10 From the Status of Arrival to the Joy of Endless Becoming: Ascent

10

From the Status of Arrival to

the Joy of Endless Becoming

Ascent

Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

In love he will have us his true sons before he is through, and in order to do that, one life is not enough.

EVERYONE STUDIES THEIR FOLDED PROGRAMS, not quite knowing where to look. A slideshow plays in the corner, looping familiar photos. The room is modest, with pews that creak when you shift your weight. Up front, bouquets are on display—lilies, carnations, roses, all of them standing tall. There must be twenty. Maybe more. You half expect someone to announce a prize for “most impressive tribute.”

The service begins with a welcome and a hymn. And then an old pastor steps forward, opens his Bible, and reads from 1 Thessalonians about not grieving like those without hope. Next he offers a prayer. And then he says it:

“The moment he breathed his last, he was made perfect.”

We began this book with me desperately trying to achieve transformation. I walked aisles, said prayers, raised hands, hoping I’d change—instantly. And now, as we end, we’re confronted by a second version of this same basic idea: That we are instantly transformed at death.

That is, the moment we die, everything warped within us is made smooth and straight—sin wiped away, character made whole, love fully formed. Dallas Willard dubbed this belief the Cosmic Car Wash—his shorthand for the mistaken notion that transformation happens not through a life apprenticed to Jesus but through the mechanics of dying. Willard taught the opposite: That we are meant to begin our eternal kind of life now, not later, and that death was not a shortcut but a continuation of the journey we’re already on.

Richard Foster agreed, warning that this view was “devastating . . . to any serious transformative change in this present life.”

It’s a dangerous idea: perfection without participation.

Do the Rules Change When We Die?

The further I go on this threefold path, the more I see the danger Willard and Foster warned about. The Cosmic Car Wash undermines the very heart of apprenticeship. It reduces the journey to mere endurance—just hang on until you die. But if that were true, why would Jesus invite us to follow him now? Why ask us to take up a cross, shoulder a yoke? Why speak of pruning, of growth, of bearing fruit that lasts? And why would Saint Paul write that we’re being “transformed . . . from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18) if transformation was meant to happen all at once?

No, I don’t think God is interested in instant transformation, not in this life—or the next. I believe he wants our transformation to be chosen. He wants our participation, and he wants to work together. As we explored in

That’s why the idea of instant perfection is so damaging. It subtly implies that the thing God longs for most—relationship—is optional. That union can happen without mutuality. That it doesn’t take two. But as my beloved George MacDonald wrote, “There can be no unity, no delight of love, no harmony, no good in being, where there is but one. Two at least are needed for oneness.”

This is what the Cosmic Car Wash gets wrong. It imagines transformation as a transaction, as something that can be done to us, rather than with us. If God were going to transform us instantly at death, why wait? Why not do it at our birth—or for our kids’ sake, on the day we become parents? It’s so important to recognize that God doesn’t treat us one way before we die, and a completely different way after. That kind of split vision creates a split God—gracious and slow in this life, but hurried and mechanical in the next. As if he says: “Your participation matters. You must learn to choose love. . . . Actually, never mind. Now that you’re dead, I’ll just make you automatically loving.”

That’s the real problem with the “instant transformation at death” view—it makes God inconsistent with himself. But he isn’t. He doesn’t invite us into a relationship and then override it. That’s not God. That’s not union. That’s a shortcut.

And again, it skips over the very thing God desires most: relationship. And you can’t have a relationship without time; it’s an essential ingredient. You can’t truly know someone all at once. We reveal ourselves gradually, and that gradual revealing is what develops union. It’s what makes a relationship a relationship: the ongoing unveiling of another person’s wonder and mystery. It can’t be rushed or forced.

My own marriage has taught me that. Union with my wife didn’t happen in a single vow, a single night, or even a single year. It’s something we keep living into—through conversation, conflict, and companionship. It’s something we keep choosing. And that’s what makes union real. That’s how it develops.

Death doesn’t change the rules. Instant transformation doesn’t align with the God we’ve come to know—slow, patient, relational. That doesn’t mean death is inconsequential, though. Far from it. The wisest voices in the Christian tradition insist that death plays a vital role in our transformational journey.

Not as a shortcut—but as a turning point.

A Moment of Unveiling

While death is not the moment of instant transformation, it is a moment of important transformation, a decisive shift that no earthly experience can bring. When I think of my own death, somewhere out there in the future, I suspect I’ll be brought face-to-face with the truth I’ve spent a lifetime trying to get around: I am not my own—I am not self-sustaining—I am not the center of things.

