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LET'S TAKE A LOOK – AGAIN – ATEXPERIENCEMichael G. Lawler aa Director, Graduate Religious Education Program,Creighton UniversityPublished online: 10 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Michael G. Lawler (1971) LET'S TAKE A LOOK – AGAIN – ATEXPERIENCE, Religious Education: The official journal of the Religious EducationAssociation, 66:5, 341-347, DOI: 10.1080/0034408710660505

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0034408710660505

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LET'S TAKE A LOOK - AGAIN - AT EXPERIENCE

Michael G. Lawler

Director, Graduate Religious Education Program,Creighton University

Experience may be actual, imagined, or created, and wecan teach to it as well as from it

Experience has always been acclaimed asthe best teacher in many fields. But it isonly in recent years that it has been toutedas the best teacher, too, in religion. Theexperiential approach in religion has beenbased upon such delightful, and delight-fully vague, slogans as: religious truth isnormal experience understood in depth; re-ligious education is concerned with bring-ing men to awareness of the total meaningof their experience. Such slogans are won-derful; they are even true. It is only whenwe ask what they mean that we begin towonder. This essay is an attempt to arti-culate various facets of this meaning formyself, in the added hope that it may beuseful to others too.

TWOFOLD IMPORTANCE OFEXPERIENCE

Religious education is concerned with thecommunication of God's word to men. Itworks, therefore, in a dipole, one pole ofwhich is God's word, the other pole men.To understand in what way experience isimportant in religious education we musttry to understand in what way it is impor-tant to each of these poles. For if it is im-portant for each, or either, of these poles,

Religious Education Vol LXVI No S Sept-Oct 1971

it must also be important for religious edu-cation.

THEOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE

God's word comes to men in that strangecategory we call revelation. The entireChristian structure arises on the basis of thisrevelation, and so we might easily assumethat this has been thoroughly examinedthrough the years. There is only one dif-ficulty with such an easy assumption; it isfalse. The truth is that revelation as atheological problem, as distinct from anapologetical one, has only recently begun tobe examined.1 There are many books writ-ten previously on the topic De Revelatione,but their focus of interest is not upon thetheological question of how we are to con-ceive what revelation is, but rather upon theapologetic questions: is revelation possible,is it necessary, did it happen? Having an-swered all these questions in the affirmative,theologians and the church were contentto give a cursory answer to the more im-portant question: what is revelation? It is

1. Two of the mote readable expositions of thistopic are: Latourelle R., The Theology of Revela-tion, (New York: Alba House, 1966); Moran G.,Theology of Revelation, (New York: Herder &Herder, 1966).

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342 Let's Take a Look — Again — at Experience

God speaking.2 Contemporary theologianshave been asking: what does it mean thatGod speaks? And their answers have beensummed up by the contemporary church inthe statement that the plan of revelation isrealised by deeds and words having an innerunity.3 The official interpretation of thisphrase deeds and words leads us to the re-alisation of the importance of human experi-ence in the process of revelation.

To anticipate, deeds and words meansexperience that is interpreted. The best wayfor us to understand this is to take an ex-ample which is well known to us from thebiblical record of revelation. Jews were en-slaved in Egypt. They reached a point whenthey decided they had had enough, and theyplanned to leave under the leadership ofMoses. And leave they did. Here is a realhuman experience, a happening deeplytouching the lives of those people who ex-perienced it. This is the deed referred toin the Vatican document. But these peoplelooked to a greater depth. They looked be-yond the obvious human event and saw adeeper meaning in it, they saw in it the ac-tivity of God. They interpreted this eventas the place where Yahweh, their God, actedin their lives. Putting together the expe-rience (deed) and the charism-guided in-terpretation (word) they articulated theirbelief that their God was a saving God.They came to know their God experientiallyby their reflection upon their real human ex-perience.

