Faith Development: Stage Five

This article continues a series on faith development, begun several weeks ago.  First time readers are encouraged to read the earlier articles to put today's into context.

Stage 5/Conjunctive Faith:  The essence of Stage 5/Conjunctive Faith is paradox.  It is easier to point at this stage than it is to describe it.  Stage 5 faith realizes that is all we really can do about anything.

Fowler confesses his frustration in trying to tack down the contours of this stage, worrying aloud that maybe he doesn’t understand it fully or worse, that it doesn’t exist. The faith at this stage is akin to what happens to a person after experiencing a powerful spiritual awakening.  I liken the way this is described in Exodus after the Israelites have crossed the Red Sea.  They have been liberated from the slavery of their narrow lives in Egypt and know too much to be satisfied any longer with the spiritual torpor of their previous existence.  Like the Red Sea, the way back is closed to them.  Once we have a major awakening, we can never successfully go back to sleep again, though many of us certainly try.  But while we have witnessed the workings of a Higher Power, our faith is still rooted primarily in the material realm.  We have more roots than wings.

We are now aware of how much and how frequently we “miss the mark.”  Can we maintain faith in those occasional glimpses of God in ourselves and others?  Do we challenge ourselves to see and believe in God in every moment and every situation, or do we save our expectations for those “sacred times” – church, meditation, weekend retreats, or a groovy hot tub experience with wine and friends?

This is the tension of Stage 5 faith.  It is the tension of consciousness, the simultaneous awareness of ourselves as created in God’s image and as the limited, flawed, humans we are. Carl Jung suggests the ability to hold both sides of a paradox simultaneously, without giving in to the internal or external pressure to embrace one side and exclude the other, is what leads to an expansion of consciousness.  We learn to do this in Stage 5 faith.

In the concreteness of stages 2 and 3 we reacted viscerally to symbols – this is our “first naiveté,” a precritical acceptance of doctrine.  In Stage 4 we learned enough detachment to step back from these symbols and dissect them.  There is something satisfying and enriching in this process, but there can also be something arrogant as well.  We think we know something because we have applied our intellect to analysis of a sacred symbol or text. 

The wisdom of Stage 5 is that we don’t really know anything, because in Stage 5 we lose the hubris of the intellect.  It is a “secondary naiveté,” in that we voluntarily relinquish our conscious knowing and allow ourselves to be acted upon by the symbols and systems we formerly studied.  We don’t forget the lessons of Stage 4, we just choose not to let them spoil the fullness of life’s experience:  there is always more to everything than what we can know and comprehend.  We re-learn the innocence of the earlier stages, holding our mind in abeyance and letting ourselves have a direct encounter with the liturgy or text or the mystery of the world around us.  This leads to a richer and deeper religious experience than the unquestioned and unexamined faith of the earlier stages.  In part it is because there is more of us to sacrifice, to bend to God’s will, and the resulting connection is consequently all the more full.

The faith stance of Stage 5 is more open to other traditions.  Fowler quotes Krista Stendahl as saying that “no interfaith conversation is genuinely ecumenical unless the quality of mutual sharing and receptivity is such that each party makes him or herself vulnerable to conversion to the other’s truth.”   Let’s leave Christianity, Islam Judaism or even Buddhism out of the picture for a moment.  How willing are we to let ourselves be “converted” to other political views?   When was the last time you were involved in a debate and you said "You know, I think you've got a good point.  I've changed my mind."

Stage 5 presupposes a firm, mature grounding in a faith system, a willingness to see its relativity and how other faiths complement or challenge it.  Fowler says people rarely get to this faith stage before middle age, because it requires the seasoning that comes from bumping repeatedly into our limitations and mortality.  He concludes his discussion of this stage as follows:

Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions, this stage strives to unify opposites in mind and experience.  It generates and maintains vulnerability to the strange truths of those who are “other.”  Ready for closeness to that which is different and threatening to self and outlook (including new depths of experience in spirituality and religious revelations), this stage’s commitment to justice is freed from the confines of tribe, class, religious community or nation.  And with the seriousness that can arise when life is more than half over, this stage is ready to spend and be spent for the cause of conserving and cultivating the possibility of others’ generating identity and meaning.

The new strength of this stage comes in the rise of the ironic imagination – a capacity to see and be in one’s or one’s group’s most powerful meanings, while simultaneously recognizing that they are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality.  Its danger lies in the direction of a paralyzing passivity of inaction, giving rise to complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth.

In next week's article we conclude this series with a look at Stage 6 faith development, Universalizing Faith. 

Do you have a question about your marriage or relationship? Is there a particular topic on relationships or individual psychological issues you would like addressed in this blog? Ask Josh in the comments below or email him at josh@joshgressel.com.

Josh Gressel, Ph.D., is a couples and individual therapist based in Pleasant Hill, CA. Visit his website at joshgressel.com.  He is currently accepting referrals.