ART & SOUL EUGENE PETERSON
The Power of a Prophetic Portrait I have been trying for 50 years now to be a pastor in a culture that doesn’t know the difference between a vocation and a job. The people who have been of most help to me in discerning this difference and embodying it in my life as a pastor have been artists. In 1955 I was a seminary student in New York City and had been assigned to do field work at West Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th Street. One of my responsibilities was to meet with a group of about 30 young adults on Friday nights. For some reason most of them were artists, primarily from the South and Midwest, who had come to New York hoping to find affirmation and opportunity as artists. Most were dancers and singers.Two were poets. There was one sculptor. All of them had menial jobs — secretaries, waiters, one drove a taxi, another sold shoes at Macy’s, whatever they had to do to pay the rent and eat — but none of them were defined by their jobs. All of them were serious artists, and being an artist was a way of life, a vocation. Willi Ossa wasn’t one of the group, but he was always there. He was the church janitor, but, like the artists in the group, “janitor” was not who he was. He himself was a serious painter. Something unspoken drew us together, and we became friends. Willi was German and had married the daughter of an officer in the occupying American army in postwar Germany. He and Mary had come to New York a couple of years before I met them. They lived in a third-floor walkup six blocks from the church. The nighttime janitorial job suited Willi because it left the days free for painting in natural light. It wasn’t long before they were invit-
ing me for supper before the evening meeting with the singles group. And then one Friday Willi said he would like to paint my portrait. In the weeks of our getting acquainted before the portrait painting began, I learned that Willi had a severely negative opinion of the church. He had lived through the war and personally experienced the capitulation of the German church to Hitler and the Nazis. His pastor had become a fervent Nazi. Willi had never heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Martin Neimoller or the Karl Barth of the Barmen Confession. All he knew was that the church he had grown up in hated Jews and embraced Hitler as a prophet. He couldn’t understand why I would be studying to be a pastor. He warned me of the corrupting
How do I prevent myself as a pastor from thinking of my work as a job that I am expected to do to the satisfaction of my congregation? How do I stay attentive to the call of God? influence it would have. He told me that churches reduced pastors to functionaries in a bureaucracy where labels took the place of faces and rules trumped relationships. And then he began painting my portrait. But he would never let me see what he was painting. One afternoon Mary came into the room, looked at the nearly finished portrait, and exclaimed, “Krank! Krank!” I knew just enough German to hear “Sick! Sick!” A couple of weeks later the portrait was complete, and he let me see it. He had painted me in a black pulpit robe, seated with a red Bible in my lap, my hands folded over it. The face was gaunt and grim, the eyes flat and without expresPRISM 2010
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sion. I asked him about Mary’s “krank” comment. He said that she was upset because he had painted me as a sick man. “I told her that I was painting you as you would look in 20 years if you insisted on being a pastor. Eugene, the church is an evil place,” he said. “No matter how good you and your intentions, the church will suck the soul out of you. I’m your friend. Please, don’t be a pastor.” His prophetic portrait entered my imagination, and quite truthfully it has never faded. Eventually I did become a pastor, but I have kept that portrait in a closet in my study for 55 years as a warning. I still pull it out occasionally and look into those vacant eyes: Willi’s prophetic portrait of the desolation he was convinced the church would visit on me if I became a pastor. I was with those artists and Willi Ossa on Friday evenings for two years. I had never before been immersed in a community of people who lived vocationally in a society in which everyone else seemed to be living a job description. Certainly they wanted to act and dance and sing on Broadway, and Willi would have loved to have had a showing of his paintings in one of the galleries on Madison Avenue. Their identity didn’t come from what anyone thought of them or paid them to do. Their identity was vocational — a calling. Nothing I have heard or read in the years since has made such a deep and lasting impression on me as those Friday nights on West 86th Street. And it has been the artists in my life — more than most others — who keep the distinction sharp between vocation and job description. Q This essay was adapted from chapter 4 of For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts (Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing House, 2010), edited by W. David O.Taylor. Used by kind permission of the publisher.