit trying to literalize them and began to see what was going on. And then that, and here I was in New York City and babbling, right? So I finally find myself living in a world which is outside the classroom, and you know, there were divorces and suicides and runaway kids, and it was just, I never knew it was gonna happen on any day of the week except Tuesday and Thursday where I taught my classes. So you know, um, what you said a minute ago about the poetry, and you, you very, you, you have actually also, you are a writer but also a translator, um, the message, your translation of the Bible is revered by so many people's different kinds of people, from Bono who recently interviewed you to, you know, one of our producers, Lily, actually, who's there, whose father was a pastor, right, and from Colombia, and used the message with his congregation of people whose first language was not English. But what

you said a minute ago about the poetry of the text is even in many of the translations many of us grew up with not evident and and without that being evident even sometimes in the way it was laid out on the page and this is so clear in the way you write about this the language we then without that context we couldn't it was impossible to read it that's true to understand it to inhabit it you know um all the prophets reports and if you don't know that you try to literal eyes everything and make samples out of it talk about what difference that makes even to 21st century people reading the prophets or having an imagination about prophets what difference does it make to know that they were poets well it means you learned what the meaning of metaphor is and that you you know a metaphor is really remarkable kind of formation because they're both means what it says and what it doesn't say and so those two things come together and it creates an imagination which is active I'm not trying to figure

things out you're trying to enter into us there. [Music] You [Music] I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, I'm with the beloved pastor and imaginative theological writer Eugene Peterson. His translation of the Bible, The Message, has sold millions of copies around the world. To give a flavor, here's how he renders a well-known verse in the gospel book of John. The King James Version reads, And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. Eugene Peterson translates, The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish. [Music] One thing you should be wrote about poetry is that I'll just read this. It's wonderful language. Poets tell us what our eyes blurred with too much of gawking and our ears dulled with too

much chatter, miss around and within us. Poets use words to drag us into the depth of reality itself. I really like this poetry; it grabs us by the jugular. Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal. Yes, I, you know, I'm just, I'm pressing on this a bit because I think that really, maybe even again right now in our time, there's an interest in the notion of profits. But I'm also just, I think you have a way of talking about what profits bring us, partly through their particularity of their language, that shakes us out of our regular, our usual categories of thinking and action. I think you're right. I think it's been important for me. I would think it'd be important for anybody, but to find a few poets that really strike home to you and then memorize them, ah, and used to learn to listen to the dynamics of their language and recognize things that if you're just looking at the words. For me, George Herbert has been one of those.

poets Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mary Oliver. Yeah, I don't have a lot of them, but I memorized them because, and I can, you know, they, the music gets inside my head, and I'm reading poetry without knowing a reading poetry, and then that helps with the soon with the scriptures too. And I didn't realize when I did the message I had a, he had a congregation of people who didn't read books, and so I started translating the Bible in their language, not knowing that I, what I was doing, and suddenly they started paying attention to me in a way they never did before. So I think, and I see, I didn't call it poetry, that if I hadn't done that, they would acquit, right? I think people who use language have to be pretty subversive. I don't know if you want to Kraus this out or not, but we've got a huge, huge thing going on in our country now, now, which is, it just despises language actually, though what I see that there's a lot of the, the worst

of what's happening in the political sphere right now, though, is it's kind of an extreme version of a of the way we've been so careless with language, right, in general. So, I mean, there was this, there's this line of yours, and I actually don't know, remember where this came from, but you wrote, We cannot be too careful about the words we use. We start out using them, and they end up using us. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I think that's informed by your scriptural perspective, but it speaks very directly to profane realities. Yeah, I mean, say some more about how words, that power of words, and that power of words, if we don't use them carefully enough. Well, the power of words when they're used well is multi-leveled. Most words have more than one meaning, and if you reduce four words just to what you find in the newspaper, you've missed out on a whole chunk of human living. And I've got, this is where a poet helps us. He trains our minds to hear stuff we didn't hear before, and

that's what's quite wonderful about having children. There's sometimes use language, and it kind of just, they discover words, yeah, and they start using them in ways we never thought of doing, mm-hmm. And I think children in their preschool days have a lot to teach us about language. It's true also that as we watch our children acquire and master words, that power of words is very evident, yeah. It is something you said about prayer also strikes me as, um, so, you know, it strikes me that when you talk about the power of words, the importance and care with them, it's not just speaking, it's also about reading, it's also about listening. You talk about if we pray without listening, we pray out of context. It seems to me the same thing kind of comes through about speaking. If we speak without listening, we speak out of context. And listening also doesn't accompany a lot of our public speech now, yeah. I think the listening business is the part of prayer that gets most neglected, mm-hmm. And I have people have

