Tara Owens: So, our topic for this issue of Conversations is “Wisdom and Aging.” We have a wide readership—from lay leaders to pastors, from parents with small children to those with great-grandchildren, people who are single, and married, and divorced. They come from all the streams of Christianity.

One of the big questions many of our readers are struggling with when it comes to this topic is how to age well, how to live out their older years with grace. Other readers are asking how to find wisdom in a world that seems to require it of us at younger and younger ages.

As we talked through these questions and this topic as an editorial team, we came to the conclusion that it might be really helpful to be able to “listen in” on a conversation between a person at the younger end of the spectrum and someone who has walked the long walk of faith well. Of course, we immediately thought of you, Mr. Peterson, as one who has journeyed well with Christ. Much to my surprise, though, the editorial team nominated me to have this conversation with you, as a younger leader and someone who is a writer, a spiritual director, in leadership at my church. But as a younger person I am still in that place of seeking to learn to live well (I think they chose me more for the last part than for the first part).

I desperately want wisdom but all that the world (and sometimes the church) seems to be offering me is just more information. Where do I go to find those who can lead me into wisdom? Where should I look?

Eugene Peterson: Well, there are a number of people who are writing in this genre these days. Joan Chittister is one who does this very well in The Gift of Years: Growing Old Gracefully. We’ve been handing this book around to friends who are our age, and it gets a good reception.

I think there are a lot of people struggling with these questions, and maybe I just wasn’t aware of it because I never thought I was old—and now it is happening.

Wendell Berry is another writer who has meant a lot to me, and I’m just a couple of years older than he is, but in the last four or five years his poems have been really saturated with getting old. My favorite is,

 

“Well anyhow, I am

not going to die young.”

 

TO:     I love that.

EP:      But he writes about getting old with a kind of objective, not self-pitying, not “how can I do this?” voice. It’s just reality that he is paying attention to, and he is getting the most out of the journey of aging. So, I like that. Have you found people that resonate with you?

 

TO:     I’ve found it in poetry. I like Scott Cairns’s poetry, and although it doesn’t specifically take on aging—it takes on the struggle in our own bodies with our own weaknesses and frailties, which we all feel, even when we’re young. There haven’t been a lot, though.

EP:      George MacDonald, his poems and other writings are excellent. Especially Diary of an Old Soul.

 

TO:     Oh! I love George MacDonald!

To change direction slightly, I want to ask a question that our readers have asked of us. What are the compulsions and the attitudes that we have to let go of to age well?

EP:      Well, I thought getting old would be a very gradual thing. It’s not! I’m almost eighty-one, and just about two years ago I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I just started having to re-understand my life, what I’m doing.

I never really retired. When I stopped working and getting paid for it, I was writing. I did as much as I ever did in my life. That’s demanding work, and suddenly I was getting tired.

I thought, well, I’m seventy-nine years old, that’s why I’m getting tired.

I tell you—my kids. I have three children who are in their late forties, early fifties. They have really been a help. They are unobtrusively watchful of me. Not so it’s right in your face. Just making sure that I don’t do too much. They offer to drive me places, things like that.

When people start getting grandmotherly over you or grandfatherly it’s kind of irritating, and they do it without even noticing. It’s unfortunate that way.

My wife and I talk about it quite a bit. Just as you say, we want to do this well and live appropriately to our age. We are both in pretty good health. That’s a gift.

Of course, I have an advantage over a lot of people in this way because I was a pastor all of my vocational life. One of the things I was very conscious of and deliberate about was visiting the old people—people in nursing homes, retirement homes. And I found that being old is not that bad of a thing.

I often took my daughter, Karen, when she was young to nursing homes, and I told my wife when I would do that, “She’s better than a Bible.”