The process of man's in-depth reflectionupon his real experience to articulate reli-gious truth about God reached its culmina-tion in Jesus of Nazareth. In this manGod lived a human life and constantly in-terpreted it in depth. Jesus of Nazareth isthe last word about God; he is definitive;there is no further word to come after him

2. See: Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum(edition XXXIII), n. 3004; Moran, op. cit., p.25 ff.

3. Abbott W. M., Constitution on Divine Rev-elation, art. 2, The Documents of Vatican II (NewYork: 1966).

— except, paradoxically, himself. Forthough Jesus died, he was raised from thedead4 and now lives, and will come again.Only when he comes again will he be fullyunderstood, and so only when he comesagain will God be fully understood. Thefullness of revelation is not behind us butbefore us. We must grow towards it.How? Following the same pattern that hasalways been followed, the pattern of wordsand deeds, the pattern of reflection uponand interpretation of our real experience.God's word, God himself, comes to articu-lation in us through our experience. Ex-perience is the best teacher, even about God.It must, therefore, be of supreme importancein religious education.

PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE

Research on the intellectual development ofa child has demonstrated that at each stageof development the child has a character-istic way of seeing the world and explain-ing it to himself. The task of teaching anysubject to him at any particular stage isreally a task of translating the subject intoterms in which the child sees things. Thework of Piaget and many others suggests thatthere are three stages in the intellectual de-velopment of the child. The first stage,roughly a pre-school stage, is the stage ofintuitive, pre-operational thinking. The sec-ond stage, roughly a grade school stage, isthe stage of concrete operational thinking.We will focus briefly on this stage. Thethird stage is the stage of abstract opera-tional thinking.

The characteristic of the second stage, thestage of concrete operations, is that suchoperations are means for understanding onlyimmediate present reality, what we are call-ing experience. The child is able to givestructure to the things he experiences, buthe is not yet able to deal with possibilitiesnot already experienced. This means hecannot systematically handle the full rangeof alternative possibilities that could exist atany given time. This limitation is best seen

4. Acts 2, 32; 3, 15; 4, 10; 1 Cor 15, 4.

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Michael G. Lawler 343

in his judgments on strictly verbal problems,that is problems which for him are notconcrete and actual. He will tend to judgevery egocentrically in terms of his own ex-perience. For example, Johnny, a nine yearold Omahan, is presented with this verbalproblem. Paul is a nine year old living inKenya, Africa. One day, while playing bythe river, Paul falls in and when he getshome he is muddied from head to foot.What will Paul do with himself and hisclothes when he gets home? Johnny willtend to reply that Paul will put his clothesin the wash pile and himself in the bath,for this is what Johnny himself might do.He is not yet able to deal with the unknownpossibility that Paul does not have a washingmachine or a bath. He judges the verbalproblem on the ground of his own experi-ence.

Ronald Goldman has demonstrated thatprecisely the same type of egocentric judge-ment takes place in religious thinking.5 Asample instance from his research will suf-fice to illustrate the point. The researchtechnique was a clinical one. The childrenwere told certain bible stories that theyknew well and were then questioned individ-ually on the stories. One of the stories wasMoses' call by God, the story of the burningbush. One detail in the story is that Mosesis told to take his shoes off because theground is holy,6 and one of the questionsput to the children bore on this detail: whydid Moses take his shoes off? One littlegirl, in the age group we are focusing on,stumped the interviewer by replying: "be-cause there was grass in the place." Thereis absolutely no mention of grass in the bib-lical account, and the interviewer is left withthe problem of explaining why she shouldbring forward this explanation of Mosestaking his shoes off.

It took a painstaking search to uncoverthe reason. Every Sunday the little girl'sfather took her to the park where he let her

take her shoes off and run barefoot in thegrass. If Moses took his shoes off, it couldonly be for the same reason; (piece togetherSunday — holy, shoes off — grass, and youhave roughly her reasoning). The pointfor us is this: this bible story, told to com-municate religious truth, is interpreted not onthe basis of what it says but on the basis ofthe experience of the child who hears it.This is just one sample out of many pos-sible ones which lead to the duplication ofthe conclusion we reached in the precedingsection. Experience is of supreme impor-tance in the child's understanding of reli-gious truth and is, therefore, also of su-preme importance in religious education.

MEANING OF EXPERIENCE7

It is now time to try to specify what wemean by experience. An experience is ahappening in life which affects my wholebeing, not just my body, not just my intel-lect, but me in my entire being. Experi-ential teaching seeks to ensure that what istaught affects the entire person, not just thatpart of him which is intellectual.

