You and God - a Unique Friendship

Introduction

Have you ever wondered why we are all so different in the way we perceive religion, spirituality, and the meaning of life?

Those words can mean very different things to different people. Our spontaneous ways of viewing and experiencing them, and of judging what to believe, are usually involuntary mental reflexes that make us all different from one another.

To better understand the type of person we are and how it impacts our spirituality, it helps to understand what our spontaneous preferences are. For instance, do you get energized from the outside world of people and things, or from within yourself? If you are religious, would you rather pray in a community, or by yourself? Do you prefer dealing with concrete facts, or abstract concepts? Do you prefer hard logic or warm feelings? Do you prefer tradition or novelty? We even differ in how expressive we are about our preferences and beliefs.

When combined, these differing preferences of ours deeply influence our personality, our beliefs, our spiritual orientation, how we tend to view God and interpret the teachings of Jesus, and how we experience life in general. They impact every single aspect of our lives.

None of these differing ways of perceiving and judging are considered in psychology to be either better or worse than their opposites, only different. This is why, when we listen to some of the greatest minds on the planet, whether they are scientists, philosophers, theologians, or uneducated, we often see how differently from each other many of them think, even among siblings or peers with similar backgrounds, when discussing deep questions about religion and spirituality.

In other words, great minds don’t think alike. And that’s often because they bump into each other’s natural but differing preferences that none of us have normally chosen consciously.

I think most of us have a deep-seated desire to grow as a person. Conventional wisdom suggests that such personal growth should start with self-knowledge, with which I agree. “Know yourself”, said Socrates. But self-knowledge, which is so important to building each our own unique relationship with God, and even to deepening our faith and trust in him, should start, in my view, with an understanding of how our own special personality quirks.

Ask yourself: How am I different from others? What energizes me, and what is my spontaneous way of perceiving, judging, and deciding? This book will help you use this knowledge to develop a more intimate friendship with God based on exactly who you are. By understanding how and why your spiritual views can be so different from some other people’s, perhaps even including those of your closest friends and family members, you can develop a more personal relation with Jesus.

Being aware of your own type, of who you are with your special gifts, has many other benefits. It can help you develop and use your natural strengths, work on your weaknesses, and make decisions more consciously for your spiritual life, such as how best to apply the teachings of Jesus in your daily life.

Understanding why other people, maybe including our close ones, might have very different religious views than ours, and how we are all “wired” differently, can lead to greater mutual understanding, acceptance, and respect without necessarily having to agree with their views. It can help prevent or resolve conflicts and mend divisions this way.

Finally, knowing that some people might discount the Christian faith simply due to a biased spontaneous attraction to skepticism can help reassure our own Christian faith when we hear them.

My lifelong experience in nurturing human potential as a certified interpreter of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has allowed me to help numerous individuals and groups understand how they have come to acquire their own special views and style so as to make more conscious life decisions. I hope this book can help you to see how you can best apply Jesus’s teachings in your life based on exactly who you are.

The MBTI is my preferred source to help you do so because, to indicate each our own individual differences and “types”, its reliability indicator meets or exceeds that of all other such methods, to my knowledge. It’s been refined many times by international teams of psychologists over the years, such that more than 10,000 companies, 2,500 colleges and universities, and 200 government agencies in the United States alone now use the test. It’s estimated that more than 50 million people have now taken the Myers-Briggs Indicator. In other words, I’m basing my assertions in this book on something that has been solidly tried and tested, and not just on a passing fad. In fact, I have seen so many people have “Ah-ha! moments” as they discover what makes them “tick” that, for me, the MBTI’s reliability and benefits are confirmed.

If you are already familiar with the MBTI, then this book will not only serve as a refresher, but you will also discover a whole new way to apply it. But you don’t have to be familiar with the MBTI to understand this book. We’ll start from scratch, and you’ll see immediately how knowing yourself better can greatly help fire up your spirituality and your special relationship with Jesus.

Part 1: What’s your Type?

Why Are We All So Different?

An old Irish couple was sitting on the back porch one evening, looking out over the countryside. The husband said, in his delightful brogue accent: “You know, I think you and I are about the only people in the world who are normal.” Then, after some thought, he added: “…and sometimes I wonder about you!”

Is there indeed even one acquaintance of yours that, in all honesty, you don’t consider to be somewhat bizarre, a little odd in his or her own way? That’s because we are all very different. Perhaps never to seem at least a bit weird in the eyes of others would be the weird thing. We don’t see ourselves the way others see us, so to know ourselves better we need to understand why we are all so different.

