Category Archives: Differences in Grace for Different personalities.
Eileen:
Our tendency to make “image” our God is a spiritual issue. Years ago becoming aware of my weakness of envy helped me recognize that I use sarcastic humor to “cut people I envy down to my size.” We all possess natural strengths and talents, as well as corresponding weaknesses. We naturally want others to admire our strenghts and overlook our weaknesses. Pointing out others’ weaknesses through sarcasm is an attempt to level the playing field.
Working with a Spiritual director many years ago made we aware of my unrecognized feelings of inferiority and attempts to bring others down to my level with cutting humor. Recognizing and accepting areas that I felt weak in helped me start accepting my humanity and quit trying to “cut people down to my size.” But later in life, having had to admit to failures to use my own gifts effectively, I had to recognize that I had resurrected that leveling weapon and was using it on people with similar personalities and talents to mine who had used them more effectively. Facing our inborn weaknesses is one thing. Facing our failure to effectively use our gifts for the benefit of others is a much harder challenge.
Father Richard Rohr writes of “the integration of the negative.” Rather than insisting that God values perfection or an idealized morality, Francis of Assisi intuited, through the example of Jesus’ life and death, that God could be found in all things, even those our religion and culture urge us to reject. Father Richard writes:
I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the “integration of the negative.” Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus’ revolutionary good news, the apostle Paul’s deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare of Assisi lived out with such simple elegance.
The integration of the negative still has the power to create “people who are turning the whole world upside down” as was said of early Christians (see Acts 17:6). Today, some therapists call this pattern of admitting our shortcomings and failures “embracing our shadow.” Such surrendering of superiority, or even a need for superiority, is central to any authentic enlightenment. Without it, we are misguided ourselves and poor guides for others.
Francis and Clare made what most would call the negative or disadvantage shimmer and shine by their delight in what the rest of us ordinarily oppose, deny, and fear: things like being insignificant, poor, outside systems of power and status, or weakness in any form. Francis generally referred to these conditions as minoritas. This is a different world than most of us choose to live in. We all seem invariably to want to join the majority and to be admired. Francis and Clare instead made a preemptive strike at both life and death, offering a voluntary assent to full reality in all its tragic wonder. They made a loving bow to the very things that defeat, scare, and embitter most of us, such as poverty, powerlessness, imperfection, and being ridiculed.
I personally think that honesty about ourselves and all of reality is the way that God makes grace totally free and universally available. We all find our lives eventually dragged into opposition, problems, “the negatives” of sin, failure, betrayal, gossip, fear, hurt, disease, etc., and especially the ultimate negation: death itself. Good spirituality should utterly prepare us for that instead of teaching us high-level denial or pretense.
Needing a ladder to climb only appeals to our egotistical consciousness and our need to win or be right, which is not really holiness at all—although it has been a common counterfeit for holiness in much of Christian history. The Ten Commandments are about creating social order (a good thing), but the eight Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–12) of Jesus are all about incorporating what seems like disorder (a negative),which promotes a much better and different level of consciousness. ( Richard Rohr)
Recognizing our failures and knowing that God has already forgiven us is the grace for forgiving ourselves. And that can free us to grow and even change. (Eileen)
The Dance of Gender Differences
Christianity was created by men, the bible was written by men, religion has been controlled completely until very recently by men. Women and men most often are born with different traits (not always.) God created us different so we would bond across those differences, which working together could make each other and the world a better place. The Working Together in a dance is the goal…..different strengths are needed for different challenges and times. To have balance there needs to be freedom to take turns leading in the dance. The spiritual journey changes us throughout our life. At 87 I’ve recognized how I have changed my view of everything, including God and Jesus and other religions, over my journey. Jesus fleshes out the spiritual journey in a way I personally can learn from, so he’s my “go to” guy. But I figure I will probably still be seeing new aspects of our life journeys on my death bed! No person or religion has all the truth, nothing but the truth, even with the help of God (which would make us equal to God!) Once we recognize that we are all one and that God is Love by any name, we can trust the spirit within. Then we can roll with the changes in this life. It is a school for learning to Love…our own unfinished, so flawed , selves and thus even the enemy who is unfinished like us but in different aspects. We actually NEED each other to help us become whole.
