Most of us want to grow spiritually. But most of us are also stuck. Some of us go years before we realize crisis is unavoidable. That faith can be lost. Some of us don’t even know faith can be found again. Joey came in wanting to talk about the late M. Scott Peck’s framework for spiritual development, a rubric that proposes we move from chaos (impulse, no moral framework) to order (rules, tradition, institutions) to deconstruction (questioning everything) to mystery (comfort with not knowing). According to Peck, the first stage is infancy and childhood. He also believed that four out of five people never move past stage two. Haroon wanted to know if that could possibly be true. Both Joey and I found that we made the break from stage two, from order and rules, to the deconstruction of what we believed in, about the same time: In our late teens. We’d venture that holds for a lot of people. We all experience the pain, the agony, and the confusion that comes with growing up, with finding out that what you think about the world, about your religion, or about yourself, doesn’t line up with what actually is. So what do you then? In this week’s episode, Joey and Haroon explore what it means to grow spiritually—by reflecting on what they lacked at key points in their lives. In Haroon’s case, that’d be a mentor, some sage who could’ve helped him reconstruct on the other side of adolescence. Because we all fall apart. Who’s there, though, to put us together again? Then Joey dropped the mic (well, figuratively), delivering us to the counterintuitive foundation of all real spiritual growth: We can’t do it alone. We can’t mature, religiously, without other people. The very people whose differences from us provoke us to deconstruct are often the same people we need if we have any hope of reconstruction. What does that mean in practice? And what about that mysterious fourth stage? You can watch the full episode on our YouTube channel (and below). M. Scott Peck was trained as a secular psychiatrist, until he confronted what his frameworks couldn’t explain away: Actual evil, the unmistakable kind. Peck moved from stage two to stage three; his material frameworks fell apart, incapable of accommodating what he later concluded was the genuinely Satanic. In books like People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil and Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, he shares this journey and the conclusions he drew from it. We make reference to the Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, which began with 2005’s Batman Begins and ended with the 2012 The Dark Knight Rises. If you’re paying attention, you’d know the swordmaster Duncan Idaho loyally served House Atreides. The third installment in the film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune saga, Dune: Part Three, releases on December 18, 2026, the very same day as the new Avengers film, Doomsday. That day is now called Dunesday. Avenue M is a podcast about the hard work of living inside a religion. Belonging is one thing. Becoming is the real thing. New episodes every week. Subscribe now for conversations about faith, tradition, citizenship, and the questions that won’t leave us alone.
