by Christian Svetnicka

I recently celebrated a birthday. And, as one does, I marveled at how quickly the last year had flown by. In fact, it seems to be a very common musing that time appears to speed up as one ages. This is quite interesting. After all, regardless of our individual age, one second is still one second; a minute is still a minute, and a year is still a year. The objective nature of time has not changed and yet, it feels like our observed experience has. What gives? Many people give explanations for this but the one that always made the most sense to me is that as we age, a unit of time represents an increasingly shorter amount of our lifetime. When we are three years old, a year represents one third of our life. By the time we get to be 80 years old, a year is less than 1.5% of our lifetime. Or, put another way, one year to an 80-year-old represents the same proportion of life as about two weeks for a 3-year-old. No wonder toddlers can barely seem to stand a 10-minute timeout!

This idea poses a very interesting application for us in our spiritual and civil lives. In the recent synod, and in the pastoral example of the Pope, we have seen people sharing their lived experiences under the call for the Church to listen to those experiences. Often, this has produced a backlash of concerns citing confusion for the faithful and the idea that we should focus on presenting the objective truth lest we slip into dangerous relativism. But as I shared above, one’s lived experience is crucial to understanding an objective truth and often the presentation of truth comes with implicit pronouncements of lived experience. For example, if an 80-year-old grandparent tells a 3-year-old grandchild to “just wait until Christmas for that new toy-4 months is not long at all!” This ignores the reality that 4 months is more than a tenth of that grandchild’s lifetime and would be the equivalent of being asked to wait almost 9 years themselves! The problem isn’t the objectively correct “Christmas is 4 months away” but with the dismissal of what that means to the grandchild.

This is an important lesson for us. When we have a truth that we wish to share with someone, we need to be extremely careful that we are not tainting it with our own lived experience in the process of sharing it. Likewise, we need to be sensitive to how it will be received by the other person in light of their lived experience. In my Christmas example, a much more compassionate response would be, “I know 4 months seems like a long time to wait. Christmas will surely come but until then, let’s go play with one of your favorite toys you already have.” This still acknowledges the truth that Christmas is 4 months away (and that the new toy won’t arrive until then!) but the response crucially enters into that child’s life and frames it in a way that doesn’t dismiss their experience. This is what I think the synod is trying to accomplish. If we engage with the synodal process and listen to the lived experiences of our brothers and sisters all around the world, it will enrich our understanding of the objective truth of God’s love and its application in our lives. Only when we hear from others about how they apply a teaching, or live the Gospel in their own lives, can we really grasp a fuller understanding of what that truth really is.

I propose that when we need to speak a truth, we first take an assessment of what is objective reality and what is filtered by our own lived experience. This can be a tricky thing to do and there is nothing wrong with sharing our own experiences. But it is important to ensure that both are clearly communicated as such. When we do share, we need to enter into our neighbor’s lived experience to try to understand how this truth may be received and, more importantly, how they can apply this in their own life. In fact, by doing this, we may come to a deeper appreciation or new understanding of what we wanted to share in the first place. If we make the effort to follow the synodal path, we may just find a much richer application of the truth that more fully resonates with everyone’s lived experiences.