How Can Christians Be Holy As The Trinity Is Holy?

“Be holy as I am holy” (Lev 19:2).

In the Old Testament the Lord reveals a good deal of concern for both his holiness and the holiness of his people—a concern expressed with what one might consider uncomfortable frequency.

A frequency which the apostle Peter reinforces in the New Testament with a fair degree of forcefulness: “But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy’” (1 Pet 1:15-17).

What is God getting at? What can he mean?

How can a person be holy like God?

And just how is God holy, for that matter?

Let us begin with Jesus.

When Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection, he blesses their hearts, declaring, “Peace be with you!” (Jn 20:19), offering his shalom of well-being and wholeness. Later, concerned for their physical well-being, he feeds them with fish cooked over a charcoal fire. How does he provide for them spiritually? Jesus breathes on them, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (Jn 20:22).

Through this gift, Christ initiates human beings into wholeness, into holiness, into a new creation that came into being in Christ by his incarnation, death, and resurrection, and is actualized by the Holy Spirit.

Help from The Holy Trinity

So we could conclude that, far from being left out on a limb, struggling against impossible odds to be holy as God is holy, the Trinity really understands a person’s needs and frailties, really takes in the impossibilities of living a holy life on this planet without the all-out help of the holy Trinity. 

But the assistance is not unilateral. God does not accomplish it all on his side. For Jesus consummates his call to holiness and wholeness with the challenge, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (Jn 20:21). Such a challenge requires a good deal from anyone who accepts it, for it calls on human beings to embark on a process of holistic transformation in personality and attitude, thoughts and feelings, as well as practices and behavior (Lk 24:38-43). 

Holy Transformation

Compass psychotheology asserts that it is less helpful to view holiness in the Platonic sense of an absolute quality in God’s eternal being, and more helpful to view it as a relational dynamic that overflows from intra-Trinitarian love into God’s relationship with people. 

This means there is a compass dimension of holiness meant to connect people to their own highest good that grows from relating rightly to God and one another. Thus we can understand God’s holiness as a delicate balancing act between his altruistic love (Love compass point) and impartial justice (Assertion compass point), between his humble service (Weakness compass point) and glorious majesty (Strength compass point).

Taken together, these dynamic interactive qualities set God apart from both the physical creation and from any sense of moral degradation, because his faithfulness to his eternal consistency and wholeness endures forever. 

This holiness and sheer interpersonal health of the holy Trinity helps explain the great reversal of the cross, through which “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). While God finds sin abhorrent, he nevertheless took sin into himself in order to ultimately vanquish it; that is, to dissolve sin from inside out, replacing its insidiousness with a deeper outworking of loving power.

The Great Reversal of The Cross

For instance, God initially sanctifies King Saul and fills him with the Holy Spirit, but when Saul disobeys God, the Lord sends his Spirit to torment Saul (1 Sam 16:14), and uses Saul’s paranoid jealousy to develop holy qualities in David, so that when David becomes king, he will rule righteously, having become a man after God’s own heart. In this way God makes even evil serve his holiness.

When people allow God to set them apart for his holy purposes, their lives take on a depth dimension, for the Holy Spirit has their permission to promote personality health, cultivate interpersonal communion, and actualize their mission on earth.

This is holiness and wholeness.

Hope is offered in the words, “Be holy as I am holy,” for in contemporary exegesis they mean, “Be well-balanced…in your whole lifestyle” (1 Pet 1:13,15; Davids, NICNT).

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY

Trusting in The Trinity

 

Compass Personality Theory and Humanistic Personality Theory

Pioneers in humanistic personality theory include Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Fritz Perls. The uniqueness of humanistic theory lies in its benevolent view of human nature with an emphasis on the positive potential for self-actualizing development that lies within every person.

What is the essence in the life work of these three theorists? A perspective that plays down the unconscious factors in behavior and builds up the self-actualizing tendency of the human organism, suggesting, as Maslow does, that when basic needs such as food and shelter are met, higher order needs such as belonging and a quest for meaning emerge.

