A Line We All Know
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put childish things away.”
(1 Corinthians 13:11)
Sometimes, a verse from an ancient text transcends itself to become a common expression, essentially assimilated through inheritance by the very culture surrounding it. This particular verse is quoted in much of the popular literature of the modern West and has even made its way into several movies.
However, what exactly does it mean to “put away” one’s childhood? Was the author (Paul) really saying to forget your childhood?
Paul is writing to a fractured adult community—people arguing over status, gifts, knowledge, and maturity, especially spiritual gifts. His reference to childhood here is neither innocence nor authenticity; a child had limited agency, responsibility, and comprehension. Childhood is a metaphor for partial apprehension, not error.
Western culture tends to hear, “I outgrew religion.” This presupposes the movement between childhood and adulthood as the completion of an arc: the conclusion of the formative stage of life and the beginning of mature understanding.
The reality of human development is much different. As we leave childhood, we merely move beyond the early formative period of life—past immature modes of engagement. Ongoing development, both spiritual and psychological, requires continued formation and regular maintenance.
Memory as Continuity, Not Nostalgia
The person we are today is the result of our cumulative experiences. Memory is not about longing for the past, but about continuity of the self across time. As such, the complete person integrates the memories of the past, allowing them to inform the present, never control it. Fragmented memories, reduced to trigger-only recall, are commonly associated with what we broadly call trauma—though such fragmentation can arise from far more ordinary experiences than the word typically suggests. These may include moments of fear or harm, but just as often involve shame, regret, humiliation, or experiences later dismissed as unworthy of attention.
A person who cannot place themselves in their own past typically struggles to remain fully anchored in the present. This is where phrases like “you’re living in the past” come into play, though they frequently misname the problem.
Our personalities are summative, but growth depends on proportion.
When certain memories come to define key aspects of the present rather than inform them, development is stymied. The present darkens, and with it the future, and hope diminishes.
“Just let it go,” we are told—but we cannot do so. Letting go presumes that something has first been held, ordered, and understood. When memory has never been fully integrated, release is not an option. Instead, the hold of the past over our present mental state becomes so strong that we must actively seek to shut it down entirely. We excavate memory, only to bury it beneath the rubble, simply to make it through our day-to-day.
Growth and forward motion stop—on all planes—and we sit atop the pile of the past, overwhelmed and unable to see the mound for the stone.
The Temptation to Spiritualize What Is Unfinished
Spiritual language often enters when something feels important but unsafe to examine directly. Spirituality offers meaning without chronology, wholeness without excavation. We reach for transcendence when integration feels too costly.
Yet integration must precede transcendence. Illumination without assembly produces distortion. It is always simpler to ignore the past than to confront it directly; to accept it for what it is and move through the quagmire of memory rather than around it.
This work, however, is not optional. Ongoing formation requires integration, not avoidance. Through it, the grip of the past is loosened—whether the memories involved are minor wounds from childhood or the more significant experiences that disrupted our formative years. What is integrated does not disappear; it is placed, allowing the growth of the self to resume.
It is also important to note that this process does not occur in a vacuum. In secular contexts, modern therapeutic approaches provide tools for integration and understanding. Spiritual practice serves a related but distinct role: helping to order, contain, and sustain what has been integrated over time.
In this way, spiritual practice—including formal religion as well as broader interfaith disciplines—does not replace psychological work, nor does it bypass it. Rather, it provides a framework within which progress can be maintained, meaning preserved, and proportion restored.
Formation Is Not Self-Sustaining
All too often, “sophisticated adults” see matters of the soul as childish fantasy—or, more accurately, this is how we are told sophisticated adults think and believe. It creates a standard to which we aspire, putting childish things behind us as we mature.
However, religion offers a system for managing one’s life, and this is exactly why it has always been both formative and practical. This goes beyond a simple moral compass and reaches into questions of meaning.
No craft assumes early training lasts a lifetime, and no structure stands without upkeep. One must regularly revisit learned lessons as refreshers. This is true of carpentry, art, and engineering; it is also true of the ongoing development of the self. Psychologists and spiritual traditions alike recognize that what is formative but not maintained does not disappear—it degrades. Maintenance is not a sign of failure; it is a sign of serious commitment.
