In the previous chapter, I likened human maturation to a journey. In this chapter, I want to suggest three other ways of imaging our progress towards maturation.

Highs and Lows

First, the journey can be viewed as a series of highs and lows, or peaks and troughs.

We have all experienced times when it felt good to be alive.

We have been captivated by the simplicity of a beautiful sunset or we have been overcome when we have looked for the first time into the face of an infant bearing our genetic signature. We have experienced the sacredness of a moment of intimacy or the thrill of discovering the solution to a problem that has baffled us. We have fallen in love or we have gained an insight into ourselves. We have been nurtured by a supportive community or we have been taken out of ourselves as we have been swept along by a moment of creativity. We have encountered God and been transformed.

Because of the relief, the newness, the energy of these experiences, the temptation is for us to live from one high to another and to anticipate a pattern of growth in which the highs will play a significant role. This anticipation, however, can be dangerous, because it can lead to disillusionment. We peg our expectation at a level that is bound to be disappointed.

We need to value times, following our highs, when there is opportunity for us to consolidate the positive benefit accruing from them. If their value is not garnered, it may be lost.

It is also important for us to realize that highs will be followed by periods of deflation, and perhaps even exhaustion. Furthermore, to conserve gains resulting from what we have experienced, we will need to put certain disciplines in place and to commit ourselves to what could be a long haul. For this we need patience and persistence.

Another danger with constantly anticipating highs is that we will overlook the importance of the ordinary. It is not difficult to discern the presence of God in the highs, but, if our attention is fixated on the spectacular, we will not detect God's still small voice in the ordinary.

While we have all experienced exciting times, we are even more familiar with times of threat, of distress, of pain and of suffering. These lows may have to do with disappointment, failure, depression, fear, loss of property, being let [63] down by someone you trusted, pain, violence, grief, being sacked from your job, incest, ill-health, poverty. The catalogue is endless.

How should we approach these low times? What will make the difference will be the attitude we adopt towards them.

It is important for us to recognize that the pain will not last forever. In saying this, I do not intend to minimise the severe or long-term suffering. However, the intensity of some forms of pain is such that those who are its victims lose consciousness. Others, whose suffering is prolonged and whose illness is terminal, are mercifully relieved of their distress when death intervenes.

It is also important to keep in mind that the distress you are currently enduring may benefit you in proving to you that you have the where-with-all to cope with life's reverses. You will afterwards be able to say, as Paul did, when he wrote to the Philippians, that he had learned to find resources within himself, whatever his circumstances.¹

Facing a current distress may also help you develop your weaknesses into strengths. I remember failing an English exam in my second year at high school. This experience, which reduced me to tears, made me determine that I would never fail an English exam again. My father had a copy of Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia. I read it through, taking note of the words I did not understand. I ruled up an exercise book, listing each of the unknown words, together with their meaning and the sentences in which they occurred. I continued this practice for many years. In my final year in high school, I received the English prize and went on to take an English major in an Arts degree.

We also need to take account of the fact that down times, painful experiences, offer us the gift of self-knowledge, provided we are open to receive it. They face us with ourselves. This is particularly acute for those who are forced to confront their mortality. Many AIDS victims, while waiting to die, find that this process strips away layers of the fabricated self. Because it is no longer possible for them to fantasise about the future, they touch base with their true selves. When they reach this stage, they become disconcertingly honest.

It is also the case that distressing experiences can draw us closer to God, so long as we do not descend into resentment. The deeper the pain and the greater the threat, the more our defensive pretentiousness falls away and the more we relinquish ourselves into God's hands. It is also through the lows that we find that we grow in personal, spiritual strength.²

To be able to cope during difficult periods, we need, during ordinary times, to be nurturing relationships with ourselves, God and others. We also need to be surrendered to the grace that conveys us on the inward and outward [64] journeys and to disabuse ourselves of the notion, that, when we are surrendered to God, everything will go right for us.

While we have looked at highs and lows separately, we also have to ask if there is a connection between them.

