Fowler

This is ridiculous, and probably only exciting/interesting to me, but I have been reading about James Fowler's Stages of Faith Development, and it has been a really helpful way to understand the changes that have happened in my spiritual journey over the past several years. If you went to college and realized that Christianity was not all you thought it was, you should read his Stages of Faith. Anyhoo, reading through his "scoring manual," I keep identifying with the statements in Stage 5 (out of 6 stages), and I'm really excited about it. Roughly, Stage 4 is kind of a period of individuation, and of turning to internal sources of authority and standards for belief. It is sort of what happens when people really start to realize that there are other belief systems out there in the world that work, and sometimes, it leads to what looks like a "loss of faith." Other times, it just causes a person to further refine their particular understanding of their own faith tradition in relation to all those other traditions. Either way, the idea is to find something that can be universalizable, in light of the recognition that what one has always believed may not in fact be universally observed. Not explaining this well! Anyway!

I sort of see Stage 5 as the re-embracing of one's faith, in light of the complexity and plurality of the world. You recognize the world can't be squeezed into one worldview, and you embrace that, but you begin again to find value in religious expression. I think reading through descriptions of this stage is helping me to put some words to what I'm sensing, and to see that I'm not the only one who's ever thought these things. It's legitimizing it, I think. Here are some examples of Stage 5 thinking:


The Stage 5 view of the world is one of a multi-levelled and complex reality, and Stage 5 finds it necessary to affirm this multi-dimensional reality and to hold its disparate elements in tension in the interest of truth and comprehensiveness...She tends to see reality as complex and to realize that different metaphors or methods can be applied to different aspects of it. Stage 5 will strive to hold these elements in tension, perhaps by some tentative vision of ultimacy or universality.

It is sensitive to such variables as history and culture in framing its judgments about the world...open to the possibility that much that is true remains hidden or unseen...will often display openness to mystery and to the uncanny.

Talking about ritual/symbol/images of God: Stage 5 can progress beyond de-mythologizing and the need to translate symbols into concepts toward a new openness to the power of the symbol to evoke, generate and sustain meaning. A new sensitivity to the multi-valent nature of symbol and its power to compress layers of meaning emerges at Stage 5...potential of a fresh turn toward the symbolic and a new sensitivity to the possible richness of its disclosures.


It's just weird, this is a transition that I could never have anticipated happening, and that never would have happened if I had continued to suppress questions, or to deny my loss of faith. I could only barely say the words to anyone but myself, but I eventually stopped believing in God and stopped identifying as a Christian at all. I don't really know how I identify now, because "Christian" still means to me what it used to mean. But there's this new awareness of how the world works. I can see it, but I can't quite say it yet, and so Fowler said it for me. I don't really want to call it a return to faith, because that makes it sound like I fell and then got back up and returned to the exact same thing, and that's not what happened at all. I just kept growing and growing, but that growth led me away from God to a general orientation toward goodness, and then now, to this wide open space, where good and God and all the gods, everyone and everything, finally live together in harmony, but not simply, not without contradiction or mystery.

Anyway. I like it!