The Goal of the Journey into Spiritual Maturity

For the last several weeks, my wife and I have been talking to our parish about the journey into spiritual maturity and the essential elements of that journey, including:

Confessing our need for God

A willingness to surrender to God

Taking a fearless moral inventory

The willingness to be a meek horse

And an openness to the reconciling work of God[1]

But where does that journey lead?

Historically, for some Christians, that journey is a good way to pass your time.  It might even be your obligation.  But for any substantive changes to take hold in your life, some Christians argue that you need to wait for heaven.  “Getting saved” is the watershed moment in the Christian life and holding onto that experience is the single most important event the Christian’s life.

Our friends who think this way about the Christian journey are serious about their faith.  But this hardly sounds like Jesus, who said that his yoke was easy, and his burden was light — or who told parables like the story of the prodigal son.  Nor does it sound like Paul, who told the Galatians that they had been set free by Christ.

But when one begins to comb through the people and the arguments that support this view, you learn that many of them are afraid that people will take credit for any improvement that they experience in this life, and they often struggled so deeply with sin in their own life, that they found it hard to believe that God could take them to new depths without taking them out of this life.

Luther, for example, certainly felt that way.  As a young man he went to confession so often that his confessor told him to go away and come back when he really sinned!

Others focus entirely on performance.  They would argue that the value of the spiritual journey that we have been describing lies in its ability to perfect our lives and in particular in its ability to perfect our performance.

I spent a good deal of time around this kind of Christian in my late adolescence, and the conversations they had about the journey to spiritual maturity revolved around rules.  Particularly rules about dancing, drinking, and smoking.

Having grown up in a family of beer drinking, cigar smoking Germans and whiskey drinking Scots, that all struck me as just strange.  But as my understanding of the Gospel deepened, it also struck me as amazingly superficial.  To be sure, I had family members who needed to quit drinking, because they simply couldn’t drink without damaging their lives and those of the people that they loved.  And I had a grandfather who died, thanks to chain-smoking cigarettes all his life.

Buy the real problem with this version of the Christian journey was that it seemed to completely miss the point.  These prohibitions had grown up in connection with prohibition and speak-easies, not out of a deep reading of Scripture.  And one could observe all of the rules and still completely miss the point of the Christian life.

The third, progressive Christian picture doesn’t register the importance of the journey at all.  The Christian’s life is all about politics and the Christian’s duty is to realize a this-worldly reality.  Oh, to be sure, you can have a spiritual life as an accompaniment to that task but it is an accompaniment to the Christian’s calling.  This view, too, is strangely at odds with Jesus, who cautioned his disciples, “Give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s”.  And, more fundamentally, it misses the fact that Jesus was crucified, in part because he failed to fulfill political expectations.  (This is not to suggest that the Christian life does not transform the way that Christians think or act politically.  But it is to say that it is not the priority of Christian life.)

Alongside these three descriptions of the Christian journey is a fourth view.  One that acknowledges that our journey has a starting point, in admitting that we need God.  One that admits that we need to seek forgiveness, open ourselves to God’s direction and reconciling love.  But it is also a vision of the Christian life which teaches that we do all that as ground-clearing so that we can begin a journey into God in Christ that transforms us in this life and goes on transforming in the next.  It is what the Orthodox tradition describes as theosis – the process of living ever more deeply into the life of God in Jesus Christ.

This view of the Christian life is one of adventure, not entrapment.  A view of growing love and deepening joy.  A vision marked by healing and growth.  A view that holds that life is the good gift of God.

It also argues that the minds, imagination, and relationships we build with God and with one another are all a part of that gift.  And that whatever the life to come will hold, it will be more like that and better.

No one can completely capture that reality, but Psalm 84 puts it this way:

4 Happy are the people whose strength is in you! *
whose hearts are set on the pilgrims’ way.

5 Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, *
for the early rains have covered it with pools of water.

6 They will climb from height to height, *
and the God of gods will reveal himself in Zion.[2]

Now, I learned a long time ago that it is dangerous to comment on poetry.  Nothing you say will be more powerful than the poetry itself, and people who don’t like poetry cannot be convinced there is anything to like about it.  But, that said, allow me to make some observations:

One, this is obviously not to be taken literally.  It was written by a family of priests that maintained the worship of Israel both during and after the Exile.  And the poem describes the assent to the Temple during two of the major Jewish festivals held each year.

It implies that the Temple is higher than everything around it.  And it was higher than much of the surrounding area.  When you land in Tel Aviv today, people talk about going “up” to Jerusalem, not because it is north of Tel Aviv – it’s south – but because it is over 2400 feet above sea level.  But Jerusalem is not the highest point in Israel (Mount Horeb is) and the Temple is not even the highest point in Jerusalem (Mount Scopos is).

