Autumnmania

I get all excited when autumn starts and I'm not really sure why. I can be spotted (indeed was, this week) collecting conkers on the side of the road, running my thumb over their highly polished brown skins, massaging off the soft white vernix, wondering how long till they'll decay, taking photos of them in sunshine, still harbouring anger at the banning of conker fights in schools, circa 2002.

Some people think that seasons correspond to personalities; you can be a summer person, or an autumn person, etc., and there's a whole colour/fashion/make up course (Colour Me Beautiful) that's linked to this conviction (explored in a previous post http://parttimepriest.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/lent-for-extroverts-16-colour-me.html).

Maybe it's true that I'm an autumn person, but apart from having light brown-ish hair (with imagined copper highlights) and brown eyes, are there also character traits that accompany being 'an autumn person'?

I have applied some pop psychology to myself and reflected upon three reasons I might feel drawn to autumn above other seasons. If you feel the same, maybe you're an autumn person too, with your own fascinating reasons for being autumn-y. In which case, don't wear navy or scarlet. They're NOT autumn colours, unsurprisingly.

Why do I feel drawn to autumn?

1. School days.

Maybe the mention of school days makes you think of summer, those lazy hazy days in the playground, sitting under a tree if you were lucky, doing 'he loves me, he loves me not' with a daisy head (yes, this is what girls do). Or if they were bleak, your school days may remind you of winter. Spring brings to mind revision, so we instantly forget that season, and are left, therefore, with autumn.

In addition, if, like me, you became a primary school teacher, or had kids who were good at singing, you could well be drawn to autumn simply because of this one fact: that all time best kids assembly song, 'Autumn Days', with the smash lyrics:

'Autumn days when the grass is jewelled
and the silk inside a chestnut shell,
Jet planes meeting in the air to be re-fuelled (is that even possible, I'm now wondering)
All these things I love so well
Oh, I mustn't forget, no I mustn't forget
To say a great big thank you, I mustn't forget.'

2. Conkers.

A memorable three years of my school life consisted of walking up an extraordinarily steep hill on both sides of which grew horse chestnut trees. My school memories are all bound up with those trees and their autumn fruit, stooping down to collect them, planning fights with my brother, feeling like they were so much treasure, a veritable free windfall of burnt umber. 

About aged ten, I went conker hunting with my grandfather in suburban north London. We took a bag, walked round the municipal golf course and loaded ourselves up with a modest but well earned brown shiny cache. One street from home, a woman came out of a house with a huge bag, on the way to the dustbin. The bag was full of conkers. Seeing our own, much smaller haul, she offered the bag to us and we took it, hesitatingly. It seemed to me, who had been brought up with a Protestant work ethic, something of a cheat, a benevolent bounty we had not deserved, which spoke of the mysterious, even risque. But we took it anyway.

3. Something ending, something beginning.

Here we get more metaphysical, but feeling drawn to autumn has to do with its being the season than most resonates with our humanity. Summer is over, stuff is going to die, and yet I find I'm often more relaxed about it than sad. One may as well be realistic. Summer is heralded by protracted ends of term, outdoor social events - in wealthy Thames valley, anyway - ever more splendid, and/or exhausting, depending on how you look at them; holidays away - more planning, travelling, angst about how to get sun, and for me, dreaded airplanes; ill fitting skimpy clothes and women's figures. I greet all this with less enthusiasm than the autumn back to school routine, children growing up into new classes, trees relaxing into brown and gold, a nip in the air. 

Because after something is ending, something new can begin. Out of all the seasons, autumn is the most like actual life: not always summery and happy, but it's not all bleak either. Such a life is viewed with what Richard Rohr calls 'a bright sadness' (Falling Upward, p. 117).

And so on this National Poetry Day, I concur with Wordsworth's admission to being:  

'a melancholy (...) that lov'd
A pensive sky, sad days, and piping winds,
The twilight more than dawn, Autumn than Spring' (The Prelude, p. 90).

School days, conkers, and endings/beginnings. Three reasons to wish you a happy autumn.

Know thyself

The 16 types of the Myers Briggs (personality) Type Indicator (MBTI).

The first time I encountered the Myers Briggs personality test (MBTI) was during ordination training for the Anglican Church. I think it was in vogue then, in certain types of training that heavily emphasised the pastoral (colleagues in other training colleges were too busy having three years of intense preaching experience and leading missions to spend time wondering which personality they had). I found it quite stimulating and helpful as a tool to understand my motivations, but let's just say once is probably enough. 

