STAGES OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH

Stages...
by Sarah

M. Scott Peck is an author who is not at all unfamiliar to me. In fact, his works have likely heavily affected my upbringing in ways that I can only imagine. As is the case with most people, my spiritual journey was shaped early by my parent’s relationship with each other and with God. I remember the days and evenings spent at the local Baptist church with my family. My Mother ran the Mother's Day Out program at the church-and so I spent every weekday and often weekends at the church. I remember grape juice and crackers on Sunday mornings and summer camps with religious-themed activities and lessons. I read the Bible every day and we prayed and held hands around the dinner table and before bed each night. I would have to say, I have read the Bible cover to cover an innumerable number of times in my 32 years. Each time since the age of 18 (and the discovery of true critical thought), I have read it with a always different perspective in terms of It’s historical and political content.

Here, in this course, I have engaged in several debates on such topics as religion and homosexuality... I have tried to express my opinions with grace and candor (often a difficult undertaking when the topics are so personal) and have been pleased to find that many people here are open minded, intelligently critical and willing to agree to disagree when necessary. I have been called a hypocrite... told that my opinions are obtuse and that I am just interested in hearing my own arguments and am not willing to listen to reason. Such an accusation is hurtful... but I understand from where it came. As I mentioned above, I come from a family that was once traditionally very conservative and religious, and so I understand most of the dogmatic arguments that are flung every which way during debates that include religion or sexuality. I understand, also, what it is to watch a parent, mired in a lifelong expectation as laid out by abusive and intolerant parents and role models, come out of her shell and find psychological continuity and freedom.

As I grew up in my Baptist household, under the watchful eyes of the Lord, I saw my Mom struggle in her movement from the second stage of spiritual growth and into the third stage. My Father's drinking had a lot to do with Mom's decision to read her first M. Scott Peck book. When I was five years old, she began attending meetings at another church. She was participating in groups (A Course in Miracles) that centered on Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled” and also began to participate in Al-Anon meetings and the like. Once an avid reader of the Bible, to the point that she carried it with her at all times, I noticed a different sort of literature was always in my Mother’s hands.

Only as a teenager and young adult could I understand that my Mom was searching for something more than what she had found behind the doors of the home and the church in which I had spent so much of my childhood. She was seeking reconciliation between the marvel of God and the questions that were unanswerable via her religion. She was actively learning that her psychology and her God were not entities at odds with one another; rather they were much the same in their degree of importance within her everyday life.

My Mom has told me several times that she feels guilty for the timing of her search for psychological continuity—that she wishes she had known earlier that the misery she felt inside could not be lessened via a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and was due to stuff that she needed to work through psychologically-stuff that involved her family and childhood. She has said she wished that the changes that happened in our family life were not a direct result of her unwillingness to stay within the fold… that the devastation that became my childhood between the ages of seven and fifteen were not merely the result of her unwillingness to swallow the bitter taste of knowing there was something better for her… that she should have accepted her role was pre-established and unyielding—Mother, Lover of God, Sinner. She has cried to me, and said she was selfish… and I have adamantly disagreed-saying that I am able to be myself, today, because she was willing to question that which was bitter, but comfortable but unyieldingly stifling.

It is not merely the break from religious tradition that tore my family apart. My Mother’s unwillingness to live with my Father’s drinking led to a separation and divorce. My parent’s divorce led to estrangement between all members of my family, for religious and addiction reasons. My Mother’s (alcoholic) parents, siding with my Father, decided to help him petition for custody of us kids. Luckily, sober Mom won. The resultant division meant that I had no family except my Mother and my brothers. No aunts or uncles. No cousins. No grandparents. And no religion. See, every member of my now lost family spouted religious doctrine as the reason for their abandonment. It is with great pain that I realize now, I come form a family of alcoholics who, unwilling to accept that they had a problem that had torn a family apart, turned to religious dogma as a defense against change.

By the time I was ten my Mom was, in my eyes, the opposite of the Mother I had known before the age of seven. She was still loving and supportive-her expectation that we be patient and communicative with one another was always a well-established paradigm within the household. We sometimes openly cried over the fact that our entire family had abandoned us… I still struggle with the understanding of that kind of love… Or lack thereof.

Had my parents stayed together, had my Mother never searched for her truth… I don’t think I would be alive today. As a lesbian, I know that my Mother’s decision to change the course of her life made my life as a psychologically contiguous person possible. Had things remained as they were when I was little, I could be another teenage homosexual suicide statistic. The Baptist religion, my grandparents and estranged family—all saw homosexuality as a sin and high in the list of deviancy. I remember hearing them speak of it, but never questioned what they meant when they talked about abnormal sexuality and the like. I saw my “normal” Mother and Father, my aunts and uncles as the ideal. And yet, even as a small child I can remember feeling “special” connections with females. My first crush was when I was four years old and it was on the sister of the girl from our neighborhood who babysat us when my parents were out. Her name was Helen, and she may as well have been Helen of Troy for how my heart flip-flopped when I looked at her or heard her voice. Yeah, I was a church-going four year old with no concept of sexuality… my parents were very much together, I had grandparents who made Sunday dinners at their house in the neighborhood, and I had no clue what “gay” meant. Born this way? Emphatically, yes.

As an adult, I am in Stage III of my spiritual growth. I have been a Stage II, in fact, I began attending church again with friends in high school as I struggled with my identity and the non-acceptance of myself as a homosexual. In hindsight, a regression of spiritual growth occurred when I began insisting on a version of God as dictated via the churches I attended in high school. It was via the insistence by my Mother that I evaluate whether God could be more likely found within the walls of a building than within the shell of my consciousness that I was able to reconcile a relationship and knowledge of spirituality with non-attendance of a denominational church. It was through a very intense evaluation of my childhood that I was able to come to terms with the existence of a God who accepts and loves me as I am, regardless of where I speak with Him. My version of God may not be the version that is widely understood by organized religion, but I have an understanding and so feel that I respect the perspective of the very religious, no matter the denomination.

I have, within the past five years, begun to move toward Stage IV of my spiritual growth. The reading of books by authors of various religious affiliation has opened my eyes to not only the differences amongst such religion, but the similar tenets. I have been most affected by Krishnamurti’s Hindu philosophies. After reading Peck’s analysis of the stages of spiritual growth, I feel that Krishnamurti’s values espouse the goals of Stage IV spiritual growth: living comfortably in the unknown and incorporating inclusiveness and unconditional love, this, with the courage to be as oneself.

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