Sacred Pathways: Mid-book reflections

Addison's Walk, where C.S. Lewis took the fateful walk that tipped him into the Kingdom

I’m about halfway through Gary Thomas’s Sacred Pathways, and I wanted to pause to think about it. Its premise is that there are different spiritual “personalities,” and we’re more likely to thrive spiritually if we neither expect everyone else to be like us, nor berate ourselves for not being like someone else. It’s a good reminder that it’s our great Object of faith, not the style of cultivating or expressing faith, that makes a Christian.

My pastor made reference to this book a month or so ago while teaching on the subject of knowing God. It raised my curiosity (mine and a number of others listening) because it touches a nerve, the nerve of having certain standards or expectations in mind that we should achieve. Sometimes these are good and biblical. But sometimes, we’re feeling a pressure not to grow in our own relationships with God, but to be someone we’re not. God is the one who made us all unique, and this book celebrates that fact, and points out that we won’t all grow in the same ways.

Rose window at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

Thomas lays out nine different “sacred pathways” in the soul’s journey toward God:

• Naturalists
• Sensates
• Traditionalists
• Ascetics
• Activists
• Caregivers
• Enthusiasts
• Contemplatives
• Intellectuals

Thomas develops a profile for each pathway, suggests some possible strengths and weaknesses for each, and discusses some of the ways each temperament can thrive. At the end of each chapter is a short assessment to help the reader determine what their dominant pathways are.

I’m not very good with questionnaires like that. I’m either hopelessly indecisive, or extremely well-rounded; in the descriptions of every pathway I find things I enthusiastically agree with. Thomas suggests that we all have several pathways that we gravitate toward more than others. By the time I finish the book, I’ll have a pretty good general sense of those pathways at the forefront and those that are… recessive. I’m discovering some things that surprise me, and that challenge the ideas I had about myself when I first opened the book. But it’s not because of the assessments. It’s because of the way Thomas develops his idea.

The church I grew up in, was saved in during a Sunday school class as a child, and was married in

Which brings me to my point: this is a great book, not in a self-helpy tell-me-who-I-am-in-3-simple-steps kind of way, but in a wow-I-never-put-all-that-together kind of way. It builds appreciation for the many pathways the soul can take in the journey toward God, for the variety of people, and for the “fearful and wonderful” creative hand of God. It offers a number of ideas for changing things up if your devotional life seems stale or one-dimensional. And it never (so far, at least) veers into morbid introspection; it walks the line effectively between developing an understanding of ourselves, and staying focused on the goal of knowing God better. It also maintains a great balance between getting comfortable with who we are as individuals, and staying connected to the community of faith.

Edited to add, 3/3: I finished this, and jotted some closing thoughts here.