Welcome back, dear readers, to another insightful entry in our exploration of spiritual development. Today, inspired by Jill Simon’s recent episode of Charisms for Catholics, we delve into the three stages of the identity journey—an essential concept for understanding our relational spectrum with God. Let’s embark on this journey together.
Understanding the Identity Quotient
Before we dive into the stages, it is crucial to understand the identity quotient. In the podcast, Jill articulates how this quotient is assessed using responses to ten statements. Scores range from 10 to 50, reflecting your relational depth with God. Saints like St. Therese of Lisieux or Mother Teresa might score a perfect 50, indicating complete surrender to God. But wherever you may find yourself on this spectrum, it’s simply a starting point for deeper self-awareness and growth.
Stage 1: The Foundation of Identity
Scores below 30 typically fall into Stage 1, where identity poses the most significant challenge. People in this stage might still grapple with understanding their place in God’s plan. They may have head knowledge about God but struggle to translate that into heart knowledge. As Jill points out, healing and deeper self-understanding are crucial here.
Jill recommends resources like Unbound Healing Ministries and the John Paul II Healing Institute, suggesting that participants seek help outside the purview of Many Parts Ministries to guide them through this vital stage of their journey.
Stage 2: Charism Discernment Sweet Spot
With scores ranging from 30 to 40, individuals move into Stage 2, an optimal period for discerning one’s charisms. In this sweet spot, identity issues are no longer pressing, and individuals feel more secure in their relationship with God. Here, the focus shifts to discovering how you can serve the larger family of God out of love, not obligation.
This stage is ripe for action. The sense of identity is solid enough for people to explore and exercise their charisms effectively, thus serving God and the community with newfound clarity and purpose.
Stage 3: Overflow of Grace
Scores between 40 and 50 represent Stage 3, or what Jill calls the “overflow” stage. Here, specific charisms decrease in significance as people begin to embody a plethora of spiritual gifts. Fascinatingly, Jill’s data suggests that those in this stage may find up to 18 charisms active in their lives.
At this stage, life centres around deeply intimate, moment-by-moment communion with God. Just as an adult child in a family instinctively knows what’s needed and acts on it, individuals in this phase respond effortlessly to God’s prompts. The relationship with God becomes the bedrock of everything, rooted in trust and mutual love.
The Larger Picture
Each of these stages is dynamic and part of a lifelong journey with God. Even if you’re at the beginning, know that greater intimacy and deeper trust are ahead. “This will not go away,” Jill reminds us, emphasizing that investing in your relationship with Christ now has lifelong, everlasting rewards.
If you wish to explore more about your path and where you stand, visit Many Parts Ministries and take their charism assessment. As Jill says, it all starts with knowing where you are, so you can chart the course ahead.
Thank you for joining us on this exploration. Feel free to share this blog post and listen to Jill Simons’ podcast episode for more nuanced insights into your spiritual journey. Until next time, keep the faith!
For more resources and to begin your own discernment journey, head over to Many Parts Ministries.
Jill Simons:
Hello, and welcome to Charisms for Catholics. My name is Jill Simons, and I’m the executive director at Many Parts Ministries, where we equip the body of Christ by helping people learn about and discern their charisms, which is really another word for spiritual gifts. When you discern your charisms, you’re able to see how the Holy Spirit is already active in your life and where he is inviting you to further build the church. Let’s dive in. Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of the podcast. Today, we’re gonna be breaking down this incredible phenomenon that has emerged from the data we have from almost 18 months of having people all over the world go through our CARISM assessment, specifically in the identity quotient. So we’re gonna break that open today. What does that mean for our personal spiritual development, and what can we expect in the coming stages of our own personal spiritual growth? So to get started, we have an online assessment, which I know most of you know about.
Jill Simons:
This is primarily created to assess your charisms, but another aspect of it that we believe is really, really, really important is the way that it assesses your identity. This gives us really important information and gives you really important information about where you’re at on the relational spectrum with God. Now, of course, as I always say, whenever we talk about the assessment, the assessment is not magical. It is just a tool. But that said, it is a very good tool at helping us take actionable data out of what it is that people are sharing with us in their responses. So the way that the identity quotient is calculated is by looking at 10 statements, and we would expect, you know, saints Therese of Lisieux or mother Teresa to be answering a 5 on every single 1 of these 10 questions. The people that are just fully, completely, wholly surrendered to their relationship with God, the truth of who he is, and the fact that their self-concept comes 100% from him and what it is that he says about them. On the other end of the spectrum, you have people answering 1.