Hierarchy of Needs

The idea is that people can be trusted to develop in pro-social ways because the more they come to esteem and love themselves, the more capable they become of esteeming and loving others. The more patient and sensitive they become with themselves, the more patience and sensitivity they express toward others. The path to healthy self-development is not through the internalization of “shoulds, oughts, and musts” from parents or society, but through listening to the ever-changing gestalt of needs, wants, and preferences from within one’s self, thereby attending to one’s “inner perceptual field.”

Humanistic psychology is strong on validating people and not inclined to categorize behavior so as to judge right from wrong or good from evil. The reason why some people are cruel, harmful, or exploitive of others lies in their earlier development, because they were not treated with appropriate respect and trust when growing up. The remedy lies in providing educational or therapeutic influences that offer unconditional positive regard and the prizing of one’s personhood. Once people internalize this empathetic form of relating, they are likely to radiate this response to others, increasing the quality and intimacy of their social relationships. As Carl Rogers said, “The basic nature of the human being, when functioning freely, is constructive and trustworthy.”

Compass personality theory agrees that human beings are endowed with potential for noble and praiseworthy behavior, adding that Christ expresses this human ethic in the Golden Rule: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Mt 7:12).

Yet as the Bible shows and human behavior empirically validates, there exists a profound capacity within human nature and personality to resist, corrupt, and even destroy the possibility for positive outcomes in self and others. 

Compass theory calls this mystery of iniquity by the biblical name of sin, a problem in which human beings manipulate the self and others through personality patterns. These patterns create rigidities present in every person to some degree. Jean Paul Sartre writes of these rigidities that “all human beings are guilty in principle, of self-deception, of inauthenticity, of playing a role or trying to disguise one’s actual personality behind a façade.”  

Manipulative Strategies

Maslow, too, noted, “We must also face squarely the problem of what stands in the way of growth: that is to say, the problems of cessation of growth and evasion of growth, of fixation, regression, and defensiveness, in a word, the attractiveness of psychopathology, or as other people would prefer to say, “the problem of evil.”

When it comes to human growth, Maslow, Rogers, and Perls see self-trust as fundamental to making authentic choices that foster congruence through listening to one’s emotions, sorting out thoughts, and integrating thinking and feeling with an awareness of bodily states. All three theorists believe that religious attitudes can contribute to the process of healthy living:

• Maslow offers a Taoist orientation to reality, a non-invasive, non-interfering way of listening to one’s own needs and relating to others.
• Rogers is sympathetic to the teachings of Lao-Tse, believing that this way of being promotes “agape love” in human encounters by encouraging non-possessive openness and respect for individual differences.
• Perls, though at times distinctly anti-religious, nevertheless asserts that Zen Buddhism provides a laudable orientation to living in the here and now, free from the burden of demands and expectations. 

By the same token, all three theorists espouse a humanistic personality theory precisely because they believe that the highest form of authority lies in one’s own human experience. 

The Kingdom of God is Within You

Compass personality theory shares with humanistic theory an emphasis on the importance of inner experiencing in becoming a person. Jesus taught that “the kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17:21), indicating God’s intimate concern with a person’s thoughts and feelings, sensation and perception, learning and memory, attitudes and worldview. Christianity encourages an attitude of trust in the present and hope for the future: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom 15:13).

Indeed, it is within a person’s inner perceptual field that the Holy Spirit moves to create self-trust, self-love, and self-development, versus fear of life or idolatrous subjugation to any external facet of creation. From this inner phenomenological field, which compass theory terms the spiritual core, Christ moves in cooperative dialogue with persons, ever-guiding them toward expanding circles of caring involvement with people and culture. Since God enjoys infinite contact with all creation, individuals growing in Christ are called to develop tenderness toward existence that reflects God’s connectedness to all that is. 

This outreach requires a rhythmic reliance upon the structure provided by the Word of God, orthodox creeds and doctrine, sacraments, and the Lord himself, offering a higher authority than an individual’s private perceptual field alone, a rhythm that benefits from developing an interpersonal selfhood in Christ. Within this context, trusting Christ for inner and outer guidance makes one’s personality and human nature relatively trustworthy, since Christ has redeemed human beings and calls them to exercise autonomy in creative dialogue with the Trinity.

