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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Learning to Live the Life You Long For In Jeremiah 12:5 God says to the prophet, "If you're worn out in this footrace with men, what makes you think you can race against horses?" We all long to live life at its best—to fuse freedom and spontaneity with purpose and meaning. Why then do we often find our lives so humdrum, so unadventuresome, so routine? Or else so frantic, full of activity, but still devoid of fulfillment? How do we learn to risk, to trust, to pursue wholeness and excellence—to run with the horses instead of shuffling along with the crowd? In a series of profound reflections on the life of Jeremiah the prophet, Eugene Peterson explores the heart of what it means to be fully and genuinely human. In this special commemorative edition, you'll find: - Peterson's invitation to grasp the biblical truth that each person's story of faith is completely original, in his signature pastoral style, - Humor, self-reflection, insight, and wisdom that will help you set a course in the quest for life at its best, and - A preface taken from Eric Peterson's homily at his father's memorial service.
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I’ll run the course you lay out for me
if you’ll just show me how.
COMMEMORATIVE EDITION
RUN WITH THE HORSES
THE QUEST FOR LIFE AT ITS BEST
Commemorative Preface by Leif Peterson
For Ericalso the son of a priest
Contents
Commemorative Preface
A Homily for the Celebration of theResurrection of Eugene Peterson
ERIC E. PETERSON
We carry this precious Message around in the unadornedclay pots of our ordinary lives. (The Message)
But we have this treasure in clay jars. (NRSV)
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
I’ve been thinking a lot about containers these days.
It brought to mind an ancient proverb that tells the story of a young girl whose morning chore it was to walk to the river and fetch water for her household. Suspended from a pole across her shoulders were two water pots that supplied her family’s daily needs. One of the pots was perfect, but the other one was cracked, and by the time they made the return trip home each day, the second pot was only half full.
After some time, the little cracked pot, ashamed that she wasn’t able to function at full capacity, expressed her embarrassment and sense of failure to the girl. “Why do you keep using me when all I do is leak?” she asked. “Why don’t you replace me with a new pot?”
Smiling, the girl gently responded, “Have you seen the beautiful flowers that grow along the path between the house and the river? And have you noticed that they only grow on your side of the path as we walk home together? That’s because every spring I plant seeds on only your side, knowing that you will water them as we walk home together. I’ve been picking those flowers for years and filling our home with fragrance and beauty. I couldn’t do it without you. What you thought was a flaw is actually a gift to us all.”
In ways that continue to astound me, God consistently chooses to accomplish divine purposes through the agency of human imperfection. Through the weaknesses and shortcomings of the clay pots—which are our lives—uncommonly beautiful things emerge.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
The message of God’s love, this magnificent story of creation, salvation, and liberation, has been entrusted to the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives (2 Cor 4). In other words, the container of good news is the broken body of Christ. We’re a bunch of crack pots. We leak. This is by design. So that the blessings might flow.
One of the most important things Eugene taught us is that everything about the life of faith is livable. If you can’t translate an idea into an experience, it’s not gospel. Abstractions are enemies of the Way of Truth and Life.
Which is why I’m so very grateful to have grown up with a man whose life was so well integrated and congruent, such that the dad who served up mashed potatoes on Saturday night was the very same pastor who served up the word of God on Sunday morning. He was someone who embodied the message he proclaimed. His body was a sacred temple. A habitation for the holy. A container of the Spirit of God.
I know this to be true because the evidence is irrefutable, inasmuch as he manifested the fruits of the Spirit.
He was a container for love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
He was a flawed and cracked container of these gifts, never hoarding, always leaking. What a holy vessel he was. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Moreover I think of his many books as durable containers of the words he wrote for us. Inspired words full of truth and grace. Words that we will treasure for many years.
But for right now I wish to draw your attention to two particular containers that are here. They are common enough as containers go. What is unusual is that they are in the same room at the same time.
A cradle. And a casket.
The one is a container of life. The other is a container of death.
