Cheese is a thing of sublime European importance, if only because of its antiquity. I do not intend any idiotic joke in speaking of the antiquity of cheese. Cheese and wine are the two things of which we can read in the remote pastoral poems of the Romans. And in connection with such really ancient matters there is a curious thing to be noticed. The older things are the more they are really fresh and free and varied, the more they differ really from town to town and from valley to valley. The new things are entirely the same wherever they go.

Bears’ soap in the Hebrides is the same as Bears’ soap in London. There is not some dark and delicate variety of Bears’ soap suited to the stormy islets in the ultimate sea. The men who use Bears’ soap do not find it smell faintly different; the children who eat Bears’ soap do not find it taste with an exquisite difference merely because it is experienced in that fringe of indeterminate and rainy island where, as Mr. W. B. Yeats would say — “Time and the world and all things dwindle out.”

The people in the Hebrides either know Bears’ soap or they do not: their enemies say not. But if they know Bears’ soap at all, it is Bears’, not theirs. It is the same exact and excellent article that is sold in a shop in Regent Street. But it would not be thus if the soap were cheese. If the people of the Hebrides had a cheese it would be an awful, shadowy, Hebridean cheese. It would taste of the terrible headlands and the hopeless sea.

It is so, I say, with all the old things, and with cheese especially. Cheese changes from county to county. Cheese can even change, like wine, from valley to valley. It is exactly because it is very old that it is always various and surprising; and it is exactly because humanity (with one dreadful voice) demands cheese, that cheese is always different…. It is precisely the things that have been most continuous that are able to be most diverse. The more old a thing is the more full of life it is. — G. K. Chesterton, “On Local Cheeses,” Collected Works 27: The Illustrated London News, 1905-1907 266-267 (I’ve divided this into paragraphs for easier reading).

Learning is a highly personal activity carried out in personal interchange: master and apprentice, teacher and student, parent and child. In such relationships, the mind is trained, the imagination disciplined, ideas explored, concepts tested, behavioral skills matured in a context in which everything matters, in a hierarchy in which persons form the matrix…. The classic methods of learning are all personal: dialogue, imitation, and disputation. The apprentice observes the master as the master learns; the master observes the apprentice as the apprentice learns. The learning develops through relationships expressed in gesture, intonation, posture, rhythm, emotions, affection, admiration. And all of this takes place in a sea of orality — voices and silences” (Working the Angles 93).

As Peterson points out, what he is describing here is the way children — even infants — learn from their parents. Interestingly, I noticed that my son picked up the music of “Thank you” before he could say the words: he was imitating our pitches, first a higher one (“Thank”) and then the lower (“you”).

But learning, Peterson argues, has been replaced by schooling:

Schooling is very different from learning. In schooling persons count for very little. Facts are memorized, information assimilated, examinations passed. Teachers are subjected to a supervision that attempts to insure uniform performance, which means that everyone operates as much alike as possible and is rewarded insofar as the transfer of data from book to brain is made with as little personal contamination as possible. In schooling, the personal is reduced to the minimum: standardized tests, regulated teachers, information-oriented students” (94).

Peterson admits that this sort of schooling does not replace learning all at once: elementary school teachers must interact with their students as persons. But he suggests that the replacement increases as the student progresses in his education, so that in the end the student’s education can be “summarized on a transcript in number, the most abstract of languages. Learning, a most intricately personal process, will not submit to such summarizing” (94).

I’m not entirely sure how to evaluate what Peterson is saying here, and I invite your feedback. Some of what he says sounds accurate. Some even seems inevitable: include more than one person in your classroom and you have to standardize; you simply cannot teach Jane at her pace and Wendy at hers, ensuring that each girl learns what you are teaching and has adequate personal interaction with you to do so.

But I can see, too, the problem he points out with standardization: if you are going to require a certain grade point average for admittance into a college or university, you also want that grade point average to mean the same thing, no matter what school the student graduated from. And the best way to achieve that goal is to reduce education to things that can be standarized: facts and numbers and dates and so forth.

