Quotes About Maturity

Those who are not true leaders or elders will just affirm people at their own immature level, and of course immature people will love them and elect them for being equally immature

there is an early stage "holiness" that looks like the real thing, but it isn't.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it. So

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life.

Most of us tend to think of the second half of life

We need to hold together all of the stages of life, and for some strange, wonderful reason, it all becomes quite "simple" as we approach our later years.

is actually undoing the fourth commandment of Moses, which tells us to "honor your father and mother"? This commandment is necessary for the first half of life, and, one hopes, it can be possible forever. As we move into the second half of life, however, we are very often at odds with our natural family and the "dominant consciousness" of our cultures.

I think humans prefer magical religion, which keeps all the responsibility on God performing or not performing, whereas mature and transformational religion asks us to participate, cooperate, and change. The divine dance is always a partnered two-step.

There are few in our religious culture who understand the necessity of mature internalized conscience, so wise guides are hard to find. You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus.

A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else.

Do not be shocked, but I suspect some priests' and ministers' moral failures are actually very helpful to their own "salvation" and necessary for their growing up.

The advantage of those on the further journey is that they can still remember and respect the first language and task. They have transcended but also included all that went before. In fact, if you cannot include and integrate the wisdom of the first half of life, I doubt if you have moved to the second. Never throw out the baby with the bathwater. People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. They are not mere iconoclasts or rebels.

True transcendence always includes the previous stages and does not dismiss them or punish them, as most reforms and revolutions have done in history. This is true reconciliation, healing or forgiveness and always characterizes mature believers. They afterward seem to thank God for the pain and the trial.   good

The would-be maturing believer is not challenged to any adult faith or service to the world, much less mystical union. Everyone ends up in a muddled middle, where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as William Butler Yeats put it.

Juniors" on the first part of the journey invariably think that true elders are naive, simplistic, "out of it," or just superfluous. They cannot understand what they have not yet experienced. They are totally involved in their first task, and cannot see beyond it.

The offended ones feel the need to offend back those who they think have offended them, creating defensiveness on the part of the presumed offenders, which often becomes a new offensive—ad infinitum. There seems to be no way out of this self-defeating and violent Ping-Pong game—except growing up spiritually.

Shadow work is humiliating work, but properly so. If you do not eat such humiliations with regularity and make friends with … all those who reveal to you and convict you of your own denied faults…, you will certainly remain in the first half of life forever.

God, however, forgives even immature religion, and those who know God learn to do the same.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts. Yet we get to the whole by falling down into the messy parts - so many times, in fact, that we long and thirst for the wholeness and fullness of all things, including ourselves. I promise you this unified field is the only and lasting meaning of up.

Of course, clergy cannot talk about a further journey if they have not gone on it themselves.

The juniors are made to think that the container is all there is and all they should expect; or worse, that they are mature and home free because they believe a few right things or perform some right rituals.

Ken Wilber described the later stages of life well when he said that the classic spiritual journey always begins elitist and ends egalitarian. Always!

First half of life folks will seldom have the courage to go forward at this point unless they have a guide, a friend, a Virgil, a Tiresias, a Beatrice, a soul friend or a stumbling block to guide them toward the goal. There are few in our religious culture who understand the necessity of mature, internalized conscience so wise guides are hard to find. You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moses' leading you on any exodus.