Review: Sacred Pathways

Author: Gary Thomas

Sacred Pathways is, in essence, a book designed to help you learn more about your personal relationship with God.

Gary was great at using analogies from his own experience to put forward his points; I personally love how the book starts by relating his own story about being prescribed an 'one size fits all' drug for his ailment to the churches attitude to 'one size fits all' spirituality. This is the Christian culture that he pulls into question.

Gary suggests that there are 9 different "sacred pathways" that each describe a way of relating to God, whilst Gary makes it clear that you won't necessarily have 1 sacred pathway, he explains that we all naturally have a 'predisposition for relating to God, which is our predominant spiritual temperament'.

The book walks us through the 9 different 'sacred pathways' in detail, with a short questionnaire at the end of each chapter. At the end of the book, you compare your scores against each type to determine your dominant sacred pathway. Gary then offers further information to help you understand your spiritual temperament.

I resonated most with the 'intellectual' category, A.K.A, 'Loving God with the Mind'.

Whilst I'm passionate about psychology and loved learning my spiritual temperament, I wasn't a big fan of the detail - in my opinion, the detail on each type felt long-winded and made it difficult to keep motivated, as a book I didn't feel it had me "hooked".

The content of the book could have just as easily been summarised into an online personality test. In fact, since reading the book, I've found that there is an option to do this: https://garythomas.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/sacredpathways.pdf

That said, since reading this book, I have referred back to regularly in conversations with friends, and I'm glad that not knowing about the online quiz forced me to take the detour of reading the book - I apologise if I've ruined the same experience for you! However, I would still recommend the book as a method of 'deepening your awareness' of your own temperaments, and others'. I've personally recommended this book to Christian friends, even buying a copy for someone.

Overall, this book is worthy of the bookshelf and I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about your personal relationship with God, or as a great gift to a friend interested in the same.

Thanks for reading!

Click here to buy this book.