Still Stuck in a Book

Halfway done with Eugene
Peterson's memoir.

Back to page 12 which I put
in my journal : FOR BLOG
because he was stuck in a book.
A grand living book that nurtured
his imagination .
Sacred imagination.

"Several years later I came across
a book by the Scottish pastor,
George Adam Smith: The Histori-
cal Geography of the Holy Land.
He had spent several months on
horseback and mule crisscrossing
Palestine in the late 19th century,
describing what seemed to me from
his detailed reporting, every square
foot of that land. His vivid writing
put my feet on the ground where
Abraham walked, the fields where
David did battle, the garden in which
Jesus prayed. There were large,
fold-out maps that I studied in detail.
I lived in Smith's book.
I think I must have spent as many
months reading and rereading what
he wrote as he did writing it. After
those few months, my imagination
was furnished with a formidable
geographical bulwark against dis-
embodied truths, heaven disconnected
from earth. It became every bit as
significant to me as any text on theology
I was to read. The book confirmed for
me the emerging perception of " on
earth as it is in heaven, " a ladder , so
to speak. With Jacob, I knelt on this holy
ground , confessing with him that
"God was in this place , and I knew it not."


Charlotte Mason wrote this about the same
time as Sir George Adam Smith: ( vol. 6)

"At any rate he should go forth well furnished because
imagination has the property of magical expansion,
the more it holds the more it will hold."