Arrival Has Never Been the Point

In his wonderful book, Naked Spirituality (see here), Brian McLaren writes about the repeated pattern of four seasons of life in God. Simply put, the four seasons are the following:

1. Simplicity - the spring season of spiritual awakening, the season of our "first love" when all is alive and prayers seem to be answered "beyond the statistical norm." "Our relationships in this stage tend to be dependent or even codependent; we need our in-group and its confident, charismatic leaders to know who we are and what we're about...This simple, dualistic faith gives us great confidence."

2. Complexity - the summer season of spiritual strengthening, a time of "hard work and getting things done during long sunny days". In this season we build on stage one with new skills in which we learn increasing independence. We move our focus from right-versus-wrong to effective-versus-ineffective. "To our core of dualism we now add a new layer of pragmatism" in which "good" people are identified less as the "correct" ones and more as the "effective" ones. We are not content to simply be with the right in-group; we want to be part of a winning team. The skills/practices we develop in this stage are 1) the ability to self-examine, 2) the habit of acknowledging our weaknesses and limitations and seeking wisdom and strength beyond our own, and 3) the ability to empathize with others in their pain.

3. Perplexity - the autumn season of spiritual surviving in which more important than being right or than being effective is being honest and authentic (brutally so). In this season we move from dualism and pragmatism to a relativistic and critical mindset. We are suspicious of the motives of leaders we used to admire. "If we acquired our faith in Simplicity or Complexity, we will probably doubt it now and may even abandon it for awhile. At the very least, we will need to add a margin for mystery and unbolt some of the structural elements of our faith that have been until now tightly fitted together..."

4. Harmony - the winter season of the nakedness/bareness of nature leading to new birth; in this stage all of the aspects of the previous stages come into harmony. "...the right-versus-wrong dualism of Simplicity, the effective-versus-ineffective pragmatism of Complexity, and the honest-versus-dishonest relativism of Perplexity are taken up and expanded into something bigger in the Harmony of stage four...If in Stage One we knew that everything was knowable, in Stage Two we knew that everything was doable, and in Stage Three we knew that everything was relative, now we in some way come to know with the old sage that 'everything is suitable for its time.' We can finally accept that all our knowing, past and present, is partial. Harmony requires this posture of humility, which allows us to finally see authority figures neither as godlike...nor as demonic..., but rather as human beings like us, often doing the best they can and even then making plenty of mistakes along the way..."

McLaren goes on to say that "Stage One orthodoxy now morphs into what some have called paradoxy - the realization that every true statement about God cannot fully contain the true majesty and wonder of God. This humility before God helps create harmony among all of us who believe in God, making it harder for us to maintain the old us-versus-them dualisms that have so often animated religious conservatives and liberals alike."

So does this mean we have now arrived? No...the season of Harmony opens into a new season of Simplicity and so on "in an ascending spiral of growth and discovery that continues as long as life itself. Far from feeling we have finally arrived, in Stage Four we finally begin to understand that arrival has never been the point."