Scripture as validated by experience, and experience as validated by Tradition, are good scales for one’s spiritual worldview.
—Richard Rohr
This week we highlight a central theme of Father Richard Rohr’s teaching philosophy in CAC’s Living School. Our personal experience is the filter through which we understand both Christian Scripture and Tradition.
No matter the religion or denomination in which we are raised, our spirituality still comes through the first filter of our own life experience. We must begin to be honest about this instead of pretending that any of us are formed exclusively by scriptures or our churches or religious traditions. There is no such thing as an entirely unbiased position. The best we can do is own and be honest about our own filters. God allows and invites us to trust our own experience. Then Scripture and Tradition hopefully keep our personal experiences both critical and compassionate. These three components—Scripture, Tradition, and experience—make up the three wheels of what we at the CAC call the learning “tricycle” of spiritual growth. [1]
Historically, Catholics loved to say we relied upon the great Tradition, but this frequently meant “the way it’s been done for the last hundred years.” What we usually consider “official teaching” changes every century or so. In all honesty, most of our operative images of God come primarily from our early experiences of authority in family and culture, while we interpret those teachings from more recent traditions and Scripture reading to validate them!
If we try to use “only Scripture” as a source of spiritual wisdom, we get stuck, because many passages give very conflicting and even opposite images of God. I believe that Jesus only quoted those Scriptures that he could validate by his own inner experience. At the same time, if we humans trust only our own experiences, we will be trapped in subjective moods and personal preferences. It helps when we can verify that at least some holy people and orthodox teachers (Tradition) and solid Scripture also validate our own experiences.
Jesus and Paul clearly use and build on their own Jewish Scriptures and traditions, yet they both courageously interpret them through the lens of their unique personal experiences of God. This is undeniable! We would do well to follow their examples. [2]
In CAC’s Living School: Essentials of Engaged Contemplation course, Brian McLaren teaches:
If we only had our own experiences to go by, every generation would have to start from scratch…. But if Tradition and Scripture are used to silence our own ongoing experience—our learnings, discoveries, thinkings and rethinkings, and quests—then … Tradition and Scripture become not the foundation on which we build, but the ceiling above which we cannot grow.
When we hold all three elements in creative tension, we’re part of an ongoing story, a multi-generational conversation, bringing together the experiences of everyone everywhere, through time, so they can be shared, reflected upon, and reevaluated in community, as a growing bank of wisdom resources for us and for future generations. [3]
Honoring Experience
Building on the metaphor of the tricycle of faith, Father Richard names that spiritual growth occurs as we pay attention to and learn from our own experiences:
The two wheels of sacred Scripture and Tradition can be seen as sources of outer authority, while only our personal experience leads to our inner authority. I am convinced we need and can have both. Only when inner and outer authority come together do we have true spiritual wisdom. Christianity in most of its history has largely relied upon official or outer authority, but we must now be honest about the value of inner experience. It was, of course, at work all the time but was not given much credence.
Information from outer authority does not necessarily lead to transformation, and we need genuinely transformed people today, not just people with answers. I don’t want the words in my books or these meditations to separate anyone from their own astonishment or to provide them with a substitute for their own inner experience. Theology (and authority figures) have done that for too many people and for too long. Instead, I hope my words simply invite readers on their own inner journey rather than become a replacement for it.
I am increasingly convinced that the word “prayer,” which has become a functional and pious thing for believers to do, was meant to be a descriptor and an invitation to inner experience. When wise spiritual teachers invite us to “pray,” they are in effect saying, “Go inside and know for yourself!” For too long we’ve insisted on outer authority alone, without any teaching of prayer, inner journey, and maturing consciousness. The results for the world and for religion have been disastrous. [1]
In our tricycle, experience is constantly balanced and critiqued by Scripture and Tradition. When all three “wheels” work together, we have a very wise person. That’s the easiest way to say it. At the CAC, that’s what we’re interested in doing: raising up not argumentative or righteous people, but compassionate and wise people. That’s our goal. [2]
Brian McLaren points to the ways that experience created both Scripture and Tradition:
If we have Scripture, experience, and Tradition around the table, it’s really all experience. Scripture is the experience of a group of people far, far in the past in a very different setting. Tradition is the experience of another group of people who, for a long time, have been interpreting what that first group of people said. Then I come along and with my own experience and a community, which bring all its experience, too. It’s a reminder that we have to be careful if any one person or group tries to edit out anybody else’s experience, because they don’t like it or they find it inconvenient.
I don’t want to be stuck simply in my own experience. It’s too limited. I need the experience that comes to me from Scripture and from Tradition. At the end of the day, we’re dealing with people’s experiences and interpretations of experience, and we need all the help we can get.
TODAY IS THE FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
Although not its formal name, I like calling it “New Commandment Sunday.”
John 13:31-35
At the last supper, when Judas had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’
I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
I’m sitting in a bookstore writing this musing.
Terrible storms swept through my neighborhood last night. Old trees, huge ones, fell in the 70 mph winds and crashed on cars and houses. Two people died. And, of course, we are without power and wifi.
