Dean Nelson - Welcome to the 12th annual Writers Symposium by the Sea at  Point Loma Nazarene University. I'm Dean Nelson on the journalism faculty at  the university, and with us today is Eugene Peterson, an author of 30 some  books, a pastor, professor of spiritual theology, probably best known for his  translation of the Bible into plain English, called the Message Bible. He's he  rarely makes public appearances, and so this is a this is a real treat for us.  Reverend Peterson, welcome and thank you for being part of our symposium  this year. I want to talk about storytelling with you. You have said that stories  invite us into a world other than ourselves, and I'd like to hear you explain what  that means.  

Eugene Peterson - Maybe a maybe a world larger than ourselves. We're a  storytelling people, and our lives are stories. They have plot. They have intent.  They have other people. We're not. We're never the only person in the story.  And the Bible is our greatest story, and if we if we just live within ourselves, or  our lives are just determined by our own needs, our wants, our desires, it gets a  very small world, and it's really not a storied world. It's not a world that has much action in it, except our own desires. So storytellers have always been the people in our society, who in the cultures that have brought us into a world that's larger  than us. It usually includes gods or God, and it includes generations. There's a  past. There's a future. We've always told stories, and the Christian story is is not unlike those stories in the way it's the way story works, but it is this story for  Christians that puts God in the center of the story, not as in some Greek,  Acadian, Assyrian stories, the gods were kind of in the background; they were  doing things, but they never got involved with the people. And here we have a  story that God, where God enters our lives, and well, that's it. We we tell stories. 

Dean Nelson - Well, and so much of your writing involves and quotes from, and  has been informed by fiction writers. You you quote from Wendell Berry. He  seems to be one of your favorites. Flannery O'Connor, I've read references to in  your writings. Walker Percy, Wallace Stegner, Dostoevsky, and Tyler. Some  detective novels have gotten themselves worked into your writings, and and so  I'd like you to to explore that and and tell me why, and then really tell me what  was the impact of James Joyce's Ulysses on you. You say it's profound. I'd love  to hear it explained.  

Eugene Peterson - Let me start with James Joyce. I was a new pastor. I was  trying to understand my congregation. They didn't seem to me very interesting,  to tell you the truth. I'd always thought when I became a pastor, I'd have all the  stars in town come-interesting people, celebrities. They stayed away in droves.  You had 10s of worshippers. That's right. And I was, as I was muddling through  all this, and kind of feeling sorry for myself, wishing I had the kind of a 

congregation that some of my friends always bragged that they had. I later  found out they. Lied a lot. I was reading Ulysses, James Joyce's greatest work,  and it's about one man, Leopold Bloom, and he doesn't do anything really  interesting. It's just an ordinary day in this Dubliner's life, and I began to see  through Joyce's storytelling how interesting this ordinary life is. And along about, I can still remember the page. I think I dog-eared the page with 338. I realized  this is my congregation. Leopold Bloom sits in my pew every Sunday, and it just  it was it was a conversion. It was an imagination conversion. So to expand from  that. Storytellers tell us about ways of living that we have not yet appropriated  ourselves or thought of ourselves. They expand the horizons of our lives, or they open up depths in our lives that we didn't know we had. I find fiction Writers,  some of the best spiritual writers, whether they're Christians or not, religious or  not, they're probing the the ordinary world of our lives, and they're great. I think  pastors should read fiction a lot more than they do.  

Dean Nelson - In fact, you've said that seminary-the first two years of seminary should just be literature training.  

Eugene Peterson - That's right. Learn how to read a story. I probably shouldn't  say this, but my wife is not.  

Dean Nelson - It's just  

Eugene Peterson - us. My wife and I spend-we've done this for years. Spend an hour before supper each evening reading aloud to each other. She usually does  the reading. I listen. We're reading right now a book I'd read 30 years ago, *Tale  of Two Cities* Dickens' book on the French Revolution. And Dickens is a really  

fine writer. He's one of he's one of the canonical fiction writers for me. And but  Jan has never read this before, and it's it's old-fashioned. It's Victorian, so he's  he doesn't. You kind of enter into that that leisurely, slow storytelling world of the  Victorians, and every once in a while, Jan says, "Now, why did he say that?  What's what's going to happen now? I don't understand what's going on. And I  said, "Jan, you got to let the storyteller tell you. Wait for the storyteller. Don't get  in a hurry. It's great. It's great counsel for pastors. Impatience is the besetting sin of pastors. We're in a hurry. We want to see things happen, and sometimes  takes 300 pages before something happens, or the thing you want to have  happen.  

