A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Eugene Peterson is Visiting Professor at Pittsburgh Seminary and has written a number of books. He taught in the Regent College Summer School in 1990. This article is based on a public lecture which he gave at that time. As of January, 1993, he will be a full-time faculty member at Regent College in Vancouver. This article first appeared in CRUX, Regent’s journal, in December, 1990.
Anyone of us, waking up in the morning and finding ourselves included in that part of the creation called human, sooner or later finds ourself dealing with language, with words. We are the only creatures in this incredible, vast creation doing this. Language is unique to us human beings. Turnips complete a fairly complex and useful life cycle without the use of words. Roses grace the world with an extraordinary beauty and fragrance without uttering a word. Dogs satisfy hundreds of thousands of us with faithful and delightful companionship without a word. Birds sing a most exquisite music to our ears, lifting our spirits, giving us happiness, all without the capability of words. It is quite impressive really, what goes on around us without words: ocean tides, mountain heights, stormy weather, turning constellations, genetic codes, bird migrations – most, in fact, of what we see and hear around us, a great deal of it incredibly complex, but without language, wordless. And we, we human beings, have words. We can use language. We are the only ones in this stunning kaleidoscopic array of geology and biology and astronomy, to use words. We share a great deal with the rest of creation. We have much in common with everything around us, the dirt beneath our feet, the animals around us, the stars above us, and we recognize links in this family identity. But when it comes down to understanding our humanity, who we are in this vast scheme of things, we find ourselves attending to language, the fact that we speak words, and what happens to us when we do.
When a person becomes a Christian, interest in language doubles because not only do we use words, but we find that God uses words as well. The one who reveals God to us is named Word. This human nature of ours with its mysterious and unique capacity for language is paralleled in the nature of God. God speaks. In the term we use to refer to our interest in God, theology, the two words are set along side each other and then combined; theos meaning God and logos meaning word. Theos is capable of logos, logos is characteristic of theos. Then the significance of this parallel hits us: We are capable of speech; God reveals himself in speech. In the complete revelation of God, the Word became flesh. We who are already flesh become words, speak words, and as we do, we become human. Language is what we have in common. In the very act of speaking, regardless of the words we use, we are in on something that is divine. One consequence of this is that those of us who speak to and with Christians have a more than ordinary commitment in the uses of language. Words are a precious gift; language is a marvellous thing. We require, and then acquire, reverence before the sheer fact of language. “God himself is with us, let us now adore him and with awe appear before him. God is in his temple, all within keep silence and bow before him with reverence.”
It is a particular cause of dismay when those who use language violate it. Blasphemy, the use of language to defile, has always been abhorrent to lovers of words and the Word. Lies, the use of language to conceal or manipulate rather than to reveal and free are known to be as dangerous to the human condition as termites to a barn. If we let it go the foundations are destroyed and the structure crumbles. Gossip and cliche are also a violation of language. Words used carelessly, impersonally, and thoughtlessly are aspects of sacrilege. We live in a wind tunnel of gossip and cliche these days, so Christians, especially Christians who use words in leadership, need to take special care to reverence language and use it accurately.
One obvious way to maintain reverence and accuracy is to keep company with the masters of language: the novelists and the poets. I want to talk about one novelist and one poet who have kept the language true and supple and fresh for me. The novelist is James Joyce and the poet is Jeremiah.
Novelist
The first book on pastoral care that meant anything to me personally or vocationally was Ulysses, James Joyce’s novel. Two-thirds of the way through this meander of a narrative, I saw what I could be doing, should be doing, in my rounds as a pastor: going into homes, going into hospitals, meeting people, talking with them on the street. Before Ulysses, I never looked on this part of my work as particularly creative. I knew that it was important and I accepted that it had to be carried out, whether I felt like it or not, but except for occasional epiphanies, it was not very interesting. Nearly everything else I did – preaching, praying, writing, teaching, administering – put far greater demands on my mind and imagination and spirit, pulled the best out of me and pushed me to my limits. But making small talk with someone around the water fountain, calling on a lonely woman, visiting a man in the hospital, sitting with the dying, these were more or less routine functions that I just did. I did them satisfactorily with a modest investment of tact, compassion and faithfulness. Faithfulness and the big thing, just showing up.
