Critical Reflection Paper I

Although many of the ideas in this course are relatively new and I find it challenging to apply these to my own unfolding life story, I will attempt to make use of a few key points to help me develop the faculty of reflective practice, hoping, as Fowler suggests, that in the retelling, insight may arise and provide fodder for fresh growth impetus.  As we are many students, you may not remember my particular journey, so I will revisit some of the highlights from my journey and attempt to view them through the lens of a few select stages from one or two stage theories.  The stage theories which I will use are Kohlberg’s and Fowler’s.
As I cannot remember much from my early life and childhood, we will bypass any interpretation of these.  We will begin, rather, by looking at my youth, from the ages of 13 and onwards, which coincides with entry to Junior High School.  Personally, at this age, I was becoming more aware of the opposite gender.  Being from a visible minority group, however, I was not often given opportunity to participate in dating.  At dances, I would stand by myself, and I don’t remember being invited to many parties.  According to Kohlberg, I would, at this age, have been drawing nearer Stage 3 – Good Interpersonal relationships, a subset of Level II, Conventional Morality.  Key to the young teen’s reasoning ability is identification with, or projection upon, what is understood by society in general.  In my particular dilemma, I felt that “everybody” could see that my being an outcast was unfair.  In Kohlberg’s moral hierarchy, I would have thus been going through a shift from “unquestioning obedience to a relativistic outlook and to a concern for good motives” (Crain, p. 138, 3rd ed.).  My awareness may be thought of having expanded from self, to self-in-context of society... still a bit limited in scope and application, but beginning to apprehend a sense of higher principles of order nonetheless.
Now in Fowler’s theory, at this point in life, I may have been making the move from Mythic-Literal Faith to Synthetic-Conventional.  In the latter stage, the emergence of formal operational thinking allows for abstractions to grasp pattern and meaning in the world.  My being rejected because of my skin colour would have become part of a larger experience, and I would begin to identify with other “rejected” peoples, including other visible minorities, in addition to historically-ostracized groups, such as the Jews under Hitler.  These dynamics would have helped to shape my personal mythos – a sense of becoming and emerging in identity which incorporates the past and anticipates the future.
Transition to the next stage in both theories may have taken place (if at all) when, as a man in his early twenties, I dropped out of medical school and experienced spiritual rebirth in Jesus Christ.  After a couple of years of partying and seeking out sensual fulfillment, I went through a crisis which involved placing my entire world-view into question.  In Fowler’s theory, the breakdown of my persona would have been facilitated by an awareness of conflict between competing authorities, and by experiences which were incompatible with a previously-unexamined but tacitly held belief-structure.  Specifically, I joined a Bible study and saw the love of Christian fellowship, in addition to many miracles.  This clashed with my Muslim upbringing, which had taught me that Christians were not to be trusted, because they ate swine’s flesh and drank alcohol.  Thus, with a commitment to Christ at the age of twenty-three, I may have begun the transition to Individuative-Reflective Faith, in which I saw the burden to make my own decisions with respect to conviction.  This choice to leave Islam created tension with my community of origin, and a quest to integrate into a new community, the body of Christ.  Although previously, my identity was assumed and adopted by virtue of membership via birth into one faith-tradition, I now began to hold to a different set of beliefs as a result of personal reaction and judgment upon competing world-views.  This new faculty for critical reflection encompassed self and ideology, allowing a total transformation of both, although residual tensions from the past remained, urging a more dialectical framework, and perhaps laying the groundwork for Fowler’s next stage.  Perhaps key in the move, which is often not made, is the ability to embrace what is suppressed (e.g. rituals, symbols and myths), allowing a second naiveté in which one’s past is not simply rejected outright, but reclaimed.

Kohlberg’s theory of moral development

Kohlberg’s theory of moral development lends itself well to the anthropological model of human spirituality (might he have borrowed from Holy Writ in the genesis of his representation?). 
Early in the history of the people of the Bible, there is a preconventional obedience-and-punishment morality apparent, notably with Adam and Eve, when they are told by God not to eat from the tree of knowledge.  As Crain explains, Kohlberg presents this first stage as exactly such, a law imposed by ‘big people’. 
When we look at stage 2 of Kohlberg, the element of exchange brings early covenants to mind.  God will provide blessings in return for devotion and obedience.  It is notable that while Kohlberg characterizes this as an individual morality, covenants such as the Mosaic were made with a community.
In the consideration of conventional morality, Kohlberg asserts motive is key at stage 3.  Thus while King David could attack and kill enemy soldiers, God said of him that his heart was pure.  Nabal, on the other hand, got drunk and died, for his heart was greedy, thus his wife, Abigail, went to David.  Here we see that action cannot be rightly judged apart from intent, and those who loved God were free.
In stage 4, social order forms the matrix for concern and action.  We recall that when Queen Vashti refused to dance before the guests of the king, she was exiled so that her action not spread among the other women of the land.  Kant’s categorical imperative springs to mind.
In postconventional morality, social norms come into question as theoretical utopias (or at least improvements to the status quo) come to the fore.  Kohlberg’s stage 5, social contract, finds a potential parallel in the ordering of church.  Jesus, speaking to the disciples, gave freedom in the formation of appropriate values and norms, “I give you the keys to the kingdom” and “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven”.  Presumably, with the Holy Spirit’s guidance, only virtuous and communally-beneficial laws would be adopted.  We see in this a loosening of strict adherence to dietary law, when the apostles wrote to Paul that gentile believers need not keep kosher but rather that they abstain from immorality and from blood.  Grace triumphed over formal law... questions beyond rote regulations could now be viably and successfully explored.
In stage 6 morality, universal principles which account for the viewpoint of others, allow for creative acts.  The example of Gandhi (peaceful resistance) is given as well as that of civil disobedience.  What Crain neglected to mention was the martyrdom of Christ and of His followers, out of love.  It is here that a belief in an afterlife is most appropriate, for as Paul says, without this hope, we are the most foolish of men. 
Thus it is clear that in Kohlberg’s stages, there is a framework for spiritual journey, as we, both as individuals, and as a race in process of growing up with, and towards God, move from preconventional fear of punishment, through conventional legal obligations and contractual lifestyles, to postconventional other-centred, lives of sacrifice.