Dean Nelson - I'd like you also to explain this this line because it goes right  along with what you're saying. You have said that every time a story is well told,  the gospel has been served. What does that mean? It 

Eugene Peterson - means that you realize that I am a story, and the the  substructure of the gospel is that we're involved in in a life that means  something. That ordinary people, you know, there are no heroes in the Bible.  You realize that there really aren't. I mean, the the ones that we call heroes are  usually villains, are big sinners, and we don't want to be them anyway. So, but  we find ourselves plotted. We find ourselves as a character, as meaning. No, no  sentence in a good a story well told. No sentence, no person is optional. Good  storytellers make every sentence count. There are no throwaway lines, and if I  get a feel for that, I know I'm sure this is this very often is very conscious. But I  get the feeling that there are no throwaway lines in my life. Everything I do is  part of what's going on, and the story. And if some way it's going to mean  something, I might not find it out for 10 years, but I'm going to find it out.  

Dean Nelson - Well, and this would then support why you like Wendell Berry so  much, right? Because of that rhythm of everything matters.  

Eugene Peterson - Everything matters.  

Dean Nelson - What else about Wendell? Berry, I know you quote him a lot.  

Eugene Peterson - Well, Wendell Berry, maybe I don't know. He's he's a  complex writer. He writes so well, but maybe the thing as a pastor that I like so  much about him is he makes community. Community is no longer a word; it's a  story. But we're we're not stories by ourselves, and one of the things in the  church that is the hardest for pastors, well, for anybody to deal with, is the  fragmentation, the individualism that separates us all. We think we go to church,  but then we go off and we do it ourselves. We we're trying to find something that we can use for ourselves, and we've lost the pronoun "we. We really have. And  Wendell Berry, there's Wendell Berry stores "we" and "us" to our language, and  the little fictional community. He writes about in his novels is you know he keeps  writing about these he's been writing about these same people for 40 years, 50  years I don't know yeah 50 years I think and he keeps coming up with a new  slant on these people we know that been those of us who have been reading  him, we've been reading these stories forever, and then all of a sudden, here's  another story of somebody that we thought we knew all about, and we're finding  the new things. I don't know how many books he's going to write,  

Dean Nelson - and they're always attached to the land,  

Eugene Peterson - the land  

Dean Nelson - on which they lived, 

Eugene Peterson - and the families, the neighbors. Now, nobody's there. No, no Lone Rangers in his books.  

Dean Nelson - How big of an ego kick was it to get quoted by Bono?  Eugene Peterson - You know when, I mean I hope Bono never hears this, but  Dean Nelson - he's he's a viewer. He's one of our fans. Just be careful.  

Eugene Peterson - When I was when I was quoted by Bono, I was told this by a student of mine at in Vancouver. He he brought me this magazine. I don't know  what it was. Look, Dr. Peterson, Bono quotes you, and I said, "Tell me who's  Bono. And this poor student-he was an Asian student-and he just-he was just  crestfallen. I mean, I went down in his estimation just so fast. After I found out  who Bono was, and and then people started bringing me his music, and I  listened to his music, and I thought, I like this guy. And I was starting to, after a  while, I started was being quite pleased that he knew me.  

Dean Nelson - Yes, but the rest of the story is when he invited you to come and  hang with them for a while. You turned him down.  

Eugene Peterson - Well, his chaplain did. He has a chaplain who travels with  him over in Chicago, And he invited me to come and spend a couple days with  them, just to hang out. But I was I was I was pushing a deadline on the  message. I was finishing up the Old Testament at the time, and I really couldn't  do it. I, I.  

Dean Nelson - You may be the only person alive who would turn down the  opportunity just to make a deadline. I mean, come on! It's Bono for crying out  loud.  

Eugene Peterson - Dean, it was Isaiah.  

Dean Nelson - Yeah. That was awesome. Okay. Well, let's talk about your  translating the Bible into modern language. Somebody once said that all  translation is betrayal. How do you think about what you did with translating the  Bible into modern English with a with a statement like that,  

Eugene Peterson - I think it's pretty snobbish. That's the it's an old phrase, you  know. Translator, traitor. Sounds better in Latin. But what would be where would  we be without translators? Now the fact is, is that every language is different, so 

you cannot literally translate from one language to another. When you do, you  just end up with misinformation, misunderstanding. So the the worst translations are those translations that are tried to be literal.  

