October for me was a blur.
Last Saturday, we at 1MISSION had our big gala at the Phoenix Art Museum. Needless to say, there was a lot of work to be done leading up to that. But it all came together swimmingly. The art installations turned out great, the mariachi and mole were on point, and the new short film I am eager to share with all of you (right here, next month!) had its premiere. Not least, our guests raised a lot of money, which will make a real difference in the lives of the families we serve.
So I had less time to read than I normally do. But less time does not mean no time.
What I’ve Read Recently
In my copy of Eugene Peterson’s Subversive Spirituality (Eerdmans), there’s a second-class Trenitalia ticket tucked between pages 90 and 91. This ticket—stamped for the international “Como S. Giovanni → Lugano” route—has been in exactly that spot for 18 years, ever since a backpacking trip around Italy (and a brief foray into Switzerland) with two college buddies.
I must have started reading this ragtag collection of journal articles, magazine columns, and interviews on the red-eye from Philly to Rome. I kept reading as we made our way north through Tuscany and destinations beyond. But I never finished it. I got distracted or bogged down, the evidence would suggest, smack dab between a pair of chapters on the book of Revelation. Go figure.
This Italy trip was the experience of a lifetime for me: touring the Vatican, walking the cobble-stone streets of Assisi, lounging on the beach in Cinque Terre, eating pasta, drinking Chianti, riding trains, sleeping in hostels. I guess I wasn’t in the mood for apocalypse.
Recently, though, fellow Eugene Peterson devotee David Taylor tweeted a quote from Subversive Spirituality (a provocative quote, some might say), which reminded me about that train ticket and how I’d always hoped to finish the book—or, better, go back and read it from the beginning.
I’m glad I did. This is vintage Eugene Peterson here, if a little rough around the edges. Some of the chapters contain the seeds of ideas that would later grow into mature books. Elsewhere, we come across material that feels (to me) completely fresh. As with any collection of disparate writings, it feels disjointed in places and there’s some repetition. Because it’s Peterson, I don’t mind too much.
Most of Subversive Spirituality is enjoyably soul-stirring and thought-provoking. But there are some isolated—though not insignificant—exceptions. In a couple of chapters, we see (not for the first time) Peterson’s unfortunate tendency to go out of his way to make a punchline out of journalists and journalism—without ever bothering to distinguish between courageous truth-tellers on the one hand and partisan, gossipy hacks on the other.
This pattern isn’t just unfortunate. It’s also perplexing, given Peterson’s dedication to the spiritual formation of the laity, not just on Sunday mornings or during “quiet times” but for their daily working lives as well. And it’s strange in light of Peterson’s own personal and professional commitment to the cultivation of words as a meaningful—even sacred—craft. Surely Peterson was aware that journalists were among his readers, among his parishioners? Surely he could have imagined that at least some principled journalists might see their work through a lens of faithful stewardship? Surely he would have wanted to encourage, challenge—and yes, pastor—such caretakers of words in their fraught, frequently lambasted work? Apparently not.
I recognize I’m making a bigger deal of this tendency than another reader of Subversive Spirituality might consider warranted. But I think this anomaly serves as a good reminder that even when we are intimately acquainted with an author’s writing, when we love and return to it more than nearly any other author’s oeuvre… even so we will now and then come across stuff in that body of work that we dislike, that we think is uncharitable and unhelpful.
And I’m here to say, that’s OK. It’s nothing to be threatened by.
Authors of books are—or can be, if we let them—conversation partners. Which is another way of saying that authors are humans like the rest of us. A conversation partner who sees everything the way I do is a boring conversation partner. And Eugene Peterson is rarely boring, which makes him one of the best.
Even, in these rare cases, when he’s wrong. Even, God help me, when I sometimes need a break.
What I’m Reading Now
There is no dearth of writing on the life of MLK. Besides his own books and posthumous collections of speeches and sermons, for as long as any of us can remember we have had biographies, documentaries, and feature films that help us understand the man behind the myth, from a variety of vantage points.
So maybe, upon seeing Jonathan Eig’s hefty new King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) on the front table at the local indie bookstore, your reaction was a bit like mine: Do we really need a new MLK biography? I mean, what more needs to be said?
A lot more, it turns out. And much of it comes down to sources. In the prologue, Eig writes that in this book he drew upon “thousands of recently released FBI documents and tens of thousands of other new items,” including letters, oral histories, audio recordings, and previously unpublished materials from people close to the action. Eig also interviewed relatives and friends of King, “many of them willing to speak more openly than ever thanks to the passage of time.”
With this book, Eig tells us he has set out to “help readers better understand King’s struggle” by seeking “to recover the real man from the gray mist of hagiography.” So, yes, we get all the heroic stuff—the speeches, the marches, the beatings, the jailings, the breathtakingly disciplined practice of nonviolence. But we also get the infidelities. And the plagiarism. And a lot of insecurity behind the facade.
Somehow this accumulation of contradiction doesn’t diminish the man. It does the opposite, making him properly three-dimensional. It’s a more tragic reading of his story, certainly, but it’s more relatable too—even for those of us whose lives have not been impacted by the blunt force of police batons, or included speeches on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, or evenings spent in hotel rooms across town.
“Before King, the promises contained in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution had been hollow. King and the other leaders of the twentieth-century civil rights movement, along with millions of ordinary protesters, demanded that America live up to its stated ideals. They fought without muskets, without money, and without political power. They built their revolution on Christian love, on nonviolence, and on faith in humankind… That [King] failed to fully achieve his goal should not diminish his heroism any more than the failure of the original founding fathers diminishes theirs.”
What a life.
What I Might Read Next
Over the years, I’ve found both Eugene Peterson and MLK to be important conversation partners. Each, in his unique way, encourages and inspires and challenges me. Both men, as “friends” of mine, keep me alert to what’s going on.
Another longtime conversation partner for me is Jhumpa Lahiri. Born in London and raised in Rhode Island as the daughter of Bengali immigrants from India, Lahiri has written movingly of the always interesting but often melancholy experience of living between cultures.
More recently—in a move that makes perfect sense to my fellow third culture kids but possibly few others—she learned Italian, relocated to Rome, and began writing in a whole new language. Just because. Her latest book is Roman Stories (Knopf), a collection of short stories set in the Eternal City and written, before being translated by Todd Portnowitz, in Italian.
I hope to read it this month.
As always, thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of these reflections. And do let me know what you’re reading these days.
Tim
This reflection means more to me than I can express here. More soon...