Why We Need: Progress
“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.” C.S. Lewis
Some time ago I was talking to a friend on the West Coast, a very sharp, talented leader I deeply respect. We were sharing how things are going, including the pressures of leadership, the ups and downs of marriage, the demands of parenting.
Of late, the crush of deadlines, drop offs, and other duties had been particularly heavy for him, and he finally exclaimed, exasperated: “It’s like living in Groundhog Day; everyday’s the same and joy is getting snuffed out.”
Many of us can relate. The daily grind, the ceaseless schedule, the relentless needs of others—all layered over the wounds of our own heart—can create the sense of being stuck in a time loop. The strain of sameness and the pain of purposelessness begin to emerge, and eventually in despair we’re tempted to smash the alarm clock of doom.
Like the psalmist, we feel that we’re sinking in the mire, and we long for movement, to get “unstuck” and experience again the vitality of advancement.
Enter progress.
Deep down, we desire it. We yearn for activity, motion; we want a sense of improvement and optimization where we feel injured, inadequate, depleted and disappointed. Perhaps more specifically, we want a harvest of outcomes from that improvement that will, we believe, satisfy our hitherto dissatisfaction with our circumstances.
And progress does indeed represent movement. The English term is derived from the Latin pro-, meaning “forward”, and gradus, “a step”. To experience progress, to progress from one place to another, is literally to “step forward”. Interestingly, though, we see from that understanding that progress may not involve “improvement” or “betterment”. It may just mean taking a step forward…“to progress” one step at a time.
That can be an encouraging thought. We can experience progress independent of external results; the act of stepping, not the outcome of the step, becomes the focus. “The journey, not the destination”, as it’s been put in other contexts.
This is borne out by the early usage of the term: progress meant simply a course taken, whether good or bad. William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century painting series A Rake’s Progress was not about a licentious man’s improvement, but rather his journey deeper into debauchery, much like Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress refers not to the believer’s growth and advancement, but to the course he had to walk.
That understanding of the term begins to reveal “the problem of progress”: is simply stepping forward enough? No, if the orientation is amiss; no, if the coordinates are awry. Stepping forward will simply move us further from the path, faster off the cliff…deeper into the cave.
This can be true corporately as well as individually. When simply moving “forward” becomes more important than the direction of the forward movement, we can fall into the collective caves of factions and -isms, where a once mission-focused tribe devolves into toxic tribalism.
To quote the sagacity of Ferris Bueller: “-Isms, in my opinion, are not good.”
A good point there, as -isms tend to breed anti-isms, then anti-anti-isms, and round and round we go. But C.S. Lewis identified the way forward, as it were: though we desire progress, experiencing it means admitting we’re on the wrong road, “doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road, and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
Which begs yet another question: to what are we turning back? A common “about-turn” in midlife is to either the artifacts or unfulfilled ambitions of youth, a nostalgic attempt to recover the exhilaration of expectation inherent to the teens and twenties.
But the sons of God are being called to turn back to him.
All the wrong roads we’ve walked, all the dead ends we’ve discovered and quicksands we’ve plumbed—a pathway has been prepared from each of them. A pathway back to a Father waiting to embrace us, to cover us with the accouterments of royalty: love, joy, wisdom, peace, patience, strength. And, above all, rest.
This is the “royal progress” of the sons of God—the turning to the Son, together, no matter how beaten and bloodied we may be, carrying each other if necessary and in that act, finding strength we did not know we had to give.
That is the progress the world is longing for.