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By Root 1568 0

may have noticed, or you may go back and notice now, that the same is true for each level: each level resolves issues created by previous levels, but then creates conditions and problems that must be transcended by rising to the next. And that’s what makes the violet level so important, so urgent, so utterly needed now at this moment. We have oranges, yellows, greens, and blues threatening and killing each other, often in the name of their gods and more often in the name of (supposedly) the same God (but seen from different perspectives), battling for dominance in an unholy war that produces only losers. And we have indigos critiquing them all from a position of superiority, which only alienates people in other zones, making them defensive and thus increasing their resistance to moving forward.

We desperately need violet Christians—along with violet Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and others—who can create a zone of ubuntu that welcomes all people to mature and advance in the human quest. If more of us don’t grow violet, our world will grow more violent. We might picture it using the following diagram. We used to put ourselves in the appropriate religious column. But perhaps now we need to also put ourselves in the appropriate row—and perhaps the row says more about us than the column.

Let’s say that row “A” represents the “old kind of Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and so on” and that by the “old kind” we mean the kind that approaches the other with the red through indigo attitudes of domination (us over you), elimination (us without you), assimilation (us taking you over), isolation (us at a distance from you), victimization (us under you), revolution (us displacing you), supremacy (us superior to you), and competition (us competing with you). And then let’s say that row “B” represents “a new kind of Christian, Muslim, and so on,” the violet kind we have tried to imagine in these pages, a new way of being human that sees “us in you,” “you in us,” and “some of us for all of us.”

Perhaps now you see why I love Jesus so much. I didn’t have this kind of terminology for it, but in this book’s first pages, when I described my feeling as a pastor of living in the tension between something real and something wrong, the something real was this inescapable awareness that in Jesus there wasn’t simply a red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet light. In Jesus, I saw and see not only the colored light of a particular religion at a particular stage, but the full-spectrum light of God.10 Through him, in him, everything looked brighter, more glorious, more holy and alive and meaningful. As the apostle John said: “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (1:4). He was radiant with a kind of full-spectrum light that included and transcended all others, but couldn’t be contained by any of them.

Include and transcend: those are the key words marking the difference between being violet and being violent. If we celebrate and defend a yellow, green, or blue Christian faith, that’s certainly okay for a while, especially because we are generally defending it against the attacks of those defending previous stages from the threat we pose as innovators. But eventually more and more of us (or our children) will outgrow the current stage, whatever it is, and we will either have to leave Christianity as we know it or find a new expression or zone of Christian faith.11

If we refuse to transcend a stage or zone when the “fullness of time” requires us to, we get ugly, tense, dishonest, defensive, and mean. Then the orange quest for security degenerates into Christian magic and voodoo; the yellow quest for power sours into inquisition and colonialism and culture wars in the name of God; the green quest for independence shrivels into an arid and sterile set of doctrines or propositions devoid of spirit and life; the blue quest for individuality decays into spiritual narcissism and Christian consumerism; and the indigo quest for honesty lapses