I’m still thinking about these things, and again I welcome your thoughts.

The song I was listening to ended. And the next song was the very one I had been thinking of: “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Until You Lose It)” by Ral Donner:

I don’t know for certain that his vocal style hurt his career, but that was exactly the artist and the song I was thinking of. How weird is that?

The next song was “Suspicion” by Terry Stafford. If you’ve ever heard it on the radio, you may have said (as I have), “That’s Elvis.” But chances are it was Stafford. Elvis recorded the song in 1962, but it was Stafford who had the hit with it in 1964.

While I’m at it, if you want Elvis’s own favorite impersonator, here’s Andy Kaufman:

But when it comes to the sense of hearing, someone else is in control. If I’m preaching and you don’t like what I’m saying, you can try plugging your ears with your fingers but it’s not going to work. I can talk loudly enough that you can still hear me (unless, of course, you start shouting yourself so that all you hear is your own voice saying, “La la la la la la” the way people do when someone is about to give away the ending to a movie they haven’t seen yet). If you really don’t want to hear me, you’re going to have to leave. (And if you do start shouting “La la la la la,” I suspect someone is going to make you leave.)

With sight, you’re in control. With hearing, someone else is in control. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the Bible often speaks of the eyes in connection with judgment, starting with Genesis 1 (“And God saw … and it was good”) and running through all of those passages about people doing things that are “right in their own eyes.” All through the Bible, eyes and sight have to do with judgment. But hearing has to do with submission. In fact, the word for “hear” often has the sense of “obey” in the Bible.

This distinction applies also to our reading of the Bible. When you read something, you’re using your eyes. If you don’t like what you’re reading, you can close your eyes or look away or turn the page. But we are not to sit as judges over Scripture. Rather, we are to sit under Scripture, to submit to it. And so we find that the Bible does not command us to read the Word; rather, the commandment that we frequently encounter is “Hear!” If we really want to appreciate Scripture, we ought not (just) to read it but rather we ought to hear it, even if that means reading it aloud when we’re by ourselves.

All of this, I say, I learned several years back from James Jordan. I imagine that I encountered it first in either his Reading the Bible lectures or perhaps in Reading the Bible (Again) for the First Time. Probably both, in fact. But the other day, as I was reading Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles, I came across some similar insights:

Listening and reading are not the same thing. They involve different senses. In listening we use our ears; in reading we use our eyes. We listen to the sound of a voice; we read marks on paper. These differences are significant and have profound consequences. Listening is an interpersonal act; it involves two or more people in fairly close proximity. Reading involves one person with a book written by someone who can be miles away or centuries dead, or both. The listener is required to be attentive to the speaker and is more or less at the speaker’s mercy. For the reader it is quite different, since the book is at the reader’s mercy. It may be carried around from place to place, opened or shut at whim, read or not read. When I read a book, the book does not know if I am paying attention or not; when I listen to a person the person knows very well whether I am paying attention or not. In listening, another initiates the process; when I read I initiate the process. In reading I open the book and attend to the words. I can read by myself; I cannot listen by myself. In listening the speaker is in charge; in reading the reader is in charge.

Many people much prefer reading over listening. It is less demanding emotionally and can be arranged to suit personal convenience. The stereotype is the husband buried in the morning newspaper at breakfast, preferring to read a news agency report of the latest scandal in a European government, the scores of yesterday’s athletic contests, and the opinions of a couple of columnists whom he will never meet rather than listen to the voice of the person who has just shared his bed, poured his coffee, and fried his eggs, even though listening to that live voice promises love and hope, emotional depth and intellectual exploration far in excess of what he can gather informationally from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor put together. In the voice of this living person he has access to a colorful history, an incredibly complex emotional system, and never-before-heard combinations of words that can surprise, startle, move, gladden, or anger him — any of which would seem to be more attractive to an alive human being than getting some information, none or little of which will make any impact on the living of that day. Reading does not, as such, increase our capacity to listen. In some cases it interferes with it (88-89).

