Fowler

A friend of mine recently exposed me to Fowler's Stages of Faith. (I'll link you here and here for reference as I speak.) There are five or six or seven phases, depending where you look - they number 0-6, with the extremities sometimes lopped off. I've been doing some self-absorbed introspection about my progression through these stages, and I thought it'd do me some good to actually type it up in a coherent format. Not sure how interesting it'd be for you all to read, but this is Apostrophe, after all, and so you're welcome to it, if you like. Please share your stories in the comments below, as well, if you feel so inclined.

Stage 0 is described as a period of "primal or undifferentiated faith." It is the time before children really understand stories, before they have any deep sense of self-awareness, before they understand the future, before they've developed imagination. I might tag onto this that it seems to be a time before the development of memory. That might be coincidental, but I certainly don't remember very much at all from before this shift happened. I vaguely remember some events that probably marked this shift, but that's all I can claim. There are three of them, all before my second birthday. I wasn't sure they went in this order when I started writing, but I've figured it out based on the details present.

It was sometime before the fall of 1995, before my brother was born and before my mom was very pregnant. I do remember, though, that she was noticeably pregnant, and that she was wearing her blue dess with yellow sunflowers. (Perhaps I only imagine that detail, because she wore that dress a lot in the 90's. But it makes sense that she'd be wearing a summery dress if this was around August.) I was laying very still, very patiently (albeit reluctantly), on the diaper changing table waiting for my mother to return with new diapers, since we'd run out in my room. The wall by my feet had a door on it, and a closet with a sliding door that made it so that the door was sunken in and the closet closer to me. Behind me was a window, and the floor was carpeted. There was a light - the kind covered by a cake-shaped plastic dome thing - in the middle of the room. I was laying on my white changing table with the cold plastic mat that had begun to warm up under my back. I was playing with my legs as I waited for her. I remember the feeling of being small and flexible enough that my soft little legs would easily rest on the mat by my head. I remember noticing the difference in the temperature.

At some point before my mother returned, I thought to myself that I should remember this moment, because I probably wouldn't be in diapers for very long, anymore, and then I would never be able to remember it. So I absorbed the moment and kept it with me. I've always wondered why it was so intuitive for me to value memory. In that regard, I haven't changed.

The second and third memories are considerably shorter. The second is from my brother's birth. My father and I went to go see my mother, and she was very tired, but I had a lot of energy. I climbed onto a chair that she'd been in and pushed some kind of button that made it move, and was delighted. I don't remember anything else about it other than that it was relatively dim in the room and that I had not yet seen Jaco. The third memory is one where I was sitting in my blue car chair waiting for my mother to buckle Jaco into his seat next to me, and my dad was getting into the driver's seat. The reason I identify these memories as part of my transition into the first stage is because I remember these only being bursts of awareness. The way time felt was plain and gentle: I did not dream things up, I hadn't learned things through anything but experience yet, and even though I loved stories, they were still a little out-there for me. I do remember one book that had become my favorite by the third memory, though, because even though we read it a lot, the largeness of the world it encompassed still overwhelmed me. I have later memories that remind me that the book had no more than ten pages, but it was very long to me at this time, such that the emotion I have connected to it suggests that it was difficult to hold my concentration through the length of it, even though I wanted to, because I was intrigued. That seems to be a pretty good indicator of the development of an imagination: the very real, guttural realization that stories communicate something and can be engaged.

Anyways, by the time I had turned two, it's pretty clear that I had long entered into Stage 1. This stage is described as fantastical, exploratory, mood-oriented, creative, and flexible. This very much encompasses the way I approached life from the age of two until kindergarten. Lively, imaginative, pretty selfish, lacking in self-awareness. Strangely enough, it's much easier for me to pinpoint the start of the first stage than the start of Stage 2. I remember the first time I fully understood the concept of an educational system, a month or so before Kindergarten started, when a friend and I were comparing the amount of spelling skills we had as we took a little tour of the school. Walking through that big school and realizing I was going to be spending a lot of time learning in the future inspired precisely the same feeling as taking college tours for the first time. It felt like the start of a vast new future, filled with progress and achievements and linear goals. I can't imagine that most kids enter kindergarten this way. I do wonder if I ever expressed any of it to my parents, though, because I remember it being very intuitive. I never put it in words until Stage 3 started coming to a close.

