Spiritual Maturity Is Not Emotional Niceness

Kintsugi honours what has been broken, not by erasing the fractures, but by integrating them into a deeper wholeness.

There is a common and deeply ingrained assumption in many spiritual contexts that maturity is revealed through emotional smoothness: through being calm, agreeable, gentle, and untroubled. Spiritual maturity is often associated with being “nice,” unruffled, endlessly kind, and free of conflict. Strong emotions — anger, grief, fear, protest, or not knowing — are subtly, and sometimes explicitly, treated as signs of immaturity, weakness, or insufficient faith.

Yet this equation of spiritual maturity with emotional niceness is not only mistaken; it can be profoundly damaging.

True spiritual maturity is not characterised by the absence of difficult emotions, but by the capacity to remain present to them — honestly, compassionately, and without denial. It includes the ability to feel anger without becoming violent, to grieve without collapsing into despair, to say no without guilt, and to remain faithful in the face of uncertainty and unanswered questions.

When Niceness Replaces Truth

In spiritual communities, emotional niceness can easily become a moralised virtue. People learn — often unconsciously — that certain feelings are acceptable and others are not. Gratitude is welcomed; anger is suspect. Forgiveness is praised; grief is hurried along. Peace is idealised; conflict is feared.

Over time, this creates an atmosphere in which individuals learn to censor their inner lives. Difficult emotions are pushed down, reframed too quickly, or clothed in spiritual language that makes them more palatable. What emerges is not transformation, but adaptation — a way of fitting in by appearing spiritually “good.”

This confusion between maturity and emotional niceness often leads to what has come to be known as spiritual by-passing, where difficult inner realities are avoided rather than faced.

This false goodness may look virtuous on the surface, but inwardly it fragments the soul.

Emotional niceness can resemble a carefully tended garden at the surface — orderly, calm, and pleasing to the eye — while beneath the soil the roots are starved of air and water. What is visible appears healthy, yet what sustains life is quietly neglected. Over time, the cost is paid underground, where vitality withers unseen.

Goodness Is Not the Same as Integration

Spiritual maturity is often confused with moral correctness or behavioural compliance. Yet goodness, understood as being well-behaved, agreeable, or self-sacrificing, is not the same as integration.

Integration requires that we are able to be with the full range of our humanity — including those parts of ourselves we would rather not see. Anger may carry important information about violated boundaries. Grief testifies to love and loss. Fear may signal vulnerability that needs care. Even resentment and envy can point toward unmet needs or unacknowledged longings.

When these aspects of ourselves are excluded from spiritual life, they do not disappear. They go underground, where they shape our behaviour indirectly — through passive aggression, spiritual superiority, rigidity, judgment, or burnout.

What is disowned internally is often enacted externally.

The Cost of False Goodness

One of the most painful consequences of equating maturity with niceness is that it can distort compassion itself. When people are taught that being spiritual means being endlessly kind and accommodating, compassion can become a performance rather than a truth.

People may give from emptiness rather than abundance, serve in order to feel worthy, or forgive prematurely in order to avoid conflict. Anger is suppressed in the name of love. Limits are abandoned in the name of selflessness. Protest is silenced in the name of unity.

Over time, this false goodness erodes vitality and integrity. It can lead to exhaustion, resentment, and a loss of contact with one’s own inner authority. In more severe cases, it creates the conditions in which spiritual abuse can flourish, because people no longer trust their own perceptions or emotional responses.

Maturity Includes Anger, Grief, and Limits

Emotionally mature spirituality makes room for what is difficult, unresolved, and unfinished. It does not rush experience toward resolution or meaning. It allows space for anger that clarifies rather than destroys, for grief that honours what has been lost, and for limits that protect life.

Spiritual maturity also includes the capacity to live with not knowing. Some experiences do not yield clear answers or comforting explanations. Faith, at depth, is not certainty but fidelity — the willingness to remain present to mystery without forcing closure.

As I explore more fully in my writing on the role of emotions in the spiritual life, maturity does not come from taming our feelings, but from learning to be in truthful relationship to them.

This kind of maturity does not make us softer in the sense of being weaker; it makes us more truthful, more grounded, and more able to love without illusion.

A river does not flow by carrying only clear water. It carries silt, debris, and darkness from its depths — and it is precisely this that makes the land fertile. When we demand that the waters of the soul remain perpetually clear, we lose the nutrients that allow growth.

From Niceness to Wholeness

Spiritual maturity does not ask us to hide what has cracked under the weight of living, but to learn how those fractures might be held, honoured, and woven into a deeper wholeness.

The movement from emotional niceness to spiritual maturity is a movement toward this wholeness. It involves reclaiming those parts of ourselves that were split off in the name of being good, faithful, or acceptable. It requires courage, humility, and often the accompaniment of another who can bear witness without judgement.

This kind of maturity is not cultivated through performance, but through presence — the slow, honest inner work that shapes how we listen, accompany, and remain available to what is real, explored more fully in my reflection on the inner work of the spiritual director.

In this sense, spiritual maturity is not an achievement but a deepening — a gradual capacity to hold complexity, contradiction, and vulnerability within a wider field of compassion. It is not about becoming better people, but about becoming more real ones.

And it is precisely here, in this honest engagement with our full humanity, that spiritual life becomes truly transformative.