There are all sorts of connections between highs and lows. Speaking generally, however, it can be contended that highs and lows are connected at three different levels, the physiological, the psychological and the sociological. Physiologically, the rush of adrenalin associated with highs can deplete potential reserves and leave us without energy. Psychologically, we cannot sustain elated moods. A descent is inevitable, which will contrast unfavourably with the peak experience. Sociologically, occasions when fresh creative energy erupts within a community will often be followed by periods of sterility. The opposite is also the case. It has been when religion has reached its lowest ebb that there is a fresh outpouring of the Spirit. The former is a preparation for the latter.

I have talked about three levels of connection between highs and lows, the physiological, the psychological and the sociological. These levels are not separated from each other. They are intimately interconnected. Furthermore, the relationships of highs to lows is not merely multi-dimensional but is also multi-directional. Highs lead to lows and lows lead to highs. Progress takes place in the form of a wave motion, from high to low to high to low. It is a little like the flow of blood through the body, that results from the dilation and contraction of the heart.

Death and Resurrection

I have argued, thus far, that the human journey can be viewed as a series of undulating highs and lows. It can also be seen as a series of deaths and resurrections.

Nature is sustained through deaths and resurrections. Night follows day, which, in its turn, is followed by another night. The seasons, spring, summer, autumn and winter, constitute a pageant that repeats itself each year. Vegetation dies off in the autumn and comes to life again the following spring. Like nature, we grow and mature through a series of deaths and resurrections.

Piaget, Kohlberg, Fowler, Wilber and other Constructivists posit a series of stages through which individuals progress in their cognitive, moral, faith and transpersonal maturation. The transition from one stage, or level, to another, necessitates the death of the old self, the old way of viewing and handling reality. This is necessary before a person is able to progress to the next level. [65]

Wilber helps us appreciate what happens by drawing attention to two processes, translation and transformation.

He argues that, as we grow in knowledge and self-management, we rework our understanding of ourselves and our world. To remain comfortably at any one level, while this is happening, we translate and retranslate the symbols that we use to picture reality.

However, as growth accelerates, the process of translation becomes inadequate. In some cases, the symbols expand to exploding point and need to be jettisoned. We are no longer able, in all honesty, to continue to conceive of reality in the way we have done in the past. We must die to our old self and relinquish our, now inadequate view of life in preparation for our being transported to a new level of reality. This process involves a transformation of the self, or the rebirth of the self at this higher level.³

Not all are happy with a developmental paradigm that views maturation as an ascent through a series of stages. Some, like Stanley Hauerwas, argue that it is more accurate to conceive of life as a narrative and to picture human development as the outworking of a plot in a novel, with its twists and turns and subplots.

Hauerwas illustrates his contention with an incident from his own life. While studying at university, in a period marked by student protest, he visited his parents during a vocation. His father, who crafted guns as a hobby, presented Stanley with one of his treasures. It was his favourite. His son refused to accept the gun, handed it back to his father and lectured the older man on the evils of weaponry. Years later, after his father died, Hauerwas, regretting his action, wished that he could re-run the incident. The years had brought insight and mellowed him. He realized that his father's gesture was an indication of his love for him. It was the nearest his father could come to expressing affection. And he had been rebuffed. Hauerwas' response had been consistent with his view of the world at the time. But he had since grown wiser. There had been a death and resurrection, a transformation.⁴

It is not easy to surrender to the grace that effects this transformation. However, unless we do, we will not grow.

Furthermore, if we baulk at death and rebirth, if we refuse to die to the old ego and surrender ourselves to the grace that promises rebirth, but which is unable to guarantee that rebirth beforehand, then damaging consequence can result.

