A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene H. Peterson, Translator of The Message

by Winn Collier

Throughout his writings, Eugene belligerently resisted the common modern habit of severing earth from heaven, splitting the physical world from the spiritual. These convictions would come to be grounded in deep theology but were first felt as a boy as he feasted on the infinite Montana sky, inhaled the scent of aspen and Engelmann spruce, and drank crisp water from rushing streams.

The butcher shop was a place, as he would later describe the church, with “a lot of misfits and oddballs.” It placed him, day after day, in a context of unspectacular ordinariness—and he learned to see it as holy.

But Eugene, thinking back to the hole where a father’s love was supposed to rest, would come to resist with fierceness the depersonalizing, relationship-killing effect that the American business model brought to his soul and to the church. Work and achievement could be a seductive addiction, as burning and deep as a bottle of Thunderbird.

Sven had inoculated me against “one answer” systems of spiritual care….

When Eugene was ten, a scandal hit the neighborhood. A man who lived across the street from the Petersons caught his son in a sexual interlude with a goat. There were only whispers among Eugene and his friends, but everyone knew the boy’s father tore into him with fury. That night, the boy hung himself. Eugene never forgot the story, always saddened when he remembered the boy’s isolation and shame. Whereas most young men would mock the tragedy or stuff it down inside, the heartbreak of it stoked compassion in Eugene’s young heart.

This is one reason Eugene was so (frustratingly) reluctant to dispense advice, why he so detested celebrity: he knew these postures of the ego-driven expert were lies and illusions. And this is why Eugene would rather pray with someone than argue theology, why he’d be eager for a call from his neighbor while letting prominent figures go to his answering machine: friendship (with God and one another) is real.