At the two meetings about our new Adult Growth and Learning Program, I shared a list of characteristics of mature spirituality that were compiled by the Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons, senior minister of All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Kansas City MO. The short list was drawn from these remarks offered by Rev. Gibbons when she received the UU Humanist of the Year Award in 2015. Several people asked for access to the list after the meeting, so I am sharing both my short list of characteristics of a mature spirituality, and the remarks from which the list was taken.  Enjoy!  Rev. Linda

Remarks When Receiving the
UUHumanist of the Year Award.
Rev. Dr. Kendyl Gibbons

This recognition is a humbling honor, for which I am deeply grateful.  It occasions the following reflections on the purpose of ministry and religious community in a context of theological pluralism. For if what we are about is building connections – among the various constituencies of the liberal tradition, and in interfaith work more generally – is not, and ought not to be, the achievement any kind of theological uniformity, then it is reasonable to ask, what is it that we are attempting to help each other do?

St. Paul offers one clue to this riddle, I find, with his list of the fruits of the spirit – love, joy, peace, gentleness, forbearance, self-control. If Christianity is doing its intended work in you, he suggests, you will bear this kind of fruit, become this kind of person. The Buddhist teaching tale of the Sanyassin who gives away a precious jewel points to the same principle; if the eight-fold path is working in your life, then you are growing into this kind of person. In fact, I would suggest that, despite their obvious differences in vocabulary, mythology, and ritual practice, the most profound mystics and teachers of all the world’s great religious traditions have long recognized each other across their diverse heritages.

A spiritually mature Christian, a spiritually mature Buddhist, a spiritually mature Muslim, or Hindu, or Confucian, or Humanist, all have something in common — a certain quality of personhood, a way of being in the world, that manifests these fruits of the spirit. This is more than a studied set of ethical exertions, or prescribed compassion; rather it is natural, spontaneous, joyful; a sense of presence that mediates profound reality unselfconsciously and without argument to others. At our best, it is the foundation of mine and my colleagues’ credibility as religious leaders, that we are spiritual grown ups, whose example of maturity other people can rely on for guidance and help.

I believe that our congregations, and our culture, and our world, all hunger for leaders who are spiritual grown ups – who are more invested in becoming their own best selves than enforcing their convictions or their authority on others. One primary characteristic of spiritual maturity is what the moral philosophers of ancient Greece called sophrosyne; the self-awareness that enables us to maintain our ideals and intentions even when passion or impulse or inertia or neediness – or popular hysteria – pulls hard in another direction. The call to ‘know thyself’ constantly summons us out of naive embeddedness in our perceptions and our environment, to learn to take our impulses, our experience, and even our existence, as objects of reflection, rather than inevitable facts.

Another evidence of spiritual maturity is the capacity to be in the presence of pain, whether our own or others’, without panic. Too often, the instinctive reaction of remedy arises out of resistance to the reality of suffering; we want to fix whatever is wrong immediately, for the sake of our own discomfort, and if that is not possible, then there is a desire to flee from the situation. To be a spiritual adult is to have the wisdom and fortitude to remain in the presence of pain, while controlling our own anxiety and resistance, so as to be of genuine help to those who are hurting.  Then we may be able to be skillful, rather than premature, in alleviating the cause of the discomfort, or, if that is not possible, at least bear witness to its truth through the eyes of compassion.

When an individual must move through the grief that comes with losing a loved one, or when a community must undergo a difficult change, immediate relief from heart ache is not always a helpful gift, even if it were possible. The spiritually grown up leader offers encouragement and validation, rather than anodynes, so that whatever learning or gift might lie on the other side of suffering may not be wasted. Our task then is to help one another learn to face into the truth of our own and others’ hurt, and not to prefer frozen numbness, or self righteous judgement, to the ache and effort of genuine healing.

I believe that the spiritually mature person also recognizes that all language, even the most precise of mathematical formulas, consists of metaphor; all speech and all writing relies on our ability to translate from symbols to experience and back again, and this is nowhere more true than in religious language. We each give our primary loyalty to a particular vocabulary and symbol set, to a tradition of inheritance or of choice; this is as necessary for our fulfillment as human beings, and indeed for our emergent spiritual maturity, as the specificity of parental relationships and marriage commitments, or the uniqueness of friendships. Yet the person who is wise, who is a spiritual adult, has the capacity to engage and appreciate the metaphors by which other souls also express the human religious impulse, and narrate the breaking of a qualitatively different awareness into mundane consciousness.

Gratitude, generosity, the sense of being blessed beyond anything we have earned amidst a grandeur that we did not create and a potential for moral order to which we are inherently accountable – this is not proprietary software specific to any one tradition, but the open source code of human religious experience.  To be a spiritual grown up is to know reverence when we see it, in any system, whether we ourselves prefer PCs or Macs. As fluently as we hope to master the deep meanings of our own faith traditions and symbols, may we also aspire to hear with understanding and appreciation the poetry of the human spirit wherever it rises to aspiration and praise. May we come to understand that the striving to stay true to our values and alert to the sacred dimensions of life and reality is not unique to any of us; that to be present to suffering without panic, and to move with confidence among the metaphors by which human experience is shared, are skills we each continue to build as long as we live.

In the end, neither the demands of scholarship nor the disciplines of personal practice will entirely satisfy this world’s need for spiritual adults; certainly the squabbles of theological identity politics will never do so. In an era when grandmothers at prayer are shot down by hate-crazed adolescents with guns, we have something more important to do than trash each others’ metaphors; we need to grow up, all of us, and get over the fantasy that the world would be a better place if only everybody conformed to our opinions. I suspect that in the end such maturity can only be nurtured in communities of faith – by which I mean groups in which we are faithful; to our commitments, and our values, and our aspirations.  And faithful as well to each other; not only in the present acceptance of who we are, but also in the vulnerability of growth, and in accountability to the promise of greater maturity that we might yet achieve.

While I confess that I have no other experience for comparison, it has always seemed to me that Humanism is a demanding spiritual path, precisely because it offers no alternative to the work of becoming grown ups; to cultivating the self-awareness and skill that ought to make us particularly good at weaving the strands of diversity into the fabric of welcome and mutuality, inviting everyone into a more profound community that nurtures maturity in all of us, and calls forth that more abundant life that we can only bring into being together.

Qualities of Spiritual Maturity by Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
1) Sophrosyne – Self-awareness in the service of intention
2) Willingness to offer Leadership and Service
3) Fluency in the use of Metaphor
4) A perspective of Gratitude, Wonder, Blessing and Generosity
5) Tolerance for Intensity and Ambiguity
6) Mitake Oyasin – the perception of universal connectedness
7) Islam – the serene surrender to reality
8) Tshuvah – the capacity to acknowledge error and change
9) Tonglen – the ability to be in the presence of pain without panic
10) Memento Mori – the consistent acceptance of mortality
11) Fidelity to Covenant
12) Attraction to Beauty, Mercy, and Justice