Sermon: Sacred Paths: Manifold Spirituality

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Sacred Paths: Manifold Spirituality

By Charles Rush

November 6, 2005

ars ago, a colleague of mine told me that he was lecturing for several days at a prominent Christian college and his lectures were very well attended. On the third day, an attractive student stopped him after one of his lectures and asked him if he was 'born again'? He asked her why she asked him that question and she said that her prayer group stressed that she should only be influenced by a spiritual leader that was born again. He didn't know what to say, so he said, "Absolutely born again" and then he called me to ask exactly what he had committed himself to.

What is it about religion that needs certain marks that indicate you are on the clear and certain path. Evangelicals want you to be baptized. Catholics want you to take the sacraments. Jews want you circumcised. Muslims want you to wear the veil. They are powerful symbols that you are submitted to the right authority, that you are following in the right way, that your heart is on the path towards true salvation.

There is nothing wrong with any of them as far as they go. Religion, quite obviously, could not exist without external symbols and without guidance in the way of virtue and truth. But just as obvious is the fact that there is no one way to salvation. Just as obvious is that there are as many forms of piety as there are personal dispositions.

I remember in Seminary, we took a course on 'Great Mystical Tradition' and we read St. John of the Cross, Thomas a Kempis, Ignatius, St. Francis, Meister Eckhardt all the way up to Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk that wrote "The Seven Storied Mountain". We were encouraged to keep a journal, to engage in the discipline of silence and prayer during this period. At one point, we went on a weekend retreat to Thomas Merton's monastery to do a two day exercise in prayer and silence. The Trappist order, you may not know, only speaks when it is absolutely necessary. They go for long periods of silence and so did we. Most of the people on that trip got a lot out of their time of silence and reflection. But there was one young man, every time we would go off to pray alone underneath a tree or in a beautiful field, that different people kept finding asleep. He was the subject of good natured ridicule by the group who gave him the honorific title, "Brother Somnulent", for his prone piety. Unfortunately that young man was me and this was just one of many early indicators that I was not cut out for the monastery.

About that time in my life, I also started to realize why this great tradition was not for me personally. I was in therapy and one day my therapist said to me, "You don't really know what you think until you've said it do you?" I got to reflecting on that and it was largely true. It was probably one of the most extroverted periods of my life. Years later, I was reading a book on management about a company in Silicon Valley that described their corporate life. The CEO had taken chairs out of the meeting room and he found that people had shorter meetings that were more to the point, meetings that didn't stray off topic, if people were standing. I read that and thought, I would love these people. This is the way extroverts want to do life.

The mystical tradition really fits for people that are more introverted, people that have a developed interior life and find internal reflection and concentration natural and nourishing.

Many of you have heard of the Meyers-Briggs Personality Profile. You may have taken it in a corporate setting because it is very helpful for understanding the challenges you have putting a management team together to get the most out of what each brings to the table. They measure personality on 4 different continua: Extroverted v. Introverted, Sensing v. Intuitive, Thinking v. Feeling, and Judging v. Perceiving.

There is no question that each of these personality traits encourage a certain type of piety that go with them.

Extroverts feed off social situations. They love the interaction. They need a lot of relationships. President Clinton used to have meetings in the very early morning at the White House. One of is aides explained that he would wake up that way, come to life talking with other people. Extroverts are more concerned with breadth than depth, more interested in the extent of things rather than how intensive they are. They are more likely to wake up reading the paper for the events of the day or flipping on the T.V..

Spiritually speaking, they tend to prefer worship. These are the people that are saying hello to everyone when they walk in the church and they like all the noise and chaos that kids make. They sign up for Church socials and are more likely to go to educational fora. People that are more extroverted than introverted make up about 75% of our population. They tend to get distracted easily during the time of silence or when the choir sings a slower, meditative piece. When they pray, they are more likely to have a short conversation with the Almighty outlining their situation than to engage in a Zen meditation. In fact, in the extreme, they may try yoga or other forms of active meditation because they know it is lacking and that their interior life is thin.

Introverts prefer fewer relationships that have more depth to them. They usually find group social outings exhausting and have to gear themselves up for them in advance and take time in between them. On the weekends, they are more likely to hibernate in the Den. Their basic style is reflective and if you are married to an introvert, you know that after an argument, they need to retreat and mull it over in their mind, especially any major decisions. At church, they are more likely to listen to Danny Rufolo's jazz piano meditations at the second service and prefer the time of silence as the best part of the service. They like one on one interactions and are more likely to show up for a small group discussion on a book that is very substantive. They are also more likely to report that feel closest to God, not in Church as such, but out in nature alone, or praying alone in the chapel at a large cathedral. For them, spirituality is about going within. In the extreme, they can't really focus when there are babies crying in worship and they will push themselves to be more social like the majority of people because it is so hard for them.

Another important personality dialectic for spirituality is Judging v. Perceiving, and here the balance is about 50/50 for the national average. Half of us tend to be more judging, the other half more perceiving.

Judging people tend to be more comfortable with things that can be settled and decided. They were more likely to major in Math and accounting. They prefer to plan things ahead and take pleasure in watching those plans come to fruition. They like dealines and tend to be decisive in their decision making style. These are the people that are more likely to speak of the need for closure and to get things wrapped up. They want to get the show on the road. In the extreme, these are the Dads in our lives that will only stop to go tee tee every 150 miles on the family trip because the plan calls for so many miles in so many hours- just use a jar. They can, in the extreme, come across like the Great Santini, as somewhat arbitrary and not given to the reconsideration of a position once they have taken one.