So it was, until I read Ulysses. At about page 611 an earthquake opened a fissure at my feet and all my assumptions of ordinariness dropped into it. All those routines of pastoral care suddenly were no longer routines.
Leopold Bloom, the Ulysses of James Joyce’s story was a very ordinary man. There was no detail in his life that was distinguished, unless it was his monotone ordinariness. Dublin, the town where he lived, was a very ordinary town with nothing in it to set it off unless it was its depressing ordinariness. A colourless, undistinguished human being in this colourless, undistinguished town provides the contents of the novel. James Joyce narrates a single day in the life of the Dublin Jew, Leopold Bloom. Detail by detail, Joyce takes us through a single day in his life, a day in which nothing of note happens. But, as the details accumulate, observed with such acute and imaginative (pastoral!) care the realization begins to develop that, common as they are, these details are all uniquely human. Flickers of recognition signal memories of the old myth, Homer’s grand telling of the adventure of the Greek Ulysses, as he travelled all the country of experience and possibility and finally found himself home.
I woke up. Joyce woke me up to the infinity of meaning within the limitations of the ordinary person on an ordinary day. Leopold Bloom, buying and selling, talking and listening, eating and defecating, praying and blaspheming is mythic in the grand manner. The twenty year voyage from Troy to Ithaca that Homer’s Ulysses took is repeated every twenty-four hours in anyone’s life if we only have eyes and ears for it.
Now I knew my work; this is the pastor’s work. I wanted to be able to look at each person in my parish with the same imagination, insight, comprehensiveness with which Joyce looked at Leopold Bloom. The story line is different, for the story being worked out before my eyes, if I can only stay long enough to see it, is not the Greek story of Ulysses, but the gospel story of Jesus. The means, of course, are different Joyce was a writer using a pencil and I am a pastor practising prayer, but we are doing the same thing: seeing the marvellous interlacings of history, sexuality, religion, culture and place in a particular person, on a particular day.
I saw now that I had two sets of stories to get straight. I already knew the gospel story pretty well. I was a preacher, a proclaimer of the message. I had learned the original languages of the story, been immersed by my education in its long development, and taught how to translate it into the present. I was steeped in the theology that kept my mind sane and honest in the story, and conversant in the history that gave perspective proportion. In the pulpit and behind the lectern, I read and told this story week after week after week. I loved doing this, loved reading and pondering and preaching these gospel stories, making them accessible to people, people in different cultures, living in different weather, under different politics. This is glorious work, privileged work. This is the work that I expected to do when I became a pastor, and for which I was adequately trained.
But this other set of stories, these stories of Leopold Bloom and Buck Mulligan, Jack Tyndale, Mary Vaughn, Nancy Lion, Bruce Macintosh, Olaf Odegaard, Abigail Davidson – I had to get these straight too. The Jesus story was being reworked and re-experienced in each of these people in this town, this day. And I was here, to see it take shape, helping it to take shape, listening to the sentences form, observing the actions, discerning character and plot. I determined to be as exegetically serious when I was listening to Eric Matthews in Koine American as I was when reading St. Matthew in Koine Greek. I wanted to see the Jesus story in each person in my congregation in just as much local detail and raw experience as James Joyce did with Ulysses in Leopold Bloom and his Dublin friends and neighbours.
The Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, gave me a text for my work,
For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
lovely in eyes, lovely in limbs not his
To the Father, through the features of men’s faces.