If we refuse to die to self, we will substitute an external victim for the self and sacrifice that victim. [66]

Deep within us, we know that the way we presently conceive of reality, and live it, is inadequate. New ways of approaching life, gestating foetal images, are formed within us. But they threaten us. We look away. Instead, our attention is draw to a person or group, external to ourselves, or to the community that shares our beliefs, whose views represent the new way of looking at life that is threatening us from within. We project, onto this individual or group, all that we are rejecting in ourselves. We vomit our emerging foetal images over them and attempt to put both to death. This is the shadow side of fundamentalism, of any form of fundamentalism, Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Marxist or secular.

A second consequence of the refusal of the ego to die, is that we are driven to dogmatise our current understandings.

We adopt a totalitarian stance. Theology becomes ideology. The facts no longer matter. What matters is the preservation of the ideology. This is the sad end to which many innovative thinkers deteriorate. Because their reputation is based on the original thesis they propounded, they feel they need to defend it to the end and at all costs, because it has become integral to their identity and essential to their self-esteem. This was one element of Freud's difficulty with Jung, and other of his early proteges, who refused to uncritically endorse his central tenets. For Freud to have moderated his dominating belief, that the essence of our humanity was centred in human sexuality, would have involved a Copernican revolution. Unable to moderate his views, Freud, the innovative pioneer, became Freud the intractable dogmatist.

A third consequence of refusing to undergo transformation, is that we attempt to immortalise ourselves at our present stage of development. Rather than relinquishing control and flowing with the grace that is the source of our true immortality, we seek to immortalise ourselves by drawing the whole of reality into ourselves. This is our response to the threat of death and disillusion at every stage transition. The young baby will seek to take in her mother through her mouth. As a child she will hang around his mother's skirts rather than venture into an unknown pre-school environment. The addictive materialism of adults fulfils the same function. It is a disguised attempt at ensuring their immortality.

Death/resurrection is a law of nature, of human development and of Christian maturation. It is focussed in the central Christian symbols of rebirth and baptism, where baptism celebrates the death of the old life and a rising to walk a new life with Christ. In some Christian traditions, the concept of conversion, or regeneration, is also associated with these symbols. [67]

A Removal of Boundaries

We have imaged human maturation as a succession of highs and lows and as a series of deaths and resurrections. It can also be viewed as a dissolving of boundaries.

The boundaries I am speaking of are not physical or psychological boundaries that protect our personal space. These need to be secured against illegitimate invasion. The boundaries I am referring to are those highlighted by Ken Wilber in his No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth.⁵

Wilber argues, in a paradigm he describes as The Spectrum of Consciousness, that boundaries are established, largely through socialization, between different facets of the self's experience of itself and its experience of external reality. These inhibit our knowledge of ourselves and of the wider reality of which we are a part. Human maturation, according to Wilber, involves, among other things, a removal of these boundaries.

Wilber sees the removal of boundaries as progressive. [68]

At the first, or egoic level, the boundary separates persona and shadow, that aspect of themselves of which we are conscious and which we regard as the person that we are and the shadow side of the personality, which is largely hidden from us, though not necessarily from perceptive onlookers. Healing, at the egoic level, involves an integration of the persona and shadow.

At the second level, the level of the self, the separation is between the self [resulting from the integration of the ego and shadow], and the body. The process of enculturation, within Western society, has taught us to psychologically dissociate ourselves from our bodies. We need to re-own our bodies, to care for them and to celebrate the fact that our reality is an embodied reality, that we are body/minds, body/selves.

The third level is the level of the body/self. Separation at this level is between the organism and the environment. We need to recognize, once we have reclaimed our bodies, that we, as body/selves, are part of a wider eco-system.

The final, integrative level, is the level of unity consciousness. Progression to this level leads to a recognition that the whole of reality, ourselves included, is part of a universal Self that holds us in existence.

Wilber further argues that the confusion induced by the presence of a welter of psychological therapies can be resolved if we recognize that different therapies address different boundary issues on different levels of the spectrum of consciousness.⁶

In this chapter the human journey has been imaged as an undulation between highs and lows, as a series of deaths and resurrections and as a dissolving of boundaries, boundaries that prevent us experiencing our God-given wholeness and connectedness with the divine. [69]

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