"On Being an Introvert"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 30^th of January 2000

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
with our whole lives, their memories and hopes
to worship on a cold winter's day in peace;
to bring the gift of ourselves
to the common life of our community;
and to find in word, silence, song and sigh
the deeper meanings and Spirit of that common life.
Blest be this day, its glories and rejoicing!

Call to Silence [Next] [back to top]

Later this afternoon there will be shouting at the goal posts, the raised cheers of tens of thousands.

Now, let there be silence.

Later this afternoon there will be discussions between friends, and members of families, the governing board of this congregation will meet to plan for our common future; and there will be rich interior dialogues of those who want to spend the time alone.

Now, let there be silence.

Later this afternoon, the snow may bring concern and worry, beauty and hazard.

Now, let there be only the richest silence,
and safety wed to silence.

Now, let there be only the richest silence,
and safety wed to silence.

Now let there be only silence,
and safety wed to silence.

Let the sound of the bell open the gate
to the place where safety and silence await us,
and where we may, step by step,
moment by moment,
week after week,
year after year,
find some enduring solace and strength.

The First Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from English novelist Barbara Pym's novel, Quartet in Autumn, written in 1977:

Father G. was often obliged to enter houses where people were on the point of death or had already died; indeed, he preferred this type of situation to normal parish visiting, with its awkward conversations, and the inevitable cups of tea and sweet biscuits.

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from our own R. Waldo Emerson's 1867 Essay called "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England":

The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself-the young were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, and the anatomy of motives.

Sermon: "On Being an Introvert" [Next] [back to top]

In June of 1986, the eight of us who had been nominated, and then selected, by the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association to create a new hymnbook began our work.

On a hot day in late June, right after General Assembly, we met around the great table of Boston's Pickett House and began to formulate how we were going to go about doing this strange and exciting work.

The vice-president of the Association, then as now, the marvelous Kay Montgomery, suggested to us that we begin our work with an outside consultant. This was to be a consultant not in music, or poetry, or even organizational structure, but in the human psychology of temperament. She felt this would help prepare us to learn to work together with greater ease, despite the severe disagreements and conflicts that we and she knew would certainly come.

After all, no matter how much we differed from each other, we still all had to agree on an end product. That meant we had to make final decisions despite our differences. And that meant that we had to find ways to thread all the mazes of theological language and cultural diversity. And that meant, quite simply, that we had to learn to get along better than we might have had we no help at all.

As chair of the committee, I agreed. I long ago learned that "getting along" is just not part of our hard-wiring. We have to learn such things. And I say that each of our learning curves is going to be different.

Why? Because, we human beings can talk all we want about how much we are all "basically" alike, with our joys and sorrows and shared mortality, but I think that such talk most often leads to a spurious sense of unity. I think that we rarely give our authentic differences the respect they need. I always smile when Unitarian Universalists talk about their "diverse" theologies…some preferring rich, humanistic images of God in their worship, and others preferring to fast from all theological language in services. Is this really where Unitarian Universalists think the rubber of our "diversity" hits the road of our "community"?

To me, its far, far more basic than that. I have come to believe that our deeper and more difficult differences are to be found in our basic approaches to life, our complex and complementary temperaments.

Some of us talk to think. Some of us think to talk. As Isabel Briggs Meyers says at the top of your Orders, the "extroverts" among us "cannot understand life until they live it," while the "introverts cannot live life until they understand it." (By the way, I am not sure any other definition would define those two words any better.) Some of us are shy, some gregarious, some energetic, some wary, some suspicious, some visionary. Some of us are spiritually "claustrophobic," and want minimal structures enclosing us in our worship; others among us suffer deeply for lack of structure and shared vision. Some make great leaps, intuiting insights just like that, others play their cards close to their chest and doubt if things are ever as simple as others seem to think. Some weep easy and gladly and count the service dry and distant if they do not leave the sermon with wet eyes; others worry that the choir anthem might one day get too emotional and bring them to tears that embarrass them. Some think applause in the service is a sign of vitality. Others are convinced that applause is the death knell to any real spiritual depth, an evasive way to disperse feelings.

