losing my grip on reality

This past week I attended the Doxology gathering held by the Eugene Peterson center for Christian Imagination and it was overall a blessing. I’ve read about every book by Eugene Peterson and deeply throughout his recommend list of books in Take and Read. I’d like to write more about the tone of the conference and how it often tilted so far into a ‘Christianity of care’ that it lost any sense of a ‘Christianity of struggle’ (concepts I’ve taken from NS Lyons) as well as a bit where the pastoral life of Eugene Peterson is (not) found today.

But an unexpected treat was hearing Daniel Nayeri, author of Everything Sad Is Untrue, who brought humor and insights to writing and life. At the start of his talk he shared this quote from Eugene Peterson that I’ve been thinking about ever since that captures much about what I hope to write above and where we failing to hold our grip on reality.

Every call to worship is a call into the Real World.... I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.