What are some of the things you lose by reading (i.e., looking at) a text instead of hearing it (even if you are hearing it from your own mouth as you read aloud)?

Peterson seems to be suggesting that if you read instead of hear, you lose the sense of a relationship: you no longer have the sense that you are engaged with a person; instead you are examining an object, in this case a printed page. More than that, you do not have as strong a sense that the words you are reading are over you, precisely because with reading you are in charge.

Peterson also indicates that attentiveness may be also be lost. Perhaps. I’m well aware that minds may wander while someone else is speaking. Such things have even been known to happen during the sermon, possibly even when I’m preaching. My own mind has wandered even when people I love are talking to me. And I have paid close attention to things that I have read … though as soon as I say that, I realize that paying close attention as I read usually involves at least subvocalization. I have to slow down and savor — hear! — the words to pay attention to them.

But I suspect that Peterson is not talking so much about attention, which we can lose whether we’re reading or hearing, but about attentiveness, about an attitude. When we’re dealing with a person, when someone is speaking to us, we know we are to pay attention. But when we’re in charge, when we’re picking up a book and turning its pages, we feel free — or freer — to let our eyes drift a bit, to skip the dull parts, to look for something that grabs us, to skim over whatever seems needlessly complicated or unimportant. You can read Patrick O’Brian and skip all the nautical details and the love interest and read only the battle scenes if you want, though I don’t recommend it. But how much worse is it if we aren’t attentive to Scripture, if we dip into it here and there, if we approach it without the sense that someone is speaking to us and that everything He says — whether it’s obscure rules or genealogies or seemingly irrelevant stories or the dimensions of a building we’ll never see — is important, worth hearing, worth paying attention to?

Peterson doesn’t mention it, but it strikes me that if we read instead of hear, we also lose the musicality of Scripture, the patterns and rhythms of writing that was meant to be heard. If you’re reading, it’s easy to skim the repetition — Numbers 7, anyone? — but if you’re hearing it read out loud, it takes the same amount of time to say those words the tenth time that it does the first time. Reading can make us impatient: “What’s all this stuff here for? We’ve already heard this!” but hearing requires submission: “This must be important. God says it, and so I have to make the time to hear it.”

They are deeply attached to one another; but since her mother, a widow with considerable property under her own control, is a deeply stupid, griping, illiberal, avid, tenacious, pinchfist lickpenny, a sordid lickpenny and a shrew, there is no hope of marriage… (H. M. S. Surprise, p. 26).

When it comes to prayer, Peterson urges caution:

We want life on our conditions, not on God’s conditions Praying puts us at risk of getting involved in God’s conditions. Be slow to pray. Praying most often doesn’t get us what we want but what God wants, something quite at variance with what we conceive to be in our best interests. And when we realize what is going on, it is often too late to go back. Be slow to pray (44).

That may sound odd, but consider Ecclesiastes 5:2: “Do not be rash with your mouth, and let not your heart utter anything hastily before God.” Prayer is dangerous, Peterson maintains, and we should not pray lightly. But so often such light prayers seem to be what people demand of pastors:

One of the indignities to which pastors are routinely subjected is to be approached, as a group of people are gathering for a meeting or a meal, with the request, “Reverend, get things started for us with a little prayer, will ya?” It would be wonderful if we would counter by bellowing William McNamara’s fantasized response: “I will not! There are no little prayers! Prayer enters the lion’s den, brings us before the holy where it is uncertain whether we will come back alive or sane, for ‘it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God.’”

I am not prescribing rudeness: the bellow does not have to be audible. I am insisting that the pastor who in indolence or ignorance is politely compliant with requests from congregation or community for cut-flower prayers forfeits his … calling. Most of the people we meet, inside and outside the church, think prayers are harmless but necessary starting pistols that shoot blanks and get things going. They suppose that the “real action,” as they call it, is in the “things going” — projects and conventions, plans and performances. It is an outrage and a blasphemy when pastors adjust their practice of prayer to accommodate these inanities (46).

