In the shower this morning, where I get my best thoughts, I was thinking about a friend who was distraught that her trans son was “no longer progressing.”
“Tell me more,” I said.
“Well, she…he…can’t go to the temple.” Real anguish and tears.
“But there is so much more to progressing than going to the temple,” I said. “Temples are built for man, not God.”
I think I freaked her out a bit.
At the time I didn’t have all the words, and frankly, she wasn’t ready to hear them in that moment.
But.
But what if all of the ways we think about spiritual progression aren’t actually the ways progression works? What if it’s not a two-dimensional path we follow from a beginning to and end or ladder we climb? What if it’s something so much more?
Interdimensional.
What if we’re meant to expand in many different directions? That feels more godlike, more infinite. Limitless.
And if that’s true, it’s a mistake to assume that people who aren’t following a check-boxed linear path aren’t progressing, aren’t growing, aren’t becoming more Christlike.
We’re just using the wrong measuring stick.
And I wonder with our check-box mentality what dimensions we’re missing?
Share with your Friends:
I like the concept, but you need to give examples of what would be multidimensional progress, please.
Perhaps instead of a linear progression of baptism, confirmation, etc., as a measurement of spiritual growth and progress, think of rays of light going out in all directions from a sphere. One of the rays is faith. One is compassion. One is humility. One is charity. One is selfless service. An endless growing or reaching outward of rays that align with godhood qualities that we’re supposed to be developing during mortality–that to me feels more like multidimensional growth and is more descriptive of the way many of us become Christlike. The longer and more complex the rays, the bigger the multidimensional growth.