contemplating the incomprehensibles
Reminder to self and any readers that my rambling nonsense on +Time is for myself alone and no one else; and that nothing I jot down has to please anyone, especially myself. Nor, once I've gone on to the next sentence and paragraph, do I necessarily agree with it.
Anyway,
For some reason, which, as I recall, I understood at the Time but have forgotten, probably because, retired and resigned to sinking deeper and deeper into retirement, I no longer deal or teach in it or think about it, some years ago we were discouraged from continuing to use the adage that our Anglican theology is formed, informed, by the three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason.
Then at some point thirty or so years ago our bishop mused with us at a clergy conference, that it seems to have become a four-legged stool that includes Experience. At that Time, I had also been reading the same notion in musings coming out of the United Methodist Church: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience as the basis for developing theology, spirituality, worldview.
Now, below, Father Richard discusses three wheels of wisdom: Scripture, Tradition, and Experience.
Rather liking the four legs, or four wheels, instead of three, I'm sticking with including Reason in the formula. And not limiting Reason to our pious description of Reason to mean interpreting scripture as we are guided by the Holy Spirit (as opposed to the infallible inerrant that reduces Faith to some sort of certitudinous faux-knowledge).
Reason meaning that I apply my intelligence and common sense to the obvious v. the absurd. Experience meaning that I engage the ever developing lessons of life. Reason and Experience meaning that I employ intelligence and observations that keep informing me throughout life such that my spiritual worldview is never set in concrete (i.e., doctrine, dogma, creed) but continues to evolve; including that I can go on loving the stories, singing the songs, waiting for Santa and the Easter Bunny, the bursting joy of "Adeste Fideles" and "Welcome, happy morning!", and eating the Bread and sipping the Wine, while appreciating mankind's endless search and uncovering of knowledge.
To continue using Father Richard's term from below, my "spiritual worldview" is informed and expanded by Hubble and JWST images beyond the flat-world, geocentric Nicene Fathers. Just as the Universe itself continues to expand, there is no end to the growth possibilities for our realization and appreciation of the world's incomprehensibilities: we do not have to have answers.
Mindful, as I look out into the Universe, of the Father incomprehensible, the + Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations
Week Twenty-One: Tricycle of Faith
Sunday, May 18, 2025
Honoring Three Wheels of Wisdom
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]