I was with a woman in a facility up in Pennsylvania one day with Karen. She was probably no more than five or six, and Mrs. Herr was in her nineties I think. She had kind of an advanced dementia, so she told the same story over and over again. This particular time, she told the same story about five or six times, and I thought maybe that was enough. I was worried about Karen being bored. And so I said, “Mrs. Herr, let me pray and sing a song together.” Kind of a way to get out of there. When we got in the car, I said to Karen, “Karen, I was so proud of you. You just sat there and listened to her and listened to her.”

And she said, “Oh daddy, I know what she was doing. She was telling me who she is.”

I thought that was pretty profound.

 

TO:     Wow.

EP:      Now, one of my sons is a pastor, and he does the same thing. He’s at these people’s homes, in the hospital, in nursing homes. And it is not a burden. I hate to say this, but there are just a lot of pastors who don’t do this, they don’t visit. And what that means is that now we don’t ourselves know very many older people.

My wife and I live in Montana, kind of out in the country. But we go to a church where about half the congregation is as old as we are. They’ve really become good friends. I have friends my age who want to go to a church that is “with it” and sings loud music and the pastor tells funny jokes, and I can’t understand why anybody would do that.

 

TO:     I have a number of people whom I journey with right now who are kind of either sort of experiencing the losses of aging with hips and knees, or mobility that is getting progressively worse, or they are dealing with a parent whom they have had to put in assisted care because of dementia, and they are trying to walk alongside that parent. Some of those folks have struggled with the idea that “that Jesus died young,” that we don’t see him journeying through the aches and pains and griefs of old age.

What would you say to these people?

EP:      Well, I think I would say that there are plenty of people in the Bible who did live to an old age. I think when we look at the life of Jesus, we know very little about Jesus, to tell you the truth. We have none of the kinds of things that we would be curious [about] if we were reading an autobiography or biography.

So I think it’s all wrong to expect to look at Jesus as a way to see your life as a whole. He is a revelation of God with us. One of the things I think you mentioned is your own interest in contemplative prayer. Contemplative prayer helps us to slow down, and the thing that I think we need to really grasp about Jesus is that we have to be patient with Jesus and with the Scriptures. They are not written in such a way that they give us answers to very much. They bring us into relationship— a listening relationship.

The thing that’s most lacking in elderly people who are doing it badly is patience. They need to learn patience. Wendell Berry writes of his aging self, “This is a new body. I’ve never had a body like this before. It’s quite marvelous.”

Part of the journey is shifting your mind from the focus on what you’re producing for your younger life and the focus on experiencing new things. As you age, you aren’t experiencing new things. I feel a little badly for the elderly people I know who travel. They are just bored to death, and so they get on a plane and go someplace. Then they complain for weeks afterwards how miserable it was.

I know that those people without families have a harder time. We’ve got nine grandchildren. And that makes a difference. They bring something into our lives that is special, but not everybody gets to have that. But I do believe there’s something in your life, in everyone’s life, I believe, that can be affirmed and that you can give praise for, but you have to be imaginative and prayerful to discover what that is.

In the evangelical church, I think, there is hardly any training for this kind of spirituality, the spirituality of the second half of life. We’re looking for answers, for projects, for what we can do for the Lord. Now it’s time to let him do something for us. So, I find I need to have a lot more silent time, a lot more unstructured silence. But because the phone rings a lot and tons of letters come in, it really takes discipline and planning to do that. To not respond to everything on the terms that people want me to do it. What kind of a church do you go to, Tara?

 

TO:     I am part of an Anglican church in Colorado Springs. We are small by some of the large church standards, but we like keeping it small, and we are a beautiful, holy group of people.

EP:      My friend and editor for The Message, John Stine, would he be going to the same church?

 

TO:     He goes to the same church, yes. He lives two streets over from me.

EP:      Oh, does he, how nice. Well, I’ve been to your church a couple times with him.

 

TO:     We love our little holy mess of a church.

EP:      I know. I know. So, you’re neighbors. Well, John is a good conversationalist. He is not nearly as old as I am, but because of his illness, his physical condition, I think he’s done this very creatively, in a very healthy way. He has accepted the limitations of his body and never complains about it. And he does what I don’t do very often, he uses the telephone a lot, and I think that is a smart thing to do.