Of course, I know this now. I can say it. I can even write it. But I don’t live it very often, which means I don’t truly know it in the way that matters. I admire it like a well-crafted sentence or a finely made piece of furniture. But if life has taught me anything, it’s that admiration of a truth doesn’t guarantee its embodiment.

That’s why the saints speak of death as a seminal step—a profound and powerful moment of revelation. Through it, we finally see what has always been true: That the life we’ve created has never really been self-made. That we’ve always been dependent—on our parents, on our ancestors, on the shelter of our communities, countries, on the ground beneath our feet, and most of all, on the One who imagined us into being and who holds us in being this very minute.

Augustine says, “Death . . . makes manifest how vain is the pride of flesh. Then the soul is forced to rest in God, if it is to find rest at all.”

Wendell Berry explains: “There is no such thing as autonomy . . . there is only a distinction between responsible and irresponsible dependence.”

Irresponsible dependence means I’m clinging to the fantasy of my own autonomy. Responsible dependence, on the other hand, names my need, accepts my limits, and helps me trust the One who has always sustained me.

Death is what really forces that recognition.

The more I reflect on it, the more I realize: I don’t have to wait until the end to learn what death will eventually teach. I can begin practicing responsible dependence now. Maybe that looks like:

Each of these miniature practices, combined with grace, can slowly pull me out of my delusions and nudge me nearer to union. They can train me to live in the same way I hope to die: surrendered, unguarded, dependent.

But now my mind wanders back to that old pastor and his familiar line: “He was made perfect.”

To be fair, perfection is a genuine reality. It’s a hallmark of union. Scripture says so. The tradition affirms it. To quote MacDonald once more: “To be one with Him is the only Human perfection . . . to be becoming one with Him, the only true Human History.”

We can’t sidestep perfection. We can’t dismiss it. It matters. But not in the way I understood it growing up. So what does it mean?

What kind of perfection are we talking about?

Doing What We’re Designed to Do

One April afternoon when I was seventeen years old, I penciled in my final answer to a fifty-five-question multiple-choice test, glided to the front of the classroom, and positioned it into a wired metal basket. It was a rare test day when I felt confident, but I had a secret weapon . . . Mr. Murray, a teacher who possessed an extraordinary power: He actually made me want to learn. The next afternoon, when he came round dispensing grades, he paused at my desk, our eyes met, and he placed the test face down. I slowly turned it over and saw it, at the tip-top in red: 100 percent. I was perfect.

Thomas Merton once said, “Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick, whether you are in religion or out of it, married or single, no matter who you are or what you are, you are called to the summit of perfection.”

Growing up, whenever I heard about perfection, I never thought of oneness or union. I thought of something like my test-taking story above, some kind of error-free existence. But that perfection was the transactional kind, the calculated, scored, and tallied kind. The version that has to meet some ideal performance.

So it was a joy to discover that ancient Christianity didn’t equate perfection with living error-free. For the early church, perfection was about alignment with your telos—God’s ultimate purpose for your life. It wasn’t about achieving perfect moral behavior.

For example, what’s the telos of a knife? What does the bladesmith want it to do? Cut. The knife isn’t perfect because it becomes an exquisitely honed piece of steel. It’s perfect when it does what it’s made to do—slice meat and dice vegetables. Sharpness matters, of course. But the aim isn’t some ideal edge; it’s about doing what the knife was designed to do.

And the principle holds for us.

We are perfect—not by chasing an idealistic life without error, but when we live in alignment with our telos. And as I’ve said again and again, what we were made for is to develop into the divine likeness. That’s our telos. Which means perfection isn’t about getting everything right. It’s about cultivating a relationship. It’s about union. It’s about becoming like Christ. It’s about becoming love.

It’s about growing Godward.

An Unending Advance

Let’s look at perfection from another angle. The old writers say God is immutable, unchanging. We, on the other hand, are mutable, changing. In short, God is fixed, we’re in flux. Think of your own desires for a minute. Have you noticed that when you gratify your hunger, you get hungry again? Or when you share a moment of deep intimacy, it’s not very long before you want it again? Or how about when you create something of great beauty or inventiveness, don’t you want to wake up and do it again?

