The Table Video

Steven Sandage (Boston University) presents a model of spiritual formation. Spirituality is conceptualized in this developmental model based on a relational framework integrating psychology and theology, and transformation is understood as emerging through a crucible-like process intensifying relational anxiety, commitment, and deepened intimacy. Spiritual maturity is framed through differentiation of self and associated capacities for virtue, healthy relationality, and diversity competence. The risks and challenges of intimacy and alterity are proposed as two relational pathways toward differentiation and spiritual transformation. This relational model of spiritual formation and transformation can be contrasted with Christian models of spirituality which employ implicit psychologies that are more behavioral, cognitive, individualistic, Gnostic, or ethnocentric. To date, a series of sixteen published empirical studies have tested this particular relational model of spirituality, and this presentation will summarize findings on relational spirituality and forgiveness, humility, intercultural competence, and social justice commitment. Practical implications will be highlighted for relational models of transformation in (a) psychotherapy, and (b) training of spiritual leaders and therapists.

Transcript:

One of the things I’d like to suggest today is that these are two of the core dimensions of what I’ll call relational spirituality, spiritual dwelling and spiritual seeking. Over the past several years some colleagues and I have articulated a relational model of spirituality influenced by many sources, but basically goes like this, that we’ve conceptualized spirituality relationally to create a broad framework of ways that we relate to God and the sacred as a starting point. Now that may sound fairly obvious to some.

I grew up in a Charismatic tradition where I actually think there was an implicit metaphor, kind of a substance metaphor of spirituality that was sort of like about filling up a gas tank, I think that was the metaphor of spirituality. Often the language was around going to worship and getting filled up, and there was kind of a sense of just having more or less of spirituality. And as I got into this field I was drawn relational models in both psychotherapy and in theology, a relational view of anthropology, and so I increasingly became interested in the variety of ways that people relate to God and the sacred, not just the amount of spirituality.

And as I’ll describe, this is a differentiation-based model, I’ll explain that more, but one of the core ideas is that spirituality involves tensions between spiritual dwelling and spiritual seeking, being in a stable way of relating to God and the sacred, and periodically going through seeking or growth cycles.

I sometimes like to call it spiritual foraging where we are drawn by necessity or our own curiosity towards something new, and that can be actually quite anxiety-provoking and quite difficult in ways that John Koh described this morning. Relationally too I would be build on the work, many people here at Rosemead have talked about this and elsewhere, that the way we relate to God and the sacred is influenced quite a bit by our neurobiological relational template experienced early in life.

So I certainly don’t believe God is nothing more than a projection of my psyche. Nevertheless, as it was mentioned this morning, I do relate to God and the sacred through my brain, if at all, and the limbic structures of my brain will influence to some extent how I interpret God. In this model that we’ve called a crucible-like model building on the work of David Schnarch, Saint John of the Cross, many other theorists, spiritual transformation could be likened to a sort of crucible process. A crucible is a metaphor for a vessel that holds the fires that transform base metals into precious metals.

And in a parallel fashion I’d like to suggest that spiritual transformation typically involves and intensification of anxiety, struggle, and that we could expect that it’s not always fun or doesn’t always feel good, as was mentioned before. We start to ask the question, what would be some of the key pathways into spiritual transformation. What I’m gonna suggest is that two of the relational pathways that I have focused on the most and that I think are very important ones are intimacy and alterity. Now, intimacy is thrown around as something that can sound all good. Who doesn’t want more intimacy?

The reality might be that many of us could feel a certain amount of ambivalence about real intimacy, about really knowing and being known. And I think the Bible’s quite realistic about the desire to know God and the human ambivalence about knowing God. So intimacy can be quite anxiety-provoking. In a parallel way I’d like to suggest alterity, or otherness, encountering diversity, difference, can also be quite anxiety-provoking. This might be simply a lunch conversation with a friend where you all of a sudden are stunned to realize you voted for someone different in the last election and it’s shocking.

Or they could be more profound. Racial, cultural, gender, religious differences. And what I’ll also suggest is that alterity, while anxiety-provoking, can be an important pathway towards spiritual transformation. These pathways can involve an intensification of anxiety, but one that can help us mature and grow. Now this is a quote from a farmer that William James interviewed. A recently converted farmer, great line.

