EP 135 | What's the Difference between Spiritual Fervour and Spiritual Maturity?

Hello everyone,

Individuals who are going through healing and integration at deeper levels often experience a drop in enthusiasm and conviction in the faith and spiritual religious practices that used to give us so much joy, that we used to be so passionate about. In my experience, as well as in the experience of so many people that I see going through this process, this becomes a cause of concern. Shouldn't we be concerned if we used to be so on fire for God, for prayer, and for our faith, and now we just can't seem to conjure up the same passion?

This is what I want to talk about in today's sharing. The reason for our concern when we experience this drop in enthusiasm is that we don't realize that healing and integration are part of the process of spiritual maturation, right? It's part of maturing, and we don't know this unless somebody has told us. Even if somebody has told us before, or we've read it somewhere, it doesn't really land until we go through it ourselves. 

What we don't know is that this process always, always includes some kind of death to the earlier experiences that we have about our faith, the earlier experiences that we have of God. Whatever we may have enjoyed, and whatever it was that gave us that sense of deep conviction that we believe in God, that our faith is the source of truth, for example, something about that experience in our childhood or youth—and it may not be physical childhood or youth—changes.

It could be like our spiritual childhood or spiritual youth. Something about that needs to die to make way for a more mature experience of faith and a more mature relationship with God.

So, I want to talk about the difference between spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity. All right. It's not necessarily an either-or situation, but they are very distinct. And I'll say it is possible to be spiritually mature and still have spiritual fervour, although it will be very different in kind. But at earlier stages when what dominates our faith life is spiritual fervour, we often don't yet have spiritual maturity.

So I'll be talking about three areas of differences, okay, between spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity. I'm going to go over some differences in the characteristics between spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity, and then I will take a brief look at, you know, where these two concepts or experiences fit in terms of the stages of faith development, and then close with looking at the different responses to suffering that we will experience when we are still in the stage of spiritual fervour versus when we deepen into spiritual maturity.

Okay, so I think it's actually a very important topic to talk about because when we fail to understand the difference between these two, we can cause a lot of harm to ourselves or to others. And this is especially the case if we are involved in faith formation or other people's faith formation.

Okay. And if we don't understand the difference between spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity, we can cause a lot of unnecessary grief. So first, differences in characteristics between spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity. Let's look at spiritual fervour first.

Spiritual fervour is, I think, most obviously the trait of powerful initial conversion experiences. Just think of the time when you first had, or your first, or first few—I would say even first few—powerful experiences of God.

Before those conversion experiences, you know, you're kind of like just damp wood. Okay, like a damp log, right? There's no warmth to it, no relationship with God. There's no kind of warmth to it. And then you have your powerful conversion experience, and then you become on fire for God, right? We often see this happen with people who, for example, go through a conversion experience retreat of some sort or maybe encounter God in their daily life, but have some kind of powerful conversion experience. It's like you feel the fire in them, right? It's blazing. You feel the enthusiasm, the conviction, the hunger, and it's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

So you go from being, like I mentioned, a damp log of wood to a log that has caught fire, and the experience of spiritual fervour often feels consuming because it feels like this fervour, this passion consumes us. We feel like we're being consumed by love and we just want to give back to that love. Right, but it's a very—how would I say?—it's a very intense and passionate kind of experience. And this experience of the fire of burning for God can sometimes feel out of control. What I mean by that is it's just so consuming. It's like when you are infatuated with someone when you first fall in love. It's such an overwhelming, heady experience. All you can think about is the person that you love.

You maybe have a very idealised version or idea of the person that you're in love with. You are distracted, and so all you can talk about is this person that you're in love with. Spiritual fervour can be like that. It's not only like that, but it can be like that, right? You're really on fire. You can't help but just see God maybe everywhere. You want to talk about God all the time. And it's almost like you don't really have control of how you talk about God. You let that experience of that fervour, of that fire, lead you.

So in the stage when we are predominantly experiencing spiritual fervour, we tend to be blind to everything else because of the intensity of the experience. And everything that we learn about God, or study about God, or conversations with others about God, is coloured by the intensity of this fire. That's that spiritual fervour, right? And because this experience is so intense, there is often a lack of self-awareness, right? All we can feel is that passion and intensity. We're so caught up with that, that we're not able to see the deeper things about ourselves. Also, especially when we are in the stage of spiritual fervour, it's not yet the work, the season for us to be aware of our shadows. So it's very self-explanatory.

