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.
