May 6, 2008: Can You Gauge Your Spiritual Progress?

"How are you doing spiritually? Do you feel you are making spiritual progress?"

These were the questions that my pastor would ask during a yearly home visit when I was young, and they would always annoy my mother. She never knew how to answer. How do you gauge your spiritual progress, and is it appropriate to do so? Do you respond, "Well, last year I prayed about 15 minutes a day but now I pray 20; and there were some occasions when I resisted my husband's leadership, but recently I haven't done that, so I'd say that while I used to be a 7, spiritually speaking, now I'm about an 8"? Mom found the practice of grading yourself in the things of the Lord to be distasteful.

All saints do. Their focus is on Christ, not on themselves and how well they are following Christ.

I have learned to distrust self-evaluation, having seen good people bemoan their depravity and bad people pat themselves on their spiritual backs. Forty-one years ago my father saw the church that we were attending utterly fail to respond in a godly way to a crisis in its midst, and he said, "This church will die." He was right, it did. He could perceive the spiritual decay, but the decaying ones could not see it in themselves. They were like the ghosts in M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense: they did not know they were dead.

Those who are spiritually alive, on the other hand, may be only vaguely aware of that life. The less aware the better. It is like playing basketball. A point guard who thinks, "I'm playing well now! Seven assists and two steals and even a blocked shot!" is more likely to commit a turnover in the next minute than the one who is simply focused on his job running the offense and listening to his coach's instructions.

Having carried with me all these years my mother's suspicion about the value of grading one's walk with God, imagine my delight the other day on finding the same thought beautifully expressed in a letter by C. S. Lewis. He wrote to his young friend and protégé Walter Hooper:

We should, I believe, distrust states of mind which turn our attention upon ourselves. Even at our sins we should look no longer than is necessary to know and to repent them: and our virtues or progress (if any) are certainly a dangerous object of contemplation. When the sun is vertically above a man he casts no shadow: similarly when we have come to the Divine meridian our spiritual shadow (that is, our consciousness of self) will vanish. One will thus in a sense be almost nothing: a room to be filled by God and our blessed fellow creatures, who in their turn are rooms we help to fill. But how far one is from this at present!

Indeed, we are far from this at present. But maybe, by looking to Christ and not ourselves, we'll inch ever closer to it.