One is open to the world; the other, closed, having finished this world.
The one holds promise and hope and future. Anticipation. The other holds completion: it is finished.
The one represents a glorious beginning; the other, a glorious end.
A cradle and a casket: these are the containers that bookend our lives.
When Eugene delivered this cradle, freshly crafted from his basement workshop in Maryland to New Jersey, where his first grandchild was born, I exclaimed to him how beautiful it was. As we were carrying it into the apartment together he confessed that it had a flaw, and he had to shim it. I knew all about shims because he had taught me, at an early age, about them. “Every carpenter,” he said, “needs to know how to use shims.”
I have scrutinized this cradle over the years, and I still can’t find the flaw. He wasn’t just a master word-worker; he was a master woodworker.
And among the things he left us, in the craft of words and wood, is this exquisite piece of work that our family will treasure for generations. Many of Eugene’s grandchildren and grandnephews and grandnieces were held in this little container, and their names are all inscribed inside.
This all came back to mind as I was building his casket a couple of weeks ago. The miter joints weren’t lining up exactly right, and I had to use some shims to tighten them up. I had never built a casket before, and so I set out doing what many of us have learned to do: I went to YouTube. And in the process, I came across a coffin maker named Marcus Daly, who doesn’t just build wooden boxes but contemplates the human condition. I very much like the way he reflects on his work. Here is what he says:
I think one of the most important aspects of the coffin is that it can be carried. And I think we’re meant to carry each other. And I think carrying someone you love, committing them, is very important for us when we deal with death. We want to know that we have played a part and that we have shouldered our burden. So, if we make it too convenient, then we’re depriving ourselves of a chance to get stronger so that we can carry on.
At various points in their lives, Eugene carried six of his grandchildren, both physically and emotionally. He was a strong, steadying presence in their lives, as he was for so many of us. He carried them up mountains. He carried them through school. He carried them through heartache.
Today those six grandchildren carry him. And at the end of the day they will be stronger for it. Today, the rest of us watch while the heavy lifting is accomplished through their fierce love, as they carry him to his final resting place. But if we’ve been paying attention, we will also know that as Eugene has been wielding the words of his craft over the years, we too have become more fit, strengthened, readied for citizenship in the kingdom of God.
This casket-container is now holding the body-container that was Eugene Peterson. I say was, because by the mystery of the resurrection, to which the baptized are heirs, his body has been exchanged for something much, much more durable. Perishability, as St. Paul once famously said it, has taken on imperishability. Mortality has been swapped for immortality. The temporary traded for the eternal.
The casket and the cradle.
These are temporary containers. Pretty much everything is. There is only one thing that isn’t.
We don’t know much about what heaven is like. The preferred biblical metaphor is that of a city, suggesting that it is inhabitable. It’s populated. But the particularities that St. John describes make it clear that it is unlike any city we’ve known on earth. For starters, it is a city without limits, unconstrained by zip codes or boundary lines, unencumbered by fences, not obstructed by walls. In other words, it’s a container for the hosts of heaven without being confining. It is a place or—perhaps better said—it’s a reality in which the limitations of our present mortality give way to the full expressions of that which we now know only in part—namely, perfect love, unmitigated joy, deep and eternal peace.
It’s quite a design, as city planning goes: there is no temple in this New Jerusalem—no church container of any kind—because it’s no longer necessary, the presence of God being so pervasive, holding everything and everyone together.
There is a river running through the city, suggesting that the blessings flood freely.
And there is a tree, whose leaves, we are told, are for the healing of the nations. And my how this world needs those leaves right now.
All of which is to say that what we sort of know as we look through a glass darkly is that heaven is a glorious container for all the saints.
Where life is free to flow unbounded, unencumbered.
Where blessings—no longer contained—rush like whitewater.
Where there are no more tears, no more pain, no more death. And because the former things have passed away, and because it is a city built by the Master Carpenter, there are also no more shims.