From that moment until now, visits to homes and to hospitals, conversations on the street, calls on the lonely, sitting with the dying, have been primary occasions for getting time for this work, access to these stories. A lot more than tact, compassion and faithfulness are required now. There is a lot more than just “showing up.” I find myself listening for nuances, making connections, remembering, anticipating, watching how the verbs work (“is that an imperfect, an aorist, a perfect?”), watching for signs of atonement, reconciliation (“is that justification that is being worked on right now?”), sanctification. I am sitting before these people as Joyce sat before his typewriter, watching a story come into existence.
When we listen to writers talk about their writing, what we hear them saying is that they do not so much make up a story as have it come to them. They write things they never knew, or at least never ‘knew’ that they knew.
Confinement by illness or weakness to a single room, from which most of the traffic of the world is excluded and to which most of the fashion of the world is indifferent, provides limits that encourage concentration and observation. While some people call that boring, most writers try to put themselves in a boring environment so they can concentrate on what is within. Too much action outside your window will not do, you will never get anything written. These sickrooms, these rooms of the dying, restrict our attention so that we pay attention to what is right there before us.
Over the course of years, most of the families in a pastor’s congregation have illness or confinement or death of some kind or another. Since my Joycean conversion, I no longer consider my visits at these times duties of pastoral care, but rather, occasions for original research on the stories being shaped in their lives by the living Christ-stories in which I sometimes get to put in a sentence, or maybe a period, or sometimes only a semi-colon. I go to these appointments with the same diligence and curiosity that I bring to a page of Isaiah’s oracles, or to a tangled argument in St. Paul.
There is a wonderful text for this work in St. Mark’s Gospel, “He is risen … he is going before you to Galilee, there you will see him as he told you” (Mark 16:6,7). I have acquired the habit of quoting this silently, previous to any visit or any encounter. “He is risen … he is going before you into Galilee, there you will see him as he told you.” Every time I show up, I have been anticipated; the risen Christ got there ahead of me. What is he doing? What is he saying? What is going on? I enter a room now not wondering what I am going to do or say, but what the risen Christ has already done, already said. I come in on a story that is in progress, something that is resurrection, already going on. Sometimes I can clarify a word, sharpen a feeling, help recover an essential piece of memory, but always dealing with what the risen Christ has already set in motion, already brought into being.
When we listen to writers talk about their writing, what we hear them saying is that they do not so much make up a story as have it come to them. They write things they never knew, or at least never “knew” that they knew. Images and plots enter their awareness, an arrival from somewhere else. They become writers, real writers, when they cultivate openness to these mysterious comings and goings. They become listeners to these presences. This is the grounding for all creative work.
It is also the grounding for spirituality. We use words to bring into awareness, to provide images and vocabulary to what the risen Christ is doing in these lives. To how many Leopold Blooms in Dublin did James Joyce give back their Ulysses story? To how many people in my congregation can I bring to awareness of their Jesus story?
Pastor
Words are the means by which the gospel is proclaimed and the stories told. Not all words tell stories that proclaim the gospel, but they can. Our awareness that all language derives from the Word, now pulls us into an awareness that all words can return to the Word and bear witness to it. But words often get severed from the Word. Novelists have been important teachers in showing me, a pastor, how to reconnect them, making a story, pulling them out of the chaos of commercial advertising, of gossip and cliche, creating something that has integrity and wholeness to it, teaching a gospel story, a Jesus story.
In a kind of rough-and-ready sorting out, words can be put into two piles: words used for communication, and words used for communion. Words for communion are the words used to tell stories, to make love, nurture intimacies, develop trust. Words used for communication are used to buy stocks, sell cauliflower, direct traffic and teach algebra. Both piles of words are necessary, but words for communion are the pastor’s specialty. If we approach people as masters of communication, we are as out of place as a whore at a wedding. We are not here to sell intimacy. We are here to be intimate. For that we use words of holy communion.