taught me this, but one of the best teachers for me has been Carl Bart. Yes, and he is just adamant about when you pray, you don't ask God for things. You pray to listen, and then when you've listened, you can hear God speak and thank you in the past. You never thought about your prayer as quite a different relationship. I mean, you say God speaks to us. Our answers are our prayers. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, it does. It's just a whole different way to entry point to thinking about what's happening in prayer to you know. I even, I think, I think kind of a Protestant, Western Protestant approach that's been there in many churches for a while, and that's one of the things that done. I think I liked about being a pastor is they're working through in conversations. I have this kind of reversal of what they're used to doing, and the ability to make the transfer from asking to listening is really profound. But when it's when you start to do it and

Sometimes takes some coaching, some encouragement from a pastor or somebody else. Ah, but it's so freeing. Hmm, I remember a conversation I had when I was a pastor. I went to see a woman who was lonely, and uh, she was, she Anna, I know what they call them, and I hope that use prints paper and cloth over in your doing, working in it. Mm-hmm, and what did they call those? Needlepoint or something like this? Yeah, there's a root word for that. Hmm, thing you're holding. Anyway, she said to me, My life is just limp. I don't, I just need something to give me some definition. And she said like this, No thing I have. Mm-hmm. Is it you can stretch it out tight and everything? It starts to fit. And so I told her, Let me get you one of those. And so I came back in a couple days with uh, where they copy the songs. Mm-hmm. And I said, This is it. This is what you need. Just take one of these Psalms and just let your mind

stretch around it and see what happens. Don't try to read a lot of songs, just take one, two, three, whatever, and it's amazing what that does. [Music] In the new revised version of the Bible that many of us read in church, Psalm 22, a cry of anguish from King David, begins My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? In Eugene Peterson's translation, The Message, he writes God, God, my God, why did you dump me miles from nowhere, doubled up with pain? I called to God all the day long, no answer, nothing. I keep at it all night, tossing and turning. [Music] You can listen again and share my conversation with Eugene Peterson through our website onbeing.org. I'm Krista Tippett, On Being continues in a moment. [Music] I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today I'm with the legendary pastor and theological writer Eugene Peterson. His literary biblical imagination has formed

generations of pastors, teachers, and lay seekers. You say that the Psalms train us in the conversation with God, that is prayer. Yeah, how? What is your practice of... I mean, so there is this traditional practice in Christianity of praying the Psalms, just praying through the Psalms, and it's what the monastics do. Do you have that kind of... have you had that kind of practice in your life, or how do you work with the Psalms in your personal spiritual life? Oh, it's hard to talk about. Yeah, I guess so much goes into it. Yeah, but for years, I have the first thing in the morning. I have about an hour, just quiet in the coffee. But I've picked seven songs that I thought were kind of covered the waterfront of what's going on, and I memorized them. And I've got picked pretty long Psalms, so I'd have to work at it, and so on. On Sunday, I do Psalm 92, which is a psalm for the Sabbath. And then I go to Psalm 68, which is kind of a

it's a collection of pieces of song from different kinds of settings, but when you read through the whole thing, that's a pretty long song. You realize all these things kind of fit together if you're paying attention. When you say all these things, do you mean all the different moves, all the different moves that it's all mixed from? Yeah, praise to fury to desolation, is that what you mean? That right, okay, they're not logically connected, yeah, but there was an imagination. They start to fit together, that's what I mean. Mm-hmm, and then some 18 is his assalam just full of metaphor, and yes, you're just overwhelmed by all the ways in which you can reimagine God working in your life. And on and just, I do it seven of those, but I've been doing that for years. So then you want to know the whole story, yeah, and I shut up and I just breathe deeply, and further 15, 20, 25 minutes, just tried to empty myself of everything, but there's enough going on through that.

first entry, but it seeps into your imagination. And so you're not really just emptying yourself; you're emptying yourself of a certain amount of clutter so that the words already need to know for how to fit in. I don't think it's a very good idea to give people a pattern to work with in prayer. We're all a little bit different, mm-hmm. And I did that myself. I just figured out what I seemed possible to do, and I did it. But when I was a pastor, I would spend time with people figuring out what to do, helping them find their whatever their 7 Psalms might be. That's right, there were the equivalent, yeah. You know, one of the words that's important to you is honesty. That disarms, trained us in honest prayer, immersed us, as you say, in the stream of life as it is, wet and wild. And I think, you know, your books, maybe especially Answering God, but not just Answering God, have been part of the training of seminarians and theologians.