So when we are in the grips of spiritual fervour, we feel very passionate about our faith and about God, but we often do not have self-awareness, and in our passion, we can be very fixed and very rigid about there being right ways of doing something. And we can be very stubborn about what is the right way. We can be quite dogmatic about it. We're not very accepting of differences in opinion. It's part of that zeal that we experience. And because we're so convicted about what is right and what is true and who God is and how He works.

That fire in us sometimes makes us feel like we want to drive that into others as well, whether or not they're ready to hear us, right?

So when we are caught up with spiritual fervour, we will experience that it is very difficult for us to be patient. The fire that you're caught up with tends to consume others as well. And so you can struggle with compassion and patience because you just want people to also get it and you want others to also catch fire.

This is just what it is. This is what spiritual fervour is. This is the initial stages of the interior journey when we catch fire and we're filled with spiritual fervour. But there are some downsides because we're still young in the faith. For example, we will struggle with impatience.

What about spiritual maturity? How does it differ from spiritual fervour? So I mentioned earlier that spiritual fervour is often the consequence of a powerful initial conversion experience, right? Spiritual maturity comes later on. It is the fruit of long-term spiritual growth rather than those very powerful initial conversion experiences. It's still a food of conversion. It's just that when you look at conversion as a lifelong process, you realize that the experience of conversion also changes as we deepen our walk with Christ as we go into the later stages of spiritual growth and development.

And spiritual maturity, in particular, is the fruit also of healing and integration with our emotional life, with our psychological life. So it's no longer just the spiritual side of things, but it's rounded out with affective depth and affective maturity, right? So emotional depth, emotional maturity. There are many of us when we are in the throes of spiritual fervour, because we haven't worked on our emotional wounds yet, we can still be very emotionally immature just because we haven't grown in that dimension yet.

But real spiritual maturity or I'll say true genuine spiritual maturity and not just spiritual fervour can only come about when we are also emotionally healed and mature. Okay, not perfectly healed but just relatively more healed and more integrated.

And this is when our fire for God is no longer just a blazing furnace or like a blazing fire that consumes everything in its path. As we develop in spiritual maturity, we'll find that the fire that we have, or the fire of our love for God, is capable of becoming also just a warm hearth, like a fireplace that can warm people, that can be hospitable. And it doesn't just burn people up.

With spiritual maturity, and this is also what is often missing in spiritual fervour, there will be deep knowledge, acceptance, and love of ourselves, and of all parts of ourselves, including the parts that we may have deemed as inferior, sinful, ungrateful, you know, uncooperative with the work of the Holy Spirit. When we were earlier in our journey in the grips of spiritual fervour, we usually reject those parts or ignore those parts and exile those parts because we see them as incompatible with holiness and with God.

With spiritual maturity though, we come to welcome them, accept them, love them, parent them, lead those parts of ourselves because we recognize that God welcomes all those parts of ourselves too. So spiritual maturity, one of the characteristics of spiritual maturity is that there's a deep groundedness in the embodied reality of God's unconditional love. That is often missing in spiritual fervour.

So another characteristic of spiritual maturity is that it is love that is mature. Young love versus mature love, right? Young love is passionate, fiery, but it lacks patience, it lacks tolerance, it is still very ego-driven. It's not a bad thing, it's just the characteristic of young love. Mature love, on the other hand, that has gone through trials and tribulations and purification, is patient and kind. And in spiritual maturity, we begin to experience that love can be patient and kind, that our love for ourselves and love for others can be patient and kind.

Spiritual maturity is also often characterized by a depth that is not present in spiritual fervour. In spiritual maturity there is stillness and interior silence. It is a love that is very spacious. And in spiritual maturity, you will find attunement, right, there's a contemplative, hospitable presence for others.

In spiritual fervour, you're like a consuming fire and when people come across your path, they will catch on fire, and maybe some of them will love that and will be grateful to you for that. But those who need, perhaps, a softer and tender reception because they are traumatized or because they are so stuck and trapped in what keeps them away from God and from joy. They may be afraid of you when you're still caught up in spiritual fervour. But when they encounter someone with spiritual maturity, they may find comfort that there is space for them to enter as they are, right? So that's a very important trait of spiritual maturity.

I just want to share for a moment here, an anecdote or a story from my own life. 

I might have shared this in an earlier sharing session, an earlier podcast episode, but when I was in that season where spiritual fervour was what really defined my relationship with God. I often brought into the Sacrament of Reconciliation, into confession, that I felt like my zeal was hurting people. And I felt like I knew, in a sense, it can't be that there's something wrong with my zeal for God. It's coming from a passion for God. Right. That can't be bad, but why is it that it's hurting people?