Understanding our own personality quirks can help us make more conscious, more mature spiritual choices. I firmly believe that the more informed these choices are, the more we’ll tend to choose God’s ways for us, which, in addition to leading us to that more unique and intimate relationship with him, it can also help us acquire, along the way, an increased faith and trust in his ways.

Let’s look at these differences of ours. Psychology reveals to us the somewhat surprising fact that, in addition to the values we have acquired while growing up, our outlook on life is greatly influenced by some preferences that come naturally to us, though these can differ vastly between people. Often, we don’t choose our outlooks and ideologies as much as they choose us, unless we are conscious of our biases.

These distinct quirks of ours, our different natural preferences, influence how we tend to perceive and deal with reality, as I’ve said, but the fact that they can even greatly influence how we view and experience religion and spirituality may come as a bit of a surprise at first. Of course, we all know that some of our worldviews and beliefs, religious or otherwise, are also influenced by our upbringing, and later by the people we associate with. But if our upbringing and friends were the only factors impacting on who we are, including our spirituality, then why would so many siblings from the same family, all raised and schooled in the same manner, and even having the same friends, differ so much in their outlooks on life and on their religious and spiritual orientations?

The American world-renowned DNA scientist and Christian advocate Francis Collins once remarked that if an individual is inclined by the nature of his slant to reject a view of God as Creator because it represents a “conformist”, traditional, and “non-exciting” view of things, then it may be very difficult for that person to be swayed. But why is that?

What is it about the very notion of “tradition” in the general sense that can turn some people off from the get-go? Perhaps in that same line of thought, the great William James, the American pioneer of psychology, a Christian, had earlier written that “Some persons […] never are, and possibly never under any circumstances could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become the center of their spiritual energy.”[1] His statement seems to me a bit extremist, so I wouldn’t go that far. But what is it about some people’s “spiritual energy” that makes it rather inconsistent with conventional religious views? James later speculated on various reasons why this might be, including, in his words, “the impossibility they may have of imagining the invisible, being anaesthetic on the religious side, etc. And maybe we could even speculate a kind of knee-jerk reaction on some people’s part to overthink everything, perhaps including Jesus’s simple teachings, for instance.

Of course, those who discount faith could speculate just as much on the reasons why we Christians keep our faith in the absence of cold, hard evidence to support our religious views, and that’s why my first book[2], which was endorsed by chief scientists, philosophers, theologians, supreme court judges, and others, has shown that there is, in fact, ample hard evidence to support our faith.

Since the days of William James, we now have the benefit of many decades of worldwide, intensive and coordinated research about the various ways in which we differ from each other. We are much better equipped to understand our psychological differences and each our own natural, spontaneous preferences and slants. This modern knowledge can greatly help us understand many of the reasons behind such differences in our natural inclinations, including our spiritual ones, the values we live by, and why even some highly intelligent people can be attracted to such biased views as those of atheism.

Let’s explore more closely this fascinating aspect of the human mind and how we can use this knowledge to bolster our Christian spirituality, our faith and trust in God’s ways for each of us, and to develop a more intimate relationship with Jesus based on exactly who we are.

Different on Four Major Counts

Based on the work of Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, founder of analytical psychology and contributor of the famous Sigmund Freud, one view that has come to be well established in personality study is that we are all different from each other on four major counts that define our personal preferences. This view was further developed with later contributions by American Isabel Myers and Katherine Briggs, co-creators of the self-assessment method known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, followed by many decades of psychological research throughout the world.

It's important to emphasize that, while these four differences, called “dichotomies”, deeply influence our thoughts and actions, they relate to preferences, not abilities. Each of us has the ability to relate to the world around us in more ways than our habitual, spontaneous ones, but we each tend to fall back on our preferred ways. These different comfort zones are as spontaneous and natural to us as the way we always fold our arms with either the right one or the left one on top, or in the way we sign our name. Our preferred styles are automatic and unconscious.

Building on Jung’s work, a self-assessment tool was developed by Isabel Myers and her mother Katherine Briggs in the wake of World War 1 to promote peace by helping individuals understand themselves and others better, and to accept each other’s differences as a result. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has been continuously refined since then by teams of psychologists worldwide, as mentioned, and has grown in popularity to become what is likely today’s most widely used personal test in the world of psychology.