It’s a most perfect, everlasting container, for all the saints.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
First Presbyterian Church, Kalispell, MontanaNovember 3, 2018
Preface to the Second Edition
I wrote this book in the year of my twenty-fifth anniversary of ordination into the gospel ministry, 1983. Now, twenty-five years later, I write this preface in the year of my fiftieth anniversary of ordination, 2008. In many ways things have not changed in this quarter century: the American culture that I live and work in is substantially the same; the life of Jeremiah that once provided a way of understanding the Christian life in radical contrast to the American way has, if anything, deepened in relevance.
But things are not quite the same in the church. The American church seems to have lost its nerve. Leaders are stepping up to provide strategies of renewal and reform. If the sociologists are right, more and more people are becoming disappointed and disaffected with the church as it is and are increasingly marginalized. The most conspicuous response of the church at this loss of “market share” is to develop more sophisticated consumer approaches, more efficient management techniques. If people are not satisfied, we’ll find a way to woo them back with better publicity and glossier advertising. We’ll repackage church under fresh brand names. Since Americans are the world’s champion consumers, let’s offer the gospel on consumer terms, reinterpreting it as a way to satisfy their addiction to More and Better and Sexier.
The huge irony is that the more the gospel is offered in consumer terms, the more the consumers are disappointed. The gospel is not a consumer product; it doesn’t satisfy what we think of as our “needs.” The life of Jeremiah is not an American “pursuit of happiness.” It is more like God’s pursuit of Jeremiah.
There is another change that affects how I read this anniversary edition. At the time I wrote it, I dedicated it to my son Eric, “also the son of a priest.” He was considering being a pastor but was still in school and keeping his options open. Eventually he did become a pastor. He was ordained in 1990 and organized a new congregation near Spokane, Washington, in 1997. As he was in formation as a pastor and nurturing an anticonsumer congregation, we exchanged letters and telephone calls. We agreed early on that leading a church in the sixties, seventies and eighties for me was very different from what he faced in the nineties and into the twenty-first century. A year or two into the growth of his newly forming people of God, he called me for advice related to a developmental issue. “Dad, what did you do when you got to this point?” A long pause. And then my reply, “You know, I never had to deal with that in my congregation. A consensus on how the church keeps its focus and identity is very blurred these days. I guess you’ll just have to figure it out.”
And he did. And all of us who follow Jesus must too as we endeavor to remain true to our foundational, prophetic traditions. Jeremiah still stands out as one of the best conversational companions to cultivate as we do that.
The most noticeable change in this anniversary edition is the replacement of the biblical text with The Message, my attempt to translate the robust earthiness of the Hebrew language into our American vernacular. I anticipate that this will give Jeremiah’s life even more prophetic bite as we live the Jeremiah life ourselves.
What Makes You ThinkYou Can Race Against Horses?
So, Jeremiah, if you’re worn out in this footrace with men,
what makes you think you can race against horses?
And if you can’t keep your wits during times of calm,
what’s going to happen when troubles break loose
like the Jordan in flood?
My grievance with contemporary society is with its decrepitude. There are few towering pleasures to allure me, almost no beauty to bewitch me, nothing erotic to arouse me, no intellectual circles or positions to challenge or provoke me, no burgeoning philosophies or theologies and no new art to catch my attention or engage my mind, no arousing political, social, or religious movements to stimulate or excite me. There are no free men to lead me. No saints to inspire me. No sinners sinful enough to either impress me or share my plight. No one human enough to validate the “going” lifestyle. It is hard to linger in that dull world without being dulled.
I stake the future on the few humble and hearty lovers who seek God passionately in the marvelous, messy world of redeemed and related realities that lie in front of our noses.
THE PUZZLE IS WHY SO MANY PEOPLE LIVE so badly. Not so wickedly, but so inanely. Not so cruelly, but so stupidly. There is little to admire and less to imitate in the people who are prominent in our culture. We have celebrities but not saints. Famous entertainers amuse a nation of bored insomniacs. Infamous criminals act out the aggressions of timid conformists. Petulant and spoiled athletes play games vicariously for lazy and apathetic spectators. People, aimless and bored, amuse themselves with trivia and trash. Neither the adventure of goodness nor the pursuit of righteousness gets headlines.
