Spiritual Maturity: Stories and Reflections for the Ongoing Journey of the Spirit [Paperback]

Joseph Sharp (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 12, 2001

Joseph Sharp's first book, Living Our Dying, received incredible praise from Thomas Moore, Marianne Williamson, and Ram Dass. Now, with moving stories and simple suggestions, he reveals how to approach deeper spirituality with a sense of joyous adventure-even when it is most arduous and the temptation to quit is at hand. Open-minded and open-hearted, this book reminds readers that faith deepens with time, that the spiritual journey is one of ongoing growth, and that having the willingness to be teachable will bring depth and maturity to everyday life.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Once in a while, a spiritual teacher comes along who avoids seminar-style language and simply writes an excellent book that reminds us how to live with integrity, humility, and soul-honoring truth. Joseph Sharp (Living Our Dying) is just such a teacher. As a former hospital chaplain and someone who's been HIV positive for almost half of his life, Sharp has the wisdom to know that spiritual maturity is not a destination but a lifelong journey. "If you are looking for a promise of finality--say, a list of quick, easy recipes to forever transform your life into a miraculous slice of sweet spiritual pie--you should know that this book is not for you," he writes. "For me finality is not the point. Learning is. As is being true to your innate calling, to what I like to call a person's 'sacred individuality.'"

Through storytelling and personal anecdotes, Sharp encourages readers to be "spiritually incorrect," even irreverent and outrageous in order to foster sacred individuality. He suggests we stop trying to simplify our spirituality and simply accept its complications. There's nothing amazingly new here, yet Spiritual Maturity makes for an excellent refresher course as we travel the never-ending journey. --Gail Hudson

From Publishers Weekly

One might expect a book on spiritual maturity to be dull, tedious and heavy, but Sharp (Living Our Dying: A Way to the Sacred in Everyday Life) manages to speak of spiritual maturity with refreshing lightness and an easygoing manner. One of Sharp's main goals is to encompass all religious sensibilities, leaving the initial impression that this primer is too simple, perhaps even shallow. At second glance, his stories and reflections start to gently grow on the reader like a Zen koan. He speaks of the importance of being spiritually incorrect, embracing outrageousness, becoming intimate with one's fears, taking on personal activism and enjoying the contradictions and ironies of life. In Sharp's view, spiritual maturity is a continuous and progressive journey in which one claims one's "sacred individuality" by learning to become more loving, truthful and compassionate. He writes, "authentic spirituality has much more to do with acceptance, recognition, and exploration, and less to do with avoidance, denial, and escape.... In a maturing spirituality, we begin making room for the possibility that pain and other fearful emotions may sometimes be the manner in which the sacred is speaking to us." Spiritual maturity, for Sharp, is not so much an attainable goal as a lifelong journey. Sharp shares freely from his own background as a friend, student, spiritual teacher, hospital chaplain and HIV-positive gay man. This warm, loving book feels like a chat with a cherished old friend.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Perigee Trade (June 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039952679X
• ISBN-13: 978-0399526794
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #885,842 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spiritual Maturity, July 17, 2001

By 

brian yansky (Austin, Texas United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Spiritual Maturity: Stories and Reflections for the Ongoing Journey of the Spirit (Paperback)

This is a wise, smart book. Through stories (both from the author's life and the lives of people he meets)told with wit and courage, he explores what it means to be a spiritual searcher. It's a zen type of approach; sometimes his questions bring answers and sometimes more questions, and he's okay with this because he sees life as a spiritual journey. Check out a few of his(there are twenty-five) section titles: "sacred individuality, daring to be spitually incorrect, cosmic irony, honoring life's complexity, outrageousness, it's never too late." There is sadness in this book and eloquence and humor. Read it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptionally Brilliant Wisdom for any Spiritual Path, November 21, 2001

By 

Timothy Ryan (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Spiritual Maturity: Stories and Reflections for the Ongoing Journey of the Spirit (Paperback)

For many of us on a spiritual journey, we can often look back on our path and note benchmarks of wise words that seemed to have advanced and enhanced our progress. Joseph Sharp's incredibly insightful book, "Spiritual Maturity, Stories and Reflections for the Ongoing Journey of the Spirit" promises to endure as a marker and guide for transformation and clarity to any spiritual seeker.

