The Bookmark

Faith traditions oftentimes have practices preserved in order to remember their most significant events. One of my friends grew up in a Jewish family and describes that practice of faith as a corkscrew, whereby the people of faith travel through their history continually to learn and live. Others have been baptized and catechized Roman Catholic, where they learned to remember the Holy Mother and the Saints as markers in the fabric of faith. Purity, devotion, simplicity, wisdom, and worship are all contained in their holy figures to point the way. I grew up Protestant and I can count only a few events that we relive throughout the calendar: Christmas, Easter, and the monthly Eucharist (or communion).

Christian Spirituality has often been described in terms of a journey. Nowhere has this been done more famously than in Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, which was written about the time of the Spanish Inquisition. I highly recommend it as she shares an extraordinary wealth of wisdom. In an updated study, Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich collaborated in a study to formally compose Teresa's model and illustrate its significant points in their book, The Critical Journey. What Hagberg has produced is a vibrant journey model and rather than bore you to tears with any more words, here's a diagram so you can see how it works.

The first stage involves recognition in a way that may be primarily affective--or emotional--in nature. Second comes the association of the neophyte within the life of a church community. This usually entails a line in the sand between "old friends" and "church friends" where the individual is empowered by a newly discovered group of people who can provide knowledge about Christianity. Third comes the productive life, which involves membership, baptism, stacking chairs, joining service times beyond Sunday morning, or ushering.

Finally, the believer enters deep spiritual reflection as they learn both about God and themselves in a deeper way and pursue that knowledge to its full extent. But this is about where the affective season in the journey tapers off, and as the euphoric emotions begin to wear off with the normalization of this new life the believer hits "the wall."

What is typically described as a crisis of faith, the wall serves as a place where everything learned, felt, thought, and otherwise experienced must be processed all over again--whether consciously or unconsciously--to see if one's faith can survive the absence of ecstatic emotional experience. If you're going through this right now, it is possible to live and enjoy faith without the heightened emotional senses you had in the beginning of your walk with Christ. It's okay.

There's really no prescription to get you out of the wall, around it, over it, under it, or through it. You just have to grow bigger than your wall until it no longer holds you back, and that's difficult because it's not in your control. You have to wait here until God reveals your purpose. At that point you begin your true mission. All that involvement in church before was fine, but this is the stage where your mission is extended to everything you've been created to do from the beginning like building relationships with the special people only you seem to be able to understand. It's where your heart is no longer broken for itself in Christ, but for others as their feelings and emotions take the place of yours. A fire is kindled for others as you begin the journey outward. After that you begin to relearn everything: wisdom, experience, passion, and salvation all dance together along the path of faith.

The catch is this: You could be in multiple stages at once. You could go through them cyclically. You could develop your purpose and mission but remain at the wall for the rest of your life, just like Mother Teresa did. You can read about that in her posthumously published in I Loved Jesus in the Night.

Other viewpoints have also emerged about spirituality and in contrast to the journey model lies the holistic model--that is a model that deals with all the aspects of a person at once. The one I'm familiar with was proposed by Donald Gelpi in The Conversion Experience, which I've borrowed from and modified based on thoughts from a good friend of mine who first introduced me to it. This diagram shows the model I use to conceptualize this form of spirituality.

Gelpi outlines how conversion may actually happen in different aspects within each person. So someone could have converted religiously but have yet to convert to the Christian morality that compels them to respect what a gift creation is to us. Another person may have intellectually and emotional converted to the way of Jesus but hasn't yet converted religiously. Pervading all of this is the physical experience which feeds the soul with images on which to contemplate, question, concern, decide, mystify, and overwhelm. 

What I've discovered most often in both myself and others is the natural desire to return to a specific place in the spiritual journey or to emphasize a more comfortable area of the holistic spiritual experience than others. Some churches innately reward people who remain or return to the affective stages of their spiritual journey while simultaneously casting guilt and consternation on those who are struggling at the wall or the journey inward. Some churches may choose leaders who are all religiously and emotionally strong while sidelining those whose conversion has been strongest in the sociopolitical or intellectual areas. 

While remembering certain aspects of our faith is healthy, and vary from tradition to tradition as I observed earlier, we should be careful that our spiritual experience doesn't lead us to "bookmark" certain sections of life while diminishing others. Some bookmarks are emotional as we use them to channel times when our emotional state was much more heightened in our experience of God. Others may be reflective, as we try to reforge seasons of life when we felt inspired. Still others may be demonstrative; characterized by acts of service or exhibition by which we try to do what we were doing when we felt God was happy with us, in some sort of attempt to regain a sense of his love for us. These are natural reactions and not to be discouraged: only recognized and guided with a focus on the character of God rather than becoming misled by a pursuit of something long past.

Do you try to access a hyper-emotional state during times of musical worship because you've been psychologically trained that this behavior brings you favor or benefits your position? Or do you break into emotional outbursts in moments like this because a new revelation of Christ has deeply penetrated your soul? Do you study the Bible because you want to appear to be the kind of person who studies the Bible? Or do you study the Bible because its history and mystery awaken light in your soul? Finally, is your understanding of how to worship God based on what you've discovered in your own experience of him and your personal response to him, or do you still base your worship on the expectations of others and how they reward your reproduction of the model they set forth? Have you ever volunteered to help the poor and felt like you had lost the excited compassion which characterized this act of loving service at the beginning? These are the kinds of situations where we must be careful we are following God instead of ourselves or someone else.

As members, ministers, and missionaries of the Gospel, I urge all of us to examine ourselves and resolve to be inclusive or people whose spiritual stage or strongest experience of God is different than our own. I remind myself that we must all worship God individually and corporately, so I should neither condemn others for their genuine expressions of love for the Father, nor should I contribute to this kind of spiritual discrimination in corporate settings. Be mindful of your bookmarks so that your experience of our incomprehensible Creator-Savior isn't limited to your favorite parts but illuminated with his full truth and greatness. In the end it must be said that you have to be yourself, for in his presence you can be no one else.