Let Your Faith Grow by Revd David Bick, O-Books, August 2011
Let Your Faith Grow by Reverend David Bick is a text to be profoundly savoured, indeed re-read. This is a well-organized, insightful and deep commentary on faith development that will help to counter `formulations of faith' that rely too exclusively upon doctrinal conventions of both an `evangelical' or `catholic' nature. For too many essentially church-sympathetic people, those formulations of faith tend to run out of steam in the thickets of life experience. Bick, a most unusual and mature Anglican priest and spiritual advisor, leads the reader through the various `stages of faith' empirically suggested by James W Fowler some 30 years ago, and still too little known in church circles, yet notably summarized in a 1984 paperback subtitled The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. Though these faith stages fit in well with modern theories of holistic human development and the recent findings of neuroscience, and indeed provide Bick with a helpful template, the gist of his work does not hinge upon this frame of reference.
Let Your Faith Grow with its distinctive cover, featuring a painting by the author: Light Shining in Darkness, Unquenched, distils a lifetime of psychological and spiritual experience in which Bick has sat lightly amid church institutions. The text has been masterfully edited and is both introduced and concluded by former University Dean, Child Care Director in the charity sector, educator and family policy activist Richard Whitfield. (Whitfield's last full-time post was Warden/CEO of St George's House within Windsor Castle's historic cloisters, a residential study centre charged with ecumenical leadership development within Church and State, being notably sustained by its 1964 co-founder, HRH the Duke of Edinburgh). .
Bick is clearly a trustworthy master teacher, having a truly enlightened Christian faith. He is well-grounded in biblical scholarship, and deeply considers Christ's comments, illustrating their inner wisdom and showing how they apply to modern life and personality growth. He foresees what may be a problem in theological understanding, reflecting a down-to-earth, pragmatic approach to a defensible modern faith in God. For example, Bick is compelling in his exploration on what the expression `born again' truly means. His mapping and commentary on Fowler's stages of faith permit him to explain essentially Jungian terms, including projection, intuition and individuation
Early in the book (pp13-14) Bick very bravely uses the full text of Thomas Hardy's poem "The Dead Man Walking", about a depressed man who feels like one who has lost all faith. Bick's manifest human touch makes text come alive; his narrative about being a youth club leader - a story of his giving up the position and then of his return to it in order to straighten out the mess his youthful replacement created - is but one example, showing an important point about common psychological projections that may beset us all. There are also riveting sections concerning Darwinism, a superb commentary on The Book of Job, and on the literary figures Tolkien (a devout cradle Catholic) plus his influence on C.S. Lewis (whose life illustrates the `conjunctive' stage of faith). Bick's writing on the meaning and importance of mythology is masterful, the best I have encountered. He is clearly attached to 1. Corinthians 13 concerning love's true character, and to Jesus' words about being child-like in approaching matters of faith; he also ably explains Jesus' use of parables.
Let Your Faith Grow is an impressive resource for those involved in pastoral counselling and spiritual direction. Bick is a truly sensitive reader of souls, a capability based on years of experience as a parish priest, pastoral counsellor, therapist, parent, and as a man who has taken the inner journey seriously. His `Prayer of Silence' proves for any reader needing to know that the author is one having the right to claim spiritual knowledge through devoting a lifetime to following in Jesus' footsteps. Late sections on morality and institutional religion enable the author to write convincingly about ethical absolutes formed from his own heartfelt experience. Institutional churches do sometimes take on the values of the World, but because Christ enjoined us all to be unworldly, our churches need to try harder to emulate Christ's dictum.
In his spiritually expansive Epilogue Whitfield well describes Bick's book as "wise and practical", while his wife, Shirley, prized in her prime role as a 'home-maker', contributes an honestly grounded Foreword.
Of course, any discerning reader is bound to have minor quibbles, particularly in a first printing when minor errors can so easily creep through. The following peccadilloes were noted:
a) Despite the author's reticence to task readers with further textual study, a need to incorporate some specific bibliographic references to Jung's vast and important work;
b) an error for the unwary in Table 2 on page 31, whose right-hand column should of course be headed `positive' side;
c) on page 76, the T.S. Eliot poetic quote should be "Humankind cannot bear too much reality" (rather than `cope with').
Such quibbles notwithstanding, many kinds of groups can benefit from Let Your Faith Grow: as a working text for classrooms, in small Christian groups, prayer groups, catechistic work for young people and for adults. Our modern, secular world is in dire need of books of this nature, so hopefully this fine book will be widely studied, becoming uniquely influential.
Robert Waldron
Retreat leader, teacher and experienced author, notably concerning books raising key issues within Christian spirituality. He is an expert on the inner life of Thomas Merton, the spiritually influential Cistercian monk who died in 1968.
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