 

TO:     You’ve named one of them, but I actually asked my pastor, when I knew I was going to be able to speak to you, what he would ask on the topic of wisdom and aging. He is not a heated man, generally, which I think is good for pastors. But he had a quick and vehement answer: he wondered why the generation above him, and by extension above me, seems to have, and these are his words, “abdicated responsibility of being spiritual fathers and mothers.” That those who are willing to step into those roles seems to be few and far between. He wondered if that has been your experience, if you have seen that, and why has that happened?

EP:      Well, I’d say the big thing is cultural. There is so little space or encouragement or modeling of being quiet with all of the digital stuff—phone, internet—we are just bombarded. And a lot of people don’t know they don’t have to do that, they don’t have to be bombarded. The people who are most available to do that are pastors, professional people, and I think pastors are the most driven people I know. They have no time for anybody. And you know, the church, historically, has been a place where you learn how to die, how to make the transition from an active life and a productive life to a receptive life and a grateful life, and if the church leadership doesn’t model that, your pastor is right, there aren’t many, and that’s kind of a cultural loss.

The elderly people feel that a lot because they have pastors who never visit them, don’t have time for them, because they are not productive and doing something for the church. So, I think more in terms of what I have responsibility for, I think more in terms of cultivating a pastoral, vocational sense that is not in a hurry, that does not measure itself by what it gets done. The terrific emphasis on success and programs and people as statistics. In my lifetime I’ve seen a total (well, total, that’s a strong word, not a good word), maybe not a total, but a kind of a devastation of the pastoral vocation and worship in congregations. I think it is just one of the glaring failures of the church in our time.

But I have friends who aren’t doing that. I have a lot of friends who still do what I try to do. So, you don’t have to do that, you don’t have to live in a hurry. Nobody is making you do it; it’s just your own ego.

 

TO:     That makes me think of a story in your memoir, The Pastor, that you shared about Philip and writing him a letter when he decided to leave his smaller congregation to lead a new, much larger congregation where he could multiply his effectiveness. And you wrote “Every time the church’s leaders depersonalize even a little the worshipping, loving community—the Gospel—is weakened.” And I just think about all of the bombardment that we live with that almost forces us to depersonalize in order to survive the amount of stuff that is coming at us. Tell us, how do we resist depersonalizing, and how do we encourage the church’s leaders to resist depersonalizing?

EP:      I’ve written a lot of books trying to do that, and I’m surprised at how I get a lot of mail, a lot of visits, and I don’t do anything, I just sit here and listen. And the people who come and visit, they write in a couple of weeks later and say, “Nobody’s ever listened to me before.”

So, that’s why your work as editor or writer can be one of the ways in which we encourage people to slow down, to take time, to live well. When people sit down to read Conversations, it takes time. It’s not a quick fix. My wife and I have been pretty deliberate throughout all of our lives, actually. We’ve never had a television set. Well, we did, I shouldn’t say that. We did when the kids were small. My wife was bored, so I went out and bought a TV set. After three years or so it broke, and we just never replaced it. And our children didn’t mind. We did a lot of talking and reading aloud and meal preparation together with them, and they thought everybody lived this way. Are you a parent?

 

TO:     I’m a stepparent and a grandmother. We are hoping for our own children, but my husband actually adopted three in his first marriage, and my youngest stepdaughter has an eighteen-month-old son and another on the way.

EP:      Good for you! You get to practice, don’t you?

 

TO:     I do! I get it the way that everybody says you should do it, which is getting to have the grandchildren first.

To transition again, I noticed that in The Message you paraphrase Job at one point where he’s saying, almost sarcastically, do you think the elderly have a corner on wisdom that you have to grow older before you understand life? And I read that and I thought, it used to be that we treated those who are older has having wisdom, but when I look around our culture today, what I see is this compulsion with the new. There’s this idea that it’s the new voice, the new thought, the new whatever that is “supposed” wisdom. My first question is, what is the difference between knowledge and wisdom? And my second is, do you have to be older to be wise?