The picture doesn’t really relate, of course, to the farmer, but I think it’s a fun picture. The farmer said, “My horses, hogs, “and even everybody seemed changed.” What a wonderful description or testimony of the impact of conversion. I’m not just loving other people, I’m actually loving the hogs better. And one of the points that I’m interested in exploring with relational spirituality and transformation is, what are the aspects of spirituality that actually improve our relationships. That’s the bottom line of what I end up being quite interested in.

My practical work is mostly couple’s therapy and diversity training. The diversity training is actually tougher than the couple’s therapy, but they both can be quite challenging crucibles to be in and I get interested in how people’s spirituality and their spiritual development will help them better manage the anxiety and tensions of relationships. This, I think, necessitates that we also look at some complicated, difficult issues in spirituality.

This is A.W. Tozer, who I would nominate as one of the best spiritual writers of the 20th century, probably one of the most powerful Evangelical writers on spiritual intimacy, and his biographer, Lyle Dorsett, had this comment about Toser, “His family and closest friends all testify that Toser, “who magnetically attracted spiritually alert people “who long to know God, kept almost everyone he knew “at a personal distance. “It was impossible to get near him or his past.” Now I’ve shared this in some settings where I wasn’t sure I was gonna make it out the back door frankly, and I think it’s important for me to say, I have no idea what Toser was like relationally, this is one biographer. But I use it as an illustration to raise, what I think, is an important point in the Christian community, in the psychotherapy community, that how can we cultivate relationship spirituality that doesn’t leave testimonies like this.

Because I don’t know about Toser, but I’ve had folks like this in my therapy office, very clearly. Powerful spiritual leaders of large successful churches who could show that they’re seemingly having quite an impact on hundreds or thousands of lives, and I’ve had their spouses and kids come in and say this. And I think this is a valuable disjunct for us to hold humbly, but with a seeking-after wisdom of what moves us beyond something like this.

And I’ve actually tried to let it haunt me. What are my relationships about? What would people say about my relational style? So that’s a big part of what I’m interested in in relational spirituality. This kind of developmental approach does ask us to look at both spiritual pathology and spiritual maturities. So, on the spiritual pathology side we’ve done some studies of spiritual grandiosity and we’ve made great use out of the Spiritual Assessment Inventory, which was developed by Todd Hall and Keith Edwards here at Rosemead.

Their scale is got a lot of stake in my career actually, I’ve made tons of use of it. And so one problem that we could identify of relational spirituality is spiritual grandiosity where someone has a way of relating to God and the sacred that somehow puts them at a position where they feel sort of above other people. And if you just ask them how they’re doing spiritually, they would say they’re doing great. That’s kind of an interesting thing to a social scientist who’s trying to do empirical research, and if you’re in some ways dependent on self-report measures this is an interesting problem because these folks would say they’re doing great spiritually. But that can be a kind of encapsulated or silo style of relational spirituality. Heinz Kohut was a psychoanalyist who actually talked about the vertical split, which he didn’t relate to spirituality but he did relate to narcissism, where someone is kind of in their own silo or cocoon and those around them can’t really penetrate it, and there’s a relational cost to that.

And that’s where the spiritual grandiosity can lead to a sort of a displacement effect through pathological tribalism, my group’s better than your group, or a kind of overidealization of one’s group or particular others. So we’ve studied spiritual grandiosity in a number of studies, some other studies done here at Rosemead, and what’s interesting is you start to see some of the relational affects of this style, on the negative side. There’s kind of a couple of interesting effects there on the positive side actually.

All the studies I’m gonna describe are of Bethel Seminary students of the higher and spiritual grandiosity, the more feeling attacked by the Devil. I had a theological friend who once suggested that people who feel attacked by the Devil all the time, certainly we could believe in spiritual warfare and that that happens, but someone who feels attacked by the Devil all the time might have a little bit of narcissism going, that they’re so important that they would be the target so often. That bore out empirically actually. A search of grandiosity’s negatively correlated within our cultural development. It’s one place this style of relational spirituality is inhibited is in relating across cultural diversity. Problems in terms of forgiveness, and in a recent study of humility, negative correlations.

