An Emphasis on Experience

I am an experiential learner. I learned at a conference about how to successfully counsel couples that I was an experiential learner. The presenter was knowledgeable, the auditory part engaging, and the visual effects stimulating. They showed so many funny, sad, serious, and moving videos!

Yet, none of these things resonated with me like the role plays did. Through the role plays, I began to resonate with the words of Atticus to Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird.
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb in his skin and walk around in it.”

If I had to guess, I bet that I am not alone. I think that most, if not all of us are experiential with regards to love for God. At least, I was and still am. One of my pivotal experiences of God’s love for me began in the adoration chapel. I was eighteen years old and giving a missionary year. My director simply repeated to me over and over again: “It begins with knowing God’s love for you. If you do not know that, you cannot be secure.”

I experienced this love by going to the chapel, shifting my gaze from the suffering Christ on the cross to the living Lord present in the Eucharist. I would ask him, “Lord, do you love me? If you do, please show me. I need to know that you love me.” That was the starting point. I repeated this exercise in countless ways over that missionary year and began to experience how detailed his love was for me was and is.

Once I am confident that I am loved unconditionally, it is much easier for me to understand the love of Jesus if I first start from my own personal experience with human beings. After all, the Bible says, “If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God* whom he has not seen.How can you love a God whom you do not see, if you cannot love humans, whom you do see?” (1 John 4:20).

The best way I can describe Jesus’ love for us in the confessional is with an analogy. I have two nephews that it causes me great pain to correct. I am deeply sensitive, and so are they. My heart aches, literally—my stomach tightens and I become tense—even when I do so in as gentle and loving a manner as possible.

If I, Andree Ory, a little, little soul, feel pain when correcting a child whom I love and cannot wait to reassure them of my love, how much more will Jesus do the same for us?

Just as my director said, “Unless you experience God’s love for you, you cannot be secure.”

http://usccb.org/bible/1john/4

https://breathebooks.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/standing-in-a-persons-shoes-tkamb/