Going to the Zoo

Once when I was small my father said he was taking me to the zoo. "It's just through this door". The door in question was in the side of the neighbours' garage - a door I'd never seen open. If we went through that door that day we merely ended up in the garage and not the zoo. I was not much older that Bishop Tom Wright's little girl was when she thought a short walk across the Cambridge University campus would take her to India - click here to see his Easter Vigil Sermon.

I think I probably knew that stepping through the door wouldn't put me magically in the zoo, but it might put me beside a car in which I would ride across Auckland to the zoo. I never did get to the zoo that day though. I was disappointed.

Life has taught me that there are no magic doors, no Star Gates and not many good shortcuts. When the angel told the Magi to go home by another way, it wasn't to shorten the journey. It may well have lengthened it. Better that that than running into trouble in a foreign jurisdiction.

Tonight I've been trying to retrace the spiritual highway that brought me to the place I am now- Stage 4 (the back straight, perhaps) on James Fowler's 6 stages of faith scale. 2 more stages and I'm a saint - cool, nuh! I've been at stage 4 for a while, been the critic of much thats gone before but trying to forge ahead, get some new angles on this faith, this Jesus, this journey.

Those individuals who move to the fourth stage of faith (individuative-reflective) begin a radical shift from dependence on others’ spiritual beliefs to development of their own. Fowler (1981) says, "For a genuine move to stage 4 to occur there must be an interruption of reliance on external sources of authority ... There must be ... a relocation of authority within the self" (p. 179). Individuals are no longer defined by the groups to which they belong. Instead, they choose beliefs, values, and relationships important to their self-fulfillment.

Certainly my "reliance on external sources of authority" has been well and truly interrupted.

Stage three is described thus: In this third stage of faith (synthetic-conventional), individuals tend to have conformist acceptance of a belief with little self-reflection on examination of these beliefs. Most people remain at this level (Fowler, 1981; Kelly, 1995). click here for more. or plug the name James Fowler into Google.

Thinking back, I can see that as a young guy at St Paul's I was very much at stage 3. It was a need I had to be led, guided, to have spiritual certainties. I expected the place to be a High Anglican version of the Assemblies of God, except the truth now resided at St Paul's and the Pentecostals had it mostly wrong.

Now everybody is wrong except me (joke!).

Man, what a journey! What twists and turns! What pain and grief! And it's not over yet. And, Donald, you don't necessarily get to hear the tune. You accept, by faith that there is a tune, and you deal with the lyrics alone, if lyrics are all you have. C'est la vie, mon frere.


Blow a raspberry at the darkness and feel the joy anyway. Nice knowing you all.

Saint Richard of Maunu (almost!)

p.s. had a thought about the tune - will keep you all posted