A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [118]
If we don’t transcend a stage in the fullness of time, we experience a kind of stagnation and stuckness. We only look backward, congratulating ourselves for how we are superior to those who came before, but never looking forward to see the next stage before us. Our pride thus prepares us for a regression. If we do transcend the previous stages but then judge and exclude all that has gone before, we will remain stuck in the indigo moment of stage six, unable to continue the quest. To cross from indigo to violet, we must include as well as transcend. The violet zone challenges us, then, to learn to see in a completely new and unpracticed way, to forgo seeing previous stages in the old dualistic terms of good/evil or right/wrong.12 As we get acclimated to the violet zone, we learn to see all previous zones as appropriate and adequate for their context, just as we consider infancy, childhood, and adolescence as appropriate and adequate to their time, not bad, evil, or wrong. Similarly, the new stage into which we are growing isn’t right; it’s simply appropriate and adequate for the challenges we now face.
When we climb a ladder, we can see things from higher rungs that we couldn’t see from lower rungs, but we never would have gotten to the higher rungs if not for the lower ones. So just as we can say that every rung is good, we can say that every zone in our quest is good, but none is good enough to stay in forever. This approach isn’t absolutist, then, claiming one zone is right and others are wrong; nor is it relativist, claiming that all zones are equally good (or bad). It is holistic or integral, and in a sense hierarchical, affirming that all zones are partial and greater wholeness is better than lesser wholeness.
Jean Danielou demonstrates how this integral, evolutionary mind-set was inherent in the thinking of one of early Christianity’s most fertile theological minds. Gregory of Nyssa lived from 335 to after 394, exactly the uneasy period in which early Christianity (Harvey Cox’s Age of Faith) was morphing into what we’ve been calling Greco-Roman Christianity (Cox’s Age of Belief). Gregory had a complex and noncompliant relationship with that process, reflected in the fact that the Roman Catholic Church conferred upon him neither the status of Doctor of the Church nor sainthood, nor did it commemorate him with a feast day. Reflecting on Gregory of Nyssa’s conception of the stages of the soul’s growth, Danielou writes:
Thus each stage is important; it is, as Gregory says, a “glory” but the brilliance of each stage is always being obscured by the new “glory” that is constantly rising…. And the laws of the soul’s growth are parallel with those of man’s collective history. And yet this is by no means to depreciate the value of each particular stage—all are good, all are stages of perfection. But the mistake would be to try to hold on to any one of them, to put a stop to the movement of the soul. For sin is ultimately a refusal to grow. (emphasis mine)13
Paul seems to agree. He says:
When I was a child,
I spoke and thought and reasoned like a child.
But when I became an adult,
I put childish ways behind me.
Now we see in a mirror, dimly.
But later we will see face to face.
Now I know in part.
But later I will understand fully,
Even as I have been understood.
So faith, hope, and love abide, these three.
But the greatest of these is love.
I will show you the most excellent way.
Follow the way of love. (adapted from 1 Cor. 13:11–14:1; 12:31)
This way of love, this quest for ubuntu, this violet way of seeing and relating, is virtually impossible to imagine for people who haven’t reached the violet zone; they are likely to mock it or condemn it as something naive, silly, or even evil (which is exactly what we would expect from people in other zones). Even having imagined it, it