EXPERIENCE

74 a) Experience begets concerns and questionings, hopes and anxieties, reflections and judgements; these merge and there results a certain desire to steer the human way of life.

Therefore, catechesis should be concerned with making men attentive to their more significant experiences, both personal and social; it also has the duty of placing under the light of the Gospel the questions which arise from those experiences, so that there may be stimulated within men a right desire to transform their ways of life.

In this fashion, experience also makes men respond in an active way to the gift of God.

b) Experience can also help make the Christian message more intelligible.

Christ himself preached the kingdom of God by illustrating its nature with parables drawn from the experience of human life. He recalled to mind certain human situations (the merchant who came on a good business, the servants who to a greater or lesser extent increase the talents given to them, and so forth) in order to explain eschatological and transcendent realities, and then to teach the way of life which these realities demand of us.

Thus it is that experience serves in the examination and acceptance of the truths which are contained in the deposit of revelation.

c) Experience, considered in itself, must be illumined by the light of revelation. By recalling to mind the action of God who works our salvation, catechesis should help men to explore, interpret, and judge their own experiences, and also to ascribe a Christian meaning to their own existence.

In this aspect, experience is as it were an object to be interpreted and illumined by the catechist. This task, even though it is not without its difficulties, must not be overlooked.