It is here we must confront an objectionwhich is frequently made against experien-tial teaching: if teaching is to be geared al-ways to the experience of boys and girls itwill necessarily be very limited in its scope,since their experience is very limited. Thisobjection seems to be based on two prem-ises: first, that the experience which is thebasis of experiential teaching is limited toexperience which the children8 have actuallyhad; secondly, that the experience in ques-tion is limited to the experience of only theboys and girls involved in the teaching situa-tion. We intend to show in our succeedingsections that both these premises are false.

5. Goldman R., Religious thinking from Child-hood to Adolescence (London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1964).

6. Ex 3, 5.

7. Many of the ideas expressed in this sectionare stimulated by Hubrey Douglas, Teaching theChristian Faith "Today, (Nutfield, Surrey: NCEC,1965).

8. In these closing sections we shall refer to thereligious education situation as if it concerned onlychildren. Since it, of course, concerns also adoles-cents and adults, the reader may substitute "ado-lescent" or "adult" whenever he meets "child" inthe text.

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344 Let's Take a Look — Again — at Experience

EXPERIENCE: ACTUAL,IMAGINED, CREATED

To use actual experience in our teaching ofreligion is perfectly legitimate, for it is incomplete accord with the pattern of revela-tion, the pattern of deeds and words. Theactual experience (deed) is examined indepth and there issues an interpretation(word) which allows the child to articulatein some greater depth his relationship toGod. For instance, a fruitful source of ac-tual experience with adolescents is their homelife. Is there disharmony in their homelife? If there is, what are the main causes?Is it that the adolescent does not do his fullshare at home? Is it, perhaps, his cominghome late? Is it that, in his eyes, his parentsspend so much time arguing one with theother? If there is not disharmony, what isthe reason for this? How are good rela-tions maintained between his parents andbetween his parents and him? Questions ofthis nature, bearing on this one sample areaof actual experience, enable the adolescent toreflect on his home life in depth and, on thebasis of this reflection, articulate better thechallenge of Christian relationship. The ac-tuality and relevance of the topic beinganalysed provide an unsurpassable basis forthe discovery of new meaning in his Chris-tian life.

It would be madness, however, to assumethat the experiential teaching of religionrests solely on the basis of actual experience.The child's, and the adolescent's and, yes,the adult's actual experience is so limitedthat such a basis would be too restricted forfull learning. Those who would limit ex-perience simply to this base appear to do sofrom a philosophic confusion between ac-tual and real. There is a whole field of realexperience which for any given person mightnot be actual. What then? The teacherwho is always a vital element in any teach-ing situation, including the religious one,has to assume his teaching responsibility andbring this real experience into the child'sconsciousness, so that in a real sense it maybe said to be his.

The first way in which this can be done

is by the teacher helping the child to imag-ine the experience. Imagination is a power-ful tool in learning. If the child can de-velop a vivid image of a real experience itcan become for him a real happening whichaffects him profoundly, and so a suitableexperience on which to base an experientialcatechesis. There are many ways to help achild come to a vivid imaginative realisa-tion (in the sense of making real) of an ex-perience. The gifted story-teller can do itwith words, as I suspect Jesus did with hisparables. But the more common way incontemporary religious education is throughthe use of media.

To focus simply on the use of film inreligious education.

Once a film gets inside and swishes around in in-teraction with the psyche, a few pores get opened.When the film comes out again in discussion itcomes out with pieces of the individual dingingto it. Everyone sees his own film. The film washesover his experience, hopes, fears, and the processof identification, projection and selective percep-tion takes over.9

One's imagination can be so completely ab-sorbed that one's identity can be lost inidentification with the characters or eventsbeing presented. The experience, throughthe power of imagination, becomes my ex-perience, even though for me it is not actual.This opens up for analysis experiences which,one would hope, will never be actual forChristians. It permits the presentation andreflective analysis of, for instance, anti-social behaviour, unethical conduct, sin inmany of its different facets. Even though forthe child these experiences may not be actual,an imaginative presentation can make themreal experiences which really affect him.Such experiences can then become the basisfor experiential teaching.

The second way in which the teacher canintroduce the child to experiences which areactual is positively to create them for him.In this case the child is involved in an ex-perience which he has not had before andwhich is meant to lead him to the better

9. Culkin John M., The New York Times, July2, 1967.

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articulation of some Christian reality. Whatthe teacher is doing in this approach isbroadening the base of a child's generalexperience so that reflection on this broaderbase might lead to a better understanding ofsome religious truth. This approach is beau-tifully illustrated by Ronald Goldman's life-themes approach,10 which we may be per-mitted to illustrate from our own teachingexperience.