So there’s relational consequences to that style. Another style of spiritual pathology that we’ve looked at is spiritual instability which, again, through the SAI is based on traits of borderline personality disorder. And I’ll give you a moment just to look at some of the items on that scale. And so what this style of relational spirituality reflects is a high level of sort of spiritual and emotional dysregulation, a difficulty being emotionally stabilized, a very polarized way of looking at self and other in the world, or what Object Relations Theorists would call “splitting,” and a high level of shame that drives the fear of spiritual abandonment, that’s a prominent theme here. This, to some of you, might seem extreme.

I’d say that it’s not hard to find folks that have developed a fair amount of this. It’d be possible to find certain churches or preaching that seems to sanctify this style of relational spirituality. And if we start to look at the empirical effects we can see that that style of relational spirituality reflects insecure attachment styles with others, with God, a sense of interpersonal alienation, mental health symptoms. It’s negatively correlated with a number of virtues, forgiveness, humility, with intercultural development again, psychological wellbeing.

And what I think is particularly important for us to understand, in my mind, from a relational spirituality perspective is that if someone who’s struggling with this orientation of relating with God, if we simply encourage them to get more intense about their spirituality, it actually may contribute to more problems in a sense because they may intensify their spiritual practice, but if the relational dynamic is along these lines we may see them get more and more distressed because somehow they’re having even more trouble with forgiveness, or more trouble with their self-hatred, or more trouble with relating to diversity.

And that, of course, becomes incredible discouraging and I have a fair number of clients who are right in that sort of vortex. So what might be a healthier version of relational spirituality. We could use a number of different constructs but I’m gonna talk mostly about differentiation of self, which is, in my view, central to mature relational spirituality. Differentiation of self is a kind of mature style of relational selfhood that includes a couple of key components. One, some capacity to self-regulate emotional life.

Now, self-regulation doesn’t mean that God wouldn’t be involved in that, but there is some capacity to self-soothe, to engage in spiritual practice that makes anxiety or despair manageable. So that’s one aspect. The second is this ability to balance intimacy and autonomy in relationships. Now some people misperceive differentiation of self as all about individuality, being my own person, that’s actually individuation in the psychology literature.

Differentiation is a more dialectical construct that involves the ability to both connect with others, and also to be able to be autonomous when necessary. And numerous Christian spiritual writers have spoken to this. Bonhoeffer just said, hey, the person who cannot be in community isn’t prepared to be in solitude, and the person who can’t be in solitude is not ready to be in community.

Henri Nouwen made similar points. So spiritual writers have often recognized there’s a need to sort of balance these aspects of relationality and selfhood. I would also say theologically that God always exists in differentiated relationship. God as trinity is always in differentiated relationship and the kind of differentiation at characterizes the trinity of cooperation, of love, of willingness to allow agency, we as human beings, of course, will never completely fulfill, but I do think that model of differentiated relationality is a great one for human development and spiritual formation, and it’s not easy to do.

This is not differentiation. [audience members laughing] So there are many problems of differentiation that I might manage by hoping that just other people will change, or that I might manage in various other ways by sort of pulling into myself and cutting off other people, or being kind of fused in a dependent way and in a meshed way in relationships, and those are struggles of differentiation. In the family systems literature around differentiation another prominent theme is rescuing, and of course there is a place for rescuing in life. There’s a place for rescuing people that are stranded alongside the road, as the Good Samaritan story tells us. There’s a place for rescuing a child that’s run into the street.

There’s a place for rescuing people with various issues and problems. It’s also possible to overuse a rescuing style of relating, and frankly in my own Evangelical heritage I think one of the great strengths of Evangelical spirituality is a lot of rescuing. I sometimes think of Evangelical traditions I’m from, which are kind of revivalist traditions, we’re like the spiritual EMTs who rush out, and pump on people’s chests who really need it, and try to help them not die, that’s kind of our specialty. But also one of the limitations of the spiritual background I’m from is almost a chronic orientation towards relational rescuing, which sort of means that we know how to help people when they’re in crisis, when they’re life’s on the line, when they’re finally facing their drug addiction or they’re ready to kill themselves.

