The Voice of Experience

Week of Monday, March 4, 2002

In an influential little booklet that attempts to explain the path to mature Christian discipleship, there is a diagram of a train with three cars: fact, faith and feelings. The clear implication is that my affective life, my feelings and my many human experiences are an unreliable source for insight on the journey with Jesus, and that faith in the facts of Scripture alone are sufficient. I no longer believe this. Rather, with Frederick Buechner, I believe that if God speaks to us anywhere other than through Scripture and the church, it is through learning to listen to your life experiences.¹

Since we are all products of our experiences, part of Christian discipleship requires us to reconcile the raw data of these experiences with our understanding of God and the Gospel. Rather than distrusting our experiences, we need to listen to them and somehow discern in them the tender voice of God.

I think this is why certain parts of the Bible are so powerfully compelling. The Psalms are such universal favorites among almost all believers because in them we see ordinary people struggling to make sense of our varied human experiences. They grapple with the ups and downs of life, its bitter tragedies as well as moments of epiphany and glory, the sense of God's nearness and the terrifying feeling of his hiddenness, the dejection of sin and the hope of salvation. We like the Psalms because they are experientially messy, just like our own lives. In Romans 7:14–25, to take another example, Paul's best intentions to serve God seem constantly besieged by the tenacity of his sinful nature—and who has not had that experience?

Many of life's most important and powerful experiences come unwanted and unsought, through no choice of our own, such as a debilitating injury, or perhaps a life-altering illness such as John Nash's descent into paranoid schizophrenia (portrayed so poignantly in the film A Beautiful Mind). We know that some gay people claim to have made no choice in their sexual orientation, any more than did heterosexuals. Half of all marriages fail, but 100% of the children of those marriages are impacted for a lifetime. Unfortunately, we cannot ask for a new hand of cards; we must play the cards dealt to us.

Experiences like these can be difficult if not impossible to explain, but this too has Biblical precedent. How can one explain how in the very same chapter 12 of Acts, James is martyred but Peter obtains a miraculous escape? Similarly, in the very same passage Peter denied ever knowing the Lord and Judas betrayed him. Both wept tears of remorse, but one recovered while the other committed suicide (Matthew 26:69–27:10). An apparently inexplicable heartache for many parents is to see several of their kids succeed in life but others fail miserably.

If you have not had the same or similar life experiences as another person, it can be very easy to judge them. Growing up in a teetotaler's home makes it hard to appreciate why so many people love going to bars. People find it easy to judge a pastor whose marriage fails, but they might see things differently if they had had similar experiences of somehow, perhaps inexplicably, becoming genuinely attracted to another person. At a recent faculty fellowship Bill Newsome shared with us the story of Franz Stangl, an ordinary Austrian policeman who ended up the chief commander at Treblinka. At one level, who could not despise this man? But when you sat and listened to Gitta Sereny's interview with Stangl and heard his experiences, explanations, rationalizations and concessions, it was shocking to admit: “My God, that could be me.”² God save us from judgmentalism.

One of my favorite texts from a favorite Christian writer encourages us to listen to our lives, all of it: the choices we make and the unsought experiences, the explicable and the inscrutable, the good and the bad:

By examining as closely and as candidly as I could the life that had come to seem to me in many ways a kind of trap or dead-end street, I discovered that it really wasn't that at all. I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas. Taking your children to school and kissing your wife good-bye. Eating lunch with a friend. Trying to do a decent day's work. Hearing the rain patter against the window. There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly. In writing those lectures and the book they later turned into, it came to seem to me that if I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. What I started trying to do as a writer and as a preacher was more and more to draw on my on experience not just as a source of plot, character, illustration, but as a source of truth.³

In his three short memoirs (The Sacred Journey, Now and Then, and Telling Secrets), for Buechner this has meant, among other things, discovering the presence of God even in his father's alcoholism and suicide, and in his daughter's severe struggle with anorexia.

The evangelical church has rightly guarded the divinity of Jesus from those who would turn him into a mere peasant preacher or wandering mystic. But in doing so we risk losing the radical significance of his full humanity. The writer to the Hebrews reminds us that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:15–16). This is the same Jesus who knew God as an ever present, tender Father (Abba), but who also when on the cross could only scream with pangs of abandonment (Matthew 27:46). He beckons the murderer Moses, the adulterer David, the betrayer Peter (in fact, all twelve disciples fled and deserted Jesus, Matthew 26:56), and yes, even you and me, to bring all of life and our experiences to our loving Father. As Buechner says, this exercise of autobiography is in fact a form of prayer.

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1. Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (San Francisco: Harper, 1983), p. 3.
2. The story is told by Gitta Sereny, “Colloquy with a Conscience,” in The Healing Wound:Experiences and Reflections, Germany, 1938–2001 (NY: WW Norton, 2001).
3. Buechner, pp. 86–87.

The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Copyright ©2002 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.