I remember that in the second half of Kindergarten, sometime around March, I began to develop a desire for deeper community than simple "play time" - for example, I remember from around this time the first time that I used what I considered a shallow activity (coloring in the lines) as an excuse to talk to a friend of mine in a special room under her stairs. It still had that sense of imagination, adventure, and childish hide-and-go-seek to it, but what I liked about our friendship is that we could both play and talk, and we didn't have to play stupid games that changed all the time.

This tendency of mine was well-established by the time I entered first grade, and I talk about my memories from that time relatively frequently, because they ended up becoming very important to me in later years, both throughout my childhood and now, as a young adult. On the playground, I was frustrated by the lack of continuity and character development in the other girls' games. I refused to play with them because there was no plot arc to their game and they would switch characters constantly; the characters themselves were simple and undefined, clearly only designed to imitate things they thought were romantic. I didn't quite look down upon them for that, but I refused to engage in these activities. I remember a conversation from first grade with an outgoing, popular boy in my class (that I very rarely had anything to do with) about the word "stupid." He believed it was a bad word, and I told him it wasn't, but couldn't find a way to express why I thought so. It confused me that he would be so adamant about it, and wondered if he just couldn't see what I saw. Although it was a loud argument with lots of kids involved (maybe five, all of which but a boy I perceived as unintelligent disagreed with me), this thought had no moral connotation to it. I didn't feel any deep resentment toward him akin to that I would later develop for people with whom I disagreed, but it was strange to me that we were different, and it was too difficult for me to take the thought any further.

My immersion in narrative reflected itself in all my games. Jaco and I had an elaborate world about mermaids and their friends laid out in an imagined overlay we had for our swimming pool. We played the same game every time we swam there, and I felt a deep sense of attachment to the progress we made on its development as a system. The way I approached this created world most certainly affected the escapist tendencies I developed later in Stage 3. Beyond games, though, I began to approach the metaphysical world, connecting formerly unconnected parts of my life in new and important ways. The experiences I had approaching the Spirit on the playground, during my loneliest times in all of elementary school, was a foundational point in the faith I have today - so fundamental that it actually inspired my very first blog on Apostrophe. Read it here if you like.

It's similarly difficult to pinpoint my entry into Stage 3, because I'm pretty sure I entered it more quickly than other children. It approached gradually during my third and fourth grade years, culminating in my fifth grade year, the end of which was indisputably fully submerged in this stage. Entry into Stage 3 is marked by an understanding of conflicting understandings of truth and the pursuit of the correct one. It's passionate and critical and often rather dogmatic. It's the stage of development that involves the development of identity, purpose, and association, which often involves the desire to conform to peer pressure. This is definitely reflected in my huge new desire to be American in the third and fourth grades, my desire to begin writing my own music, my realization that it was within my power to hate practicing scales and refuse to play anything written after the death of Beethoven. I have a memory from my fourth grade year where I journaled about the fact that I was thinking about my own thoughts and about the relationship between my future, past, and present "selves" for probably half an hour straight. It was also during this time - somewhere between third and fifth grade - that I began to establish myself as a coordinator, a leader, a critic of the status quo. In fourth grade, I wrote a petition to the head Recess Teacher and janitor to let us peel the paint off of the bars we played on when they (moronically) decided to paint them over the summer, because the paint gave us blisters. I wrote up our complaints very neatly and very firmly on a piece of lined paper and made sure the little fringes were torn off, got twenty signatures, and presented it to him. I only realized how foolish it was to expect that he'd listen to me after I tried to give it to him. He didn't even accept the paper. Then I knew I was just a kid to him, and that nothing I said could possibly sway him because of his inherent adult arrogance. Oh, the injustice of the system. Thereafter, I had a very conflicted view of the man, because all the kids loved him and he was very nice, but I knew he was also a symbol of oppression. I had experienced his dismissal.