I believe that it’s through each our own deepest preferences and drives, all of which are special gifts, that God attracts us to him if we open ourselves to his love. In Romans 12:6, Saint Paul said: “We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us.” We are, in other words, each called to come to God in our own special way. But to understand our special gifts, we need to know ourselves, our spiritual orientation, how we relate to and interact with God and with the world. This knowledge will guide us in how to apply our special gifts to help those around us. So, let’s look at how these differing preferences of ours tend to influence our views of God and our spiritual orientation.

I have said that we are all different from one another on four major counts in the way we perceive and interact with the world. These four ways are as follows:

We differ in the way we get energized and in how we direct our energy and attention. This is called extroversion versus introversion.

We also differ in how we generally perceive or “take in” information. This is called sensing versus intuition.

We differ as well in the way we make judgments. This is called thinking versus feeling.

Finally, whichever is our preferred way of perceiving or judging, in #2 and #3 above, we even differ in whether our preference is for judging or for perceiving.

Visually, the four categories of preferences are as follows:

Four types of preferences

Extroversion (E) –

(I) Introversion

Sensing (S) –

(N) Intuition

Thinking (T) –

(F) Feeling

Judging (J) –

(P) Perceiving

Not only are we different in each these four categories of preferences, but we even differ in the degree, or intensity, of the preference in each case. It’s rare, though not impossible, that the preference would be extreme in any of these four categories of preferences, like being, for example, 100% extroverted with no inclination whatsoever for introversion, or vice versa. Preferences are usually a matter of degree, but always at the expense of its opposite preference, within any of the four categories. For instance, no one is equally extroverted and introverted. We prefer one or the other, either just a little more, or a lot more.

Suggestion: As we look closer at these four categories of preferences, think about which of the two opposing preferences in each category most closely describes you. A preference may be stronger or weaker for you depending on the category.

Extroversion versus Introversion is the first of the four ways in which we differ from one another.

The term extrovert does not necessarily relate to a loud and boisterous party animal, any more than the term introvert means that the person is a shy shrinking violet. Many misconceptions and exaggerations have entered popular language over the years, sometimes negatively influencing, unfortunately, how the two types view each other. The preference for either extroversion or introversion, and the degree of that preference, simply tell us how we tend to direct our energy and attention.

Extroverts are energized by people and external events. Introverts are energized by their inner world of thoughts and ideas. We all prefer one of these two ways of being, more than the other, and this is often apparent even at a very early age. Just observe young children’s behaviors and you will notice some who mostly seek interaction with other children, while others mostly prefer to play either alone or maybe with a close relative like a parent. Both are content, both are normal. The first may be an extrovert and the other an introvert. Their differences have nothing to do with ability, it’s simply a preference, and they did not consciously choose that preference.

One way to check whether your natural preference is for either extroversion or introversion is to think about how you tend to “recharge your batteries”. Do you normally do so by surrounding yourself with people, as extroverts more likely do, or would you rather go off on your own instead, maybe working by yourself or immersing yourself in a book, as an introverted person would more likely do? The word “solitude” can be a depressing one for an extrovert, but an energizing one for an introvert. Conversely, “bubbly effervescence” may sound annoying to an introvert, but invigorating to an extrovert. We’ve all heard the expression “one person’s food is another person’s poison.” …

Of course, there is a risk of oversimplifying this whole notion by using only a few examples, because even extroverts like to spend some time on their own now and then, and even introverts can like company. For instance, a strong extrovert, whom you might describe as a “party waiting to happen”, can get “peopled-out” after a while and need a break from back-to-back interactions at some point. At the other pole, even a strong introvert would likely find solitary confinement hard to take after a while. But I’m sure you get the general idea and are starting to see some implications for our topic of how we tend to subconsciously choose and experience our spirituality and relationship with God or how we would more likely apply the teachings of Jesus.

Extroverts, for example, if they are religious, are more likely to express their spirituality through their involvement in community work or prayer groups. They may find it uplifting to join a church full of animated, expressive singers with their hands held high. Religious introverts, however, may find such animation too intense, distracting and perhaps even intrusive in their private life. If the latter are praying, they are more likely to prefer doing so on their own than in a large and energetic prayer group.

Sensing versus Intuition represents the second significant difference among individuals. It relates to your preferred way of perceiving, or absorbing information.

[1] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 183.

[2] Eugene Aucoin: Has Science Killed God? – Three Powerful Ideas that Will Reignite your Faith. (Manila: St Paul’s, 2019). It won the Cardinal Sin Award for Asia’s Best Book of the Year in Theology in 2020. Website: eugene-aucoin.com