World of Love Sess7 - A Picture of the Highest

These are the most inspiring values of life; these are the ones that people are willing to die for; these are the ones they are willing to pay for with effort, pain and torture. These are also the "highest" values in the sense that they come most often to the best people in their best moments, under the best conditions. These are the definitions of the higher life, of the good life, of the spiritual life, and I may also add, these are the far goals of psychotherapy, and the far goals of education in the broadest sense. -Abraham Maslow ¹

The children of God should not have any other country here below but the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it ever has contained, contains, or ever will contain. That is the native city to which we owe our love. ... Our love should stretch as widely across all space, and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it, as is the very light of the sun. Christ has bidden us to attain to the perfection of our heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestowal of light. Our intelligence too should have the same impartiality. -Simone Weil ²

In the breakthrough ... where I stand free of my own will and of the will of God and of all his works and of God himself, there I am above all creatures and am neither God nor creature. Rather, I am what I was and what I shall remain now and forever. Then I receive an impulse which shall bring me above all the angels. In this impulse I receive wealth so vast that God cannot be enough for me in all that makes him God, and with all his divine works. For in this breakthrough I discover that I and God are one. -Meister Eckhardt ³

The revolutionary new faith for the 21st century is based upon nothing less than the whole, healthy, strong, loving, joyful nature which, in our most perceptive moments, we all desire. This is the divine excellence which has been designed for us by God. We can see flashes and fragments of it in ourselves and in others around us.

In this session I will attempt to draw an outline of the highest that human beings can attain in excellence, what Abraham Maslow referred to in the title of his book, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.

Kohlberg discovered in his research that we are unable to see clearly or believe fully in the morality which lies more than one stage above where we currently are operating. In a parallel sense, we are unable to envision clearly what the highest and best kind of person would look like because even the best of us have only begun to draw near to it. We can only understand God as we become like God, and we can only see clearly the shape of the highest as we become it.

The attempt to understand the highest, however, is necessary. We inevitably do project upon the horizon our own pictures of the highest and in our best moments we try to copy them. From antiquity people have attempted such pictures. We must attempt to make them as scientific and accurate as possible.

We are able to do this meaningfully because we draw from the experience of the highest we have seen. We also incorporate the best of the researches to which we have access from the social sciences. And we use all of the tools of reason available to us, testing each part continually for consistency, inclusiveness, noncontradiction and coherence.

In this session we see the answers to our two key questions come together most dramatically. These are:

1. What difference does it make in style of life if a person is at stage 6-7?

2. What difference does it make if salvation is seen more as becoming like God than going to a place called heaven?

We see here why the road to a stage 6-7 nature is also the pathway to godlikeness.
We begin with the findings of a person who gave his life to attempting to define the highest, Abraham Maslow.

Starting with Health

At the time Abraham Maslow moved to New York as a young man, having just received his doctorate, he had been deeply impressed by two of his teachers, Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer. They seemed to him to be exceptional, superior persons. Yet he found nothing in his psychological training which accounted for this.
He decided to observe exceptional people and take notes.

He listed the traits he found in outstanding people. He examined and analyzed the peak experiences of people, those rare and high moments of joy, ecstasy or mystical exultation, He asked how people felt at those peaks. He compiled lists of these feelings, defined and classified them.

Maslow felt that Freud had made the mistake of concentrating on analyzing illness. It seemed to Maslow more valuable to look first at what health is. It seemed to him that the experiences and feelings people had in peak experiences, along with the traits exhibited by mature, healthy, excelling people, should offer clues to health and so to the nature of the highest and best we can become.

These are the feelings which Maslow found people tend to experience during peak experiences:

... integrated, unified; strength to feel one with the world and autonomous, egoless; fully functioning; grace; effortless; more determined, in charge, free of blocks, inhibitions; spontaneous, innocent; more creative, unique; in tune with present and surroundings; more a pure self and less a thing or object, more free of striving and need; more artistic in expression; sense of completion; playfulness; fortune and joy. ⁴

Note that these people, functioning seemingly at their highest, are characterized by great freedom and spontaneity; have a tremendous empathy with their inner selves, others and their larger environment; feel expansive and unthreatened by variety and complexity; and have a tremendous sense of inner unity and strength. These characteristics correspond exactly to the four poles of the divine wholeness we've looked at before.

Maslow noted two other things about those he came to call self-actualizing people:

1. They seem to unite the divisive polarities of life, such as autonomy and participation. They can experience all of these traits, even those which seem to contradict one another, and harmonize the contrary feelings that come with this tension within a larger, synthesizing whole.