When my daughter Karen was young, I often took her with me when I visited nursing homes. She was better than a Bible. The elderly in these homes brightened immediately when she entered the room, delighted in her smile, asked her questions. They would touch her skin, stroke her hair. On one such visit we were with Mrs. Herr, who was in an advanced state of dementia. She was talkative and directed all her talk to Karen. She told her a story, an anecdote out of her childhood that Karen’s presence triggered. When she completed the story she immediately began at the beginning and did it again, word for word and then again and again and again. After twenty minutes or so of this I became anxious lest Karen become uncomfortable and confused about what was going on. So I interrupted the flow of talk, anointed the woman with oil, laid hands on her, prayed and left. In the car and driving home I commended Karen for her patience and attentiveness. She had listened to this repeated story without showing any sign of restlessness or boredom. I said to her, “Karen, Mrs. Herr’s mind is not working the way ours is.’’ And Karen said, “Oh, I knew that, Daddy, she was not trying to tell us anything, she was telling us who she is.”
Nine years old and she knew the difference, knew that Mrs. Herr was using words not for communication but for communion. Her father, who should have known better, was nervous because there was not any communication going on. This is a difference which our culture as a whole pays very little attention to, but that pastors must pay attention to.
There is an enormous communications industry in the world that is stamping out words like buttons. Words are transmitted by television, radio, telegraph, satellite, cable, newspaper, magazine. But words are not personal. Implicit in this enormous communications industry is an enormous lie: if we improve communications we will improve life. It has not happened and it will not happen. Often when we find out what a person “has to say,” we like him or her less, not more. Better communication often worsens international relations. We know more about each other as nations and religions than we ever have before in history, and we seem to like each other less. Counsellors know that when spouses learn to communicate more clearly, it leads to divorce as often as it does to reconciliation.
The gift of words is for communion. We need to learn the nature of communion. This requires the risk of revelation – letting a piece of myself be exposed, this mystery of who I am. If I stand here mute, you have no idea what is going on with me. You can look at me, measure me, weigh me, test me, but until I start to talk you do not know what is going on inside, who I really am. If you listen and I am telling the truth, something marvelous starts to take place a new event. Something comes into being that was not there before. God does this for us. We learn to do it because God does it New things happen then. Salvation comes into being; love comes into being. Communion. Words used this way do not define as much as deepen mystery – entering into the ambiguities, pushing past the safely known into the risky unknown. The Christian Eucharist uses words, the simplest of words, “this is my body, this is my blood,” that plunge us into an act of revelation which stagger the imagination, which we never figure out, but we enter into. These words do not describe, they point, they reach, they embrace. Every time I go to the ill, the dying, the lonely, it becomes obvious after a few moments that the only words that matter are words of communion. What is distressing is to find out how infrequently they are used. Sometimes we find we are the only ones who bother using words this way on these occasions. Not the least of the trials of the sick, the lonely and the dying is the endless stream of cliches and platitudes to which they have to listen. Doctors enter their rooms to communicate the diagnosis, family members to communicate their anxieties, friends to communicate the gossip of the day. Not all of them do this, of course, and not always, but the sad reality is that there is not a great deal of communion that goes on in these places with these ill and lonely and dying people, on street corners, in offices, in work places, in schools. That makes it urgent that the Christian becomes a specialist in words of communion.
Poet
Most societies have honoured poets because of the general importance of words. Martin Heidegger used to call philosophers “shepherds of words,” watching over them, binding them up when they get injured, going after them when they get lost, knowing them by name, in love. It has always seemed to me that pastors, who have so much to do with words, should be more fond of poets than they are. It surprises me when pastor friends are indifferent or hostile to poets. More than half of our Scriptures were written by poets. If the form in which something comes to us is significant – and it is – then poetry and poets are a force to be reckoned with for anyone who has responsibility to conveying the Christian message in any way for this Word made flesh.
It surprises me when pastor friends are indifferent or hostile to poets. More than half of our Scriptures were written by poets. If the form in which something comes to us is significant – and it is – then poetry and poets are a force to be reckoned with for anyone who has responsibility to conveying the Christian message in any way for this Word made flesh.
