Becoming an Adult of God

I like it! I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way before, but the analogy makes sense. It correlates nicely with Fowler’s stage 4 & 5.

Just adding my agreement. Great thoughts.

HiJolly

Just found this old thread and want to bump it up.

Thanks Hawkgrrl and Thanks to Ray for bringing it to our attention.

I’ve been thinking about this idea for some time now. I’ll tell you a little story. About 5 years ago my husband and I hired a life coach and in the process of our meetings I began to search for my purpose. Why was I here on this earth, what did God want from me, and how should I go about doing this work? About a year later on a Sunday while partaking of the sacrament I heard a little voice in my mind say, “Your purpose is to be a woman of God as a wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend and to mentor others in the pursuit thereof.” I was pretty excited by this because I truly had been trying to understand my life’s purpose and since that time I’ve let those words guide my life. I HAD NO IDEA the path to becoming a WOMAN of God would lead me here. In using the word “here” I mean literally StayLDS, NOM, as well as faith-crisis, lots of anger, and ultimately more peace than I have ever experienced in my life so far. (such a paradox anger and peace)

A few weeks after that experience I began to ask myself the question, what is a woman of God and then what does she look like, how does she act, how does she dress, what does she say? And those questions have led me on a journey that is exciting, invigorating and scary. I’m growing up I guess. And in Hawkgrrl’s metaphor I’m A teenager of God, a young woman still searching and learning, acting just as she should.

It was nice to be validated in that thinking.

CG

We talk in the church about being a child of God, and there are many scriptures about becoming childlike or having the faith of a child. But I think many of us have found that at some point, child-like faith isn’t sufficient for us. We want the promise of eternal progression implied in the most basic LDS doctrine. We want to become adults of God. The stage between childhood and adulthood is called puberty. And it can be ugly and difficult. In that stage, we think we know much more than our parents and teachers. We enjoy smarting off to authority figures. We see every mistake our elders made as evidence of them not getting it. We know we would never be like that if we were in charge. When I was a teenager, I was pretty mouthy and disrespectful at times…This analogy (which is similar to Fowler’s stages of faith development) helps us to know that there is progress to be had through the seeming regression of that transitional age.

I guess I have a slightly different take on this idea. Rather than feeling like I am acting like an insolent teenage punk for disagreeing with the Church about many points of doctrine I honestly feel like they are the ones being childish and unrealistic for expecting me to un-learn or ignore so many “truths” that are “not very useful” to the Church. Basically it feels like they expect me to go back inside a limited and restrictive box and stay there when I already know what’s outside the box and feel like I have outgrown this perspective for good.

In my opinion, the difference is that immature youth often refuse to listen to sound advice based on practical experience so they need to learn things the hard way sometimes. On the other hand I feel like I have been perfectly willing to listen to the Church and give them the benefit of the doubt longer than they really deserve and it looks to me like much of their advice has not been sufficiently tested and proven to work in most cases because it is based on relatively limited experience and a very narrow perspective that completely ignores many alternative possibilities worthy of consideration.

I can see why the Church would favor naive childlike faith so much because one of the most likely alternatives at this point is inactivity/exit and therefore the danger of eternal condemnation from their point-of-view. I think they justify teaching whitewashed history for essentially the same reason as an attempt to present “milk before meat” (1 Cor. 3:2). However, lately it seems like we are expected to survive entirely on milk alone because of the fear that too many people will choke on the real “meat” of some of the obscure and unpopular LDS doctrines and un-sanitized Church history. I think this fear and rationalization is part of the reason that the Church has become so strongly geared around the stage 2-3 mindset to the point that it is currently one of the absolute least friendly of all religious sects that I know of toward anyone in stage 4 or 5.

I’m not sure what to make of Hawkgrrl’s post. Conceptually, it’s interesting, but if it implies that people who have taken exception to Church leadership and repeated error on their part are somehow in a rebellious teenager phase of spiritual maturity….I’m not sure.

One thing about the Church is that it’s highly repetitious. In one sense, that is good because it gives repeated opportunities to do better. On the other hand, it also presents repeated experiences that are hard for some to take, and which can interfere with the spiritual journey.

My short summary:

Stage 3 = thinking as a child, as in accepting what you’re told.

Stage 4 = thinking like a teenager, as in rebelling not because you have anything better but simply because you don’t like what you’re told or begin to establish your own identity – and often doing it loudly and publicly to show that nobody can tell you what to do.

Stage 5 = thinking as an adult, as in deciding how to act based on what you personally believe, generally as a combination of the completely personal and the communally accepted – sometimes publicly, rarely loudly (but forcefully, when necessary), sometimes privately, usually quietly and almost always respectful of others’ differing views.

How’s that?

I think this is a good summary actually.

One thing that I am finding and noticing – I deal with teenagers EVERYDAY, ALL DAY, and I like them. I like to see people “escaping” childhood and stage 3 thinking and start to really find themselves and discover what is and isn’t important to them. I’m not one of these guys who disses on the kids — in fact, in staff meetings I’m usually the guy who defends them for having the guts to speak out when they feel something is wrong and needs to be fixed.

Yes, it would be nice to see more of them move quicker to a stage 5 way of thinking and behaving in society, and many of them do — but all to often they many of them just fall back into a DIFFERENT stage 3, either from peer pressure from other youth or from a another group of adults. That’s not always a bad thing, but it’s not necessarily good either.