The Spiritual Journey to Wholeness
I am an idealist: The positive is that I want to make things better and often can. The negative is that since nothing and no one is perfect in this life, I have to fight the tendency to always be unhappy with what is.
I’m a people person: Relationships are important to me. The positive is that I reach out to people and notice and can respond to their obvious needs. The negative is that many people are not about relationship and either don’t notice my needs or find them overwhelming.
I respond to life emotionally first. The positive is that I care about people and want to help them. The downside is that I am not logical about limits to what I or others can do and am susceptible to giving up on using my gifts and sometimes on relationships.
I am intuitive which helps me be open to new ideas and possibilities and see connections that others may not see between cause and effect. The downside is that sometimes I connect things people do, or do not say or do, to motivations that aren’t real.
I focus on ideas, thoughts, and possibilities which can help me be creative and open to learning new things. But the downside is I often literally don’t SEE the concrete world around me that is important to others.
We are born with different tendencies to personal focus and values, so we have strengths and weaknesses in different areas, but our birth families and lives may challenge us to develop coping skills different, but less effective, than our natural gifts. So the degree of focus and competence will vary some, but generally not completely. We literally see and hear differently in the same situation. We did not get to chose this. And it affects everything.
The differences for all of us are loosely: Focus outward vs focus inward. Focus on the concrete and known vs seeking new ideas and possibilities. Responding to people and the world from logic vs emotions. The need to move quickly to closure/decisions vs wanting to stay open to other possibilities.
Our upbringing and early influences and survival needs can affect the strength and thus the balance of these tendencies, but will not wipe them out. So we can end up being a square peg in a round hole in our lifestyles, professions, relationships, and even religions.
I stress type differences because it was what I studied and actively worked with for twenty years and understanding it made a huge difference in my marriage of sixty years, since Julian and I were extreme opposites in every area of differences.
This does make marriage more challenging, but once understood it can not only help stay together, it can help us grow and change and become more balanced and understanding of those different from ourselves and free us to love across differences.
What I am working on understanding is if those of us who are : focused outward, open to possibilities, and inclined to stay open to possibilities may be called to lead in attempts to understand one another, so we can allow and maybe even benefit from a balance in these personality traits. Understanding frees us from hating and judging.
But it really has to begin by understanding and accepting the reality of our own strengths and weaknesses. For me understanding these differences helped me value my strengths and understand why some things are so hard for me and that I had to often learn by failing. This eventually not only helped me forgive myself for my failures, but to forgive those I love for their undeveloped sides. We’ve all got them, because we are unfinished human beings.
Now, something I began to recognize in my sixties was that I was becoming more capable in my weak areas, but at the temporary cost of my strengths even in my ways of being open to grace. Since women tend to share both their ups and downs, friends around my age began to struggle with the same thing. It began to occur to me that the second half of life is a series of dying to strengths (self) so we can develop our weak side. This is a journey to wholeness, perhaps holiness.
It’s nothing short of miraculous. When Julian was dying those two years, he needed caregiving in ways that used to would have been impossible for me. I’m sure since he knew me so well, that it was terrifying when I had to do things to/for him that required focus on small physical details and using physical skills that he knew I didn’t have! God bless him! And yes, it was scary and challenging for me and at the end I was grateful that he could have professional medical care in the nursing home though I stayed with him there for five months. But what a blessing for me. I was able to love him in ways I never could have before. And if we are open to these challenges of change, we will not only be able to love in ways we have never loved before, but to also better understand and love those very different from us. No one dies perfect, but we can die like Jesus did, understanding even our enemies.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 