What does Peterson recommend as a remedy? Saturating ourselves in Scripture, and the Psalms in particular, understanding that all of our prayers are responses, second words in response to God’s first words:

What do we do? We do the obvious: we restore prayer to its context in God’s word. Prayer is not something we think up to get God’s attention or enlist his favor. Prayer is answering speech. The first word is God’s word. Prayer is a human word and is never the first word, never the primary word, never the initiating and shaping word simply because we are never first, never primary… (47).

All day long, New York, stewing in the rays of a late August sun, had been growing warmer and warmer, until now, at three o’clock in the afternoon, its inhabitants … had divided themselves by a sort of natural cleavage into two main bodies — the one crawling about and asking those they met if this was hot enough for them, the other maintaining that what they minded was not so much the heat as the humidity. — P. G. Wodehouse, Sam the Sudden, p. 11.

For a long time I have been convinced that I could take a person with a high school education, give him or her a six-month trade school training, and provide a pastor who would be satisfactory to any discriminating American congregation. The curriculum would consist of four courses. Course I: Creative Plagiarism. I would put you in touch with a wide range of excellent and inspirational talks, show you how to alter them just enough to obscure their origins, and get you a reputation for wit and wisdom. Course II: Voice Control for Prayer and Counseling. We would develop your own distinct style of Holy Joe intonation, acquiring the skill in resonance and modulation that conveys an unmistakable aura of sanctity. Course III: Efficient Office Management. There is nothing that parishioners admire more in their pastors than the capacity to run a tight ship administratively. If we return all telephone calls within twenty-four hours, answer all letters within a week, distributing enough carbons to key people so that they know we are on top of things, and have just the right amount of clutter on our desks — not too much or we appear inefficient, not too little or we appear underemployed — we quickly get the reputation for efficiency that is far more important than anything that we actually do. Course IV: Image Projection. Here we would master the half-dozen well-known and easily implemented devices that create the impression that we are terrifically busy and widely sought after for counsel by influential people in the community. A one-week refresher course each year would introduce new phrases that would convince our parishioners that we are bold innovators on the cutting edge of the megatrends and at the same time solidly rooted in all the traditional values of our sainted ancestors.

(I have been laughing for several years over this trade school training for pastors with which I plan to make my fortune. Recently, though, the joke has backfired on me. I keep seeing advertisements for institutes and workshops all over the country that invite pastors to sign up for this exact curriculum. The advertised course offerings are not quite as honestly labeled as mine, but the content appears to be identical — a curriculum that trains pastors to satisfy the current consumer tastes in religion. I’m not laughing anymore.) — Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, pp. 7-8.

Any church which forsakes the regular and uniform for the periodical and spasmodic service of God, is doomed to decay; any church which relies for its spiritual strength and growth entirely upon seasons of “revival” will very soon have no genuine revivals to rely on. Our holy God will not conform His blessings to man’s moods and moral caprice. If a church is declining, it may need a “revival” to restore it; but what need was there of its declining? — T. L. Cuyler, Recollections, cited in P. Y. DeJong, Taking Heed to the Flock: A Study of the Principles and Practice of Family Visitation, p. 19.

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shopkeepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shopkeeper’s concerns — how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shopkeeping; religious shopkeeping to be sure, but shopkeeping all the same. The marketing strategies of the fast-food franchise occupy the waking minds of these entrepreneurs; while asleep they dream of the kind of success that will get the attention of journalists. — Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity, p. 2.

This quotation at the outset of Peterson’s book hits the nail on the head, and perhaps especially for church planters (such as I was until recently), for whom the thought “How can I get more people to attend church?” is never far away. This is the second of Peterson’s books on pastoral ministry and I’ve enjoyed it even more than the first, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, valuable as that was. I’d recommend it for every pastor. Expect more quotations from it from time to time, now that I’m back to regular pastoral work and back to blogging.