Pitching your spiritual tent

Last summer my children and I discovered a funny series of books called Amelia Bedelia. Amelia Bedelia is a maid for a family, and a very literal thinker.

One of our favorites is Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping. When Amelia Bedelia is asked to pitch the tent, she throws it into the bushes. When she is asked to put on some coffee, she ends up sprinkling coffee on the the grill. When she is asked for tent stakes, it turns out she has trimmed the steaks to look like triangular tents. When asked to get the sleeping bags, she quietly brings out paper bags and whispers, "I think they are sleeping. But how can you tell?"

In all kinds of delightful adventures, loveable Amelia Bedelia misses the point with her funny concrete thinking. The books are very fun to read.

There is a little problem however. As I would read along as an adult, I often found my children did not laugh at the mishaps, especially if they did not see the pictures. That is because children are concrete thinkers also, so I think more often than not they felt Amelia Bedelia might be right on target. I found in reading these books that I would sometimes need to stop and say and ask, "What did Amelia Bedelia do wrong?" Or, perhaps, "Is that what Mr. Rogers wanted her to do?" Then I'd nearly always get a laugh.

My children are two years apart, and I found it was much more the younger one that needed a little explanation - definitely an age factor. While I think both my children are smart kiddos, they just weren't always able to see the humor of the story. Children generally say what they mean and mean what they say - literal, concrete thinking.

From a spiritual standpoint, James W. Fowler discusses this type of thinking in his classic book Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. He calls it "Stage 1: Intuitive-Projective Faith." Here is a portion of his insight:
"The Intuitive-Projective child, whose age ranges from two to six or seven, uses the new tools of speech and symbolic representation to organize her or his sensory experience into meaning units... they simply assume without question that the experiences and perceptions they have of a phenomenon represent the only available perspective... Preschool children typically do not yet generate (or faithfully retell) narratives that could give order and a kind of casual connectedness to their image clusters. They appreciate long stories and follow their details, but have limited abilities to retell them... only concrete symbols and images really address the child's way of knowing."

The next stage described by Fowler is "Stage 2: Mythic-Literal Faith:"
"Symbols are taken as one-dimensional and literal in meaning. In this stage the rise of concrete operations leads to curbing and ordering... Story becomes the major way of giving unity and value to experience... The limitations of literalness...can result either in an over controlling, stilted perfectionism or 'works righteousness' or in their opposite, an abasing sense of badness...

Okay, enough with the psycho-babble. In other words, children don't do metaphors nearly as well as they do concrete. As you grow into adulthood, you are also able to see a thing on multiple levels, and not just at face value.

Recently, I was talking about a situation with my friend Anneliese, and she reminded me of these stages of development, as well as those set up by Erik Erikson in the 1950s. Suddenly, I saw these stages in a new way. They don't always follow a certain actual age; rather, they can be metaphors themselves. In different areas of learning, even as adults, we can be at any one of these stages. Particularly when it comes to Fowler's theories, it is important to consider they relate to our spiritual development.

In other words, when we consider Amelia Bedelia's case, even though she is a grown-up, she still thinks on the level of a kid. This is very funny to read with a child, but not so funny when it comes to our faith.

Where are we in our faith? If I might ask in the theme of Amelia Bedelia, how are we pitching our "spiritual" tents? It is quite an uncomfortable question to ask, as it begs us to consider how we interpret, read, and study Scripture. It also raises all sorts of questions about Scripture and preaching and community and wars and pain and suffering. Therefore, we are called to tread gently. It is always wrong of us to consider wherever we are personally as "the only way." In doing so, we are stuck in Stage 1 or 2, no matter how much we argue otherwise.

Fowler calls us forward in our faith, as does God. We may be "stuck" in any stage and assume that is as deep as it gets. Look closer, however. No matter where we find ourselves, there are new levels of faith for us to explore and test. Keep moving forward. Keep exploring the stories and symbols and meaning and words behind our faith. Ask God to stretch you, to stretch all of us, toward a bigger way of thinking. May we all learn to love each other a little better, by seeking to understand each other a little better.

Amelia Bedelia calls us forward as well. She keeps plugging along, she keeps trying... and she loves all the people she meets. May we learn from that kind of character. Amen.

In Wisdom,
Brandi Calhoun Diamond

For more information on Fowler's Stages of Faith, please visit:
http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/fowler.htm

For more information on Erikson's Development Stages, please visit:
http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachti...