Subversive Spirituality

In my copy of Eugene Peterson’s Subversive Spirituality (Eerdmans), there’s a second-class Trenitalia ticket tucked between pages 90 and 91. This ticket—stamped for the international “Como S. Giovanni → Lugano” route—has been in exactly that spot for 18 years, ever since a backpacking trip around Italy (and a brief foray into Switzerland) with two college buddies.

I must have started reading this ragtag collection of journal articles, magazine columns, and interviews on the red-eye from Philly to Rome. I kept reading as we made our way north through Tuscany and destinations beyond. But I never finished it. I got distracted or bogged down, the evidence would suggest, smack dab between a pair of chapters on the book of Revelation. Go figure.

This Italy trip was the experience of a lifetime for me: touring the Vatican, walking the cobble-stone streets of Assisi, lounging on the beach in Cinque Terre, eating pasta, drinking Chianti, riding trains, sleeping in hostels. I guess I wasn’t in the mood for apocalypse.

Recently, though, fellow Eugene Peterson devotee David Taylor tweeted a quote from Subversive Spirituality (a provocative quote, some might say), which reminded me about that train ticket and how I’d always hoped to finish the book—or, better, go back and read it from the beginning.

I’m glad I did. This is vintage Eugene Peterson here, if a little rough around the edges. Some of the chapters contain the seeds of ideas that would later grow into mature books. Elsewhere, we come across material that feels (to me) completely fresh. As with any collection of disparate writings, it feels disjointed in places and there’s some repetition. Because it’s Peterson, I don’t mind too much.

Most of Subversive Spirituality is enjoyably soul-stirring and thought-provoking. But there are some isolated—though not insignificant—exceptions. In a couple of chapters, we see (not for the first time) Peterson’s unfortunate tendency to go out of his way to make a punchline out of journalists and journalism—without ever bothering to distinguish between courageous truth-tellers on the one hand and partisan, gossipy hacks on the other.

This pattern isn’t just unfortunate. It’s also perplexing, given Peterson’s dedication to the spiritual formation of the laity, not just on Sunday mornings or during “quiet times” but for their daily working lives as well. And it’s strange in light of Peterson’s own personal and professional commitment to the cultivation of words as a meaningful—even sacred—craft. Surely Peterson was aware that journalists were among his readers, among his parishioners? Surely he could have imagined that at least some principled journalists might see their work through a lens of faithful stewardship? Surely he would have wanted to encourage, challenge—and yes, pastor—such caretakers of words in their fraught, frequently lambasted work? Apparently not.

I recognize I’m making a bigger deal of this tendency than another reader of Subversive Spirituality might consider warranted. But I think this anomaly serves as a good reminder that even when we are intimately acquainted with an author’s writing, when we love and return to it more than nearly any other author’s oeuvre… even so we will now and then come across stuff in that body of work that we dislike, that we think is uncharitable and unhelpful.

And I’m here to say, that’s OK. It’s nothing to be threatened by.

Authors of books are—or can be, if we let them—conversation partners. Which is another way of saying that authors are humans like the rest of us. A conversation partner who sees everything the way I do is a boring conversation partner.

And Eugene Peterson is rarely boring, which makes him one of the best. Even, in these rare cases, when he’s wrong. Even, God help me, when I sometimes need a break.