Compass Psychotheology and the Spiritual Core

At the center of the Self Compass lies an inner circle called the spiritual core. Compass psychotheology interprets the spiritual core as the “I am” center of awareness and free will. 

The Self Compass

The spiritual core also finds expression in personality theory as a person’s:

• center of gravity (Horney)
• inner locus of control (Rogers)
• nucleus of the total psychic system (Jung)
• inner supreme court (Maslow)
• core of personality (Shostrom)
• higher self (Assagioli)
• spiritual self (Frankl)

For compass psychotheology, the spiritual core is the sacred center of personality, the equivalent of a nucleus within a living cell. The spiritual core symbolizes the depth dimension of personality from which people find self-identity and develop intimacy with others and with God, whom William James calls “the Great Companion.” 

From the spiritual core arises the “I am” quality of personal existence, endowing human beings with the capacity for self-awareness and free choice, a capacity imparted by God in the creation of humankind. The Lord is the transcendent “I AM,” a name that signifies eternal self-existence and personality. By contrast, the human person is a temporal and finite “I am,” a limited interpersonal being created in the image of the Trinity, whose spiritual core needs God’s indwelling for completion. 

The Holy Trinity

The spiritual core is what differentiates Homo sapiens from other mammals, bestowing a sense of responsibility for behavior and receptivity to inspiration from the Holy Spirit. Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit when he said, “As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ Now this he said about the Spirit, whom believers in him would receive” (Jn 7:38-39).  

Jesus' metaphor of existential intimacy conveys the dynamic flow of the spiritual core, for God is in the hearts of his people. It is the personality of the believer that is the residence filled with God’s living presence. That place of the Holy Spirit where Jesus tells the Samaritan woman, “the water I will give them will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (Jn 4:14). 

The wellspring of the Holy Spirit provides a fountainhead of existential intimacy between God and individuals, and between persons. God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Ro 5:5), through whom we actualize the love of God in Christ.

The Holy Spirit is the one called alongside to help. Parakletos. Comforter. The Companion who inspires transformation in the personality by accepting and understanding people, while spurring them on to their full potential.  

The Holy Spirit

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (Jn 16:8,13). When individuals open themselves to believe and trust in Christ's Holy Spirit, their spiritual core becomes the vehicle for healing and transformation.

Why We Need A Christian Personality Theory

There is a Freudian personality theory, a Jungian personality theory, a cognitive-behavioral personality theory. And now there is a Christian personality theory.

   

Compass personality theory offers a Christian approach to personality and relationships that is anchored in a biblical worldview, informed by personality research, and applied to the understanding of self, others, and God.

Compass theory describes human beings through the term interpersonal selfhood, a term that unites the essence of individual persons with their common humanity, a term that preserves the singularity of personality while reflecting the plurality of social existence, a term derived from the Trinity as three persons in one God who created humankind in their image. Thus, human beings derive their personhood and interpersonal orientation from God, who is “a living person whose nature defines the meaning of personhood” (cf. Nah 1:4-5).

God exists as the transcendent and sovereign Creator of all that is: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one!” (Deut 6:4). Yet the plurality of God’s Being is revealed by the use of the plural pronoun, elohim, in the Genesis narrative of creation: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’” (Gen 1:26). Further, God has disclosed his personality and interpersonal nature through Jesus Christ, the God-person, and through the social Trinity—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who are historically and progressively revealed in the biblical narrative.

Because Jesus voluntarily descended from the Godhead to assume human nature, he relates to all humanity. His death accomplished the atonement for sin that reconciles persons to God and one another. At his resurrection he declared on behalf of every person, “I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (Jn 20:17).

Because Jesus is himself God, sharing with the Father and Holy Spirit the interpersonal selfhood of God’s essence, Christ mediates the Lord’s actualizing purpose for human personality, infusing those who trust in him with the power of personality transformation, power imparted not through esoteric teaching, ethical striving, or religion per se, but through an individual’s own human nature, personality, and connection to Almighty God.

