A Mature Spirituality
Sermon by Steve Edington
April 11, 2010
If you had asked me last Sunday what the worse news out of the State of West Virginia was, I would have told you that it was the West Virginia University's basketball team's loss, one game short of a national championship, in the Final Four March Madness NCAA tournament in Indianapolis. The news out of my home state over the past several days has demonstrated the difference between a mere disappointment, like losing a basketball game; and a real, and horrible, tragedy like a coal mine explosion that takes the lives of 29 miners, and leaves a closely knit community in a state of shock and deep grief. While coal is not the only source of electric power in our country, the fact remains that whenever we turn on a light, or use electricity in all the other countless ways we use it, we're asking young, and not so young, men (mostly men) to risk their lives, and the well being of their families, on a daily basis.
Among the news feeds that are still coming out of that little grief-stricken town, which is about 30 miles south of the town in which I was raised, are those that focus on the faith, on the religious convictions, of its inhabitants. There are signs all over asking for prayers for the miners and their families, and for the souls of those who lost their lives. Prayer meetings take place in what are generally small, white, clapboard churches; churches that will now be the sites for most of the funerals that now have to be held.
Even as I know that not everyone in these small Appalachian communities believes in the same way; by and large, in these gatherings, a loving and merciful God will be praised. A God whose ways are not always understood, but a God in whom one must have faith and trust nonetheless that He (and it's still by and large a He) will still care for you and sustain you, just as His Son Jesus cared about people like you and for whom he gave his life.
This is no longer the faith I affirm, but for me to watch the news stories now coming out of Montcoal, West Virginia is to also be reminded of where my own religious and spiritual journey began. While I did not grow up in a coal mining town, I still swam that larger religious culture for the first 20 years or so of my life.
Earlier in our service we welcomed new members, which is always a joy. Each person who joins our congregation also brings with them a journey. Some of those journeys involve, in a way similar--although not necessarily identical--to mine, moving away from a faith tradition, or set of religious beliefs and practices, which no longer meaningfully speak to the person. Others who join with us may not be coming from any strong religious background, as a part of their personal history, at all; but still find themselves on a personal search for some greater levels of meaning and depth in their lives; and a community they can connect with where they can be supported in their search. And they're also looking for people they just plain enjoy being with; as I hope, and believe, we are.
For many years I've made it a practice, along with our Membership Coordinator (as Sherri Woolsey has been for several years now) to have a conversation with each person who puts their name in our Membership Book so I can learn a bit of the journey that has brought them to this point. And as I reflect on those conversations, especially in more recent years, and do some re-reflecting on my own trip, I'm finding some confirmation of what Dr. Harvey Cox has written in his latest book The Future of Faith when he says we, "we" in a broad cultural sense here, are moving from what he calls an "Age of Belief" to an "Age of the Spirit."
This is the third, and I promise you, final sermon in a series I'm doing that was generated by Dr. Cox's book--the first two coming back in January. I'm only going to give Harvey Cox just a very brief fly-by today, since I've pretty much done already what I wanted to do with him in those other two sermons. His broad based prediction, as a now 80 year old, life long observer and scholar of religion in the West, is that for many religion now is, and will be, less a matter of finding a codified set of beliefs to which one can subscribe, and more of a matter of seeking out, in an eclectic kind of way, those ideas, beliefs, practices, and faith-based communities, whereby and wherein they can feel some connection with a reality greater than themselves, with some Larger Spirit of Life. They are looking for a way, in the late Forrest Church's words, to say 'yes' to the Cosmos that goes beyond codified belief.
Cox also sees fundamentalism as a kind of rear-guard action against this larger trend. I think it's more than that, but I've devoted a sermon to that particular topic and will not revisit it now.
This is as far as I'm going with Harvey today other than to say, as a segue, that this latest book of his reminded me of another, somewhat similar, one that came out some 25-30 years ago by a Dr. James Fowler called Stages of Faith. And that's the one I want to use for a bit this morning on this sermon topic of "A Mature Spirituality."
Dr. Fowler, who recently retired as a Professor of Theology at Emory University, did not start out as a religious guy, in any academic sense, at all. Originally he's a developmental psychologist. He was also a very active lay leader with the United Methodist Church, a mainline-to-liberal Protestant Christian body. In that latter capacity he became interested in how people's ideas and beliefs about religion and spirituality develop and change--to the extent that they do--during the human life cycle. So he took some of the human development categories that a number of psychologists cite, and applied them to faith development or spiritual development. In so doing he got--depending upon how you count them--six or seven such stages.
