Some have viewed the human experience as a journey. Others have focused on developmental stage transitions.

Classic Expositions of the Journey

The human journey has been depicted in a number of ways. Two classic delineations, which differ significantly from each other, are John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress¹ and Herman Hesse's Siddhartha.² In both narratives the principal characters leave behind their families. Christian, in Bunyan's narrative, seeks the celestial city and release from the burden of sin. Siddhartha's quest is for the meaning of life. The people Christian encounters either assist or frustrate his progress. Siddhartha learns from all whom he encounters, but passes beyond them in this quest of self-knowledge. Christian, after many near-fatal excursions, arrives at his destination and the burden falls from his back. He later returns to the City of Destruction to rescue his wife and children.

Siddhartha, after encountering a group of ascetics and spending some time with the Buddha, leaves behind his friend Govinda, who is content to sit at the feet of the Enlightened One, and journeys on. He masters the arts of business and of love, and is plunged into deep distress by the death of his mistress and his son's rejection of him. However, he finally learns, with the help of the ferryman, to listen to the river, to the unitive music of nature and of life, to flow with and to be lost in it.

The human journey, of which the two stories are unique reflections, is a two-fold journey. It is both an inward journey and an outward journey.

The Inward Journey

The inward journey focuses on two inter-connected areas, mapping reality and experiencing it.

Mapping Reality

The inward journey is concerned with mapping and re-mapping reality. Mapping reality is concerned with philosophical and theological beliefs, which are initially acquired through the influence of family, local community, church and the wider culture. The early map of reality with which we work reflects these influences. As we grow, this early patterning of reality is challenged by internal incoherence, conflict with alternative world-views and inconsistency with personal experience. [56]

Experience

Inner development is also fostered by experience. However, in reflecting on experience, we discover that it is impossible to disentangle experience from interpretation. There is no such thing as sheer experience. We interpret reality through a pre-set grid, which influences the shape and tone of the experience. These experiences, in turn, continue to modify the cognitive grid that helps us get a handle on reality. The influence is two-directional. The grid influences the experience and the experience modifies the grid. One could go even further and argue, on the basis of quantum physics, that we help create what we experience. We are not objective observers, but participant observers.

To make progress on the inward journey we need to live with insecurity. We have to let go of a dogmatism born of fear and to release our grip on the lid that seals in the unconscious. However, when we purposely pursue this journey, in spite of these obstacles, our lives and our ministries will be marked by an insightfulness, a freshness and a lucid simplicity.

The Outward Journey

The outward journey is similarly concerned with two elements, lifestyle and career trajectory.

Lifestyle

Toyoika Kagawa, son of a wealthy businessman and a geisha, lost his mother and father early in life and was forced to live with his father's legal wife, who hated him. Presbyterian missionaries talked to Kagawa about Jesus and he became a Christian. He was overcome by the love, the utter self-giving of the crucified Christ.

Kagawa enrolled in a Presbyterian seminary but caused problems for the staff because he invited beggars to share his room. Following frequent reprimands, he eventually collected together his belongs, piled them into a wheelbarrow and trundled them across a nearby bridge into the slums of Shinkawa, where he shared his life with the poor and with prostitutes and criminals.

Kagawa, who was later to be recognized as one of the most conspicuously Christian personalities of the twentieth century, pursued an outward journey that involved both life-style and career choices.³

Career

The career of the young Martin Luther King Jr. took a dramatic turn, shortly after graduation from seminary, when he found the leadership of the civil rights movement thrust upon him. He had not anticipated this development. However, this change of direction was to be central to his ministry and to the future of Afro-Americans and of the United States of America.⁴ [57]

For most people, the stakes are not as high as they were for either Kagawa or Martin Luther King Jr. They are significant, none the less. And like Kagawa and King, the outward journey, if we are faithful to our guidance, will involve us in life-style and career options. The outward journey will also involve us in living with insecurity, in the sense of letting-go of the scripts that we have been handed and in leaving behind the safe place.

The Connection Between the Inward and Outward Journeys

The inward and the outward journeys are interconnected. They share the initiative and influence each other.

The journey itself cannot be avoided. Even if we are unwilling to change, the world will change around us and we will find ourselves in a strange place.

While we cannot anticipate the future, the way ahead will require of us a commitment to living on the growing edge, a willingness to live our questions, an openness to a graced guidance that is new each moment, a leaving behind of old securities and the temerity to face the giants that the spies have spoken about.

If we are willing to venture, God will give us the grace to discover and accept ourselves, the courage to venture and a sense of place and rootedness in him and in his love. The confidence of those willing to pursue the journey was well expressed by Paul in the passionate rhetoric of the eighth chapter of his Letter to the Romans, where he argued that there was nothing that could separate us from the love of God.⁵

Hanging Loose

While we need to be committed to journeying, we should be careful that our desire for change and growth does not become compulsive. Compulsion, or the pressure we place on ourselves to change, can be self defeating. If we work ourselves into a sweat about the need to change, the extent of our compulsiveness will reflect the measure of our inability to accept ourselves as we are. This compulsion will also abort the change it desires. Paradoxically, it is only as we accept ourselves as we are that it becomes possible for us to change. The secret is to be committed to change while at the same time surrendering oneself to the gentle flow of divine grace that will direct and energise our journeying.

