A thought on spiritual growth

"It is simply not possible to proceed very far along the path of spiritual growth without honoring the need for individual time, without valuing subjective personal experience, and without cultivating and exploring your own inner life. The wisdom of the ages, if one but culls out the most self-serving of the messages of organized religions, is that the spiritual life begins with the inward journey and moves outward from that. If it does not begin there, it is simply a matter of outward forms - a parody of the religious life in which church is merely a forum for social connection and advancement, and 'outreach' a way of assuaging one's conscience. Faith without works may be dead, as St. Paul argued, but works without a deeply rooted, faithful inner life is shallow, superficial, and ephemeral. More important for our purposes, it does nothing to advance one along the way toward true spiritual growth and the development of the kind of maturity that is essential to life and work in our new cultural paradigm." - C. Michael Thompson, The Congruent Life: Following the Inward Path to Fulfilling Work and Inspired Leadership, p.236