Spirit Story
as Experienced
Spirituality involves not just talking about
something, not just reading about or
considering something, not even just doing something: it involves actually experiencing life in a new way.
Spirituality makes possible—makes one capable
of—specific kinds of experience.
The primacy of experience may be the profound spiritual truth¼In the process of telling our own story and
listening to stories and beginning to live out our discoveries, we find that
certain experiences flow from them—
Release, Gratitude,
Humility, Tolerance, Forgiveness, and Being-at-home.
These
experiences share this in common—they cannot be commanded.
We do not call them forth when we want them; they become available to us when
we
need them, if we are available to them.
They happen and we
experience them, if we are open to them, but we cannot control when or how they
happen, no can we control when or how we experience them. Once again, we find ourselves locked in
paradox: We cannot command precisely
those realities that we most crave.
The language that is storytelling involves
not dogma or commandment, not things to be done or truths to be believed, not
theory, conjecture, argument, analysis, or explanation, but a way of conversation shared by those who
accept and identify with their own imperfection.
A
tradition of spirituality conveys
experience rather than “teaches” concepts.
Always truthful to experience, the language makes it possible to see—and thus to understand—reality differently.
And it is in this different vision that spirituality begins.
The
“language” works not because those telling their stories describe experiences of
Freedom, Gratitude, and so on,
but because, in the very telling of their stories they actually experience those realities.
Those who undergo profound
change, those who explore and make discoveries,
enter what has been termed a new “universe of
discourse.” It is less that that they
speak differently, in new terms, than
that they see differently, in
new categories, coming to understand
reality in new ways.
How we speak shapes how we
think, and therefore what we see, and then
in turn
what and how
we experience.
Language thus fashions experience:
It is
how we make it “our own”, our “world
view.”
Because
there is a constant back-and-forth flow between language and vision, between how we speak and what we see, spirituality influences how we live by
shaping what we experience.