I would confess that I'm not patient enough. I would confess that I lack compassion. I was pretty hard on myself because that was the only lens that I had to look at myself. So I knew that was a real area of struggle. And during one of these confessions, when I confessed yet again to lacking compassion and patience for others, my confessor asked me what my current image of God was, and I didn't hesitate and I just answered, "Fire. It's like a huge, all-consuming fire." That was my image of God at that time. It really felt like that.

And my confessor simply said, "The Holy Spirit, here's what I would like you to do. You asked the Holy Spirit who has set you on fire to teach you how to use that fire." And for my penance, he invited me to make a novena to the Holy Spirit, basically to deepen my relationship with the Holy Spirit. And I thought that advice that he gave me was brilliant because yes, it answered that question I had in my heart, right? It surely the zeal is of God. It can't be bad. And it was, I was affirmed that the priest said that it was the Holy Spirit who had set me on fire.

But that second part, when he said, "and ask the Holy Spirit to teach you how to use that fire," it was an aha moment for me. But what I didn't realize yet at that time is that the process of the Holy Spirit teaching me how to use that fire, that's actually what healing and integration will have to bring about.

Another image that I can offer to illustrate the difference between spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity is actually from the movie I think it's X-Men: First Class. So it's from one of the movies that was made about the X-Men, the mutants with special powers, and X-Men: First Class was focused on when the mutants that we're familiar with were young, so they had these powers, they had these mutated powers, but they hadn't learned how to harness them, how to tame those powers and let those powers, in a sense, be channelled and used for good. So very often, those powers were hurting themselves or hurting people that they love, right? Because they don't know how to help themselves, they can't help themselves.

And so that is why Professor Xavier started the school for mutants, right? For gifted individuals. I think I'm not that familiar with this universe, but the whole idea was to educate these young mutants about their powers and help them find a way to tame and control those powers, right?

Fire is such an incredible source of power and it can be great to it can be used for great things and great good, but not if we, there is no way to control the fire and then the fire can get out of control and become a source of destruction and death. But if we are able to harness the power of fire, it can give life, right? It can save lives even, but that's predicated on the ability to be able to harness the power and not let it be out of control. So that kind of illustrates what I'm trying to show about the difference between spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity.

The thing that spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity have in common is love, is that fire for God. It's present in both, but just in spiritual fervour, especially younger spiritual fervour, without spiritual maturity, that fire can be out of control. It's still not yet seasoned, tested. So it's, it's still not yet purified, right? Spiritual maturity is kind of like the fruit of what happens when that love has been purified, when that fire has now been harnessed and tamed so that it can be a source of good and less of a source of destruction and death.

The next thing I want to look briefly at is how spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity belong to the different stages of faith and spiritual development, all right? So I want to refer you to an earlier video that I did or an earlier podcast episode that I did on the stages of maturing faith.

So there's this entire episode that I introduced the book called The Critical Journey, where There are six stages of faith. So I want to refer you to that episode if you are not familiar, you haven't heard it, you haven't watched it, because these are the stages that I'm going to be using to explain this point.

Okay, the six stages from the Critical Journey. So just very briefly as a refresher, the six stages of faith development in the book The Critical Journey includes at stage one, the recognition of God. That's kind of like the initial experience of awe and wonder of God. When God becomes real in our life and more than just an intellectual concept, for example, we fall in love. We begin to fall in love, right? And that's the recognition of God. That's stage one.

And stage two is when we begin to be apprenticed into what it means to be in this relationship with God. We learn about what it means to, say, be a Christian disciple. Alright? And that can carry on for many years. And we can experience great fervour. In fact, I think oftentimes in stage two, it is our fervour that drives us to wish to learn more about God and understand how we can serve him.

And in stage three is when we move from just apprenticing and learning about what it means to be a disciple of God, for example what it means to be on fire, right? Set on fire by this love to how can we use that fire for others? Right. So in stage three, we enter positions of leadership. Sometimes we're very productive. We're labouring very hard for God, right? We are really desiring to use that fire that set us on fire the passion that we have for God. So that's stage three.

And in stage four is when there's this huge change and things crumble, okay? Go to that episode where I dedicated the whole entire episode to the six stages to hear more about this. But stage four, there's a huge shift and we focus now inwards. We suddenly become very aware of our shadows and our brokenness. And so suddenly it can feel like the fire is gone. We were so sure of ourselves. We were so filled up with passion and zeal before this. And then now all we can see is how imperfect we are, how flawed we are, and how even despite our best intentions, we keep hurting people when all we want is to love them. And we recognize that we can't, we don't know how to love God. It's a new realisation. So yeah, stage four and the wall is this long, difficult season of purification. But it's also exactly where very deep healing and very deep integration happens.