Kohlberg had a parallel hypothesis. He believed that he had observed in the lives of stage 6 people the ability increasingly to unite the polarities of their lives in higher syntheses, to transcend and overcome the negative power of these inner divisions. He also observed that persons who he judged to be functioning at near stage 7 exhibit an extraordinary freedom from fear of death and a willingness to take risks, to sacrifice for achievement of their values.

2. The other important discovery of Maslow for this study is his observation that in the healthy, self-actualizing person, where two or three of these traits are found, all of them tend to be present.

This suggests that where the highest freedom is found, it is accompanied by the highest love, the greatest internal integrity and strength, and the widest expansion of the boundaries of the self and greatest variety of content. Rather than being isolated
traits, these are all necessary dimensions of a particular kind of fully developed, mature person. We do not find one of the traits highly developed without the powerful presence of the others.

This helps us define the love called agape more clearly. It is the mode of relationship of the truly mature and healthy person to other people, to self, to things and to death and infinity.

These four dimensions must develop in relation to one another. Stage development, as expansion (Kohlberg), is only one of the dimensions. If one pole develops without its opposite it is as if the buttresses were missing on one side of a cathedral. The whole building would be unstable. Or in a better metaphor, it could never be built so high in the first place.

For example, the person who seems strong in autonomy, a loner without need for other people, is in fact running from agape. He is suffering from the debilitating anxiety related to loneliness, whether this is understood consciously or not. The anxiety expresses itself in an eroding boredom, anger at those who do not love him as he wishes to be loved, a constant restlessness and hunger for exotic excitements.

Expansion of the boundaries of the self is essential, to the point where all people are included and the cosmic Void is confronted along with personal death. This expansion must take place when or before we reach true freedom, inner unification and fully mature compassion.

False Growth

When we seem to grow on one of the four dimensions of agape far beyond the other three, this turns out to be pseudo-growth. If our declarations of independence out-pace the reality of our compassion we are becoming more insensitive and not really more free. If our empathy side seems to shoot ahead beyond our actual autonomy, then we are in danger of a sentimentality which depends upon or gives in to others rather than relating to them in the tough love of agape.

The pattern of the god-self within, however, is always in balance, so an uneven surge of growth on one pole is recorded elsewhere in a demonic self-system and becomes demonic in its effect.

Stage 8

Are there perhaps stages 8 and 9 and beyond? If there are any stage 8 people around the one thing sure is that we would think them strange. They would not necessarily be sitting on mountains meditating. But one would expect that if a seeker asks for the ultimate truth, the reply would very likely be, "If you have to ask, you can't really understand." Or, would she more likely speak to us in the indirect language of parables to make us think and struggle upward? And, would she, in addition, give us short two or three word commands, such as "Love your enemies!", knowing that only by striving to do just that sort of thing can we put ourselves in the way of the grace which alone can impel us stage by stage godward?

Instead of speculating about a stage 8 and beyond, we might better speak of stage 7n. Since stage 7 is the highest which we dare talk about, stage 7n indicates that it incorporates for us all the higher stages for now. 7n symbolizes stage 7 to the Nth or infinite power.

Agape and Being-Love

One of the valuable contributions of Maslow is the distinction between what he calls Being-love and Deprivational-love. B-love and D-love correspond very closely to the distinction theologians make between agape and eros.

Deprivational-love is needy, anxious, dependent, driven love. Being-love is overflowing, out-going, unanxious love.

D-love results when as children people are deprived of adequate security, care, trust and recognition. Their perception is distorted and they are split into parts. This is when the tapes are recorded which relate to particular inner persona. In these persona everything and everybody are seen through the garishly tinted spectacles of unmet inner needs.

It is this sense in which the demonic self-systems lust. They are driven by needs which cannot be satisfied, or can be filled only as a temporary fix.

There are higher needs at higher levels, Maslow taught, meta-needs. Neglect of these produces meta-pathologies. These the medieval spiritual guides called illnesses of the spirit. Modern existentialists use words like boredom, angst, loss of boundaries and meaninglessness.

Maslow says that in order to be aware of these higher hungers the earlier needs for security, care, trust, recognition and achievement have to be to some degree met.
Otherwise, the stomach pains of the more basic needs block out the higher hungers.