 

EP:      No, it’s a tragedy when you don’t become wise as you grow old, but you don’t have to be wise to be old. I think there’s a lot of wisdom, but it’s not in the mainstream, it’s not where all the action is. That’s why poets are important, because in order to be a good poet you have to go slow, you have to be patient, you have to write and rewrite and rewrite. By the way, a book of my poems was just published. I’ve never published my poems before. I’ve written them all of my life, but I’ve never really thought of myself as a poet. It’s called Holy Luck, and it’s published by Eerdmans.

 

TO:     I will get my hands on that!

EP:      If there’s wisdom, some of it might be in there.

 

TO:     How do you know when someone is wise? If I’m looking for someone who has wisdom, if I’m seeking it like Proverbs 3 and 4 encourages us to do, how do I know I’ve found someone wise versus someone who’s wise in their own eyes?

EP:      Well, if they set themselves up as being wise, they are probably wise in their own eyes.

I really don’t think it’s something people can be very self-conscious about. You’ve got to be living. Wisdom doesn’t come from talking about it. There’s got to be some lived quality to what you’re doing. I don’t think people who are wise are very aware they are wise. They are thoughtful about life, thoughtful about the way the culture has destroyed so many people’s lives. You know it when you see it.

 

TO:     I’m beginning to learn that the wise people are the ones who don’t say much. They are the ones who can listen.

EP:      Yeah, that’s true. You asked, do you have to be old before you are wise? No, I don’t think so. But you do have to know how to listen. When we are younger we have a lot of ideas, plans, enthusiasm, which is all good, but when it gets in the way of being present to somebody, just present, then that person is not getting the best of you. Wisdom starts now. It starts when you are in your twenties, thirties. I discovered MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul when I was thirty-five years old and started paying attention to him. You mentioned Scott Cairns; do you have other poets that you read?

 

TO:     I do. I’m looking at my bookshelf right now. Jeanine Hathaway is a modern one whom I read.

EP:      I like her.

 

TO:     Richard Howard, Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, Wilfrid Gibson, Luci Shaw. Those are a few.

EP:      That’s a good list.

 

TO:     Following along the lines of poets, I ask this for myself and for others, looking back on your career, what is the greatest piece of advice you could give to writers, artists, poets?

EP:      I think when somebody comes to me and says that they want to be a writer, and asks, how can I learn how to write? I usually ask the question, “Why do you want to do this?”

When they answer, “Because I have something to say,” or “I think I’ve got inside of me and I want to get it out,” I say, “Forget about it!”

Writers are writers not because they have something to say, because they are interested in words, interested in language. Real writers don’t know what they are going to do. They are interesting, they are interested. I’ve always liked something James David Duncan said; I like his writings a lot. He said that writing a novel is like being in the woods with a pencil flashlight between your teeth illuminating about three feet ahead of you, and you just keep following it. You never know what you are going to write until you start writing.

But it’s a craft, it’s a creative craft. You have to sit there and do nothing for hours sometimes until the words start coming together. When I’m talking to people like this, I often use the word heuristic. Writing is heuristic, it is discovering something, exploring something, and letting the words come together.

Tara, I don’t read The Message very much myself, to tell the truth. I’m still reading the Greek and Hebrew. But sometimes I open The Message up and read a couple chapters and think, “Where did that come from? I didn’t know that!”

So much of it is kind of in your subconscious, your unconscious. I think so many people who have something to say don’t really have anything to say, just some information or ideas. The writers that I have been influenced by and maybe I’ve influenced don’t have ambitions to be a writer. They have ambitions to get a book published, and that’s quite different.

 

TO:     Mr. Peterson, I’m so grateful for your time, and for the ways you bring your wisdom to the pages of Conversations and through the pages of your books. Your teachings are shaping a generation for that long obedience in the same direction. I pray that we may be faithful stewards of those gifts.