Trying to lead nine year old children tosome understanding of what statementsabout God really mean, we "discovered"that one such statement is that Jesus is thegood shepherd; that is, that the little Chris-tian (and the big one!) stand in the samerelation to Jesus as sheep do to their shep-herd. This led to a problem, for twentynine children out of the thirty in the classhad never seen a sheep and thirty out ofthirty had never seen a shepherd. Experi-ential teaching now out of the question?Not at all. The children had no experienceof sheep and shepherds, so we would haveto create that experience for them, to helpthem understand the religious statement(which is the purpose of -the entire manoeu-vre). This creation evolved in two stages.First, thirty children and one teacher wereloaded into a bus and driven into the nearbycountryside to discover sheep. Secondly,this accomplished (with much laughter,chasing about, and muddy shoes!), we thenproceeded to discover what a shepherd doesfor his sheep. This stage involved the useof a home-made movie of a journey throughthe hills of Judaea which the writer hadmade two years previously. The featureditem in the movie was the little bands ofsheep constantly encountered in that region,being led to pasture and to water by theirshepherd. The stage was now set, the basicexperience had been created. We then wenton to discuss what the shepherd does for hissheep. He is not just there "when the sheepneed him." He is "always there, caring forthe sheep, leading them to water and pas-ture." "Jesus cares for us in this same

10. Rupert Hatt-Davis Educational Publica-tions, (London: 1966-68).

way," not just when we "are in trouble"but always. On the basis of a created expe-rience these children came to some under-standing of a religious truth. The attemptto teach to only their actual experiencedwould have cut them off completely fromany understanding of this particular state-ment.

There is a universal truth for religiouseducation here. Theology postulates thatevery statement we make about God is madeon the basis of some real human experi-ence. Theologians call this analogy. Tounderstand, for example, what it means thatGod is our Father, we must first understandin all its depth what is the relationship of ahuman father to his child. Having graspedthis basic human experience we are then ina position to come to some genuine under-standing of the statement "God is ourFather" which is based on it. And so withall our statements about God. A genuineunderstanding of human experience is al-ways the best teacher — even about God.

WHOSE EXPERIENCE DETERMINESTHE EXPERIENTIAL APPROACH?

Experience-centred teaching is a recognitionof the fact that people learn most effectivelythrough the whole of their personalities, notjust through their minds. The greater thesense of personal involvement in an experi-ence, the more the whole of one's facultiesare exercised in it, the more effectivelylearned is the lesson of that experience. Wehave dispelled the idea that the experienceof the experienced-centred approach meansonly actual experience, and have enlargedit to embrace also imagined and createdexperience. There still remains, however, asecond false premise to be dispelled. Everyteaching situation is a dialogue in whichthere is a teacher and there is a taught whogrow together towards an understanding ofsome reality. To sell either of them shortis to sell the whole dialogue (and learningsituation) short. Whose experience, then,teacher's or child's, is to determine the ex-periential approach? If the dialogue is tobe a learning dialogue for both teacher and

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346 Let's Take a Look — Again — at Experience

child, and it must be, there can be no an-swer other than the experience of both.

The Christian teacher must be a teacherwhose experience is a truly Christian experi-ence, and from this experience he mustteach. The Christian teacher is the mediumthrough whom the analysis of a human ex-perience leads to the articulation of theChristian message in greater depth. He can-not escape this role. When he does nothing,when he says nothing, he still communi-cates by what he is and how he relates to hisgroup. Worse, he can speak two conflict-ing languages at two different, but very real,levels of communication. In his words hemay speak eloquently of the need for loveof neighbour to further personal and com-munity development; in himself he maynever display love or acceptance of his stu-dents. He may analyse in depth "GuessWho's Coming to Dinner?," highlight thevarious problems of racial prejudice and showwhat Christian values are at stake; and hisstudents might reply with "Physician, healthyself!" What he is speaks so loudly thatit is impossible to hear what he says.