Now the good Dr. Fowler, being the good academic that he was and is, could not resist giving these stages of faith good academic sounding names. So he came up with titles for them like "Intuitive-Projective" and "Mythic-Literal" and "Synthetic-Conventional" and "Individuative Reflective" and the like. Well, all due respect to Mr. Fowler, even as bright a bunch as you folks are neither going to remember, nor process, that kind of jargon. I know I can't. And besides that, my Micro-soft word processing program doesn't even recognize a term like "individuative." Every time I typed it a red line came up underneath it. So I went to my own drawing board and came up with some brand new, and easy to grasp, names for these stages which I now offer to you. And they are Stages One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven! So, let's roll:
Stage One, also called "Primal," is simple enough. It's when an infant first begins to sense, in a pre-verbal and mostly pre-cognitive way, his or her environment; and begins to sense that there's a "me" here and an "other" out there. Is that "other" a safe and accepting one; or a threatening and mistrustful one? Those earliest sensations do play a role in how a person relates to his or her world at later points in their life.
Stage Two. This usually runs from late infancy--three years old or so to around age seven or so. Here's where you learn a language and begin to hear stories; and, with respect to those stories, there's very little differentiation between what's fantasy and what's not. You hear the beginnings of a narrative into which you'll fit you life. It's not just a religious narrative, incidentally. This is where you hear you family stories; maybe the one about how your great-grandparents came over on the boat and had to struggle to make a life of it in their new country. The historical and cultural stories of whatever country or culture one is living in are also told here. What you get is a narrative into which you can fit your life.
One's first ideas about God are formed here, which often is an expanded version of one's parents. If you have loving and caring parents; then God is this greater, super loving caring person who lives off in some other place. In a home where Christmas is celebrated, God and Santa Claus can get all mixed in together, as in "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good..." etc. Could be either one: God or Santa Claus. In a religious home or community this is when you first start hearing the stories of that faith--again with no distinction between what's fantasy and what's not.
Stage Three is when you begin to think about the meaning, or possible meanings, behind the stories; or behind the pictures of God you're being given. They're still taken literally, but a larger meaning is also sought. You still focus on the story, but also start to figure out what this story has to do with me.
This kind of morphs into Stage Four--we're up to early adolescence now--where you begin to form a belief system, or some conceptual way of understanding and relating to your world, based on the stories and the teachings and the God-concepts you've been exposed to up to this point. You might be starting to get away from their literalness, but the story is still important. This is when most religions have their coming-of-age rituals. Bar or Bat Mitzvahs, Confirmation Classes, and the like. We call it ROPES here--Rites of Passage Experiences.
Stage Five--which is where this "individuative" business comes in--could also be called the "de-mythologizing" stage or the "critical thinking" stage. We're at late adolescence moving into early adulthood now. Here it's like: Wait a minute? Is all that really true? Did that stuff all happen? And who or what is God anyway, or does such a person or being even exist? The bigger picture happening here is that one is forming an independent identity for oneself, based on a sense of who you think you are on your own terms--which is what "individuative" means. (I can't seem to let go of that word!). That identity may build on, and incorporate, all you've taken in to this point. Or it could be based on a rejection--a clearing the decks--of all you've been inculcated with so you can figure out who the "real you" is. This stage generally involves deciding what you're going to reject and what you're going to keep. Which gets you to:
Stage Six: This could be called, at least in part, a "re-mythologizing" stage. OK, so a lot of those stories weren't really true in any historical sense, you think, but perhaps they have some metaphorical value I can relate to. Okay, so I no longer believe in God as a Supreme Being of a Supernatural sort, but I still sense that I am part of some greater mystery, some greater reality that I cannot, and maybe will never, fully grasp. But I still want to pursue a relationship with the greater mystery even if I do not know what it fully is.
A person working his or her way along at this stage appreciates these words from Forrest Church: "When people tell me proudly they do not believe in God I ask them to tell me a little about the kind of God they don't believe in, for I probably do not believe in (that God) either. 'God' is not 'God's' name. God is our name for that which is greater and all and present in each. Call it what you will: sprit, ground of being, being itself..."
This is also where you come to an appreciation for irony and paradox. You also see that your story, or your narrative, and the philosophy--or life/faith stance--you take from that narrative is but one of many in this world. You learn to value and appreciate the stories, narratives, philosophies, and faiths of others. This, in fact, is what I consider to be a mature spirituality. But wait, there's more:
Stage Seven: Fowler, who uses language for this one I can actually get, calls this one the "Universalizing" stage. This one is generally reserved for mystics and seers; it for those who can get beyond only intellectualizing about the "oneness of all things" and actually feel they're participating in that oneness. According to Fowler, "This stage (also) includes the Mother Theresas, the Martin Luther Kings, and those whose faith is integrated into an unswerving commitment and devotion that cannot be hindered or quenched."
