Christian Spirituality

I'm holding the 1988 Harper & Row title Christian Spirituality: The Essential Guide to the most influential spiritual writings of the Christian tradition. And peering through I behold many old friends, and mentors and some that I consider confused and outright fools. I've been disposed toward an interest in spirituality for years. I consider myself on a quest toward knowing God better. But its completely unnerving to hear a person detail their experience as an individual and then have it packaged as a normative rule, a study guide. I love it that the Bible is not a guide book to personal sanctification. What? Yes, the Bible is history, songs, stories and letters that detail human interaction with the same God over thousands of years. It is unified but not reflective of any one experience. Maybe in the Bible God is proving that we humans are broken, irrational specie, incapable of bearing his image in any one way or in one person. Maybe its His way of showing us it takes millenia for us to know Him completely, but even there that with all our tradition and writ we are so imperfect of living it out for any length of time.