"Respecting Our Experience"
"Respecting Our American Experience"
The cultural experience of each country has to be respected and listened to, for God has spoken through the minds and hearts of each people. Each, I believe, holds different parts of the Great Mystery in special awareness.
If we’re going to listen to the experience of our brothers and sisters in the Third World, I think, in fairness, we have to grant the same privilege to ourselves. We have to respect and listen to the only experience that we Americans have had. We have to trust it, we have to say, somehow there’s some truth in it.
We must recognize the good in our society before we can eliminate the bad because good and evil are two sides of one coin. You can’t recognize evil without recognizing good. You can’t accept the one without, to some degree, accepting or at least understanding the other.
What is the American experience? What is our experience of life, for good and for ill? It’s the only experience you and I have. I would list the essentially good values of American culture as: personalism, freedom and self-determination, pluralism, up-front honesty, democratic self-criticism, a not-so-bad emphasis on productivity and practical effect, and a natural egalitarianism that disdains caste systems in any form. These are all potentially gospel and part of the cosmic mystery of the Body of Christ.
The American experience has formed our psyche. God is willing to use these values. We must be willing to work with them, too, recognizing both their gift and their temptation.
from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction
The cultural experience of each country has to be respected and listened to, for God has spoken through the minds and hearts of each people. Each, I believe, holds different parts of the Great Mystery in special awareness.
If we’re going to listen to the experience of our brothers and sisters in the Third World, I think, in fairness, we have to grant the same privilege to ourselves. We have to respect and listen to the only experience that we Americans have had. We have to trust it, we have to say, somehow there’s some truth in it.
We must recognize the good in our society before we can eliminate the bad because good and evil are two sides of one coin. You can’t recognize evil without recognizing good. You can’t accept the one without, to some degree, accepting or at least understanding the other.
What is the American experience? What is our experience of life, for good and for ill? It’s the only experience you and I have. I would list the essentially good values of American culture as: personalism, freedom and self-determination, pluralism, up-front honesty, democratic self-criticism, a not-so-bad emphasis on productivity and practical effect, and a natural egalitarianism that disdains caste systems in any form. These are all potentially gospel and part of the cosmic mystery of the Body of Christ.
The American experience has formed our psyche. God is willing to use these values. We must be willing to work with them, too, recognizing both their gift and their temptation.
from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction
posted by LuisVelasco @ 7:01 AM
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