When one dismisses the institutional Church, or at least brackets it off into "its own world," it seems that one is left with little else than experience. Which is what I hear Tripp saying. It seems that Tripp celebrates that asserted reality, as though to say, "Good, what we have is primarly (or only?) experience."
But experience is so notoriously unstable. Yesterday I would have told an honest and earnest inquirer into how my day was going that it was a gloomy and depressing day. Yet were I to list all the things that happened, my inquirer would be hard pressed to understand my evaluation, because in actual fact far from depressing and gloomy, yesterday was filled with interest and accomplishment.
I suppose I understand why we want the world around us to respond to our experience of it. If we're down and depressed, we quite naturally want something good to happen. If we're frustrated, we understandably want things to go our way. This, I fear, is the notorious underbelly of experience. Far from being an accurate barometer of what's happening to us, it is clouded over with self-interest. We are right, it seems to me, to mistrust it in itself, or at least to attempt to ensure that our experience is evaluated and confirmed by something external to us.
Take for example concerns about "patriarchal" language in Bible translation and liturgy. Many devout and serious women experience the "male-oriented" language of Scripture and Eucharistic rite in a way that seems, according to their experience, to "block" their access to God. So the NIV people respond with the TNIV, a revision of the NIV New Testament that attempts to achieve a translation in which the aforementioned women no longer have the experience they do. Similarly, liturgical rites are scrubbed of father-male references. No longer does the Christological reference in the liturgy "Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord" have to be male, despite Jesus' own incarnational and historical maleness, it can be "Blessed is the one who comes in the Name of the Lord." Thus the Church's Scripture (in translation) and liturgy can be made to conform to our experience. Which presumably removes feelings of alienation.
But I suppose the question I have is, isn't the appropriate response to these feelings not to evaluate Scripture translation and liturgy (at least not as a first response), but to evaluate experience? I want to be as sensitive as I can--being a male who has never himself experienced gender-linguistic barriers to God in Bible or worship--and do not want to in any way devalue the pain and alienation felt by those women who feel a lack of access in these matters. But I do want to ask quite seriously: On what grounds can we trust such such an experience? How can we evaluate that such an experience indeed matches the reality it thinks it has felt? What do we do with the millennia of experience of women who worshipped with this sort of language (across place and time) and did not feel alienated from God? And then, is the appropriate remedy to conform the Scriptural and liturgical world around us to our experience? Or is it the case that our experience is that which needs healing and conformation to Scripture and liturgy? In short, does our experience itself block access, because of its own shortcomings and not those perceived to be in Scripture and liturgy? And might it be the case that a renewed understanding of Scripture and liturgy vis a vis experience will open that experience to the access to God that was always there, if unseen and unfelt?
Despite my best efforts, I'm sure to offend those who read this who have felt deep pain in their experience of what they take to be the patriarchal language of the Bible and worship. Let me assure those folks again that I do not want to devalue or negate their experience. I merely want to look at alternative explanations.
Glory to God in all things.
Posted by Clifton at February 12, 2003 01:10 PM | TrackBack