How can I facilitate your spiritual growth?

There are a lot of people from whom I have learned about spiritual development, and perhaps one of the most helpful has been James W. Fowler who has written books, now classics, on the subject, entitled, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and The Quest For Meaning, followed up by Faithful Change: The Personal and Public Challenges of Postmodern Life.  If we are to seriously apply the third principle of Unitarian Universalism, “acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations”, it is important that we have some idea, some model, some frame of reference by which to understand what “spiritual growth” entails. Fowler’s model and analysis is very helpful.

In his book, Faithful Change, Fowler writes about the importance of shame. “Spiritually, shame is related to the deepest places of truth in our souls.” p.92 Polonius says in Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, “above all else, to thine own self be true.” What happens when we are not true to ourselves? We harbor a deep sense of shame which most often we are unaware of until someone asks us our deepest, darkest secret that we have never told anyone and we shrivel, embarrassed, frightened, defensive.

Most religious traditions tell us that we should live in an open hearted way loving everyone, and Unitarian Universalist minister, Galen Guengerich, teaches that the ethical imperative of Unitarian Universalism could be gratitude. The problem is that shameful people cannot be genuinely grateful. They are too distrusting, too insecure, feeling too inferior, and they are, at least to some extent, close hearted, and close hearted people are not grateful people except in disingenuous, sycophantic ways. A person can’t give what he or she doesn’t have; can’t share what they don’t possess. Gratitude cannot be manufactured except in pretentious, artificial ways unless a person’s underlying sense of inadequacy, defectiveness, inferiority is resolved and healed first.

Some very successful and ambitious, intelligent, charming people are full of shame because they are driven to prove something to someone even if it is to themselves. And if you ask such people what makes them tick, what drives them to excel, they usually can’t really tell you, but at a deep level it is a fear of inadequacy and defectiveness. With such people, their successes, their achievements are never quite good enough. There is always a need for something more, something better, something more perfect. Perfectionist people who are driven are not grateful people because for them, there is always something missing; something that will finally fill up what John Bradshaw calls “the hole in the soul.”

Some people mistakenly perceive these shame based feelings, thoughts, and behaviors as a problem in self esteem and self worth and while these feelings can be part of the picture, artificially trying to enhance someone’s self esteem with congratulatory interactions usually don’t help with the person’s underlying sense of toxic shame. What does help? Coming to understand that every person has inherent worth and dignity, and at one’s core, one is already perfect and loved by his or her Creator. The opposite of shame is not self esteem and self worth, but wholeness, okayness.

Back in the 70s, with Eric Berne’s development of Transactional Analysis, there was a description of four basic life positions: the first, I’m not okay but you’re okay is the depressive position; the second, I’m okay but you’re not okay is the paranoid position; the third, I’m not okay and you’re not okay is the position of despair, psychosis, and suicide; the fourth, I’m okay and you’re okay is the mentally healthy position. Elizabeth Kubler- Ross, the psychiatrist who mapped out the grieving process, taught that there was a fifth position which is I’m not okay, and you’re not okay, but that’s okay. Helping people get to this fifth position is the work of psychotherapy and religion.

People come to Unitarian Universalism from other religions or paths in life in which they felt abused, confused, refused, and failures. They are looking not only for a place where they can be their inadequate and defective selves, but where they can be accepted in their defectiveness, and be healed, and helped to be made whole.

The question from this perspective is how can Unitarian Univeralism revive, and rekindle a demoralized spirit? Is what UU has to offer inspirational? There are some UU preachers I listen to in podcasts who almost always are inspirational because they are not afraid of pain and suffering. They can see into the depth of human sorrow, injustice, inequity, brokenness and find a way to the light, to break open a ray of hope. These are preachers who often seem to have suffered greatly themselves. In is in transforming their own suffering that they are filled with compassion and mercy for others.

As a former Roman Catholic I was often told that church was a hospital for sinners and that healing grace was conferred through participation in the sacraments. Unitarian Universalism is not a sacramental church but what they like to call a covenantal church. Healing grace is conferred by covenanting with one another to practice our seven principles. So ask a friend, a family member, fellow church goers, “How can I help to facilitate your spiritual growth like I’m asked to do in our third principle which we covenanted together to affirm and promote?” Will they be embarrassed, feel put on the spot, feel awkward because they don’t know what to say? How would you answer if someone asked you?