The Hymnbook Resources Commission was a small, but entirely typical Unitarian Universalist community. The diversities of approach I just listed could be found among us, too.

And so, with all this personal diversity among us, I took Kay Montgomery seriously. I called up the Rev. Eleanor Artman from Cincinnati, a skillful and compassionate virtuoso in such things as human temperament. I asked her to help us get to know each other at the level of our differences. I asked her to give us tools to work with our differences. She said yes, and came to one of our early meetings, and gave us forms to fill out, tests to take. Then she gave us the results.

It was then I found out that I tested out as "introverted." Just barely under the wire, mind you. But introverted.

Now I know many people who do not believe this. They think of me as basically "a people person," with a lot of energy and vitality, a fast talker, highly opinionated to be sure, but mostly very amiable, someone who cultivates many friends, loves to meet new people, laugh and play, and who enjoys good food in the presence of good company.

True, as far as it goes. But I also have a great need to be alone. And when I have very little time alone, I begin to lose myself a bit. Forget things. Blot out appointments like I did this week. Hide in forgetfulness. Retreat from the world. Go about helter-skelter, unconsciously lunging at stray opportunities for renewing solitude.

You see, I am partially extroverted, yes, but a lot more introverted than people assume.

Others on the committee were different. Some desired very little time alone. Found it stifling. They needed constant input from the world, and talked non-stop. Others could have kept silence for the entire meeting if they were never asked directly for their input. I was, as I remember, someplace in the middle.

I must say that Eleanor Artman probably helped us more on a day-to-day basis than any of the other consultants we invited in to help us with our work.

With her help, some of us who were talkers shut up a bit. It was hard, but we pulled back. And some of the introverts spoke up quicker. It was hard for them, but they did it. The impatient deliberately set out to become more patient, and the less than decisive pushed us all toward decision now and then. It was difficult, it took conscious effort, but they did it. The folks who were so moved by the music of Bartok that they wept learned to not look down on those who found Bartok deadly; and those who loved snazzy pop songs written yesterday stopped wrinkling their noses at those who felt Palestrina was the last word in good music. All of this was difficult, but we got through it pretty well. And although there certainly were days when the conflict brewed thick, and the frustrations were rife, all in all, by paying conscious attention to each other's real differences, we all got along.

Now I was telling all this to Susan Ritchie, our parish minister up in Dublin, on the way back from our retreat last Monday up in Akron with our fellow religious professionals. I was telling her that I wanted to talk about introversion and shyness and other non-theological things that all of us encounter in human communities…churches or otherwise.

"But what about shyness?" she offered. "You are not going to say that being introverted is the same as being shy?"

"I don't think I am, but why don't you tell me what you mean."

She did, and I agreed with her.

Shyness is not the same thing as being introverted. A shy, introverted person may be happy. An extroverted person who is not shy may be very happy. But I would bet that both the shy extrovert, and an introvert who is not shy have some struggles. I know that I can be shy some days, and when I also am in my more extroverted stage, that can prove really painful.

My shyness though is not a profound as some folks' shyness. Mine is entirely affected by structure. Like the Anglican priest in Barbara Pym's novel, certain structures and urgencies empower me. Visiting a dying person in the hospital is an entirely different thing for me from just running into someone informally. I nervously run on at the mouth more when there is less urgency or structure, because I am not as self-assured when I don't have a clear role. Standing in line to greet people on Sunday is much easier for me in many ways than the practice of my former congregation, which always held their coffee hour in the same multi-use room where we worshipped. When the structure of formal worship gave way to the sheer chaos of coffee hour, people on all sides me, my anxiety went way up. And, I assure you, were I not one of the professional ministers of the church, someone who has structure built into his very role, I would probably just stand in the corner and look at the floor.