Jill Simons:
These would be people who are kind of like Jesus who. Like, what what does that even mean for me to put my life in the context of relationship with God? This might be people who don’t have faith or not people of faith in the Christian tradition or people who are just really haven’t haven’t made any substantial movement from head knowledge to heart knowledge within their Christian faith. So that gives us scores from 10 as the lowest possible score, scoring a 1 on all 10 questions, all the way to a 50, which is scoring 5 on all 10 questions. That big spread from 10 to 50 gives us a whole range of options and gives us more than we even anticipated, a really, really accurate picture into where people are at on their spiritual journey. So I’m gonna be breaking that down and explaining where the outliers exist if they do exist and how we can interact with your personal score to kind of figure out where you’re at on the journey and what you can expect moving forward. So let’s start on the low end. Typically, the low end scores are from from 30 down to 10 or 10 up to 30. Now the number 30 is not magical and is not a line in the sand.
Jill Simons:
It is something that is a little bit arbitrary where the cutoff is, and so we look when you’re close to that cutoff, we look at other factors together with that to kind of figure out which stage of the journey you fall at. So, generally, people below 30 are in what we would consider the first stage of your relational journey with Christ. This is where identity is really the biggest pain point in your journey with Jesus Christ. You have yet to really cross a threshold to where what it is that God says about you has fundamentally shifted what you say about yourself and where what is true about God is what you most believe about who God is. This kind of mid this this lower end segment is a group of people who struggle to really functionally, meaningfully discern their charisms. Now it’s not impossible, but that said, it’s much more challenging. So my invitation for people in that lower end of the identity scores is to spend some time there, to really look at why is this, what you’re receiving on your assessment, and why are we struggling to hear from God in prayer, to know what’s true about him, to know what’s true about us. And there is almost always some necessary healing that we are being invited into.
Jill Simons:
Now that healing is outside of the scope of what many parts can provide for you, and we don’t even try because we have so many amazing places that we can refer you to where this is all they do. Just like all we do is Charisms, we have a great place. We can refer you, to people who can offer you those further healing services. But the shortlist is Unbound Healing Ministries, the John Paul the second, Healing Institute, and Encounter School of Ministries healing program that also provides some online healing resources. So those are the 3 places we would check out first, see what’s available to you locally, see where you can grab a retreat, see where you can get some services online. I believe all 3 of them have all 3 of those kinds of options. Because that lower identity score really corresponds with that phase in the adoption process where you have a child that has been adopted, but they don’t yet feel safe in the family they’ve been adopted still afraid if they break a dish, they’re gonna get sent back. They’re still still afraid if they break a dish, they’re gonna get sent back.
Jill Simons:
They’re still afraid that they need to bring home a perfect report card in order to stay. There’s all of these things, these external factors they’re looking to to earn and prove that they can save or keep their place within their family, and that’s not the family’s intention for them. And so those come out of our woundings, what it is that we have come to believe even since childhood in a lot of cases about what we have to do to earn love or to be loved. And so those places, god, in his mercy, doesn’t want you to persist in a life with those wounds intact. He wants to invite you out of them and invite you into healing them, which is just a beautiful expression of the mercy God has. So if you find yourself in this lower bracket, that’s first of all, I wanna make it really clear that is not a judgment on you or a judgment on the fact that your faith is not enough. You haven’t done enough. That segment of the identity spectrum will also very frequently feel singled out, called out, humiliated, shameful, that that is where they are at.
Jill Simons:
And that is really the tactic of the evil 1 when you’re in that place to keep you in that place. He can if he can keep you from ever pursuing the help and the resources and the guidance that can help you move forward, he can keep you there where you are cut off from really the fullness of what it is that God’s trying to give you, not because he’s not trying to give it to you, but because there are things in you that are struggling to receive it. So God is inviting you into healing those things, and the evil 1 is inviting you to stay right there where you are miserable, but most likely also kind of comfortable. And that’s why the ball is ultimately in your court. You get to decide how much and how you pursue the healing that God is holding out to you. But I wanna be the 1 to tell you that he is 100% holding it out to you. Just because that has not been your experience yet doesn’t mean that it’s not the truth. So if you have been trying to hear God’s voice in prayer, if you’ve been seeking healing and you feel like nothing has worked yet, I always use the example of learning a a back handspring.
Jill Simons:
Just because we can’t do a back handspring doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. It means that we get to decide how much effort we’re gonna put towards attaining that. And so unlike I have back handspring where you might choose you wanna do it, you might choose not, totally depends on the person. This relationship with Christ is really the good thing that every good thing in your life will flow from. And so anytime you invest in it, even the painful parts of it, going deep into what needs healing and other things like that, you are creating space for God to be able to fill you more for the entire rest of your life. This will not go away. This won’t be something that gets revoked down the down the road. You are investing in a relationship that becomes the bedrock of your entire life, And it cannot be overstated how valuable and how important this effort and this time is.