As a psychotherapist sometimes I ask my clients when it seems appropriate and we have a trusting relationship, “Will you tell me what your interior spiritual life is like?” Surprisingly, I have never had anyone fail to answer the question. Some people are more articulate than others, but I have never had anyone not share something. It is a very intimate question, isn’t it? We are asking the person to share something very personal about themselves, and perhaps they might feel vulnerable, but often it is something they have never been asked before and with an inquiry made with curious interest, people seem not only willing to respond but somehow even complimented to be asked. Try it. See what happens.

Dr. Paul Pearsall, the neuropsychologist, wrote that no therapist should try to help a patient unless the therapist has some sense of how the patient might answer these three questions: why was I born? What is the purpose of my life? What happens to me when I die? I would add a fourth question, “What matters the most to me in my life is___________? And a fifth question, “What would it take for your life to get on a little better track, and is there anything I can do to help you?” I suspect that just asking the question is a big help in and of itself.

16 Reflections of First Principle now available in paperback and on Kindle on Amazon.com

The paperback book and Kindle edition of 16 Reflections On The First Principle Of Unitarian Universalism: The Inherent Worth and Dignity Of Every Person are now available on Amazon.com.

This book is wonderful for personal reflection and for use in book discussion groups, small ministry groups, and adult religious education classes.

Please spread the word by sharing this post with others using the email button below the article or Facebook, etc.

Thank you.

Fund raising opportunity selling David G. Markham publications books

August, 2014

Fund Raising Opportunity

David G. Markham publications has a fund raising opportunity for churches and other organizations which would like to sell DGMP books. Most of the DGMP books sell for $9.95 on Amazon.com. If you or your organization would like to buy the books in quantities of 5 for $25.00 or 10 for $40.00 you or your organization can make almost $5.00 per book with the 5 book bundle or $6.00 per book with the 10 book bundle. That’s a profit of almost $25.00 for the 5 book bundled, or $60.00 for the 10 book bundle.

These books are beneficial for personal reflection, but lend themselves especially to book discussion groups, small group ministries, or the basis for adult education classes or workshops.

For more information and or to order books email me at davidgmarkham@gmail.com or call me at 585-727-3663. New titles are being added every month. To view the current books available, search by the author’s name, David G. Markham on Amazon.com.

Thank you for your attention and consideration of this opportunity to be of service in faith development, and to raise money in a very lucrative and beneficial way for you, your church, or other organization.

As of August, 2014 the books available are:

2 books in a series on the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism:

1  

16 Reflections On The First Principle Of Unitarian Universalism: The Inherent Worth and Dignity Of Every Person

   

J      

Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations: The Second Principle Of Unitarian Universalism

2 books based on critical readings of UU A Way Of Life Book Of The Month selections:

    

       

             God Revised, revised: The conversation continues by Galen            Guengerich

Critical Reading Of Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver: A Unitarian Universalist’s perspective.

UUAWL theme for September: free and responsible search for truth and meaning

The UU A Way Of Life monthly theme for September, 2014, will be "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning." Ideas, comments, essays, stories, poems are being solicited for publication that are relevant to this them. Send them to davidgmarkham@gmail.com

Can we enlarge our moral imaginations to include all living things in our circle of caring?

Chapter 10 in The Green Boat by Mary Pipher is entitled, “The Vast Sea Around Us: Interconnection, Deep Time, and Bliss.” She opens her chapter with this paragraph:

“Our species is consuming, contaminating, or destroying almost everything: rivers, oceans, topsoil, prairies, fisheries, and forests, not to mention cultures. We are not behaving this way because we are cruel but because we are caught up in the Great Acceleration and having a hard time slowing ourselves down and thinking things through. We are living in fragmented ways, disconnected from not only each other and the natural world, but from our pasts and our futures.” p. 180.

Pipher is preaching to the choir when it comes to Unitarian Universalists who are way ahead of their fellow Americans and Earth Planetarians because for several decades now, UUs have had one of their principles, the seventh, “respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part,” as one of its primary values.

On page 185 Pipher tells a wonderful story she got from a book called, Hey, Little Ant by Phillip and Hannah Hoose and Deb Tilley. Apparently as part of the story there is a song about a conversation between an ant and a boy on the playground with all his friends watching. The boy wants to squish the ant just for fun, but the ant sings that he has a home and family too. As Pipher writes, “He sings to show the boy that his life is as precious to his ant family as the boy’s life is to his human family. The song ends with a question for the listener to ponder, ‘Should the ant get squished? Should the ant go free?/ It’s up to the kid, not up to me./ We’ll leave the kid with a raised up shoe./ What do you think that kid should do?’”

