I am not the same person I was when I graduated from high school. I’m not the same person I was when I got married, when I finished law school, or when I was ordained to the diaconate. To put it simply: I’m not the person I used to be! But then, no one is.
When I look in the mirror, I see a guy who is older than the man I used to see in the mirror, a lot grayer, and, I hate to admit it, also heavier. And when I cut the grass, rake the leaves, or shovel snow, my joints and muscles remind me that I am not in as good shape as the guy I was twenty or thirty years ago.
On the other hand, I like to think that I am a bit smarter, more experienced, maybe even a tad wiser than in the past. I believe I am more even-tempered and less judgmental. No, I am not the man I used to be, but, by and large, I am okay with that. With age, I believe I have become more reflective, more meditative, more prone to see the good in people, and less inclined to note the shortcomings of others.
Inner Development
Most of all, I think that as I have aged I have developed a better, deeper relationship with God. Even when I was a young man, my relationship with God was an important part of my life; however, I will also admit that it was just one important relationship among several. Even though the God relationship was always first to me, the problem, at that point in my life, was that I didn’t often think about which relationship among my important relationships was the most important.
Honestly, even as I grew older, I did not spend a great deal of time reflecting on my relationship with God. What got me musing on this subject, however, was an article I read in America magazine, entitled, “New Habits” (8/5/19 issue). Written by Stephen B. Grant, a securities lawyer in New York City, it recounted his month-long stay at Mepkin Abbey, the Trappist monastery in South Carolina. The monks there offer a guest program where one can – as the advertisement states – “Be a Monk. For a month. For a year.” And while Mr. Grant recounts what it was like to be a “monk for a month”, it was a statement in his last paragraph that caught my attention. He wrote that one of his reasons for going to Mepkin Abbey was to “begin a discernment about the next phase of my life.”
I suppose that “discernment about the next phase of my life” could mean several things, but I took it to mean that Mr. Grant was exploring the next level of his relationship with God. Scripture tells us that as we grow older – and hopefully more mature – we discard that which is no longer appropriate, that which is not useful in furthering our relationship with God. St. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13:11:
When I was a child I use to talk as a child,
Think as a child, reason as a child;
When I became a man, I put aside childish things.
When we are children, we usually have a childish relationship with God, but as we mature, our spirituality, our relationship with God, must also mature.
But childish is not the same thing as child-like, of course. Hopefully, as we grow older, we also grow in wisdom and understanding. Yet Jesus tells us in Matthew’s Gospel that we must remain child-like if we wish to enter the Kingdom of God: “Let the children come to me; do not prevent them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the Kingdom of God like a child will not enter it” (Matthew 10:14-15).
So, while we need to remain childlike, open, vulnerable, and completely dependent in our relationship with our heavenly Father, we nonetheless have to abandon childish beliefs and understanding as we grow older and develop a more mature, adult-like understanding of how we are to relate to God.
A Universal Truth
This idea of passing through different phases or stages in one’s relationship with God is not something unique to Catholicism, or even Christianity. In his book, Living Religions, M. K. Fisher notes that the five pillars of Islam – belief in the one true God, daily prayers, works of charity, fasting (especially during the month of Ramadan) and making a pilgrimage to Mecca – are all things Muslims learn as children and take responsibility for as they grow older. While these are not directly related to life stages, it is fairly clear that adhering to Islam’s five pillars is something a person must grow into as he matures in his relationship with God.
Hinduism, on the other hand, talks specifically about the four stages one passes through in life. The first stage is the student stage where one’s obligation is to learn about both his religion and the world. Next comes the householder stage, during which the individual gets married, raises a family, becomes a productive member of society and continues to grow in his faith and relationship with the Divine. The third stage is that of the retiree, who begins to withdraw from worldly activities in order to focus on the spiritual life. The last stage – and one which admittedly few pursue in modern times – is one in which there is an almost total withdrawal from society, spouse, and family. Fisher also notes that those who make such renunciations often retreat to live the spiritual life in a monastery or ashram, and in rare cases go to live in forests or caves, begging for alms and spending the last years of their life in spiritual study, prayer, and contemplation.
I am not encouraging anyone to abandon their families and go off to live in a cave! This tradition of Hinduism would not easily mesh with 21st century Catholicism, despite the fact that from early times the Church had a tradition of religious hermits. However, I am suggesting that at least the first three stages of life in Hinduism are compatible with living our Catholic faith. We, too, go through a stage of learning our faith, and a stage when we pass our faith on to our children. Then we enter a stage where we begin to be less concerned with worldly affairs and more focused on our relationship with God. Finally, we reach a stage where we are or should be little concerned with houses, expensive cars, and social standing, and increasingly concerned with growing as close to our heavenly Father as possible.
The Goal of Our Journey
When Stephen Grant talks about discerning what comes next, what the next phase in his life will be, this should not be puzzling to Catholics. We know that Baptism is the beginning of our faith journey, but sometimes we fail to remember that the journey doesn’t end until we come face to face with God.
As we make our life-long journey of faith, we will move from one phase or stage to another. As we grow in knowledge and wisdom and grace before God, we become a new person. We not only put aside childish things, as St. Paul writes, but we put aside our old self and embrace the new person we become because of our deeper, more intimate relationship with God.
Our journey of faith is really just a path that connects the various stages of our relationship with God. Each phase brings us closer to God and helps us know Him more intimately so that at journey’s end, when we meet God face to face, it will be less like standing before a judge and more like a meeting between two friends.
2 thoughts on “Growth Stages in Our Relationship with God”
It sounds like this deacon wants to evolve his relationship to false gods.
I am new to the blog -referred by CNA. The article is interesting yet puzzling in that under the title Universal Truth you make references to Islam and Hinduism. The transformation and next phases you speak of are to be found, I believe, in the summit of our lives – the Eucharist. The encounter with Christ and the learning of the way of the cross – to offer up our sufferings to Christ’s sufferings on the cross for all of our sins – I think this is the ultimate phase transformation we need to seek before the sand runs out of the hourglass.