I came across an article by this name. It is a notion I have seen implicit in many contexts, and not least in considering what kind of men are suitable for the priesthood. Well, I would say that a good parish priest in a modern city parish, apart from being devout, cultured and educated, should have good management and teamwork skills, good communication and exude an aura of dynamism and masculinity. That would certainly be so for a parish with a lot of activity in and out of liturgical services. And, in a few years, city parishes is all that will remain.
According to this way of seeing things, the Bishop’s task is very simple. He has all his seminarians and applicants subjected to personality type tests, and accepts those with the right combinations of letters. Tick the multiple choice boxes and fill in the form, and the bureaucracy will give its green or red light. The Bishop could go on a round-the-world cruise in his forty-foot yacht with electrically-furled sails – and leave his job to a computer! If that’s the Church, I for one am not interested, nor are 90% of the people who live around us.
Jung’s theory is that we come in different personality “types” by which we give priority to different values and relate to other people. There are extremes and everything in between persons who prefer one thing to another and to different extents within the grey scale. The psychological test is called the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator (MBTI). The full and accurate version is given by a qualified professional and you pay the man for his job well done. There are free online tests, and they depend on your complete frankness – don’t be tempted to think yourself into someone else’s profile. It isn’t easy, so you need to know what you want. Computers can do approximate translations from one language to another, but customers still pay for human translations on account of our being able to be intuitive and capable of interpreting. How much more for a complete human personality and not merely a text someone has written?
We are generally introverts or extroverts, with various other characteristics. I took an online test this morning, and I found it difficult to distinguish my intuitive inclinations and things I have learned by experience of life. For example, one always does a better job by being organised and coming up with a good and coherent plan. That realisation is a fruit of experience but not necessarily our natural inclination. So, I tried to be as honest as possible. The machine came up with Introvert INtuitive Feeler Perceiver (INFP). Perhaps that could be contested, but by paying a professional to do a human test in the same way I translate French texts into English texts faithfully expressing the same concepts. The test sorts people into extrovert or introvert types with a degree of coordination with characteristics like thinking, sensation, feeling and intuition.
That’s all very interesting, since we want to know ourselves better in order to make the right decisions in life. On the other hand, there are factors that come into play like peer pressure: it is more socially acceptable to be an extrovert or force oneself to be one. The introverts shiver in one corner, and the team of extrovert bully boys dominates the classroom. Perhaps, that is a caricature.
This article is fascinating in that it describes a Church that is dominated by people who are very talkative and only function in a crowd. Take this to the extreme and the person ceases to be anything and the collective is all – Soviet Communism in a way. Creativity is stifled by being fettered to the team. It is often said about the priest that he must be a team player and an extrovert. Otherwise, needless to apply.
Modern liturgy is made for extroverts. Those I know who prefer the new type liturgies with the “facing the people” position are extroverts. It is teamwork, full participation of all, no hiding in your corner.
I could not personally imagine myself being the parish priest of one of those big churches in Paris with lots of meetings, liturgies, various associations and organisations, something going on all the time. On the other hand, I spent six months as a working guest in a Benedictine monastery, but I didn’t find a vocation to stay there and become a monk. There used to be country parishes, and they tended to be given to introverted priests (I have known a few of the old ones who have now passed away), but introverted men find it more difficult to get through the seminary system – so the country parishes are closed or grouped together into “team ministries” – for extroverts.
It’s an interesting idea. I don’t know how well that proves to be a cogent analysis in any way. I would appreciate feedback from different experiences. Has the introvert or “contemplative” (who is not cut out for formal monastic life) a place in the Church or in the clergy?
The Blue Flower 
Father, I’ve taken the Myer-Briggs test formally (not on line) and also scored as INFP. I was a counsellor and mediator within a department when I took the test. Many of the engineers within the department scored as ISTJs. In other words, the ways I went about things and approached problems were different from the chaps who preferred to remain in arithmetic compartmentalised worlds.
The thing to remember is that the MB test expresses personality as “preferences”. It is not only the score profile but this characterisation that is key to understanding the reason why so many inter-relational problems occur: mis-communication, why we feel threatened outside of our “comfort zones” and so on. If we are strongly introverted or marginally so will explain why we may be less or more able to show extroversion. Introversion in MB means, in part, the preference of usual state of drawing energy from within oneself rather than needing to draw it from others.