Modern man is “a bleak business,” says Tom Howard. “To our chagrin we discover that the declaration of autonomy has issued not in a race of free, masterly men, but rather in a race that can be described by its poets and dramatists only as bored, vexed, frantic, embittered, and sniffling.”2
This condition has produced an odd phenomenon: individuals who live trivial lives and then engage in evil acts in order to establish significance for themselves. Assassins and hijackers attempt the gigantic leap from obscurity to fame by killing a prominent person or endangering the lives of an airplane full of passengers. Often they are successful. The mass media report their words and display their actions. Writers vie with one another in analyzing their motives and providing psychological profiles on them. No other culture has been as eager to reward either nonsense or wickedness.
If, on the other hand, we look around for what it means to be a mature, whole, blessed person, we don’t find much. These people are around, maybe as many of them as ever, but they aren’t easy to pick out. No journalist interviews them. No talk show features them. They are not admired. They are not looked up to. They do not set trends. There is no cash value in them. No Oscars are given for integrity. At year’s end no one compiles a list of the ten best-lived lives.
A THIRST FOR WHOLENESS
All the same, we continue to have an unquenchable thirst for wholeness, a hunger for righteousness. When we get thoroughly disgusted with the shams and cretins that are served up to us daily as celebrities, some of us turn to Scripture to satisfy our need for someone to look up to. What does it mean to be a real man, a real woman? What shape does mature, authentic humanity take in everyday life?
When we do turn to Scripture for help in this matter we are apt to be surprised. One of the first things that strikes us about the men and women in Scripture is that they were disappointingly non- heroic. We do not find splendid moral examples. We do not find impeccably virtuous models. That always comes as a shock to newcomers to Scripture: Abraham lied; Jacob cheated; Moses murdered and complained; David committed adultery; Peter blasphemed.
We read on and begin to suspect intention: a consistent strategy to demonstrate that the great, significant figures in the life of faith were fashioned from the same clay as the rest of us. We find that Scripture is sparing in the information that it gives on people while it is lavish in what it tells us about God. It refuses to feed our lust for hero worship. It will not pander to our adolescent desire to join a fan club. The reason is, I think, clear enough. Fan clubs encourage secondhand living. Through pictures and memorabilia, autographs and tourist visits, we associate with someone whose life is (we think) more exciting and glamorous than our own. We find diversion from our own humdrum existence by riding on the coattails of someone exotic.
We do it because we are convinced that we are plain and ordinary. The town or city that we live in, the neighborhood we grew up in, the friends we are stuck with, the families or marriages that we have—all seem undramatic. We see no way to be significant in such settings, with such associations, so we surround ourselves with evidence of someone who is. We stock our fantasies with images of a person who is living more adventurously than we are. And we have enterprising people around who provide us (for a fee, of course) with the material to fuel the fires of this vicarious living. There is something sad and pitiful about the whole business. But it flourishes nonetheless.
Scripture, however, doesn’t play that game. Something very different takes place in the life of faith: each person discovers all the elements of a unique and original adventure. We are prevented from following in another’s footsteps and are called to an incomparable association with Christ. The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God’s creative genius is endless. He never, fatigued and unable to maintain the rigors of creativity, resorts to mass-producing copies. Each life is a fresh canvas on which he uses lines and colors, shades and lights, textures and proportions that he has never used before.
We see what is possible: anyone and everyone is able to live a zestful life that spills out of the stereotyped containers that a sin-inhibited society provides. Such lives fuse spontaneity and purpose and green the desiccated landscape with meaning. And we see how it is possible: by plunging into a life of faith, participating in what God initiates in each life, exploring what God is doing in each event. The persons we meet on the pages of Scripture are remarkable for the intensity with which they live Godward, the thoroughness in which all the details of their lives are included in God’s word to them, in God’s action in them. It is these persons who are conscious of participating in what God is saying and doing that are most human, most alive. These persons are evidence that none of us is required to live “at this poor dying rate” for another day, another hour.