for a few generations here, and I think you know one of the things you talk about is that the honesty of the Psalms, that bringing every possible human, everything human before God, which even lectionaries, I mean even official Christian texts, have often shied away from or edited out, you know, the cursing, the imprecatory psalms, the beautiful psalm that we all know, we'd consider is a Babylon, there we sat down and wept, but that also has a moment where it says, Happy shall be he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks. That's right, but for you, that honesty about the human condition is absolutely at the heart of what is necessary about the psalms. Yeah, it is, and how else you get permission to do that except you have something that's in the Bible, it's inspired, it's been practiced by people for thousands of years. I was in conversation with Bono just two months ago, and he was talking about, we were talking about the songs, and he says, Oh, what do you do when

you get angry unless I'm not quoting, and I said, Well, you've got to learn how to cuss without cussing, and I think that's what's the song by the waters of Babel, and we sat down and wept. Um, there are ways in which you can express your anger in a context which doesn't become mean. Mm-hmm. And I think that's what the Psalms have always done, not just the Psalms, but the stories. Yeah, the biblical stories. Yeah, I know that you will be aware of this too, that at this particular moment in history, there is some sense that these kinds of passages and imagery in the Bible are part of what is dangerous about the Bible in the world. I think you, you know, here's something you say. I think you have a more sophisticated way of talking about what's going on and what it is meant to work in us. And you, you, you wrote, It's easy to be honest before God with our hallelujahs, somewhat more

difficult with our hurts nearly impossible to be honest before God in the dark emotions of our hates talk about what is redemptive and actually good for the world and people being able to bring the dark emotions of their hates before God. Well, I think people need to be given permission to do it, to find a language of hate, disappointment, retaliation, and get that out. People who are oppressed, all those emotions often get sick, depressed. Learning how to express our fears, discomfort, our hate, if you will, it's often very freeing. So, is it your sense that if people can bring that before God, it's less dangerous as something that's in the world? Oh yes, how much less. And that's just kind of one of the mysterious things about human beings in the world, isn't it? The mystery of us. And I think that's where art comes into the artists can sometimes bring out these feelings, perceptions that then we don't know how to do it ourselves. And yet they're good artists, they know what they're doing, and they're honest, they

can be a great help. You know, you wrote in the pastor your new memoir. I think you spoke to the phenomenon I'm talking about, which you know, we're talking about how the psalms of the Hebrew Bible bring every human aspect into the light, even the worst. Yes, and so that is a way of. So one thing you talk about crowds, and you said classically there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence: religious meaning through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, I mean chemically induced in transcendence, and recreational sex, and through the ecstasy of crowds. And you said church leaders frequently warn against the drugs in a sex, but at least in America almost never against the crowds. And there's something about the moment we inhabit, I think even globally, that feels very resonant and psychologically astute. I think it's true, but the poets and the writers that use writing as a way of conveying truth rather than just entertaining people. I used to when I was know as that was a

pastor, I just, I to get a pile of books in the same book, like 10 or 20, 30 books, and buy them, and put him in the narthex, and ask people to pick it up and read it. There's some really great Christian writers who really keep you burrowed into the reality of your life, the world's life, who would be in that pile. Well, Charles, Charles Dickens is one, and I think I read all his books three or four times. Yeah, and most people would not think of Charles Dickens as Christian reading. That's true, but he is. I mean, that's a Christian reading if there was one. Let's say some more. Well, he enters into the life of these poor people and bad people and stupid people, and it makes them come alive, and you, I'm never gonna do that, just think, and then you do, and then you know you did it. Wallace Stegner, I think, is one of our most healthy novelists. Hmm. My wife and I have, we often in the evenings

we read a book aloud, and I guess we've read stagers' books aloud five or ten times. You know, again, I don't know that people would think of that as a book that would be in the back of a church. Um, this is a huge question, so I'm just gonna ask you how you would start to answer it. You know, what at this stage in your life, like what continues to perplex you? What do you not have answers for that you would like to have more answers for? What has surprised you even as you've moved through anger and forgiveness and sadness and the things that go wrong in a human life? Well, you know, I don't. I'm 83 years old now, and one of the things that's uh, this surprised me is the lack of questions I have now. It's kind of like I've just entered into a world where everything is going not the way I thought it would go, but the way it makes sense. I'm, I forget things a lot, I misplace things, and I used to get angry with

myself. I don't anymore. This is the way a lot of the world is living. This is time. Just enjoy it. So, you got to go look for your keys for a half a dozen times before you find them, huh? And having a family helps, you know. I've got three children and nine grandchildren. That puts you and I in a context where a lot not to be appreciated and a lot to worry about, ah, and their worries don't crowd out the glories, but we've got to give ourselves permission to do that. [Music] I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being today, and with the beloved pastor and literary theological writer Eugene Peterson. Here are some lines from his memoir, The Pastor. My work has to do with God and souls, immense mysteries that no one has ever seen at any time, but I carry out this work in conditions, place and time, place but not just any place, not just a location marked on a road map, but on a topo, a topographic map with named mountains and rivers identified.

