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It's hard to believe now, but Eugene Peterson says he used to feel like the uncontemplative pastor, caught up in the moment, fixated on the mission statement. The Sixties were a hard time for anyone to gain a footing, but starting out as a pastor near Baltimore, Peterson says he was consumed by distractions and at odds with advisors who spoke urgently of demographics, strategies, goals, and other words that don't appear in Scripture.
Peterson's inspiration to pursue a less-traveled path came in a lecture by Swiss surgeon and author Paul Tournier at John Hopkins Hospital. Reading Tournier's books, Peterson was struck by his words; seeing him speak, he was struck by the continuity. "I had the feeling that what he was saying and who he was were absolutely congruent," Peterson said, in a lecture hosted by Christian Century magazine in downtown Chicago. "He was the same man as he was in his books … There was no pretense."
Some 40 years and 20 books (including The Contemplative Pastor) later, Peterson is the antithesis of a frantic, insecure shepherd, and his address may well have given listeners a similar epiphany about integrity and wisdom. Few are as fit as Peterson,who is now retired from Regent College in Vancouver and living in Montana, to give an address called "The Contemplative Christian in America." It is not just a title; it is appositional to his name.
Do not let the word "contemplative" throw you off, Peterson admonished. He is not interested in an isolated life spent pondering high-minded concepts. Instead, the contemplative Christian life can be described by what he saw in Tournier—a life lived with "wholeness, honesty, without contrivance." One word that comes to mind is authenticity, but the one Peterson used over and over was congruence—the alignment of who you are and what you do, the harmony of the ends you seek and the means you use to achieve them.
Peterson invoked the classic Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," which was also the first half of his lecture's title, to bear this out. The vivid sonnet says that living beings were created to have Christ come alive in them. Note the source of this action, Peterson said. "Hopkins doesn't talk about achieving this congruence, but how it is achieved in us, when Christ lives in us."
This is not the triumphal self-motivated march toward sanctification in which many American Christians are caught up. "It's easier to talk about what Christians do—life as performance," Peterson said. But the three pieces of Jesus' fundamental declaration that he is the way, the truth, and the life, must be in perfect correspondence. "Only when we live Jesus' truth in Jesus' way do we get Jesus' life," Peterson said. Not his truth in our way for the sake of our life. Peterson speculated that America's current hunger for "spirituality"—which he earlier told the Century often "degenerates into a sloppy subjectivism"—may have been brought on by Christian leaders who say the right things but lack this coherent identity—"a life lived whole, with integrity, the inside and outside organic to one another."
The deeper problem, Peterson said, is that two things that are basic to the Christian life run counter to the American ethos. First, the Christian life is not about us, but about God. It is not like giving ourselves a makeover. "We're in on it, but we're not the subject or the action," Peterson said. Ever notice how in the Bible, we always come in after a preposition? God with us, in us, for us. In an individualistic, commercial culture, where the self is the center of everything, an autonomous agent of transformation, we have lost this grammar of shalom—what Peterson called "prepositional participation."
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