I recently picked up a book again that I read toward the beginning of what I would now call my spiritual awakening. It is called Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd. It is a spiritual memoir, which if you read my blog you already know I am a total junkie for spiritual memoirs, and it chronicles the author’s road from being an active member of a Christian church to being a faithful devotee of the divine feminine.
Now, you must know from the get-go, I love all books Sue Monk Kidd from her novels like The Invention of Wings and The Secret Life of Bees to her spiritual memoirs like Traveling with Pomegranates and When the Heart Waits. So, re-reading one of her books is like visiting with a dear friend.
It’s interesting though to reflect on the changes inside of me since when I first read this book, Dance of the Dissident Daughter in 2011, to now.
One that stands out to me, as I write this is now, is that I feel a much greater sense of ease about being in the midst of a spiritual unfolding.
In the beginning, it was almost a little scary. I found myself craving a framework to understand what the heck was going on with me. Never before had I been reading books and articles about religion and god. Never before had I been wishing for more time in my day to dedicate to a spiritual practice or discipline.
To be honest, I felt a little crazy. A little off my rocker; which initially led me to keep the whole thing very private, on the down low.
I wish I could go back to that earlier version of myself and say some kind and reassuring words. But I know that is not how it works, and that is probably a good thing.
The truth is, to take a leap of faith probably requires a small combination (or large depending on how rigid and controlling you are, aka: me!) of confusion, feeling lost, and desperation in order to thrust you into a new direction that otherwise would have been off limits to you. Not because a fence or a wall kept you out, but because you never would have walked through the wide open door. Maybe because you didn’t know the door was even there. Maybe because of fear of what might be on the other side of the door. Maybe because the spiritual life felt like something luxurious or extra. Something to do when I get all that free time into my schedule when I get all the real important stuff accomplished.
For my experience, I was the one who didn’t even know the door was there. As some of you know, my upbringing was a secular one without talk or mention of god or spirit. Which now I find so interesting because just the other day I was reading Marianne Williamson’s thoughts on the necessity for making time for god at the start of the day, and I thought, “that makes complete sense.” She says:
"Most of us wouldn't think of beginning our day without washing the accumulated dirt from the day before off our bodies. Yet far too often we go out into the day without similarly cleansing our minds...It would be ludicrous to say, 'I'm just too busy. I had to give up showers.' And yet 'busy-ness' is a common excuse for why we do not take the time, or give the time, to meet regularly with God."
It is hard to believe that in just a handful of years my relationship with god could have become such a central part of my life and priorities, and yet it has.
I’ve come to see my spiritual journey as chapters. Not in an overly compartmentalized way, but more like, periods of time when I was really steeped in a particular spiritual life stage.
You remember the famous 20th Century psychologist Erik Erikson who, with his wife Joan Erikson, developed the stages of psychosocial development over the course of the lifespan? It started with the Stage of Trust Vs. Mistrust in Infancy and went all the way to the Stage of Ego Integrity Vs. Despair in old age. Well, I think of spiritual life stages akin to the same theory of development, but for the purpose of the soul.
Despite what I am writing here oh-so-authoritatively, please don’t believe that I think this is the only way or path. For certain, god is far too diverse and vast for such a narrow road to awakening that would be one-size-fits all for all 7 billion of us human beings on the planet.
For example, in Sue Monk Kidd’s spiritual journey, written about in Dance of the Dissident Daughter, her stages of spiritual development are described as: Awakening, Initiation, Grounding, Empowerment. Whereas writer and spiritual teacher Joan Borysenko has written about a bio-psycho-spiritual model of development called The Feminine Life Cycle in terms of 4 Quadrants with death as described as “The Ultimate Act of Renewal & Growth.” In Ms. Borysenko’s book A Woman’s Journey to God she borrowed from the biblical stories to describe the spiritual life especially for women as more of one of “dancing Sarah’s circle” than “climbing Jacob’s ladder.”
Nonetheless, I will share my path, so far, in the hopes that it may be helpful to one of you as well, or maybe for someone that you know who appears in the midst of a spiritual unfolding.
I have conceptualized my spiritual life stages in 4 Acts, like in a play. No Act is more important than the another, but they are sequential. Meaning, Act II could not have preceded Act I. I don’t mean the second Act could not have preceded it for anybody, it just couldn’t have for me. Like in college, I needed to take Sociology 101 before I could take Sociology 201, or otherwise 201 just would not have made any sense. So for me it has unfolded like this:
Act I: I am. In this stage the spiritual task is a return to Self.
Act II: You are. In this stage the spiritual task is a return to god.
Act III: We are. (This is where I believe I am right now, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be here for a while.) In this stage the spiritual task is to connect with others in beloved community (to borrow a phrase from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.).
Act IV: Inter-are. Now, this is just a guess because I’m not here yet, but I’m borrowing Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept here for the possibility of an even deeper sense of oneness that would be an echo of physicist Albert Einstein’s famous quote:
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
I have described these spiritual life stages as sequential, but in my mind, sequential is not quite the same as linear. Because linear, to me, suggests a path that is direct, like an express train from New York to Boston with absolutely no stops along the way. Sequential though, is more like this passage I recently read in Becoming Who We Are by Jesuit Priest James Martin: "God writes straight with crooked lines." In other words, it’s not the “right way” because it is some perfected formula. Instead, it is just a way that works, for some but not all, because it just does.
As for what happens after my Act IV guess, I don’t know. But then again, Joan Erikson, wife of the psychologist Erik Erikson, lived longer than her husband, and she believed there was actually another life stage after Ego Integrity Vs. Despair that was never developed by her late husband.
I myself don’t pretend to know what all of my spiritual life stages will be which is probably why I gravitate toward the word “unfolding.” That word was first introduced to me when I became a mother. I was told that motherhood “unfolds.” In the beginning I had no idea what on earth that meant. Kind of like how I had no idea what was going on when I first felt the beginning of the spiritual awakening several years ago like an earthquake inside of me. But now, 6 years into motherhood, I think “unfolding” is the perfect word to describe the experiences of both motherhood and the spiritual life. We’ll see what unfolds next…
I would love to hear from you as well…How do you conceptualize spiritual life stages, if at all?
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