Moving Toward Spiritual Maturity

Psychological, Contemplative, and Moral Challenges in Christian Living

Neil Pembroke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136450150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Three 'windows' to spiritual maturity How can a faithful Christian avoid stagnating in their spiritual development? Moving Toward Spiritual Maturity: Psychological, Contemplative, and Moral Challenges in Christian Living explores effective ways in which Christian discipleship can grow in spiritual maturity. This thoughtful, integrative roadmap explains the journey through three interrelated perspectives, or 'windows, ' psychotherapeutic psychology, prayer and contemplation, and moral theology. The author uses numerous examples from everyday life to make the reflections interesting and practical. Unlike other books on Christian spirituality, this book is more challenging and sophisticated in its depth of thought. Spiritual maturity is a process that begins when a person accepts Jesus Christ as Savior, and progresses ongoing through a Christian's life. Moving Toward Spiritual Maturity discusses in detail the challenges one must face, including the sustained, in-depth, and faithful attention to psychological wholeness, conversion to the true self, and interpersonal and social responsibility. Effective strategies are given through example and personal story, making understanding of the principles easier. This reflection on Christian maturity helps readers to focus directly on the personal issues all must face when attuning to the Spirit of Christ. Topics in Moving Toward Spiritual Maturity include:

• reforming the wayward self
• moral or guilt-based perfectionism
• achievement or shame-based perfectionism
• the two types of conversion
• responsibility and accountability
• agape and the loving of oneself
• three virtues at the heart of the responsible lifeintegrity, courage, and compassion
• virtues as habits
• the relationship between personal fulfillment and the Christian vocation

Moving Toward Spiritual Maturity is a unique look at the path toward spiritual maturity, and is challenging, thoughtful reading for laypersons, ministers, priests, and theological students.

PART I: SETTING THE SCENE

Chapter 1

Self-Fulfillment and Vocation

This is a book about growing into spiritual maturity. The first “window” that we will open in our search for wisdom and insight is psychotherapeutic psychology. In our therapeutic culture, self-fulfillment is something that is valued very highly. We desperately want to live lives of meaning and purpose—lives that are permeated with happiness and a sense of well-being. In a word, we aspire to full humanness. In fact, this is Abraham Maslow’s word. The term selfactualization is more frequently associated with Maslow, but full humanness was for him a more descriptive term.¹ In order to progress toward the goal of being fully human, a person needs to know herself and her potential and to actively reach out for it.

Maslow (along with others in the humanist stream of psychology) believes that it is through realizing our physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual² potential that we experience personal fulfillment. These psychological theorists have much to teach us about the journey to psychospiritual maturity. From a Christian perspective, however, their approach suffers from a serious flaw. It is founded on an assumption of self-groundedness (perhaps the most serious of the modern heresies, according to James Fowler³). The primary concern for those of us who are disciples of Christ, I will be suggesting, should not be with self-fulfillment, but rather with living our vocation. God calls us to incarnate God’s love in the world. It is as we live faithful to this calling that we experience fulfillment. Fulfillment is something that happens while one is living in and through love for God and for neighbor.

PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO PERSONAL FULFILLMENT

Martin is a talented accountant. He’s always been a very organized and careful person. The order, logic, and precision associated with accountancy fits his personality extremely well. He’s very good at what he does. Martin is rewarded handsomely for his contribution to the firm, and his colleagues are good to work with. Ask Martin about his work and he’ll tell you that he loves it.

Sadly, Martin is not as happy as one might think. The inner turmoil that he has to contend with has nothing to do with his personal life. He is married to a lovely woman, Janette, and they share their life with three fine children. Martin is not worried, either, about his physical appearance. He is a fine specimen of manhood. Martin is not bored, and nor is he stressed. The absence of the spiritual dimension is not the issue. He is not a regular churchgoer, but he finds real peace and strength through prayer and meditation.

So what is the problem? Martin’s unhappiness stems from the fact that he is plagued by a lack of self-confidence. This adversely affects the way he works. Its impact is especially strong when he meets a new client. Though he knows that he is a good accountant, he finds himself trying too hard to prove that to the client. Martin would love to be able to relax and simply trust in his ability.

Martin’s lack of self-confidence also caused him to pull back from a very important opportunity that came his way. Last month, he was offered a partnership in his firm. Janette and he talked long and hard about the offer. While she was convinced that taking it was right for him, Martin was not so sure. He felt that he was not ready for it at this stage. “Give me another few years,” he told her, “and I’ll have the experience I need.” In his honest moments alone, he realized that he was hiding from the truth. He was more than ready. The reason he chose to turn the offer down was that he was scared. He was afraid of failing, and he was afraid of succeeding.