Because our passage through the stages is so troubled, there are self-systems within us which reflect most or all the levels of unmet needs. This is why at one time a person can be driven by a seemingly very immature need for recognition and at another time by meta-needs such as boredom or a sense of meaninglessness. We also know that a feeling of boredom or guilt may be even more complex. Boredom can simultaneously represent a mixture of influences from a genuine feeling of cosmic futility to the covered form of an unacceptable rage felt towards one's parents dating from a very early age.

Characteristics of the Best

The following characteristics of the highest may appear to be an examination of a number of separate traits, but each is a necessary part of a larger whole. Each expresses some aspect of or combination of (1) inner cohesion, (2) empathy and compassion, (3) expanded boundaries and enriched content, and (4) autonomous freedom. These are the interdependent characteristics of the truly mature person:

FREEDOM ------------- RELATEDNESS
EXPANSION ------------ INTEGRITY

As a mnemonic device to help keep these four dimensions in mind think of FIRE OF THE SPIRIT:

F reedom
I integrity
R relatedness
E expansion

Maturity which can bring into harmonious unity these opposites rests by necessity on all four of these legs. That's what we mean by wholeness.

1. Floating Free

The stage 7 person floats free from attachments to persons, institutions, ideologies, causes and things, just as she is indifferent to fame, wealth, prestige and power. These attachments, which always reflect dependency, are the scaffoldings which have held her into existence during the transitions through the stages of growth. The stage 7 person relates responsibly, lovingly, and creatively to persons and institutions, but not out of need. She is not at all exploitative, manipulative or compulsive.

Imagine now two circles, side by side. In the circle on the left is a stick figure with many lines extending from the body to the sides of the circle. This illustrates how at the lower levels of development we are literally held in being by strands of relationship to others, to organizations and causes, to things. We derive from them what Paul Tillich called “power of being.” This includes certain shapes, boundaries, vectors of purposiveness in our inner sub-selves, corresponding to the pull and tug of these strings.

These are all dependencies in the root meaning of the word: to hang from. These relationships represent deficient forms of love, D-loves, loves of the demonic self-systems within their straitjacket boundaries. They are characterized by words such as need, want, lust, yearn, demand.

This also illustrates (as in Kegan) the reason for anxiety at stage transition. Each time we cross from one stage level into another, we must let some of these lines be cut, or at least go slack. Amidst uncertainty we must then take on new attachments, a new scaffolding. Each dependency has a different object with different demands and emotions related to it.

The child in the first day of kindergarten is subconsciously aware that the lines of support from parents are slackening, but does not yet feel the tug of lines of support from teacher and fellow students. It is no accident that she digs out her security blanket that night and clutches it to her cheek as she slurps her thumb.

The figure on the right illustrates one of the defining characteristics of stage 7, how finally all the lines are cast off and we are free-floating. When the last line is dropped, we are surprised to find that we do not fall. Or, perhaps we are not so surprised since this takes place at the culmination of the long development during which we have become increasingly aware that we are buoyant in the universe. There is no place to fall. The gravity we felt was the drag of the demonic self-systems. That dream of endlessly falling through the darkness, neither alive nor dead, is anxiety of the demonic self-systems.

The god-self does not incorporate all the content of the universe; it is not God save in the structure of its inclusive, strong pattern. But, by now, it has sampled all the kinds, sorts, and qualities of existence. If not all were found to be good, at least none were found to threaten ultimate harm.

It is not the idea of God which is our support, but the direct experience of God. The god-self is aware of swimming in a sea of God; it knows at all times it is borne up and has no place to fall.

This is the vision George Fox, founder of Quakerism, had which transformed his life, the vision of a great darkness which was overwhelmed by an enormous light. It was the source of his belief that in every person is an Inner Light which glows with the Great Light. This intuition which arose from his inner depths in a mystical experience of great power. The god-self is surely the source of such intuitions.

Fox believed this is the possession of every human being whether she knows of God, has ever heard of Jesus Christ, is an atheist, agnostic, Buddhist or animist.

2. Permeable Boundaries

Now, imagine two other circles, side by side. Each of them has a smaller circle within, which represent the inner and outer boundaries of our self-systems. On the left the boundary lines of the inner and outer circles are almost totally closed. On the right, representing stage 7n, they are open, permeable to outside and inner reality, even that which terrifies.

To grow we have to take in both external and internal material foreign to our present personality balance. We are recovering and reintegrating parts of the self within which have been rejected, mislabeled, repressed or otherwise mislaid into the unconscious.