But the background I’m from was not as strong in how to actually help people mature beyond crisis and to actually learn to deal with differences in longterm relationships on mission boards or in ministry situations. For those of you who’ve done counseling of any type it would be interesting to go around the room and ask how many people have you seen who came out of a life and death experience through conversion and their life was transformed, and then a few years down the road they’re actually trying to figure out how to love their kids, how to parent well, how to keep a marriage going, and they’re struggling because the form of relational spirituality that pulled them out of the crisis isn’t exactly what’s needed to cultivate ongoing relationships. When I say form I don’t mean they need something other than Christianity, what I mean is that they need a more mature relational orientation than crisis.

There’s work going on in a number of areas around differentiation and hopefully– Do we have references out? So these are all referenced there. In our research, these are a couple of colleagues who’ve worked on research on differentiation with me, the array of empirical correlations between differentiation of self and mental and spiritual health indexes, virtue indexes, and diversity indexes, I think is quite interesting.

We’ve tested a number of mediator models to show that differentiation of self can statistically mediate the effects between lots of good stuff would be the summary statement, we have about seven or eight of these models published now, but differentiation of self can account for the effects of spiritual wellbeing on mental health, on gratitude and intercultural competence, on forgiveness and mental health, so the empirical data supports the idea of differentiation as a got a lot of upside and these effects are over and above the effects of impression management, which is important in this kind of research.

So one of our emerging areas that we’re focused on these days is relational spirituality and alterity, or otherness. How does my spirituality help me relate, as Levinas would have said, to the face of the other who’s difference comes into bold relief. And we think this is an important index of spiritual maturity. How can I hold on to myself, know my own beliefs, not have to lose my faith or my perspective in close interaction with people who are different? And so a couple of aspects of mature alterity that we’ve been studying in our cultural competence, the ability to relate sensitively and constructively across cultural differences, and a commitment to social justice are a couple of the indexes of alterity we’ve been studying.

And we’ve found in recent studies that actually both are positively correlated with both differentiation of self and humility, which forms kind of an interesting integrative set of issues we’re gonna be exploring in the months and years to come probably. Humility, of course, more of a classic virtue construct within the Christian tradition, differentiation, which sounds like kinda new fangled psychology stuff, and they actually predict unique variants in both of these constructs so we’re interested in that.

Actually, the measure we use of intercultural competence is the Intercultural Development Inventory, I don’t know if any of you have used that before, but it’s actually a very robust measure that you can’t really cheat. It doesn’t correlate with impression management, it’s a very robust measure of the ability to relate across cultures. And I was thinking recently the correlates of that are so strong in terms of spiritual wellbeing, virtue, relational development, that actually if you said to me, Steve, we’ve got 300 people over in the gym who volunteered for a really tough, serious, ministry assignment and we’re gonna take 30 of them, and we don’t have time of interview them or talk with them, all we do is use one psychometric that’s gonna give us a sense of people who have a really mature orientation towards life and relationships. I would actually go with the Intercultural Development Inventory.

I think at the moment empirically it’s the best measure actually of spiritual maturity as I’m describing it. Now in these last few minutes before taking questions I wanna describe a little bit more of the transformation process and this idea that spiritual development often comes out of emergencies or anxiety-provoking situations, or what James Loder called “ruptures in the knowing context.” Something that challenges us, that maybe strips away some of our illusions, raises some discomfort. Just a very brief anecdote, when I was leaving graduate school my wife and I each had a parent diagnosed with cancer in the same month and we were living across the country, a very stressful time.

And I remember we headed up to the Mayo Clinic, my mom was having some testing and was probably heading into surgery, and I can remember sitting in this waiting room at the Mayo Clinic, which is a huge clinic as many of you know in Minnesota, and there were hundreds of people probably in this one huge waiting room, which was bigger than this area, and I was really challenging myself to face life really honestly, I was in a very existential phase, which I still am kind of, and I really wanted to look at this honestly.

And so I was thinking about how terrible this situation was, and then I looked around and I thought there are tons of people here dealing with the same things and rather than that shifting my perspective, it dropped me down a few floors, I don’t know how many of you have had that kind of– It made it worse to think about how many people were suffering. And then I thought in this whole Mayo Clinic how many people are dealing with this, and I was in kind of a free fall emotionally and spiritually, and I said this prayer, I said, “God, I need You to show me something beautiful right now.”