Martin has settled for a “regression choice” (Maslow). Unless he can find the inner strength to make some crucial changes, he will never realize his full potential. In order to move toward full humanness, a person must become increasingly self-aware. “A very important part of this task,” writes Maslow, “is to become aware of what one is, biologically, temperamentally, constitutionally, as a member of a species, of one’s capacities, desires, needs, and also of one’s vocation, what one is fitted for, what one’s destiny is.”⁴ Finding one’s mission in life, then, involves “opening oneself up to himself.”⁵

Reaching out for our destiny requires a willingness to make the choices that will carry us forward. The decisions we make in life, says Maslow, fall into two camps.⁶ On the one hand, there are “progression” or “growth” choices, and on the other, “regression” or “fear” choices. Those on the way to full humanness are not afraid to choose paths that challenge and stretch them. They are aware that the growth choice carries with it a significant risk of failure, but they are prepared to take on that risk for the sake of progression toward self-actualization.

It is a matter of learning to face the challenges life presents with honesty, truthfulness, and courage. “A person who does each of these … things each time the choice point comes,” reflects Maslow,

will find that they add up to better choices about what is constitutionally right for him. He comes to know what his destiny is … what his mission in life will be. One cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment in life.⁷

Rollo May refers to this process of embracing the truth of one’s life as choosing oneself (using a term coined by the father of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard). When I choose the self that is genuinely me, I am truly free. Indeed, freedom—a favorite theme of the existentialists—is the key concept in May’s analysis.

Freedom refers to a person’s “capacity to take a hand in [her] own development.”⁸ If a person is to do this, she must be self-aware. Without consciousness of the self, she is at the mercy of her own unconscious drives as well as a whole range of external forces. In the absence of self-awareness, there is no possibility of taking control of the unfolding of one’s life. One is simply pushed and pulled through life. “That consciousness of self and freedom go together,” writes May,

is shown in the fact that the less self-awareness a person has, the more [she] is unfree. That is to say, the more [she] is controlled by inhibitions, repressions, childhood conditionings which [she] has consciously “forgotten” but which still drive [her] unconsciously, the more [she] is pushed by forces over which [she] has no control.⁹

Dorothy Rowe also makes this connection between creating personal meaning and freedom. Too often we forfeit our freedom as human beings, observes Rowe, because our nerve fails us. We fall away from our responsibility for creating our own truths, our own way of being. Instead, we regress to the blissful state in which powerful others (e.g., Mom and Dad) shaped our world for us. Thus, we hand over our responsibility to the state, the church, and the international cartels.¹⁰ To take responsibility for the construction of our own universes of meaning is scary, and hence we hand over our freedom to others. We may feel less anxious, but the cost is too high. When we fail to take responsibility for ourselves, we lose the joy of being. To find joy, meaning, and fulfillment in life, we need to live our freedom. This freedom is not “willful selfishness,” however.

This “freedom” is no freedom at all, for the person indulging in such “freedom,” be he a soccer hooligan or a dishonest industrialist, is not free but is driven by an insatiable hunger for he knows not what. The freedom of which I speak is the freedom to recognize and to use our capacity to choose. In such freedom we experience ourselves as neither driven by outside forces and demands, nor imprisoned and inhibited by outside barriers and our own fear, guilt and shame. Freely making our own choices, we stand behind what we choose. Freely we choose to accept responsibility for ourselves. Freely we choose to make commitments. Free, we do not fear freedom.¹¹

Any discussion of freedom must pay attention to the role of determinism. There is a whole range of factors beyond a person’s control that will have a very significant impact on the final form of her life. The culture of her country of birth, the values and attitudes in her family of origin, the gifts/abilities and the traits/tendencies associated with her genetic inheritance, together with a number of other factors, are determinative to a very significant extent of her destiny. May argues, though—following the existentialists—that there is one freedom that determinism can never remove, and that is the freedom to choose the facts of one’s life. That is, one can freely accept the realities rather than treat them as imposed. A person who would love to be a great artist can find peace and fulfillment in accepting the fact that she lacks the talent to reach that far. She can’t choose to be a great painter, but she can choose to love her art and the creations that come from her hand, even though part of her would like them to be so much better. On a higher, more dramatic level, Socrates chose his cup of hemlock over compromise, and Jesus chose his cup of suffering over infidelity. “Thus,” reflects May, “freedom is not just the matter of saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘to become what we truly are.’”¹²