A Developmental Paradigm

We have looked at our experience of life as a journey. It could also be argued that this journey is set within the context of a process of personal, spiritual maturation.⁶ [58]

In defining the essence of our personhood, that is, of the body/mind/spirit, I argued that its two principal functions were meaning-making and communication and that, as we develop, both are pursued at increasing levels of self-transcendence or self-awareness.

I want to go on and further argue that human development is a two-phase process involving self-flourishing and self-emptying. The gospel of the psychologists and the gospel of the theologians are not two contradictory gospels, but are two phases of the one gospel.⁷

A Two-Phase Model

Unfortunately, the church has only recently begun to recognize that the first phase, self-flourishing, is essential to Christian development.

The failure to recognize this has resulted in the retarded or distorted development of some Christians. The call to self-denial has often been responded to by those least capable of self-denial. If self-denial is to be the healthy exercise it was intended to be, as a mature phase of our self-enhancement, and as a means of benefiting others, then we must have something to deny.

Because many preachers and theologians have not acknowledged the need for people to develop latent, God-given capacities, as an integral part of their spiritual maturation and as a foundation for the later exercise of self-denial, they have inadvertently fostered communities of crippled, judgmental Christians, who are secretly resentful of the God who demands of them this sacrifice of their essential humanity. These have responded to the call for self-denial from a position of weakness, rather than a position of strength. As a consequence, they remain the puppets of their own unrequited ego needs.

The reality is that we can only healthily deny ourselves to the degree that we have developed a sense of self and a range of human skills. The more centred we are, the more comfortable we are with ourselves, the more accepting we are of ourselves, the more we are able to deny ourselves and the greater will be our desire to do so. Self-emptying does not flow inevitably from self-enhancement, but it cannot effectively proceed without it.

The First Phase

The first phase of human maturation, self-flourishing, involves the development of potential abilities. These include cognitive development, moral development and faith development, the dynamics of which have been investigated by Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and James Fowler. Human flourishing also involves the development of one's personal centre, a process reflected in Erikson's focus on a socially-generated identity, in Jung's [59] concentration on the exploration of the unconscious and in Ken Wilber's emphasis on transpersonal development.

The Second Phase

The second, self-emptying phase of human development is concerned with the growth of the individual towards the generous self-giving that we see reflected in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. It is evident in an increasing centredness and in a self-love that, out of its abundance, lovingly cares for others without manipulating them. It can also be

discerned in the mature exercise of an unconstrained, constitutive freedom, whose essence is discovered in a commitment to flowing with the movement of an internal grace. Other indicators of maturity are peaceableness, lack of judgementalism, human warmth, gentle strength, the capacity to live a day at a time, playfulness, spontaneous creativity, compassion, the ability to be there for others and a quiet but solid commitment to the truth. It is also evident in a roundedness in our personal, spiritual development, that is, in the psychological profile and in the theological model of spirituality that informs our living.

Interaction Between the Two Phases

I have argued that personal spiritual development is a two-phased process and that a person must be some way into the first phase before they are capable of being launched into the second. In arguing this way, however, I would not want to be understood to be implying that the two phases can be easily separated. Parents can introduce children to a healthy pattern of self-denial provided they respect their children's potential for development and provided they do not force their children to adopt self-denying behaviours that are inappropriate and crippling. On the other hand, those who are strong enough to give of themselves generously to others will find their greatest fulfilment in self-giving.

While it is important to point out that there is a double directionality in the process of spiritual development, towards the self and away from the self, and, while it is necessary to distinguish between the two phases in order to alert Christians to the fact that self-enhancement is an aspect of spiritual development and that premature self-denial is dysfunctional, it should also be emphasized that maturation involves a fruitful interplay between the two phases.

Further Reflection

Before concluding this brief description of the two-phased process of personal, spiritual development, I want to comment on the dialectic between formation and transformation and on the role of prayer in this development.

Formation and Transformation

From the moment of conception God begins forming us. Genetic inheritance and environment are the constraints within which she works. This process of formation involves experiences of transformation, which make us aware that something is happening within us for which we are not wholly responsible. It is at such times that we are aware of a reworking of our centre, which results in fresh enlightenment, a growing capacity for love, a new freedom and mastery and an increasing capacity for self-transcendence. This transformation usually follows developmental crises and periods of resistance, perplexity, disillusionment and suffering. [61]

Prayer

Personal spiritual growth can be fostered by prayer and service to God and to others and by commitment to the inward and outward journeys.

The prayer that is recommended may take one of a number of traditional forms, such as vocal prayer, meditation or contemplation. On the other hand, it may be a matter of listening to the voice of the Spirit of God speaking to us through our unconscious and calling us to an exploration and appropriation of our shadow, a process that will centre us in the depths of our embodied reality. This, in turn, will release inhibited natural capacities and make it possible for us to give of ourselves to others, where we are not diminished in the process and where others are not conscripted into meeting our ego needs by a spurious generosity.⁸ [62]

[SFM 56-62]