And we were all facing this direction, kind of like you’re all facing this direction, and at that very moment I prayed that there was a man in front of me, his back was to me, he was probably I would guess about 75 years old, very wide man he stood up right as I prayed, “God, I need You to show me something beautiful right now,” and he was at urology, and he was wearing sweatpants, and his sweatpants slid all the way down revealing his bare buttocks right in my face at about this distance. [audience laughing]

And you folks are laughing about that. [laughing] I can tell you that my millisecond initial response was not laughter. And then I entered into a very ambiguous space where it was so crazy and absurd I was kinda laughing, and I kinda wanted to scream, and I thought that probably won’t go over well here in the waiting room, and I thought, to be honest this could sound sacrilegious, but I thought honestly, God, are You mooning me? [audience laughing]

And it took me a little while to sort of step– The whole thing was what Loder in his fancy language would call “a rupture in the knowing context.” I was like, this is crazy. Somehow it did allow me to step back and I thought for a moment, what was God gonna do? Sort of anxiously rush out of the heavens and show me what to make all of this look good? There really wasn’t some great answer to that prayer in that moment.

And somehow it did shock me into sort of seeing the deeper vulnerability that I was in and, in some ways, the authenticity but silliness about prayer. It was a shocking relational move that ended up having a pretty transformative effect over time. I would actually say I did end up seeing some beautiful things in the months and years to come. But that’s what I mean by an intensification of a crucible-like experience, and as I look at the Scriptures it’s grown increasingly interesting to me how many places there are where God transforms someone in a dark space.

In prisons, dungeons, caves, wells, fiery furnace, lion’s den, cooking pot, Garden of Gethsemane, my daughter’s favorite, the belly of the whale, which is an incredible, powerful symbol for folks that I’ve worked with in therapy at times who realize they’re in a crucible, they’re in the belly of the whale. They’re in what Victor Turner would call “a liminal space”, they’re in a between state. Things are no longer the way they were, but they are not on the other side of it. And of course ultimately the Christian story has the most important dark space of a tomb where spiritual transformation happened.

And so this speaks to the ways in which I think our normal ways of dwelling with God and the sacred, our ways of relating, eventually get ruptured or challenged. This is a model that depicts in the center circle the way that we dwell in relation to God and the sacred in ways that are fairly stable. And at some point they don’t work anymore, we’re faced with a challenge that makes us need to grow. But something destabilizes us, and if I get destabilized out of that spiritual dwelling cycle in the center, I may take that off ramp on the lower left towards the spiritual seeking cycle. But if I do that, my anxiety and arousal is going to intensify because I’m now into new territory, I’m in the belly of the whale. And it actually becomes tempting to sort of duck back in, I don’t know how many of you’ve had a spiritual growth cycle start and you’re describing some deep question you’re wrestling with, or some conflict within yourself, and someone says, oh come on, you’re just being too hard on yourself, or you’re thinking about this too deeply, and it’s kind of what Job’s friends did to him.

There’s an invitation back into the normal mode of relating. But if someone stays in that spiritual seeking cycle there can be foraging that happens. There can be a groping, there can be a more solid sense of exploration, but that’s what potentiates a potential transformation and how a person relates to God and the sacred, and I think it typically results in themes like a deepened sense of intimacy, a deepened sense of trust, a deepened sense of commitment to God and to relational growth. We have a bit of data that has tested this in a short period of time.

It’s kind of challenging to explain this model but it looks kind of fun on PowerPoint so I like to include it. But basically this is from data where we looked at people’s questing, which is the X axis, and on the Y axis is their spiritual maturity using the Relational Acceptance Scale from Hall and Edwards, which is kind of a differentiation-like measure, and in this sample we just asked a simple question of whether students had had a spiritual transformation in the past year that we defined in certain ways to reflect a crucible-like process.

And if we look at those who did versus those who didn’t, we can see a fairly interesting, I think, shift in the relationship between seeking and dwelling, or questing and spiritual maturity where there’s something about spiritual transformation that involves questing that can result in more complex, mature spiritual dwelling. And so in conclusion if we ask what are the implications of this I would say, how can we cultivate people growing in their actual relationships with other people where there is a mature ability to tolerate difference and conflict and sit with people in the crucibles that they’re going through without rescuing or running away.

