Earlier in the week I wrote of my grey weekend. Gordon pointed me in the direction of an interesting article by Alan Jamieson – Off Road Faith.

In it, he talks of stages of faith, and how journeying through them is like learning to drive a 4 wheel drive, rather than a normal car.

He speaks of how we move through phases of faith, and as we do our faith is radically transformed as we pass through. Jamieson would say I am moving from a conventional to a post conventional faith, or from a first naivety to a second naivety. I like that term more as I think that really sums it up without sound presumptuous or superior in any way.

We will always only ever understand and know in part. W are all understanding from only one or two perspectives. In this sense we are all naive in our faith. When our faith ‘develops’, or changes or undergoes some shift, I agree that we just move from one opinion to another, from one naive viewpoint to another naive viewpoint. Not a better, more developed, more mature naive viewpoint, just a different one.

So now I am existing and journeying in a different naivety than the one I was traveling in a few years ago. I hope that in 2 years time I will be traveling within another one still.

One thing is clear to me, which brings me on to the car/4 wheel drive analogy that is used here. It is clear that I can’t navigate through my new naivety in the same way I did through my old one. The terrain is different. There are no roads. In some way its just me traveling this path. In other ways loads are, but tracks have not been left obviously. Its a bit like walking in the Lake District.

As I am journeying, I need to learn new ways to navigate. One step at a time! In many ways this is nothing new, Psalm 119 talks of God’s word being a lamp to our feet. I remember the old stories and explanations when it was explained to an impetuous me, that a lamp only lights up a little way. It shows the next few steps. It also strikes me that it confines the past to memory because as well as not being to see into the distance and work out where you are going, you can’t see behind you and where you have come from either. I wonder if this is why people harp back to the ‘good old days’, which really, deep down, we have a pretty good idea that they never existed. At least, not in the rosey way we like to think they did.

Navigating a new landscape – sounds quite scary and exciting all rolled into one. Go read the article, it certainly throws up some good stuff. In fact the whole Spirited Exchanges blog is pretty excellent and provoking in its thought matter.