Last Saturday I was invited by the Ohio State University Office on Gender and Sexuality Issues to Hillel House on Campus to participate in one of the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Awareness Week Activities. After the formal presentation, many of us noshed at cookies and juice on the table, a sort of coffee hour without coffee.

One young woman clarified who I was, and where I served and then spoke to me. "Oh, I've been to your church. I used to go a few years ago, but I stopped. Didn't like it at all. Hated the choir and the other music. Didn't like it that people sat so stiffly in their seats, as if they didn't care about what they were doing. I liked the progressive ideas I heard there, but I got so bored by the service."

As she continued speaking, I naturally got more and more defensive. Didn't like the one of the best choirs in the Association? Didn't like one of the finest music programs in the Association? Thought we were all cold and unfriendly? I felt the mother hen rising up in me. I was ready to attack when she concluded her statements. "Besides," she said, "no one came up to talk with me during coffee hour. I just would stand there, and not one person would talk to me. I would have thought that you would be more welcoming of young folk like me."

All of a sudden, I got it. Just like me, this young woman was shy in an unstructured situation. And she never connected with anyone in the church although she came several times. She felt hurt. This, I decided, was the deeper reason why she was coming across so strong about her dislike for this church. It was ultimately more than a cultural or generational difference.

I told her that the same thing happened to me when I first went to a Unitarian Universalist Church in California…no one spoke to me for four Sundays in a row during coffee hour. And, shy as I am in unstructured situations, I found it hard to break into one of those animated conversations everyone else seemed to be having. I would leave feeling quite hurt.

But, I said to her, the expressed religious values of the church in the services were enough to help me stay long enough to get connected. And, as I recall, I did not like their music program very much when I got there…there wasn't really much of one in fact. They had no real choir, and the services were so-so in my book. "But you know what?" I said to her, "I eventually became a student minister there, and led many a service. I even preached my very first sermon in the pulpit of that church."

So then we talked about musical tastes, and generational differences, and shyness during coffee hour. And we closed our conversation very cordially.

This young woman did not strike me as an introvert. And, she was not timid, another word often confused with "shy," since she spoke right up.

But in certain unfamiliar and new situations, she was very shy indeed.

The words "shy" and "introverted" do not mean the same thing, but they often get tarred with the same brush. They are not often seen charitably by the majority. One critic I read this week just dismissed shyness as "egoism out of its depth." And so charitable a man as the great philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, "We are all prone to the malady of the introvert."

"A malady" he calls it. A sickness.

In the Main Library this week I saw plenty of books with titles like "Unstoppable" and "Exuberance" and "The Charisma Book" and "Assert Yourself." I didn't see one single book with the title "Oh shut up already!" or "Stop being so damn aggressive and exuberant."

In my own family, introversion and shyness are often set in deep contrast to the concept of "personality." "Personality" is my father's somewhat old-fashioned word for "extrovert." "She has personality"…that is, she is extroverted, is the highest compliment my father can pay. And when I was acting shy in some very loud family gathering, my father would always ask later "Why were you so quiet? Is there something wrong?"

Being shy, finding it hard to speak up, was a sign that something was "wrong."

In this United States, statisticians estimate that most of us are extroverted, and that over a third of us tend toward shyness. Recently, I've read where some of this shyness was attributed to genetic structures inherited from the parents. Could be so. Who knows? I know a lot of researchers have suspected that for a long time.

And I know ethnic realities play a part here too… some cultures survive at a greater loudness level than others do, and some cultures define space differently. A man from Oslo may perceive a man from Cairo as extroverted but the Egyptian may not be so preceived within his own cultural tradition. I know for sure that many people in this church would be shocked at how loud our family gatherings are. At Christmas this year, even I was amazed by how loud we are.

Now, Mr. Emerson defined introversion in a different way than modern post-Jungian psychologists. In the second reading, he applied the word to the New England youth of the post Civil War era. He found them always prone to self-dissection, and to constant study of their own ulterior or unexpressed motivations. (Motives is the word he used.) It's not entirely clear to me whether he approves or doesn't approve of all this self-dissection. As a very shy man himself, a shy man prone to introversion despite all of his public speaking gigs, I would suspect he found some comfort in the mindset of the post Civil War era. All he says for sure is that it was a time when the mind became more aware of itself.