Piper writes on that she is telling this story to her grandkids and she asks them what they would do. The nine year old granddaughter, Kate, tells Pipher she will never squish an ant again, and her seven year old grandson, Aidan, promises to let all the ants go free, but her five year old granddaughter, Claire, tells Pipher, “Nonna, I still like to squish ants but I won’t kill any talking ants.” Pipher comments jokingly, “Sigh. She’ll have a growth spurt soon enough.” P. 185

And it seems that when Claire’s pre-frontal cortex develops further and is able to control her amygdale she will indeed outgrow the instinctual urge to kill things different from her own species, but unfortunately, it takes more than just a chronological growth spurt because Americans, especially, are a violent people who love to kill things and, even each other, in far greater numbers than any other first world country or primitive cultures. We might speculate about why American culture is so violent and this fact seems, obviously, to be multi-determined, and the obvious thing is that “old time religion” hasn't helped but rather is used to justify killing as the Old Testament of the Bible gives human beings an injunction to dominate the earth, and as our American Presidents have sent our soldiers off to Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan they end their rationalized arguments for the necessity of killing with “And may God bless America.” The ludicrous observation is what kind of God is it that Presidents and Americans are invoking when they justify their ant squishing with “shock and awe” by asking for a blessing from this imagined entity?

Once again it is apparent that if Unitarian Universalists are to live their espoused values, the principles that they covenant to affirm and promote, they will be in a counter cultural position vis a vis their fellow Americans.

Pipher, though a Buddhist, thinks like a Unitarian Universalist when she writes, “If we do not expand our vehicles of mercy and ways of helping each other, we will destroy ourselves. To adaptively cope with our global storm, we need to enlarge our moral imaginations in order to include all living things in our circle of caring.” p.181 If only a President of the United States would call on someone with the moral imagination of Mary Pipher and Unitarian Universalists to bless the country and his policies.

"Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations now available on Amazon.com

As consistent readers of UU A Way Of Life on line magazine know, books based on articles on this magazine are being published and available from Amazon.com for personal reflection and group study.

The second book in a series on the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism is now available. The purchase of these books and materials supports the work of this online magazine. Your purchases are very much appreciated and your sharing this information with other people you think might be interested is very much appreciated as well.

Sincerely,
David Markham

This is from the Amazon.com web site:

This book of 11 reflections on the second principle of Unitarian Universalism, “to covenant to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion” is a gem. This principle rolls easily off the tongue with its triadic meter and yet when deconstructed, unpacked, is probably more than most people would bargain for. Markham argues that the application of this principle is counter cultural and places the devout and committed Unitarian Universalist at odds with the predominant, conventional, American Culture. Not only for Unitarian Universalists, this book is of interest to all those reflecting on The Good Life and what its most basic virtues of justice, equity, and compassion entail. It lends itself to personal reflection as well as to group discussion. It is highly recommended for those who want to dig deeper into the meanings of the most basic and the most fundamental of human values.

Encouragement to spiritual growth runs down hill

Unitarian Universalists are not known for their spirituality especially their mystical spirituality. The closest they can come to mysticism is probably their identification with the transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. So when we consider the third principle and ask ourselves what it means to encourage spiritual growth in our congregations, usually other than airy fairy, psychobabble, communing with Mother Nature kind of stuff, UUs are lost.

UUs have a history of embracing science and intellectual pursuits and have been skeptical of an exploration of what’s within feeling more comfortable with exploring externalities, the phenomenon outside ourselves in the world. And yet as it says in the Perennial Philosophy:

“For, as all exponents of the Perennial philosophy have constantly insisted, man’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God. To be a self is, for them, the original sin, and to die to self, in feeling, will and intellect, is the final and all-inclusive virtue.” P. 36 If this is the goal of spirituality, if we are to agree with what has been taught for ages by the world’s religions, how are UUs taught to shift their perception from “me” to the all?

Jesus tells us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The first step of 12 step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous is to recognize that our lives have become unmanageable, and step two involves coming to understand that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. It might be argued that 12 step programs are more spiritual than are our contemporary mainstream religions in the sense that they require a recognition and acknowledgement that the path to serenity and recovery is not in continuing to advocate for and tenaciously protect a unique sense of self, but rather to rise above the ego, to transcend the limiting sense of our mortal body and personality by joining with what Emerson called the “Over-Soul”. One of the slogans of the systems view is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and so, one might ask, what is this system that we human separate selves are a part of?

