Hermetic Homiletics

Stage 5: Conjunctive Faith

Attributes:
~Unusual before mid-life
~Involves the integration into self and outlook of much that was suppressed in Stage 4’s self-certainty
~A “second naivete”: symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings
~Reclaiming and reworking of one’s past
~Opening of the “voices” of the “deeper self”
~Recognition of one’s social unconsciousness
~Alive to paradox in truth
~Strives to unify opposites in mind and experience
~Generates and maintains vulnerability to the strange truths of those who are “other”
~Commitment to justice is freed from the confines of one’s culture
~Life half over, a readiness develops to spend and be spent for the cause of conserving and cultivating the possibility of others’ generating identity and meaning
~Remains divided: lives and acts between an untransformed world and a transforming vision and loyalties
~Social contract principle qualified with human rights/equality principle (a principled approach)

Gifts:
~Rise of ironic imagination: ability to see and be in one’s or one’s group’s most powerful meanings, while simultaneously recognizing that they are relative, partial, and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality
~Can appreciate symbols, myths, and rituals (its own and others) because of being grasped, in some measure, by the depth of reality to which they refer
~Can see the division of the human family vividly because it accepts the possibility of an inclusive community of being

Dangers:
~Possible paralyzing passivity or inaction, giving rise to complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth

Transition:
~Overcoming the paradox of Stage 5 through a moral and ascetic actualization of the universalizing apprehensions

Note: Fowler actually suggests that sermons target this stage. However, I want to include Stages 3 and 4 to facilitate a smoother developmental process.

posted by irreverance @ 2:04 PM