At the same time we are expanding outwardly to take in the nonbeing which comes in the form of new relationships, new environments, new and risky decisions. Both these movements are involved in the expansion of the boundaries of the personality.

The left hand diagram illustrates how at stage 1 the boundaries of the self, both internal and external can be spoken of as comparatively rigid and closed. The child is pushed into change by outside pressures and the inner playful urges to explore and experience.

When transitions are made to higher stages it is against resistance and with anxiety. As we progress, with practice, the jumps may be made with less anxiety. Insofar as we fairly successfully integrate the newly incorporated material and reinterpret the carryover parts of the old self-systems, boundaries become more permeable. This is symbolized by the broken lines in the right hand figure. Taking in nonbeing becomes more a matter of choice, under conscious control, more of a steady process, less of an anxious activity, and less a matter of cataclysmic jumps.

3. Letting Be

Stage 7 also represents the fulfillment of the Tao, the way of letting be. The stage 7 person is not anxious about self, others, or the fate of institutions or causes. She may dedicate herself to achieving various penultimate goals, but is much more willing to let individuals be who they are, find their own way, make their own decisions and suffer the consequences.

The stage 7 person recognizes that no loss is final or ultimate tragedy. This is also the Christian eschatological faith, but it is not resident in the guts until stage 7 is reached. There are suffering and sense of loss, but no final tragedy where God and the god-self have the last word.

Letting be is also the recognition that this is the way God has treated us. It does not mean we hold ourselves aloof or that we are not available in time of need. It does not mean that we always avoid offering advice and help. It means that we do not meddle or nag, are not anxious, do not seek to control or manipulate or deceive in order to produce a good end. Often the stage 7 person holds back in order to make room for growth in the other ^.5

The stage 7 person is empowered to follow Jesus' command: Do not be anxious; who by being anxious can add eighteen inches to her height?
In subsequent sessions there will be an opportunity to talk about exactly how God is involved in the world. To give a hint: I am not a Deist who believes God set the world running and then withdrew to knit other sweaters. I believe God is involved as deeply and directly as possible given the difficulty of producing free and loving beings.

Letting be means living a hard love. Nietzsche was right to deplore the sentimental pity which Christians of his day were substituting for real love. He wrote, "Be a bed for your friend in time of need, but be a hard bed." Agape deals with the other in terms of his highest needs; it is willing to allow or even precipitate suffering for the sake of the others' growth.

Nietzsche also said, "That you have done it (evil) to me, I can forgive. But how can I forgive what you have done to yourself?"

4. Kenotic Leadership

The fully realized person, to use Maslow’s term, is free of need for prestige, honor, achievement. These people will often withhold their leadership or withdraw from leadership in organizations, another kind of letting be. This may be to make a place for another's growth experience. The one who withdraws then takes up a more humble position of help and support to the new leaders.

It may also be to avoid compromising conscience. Stage 7 persons are often willing to see groups or causes fail rather than to allow themselves to be made charismatic leaders. They take a dim view of letting the cause or organization rest on them personally rather than being a communal effort. This is why stage 7 people would find it difficult. I think, to be ordained ministers, given the expectations that go with the vocation.

The stage 7 person is capable often of seeing beyond the immediate goal to the long-range consequences, rather as Jesus in the temptations on the mountain was able to see that magic, charisma or military might could not establish the loving rule of God on earth, not without continuing the falsehood that God supports violence or manipulation in good causes.

5. Effortlessness, Grace and Play

The stage 7 person, insofar as she integrates the previous stages in unity, has recovered childlikeness from the earlier stages. She now sees God more and more as one who is engaged in creative play, and who invites us to join the game and play it with joy.

Maslow detected a dancing and soaring quality in the peak experience, a kind of effortlessness, grace, spontaneity, innocence, lack of inhibition, play, capacity for ecstasy. Nietzsche, struggling to understand the supra-human, spoke of soaring like a bird.

The anxieties, hates and resentments, envies, lusts and possessiveness of the demonic self-systems are what make us awkward, self-conscious, up-tight, fearful of what people may think of us. So long as we are held in being by the scaffolding of other persons or institutions, then we are anxious about what people think. We believe that their opinions about us have power to hurt.

I have dubbed stage 7 the cosmic, transcendent, ecstatic stage. It represents ecstasy (root meaning: to stand out or apart) in that it is where we are able to stand outside anxiety about what other people are saying or thinking about us.