This explains why you can recognise that you are in large part attracted to a context where the demands on you to be extroverted or to engage with people in a fully interactive way are less, but at the same time find it a bit extreme relinquishing – as you would be doing in a formal monastic setting – nearly all freedom to occasionally get “active” on your fellow man. It’s because you may well have sufficient need of energy from outside yourself that the purely contemplative life is too much for you. You may be only partially contemplative. That you blog and constantly seek to engage with others in sharing your introspections demonstrates another side to your personality.
You can see I have thought about these things: indeed it is characteristic of Introverts (in the Jungian / MB sense) to think about these things. The human world needs a diversity of talents and jobs to be done and we would still be in caves or extinct if everyone were introverts and intuitives etc. Still we always have to try to curb the tendency to dismiss everyone we don’t “click” with as Wells-ian Morlochs to our Eloi.
Having said that, of course I think there is a place for someone like you in the clergy and Church in the bustle of the world. Indeed I think many clergy are probably “hybrids” like you. Christianity is not a religion that appears to operate well when it veers too much towards E or to I. It needs both. After all it is founded on an ethos of loving God (the pure and remote) AND loving neighbour (the rough-and-sweaty in-one’s-face). One is leaven to the other.
There may be a thesis in inquiring into whether and how these personality behavioural preferences used by MB show up in the religious world: are those inclined to fuzzy holism one kind and those inclined to orthodoxies another kind on the whole?
“No hiding place.” That phrase beautifully sums up what makes attendance at church so uncomfortable in many places, especially France: the deafening music, the amplified sentimental solos, the dramatic readings from Scripture in infant-school language, the tyrannous collectivism of it all. In our diocese the gruppenfuhrers go about looking for pockets of introspective resistance, in order to impose the latest “best practice”. Alas, alas!
I think Stephen K hits it on the mark. “Christianity is not a religion that appears to operate well when it veers too much towards E or to I. It needs both.” Perhaps I’m tiresome in my constant repetition, but I believe successful living, successful religion, successful spirituality, are all unattainable objectives if one gravitates toward one extreme or another in any of the multitude of dichotomies we face. Seeming opposites simply have to work together to achieve completeness. It’s not logical consistency, but a true and sometimes counterintuitive balance that needs to be sought. To be all E or all I is to be both unhealthy and dangerous. I certainly seem to see both in myself and have spent a lifetime trying to balance these apparent incompatibles, and I’m beginning to think I have a glimmer of what that means in my life and thinking.
This is interesting. I recall management seminars in my working life when you would see ‘Over the Top’ extroverts quickly seeking to dominate the proceedings. I think most of us in ordinary employment will have seen the situation where the very ‘pushy’ extrovert has achieved promotion and then failed badly because of interaction difficulties with colleagues and the general public. I would say that leadership in some spheres of activity does require a person to be something of an extrovert rather than a ‘Shrinking Violet’. I would say that an essential quality whichever type of personality a person in a leadership position has, is empathy. In the Christian priesthood I would say that there is a place for all types of personality except perhaps the profoundly introverted. I would though be looking for empathic ability in candidates.
This sounds very good to me. As Ed Pacht suggests and I had already expressed less explicitly than he, we need to be fully integrated persons with aspects of every quality in every shade of grey – no absolutes or extremes. Different persons are in different places along each continuum, so there are no stereotypes other than for the purpose of study. It’s like theology: God is too much of a mystery to understand and describe, so we have to use analogies. We might be more introverted than extroverted, but we still have to relate to people with empathy. That’s life, otherwise we might as well live on a boat or an uninhabited island and die of loneliness.
I have done quite a lot of reading about empathy. If we have no empathy, we cease to be truly human. The lack of empathy and moral conscience is what makes the narcissist, the sociopath and the psychopath – from executives who care for nothing other than their careers to serial killers and school yard bullies.
Empathy is essential.
Having worked professionally with people who are genuinely incapable of empathy, and now being retired and not under such a strict obligation to guard my tongue, I can say that I find such people quite frightening, and on one occasion genuinely terrifying. Not because I feared for my own safety in those situations, but because it was clear to me that these people really were capable of committing – and in some cases had already committed – dreadful crimes, and simply could not comprehend that their actions were inherently wrong.
That said, the former patient who stalked and assaulted me (thereby teaching me to be very circumspect on the internet) did not suffer from this sort of illness.
By the way, I have consistently scored as INTJ over the last 30-odd years.