Human psychology is not foreign to Christ because he invented it. Human personality development is not irrelevant to God, because God’s personality gives infinite significance to human personality. Human community is not alien to God, because he delights in it, reflecting as it does the Trinitarian community. 

When joined together in Christ, human psychology, personality, and community find actualizing fulfillment, as Jesus foresaw in his earthly prayer to the Father. “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (Jn 17:22-23).

Christ actively engages those who invite him with the greatest challenge they can know: to develop their thoughts and feelings, sensation and perception, learning and memory, motivation and intentionality—with the presence of God in their personality. 

Since the Trinity radiates supreme health in their unity as God and their relationship to humanity, Jesus provides the standard for assessing personality health among human beings, not just theoretically, but as the ontological foundation for compass personality theory.

For more, read:

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY:

A SELF COMPASS FOR HUMANITY

God Gave You A Mind, Heart, Body, & Spirit. Why?

God gave you a human nature -- a mind and heart, body and spirit -- to grow closer to him.

The Human Mind

The mind houses cognition, where people think about their life experiences, store past learning, plan for future contingencies, and make choices about whether or not they seek God as an intimate companion. 

For all who seek a living relationship with the Trinity, the mind plays a crucial role, capable not only of conversing with God, but of understanding God’s self-disclosure received through the Bible, God’s living and lively Word, which conveys a historical record regarding God’s attributes and expectations about people’s personalities and patterns of behavior.

For good reason Paul says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Ro 12:2). 

The pursuit of God requires intellectual commitment, a hunger to know God interpersonally, and a willingness to develop conceptual constructs in accord with the Word of God and in the person of Christ. To think about God is a good thing, to pray to him even better, asking what matters to him, and what his plans are for one’s life. This takes the discipline, mental focus, and thoughtfulness that only the mind can bring. 

The Human Heart

While the mind plays a crucial role in self-understanding and perceiving enough about God to trust in him, it is the heart, one’s emotional attitude, where God encounters the person.

Whether it is God speaking through the prophets to the Israelites or Christ speaking about what really matters in a relationship with the Father, the heart holds high status in the eyes of the Lord.

“I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart” (Jer 24:7).

Parents want their children to love them. Spouses want to give and receive love. Friends share love through their loyalty and enjoyment of each other. The Trinity desires to experience heartfelt human love, and wants persons to know and trust God's love for them.

Carrying on a relationship with God brings inclusion in the active love flowing between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Though it has received little emphasis in the history of the Church, God is far more interested in people feeling warmly connected to him than he is in all the rites and rituals and rules combined—and not just connected by way of membership in the church, but interpersonally connected to the Lord by way of attraction, excitement, curiosity, delight, and celebration. 

Jesus experienced John as the beloved disciple precisely because John more than all the rest cared for Jesus, treasuring the time they could spend together, the many talks they shared, the good times and frightening times they walked through together as friends, including the Last Supper, where John, alone among the disciples, rested his head on Christ’s shoulder, and at the cross, where Jesus entrusted his mother Mary to John’s tender, faithful care.

The sharing of one’s emotions with God is not limited to love, but within that love, encompasses occasions of frustration, confusion, depression, irritability, complaint, anguish, insecurity, anxiety, loneliness, and even doubt. God, for his part, never turns a deaf ear or tries to change the subject in order to cut short a person’s cathartic release. The Lord draws especially near when one is processing and ventilating human emotion, knowing that some feelings are crucial to express before gaining a larger perspective. David, the Psalmist, a man after God’s own heart, knew this well.

The Human Body

God views the human body as good. He created it. He wants people to cherish it. “Do you not know,” Paul says, “that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” (1 Cor 6:19). The human body—whose tangible bone and tissue, muscle and sinew, brain and spinal cord, central and autonomic nervous systems—is home to that mystery called the human spirit, something that scientists can never explain. Paul declares that the body and spirit are raised together in a personal resurrection that transfigures the corruptible biological body into an incorruptible one like Jesus Christ’s (1 Cor 15:39-44; Ro 8:23).