As far as I can see, our desires are possible to gratify, but impossible to satisfy. And that’s our clue—our desires hint at something fundamental about how we are made. The things of this world, by their very nature, can’t satisfy the desire at the center of us. We were never meant to be self-satisfied. We were meant to be drawn into a life we can’t exhaust. We have an infinite capacity and we must find an infinite supply—only the eternal can satisfy the infinite.

Our endless desires point to a life that isn’t meant to be completed but continually deepened. And that’s the heart of perfection:

Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great church fathers and a key voice behind the Nicene Creed, developed the idea of epektasis—a word drawn from Saint Paul’s language in Philippians 3, where he writes, “I press on” (epekteinomai in Greek). Gregory takes Paul’s verb and turns it into a vision: the soul in eternal motion, always stretching forward, always being drawn deeper, always pressing into the life of God. For Gregory, perfection wasn’t about reaching a finish line. It was the journey itself—a never-ending transformation into divine likeness.

There’s no end to our transformational journey because there’s no end to divinity.

God is an eternal discovery. The deeper we go, the deeper he gets. The more we know, the more he reveals. So when it comes to perfection, there is no definitive attainment. Perfection is progress. There’s always more to receive, more to become.

For Gregory, this is not a frustrating experience—it’s exhilarating: “The one limit of perfection,” he writes, “is the fact that it has no limit; there is no stopping place in the racecourse of virtue.”

You’re never going to reach a fixed measure of love—it will keep widening, drawing you further in.

You’re never going to arrive at a final degree of humility—it will forever deepen, reorienting you more and more toward others.

You’re never going to taste a certain amount of joy and then stop—you’ll be invited, endlessly, into richer and richer divine delights.

This is a far cry from the Cosmic Car Wash, a heavenly paralysis, a static state. No, perfection is entering an eternal life of never-ending, always-deepening union. It’s developing, always by degree, into the divine likeness. Union with God is not a destination but a direction. That’s why Thomas Merton wrote, “But oh! How far have I to go to find You in whom I have already arrived.”

This is our destiny: To develop more and more into the divine likeness, to grow more and more into the reality to which we are called, to become more and more who we already are at the very center of our being—divine images cultivating divine life. To grow godlike is to grow forever.

As Aslan told Lucy, “Every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

The Relational Heart

It’s tempting, though, when speaking of Christian perfection, to strip it of its relational heart. That’s how I used to see it: The goal wasn’t intimacy with the Trinity, it was maturity measured by behavioral correctness.

But Jesus’ relational intimacy with the Father was the real source of his morally resplendent life. He was saturated with divine love. His heart was totally aligned with his Father. He knew an intimacy so deep that sin had no appeal.

This all makes sense when you see the word perfect translated in Greek. It’s teleios, which doesn’t mean “flawless” or without error. It means complete or whole—brought to fullness of purpose.

You probably recognize that the root of teleios is telos—a word we’ve already been exploring. Again, it means goal, end, or purpose. So when Jesus says, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48), he’s not laying down a standard of moral infallibility we must achieve. He’s naming our divine destiny. He’s pointing to the life we were made for. And just before he says “Be perfect,” he says what that life looks like:

This is the relational perfection Jesus is calling us to—not a spotless record, but a heart that overflows with love like his Father’s.

To be clear, I do think that one day we’ll stop sinning—not because we’ve finally figured out how not to, but because we simply won’t want to. In other words, we will have been fully created. Love will have so thoroughly transformed us that the idea of sinning will strike us as absurd, like jabbing ourselves in the eye with a pencil or slamming our hand in a car door. We’d never consider it—not because we’re trying hard to resist, but because it doesn’t make sense.

That’s what Jesus meant by perfection—not a life without mistakes, but a life woven with love. Take away the relationship and all you have left is raw performance. But keep the relationship and what you find is a deepening companionship, a friendship that will never end.

A Forever Friendship

Toward the end of his earthly life, Jesus said to his disciples: “I no longer call you servants. . . . Instead, I have called you friends” (John 15:15 NIV). At the center of the unitive stage lies a union so intimate and relational that it becomes nothing less than friendship with God.

This, I think, is one of the reasons Jesus will always be Jesus. Always human. Always embodied.

I didn’t get that at first. For a long time, I held a more transactional view: That the Son of God put on flesh, became Jesus of Nazareth, completed the job, and then shed his humanity and returned to heaven. Mission accomplished. Over and done with.

But that’s not incarnation—it’s intervention.

