Introversion it is not – 14 October 2016

One of the trendy ways to make sense of human society is to label people as extroverts or introverts.  It seems obvious.  Those labelled extroverts not only enjoy the company of others, but look for it and actually need it.  They languish and shrivel if they are all alone.  They are energised by other people.  They tell you: You should get out more.  These are the extroverts.  Others in category introvert tend more to be drained in society.  Hell is a cocktail party, as someone put it.  Far from languishing all on our own, we are restored and reanimated in solitude. 

We all know that life and people are actually much more complicated than that, and that most people find ways to live happily in both camps…  The assumption however is that when it comes to contemplative life and prayer, introverts will tend to take to it better than extroverts.  It is the introverts, we think, who will be more at home with silence and stillness and solitude… and inwardness… so the argument goes. 

Well, it is not so.  Fr Laurence Freeman says that in what he calls our self-conscious and narcissistic society, we confuse introversion with true interiority.  In contemplative spirituality, introversion is not what we are looking for.  Conversion is what we are looking for.  Our concern is no longer to be looking at ourselves and all our feelings, reactions, desires, ideas, dreams or daydreams… interiorly or exteriorly.  That is what we are turning away from, in our disciplines of silence, stillness and, with most of us, our mantra. 

True contemplative life, experience and prayer cordially includes both extroverts and introverts.  This is because it is at another level than all this management of self and fascination with self.  It is where we are consciously in the presence of the unseen God – or we may say, the Spirit of the Risen Jesus.  We are admitting a presence and a grace other than our own.  Whether the meditator is an extrovert or an introvert, either or some of each, the issue now is to be still and receptive, to be silent and undemanding… indeed, in what I think to be wonderfully moving Hebrew terms, to welcome with hospitality the love that encompasses us all. 

So personality type is interesting…  I have always found it so.  If nothing else, it warns me when to become invisible in company…  But in prayer the question does not arise.  Whoever I am and whatever I am like, indeed, however I may be feeling right now, I do what I can to be fully present – in the presence of God in Christ.