Dean Nelson - Wasn't it Luther who said literalists were lemmings?  Eugene Peterson - That's right.  

Dean Nelson - Of course, you're not Lutheran. Well, keep keep going though,  because that that that whole literal thing that's that's a big deal in some cultures. 

Eugene Peterson - Well, it is, and it's unfortunate, but I think it's probably, you  know, people want to be true to the Bible. They want to keep this. This is a this  is a sacred text. They don't want anybody tampering with it, so they think that if  they can just get it, you know, literal, then no nothing else can creep in. But the  

language, each language has its own colloquialisms, vernacular, rhythms,  syntax. I like what Kwame Bediako, an African theologian scholar, says, and  he's talking about the about Africa, where they have a lot of different languages.  He said, every time the Bible is translated, it gets fresh meaning because every  language has its own unique quality, and so every time it's translated, another  language gets to put in its two cents worth in the ramifications of this text. The  like a stone, a gemstone, that you turn it a little bit, and new light comes off of it.  The stone doesn't change, but the the light, the hue, the vibrations-they change  a little bit. So every time the Bible is translated, expands. Not is not diluted. It's  it's larger, and I think that's true.  

Dean Nelson - What What's too far though? I've seen the leadership Bible, the  skateboarders Bible, the living Bible. Mine died. I I didn't know. I didn't know  what to feed it. But but, what do you what do you do with with trying to put it so  much into a colloquial culture? Is there a distortion problem there.  

Eugene Peterson - There can be. There's always a temptation to try to be  relevant or cute, eye-catching. I had an editor. I had I had editors on a different  editor for every book of the Bible. Their job was to make sure I was staying true  to the text and not distorting it. What I was trying to do, Dean, was from very  outset. I was thinking, if Isaiah was saying this in America, how would he say it?  I didn't want to do much interpretation. I didn't want to do explanation. That  would be going the route of paraphrase. But I wanted to say in such a way. See,  I thought, you know, nobody in Isaiah's time had to go to a dictionary or a  handbook to find out what he was talking about. I wanted to translate in such a  way that the images he used were images that would be recognizable to  somebody in my congregation or the man in the street, and it's not easy. It's it's 

very hard, and there are you're always kind of walking on the edge of a  precipice, too much, too little. But I had my friends, I had my editors, my  scholars who checked what I was doing, And I wanted to use the word "lucky" in  the Beatitudes. Blessed sound a little too religious, and in Hebrew and Greek,  the word they used was not a religious word. It was happy. Many translations not say happy. I liked lucky. You know why I liked lucky? Why? Because there was a woman in my congregation who had never come to church. She was 40 years  old. She was kind of an ex hippie. Still, she wasn't ex really. She.  

Dean Nelson - I was going to say, can you be an ex hippie?  

Eugene Peterson - No, she she wasn't. She she wove all her own fabrics and  wore clunky shoes, and she was beautiful in a kind of a folksy way. And she  came. Her husband was an alcoholic. Her son was a drug addict. And she came to church because she had friends she'd met in Al-Anon. And but she always  slipped out. She didn't want to. She never came and visited and served by hand  at the door. I never knew she was. Nobody told me who she was. And and then  one week she I was starting a series of sermons on David. And she came  through the door and she shook my hand and she said, Pastor, thank you. I  never heard that story before. And the next week, and the next week, every  week, I never heard that story before. I feel so lucky. And then she kept using  the word lucky. I feel so lucky. Well, suddenly the word lucky had a biblical  sound to it. Just, it just, you know, surprise. Never knew this could happen. So I  tried to put it in the Bible, and my editor said, "Eugene, you can't do that. There's a whole subculture out there that thinks Lucky is a nickname for Lucifer, and you know they'll just trash the whole thing just because of Lucky. So I had to give up. 

Dean Nelson - What'd you use?  

Eugene Peterson - I used kept blessed. I said, "You are blessed when.  