More aware of itself. More conscious.

To me, that is one of the best thing that progressive religion can promote. More consciousness. If we use the word introversion in an Emersonian way, then I for one am for a lot more of it. A lot more consciousness.

The Hymnbook Committee dealt with this consciousness issue all the time in the area of both words and music. The most famous example is gender inclusive language. For a thousand years, feminine pronouns in English were rarely used, since they applied only to women, and women were not seen as part and parcel of the power of society. When Thomas Jefferson wrote his famous "All men are created equal," he did not mean women, he meant men. And only men of European origin. If you doubt me about this, consult the angry letters Abigail Adams wrote to her husband about the complete male-centeredness of all the early American documents. She knew quite well that she was not one of "the men."

When women pointed this out in the 19th century, the men who defined all the words in the dictionary just smirked and said, "OK, from now on, when we say "man" we deem that it means both "men and women" and when we say "he" we mean both "he and she" and when we say "mankind" we mean everybody. There. For a while, this seemed to work. Everything remained male-centered. Then some folks began to raise consciousness about this constant expression of gender disparity more aggressively.

For example, I once heard a Christian minister make the point marvelously by re-framing the whole Western Christian tradition. I will now try to recreate what she said as an experiment in consciousness raising in this very room, so you might understand what I mean:

"Once there was a world where women were Queens and Philosophers and Clergy and Warriors, and men stayed home and took care of the children because everyone knew they were much better suited for such work. Men were not allowed to go to war because, after all, they were too often silent, and way too caught up in childish frivolities like football. Besides, the sexual organs of women were safely protected inside their bodies, whereas men in battle would be vulnerable because their sensitive areas flop so foolishly in front of them and are completely unprotected. Goddess made everything at the beginning of time. All women are equal (of course, we mean the men are equal too.) However, in the fullness of time, Goddess the Mother sent Goddess the Daughter to earth to be incarnated as Jessica Christ, who saved the world with her death and resurrection. Afterwards, her disciples went around the earth to Queendom after Queendom converting all womankind to the message of peace preached by Jessica Christ.

Ministers and priests attended schools called ovularies so they could become ordained in the service of religion. There were some heretics, called Unitarians, who denied that Jessica was actually Goddess, but they were never taken seriously. There were others who said that there was no such thing as hell, called Universalists, and they even suggested you could call God "Father" as well as Mother. They, too, were looked upon as very strange indeed. They were, however, the first denomination to officially ordain men to the ministry, which many sound scandalous, since Jessica herself was, of course, a woman.

etc. etc.

When presented this way, some folks began to become more conscious of their language, their language which clearly helps to shape their reality so richly. They analyzed their language, dissected their unconscious motivations.

Such consciousness led to social changes for the better. Consciousness of inequalities of race and ethnicity also led to changes for the better. Consciousness of economic factors in human relationships leads to more awareness of justice.

Unconsciousness, however leads nowhere. Except, perhaps, right back to the status quo, where status quo power, status quo authority, status quo literalist theology and status quo smarmy politics rules the roost without question.

Changing words is not magic. Consciousness is not raised by magic tricks, anyway, but by real devotion to keeping both the questions and the language alive. There will always be room for debate about how wide such changes need to range…can you change an ancient text? Can you put Jefferson into modern language? Do you have to bring it up all the time?

But consciousness is not just for vast and complex social issues. Consciousness is for community, too.

And communities are most often made up of a majority of extroverts, and with plenty of shy people among both the majority and minority populations.

It seems to me that neither introversion nor extroversion are maladies or imperfections. Shyness may have some genetic factors involved in some people, but that hardly makes it a disease or something to be eradicated.

