What Is Spiritual Maturity?

Switching gears here.

I’ve spent the last few years, frustrated with, and often angered by, the obstruction of, and resistance toward, civil, open dialogue and the division it has caused among us regarding the pandemic and our health. The tribes. The camps. The stoking. The arrogance and attitudes of “rightness.” It’s not love and it’s, above all, not healthy.

So, what is?

For me, it started with some distance. I needed a respite. Second was a tonal change that puts more focus on progress than on destruction, looking forward, not back.

When I was in the 9th grade, my science teacher posed the following question to the class:

What is the one thing all living things do?

Kids blurted out all kinds of answers, none of which I can recall, specifically, but all of which caused our teacher to keep shaking his head and saying, “Nope, try again.” When the cacophony of children’s voices died down, there was a long, pregnant pause and I said, “Grow?” He extended his arm, darting his index finger in my direction as his bright, teethy smile emerged from under his dark, bushy mustache and beard. “Yes!” He exclaimed.

I swear that was the only thing I ever got right in school.

That, and one other time, the following year with an all-or-nothing, pass/fail question from my health and sex-ed teacher.

What are blotz dots?

Whoever answered correctly was promised an A, for the year.

Mind you, I was at breakfast every morning during 3rd period cutting health class with my boyfriend at a place called Slices in Lincroft, NJ having a bacon omelet and hard roll, buttered, with whipped cream cheese. As a result, I was already trending a strong F. For some reason, (maybe my boyfriend’s black Camaro Z28 was in the shop) we didn’t skip class the day our teacher decided to play this little game with us. I am 100% sure he had not the slightest inkling that I might answer. Yet, I was the only person in the room to raise my hand. My teacher, an old, bald, bespectacled guy who wore yellowed, wrinkled shirts and loose ties that did little to improve the appearance of his protruding belly, looked sick when I was the only one ready to answer the question. He looked through me, unsuccessfully.

“They are the reflective discs that edge the roads to keep you from swerving out of your lane,” I chirped proudly. Teacher might as well have been encased in a block of ice. He froze. The whole class cheered.

This was the 7th grade. Puberty was underway for most of us. Even though the hormones themselves were elusive, the changes were not. Tangible, physical developments we see and feel mark the start of a trajectory into adulthood. Physical maturity. Check.

We grow.

At some point soon thereafter, we go out on our own. Maybe college, maybe marriage, maybe our first job. We begin a socialization process where we start to navigate the world as independent contributors. New relationships, new responsibilities, new challenges and situations. We meet people. Some good, some bad and we have to figure all that out. Through that process, we develop social maturity.

We grow.

Eventually, for those of us who work and climb the ranks of a career, we start to learn a whole new set of rules. Hierarchies, egos, compensation, politics, competition, and a new language inherent to the world of work. How well we fare is due in large part to how we handle things like taking and giving criticism, communicating in a healthy and productive way, managing disappointment, winning gracefully, being team or group-minded minded over self-minded, etc... The manner in which we approach our environment and the people in it at this stage is a reflection of our professional maturity.

We grow.

Eventually, we may also enter romantic relationships and are faced with our sexuality. We learn about our intimate capabilities, who we are as sexual beings and how we express ourselves through what can be a very vulnerable act, how we handle rejection, how we communicate what we want and need, etc... Depending on how that goes, we develop sexual maturity, or not.

All along we cope, sometimes better than others. The degree to which we do this well depends on how emotionally mature we are. Emotional maturity, also known as emotional intelligence (EQ), is a factor of development from the raw emotions of a baby to more evolved emotions of a healthy adult.

But then what?

Then we still have the deepest part of ourselves left untapped. The part that gently nags us to attend to it. The part that when left in the dark, leaves us feeling incomplete. It’s the part of us that doesn’t mature in response to how the outside world shapes us. Rather, it’s about how we take hold of our own inner worlds and shape them ourselves. Our spirits. They can be bright and alive or dark and dead. I would argue that it's spiritual maturity that helps us find the former and feel full as a result.

Spiritual maturity is about how we love, how well we connect to, and take care of, our bodies, how connected we are to our inner guide, how conscious we are and how honest we are.

C.S. Lewis says that pride is spiritual cancer and that joy is a pointer to something other and outer. But I would argue that nothing good points out unless we have pointed in first.

Growing up is all inclusive. We need each phase, but in the end, you know you're reaching spiritual maturity when you start noticing the thoughts you no longer have.