Dean Nelson - Oh, okay. I guess I should have known that had I read your  book. Well, on the whole thing about translation, though, isn't reading itself a  type of translation? It  

Eugene Peterson - is. Reading isn't one of the hardest things we do. Most  difficult things we do to do it accurately. I just wrote a book about reading, and I  was amazed at how difficult it is. This is the  

Dean Nelson - book. Eat this book. That's correct. Marvel. Actually, I have read  that one. 

Eugene Peterson - You're lucky.  

Dean Nelson - You want to do this symposium for me next year? I want to ask  you about something and see if you meant this as hyperbole. You wrote one  time that most of what we've learned about God is wrong. Do you still feel that  way? And what does it mean? It  

Eugene Peterson - means that most of what we learn about life is wrong, and  God most of all. As we grow up, we you know we think the earth is flat, and  we're wrong about that. We gradually get we thinks our we think our parents are  just jerks, and we actually we start to find that they're pretty much okay. We  were ill formed when we're born, and we gradually, by increments, we start to  get the hang of things. We go to school, we have experiences, and and God is  one of the realities in which we deal with that gets encrusted with a lot of stuff,  neighborhood. What neighborhood kids are saying, what our we hear on the  media, and so we have to work our way through a lot of misunderstanding, but  see the basic thing is is more is just we're sinners. We don't have a sanctified  imagination to receive things pure, and so we're constantly having to be  corrected, being rebuked, being come to some new understanding, learning,  and this is why Jesus Christ is so so central to what we're doing because we  have now a revelation in the way we can understand in our terms, not fancy, not  elitist, just everydayish. but yeah, we. And one of the reasons one of the  reasons that complicates this is, we really don't want God. We want to be our  own gods, and so when we get a picture of God that doesn't take account of I  want him to be, we reject it, or we modify it, try to turn it into something that is  useful to us. So this pastors are the you know we're at the forefront of all this,  because one one of our jobs is to keep the perceptions clean of God, and  people are coming to us all the time. Why doesn't God do this? Why did God let  this happen? Why does God, you know, I hate God. Well, tell me about the God  you hate. I probably hate him too. Though it's that's why we gather these people  every week in church to incrementally build a true picture, a whole picture of  God.  

Dean Nelson - Tell me why you'd rather have your books in a bookstore section  that's not in the inspiration section, but you'd rather have your books over in the  cookbooks section. Tell me why you said that.  

Eugene Peterson - Did I say that?  

Dean Nelson - Yeah, you did. Trust me, I'm a journalist. I don't know why that's  so funny. 

Eugene Peterson - I guess I feel that there's so much religious or inspirational  so-called writing that is so thin, thin soup, soupy. I'd rather be associated with  with serious writers who have lived what they've written, who've spent their lives  trying to get this straight. Writing is hard work, and religious writing is often really badly written. And so, I well, you don't get to choose those things. I don't know  the the cookbook thing. That's you know people buy cookbooks because they  want to cook. People don't always buy religious books because they want to be  good or serve God. becomes a substitute. In fact, somebody some people buy  cookbooks that way. I have a friend who buys cookbooks all the time, and she  never cooks a meal. Buying the cookbook, looking at the pictures is that  satisfies. Do  

Dean Nelson - you have any do you have any advice for the writers in our  audience or our viewers who might be watching this? People who think I think I'd like to write. I'd like to be a storyteller. What do you want to tell them?  

Eugene Peterson - Do it. We need all we can get. There's there are never  enough storytellers. There are a lot of people who want to write stories, but they  don't want to go through the discipline, the agony, The the immersion in life that  requires to tell the truth with all of this. Now I think writing is one of the sacred  callings. I wish, in fact, that the church would ordain writers the way they ordain  pastors and professors, give some dignity to this work of the imagination. That  William Blake always capitalized the word imagination. For him, it was the Holy  Spirit, and I don't know if he ever explained that or not. But the imagination is the is a very in our culture right now the imagination is maybe the least developed  faculty in adults. We let other people do our imagining for us, and and we  usually and as a culture we take the lowest denomination denominator of  imagination, but the imagination is almost not quite the same thing as faith. It's  that which connects what we see and what we don't see, and and pulls us  through what we see into what we don't see. Now, when that imagination then  become involves trust and participation in the unseen-it's faith. But imagination  is the training ground for that. So that's why I think novelists, poets-we ought to  ordain them. I mean, they're very important to the life of the faith, the life of the  church.  

Dean Nelson - Eugene Peterson, thank you so much for being with us today.  That was wonderful. 



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