Okay stage four is where integration begins to happen so this affects our relationship with God as well. It affects our experience of faith. That's a big reason why interior pilgrims begin to feel a like a diminishing or a lack of conviction and passion that they used to have in earlier stages.

Okay. So that's stage four. And then you go into stage five and stage six, where it's really the journey outward again, from integrated spiritual fruitfulness. Now, I wanted to highlight these six stages because the way I see it, the way I've experienced it, spiritual fervour is the main characteristic of the stages one to three in the Critical Journey. Okay, so like kind of the first half of life, the first half of that spiritual developmental journey is characterised by spiritual fervour and rightly so.

Just think of any friendship or relationship, especially a romantic relationship, at the start, there are sparks, right? The sparks are there to motivate us to deepen the bond with each other, to learn more about each other. But in the first part of the journey, we often are blind to the faults of the other person and also the faults in ourselves. When we really struggle in that relationship, and we still choose love, like we wish to continue to love this person, we wish to continue this journey. That's when we are broken down and we are purified, right? And we begin to really see ourselves. We have to choose love in order to be willing to see ourselves or else we may forever be stuck in just the first half of life where we can't see our true selves and we can't see how broken we are.

Spiritual maturity is characteristic of the second half of this spiritual journey. In fact, I would say it begins in stage four. Before stage four, I wouldn't even say there's much spiritual maturity at all. I can't really talk about spiritual maturity. But the process of Stage four being broken down, of turning inward, begins the process of spiritual maturing. And it's really the fruit that you see and other people experience when you enter into stage five and stage six of the critical journey.

So that's one way, another way of looking at spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity through the developmental stages of faith. Now the last part that I want to talk about today in terms of the differences between spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity is the response to suffering. This is a big part of our lives, right? Every interior pilgrim knows what it's like to experience pain and suffering. There's a lot of pain and suffering in our own lives. And when we begin to be intentional about healing, we awaken to new layers of the reality of our pain that we did not see before.

So suffering is really a part of our life, but the difference, depending on whether we are still in the throes of spiritual fervour in the earlier stages of spiritual and faith development, or when we are already going into the second half of life and entering the phase of, let's say, where spiritual maturity is becoming more descriptive of our experience, how we respond to suffering is different.

When we are still in that first half of life and spiritual fervour characterises our relationship with God, we often struggle to integrate our faith with suffering. It's not that we deny that suffering—we can't help but experience our pain, right in our suffering, but we tend to go either one of two ways.

We either believe that faith and suffering are incompatible. And if that's what we subconsciously believe, we feel that God should remove our suffering. If God loves us, he should remove, he will remove our suffering, okay? Or, some people go the other way and they believe this is especially true for Catholics, I think, that faith is all about suffering for God.

And then suddenly, it seems like, you know, if that's the way that you go, subconsciously, then the spiritual fervour that you have also has a lot of emphasis on the cross and what it means and that we have to suffer for Christ. It's like you cannot see even that there are such things as, for example, unjust suffering that should be eliminated if we can, right? Every suffering becomes something that is a cross that I have to pick up for God and other people should pick up and carry for Christ, right?

So that's what I mean by a failure to integrate faith is suffering. You kind of go one or the other direction. In that kind of season, people often use faith or spirituality to flee the pain by bypassing that suffering, okay? Sometimes you would hear people who tell you that, if you have sufficient faith, or if you pray fervently enough, the suffering will be lifted, that God will heal you and therefore God will remove that suffering, right?

That's one version that you may hear from people who are very full of spiritual fervour, right? And at the same time, when you are still very caught up with spiritual fervour, you're very unaware of how your own wounds contribute to your suffering and contribute to the suffering of the people around you. You're even more unaware, I think, of how your wounds contribute to the suffering of people around you.

But because you're so unaware, then you see you're again stuck in that very extreme. Either I'll bypass the suffering by praying, wanting God to lift me up from the suffering, or I swing the other way and I believe that I must bear with all suffering. You almost romanticize suffering and believe that you must accept suffering. I just want to suffer with God. Okay, that's a dangerous, emotionally unhealthy way of looking at suffering because there's a lack of integration.

Okay, so that's spiritual fervour. What about spiritual maturity? When we have greater spiritual maturity, we'll find that we are able to accept suffering more peacefully as part and parcel of the interior journey and of life. There is this new dimension of recognising that it is part of life, part of the reality that we need to enter and accept. It's part of the reality in which God meets us.

