Journal

Eugene Peterson on Christian Spirituality

Posted on August 17th, 2005, in the morning

When I launched this journal one of the things I said I would post on was 'Christian spirituality'. By that phrase I was really trying to find a term that encompasses being, practice and belief as aspects of lived Christianity, rather than misemphasising one above others.

I used the term 'spirituality' tentatively, because I have no time for much of what our culture understands by it (a kind of undefined mumbo jumbo of ethereal ideas), yet I don't think I could have offered a particularly articulate definition of the nonetheless very real distinction I see between that and 'Christian spirituality'.

I've just started reading Eugene Peterson's Subversive Spirituality. I can already tell I'm going to hugely benefit from this book, and one of the immediate benefits in the first chapter is what I consider to be a very helpful definiton of (Christian) 'spirituality' from his observation of the narrative structure of Mark's gospel:

Spirituality - the attention we give to our souls - turns out in practice (when we let St. Mark shape our practice) to be the attention we give to God revealed in Jesus.

Eugene Peterson, Subversive Spirituality
(emphasis added)