AN IMAGE OF MAN
This two-edged quality of Scripture—the capacity to intensify a passion for excellence combined with an indifference to human achievement as such—strikes me with particular force in the book of Jeremiah.
Cleanth Brooks wrote, “One looks for an image of man, attempting in a world increasingly dehumanized to realize himself as a man—to act like a responsible moral being, not to drift like a mere thing.”3 Jeremiah, for me, is such an “image of man,” a life of excellence, what the Greeks called aretē. In Jeremiah it is clear that the excellence comes from a life of faith, from being more interested in God than in self, and has almost nothing to do with comfort or esteem or achievement. Here is a person who lived life to the hilt, but there is not a hint of human pride or worldly success or personal achievement in the story. Jeremiah arouses my passion for a full life. At the same time he firmly shuts the door against attempts to achieve it through self-promotion, self-gratification or self-improvement.
It is enormously difficult to portray goodness in an attractive way; it is much easier to make a scoundrel interesting. All of us have so much more experience in sin than in goodness that a writer has far more imaginative material to work with in presenting a bad character than a good person. In novels and poems and plays most of the memorable figures are either villains or victims. Good people, virtuous lives, mostly seem a bit dull. Jeremiah is a stunning exception. For most of my adult life he has attracted me. The complexity and intensity of his person caught and kept my attention. The captivating quality in the man is his goodness, his virtue, his excellence. He lived at his best. His was not a hothouse piety, for he lived through crushing storms of hostility and furies of bitter doubt. There is not a trace of smugness or complacency or naiveté in Jeremiah—every muscle in his body was stretched to the limits by fatigue, every thought in his mind subjected to rejection, every feeling in his heart put through fires of ridicule. Goodness in Jeremiah was not “being nice.” It was something more like prowess.
Jeremiah has thus served personal needs. But he has also been of pastoral importance, and the personal and pastoral interests converge. As a pastor I encourage others to live at their best and provide guidance in doing it. But how do I do this without inadvertently inciting pride and arrogance? How do I stimulate an appetite for excellence without feeding at the same time a selfish determination to elbow anyone aside who gets in the way? Insistent encouragement is given by many voices today for living a better life. I welcome the encouragement. But the counsel that accompanies the encouragement has introduced no end of mischief into our society, and I am in strenuous opposition to it. The counsel is that we can arrive at our full humanness by gratifying our desires. It has been a recipe for misery for millions.4 The biblical counsel in these matters is clear: “not my will but thine be done.” But how do I guide people to deny self without having that misunderstood as encouraging them to be doormats on which others wipe their feet? The difficult pastoral art is to encourage people to grow in excellence and to live selflessly, at one and the same time to lose the self and find the self. It is paradoxical, but it is not impossible. And Jeremiah is preeminent among those who have done it—a fully developed self (and therefore extraordinarily attractive) and a thoroughly selfless person (and therefore maturely wise). In conversations, in lectures, on retreats, in sermons, Jeremiah has, for fifty years now, been example and mentor for me.
A QUEST FOR THE BEST
We live in a society that tries to diminish us to the level of the ant heap so that we scurry mindlessly, getting and consuming. It is essential to take counteraction. Jeremiah is counteraction: a well-developed human being, mature and robust, living by faith. My procedure here is to select the biographical parts of the book of Jeremiah and reflect on them personally and pastorally in the context of present, everyday life. More is known of the life of Jeremiah than of any other prophet, and his life is far more significant than his teaching.5 It is noteworthy, I think, that when people were trying to account for Jesus, Jeremiah was one of the names put forward (Mt 16:14). By enlisting the devout imagination in meditatively perusing these pages of Scripture, I hope to stir up a dissatisfaction with anything less than our best. I want to provide fresh documentation that the only way that any one of us can live at our best is in a life of radical faith in God. Every one of us needs to be stretched to live at our best, awakened out of dull moral habits, shaken out of petty and trivial busywork. Jeremiah does that for me. And not only for me. Millions upon millions of Christians and Jews have been goaded and guided toward excellence as they have attended to God’s Word spoken to and by Jeremiah.
