Pre-Reflections on Text and Experience

At the end of this quarter, my first quarter of divinity school, I will be asked to communicate my thoughts on the relationship between text and experience. Specifically, as I engage in theological thinking, I am asking myself how experience, writing, and thinking in terms of theology inter-relate, inter-situate, and inter-change. All of this is profoundly challenging, and yet, curiously provocative.

I thought it might be best to pre-reflect on text and experience. These pre-reflections are "pre" in the sense that they are my initial attempts to capture--in words--how I understand that interrelationship of text and experience, and "reflections" in the sense that I am looking again or looking anew on these categories.

I have found writing to be incredibly therapeutic. Not simply in the cathartic sense, but in the formative one. Writing, for me, is an opportunity to solidify my thoughts. However, the solidification is not one of permanence, but of reference. Only when I solidify my thoughts can I come to terms with myself: I can affirm or resist my initial descriptions and conceptions. This is an interesting process for several reasons:

First, the very act of writing shapes previous experience and current thought in unique ways. It takes content and molds it in the form of novel words, phrases, paragraphs, and entire narratives or texts. In a sense, I admit, this is a modification of experience. It is the act of selecting from experience certain things for certain purposes which then re-impose themselves on the unselected material.

Second, the act of re-reading one's writing is an opportunity for revision; literally a seeing again. We can choose to see that experience through the lens of that writing or resist that writing altogether for a better, fuller, or alternative formulation.

Third, the process of (re)formulating experience is an act of emergence. It is the emergence of ideas which might otherwise not exist. The ideas are caught up in the words themselves, and it is only in working and reworking these words that such ideas can ever be embraced or denied.

Finally, the interplay between vision and revision, writing and rewriting is a dialogical trajectory which builds upon itself. It is dialogue with oneself while simultaneously constructing oneself.

Thus, much of my writing is not permanent assertion--although it may initially be an assertion--but reference. It is a point of reference which I can revisit and reassess. But it is a necessary starting point from which to continue and build. I believe that with my time spent at the university I will be wrestling with the theological process of self-formation. I hope that what I construct will be helpful and meaningful for others as they journey alongside me.