The Spiral Gospels and the Seasons of our Soul

By Rev. Dr. Tom Thresher

Suquamish Community Congregational, United Church of Christ

June, 2004

In 1999 I attended a seminarians’ retreat with the national leaders of the United Church of Christ. One of those leaders shared the story of a young man who had approached him and asked how he could develop his spiritual life. The minister asked whether he attended church. The young man responded with evident sincerity, “What does church have to do with my spiritual life?” This young man’s answer reflects a common distinction in our culture between the “religious” and the “spiritual”. As one author put it, too often religion acts as a vaccine against direct experiences of the divine. This is not merely a danger for Christianity, but any religion that seeks to institutionalize and perpetuate the realization of their founder.

My question is whether the gospels still have something to say about the path of spiritual development? I believe they do. It is my view that the gospels, and the Christian liturgical year, symbolically trace a path of psycho/spiritual development in the individual; that they offer both a road map for the seeker and track the natural path of spiritual development.

The process begins with Advent, the beginning of the Christian year. During the season of Advent a new awareness begins to develop with inklings of new possibilities. It is a time of waiting and anticipating something as yet not grasped, but felt; possibilities glimpsed from the corner of our eye.

Christmas represents the first awakening, the birth, of that which had been anticipated. With Christmas a new consciousness reveals itself fully enough that the self can begin to identify with it. As we look more deeply into this new awareness a flood of insights burst upon us during our season of Epiphany. This can be a time of great energy; a flood of new insights and perspectives. To fully integrate the new awareness that is growing in us, however, we must relinquish our hold on our previous mode of understanding. We don’t lose the understandings of our previous way of being, but we must relinquish our exclusive identification with them. We might think that the excitement of a new consciousness emerging in us would be sufficient impetus for shifting our sense of self to the new awareness, but that is not the case. If I am a child and the hormones raging through my body demand that I perceive the world differently, it is still profoundly challenging to relinquish the world I have become accustomed to for the unknowns of puberty.

Every transition to a more inclusive order of awareness demands the death of our exclusive identification with our previous sense of self. This is our time of Lent. Lent demands that we let lose of the story of “who I am” that has explained the world to us, given us purpose, comforted us, and guided us. It is a time of preparation for death, the death of the old “who I am.”

This struggle to relinquish the old self reaches a crisis during Holy, or Passion, Week. If completed successfully, the struggles of our Passion result in a final letting loose of “the old me.” It is our death on the cross.

The great promise of Easter is that the complete surrender of our old self is inevitably followed by resurrection into a new order of being, a new consciousness. We do not die, we become more fully alive.

The time of Pentecost is a time of integrating, understanding, and exploring the benefits and limits of this new consciousness. Pentecost comes to an end as the limitations of our new awareness eventually lead us to seek a new way of understanding. Thus we enter the season of Advent once again, now at a new and more inclusive level of awareness.

When we walk a road we have driven along many times, we see and experience familiar things in a new light. For spiritual seekers, the ancient gospels appear to provide a fresh road map for exploring new levels of awareness.