Jill Simons:
So I just really, really before we move on, before we talk about kind of the heights attained at later stages of the journey, it all begins for every single 1 of us with deciding to invest when we are in stage 1. And, of course, by invest, I’m not talking about something you need to buy or some program you need to join. I’m talking about going to prayers, investing your time, yourself in the process of coming to know God more and letting him heal you. And as I said, those 3 resources, John Paul the second Healing Center, Encounter School of Ministry, and Unbound Ministries, from Heart of the Father are all great places to go for further, details and information about how to engage in that work. After that phase of identity, we have a middle phase from 30 to 40. 30 to 40 is typically the just fantastic sweet spot for charism discernment. Once again, I am not saying you cannot discern your charisms if your identity quotient is lower than that. You just wanna have your awareness raised to the possibility of using your charisms to prove, earn, and or and get people to love you or or to get God to love you.
Jill Simons:
You just wanna be on high alert for whether or not you’re doing that. And sometimes people in that lower identity bracket actually find new freedom in discerning their charisms and being able to let go of that in some specific places in their lives, and that can be a part of the identity healing journey. But people from 30 to 40 are just in the, like, fantastic. This is where we see the greatest fruit where everything is just kind of in the best place possible for you to be able to discern your charisms. Identity is usually not a pressing issue. There’s still there’s still room to grow. There’s places to go, but it’s not pressing. You are aware of the reality of yourself, who God is.
Jill Simons:
You are able to trust him on a on a general basis, and now is the time for you to start doing chores in the family of God. This is when you are being invited into contributing to the family, not to earn the love of the family or show that you belong, but to serve the family, to give back to the people that love you out of love for them. So this is such an ideal ideal stage to discern your cares and that. This is typically when you are going to really be able to discern super well because that relationship aspect of hearing from him and receiving is really dialed in, and you’re able to move forward with a lot more confidence because identity is not a struggle. So, really, we have phase 1 is kind of, identity is a pain point. Phase 2 is cares and discernment, where your identity is really ripe to be able to start upping your game, start giving back more, start serving the family because you’re ready for that. And then finally, we have from 40 to 50 in identity quotient scores. We have this 3rd phase that I like to call the overflow.
Jill Simons:
This is a really interesting unique phase, and this is what has surprised me the most from the data that we have gathered over the last year and a half of having, all of the responses to the CARISM assessment together to be able to do some statistical analysis on it. And in doing so, we have discovered that in this 40 to 50 age bracket or I apologize. Identity bracket, which does not necessarily correspond to age, it can. We see more statistically, more people who are older having higher identity scores, but that’s also not true across the board. There are people of every age at every stage. There are people all over all 3 stages no matter what age they’re at, what point in life they’re at. But in this overflow stage, the specific charisms decrease in importance, and we see people receiving and and walking in having sometimes double digits of charisms. 10, 12, 14, even 18 is the highest number I’ve seen where they received a green score above 20 for all 18 of their top charisms.
Jill Simons:
This is a really unique phenomenon that just so illustrates what it is that Christ says to us in in the scriptures and what we hear all throughout scriptures, that God’s ways are not our ways, that his way of doing things is the opposite of how we would think about as humans. So the way I like to illustrate this is you think about, you know, getting college degrees. So you go to college, you get your bachelor’s, you maybe go on to get a master’s, and then eventually you start getting what’s called terminal degrees, a PhD, an MFA, something like that. That is the highest degree that you can possibly get in your industry or specialty. Those in progressively higher accolades and certifications allow you to become more and more and more independent within that field. So you typically will not need as much input and insight from peers once you have progressed, or at least that’s our expectation in attaining higher and higher levels of education. In the spiritual life, it is the opposite. When we are at the highest reaches of our identity, that is and we rely the absolute most on God to let us know really moment to moment what it is he’s inviting us to do.
Jill Simons:
This is where we see the specific charisms kind of fall off in importance. It’s still very good to be aware of what are the things that I have been given, what is maybe not the primary things I have been given. But when you are at that level of intimacy with God, life becomes much more about doing whatever the next thing he asks you to do is versus doing specific tasks that are always the same. So, again, if we go back to this family, adoption metaphor, Stage 1 of identity, we’re still just needing to know that we’re loved and safe in this family. Stage 2, we’re ready to start doing our chores. We are ready for some guidelines, some expectations. We’re ready to start rising to those expectations because we really wanna serve the larger family. We we really want to show up for the larger family.
