Last week, Aaron likened the Roman Catholic practice of offering indulgences to similar practices in Evangelical circles such as exhorting people to read the Bible more or carve out additional devotional time etc. He went on to talk about how they are simply different approaches to dealing with the “lingering effects of sin”. Aaron also observed that indulgences are for believers, not for those “outside the fold”.
This reminded me of something that has been on my mind lately. We hear a lot of talk in churches about “spiritual maturity”. But to be honest, I’m not exactly sure what that term means. The best I can tell is that it has a lot to do with morality and self control and discipline and that sort of thing.
Well, the other day while reading in my Educational Psychology textbook about metamemory (a type of metacognition that focuses on memory and memory processes) I came across this:
Preschool children have an inflated opinion of their memory abilities. For example, in one study, a majority of preschool children predicted that they would be able to recall all ten items in a list of ten items. When tested, none of the young children managed this feat. As they move through the elementary school years, children give more realistic evaluations of their memory skills.
As the children grew older, or matured, they became more aware of their limitations, or what they were truly capable of accomplishing. It occurred to me that the same is true on a spiritual level. That is, perhaps spiritual maturity begins with the realization that we aren’t as “in control” as we once thought we were.
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3 responses to “Metamemory”
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Yes! Hopefully, we are getting more and more uncomfortable with our delusions of control and more and more used to our justification from the outside.
Thanks Mike. Very helpful.
Your thought reminded me (if memory isn’t failing me… grin) of what Forde said in an essay about santification. If I remember right, he came to the surprising conclusion that it wasn’t characterized by moral improvement — not in the way we typically think of it anyway.
Rather, he had come to see that it was defined by being increasingly broken by life: an increased willingness to truly confess oneself as a sinner and (even more distinctively) an increased willingness to forgive others.
At least, that’s what I think he said — my memory is certainly pretty bad! Plus I can’t find the essay collection right now.
The other thing I thought striking about Mike’s piece is the study he cited of preschool children. (I used to be a preschool teacher when I was in my 20s.)
Of course they said they could remember all 10 items on the list. The researcher was a grownup, a Lawgiver! He was coming down from the mountain with a tablet of Ten Things They Must Remember.
We are all like these children in our unjustified life. The children all thought that their good standing with the teacher was determined by being able to comply with the List of Ten Things.
When we hear the Gospel, however, we are given the freedom to confess our inability, which is tied intimately to being placed in a non-judgment zone. Only in the announced forgiveness extended to bound sinners can they then begin to deal with what our beloved PZ has lately been calling “reality.”