Skip to main content

Reflections


We are born into community. We grow inside another human being and spend the first few years of our lives in absolute dependence on that person and on the others who closely surround us. The ones near to us provide us with more than our bodily needs. Our very self - our sense of who we are - is primarily built as we see ourselves reflected back in the words and behaviour of others.

Before we can talk, this reflection is, obviously, non verbal. It is kinesthetic. In the way we are held, in the regularity with which we are fed and cleaned, in the warmth -physical and emotional - of our surroundings, we find the earliest information about the world and how we relate to it. Later, we listen to the words said to us and about us. Later still we observe, and with a growing theory of mind, are able to perceive other people as separate personalities with their own points of view, and we are able to build ourselves by comparison, identification and imitation. As our perception broadens we take on the mores of our family, tribe and culture. Sometimes a sudden shock or a moment of revelation can have a deep and lasting effect on our sense of self, but usually it is the words and actions of others, repeated day after day, year after year, which forms who we are, and gives us a sense of being a separate entity with a distinct and unique personality.

The stories told by others about us shape us when they become stories we tell to ourselves. We are, for example, impervious to our schoolmates calling us "loser" right up to the point that we acquiesce and say to ourselves, "yes, I am a loser". We are reflected back initially from a small group of people, but the range of "reflectors" gets larger as we grow older. Firstly it consists of our mother and the rest of our family; then our wider family, and our peer group. Then the various sub groups we identify with, the heroes we try and emulate and the general voice of our culture. The process of building a self follows a fairly predictable pattern, spelled out in detail, and with differing emphases by, for example, Piaget, Erickson, and James Fowler. I don't want to go into too much detail here, other than to point out some implications for our spiritual development:

1. Spiritual development is impossible without community. It doesn't matter, I suppose, what that community is, but we will not grow as people in the values we aspire to unless those values are reflected back to us. We therefore need a community where people are at least trying to do this.

2. Spiritual development is ALWAYS ethical development. We are reflectors for all those we come into contact with, and are therefore partially responsible for their sense of self. It MATTERS how we treat them.

3. There is nothing in our sense of self that is unchangeable. The stories about ourselves that we have learned to parrot from others can all be changed...

4. ...and from 3. it follows that there is nothing in our sense of self that is, ultimately, permanent. "We shall all be changed, in the twinkling of an eye..."

5. You need your sense of self to grow as a sentient being, but don't go getting too attached to it. Don't go getting all protective and indignant about your "real self". One day you will need to put it aside as a butterfly puts aside its cocoon.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I think your butterfly analogy is a useful one. Our identity as a caterpillar serves a useful purpose, but if we cling too closely to it, we will never achieve our full potential.
Anonymous said…
" Spiritual development is impossible without community. It doesn't matter, I suppose, what that community is, but we will not grow as people in the values we aspire to unless those values are reflected back to us." ???? Come on Kelvin, of course it matters what sort of community one is in! There are far too many communities where the values work to harm - either by negating worth - of the individual "Loser!" - or even of the community within the larger society.
Then there are communities where the values are very strong - but which you or I would hesitate to ascribe to - and which can also, therefore, damage the individual who wants to make a different set of choices. Bill feels very strongly about this in The Virgin In the Garden, - it is what motivates all his participation in the WEA - as you are presumably discovering as you read it....
Kelvin Wright said…
Of course you are right, it matters what SORT of community one is in, which is what, I was trying, clumsily, to say - that what is important about the community is precisely that it reflects back the life giving values that your need to grow into but that this can happen in a range of different communities - or not as the case may be

Of course in the best of all possible worlds the church is always one of those life giving places to be, but as we know, Bill's assessment of the church as a life giving community is too often quite accurate.
Anonymous said…
Hi again Kelvin - I had to come back because this has been bugging me. I haven't studied this area in the way that you obviously have, but is spiritual development really *impossible* without community? I can see that a nurturing community will be helpful, but is it really vital?

The way I see things, we are born with an innate sense of what is right and a connection with the divine. As we grow, and the community around us teaches us to identify more with our egoic self, we tend to lose that connection. As it imposes its own sense of values upon us, we tend to rely on that and lose faith in our own instinctive 'knowing'.

Later, if we find a nurturing, spiritual community, it may help us to find our way back, but like the prodigal son we are returning to something from which we have strayed, something which has always been ours though we did not know it.
Anonymous said…
Kelvin,

You write, "1. Spiritual development is impossible without community."

But where is the community? "Community" must mean a willingness to meld with others, to accept that others may be right, to back off the assertion of my needs to recognise other's needs are as important as mine, big etc. In every parish I have been in, with one exception I think, I have had to cope with, "I will belong to this parish as long as I get what I want. If someone else gets what they want at some other time, that is none of my business; When I am here I get what I want or I withdraw." Such a position is hardly belonging to a community. It might be called physical presence.
To be a member of a community is to be knocked about a bit.
Thinking as I write, isn't this the present tension in the Anglican church, and Lambeth in particular? "I will join with you as long as my values are your values." Community cannot be a group of people who agree on all things. Community must be a people who are willing to have hard corners knocked off to achieve the greater good.
Community, yes. The response is not a shout of 'hallelujah' but a hesitation at the possible cost.
Bill Schroeder
Anonymous said…
Simon, I agree with what you say, it's a matter of definitions. We are born into Eden, where God walks in the garden in the cool of the day. We are one with everything, and we are, in a sense alone - there is no real boundaries between us and every thing else that is. We are not supposed to stay there,however and to move away requires the development of a sense of self. We become - we ARE; we develop this illusion of selfhood by way of he community which surrounds us. Inevitably the developing sense of self means we unlearn - we overlay - the truth of what we really are.

This state is not static and he quest to develop our self and to protect it, especially from the frightening reality that it is all actually an illusion, occupies most of humanity most of the time. Inevitably, sooner or later, we are all get challenged to move on. The self is a Chrysallis in which the real purposes for us develop: which is the unlearning of what is false, and the entry again into the sense of oneness from which we all started - only the reentry comes from a new perspective: we carry back the wisdom and awareness we have developed in a lifetime of struggle with the world.

The process by which we make this movement - the shift from what William Blake calls Experience to Second Innocence is what we call religion. To make the shift requires a community and this can be either formal or informal. Take a look at your blogroll - it is a sort of informal community of those people you have selected to speak to and listen to - those who will reflect back to you the ideas and concepts you know you need to move onwards.

Without a community are ideas are merely possibilities that are never realised (ie made real) or we run great dangers - of becoming inflated and destroyed as our ego shapes what we think and twists it to its own ends. I think that the safest communities are the great world faiths where most of he conceivable traps of inflation have been long since worked out, but what do you do when the great faiths no longer seem to speak in ways which assist people on the path to growth? - his is precisely the situation for many in my wider community, the Anglican Church, right now.

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old