RIP Poet Theologians

I am seeing Facebook posts that Tony Hoagland has died.  While I enjoyed his work, he was not one of my touchstone authors.  This essay about race and the U.S. and cancer wards seemed amazing when I stumbled across it this morning while looking for confirmation that Hoagland had died.

No, this week my thoughts return to Eugene Peterson, who died on Monday.  Peterson was about 2 decades older than Hoagland; his death at age 85 might make many people shrug and say, "Well, he lived until a ripe, old age."

In fact, I could make the point that he didn't really start doing some of his most important writing work until later in his life.  Peterson is most famous for his translation of the Bible, The Message, which puts the Bible into a modern English that retains the poetry of the original, unlike those 1970's versions of the modern, Living Bible, which stripped the poetry out (that's my analysis--you may disagree).

The Peterson obituary in The Washington Post chose this example:  "The King James version of a passage from the Gospel of John begins 'And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.' In 'The Message,' it reads: 'The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes.'”

He didn't publish his translation of the Bible until he was in his 60's.  He'd written books before that, but none of his works approached the readership of The Message.

Consider this summation of a man's life, from The Washington Post obituary:  "Rev. Peterson never led a church of more than 500 congregants, rarely appeared on television and seldom made political pronouncements from the pulpit, yet he quietly became one of the most influential religious thinkers of his time."

I was late to discovering Peterson's version of the Bible--when I started going to Create in Me retreats in 2003 and 2004, I heard about it, and was instantly skeptical, as I usually am when hearing about something wildly popular.  But Peterson's language (and finding out that he had serious academic training in his youth--in other words, he could read some of the original languages of the Bible) quickly persuaded me to put aside my doubts. 

Here's a translation that my father loves, along with some of the youngest adult Christians I know.  I am in awe of a man who can translate the whole Bible, while still leading his small church of non-readers for whom he wrote those translations.

This morning, I'm hearing his message that it's not too late for any of us creative types, even though we may have to keep working our full-time jobs.  But perhaps those full-time jobs can lead us to the work that will be the most important.

Let us all take heart and do the work that calls to us.