Yet persons are called by God to live in their bodies in the here and now: touching, tasting, seeing, hearing, moving, dancing, making love, playing sports, walking, running, swimming, exercising, eating, drinking; using one’s hands to express caring, write a poem, create a science experiment, or fold in prayer; lifting one’s arms to embrace another with a hug, carry a load of groceries, shovel snow, or praise the Lord: surely reason to celebrate the body—as does the Son of Man during his time on earth. 

As embodied persons, human beings need techniques for reducing the distraction of body tensions that mount in a stressful day. Teeth grinding, chest tightness, migraines, or lower back pain need attention not only for bodily health, but for finding the source of the underlying psychological stressors; not only for mental health, but for the health of one’s relationship with the Trinity. Relaxing the muscles and deepening the breathing helps the Holy Spirit move through the human body to inspire the human spirit.

The Human Spirit

The spirit rounds out the fullness of human nature, the gift of God to Homo sapiens, a gift that differentiates them from other mammals, bringing a level of awareness, choice, and responsibility unparalleled in the animal or plant kingdoms.

While no field of study can objectively account for the spirit within human existence, we can say that when people are dispirited they are depersonalized, losing the sense of meaning and purpose that would otherwise enliven them. This awareness increases the trend for health professionals, including psychotherapists, to respect and utilize spirituality as a healing force within human nature.

The human spirit is not an ethereal, otherworldly affair, but rather a concrete, embodied dimension of one’s grounding in Christ, the “life-giving spirit” (1 Cor 15:45). While persons can live apart from a relationship with God, they cannot abandon his image within them as the true origin of their existence. They can repress the spirit that comes as part of human nature, or distort it to such an extent that their behavior is far removed from God’s will. But they cannot escape the reality that God loves them and is calling them into his family.

Christ’s entry upon this earth unites the human spirit with God the Holy Spirit, who in turn assists the human spirit to form an intimate, inner connection with God, a connection that generates a conscience, not in the sense of Freud’s rule-shackled superego, but in the sense of a living union with Christ, an inspired yet vulnerable capability to know and do the Father’s will. 

In other words, the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father and Son to indwell the person, bearing witness with their spirit that they belong to God. “And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal 4:6). Invited to serve God with the same intentionality that Christ did and the Holy Spirit does, individuals can now learn to do so, not by following the letter of the law, but because God is so loveable. 

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY:

COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY APPLIED 

 

Childhood Origins of Personality Health or Dysfunction

Human development is complex, yet comprehensible. A human being’s biogenetic heritage, psychosocial development, and spiritual propensity all influence the ongoing development of personality and interpersonal relationships. 

There are sensitive periods for particular developmental tasks which emerge at particular times during this process. Infants, for example, are genetically predisposed to form an attachment bond with an adult in the first year of life. Yet whether or not this developmental need is met depends upon the intricate interplay between an infant’s biological predisposition, the style of parenting the infant perceives, and the immediate socio-economic environment.

How does compass psychotheology regard the developmental process? By viewing personality and interpersonal development as significantly influenced by the ratio of core trust versus core fear a child experiences. If core trust prevails, the child grows increasingly capable of exercising compass choices. Love in rhythm with Assertion, Weakness with Strength. But if core fear outweighs core trust, personality contracts, leaving the child fewer and more rigid behavioral options. 

Thus, in compass terms, the process of personality development is framed within a continuum that ranges from the actualizing balance of compass living to the rigidities of trends or patterns. All four compass points are present as potentiality in children, since humans are made in the image of God.

The developmental tasks that lead toward personality wholeness emphasize some compass points more than others, depending upon the child’s particular stage of growth. In the first year of life, in which infants and their parents enter a dance of budding intimacy, the Love compass point is the primary locus for healthy intrapsychic and interpersonal growth. As infants are cuddled, talked with, bathed, and changed with caring consistency, they learn about love in sensorimotor ways, developing a sense of trust from the care they receive.

But there are potential risks for the development of secure attachment. Infants may receive infrequent, disengaged care from a mother who is depressed and withdrawn on the weakness compass point. Or, if an infant is biologically predisposed to irritability, the parent may respond in kind, especially if the parent already exaggerates the Assertion compass point.   

