Four Stages of Spiritual Maturity

As simple as they are, I found these concepts to be wonderfully helpful in my understanding of what the heck is going on in the world of human religion. Mark K. also seemed to sense their value, and so encouraged me to share them with y’all. I stumbled upon a good synopsis by Len Hjalmarson at his interesting web site: http://www.nextreformation.com/html/...s/holistic.htm
and hope that he will forgive me for reprinting it here:

Scott Peck, in The Different Drum, (1987,) advances a useful growth typology. He discerns four stages in spiritual growth: (though he notes that they shade into one another)

· Stage I: Chaotic, antisocial
· Stage II: Formal, institutional
· Stage III: Skeptic, individual
· Stage IV: Mystic, communal

Peck places all young children and one in five adults in Stage I. This is undeveloped spirituality, which he terms antisocial because those adults who are in it are generally incapable of loving others. Although they may seem loving, their relationships with others are essentially manipulative and self-serving.

Peck terms these people chaotic because they are unprincipled; nothing governs them except their own will. If these people get in touch with the chaos of their being it is extremely painful; some ride it out, some commit suicide, and some move to stage II.

Stage II people are attached to the form, as opposed to the essence, of religion. They oppose change because it is the forms which liberate them from the chaos of their lives. Their vision of God will be that of an external, transcendent being. They may consider Him loving, but also fear His punitive power.

Some stage II people have become institutionalized because they need an external and imposed order to survive. Whether it is prison or the military or a strict religious structure, these people need structure.

If two Stage II people marry and have children, the children tend to absorb the principles of their parents. Once these are internalized, the children are self-governing human beings, and are no longer dependent upon the institution for order. They begin to convert to Stage III -- skeptic, individual -- often becoming atheists or agnostics. Although individualistic, they are not antisocial. They are usually highly principled and independent thinkers. Advanced Stage III people are active truth seekers.

If people in Stage III search for truth for long enough, they find what they are looking for. Like pieces of a puzzle things begin to make sense, and they begin their conversion to Stage IV (the mystic communal stage).

Stage IV people have a sense of the connectedness of all things. They see themselves as good and evil, and recognize that truly "no man is an island, of itself entire." In some mysterious way we share in the destiny of the cosmos.

Moreover, the more we grow in understanding, the more we have a sense of knowing nothing. While people in other stages often seek religion in order to escape from mystery, people in Stage IV seek to approach it. Thus Stage IV people value emptiness, the ability to move beyond pre-conceptions and even rationality to perceive the fabric of reality apart from boundaries and form.

I rehearse Peck's stages to point out the similarity in this progression to the stages of normal psychic development. The infant exists in undifferentiated chaos (psychologists term it symbiotic or primary narcissism); there is no sense where "I" ends and "other" begins. If the home is relatively stable the child forms boundaries and internalizes the expectations and values of the parents. He learns right from wrong and recognize that self and other are a mixture of good and evil and that only God is perfect.

If the child is valued as an individual and taught to think for herself she begins to question her parents' values and faith and becomes a skeptic (a process which makes the teen years more turbulent). If she continues to experience grace and search for truth she begins to understand the meaning and spirit of the law...