Spiritual Alignment: From God to Eternity

By Dr. Urias H. H. Beverly

A reflection on Dr. Urias H. Beverly's book, Spiritual Alignment by Tony Curtis Henderson. In this volume, Dr. Urias H. Beverly explores the topic of spiritual alignment and its essential significance in bringing or restoring balance to our individual and corporate lives. Here, he provides the reader and the researcher with a definitive description of the subject through the use of several examples that illustrate what spiritual alignment is and is not. After, he helps the reader to understand the subject. He gives a bit of historical development as he invites and encourages the reader to hear the conclusion of the narrative. Included in the historical development of spiritual alignment are its origin, growth, stagnation, and restoration in the lives of individual believers in and practitioners of spirituality. For persons who wrestle with the complexities or challenges of life, and who have some difficulty in navigating a healthy path to a viable solution to their situations, Dr. Beverly offers us a source of hope that can help us to achieve the joy and peace of wholeness that God has provided for us. Urias does an excellent job of providing another effective resource that may be used by persons of faith, ministers, pastoral counselors, and others to recover or restore balance to our lives through spiritual alignment. This book is written in such a way that the author masterfully carries the reader on a journey that moves one to laughter, tears, deep self-reflection, and personal assessment. All seminarians should be required to read this great work. I highly recommend that anyone who will be serving in any area of pastoral ministry or family ministry should read this book. Rev. Tony Curtis Henderson, DMin. Associate professor of practical theology. Ecumenical Theological Seminary. Detroit, Michigan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645844778

Book preview

Chapter One

Autonomy Balanced by Theonomy

Autonomy

The first dynamic that must be considered is autonomy balanced by theonomy. I bought a seat to take my four-year-old granddaughter, Jojo, for a ride on my bicycle. The seat was installed between me and handlebars on the bike. We had a good ride for a brief time before Jojo, holding on to the handlebars, tried to control the direction of the bike. I realized this might happen but was comforted in the knowledge that I was much stronger than she, so I could handle it. I couldn’t. I was only able to guide us enough to have some choice about when and how we would fall so we would not be hurt. I learned again for the twenty-eleven-dozenth time only one person can guide the vehicle at a time.

I have ridden on a tandem bike, also on a four-wheel bike. When I was a teenager, I invented a contraption by wielding two bicycles together, which I called a bike mobile. Each of these conveyors allowed only one person to control the direction of the bike. Two people could peddle and even apply the brake on the bike, but only one could steer it. In the case of a two-wheel bicycle, we are not only concerned with speed and direction of the bike, but more importantly, we must be concerned with balance.

The handlebars allow one person to maintain the balance of the bike. If two people try to control it, they both fall. If a blind person leads a blind person, will they not both fall into a ditch? (Luke 6:39, Bible) So it is with life. Only one person can determine a person’s direction. As a child, one must depend on parents or surrogate parents to guide him or her, but when the child grows up, he or she must put away childish things(1 Corinthians 13:11, Bible).

Childish things may be a luxury or the frustration of parents, family members, friends, or anyone else making decisions for the competent adult.

To have control of one’s own life means having and exercising the freedom and responsibility to make one’s own decisions for oneself. That is what autonomy means. It does not mean that one cannot ask for advice. Asking for advice may be a wise thing if one asks the right person. Autonomy means that after gaining the entire advice available, one still has the freedom and the responsibility to decide for himself or herself what advice to take by deciding.

Autonomy is not something to be taken lightly, nor can it be achieved in an instant. Many teenagers can’t wait to get free of their parents’ rules at the house. Once they leave home to go to college, they find that making their own decisions is a more difficult task than they thought. They realize quickly that they are not ready to be autonomous in their decision making. Every person is different and goes about decision making based on their experience and personality.

There is no one way to make decisions. Some people collect all the information they can and sometimes write it on paper to make decisions. Some calculate the best decision for them mathematically, while others seek advice and/or pray for guidance. There are even some who toss the dice, so to speak, and let the chips fall where they may. Regardless of how the decision gets made, there are consequences for the one who makes the decision.

Even after making a good decision, some people suffer from what might be called buyer’s remorse. Others cannot sleep at night because they made a decision. Fear and anxiety are frequent company keepers of those who make autonomous decisions.

Some years ago, I made a decision to change my life insurance policy. I had to write a check for $3,000.00 to move the assets from one account to another so I would not have to pay taxes on it. I had never written such a large check in my life. I called the agent and asked a question, which he answered simply. Two minutes later, I called again with another simple question, which he answered.

I was a college student at the time, and I called again in about five minutes and asked, How do you spell thousand?

The agent said to me, You have never written a check like this before have you? I answered I had not. He said to me, You have made a good decision to do this. Everything will be all right. Now go on and write the check. I hang up and wrote the check. It is not easy to make autonomous decisions when you have not done it before.