wildflowers and forests, elevation above sea level, and annual rainfall. I do all my work on this ground. I do not levitate time, but not just time in general, abstracted to a geometric grid on a calendar or numbers on a clock face, but what the Greeks named Kairos, pregnancy time, being present to the presence. I never know what is coming next. Once he wrote, People ask, 'How do you mature a spiritual life?' and you said, 'The one thing you do is you eliminate the word spiritual. It's your life that's being matured. It's not part of your life, but the word spiritual much more than when you first became a pastor is everywhere now.' I don't know how you hear that, respond to it, what you think of it. I think it's cheap. It's your doing. You're taking something and putting a name on it, spiritual, which means it's defined. The whole world is spiritual, and the word spirit is wind, it's breath. Well, people are breathing all over the place, they're all spiritual beings, but they if

you have a name for it. You can compartmentalize it, and that just wrecks havoc with the whole thing. Spirituality is, and that's why I don't like the word, because it's so easy to just say, Well, he's such a spiritual person. She's such a spiritual person. Well, nonsense. You're - mm-hmm. And I guess that's where I think the church has a place. Wow, which is maybe more important than it has ever been, but it's done well. There's no spirituality that you can define because it is in everything you do. That's right, and if you don't know right, if you don't recognize that that's possible, you just subtract a whole part of your life. Mm-hmm. You have always balanced mm-hmm what I'm going to inadequately call your spiritual life with a very robust intellectual life, a love of ideas, a love of the rigor of the text and the teachings. Has that been something you felt you had to balance? Has it been a

creative tension, and you know that also makes you different than the way a lot of people live with this part of their lives. In fact, are equipped. People aren't really given the tools to live with this part of their lives with that rigor. Oh, I don't know. I just always loved books. I always loved good books, loving writers. It's not been that's made an effort for me, hasn't been a discipline. Mm-hmm. It's been a spirituality. There you go, contradicting yourself. I wonder even you're 83. You know, I think actually this last exchange just kind of pointed out the complexity of dealing with words, even though they are so precious. And I just wonder if other words, if words themselves, even the word God, become too small after eighty-three years of pondering, grappling with the immensity of the reality and who God might be. You become too small. DISA word God feel too small to you at this point. Yeah, what do you do about that pretty

much. I'm very circumspect about using it. Yeah, what about the word Christianity? Oh, that's even worse, right? Well, say just a little bit about that. About that. Well, the people who use the word Christianity mostly are thinking of an institution, and that's hard to get rid of it. You know, most of us have negative influences about this church, certain churches, experiences we've had, and so why don't we just eliminate the word? That's hard for people like me. You. It is part of so-called Christianity. Exactly. I mean, your life and your writing is passionately interwoven with this enterprise, this aspiration of church. That's true. Do you know a small church? When I was a pastor of a congregation, people would leave and say, How do I pick a church? Yeah, and my usual question, my usual answer was, Go to the closest church where you live and the smallest. Huh. After six months, This is not working. Order the next smallest. Okay, so what is it about smaller rather than big? Ah, because you have to deal with people as

they are, and you've got to learn how to love them when you're not lovable. And we go to a church now. It says I'm the best material. It's a Lutheran Church, and most of the people are my age, and my pastor's young, and he's a really good pastor. But I don't go to church. I mean, I go there to be immersed in what I don't know about, and these people, I mean, there's 80 people in church, and I don't, you know, I know some of them quite well. I grew up with many of them. Oh, how just this so treat me like a little kid, and so that's kind of refreshing. So you've written that prayer matures into the practice of memory, but it's a wonderful sentence. Prayer matures into the practice of memory, and I wonder just as my final question, you know, is that, has that been true for you, and what does that look like? How does that unfold, and how has your prayer changed even as you pray the same Psalms?

year after year. Oh, I think the answer is easy. I think I'm praying when I don't know I'm praying. It's entered into my subconscious, and so I feel like I know. I don't mean for this to sound spiritual, but it is. It surprises me that something has been going on in my life for years and years and years, which is pretty much absorbed into my psyche now, and it gives me hope. It gives me hope because our politics in this country are not very swift right now, and yet when I think about individuals I know, they're doing something. They're not discouraged. They're determined to do it right, and I feel like I'm a colleague with a lot of people who are my companions in this business. Hmm, and you're one of them. Thank you. Thank you so much for all that you've done and for having this conversation with me. So, this is it. I think this is it. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.