Jill Simons:
Stage 3 is like an adult child in the family or an older child in the family who is just watching to pitch in wherever help is needed. They don’t necessarily have, like, a specific list. These are your chores. They’re just aware of the state of the father, what it is that the parents are desiring to happen, and they’re just there to do that. They are not reliant on the same chore list, checklist, template for them to use over and over again. They are now functioning more like the parents in the fact that they just are able to do what needs to be done in a fluid man in a fluid manner, responding to a parent saying, hey. Can you do this really quick? Yes. Absolutely.
Jill Simons:
Their, level of intimacy with the parents, their level of responsibility as a child in the family has risen to the point where that’s appropriate. And this is the same thing we see in this third identity stage. And so 1 of the ideas that I’ve been kicking around for a while is actually creating groups in person, you know, on Zoom or in local areas where people in this overflow stage can share about the experience because it can be so unique. It can feel isolating. There are there is less people than ever, I think. I could be wrong about this, but my general impression is that there are less people than ever actively pursuing the most saintly life they can have, and there’s a whole lot of people saying, okay. This is good. I’m, like, in a good place.
Jill Simons:
I’m able to volunteer and give and tithe and send my kids to Catholic school, and I am comfortable with the point I am at. A lot of those people are in the cares and discernment it phase, and that is lovely. That’s a fantastic place that we need, but, also, it’s not the place to set up shop. It’s not the place to have the goal to be to live forever. We should be seeking greater intimacy with God that’s organically leading us into that 3rd stage of identity development where we detach a little bit from the specific work of our charisms and come into greater communion with God and are able to, like Christ, say that we can only do what we see the father doing, where it is emulation of him that is the function of our days and not execution of specific tasks. And it’s so, so cool to see this in black and white over and over and over again in the responses. Now I want to just addendum all of this by saying, when you come close to the lines, so from 25 to 30, from 30 to 35, from, you know, the higher end of the thirties, lower end of the forties, the the line the numerical lines are not perfect. It is not an absolute.
Jill Simons:
It is not a, oh, if you’re at 29, too bad. You’re still in the, you know, lowest stage of identity even though you feel completely ready to discern your charisms. These are the general statistical trends that we’re seeing. The lived experience of it is more individualized within that, of course. And so I don’t share this for you to become scrupulous about where your numbers fall and putting yourself in a very specific box at different stages of your journey. But to be helpful in terms of charting the course ahead, what is it, Where is it that you are now, and what is ahead for you? Because, of course, once you are in that overflow, then what is ahead is ever deepening relationship with God that is requiring ever more risk and trust and reliance on him. So even if you are already in that stage, that stage is never going to grow old because it is dynamic and life filled based on the author of it who is life itself. So wherever you fall, I want to give you hope that it is 100% possible for you to progress.
Jill Simons:
And wherever you fall on your individual cares and journey, I want to encourage you that there is a role that your charisms can play in hearing god you’re hearing from god about how to move forward. So if you have more questions about the specifics of this kind of stages and breakdown, I would love to answer your questions. You can always send us an email at hello at manypartsministries.com. And if there’s a question that makes sense to break out into another episode, I would absolutely love to do that, because this this numeric data about relationship with Christ and what it looks like has completely renewed my mind around what is possible in my own spiritual journey. And that’s my prayer that it does for you as well. This is allowing us as individuals to see where where where we are at, and this is allowing parishes as a whole to see where are our people. A lot of parishes that are using our resources for parishes are focusing for the 1st several years on this identity aspect, knowing where people are at in their spiritual life and then being able to create programming and resources specific to those stages. So it’s just a very exciting thing to be able to get some outside perspective on.
Jill Simons:
Because a lot of times, our own lived experience, we don’t know anything else. And so it’s very challenging for us to assess where we fall without some outside help. And so that’s our goal in the assessment in both the identity and the care and some aspects to just be that third party for you to get a an accurate reflection back of just kinda where you’re at. So if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating or review that helps more people to see our podcast all the time. We are growing really quickly, and that is all thanks to you. So thank you so much to everyone that has shared about our podcast with their friends, with their family. If this is helpful to you, go ahead and send this episode on to somebody else who has taken their CARESOME assessment for greater context about where that identity quotient fits in their life as well. Thanks so much for joining us on today’s episode of Charisms for Catholics.
Jill Simons:
If you would like to learn more about your charisms or begin your own discernment journey, head to our website at manypartsministries dotcom where you can download our free pdf guide to all 24 charisms and also begin your own journey by taking our charism assessment.