The first thing that a poet does is to slow us down. We cannot speed-read a poem. A poem requires re-reading. Unlike prose which fills the page with print, poems leave a lot of white space, which is to say that silence takes its place alongside sound as significant, essential to the apprehension of these words. We cannot be in a hurry reading a poem. We notice connections, get a feel for rhythms, hear resonances. All this takes time. There is a lot to see, to feel, to sense. We sit before the poem like we sit before a flower and attend to form, relationship, colour. We let it begin to work on us. When we are reading prose we are often in control, but in a poem we feel like we are out of control. Something is going on that we cannot pin down right away and so often we get impatient and go read Ann Landers instead. In prose we are after something, getting information, acquiring knowledge. We read as fast as we can to get what we want so that we can put it to good use. If the writer is not writing well – that is, if we cannot understand him quickly – we get impatient, shut the book and wonder why someone does not teach him to write a plain sentence. But in poetry we take a different stance. We are prepared to be puzzled, to go back, to wait, to ponder, to listen. This attending, this waiting, this reverential posture, is at the core of the life of faith, the life of prayer, the life of worship, the life of witness. If we are in too much of a hurry to speak we commit sacrilege. Poets slow us down, poets make us stop. Read it again, read it again, read it again.
The poet I am using alongside the novelist James Joyce is Jeremiah. Jeremiah is one of the great poets of not only our faith, but of the world’s life. He begins the book that is called by his name with a poem:
And the word of the Lord came to me saying,
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I set you apart, I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” “Ah, sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak, I am only a child.”
But the Lord said to me,
“Do not say ‘I am only a child,’ you must go to everyone that I send you to and say whatever I command you, do not be afraid of them for I will be with you and will rescue you,” declares the Lord.
Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me,
“Now I have put my words in your mouth. See today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms, to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”
The word of the Lord came to me, “What do you see, Jeremiah?” “I see the branch of an almond tree,” I replied. The Lord said to me, “You have seen correctly for I am watching to see my word is fulfilled.”
From that poem on the opening page of Jeremiah I want to make some observations. Jeremiah is a classic poet, doing things that poets do that impact all of us who use words. He is not only a prophet; he is a poet, caring for words, caring for language, showing us how language works.
The first thing that I note here is that the word is first, word is primary. “Before you were born I knew you, before you were born I consecrated you. I appointed you as prophet to the nations.” Previous to Jeremiah, God is shown as knowing, consecrating, appointing. These are all verbal actions. The word is previous to everything else. Before we are conceived and shaped in the mother’s womb we are spoken into being. The word is first. Before sun, moon, stars, (in Genesis) there is word. Before governments and hospitals and schools, word. If word gets displaced from its “firstness,” its primacy, everything goes awry. If the word is made second or third or fourth we lose touch with this deep divine, originating rhythm to creation. If the word is pushed out of the way and made a servant to action and program, we lose connection with these vast interior springs of redemption which come out of the word, the Word made flesh. If this word is treated carelessly, casually, we wander away from the essential, personal intimacies that God creates by the use of word. That is why we have “ministers of the word” who take seriously what it means to have a word. The poet helps us attend to the nature of that ministry, that it is wordcare, wordservice, serving this word, this God Word.
When Jeremiah heard God’s word, he answered it. He said, “Ah, Lord God I do not know how to speak, I am only a child.” It was kind of an apologetic answer, but it was an answer. He did not just stand there like a dummy. The word is not a label that you put on a box in order to identify the contents of the world or its people. It is not a piece of information. The word is personal. When the word is really heard it calls forth an answer. Suddenly something has been created – Jeremiah. He has a name, he is someone, God is addressing him and he begins to answer him, “Ah, Lord God.” We can ponder the fact of God from morning to night for the rest of our life and never have our life changed. We can take tests and eat meals and play games for our whole life and never change other than biologically. But when the word is spoken and answered, something new is created – not just God out there speaking the universe into being, not just me sitting here stewing in my own juice, but a relationship full of energy, change, development, love. Jeremiah does not believe that yet; he does not see what is going on. He is modest and does not see how a word of God could have anything to do with his word, “I am only a youth – I cannot speak, I cannot use the same kind of language that God uses.” But God says it does. He says, “we are speaking the same language, Jeremiah, do not say that you are only a youth.” There can be conversations between the God who speaks worlds into being, speaks our lives into being, and a man or a woman who uses words to get a second helping of potatoes, or to tell a check-out clerk that she was overcharged $3.50 on the broccoli. These words are compatible – God’s word and our word.
