Faith as Many Rooms: Fowler and Faith Development
An Essay for First Eucharist Parents
God invites us to grow in the ways of faith. From the time we are very small until we pass through death’s door (and perhaps beyond!), God remains ever-invitational, giving us many avenues for growing in faith. John Fowler, in 1981, codified stages of faith development and in doing so, offered an intellectual framework to help us understand what can happen during what stages of our lives, observing that faith grows alongside our physical, psychological and emotional growth. What follows is based upon Fowler’s work but intends to look at the delineations not so much as stages that one passes through as avenues for growth in faith, some of which are more functional at certain stages of life than others. The purpose of this exploration is to assist those raising children or participating in the implementation of faith related activities to have some sense of how God invites us to grow and so to reflect those in our efforts.
The National Directory for Catechesis coins a phrase called “The Pedagogy of God.”[1] In some ways, Fowler’s stages illumine God’s methods, by showing us what God has given us as avenues to a deeper relationship: imagination, literacy, companions and community, a desire for intimacy, a divine spark and a compulsion to care for others. Because language is linear, and intellectual and emotional development follows time these doorways to God can appear as if you pass through them only once. I would like to suggest that this limits the insight. Rather, I would like to suggest that each of them invites faith, and once these doorways are open, the rooms they reveal remain avenues to deepen our enchantment with the mystery of God.
God gives us imagination and the ability to think imaginatively, feel imaginatively, dream imaginatively. For the very young, imagination is how God is accessed with a variety of images, fancies and fascinations. Jesus depended on this imaginative capacity when he likened the Kingdom of God to such things as mustard seeds, lost coins and a pearl of great price. Without imagination, none of these metaphors hold much meaning, let alone the great imagination required to believe in and work for God’s Kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven. Imagination draws us in. Imagination gives us connections and hope. St. Ignatius suggested that an imaginative read of the scriptures would let us connect, enter the story and hear its many meanings.[2]
For parents raising children in the ways of faith, an imaginative faith[3] is a great gift. It’s possible to spark this imagination with drama and music, with images, with rituals, with stories and with creation. Faith entered into through the doorway of imagination makes encountering God possible for the young church[4] through such things as dramatic interpretations of scripture, tying music to scripture and of course, artistic expressions like art and dance. For the very young, this is how God comes to them and for the not-so-young, this is how God remains who God is: the creator who asks us to continue to imagine the Kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven. Besides, only a wildly imaginative God could have created manatees, elephants, zebras, giraffes, and birds of paradise, not to mention amoebas, paramecium and all the wonder of humanity!
A second doorway into the mystery of God is the doorway of literal faith. Some of everyone’s growth in faith happens literally in the room where we want to know what is real and true. We do not access imagination, allegory, simile, or metaphor. We take what is said or written as the literal truth and we operate from that position. This is a valuable doorway, because it introduces us to our search for what is “real” and “true”, what is “right” and “just.” With regard to God, this literal stage hears the descriptors of God as Father, Creator, judge, punisher, and lover and we assign our meaning to those concepts. There is a surety here that God is who I know God to be and I can trust that. God is reliable in God’s actions. I can trust this God. I can bargain with this God and if I am good, God will reward me.
Many of you will recognize elements of your childhood faith, and perhaps elements of faith still operating today. Through this doorway we learn to trust in God’s actions, to trust in the very presence of God who is involved in our lives. We learn to take God at God’s word, and as a result we feel we can “settle in” with God.
For parents raising children in the ways of faith, this doorway lays those foundations about who God is: always present, able to be trusted, revealing truth, showing us the way. Foundations for understanding the tension between mercy and judgment, between life with God and life without God (heaven and hell), and of such things as the need for change and repentance are laid during this safe room of literalism.
This doorway’s security and sensibility of knowing who God is and how God acts provides a comfortable faith. For those suffering, for those not yet able to deal with life’s ambiguities and the mystery of faith, this doorway provides a resting place. Often however, life will serve up a circumstance where it appears God can no longer be trusted to act in the ways assured to us in this room. God lets us down, does not provide for us what we know we need, or takes us through a hardship or sorrow that forever changes our sense of security. It’s time to seek another doorway, another room, and for some this comes very young. Therefore it is wise for parents to have visited another room of faith, so they can guide a child there when life unsettles the world created by literal faith.