6. Old Age

The stage 7 person has solved the problems of old age, except for the weakening and failing of physical and mental powers. The stage 7 person is aware of being on an upward spiral toward more and more richness and meaning in life rather than feeling he is running down like a wind-up clock.

Though the body is wasting away, Paul wrote, spiritually we are being continually renewed and built up. Death has lost its sting. With the elimination of guilt, events of the past are purified and reinterpreted and comes to glow with lovely memories. Creativity and play come to the fore.

We have inner conversations with all the others of the past, dead or alive. We are reconciled and hold fellowship even with those we have hated or who have hated us.

Anxiety about the future likewise is overcome. We have laid up treasures in heaven where moth and rust cannot corrupt by investing in the god-self. Nothing invested in this god-pattern is ever lost. Such investment does not affect the shape of the god-self but enriches and fills it ever fuller.

7. Eternity

Stage 7 is participation in eternity and infinity. Berdyaev spoke of the God-man within us as dwelling in or having eternity. This is not a duration of time. It is, he believed, the redemption of fallen time. It is time freed of all anxiety, guilt, lust, envy, greed, and hate, all the negative emotions of the demonic self-systems. It is eternal life, that is, life in the tempo of eternity.

Jesus often spoke of eternal life as a quality of life first and only secondarily as a quantity of time. This quality of time is the only kind of life which would be endurable for an eternity of linear time, though we should not think that we are limited to linear time beyond this life

Emil Brunner gave a series of lectures published in a book titled, Faith, Hope and Love. Faith, he said, overcomes the guilt-burdened past. Hope overcomes the anxious future. And love overcomes the suffocating drag and temptations of the present moment.

Eternal life is time as peace, suffused with joy, filled with concrete exchanges of love, decorated with playful creativity. It is time that lives lovingly in the present; playfully rather than guiltily in the past; and hopefully, not anxiously, in the future.

Here, the poisoned fangs of time, past, future and present, are pulled. We become able to live spontaneously and soaringly in the eternal now of agape.

8. Non-repetition

The stage 7 person does not need the repetition of any experience. Having heard Beethoven's 9th symphony once, she does not need to hear it again. Having been with a person once, made love once, read a poem once, afterward none of these need be repeated.

The stage 7 person chooses to do many things again, but does not need to. The stage 7 person is self-sufficient within.

This freedom in relating to others is important for the health of the loved ones. It eliminates the need to control, to be dependent or to manipulate or deceive.

The stage 7 person also does not need to have children, not to perpetuate a family name, to prove virility or motherhood, or to have someone to love. These motivations belong to the lower stages. The stage 7 person is free to have children and to love them, but may well choose to give love to someone else's children or to adopt. Those who have children out of need love often do not make very good parents.

A reader suggests this is ridiculous. How could the author know? Well, all of this is extrapolation. If it doesn't speak to your condition, as the Quakers say, ignore it.

9. The Inner Community

The stage 7 person is so self-sufficient partly because he is so rich inside. He is a community of persons and a cosmos within. The stage 7 person has more interesting conversations and experiences within her own head than most of the conversations and experiences which go on outside. This is perhaps only a faint foretaste of the much greater interpenetration and communication we will have with one another and with God in future lives.

10. No More Worship

The person who integrates at stage 7 will have a dramatically different relation to God. At this point it becomes clear that God does not want worship and never did. God wants loving companionship on as near equal terms as is possible. Worship as we use the word has bad connotations of dependence, subservient awe, and the need to give preplanned times to thinking of God.

At the peak of our growth every moment, act and thought become relationship to God. To the extent worship takes place it is in the form of celebration and thanksgiving for God's gift to us of her own inner nature. It is no longer characterized by fear or dependence.

Theologies commonly contend that we remain dependent upon God because the gap between God's power and goodness and our weakness and debased morality continues forever to be all but infinite. We must worship in awe and humility, it is said, for the sake of our growth, even if God does not need or seek it.
But humility is implicit in the stage 7 person's celebrative, playful, thankful, loving relationship to God, which is echoed exactly in all relationship to other beings and to nature. Jesus didn't "think equality with God a thing to be grabbed at." So right. But it is God's to confer, if S/He wants to. We now are made aware of the lower enjoyments not as filling "needs" but as sweet icing on the cake of solid inner wholistic being.

A Summing Up

Irenaeus said that the divine-human nature of Jesus came into being, in part, because he "recapitulated" the faithful devotion of those who had lived before: Abraham, Moses, David, Esther, and so on. Jesus was the culmination and distillation of the highest which had gone before. Since their lives were examples of joint divine and human action, Jesus is also divine and human in one personality. He is also the "first fruits" of what we are to become.

