On Being With Christa Tippett is supported in part by the Fetzer Institute, helping build the

Spiritual Foundation for a loving world. Fetzer's sharing spiritual heritage report asks,

how will we reimagine our spiritual infrastructure for today's time? Learn more at Fetzer.org.

Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming. These are words of the

late legendary biblical interpreter, teacher, and pastor Eugene Peterson. He authored dozens of books

like Answering God about praying with the Psalms and Christ plays in 10,000 places, jumping off a

line of Gerard Manley Hopkins. At the back of the church, Eugene Peterson,

pastored for nearly three decades, you'd be likely to find well-worn copies of books by Wallace

Stegner or Denise Levertov. Frustrated with the unimaginative way, he found his congregants

treating their Bibles, Eugene Peterson translated the whole thing himself, and that translation has

sold millions of copies around the world. His down to earth faith hinged on a love of metaphor

and a commitment to the Bible's poetry as what keeps it alive to the world.

All the prophets reports, and if you don't know that, you try to literalize everything,

and make shambles out of it. You know, a metaphor is really remarkable kind of formation,

because it both means what it says and what it doesn't say. And so those two things come together,

and it creates an imagination which is active. You're not trying to figure things out, you're

trying to enter into us there. I'm Christa Tippett, and this is on being.

Eugene Peterson spent the last years of his life with his wife, Jan, at the home his father built

in Lakeside, Montana, just outside Glacier National Park. And that's where he was when we spoke

in 2016, two years before he died at the age of 85. I'd like to start by just asking you

how you would start to describe the religious and spiritual background of your childhood.

I grew up in a very sectarian church, Benny Cosl Church. It was a small little church in the

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