[Music] Eugene Peterson served as a pastor for 29 years. He's the author of over 30 books, including Answering God, The Pastor: A Memoir, and The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. [Music] On Being is Trunculus Chris Hiegel, Lily Percy, Mariah Helgesen, Maya Terrell, Murray Sam Ballet, Bethany Man, Selina Carlson, Brendon Sturmer, and Ross Feehan. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoe Keating, and the last voice you hear singing our final credits in each show is hip-hop artist Liz Oh. On Being was created at American Public Media. Our funding partners include the John Templeton Foundation, the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide at FordFoundation.org, the Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world, find them at Fetzer.org, Kalia Pea Foundation, working to create a future where universal spiritual values form the foundation of how we care for our common home, the Henry Luce Foundation in support of

public theology reimagined the Osprey Foundation, a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives, and the Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based private family foundation dedicated to its founders' interests in religion, community development, and education, on being distributed by prx2 public radio exchange. And there's a Krista Tippett public production. You, you, you, you, you.

Eugene Peterson — The Bible, Poetry, and Active Imagination

The On Being Project

Eugene Peterson: A Journey of Faith and Language

Eugene Peterson, a biblical interpreter and pastor, emphasized that prayers are for being and becoming, not for doing or getting.

His unique translation of the Bible, born from frustration with his congregants' treatment of it, has sold millions of copies worldwide.

Peterson's love for metaphor and poetry in the Bible shaped his down-to-earth faith and spiritual imagination, while his childhood experiences in a sectarian church and the Montana landscape played a significant role in his formation.

The Impact of Poetry and Imagination in Theology

Eugene Peterson, originally pursuing a career in academia, became a pastor out of necessity and was transformed by his experience teaching the book of Revelation.

His understanding of the text shifted when he recognized John as a poet, leading him to appreciate the power of metaphor and symbolism in scripture.

Peterson's translation of the Bible, The Message, has resonated with diverse audiences, emphasizing the importance of poetic language in understanding and inhabiting the texts.

Poets use language to deeply engage us and challenge our usual ways of thinking.

Memorizing the works of impactful poets can help us listen to the dynamics of language and its power.

The careful use of words is crucial, as they can shape our thoughts and actions, and the act of listening is essential in both prayer and public speech.

The Power of Psalms in Finding Definition and Connection

The speaker reflects on the transformative power of coaching and encouragement, sharing a story of a lonely woman who found definition in her life through needlepoint.

The speaker suggests using the Psalms as a tool for personal growth, offering one or two to focus on for reflection.

Eugene Peterson, a legendary pastor and writer, shares his practice of memorizing and praying through seven Psalms, emphasizing their ability to provide a sense of connection and reimagination of God's work in one's life.

The Importance of Honesty in Prayer and the Psalms

Honesty in prayer is crucial, as it allows individuals to express their true emotions and clutter their minds.

The Psalms, with their raw and honest depiction of the human condition, provide permission to bring all emotions, including anger and hate, before God.

This practice of expressing dark emotions can be freeing and ultimately less dangerous for individuals and the world.

Humans seek transcendence through religion, drugs, sex, and the ecstasy of crowds, with church leaders often warning against the latter.

The author's memoir emphasizes the importance of literature, particularly the works of Charles Dickens and Wallace Stegner, in conveying truth and understanding the human experience.

At 83, the author reflects on the surprising lack of questions in his life and the joy of appreciating family and the present moment.

The Complexity of Spirituality and Life's Balance

The speaker reflects on the concept of spirituality, challenging its definition and arguing that it is present in all aspects of life.

They emphasize the importance of eliminating the word "spiritual" to avoid compartmentalizing life experiences.

The speaker also discusses the balance between their intellectual and spiritual life, expressing a love for books and ideas, while questioning the effectiveness of using terms like "God" and "Christianity" to define their experiences.

The speaker finds solace and growth in a Lutheran church with a young pastor and familiar faces.

They reflect on the transformative power of prayer, noting that it has become a subconscious practice that offers hope and connection.

The speaker feels empowered by the determination of individuals around them to make a positive impact, despite challenging political times.