"Recognize Your Starting Point"

There is a liberation theology for the First World. What is it that we need to be liberated from? How do we need to be freed so we can receive Christ? Inner biases must be faced, I'm convinced. Unless those inner liberations happen, we're not going to be that rich soil that can receive the more demanding word of God. The beginning point of liberation theology is the experience of human beings. This theology isn't pulled out of philosophy or metaphysics, beginning with first principles and then deducing down to us. It starts at the other end, with the longings of the human heart, and moves back toward God. Experience is the only honest place to begin. Because even when we don't admit that we're beginning out of human experience, we do anyway. We begin out of our so-called first principles, but even those are planted in the experience of Italian people, German people, American people or African people, who all read it through their own eyes but don't admit it. And that's why the gospel has been so culturally trapped. We assume we've all been true to our totally objective first principles of philosophy and theology. But in fact it's all filtered through the cultural eyes, prejudices and assumptions of each country. In Germany you experience Catholicism, but you also experience Germany. In Italy it's Catholicism, but it's first of all Italy. Across the Atlantic it's Catholicism, but it's first of all America. We've got to be honest enough to admit that. Deductive theology never worked anyway except in the textbooks, and for those few who lived there. Every viewpoint is a view from a point.

from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction