In the summer of 2010, the rock band U2 was joined on tour by a retired pastor from Montana who, until not long before, had never heard of Bono and his fellow Dubliners. For most of his adult life, Eugene Peterson had worked as the pastor of a small church in Maryland and writer of Christian discipleship books that had many admirers but few readers. Then, in the early 1990s, Peterson began writing a paraphrase of the Bible, The Message, that would go on to sell multiple millions of copies. In 2001, Bono told Rolling Stone that The Message was among his favorite books, a fact which fans already knew from Bono’s onstage quoting of the text. He also began telling friends of his deep admiration for Peterson’s Run With the Horses, a reflection on the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah. Eventually, some of those friends were mutual friends of Eugene Peterson. A backstage meeting in Dallas’ Cowboys Stadium was arranged, and the world’s most famous rock singer and his favorite writer—a flattered and slightly flummoxed 78 year-old man—were united for a couple cities on the U2 360 tour.

Any Christian U2 fan will tell you: this Bono-Eugene Peterson business is an evangelical dream come true. For several decades, one of the most palpable features of evangelicalism has been a desire to appeal to the secular world. As their consumer-conditioned megachurches and copycat culture products attest, evangelicals strive to be relevant to the world as they see it. (Not to put too fine a point on it, the flagship magazine of the young adult evangelical set is entitled Relevant.) The Message has been the perfect Bible for its evangelical moment because it reconditions scripture for laid-back modern ears. Peterson translates the twenty-third Psalm from “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” to “God, my shepherd! I don’t need a thing.” In the Lord’s Prayer, “Thine is the kingdom” becomes “You’re in charge!” and “Amen” becomes “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Peterson has called The Message an effort in relevance, and by one count, the pastor and his work are at the very heart of the American evangelical project in the contemporary era. His publisher has churned out countless derivatives—The Message for teens, for kids, etc.—and has made him a prominent figure within evangelical churches.

But as Peterson’s other writing has long attested, he’s never been at home in the evangelical world. And in the last half-decade, Peterson has become one of the most trenchant critics of the mainstream American church and its pursuit of relevance, and he has taken to publicly bemoaning the diminished spirituality contemporary churches have produced.

In 2005, Peterson published Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, the first of a five-volume series on what he calls “spiritual theology.” Each of the books takes on major Christian themes—Jesus, the Bible, the church, community—and reexamines them in light of a new—or, as Peterson would argue, ancient—conception of spirituality. The books aim to solve the problem of the evangelical church, to halt its attempts at cultural relevance, and to remedy the thin, consumption-driven spirituality recent evangelicalism has created.

Peterson historicizes the term “spiritual,” noting that St. Paul used it to describe personal actions and attitudes that emanate from the work of the Holy Spirit in all Christians. That’s “spirituality” as Peterson sees it—democratic, available, personal, grounded. But in the centuries after St. Paul, the term was bastardized. For the medieval monastics, “spiritual” described only the most perfect, most holy believers. In the early modern era, Catholic laity such as Madam Guyon tried to reclaim the term, arguing, writes Peterson, that “the monasteries had no corner on the Christian life well-lived.” But Mother Church rebuffed those efforts, and la spiritualite became “a term of derogation for laypeople who practiced their devotion too intensely.”

Peterson worries that in our day spirituality is too abstract. The term should call to mind things grounded—God in the details of grimy, gritty daily lives. “It’s just ordinary stuff,” Peterson writes. God’s work “is all being worked out in and under the conditions of our humanity: at picnics and around dinner tables, in conversations and while walking along roads, in puzzled questions and homely stories, with blind beggars and suppurating lepers, at weddings and funerals. Everything that Jesus does and says takes place within the limits and conditions of our humanity.” The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had it right—Christ plays in ten thousand places.

The problem with the American church, argues Peterson, is that it does not understand this spirituality. The pursuit of relevance has fostered a business-savvy, goal-driven, method-mad church that preaches the truth of Jesus while ignoring the way of Jesus. (One book in the spiritual theology series, The Jesus Way, is dedicated entirely to this problem.) Peterson calls the most successful Christian congregations “state-of-the-art consumer churches.” He writes of his dismay in finding “my Christian brothers and sisters uncritically embracing the ways and means practiced by the high-profile men and women who lead large corporations, congregations, nations, and causes, people who show us how to make money, win wars, manage people, sell products, manipulate emotions, and who then write books or give lectures telling us how we can do what they are doing.” In Peterson’s view, this is why the church is failing: “our religious institutions…prove disappointing to more and more people who find themselves zealously cultivated as consumers in a God-product marketplace or treated as exasperatingly slow students preparing for final exams on the ‘furniture of heaven and the temperature of hell.’”

The American church, Peterson argues, is not hospitable to spirituality because it is not hospitable to the unimpressive way of Jesus.

When Peterson set out to make the Bible relevant, he didn’t mean to make it hip, or even successful. He meant to make it ordinary—to make it spiritual. He meant to show people that spirituality is nothing special as we normally understand “special.” It’s the quotidian quality of Jesus. In Peterson’s straightforward words, “life, life, and more life.” Peterson is straining to help Christian believers to understand that that message is the message of God.