As the theologian Karl Rahner said, “Jesus, the man, not merely was at one time of decisive importance for our salvation . . . but—as the one who became human and has remained a creature—he is now and for all eternity the permanent openness of our finite being to the living God of infinite, eternal life.”

It’s almost too much to take in: We’re going to see the face of Jesus. And I don’t mean something ethereal, but a face of beard and bone. Yes, God’s choice to become one of us was not a temporary incarnation, but a permanent one.

Emmanuel does not mean “God visits us.” It means “God with us.”

God will forever manifest himself through the resurrected humanness of Jesus. Which, I believe, was the divine plan before time began. “Even had there been no fall,” Kallistos Ware wrote, “God in his own limitless, outgoing love would still have chosen to identify himself with his creation by becoming man.”

In other words, the incarnation is not just about God rescuing us, it’s about God relating to us. It’s about God longing to be one of us, so he can be one with us. That’s not transactional; it’s relational. And it’s an invitation to companionship.

As Trevor Hudson writes, “The Creator God who loves us, who spoke the whole universe into existence, and who sustains our lives in the immediacy of each moment wants our intimate friendship.”

As our friendship deepens, we come to see the goodness of God’s will more clearly—and want it more freely. And we keep choosing it. Our will becomes united to his. But our will isn’t erased—union isn’t uniformity, it’s unity. And true unity is the wedding of two wills, each freely given, each joyfully received, joined together in love without losing what makes them distinct.

This is the kind of forever friendship ahead of us.

And because of epektasis, that friendship never stops deepening. We will be drawn, deeper and deeper, into a richer communion of peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and so much more. We are invited into the eternal community of the Trinity—the ceaseless, self-giving movement of divine love—a friendship that cannot be finished.

Living Forever

One summer evening, C. S. Lewis was making his way to St. Mary’s, the parish church of Oxford University, to deliver The Weight of Glory. Waiting for him was one of the largest gatherings assembled there in modern times, and what they heard was one of the most influential sermons of the twentieth century. Let me try and end this book where Lewis ended his sermon: “Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive.”

With that single line, Lewis delivers a sobering reminder: We are eternal, and death isn’t. Death dies. But we don’t. When the stars collapse and the galaxies dissolve, we’ll still be around. Each of us. The weight of that truth is overwhelming if you let it sink in—not just because it points to the endlessness of life after death, but because it raises an even deeper question: What kind of life will that be?

Is there a quality of existence that justifies the immensity of eternity? Is there a kind of life worth forever?

Because living forever with unrest and division, torn by desire, fixated on self, ever-diminishing and never transforming—in short, living without love—is no way to endure. On the other hand, living forever with rest and wholeness, with harmonized desires, living others-conscious, ever-developing, ever-increasing, always transforming—in short, living with love—is a life worth forever.

Jesus, of course, called this eternal life, a never-ending life of love.

And that life starts now. We don’t have to wait until death. Our little lives can participate in a love that never ends. This, then, is the invitation of the Threefold Way: To begin living now the kind of life that carries the weight of glory, the weight of eternity, the weight of divinity.

Throughout this book, I’ve tried to trace that path. Not as a formula, but a way—a living tradition walked by countless Christians before us. There have been many articulations of the journey.

Each tells the story in its own way—through symbols, poetry, theology, even psychology. But they all follow the same transformational terrain—purgation, illumination, and union.

What I’ve tried to offer in these pages is just my little addition to that long tradition. Not even a map really—just a window. A glance. A look from my own place and time. Mine is a story of moving from a modern, transactional version of Christianity to a more ancient and transformational one. One where I’m learning to leave my formulas behind and participate in my own formation. One where I’m learning to dwell with Christ for all of life, and beyond. I still have a long way to go, but here’s what the journey has shown me so far:

Those are the three basic movements—purgation, illumination, and union—not steps to master, but experiences to enter, again and again. They spiral, they echo, they unfold. And best of all, they work.

And here’s the grace of it all: You don’t have to finish the path in this life. You have all eternity to grow Godward. So wherever you find yourself—starting over, growing tired, newly awakened, long confused—you’re not alone. You’re not behind. You’re on the path.

So keep walking. Keep receiving. Keep dwelling. Keep becoming. Because here’s the most marvelous truth of all:

You came from God.

You belong to God.

And you are going to God.

So let’s get going—this is the transformational journey—an ancient and enduring way, a way that begins now and lasts forever.

This is the Threefold Way.

In Sum

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