In the second year, toddlers explore the Assertion compass point by testing interpersonal boundaries as they investigate their immediate world. Avidly curious, they move to learn, searching out the nooks and crannies of their universe with their bodies, hands, and mouths. If their parents set limits with kindness, toddlers learn a rhythm between rudimentary self-expression and restraint. They protest out of Assertion and acquiesce from Weakness, while feeling grounded in the comfort of the Love compass point.

Toddlers will have difficulty developing this rhythm if parents rigidly over-control or under-control their exploration. Toddlers may respond by developing a compensatory rigidity of their own, moving into frequent temper tantrums or inhibited fearful behavior. The situation can be complicated by the toddler’s predisposition to shyness. The potential result is either Assertion or Weakness, exaggerated at the expense of a rhythm between the two.

Preschool children expand the context of Assertion to include the exploration of their creativity. They test limits with newfound verbal skills. Increased social and cognitive skill brings more sensitivity to their own and others' feelings as well as more awareness of behavioral standards. One of the consequences is short-term healthy guilt. In compass terms, children of this age are deepening their experience of the Weakness compass point.

But if preschoolers are frequently judged or punished, or if they are primarily ignored when rude or aggressive, then their behavior polarizes into incipient withdrawn, dependent, or aggressive trends.   

During the school age years, the heart of motivation lies in the Strength compass point. Children experience a sense of competence when they read out loud, complete a science project, or collect coins. These activities are fueled by the desire to accomplish something concrete—an end product that compares favorably to the efforts of their peers. 

When confidence grows in rhythm with healthy Weakness, school age children develop a beginning ability to assess their strengths, yet are realistic about their limitations. But if given an over-inflated sense of their capabilities, school age children can exaggerate the Strength compass point, feeling entitled to praise with little effort. Or if they are treated as incapable or unintelligent, they can retreat to the Weakness compass point, avoiding the needed risks for growth.   

Then adolescence, that period of life when the challenge of existential identity awakens. This is not to imply that a child forms little sense of identity before adolescence (or subsequently, for that matter). It means, rather, that identity formation takes precedence at this stage in order for the development of an actualizing person to proceed. Identity is a developmental task that calls upon the entire Self Compass.

The increasing ability to think abstractly allows adolescents to construct theoretical concepts. To see one’s self as separate from others. To begin the search for ideals. To pursue dialogue with God about goals, friends, and work choices. In actualizing development, adolescents learn to know and prize themselves as persons separate from their family. They cooperate with their parents when appropriate, yet take stands if they feel their identity is at risk. These growing abilities reflect the initial rhythmic relating of loving assertion and caring strength.

But adolescents whose legitimate decisions are frequently preempted by over-controlling parents can respond by rebelling, thus exaggerating the Assertion compass point through active or passive aggression. Or they can respond by complying with the identity proscribed by the parent. They retreat into the deflated Weakness of the avoidant pattern or distorted love of the dependent.

By young adulthood, the developmental focus becomes the search for intimacy. Young adults on an actualizing path give love to intimate others. And they seek to receive it. They experiment with immersing themselves in another person while preserving their own identity. But few actually experience love in dynamic rhythm with assertion, and strength in balance with humility.

In reality, the majority of young adults function with a partial Self Compass. Rigid responses are congealing into trends or patterns. If the response is aggressive, then one refutes love by insulting or arguing with those who try to offer it. If controlling, one strives for perfection to earn love, yet one’s judgmental behavior damages others' esteem. If dependent, one sacrifices one’s identity to people-pleasing neediness. If withdrawn, one pulls back from love, seeing intimacy as too dangerous a risk. 

If left unchecked, the consequences of these imbalanced responses replace a sense of intimacy with God and others with a growing isolation, even alienation.

By adulthood, the developmental initiative centers on participation in community. If the actualizing process prevails, the life of an adult reflects the LAWS of personality and relationships in one’s work, family life, and interest in the common good. 

It is as if every adult needs to revisit the developmental tasks of 1) forming attachment bonds with others, 2) asserting one’s identity and individual differences, 3) handling vulnerability and anxiety without undue stress, and 4) developing esteem for self and others.