This emotional disposition has a pronounced manifestation in the spiritual realm. These are the folks tend to like their religion boxed up, neat and orderly. They tend to presume that one of the intrinsic jobs of the Church is to provide answers. They want the Church to take a stand.

They tend to gravitate towards authority and things authoritative in religious life. They are over represented in the ranks of the Roman Catholic Church that look to the Vatican clarification of what the official teaching of Christianity ought to be.

People who score high in the J category are likely to be over represented in the ranks of all of our Protestant denominations that want the Church to make a concrete stand on issues of the day. As you know, every major denomination is presently divided on the issue of how to treat homosexuals, whether they should be allowed to marry or serve as Ministers. Judging personalities would prefer, one way or the either, for the Churches to make a definitive statement and get on with it.

Spiritually speaking, people who score high on the J personality index are also likely to value tradition and history. There is a clarity and definition to the past and religious tradition, particularly as it is embodied in the liturgy and in architecture, reflects the accretion of our past definitions of where we have been. These markers from the past also orient us toward the parameters of our future definition.

In juxtaposition to Judgment are people that are more comfortable simply perceiving the world around them. They value the process of gathering more data and keeping the agenda open ended. They are much more likely to see their immediate enterprise as a kind of treasure hunting expedition. They are looking for things that they don't presently see that will emerge in the course of the investigation. They are looking for the things that will eventually turn up to be important considerations that could shade what they will do or the reasons they will do it.

As a result, they tend to want to keep their options open going forward. Instead of being decisive, they tend to be more tentative. Rather than sense that something must reach a resolution, these are the people on the committee that suggest there is plenty of time or at least caution you to take more time. They are more comfortable just letting things happen rather than planning every detail and they are more likely to stress the value of adapting to new circumstances rather than executing a definite strategy. Their virtue is keeping things flexible.

In the extreme, they get on the nerves of people that favor judgment because everything in their plan is always pending. To people that are on the judgment side of life, they can appear like teenagers that never know what they are doing on Friday night until the very last moment when the party is actually already underway and they are late getting there.

Spiritually speaking, these people tend to be more comfortable waiting for the Spirit to move in the community and direct where we should be going in the future. In the pragmatic life of the Church, you see it regularly revolving around money. The Church always seems to be about $10-50k short of what it needs every year in order to break even. Budget shortfalls create anxiety, period. Some people tend to get focused on how to control spending or amend the budget in some way- a more typical J response- and some people want to focus on manifesting our core mission in faith that things will simply come together in ways that we can see right now… but they will. Our treasurer is fond of quoting a great P type person when projecting a budget shortfall, "The Lord will provide". And for 10 years, the Lord has provided, just barely and later than I would wish, but it does come together somehow, someway.

When we were going through our own debate internally about homosexuality, some people would say, 'trust the process'. That meant that we didn't know what the consensus was going to be yet, but in the fullness of time, it would emerge.

Before the Pilgrims had decided to come to the New World, one of their Ministers John Robinson gave a sermon that has stood the test of time in the P vein of spirituality. Some people argued that the Pilgrims should just remain content where they were in Holland and England. But Robinson addressed them and said, "… the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word." It is not just about paying attention to tradition and what God has done in history, we must also be open in a daring way to the emerging future and the possibility of something quite different and new.

Spiritually speaking, folks that score high on the P indicator, are more likely to get energized when the Church is doing something new in the liturgy. They are more likely to attend those seminars that deal with moral questions on a subject like stem cell research that we have never dealt with in the past.

Spiritually speaking, folks that score high on the P indicator, are more likely to embrace unpredictable things that fall in your path as a spiritually significant sign- things like an unexpected pregnancy or a job downsizing that forces you to look in broader directions than your original life plan. Spiritually speaking, P folks are more comfortable embracing the adventurous dimension of our lives and going with those where they lead us.

There is no one path spiritually speaking, but rather a manifold spiritual expression. You have probably heard the quote from Rama Krishna, speaking of the various world religions, when he said, "There are many paths to the Mountain top but the same view."

I think he is actually wrong about that. Nirvana in Hinduism is actually not the same view as Enlightenment in Buddhism, which is not the same view as Holiness in Judaism, which is not the same view as Salvation in Christianity, which is not the same view as Submission in Islam. Different religions actually take us to different places if we follow their spiritual disciplines.

However, within each tradition, you have expressions of piety that match our different emotional dispositions. I've only mentioned two of the four on the Meyers-Briggs for lack of time. But as you would expect, over time, there develop as many sacred paths within our Christian tradition as there are manifold spiritual types. It is not that one is right or wrong, though we get annoyed with people that process things differently than we do and don't seem to be able to accommodate our way of doing things, the point is that one size does not fit all. Variety simply is the norm and key to developing a mature life of piety is finding expressions of piety that fit your emotional and spiritual disposition, hopefully without passing a lot of judgment on a different path.

I know when I tried the path of mystical tradition in prayer and found that I wasn't very good at it, I could have given up and said the life of spirituality is not for me, back to law school. Thank God, I happened to be reading St. Thomas Aquinas during that time. Aquinas made a remark that one minute of serious academic study of theology was like unto an hour of prayer. Aha! The obvious had not yet occurred to me that what I did most often and did fairly well, was also an acceptable spiritual path- study.

No, there are many paths, find yours. There are some things we will only be competent at, but the chances are that there is one way that you express yourself spiritually that is profound. I say that with some confidence because I am surrounded by talented people. Don't overlook the obvious, the spiritual manifestation of what comes by you naturally and you seem to do with ease. Amen.