Episode 139: Undifferentiated Faith part 2

I didn’t release an episode for several weeks. Overwhelm. It’s been a process these past several weeks. Stuck. I needed space and to give myself the gift this creative block was offering me—rest, time away, a break from thinking about something that brings a lot of mixed and sometimes heavy emotion.

I had been reading James Fowler as part of my study on the stages of faith. He talks about undifferentiated faith. It really piqued my interest. What exactly is undifferentiated faith?

Some pretext is needed before answering that question. The first stage of faith Fowler discusses is actually a pre-stage one (stage zero), which he terms “infancy and undifferentiated faith.”

On page 120 of The Stages of Faith by Fowler, he lays the foundation:

“We are wonderfully endowed with innate potential for adapting to this new world, but the activation and elaboration of our adaptive capacities depends both on the progress of our overall maturation and on the way the persons or conditions of our environment greet us and beckon us into interaction.”

He continues further down the page:

“…if there is no person or persons with whom we can achieve a dependable complementary relationship of mutuality, our trust of the world and in ourselves can be outweighed by distrust and infantile despair.”

Paraphrasing: gradually we begin to understand objects in our environment as separate from us, continuing into existence when out of our sight or attention. In the beginning, the breast or bottle, mother’s face, and objects grasped and tasted are extensions of us (the infant), miraculously there when need or curiosity arises.

Fowler says, “A primal ‘fall’ into consciousness occurs as our interaction with persons and objects enables us cognitively to construct what Piaget calls the ‘schema of object permanence.’”

Schema: a diagrammatic presentation, a structured framework, a simple diagram. Basically, the very embryonic beginnings of a “language of images” of sorts. We don’t have verbal language yet.

He continues, paraphrased: by 7–8 months we are able to form and retain mental images of missing objects (people and things). We’re on the way to knowing that we’re separate from those we love, and toward needing to experience ourselves as central in a world of “others.” In other words, we’re on our way to understanding that we are a separate entity in and of ourselves.

Fowler describes this fall—or realization—as traumatic. “Some think that our primal innocence gives way to the first split of conscious and unconscious as we experience the new anxiety… of remembering our mothers when absent… and the panic about whether they will return.”

In other words, our innocence is taken from us as we begin to be conscious of our separateness from others, particularly mother or caregiver, when we do not see them and are unsure of if or when they’ll return.

Fowler says this panic is so severe that observers tell us it is repressed by our first psychic defenses and “forgotten.” This healthy forgetting is made possible by the timely returns of the mother or primary caregiver. As she returns, calling the baby’s name and blessing it with the gift of her eyes and face, the baby is reconfirmed in being and well-being and restored to a sense of centrality in its world of objects growing increasingly separate.

This is the beginning of the formation of trust—in the caregivers and the environment they provide, trust in the self, its worthiness and its being at home, trust in the larger world of meaning—all of which occurs through their bodies and voices and the patterns of their ways of parenting the child toward their culture’s images of worthy personhood.

Why is this important? Why is this topic worthy of talking about in a podcast episode? Fowler gives us a clue:

“Those observers are correct, I believe, who tell us that our first pre-images of God have their origins here. Particularly they are composed from our first experiences of mutuality (the exchange between infant and parent in feeding, changing the diaper, holding, meeting needs, etc.) in which we form the rudimentary awareness of self as separate from and dependent upon the immensely powerful others, who were present at our first consciousness and who knew us with recognizing eyes and reconfirming smiles at our first self-knowing. I call these pre-images because they are largely formed prior to language, prior to concepts and coincident with the emergence of consciousness.”

So this sets the stage to examine more closely and clearly infancy and undifferentiated faith. Before I read what Fowler says, I wanted to understand a little deeper.

I looked up “undifferentiated.” Term used to describe cells or tissues that don’t have specialized, “mature” structures or functions. Merriam-Webster: not divided or able to be divided into different elements or types.

Fowler writes:

“In the pre-stage called undifferentiated faith the seeds of trust, courage, hope and love are fused in an undifferentiated way and contended with sensed threats of abandonment, inconsistencies and deprivations in an infant’s environment. Though really a pre-stage (largely inaccessible to empirical research of the kind we pursue), the quality of mutuality and the strength of trust, autonomy, hope and courage (or their opposites) developed in this phase underlie (or threaten to undermine) all that comes later in faith development.”

In other words, the infant has not yet learned how to distinguish the seeds of trust, courage, hope, and love, and yet they are all being planted simultaneously. They are competing with the inevitable panic that has ensued, resulting from this realization that they are separate beings and there are things outside of their control—mom or caregivers, feeding from the bottle or breast, etc. All of this contributes to their conceptualization of trust. The quality of mutuality (relationships) developed in this phase, stage zero, is the foundation of everything else to come in faith development.

So what happens here matters and is worth considering, examining, and increasing awareness of, as it informs us more clearly of our journey later on and ultimately in the here and now.

That’s all I have to share for this episode. I will pick this topic back up in part two! Thanks, until next time.