Eugene Peterson's Pastoral Ministry 4

Eugene Peterson's Pastoral Ministry 1-4 as one interview is taken from http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2274



Here is Part 4:

Spiritual direction is a prominent theme in your work and in your own experience too. How do you understand the role of a spiritual director?

Peterson: I’m a little bit uneasy about the professionalization of spiritual direction. Granted, the training and counsel can help us do this work better. But basically it’s not a specialized thing. It’s very much a part of the Christian life and should be very much a part of the pastor’s life. In my view, spiritual direction is a conversation in which the pastor is taking the person seriously as a soul, as a creation of God for whom prayer is the most natural language.

This kind of conversation is not problem-centered. If you have a problem -- an intense, tangled, emotional problem -- there are counselors, psychiatrists, psychologists to help you. That’s good and important work. But most of the time people don’t have problems -- though somehow in our society we don’t give careful attention to one another unless there is a problem. If I don’t have a problem and yet I have this sense that something is going on in my life and I have questions about what God is doing -- what am I to do? I should be able to call up my pastor and say, "I need to talk to you." But usually people feel like they have to come up with "a problem."

If they’re lucky, they have a pastor who is alert to what’s really going on -- which is usually not much more than ordinary life and the yearning to live it fully, maturely, with some intensity. "Ordinary" doesn’t mean mediocre or complacent. Ordinary is capable of intensity and is worthy of attentiveness and commitment. I get worried that the popularity of spiritual direction will take it out of ordinary life and put it more in the category of problem-solving.

As you note, there are now a lot of programs training pastors to be "spiritual directors." You seem to be saying that the pastoral life itself is a school for spiritual direction.

Peterson: Some of us have a lot to learn about listening and discernment. If those programs develop those kinds of skills, they serve an important purpose.

I have two basic definitions of spiritual direction. One is you show up and then you shut up. It’s important that people have a place they can come to and know that you’re going to be there with and for them. The other is that spiritual direction largely involves what you do when you don’t think you’re doing anything. In other words, you’re not trying to solve a problem. You’re not answering a question and it doesn’t seem like you’re doing anything. It takes a lot of restraint and discipline for a pastor not to say anything, not to do anything. But the pastoral life is an ideal school for learning how to do it.

The significance of everyday life is a theme in much of your writing.

Peterson: I should explain that I grew up in a Pentecostal church that emphasized extraordinary experience -- it was the church of miracles, ecstasy, epiphanies, and a great deal of manipulation in order to promote those kinds of experiences. As a result, the Christian life became a kind of scrapbook of extraordinary experiences. I knew I didn’t want to go in that direction. That approach to the Christian life doesn’t produce mature people.

So when I became a pastor I didn’t want to do anything that would distract attention from what was going on in somebody’s family room at five o’clock on Thursday or in her workplace at two o’clock on Monday.

A central challenge of the pastoral life is to take people seriously just the way they are and to look at them, to enter into conversation with them and to see the glory that takes place right there, in that person’s world, the glory of God present in them.

                                                     The End