But at the same time, where there is spiritual maturity, we also have full agency to work towards - and this is very important - we can work towards the elimination of unjust conditions that perpetuate suffering. For example, we do the work of inner healing. We recognise that we are survivors of complex trauma and that injustice had been done to us in our growing-up years within our families of origin. A lot of our suffering has been caused by those wounds and a lot of the suffering we cause ourselves and others is because of those wounds. Therefore, part of eliminating the unjust conditions that perpetuate suffering is working for our healing and our integration. When we become more integrated, we will have more interior freedom to love people better.

With spiritual maturity, you move from a more either-or dualistic mindset that comes with spiritual fervour to one that's more holistic, one that sees that everything fits and everything belongs to a larger whole. With spiritual maturity, there's also greater awareness of how our own brokenness contributes to suffering and therefore, we take that responsibility for our own healing and integration.

If you recall, when I talked about spiritual fervour, we tend to either try and bypass that suffering, or we can maybe blame sin or blame others for suffering. Or we may just try and embrace suffering in some kind of romanticised way, without trying to remove the unjust conditions that cause that suffering. With spiritual maturity, we have the wisdom to see the difference. We are able to both accept suffering that is part of our lives and still take responsibility for our own healing and integration.

With spiritual maturity, we allow God to transform suffering into joy, into wholeness and fruitfulness. When we develop greater spiritual maturity, we can transmute or, as some people like to use the term, alchemise, transform the dross, the junk, so-called, of pain and suffering into light, into love, into joy, by letting God love us through it. Just letting grace seep through all parts of our lives, it becomes a very inclusive, transcendent part of our spiritual life, part of our relationship with God.

As a final thought, I just want to say that, remember, while there are these big differences between spiritual fervour and spiritual maturity, it's not that one is absolutely always better than the other. It's better to think of it in terms of development and growth. Like I always say, when we look at a baby, a baby is precious, right? An infant is precious, even though it's incapable of doing anything for him or herself. A toddler is precious, even though, let's say if the toddler is in the terrible twos, it can be deeply frustrating and may not recognise or realise at all when his or her behaviour may be making life very difficult for others in their life. A person who is in adolescence is precious, even though there are great hardships that come with adolescence, not just in their own lives, but there's great hardship that adolescents and teenagers often cause to other people.

At every stage of growth and development, we are precious. We are loved. We are at the edge of growing something new. And when we are at the edge of something new, it's always unfamiliar. We are clumsy. We're unwieldy.

Think of the X-Men that I mentioned, you know, the mutants who have not yet learned to harness the energy of their powers. God looks at all of this with so much compassion and so much love. He doesn't reject our clumsiness. He doesn't reject our immaturity. Okay, immaturity is not an ethical, moral failure. Immaturity on its own, I would say, is just reflective of where we are.

Now, sometimes it becomes more of a tricky thing when we refuse to develop and grow beyond where we are, even if, let's say, we are aware that where we are stuck is causing a lot of problems, a lot of grief for others. It's very intricate. It's so nuanced.

But I just want to say, let's not look at spiritual fervour and all that comes with it and say like, "Oh, that is less good than spiritual maturity." Rather, let's recognise that when we are in that season where spiritual fervour was the main characteristic of our experience, of faith experience, it was good and it did important things for our development. And God also works in particular ways through us when that was the stage that we were in.

But if we have already been invited to go beyond that and we're responding, and this is where people actually begin to be troubled, is because they respond to God's invitation to go beyond spiritual fervour. They enter the season of disintegration, or fragmentation of falling apart because they are recognising that inside, in the deeper levels of their inner life, things are not that rosy, right? And that there's a lot of reconsolidation, taking apart and being undone, that God wants to do in their inner lives before we are rebuilt again.

Then recognise that it is okay to lose the fervour, the passion that you have known so well for, let's say, the previous stages of your life, right? It is not a reason for anxiety or panic. It's just part of spiritual maturation. So spiritual fervour comes before spiritual maturity.

And if you have lost that first flush of the passion and zeal that you used to have, but if you can recognise still that there are fruits of the Holy Spirit in your life, and now this is where having a spiritual director or therapist or other people in your life that have objectivity can help you, can reassure you, right? Because when we are really low ourselves, sometimes we just can't see it. But other people may tell us, "I do see the fruits of the Holy Spirit in your life."

So don't be afraid. This is part of the journey. So I hope that today's sharing gives those of you who are experiencing a lack of spiritual fervour as compared to the past because you've entered deeper seasons of healing and integration some hope, right? Give you a different perspective to consider and assure you that it will always feel unfamiliar and, in some sense, disturbing and uncertain when we enter deeper waters.

But what we can look forward to, even if we cannot see any sign of it in the present, is that God is leading us into deeper waters of stillness of silence in him, and that he is preparing us to be able to love more like he loves.

So on that note, I wish you peace. I wish you healing and hope and love. Goodbye.