The fact that, at approaching 64, I’m not the emperor of the world or an international criminal mastermind (or dead) is probably a testament to the inherent unreliability of Myers-Briggs. 🙂
The thing that makes me think the most is how to distinguish between our natural inclinations and the things we have learned through experience as objectively good. As my late mother used to say, you can’t change your personality but you can get better at many things with practice and experience. I can see this as a reason to doubt the method’s reliability.
M-B is not wholly useless – far from it. The criticism really stems from the idea that you can test a person once or twice and extrapolate from it their entire lifetime relationship with their environment. (I exaggerate for emphasis, but not by very much.) Several studies over the years have shown that as many as 70% of test subjects will produce substantially different results when re-tested in a different environment – or even when tested in the same environment a few weeks after the first test.
Where M-B is particularly useful is when the test is administered several times over a longer period – perhaps 3-4 times a year for 3-4 years. This does produce a much more consistent graph of the boundaries of a person’s preferred mode of operation, but even then it is essential to consider the tertiary and inferior functions do tend to become stronger as the individual adds to his or her life experience (so your mother was right on the money). For instance, I (as a typical INTJ) have an absolute horror of spontaneity, but as I have aged and matured like a fine wine I have found that I am more able to accept spontaneity in others and have even indulged in it myself – after careful consideration of all the facts and evaluation of likely alternatives, of course.
Everyone is entitled to say this as how they see it. If people think MB is unreliable it’s like someone saying they swear by (or swear off) a brand of breakfast cereal. I myself don’t see MB as something that is supposed to get everything right, like Linda Goodman’s Star Signs for Lovers. I’m sure that some results are skewed by inadequate or unreliable self-disclosure too. But for me, MB was a highly useful tool that flooded me with insight into how people were behaving or communicating, including and above all myself. In other words, it opened my eyes to seeing how people were legitimately different and seeing and valuing things differently. I did not use it like a horoscope or tea-leaves, and I think it misses the point to see it as an inerrantly comprehensive explanation for all that a person is. It does not purport to do that in any case. It is, I think, a highly useful way of looking at these behavioural preferences we find ourselves with. It helps us see where we might tinker at the edges without unrealistic expectations or without doing damage to our psyche but to the benefit of mutual understanding or the avoidance of gross misunderstanding. There are many ways to slice and dice human beings and this in my view is one of the good ones, without elevating it to a magisterium. Jung was on to something. So were other psychologists, like McLelland, Cattell, Allport, and that great meta-psychologist, Hans Eysenck. Freud told us useful things too – again, in my opinion. But I’ll cease here in case anyone thinks I sound like a true believer. (Speaking of which, has anyone here heard of the Buteyko method for controlling and overcoming asthma? I have seen the wonderful results in my own daughter, and others and cannot speak highly enough of it, so I am hardly likely to rubbish MB).
I see it as a tool of scientific research or a diagnostic procedure that needs to be used together with other methods. Also, every method for doing anything has its limitations. When I had a hernia operation, the surgeon described the method to me beforehand, but for reasons known to himself and his professional expertise, when I was under anaesthetic and on the table, he decided on another method and that he could do “keyhole” surgery instead of cutting me open! So, there was some doubt until he saw everything in detail. Great, I was out of hospital the same day and the repair is still holding. That is the first thing a doctor does: diagnosis before deciding on the treatment or whether treatment is needed as opposed to letting nature do its healing work.
I also appreciate what I have read about and by Jung. He was one of the first psychoanalysts to take man’s spiritual soul into account and not treat us as bio-electro-chemical machines.
I could see that when I took the online test, I could see that I would really have to discipline myself and be ruthlessly honest with the questions and not project on myself an image of what I perhaps would like to be. So, it’s no good saying I like to be organised if my office looks like a battlefield after Jerry has been over it with bombers, heavy artillery and machine guns! 😉 If that element of self-criticism is not there, we will falsify the results. Then it won’t be the fallibility of the test but our own fault for putting in wrong data. I’m sure a professional psychologist can help us to avoid this kind of self-deception so that the results can be accurate, and that’s what you or your employer pays for.
We need to know what we want. We could want not to be able to say anything about anything. That’s a choice for each of us.
Yes, without a doubt, Father: anything always needs to be considered along with other things, because nothing provides all the answer to everything or anything! (Of course, if that little aphorism is true, then no religion – or expression of it – does, either).