Another doorway, perhaps more suited to a maturing life (growing in stature and wisdom as Jesus did[5]) can be found in group faith. Group faith rests on the power of others to influence belief. The influential group may be the family, a peer group, a denomination or local congregation or any combination of groups. It may be a group that is far less organized but it still begins to provide help in making sense of what life is dealing. In this stage God invites us to grow by adopting the actions, beliefs and commitments of others.
Depending on what chronological age we enter this stage (it is most influential among tweens and teens), this group faith doorway invites us to begin to worship and practice the ways of faith intentionally in community. This kind of faith develops clarity and consistency and provides the beginnings of community that extends beyond the nuclear family. In this room we come to know things like creeds, ritual actions and practices, and the “way” we mark occasions like births, marriages and deaths.
For parents raising children in the ways of faith, it is here that it becomes essential that the young church have a foundation in family faith practices so that they can trust the faith expressed in the community. If there’s been a void in family faith practice, the doorway of group faith may lead into rooms where there are all kinds of group practices and beliefs, not all of them consonant with Catholic Christianity or Christianity in general. In addition, the young church may well find the faith community (the parish, youth group, etc.) to be too outside their lived experience to be trustworthy or meaningful. (Weird is the oft-repeated word!) On the other hand, if the foundation has been laid, then group faith can provide a wonderful new doorway to the room where the young experience Christ and the Church. Finding other young people who believe, and benefitting from other adult believers is possible in this room of faith. Here are some encouraging thoughts about dwelling in this room: the greater the identification with the group’s faith, the stronger the faith of the young person; and, Jesus made it clear that to follow Him requires a group, for it is too difficult to share in building the Kingdom alone.
There is a potential shadow side to group faith. This room of faith often perpetuates an authority laden and unquestioning faith, although today’s young people are far less apt to stop questioning than those of previous generations. However, it is possible, if the group faith is not an open faith with room for questions and discussions, that this room will be vacated by those appropriately beginning to question why, what, what for and who said so? More experienced members of the group must have heart-felt, articulate and denominationally precise responses to questions and must be willing to create the safe space for the growth that is born of questions. Without this space, the young church in the 21st century will not only walk out of this room, but walk away from faith altogether. For adults in the group who have never found the responses to those questions, who have not questioned, and who do not see the need, the sharing of this type of faith with questioning young church members can be unsettling and invigorating. But here’s the good news: Jesus embraced lots of questions as he led people from literal faith, rule laden and authority driven, to a personal and loving faith.
So far we have looked at imaginative faith, literal faith and group faith. They each hold both opportunity and danger within them, especially for adults who have not moved out of one room and through the door into another. Fowler says most adults move around in these three rooms, never really moving to a personal faith which is the next doorway.
Personal faith emerges as questions are asked and answered and an individual moves from believing based on the faith of others, to appropriating beliefs and practices for themselves. It’s no longer enough that the family is Catholic, or the Church says I have to practice, or my teachers taught me to do this. Previous beliefs are now looked at through the lens of personal experience, and assessed in light of their ability to help make sense of that experience, challenge it, or judge it. This is a room full of tensions, ambiguities, uncertainties and instability. It is no wonder that many who enter this room quickly retreat to the room of literal faith, where little of this exists. Fowler suggests that most adults never leave this room and that is why, in part, accompanying a much more assertive and questioning generation is so hard.
For parents, teens tend to drag them into this room. Their intellectual development and emotional timbre set the stage for a lot of questions, a lot of at least superficial rebellion and a good deal of tension. For parents who may themselves have not dwelt in this room (remember Jesus told us that in His Father’s house there are many mansions), this can be an unnerving, hostile and tense time. It is also one of the places God is mightily at work, for God revealed to us in Jesus that God wishes to have a personal relationship with us, to share in every part of our lives. God gave us Jesus as the person through whom this is possible, but we must now develop this relationship for ourselves.
For parents, this is also often the time we discover we do not have enough knowledge of the faith, we do not have a language to express what we know and believe, and we may or may not have any experience actually sharing our own relationship with Jesus. And if we are being blunt honest here, it is when confronted with this kind of questing and questioning faith that we may discover we do not have a personal relationship with Jesus ourselves and that can unsettle and unnerve.