Well, that's all well and good, but to make it less academic, let's try applying these stages to a specific story; in this case the one we told at our Seder a week ago Friday--and that is told at every Passover observance everywhere Passover is celebrated.
If you read or hear that story at any point up to Stage Three and possibly into Stage Four, with a little wriggle room allowed, you tend to see it like Cecil B. DeMille told it in The Ten Commandments. That Red Sea just opened right up when Moses held up his staff and the members of those enslaved twelve tribes of Israel walked right through and Pharaoh's army got drowned. The hand of God wrote those Ten Commandments on those slabs of rock; which is why we are supposed to obey them. And at the end of the story God carried Moses off to heaven after allowing him to see the Promised Land from the top of the mountain where he died. It's a great story; and it made one heck of a movie!
Well, a Stage Fiver comes along and says, c'mon get real. That whole business about the twelve tribes was written up by the court scribes during the reign of King David when he was trying to unify these nomadic peoples into a single kingdom; and a story about how the progenitors of each of their tribes were actually brothers did the trick. It made all these disparate tribal people think they were really family. And, as ol' David further reasoned, since Egypt does pose a threat to our southern border, let's get a story out there about how they once enslaved our ancestors, so we've still got to keep an eye on them. You see, it's all a mythical story based on a slave revolt that, well, maybe did happen, but certainly not like what's in the Book of Exodus. And those Ten Commandments are generally reflective of the moral codes of that time all over the ancient Near East, and had nothing to do with the hand of a tribal Deity. So grow up!
A Stage Sixer says well yes, you're right, but... But there's a deeper, and very real, universal human story here about the ongoing human struggle to overcome bondage and oppression and strive to greater levels of human freedom. We can still relate to it on that level. And it's about people who felt their lives were bound up with, and in, something greater than themselves; and the best name that had for that "something greater" was Yahweh. We too need to look for some greater dimension and deeper meaning in our lives whether we invoke the name of a Deity or not. And whatever the origins of those Ten Commandments were, many of them do point to moral codes that we still live by. So we can still appreciate this story for its deeper human meanings and for its metaphorical value. And you can just grow up!
Stage Seven people don't even get into that conversation. They're somewhere beyond it. When I think of this story at the Stage Seven level I think of the concluding words to the last public speech Martin Luther King made the night before he was murdered. He said to his audience there in Memphis, "I have been to the mountain top and I have seen the Promised Land. (But) I may not get there with you..." Moses is a mythical figure; and Dr. King, with his PhD in religious studies from Boston University, surely knew that. But that didn't stop him from channeling Moses the night before he lost his own life. Dr. King was a universalistic type of visionary who was able to take a tribal legend and turn it into a universal narrative which, in turn, turned this whole nation around.
Okay, that's that. I want to offer one quick caveat before I wrap this up. As I put these thoughts together I became uneasy with my sermon title, "A mature spirituality" since I did not want to come off in an arrogant kind of way by saying that persons at one stage are somehow more spiritually mature or advanced than those at another.
In that initial religious climate of mine--which I spoke of at the beginning of these remarks--I saw people, like, say, my father, who were very well grounded and very much at peace in what Fowler calls that "Mythic Literal" stage. They felt no need to be anywhere else. I can't, in all honesty, call that immature. It just doesn't happen to be where I am.
I'll admit as well that I do get a little impatient with persons in that Stage Five, who are demythologizing and rejecting and doing a lost of casting off--which is where people like Richard Dawkins who wrote The God Delusion seem to be. But I finally have to say, OK, if this is where you need to be, then be there for as long as you have to, even if it's for the rest of your life.
In addition I've seen, and worked with, people at various of these stages whose commitment to working for a more sane, peaceful, just, and humane world is at least as strong as mine and in many cases more so. Fowler himself does not make value judgments about who "should" be at which stage when, and I try to avoid doing so myself.
So when I say I feel well settled in at Stage Six, that "re-mythologizing one," I'm only pointing to where my journey has taken me at this seventh decade of my life.
We here are a community of journeys; a community of journey makers. This is the kind of congregation to which we welcome new members even as we affirm and celebrate the paths of those who have long walked with us. Our third Unitarian Universalist principle calls upon us to affirm and promote the "acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations." It is my hope for each of you that wherever you are on your path today that it will keep on leading you to an ever deeper journey of the spirit.
Stephen Edington
April 11, 2010