But whenever Scripture talks about the Temple, it is talking about a journey into the presence of God and the whole universe is a hierarchy.  There is God, and everything else is pretty much downhill from there.

For that reason, the Psalm wasn’t written just to capture the geography of the festival, it was written as a description of the spiritual journey.  And the journey is one in which people fix their hearts on God, draw strength from God’s presence, and are carried through desolate places along the way.  Hinting, as it does, to struggle and sorrow – it also teaches that no matter what happens, the journey is one that moves from strength to strength – not because the pilgrim relies on his own strength but because the pilgrim draws strength from God.

But, for all of us, including less poetic souls, what does that journey look like in “real life”?  Allow me to tell one story:

I first met my friend, Doug, almost thirty years ago.  He lived just a block or two north of Washington National Cathedral.  He frequently attended the Eucharist on weekdays, which is where we met for the first time, and we became close friends.

He was a freelance photographer and took photos of political leaders, prominent figures, and events held by non-profit organizations.  My personal favorites were two photos that he gave to me – one of me praying with Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the Cathedral and another of Mother Theresa’s hands, which he took when she was visiting the United States.

Doug had a great eye.  He looked at the world through a passion for the beauty of the world around him.  He was larger than life in social settings.  He made friends instantly.  He put people at ease – even when they hated having their picture taken!  And he loved a celebration.

But life was not always kind to Doug.  He battled bipolar disease for most of his life, and the medication that he took destroyed his kidney function.  As a result, he was on dialysis for decades.

Technological changes and economic pressures destroyed his business.  He succeeded in making the change from film to digital cameras but the IPhone and the financial collapse in 2008 posed insurmountable challenges.  The circle of clients he served simply stopped spending money.

Doug never found his footing, work-wise, after that.  On one occasion he was homeless, and in recent years he lived in shared housing provided by social services.

To make matters worse, in recent years his health deteriorated.  He had four heart attacks, and he needed dialysis with increasing frequency.

But the “the desolate valley” never robbed him of inner strength.  In fact, his love, his character, and his generosity of spirit shone all the more brightly.  The friend I knew in Washington never changed in essential ways, and those were characteristics about him that transcended those struggles.

Above all, he had a big heart, a deep love of both God and everyone he met.

He loved to worship.  He attended our church online and then attended his own Lutheran Church – every Sunday.  (He may be the only layperson I know who went to church that often.)

And throughout his life, he was attentive to the needs of those around him.  There was an abandoned “Five and Dime” between the Cathedral and a Starbucks where we would occasionally meet for coffee.  A man named George lived in the entrance of the Five and Dime, and Doug would always buy him coffee and a pastry, call him by name, and crouch down to talk to him for a while.

On another occasion, he witnessed an argument between a man and his wife and doubled back to comfort and encourage the agitated stranger, reassuring him that he was just having a bad day and that God loved him.

More recently, in the home provided by social services where he lived with five other men, he shared coffee, food, and his phone with them, even though he had lost everything he owned, including his cameras.  And on Sundays when he tuned into follow our Sunday service, he invited his housemates to join him.

Those are just a few examples, and they hardly scratch the surface.  For all that he went through, Doug was never angry or bitter.  He was deeply devoted to God’s work in his life.  And he was tirelessly devoted to the needs of others.  I guess you could say that for all the disappointments that he experienced, Doug was always on a journey turned toward God that was shaped by love and wonder.

A month ago, as he waited outside for his ride to dialysis, he suddenly collapsed and died.  At first, I was sad to think that he was alone that morning and that there were no opportunities for a final conversation.  But it has occurred to me since he died, that his death, like so many of the other obstacles that he encountered, could never divert him from that journey.

Now why am I sharing his story with you?  I suppose the reason is this: I could share a story of a great saint who made his mark on the church and history.  And those stories have their value.  But I also know that when I tell a story like that, there are inevitably those who think, “Oh, I see, he thinks I need to become a nun or a monk, a missionary or a penniless saint, or – God forbid – a priest or a deacon.

But, in truth, the invitation to the Christian spiritual journey is not all about that kind of life at all.

More often than not, the Christian journey is about those who respond to God’s love in the “everyday-ness”[3]

of their lives, giving back to God and to others, from whatever they have, wherever they are — living into Christ’s desires for them and caring for those that they meet out of the abundance of God’s mercy.

Doug was just that kind of person.  He made that kind of journey.  And you can make that journey, too.

[1] There are echoes of the 12 Step program here, which Christian in its underpinnings.

[2] Psalm 84:5-7, NRSV

[3 I am grateful to Eugene Peterson for this expression.

Photo by Jayson Boesman on Unsplash