Some people cop out on making autonomous decisions. They think they are avoiding making a decision, but no decision is a decision. Some years ago, I had three teens for counseling about the same time and age. They all had essentially the same problem; they were doing well in school until the twelfth grade, and their grades began to plummet. I finally realized the similarity of their problems in two or three weeks. It turns out they did not know what to do after graduation from high school. So they unconsciously decided not to graduate.

In my sessions with each of them, I learned that they had their lives planned for twelve years, but after high school, they were expected to make their first autonomous decisions for the rest of their lives. This created in each of them tremendous anxiety. I helped each of them to generate some options for what to do with themselves after high school. Once they saw some possibilities for their future, they relaxed and went back to graduate from high school. Autonomy is not always welcome to people who do not know what to do with themselves. They have problems with autonomous decision making.

Some people have autonomy thrust upon on them by unfortunate events in their lives: loss of parents through death, abandonment, neglect, or illness. This is a difficult situation because autonomy is something that is best learned one decision at a time. It takes a lot of practice to learn how to make daily decisions. It is a trial-and-error method at best. To have total autonomy dumped on a person who has not had time to learn how to make decisions is a tragedy.

The damage caused by the circumstances listed above may take years to undo. That is only if one is fortunate. This is particularly true when autonomy is the result of disasters such as losing one’s family in a fire, auto crash, tornado, hurricane, flood, airplane, or other similar crisis. It is devastating to have autonomy forced on us by social and political issues like war and the strain of losing parents or loved ones to prison or exile.

Sometimes autonomy is taken away when the community turns against a person or family because of one’s race, culture, nationality, ethnicity, or religious faith.

Individual Effort

There are some things that require total autonomy even when there are others we can lean on for support, but in the end, each individual must make autonomous decisions all alone. In education, one can get all the support he or she wants, but the answers given on a test are the decisions made by each individual. If a person sets a goal to lose weight, only that individual can decide when and what to eat, what exercises to take, etc. Many suggestions may be available to the individual, but each choice must ultimately be that of the person accountable to achieve the goal.

This is true on the field in sports just like it is the responsibility of the athlete’s character off the field. If a person is addicted to some chemical, only the individual can make the independent choices to change his or her condition. All the help in the world may be available, but there comes a part of the process that must be contributed by the person autonomously, or the goal cannot be achieved.

We all have these forks in the road as we journey through our lives; forks that demand individual decisions. Try as we may to avoid it, but there is no such thing as no decision no matter how we may try to make someone else responsible. With autonomy comes responsibility, and it cannot be taken away unless by force. If we choose to follow another’s suggestion, it is still our choice. This is a difficult matter for some young people to understand. As teens, they follow the peer group. It can be very painful to fall out of fellowship of the peer group. Peers believe that everybody is doing it. Everybody knows it, everybody wants it, everybody understands it, and that is everybody in the peer group. Behaving contrary to the peer group is literally impossible for teens and young adults. Nothing could be more threating to many of them, even when the demands of the peers are totally against the values of individuals. For those who cannot fathom anything apart from the thinking and actions of the peers, it is an unconscionable dilemma when they find themselves in serious trouble for doing something they did not even want to do. Autonomy can be a very hard lesson to learn. One cannot achieve autonomy unless he or she experiences differentiation.

Differentiation

There are many different ways to define differentiation: from the biology and plant cellular approach, the mathematical approach, the educational approach, and the family systems approach. This is not an exhaustive list. In the cellular meaning, it begins with the sperm and the egg. From this union, a cellular system is created and begins to change and mutate quickly. A few days from its origin, the system shows impressive, measurable development. The early cells in a system are general, unspecified except to the origin of the system. The system forms a DNA pattern, and regardless to how many of the cells may change, they almost never change their relation to their parent cells, DNA.

However, the mutated cells change in their shape, size, and membrane as well. They split off to become a more specified cell and even give birth to other cells. These new cells may in time split off as well and may become a part of a major system. If nothing else, this means that differentiation is a natural process.

In mathematics, differentiation is two factors used in a calculation that renders a third factor and the derivative of the entire equation. As simply as I can put it, it is a mathematical process of identifying a contingency when a system changes. In biology, the derivative expands into more; in mathematics, the process starts at the expanded phenomenon and seeks to discover the nucleus of a system. In biology, the reference is in operation. The process starts at the nucleus of a single cell and develops into a larger system. At some point, a part of the system separates into a smaller cell and begins to develop into a larger more complex system. What these two processes have in common is however large and/or complex a system may become, it must deal with its origin. It can break away, but if so, it carries with it a part of its beginning. It may calculate enormous equations but will always be in search of its derivative, its origin.

In family therapy, a person is bound to parents and family members until the child grows up and begins to try to become autonomous. This may start in the teen years when the child wants to be free to follow the demands of the peer group. The teen is successful to a greater or lesser degree. When the person truly becomes autonomous, he or she will likely be eighteen to twenty-one or older. These are very difficult times for both the parents and child, who is an adult now, but not yet able to bear all the burden of his or her own