Remembering Eugene Peterson

It was, back then, one of the wonderful features of our annual get-togethers. We'd take turns reading from whatever it was we were working on, then field responses from the group, a circle of writers with exceptional abilities, some of whom had sold thousands--even a million or more--books. 

Phillip Yancey was just then finishing What's So Amazing About Grace? It must have been 2007 or so, already long ago. Phillip chose, that year, to read the chapter he'd written about Mel White, an evangelical hero who had ghost-written things for the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Billy Graham. White had left his wife and family and taken up with someone new, a male someone-new. He had lived in the company of thoroughbred evangelical Americans, many of whom didn't quite know what to say. Those who did, cast stones.

The Mel White chapter in What's So Amazing About Grace was what Phillip chose to read at that meeting. When he finished, silence sat down in the room beside us, having emerged from astonishment, not at the chapter or even the Mel White story, even though some of the members of the group, including Phillip, knew him. What silenced the group was realizing the enormity of horrors any such discussion might create among the American evangelicals everyone in that circle understood to be their readership. 

It wasn't the sin of adultery or fornication, or even Mel White's walking away from his wife and kids, but a realization that the Whites' story was somehow more than its immediate wake--infidelity or a broken family, a realization that an open discussion of homosexuality among evangelical Christians was, well, impossible. 

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the first person to speak was Walter Wangerin, who simply surveyed the possibilities and said something to the effect that he didn't think anyone there could say anything whatsoever about what we today call the LBGTQ+ world without triggering immense fallout. 

What I remember is significant silence, some head-shaking, shrugged shoulders. No one criticized anything about what or how Phillip had written. The silence that pervaded the circle grew from a realization that the issues Mel White's story raised would tear up the fabric holding people of faith together.

I may be wrong, but it seemed to me then that I was the only member of the group who didn't know a thing about the Mel White story. Some of them knew it personally, had been friends with Mr. White, knew his wife and family. Especially for them, the story was impossible to imagine. 

From the first meeting I attended, I couldn't help thinking of Eugene Peterson as a replica St. Francis--tall and thin, what hair he had, like his beard, was snowy. He looked gaunt, as saints should, and most of his devotions were ideas he'd drawn from the geese on the lake beneath his Montana home or the shape of a bird's nest, homely reminders of the perfect beauty of grace. His gravely voice was somehow surprising, given the constancy of his wide grin. 

I asked him, personally, in the middle of that discussion, what he thought of what was already churning through the church all of us wanted to be, biblically at least, the bride of Christ. He'd been silent. "Eugene," I said, "how do you feel about this whole subject?" 

He smiled, of course, waited, looked around above the faces of the circle of his friends, scratched his beard a bit and smiled even wider. "I don't know," he said, seriously, "but not a week goes by without someone calling or stopping by to try to get me on their side."

It was, as I remember, one of the few times that the famous Eugene Peterson smile simply fell away. 

No one spoke.

(more tomorrow)