Monday, October 21, 2013

More Fun with Myers-Briggs

I just came across an interesting infographic that gives a breakdown of Myers Briggs personality type indicators to socio-economic position.  I am either an INTP or INTJ, depending on what day I take the test, though I think I'm leaning more and more towards the P (perceiving) as I get older.  What you might notice is that I fall into a group of personality types called rationalists, and that, as a percentage of the population, I'm in a rather drastic minority (10.3% of the American population).
Over the years, I have been through a couple different wrasslin' matches with the MBTI, usually I come away with some slightly new information, and a renewed question of whether or not the thing is anything more than a psychological parlor trick.  Being a "rationalist" though, I love things that seem science-like, and when you start breaking down something as seemingly complex as the human persona into four descriptive continua, I can't help but get a little geeked up.
Funny thing though, if you look at my dominant personality traits in my case the NT part of my Myers-Briggs type, you will find that I am probably not very well suited to the clerical vocation.  You may think, "well duh," being a Pastor doesn't really seem like a very good thing for a 'rationalist' to be doing."  And the career counseling/psychological evaluation that I had when I was in seminary would agree with you, but here I am.
The test indicates that I would be better off as an architect or something of that nature, but life is funny, and often times human beings end up confounding all the fancy instruments and indicators that supposedly tell us what to be and do.
MBTI is interesting though, because it explains a lot of things that are prolifically verified by my experience.  For instance, being an Introvert and also being a statistically rare personality type leads to feeling like an outsider rather frequently.  Some people experience the feeling of exclusion from the majority based on race, gender or sexual orientation, I experience it as an ontological condition that has nothing to do with my physical nature.
Despite an almost genetic predisposition to feelings of alienation, despite a profoundly skeptical nature, despite the fact that I generally do not accept things that cannot be proven, I have somehow wandered into a vocation that revolves around faith and, probably even more difficult: people.  The very core of what I do for a living is a mystery, not a sound and reasonable proposition or even a logical hypothesis, but a massive, and I would say intentional, void in our ability to comprehend our existence rationally.  It's somewhat like the the black holes that some astronomers suspect exist at the center of galaxies.  The hold clusters of stars by their gravitational force, but we can't directly study them because even light cannot escape the event horizon.  We only know they're there because of their effect on everything else.
To me, God is sort of like that.  I can't prove God's existence, but for some reason I can accept it, because I see evidence of it in so many other places, and I do see evidence.  The evidence is everywhere, truth, beauty and love confront us in just too many places.  The purpose behind things seems way too elegant to be random.  Theology tells us that God is ineffable and unknowable, like that black hole that cannot be directly observed.  We can only know about God because the effect God has on things we can see.  Like God changing Saul: murderous zealot, into  Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles.  Or God calling a rationalist malcontent, who always feels at odds with the world, to be a pastor.
I wonder what type of personality does that sort of thing?

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