I see it this way. Human beings may be diverse in how they solve the problem of anxiety, but I bet most of us start with anxiety. We may be anxious about what people will think of us. We may be anxious about our appearance, since we don't resemble who we are supposed to resemble: Tom Cruise, or Denzel Washington, or Whitney Houston or Michelle Pfeiffer. We may be anxious because we are in unfamiliar territory with different rules than we know. We may be anxious because things are too formal or else not formal enough. We might fear a breach of privacy, a moment of unexpected vulnerability. We may undervalue human speech as a tool of honest expression, or we may overvalue it.

And so the extroverts talk and dance their way around these anxieties, and the introverts go inward to shelter them. But the anxieties, I am here to say, are there in any case.

And our religious way, for hundreds of years, has called us to deeper and deeper rungs of consciousness. Consciousness of social inequality in the larger world. And consciousness of religious inequalities in the larger world. But also, I think it asks us to be more conscious in our local communities.

But what to do? "Don't be too timid or squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment!" wrote the shy Emerson in his journal in 1842.

In other words, if you are extroverted, become conscious of that, and then experiment for a few moments with being quieter than you usually are. It will be tough, but you can do it.

If you are an introvert, become conscious of your natural tendency, without shame or embarrassment; and then experiment by showing up at coffee hour for just a few minutes at least. Note how you feel. And next week, stay one minute longer.

Shy? Note when you are. Structured time? Unstructured time? Experiment by becoming more attuned to your anxieties. Can you specifically name them? Can you simply say hello to one person during coffee hour or in the gallery you never have said hello to before … at least once this week?

Shyness will not disappear once and for all by these experiments…remember, I do not think it's a malady. But to learn to compensate just a bit is the kind of raised consciousness that leads to deeper and more satisfying community.

Have you forgotten someone's name, and that makes you feel shy? Say to yourself, "Forgetting a name is neither a sin nor a sign of lack of care…it's a direct result of our modern day crowded mind, with a hundred times more bits of information bombarding us every day than Emerson knew in a life time." And then go say hello, and if you cannot remember their name, ask them to remind you of it. If their ego doesn't like that you did so, it really is their problem. Not yours. And they themselves will have to work on it, not you.

Real community cannot be built unless there is consciousness. The same old ways and approaches rarely ever swerve unless there is some conscious effort.

We'll not ever be all the same one day … equally balanced between extroverts and introverts, the shy and the exuberant. Who would want that? We Hymnbook commissioners retained our basic approaches to the very end. Some of us were introverts, some extroverts, a few us of were shy, some of us were not. But we did, all of us, move toward deeper relationship because we experimented with becoming more conscious in thought and word and deed.

And thus, each of us changed a bit. And each of us began to like music we had never liked before. And each of us learned how to navigate the rough waters of difference. And in the end, we came up with a final product that we are proud of.

In 15 years this book will be completely outdated, I suppose. That's been the story of our hymnbooks for a hundred years. 25 or 30 years, then kaput. But the care and love and consciousness and experimentation that brought a group of very diverse human beings together to make such a book will never, I pray, perish off the earth.

Prayer  [back to top]

Free from undue want. Everyone.
Free from undue loss. Everyone.
Free from undue fear. Everyone.
Free from undue notions. Everyone.
Free to serve each other. Everyone.
Free to be conscious of self and others, Everyone.
Free for the sake of freedom itself, Everyone.
Free for the sake of responsibility itself. Everyone.

Free to love and praise and encourage. Everyone.
Free to learn and grow more conscious. Everyone.
Free to meet and assemble in peace. Everyone.
Free to say no and say yes or think about it. Everyone.

All of these things I pray for everyday by breathing.
All of these things I pray for everyday by feeling.
All of these things I pray for everyday by thinking.
All of these things I pray for everyday by risking.

But I wish I knew how it would feel, Oh Love,
and I wish I knew how it would look,
and I wish I knew how it would sound,
and I wish I knew how it would taste
to be so totally, wonderfully, and divinely free. Amen.

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