One of the definitions of enlightenment that resonates with me is the idea that our consciousness is raised to the point where nothing it life is excluded from it. In the 60s we referred to this state as “cosmic consciousness.”

If we, as Unitarian Universalists, are to encourage each other in our spiritual growth, how do we help one another develop a cosmic consciousness?

As a former Catholic I was taught to pray on my knees, to fast, to do other bodily mortifications that would make me more aware of the greater good like giving something up for lent, etc. Muslims fast during day light hours during Ramadan, Buddhists sit in a purposeful pose on a meditation cushion when they meditate, etc. These physical disciplines have the purpose of increasing awareness by eschewing the physical bodily comforts in favor a spiritual altered state of consciousness.

Now days people pursue these altered states of consciousness through drugs, exercise, work, sex, and adrenaline inducing “extreme sports” whether participating or just watching.

What does Unitarian Universalism have to offer in helping people move from a self centered pre-occupation with pleasure to a mystical state of bliss with the transcendent? Various UUs draw from the six sources, and UUs practice many different techniques and rituals as taught by various traditions, but when one considers what Unitarian Universalism has to offer uniquely its own even if integrating practices from other traditions, it seems that one is left empty handed and in a limbo.

One woman told me one time that she was drawn to the UU principles and fellowship but missed the Catholic rituals, liturgy, prayers, and other practices and finally resolved the two attractions by alternating her attendance at both a UU church and a RC church.

I think that many UUs, finding the tradition lacking, do a similar thing maintaining a participation in a UU church but also participating actively in other faith tradition practices. Perhaps this is good thing and should be encouraged, but it seems also fragmenting and distracting. This has been difficult for some congregations who struggle for an identity when there are factions within congregations of people who prefer one type of religious expression more than another such as Christian and Buddhist, or Jewish and Humanist, etc. Perhaps part of the appeal of Unitarian Universalism is that “the movement,” as some people call it, has no unique identity of its own, but is a hodge podge of interreligious gobbledygook as pastors and worship committees try to keep everybody happy.

The point of describing this state of affairs is to come back to the question of how is a UU congregation to encourage spiritual growth in its congregation when there isn’t even any agreement on what “spiritual growth” looks like, consists of, and needs for nurturance.

Unitarian Universalism is a very small denomination with very few churches and if one preferred a UU church with more of a Christian orientation, or a Buddhist orientation, or a humanist orientation, or a earth centered orientation, it is very unlikely that a person could access such a church within several hundred miles unless one lived in a major metropolitan area that had three or four or more UU churches.

As one considers this state of affairs, it becomes apparent that Unitarian Universalism in one congregation can be different in emphasis, focus, and culture than another. While there are some elements of Unitarian Universalism that are common threads in these different cultures, are these common elements enough to hold the congregations together in a meaningful tradition? The numbers of participants seem to say no. The membership of UU has been stagnant, if not diminished slightly, over the last few years, and given the consistent rise of the population, the percentage of the United States population who identify as UUs has grown smaller. Is it fair to say that whatever UU congregations are doing to encourage spiritual growth in their congregations isn’t working at least looking at the numbers of customers buying the product and services being offered for sale? Of course, it could also be argued that it’s the quality of the spiritual lives and growth and not the quantity that matters.

At any rate, let’s start with the basics. What condition is your condition in? What is your interior spiritual life like and do you feel and think it is nurtured and encouraged in your congregation, and if so, how? If a survey were actually done, I would hypothesize that what people will report as most helpful to their spiritual growth is the fellowship, but I could be wrong. However, I hypothesize myself that the key ingredient in a congregational culture facilitating spiritual growth is the holiness of the pastor. Those who play the key pastoral roles in a congregation are the spark plug that ignites the engine of congregational life and sets the tone, focus, and culture within which people thrive, stagnate, or destruct. The pastor needs a lot of support and certainly can’t do it alone just like a quarterback needs a good team to run the plays or an orchestra conductor needs talented and skilled musicians in the orchestra. But encouragement to spiritual growth starts at the top and cascades down through a congregation for better or worse, health and sickness, good times and bad, until the relationship between the shepherd and the flock is disrupted or terminated.

Are holy men and women being ordained into UU ministry? How are these pastors inspired, encouraged, and nurtured? Therein, perhaps, is the key to rejuvenating a stagnating denomination.