Jesus told us many times in the Gospels to not be afraid (some internet sites say God speaks that command 365 times in our Sacred Scriptures).[6] No matter the number of times, God in Christ assures us that we need not fear our questions, our uncertainties, our doubts, for God has given us Christ, His Church, and the gift of many wise and loving people to accompany our quest. In fact, Jesus revealed through his apostles that the questions are the doorway to intimacy and the doubts a doorway to belief.[7] Personal faith is the room where all this begins to surface. It may also be where parents must confront for themselves where they have been dwelling up to now. What a great grace and invitation from a loving God for us all, parents and teens to draw near!
What happens when God meets us in the quest, in the questioning? What happens when we encounter God and know it to be the case? What happens when Christ touches us, heals our hearts or minds, sustains us in sorrow? Sweeney calls this room of faith mystical faith. This is not mystical like in the circus or in fairy tales, but mystical as it relates to God as the great Mystery: able to be partially known but not fully known.[8]
To understand how this will happen it is important to understand that we cannot meet God face-to-face because we cannot endure that meeting. Instead, an encounter with God will be mediated, that is, it will come through Christ, through the People of God, through the Scriptures prayed, proclaimed, preached or sung, through the fruits of the Holy Spirit[9] received generously and at “just the right time”, and of course through prayer. And we will be renewed, given sight, set free from something that has been binding us, and we will know the power that made that possible was beyond human. That is mediated faith: mystical faith.
When the room holding mystical faith welcomes us, we can then begin to understand that God’s spirit dwells in others also. Reverence for all humanity emerges, and an expansive acceptance of humankind emerges. Parents of young people may find vestiges of this in their teens and young adults, especially if they have good friends and early love interests among those with other beliefs. This can give rise to what current scholars of culture call relativism: one path is as good as another and God is in everyone so there is no single Truth. I hope you can see how this can happen if the other rooms or different types of faith have not been visited and dwelt in so that their fruits can be appropriated. The other rooms provide some foundations that then enable mystical faith to be grounded in Christ and mediated through His Church. Faith then has signposts and gauges and Truths that are already believed. Relativism does not have fertile soil to take root, while respect, curiosity, honesty, knowledge and understanding do.
One of the great gifts of mystical faith is that once it is part of how one engages God through Christ and the Spirit, it naturally leads to a quest to lead institutions and those we love into this higher relationship. It can be a time of challenging hypocrisy (real and perceived), of questioning structures and laws, and of becoming suspicious of authority that asks others to do what they are not doing. Jesus exhibited just this kind of challenge to the institutional representatives of Judaism in his time.[10] They did not like it then, and it is still difficult today. Nevertheless, Jesus maintained his prayerful connection to God, held his community of wavering believers close to him, studied the Scriptures and focused his vision.
For parents of teens and young adults, this kind of faith, this room if you will, can produce troubling questions, point out the unconverted areas of the institutional Church[11] and perhaps of the family and local clergy, and can become an excuse to leave group faith altogether. However, if this mystical faith is grounded in personal faith, group faith, literal and imaginative faith, then the quest to continue to meet God can take place within Christ and His Church. However, if those earlier doorways have never been opened, those rooms never played in, it will be very logical for mystical faith to lead to a rejection of the institution, the family’s practices and a loss of personal practice. But please note, that faith is still present, God is still at work, and within all the rejection is a deep yearning for the mystical, the holy, the power of something far bigger than them.
And that wish for something outside themselves leads to the final room of faith: sacrificial faith. Sacrificial faith recognizes that the individual person is NOT the center of the universe, that others need care, compassion, and concern and that God revealed in Jesus the demand that those who would be saved concern themselves with the least among us.[12] Lived fully, this room of faith contains those Saints after whom we’d like to pattern our lives: St. Francis of Assisi, St. Clare, St. Agnes and all the holy men and women of God[13].
Many parents find the young church can enter this room off and on. Many of us as parents WANT our children to both meet our Catholic heroes and heroines (because that fosters group faith and hands on the communion of Saints), but also to begin to care for others. Many parishes offer or require that the young church participate in service projects, because Jesus made it clear this kind of sacrificial faith IS what sets His followers apart from others. In so doing, the young church meets the least among us, and serves alongside other members of the faithful who are seriously taking their baptismal call to build God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.