Love, Part 4

So, where are we?

6-26-22

Remember M. Scott Peck?

For those new here or as a reminder, on June 6 I mentioned that some years ago I found myself divorced, alone, and hundreds of miles from the two kids I loved desperately. All day long, my stomach felt as if I had been gobbling lead. At nights, if I managed to fall asleep, I would soon awake. Pills didn’t help. I lost way too many pounds.

A letter from a friend expressed his excitement about The Road Less Travelled, by Mr. Peck. I bought it and began reading some every day and one of the book’s themes cured me. 

That theme was: anyone seeking emotional or spiritual health must face the absolute truth, no matter how bitter, brutal, dangerous, or threatening to the ego. 

Not many months later, the author lectured at a church about two miles from my home. I only knew because my cousin, who attended that church, asked if I had heard of Dr. Peck. 

Though in those days I avoided churches, I attended the lecture. His topic was the stages of emotional/spiritual development. He laid out our spiritual growth as follows:

Each of us is, from birth, on a journey of emotional growth, which most people of faith find inseparable from  spiritual growth.  He proposed that we develop through fairly distinct stages.

We begin life as pure narcissists. All we care about is fulfilling our needs. Stage one. 

The second stage takes over once experience teaches us that to get what we want, we need to fulfill certain expectations, act in certain ways. So we grow into somewhat enlightened narcissists.

The third stage involves an awareness of our utter selfishness (our sin nature, in Christian lingo). We recognize (either vaguely or acutely) that even what we think of as love is mostly based upon selfish motives. We suspect that selfish people (like us) can be dangerous to themselves and to others. Now conscience or fear of punishment or something else may lead us to seek out a creed or an authority, a dogma that will hold our selfish natures in check. Many of us find a church. Others settle more comfortably into a religious culture in which they were raised. Emotional growth often stops somewhere in stage three, when people give up youth's restless quests in exchange for what feels like security.

The fourth stage arrives when people begin to develop confidence in their ability to rise above their selfish natures. They may become willing to strike out on their own without external restraint and so find church too rigid or prescriptive and leave it behind.

The fifth stage is harder to describe because it can take many forms, but its essence is that contentment eludes stage four people and compels them to return to their youthful quest for more than they see around them, to reach for a greater awareness, to discover more beauty and perhaps a light the mundane world can’t provide.  Some of these people may return to or discover church. Some won't.

Dr. Peck maintained that his primary motive as a psychiatrist was to help his patients move from whatever stage they find themselves in to the next stage. He didn’t believe he could save people or change them from beasts to angels. But he could help them take the next step.

I recall someone asking what was his goal for patients who had reached stage five, and him replying that those folks don't need a psychiatrist.

No doubt a precious few adults live squarely and consistently at one or another of those growth levels. Still, I will return to The Road Less Travelled and Mr. Peck's definition of love as "the willingness to sacrifice for another's spiritual growth" and suggest that  we can best love others or ourselves by estimating where their (or our) growth might be and helping them (or ourselves) on the journey toward the next stage; all the while remembering, especially in these trying times, that if we have chosen to trust Jesus, we are required to love our enemies.

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Now let’s all obey Grace Slick and go find somebody to love.