I am sitting in a study overlooking Flathead Lake in Montana. The west wall is lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. What surely must be complete collections of Wendell Berry’s and Karl Barth’s works catch my eye; I suspect the volumes of Church Dogmatics are first editions. The lowest shelves hold Eerdmans’s Theological Dictionaries of the Old and New Testaments, stretching on for 27 thick tomes. There are bookshelves on the east side of the study too, below windows that let in so much morning sunlight I nearly need sunglasses indoors. Ceramic tiles depicting the Stations of the Cross line the windows, the handiwork of the Benedictine monks of St. Andrew’s Abbey in the Mojave Desert. My friend Eric Peterson invited me to write here for the week. This is the study where his father, Eugene, wrote books.
I picked up my first Eugene Peterson book a couple of months after my ordination, 20 years ago. My whole first year as a pastor, I vacillated between queasiness and low-grade panic. Seminary hadn’t fixed the tiny complication I carried with me throughout my theological education: I didn’t know God. I mostly believed in God, intellectually. I sort of loved God, theoretically. But I had never tasted and seen that the Lord was good. The closest I’d gotten to faith was wanting to believe. The tangibility of Jesus resonated, but post-resurrection Christ seemed little more than an imaginary friend. Meanwhile, I’d gone into ministry because of a deep hunger for God, and now I found myself consumed by the logistics of running a church. Why on earth had I felt called to become a pastor if I was never going to experience the grace of God and the consolation of faith?
Many of my peers in the liberal mainline tradition seemed content to shake off personal piety in favor of a ministry oriented toward social justice. But I was desperate for an encounter with the holy. I can’t say why Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places caught my eye at a bookstore. I did not have a favorable impression of Peterson, having been led to believe by my seminary professors that The Message, his biblical paraphrase, was akin to a peanut butter sandwich with the crusts cut off. But I bought the book, and it changed my life. A few months later, at the same store, I found a battered copy of Working the Angles, and it changed my ministry.