I have arranged the passages that I have chosen for reflection in roughly chronological order. The book of Jeremiah is not itself arranged chronologically, and there is far more in it than biography. That means that readers not infrequently puzzle over transitions and wrestle to find the appropriate settings for the sayings. I have not attempted to sort out these puzzles or explain the difficulties. Nor have I described the complex international historical background of the times, a knowledge of which is an immense help in reading Jeremiah. That would be to write another kind of book and a much longer one. For readers who want to extend their understanding of Jeremiah and be guided through the text in detail, I recommend three books: R. K. Harrison, Jeremiah and Lamentations (InterVarsity Press) for a good, readable introduction into the world and text of Jeremiah; John A. Thompson, The Book of Jeremiah (Eerdmans) for a more advanced, detailed treatment; and John Bright, Jeremiah (Doubleday) for the most complete study of the prophet and the prophecy.
COMPETING WITH HORSES
Vitezslav Gardavsky, the Czech philosopher and martyr who died in 1978, took Jeremiah as his “image of man” in his campaign against a society that carefully planned every detail of material existence but eliminated mystery and miracle, and squeezed all freedom from life. The terrible threat against life, he said in his book God Is Not Yet Dead, is not death, nor pain, nor any variation on the disasters that we so obsessively try to protect ourselves against with our social systems and personal stratagems. The terrible threat is “that we might die earlier than we really do die, before death has become a natural necessity. The real horror lies in just such a premature death, a death after which we go on living for many years.”6
There is a memorable passage concerning Jeremiah’s life when, worn down by the opposition and absorbed in self-pity, he was about to capitulate to just such a premature death. He was ready to abandon his unique calling in God and settle for being a Jerusalem statistic. At that critical moment he heard the reprimand: “So, Jeremiah, if you’re worn out in this footrace with men, what makes you think you can race against horses? And if you can’t keep your wits during times of calm, what’s going to happen when troubles break loose like the Jordan in flood?” (Jer 12:5). Biochemist Erwin Chargaff updates the questions: “What do you want to achieve? Greater riches? Cheaper chicken? A happier life, a longer life? Is it power over your neighbors that you are after? Are you only running away from your death? Or are you seeking greater wisdom, deeper piety?”7
Life is difficult, Jeremiah. Are you going to quit at the first wave of opposition? Are you going to retreat when you find that there is more to life than finding three meals a day and a dry place to sleep at night? Are you going to run home the minute you find that the mass of men and women are more interested in keeping their feet warm than in living at risk to the glory of God? Are you going to live cautiously or courageously? I called you to live at your best, to pursue righteousness, to sustain a drive toward excellence. It is easier, I know, to be neurotic. It is easier to be parasitic. It is easier to relax in the embracing arms of The Average. Easier, but not better. Easier, but not more significant. Easier, but not more fulfilling. I called you to a life of purpose far beyond what you think yourself capable of living and promised you adequate strength to fulfill your destiny. Now at the first sign of difficulty you are ready to quit. If you are fatigued by this run-of-the-mill crowd of apathetic mediocrities, what will you do when the real race starts, the race with the swift and determined horses of excellence? What is it you really want, Jeremiah? Do you want to shuffle along with this crowd, or run with the horses?
It is understandable that there are retreats from excellence, veerings away from risk, withdrawals from faith. It is easier to define oneself minimally (“a featherless biped”) and live securely within that definition than to be defined maximally (“little less than God”) and live adventurously in that reality. It is unlikely, I think, that Jeremiah was spontaneous or quick in his reply to God’s question. The ecstatic ideals for a new life had been splattered with the world’s cynicism. The euphoric impetus of youthful enthusiasm no longer carried him. He weighed the options. He counted the cost. He tossed and turned in hesitation. The response when it came was not verbal but biographical. His life became his answer, “I’ll run with the horses.”
