4. My spiritual journey includes a variety of knowledge about and experiences of God that have led to a deep and lasting relationship with Him.
What would you say is your primary way of learning about God?
How have your experiences of God shaped what you know or think about Him?
How have your experiences of God and your coming to know Him worked to create a personal relationship with Him? Speak to Jesus about this, celebrate what is true about your relationship with Him, and invite Him to show you what more He desires for you.
Our spiritual experiences are an essential part of our spiritual journey. We grow to know God in different ways, using our minds to know about God and our feelings and experiences to know Him as a person. The first kind of knowledge can be called rational knowledge and the other is experiential knowledge. Both are valuable ways of coming to know God, but they are different in their outcomes.
An experience of God leaves us with a greater sense of the reality of God; it often gives us an idea of how God feels about us and how much He loves us, and it creates a personal connection between God and us. Learning about God is essential in that it helps us know that our experiences of God are true and valid. An experience of God will typically include learning something about God, even though it may be just a deeper awareness of something we already knew. Learning about God rationally, however, will rarely include an experience of God.
Rational and experiential knowledge are both important but each also has its dangers. Rational knowledge about God without an experience of Him rarely leads to an intimate relationship with God. But experiences of God without a rational understanding of Him and His ways can lead people to misunderstand an experience or become overly dependent on experiences, which can lead to an unstable spiritual life that lacks discipline and spiritual grounding. If we depend exclusively on experiential knowledge of God we may find that we are worshiping the experience of God, rather than God Himself. When we only learn things about God, though, we will not develop an intimate relationship with Him.
Rational knowledge is important, experiences are essential, but our goal should be to use both to create a relationship with God that is not overly dependent on either kind of knowledge. Both kinds of knowledge depend on some kind of go between. In the case of rational knowledge, it could be a teacher, the Bible, an author, etc. Experiential knowledge may be facilitated by liturgy, communion, nature, music, community, art, stressful situations, unexpected blessings, and more. In each of these examples, the experience is connected to something we can see, feel, or experience.
What stands between us and our knowledge or experience of God is a “mediator”; something that transfers or mediates information.
But ultimately, God offers us relationship with Him, not just knowledge about Him. He offers us an unmediated relationship with Him that doesn’t depend on a go between. Think of this in terms of human relationships. A letter can tell us about a person; it mediates knowledge about the person to us—but the letter is not the person. A shared experience with a friend can give us a knowledge of that person but the experience is not the person. Both the letter and the shared experience help to inform us about the other person, but they are no substitute for the person.
So too with God; we can use mediated rational knowledge and experiences of God to help us come to know Him and develop a relationship with Him, but what is even better and what God desires is a direct, unmediated, relationship with us.