From time to time various shortened versions of the MBTI come up on social media and people fill them in in five minutes and arrive with some result. It's meant to be a lot more nuanced than that. A proper full length MBTI questionnaire takes time to fill in, is expensive, and only recognised practitioners can give you an accurate 'result'; i.e. your combination of 4 letters, from a possible set of 16 combinations. Each letter also has its 'opposite'; the pairs being  E-I (Extraversion-Introversion); N-S (iNtuition-Sensing); T-F (Thinking-Feeling) and J-P (Judging-Perceiving). 

Each pair represents the 2 ends of a spectrum, and in deciding if you're one letter or the other, what you're really doing is indicating how strong a preference you have for one over the other. Not only does the test give you the letters, but it gives them in differing numerical relationship to each other. It's like right handedness and left handedness: if you're right handed you prefer to do certain things with your right hand, because it feels normal; but if necessary you can do stuff with your left - it just feels less obvious.

EXTRAVERSION-INTROVERSION
There's a bit of technical language to understand, so for instance, the Extraversion/Introversion questions try to ascertain to what extent external things (other people, places, events) energise or drain you; and perhaps whether solitude is a habitual and sought out refreshment or a boring state to be endured until something more stimulating comes along, for example.

The classic scenario in our house is those who have 28 tabs open on the laptop while watching TV, texting and singing their latest favourite song (having left the radio on loud in the room they just walked out of) vs. those who are doing one thing at a time in silence in a corner, in the three hour break they need to rejuvenate themselves between one external/social stimulation and the next.

INTUITION-SENSING
iNuition and sensing are about how you take in information from the outside world. iNuitives (N) add meaning and infer abstract things from what they see, hear, feel, taste or smell; while Sensers (S) are more likely to take the information coming at them at face value, i.e. they use their 5 senses and leave it at that (a slight confusion: the iNtuition is given N as its letter, to distinguish it from the I for Introversion).

I didn't grasp the iN-S distinction at all till the aforementioned C of E training weekend. After some preamble in our assigned conference room, we were told to go outside to the grounds of the place where we were staying and spend 20 minutes there before coming back to report on what took place. It was a pleasant sunny day but I remember being frustrated at this unnecessary interruption, feeing bored, half noticing a pond, which made me think of depth as an abstract concept; feeling generally impatient and then returning to the room hoping the programme would proceed without further ado. 

Once inside I was amazed to discover that some of my colleagues came back and reported on the intricate pattern of tiles on the roof, cited the names of six different trees and grasses, the shade of blue in the afternoon sky and the exact sound a certain bird had made whilst flying overhead. It won't surprise anyone that I'm not very far down the Sensing end at all.

THINKING-FEELING
Thinking and Feeling seem more self explanatory, but a preference is not always easy to discern in my case. The scenario we were given on this: you have to address a group of people who were all hoping to go on a foreign trip you had organised, but there was a mistake and only half of them will now be able to go. How do you react when telling them some will be disappointed? I figured only really hard line Thinkers would not feel upset that some people would not be going on the long hoped for holiday, and I felt I would worry about telling people, and so in that discussion I came out as a F. However in the pre-prepared questionnaire result, which was less emotive, I had scored as a T. 

With some people, of course, it's easy to guess a preference in either direction. How do you normally decide on a course of action? Do you weigh options up cooly and logically, mastering feelings and taking the reasonable path (T) or do you decide with the heart, feeling strong empathy for those affected by the consequences of your actions (F)? I'm still unsure whether I'm an "F" or a "T". I tend to vacillate, and some scores give me 'no preference for F over T' (which presumably also means 'no preference for T over F'). I think it could be that during ordination training I had to be pretty T-oriented, with all the new concepts, but in pastoral ministry I find my "F" more to the fore. I've also noticed that with those who are strong on "F" I feel very "T"; and vice versa.

JUDGING-PERCEIVING
Perhaps the oddest pairing is the final one: J-P. Judging-Perceiving refers to how you make sense of and order the world about you. Do you like to impose a structure and a plan, which you then stick firmly to (J) or do you simply observe the world as it comes your way, and respond accordingly with whatever option seems appropriate at the time (P, because you simply perceive the word and do not try and control it). Along with iNtuition, this is my more obvious result - I consistently act J in most things, and am not at all good at leaving certainty and exploring down the P end. Decisions that are last minute; people who seem passive and people who are flaky about time keeping I find personally challenging. No, definitely a J.

