RECOVERING PASSION FOR GOD
How an unlikely mentor helped one pastor rediscover the heart of ministry.
Eugene H. Peterson
January 1, 1990
I was in crisis and went looking for a priest, a pastor, a guide-someone who could help me work out my calling in a most uncongenial setting. I felt beleaguered. I needed help.
I made several attempts at finding a mentor among the living, without success. Then I found Fyodor Dostoevsky. I cannot now remember how I hit upon him, for I had no previous acquaintance. An inspired hunch, maybe.
I took my appointments calendar and wrote in two-hour meetings with "FD" three afternoons a week. Over the next seven months, from three to five o'clock on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, I met with FD in my study and had leisurely conversations through Crime and Punishment, Letters from the Underworld, The Idiot, A Raw Youth, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov. All winter long, through the spring, and a month or two into the summer, I spent those afternoons with a man for whom God and passion were integral-and integrated.
My crisis had come when I realized that I was living in a place where God and passion were only marginal, and I sensed subtle but insistent pressures to displace them in myself. But if God and passion became marginal, I would not be myself; I would not be a pastor, a vocational identity that had been formed by God and passion.
The crisis took place in a Maryland cornfield fast being overlaid with asphalt: classic American suburbia. Sent there to organize a new church, I found to my surprise that God and passion, far from being assets in parish ministry, as I had naively supposed, were impediments.
Organizing a new congregation, I felt pressure to get a lot of people together as quickly as possible so they would provide the financial resources to build an adequate sanctuary for the worship of God. I found that gathering a religious ...
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