Eugene Peterson, Teresa of Calcutta, and the path of sainthood

I began reading Eugene Peterson last August, after a good friend of mine spent several years reading most of his works. He's quickly becoming one of my favorites. I really appreciate his restful, thoughtful spirit and the particular way he encourages us to get God's Word in us, to form and shape us in a way that leads to flourishing.

Therefore, I was pleased to hear Andy Crouch bring him up in the latest episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. The entire podcast, while well done and fascinating, has been a troubling and sad indictment of what happens in leaders when charisma outpaces character and how abuse can be overlooked and even protected by those close to it because a lot of good is happening too. 

And that brings us to Peterson, and Teresa of Calcutta, on a different way to live and be. Here's Andy Crouch: 

Through this whole story of the rise of the mega-church, there's this incredible alternative being offered in the writing and the life of this guy, Eugene Peterson. Who then happens to perform a kind of act of media, sort of brilliance, by doing The Message thing...Then he becomes powerful in a worldly sense. Everyone was like, "Oh, Eugene Peterson." But his life mattered long before The Message. His life would matter if the Message had never been produced and sold the way it did. There was a witness, right there, in our world.

Teresa of Calcutta, not a perfect person, sometimes a little harsh with her people that she had power over. But nonetheless, a witness. I think about the fact that Teresa and Diana died in the same week. They are like these mirror images of what we want to be as a human being. The two most recognizable, visible women in the world, it was said, at the time. But utterly different paths to celebrity. Utterly different paths to influence. And of course, one of the things I said in my book Culture Making, it's fascinating that almost everybody wanted to be like Diana, but nobody could be like Diana. Only one person gets to marry the Prince of Wales. And most of us are not beautiful like Diana. We've got no shot. Zero.

Meanwhile, you have Teresa of Calcutta and anyone could be like her, because all she is is a saint. And anyone can be a saint if they open themselves up to Jesus. We have not lacked for models of godly power. We just don't want the suffering that comes with it, the long stretches of anonymity and seeming ineffectiveness, the humiliation of being like your Lord. That part we would really rather not have. There have been other options. But the way of Eugene Peterson, the way of Teresa is right there. Any day I can wake up and say, "I'm heading on that road." Whereas, if I look at some celebrity and try to imagine how I'd get to where they are, I got no chance. Yet, every day I'm tempted to divert into some facsimile of the path of celebrity rather than the path of sainthood.

Abuse is worth being sad about, mad about

I've been thinking about abuse a lot lately. One reason for this is that I am in a class here at Fuller called Pastoral Care and Abuse. Through the lectures and readings just over the last week, I'm learning very quickly about the prevalence and the horrors of all kinds of trauma and abuse.

Also, last night, Brittany and I watched Martha Marcy May Marlene. It was an intense and powerful movie about a girl who gets involved in a abusive cult. She goes on to suffer from severe delusions and paranoia because of the sexual abuse that she had experienced there. It was a very sad visualization of the atrocities being committed, occurring much more than we think about, as well as the life long psychological effects that come from these traumatic events. For Brittany, the movie also brought up recent conversations with someone in therapy who has been the victim of incest at an early age. I can't imagine a more horrible form of abuse than that.

Brittany and I cried together last night. My sadness then morphed into a sort of anger. I don't understand why all this has to happen. Doesn't God care about this? Can't he do something about it? My theology tells me that he both cares and can do something about it, so why does it still exist? I think these are questions that all of us have or will one day wrestle with, and I think it's okay to do so.

The answer to these questions for me right now is "I don't know." But I do know that part of what we are celebrating this week, the death and resurrection of Christ, is about God's concern about the evil and abuse in the world. Christ's death and resurrection are a proclamation that the world is not as it should be, and a demonstration that God cares enough about us to enter the world and be subject to its abuses. The cross reveals that there is healing for the abused, and even more radically, that there is forgiveness for the perpetrator.

Being sad about abuse and mad about it is something that reflects the way God thinks about it. I wanted to close this post with some thoughts from a song I've been listening to the last couple of days by High Society Collective. It's called Mad About. It's a song that expresses anger about the many injustices going in the world right now, including abuse.

The line that gripped me this morning as I was running was about sexual abuse. I'll end on this, hoping this line illustrates yet again the horrible reality of abuse going on all around us, and that it's worth being sad about and mad about.

She was only eight when they threw her in the trade/Abused in her youth now a slave of this rape/Uncle prostitutes the niece before she got through puberty/And its hard for her to pray ’cause she’s dropping to her knees for a priest/Geez, the cross that he wears is the cross that she bears/Pedophiles is what Im mad about.