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” (1877)

Though writing a generation later, the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins invokes a Romantic enthusiasm for the natural world, finding there not only artistic and intellectual stimulation but also a resource informing theological contemplation. Hopkins’s art stands out in this respect, for though there are remarkable exceptions, it is generally the case that Christian thinking is anthropocentric in orientation. Perhaps fascination with post-mortem destinations (heaven, hell, purgatory) in much Christian discourse minimizes perceived value in the material world. Alternatively, maybe it is the tendency to stress the unique status of humans as made in the image of God (see Genesis 1:26), and the fallen state of the post-Edenic universe that is to blame. Whatever the reason, many Christian thinkers seem reluctant to recognize anything of spiritual import in the ecological wonders that surround us. To my mind, this is a missed theological opportunity. Hopkins’s willingness to see the divine purpose in each thing—What I do is me: for that I came—and his awareness that all creation is “charged with the grandeur of God,” as he says elsewhere, inspires a worldview that refuses to put self, and humanity as a whole, at the centre of all things.

Hopkins’s complex poetry gestures toward a spirituality, a communion of individuals with the world around, including animals. And I suspect I am not alone in saying experience resonates with this insight. Such was the case for me a few years back when we lost our spirited greyhound named Tiger after a short illness. It was a heartbreaking diagnosis. Osteosarcoma is a bone cancer that leaves few viable treatment options, apart from pain management. The brief time between diagnosis and our final goodbyes was not easy. There were frequent trips to the animal hospital, and the financial costs of palliative care, including an expensive routine of medications. Far worse was the emotional toll as we waited the inevitable but gradual progress of the disease. We wondered constantly when the quality of life ends for an animal, and whether the decision to delay euthanizing was for our own benefit or hers.

Companion animals inspire much behaviour well described as spiritual in the broadest sense of the word. These creatures have a remarkable capacity to disrupt self-centeredness and inspire affection and appreciation for something completely “other.” Though with Hopkins I contemplate and define spirituality in light of both Christian theology and the wonders and mysteries of the natural world, there is inevitable dissonance that results from each attempt to link the two, particularly when animals are involved. The church’s history boasts many teachers finding religious meaning in encounters with other sentient beings, and yet many more reflect the deeply entrenched view that the natural world does not matter. As early as the writings of St. Paul in the mid-first century, we find language appearing to minimize the significance of animals: “it is written in the law of Moses, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.’ Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Or does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was indeed written for our sake” (1 Corinthians 9:9-10). At least on the surface, Paul appears to undermine the force of a Torah regulation clearly intended to protect labouring animals in favour of an anthropocentric remark. No doubt influenced by Paul’s thinking, the church has a sorry history of neglecting the importance of animals in the religious life, not to mention its tendency to overlook moral responsibilities toward them. Despite Paul’s interpretation of Deuteronomy 25:4, biblical literature provides plenty of evidence to suggest that animals are more than ornaments in the world God made. This is not the context to develop a biblical theology of nonhuman creation but suffice it to say that just as the heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19:1), so too animals reveal something of their maker. This God declares them “very good” along with everything else he made (Genesis 1:31). One striking account of the religious consequence of animals in the context of biblical literature is a scene in the Book of Job.

“Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads its wings toward the south?” (Job 39:26). This is but one of a litany of questions God puts to Job once he responds to this man’s complaints from the whirlwind. Job lost everything and understandably, he voices despair, sorrow, and anger over his sorry plight. Yet God does not explain the man’s losses and torments but instead directs Job to observe the world around him, including a wide array of nonhuman species (Job 38-41). Lions, mountain goats, wild asses, eagles, deer, oxen, ostriches, horses, and the mysterious but mighty Behemoth and Leviathan appear among the wonders of the natural world God describes, and the effect on Job is striking and perhaps predictable. “I am of small account,” he says to God, “what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but will proceed no further” (40:4-5). The experience transforms Job. His worldview no longer centres on his own predicament. He gains perspective, acknowledging his minuteness (which is not to say insignificance) in relation to God and the world around him. This ancient Jewish text offers another obvious yet profound lesson. Our interactions with the divine occur within a richly diverse and majestic world populated with seemingly endless species, and these nonhuman animals are every bit as dependent on God for life and wellbeing as human beings (see e.g., Psalms 78:23-25; 145:15; 104:21; 147:9).

Caring for and grieving the loss of my dog turned my thoughts away from myself and toward God, the ultimate “Other.” My relatively short time with Tiger in life awakened compassion and celebration of God’s good world, and my journey with her through the valley of the shadow of death evoked a longing to find meaning and solace in loss. Much to my surprise, this animal-human relationship reminded me I am not at the centre of a God-ordered universe. For the nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, all living things reveal the creator God, with each kingfisher and dragonfly—and let us add each companion animal—offering a glimpse of the divine.