As a kid, I had a Big Wheel.
With the aptly named big wheel in front and two smaller wheels in back, I was the king of the driveway. Little did I know that almost fifty years later, my tricycle toy would become a powerful metaphor for healthy spirituality.
Today I’m sharing the third and final metaphor of this series – The Tricycle. The Cosmic Egg gave us a map of reality with My Story, Our Story, and The Story. The Three Boxes showed us how to travel across that map via the Order, Disorder, and Reorder Boxes. The Tricycle metaphor helps us navigate whichever Box we find ourselves in. I extend my appreciation once again to author and teacher Richard Rohr for each of these teaching tools.
Picture a tricycle. The front wheel is Personal Experience. One back wheel is Sacred Stories, and the other, Tradition.
We can define Personal Experience as the summation of our everyday, real-life encounters. Things we see, hear, feel, taste, touch, smell, and do. Interactions with people and our environment. Pleasures we savor. Hardships we endure. Events, actions, and memories we recall with fondness or regret. These are our Personal Experiences.
Sacred Stories are the cherished, revered, perhaps even idolized source materials of spiritual systems. The Quran of Islam. The Talmud of Judaism. The Bible of Christianity. The Vedas of Hinduism. The Tripitaka of Buddhism. The Book of Mormon of The Latter-day Saints. The creation stories of indigenous people groups. These are writings and oral histories from various spiritual perspectives that try to answer some of life’s biggest questions – where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? How should we live?
Let’s define Tradition as the way people attempt to apply Sacred Stories to their lives. Each spiritual system has its own prayers, services, liturgies, rituals, ceremonies, styles of dress, and ways of doing things. Tradition is the history of how past adherents have tried to understand and live out a particular brand of spirituality.
Some spiritual systems emphasize Personal Experience, some Sacred Stories, and others Tradition. The metaphor of The Tricycle teaches that a healthy spirituality embraces them all. Importantly, it places Personal Experience as the front wheel because that is our primary way of understanding the world. Our myriad of experiences are unique to us and incredibly formative, shaping our worldview in profound ways.
As important as Personal Experience is, it’s also crucial to know our place within our Sacred Stories and to learn the lessons they teach. And why we would ignore the hard-won wisdom offered by those who have gone before us through Tradition? Without all three components, our spirituality will be out of balance. We won’t get far on a tricycle that’s missing a wheel.
When I was in my period of deep spiritual struggle (you can read that story here), The Tricycle metaphor gave me the gift of validating my Personal Experience. I recognize that depending too much on my own experiences, without healthy external reference points, can lead me to believe in false realities. But without Personal Experiences in the lead position, other problems arise.
Here’s an example. The evangelical Christian system I’ve been in most of my life places its Sacred Story, the Bible, as the front wheel. And not just the Bible, but that system’s particular interpretation of the Bible. So whenever I had real-life personal experiences that ran counter to the Biblical interpretation my system taught, it caused me a lot of confusion and stress. That’s what led me into the Disorder Box, as I shared in my last post. When I finally rotated the wheels on my spiritual Tricycle, placing Personal Experience at the front, with strong support from Sacred Stories and Tradition in the back, I found my way to a healthier spirituality.
If you’re wondering where my spiritual Tricycle has led me, I’ll share some of my current thinking based on my own experience. I believe that we all come from God‘s love, exist in God’s love, and will be welcomed back to God‘s love when die. I believe that God is in everyone and everything. This allows me to look at all people as my spiritual family, even those of another faith or who claim no faith at all. I can gaze at creation and see, as Saint Francis did, “Sister Moon” and “Brother Sun.” This is not pantheism, a belief that everything is God, but panentheism, a belief that God is in everything.
So how about you? Which wheel is at the front of your spiritual Tricycle? Does a rotation need to be made? Are you out of balance? Is there a wheel missing? Prioritize your Personal Experience. Know your Sacred Stories. Honor your Tradition. Remember The Cosmic Egg. Work through The Three Boxes. Balance the wheels of your Tricycle. If you do, you’ll find your way to a healthy spirituality, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.
For more on these ideas, I highly recommend Richard Rohr’s daily email mediations and Another Name For Everything podcast.
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