I woke early, unsure of the time (it was around 6:30), and went outside to survey the damage. I stood on the porch and looked around. Our house and the cottage were unscathed. But buckets and flower pots were tossed, rain-pounded plants lay flat on the ground. Tree debris was everywhere, branches, leaves, whirly-gigs, and scores of brown stringy bits and piles of pollen.
When I glanced down, I noticed that one of the brown stringy things had landed in a perfect heart shape at my feet.
And there it was: in the midst of the wet and muddy chaos, a tiny token of love.
The storm-ravaged world seemed to have conspired with today’s gospel reading: I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
There’s some contention right now over who is “really” Christian. Some people don’t like the term “Christian nationalism” because they say it isn’t “Christian.” Although I confess to sympathize with this view, it must be said that Christian nationalists don’t think that I am a Christian — nor anyone who holds views like mine or churches that proclaim inclusion or have women pastors. According to them, I’m not a Christian. Then there are those who say like Jesus but don’t like the word, “Christian.” Still others embrace Christianity as a religious tradition, a moral philosophy, or familial identity.
The truth is all these different sorts of Christians claim to be disciples of Jesus; they all claim to be Christian.
It can be hard to sort out. And it can get ugly when quarrelsome believers divide themselves into “true” Christians and “fake” ones. Who counts as a Christian? What is the test of real faith? Christians themselves have created a mess of things by name-calling, exclusion, hubris, inquisitions, heresy hunting, and worse.
Jesus said: By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
Love.
That’s it.
Seems simple. Crystal clear.
The odd thing is that even the worst inquisitors knew this. During heresy hunts and witch burnings, they insisted that it was loving to torture one’s neighbor to save them from the fires of hell. Better a bit of pain and a few broken bones now than an eternity with Satan.
Equating love with coercion is a feature of some forms of Christianity. Coercion might be “soft,” as with some evangelists and missionaries I have known. But, in recent decades, the most gentle forms of corrective love have given way to outright violence — taking a variety of forms from child, domestic, and sexual abuse, denominational take-overs and purges, and political movements to assert Christian supremacy. Entire churches are based on the premise that love-is-coercive violence — of conscience, of social pressure, or actual physical injury.
These tendencies have, sadly, been with Christianity for centuries. Some historians think that the very first Christian to ever have been executed by other Christians was Priscillian of Avila in 385 C.E. Priscillian was found guilty of heresy by a synod of bishops and, with six of his followers, was put to death. In the 250 years following this event, theologian Harvey Cox claims, “Christian imperial authorities put twenty-five thousand to death for their lack of creedal correctness.”
I’m sure those imperial bishops and Christian rulers thought they were doing the loving thing.
The faith that had been born in persecution became the persecutors. As philosopher Rene Girard pointed out, “Beginning with Constantine, Christianity triumphed at the level of the state and soon began to cloak with its authority persecutions similar to those in which the early Christians were victims.”
Once you start attacking your own, dismissing their humanity, it is very easy to attack others you deem less than fully human.
Whatever Jesus said, far too many Christians found it easier to redefine love than follow his straight-forward command. His disciples began to constrict the circle of who counted as a “disciple” thereby limiting the sphere of love. Since you are to love “one another,” some speculated, you needn’t love those outside the sphere of Jesus’ followers. Love wasn’t for anyone. Just those who think or look or act like you.
And yes, this is the exact logic employed recently by J.D. Vance when he commented on the “order of love,” implying that love exists in concentric circles from family outward. First, you love those closest to you and then move out to others.
Problem is that most people don’t. Because human beings find ways to limit love.
That’s not what Jesus suggests in his famous command to love. Instead, as Pope Francis clapped back at J.D. Vance, love is a universal principle, “a fraternity open to all without exception.” It moves from the vast and cosmic and is demonstrated in the particular. From one of the Pope Francis’ final letters:
Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris(‘order of love’) that must be promoted is that which we discover….by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.
Jesus didn’t say, “love each other and then love everyone else.” No. He insisted that the love that the disciples had for each other would witness to a larger love, the same love he proclaimed and modeled in his life and death. Jesus didn’t love only a few. Jesus didn’t die for only the church. For God so loved that world that he gave his beloved Child so that everyone…..
Love moves from universal to particular back to universal. It doesn’t move from a particular community to a limited sphere of qualified recipients. If you love only your own, you won’t get much further than that. The history of Christianity is proof enough of the failure of love to expand.
According to Jesus, however, love is the marker, it is the test. If you love each other, you show the love that is the central reality of all creation. You’ve touched the vastness of cosmic love. Love witnesses to truth, dignity, justice, and beauty present in and with all. Human love, love in community, reveals that universal love of God, the very meaning and purpose of everything.
If you hold together in love, Jesus told his followers shortly before he died, you will make it through the coming storm. Because your love for each other will help you remember the truth of love. Love is the foundation, the shelter, the covering. Love is the way. Love is the only thing. It is the beginning and end. It is the guide to traverse the journey ahead.
And, like the small heart on my porch after the storm, you know it when you see it. It really isn’t that hard to spot love.
