“Four A.M. in the darkness of a cold winter morning, suddenly I am fully and frighteningly awake. I see it clearly: I am going to die. I am going to die. This body, this mind, this lived and living myth, this [spouse], [parent], teacher, [progeny], friend, will cease to be. The tide of life that propels me with such force will cease and I—this ‘I’ taken so much for granted by me—will no longer walk this earth. A strange feeling of remoteness creeps over me. My [partner], beside me in bed, seems completely out of reach. My [children], asleep in other parts of the house, seem in this moment like vague memories of people I had once known. My work, my professional associates, my ambitions, my dreams and absorbing projects feel like fiction. ‘Real life’ suddenly feels like a transient dream. In the strange aloneness of this moment, defined by the certainty of death, I awake to the true facts of life.”

The above paragraph is borrowed from the introduction of Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning by James W. Fowler and was slightly [modified] by me to be gender neutral.

If I were to self diagnose the stages of faith as defined by James W. Fowler, I would be in the 6th stage of faith, which is also known as Universalizing faith, the stage where an individual treats all people with compassion because the individual views all people as having derived from a universal place and thus all people should be treated with universal principles of love and justice.

I started burning devotional candles when I lived in Silverlake, Los Angeles back in the late 80s. I bought the candles because they kept me company at night, they were colorful, they lasted forever, they were cheap, and they were in every supermercado. Coffee, mangos and The Holy Virgin of Guadalupe; that's pretty much all I needed during what Fowler would call the 4th stage of my faith which is known as Individuative-Reflective faith and is often characterized by angst and struggle. I can dig it.

So my faith over the decades has progressed from the singular to the universal and a friendly candle has been with me throughout the journey. And by the way, according to Fowler, there is nothing beyond Stage 6. Let's see about that.

Live your life [death].

⌘