On May 10, 2019, our friend Jan Peterson died, joining her husband and my mentor, Eugene Peterson, just seven months after his death. Jan lived much of the last three decades of her life in the shadow of her husband, but she was no shrinking violet.
My first memory of Jan was from the evening Eugene was installed as the James M. Houston Chair of Spiritual Theology at Regent College. A large crowd had gathered to be present at the event, hoping to hear some wisdom from Eugene, who had just published the New Testament part of The Message, his contemporary rendering of the Bible. There was a sober academic feel to the evening, but my wife and I were running a little late.
And just as we were at the doors to enter into Regent College, Jan came bustling up behind us, muttering to herself and saying, “The bane of his existence!” Her tardiness was holding things up.
Her muttered words were both a poke at herself and at Eugene at the same time. There was a self-reprimand to them, but there was also a twinkle in her eye as she said them to Charlene and me. She was frustrated to be the “bane of his existence” and yet she relished the bubble-bursting effect of being the cause of delaying such a droll ceremony.
It was at that moment that I discovered how important it is for people who reach so high, sending their branches into the skies like Eugene did, to have spouses who ground them, by sending down roots that anchor them to reality.
Jan could express a profound wisdom of her own, but it was her turn of the head and her twinkle of the eye as she said something abrupt or off-color or awkwardly to the point that made her so vital to Eugene’s life and to our own.
At a party we had in our tiny home during those Regent College years, when I was Eugene’s teaching assistant, I was doing something rare for me: I was playing matchmaker for my friends Jackson and Malaika (still married two decades later). When Jackson’s name came up, Jan smiled and said, “Oh! He’s cute!”
It caught me off guard. She was married to the great Eugene Peterson, but the way she made her comment about Jackson sounded as if she’d been checking out this athletic young stud for months. It didn’t seem, well, very spiritual. But that was Jan, letting the hot air out of our overly serious, overly self-important efforts to be spiritual. In that moment, she was just a normal woman who isn’t going to ignore when she finds someone attractive.
Jan restored a basic humanness to us by deflating our pumped up sense of what it means to follow Jesus. She returned us to the ground.
Eugene needed her. By being the roots, she enabled him to stretch his branches high.
He told me of the time when he decided to read the hundred most important books in American literature. It was a very Eugene kind of thing to do.
So, he would come home from a day at the church office and sit on the sofa, reading these books for pleasure. Meanwhile, Jan was preparing dinner and helping the kids with their homework and so on. He said he never thought anything of it, but he wished in hindsight that he’d helped out more. But here’s the thing: If he’d helped out more during those days, he wouldn’t have read those books and other books that shaped his thinking. If he’d helped out more, he wouldn’t have written all of those early books that gave him the confidence and wisdom necessary to write his later books and The Message.
Did Jan enable him? Yes. She enabled him to get away with things that dads don’t get away with now. But she also enabled him to do the things that made him such a treasure to the kingdom of God.
A few months ago, Jan finally published her own book, Becoming Gertrude. After scores of books by Eugene, Jan got her one. Is it as profound as Eugene’s books? No. It’s not a branches book. It’s a roots book. Simple. Grounded. True. Just like Jan herself.