Wise beyond his years and certainly our times, Sharp's clear and steady voice is, at once, comforting and illuminating. Throughout the book he engages a remarkable wisdom that asks the reader to honor the truth of the spiritual process. "Remember, we have been given a sacred individuality by God so we might express our inner brilliance within this mortal coil. The message from within is: You can be grand.", he begins. Sharp "promotes a way of courageous self-honesty - especially when social or religious pressures to `keep up appearances' encourage us to pretend otherwise. Sacred individuality asks us to cultivate open-mindedness, tolerance, and a sense of grand permission in our lives and seeking."

This book serves as a common-sense guide to spirituality and Sharp creates an "atmosphere of permission" that invites the reader to better understand the wisdom within and among us. He reminds us that "authentic spiritual maturity has much more to do with acceptance, recognition and exploration, and less to do with avoidance, denial and escape" and he encourages us to find our own individual path. "The individualistic imagination of the brilliant soul usually annoys the rather dull, hallowed halls of `The Established Way'", Sharp says. He challenges the reader to always be different, distinct, courageous and outrageously individualistic on the journey.

This book endeavors to teach us that our life's lessons are present in every moment. Every encounter, every thought, every experience in each minute of the day is a sacred spiritual act designed to help us discover our truth, our path, and ourselves.

With incredible insight and clarity, Sharp asks us to embrace our own dark moments as pathways to spiritual learning and growth. "For the seeker, the question is not whether we can successfully shield our spirituality from life's grit. We can't. The real question is: Do we cultivate a vision that gives us permission to acknowledge and include all our life experiences, especially those darker moments within the boundaries of what is considered appropriate territory for spirituality?", he asks. "When we encounter life's painful and unpleasant experiences, do we pause to consider the possible wisdom beneath the suffering?"

Sharp delivers countless brilliant moments throughout the book and exacts points of wisdom from other friends on the path such as Anne Lammot, Rumi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Chogyam Trungpa, Natalie Goldberg and Robert Arpin.

In this book, he embraces all religions but encourages us to find our own truth and personal experience outside the confines of any religious doctrine. Sharp reminds us that we must travel our own path and avoid accepting religious doctrine blindly without spiritual exploration - "we are asked to seek the spirit of the teaching, to get to the heart of the matter with self-honesty and awareness -- to find the inner truth of that information."

Throughout the book, Sharp offers a tender voice of reason to guide us on our journey and perhaps his greatest gift to us is an abundance of courage, "An honest soft courage. A courage that opens the heart, reveals vulnerability, and trusts in a larger process at work. Make no mistake about it, being true to yourself and your unique individuality demands the quality of soft courage," he writes. "It takes courage to step out of the safe, convenient, and comfortable boundaries we've established for our lives: courage to give ourselves a wider landscape in which to seek and explore; courage to give up the illusion that we will one day get `everything right', and courage to honor and appreciate the divine human mystery that is ultimately beyond our conceptual understanding altogether. It takes courage to kiss our scars figuratively as well as literally."

This is an incredibly wise book written with a kind and clear brilliance that should illuminate even the darkest path and send us on our journey with God-speed.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grand Permission, August 18, 2001

By 

Ellen Marks (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Spiritual Maturity: Stories and Reflections for the Ongoing Journey of the Spirit (Paperback)

Joseph Sharp's new book, Spiritual Maturity, sets his readers on a wide road, "[a] road extending far beyond what we think we see now, far beyond any preconceived ideas of spiritual correctness we could possibly imagine." He recognizes the messiness of life--the impulses to anger, jealousy, fear, the reluctance to forgive ourselves and others--and sees these not as obstacles to spiritual maturity but as part of the road. In a series of lovely and sad stories, taken from his experiences as a chaplain at Parkland Memorial Hospital and his personal relationships with the dying and terminally ill, he suggests that personal and emotional honesty are more important to spiritual maturity than any sort of formulaic positivism. At the same time, his is an inclusive work, referencng the Bible, Buddha, Zen masters, Rilke, Anne Lamott and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. For Joseph Sharp, exploring spiritual maturity means exploring life in all of its complexities. I strongly recommend this intimate, thoughtful book, full of subtle insights and small blessings.