Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Has your religion helped you grow up?
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
August 2004My son jumped off the roof of the garage, as has many a child, because he thought he could fly. More accurately, he did not know he couldn't fly.
Whether jumping off a garage, trying to make a bicycle fly, or getting a broken doll to come back to life, each child needs a story like this one. An important part of a child's development is learning about her limits, her difference from the world around her. It is amazing how important this learning of one's smallness is.
Until that moment, a child experiences total love and nurture from mother and the environment and assumes it's all hers. When she discovers her limits and imperfections a much more vital discovery can be made. Limited, imperfect, she finds that mother and father still love her, that she is infinitely valuable just as she is.
Healthy people grow up sensing themselves to be of infinite value. But if they stop there, they become truly dangerous. The final part of the process that begins on the garage roof is the discovery that every other person is of infinite value, too, and moves on to learning to honor that in them with their own limitations and imperfections fully present. That is growing up.
People who do not value themselves are not going to relate to others in the best way. People who do not discipline themselves to see the infinite value of the lives around them will also be threats. Loving neighbor and self makes sense only if the love of neighbor and of self is based on an awareness of the value of all life.
Whether you call those activities religion or spirituality, people engage them in order to get a sense of well-being, a sense of order in the world, and a sense of meaning for their lives. Do they help you grow up?
If one is a go-it-alone practitioner of spirituality, one has always to ask oneself if one's spiritual practices lead one to value others infinitely and how one gets better at expressing that value so that the world becomes, as the saying goes, "a better place."
If one is a religious leader or a person who has any say about what goes on in a faith community, the task becomes harder.
Certainly people need to grow in the knowledge of their worth through all the stages of life. They indeed need to be reminded of God's call to them. As human beings in a pattern of growth, they also need to recognize the value of others, not as potential converts but as people to be honored and served.
This often means inviting people out of their comfort zones.
Unless there is disciplined engagement with others as valuable, however, religion becomes a kind of personal property. God is domesticated into a kind of utility that gives one an hour's peace on demand.
Having fallen from life's garage roof, a grown-up and healthy religion is not solely concerned with making people feel good about themselves, and certainly does not dabble in making them feel superior to others. It does not reinforce feelings of persecution and victimhood, but asks its adherents how they will put their awareness of their own value and purpose into practice as they encounter other, equally valuable people.
Is your spiritual or faith community helping you grow up? It might be interesting to keep track of the messages you receive from it in the next month in word, print, image or act.
How many messages move you beyond valuing self to valuing others (as something other than potential converts)? How many messages encourage suspicion or mistrust of others? How many messages keep you focused on the past? How many messages encourage you to move into a creative future?
I would love to learn the results of your survey, and can be reached at
bishop@diobeth.org.Return to the index of Bishop Paul's columns for the secular press
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