Our spirituality, or lack of it, come from our own life experience. Actually, contrary to some religious formation philosophy, our faith is not formed exclusively by Scripture or Church Tradition.
Using “Scripture alone” gets us stuck, because many passages give very conflicting images of God, and relying heavily on tradition leaves us static because evolution is the nature of everything related to God.
In order to grow spiritually, we need three elements: Scripture, Tradition, and experience.
Jesus only quoted Scripture passages that He could validate by his own inner experience. At the same time, if we trust our own experiences exclusively, we will be trapped in subjective moods and personal preferences.
It helps when we can verify that some holy people and orthodox teachers (Tradition) and some solid Scripture also validate our own experiences. Such affirmation makes us more confident that we are guided by the Holy Spirit and are participating in God’s sacred work.
Jesus and Paul clearly used and built on their own Jewish Scriptures and Tradition and they both courageously interpreted them through the lens of their own unique personal experience of God, their unique experience of Love.
Colossians 1:9-10 “Then the way you live will always honor and please the Lord, and your lives will produce every kind of good fruit. All the while, you will grow as you learn to know God better and better.”
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