Friday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time

“But when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher.”

I often hear people use this verse to justify studying the faith. And I think that is reasonable. We need knowledge of the faith in order to live it out. Knowledge of God is valuable to us. But knowledge comes in two broad varieties, and sometimes we give priority to the wrong one.

The first is the kind of knowledge we associate with school. We go into a classroom, sit down, and listen to a lecture. Or we read a book and think about a subject. That knowledge gives us frameworks for understanding the world and the situations we face.

But there is another kind of knowledge: the knowledge of experience. It is what we gain by actually going out and trying to live something.

Think of the rosary. You could know its entire history, everything every great theologian ever said about it, and what every saint thought about it. You could have all of that memorized. But if you had never prayed it, it would do you no good.

Abstract knowledge, the knowledge of the classroom, can easily be like that. It is intentionally disconnected from the world we live in. You could know everything and still be a horrible person, because you never practice any of it. You never live it out.

The Christian faith is meant to be lived. So the principal kind of knowledge is the knowledge of experience: going out and actually trying to love your neighbor, to love your enemy, to bless those who curse you. That is where we gain our truest knowledge.

For millennia, illiterate peasants have lived the Christian faith, and among them have been very holy people. The faith was fully accessible to them, even though they may not have had the kind of knowledge you get in a classroom or from a book. We cannot have a conception of the faith that excludes their holiness. The primary means of becoming holy is to go out and live the faith, to live as Christ has taught us.

Especially today, we tend to prioritize classroom knowledge, abstract knowledge. It is certainly a good thing, and I do not want to denigrate it. But it is not primary in the Christian life. We must go out and live the faith. We must practice it.

We must find the places where we struggle to live the Christian life and keep trying, again and again, until we get better. Through that experience, we gain the knowledge that helps us live it. And that is the kind of knowledge we want to pass on to others.

If someone comes to you and says, “I’m struggling with this, and I don’t know how to deal with it,” they are not looking for an abstract answer. They do not want twenty minutes on how the inner life of the Trinity solves their problem, because that will not help them. What they want to know is, “How did you overcome this? How did you deal with this struggle in your life, day by day?” That is what they want to hear, because that is what they need to grow in holiness.

Notice that Jesus, in his own ministry, does not spend a lot of time giving abstract knowledge to his apostles. He tells them to go out and serve people, to feed them, to do these things. There they will learn true holiness.

So in our own lives, yes, study is good. It can help us make better decisions day by day. But our priority, our focus, must be living the Christian life and learning it through experience. We come to know who Jesus Christ is by truly becoming like him in our daily lives and choices.