S30 Ep 4 | The Destination is the Journey

Ruth continues this season on stages of faith, urging churches to become communities “big enough” to hold people across the spiritual journey. This week she focuses on the deeper wilderness that leads toward union with God, likening it to Israel’s “great and terrible wilderness” where what must die does die. She describes the dark night of the senses (loss of familiar spiritual consolations) and the dark night of the spirit (God “behind the cloud,” experienced as absence yet actually overwhelming closeness), as purifications preparing for transforming union. Ruth also explores why many churches and pastors are unequipped for this stage, highlights spiritual direction as vital support, and emphasizes the journey unfolds at God’s initiative, not ours. For any of us who have experienced, or are experiencing a season in the wilderness, this one’s for you.

Ruth continues this season’s exploration of stages of faith in the family of God, overlaying Fowler’s developmental insights and the Exodus as a communal journey rather than an individual one. In this episode, she traces movement from pre-awareness to awakening, then to a decisive turning point or conversion where we trust ourselves to God amid fear, loss, and uncertainty, often after things worsen. Using her own job-leaving story and Paul’s waiting after conversion, she highlights the liminal space that follows. She then describes “illumination” as Israel’s God-guided “roundabout way”: a formative season of spiritual flourishing, tangible guidance, provision, instruction for community, and lessons in trust. She also names the predictable onset of ambivalence and the dark night of the senses, urging communities not to lose those in darker seasons. We conclude with an invitation to remember and mark where God has met them along the way.

Ruth opens this season by introducing stages of faith. Drawing from her book Leading a Transforming Community and her own experience of “hitting a wall,” she argues that many churches fail to recognize or support the stage someone is in, which can leave people feeling “bad” or forced to leave to find what they need. She frames the spiritual journey as an increasing capacity for surrender rather than belief alone, names key models (Orthodox/classic stages, The Critical Journey, Fowler, and Exodus), and explains the classic movements of awakening, purgation, illumination, and union (including dark nights) as cyclical and often triggered by crisis or suffering. Using Exodus, she explores pre-awareness and awakening and invites listeners to notice where they may be waking up. We conclude with a prayer to “trust in the slow work of God.”

In this episode, Ruth closes our podcast season on “becoming human,” reflecting on an incarnational spirituality that is lived in the God-ordained reality of our bodies rather than bifurcated from them. She invites listeners to notice what they now know, what questions have surfaced, and how suffering and honest inquiry shape theology and spiritual leadership, calling leaders to stay present to bodily experience in themselves and those they shepherd. Ruth closes with four practices—paying attention to the body, caring for it, praying with it, and biospiritual focusing—and concludes by once again reading Brian Wren’s “Good Is the Flesh” as an embodied blessing.

This week, Ruth is joined by retired pastor and spiritual director Bill Sherios for a conversation about aging and diminishment as God-ordained realities. Prompted by the deaths of close friends and family, Bill reflects on accepting physical limitation, resisting a cultural bias that sidelines older people, and learning dependence as a spiritual practice. They discuss transitions as “running with the baton,” the importance of grieving (especially for leaders who officiate funerals), and how accompanying parents in death awakens daily awareness of mortality and the possibility of “giving away” one’s death. Bill names a shift toward smaller spaces, simplicity, and contemplative prayer, while Ruth reframes medical care and strengthening the body as ways to glorify God.