on Peterson’s “Answering God”

Published by bryan | Filed under journal entries

September 14th.

I’m reading a wonderful book by Eugene Peterson called “Answering God, The Psalms as Tools for Prayer.” Peterson is fast becoming my favorite spiritual writer for his straight thinking and bold, anti-conventional assertions. I often feel that I am reading C.S. Lewis were he a theologian as opposed to a literary critic.

In Answering God, Peterson addresses the Psalms as God’s provision of prayers, of language we can use to answer what He has done in our lives. Having just attended a Greek Orthodox pilgrimage, I confess the book arrives at a time when my soul most longs for a less informal and more ancient methodology of communication.

Here are some quotes from the book:

“The Psalms are the best tools available for working the faith—one hundred and fifty carefully crafted prayers that deal with the great variety of operations that God carries on in us and attend to all the parts of our lives that are, at various times and in different ways, rebelling and trusting, hurting and praising. People of faith take possession of the Psalms with the same attitude and for the same reason that gardeners gather up rake and hoe on their way to the vegetable patch, and students carry paper and pencil as they enter a lecture hall. It is a simple matter of practicality-acquiring the tools for carrying out the human work at hand.”

“If we wish to develop in the life of faith, to mature in our humanity, and to glorify God with our entire heart, mind, soul and strength, the Psalms are necessary. We cannot bypass the Psalms. They are God’s gift to train us in prayer that is comprehensive (not patched together from emotional fragments scattered around that we chance upon) and honest (not a series of more or less sincere verbal poses that we think might please our Lord.”

“Christ prayed the Psalms.”

“The Psalms set their faces against this lush eroticism, this rank jungle of desire seeking fulfillment. In a world of prayers that indulge the religious ego and cultivate passionate longings, the Psalms stand out with a kind of angular austerity. The Psalms are acts of obedience, answering the God who has addressed us. God’s word preceded these words: these prayers don’t seek God, they respond to the God who seeks us. These responses are often ones of surprise, for who expects God to come looking for us?”

“Left to ourselves, we will pray to some god who speaks what we like hearing, or to the part of God that we manage to understand.”

And the book goes on. Again, it is called “Answering God” and I purchased it from Amazon.

All the best.

Don