The notion of “maturity” is not an easy concept to define.  It’s one of those “garbage can words” into which we often toss whatever meanings suit us at any moment we choose to use it.  And it’s often assumed that “growing up” routinely results in achieving maturity by some inevitable process. Of course, if you put “maturity” into a search engine, you will be offered a plethora of websites offering various definitions and lists of the 5, 10, 12, or 15 characteristics of maturity, depending upon whether it’s emotional, biological, psychological, rational or “whatever” criterion is in play. 

Enough said to establish

• the complexity of the concept I have chosen to address,
• the “book length” volume that would be required to address it fully, and
• my clear lack of competence—to say nothing of my lack of inclination—to do so.

What I have chosen to do, instead, is to explore one aspect of maturity—of “growing up” to adulthood—that has fascinated me for a very long time.

The longer I have lived, the clearer it has become to me that the road to maturity, by any definition, is a long one and, while I certainly do not offer myself as any shining example of one who (even in his 80s) has “arrived,” my interests in the subject do have a history.  Over forty-five years ago I wrote a monograph called The Needs of Persons, research for which led me to a curiosity about the quest for maturity.  A short time later, an address on the subject by my friend, the late John Claypool, excited my imagination, as John always did.  Later, renewed interest in the developmental stages of life led me other writings by Sheehy, Erickson, Kohlberg, Gilligan, and a host of readings in philosophy and ethics.

If one needed a scriptural springboard into the topic, it isn’t difficult to find.  Paul, in his first letter to the church at Corinth, wrote:  “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child.  But when I became a man, I put away childish things.”  And again, in the Ephesian letter, he exorted the use of our various gifts to “attain . . . to mature manhood (perhaps if he had written in the 21st century, he would have said “adulthood;” then again, knowing Paul, maybe not), so that we may no longer be children” but rather “grow up in every way . . . ”  Here is stated the significant challenge of becoming fully adult and putting behind the ways of childhood.  What, then, is involved in the process of dealing with ourselves and the world in a mature way, of becoming one thing and putting away something else?

My thoughts about this issue have coalesced over time into what I have come to believe is a profound idea that I want to illustrate with two metaphors—analogies, similes, images—take your pick.

The first one I learned originally from Harry Emerson Fosdick—one of my early mentors, although he didn’t know it—who believed that mature Christian living is learning to “live under the ceaseless tension of opposites.”  And it was this same idea that re-immerged in the address by John Claypool who argued that the “challenge of maturity” is learning to live with paradox—learning not to absolutize one side of a matter at the expense of all others.  

The second metaphor that illustrates the attribute of maturity that I want to explore is a characteristic called outgrowing “the simples.”  I’ve borrowed the phrase from the late senator from Missouri, Thomas Hart Benton, who used to say that the worst disease afflicting his constituents back home was a malady called “the simples.” 

My friend, the late Bob Mullinax (who introduced me to Benton’s reference), said Benton “was referring to the persistent desire to reduce the complexities of life to a few sentences which we can get the fingers of our minds around with great ease.” I would argue that Missouri has no exclusive claim on that malady!

I invite you, then, to follow me as we explore these twin ideas that “cuddle comfortably” under the umbrella of mature adulthood.

Let me first expand a bit on the acceptance of paradox as a basic form of human experience that involves putting aside a simplistic way of seeing life.  I am using the word “paradox” here in its most general sense as referring to that situation where two seeming opposites exist side by side, and yet both are essentially true.  Paradox is really our human acknowledgement of the depth and complexity of reality.  I don’t mean acknowledging contradiction and absurdity.  If I said someone was both old and young, it would make no sense.  But to say she is old in years, yet young in spirit, does make sense, for it points to the complexity of being that is the mystery of personhood.  This is paradox–the acknowledgement that our seeing is always as through a glass darkly.  Our grasp of ourselves, others, and the world is real, but never total or absolute.

The recognition of this fact about our relationship to reality is, in my judgment, a grand mark of maturity, and its saves us from those endless distortions which result from failing to recognize issues that often live in an “either-or” world but that deserve to be considered in the sphere of “both-and.”  To become a mature person—at any age (it isn’t automatic, by the way; some do it early, some late, and some never at all)—is to agree to live in the ceaseless tension of opposites that is the calling of finite persons.

This same principle holds true in terms of one’s relationship to the stream of time.  The process of becoming an adult involves putting away all absolutizing of either past or present or future to the exclusion of the other. 

This means allowing all three modes of time their proper roles in living in the creative tension where no one of them is embraced at the expense of the other.  It is a surrender to “the simples” to be an absolute reactionary, to concentrate solely on what has been, to fear change and innovation, to assume something must be done this way because it always has been done this way.  This denies the very nature of Reality as a moving, flowing process. 

It is just as simplistic, however, to be a total revolutionary, to ignore history altogether and be absolutely absorbed in the new.  The past is not a hitching post to render all life static and immovable, but it is a guide post that can be very helpful and instructive.  A person without a memory is only half a person.  Amnesia is not an asset, it is a disease.  There is a great reservoir of insight in a creative relationship with the past that allows us to stand upon the shoulders of giants and thereby to see and reach what we never could if we had to start over anew in every generation.

Of course, neither one of these should blind us to the decisive moment of the present.  This is really the only time we possess in any significant degree and to allow it to be eclipsed by either the past or the future would be to lose the opportunity to grasp the challenge of “the now.”  We must, rather, learn from both and then act with responsible insight.  Again, this is what I mean by paradox, living within the tension of all three–past, future, present–and putting away the temptation to oversimplify and, thus, distort.

In the second post on this topic, I will suggest two other areas where the temptation to absolutize one side of a matter at the expense of all others and, thus, to fall victim to “the simples,” Is massive.