And how can we move towards relating better across various kinds of differences without denying the differences, or trying to smooth them over, or pretend that we’re all alike. How can we have the humility to do that. So that’s a bit of what I’ve been thinking about. Let me see what questions you have.

Moderator: Questions anyone?

There’s one over here.

Moderator: Ooh, yeah.

[Audience Members] Can we get access to your slides?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Audience Members] I will say that the chart that was two slides ago that depicted the various stages of spiritual life is in Dr. Sanders’ book, “Relational Spirituality.”

“Transforming Spirituality.”

Audience Member: “Transforming Spirituality,” which is for sale outside.

So, Steve, the last kind of list you had there of secure attachments and relational containers, how much of this do you think can happen in normal friendships, marriages, how much do you think we’re gonna need a therapist? How do you think about that?

Great question. I would take a — that I think I would love to see church communities and other communities maybe even more intentional about relational maturity and growth. I actually think that there’s a lot relational offerings in many of our churches, small group movement and all of that, but I’m not quite sure how often in our Christian communities we kind of realize that you can’t just throw people in a small group and have transformation.

I don’t know if you think I’m overstating that, but I’ve been in places where there’s kind of a I think a somewhat naive model that if we put people in a group together transformation’s gonna happen. And kind of what I’m suggesting is it’s a lot messier and more anxiety-provoking than that, but I think we should do it, we just should provide some training, some counsel, some resources on how to do that well. So I love the idea in just natural settings people can grow, especially with a bit of input.

And then I think there’s situations where it really does help to have someone, a therapist or some other leader, who can be a pretty differentiated presence, and that doesn’t have to be a therapist but often that’s our training and a spiritual director sometimes could train where I’m not gonna take sides unless I absolutely need to. So couples’ therapy is an interesting challenge because it’s so easy for couples how are struggling to find relational resources that will take sides.

Just in thinking about the crucibles that you talked about for transformation, do you think it’s something that needs to happen with an external circumstance, or can people enter into these crucibles if something isn’t happening externally, someone just wants to go on a journey of growth and transformation?

Yeah, great question. I also think from this differentiation-based model it would predict that as we’re really low in our differentiation it takes more to get our attention and so the lower I am in differentiation, the more I’m gonna need some external circumstance to get my attention, and God will use that to get our attention.

As we mature and get more differentiated I think we develop more ability to value our own internal integrity dilemmas, and it also I think it behooves me to try to deal with issues before I need an external crisis. So I think God will work either way, but I think that’s one of the advantages of growing in differentiation maturity and learning to sort of take myself on before the people around me or circumstances have to create a crisis to get my attention. There’s one in back. Okay.

[Audience Members] Steve, would you talk a little bit about spiritual self-regulation practices. Do you mean balancing between seeking and dwelling? It seems to me it would be hard to know when is a good point of self-regulation versus too much–

Right, so part of what I mean by self-regulation is the ability to manage anxiety and stress in life and I work with clients to help develop various prayer, and mediation, and other spiritual practices to deal with that so I think that’s really important. I see many, many clients who are devout Christians who pray but their styles of prayer don’t really seem to generate self-regulation. In fact in our research we’ve looked at petitionary prayer, which is asking God for help, and I think that’s a very fine and valid thing to do but it really doesn’t actually correlate with any of these things we’re talking about, virtues, emotional wellbeing.

And some people only know how to pray by sort of listing the things that they want help from God about, and that doesn’t do a lot for the kind of self-regulation that I’m talking about. Now the tension between balancing dwelling and seeking, I think as people grow they can work to integrate those, but in early cycles of change there maybe times I’m really out in a dark night of the soul doing a lot of seeking and haven’t found a way to really comfortably dwell in the presence of God again, and that’s what John Koh was I think referencing this morning.

And ideally when a transformation happens, someone will have an integration of their ability to do the things at the start. Be still and know God, and to also seek deeper intimacy and understanding.

Moderator: We have to call it quits there so thank you, Steve.

Thank you. [audience applauding]