I exaggerate the tone only to demonstrate the nature of my thinking at this time. I didn't really hate the guy that much, but I saw the paint on the bars as an institutional policy affecting my business (a relatively complex academy of sorts for skill and technique on the bars, which involved a strict and finely-delineated hierarchy of levels and a scheduled recruitment calendar). During fourth and fifth grade I also started realizing what was important to me in terms of politics (which I promptly forgot) and community service. I started getting really passionate about weeding the school garden and was resentful in a very new way that I felt I could justify toward the teachers that told us not to run in the hallways. I became dogmatically opposed, by fifth grade, to some things we were being taught at Sunday School, and started talking to authorities I liked much more, while shunning and condemning (rather harshly, sometimes) those I didn't like or agree with. I made it very clear that I hated Math; I made it very clear that I cared about all life, including those bugs you have a moral obligation not to squish; I made it very clear that I thought access to candy was a human rights issue that adults simply didn't understand because they didn't like it as much, such that I invented a secret code to communicate amongst my narrowly-defined group of friends about the candy we were supposed to steal from home and trade illegally behind the garden shed at recess every Thursday. Things became much more clear and certain. Certain people were in and out. I liked people and I hated others. I could no longer simply accept that some people thought the word "stupid" was stupid, because I was no longer so confined by the limitations of my intelligence.

I didn't realize until my friend started explaining to me the nature of these stages that I had entered a typically "teenage" phase by the time I turned nine or ten. This explains very well why I felt alienated from my class at the end of fifth grade and why I seem to remember everything from that time so much better than my classmates. I was crushed when my friends (whom I believe to have been in the last few years of Stage 2) didn't keep touch with me after our move in 2006, because they'd long been established as part of my "in" crowd. They were a select group of people I'd been growing my identity around, and their absence compounded by their unwillingness to be present was a devastating loss to me. In reality, presence versus non-presence simply wasn't important to them, yet, because the confines of our friend group had not yet become an integral part of their development.

This stage continued through my middle school and first year of high school. I still grouped people into very firm (and often judgmental) categorical labels intended to establish a firmer sense of identity for myself: there were the stupid popular boys, the awkward, socially-inept nerd boys, the bitchy, obnoxious popular girls, and the slightly boring but normal girls I associated myself with. I separated my school into Good and Bad parts, separated friends into Good and Bad friends, got freaked out when I couldn't live up to the rigid expectations I had, was devastated when things weren't as I'd been lead to believe they were, and had deep bouts of depression centered around confusion and a lack of coherent identity. But I also had a very firm understanding of a very powerful, loving God. Albeit quite anthropomorphized and scarily congruent to the Gods of those people in my life I considered to have respectable authority, my faith had become conscious and important, and simply being in a place where I knew what I wanted to pursue on the metaphysical level, and not just on the social level, was what completed my progression through this stage.

I hit Stage 4 at the ripe old age of 15. For the first time in my life, I was part of a community that challenged and expected me to think, to stand as my own person, to respect what I said, and to except the full implication of whatever I argued for. I could no longer rely on things I'd been told, and I kicked against "ethos" arguments when they were made, because I had discovered a reckless new sense of freedom that seemed dangerous and exciting and real. I was exposed to many ideas that typically induce the initiation of this stage in college freshmen: philosophy, linguistic deconstructionism, debate. My friends and I no longer spent our time talking about our lives and comparing experiences or the people we knew as much as our thoughts about the ideas we were encountering. Having established a sense of identity, I - we, I think - moved on to explore the larger world. And the truth will set you free. Or not.