Stage 7 for all of us, insofar as we successfully integrate at that level, is the recapitulation of all our previous good, both that which others put in us and that which we have created. It is also the unpoisoning and healing of all evil experiences. As the demonic self-systems shrivel away, positive aspects of the sub-selves are united to and fulfilled within the wholistic agape self. Nothing good is lost and much poisoned by evil is regained in renovated form.

The childllkeness, innocence, wonder, creativity and play of stages 1 and 2 are brought in. The idealism, romanticism, poetry and pietism of stage 3 are recaptured, renewed and treasured. The discipline, order and organizing logos of stage 4 are there to be brought to every problem and task. The openness to the new and the democratic sense of stage 5 contribute tolerance, leadership qualities and balanced responsibility. The universal perspective of stage 6, the vision of the infinite worth and equality of all God's children, is constantly brought to bear on every issue and problem.

To picture more clearly the knitting up of the stages within imagine this: One of the most common fantasies in our daydreams is having given a great speech or performance and having the whole audience arise, applaud and cheer. Assuming that we have done something which serves the kingdom of love, all of the levels of our personality, all of our inner persona reflecting all the stages of our development, join in enjoying the applause. Each level has its own quality of enjoyment. Stages 1 and 2 within us are like a little girl who having tap-danced is performing a sweet curtsy and being applauded. She anticipates the hugs and praise her parents will give her afterward. The stage 3 adolescent within us is imagining as he smiles and bows how his friends in the peer group will envy him and stand in awe of him and how his enemies who have put him down will be silenced. This is much the way King David writes in his psalms when he calls upon God for a victory so clever that it will send his enemies slinking away in shame. The stage 4 and 5 persona will smile while he sedately lifts a hand to acknowledge the storm of approbation, is thinking of awards and testimonial dinners which will reward his services to humanity. The stage 6 sub-self (assuming we are now far enough along to be sensitive to its presence), simply smiles at having brought knowledge, aesthetic satisfaction or laughter to many people. It is reward enough simply to have done it. And the stage 7 persona, to the extent we are aware of its power within us at all, is lifting eyes upward, barely hearing the applause, enjoying the way the whole experience joins the music of the spheres and swings in harmony with the love of God in and through all creation.
All of this rejoicing is ours simultaneously, like a seven part chorus, singing in harmony. And it is all of it quite healthy, the lower being cleansed by and integrated with the higher.

This does not include the grand likelihood that in other lives we shall be in close, perhaps telepathic, communications with multitudes.

Perfection

Berdyaev said we are destined not just for justification and forgiveness but for perfection. The god-self, as we have seen, is perfect in the same pattern as God's perfection.

Perfect freedom is the necessary condition for perfect love. Perfect inner unity is the condition for perfect freedom. Cosmic expansion is a condition for all three.

The word perfection can be misleading. It does not (or should not) mean complete or finished. The god-pattern is perfect in the sense that it can exist only as a fusion of the four polarities in their unity and interdependence. We are never complete. We can always be enriched further and go on to ever more elaborate and exciting creative play just as God does. There is no outer limit on our growth because there is no limit to the variety implied in loving creativity in community joined to endless time and limitless power.

The way of salvation, in this life, is to choose resolutely to live in the god-self as much as possible, in community with other seekers, and to put to death the old selves -- the demonic self-systems -- through disciplined neglect. It is to accept forgiveness for all our failures and to forgive others. It is to deliberately put ourselves in the path of the struggle, suffering and grace which will change us. That means to go deliberately into new challenging relationships and new environments of struggle for justice.

And to do all these things with celebration, enjoyment and play.

Consider or discuss perfection and godliness. Notice that in Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus commands us to be perfect as God is perfect, but in Luke's parallel version in the 6th chapter, we are commanded to be merciful as God is merciful, and the basic import is that we are to be as forgiving as God is.

Contact the author: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, The Viking Press, NY, 1971, page 109
2. Waiting for God, Harper & Row, Publishers, San Francisco, 1951, 1073, page 97
3. Quoted in Breakthrough, page 302
4. Summarized from Maslow, Abraham, Toward a Psychology of
Being, (2nd edition), D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., NY, 1962, pages 104-114
5. See Geddes MacGregor, He Who Lets Us Be, A New Theology of Love , Seabury Press, 1975, Paragon Publishers, New York, 1987

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