The poet does what we do not think can be done; he puts together two sets of words that do not seem compatible, that do not fit and then shows how they are part of the same conversation – God speaking, me speaking. At least part of what it means to be in the image of God is to have language, to be able to speak and listen to words that link these mysterious interiors of our lives with this vast mystery of who God is.
Then the Lord put forth his hand and touched Jeremiah’s lips, the place where words are formed and the action starts. Energy flows from these word actions, word utterances. Three pairs of words, six verbs, pluck up, break down, destroy, overthrow, build, plant. Each originates in word. It is so easy to lose connection with this reality. We let ourselves be intimated by force, by might, money, horsepower, nuclear power.
We should look at one more thing in Jeremiah the poet, another aspect of poetry; maybe it is the most important. “The word of the Lord came to me saying ‘Jeremiah, what do you see?’ I said, ‘I see a rod of almond.’ Then the Lord said to me, ‘You have seen well for I am watching to see that my word is fulfilled.’”
The word God gives us to speak is confirmed in the world that God made. Words are analogous to matter, the word God gives to speak is confirmed in the world God creates. There is a congruence between word and world. The congruence is often destroyed by sin, by rebellion. The task of the poet is to bring them back together. Jeremiah uses a pun and a vision to accomplish this in his poem.
God asks Jeremiah what he sees. Jeremiah looks out the window and says “I see an almond branch.” I am guessing that it is spring. The almond branch is a blossom of white flowers similar to our apple trees blossoming white fragrant clusters of petals. “I see a flowering almond branch.” God replies with a pun, “You have seen well, Jeremiah, for I am watching over my word to perform it.” We cannot reproduce the pun in English. In Hebrew it sounds like this, “what do you see Jeremiah?” “I see a shaqêd (almond branch).” “Right, Jeremiah, I am shôkêd (watching) my word to perform it.” Do you see what is going on here? Every person who uses words wonders at times if anything happens with them. Are they congruent with what God is doing in this world? Every spring for the rest of his life Jeremiah would see the almond branch (shaqêd) burst into blossom, and hear “I am watching over my word to perform it” (shôkêd). These words are watched over, kept, confirmed, validated. “No word shall return unto me void.” This is what poets do; they draw us into an experienced congruence of word and form. Every time he sees shaqêd he hears shôkêd. The deep, internal organic divine connection is restored between word and world, between what is said and what happens.
For those of us who use words – pastors, teachers, witnesses of all kinds in the service of Christ – we need to believe in this connection between word and sacrament, between what we see and what happens. That blossoming almond branch in three or four months becomes a cluster of nuts. Words are not just pretty words, they become something because God is watching over his word to perform it. He is the shepherd of the word, he is not going to let one of these words get away. Words are never mere words; they get under our skin, shape our lives, make us from the inside out. When the word is spoken, preached, taught, said, sung, prayed, meditated, that is not the end of it. God continues to watch over this word, tending it, caring for it. And we watch him, we watch God watch over the word. Not, however, as spectators at a ball game, but as shepherds of a flock, parents of a child, as lovers, friends, watching for the sign of grace, watching for movements of joy, watching for the evidence that once again this word is becoming flesh.
Novelists and poets can be our allies in helping us respect words and show us how they work into our lives. As you listen to the stories around you and listen to the words before you, know that the word of God is present in all these words we speak and can become flesh.