I plummeted into huge skepticism my sophomore year. For all the hyper-rationality, I was increasingly uncertain of anything I'd believed and anything I'd been taught to believe. I could hear no sermon without conflicted conclusions about its message; I could open no book without finding something to argue with. We were taught in school that "Everything is an argument," and I took this to heart completely. I loved it. I reveled in it. It opened my mind. But it was also empty in some way. I was often lost and very aimless. I was subject to deep and disorienting crises of faith and philosophy. My worldview shifted constantly, but I kept looking backward (often to stories from Stage 2) for something to hold on to, something to stand firm on. Stage 4 is apparently characterized by a total reworking of the nature of one's place in a social group; and so it happened for me. I was willing to be daring, to do and say things counter to the status quo, things that would gain me attention, things that would grant me a reputation that was different from the others in my social group. I started hanging out with all kinds of people that were much more different from me, until "my friend group" had almost no definition whatsoever, and, though that would've been unfathomable to me just two years prior, I actually liked it better that way.

Spiritually, my understanding of God became at once much larger and much more subjectively applied. I went through the whole process of accepting both the inherent flaws and weakness in authority, popular opinion, and my own worldview, becoming acutely aware of the presence of my own biases. My introspection turned from likes and dislikes, ups and downs, ins and outs, to more nuanced (perhaps overcomplicated) explanations of the core natures of the things I wanted to examine: good, bad, complex, questionable, dubious, uncertain.

My second source on Fowler Stages describes the transition between four and five as such:

Restless with the self-images and outlook maintained by Stage 4, the person ready for transition finds him- or herself attending to what may feel like anarchic and disturbing inner voices. Elements from a childish past, images and energies from a deeper self, a gnawing sense of the sterility and flatness of the meanings one serves any or all of these may signal readiness for something new. Stories, symbols, myths and paradoxes from one's own or other traditions may insist on breaking in upon the neatness of the previous faith. Disillusionment with one's compromises and recognition that life is more complex than Stage 4's logic of clear distinctions and abstract concepts can comprehend, press one toward a more dialectical and multileveled approach to life truth.

Not quite sure how accurately I'm reading this, but I find myself smack in the middle of that description. In description of Stage 5, it says, "What the previous stage struggled to clarify, in terms of the boundaries of self and outlook, this stage now makes porous and permeable." Since my senior project (what better exemplifies the desire to be "Alive to paradox and the truth in apparent contradictions ... striv[ing] to unify opposites in mind and experience"?), but especially since the start of college, I have started realizing that something much more stable, more reasoned, more complicated, but more simple exists. I have begun to describe to myself the reckless abandon of my late-high school intellectual lifestyle as "unsustainable," and to yearn for something more realistic and all-encompassing. I deeply want to appreciate previously condemned concepts like tradition with a "new naïveté," as described, and I find it exhilarating to be in community with those that are "threatening to self and outlook (including new depths of experience in spirituality and religious revelation)." I'm almost scared by the accuracy of this description, because it so perfectly depicts the differences between the way I thought a year ago and the way I think now. But then I hit the next sentence: "And with the seriousness that can arise when life is more than half over, this stage is ready to spend and be spent for the cause of conserving and cultivating the possibility of others' generating identity and meaning."

Damn. Guess I'll be dead by 40, then. But in all seriousness, I have felt this desire to "conserve and cultivate the possibility of others' generating identity and meaning." I'm almost embarrassed, now, to admit that this is a huge part of the reason I approached the last chapter of my Controversy writeup the way I did. Leaving Bear Creek, I was moved by the sense of legacy and commitment I felt for the new generations entering our school, and was disoriented by my unexpected nonchalant attitude towards the fact that I was leaving. While I recognized that I would be gone and investing in a new community, I felt a sense of obligation to be connected to the legacy of the school, of this institution that took me through this whole journey from the depths of Stage 3 to the culmination of 4.