Jeremiah
The Message of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah of the family of priests who lived in Anathoth in the country of Benjamin. GOD’s Message began to come to him.
What’s in a name? The history of the human race is in names. Our objective friends do not understand that, since they move in a world of objects which can be counted and numbered. They reduce the great names of the past to dust and ashes. This they call scientific history. But the whole meaning of history is in the proof that there have lived people before the present time whom it is important to meet.
THE FIRST THING THAT I CAN REMEMBER WANTING to be when I grew up was an Indian fighter. Only a couple of generations before I was born the area in which I grew up was Indian country. I could walk from my house into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in about twenty minutes. On most Saturdays through my boyhood years I carried a lunch with me and roamed for the day in those hills, exploring forests and streams, imagining myself matching wits with treacherous Indians.
If anyone would have pressed me to account for what I was doing on those rambles, I’m not sure I could have done it, but the feelings are still sharp and vivid in my memory: a feeling of adventure in the wilderness in contrast to the protected and prosaic life in the town; a feeling of goodness in contest with evil, for in those days the only Indian stories I had heard featured them scalping innocent travelers.
All the great stories of the world elaborate one of two themes: that all life is an exploration like that of the Odyssey or that all life is a battle like that of the Iliad. The stories of Odysseus and Achilles are archetypal. Everyone’s childhood serves up the raw material that is shaped by grace into the life of mature faith.
I had most of my facts wrong on those wonderful Saturdays. The wilderness that I thought I was exploring was owned by the Great Northern Railroad and was already plotted for destruction by executives in a New York City skyscraper; the Indians that I supposed were darkly murderous were, I learned later, noble and generous, themselves victims of rapacious early settlers. My facts were wrong; all the same there were two things essentially right about what I experienced. One, there was far more to existence than had been presented to me in home and school, in the streets and alleys of my town, and it was important to find out what it was, to reach out and explore. Two, life was a contest of good against evil and the battle was for the highest stakes—the winning of good over evil, of blessing over malignity. Life is a continuous exploration of ever more reality. Life is a constant battle against everyone and anything that corrupts or diminishes its reality.
After a few years of wandering those hills and never finding any Indians, I realized that there was not much of a market any longer for Indian fighters. I was forced to abandon that fantasy, and I did it readily enough when the time came, for I have always found that realities are better in the long run than fantasies. At the same time I found myself under pressure to abandon the accompanying convictions that life is an adventure and that life is a contest. I was not, and am not, willing to do that.
Some people as they grow up become less. As children they have glorious ideas of who they are and of what life has for them. Thirty years later we find that they have settled for something grubby and inane. What accounts for the exchange of childhood aspiration to the adult anemia?
Other people as they grow up become more. Life is not an inevitable decline into dullness; for some it is an ascent into excellence. It was for Jeremiah. Jeremiah lived about sixty years. Across that life span there is no sign of decay or shriveling. Always he was pushing out the borders of reality, exploring new territory. And always he was vigorous in battle, challenging and contesting the shoddy, the false, the vile.
How did he do it? How do I do it? How do I shed the fantasies of boyhood and simultaneously increase my hold on the realities of life? How do I leave the childish yet keep the deeply accurate perceptions of the child—that life is an adventure, that life is a contest?
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
The book of Jeremiah begins with a personal name, Jeremiah. Seven more personal names follow: Hilkiah, Benjamin, Josiah, Amos, Judah, Jehoiakim, Zedekiah. The personal name is the most important part of speech in our language. The cluster of personal names that opens the book of Jeremiah strikes exactly the right note for what is most characteristic of Jeremiah: the personal in contrast to the stereotyped role, the individual in contrast to the blurred crowd, the unique spirit in contrast to generalized cultural moods. The book in which we find this most memorable record of what it means to be human in the fullest, most developed sense, begins with personal names.
