Explanations vs. Experience

“The clue for me is to separate the Christ experience from the Christ explanations. All explanations are time-bound and time-warped, they are never eternal.” ~ John Shelby Spong, A New Christianity for a New World

Several years ago at this time of the year, it was suggested to me that I might find it helpful to read “The Coming of the Cosmic Christ” by Matthew Fox. I started reading it with a feeling of excitement. Finally I was going to ‘get’ what the Cosmic Christ was all about. I would finally understand!!! Suffice it to say that I didn’t quite make it all the way through the first chapter before the book got put down and has remained on the shelf ever since. All my hopes that a more modern explanation of the Christ experience might prove meaningful had been in vain.

However I have just now completed an 8 month book study on another of Fox’s books ‘Original Blessing’ which has given me some insight into just why I was so disappointed in ‘The Coming of the Cosmic Christ.” It goes directly to the quote by John Spong that I started out with. Matthew Fox is my age and therefore of my generation. So one might well expect that our way of understanding the world might be somewhat similar. However Fox was a Roman Catholic priest who was ex-communicated by the church. He is speaks from the position of a male cleric who’s life has been centred on the church for the most part, for whom God is primarily male, who lived in a protected environment for most of his life. In short, someone whose life experience has been very different from mine. It is no wonder that I find that I have little in common with his writing.

I used to feel that there was something ‘wrong’ with me when I didn’t appreciate someone else’s writing as I felt I was expected to do. What this experience has shown me is that I can’t rely on other people, no matter how learned or ‘holy’ they are, to explain my experience with their explanations, not even the writers of the gospels. Their writings are based on their experiences not mine. While it might be interesting and in some cases instructive to read where those experience have taken them, unless they resonate with me as talking in some way about my experiences, they aren’t going to take me farther along the path I am on.

As it says of the scripture (thanks to Thomas Cranmer) in Proper 32 in the Book of Alternative Services, we are to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them” but what I never noticed until now is that it doesn’t say ‘and take as your own/believe implicitly in what they say’. What it does tell us to do is to think about what is said in conjunction with what we have experienced as our truth. We are the only ones that can make that decision for us!

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