Prayers Are Tools

Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.

Eugene H. Peterson

Eugene Peterson, the late revered teacher and interpreter of the Bible, held a profound understanding of the purpose of prayer. “Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming,” he once reflected. His pastoral ministry spanned nearly three decades, a setting where one might discover worn volumes by writers such as Wallace Stegner or Denise Levertov subtly mingled with sacred texts.

Peterson's quiet discontent with the limited manner his congregants engaged with the Bible led to a significant undertaking. Disrupting the passive reading habits, he dove into the extraordinary task of rendering the entire Bible into a more accessible language. His translation, which resonated deeply with millions worldwide, became an instrumental force in shaping the perspectives of pastors, teachers, and readers across generations.

The subtlety of Peterson's faith was grounded in a heartfelt fondness for metaphor and a steadfast commitment to the poetry inherent in the Bible. To him, these were not mere literary devices, but the essence that invigorated the Scriptures, enabling them to resonate in a world that often seemed disconnected. This ethos was carried forward in his vast literary contributions, including over 30 books such as Answering God and The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. Even after his passing, Peterson's voice continued to echo in works like This Hallelujah Banquet: How the End of What We Were Reveals Who We Can Be, a Lenten sermon series published posthumously in 2021.

Eugene Peterson passed away in 2018, leaving behind an enduring legacy. His son, Eric, himself a pastor near Spokane, Washington, tenderly remembered his father, “He remained gentle and humble right up until the end of his long life and was simply the holiest man I’ve ever known. In death no less than life, he is a person of grace and truth.” In the stillness left by Peterson's passing, these words serve as a poignant testament to the enduring impact of his life, both in his personal sphere and in the broader world of biblical interpretation.

(1932–2018) Christianity

Pastor Eugene H. Peterson [The Pastor: A Memoir].

Eugene H. Peterson

Theme: Prayer

“Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.” These are words of the late legendary biblical interpreter and teacher Eugene Peterson. At the back of the church he pastored for nearly three decades, you’d be likely to find well-worn copies of books by Wallace Stegner or Denise Levertov. Frustrated with the unimaginative way he found his congregants treating their Bibles, he translated the whole thing himself and that translation has sold millions of copies around the world. Eugene Peterson’s literary biblical imagination formed generations of pastors, teachers, and readers. His down-to-earth faith hinged on a love of metaphor and a commitment to the Bible’s poetry as what keeps it alive to the world.

—On Being with Krista Tippett [https://onbeing.org/programs/eugene-peterson-answering-god/].

Excerpts From Interview

Excerpt #1:

Tippett: “Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.” These are words of the late, legendary biblical interpreter, teacher, and pastor Eugene Peterson. He authored dozens of books, like Answering God, about praying with the Psalms, and Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, jumping off a line of Gerard Manley Hopkins. At the back of the church Eugene Peterson pastored for nearly three decades, you’d be likely to find well-worn copies of books by Wallace Stegner or Denise Levertov. Frustrated with the unimaginative way he found his congregants treating their Bibles, Eugene Peterson translated the whole thing himself, and that translation has sold millions of copies around the world. His down-to-earth faith hinged on a love of metaphor and a commitment to the Bible’s poetry as what keeps it alive to the world.

Peterson: All the prophets were poets. And if you don’t know that, you try to literalize everything and make a shambles out of it. A metaphor is a really remarkable kind of formation, because it both means what it says and what it doesn’t say, and so those two things come together, and it creates an imagination which is active. You’re not trying to figure things out, you’re trying to enter into what’s there.

—On Being with Krista Tippett [https://onbeing.org/programs/eugene-peterson-answering-god/].

Excerpt #2:

Tippett: Something you said about prayer also strikes me as—so it strikes me that when you talk about the power of words, the importance and care with them, it’s not just speaking. It’s also about reading; it’s also about listening. You talk about if we pray without listening, we pray out of context. It seems to me the same thing kind of comes through about speaking: if we speak without listening, we speak out of context. And listening also doesn’t accompany a lot of our public speech now.

Peterson: I think the listening business is the part of prayer that gets most neglected. And plenty of people have taught me this, but one of the best teachers, for me, has been Karl Barth. And he’s just adamant about, when you pray, you don’t ask God for things. You pray to listen. And then, when you’ve listened, you can hear God speak and take you into paths you’d never thought about.

Tippett: You propose quite a different relationship. I mean, you say, “God speaks to us; our answers are our prayers.”

Peterson: Does that not make sense?

Tippett: No, it does. It’s just a—it’s a whole different way to—entry point to thinking about what’s happening in prayer; to even, I think, a Protestant, Western Protestant approach that’s been there in many churches for a while.

Peterson: And that’s one of the things that I think I liked about being a pastor is the working through in conversations of this kind of reversal of what they’re used to doing. And the ability to make the transfer from asking to listening is really profound, but when you start to do it—and it sometimes takes some coaching, some encouragement from a pastor or somebody else—but it’s so freeing.

—On Being with Krista Tippett [https://onbeing.org/programs/eugene-peterson-answering-god/].

Additional Eugene H. Peterson Quotes

“I love being an American, I love this place in which I have been placed—its language, its history, its energy. But I don’t love ‘the American way,’ its culture and values. I don’t love the rampant consumerism that treats God as a product to be marketed….The cultural conditions in which I am immersed require, at least for me, a kind of fierce vigilance to guard my vocation from these cultural pollutants so dangerously toxic to persons who want to follow Jesus in the way that he is Jesus.”

—Eugene H. Peterson [The Pastor: A Memoir].

“Congregation is a company of people who are defined by their creation in the image of God, living souls, whether they know it or not. They are not problems to be fixed, but mysteries to be honored and revered. Who else in the community other than the pastor has the assigned task of greeting men and women and welcoming them into a congregation in which they are known not by what is wrong with them, but by who they are, just as they are?”

—Eugene H. Peterson [The Pastor: A Memoir] p. 137.

“Prayer is a refusal to live as an outsider to my God and my own soul.”

—Peterson, Eugene H. Tell It Slant: a Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012, p. 136 [Eugene H. Peterson, Tell It Slant].

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