Transparent lives

Christian Century, Nov 29, 2003 by Eugene H. Peterson

FORTY YEARS AGO, I found myself distracted. I was living 20 miles northeast of Baltimore in a small town that was fast becoming a suburb. Assigned there by my denomination to start a new congregation, I started out with a fair amount of confidence and energy, and with strong personal, organizational and financial support. But as time went on, I found myself increasingly at odds with my advisers on the means and methods used for ensuring the numerical and financial viability of the congregation.

It wasn't long before I was in crisis. A deep chasm had opened up between what I was preaching and the way I was leading our congregational development. My attitude toward the men and women I was gathering in the congregation was silently shaped by how I was planning to use them to succeed, with little thought to feeding their souls with the bread of life. I found myself thinking competitively about the other churches in town, about how I could beat them at the numbers game.

I never wavered in my theological convictions, but I had to get a church up and running, and I was ready to use any means to do it: appeal to people's consumer instincts, use abstract principles to unify enthusiasm, shape goals through catchy slogans, create publicity images to provide ego enhancement.

Then one day my wife and I attended a lecture by Paul Tournier, who showed me another way of being. Given my distracted condition, the timing was just right. The lecture provided a fine image, shaping my life personally as a follower of Jesus, and vocationally as a companion to other followers of Jesus, in the role of pastor and writer.

Tournier was a Swiss physician who at midlife shifted his medical practice from examining rooms and surgeries to his living room. He left a medical practice that was focused entirely on the body mad embraced a healing vocation that dealt with the whole person--body, mind and spirit. He wrote many books, and I have read them all. They were not great books--anecdotal in style, personal in story--but an appealing spirit of discerning grace permeated everything he wrote.

Driving the 20 miles home my wife and I were commenting appreciatively on the lecture, when she added, "Wasn't that translator great?" I said "What translator? There wasn't any translator," She said, "You're kidding me. He was lecturing in French, and you don't know 20 words of French. Of course there was a translator." And then I remembered her as she stood just behind Tournier's shoulder, unobtrusive, and translating his French into my English. She was so modest that I forgot she was there.

And there was something about Tournier himself. Dining the lecture I had a growing feeling that what lie was saying and who he was were completely congruent: his long life in Switzerland and his lecture in Baltimore were the same. Just as the translator was "assimilated" to the lecturer, her English words carrying the meaning and spirit of his French words, so Iris words were at one with his life--not just what he knew and what he had done, but who he was.

The transparency of the man was a memorable experience. There was no dissonance between word and spirit, no pretense. Later on I remembered what T. S. Eliot had said about Charles Williams. Some people are less than their works, some are more. Charles Williams cannot be placed in either class. To have known the man would have been enough, to know his books is enough. He was the same man in his life and in his writings. That's the sense I bad that day with Tournier. He wrote what he lived. He lived what he wrote. He was the same man in his hooks as lie was in person.

THIS WAS the day that the word contemplative entered my vocabulary, giving shape to the way I wanted to live my life. I use the word contemplative with considerable apprehension, fearing that you will associate it with the kind of living that's done best in monasteries or in mountain retreats or in desert caves. I'm apprehensive that you'll disqualify yourselves on the grounds that you work in a noisy office or live in a dysfunctional family or don't have much interest in that kind of life.

Although many connect the word with a quiet life of withdrawal, I need a word to designate those times when we sense that a life is being lived well, that a conviction is held honestly, without contrivance. My concern is spiritual theology, and I need a word to identify what is distinctive in the Christian life in contrast to much of what is muddying the word "spirituality" in America. I'm looking for a word that defines the way Christians--every butcher, baker, candlestick-maker Christian--can live to the glory of God. I want to free the word contemplative from its captivity in Buddhist and Trappist monasteries and reclaim it for people like ourselves.

Last summer, our ten-year-old granddaughter, Lindsey, was staying with us for a couple of weeks. Two Carmelite nuns were planning to visit us after she left. The nuns were spending a few days in the mountains of Salt Lake, and the forest fires were really bad just then. So they called and asked if they could come a few days early I said certainly they could. When Lindsey heard that the nuns might overlap with her visit, she said she didn't want them to come. "All the nuns do is go 'Hmmm ... hmmm ... hmmm.'" So much for stereotypes.