The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.
··· Tags pointing to: experience ···
A Question of Experience
To me, the God issue is a question of experience. For example, I want people I love not to die; I want friendships that are not betrayed; I want justice—desires that seem to make no sense, that appear in fact to be irrational…. There is, I admit, a certain uselessness to this, in terms of the fact that nothing in the world seems to correspond with or answer these desires. All that I ask of myself, and I think it is reasonable to ask everybody else, is to be faithful to that experience and to explore the implications of it. And if something is found that explains it, so that the question disappears, then fine, that’s the answer, and that’s that.
It’s laughing with your friend at a time when you shouldn’t. It’s the sweat in your palms wanting to know someone you see and the pit in your stomach when they actually see you. It’s being touched by hands that aren’t your own. It’s the thrill of an escape that almost wasn’t. It’s the embarrassment you feel, naked for the first time. It’s helping a friend find something they lost. It’s a smile, a joke, a song. It’s what someone does that they like doing. It’s what someone does that they like remembering. It’s the thinking of things you may never do and the doing of things you may never have thought. It’s the road ahead and the road behind. It’s the first step and the last and every one in between, because they all make up the good life.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.
Metaphor is the lifeblood of art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing now with what we have experienced before.
God comes to us disguised as our life.
Most people in my experience are still into fearing God and controlling God instead of loving God.
By Some Other Means Than Forgiveness
As long as you can deal with evil by some other means than forgiveness, you will never experience the real meaning of evil and sin.
Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.
For Whatever Reason
For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.
Experience
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Every human situation, the Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus once warned, is like a vase with two handles: If you have quarreled with your brother, you can grasp the handle which is the fact that you have quarreled, or you can grasp the handle which is the fact that he is your brother.