Category Archives: Scripture, Tradition, Experience
The “Guts” of my Faith
Trying to kind of sum up my faith and understanding of the spiritual in life.
Is there something/someone worth calling God? Yes! Why do I believe this? Because I’ve experienced unexplainable timing miracles over and over in my life and because when I separated Jesus from any religion, it became clear that Jesus fleshed out these things: 1. UNCONDITIONAL LOVE; 2. that we ALL are loved: and we are ALL created and called to love one another(even our enemy) just as WE are loved. 3. God’s essence (Spirit) is in everything and everyone if we are open to it. We are an essential part of the whole, but we individually are not equal to the whole. 4. Life, both as individuals and as humanity, is a school for the spiritual journey of evolution in loving, and we are learning to love still on the day we die. 5. We are not all dealt the same hand, so it is impossible to judge how well anyone is playing their hand. Only God knows that. 6. No person or group has all the truth and nothing but the truth. 7. We are part of God and God is part of us, but we are not the whole. 8.The Scriptures are letters from God written by people in earlier and more primitive cultures, but we hear God through the Scriptures with the understanding of the culture we are living in. with its differences AND its limits. 9.Truth and fact are not the same. Some Scriptures teach truth through metaphorical stories. The details are not facts, but the truth they are illustrating is real. 10. Jesus FLESHED out not only the Love of God for all humanity, but also the stages of growing into Loving as God Loves. His WAY is our WAY. He is the witness that we unfinished human beings can grow from the selfishness of an infant’s needs to the freedom to Love others more than ourselves, even those who seem to be our enemies, but who play a crucial part in our growing free to Love. 11. We not only can love our enemy, but choose to trust God when we feel abandoned just as Jesus ultimately did on his cross. 12.This life is not all there is. 13. Jesus as a person in History is not the only way to learning to love as God loves. But Jesus has definitely been my personal way, so I that is what I have to share.
At 87 I am still on my personal journey so may understand more tomorrow, but will not know it all in this life, just my God given personal potential through the grace of being loved. I pray for people, even those connected to cars broken down on the highway this way: “God, be with that person and their loved ones. Give them the grace they need physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to become the person you created them to be. I ask this in Jesus’ name, who fleshed our Your love for us. Amen.”
A Holy Balancing Act
The Daily Meditations this week focus on the first of Richard Rohr’s “Seven Themes of an Alternative Orthodoxy”:
Scripture as validated by experience, and experience as validated by Tradition, are good scales for one’s spiritual worldview.
We use the metaphor of a tricycle to illustrate this dynamic relationship. The front wheel is experience and the two back wheels are Scripture and Tradition. Richard explains:
People have every right to ask preachers and teachers, “By what authority do you say what you say?” That’s why I want to declare our methodology right at the beginning and say that it’s three-wheeled, which allows us to move forward. The front wheel, experience, may seem surprising, because neither Orthodox Christians, Catholics, nor Protestants were taught a lot about it. We make experience the front wheel because we all filter Scripture and Tradition through our own experience anyway! We cannot not do that. It’s common sense. It’s obvious.
But we didn’t have the courage or maybe the awareness to state what we now realize is obvious. Catholics thought that all our teaching was based on Tradition with a big “T”: the Tradition of the first 1,500 years at least. Well, maybe, but it was more Italian tradition, French tradition, German tradition, and that’s tradition with a little “t.”
So, we make it our work to get back to the big “T,” the perennial Tradition. What keeps recurring? What keeps coming back, century after century, in mystics, saints, and councils of the church? What do wise people keep saying? The Catholic intellectual St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) held that if it’s true, it’s from the Holy Spirit. [1] And if it’s from the Holy Spirit, it’s going to keep being discovered again and again.
Scripture is validated as well by two other wheels on our tricycle. If it’s true—and this is an act of faith—we would say that it somehow has to be found in Scripture. It can’t be directly contradicted by Scripture. We Catholics weren’t too good at that. We put all our eggs in the Tradition basket. So, let’s look for validation in both worlds—in verses from Scripture, and in writings of mystics, saints, prophets, church Fathers and Mothers, and Councils of the Church. [
Since the Reformation in the sixteenth century, much Christian infighting and misunderstanding has occurred over the Catholic and Orthodox emphasis on Tradition versus the Protestant emphasis on Scripture. Tradition usually got confused with small cultural traditions, and the Protestant cry of “Scripture alone!” gradually devolved into each group choosing among the Scriptures it would emphasize or ignore. Both currents have now shown their weaknesses and biases. They lacked the dynamic third principle of God experience: personal experience that is processed and held accountable by both Scripture and Tradition, as well as by solid spiritual direction and counseling. This is our trilateral principle at the Living School for Action and Contemplation.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 