Eugene Peterson > Quotes

“Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.”
― Eugene Peterson

“Practice resurrection,” a phrase I got from Wendell Berry, strikes just the right note. We live our lives in the practice of what we do not originate and cannot anticipate. When we practice resurrection, we continuously enter into what is more than we are. When we practice resurrection, we keep company with Jesus, alive and present, who knows where we are going better than we do, which is always “from glory unto glory.”
― Eugene Peterson

“The first thing that we realize from the Psalms is that in prayer anything goes. Virtually everything human is appropriate as material for prayer: reflections and observations, fear and anger, guilt and sin, questions and doubts, needs and desires, praise and gratitude, suffering and death. Nothing human is excluded. The Psalms are an extended refutation that prayer is being ‘nice’ before God. Not at all–it is an offering of ourselves, just as we are.

(Eat This Book)”
― Eugene Peterson

“It is entirely possible to come to the Bible in total sincerity, responding to the intellectuel challenge it gives, or for the moral guidance it offers, or for the spiritual uplift it provides, and not in any way have to deal with a personally revealing God who has personal designs on you.”
― Eugene Peterson, Eat this book

“Spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized to the menial status of producers, and performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries. But there is far more to us than our usefulness and our reputation, where we’ve been and who we know; there is the unique, irreproducible, eternal, image-of-God me. A vigorous assertion of personal dignity is foundation to spirituality.

(Eat This Book)”
― Eugene Peterson

“Names are seeds. When they germinate, they become stories.”
― Eugene Peterson

“The moment we begin to see others in terms of what they can do rather than who they are, we mutilate humanity and violate community.”
― Eugene Peterson

“The splendors of creation and the agonies of redemption combine in this event, this center where God in Christ invades existence with redeeming life and decisively defeats evil.”
― Eugene Peterson

“Prayer is subversive activity. It involves a more or less open act of defiance against any claim by the current regime. . . .”
― Eugene Peterson

“I have put great emphasis on the fact that Christians worship because they want to, not because they are forced to. But I have never said that we worship because we *feel* like it. Feelings are great liars. If Christians worshiped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith. Paul Scherer is laconic: "The Bible wastes very little time on the way we feel.”
― Eugene Peterson

“Contemplation means submitting to the biblical revelation, taking it within ourselves, and then living it unpretentiously, without fanfare. It doesn't mean (and these are the stereotyped misunderstandings) quiet, withdrawn, secluded, serene, and benign. It has nothing to do with whether we spend our days as a grease monkey under an automobile or on our knees in a Benedictine choir. It doesn't mean "having it all together." It doesn't mean being emotionally and mentally well-balanced.
Contemplatives fly off the handle, make bad judgments, speak out mistakenly and regret their words, run stoplights and get speeding tickets. Contemplatives get depressed, get confused, get fat, get lose, and sometimes don't get it at all. "Contemplative" is not a term of achievement. It is not a badge of merit.
Comptemplative is a designation that any one of us can accept for ourselves and one that we all should. We will never read and live the Bible rightly if we don't. Lectio divina anticipates and assumes contemplation. If it makes us feel better to attach the adjective "failed" I have no objection. Failed contemplative. All contemplatives are failed contemplatives.
Contemplation means living what we read, not wasting any of it or hoarding any of it, but using it up in living. It is life formed by God's revealing word, God's word read and heard, meditated and prayed. The contemplative life is not a special kind of life; it is the Christian life, nothing more but also nothing less.”
― Eugene Peterson, Eat this book

“cada generación tiene que contender con el mundo en una forma nueva. El mundo es una atmósfera, un humor.2 Al pecador le resulta tan difícil reconocer las tentaciones del mundo como a un pez descubrir las impurezas en el agua. Existe una sensación, un sentimiento de que las cosas no están bien, que el medio ambiente carece de integridad, pero saber exactamente lo que es elude nuestro análisis. Sabemos que la atmósfera espiritual en la cual vivimos erosiona la fe, disipa la esperanza y corrompe el amor, pero es difícil saber exactamente qué es lo que está mal.”
― Eugene Peterson, Una obediencia larga en la misma dirección: El discipulado en una sociedad instantánea

“Metaphor does not explain; it does not define; it draws us away from being outsiders into being insiders, involved with all reality spoken into being by God’s word. . . . Metaphor sends out tentacles of connectedness. As we find ourselves in the tumble and tangle of metaphors in Scripture we realize that we are not schoolboys and schoolgirls reading about God, gathering information or “doctrine” that we can study and use; we are residents in a home interpenetrated by spirit – God’s Spirit, my spirit, your spirit. The metaphor makes us part of what we know.

(Eat This Book)”
― Eugene Peterson

“La vida es difícil, Jeremías. ¿Te vas a rendir con la primera señal de oposición que se presente? ¿Te vas a retirar cuando has descubierto que la vida es mucho más que tres comidas al día y un lugar cómodo donde dormir por la noche? ¿Vas a salir corriendo en el momento en que hombres y mujeres están más interesados en mantener tibios los pies que en vivir para la gloria de Dios? ¿Vas a vivir cobarde o valientemente?”
― Eugene Peterson, Correr con los caballos: La búsqueda por una vida mejor

“Many people want to go to heaven the way they want to go to Florida - they think the weather will be an improvement and the people are decent. But the Biblical Heaven is not a nice environment far removed from the stress of hard city life. It is an invasion of the city by the City. We enter heaven not by escaping what we don’t like but by the sanctification of the place in which God has placed us. There is not so much a hint of escapism in St. John’s heaven. This is not a long (eternal) weekend away from the responsibilities of employment and citizenship but the intensification and healing of them”
― Eugene Peterson

“The primary reason for a book is to put a writer into relation with readers so that we can listen to his or her stories and find ourselves in them, listen to his or her songs and sing along with them, listen to his or her arguments and argue with them, listen to his or her answers and question them.”
― Eugene Peterson

“Dissenters in a society are as dangerous as criminals to the political establishment.”
― Eugene Peterson

“En un mundo semejante no es difícil lograr que una persona se interese en el mensaje del evangelio; lo que es terriblemente difícil es mantener su interés. Millones de personas de nuestra cultura toman la decisión de entregar su vida a Cristo, pero existe un espantoso índice de abatimiento. Muchos afirman que han vuelto a nacer, pero la evidencia de un discipulado cristiano maduro es poca. En nuestra clase de cultura todo se puede vender, incluso las nuevas sobre Dios, siempre y cuando tenga un envase fresco y novedoso; pero cuando éste pierde su frescura, va a parar a la basura.”
― Eugene Peterson, Una obediencia larga en la misma dirección: El discipulado en una sociedad instantánea

“Scripture is not the answer book to all of our problems but a doorway into the world of God's mystery. And one of the mysteries of this life is that God isn't interested in solving all our problems in the ways we think they should be solved.”
― Eugene Peterson

“It is difficult to recapture… the incongruity of a person self-designated as Son of Man, hanging pierced and bleeding on a cross. The incongruity is … even more offensive when this Son of Man has dinner with a prostitute, stops off for lunch with a tax collector, wastes time blessing children when there were Roman legions to be chased from the land, heals unimportant losers and ignores high achieving Pharisees and influential Sadducees. Jesus juxtaposed the most glorious title available to him [the Son of Man] with the most menial of lifestyles in the culture. He talked like a King and acted like a slave…

He was, in fact, Son of Man ‘given dominion and glory and kingdom’, he was, in fact, completely at home in the ordinary, the everyday, the common. He did not give an inch in either direction: he was very God, very man.

(Reversed Thunder)”
― Eugene Peterson