In order to be free, to take responsibility for shaping one’s life, courage is required. As we have already seen, it is easier to let others decide for you. It takes inner fortitude to choose one’s own path. A person needs the courage to listen to her “impulse voices” rather than to introjected parental voices.¹³ What is required is “the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.”¹⁴ This assertion of autonomy, this break from external control and direction, is a challenge that is not only a factor at critical times such as beginning school and the adolescent identity crisis, but right through a person’s life. It involves being prepared to step outside of the boundaries that others have constructed in defining acceptable or normal attitudes and behaviors. There is security in following the patterns of values, thinking, and action that the family, the church, and the society establish in consensus. To follow an inner direction that challenges the normative patterns creates fear and uncertainty. “Courage,” writes May, “is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom.”¹⁵ This is not to say that freedom is just another name for rebellion. A compulsive need to rebel constitutes another form of bondage. To have to be different is not the same as choosing one’s own path; indeed, it speaks more of insecurity than of liberation. To pass over the difficult task of evaluating consensus values and attitudes and move to a quick and easy dismissal of their worth is to fall away from freedom and into license. “Rebellion acts as a substitute for the more difficult process of struggling through to one’s own autonomy, to new beliefs, to the state where one can lay new foundations on which to build.”¹⁶

Courage is also indissolubly linked to truth. One is reminded of Jesus’ words “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” (Jn 8:32). Knowing the truth is not so much a function of intelligence, of learning, and of a store of facts, but rather of finding the courage to see what is really in oneself, in one’s family, and in the world around one. Ultimately the courage that is called for is the courage to cast off our defenses and neurotic needs. Our repressions, conflicts, and defense mechanisms cause us to distort inner and outer reality. They lead us to project our prejudices, failings, fears, and expectations onto others and the world around us. The way of courage-seeking-truth, then, is the way of self-awareness. “[I]t is precisely the lack of self-awareness,” observes May,

which leads us to call error truth. The more a person lacks selfawareness, the more [she] is prey to anxiety and irrational anger and resentment: and while anger generally blocks us from using our more subtle intuitive means of sensing truth, anxiety always blocks us.¹⁷

Personal fulfillment, observes Dorothy Rowe, is not about having everything, but rather about realizing that the best is good enough. To live in and through self-awareness, truth, courage, and creativity is to be truly free—that is the best that life has to offer. Toward the end of her book, however, Rowe points out that from her list of what is best in life she has omitted love.¹⁸ She takes some time to get to this central human concern and experience because it is so often misunderstood. In the place of confused and sentimentalized versions of love she suggests that we interpret it as “gentle, strong, boundless, secure, fearless, joy, contentment, bliss of being.”¹⁹

The enemies of this “true love” are fear and hate. Where there is fear there is a barrier that keeps love out. And of course, love cannot exist where there is hatred. Hate can be strong and total, as in hatred for one’s enemies. Or it can be milder and more specific, as in the hatred one might have for certain aspects of the beloved. True love transcends these blocks through approaching the other as an equal. With all our flaws and inferiorities, as well as all our gifts and strengths, we struggle together in the face of life’s uncertainties and peculiarities. Neither you nor I can assert superiority in this struggle, for we are both simply doing our best. Here is the basis for mutuality in relationship, and through such mutuality true love is expressed.

It is noteworthy that nowhere in her discussion of love does Rowe uphold the value of self-giving. To the contrary, she champions “an enlightened self-interest” and suggests that self-sacrifice is “a waste.”²⁰ Now of course self-sacrifice and self-giving cannot simply be equated. The latter term makes room for appropriate self-regard, whereas the former tends to imply its absence. But it is clear enough that giving-of-self-for-the-other has only a relatively small place in Rowe’s conception of love. She can happily talk about it in terms of security, contentment, fearlessness, joy (bliss even), and equality, but she does not see a need to commit herself to the ideal of self-giving.

Rollo May and Abraham Maslow, on the other hand, are quite a bit stronger on the importance of making oneself available for others. May has written extensively about human love. He shows how the three loves—eros, philia, and agape—are interrelated.²¹ Eros is desire, the experience of being pulled toward the other. Philia is friendship love. It is established through the mutuality and reciprocity shared by friends. May points out that eros needs philia. The sexual tension needs to be dissipated; the lovers need to be able to simply relax in each other’s presence. Particularly relevant to our discussion is May’s observation that philia, in turn, needs agape. Genuine friendship is built on disinterested love. Agape is grounded in a concern for the other’s well-being that is (l...