And more embarrassingly, I realize that my way of interpreting some discussions I had in the first couple weeks here, especially in Prelude, was forcedly condescending, because I couldn't find any other way to cope with the slight incongruency between my own place in life and my peers' place in life, which was the same place my authorities expected me to be. So at first, I found myself entering into important conversations (which my friends had never had before) with an attitude that included 1) an incredible amount of excitement that other people were starting the same process I did at the end of Stage 3, 2) intentional introduction of certain concepts I've experienced to be successful in the past in a particular order, and 3) a deeper meta-level appreciation of the concept that people are driven to ask these questions at all. After I started getting to know these people, I was pleasantly surprised to find that even in the midst of conversation about things I've talked about before, I was taught things I've never even considered. It's definitely a different type of learning, but it contains much of the same spirit as before. Perhaps that's because I'm only a freshman in college, and the vibe is a healthy one to hang on to at this age, regardless of "Stage of development." 

On that note, I should make it very clear that I don't see the fact that I seem to be in a different "Stage" from other people as some sign of moral superiority or intellectual/social hyper-agility. Big pieces of my life have lagged behind others' because of the differences in the way I've grown up - like strategy, for one, I've been realizing. I might see things more completely than some people, but the amount of stuff I've seen is kind of pitifully tiny, so it balances out almost disappointingly evenly. It's kind of sad to realize how futile a lot of this whole process has been when I see how much amazing stuff people know and do that's totally different from the stuff I know and do, which usually has a lot to do with the nature of knowing and doing themselves on the metalevel. Apparently, that's another feature of the fifth stage: the recognition of and satisfaction with one's limitedness, and a desire to rework an old process as a matter of personal growth, sustained openness, and commitment to a more permanent lifelong trend.

I haven't quite moved into Stage 5, but I can feel it happening. It is quite disorienting to read a description of your most fundamental and most recent worldview shifts, to identify the present at a certain point, and then to discover a continuation of the story you haven't reached yet, as though it's telling the future. I honestly don't think my brain is quite ready for a lot of Stage 5's realism. I'm still just a naïve little college freshman, and to some extent, I really just want to be a college freshman. I'm not old enough to access most of what makes this stage valuable. I don't have enough experience upon which to base conclusions. I'm still too small a person for any real grounded wisdom. Much of Stage 5 is concerned with stability over long stretches of time, and I've realized that, despite my strange, conflicting recent instinct to move into stability (which might be explained by my movement into the fifth stage, but maybe that's coincidence), I'm not nearly ready for stability yet. My life needs to become a hybrid of 4 and 5 first, and hover there for a decade or so, before I think it'd be healthy for me to move fully into 5. The last part of the description of 5 explains that 5 "can appreciate symbols, myths and rituals (its own and others') because it has been grasped, in some measure, by the depth of reality to which they refer. It also sees the divisions of the human family vividly because it has been apprehended by the possibility (and imperative) of an inclusive community of being," and its greatest vice is listed as "the direction of a paralyzing passivity or inaction, giving rise to complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth." I cannot bear to think that I would so waste the opportunity to be an energetic, idealistic young person that I would become moved to inaction. This is such a unique and valuable piece of my life that I almost fear the completion of the cycle.

One reason my fear is quenched quite quickly is that I think there are way too many people around me that I disagree with about things to become complacent during my time at Calvin. I doubt that I will have the ability to sequester myself so deeply within the confines of whatever homogeneously like-minded group I might find eventually that I would entirely avoid confrontation with "the other." My goal is not just to learn about "the other," either, but to form genuine relationships, a genuine understanding, a genuine appreciation of "the other"'s worldview and culture and values. This is the element of 5 that I have been appreciating very much. I found myself, just a couple months ago, struggling to clarify the boundaries of self and outlook that this stage has begun to make porous and permeable, to quote the summary once again. I'm no more than half a year or so into this phase, though, and it's one that's supposed to last awhile, so I'm guessing the "porousness" is more like cork than sponge at the moment. I like it that way, though. It's exciting. Instead of trying to move forward in this regard, I'd really like to spend the next four years amassing enough actual experience that I might be caught up to everyone by the time they're finishing 4, as well.