The Christian teacher can never be some-one standing on the outside giving answers.He must always be on the inside, actively re-flecting with his children, actively searching,actively anxious to become Christian. Inhis life, as an adult and an adult Christian,he has found some answers and he does nothesitate to teach from this experience. Buthe also knows that there is no absolute solu-tion to any area of human searching, and sohe is willing to listen to the different an-swers advanced by his students. Someyears ago, at the conclusion of a catechesison freedom an adolescent said to his teacher:"You were searching with us to-day. Thathelped more than anything you said." Thenature of -that special help is difficult to spec-ify, but it illustrates what I am saying: theChristian teacher is the medium in cateche-sis, not by the Christian things he says,but by the Christian that he is. He mustalways teach from the valid Christian expe-rience which is his.

But experience within religious education

must also refer to the child's experience, thenormal range of his interests, life-situations,life-attitudes. The teacher must teach to thisexperience, must make it the experiencearound which the catechesis develops.Teaching to experience means making surethat what is offered is relevant to the chil-dren at the stage they are at. It imposesupon the teacher the obligation of discover-ing just where the children are, so that hemay speak to that experience, and so speak-ing help the child to the articulation of hisChristianity appropriate to his experience.

It is a commonplace today in the broadscope of education, not simply religious edu-cation, to state that teaching must start fromwhere the children are. The difficultyarises when one asks where does one go fromthis starting point. Commonly a series oflogical steps leads very soon to where thechildren are not. Let us assume the chil-dren are at point A. If the teacher de-velops a logical lesson that progresses fromA to B to C to P to R to Z, very quicklyit reaches a point where the children arenot. As such a development progresses itbecomes less and less teaching to experience.

Teaching to experience does not dependupon abstract argument by which a teacherattempts to lead children forward in theirthinking. It depends more on a series ofshifts in emphasis, so that the same basic ex-perience is examined all the time. The de-velopment never moves out of the range ofthe starting experience. The same experi-ence (A) is seen in a variety of ways, untileventually it comes to be seen in full depthand in all of its different facets. We couldput it another way. The starting experi-ence (A) is not a point from which we moveto B or D or Z. It is rather a point whichbecomes the centre of a circle, and the de-velopment of the lesson is the explorationof the various concentric circumferenceswhich can be drawn about that centre.

A concrete example might clarify this.Let us assume we want to develop a cate-chesis on liturgy. The basic structure ofliturgy, at least as we wish to develop ithere, is a structure of offer and response.

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Is this a structure which is part of our nor-mal experience? Of course, it is. It ispresent in love or friendship, for instance:love is something which is offered, whichdemands a response, either acceptance or re-jection. Offer is made us, too, in the wholegamut of the advertising world, offering uscommodities which we may accept or reject.Offer and response is a general structure ofour everyday experience, which we will de-tect, though, only if we look in depth. Isit possible that this same structure is partalso of that area of our lives that we tend todesignate as religious? Predictably, it is,but again we will find it only when welook in depth. Creation is God's offer tous; offer of life, offer of love, offer of friend-ship with him. To that offer we must re-spond, either positively or negatively. Lit-urgy is simply the publication (in the senseof making public) of a positive response:I accept.

This is the way an experiential catechesisshould develop in order to teach where thechildren are. A life experience is analysedin circles, each succeeding circle deepeningthe understanding of the experience until itis seen as active and effective in every areaof life. Assuming that children are at of-fer and response, the catechesis goes in cir-cles around this point, never losing sight ofthe fact that where we are at is offer andresponse.

The experiential approach is difficult. Itruns the risk of remaining only on the humanlevel; it runs the equal risk of making artifi-cial leaps from life experience to religioustruth. To be really effective it demands ateacher who is equipped in two directions:who can, first, identify, assess, interpret andarticulate the in-depth meaning of experi-ence; and who, secondly, can integrate thisexperience into his articulation of religioustruth. This is just another way of sayingthat it needs a teacher who is a Christian.And, in its turn, this is nothing but an echoof the plea that Christian teachers

be trained with particular care so that they may beenriched with both secular and religious knowl-edge . . . and may be equipped with an educationalskill which reflects modern-day findings. Boundby charity to one another and to their students,and penetrated by an apostolic spirit, let them givewitness to Christ . . . by their lives as well as bytheir teaching.11

Only such teachers are ready to use an ex-periential approach. For only such are con-vinced enough to teach from experience,and mature enough to accept the differentexperiences of others in such a way that theycan teach to them.

11. Abbott, op. cit., Declaration on ChristianEducation, art. 18.

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