Why I Love Eugene Peterson...

I think what's happening with this blog is that I'm having lightning flash moments - thoughts, insights, experiences - and then putting them here. It's an o-so-subtle change in blogging but I'm finding that it works for me. Perhaps it will continue to work. Now, on to the matter at hand...A Christianity Today conversation with Eugene Peterson from March '05 came up in my RSS and I'm always intrigued to hear what he has to say. Mostly because he doesn't care - he isn't engrossed with spin and public persona the way many of the evangelical rock-star crowd is. And the result is you get quotes like this:

"I think relevance is a crock. I don't think people care a whole lot about what kind of music you have or how you shape the service. They want a place where God is taken seriously, where they're taken seriously, where there is no manipulation of their emotions or their consumer need."

He also goes back to how the work of the Kingdom is soul work, which is necessarily "slow work" and I think that's a reminder I need constantly. That the movement through the dischord and opaque nature of things to some clarity about our motives, desires, and impulses in the light of Christ is more like a disengaged stroll than a sprint, and to try and quantify that stroll - measure it and market it - often results in the process moving faster than the reality and in the end everyone ends up frustrated.

Reading for my next doctoral course on the topic of spiritual direction and I will likely find myself at some point in the next year finishing St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises as I have yet to read any assessments of contemporary spiritual direction that don't at least refer back to the first Jesuit himself. 

So, off to do the slow work. Slow like my vegetables which are hungry for the heat and humidity that should be here by now, but taking their sweet time growing from seed to plant to fruit. I sometimes wonder if you can truly understand the Gospel or the life of following Jesus if you've never planted and cared for a seed...