SO WHAT?
What practical use does it all have, and what was a Myers Briggs Training weekend doing on an ordination course? I think it all depends where you're coming from. On our course, many poo-pooed it (but they were mainly the scientists and the more P-oriented, who can't bear being categorised anyway). Interestingly, some research file:///Users/clairealcock/Downloads/religions-02-00389.pdf
has suggested that the 'typical' MBTI combination for Anglican Clerics is INFJ; that is, we are often introverts who are happy conceptualising, who feel strongly about things and who have a pre-thought out structure for the world, in which case, I fit in 50% of the time, or in 2 out of 4 of the typical letters associated with priests. Thankfully, this is only a trend, not a rule, but it might account for some suggested bias in the C of E selection process - I wonder if selectors generally are nervous of people who appear to be spontaneous and unpredictable....(a classic P).

In some settings the typical INFJ makes sense in the C of E, all that empathy you're supposed to show as a minister; plus believing certain things makes you (possibly) less likely to be open ended and spontaneous about life, so you end up J. 

*All our seats are in rows, for a start...

I felt certain echoes of this when I first began attending events with large groups of clergy. Putting it very bluntly, as an ENTJ, there seemed to me to be a surfeit of niceness (all those Feelers) and a reluctance to look outwards (all those Introverts). I seem to remember that after collating the MBTIs of all the ordinands on the weekend mentioned above, there were not many spontaneous 'living in the moment' types (P) so although I'm not one myself, in terms of ordained priests who are strongly P, I feel quite sorry for them, trying to function inside our particular institution. It must be maddening*.

How does all this personality stuff sit with growing in holiness? As far as I understand it, the MBTI is a good starting point but I never could get beyond that, to see how it accounts for growth. Presumably the idea is that whilst you remain more or less true to your type through life, you become more adept at exploring down the other ends of the spectra. I think this is noticeable when you meet people who are really mature - they pick the appropriate way to respond in any given human situation and don't get stuck in a habitual series of reactions which are extreme, unfortunate or difficult for everyone else. 

In pastoral ministry I often find myself trying to identify the MBTI of other people, to try and understand them better, and to understand how we are reacting to each other. There's some danger in this because it isn't necessarily appropriate to identify something as nuanced as another's personality and you can be wrong. At the best however, the MBTI is a useful tool, among others, for knowing yourself better. And 'know thyself' and knowing God are two things that are much closer together than you might think.

Sensing Lent 15: Shadow

Shadows seem to have a hard time in the collective imagination, though visually I'm quite a fan.

Associations with things dark and shady mean we prefer light to shadow and we fear what might lurk in the shadows.

Psychology speaks of the shadow side of personality and I've been wondering how this idea links with biblical anthropology.

One of the problems with an over moralised version of Christianity is to focus on outward behaviour (obey this rule, follow these guidelines etc.) whilst neglecting what's going on inside. It's much easier to 'behave yourself' than to be transformed from the inside, with all the murkiness that might be lurking there. But we need to explore and expose the shadows nonetheless.

Or, switching to psychology, the shadow side is the underused parts of our personality. Thinking about the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator (MBTI) this would mean, for example, that if you had a preference for Extroversion, looking outwards and being stimulated by externals, exploring your shadow would mean withdrawing and looking inwards for a change. 

And if you tended to think before feeling, you would want to embrace the feeling side of you, even if it seemed somewhat scary to do so. And those of us who make quick judgements and like routine and predictability would want to become more open ended and 'go with the flow' (dreadful thought...)

Finally, as I'm trying this Lent, 'iNtuitives' who love abstract theorising and the big picture, would pay more attention to their 5 senses and try and live in the moment more.

In Jungian thought (which is roughly what the MBTI is based on) far from being something to fear and avoid, the shadow side could prove to be the place of most creativity and growth.

I suppose biblically, coming to terms with the shadowy stuff inside and exposing it to the light and love of Christ would be what we call sanctification. 

I suspect sanctification and shadow befriending are linked, but I'm not sure how. One thing's for sure, you can't see the shadows without the light.