Religion is formative in the early shaping of conscience, providing both restraint and meaning. It offers recalibration when one inevitably drifts and imparts a sense of rhythm, repetition, and proportion. Should one drift too far, it also allows for return.
Of course, religion itself is not the only spiritual practice that can achieve this goal. For some, it is not even the right answer. It was, however, explicitly designed to maintain formation across an entire lifespan, and modern culture discarded that maintenance function without replacing it.
A Detour into the World
For a time, my own path followed a familiar arc. Early in life, I was oriented toward spiritual study and inward formation. Questions of meaning, responsibility, and inner coherence were not foreign to me; they were part of the air I breathed. That orientation did not vanish, but it did recede.
I made a deliberate turn toward a world that presented itself to serious people: business, career, structure, and achievement. Metrics replaced mystery; competence became the measure of worth. I embraced the language of success—performance, efficiency, deliverables, and outcomes. There is real appeal to such systems, especially for the traditional “go-getter” type-A personality. They reward effort, impose order, and provide tangible feedback.
I did well within these systems, but eventually came to recognize their limitations. The world is quite good at demanding a self; it even provides frameworks for a fully developed, productive, coherent persona. Depth is assumed, integration taken for granted, satisfaction measured in material wealth, titles, and accessories.
Ironically, this was not what I actually sought from life.
The realization did not arrive as regret or disillusionment; it was simply the next step in a long line of growth patterns. Competence and achievement can carry a person far, but they rely on the external rather than the internal. Over time, what is not actively sustained begins to thin, losing proportion and depth.
Health issues intervened, as they often do, interrupting the cycles of thrust and achievement. In that interruption, it became clear that this period had been less a departure from spiritual formation than a test of what happens when formation is no longer actively maintained. The world had done what it does best: it asked, and I answered. It did not, however, sustain or deepen the interior work on which growth depends.
Returning, Not Regressing
The decision to return to spiritual study was not a reversal, nor was it an attempt to recover something lost. It was maintenance long overdue. What had once been formative had simply gone unattended, assumed to be self-sustaining. Return was not backward-looking; it was corrective.
Modern culture habitually treats return as failure. Revisiting that which shaped us is framed as nostalgia at best, regression at worst—as though maturity somehow requires permanent distance from early sources of meaning. Once again, this assumption mistakes abandonment for growth. It lives up to the sociocultural expectation that we “put away childish things” once they have served their purpose and are no longer useful.
This classical line has been so often misread. It was never an instruction to discard the foundations of formation. Would one disregard the foundation of a house simply because it was laid on day one?
Instead, the call is to abandon immature forms of engagement.
There is a way of speaking that belongs to childhood, and with it a way of reasoning and understanding. Maturity brings discernment; what was once received simply is now examined, practiced, and sustained. The focus shifts toward depth, discipline, and acceptance.
Return, then, is a matter of responsibility, not sentimentality. It reflects the recognition that formation is never truly complete, that growth is an ongoing enterprise continually reshaping the self. In this sense, return is not a retreat into the past but an advance into the future. It marks the point at which one accepts that growth is rarely linear, and that wisdom often requires revisiting what was first learned—now with the capacity to see and understand more fully.
Integration Before Illumination
Psychology assembles the self. It names experience, orders memory, and restores continuity across time. Without this work, the self remains fragmented—functional, perhaps, but unstable.
Religion disciplines and preserves what has been assembled. It provides rhythm, proportion, and return. It anticipates drift and offers correction. Its task is not discovery, but maintenance.
Spirituality expands what has already been integrated. It seeks meaning, depth, and transcendence. When grounded, it enlarges the self rather than dispersing it.
The order matters. When illumination is pursued without integration, it produces dissonance. When transcendence precedes discipline, it yields impermanence.
Integration is not glamorous, and maintenance is not exciting, but they are necessary. Only a self that has been assembled can be expanded. Only what is preserved can be illuminated.
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